The Museum of You Read online

  He passed it to her as slowly as he dared. If only he’d thought to open her purse, he might have discovered her name.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, and she stepped down on to the pavement.

  ‘I’ll be stopping here at 10.20 tomorrow,’ he called.

  She glanced back at him and didn’t smile.

  The girl with the bag. That was how he thought of her. She reminded him of something: a familiar place or a feeling – he couldn’t quite think what. He spent the rest of the shift wondering. Finally, it came to him. When he was at high school there were these pictures in the art room. Soft, partially naked women with waterfalls of hair and skin like white marzipan. He’d liked the art room. It was different from the rest of the school. The art teacher wore stonewashed jeans and black T-shirts, and during lessons he played classical music on a portable CD player. ‘Just have a go,’ he’d say, and once you had, he’d lean over your shoulder and find something to compliment before setting to with a soft-tipped pencil: an addition here, a deletion there and he’d discover the shape of your intentions. Although Darren lacked an aptitude for the subject, he enjoyed it. When they visited the school library during an English lesson, he looked in the art section and found a book about Rubens. He took it out with the ticket still inside the cover. The library worked on an honour system of sorts. You were trained in how to take out a book and then it was up to you to find the little ticket holder with your name, remove the ticket from the inside jacket of the book and place it inside the holder. If you didn’t do this and someone found out, you’d get into trouble. But if no one noticed, you could keep the book as long as you liked – for ever, in fact, which is what he did with the Rubens book, it’s in the house somewhere.

  The women he ogled on the covers of the top shelf lads’ mags at the newsagent’s – nipples screened by stars that really said ta-dah! – were carefully posed in hip-tilted, head-angled, arm-raised stances that couldn’t possibly be maintained for more than a few moments; positions that were, if you thought about it (and he often didn’t) pretty ridiculous. But the women in the coloured prints on the art-room wall and the black and white sketches in the library book were casual, unguarded, and seemed, to Darren at least, timeless. Rubens’ pictures were drawn hundreds of years ago. The women looked patient and unruffleable. They reclined and slouched, stomachs creased, dimpled thighs splayed, with barely a glance at the viewer; no half-parted lips, no winks or self-conscious smirks. And, of course, they were beautiful: fulsome and robust. Like the girl with the bag.

  The 43 route started in High Park then headed over the railway bridge at Meols Cop, past the house he’d buy one day, through the town centre and out to Birkdale, before looping back. He started to look for her when he was driving through town. How strange to think of the many times he may have passed her without knowing it.

  A few days later she boarded his bus accompanied by an old chap with enormous ears and a woolly, Sherlock Holmes-like cape. Her red bag had a long strap. She wore it sideways, streaming between her breasts. Days after that, he saw her waiting at a stop on Lord Street, standing behind a different elderly fellow in a wheelchair. And later still, supporting the elbow of a tiny, desiccated woman as the wind buffeted her on the corner of Eastbank Street.

  She worked in an old people’s home, Peacefields, on the promenade. They had a mix of residents: some who needed nursing care; others who were just a little frail, recovering from surgery or staying for a few weeks while family members had a break. When she got on his bus he talked to her. He tried to ask questions that couldn’t be answered with yes or no; he even planned some in advance so she’d have to respond with more than a word at a time. Eventually, having taken courage from the oft-repeated story of his mum and dad’s courtship, he asked her out and she said yes.

  He’d bought a second-hand Fiesta Mark IV. It had a 1.0 litre engine and all the oomph of a chicken korma. Still, he was pleased with it, it was a car and it was his. That was their first date, going for a drive in his new car. He drove them up Rivington Pike, a summit on Winter Hill, a destination he suggested casually, pretending he’d only just thought of it. In truth, he’d found the walk beforehand in a leaflet from the Tourist Information booth at the bottom of Eastbank Street. When they couldn’t drive any further they got out of the car. It was May, still cool, breezy. Her hair went everywhere, as if it was alive. The walk to the summit was steep, muddy in places. The leaflet came in handy. He commented on the blanket bog, like it was something that had just occurred to him, and he told her about the legend of the spectral horseman, hoping she’d think him interesting and informed.

  On a soggy section of high moorland he held her hand for the first time. His heart was thumping, and he had to wipe his palm on his jeans first because it was sticky with anxiety. There were opportunities for her to pull her hand back. She didn’t. And he knew, with the kind of certainty some people evoke when they talk about Jesus or politics, absolutely knew he would love her, if she’d let him.

  When they got back in the car she was pink-cheeked and windswept, but she didn’t rearrange her hair or pull down the visor to check her reflection in the little mirror; it was as if those small vanities were beneath her. He liked that. She had more important things to worry about, but he didn’t know it then.

  She’d bought him a present, for the car. It had been sitting in her pocket the whole time. She passed it to him, shyly. It was a wooden clown on a pull-string, about as big as the palm of his hand. When you pulled the string its arms and legs shot up. She hung it from the mirror, and in the years that followed she’d pull the string and make the clown perform star-jumps each time she got in the car. ‘Hooray,’ the clown seemed to say – ‘off we go, together, hooray!’ Once the clown was in position he took her hand again. She liked his hands, she told him. She’d noticed them resting on the steering wheel of the bus and thought how strong and capable they seemed. Afterwards, when she was his girlfriend, he would take his hands out of his pockets or off his lap and rest them on the table in front of him when she was around, just in case she fancied a look. On that day he held her hand all the way home, adjusting his grip when he needed to change gear, knocking the stick with the heel of his hand so he wouldn’t have to let her go.

  Colin called her Mizz Frizz to begin with. She refused to smile and take it in good part. ‘Tell him to piss off and polish his rapidly balding bonce,’ Darren suggested. But she wouldn’t. In the end Colin used her name, though he never quite forgave her for refusing to take the part of tease-ee. He found her stand-offish and humourless, said he couldn’t understand why some people never laughed. She agreed, said she couldn’t understand it either – she always laughed, if something was funny. It sometimes felt as if they were playing tennis and Darren was the net.

  Colin had only recently come out and was sensitive to any perceived coolness. Darren had been both surprised and not surprised by the revelation, in the same way that Colin managed to be both sorry and not sorry whenever he was a twat. Darren carried the news around with him for a day or two, taking it out every so often to examine it, eventually concluding that Colin’s predilections were none of his business; no one wants to think about their mates having sex with anyone, male or female, do they?

  He wanted Becky and Colin to get on. He tried to explain her to him: yes, she didn’t laugh at his jokes, and yes, she had a way of being quiet that sometimes made her the loudest person in the room, but she was optimistic and kind and genuine – she never fake-smiled out of politeness. She was touched by the smallest of gestures: a card in the post, a chocolate bar, the cheap gold-plated necklace he bought for her nineteenth birthday, weeks after they met. He wanted to make her laugh. He had the feeling that making her completely happy would be a worthwhile occupation, more worthwhile than Geography BSc Hons or any of the other things he’d imagined for himself.

  Colin was unimpressed, said it was his dick talking. ‘Knob her for a bit, then get away while you still can.’

  Da
rren cringed. ‘It’s not a matter of knobbing.’

  ‘You’re serious, then?’

  ‘I am,’ he said.

  ‘Why her, what’s so –’

  ‘I love her.’

  And Colin groaned, unaware that he was the first to know, that he had heard the words before Becky.

  On the day when she’d lost her bag, Becky had been visiting Jim in the hospital by the park. It was the first time he’d been sent there. She was worried but hopeful; he was in the best place and he was going to get better. She talked a lot about Jim. Enough for Darren to create a likeness of him in his head: benign and stoical, bearing his illness with bravery.

  He still occasionally relives that first visit to her mother’s, finds himself twenty-one years old again, trapped in a nightmare of horrified politeness. The door to the flat opens and he is assaulted by a matchlessly vile stink. He’ll learn later that it comes from Jim’s rat Derek, who lives in a cage on the kitchen worktop. On that day, he wonders how Becky can live there and not smell of it. He hasn’t seen her room yet, the plug-in air fresheners, the perpetually open window, the tidy piles of clothes and books. The door opens straight into the lounge. Maureen is parked in the middle of a pink leather sofa. She doesn’t get up. The telly stays on. He had pictured an ample, soft woman; someone who had caused significant harm, yet meant none of it. The real Maureen is hard, tiny. Bones knuckle her neck and her complexion is grey. She looks hungover and not pleased to see him. He forces the hinge of his smile wider, embarrassed at the way the word mother has infused his expectations. Uninvited, he sits on one side of Maureen, and Becky takes the other.

  ‘Not your usual,’ Maureen says to Becky, her voice like stone.

  ‘Don’t,’ Becky warns. And, leaning forward, to him, ‘There isn’t a usual.’

  ‘I hope you’re earning good money.’

  He is nudged by the poke of a twiggy elbow, and a potent blend of booze and sweat seeps from Maureen’s sealish skin.

  ‘She’ll eat you out of house and home, this one.’

  Becky’s cheeks and neck flush pink.

  ‘You never know, he might marry you, if you lose some weight. Ta da, da-da – all fat and wide.’

  It is done in a playful way, only a joke.

  ‘I might marry her if she stays exactly the same as she is,’ he says. ‘Or if she puts weight on,’ he adds, in case that is the next line of attack.

  Maureen laughs, but he can tell he has pissed her off. Jim appears, eyes bloodshot, also the worse for wear, though he’s barely old enough to be drinking. There are white crusts on his elbows and around his hairline. His hands are pink and scaly. It looks so sore. Darren’s heart goes out to him. It’s an actual feeling, like a leak in his chest. He’s so full of love for Becky, he still feels it should be easy to love the people she loves. He explains how pleased he is to finally meet Jim, who replies ‘Likewise’ in a silly voice, making it clear that he is not pleased at all.

  They don’t like him. He is disappointed and discomfited, uncertain about what he has done wrong.

  ‘What did you think?’ she asked afterwards.

  ‘They’re not what I’d expected.’

  ‘What were you expecting?’

  ‘I thought they’d be more like you,’ he said carefully.

  ‘They’re my family.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘She was horrible to you.’

  ‘She doesn’t mean it.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘You don’t know her.’

  He agreed that he didn’t and he learned to be quiet, listening as she told him about living with her grandparents on and off, before they died. About the six different schools. The difficulty of making friends when she knew she’d likely move again. The barely remembered time before her dad’s suicide, when her mum was better – kinder, nicer. Jim didn’t remember it, but she’d told him all about it, probably made it sound better than it actually was, in fact, but never mind. She didn’t want Darren to feel sorry for her, though; didn’t want him to think she was complaining.

  Of course he didn’t think she was bloody complaining! As he listened to her, he realised how lucky he was that the people he loved had never been cruel. And each time he was tempted to interject, he reminded himself that the people she loved were hers to criticise. He could loathe them silently. Which he did.

  They walked a lot that first summer, especially in the evenings, after work. When the weather was fine, walking was preferable to spending time at either of their homes. They strolled down Lord Street, walked around the Marine Lake or ambled along the south end of the beach, which was usually empty by dusk – tourists tended to leave at the same time as the ice-cream vans and donkeys, and the locals went to Formby, which was prettier, sandier.

  On a particularly quiet evening they skated up and down the sandy slopes of the dunes, hands clasped, stumbling, giggling. They sat down in a sheltered dip. Eventually lay down, on her jacket. He rearranged the sweep of her hair as he kissed her mouth, shoulder and neck. Her stray curls tucked away from the sand, he kissed the square and slope of her jaw. Unbuttoned her shirt and tongued the gorge between her breasts. Kissed the hard pearls of her nipples while she unfastened his trousers and shucked hers past her hips.

  ‘Go on,’ she whispered.

  ‘What if someone comes?’

  ‘You. And me. We’ll come.’

  The beat of her breath was syncopated by laughter as he dug his fingers into the round curve of her arse and lost himself in the coast of each repetition.

  Afterwards, they lay side by side as the temperature dropped and gaps in the cloud revealed the stars. They would come back to this exact spot, every summer, he thought. Even when they needed walking poles, and blister plasters, and a rest on the way up the hill, when they were old and their skin was wrinkled, when there were lines around their eyes and mouths and they’d had kids and grandkids and knew the up and down and inside-out of each other by heart.

  ‘You,’ she murmured, ‘are the best thing that’s ever happened to me.’

  And he let himself believe it.

  In the beginning there are no favoured courses. Those first feelings run where they will. But it isn’t long before they form a stream and subsequent feelings have no option but to wash that same way. As they do, the stream deepens into a creek, a river. And then you can’t help it: the someone you have chosen to love abrades your banks; they run right through you, and it is easy for their plans and dreams to become yours, for your hopes and wants to be subsumed by theirs.

  Becky wanted to move out of her mum’s flat. She dreamed of progressing at work and going on holiday. And she planned to look after Jim. How tempting it was to assume that he could grant her all wishes. His own wants were increasingly malleable.

  ‘Would you still like to go to university?’ she wondered.

  ‘What would you like?’

  ‘I asked you first.’

  ‘I’d like whatever you’d like.’

  ‘I asked you.’

  That’s how it went. They played hot potato with his plans.

  They’d almost been together for a year when he surprised her with the holiday. Although he’d never gone on a proper holiday before, he didn’t feel as if he’d missed out. He’d enjoyed day trips with Mum and Dad: Blackpool, Morecambe or the Lake District, topped off with a bag of chips on the way home. Becky, though, hadn’t been anywhere. Facing the unavoidable ‘What I did in the holidays’ assignment every September had been worse, she said, than ‘What I got for Christmas’, which could be fudged with the inclusion of seasonal television programmes and the excitement of Christmas Eve.

  He built it up – that was a mistake. He tore a sheet out of a calendar, circled the days – the final of which was Valentine’s Day – and sent it to her in the post: surprise! He told her to pack her swimming things. When she asked about changing money, he said not to worry, he’d be taking care of that.

  Becky had a ver
y particular definition of what constituted a holiday, something he learned later, when she demoted his surprise holiday to ‘weekend break’. According to her, a holiday occurred in a destination that had to be reached by plane or boat. It meant a visit to a different country (not Wales). Friday to Monday in an apartment at Pontins was not a holiday.

  It poured. Fat, maximum-wiper, Welsh rain. But there was a swimming pool with a wave machine and a slide, and the cabaret wasn’t bad – better than the Bon Jovi tribute act, that’s for sure. She said she was having a good time. She managed to juggle a smile. But he wasn’t stupid. On the way home, the wooden clown dangled from the car mirror and it occurred to him for the first time that there was something circus-like about her optimism; it was precarious, balanced on stilts.

  When they got back from their not-holiday, Maureen had gone to Portsmouth to meet someone she’d met on the internet, leaving Jim by himself. Derek the rat was dead. Jim was pretty sure he’d remembered to feed him, but he couldn’t be certain. After Maureen returned it was determined, via a process Darren never quite understood, to be Becky’s fault.

  Dad didn’t mind Becky. When she came round in the evenings she commented on the telly, a bit like Mum, and as winter thawed and the weather improved she followed Dad out to the greenhouse and helped quietly, passing the test Colin tanked all those years ago. Still, when Dad spoke about her, an unspoken but hovered at the end of his sentences.

  ‘She’s a nice girl . . . She’s got a kind heart . . .’

  He’d be sure to follow up with: ‘So you’re staying here, then, son? Just driving a bus for the rest of your life?’

  Prospectuses he hadn’t ordered started arriving. From all over the country, the further away the better, it seemed.

  At the end of the summer Darren came home from work and encountered a FOR SALE sign. He tried to make a joke out of it. Asked whether Dad was planning to emigrate. But it wasn’t funny. It felt like a punishment for being a rubbish son, for falling in love while he was supposed to be grieving. Of course he was gutted about Mum, but you can’t keep things separate; feelings don’t line up neatly like Neapolitan ice cream.