The Best-Laid Plans

Tammy was different. Or I always thought she was. Tammy was the one person I could trust completely. The one person who knew all about me, who really knew, and still loved me anyway. The cousin who described herself as more than a sister and more than a friend.

That was the kind of sentiment I liked to pretend I mocked and thought was only appropriate on a Hallmark card or a fridge magnet. But the truth is that deep down I rather liked it, and though I won’t say it comforted me, I thought it might be rather nice to actually believe it.

Tammy knew I wasn’t normal. That there was no “default normal” to return to after some aberration. That I wouldn’t be back to normal once that violent passion had passed, or once that sapping apathy had abated. She knew that I wasn’t “between jobs” but had never had one, not a proper one, and she knew that I had never had a boyfriend. She knew all that. Mum and Dad had known some of it, of course, especially the practical side, and Mum had suspicions about the rest of it. But they were long gone, both of them too young, though not young enough for people to call it a tragedy, and I was old enough (by several decades) to not need any looking after.

Tammy’s mum had died when she was only four, and her dad barely made it into his seventies. I think I said all the right things when it happened. But there was part of me – okay, there was a lot of me – that thought, well, now Tammy and I will be everything to each other. But I don’t know if I thought that would really be the case, and I don’t know if I found it especially reassuring.

Anyway, I “passed” at the funeral and in the weeks after. I’m good at that. At “passing”. I sometimes think (not that I particularly care) that it’s not entirely fair. I am not unintelligent in certain matters. I can turn on the charm and the good manners and be just apologetic and remorseful enough without abasing myself. Such things can work wonders with the benefit agency and with utility firms when you’re in debt.

Oh, it’s not foolproof. Every so often instead of a soothing and apologetic (as if there is a moral duty to reciprocate in such matters) “Don’t worry about it, Lauren, we can work this out, and it took a lot of courage to make that phone call” I have been met with a frosty “Miss Price, you have been accruing council tax debts for several months now despite our efforts to contact you.”

“Efforts to contact you”, even in these days of the ubiquitous Internet, is often a round the houses way of saying letters. Letters in brown envelopes, letters in white envelopes, letters with red messages on them about not ignoring them, and, bizarrely, from our local council, letters with green and white striped edging.

Tammy knows I am not good with money. That is not technically true. Oh, I could never be an economist or an accountant or anything like that, but I don’t have the right priorities. Some people word it more harshly than that, some more tactfully, but that’s what it amounts to.

Yet I am not a lover of luxuries. I have no aspirations to have gold plated bath taps or a diamond necklace, or even a diamonique necklace. I am quite happy to get my clothes and books from charity shops.

Still, there is something halfway acceptable about not being good with money.

Tammy knows more than that and she still loved me, and I still trusted her.

Tammy knew that I wrote strange, prosaic, repetitive fan fiction about – well, people I won’t name. But it was not the kind of fan fiction you publish on the Internet. Tammy knew that I had a great interest in disasters and catastrophes. She rationalised that, saying, “Well, lots of people like reading true crime, so I don’t see it’s that much different, and after all, there are even shows on TV about when – things go wrong. “

I was wrong, of course. She didn’t really know me. It was a dangerous illusion to think she did. She knew that I watched and was fascinated by episodes of Ancient Engineering where dams burst and bridges collapsed, but she never knew – or did she – that I WANTED them to happen. That I especially wanted people I admired and places I loved to be stricken by tragedy and catastrophe.

When I put it down like that, I almost shock myself. Almost. And anyway, the thing is, it never lasts. Even the most terrible tragedy leaves the headlines soon enough and then there was, there is, that flat, empty, sated and hungry feeling.

Oh, I don’t spend all my time fantasising about catastrophes and writing fan fiction that is sometimes not really writing at all, but muscle memory, phrases and paragraphs repeated, especially the most touching ones.

The more I think about it the more I realise how little Tammy really does know. And the more frightened I am that she knows more than she lets on.

Tammy is such an innocent, really.

Or is she?

Sometimes it seems to me, and it’s not when we’re having a serious discussion (which I try to avoid as much as I can anyway, unless the subject matter suits me) that there is a look in her eyes, a tone to her voice that is both pitying and appalled, both striving desperately to understand and being relieved that she can’t.

I do know for a fact that the new man in her life, Ricky, doesn’t like me very much. Now there are a few things to tidy up here. I’ve never minded that much about her having men in her life. I didn’t even really mind when I thought she and Steven were going to get married. And most of them have got on well enough with me. Oh, I can be careful, you see. I don’t play the Rejected Raspberry. I let Tammy and her men have their space, but chat away “happily” enough with them when appropriate.

Ricky doesn’t seem to know the rules. I’m pretty sure that Tammy must have told him the “official version” about me in one of its forms (not exactly a lie but a tad of economy with the whole truth) but only the other day he asked, very casually, “What is it you said you do for a living, Lauren?”

What happened next was a conversation that took place purely with our eyes. Tammy gave Ricky a look that clearly said, “We agreed not to talk about that, Ricky, or at least not that way!” and Ricky gave me a look that said, “I’m not taken in, and I don’t see why Tammy should always cover up for you!”

It seems to me there’s a very real chance that even if they don’t get married, Ricky will muddy the waters more than Steven ever would have done. I liked Steven as much as I like anyone apart from Tammy and I think he quite liked me. It was something bland and totally unbothersome.

It’s just dawned on me who Ricky reminds me of, and it’s my brother. Oh, you see, I’m not quite alone in the world apart from Tammy, but I might as well be. There’s such a massive age gap between us and we got out of touch, though when we were younger we were quite close.

That’s a statement that is both true and untrue. The age gap and the being out of touch is totally true, that’s in the world of practical facts. But were Nigel and I close? This is where it gets complicated. Perhaps the age gap was enough (my Mum lost a child in between) for the more usual kind of jealousy and squabbling to be avoided. He didn’t treat me as a nuisance on principle, the way some boys are with their little sister. He even half-let me into the secrets of his hobby of astronomy and let me look through his telescope, and later one, when I was in my early teens and he was in his early twenties but had come back to live at home for a while, we went to the park together and played table tennis on the stone tables. But our relationship wasn’t unproblematic. A couple of events stick in my mind. When I was eight, and playing with my dolls, and I said something like, “Kitty,” (a favourite little doll of mine one who had dark hair and wore and blue and white polka dot dress) “isn’t feeling at all happy about this,” he took Kitty and said, “You do know she doesn’t feel anything, Lauren? She’s just made out of plastic, no different to a mixing bowl or one of your hair slides.” I had wailed, and Mum had intervened, but he’d stuck his ground and said, “Ma, she has to realise these things. She’s eight, not four!”

The other incident was – well, I suppose it must have been around the table tennis time, though it’s a bit weird to connect the two. I admit I had been terribly careless. I had been writing one of my disaster stories in the loo (though I had no need to, my parents had never enforced lights out with any great rigour) and in an act of carelessness I never repeated had left the book on the towel rail. To this day I can recall it was a little A-5 book with a floppy orange and brown cover. It was obvious Nigel didn’t need to relieve himself, as the door was open, and he was reading it. He hadn’t even bothered to close the door and hide his nosiness. I snatched it off him and muttered something about a school project. To this day I don’t know how much he read. I do know he never mentioned it again to me and, presumably not to our parents. But he had seen something. I had seen the look, and the look Ricky was giving me was all too similar.

To my relief, Tammy didn’t say something like, “Come on, I want the two of you to be friends.” Probably that was the only thing Ricky and I agreed about. But matters that have been let drop have a nasty way of hovering.

Ricky is not prepared to play along. Tammy knows it. Oh she gives him disapproving looks, and has quite possibly had words with him out of my hearing, but she has allied herself to someone who asks me awkward questions he knows I don’t want to answer. At least he will never read my scribblings. That business of the book left on the towel rail taught me a lesson I’ve not forgotten to this day.

Not that I always mind people seeing my writing. Far from it. I have a certain facile facility with a certain type of verse, and I can also produce them more or less on a production line. I’ve even written novels, though after a couple of rejections when I was in my twenties, I’ve never sent any of them in.

There’s the irony, of course. I’m not saying I could necessarily earn my living as a writer. That’s not easy, even for people with considerably more talent than I have. But it’s something you don’t need a CV for, or letters of reference for, or certainly not to the extent that you do in normal jobs. I could at least dedicate a few months to making the effort. But that’s the point. I don’t make efforts. I don’t do hard things when easy ones will do. And why spend hours doing something that will only lead to rejection letters? I’m not exactly scared of rejection letters. They don’t, or wouldn’t, count among “efforts to contact me”.

Tammy HAS been talking to Ricky about him. Or he’s been talking to her. She needn’t think I’m taken in by that casual reference to the local council Wellbeing service. “It’s not for me, Tammy,” I said, in a determinedly calm and reasonable voice.

“Lauren, sometimes I wonder just what IS for you!” she exclaimed, in a tone of voice I didn’t like one little bit. “Please don’t be upset or mad at me – well, be mad at me if you want to – but I can’t believe you actually like the life you lead. You deserve better.” I don’t trust the word “deserve”. It’s one of those false caring words.

“So what do you suggest I do?” I asked. “Make up a false CV? Forge reference letters?”

“Of course not,” she sighed plainly wishing (and she wasn’t the only one!) that she hadn’t started the conversation. Though of course she wasn’t the one who REALLY started it! “It’s not even necessarily about a job, though I do wish you’d make something of your writing. But it’s getting quite serious with Ricky and me ……”

“And did I bother when you thought,” I didn’t mean to emphasise the word “thought” but wasn’t sorry it came out that way, “it was getting serious with Steven?”

We were both silent for a few seconds that seemed longer. “I liked Steven hugely,” she said, “Yes, I suppose I loved him, and as you know, we’re still friends. He’s a thoroughly nice man. But there’s something – bland about him.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, grow up!” I exclaimed. I won’t say it was only panic that made me cruel, but it didn’t help. “You’re a bit old to be hankering after Heathcliff!”

“And it’s a bit rich, you lecturing ANYONE about growing up!”

Well, there it was. We had quarrelled. We’d had differences of opinion before, of course, on things like the colour of a bathroom suite or whether we thought there should be a new bypass. But this was a different matter altogether, and we knew it.

We stopped before it went any further, but it was festering, and we didn’t exchange the usual hug we did on parting company.

Desperate situations require desperate remedies. Much as I generally have little time for such truisms (despite not being against repeating whole paragraphs verbatim in my own writing) there’s some point to that one.

Before we fell out, Tammy often prattled away about what Rick was doing and what he was going to do, and of course I was pretending to be interested at that point. But despite not really being, some things have stuck. And I know that Ricky will be returning from a business trip this Friday, and I know that the route that the high speed train he’s on will take. I know where it will be at its highest velocity, and I know what the effect of debris on the line – say, a couple of old shopping trolleys, will be. Of course it’s not risk free for me, but so far as everyone else is concerned, my life, though futile, has been blameless, and like most people, even though we don’t have to wear them now, I still have a mask. But on reflection a dark coloured one would probably be more sensible than what Steven called “invalid carriage blue” – showing us a picture of his late grandpa in just such a vehicle.

Anyway, there are risks worth taking. Especially when the benefits to be reaped will be twofold. I can almost see – in fact, no need for the almost – the headlines now.

Many Feared Dead in Train Derailment in East Anglia

And who will Tammy turn to in her grief, despite their recent quarrel. Why, Cousin Lauren of course. Lauren, the cousin who is more than a sister and more than a friend.

It was easier than I thought, and I’m pretty sure nobody saw me. And there’s already been the news report – I wonder when they stopped calling them news flashes. I have people wonder that in my scribblings, too.

The phone rings. Lauren. Her voice is trembling. “Things like this make you realise what really matters, Tammy,” she says, “I’m sorry we quarrelled.”

“It was my fault,” I say, magnanimously. “And you know I’m here for you now, love.”

“Oh, bless you. Ricky had just rung me from the hospital. He’s hurt his leg but otherwise he’s fine, and he’ll be coming home tomorrow. And he proposed and I accepted. Not – the situation anyone would have envisaged and I feel wretched about the folk who died and their loved ones but …”

Her voice is fading into the background. She is not saying anything I need to hear. I think I may be screaming, but I’m not sure.