Swimming Upstream Read online

  I zoomed back down into the blackness and into the road again. Catherine was leaning over me and calling my name. Her voice became a man’s voice and she was wearing a green uniform.

  “Lizzie?” said the voice again. “Can you hear me?”

  I realised that this was not Catherine but a paramedic. “Oh God,” I groaned. “I’m not going to be doing Breakfast tomorrow, am I?”

  “That’s the last thing you want to be worrying about right now, my love,” said the paramedic. “Anyway, let them get their own. Do them good.”

  Catherine was sitting on my bed. I lifted back the curtain that surrounded us and looked out of my cubicle. Casualty was full, wall to wall with broken legs and noses.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “You don’t have to wait with me.”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Catherine gently. She gave my hand a squeeze. “I don’t mind. I wouldn’t leave you like this. Anyway it’ll give us a chance to catch up.” She lifted her hand to display a diamond-encrusted fourth finger.

  “You’re getting married?”

  Catherine nodded, smiling and arching her eyebrows expectantly.

  “Congratulations,” I added.

  “So,” said Catherine, “How did you end up here? In Cambridge, I mean, not here!” She laughed and waved her arm round expansively.

  “I came here to study. And then I met someone. So I stayed.” I told Catherine about Larsen, from the beginning, but leaving out the end, because I didn’t know what the end was.

  “So. You’re shacked up with a popstar. How cool is that? And he sounds gorgeous,” said Catherine when I’d finished.

  “He is. Gorgeous,” I repeated.

  “But?” said Catherine perceptively, and I realised how much I needed to talk to someone. I realised suddenly that I didn’t have any friends, after all. Not real friends, friends that I could talk to about how I was feeling. All I had was Larsen’s friends, the friends I had inherited the day that I met him. The friends that had always been Larsen’s friends before mine.

  A nurse came in with my X-rays. “Well, nothing broken,” she said.

  “Really?”

  The nurse started to bandage up my foot. “It’s badly sprained. You’ve torn a few ligaments. Don’t expect to be running a marathon any time soon.” Or swimming, I was guessing. She disappeared again.

  “So what about you?” I asked Catherine, not wanting to bring her down with my problems. “What have you been doing since I saw you last? And who’s the lucky man?”

  “I went to drama school, luvvie. Four years at the Central School of Speech and Drama. London. Swiss Cottage. Then I met Martin when I was performing at the Arts Centre here in Cambridge. A fringe thing. Some play one of my classmates had written. It was awful actually,” she laughed. “Martin knew her, so he came along… and the rest is history, as they say. I moved to Cambridge to be with him.”

  “What are we like?” I smiled.

  “What do you mean?” asked Catherine.

  “Following men around.”

  Catherine looked puzzled. She smiled faintly and pulled back the curtain. An elderly registrar arrived. He handed me my prescription and a pair of crutches.

  “Watch where you’re going in future, young lady,” he told me. “How are you getting home?”

  “Home? I can go home?”

  “You’ve been lucky. No real damage done. Your observations are all good. Blood pressure’s on the low side, but I understand that’s normal for you.”

  “Yes.”

  “That will account for the temporary loss of consciousness. Nothing to worry about. And the sprain will heal in its own time. So, is there anyone who can take you home?”

  “My fiancé,” said Catherine. “He’s coming to collect me. Us. We’ll take her.”

  The registrar nodded and disappeared.

  “You don’t have to do this!” I protested. “I can get a cab.”

  “Don’t be silly. He won’t mind.”

  “Are you sure?”

  By way of reply, Catherine took me by the arm and hoisted me off the bed. We hobbled together down the corridor towards the reception area. Outside, I pulled a pack of cigarettes out of my bag and hastily lit one. Catherine took one crutch for me and I leaned on the other one and breathed in deeply while Catherine glanced round the car park.

  “There he is!” Catherine pointed towards a black BMW Three Series, which was parked up just outside the entrance. “He’s here already.”

  “Nice car,” I said. I stubbed out my cigarette.

  “It’s old,” said Catherine, modestly. “Not as flash as it looks.”

  “So what does he do?” I asked her, trying to show some enthusiasm for her good fortune in the wake of my own despair.

  “Do?”

  “Martin. For a living.”

  “Oh!” she laughed. “He works at the pools complex. That’s where I was heading when I saw you doing your kamikaze act in the road. I was on my way to meet him from work. To surprise him.”

  “He works at the pool?”

  “He’s a lifeguard,” she explained.

  At that moment the door of the black BMW opened and out stepped Martin, still in his shorts and flip flops. I recognised him instantly and could see that he recognised me.

  2

  What was it like, the beginning, with Larsen? Magical, heady, scary. A chance to forget anything bad that had ever happened to me. And to discover that love really does conquer all. Well, for a time, at least.

  Cambridge was beautiful but I didn’t belong. My first term at the College of Arts was like being part of a big, new, interesting jigsaw puzzle, only I was the piece that didn’t seem to fit. I was studying French, and trying to make friends was harder than I’d thought. I’d sit in the canteen and try to join in the chat with my classmates but somehow there was never a connection and that just made me feel insecure. Their background, their frame of reference, was so different from my own, their conversation, their experiences did not fit with my own thoughts, my own reality. Not only that, but everyone spoke better French than I did and although we’d all started the course at exactly the same time, it felt as though they had all been here, studied, and met and forged their friendships long before I came on the scene. I wandered by myself from tutorial group to lecture hall, feeling more and more isolated as the weeks went by. I discovered that being alone in a crowd is the worst kind of lonely.

  Then, in early December, I got chatting in the launderette to a girl called Karen who told me they were advertising for bar staff at the club where she worked. Before long I was working there too, in the evenings and at weekends. It was just over the Romsey bridge, off Mill Road, but far enough from both the red brick of the Tech and the gothic splendour and tended lawns of the University to feel as if it could have been the street that I grew up in. Immediately my mood lifted and I began to feel as if I belonged in Cambridge. Everything made more sense at the club. Everyone seemed more real to me. And it wasn’t long before I spotted Larsen, up on the small stage with his band.

  “Who’s that?” I asked Karen, the first time I saw him.

  “Larsen Tyler,” she said. “He’s the local talent.”

  Larsen was a natural performer. I watched him, constantly, every chance I got, every time he played. I watched him longingly, but quickly averted my gaze whenever he seemed to be looking my way. He seemed at home in his body in a way that I never had been with mine. He stood on stage, his legs splayed, his head bent over his guitar, his shoulder-length blond hair flopping forward and covering his face as he strummed. He would throw his head back and smile as he sang, his eyes working their way round the room and locking briefly with everyone in his field of vision. When the song ended he would whip his guitar strap off his shoulder and leap onto the piano seat, his fingers moving gently over the keys to a slower melody, while the rest of the band fell into time. After the set finished, he would disappear into the back room with the manager of the club and the rest of the band,
where I knew they were drinking till late. Occasionally I would see him chatting to some girls at the back of the bar and would feel an irrational knot of jealousy tighten in my stomach. But he never looked my way.

  Once or twice he came to the bar but Karen always served him and chatted away easily with him while I hovered nearby self-consciously, smiling and nodding in agreement as she complimented him on the set. Once or twice he smiled back at me but we never spoke.

  Then, late one Sunday evening when the club was all but empty and we were near to closing, he appeared out of nowhere, standing at the bar. I pushed shut the till, turned and looked up to find him looking straight into my eyes. His were a deep blue-grey, with laughter lines in the corners. When he smiled you could see all his teeth. It looked as if he still had all his baby teeth, like Peter Pan.

  “So, what are you drinking?” he asked, fishing in his jeans pocket for his wallet. I gazed back at him, and cleared my throat softly. “Me? Oh, well… a pint of Harp, please,” I said in a voice that didn't sound like mine.

  “You don't wanna drink that gnat's piddle,” he replied, leaning over the bar towards me. His blond hair flopped forwards. I glanced down at his muscled forearms, which were resting on the sticky bar top. “How about a pint of Kronenbourg?”

  “Okay then,” I agreed. Larsen watched me closely as I moved down the bar to the tap.

  “So, what’s your name, then?” he asked.

  “Lizzie. Lizzie Taylor.” I waited for him to give me the “Not the Elizabeth Taylor” line, like most people did, but he didn’t.

  “Lizzie Taylor,” he repeated, as if it meant something really special.

  I felt myself flushing. It felt really intimate, him saying my name like that. I thought it would sound false and stupid if I asked him his, but “I know who you are” would sound even worse, so I didn’t say anything, except “Cheers.”

  “Cheers,” said Larsen, clinking glasses with me. “Nice to meet you at last. So, you’re a student, right?”

  “Isn’t everybody?” I was still reeling from the “at last” comment. Did this mean that he had been watching me, after all, like I had been watching him?

  “Nope. I’m not. I was. At the College of Arts.”

  “That’s where I am!” A person to whom I didn’t have to explain, “It’s not the University”. “So, what happened?”

  “I packed it in. Failed my first year exams. Never looked back.”

  “Really?” I said, hope rising inside me. I wasn’t alone. Larsen had trodden this path before me, and survived. “I think I’m going to fail mine. It’s really hard. It seems like a big leap between sixth form and studying for a degree. For me, anyway. Everyone else seems to get it. It’s just me. I don’t seem to fit in.” I stopped abruptly. I had surprised myself with my confession. But Larsen was already nodding, as if he understood.

  “Leave, then,” he said simply. “It’s an elitist institution anyway.”

  I laughed. “Well, you could argue that the Tech is the institution of the underclass, since it’s not part of the University.”

  “Right. So, how many poverty stricken students from working class backgrounds are there on your course?”

  I smiled. “Point taken. So what are you doing now then? Apart from…” I waved my arm in the direction of the stage.

  “Apart from wasting my time playing music?” Larsen smiled and raised his eyebrows.

  “I don’t think that at all. I think you’re brilliant.”

  Larsen looked at me for a moment, then in one swift movement placed his hands onto the bar, vaulted up, leaned over and kissed me on the lips. I was so stunned that I couldn’t speak. I glanced around the near-empty bar but no-one appeared to have noticed. Karen was busy playing on the Mad Planets machine.

  “I work for the council,” Larsen continued, as if nothing had happened. “Ents. The Entertainments Department, that is. It’s a good job. And we have a laugh.”

  “That’s Entertainment,” I said.

  Larsen laughed. “You’re funny. You know what that song is about?”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “Listen to the lyrics,” said Larsen. “If you get it, you’re working class. It’s the true definition.”

  “Well, I don’t know if I am working class,” I said. “I just don’t seem to be truly middle class either. Are there any classes any more?”

  “It’s like saying, “How old are you?”” said Larsen. “Everyone says you’re as old as you feel. I think it’s the same with class.”

  “How old do you feel?” I asked him.

  “Ageless,” smiled Larsen.

  I smiled back. “So why do you live here, surrounded by all the students, if you don’t like them?”

  “I was born here,” said Larsen, simply. “It’s my home. I’m town, not gown. Hey, do you know about the Rock against Racism gig on Midsummer Common?”

  “That’s next month isn’t it?”

  “Yup. I’m organising it. It’s a great line-up. We’re playing. You should come. It’s going to be mega.”

  “Sounds great.”

  Karen appeared. It was time to close up.

  “I need to change the barrels,” I told Larsen. “Ready for tomorrow.”

  “Need a hand?”

  “I can do it. It’s okay.” Idiot, I told myself and added, “I do need another crate of cokes though.”

  Larsen followed me down the steps into the cellar. Unnerved, I tripped on the second step and Larsen caught me.

  “Steady!” He put his arms round me. “You okay?” he asked, stepping back and surveying me, his hands still round my waist.

  “I’m okay,” I smiled. “Now.”

  He held me a little longer than necessary, looked at me for a moment then said,

  “Tell you what, do you fancy coming back to my place? There are a few people coming back, a bit of a party? Karen’s coming,” he added, as if I needed persuading. “It’s only about five minutes from here.”

  I nodded. “That would be great.”

  “Good,” said Larsen. “You get and close up while I pack up my gear. Then we can grab a few beers and head back.”

  I washed glasses and Karen dried them while Larsen turned off the stage lights, shut down the PA desk, boxed up microphones and wound up leads. All the while I felt my heart thumping in my chest with excitement, feeling somehow that this short time - which included all three of us, together inside the empty building, calling out and laughing as we worked - was a joyous prelude to something momentous that was about to happen in my life; an end to the isolation of my student world. Karen and I turned the plastic chairs upside down on the tables and pulled down the shutters. Once all the glasses had been stacked neatly on the shelves and the ashtrays emptied, I picked up my coat and Larsen set the alarm and locked the door while Karen and I stood outside shivering, our breath making foggy clouds in the cold night air.

  “Poor Larsen,” whispered Karen. “He needs a bit of cheering up. He’s just split up with his girlfriend.”

  “Really?” I asked, hope rising up inside me.

  The party was in full swing when we arrived and I felt heady as the wall of heat and smoke rose to greet us in the hallway. Music was blaring from the living room. I followed Larsen and Karen into the kitchen. The floor was sticky and the soles of one of my shoes had picked up a fag end. I lifted my foot and pulled it off.

  “Larsen, man, you made it,” said a huge dark-haired guy wearing a checked shirt and jeans. He took a beer out of Larsen's hand, stuck his fingers up at him, and took the top off with his teeth. He turned to look at me with friendly curiosity.

  “Of course I made it, I live here, you fool,” said Larsen and put an arm round his shoulders.

  “Doug, this is Lizzie. Lizzie, Doug.” Doug took my hand and kissed it.

  A girl appeared in the doorway. She was tall, with light brown shoulder-length hair and green glassy eyes, oval-shaped and slanted in the corners like a cat's. I thought she looked sophisticat
ed, even though she was casually dressed in a baggy black jumper and jeans. I looked at Larsen who was taking off his leather jacket and felt suddenly overdressed in my mini skirt and tight-fitting jumper.

  “Tyler, You're here,” said the girl, accusingly, as if someone should have told her. She looked straight through me, bounced up to Larsen and flung her arms round his neck. He caught her with one arm as he swung round.

  “Jude, meet Lizzie,” he said brightly.

  I smiled. Jude responded with a vague nod and, tossing her hair, disappeared back into the crowd. Doug and Larsen exchanged a furtive glance.

  “Come on,” said Larsen and we all trooped into the living room.

  The guy beside me passed me a joint. His name was Jeff. He had something of a cross between a mohican and a footballer’s haircut going on; short at the front, long at the back and shaved at the sides over his ears. He talked interminably about music, reeling off the names of various obscure bands that I guessed I was supposed to have heard of, while I sat and nodded at him in silence. All I could think about was Larsen, who was leaning up against the wall next to Jude, deep in conversation.

  “Don't get back together,” I pleaded at them inside my head, feeling hopeless. I wondered why I cared that much. After all, I barely knew him. I must be crazy. I wondered if I should go home, but knew I wouldn't, not yet.

  I looked around the room. It was unmistakably a student pad - minimalist, quirky. A chipboard table and chairs were pushed into one corner and a stolen road sign “No U-turns” - took pride of place near the door. Underneath the window opposite me was a sagging green sofa with lots of people I didn’t know spilling off its edges. There were several interesting-looking pictures on the wall which I would have liked to get up and contemplate, but I was sitting on the floor in a bean bag and not at all sure that I could get up without drawing huge amounts of attention to myself. I was suddenly feeling very stoned.

  “What about Jellybelly?” asked Jeff; at least that's what it sounded like.