by Robert Webb
She took a breath. If dear Mother answered then that would be manageable. But that was not her hope. She checked her watch. Nearly two in the afternoon on a Saturday. Madeleine would surely be at a friend’s house where they would spend about ten minutes politely daring each other to open a bottle of rosé before necking one each. Bill, though – if Millwall were playing at home, he’d be watching them at the Old Den with Keith. If not, he would either be out working or enjoying some other game on TV. Kate calculated that he wouldn’t mind the interruption. Unless he was in the middle of watching West Ham getting thrashed. If so, no problem – because in those circumstances he wouldn’t answer the phone.
She picked up the receiver and dialled 100.
‘Operator. How may I direct your call?’
‘Hi, I need to make a reverse-charge, um, telephone call.’ Kate gave the number and waited for the connection. She heard a phone ringing down the line. The ‘new’ green phone with buttons instead of a dial and an electric thwerp that rang like an outraged cricket – the one in the little hall by the stairs, on the antique side-table which Madeleine had bought, with the wobble that Bill had fixed with a folded envelope.
‘Hello?’
The sound of her father’s voice had Kate leaning her head against the wooden divider that separated the kiosks. She closed her eyes and experienced the sound as warm milk with just a dash of morphine. She felt pleasantly sick.
‘We have a reverse-charge call from a York area phone box. Do you accept the charge?’
‘Yes, please.’
No more fainting, no more fainting, no more fainting.
‘Thank you – you’re through.’
Kate heard the click as the operator hung up. She opened her eyes but could hardly breathe.
‘Kate? Hello, Katie, is that you?’
‘Daddy,’ she gasped. There was a brief pause of surprise at the other end. She hadn’t called him that since she was nine.
‘You all right, love? Has something happened?’
The last thing she wanted to do was upset him. She gritted her teeth and froze half of her heart to let the other half feel the sun. She imagined being physically attacked by a pack of wild hyenas.
‘Nah, no, nothing’s happened. Just wanted to hear … just wanted to say hello.’
‘Well, hello back! I only took you to the station yesterday. Didn’t think we’d hear from you till Christmas, to be honest. Not that it’s not lovely to talk. You sure you’re all right?’
‘What you up to? Didn’t interrupt a game, did I?’
‘No, love. Well, yeah, but it was rubbish so I’d turned it off. Spot of reading. Dr Francis Fukuyama, if you please. The End of History and the Last Man, it’s called. Brand new. I can smell the paper factory.’
‘Why do you buy them in hardback, Dad?’
‘They last longer.’
Indeed they did. Kate had inherited this book, among others, when her mother had downsized to her bungalow. She had kept it back from the church fête book sale.
‘And what’s he saying, then?’
‘Seems to be saying that the cold war’s over and we won, ergo we’ve all agreed that liberal democracy is best and so we don’t need to bother arguing any more, ergo the end of history. What do you think?’
‘I think history might have other ideas.’
‘Too right. They say tomorrow never comes but it did yesterday, didn’t it?’
Kate laughed. A little pause opened up and she sensed Bill was still puzzled by the call. She said, ‘All right, well, I’ll let you get on. Just wanted to say hello. I might come and visit a bit sooner than I thought.’
‘All right, love, that sounds nice.’ There was another pause. ‘You are making friends and that, aren’t you, love?’
‘Yeah! ’Course. Batting them off, I am.’
‘Good. Well, just don’t get pregnant.’
‘That’s very much not the plan.’
‘Glad to hear it. I’m too beautiful to be a grandad.’ Kate smiled but had run out of mental hyenas to battle. She couldn’t keep this up any longer. She wanted to say ‘I miss you’ but didn’t dare. Ditto, ‘I love you.’
Instead, she could keep her voice level enough to say, ‘See you soon, then. Take care of yourself.’
‘You too, sweetheart. And call any time you need to.’
‘Will do.’
‘I’m always here.’
‘…’
‘Kate?’
‘Yep. I know you are. Bye.’
‘Bye, love.’
Kate put the phone down and sank to the floor with her face in her hands. How many more dead men did she have to talk to today? Just one, hopefully.
It was a complicated kind of hope.
Presently she became aware of a stranger (or so he thought) crouching by her side. She looked up and the heaving sobs turned into a choked laugh. Yes, of course. Who else?
Kes – concerned and absurd in his red jeans, carefully chosen odd socks and floral shirt with a flared seventies collar. The sight of him restored her, and her mood swung round on a sixpence like a black cab in a cul-de-sac. He seemed ironed and shrink-wrapped like Amy but the reverse-ageing was less pronounced in this face, given the amount of Botox he was going to pump into it, starting in his early thirties. A TV critic would one day refer to him as ‘a Welsh John Barrowman’. Kes found that he could just about live with that despite complaining to his agent that it should really be Barrowman who was ‘an American Keven Lloyd’.
‘All right there, dear? Bad news from home, is it?’
Kate reached out and he helped her up. ‘Thanks. No. No, it’s actually great news from home. Just a bit overwhelming. Erm …’
‘Don’t tell me – a distant cousin you’ve always hated has just won the pools and she’s going to blow it on that condo in Biarritz right next to yours and then bang goes the neighbourhood?’
‘Yes, exactly.’ Kate rapidly tuned in to the wavelength of fantasy bitching she used to enjoy with Kes. ‘Typical Marcia. She’ll stick fairy lights up everywhere. Such a vulgar prick.’
Kes’s face lit up with discovery. ‘Yes. What the hell is it with Marcia? You’ve been telling her for years but she won’t listen.’ Next to Kes, Kate recognised a slightly wan-looking Benedict student who was beginning to frown in confusion. He shifted his weight, momentarily reminding Kes of his existence. ‘Oh, sorry – I’m Kes and this is Jordan.’
‘Jury,’ said Jury.
‘Sorry. Jury.’
‘I’m Kate.’ She shook their hands.
Kes said, ‘I’ve just got to make a quick call to my tailor on Savile Row, but then maybe I could take you for a stiff gin in the city centre?’ Turning ruthlessly to Jury, he added, ‘Darling, can we take a rain-check with the tea and crumpet? I feel sure Kate here needs my undivided attention. You know how it is with Marcia.’
Jury started to open his mouth, visibly trying to work out who the hell Marcia was and how she had somehow just cancelled the blow-job he’d been extravagantly promised ten minutes ago. Kes went on: ‘But I’ll see you later in the bar and don’t you dare let me forget.’ Before there could be an objection, Kes took Jury’s sweet face in his hands and said urgently, ‘I want to know a lot more about you. A lot more. You promise you’ll be in the bar?’
‘Erm … okay!’
With that, Kes kissed him lightly on the lips and broke away. The boy blushed but grinned.
‘See you later, dearest.’ Kes uttered this and nodded with an authority that left the slightly younger man in no doubt that he was now required to go away. Which he did.
Kate watched the youth amble off. In her own time, a gay kiss in public was braver than liberals liked to think but in 1992 Kes was making quite a statement, even on a college campus. She looked at him admiringly but said, ‘Predator.’
‘I know. Thank God you were here to save me.’ Kes went up to the kiosk and rummaged in his pocket for change.
‘I meant you.’
�
��Me?! Oh Kate, how could you? After all this time?’ He winked at her and held up an index finger briefly as if to say I won’t be long, before dropping one of the massive old 50p’s into the slot and dialling with care. She turned away and backed off a few paces to give him some privacy.
This was all wrong. She had met Amy too soon and now Kes. And the first time round – that night in the bar – Kes had all but ignored her. His dubious talent for instant friendships had been directed elsewhere. Now he was making what he assumed to be ironic jokes about their long-standing intimacy. All because she had conjured the name ‘Marcia’ and called her a prick.
On the breeze she could hear a conversation being conducted in Welsh. Kes’s tone was cheerful but tender, and she guessed who he was talking to. His older brother David had been in and out of juvenile detention centres since they were children. It would be a few years before Kes’s TV success would fund a local college course for David and things would begin to turn around. In the meantime, Kes was giving his time and attention to the brother he worshipped but whose path he had managed to avoid. Kes had made himself the indispensable person and it had worked. Kate wondered at it – a happy ending under construction.
Before long, Kes was off the phone. He clapped his hands loudly. ‘Right, then!’
‘How was your tailor?’
‘Hmm? Oh, he’s distraught. I wanted a shimmering gold lamé blazer for the Oscars but he made the last one for Keanu Reeves and has now completely run out of gold lamé. He’s quite beside himself.’
‘Can’t you just ring Keanu and ask to borrow his?’ They started to stroll towards town.
‘That’s a thoughtful suggestion, Kate, but it’s well known that Keanu is aggressively right-wing and homophobic. It’s a non-starter.’
‘And he particularly hates the Welsh, is that right?’
‘He hates us with a passion. He turns up in Porthcawl, ostensibly to play golf … you know Keanu’s a very keen golfer, don’t you?’
Kate pictured Keanu Reeves with a sun-visor and white slacks. She confined a laugh to her abdomen. ‘Actually, I didn’t know that.’
‘Oh my God, he lives for golf. But of course he only plays it in Wales so that by night he can go out in disguise and slaughter us one by one with his bare hands.’
Ah, the uncomplicated pleasure of listening to Kes talk bollocks. This was surely what the doctor ordered. ‘What’s his disguise?’
‘His disguise is a matter of controversy. Some say he wears his mother’s wedding dress with a veil but I think they’ve seen too many horror films. My own view is that there’s been a terrible misunderstanding. He hates us but he also wants to help us. I think it was his involvement with Bram Stoker’s Dracula that induced the psychosis. He’s conflicted, you see. He tries to lay on his healing hands but he doesn’t know his own strength. That’s when the bodies start to pile up. It’s all deeply regrettable.’
‘Is that what brought you here? To escape Keanu’s lethal embrace?’
‘Yes. That, and the fact that fucking Oxford wouldn’t have me.’
Kate chuckled. ‘Snap.’
‘Ah, a fellow reject.’ Kes offered an arm and she took it. ‘What’s your excuse?’
Kate was glad to be on such familiar territory, looking straight backwards from 1992 with no time-related booby traps to dodge.
‘Oxford, right then,’ said Kate, happy to tell the truth. ‘I lost my shit and was obscenely rude to my interviewer.’
‘Oh for God’s sake, tell me everything immediately.’
‘Well, I’m a computer person at heart and my Computer Science interviewer found that a bit challenging.’
‘Because of your provocative ownership of a vagina?’
‘I was hoping it wasn’t that but it turned out to be completely that.’
‘A sexist Oxford don. I find this incredible.’
‘He was worried about the hobbies I’d written on my UCAS form.’
Kes was enjoying himself. ‘You see, the hobbies I put on my own form were a glorious pack of lies. But I get the sense that yours were truthful.’
Kate took the compliment. God, she had missed him. ‘They were. I mentioned my interest in karate.’
‘Ah. The violent arts. Is this a casual interest? I mean, do you—’
‘I’m a seventh dan black-belt and world silver medallist.’
The eighteen-year-old Kate would never have put it so boldly. She watched Kes absorb the information. He looked at her for the first time in a few minutes, his huge face and teeth set into a wide and helpless smile. All he said was, ‘Who got the gold, you appalling loser?’
Kate laughed. ‘Her name was Mischa Filatova. Very nice girl, and we were pen-pals for – I mean, we still keep in touch. But the Hungarians were doping their team to distraction. The poor cow looked like Tom Selleck.’
‘And our Oxford friend found your achievement too much to bear.’
‘He was weirdly aggressive for half an hour. Computer don with egg on his tie and a goatee beard. At the end he suggested a fancy-dress party where I come as Miss Piggy because she also does karate chops.’
‘And you took his fancy-dress badinage to heart.’
‘I told him he should glue a few more pubes to his chin and go as a cunt.’
Kes closed his eyes to savour the joy of what he’d just heard. ‘Oh Kate, I can see we’re going to get along rather wonderfully.’
Kate got back to her room at around 5 p.m. after a couple of gin martinis with Kes in the matinée bar of the Theatre Royal. Maxed-out on three credit cards, he had bounced a cheque for the occasion. They had chatted artfully as if they were minor aristocrats slumming it amongst the hoi polloi, or in this case the well-to-do retirees of York lapping up an Ayckbourn. She remembered that Kes brought out the enjoyable worst in her. Years of minding her vocabulary, minding her gifts – making sure she gave nobody the excuse to say she was ‘too clever by half’ – all released in the bitchy company of this working-class-with-airs-and-graces bisexual funbucket. He had even made a mild pass.
‘Lady Katherine, I own that I am not yet one and twenty, but I think I must warn you that I am no mere seeker after the pleasures of the cock. I am also no stranger to the charms of the WOOLWA.’
‘Lord Keven of Newport, I appreciate the delicacy of your proposal. But must confess that my WOOLWA is promised to another.’
‘Another!? How can this be? Who is this troublesome cad? I shall challenge him to a lethal competition and destroy him instantly.’
‘Frisbees at dawn?’
‘Razor-edged frisbees at any time.’
‘Difficult to throw. Ouch.’
‘I hadn’t thought of that. But may I be serious – you are attached?’
Kate smiled into her gin. ‘Keven, we must have a secret or two between us. Otherwise it gets boring, don’t you think?’
Kes was trapped between his insatiable curiosity and the threat of appearing to be dull. They clinked glasses. ‘To Kate’s lover,’ he announced, ‘whomsoever they may be. I hope he or she appreciates you.’
‘He does,’ said Kate. ‘He will.’
She sat on her bed, contemplated her unpacked suitcase and then immediately lay down. Her tights and pinafore dress were annoying so she scrambled out of them. Jeans and a top later. Get comfy. Hmm, bit pissed. This body isn’t an alcoholic. The two gins that would normally serve as a hearty breakfast were now coursing through her blood with a long-forgotten potency.
Her thoughts turned to Luke, vaguely pondering the conundrum of time-travel and monogamy. It wasn’t a problem turning down Kes because she wasn’t attracted to Kes. But this was surely going to be an issue.
She sniffed sharply and sat up. So then, technically, she was single twice over. She was either a widow who didn’t have to be faithful to Luke because he was dead, or she was a young person who didn’t have to be faithful to Luke because she had never met the guy. But it wasn’t that simple. She couldn’t dodge the emotional reality of their tw
enty-eight years. They had not divorced. They were together. He had died but now he was alive. Her husband was alive. And she could save him. What was lost had been found.
The slight problem was that he didn’t know he was lost.
Kate relaxed back into the pillow.
I will play it cool. I’ll play it real cool. When Luke walks into that bar? I’ll be totally cool.
Chapter 9
She stalked into the room as if returning to the scene of a crime.
The bar of Benedict College resembled an airport departure lounge endured by its unlucky passengers with a British blend of stoicism and alcohol. It was a large, L-shaped room where the bottom of the ‘L’ formed a quaint ‘non-smoking area’, carpeted and shop-fresh through lack of use. The main body of the bar was the setting of a vast, ongoing brawl between broken tiles, strip-lighting and chipped Formica. The walls were brown but with that hint of yellow that gives horse manure its element of drama. Around the edges were a series of semi-circular ‘booths’ featuring red plastic banquettes and tiny, quivering tables guaranteed to immediately spill any drink they came into contact with. The metal chair legs had all lost their rubber stoppers years ago and the effect of a hundred of them scraping against the ‘terracotta’ floor was – until you learned to tune it out – what insanity might sound like if it lived with a dentist. It was a room that couldn’t hear itself think and which understood no smells but tobacco and last night’s beer. Kate felt immediately at home.
For a moment she was tempted to take a seat in the non-smoking area but then remembered that she was apparently eighteen and not supposed to be interested in a nice sit down in a comfy chair. She had passed a shoe shop earlier and had found her eyes lingering on a pair of Scholl’s. She turned into the main bar and paused, surveying the field of battle. That was the corner. The table she’d been sitting at on her own when Luke had approached. It was empty. She affected a casual stroll to the bar, trying to tell her heart to calm down.