Take Two Girls

Take two girls

Remember that girl who married that guy, oh, it's years ago now; the only son, the one who was due to inherit that huge business. You do remember her? I met her only recently.

Well, the thing is she has been in counselling for the last few years. So was he for a while, but you know men, he didn't go to the sessions for as long as she did. He didn't want to go at all to begin with, of course. It was hardly the sort of thing he could talk to his friends about, but when some of the friends admitted that they too had been in counselling and it had even worked for some of them, he decided to have a go. Nothing like another chap to help you make up your mind? And he did go along with her at the very same time each week - he thought it might be a laugh? OK, so it wasn't a laugh at all and it cost them an absolute fortune, but then, what doesn't cost a fortune nowadays?

And look at it this way. At least they are definitely not alcoholics. Well, not as far as they know. Of course they drink every day, but honestly, what harm is a couple of gin and tonics and maybe a bottle of wine each? It's good wine, the best of wine, and good wine is very good for you. Everybody knows that.

And they are definitely not hooked on Cocaine. They only use it now and again, at the parties, just as their friends do. And that's only every other weekend or so. Well, maybe the odd time, at a special dinner. As a treat to go with the Champagne, when their two offspring are away elsewhere for the night. Staying in other successful people's houses, they hope.

And the offspring? Hey, their two kids are doing just fine. They both drink of course. God knows how much. It is so difficult to keep track when both parents spend so much time out at their various functions. Maybe they should just stop stocking up the drinks cabinet and see what happens? But you can't just do that. Too weird. You have to just trust your kids, haven't you? They hear the usual arguments in favour of 'drugs of choice'. Like all their friends' children argue too. And what can you say? Difficult to win that particular argument. The kids are probably right. All their parents do, and have always, abused substances, just different ones. They certainly seem to need an awful lot of pocket money?

Oh but good news, at least the pair of them hadn't taken up smoking cigarettes full time. Well, they both need inhalers for their asthma, so it was just as well that they didn't smoke. And last but not least, they hadn't brought home someone from another country. Well, the wrong country, and announced that they were getting married, or even worse, that there was a citizen of the world on the way.

So that's how we find girl number one from our early schooldays, living a perfect designer life, almost twenty years on.

Now, remember the other girl? The one who, growing up, had never, ever found herself with the chance to mix in circles where she might meet a guy who would inherit a business? You remember her as well? She isn't in counselling. She could never have afforded it anyway. Nor, to be honest, has she ever needed it. It's not that she hasn't had any dreams dashed, or major upsets in her life. If we are honest, we remember that she didn't have that many dreams to begin with, but still, she did have some.

But wait. This isn't one of those 'rich girl with time on her hands goes to counselling' versus 'poor little simple girl gets on with life' tales. Oh no. The second girl annoys us just as much as the first, if not more. She, intentionally or otherwise, hasn't appeared to progress, doesn't seem to have crossed any lines at all since she was born. Our second girl's dreams were more concerned with winning the holiday camp 'Miss lovely legs' competition when she was fifteen years old. It was the pinnacle of success for her family. Her imagination never fully developed beyond a certain point. So things don't bother her as much as they would other people. She ended up getting married to a near neighbour just before her twentieth birthday, produced five hideously mannered, red-faced children in eight years.

To this day she goes and visits and sits and talks with her mother every day. Her father is not dead; he just doesn't sit in the same room. Other members of the family drop in too. They all talk. They all know every single thing about each other, each other's husbands and each other's children, loads of them. So there they sit, all squashed into the back room of her old house each and every afternoon, with her mother and sisters, talking endlessly, talk for talk's sake, all smoking their heads off.

She never went to a dentist after she left school aged fourteen because of having awful memories of being there as a young child, so all her teeth eventually went brown and began to fall out. She didn't care. She couldn't wait to get the full set of false teeth anyway. No more trouble with teeth. But she did buy little funny shaped toothbrushes for her kids and shouted at them to wash their teeth at night. And then she would give them sticky toffee sweets to bribe them into going to bed. The children's day, apart from school, was spent staring at a TV screen or playing games on the computer in their grandparent's house. The grandparents had bought the computer for them for Christmas and it had stayed in their house because that's where the children went after school and spent most of their time even at weekends.

The children went to the same school as their mother had, because it was near their grandparent's house. The girl and her husband, who picked up his family after work, on the way home to their own house each evening would often get a Chinese takeaway and the children would have a little piece of this. Or maybe toast. Well they had eaten something earlier in their grandparents hadn't they? The children would have an orange fizzy drink with their little bit of supper and the parents would have a few beers, which they drank directly from the bottles, along with the bright yellow curry.

These are just two stories of how things turned out for two girls from different ends of the rainbow, glitzy cocaine parties at one end and fish and chips with beer and no dinner for children at the other. Both of them were judged to be total successes in their parents' eyes. Both girls had gone the same route as their parents had. The cocaine dinners at home replacing the golf club dinners. The Chinese takeaway replacing the local Italian chip shop of the old days.

What about the in betweens, the ones who didn't follow the path their parents might have expected them to? The ones who struck out on their own, and never regretted it, although at times the path was very rocky, and they were in uncharted territory, with no advice forthcoming, as nobody had gone there before?

Some girls didn't buy into the dream of marrying the rich guy who would mind them forever in return for minding him and his offspring. Nor were they happy to marry the chap down the road, remain in the same place and mindset as their parents, who out of necessity had lived a very different and a very limited life in some respects.

Some, now called 'boomers', born in the nineteen fifties, took life by the scruff of the neck at times, and at other times we unfortunately found that life took us by the throat. And we survived it all. We saw life through very different eyes. We thought anyone could be anything they wanted to be. It was our only way out....

ends