Natalie Lucas - Sixteen, Sixty-One

Lucy, a tiny blonde woman swathed in coloured silk, was explaining how she chose each bead. Something about the karmic energy, I think. I watched her mouth as she talked for a while, but quickly turned my attention to her husband, Graham, who wore ripped jeans and sat with an air of boredom on the sofa next to Matthew. He and Lucy had a son two years above me at school, but Graham looked a bit like a floppy-haired George Clooney so I figured it wasn’t too bad to have a crush on him. I sat on the floor next to his feet and asked him about his motorbike, giggling when he said I should come for a ride one day.

‘If your mum says it’s all right, that is.’

I flushed with excitement and tried not to notice how old Matthew looked beside Graham, how his leg rested effeminately upon his knee and his shirt fell over a muscle-less torso. It wasn’t that I didn’t love him or that I didn’t want to repeat what we’d done this afternoon, but something had changed today and I felt a new kind of energy coursing through my limbs, one that drew me instinctively towards the Grahams and Lucys of the world.

I wasn’t the only one, though, and before the evening was over, Hannah was sat tipsily in Graham’s lap and Annabelle was fawning over Lucy’s earrings, brushing the skin on her neck as she fingered the green gems dangling from her lobes. My mum and Valerie were deep in discussion about the treatment of mental health patients in 1975 and James’s head rested heavily on his arm as Lydia spoke of the difficulties of getting out to do the gardening. On the way home, James growled at my mum that he’d never be forced to go to one of those things again and she muttered a reply along the lines of, ‘I don’t know why you have to be so antisocial; Nat seemed to enjoy herself.’

On dreary country days, when the air choked with the pitiful mediocrity of small town life, old ladies wheeled their trolleys through town to collect their pensions from Nicky at the Post Office and Ray listened to people natter about haemorrhoids in the chemist before dispensing Preparation H, I would sit in Matthew and Annabelle’s open-plan kitchen, playing cards and drinking tea from a pot. Sometimes I’d curl my legs under me on the awkward unpadded chairs while Annabelle doodled flowers beside the crossword in the Telegraph and Matthew consulted The Racing Post . He sat at the head, with the two of us on either side; these were unarticulated but set places and it was always odd when Annabelle was away and Matthew set my place for dinner at her chair.

During term time, I spent six out of seven nights there and, on holidays, most days too. Eight front doors and eleven cars separated their house from my mum’s. The Grays, the Smiths, the Popels, Mrs Pratt, Mr Davis, Oliver and June, Beatrice and the Roberts lived in between. Our immediate neighbours, the Grays, had retired to tend their immaculate garden and always said hello when I passed them on the pavement, but would become more reserved in a few months once I moved in with my dad and my mum began muttering up and down the street about my being an ‘awkward teenager’. Mrs Pratt had been a teacher at my primary school and, although she asked kindly about my exams and future plans, I was still a little afraid of her and mumbled nervously whenever I encountered her on my way to the house on the end.

Matthew’s study lay behind the street-side window, so I could always tell before I arrived whether he or Annabelle would answer my knock first. Their post-box-red front door encased in its black frame now looms overly significant in my memory. Stepping through that doorway I would shed the unhappy teenager living in a deadly dull town that haunted me on the outside and enter the safe place of art, poetry, philosophy and love.

A kingfisher I had drawn in pastels at the age of eight hung above their stove, the Piglet I had won Matthew at the fair was pinned to the whiteboard in his study, my cribbage board had found a permanent home on the shelf with his chess set, and Juno, Annabelle’s cat, paid no attention to my comings and goings. Towards the end, I might even have had a key, and, of course, volumes of my angsty diaries lay in a locked drawer of Matthew’s bureau because we’d agreed early on that this was safer than having them only perfunctorily hidden beneath my mattress.

The three of us played cards, drank wine and sometimes smoked weed acquired from my friends at school. Matthew and I would touch feet under the table and sneak a kiss when Annabelle ran upstairs to fetch something. Sometime after 10pm Annabelle would pour herself a tiny glass of port and wish us goodnight. I would stay, wrapped in Matthew’s arms as we whispered secrets to each other or dared ourselves to forget Annabelle was only upstairs, until it got late enough that I worried a parent might come looking for me and I let myself out, arrived home and calmly watched some television repeat with my unquestioning family.

My first memories of Matthew and Annabelle hardly involve Matthew at all. Annabelle and my mum were introduced through Ruth, a woman who had had her first marriage annulled and convinced a Methodist priest, despite her four grown children, to perform her second attempt to a childhood friend. When my parents were ending their messy though marriageless relationship, Ruth was the witch who stole my mother from me when she cried, but Annabelle was the angel who gently entertained my brother and me; she turned packing up our family home into a game of make-believe pirates and princesses.

Annabelle’s husband was just one of those shadowy figures of husbands you remember from playing in the garden while your mother gossiped with her friends on the patio, drinking cups of instant coffee. He must have been in the background and I must have known him, but the squiggly jigsaw pieces of his identity in my mind didn’t slot together until our conversation at his birthday party. From that moment, though, it was like someone flicked a switch and swapped the direction of the escalators in a department store. As Matthew became a fleshy figure, a father, mentor, Uncle and lover, and I spent more time with Annabelle, building the friendship I’d craved as a child, the haloed idol of my youth slipped away and was replaced by her altogether more self-assured husband.

I didn’t, don’t and probably never will know what Annabelle knew about what was between Matthew and me, but she was my friend. I’d loved her in a childish way and still adored spending time with her, but I never felt guilty about sleeping with her husband. The larger difficulty was sneaking around. Matthew and I were conducting an affair in a small, gossipy town where privacy didn’t come easy. I had to sneak along the street, invent reasons to go into town, dart through his door when the coast was clear, tell my mother I checked my email five times a day because of school projects, leave notes under a plant by his door, pin myself to the wall until he’d drawn the curtains, worry about his aftershave on my coat and secretly wash my expensive lingerie in the bathroom sink.

Communication was the most difficult: frequently I would arrive at his door expecting intimacy only to be greeted by a booming, ‘Oh look, it’s Nat, how unexpected. We haven’t seen you in ages! Barbara and Richard are here, do come in. Have you come to borrow that book?’ and have to endure an afternoon of personaed small talk instead. Or I’d wait all day to visit at the appointed time, but discover Annabelle had changed her plans and run her errands in the morning.

Mothers and brothers and fathers and in-laws, neighbours and doctors, shopkeepers and postmen all thwarted our arrangements, left us tapping out frustrated messages from separate computers, compelling us to dream of a mythical time and place where we could be free to love in the open.