And Baby Makes Two - Dyan Sheldon [8]
So this is love, I thought. L-O-V-E: LOVE.
The CD ended and a really old song floated into my head. After my dad escaped when I was four, me and Hilary went to live with my nan for a few years. The Spiggs threw herself into rebuilding her life, so it was Nan I spent time with. Most afternoons we’d get out her box of old records and we’d play them on her ancient record player. This song was one of my favourites because it made me feel really happy. I made Nan play it all the time. And years later they had it in that film. Lying in bed that night, I could hear it exactly the way it sounded on her old record player. Scratchy and old-fashioned.
“Just blahblah and me … and baby makes three … we’re happy in my blue heaven…”
I didn’t really understand it when I was little, but I did now. Now I knew what the singer meant.
I drifted off to sleep, softly humming my nan’s song. At last I understood what life was all about.
Love Will Set You Free
Les said I was pretty, fun to be with, and that I made him laugh. I couldn’t believe it.
“Me?” I’d say.
And he’d say, “Yes, you.”
Like me, Les had had a hard time at school. He was quiet, and teachers and other bullies picked on him a lot. Plus, though it was hard to believe now, he’d been fat and unpopular. So he was always shy with girls. He said he never even thought about girls in secondary school, all he thought about was getting out and getting a job and having a life. Also like me. He only moved out of his mother’s and down to London that summer, so though he’d been out with a few girls he’d never even had a real girlfriend. Before now.
“You kiss like you have,” I told him.
Les laughed. “Beginner’s luck.”
Les liked the way boys looked at me in the street, like they wished they were him.
“Green with envy,” he’d say as we passed a group of them. “Green with envy.” He’d give me a hug. He was really chuffed.
I’d hug him back.
I was really chuffed, too.
Les also liked that I was really feminine and into make-up and stuff. He was a musicals freak. He said I was like some song in some old musical, I enjoyed being a girl.
“I do now,” I said.
There were tons of things Les knew about – sports and cars and videos and who originally starred in Oklahoma!, that sort of thing – that I didn’t know much about. I loved to listen to him explain them to me. And he loved to explain them.
“You’re sure I’m not boring you?” he’d ask.
And I’d say, “Of course I’m sure.”
But even though we hung out a lot together and were always happy and kissing and stuff, Les never said the L-word. He said he wasn’t ready for a serious relationship, but I reckoned he was just shy. I mean, it was all pretty new to him. Les was a boy, so he hadn’t spent all the years I’d spent waiting to fall in love. He wasn’t prepared. I knew that it can take a man a lot longer to realize he’s in love than it does a woman. Like in When Harry Met Sally… Though I hoped it wouldn’t take him that long.
So I never said the L-word, either. Not that it mattered. I felt it. And I showed it. And I knew that, deep down, Les felt it too.
Besides being ecstatically happy, the beauty of being in love was that it gave me real power for the first time in my life. Because nothing else mattered. It was that simple. Nothing else mattered at all.
The Wicked Witch of NW6 could moan at me and threaten me and refuse to give me any pocket money, and it didn’t matter. I couldn’t care less. She was like a toothless, clawless lion roaring at the ringmaster. I might still be living in her flat, but in my mind and heart I was already gone.
It was the same at school. Now there really was no reason why I should worry about boring stuff like science and history. As soon as I was sixteen, I’d leave school, move in with Les and get a job. Les was bound to be a manager by then, and he’d get me something