Love Is a Four Letter Word (7 page)

Come early and lend a hand? Thanks, but no thanks.

Bella gave a peremptory toot as she drove out of the gate. In the rear-view mirror she saw her father's arm raised high, as if signalling from a desert island to a distant ship, her mother's hand tentatively lifted, stretching out for something she couldn't hope to reach.

‘Why not do an evening class – that way, you'll meet people and learn something at the same time!' Bella had been leafing through a women's magazine in the loo at work. The advice was always the same; whenever someone wrote in saying they wanted to meet people, the answer was predictably of the get-out-and-join-clubs variety. But did you ever meet likely men at an evening class? Bella sounded out Viv and Nick later while at their place for supper. Nick decreed it a rational approach (Viv: ‘Rational? Oh, well, that's the main thing, of course,') and asked what subject she planned to take: carpentry or car maintenance? Bella had rather fancied stained glass or patchwork; she whimpered at Viv, who would have none of it.

‘Look, do you bloody want to meet men or don't you? Go to patchwork classes if you want, but don't come running to me afterwards whingeing that the best bet in the class is a forty-seven-year-old midwife because at least she's got hair on her chin.'

‘That'd do. I want to meet more
people,
otherwise I feel like I'm just a visitor here.'

They sat round the dining-table eating garlic and ginger prawns with stir-fried noodles, trying not to laugh at Nick and his attempts to use chopsticks. He
dropped a prawn for the third time as he was trying to raise it to his lips.

‘The suspense is killing me, Nick. Have a fork.' Viv half-turned towards Bella and gnashed her teeth silently. ‘He does this every time.'

‘No, no. I'm getting the hang of it now.' The prawn teetered dangerously as three pairs of eyes watched its unsteady course from bowl to mouth.

‘You won't get a gold star anyway, you know.' Bella's chopsticks threatened to snatch the prawn away deftly.

The prawn fell with a soft plumpf into its nest of noodles. Nick went into the kitchen and started clattering about.

‘There's no point anyway. Even if I met someone, I never think I know how to
do
relationships. I can do the going out to dinner bit and the having lots of sex bit, then I get lost. There must be some secret formula that I don't know about,' said Bella. ‘Can't you give me your top ten tips or something? You seem to have it sussed.'

‘Viv, have you hidden the forks with the blue handles?' from the kitchen. ‘I don't like the other ones for Chinese.'

‘Yeah, that's right. We're completely perfect.' Viv shook her head and bellowed back. ‘In the
second
drawer – where they
usually
are.'

‘No magic formula?'

‘What, like my Scottish granny's drop scones? If there is, no-one told me and, God knows, no-one bothered to tell Nick. I mean, Nick thinks mutual support means leaning on each other after a heavy session at the Tickled Trout. I haven't a clue. Yes, I have. I s'pose talking's the main thing – when you want to and when you don't want to so that neither of you sits around seething for weeks over some piddly little problem that suddenly explodes into door-slamming, crockery-hurling and suitcase-packing. Oh, yeah – and
a little love doesn't go amiss. Gets you through the –' she raised her voice, ‘ALL TOO FREQUENT CRAPPY BITS.'

Bella stuck out her lower lip.

‘Is that it then, guv?'

‘I still can't see them.' A plaintive note had crept into Nick's voice.

‘No. You need huge dollops of luck as well.' Viv got up and marched through to the kitchen. ‘Not
that
second drawer,
this
second drawer. And,' she continued, ‘you need to be able to wade through all the pigs and creeps and mummy's boys to find yourself a nice, only averagely neurotic male who can't even find a fork in his own kitchen but who is at least prepared to have a proper go at all this stuff, too.'

‘I might as well end it all now.' Bella stabbed at her stomach with her chopstick.

‘Wait till next week. Then it's Nick's turn to do the floor.'

Leafing through the booklet of adult education courses from the library while she was supposed to be working, Bella thought she could do with lessons just to make sense of the brochure. Was there some logical reason for the range of subjects, prices, and locations to be encrypted in quite such a complex way? She was tempted to leave it till September. Maybe she'd have more energy for deciphering it after the summer and she could start afresh with the new academic year. But, knowing her, she would have forgotten all about it by then. For her, the saying ‘Why procrastinate today when you can do it tomorrow and have it to look forward to?' was not a joke but a perfectly valid philosophy of life. She should definitely do it NOW. Her sole achievement in the last two days seemed to be making a lemon cake, hardly top priority, and hemming her bedroom curtains. She had even cheated by
adding ‘Hem bedroom curtains' retrospectively to the epic List, soon to be available as a ten-volume boxed set, just so she could relish the rare satisfaction of being able to cross something off.

She waded back through the brochure again – perhaps she should do it by location? Just choose the one she could be bothered to get to and pick a subject at random. Or choose blind? She shut her eyes, flicked open the brochure and stabbed the page. Learning to Draw and Paint. Most amusing. Probably the only subject on offer that she didn't need because she could already do it. Well, used to be able to do it. Her early dreams of being a painter seemed like an embarrassing first crush, a piece of folly best forgotten.

There ought to be some kind of evening class that you could take for all the really tricky stuff. What was the point of worrying about Intermediate Spreadsheets or Creative Machine Embroidery when you really needed Having a Relationship – Complete Beginners or Getting Your Act Together, Level I? Surely Advanced Cake Decorating was, well, the icing on the cake? You had to have a cake first and that meant getting all the ingredients in the right proportions and then mixing them so they all melded together properly. The analogy was beginning to become entwined in itself and was also tugging her mind towards thoughts of lunch.

She picked up her bag and nipped out to the sandwich shop. The classes would have to guide you through slowly, of course, so that you progressed gradually from, say, Lesson 1: The First Phone Call to Lesson 2: The First Dinner, then Removing Clothing Without Fumbling, Zen and the Art of Putting on a Condom, Meeting His Parents, Dealing with Sulks (Novices), and Walking Out: How To Say I Need More Space When You Really Want To Say Piss Off.

*   *   *

Car Maintenance/Complete Beginners was due to start on Tuesday evening at half-six. Bella dashed home after work to pick up her car. It wouldn't start. Ha-ha, ha-ha. Very droll, she thought, slapping the dashboard. How cheering to witness that God obviously did have a sense of irony after all. And, of course, she panicked, and kept revving it, and gave it too much gas and everything else she knew she wasn't supposed to do, and the engine flooded. She tried giving it the nice cop/nasty cop treatment, alternating between ‘Come on, you're a great little car, you'd like a little outing wouldn't you? Let's go,' while lunging in her seat to demonstrate the concept of forward motion, and ‘You bastard – one last chance then I'm trading you in for a scooter.'

She turned off the engine and sat there for a few minutes. Marvellous. Another element in her life that didn't work. The evening-class thing was a stupid idea anyway, she'd obviously never meet anyone like this; she probably had mildew between her legs by now. Why couldn't she simply accept the fact that she was a sad, pathetic spinster who would never have a man or children, and throw herself into helping starving refugees or victims of unpleasant wallpaper by going round the world on a tricycle or doing a sponsored walk to Llandudno in flip-flops?

One last try. It started. Of course. Glanced at her watch – it might still be worth it; she could still enrol at least. By the time she got there, and found a parking space, the lesson was half-gone. She found the room and, wisely as it turned out, peered through a pane in the door before plunging in.

A group of about a dozen people were clustered around what she assumed must be a car engine. They suddenly parted to let a fiftyish man in blue overalls get to the centre. As they moved aside, they turned in Bella's direction. All except two of them were women.
The two that weren't huddled close together and looked very awkward; one had ginger hair that stuck up all over his head as if he'd just had a shock; the other had such bad acne, you could have used his face to map out constellations; neither could have been a minute over seventeen. She pressed herself back against the wall like a B-movie spy. A narrow escape. Hell, who wanted to learn about engines anyway? That was what mechanics were for.

It seemed a bit of a waste, however, now that she was there. The noticeboard's list of classes for that evening offered Be Your Own Accountant (who could resist?); Italian/Intermediate (possibly interesting, but she hadn't yet progressed much past
grazie
and
spaghetti al pesto
and Alessandra would be bound to go on about it and correct her pronunciation); Polish Folk-Dancing (checked watch: class nearly finished); and Life Drawing/All levels (starting in 30 seconds). Probably not many men, but she would enjoy herself anyway, and she needn't tell anyone; she hadn't sat in an actual class since she'd been at art school but she had loved that complete absorption in the task. When she drew, she was entirely focused, her concentration lasered into looking, really seeing, and interpreting her three-dimensional vision into two dimensions. She hurtled along the corridors, trying to find the right room. Why did these places always have peculiar names or numbers for rooms? The one she wanted was called WG4, but there didn't seem to be a WG1, 2 or 3.

She finally tracked it down in an annexe and leapt into the room in the middle of the tutor's introductory blurb. He said they must all call him JT and ask as many questions as they liked. Despite the fact that the tutor insisted on calling himself by initials, he seemed to be OK. ‘Erm …?' Bella found herself saying to avoid using JT, which sounded like a cleaning product or a megalomaniac boss who thought he was being
chummy with his staff. How could anyone say ‘Call me JT' and not sound embarrassed? ‘Erm' suggested they all start with a quick fifteen-minute study before moving on to a longer pose.

The model disrobed and moved into a standing position, leaning forward with his leg on a chair. There, she was getting to be with a naked man after all, and without any of that awful awkwardness. No having to laugh at laborious puns, no discovering he thought foreplay meant ten minutes of energetic rummaging in her pubes, no cystitis, no having to introduce him to her mother. Marvellous.

Bella rootled in her bag for the stubby end of a pencil. How odd it was, she thought; as soon as you really started to look, to draw, you no longer saw a naked person. The model became simply a skeleton overlaid with flesh, a collection of volumes and planes, areas of light and shadow. If only she could reduce people to this simplicity the rest of the time: the angle of a leg, the curve of a shoulder, the weight of hand on hip. It wasn't that drawing was easy – far from it; how would she manage to convey that foreshortened foot, for a start, without it appearing deformed? And do his dangly bits without making them look like chicken giblets? But if you really looked, you did start to learn, you did get better at making sense of it. You could make some personal interpretation that was akin to the reality. Yet you could live on the planet for a thousand years – well, thirty-three, but she bet it didn't get any easier – and still find other people, and yourself, a total mystery. She dismissed the thought as fruitless, focused her attention on the model and lost herself in drawing.

When it was time for the model's break, Bella noticed the room around her, the other people in the class, as if she had awoken from a trance, forms coming into
focus. Blinked as if the lights had been switched on suddenly. Found it hard to speak for a moment or two, her head still filled with pictures, shapes. Saw the words as symbols in her mind first before she could translate them into sounds, the letters only abstract lines and curves for a second as if they were pictures rather than meaningful language. Drawing
was
rather like being in love, she decided, the completeness of it, no need for anything else.

She was aware of a presence at her left shoulder. JT, checking her progress. He nodded, approving.

‘I take it you're not exactly a beginner,' he said.

Sunday. The day designed for the sole purpose of reminding all single people on the planet just how sad and lonely they really were. It wasn't as if she had a shortage of things to do. There was the small matter of the boxes, for a start. It was weeks now since she'd moved in and she was still surrounded by her cardboard cityscape. But what was the point of unpacking everything when it would all have to be repacked when she got around to having the damp done? She couldn't descend on Viv and Nick again. Viv kept saying it was fine, but the other evening Nick had remarked that they needn't bother having any children now because they had Bella: no need to worry about getting her into a decent school – no need to fund her through college – no arguments about her staying out late or hogging the phone for hours. Fantastic, he'd said, why hadn't anyone else thought of it? Why put yourself through all those years of anxiety and heartache when you could just adopt a thirty-three-year-old who could cook and everything? Hilarious. My, how she'd laughed.

She got out her list. ‘Sort out house', it said. ‘Sort out garden'. They both seemed a bit epic for a Sunday morning. ‘Damp'. She underlined it firmly to give herself the feeling that she was somehow hastening its
progress. Added ‘Chase Mr Bowman again' as a sub-entry beneath it. ‘Crack in wall/studio'. That was obviously more of a DIY project, more of a get-someone-else-in-to-sort-it-out sort of thing. ‘Shower curtain', the list continued. ‘Blind for bathroom'. Ah, that was more like it. She could manage a little light selecting of shower curtains. Habitat wasn't open till noon. Plenty of time to whizz round and have a quick tidy-up. After a spot of breakfast.