The Confusion of Karen Carpenter Read online

  For Lee Anderson

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  All She Wants

  Prologue

  ONE

  ONE

  Hello.

  There are two things you should know about me:

  1. My name is Karen Carpenter, and

  2. Last month my boyfriend left me.

  I’ll get on to the boyfriend in a minute, but first let me tell you that having the same name as a 1970s pop star is no barrel of laughs. You may be thinking I’m as skinny as a rake, with poker-straight chestnut hair, sallow, sunken cheeks and dark brown eyes. You might also assume I have a voice like velvet and know my way round a drum kit, and on top of that you might presume I’m a dab hand at Solitaire. (Well, it’s the only game in town.)

  Sadly I am none of these things and have none of these skills or attributes. If you could actually see me, you’d probably be disappointed. I’m no fat old sow, but neither am I a Belsenesque size-zero skinnimalinx. I can hold a grudge, but I can’t hold a tune, and my favourite game’s Bullseye. I’ve never actually played it; I just like watching the reruns on TV. My hair is mousy with blonde highlights and a tendency to frizz, my eyes are blue with a tendency to squint when I’m really, really tired, and the nearest I get to playing the drums is when I have to hit one of my radiators a few times to get it working. (Temperamental radiators are the bane of my life. Or they were, till Michael left me. Oh damn. I said I’d get on to him in a bit.)

  I don’t want to mislead you. Although I may not slip into the skinny-minny category, I’m not a complete and utter minger. I once found a piece of paper at school that Yusef, one of our year tens, had written on. It was a top ten list of all the female teachers he wanted to shag. (It was called, coincidentally, ‘Top Ten Teacher Shags’.) I was number three. Number one was Constantine, the French teacher, who wears hot pants and low-cut tops, and is always dropping her folders on the main staircase like a damsel in distress so that the lads hurl themselves at her to help her out, so I’m not surprised. More unexpectedly, number two was Dorothy from religious education, but I think that’s because a rumour went round a few years ago saying she’d got drunk on a French trip and fellated a wine bottle for the amusement of the other staff. Complete rubbish, of course, but you try telling the kids that. So number three ain’t that bad. If it was in my nature, I might even take a bow. Of course, happiness, as I’ve discovered, is fleeting – when I told Danny from English about the list one day, he chortled into his polystyrene beaker of tepid coffee (our staffroom drinks machine is pants: you could bath a newborn baby in any of our ‘hot’ drinks) and pointed out that Yusef is blind in one eye.

  I later tried to verify this hypothesis by catching said eye in class when I thought no one else was looking. I carefully mouthed the word ‘Help!’ with an expression of panic on my face. I regretted it instantly. Yusef frowned, looked around and then said, ‘Is you OK, Miss, man?’

  I returned the frown and made out I had no idea what he was talking about and demanded he please get on with his work. I know. The shame. But at least I was able to tell Danny that he was full of crap when I saw him next.

  Back to my name. Think how many times you have to give out yours over the phone. Now imagine what that might feel like if it was vaguely ridiculous. Every time I ring the bank, or the satellite-TV people, or the gas, or the electric, they ask for my name, and when I give it, there’s always a pause. Or a giggle. Or a wisecrack. ‘Oh, I thought you were dead!’ is a common one. Or ‘I hope you’ve had something to eat!’ And only last week the woman in the call centre at my bank wondered if my password was ‘Sha-la-la-la’. It’s not.

  I know the name Karen Carpenter is quite a mundane one, erring on the humdrum. If it wasn’t for the fact that it was her name, it would definitely be dull. But if this doesn’t sound too bad to you, imagine this scenario. A woman moves in next door. You go round with a bag of sugar (because you’re like that – you’re delightful; I can just tell) and you say to her, ‘I’m —’ (insert your name here) and she goes, ‘Oh, hello, I’m Dolly Parton.’ Or, ‘Hi. I’m Beyoncé Knowles,’ or, ‘Hi. I’m Lulu.’ Admit it – if you didn’t perhaps laugh, you would definitely crack a smile. And I wouldn’t blame you. But that’s the sort of thing I’ve had to put up with all my life.

  Growing up in Liverpool, where everyone’s a comedian, was where the rot originally set in, especially when I hit my teens and got myself some puppy fat. When the hard kids at school rechristened me ‘Skinny Bitch’, they argued to the teachers that their nickname was not an ironic reference to my size, but to my namesake. Thankfully the teachers banned it, so they reverted to calling me ‘S.B.’ instead, which of course sounds completely innocuous to those not in the know, but to me, a whispered ‘S.B.!’ during double geography would make my skin burn with shame and give me the full-on horrors.

  I used to dream that I had a normal name, like all the other girls in my class. Colette Carpenter or Tracy Carpenter. But Karen? Karen? What were my parents thinking? Well. Their hackles rise if I so much as challenge them over it. You see, Karen was the name of Mum’s sister, and she died in a car crash when Mum was pregnant with me, so of course when Mum gave birth, the family was so uproarious with joy that she decided to name me after my dead, car-crashed aunt. Forgive me if that sounds cold and uncaring, but really . . . didn’t someone think to say to Mum, ‘Val, I know you’re knackered and you feel like you just pooped out a block of flats, but please . . . remember your surname. Call her Colette’?

  Hmm?

  No. Apparently there were tears of happiness in the Oxford Road Maternity Hospital, and my nan kept saying, ‘It’s like she’s still alive. It’s as if our little Karen’s still here!’

  I like to think she stopped for at least a second, adding, ‘Just a shame she now has the same name as a woman who’s known for two things: a fabulous pop voice and not eating her dinner.’

  I hope by now I have convinced you of some of the embarrassment involved in sharing a name with a recording artist. Oh God, I sound like a complete teacher, saying that. Like I’m doing a lesson plan and recapping to check everyone’s up to speed with me. If I was doing a lesson plan right now, it would have two aims: to illuminate the issues involved in having a silly name, and to establish that I am newly single.

  Single. Oh heck. That. I said I’d get on to Michael leaving me. Suppose I better do that now. Here we go.

  Michael and I were together for nearly twenty years. That’s a lifetime, if you’re twenty, and it represents a lot of haircuts/crow’s feet. It’s the section in my life from ages sixteen to thirty-six. Help.

  Michael’s an affable chap who won a ‘Who Looks the Most Like Bart Simpson?’ contest at Butlins when he was fifteen, which will a) date him, and b) give you an idea of what he looks like. Or looked like at fifteen. Except he didn’t really look like the cartoon character. People assumed he’d dusted himself down with yellow chalk, whereas in fact he had gone that colour overnight and was later diagnosed with hepatitis C, from which he nearly died and spent months in hospital.

  Things had been great between Michae
l and me, mostly. He really was the full package: decent, caring, could put up a few shelves and was drop-dead gorgeous. I know he’s gorgeous because whenever I’ve put pictures of him on Facebook, people who don’t know him post comments such as: God, Karen, your man is well tasty. LOL.

  Or: OMG, Kagsy, well jel.

  Of course, the unspoken subtext of sentences like that would be: And what the hell’s he doing with you, you fat knacker?

  Or even: Punching above your weight there, you hefty bitch. LOL.

  I’m not really fat, of course. It’s just when your namesake’s synonymous with anorexia, every time you look in the mirror you see Mount Vesuvius staring back.

  I once got very jealous when I saw that some woman he worked with – Laura – had written on Michael’s Facebook, under a particularly nice shot of him: Were U born that handsome? Stunning eyes.

  I really wanted to write underneath it: Hands off, bitch – he’s mine.

  Luckily Michael talked me out of it. Well, laughed me out of it, saying that this Laura was away with the fairies and was on another planet. Which, thinking about it now, wasn’t that reassuring, bearing in mind she’s a safety officer for London Underground. You see, Michael is a Tube driver. He works on the Jubilee line. I’d never given much thought to the men and women who drive the trains beneath the streets of the capital before he started driving. Now that he’s left me, I wonder if I’ll ever be able to bring myself to get on one again.

  Being a Tube driver just about sums him up really, and by that I don’t mean that he is deep. (Even though he is. A bit. He is into Leonard Cohen – does that count?) I don’t know if you know many people who work on the London Underground, but having spent so long with Michael, I do. And if you think about it, their jobs and lives revolve round helping people. Helping people get from A to B, with no snobbery – there’s no class divide on a Tube. We, the paying public, are their number-one priority, so they put others before themselves. And while transporting us from A to B, our safety is paramount, so they need to be lean, clean transportation machines. Consequently Michael rarely drank, never took drugs and always put others before himself. You might think that makes him sound like a boring bugger, but actually he is a laugh and can get pissed as a fart when he fancies it. Just not the night before he starts a shift at four in the morning.

  I know I’ve made the entire staff of a rather large organization sound like a heavenly host of angels – and I’m sure the next time you cross a surly cleaner on the Northern line, you’ll be thinking, Jesus, Karen, did you never meet this one? – but generalizations are like clichés: there’s a large grain of truth in there somewhere.

  The one thing Michael did that wasn’t exactly angelic was leave me. He did so just over a month ago. Three weeks before Christmas to be precise. Perfect timing. I came back late from school one evening. We’d had a departmental meeting and then I’d slipped to the local pub, the Who’d’ve Thought It?, for a dry white on the way home with some of the English department and got in to find an envelope Sellotaped to the kettle. In that envelope was a letter.

  Dear Karen,

  I’m sorry but I can’t do this anymore. You know I’ve been unhappy for a while. I think the only way I’m going to be happy is if I go. I’m sorry I’m such a coward I can’t tell you to your face. Don’t come looking for me, and don’t worry about me – I’ll be fine. And you deserve better anyway.

  Michael

  What stung the most was not the content – that after nearly twenty years he was throwing in the towel – but the fact that he’d not put a kiss after his name. I’d noticed he’d stopped putting kisses on his texts about six months earlier. I’d attributed it to him being busy with work, but now that this might well be his last ever communication with me, and still no kiss . . . well, I burst out crying. Daft, eh? Not even really crying for the fact that he had left me, but that he had cared so little about me that he’d not even put a kiss.

  He’d not thrown in the towel at all. He’d dropped it limply at his feet and grunted in a fashion that conveyed the meaning of a sort of ‘Make of my towel-dropping what you will.’

  The next few hours were a bit of a blur, but I went and lay on the bed, staring at the wallpaper, staring at the fake sunflower Michael had ‘planted’ in a tub by the window. I must have lain there for hours, catatonic. The next morning I was still lying on my side of the bed, still staring. It was as if I hadn’t blinked once. And all night long the thought had been trapped in my head.

  Michael had left me.

  A thought so huge it was beating the shell of my skull. A manic thought in the padded cell of my mind, desperate for escape but unable to find a way to break out. A thought growing bigger and bigger until it would become too much for me and for the umpteenth time I would burst out crying.

  Michael had left me.

  And throughout the weeks that followed the thought was very rarely absent. Unlike Michael, it never left me. My only respite was the mornings when I’d wake and, for a few fleeting moments, not remember. But then of course I would. I always would. And slowly but surely I’d start to sink.

  One thing I’ve learned to do over the last month or so is zone out. Thinking about him leaving makes me sad, so I have become very adept at turning my mind into a sort of Internet browser, clicking on link after link after link, zooming off in opposing directions from the place I started, thinking of more and more things that move me away from the sadness. The downside to this is I spend so much time in my head that I’m often unaware of what I’m doing physically.

  Like now.

  I appear to be in a park. This happens a lot lately: I find myself in a place with scant recollection of getting there. It’s dark. The moon is piercing the trees and it’s reflected in the puddles. Peering through the leaves, I can see what look like low-level multicoloured stars beaming out. Blues, reds, yellows. Christmas lights from the crescent of houses circumnavigating the park. They make me think of home.

  Home.

  Where is my home now?

  I have to think for a second, and then I remember.

  Well, there’s the house I shared with Michael. Better head there, even though since his departure it’s not felt like home. I leave the park, retracing the steps I must have taken, heading to the place that used to be warm, the place I used to love returning to, but that now just leaves me feeling cold and sad.

  God, I sound miserable and sorry for myself, don’t I?

  I tell myself to cheer up. Mind over matter. If I make myself smile, then I will feel unmiserable and happy. And the world will smile with me. And I will never feel depressed again. It works for about two minutes. I get some funny looks from passers-by, as I am clearly grinning like the madwoman who escaped from the loony bin. Then all of a sudden I am caught up short, winded. A red neon circle, slashed by a blue line.

  I am outside a Tube station.

  Why do they have to have so many Tube stations in London? Don’t they know I am suffering? Don’t they realize that every time I see one it’s like a slap round the face?

  I freeze at the entrance. I could go down there. I could go down there and get on a train and find him. I could work my way through every single Tube until I found him. I could climb into his car, slap him round the face and say, ‘Why? Why did you leave me? What did I do that was so bad that you couldn’t bear to share your life with me anymore? I don’t buy this “it’s not you, it’s me” bollocks. Tell me. Please!’

  Because the weirdest thing about him going was that he offered no explanation. He didn’t tell me why. Nearly twenty years down the pan and nothing. Zilch. Nada. I tried phoning him to ask – in fact, it was the first thing I did after reading the letter on the kettle – but the minute I called his mobile, I heard it ringing in the kitchen drawer. He’d not even taken it with him. I had no idea where he’d gone. I have no idea where he is. I don’t know if he’s run off with someone else. I could find out. Ask his friends, his mum. But I simply don’t want to know.


  And yet if I just went down these stairs, if I just went into the hot draught of his subterranean world, I might find him, confront him, discover. For some reason, though, I don’t want to.

  I turn. I hurry on. It starts to rain and I feel like I’m running through one of those smudged pastel drawings of night-time London that they sell in the tourist shops, the sort that look like they were drawn in 1968. London looks so much nicer at night, lit up like a Christmas tree all year long. In the day, though, especially round here, it’s just grey, grey, grey. As I run, I am overcome by waves of sadness. I know why. For years I have sent waves of affection and love out to someone else, and I still send out those waves, but because he’s not here anymore to receive them, they just spray back and engulf me.

  In the end I run out of breath. I take a bus to our street.

  My street. It is my street now – I have to remember that.

  I am bedraggled. Everyone on the bus is. We sit alongside each other, squelching every time the bus judders, puddles collecting at our feet.

  I let myself into the house and the first thing that strikes me is that it’s freezing. It’s been quite a mild Christmas, but the central heating’s been playing up and I’m not brilliant at sorting out practical stuff like that. That was always Michael’s domain. I head to the boiler and click it off and on again and hope for the best. I take off my coat and put on two cardies and a woolly hat with flaps. I try the tap in the kitchen and am briefly excited that, for the time being anyway, the hot water appears to be working. I hotfoot it upstairs to the bathroom and run a bath. I have to go back to work tomorrow, and at least if I can have a bath tonight, I won’t be too embarrassed if there’s no hot in the morning. If I can grab one now, I won’t be too smelly for school.

  I feel a little wave of dread roll over me as I luxuriate in the hot water. Much as I am looking forward to the start of the spring term and having lots to take my mind off my current predicament, I am not relishing the prospect of the sympathetic looks in the staffroom, or the loaded questions.