Pamela's Dream scenes 2 and 3

We are unbelievably late. The boys were still in the bath when the christening was scheduled to start and then, just as we were about to leave the house, Matty wet his pants and soaked the linen trousers bought especially for the occasion. I am extremely thankful I didn’t accept the invitation to be Georgina’s Godmother. I can’t even get there on time as a guest. What sort of example would that be setting? When they asked me, at the end of an awkward, and therefore, boozy dinner party, I knew it was only because Seth was Ryan’s Godfather and I just blurted out an emphatic NO.
‘I told you she wouldn’t do it,’ said Harry with a smirk. Alice was affronted; seeming to believe it was a personal slight on her and her beautiful new baby. There were tears and raised voices and then acceptance and drunken hugs when the discussion turned to me not believing in God, with good reason, and so possibly not being the best spiritual guide. Then we all cried again and toasted Seth with unwise wine telling him aloud how much we missed him.
The only thing of Matty’s that was clean was a pair red Gap comfys. Dressed hastily in the hall he looks mismatched, still in his pressed white shirt but now with the incongruity of tracksuit bottoms. He’s not happy. Calm now at least after thermo-nuclear meltdown, but his face is red and dirty and you could hang a coat on his bottom lip. He’s scrunched in his car seat, staring at Joseph with abject hatred as his brother tries not to laugh.
‘Not funny,’ he shouts and renders Joseph helpless with giggles.
I sigh; undo my seat belt and turn to face them, adopting the stern expression recommended by Supernanny.
‘Right, you two behave. We’ve missed the church because you were fighting all morning. This is Georgina’s day; it’s not about you, so no more trying to get attention.’
‘We’re late because Matty pissed his pants.’
‘Not funny,’ shrieks Matty.
‘It is funny. He’s so utterly ridiculous.’
‘Since when did you swallow a dictionary? Don’t wind him up at the party.’
Joseph salutes me. ‘Yes sir!’
‘Not ickulus.’
‘And you be quiet, or there’ll be no TV when we get home - for either of you.’
‘That’s not fair,’ says Joseph, ‘anyways, we won’t get home in time. You’ll end up drinking too much wine and talking to Harry in the kitchen for hours, laughing at all his stupid jokes and we’ll have to get a taxi at about midnight. Then you’ll spend all day tomorrow in a bad mood.’
‘Joseph.’
‘It’s true. It always happens and besides Georgina is an amoeba and won’t even care if we’re good or not.’
I take my lipstick out of my bag and look in the mirror, sweep it across my lips and pat down my hair. Then I stick my tongue out at Joseph in the back.
‘Right lets go. If you behave I’ll take you to Drusilla’s tomorrow.’
‘Aw cool!’
‘Cillas Cillas!’

I take a deep breath, smooth the silk of my blouse and ring the doorbell. Big Ben chimes in miniature. Alice opens the door; Olivia perched on her hip like a plump meringue, her face a big round strawberry of teething-swollen cheeks dotted with rusk-crumb pips. I can tell at a glance that Alice has already had a couple of glasses of champagne. Her cheeks are the same colour as her daughter’s, and it has little to do with her hastily applied blusher. Her eyes are slightly too open, as if she’s already fighting to keep them that way, and there’s a light film of perspiration on her forehead. She’s dressed beautifully in Coast’s finest pink chiffon, with black heels and a necklace of jet carved into inter-linked leaves. Her sleek blond bob is finished off with a veiled pill-box hat, pinned to her head so precariously it’s begging to be knocked off. There’s a tea-towel draped over her right shoulder printed with a gaudy carousel. The leering horses have obviously scared Olivia’s crusty fingers because they have avoided it completely, preferring to smear an oily rusk line across Alice’s chest. Joseph gives Matty a shove as Alice opens the door wider to let us in. Olivia points a sticky finger at them, ’Ba ba ba ba ba!’ She shrieks. Joseph blows her a loud raspberry, she giggles eyes popping and Matty nearly falls over laughing. Alice gives me a reproachful look and grabs me by the arm hauling me inside.
‘Jesus Pamela it’s nearly two - where the hell have you been? Harry’s mother is driving me nuts, telling me over and over how good it was you had the sense to turn down the job of Godmother, how Harry was never keen on having you anyway, how unreliable you are - missing the service, and thank God his cousin Matilda stepped in, and blah blah blah blah blah.’
‘Sorry,’ I say, pathetically unable to think of any adequate excuse. I kiss her on the cheek and look behind her into the hall. The house is a buzzing hive; guests dressed to the nines stand in clusters in the enormous hall, talking animatedly, fuelled by abundant fizz. The sound of voices and laughter permeates from the lounge and the dining room, children’s footsteps and giggles echo over the polished floorboards. There are vases of tall pink-hearted lilies on every surface, their stamens heavy with orange powder. Chains of pink and silver Happy Christening balloons hang from the ceiling and over doorways and an obscenely enormous pile of fairy-wrapped boxes spills over the hall table and onto the floor.
Through the open kitchen doors the boys catch sight of face-painted children marauding around the back garden, and push past us, sending Alice tottering on her heels and disappearing from view like rockets into orbit. I look after them into the kitchen as Alice chatters on. Harry is standing in the doorway holding a bottle of champagne in one hand and an empty glass in the other. He is dressed in a crumpled linen suit and an un-ironed open-necked shirt of a curious grey/pink colour. I find myself hoping Alice bought it for him and that he didn’t pick it for himself. He’s standing opposite an immaculately pressed older man who must be a client, slick, with sheeny silver hair and a deep tan; he is talking to Harry as if they are in a meeting rather than at a party. Harry nods at the silver fox, then touches him lightly on the arm and turns his gaze to me.
‘Excuse me a moment,’ he says and walks towards us.
‘Pamela,’ he says warmly and he kisses me on the cheek as he always does, but our mouths touch, and when he moves back I feel myself blush as I notice the smear of lipstick crossing the corner of his lips. For a moment he stares deeply into my eyes and smiles.
‘Drink?’ he asks, already pouring champagne into the empty glass - his empty glass. Drained by the mouth that kissed mine the last time we met. Mouths that only parted when Olivia cried, stirring in the cradle of cushions we’d made for her on the living room floor, as we lounged on the sofa after a day of kid’s football and hours in the playground. Alice away visiting her mother, children fed and put to bed, an Indian takeaway and a bottle and a half of Albarino. A tussle over the TV remote and then a kiss. A kiss that wasn’t chaste, or made of friendship. A kiss that could have changed everything. A kiss that I wanted and repelled all at once, and that was cut short only by a baby’s cries and the instant sobriety they conjured.
The smell of shit breaks through the pervading scent of the lilies, and Alice cries out in anguish as ochre liquid seeps through Olivia’s christening gown and onto her pink chiffon.
‘Fantastic.’ She hisses, taking the drink her husband poured for me and downing it in one. She hands me the glass, looks me in the eyes and pulls a camel-face. ‘I’ll go and change us both then.’
She holds the gurgling Olivia at arm’s length and turns towards the stairs. ‘C’mon poopy-pants let’s get you cleaned up.’
‘Do you want a hand?’ says Harry.
‘With what?’ says Alice tersely, ‘I need to change too,’ and then adds in a softened tone, ‘you stay here and entertain our guests.’
She totters across the hall floor, never at home in heels, weaving in and out of guests, treating them to a whiff of baby poo as she goes - like air-freshener in reverse - and escapes upstairs.
Harry holds up the bottle and smiles again, a bit too widely, too unnaturally. God this is awkward. I hold up the glass and look at it as he fills it watching the bubbles swirl and bump their way to the top. We stand side by side leaning against the beautiful antique dresser situated opposite a large gilt-edged mirror. Neither of us can think of anything to say; instead we look down at our feet. Whatever it was I wanted four days ago it wasn’t this. The morning after I’d allowed myself to hope it wouldn’t be like this. Hoped it was just a kiss nothing more. I thought it might be like the last time it happened - years ago, when we were barely in our twenties - a full-on snog on the sofa, as Alice and Seth slept drunkenly in other rooms. We pulled apart just in time and it was never mentioned again. Everything carried on, as if the kiss had been a flicker of a dream shared in the post-party dawn. That’s what I’d hoped this time. That’s what I told myself anyway; too much to hope for at our age I suppose. I wonder what he wants. What he thinks is going to happen, this old friend of mine with whom I’ve shared so much. Fifteen years - that’s how much.
‘You have beautiful feet,’ says Harry and laughs, presumably at the absurdity of using such a line an old friend. At least he’s broken the silence. I shift my bottom against the dresser and swig my champagne.
‘You think so?’ I say turning my foot on my stilettos to appraise my ankle. He looks too. I look away and catch sight of myself in the mirror, only fleetingly, but enough despise what I see - a cliché of seduction. Seth used to call it my come-hither stance. He said it was what attracted him to me in the first place, went straight to his cock, he said, embodied the word coy and all it entailed, and after he recognised that he knew he had to have me.
On the night we met, he told me years later, he became aware of me standing half in, and half out, of our circle of friends, as we gathered next to the shiny chrome bar of an early 90s nightclub. He described things I’d long forgotten, or never been aware of - that I was holding a pint for instance, and my fingernails were bitten and finished with chipped black polish. I had bangles, made from cheap necklaces, wrapped around my wrists, which were as thin as a bird’s leg, my hand bent at an angle, porcelain white, its pointy bones barely covered by the skin at the bend. I wore an incongruous mix of hoopy tights, black DMs, a wrap-over top and a floral skirt. I remembered the skirt I’d made it earlier that day out of an apron, which only had enough material to cover half of my thighs so had to be teamed with the thick tights.
He told me he’d pretended to listen to the conversation of our mutual and, until then, separate friends all the while watching me surreptitiously, lifting his glass to his mouth as an excuse to gaze at me through the amber lager. I didn’t join in the conversation either, not really, I smiled and hung back slightly, nodding when someone said something the group considered witty, but I was on the outside, he said he could see that without knowing anything about me. He said it was the distance that did it, the guarded way I held my self as I if wanted to keep everyone at bay, not let anyone in. He wanted to be the one I surrendered to, the one I let know everything. He told me all this on our honeymoon, looking out over dawn rising on a Mexican beach, naked on a bed of silk and velvet. He said it was the combination of extreme beauty and spectacular unease that hooked him. I stiffened when he said beauty. I never could take a bare compliment.
‘Even now, even after five years and a huge wedding, even now you don’t trust me to tell you how beautiful you are.’
I’m not beautiful. Far from it. My spine is an S. It curves where it’s not supposed to, raising one shoulder and dropping down on the opposite side at the hip, a serpent of bones. If I listen hard enough I can hear it hiss. I exaggerate; it’s only slight, you can’t really tell when I’m dressed, not unless you know, but my come hither stance, the thing that first attracted Seth to me, is in fact a result of deformity and not of beauty at all.
I look away from myself, back down to my feet.
Harry closes the gap between us, shifting fractionally to the side so that our arms are touching, heat exchanged like molten metal.
‘Pamela, we should talk about the other night.’
Our eyes meet, his face is full of expectation, of wanting me to meet him halfway, admit there’s something there. I frown.
‘I think we should just forget it don’t you? Put it down to too much wine.’
Now it’s his turn to frown. He answers quietly as though his throat has suddenly dried.
‘We both know it wasn’t that.’
I down my drink and look at us in the mirror.
‘Wasn’t it? I don’t see how it could be anything else.’
‘It felt like more than that Pamela. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. When you didn’t turn up to the church today I thought you felt the same, that you were…’ he lowers his eyes to my ankle again, ‘avoiding the situation.’
He looks up at me and I am still looking at us in the mirror. His face is handsome in profile but it belongs to someone I don’t know. I turn towards him suddenly irritated.
‘Situation? There isn’t any situation.’
He looks like a child caught stealing from the cookie jar – the anticipation of sweetness fading.
‘What do you want me to say, Harry?’
Two of the children rush passed us armed with water pistols, skidding across the floor, leaving dark footprints on the lacquered wood.
‘Pow Pow Pow!’
We follow them with our eyes as they round the stairs and disappear into the lounge.
‘Mind the presents,’ someone shouts from above. It’s Alice standing on the stairs, a transformed Olivia in her arms.
Harry straightens and moves away from me. His mother walks out of the kitchen.
‘Pamela darling,’ she says and kisses me on the cheek, ‘you look marvellous. Did you go to the wrong church?’ She takes my arm. ‘Come and say hello to David, he’s been very worried by your absence.’
I look back over my shoulder at Alice’s unreadable expression.