Chapter two: Real Life

Saturday, 15th July 1989

Wolverhampton, England and Rome, Italy

Emma Morley was writing a letter.

Stoke Park School, Wolverhampton

Hello Dexter,

How are you? How is Rome? How is La Dolce Vita? (Try a dictionary!) I know that some people call Rome ‘the eternal city’ but I’ve been here in Wolverhampton for two days now and they have felt eternal to me. So perhaps Wolverhampton should be called by that name. Ha ha.

Well, I decided to take the job I told you about, so I’m working with Sledgehammer Theatre. It’s a Theatre-in-Education group. For the past month, we’ve been touring schools with a play about slavery. Today we’re performing it at this fine school. Anyway, we try to show 11-13-year olds that slavery was A BAD THING. Aren’t we brave and original!

Really, I don’t know why I am being nasty about my job. A lot of the kids have never thought about social problems of the past until now. And now some of them – the ones that don’t throw things at us – are becoming really interested. So I still think that we can make a difference for people.

Emma was trying to be positive. She had to try hard. The last year had been full of mistakes.

After her graduation, she had stayed on in Edinburgh. But she had made a series of bad career choices. There was the terrible all-girl band she had played in. There was her first novel, which she had stopped writing. There was her second novel, which she had also stopped writing. She had worked in shops, trying to sell things to tourists. But the tourists never really wanted the things she tried to sell them. So finally she had moved back to Yorkshire to live with her parents. That wasn’t good either.

‘But you’ve got a really good degree,’ Emma’s mother said almost daily. ‘Why on earth don’t you use it to get yourself a good job?’

From time to time, Dexter Mayhew became part of her life for a few days. At the end of the summer, she had gone to stay at his rich parents’ huge house in the countryside. But that had gone terribly wrong. Emma had had too much to drink one evening and had argued with Dexter’s father about politics. She had shouted at him and told him he was a bourgeois fascist. Then, more recently, they had met up in London for the birthday party of one of their friends – a man called Callum O’Neill. Callum had shared a flat with Dexter in Edinburgh. He now had a successful business selling computers.

Dexter and Emma had spent the day after the party together. Most of the day they lay on the grass in Kensington Gardens. They drank wine from a bottle and they talked. They never quite touched each other and Dexter told her all about a wonderful Spanish girl called Lola. Emma decided that this was all their friendship was ever going to be. Clearly, Dexter didn’t want to sleep with her. He wanted to tell her about the other girls he slept with. But strangely, Dexter also told her that his mother had liked her very much. ‘She says she has a good feeling about you and me,’ he’d said. At the time, Emma hadn’t understood the importance of Dexter’s words. Emma didn’t know that Dexter loved his mother more than anyone in the world. And she didn’t know that Dexter’s mother felt the same about him.

Then Dexter had gone travelling again. When he was away, Emma wrote him long letters. He usually replied on postcards.

‘We’re just pen pals now,’ Emma told herself. ‘We’ll never be anything more to each other.’

Emma got a job in a pub for a while, but living with her parents was killing her mind. When an old friend phoned and offered her a job in his theatre group, she’d accepted it immediately. But now, after three months, Emma hated the theatre group.

‘I don’t want to be here making a difference,’ she thought. ‘I want to be in Rome. I want to be with Dexter Mayhew.’

Emma made herself continue with her letter.

Anyway, I’ve got a new plan. I’ve written a two-woman play about Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson. One of my friends from the theatre group and I want to find somewhere in London where we can stage it. Do you remember my friend Tilly Killick? We shared a flat in Edinburgh. She lives in London now and she has a spare room in her flat. So I’ll probably live there for a few months. Are you coming back to London soon? Maybe we could be flat mates?

Emma stopped writing. Suddenly she felt nervous. Then she wrote: It’s all right, I’m just joking! But I really miss you, Dex. And she signed her name.

In Rome, Dexter was out with a Danish girl. He was working as an English teacher and the girl was one of his students. She was nineteen.

‘I have an exam on Monday,’ the girl said. ‘Test me on verbs, please, Dexter.’

‘All right – the present continuous,’ Dexter replied.

‘I am kissing, you are kissing, he is kissing…’ said the girl. She showed him how to kiss too. ‘But what would Emma Morley think about this?’ Dexter suddenly thought.