Nicola Rayner - The Girl Before You

Ruth is on her own, hiding in the far corner of the room, drinking in a determined fashion. Her glance keeps flitting back to George. He has his back to her. As Kat makes her way over to Ruth, picking her path delicately through the crowded room, she notices one of Ruth’s hairs is streaked across the shoulder of his dinner jacket.

‘You’ve got to stop looking at him,’ Kat says quietly when she gets to Ruth. ‘What happened?’

‘It went wrong.’ Ruth stares into her wine glass.

‘How do you mean, it went wrong?’

‘I lost my nerve.’ Ruth looks down at her feet. There’s a red line where her shoes have dug into her skin.

‘He didn’t want to wait.’

Ruth shakes her head. ‘I don’t think he …’ she begins, then corrects herself: ‘I think it’s now or never.’

She glances over again. George’s group has been joined by a couple of girls. One, in a particularly arse-skimming dress, has started to talk to him.

‘Do you want it to be special?’ Kat asks. ‘Because it probably won’t be. With him.’ She takes out her cigarettes and offers Ruth one.

‘I know it’s not a grand romance, but I do like his spirit.’ Ruth’s voice sounds plaintive. ‘I like making him laugh.’ She takes a gulp of wine.

‘For me, I just wanted to get it over with,’ Kat says. ‘I mean, it’s uncomfortable however you do it, so why not do it quickly?’

Ruth nods. ‘I shouldn’t say this, but I can say it to you …’ She lowers her voice. ‘I feel like when I’m with George, people notice me.’

‘You’re daft.’ Kat shakes her head, catches Richard’s eye from the other side of the room. ‘People notice you all the time anyway.’

Ruth takes another slug from her glass. ‘I guess I hate to lose.’

One of the girls talking to George keeps touching her hair, gathering it up and dropping it down one shoulder, exposing her bare neck to him like a willing vampiric victim.

‘I want another shot at it,’ Ruth says. ‘It was just a false start.’

‘OK,’ Kat says.

Richard’s hair is messy, as usual. He’s carrying a book in his hand.

‘I don’t want to be needy and clingy and girlish ,’ says Ruth, emphasising the last word. ‘I want to be equal. I want to be powerful. I want to be free.’

‘OK,’ says Kat again, wondering if Ruth should ease up on the wine.

‘I want,’ says Ruth definitively, ‘not to be a virgin any more.’

‘Go and tell him.’ Kat gives her a push. ‘Not all of it – maybe just that last bit.’

George is still talking to the other girl. Their heads are close together as Ruth approaches; his hand is on the girl’s forearm, as if to keep her attention. Ruth makes her way across the room towards them and stands for a few seconds, her face flushing while George ignores her. Kat wonders for a moment if she will give up on her mission – wonders, too, if Richard is watching as Ruth says, ‘Excuse me,’ to the girl, takes George’s hand and leads him off, as Kat will hear later, not to the bathroom but a more private store room, where things go better the second time round.

In the mornings our father smelled of aftershave and soap. When we woke, he’d be up already, starting his paperwork downstairs, but his scent lingered in the corridors of the hotel behind him. Our father was tall, with silvering auburn hair. He wore bow ties with his suits so as not to be like other people. It was embarrassing. He also wore leather shoes that clicked on the pavement as he walked.

‘That’s the sound of a real man walking,’ our mother would say. ‘I do like a man with proper leather shoes.’

‘And a bow tie?’ we would ask.

‘Hmm,’ replied our mother.

She always sounded less sure about that.

Our father’s car was an Aston Martin with a personalised number plate, which was the most embarrassing thing of all. The Aston smelled of clean leather seats, as if it were still new. It purred along so close to the ground that we couldn’t see over the hedges. The world looked different through the windows of the Aston. It didn’t win our father many friends.

‘You win some, you lose some,’ our mum said of the car.

She drove a battered but sturdy Volvo without a personalised number plate. In her car, we would sit in the back, pushing our fingers through the guard to touch the dogs’ wet noses. They weren’t allowed near the Aston Martin.

But in the evening, the leather shoes and suit were gone, replaced with corduroys and old jumpers with patches on the elbows. He would do odd jobs in the hotel garden when he could – mow the lawn, build bonfires – and he smelled of wood smoke and beer when he came to kiss us goodnight. The rough texture of his jumper tickled us as we sat up in bed to hug him. He wasn’t the best at bedtime stories – it wasn’t really his thing. Our mother was better, revealing tantalising snippets from Gone with the Wind or acting out the narrative of operas with doll’s house dolls – though not Madama Butterfly (‘it’s too sad’). Our mother had to be careful about things that were sad.

Our dad was good at sums and puzzles. Horses and riding. Dogs. Swinging us high in the air. Long walks on the windy clifftops. Our mother was for tummy aches and baking cakes and singing. She’d sing in the hotel bar on open-mike nights – never for long, just a couple of songs, which she’d murmur into the microphone with her eyes closed, her hair messy from a night’s waiting in the restaurant.

The men in the bar would look at her face carefully then, as if they were looking at the sun. ‘A rare beaut,’ our father used to call her. ‘You’re my rare beaut,’ he would say as he stood behind her in the kitchen and wrapped his arms around her, and she would smile and say, ‘You’re silly. Isn’t your dad silly?’ But she would look flustered, as though she liked it really.

The men who drank in the hotel never really forgave our father for stealing our mother – I think that’s the way they saw it. They called him a spiv. Ruth dared me to ask our mum what it meant and I knew, even as I asked, that it was an ugly word – something we should have looked up in a dictionary rather than saying out loud. Our mother’s fingers touched the corner of her apron, squeezing the material in a ball for a second.

‘Where did you hear that?’

We had heard the word in the bar, from the mouth of Dai the Poet, a camp, overweight man in his fifties, with drama school enunciation and a nasty turn of phrase when he was drunk.

‘What does it mean?’ Ruth asked.

‘It means people are jealous.’ Our mother let go of the apron, brushed it down and looked away.

Of the many things our father was good at, making money was the one that attracted the most attention. It was his gift. He could see opportunities where other people couldn’t; he could crack through the sums; he could glance at the restaurant or the bar and know, more or less, how much they would take that night or what they could do to make more. He had turned our grandmother’s Pembrokeshire hotel from a bohemian labour of love into something profitable in just eighteen months.

‘He came from nothing,’ the posh men would whisper in the bar. Like that was a bad thing: to create something from nothing.

‘He’s not even from here,’ the locals would say. As if that were the final insult: that he had whisked away their most beautiful girl, made heaps of money and, worst of all, he didn’t even have the decency to be Welsh.