And Baby Makes Two

Ford.

“Well, that’s the way they are,” I told her. And I gave her a shove that knocked her against the wall and slammed my door behind me.

My mother always told me that love wasn’t like it is in films and songs and stuff like that. Meaning that it wasn’t like that for her. Charlene and Dara’s father died when they were little. Hard though it was to believe, the Spiggs had been madly in love with him. She married my father because he was the best she could get with two children and cellulite and her lousy personality. Charlene and Dara’s father was God’s gift to the earth; mine was a reminder that God likes to punish people.

“You don’t just meet someone and BOOM, you’re in love,” my mother had told me. “Real life isn’t like in films.”

I didn’t believe her when I was twelve, and now that I was fifteen I knew she was lying. She wanted me to have the same miserable life she had, that’s why.

Love was exactly like it was in films: BOOM.

One minute you’re just an ordinary person, waiting for something great to happen, and the next minute – BOOM – something great has happened. You feel happier than you’ve ever felt before – than you ever thought you could feel.

I’m not sure if I fell in love with Les when he kissed me, or if it happened before that, when we were talking in McDonald’s. Not that it mattered. I knew that first night that he was the man I’d been waiting for since I was born.

After she stopped shouting at me through the door and finally staggered off to her own room, I put a Celine Dion CD in my Discman and lay on my bed, staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars I’d stuck on the ceiling. I went over everything Les had said. I imagined every detail of his face, and the way he laughed, and the way he ate, and the way he drove, and the way he looked at me and how he tasted in my mouth.

So this is love, I thought. L-O-V-E: LOVE.

The CD ended and a really old song floated into my head. After my dad escaped when I was four, me and Hilary went to live with my nan for a few years. The Spiggs threw herself into rebuilding her life, so it was Nan I spent time with. Most afternoons we’d get out her box of old records and we’d play them on her ancient record player. This song was one of my favourites because it made me feel really happy. I made Nan play it all the time. And years later they had it in that film. Lying in bed that night, I could hear it exactly the way it sounded on her old record player. Scratchy and old-fashioned.

“Just blahblah and me … and baby makes three … we’re happy in my blue heaven…”

I didn’t really understand it when I was little, but I did now. Now I knew what the singer meant.

I drifted off to sleep, softly humming my nan’s song. At last I understood what life was all about.

Love Will Set You Free

Les said I was pretty, fun to be with, and that I made him laugh. I couldn’t believe it.

“Me?” I’d say.

And he’d say, “Yes, you.”

Like me, Les had had a hard time at school. He was quiet, and teachers and other bullies picked on him a lot. Plus, though it was hard to believe now, he’d been fat and unpopular. So he was always shy with girls. He said he never even thought about girls in secondary school, all he thought about was getting out and getting a job and having a life. Also like me. He only moved out of his mother’s and down to London that summer, so though he’d been out with a few girls he’d never even had a real girlfriend. Before now.

“You kiss like you have,” I told him.

Les laughed. “Beginner’s luck.”

Les liked the way boys looked at me in the street, like they wished they were him.

“Green with envy,” he’d say as we passed a group of them. “Green with envy.” He’d give me a hug. He was really chuffed.

I’d hug him back.

I was really chuffed, too.

Les also liked that I was really feminine and into make-up and stuff. He was a musicals freak. He said I was like some song in some old musical, I enjoyed being a girl.

“I do now,” I said.

There were tons of things Les knew about – sports and cars and videos and who originally starred in Oklahoma!, that sort of thing – that I didn’t know much about. I loved to listen to him explain them to me. And he loved to explain them.

“You’re sure I’m not boring you?” he’d ask.

And I’d say, “Of course I’m sure.”

But even though we hung out a lot together and were always happy and kissing and stuff, Les never said the L-word. He said he wasn’t ready for a serious relationship, but I reckoned he was just shy. I mean, it was all pretty new to him. Les was a boy, so he hadn’t spent all the years I’d spent waiting to fall in love. He wasn’t prepared. I knew that it can take a man a lot longer to realize he’s in love than it does a woman. Like in When Harry Met Sally… Though I hoped it wouldn’t take him that long.

So I never said the L-word, either. Not that it mattered. I felt it. And I showed it. And I knew that, deep down, Les felt it too.

Besides being ecstatically happy, the beauty of being in love was that it gave me real power for the first time in my life. Because nothing else mattered. It was that simple. Nothing else mattered at all.

The Wicked Witch of NW6 could moan at me and threaten me and refuse to give me any pocket money, and it didn’t matter. I couldn’t care less. She was like a toothless, clawless lion roaring at the ringmaster. I might still be living in her flat, but in my mind and heart I was already gone.

It was the same at school. Now there really was no reason why I should worry about boring stuff like science and history. As soon as I was sixteen, I’d leave school, move in with Les and get a job. Les was bound to be a manager by then, and he’d get me something in Blockbuster until we decided it was time to have kids. Before you knew it, I was going to be decorating our flat and making dinner for our friends, not sitting in the library with my nose in a book worrying about who started a war hundreds of years ago. I mean, it wasn’t like I was going to have to list the kings and queens of England in chronological order to shop in Sainsbury’s, was it?

As usual, the preachers didn’t exactly agree with me.

“You’re bright enough,” Mrs Mela, my English teacher, informed me one afternoon, “but you just don’t seem to want to make any effort at all any more.”

That’s why Mrs Mela had made me stay behind. Because I didn’t make any effort at all any more. She’d caught me passing notes to my friend Amie while she was reading us Romeo and Juliet. Again.

Thing was, I really didn’t want to make any effort just then. I was meeting Les for tea before he went on his shift. Who wants to discuss their lack of interest in English when they’ve got a date? I stared through the window behind her, as if I was listening and thinking deeply about what she said.

Mrs Mela sighed. She sounded just like Hilary Spiggs.

“Lana,” said Mrs Mela in her user-friendly voice, “what’s going to happen to you if you keep this up? You haven’t done your homework in weeks. You disrupt the rest of the class…” She gave another heartfelt sigh. “I’m very, very concerned.”

I flashed her one of my best smiles. “There’s nothing to be concerned about,” I assured her. “I understand what you’re saying, but you’re wrong. I’m fine.”

Mrs Mela cleared her throat. “And what about your future?” she wanted to know. “What are you going to do with your life? At the rate you’re going, you’ll be lucky to pass half your GCSEs.”

Now she really sounded like my mother.