Chapter Two

Chapter 2 of Can You Smell Carrots?

Two conversations:

 

“So have you met any nice people?”

It was 3am. I had sneaked out of Jay’s room with the beginnings of a musty headache. I was eating a bag of cheese shapes and talking to my sister Rally, in case the phone lines went down and I was never heard from again.

“Well, I’ve met a man,” I said, cradling the receiver between my chin and shoulder. I wasn’t sure whether a pathological liar really counted as a nice person. “He’s a bit young, though, probably only about 25.”

“I think younger men are hot!” she said. “Go for it, that’s my advice.”

“I’m not going for it,” I said, dully. I noticed I had a bit of dandruff, a sure sign I was depressed.

Rally lived in London. She was very glamorous and had the look of a minor aristocrat. She wore wrap-around oversized raybans that hid half her face and made her look like she was about to handle a  power saw. We didn’t get on. I had a photograph of us rolling around the garden in identical smocks made out of my nan’s lounge curtains and matching flowery slippers. Our slippers had a cream fur band like the nosebands racehorses wore. We were six and seven. In the picture we were laughing but it looked like we were trying to kill each other.

“I think you should just stay away from men, then,” she said. “It doesn’t make you happy and you need to just concentrate on yourself and stop giving them all your power. I never really liked Miller, anyway.”

“You say that about all my boyfriends! Why don’t you ever say it at the time? I ask you and you swear up and down that you like them!”

“Well I don’t. Miller was always shifty.”

“He was NOT shifty!”

“I really think you need to be your own person,” said Rally, sanctimoniously. I felt my teeth clench. It wasn’t easy taking advice from someone who’d had a nervous breakdown in the middle of Pizza Express. “I don’t think you’ll ever find a relationship that works until you’ve sorted yourself out. You’ll just keep bringing your bizarreness into it and its time to leave it behind.”

“But I don’t want to be my own person!” I wailed. “I can’t be bothered to be my own person! Was Mum her own person when she met dad? Was Amy her own person when she met Brett?” Amy was my best friend. She was getting married in three months and I was to be her bridesmaid. “Why am I the only one who has to be her own person? Being my own person sounds like a whole load of effort I can do without!”

There was a long pause. I stared at a picture on the wall in front of me of lost of very happy looking people dressed in banana-coloured padded suits. They looked like they were about to be jetted into outer space. Underneath were the words ‘whale watching expedition’ in swirly writing. It was clearly summer. I wondered if was the only person masochistic enough to go on holiday to Canada in January.

“Is that your child talking?” Rally said. “I think we need to do a track back. Are you in your child or your adult at this moment, do you think?” Rally had been doing transactional analysis with her therapist, which made her think she was qualified to analyse me. It made me want to stick knitting needles into her ears and then rotate them very slowly.

“Are you having a nervous breakdown?” she said, quietly.

“NO! And address me about it when you’ve come off valium! What’s it been now, a decade!?” I slammed the phone down.

 

Afterwards I called Amy to tell her about my hellish holiday but she was more interested in fretting that her fiancé wanted a stag night.

“Well he is getting married,” I said, shoving a cheese shape into my mouth. “It’s pretty standard.” 
“I just don’t know how he can do it to me,” she wailed. “I wouldn’t put him through it. I don’t want a hen night.”
“Oh right.” I said. “What about your friends? I was looking forward to getting trolleyed and wearing a condom on my head.”
“You can do that anytime, no-one’s stopping you. I can’t stand the thought of him going. I don’t trust his friends not to do something awful. I’ll spend the whole night worrying about him.”
“Why don’t you get drunk instead?”
“I can’t! You know what my bowels are like. I’ve stopped drinking altogether!”  Her voice leaned forward into the receiver. “I’m worried they’ll take him to a strip joint,” she whispered.
“Amy, we live in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere. There are no strip joints.”
“They’re thinking of going to Amsterdam,” she said, through gritted teeth.

This was bad. Miller had been to a strip club in Amsterdam. Apparently there had been a woman on stage with two Alsatians. The logistics of it had intrigued me for weeks. 

“Do you think I’m developing a hump?” she asked suddenly.

“Excuse me?”

“You know, my posture’s so terrible, I think I’m becoming a hunchback.”

“Amy,” I said. “I’m having the holiday from hell. Can we discuss the possibility of you having a hump when I get home?”

“When will that be?” she said, mournfully.

“In a few days. This blizzard is meant to clear tomorrow and then Jay and I might take off to Vancouver.”

“Well be careful,” she said. “You know I’m a bit psychic and I keep having funny thoughts about you.”

“What sort of funny thoughts?” �" alarmed.

“You know �" thoughts. Nothing bad. I’m just telling you to be careful.”

 

I was lying on my back in Jay’s bed gazing up at the curtain rail. The ends looked like upside down tulips. The ceiling was studded with brass mounds with smaller mounds in the middle, like breasts with tiny n*****s. 

Jay must be running out of lives, I thought, yanking the ancient duvet from under him. He’d been headbutted by a trigger fish (a fish with three protruding front teeth) whilst scuba-diving, been caught in a rip tide which killed two other people in front of his eyes, and he was always flinging himself around on his bike at the top of mountains. Yesterday he saw two grizzly bears.

Personally I hadn’t left the B&B since I arrived. I’d been scared to go out in case I was eaten by bears. Freddie and I had had the following conversation as I checked in:

Me: I wont see any bears if I walk into the village today, will I?

Him: You might

Me: (freaking out) Oh my God, I don’t want to see a bear! Oh my God! What do I do?

Him: Oh (shrugs) nothing. If you see one ahead, just back away, clap your hands, sing loudly, make some noise. If it’s intent on attacking you, don’t let it think you’re easy prey. Fight back a little!

I decided to stay indoors.

“Bears don’t scare me,” Jay muttered sleepily when I told him. “In my line of business you deal with worse threats than being eaten by animals.”

He had crooned me to sleep with stories about spying on people in restaurants and being followed down dark alleys and having to constantly move house because he could hear people prowling around his yard at night. “Gosh, that must’ve been frustrating,” I said, not believing a word.

 

Miller had been an alcoholic. His heroes were Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain. He thought there was something heroic and romantic about drinking himself into a stupor. “I like living in a state of chaos,” he would say. “When I’ve had a lot to drink, I just want to know what would happen if I went over the line. What if when I’ve had enough I have another one and then another, what would happen then?”

There was really no mystery in it.  What would happen was that he would fall over, throw up or go to the hospital to have his stomach pumped.  Once he woke up with a lopsided mohican and half an eyebrow. Another possibility I hadn’t considered was that he would have sex with one of my best friends. I’d found out three weeks ago and immediately moved out of the shed we lived in and in with Mick the cab driver. Even that hadn’t been far enough away, so I booked a holiday to Canada to “get my head together.” And now I had to decide what to do with the rest of my life. It felt good to have someone’s arms around me whilst I thought about it.

 

The last time I saw Miller was December 31.