They talked, and laughed, and talked some more. Go for it, thought Tom.
“I would very much like to see you again,” he said.
She smiled; her dark eyes shone like wet lead.
“I’d like that.”
Nia asked for his phone and swapped phone numbers.
“I’ll text you soon,” she said. “I have a busy, few days, but I’ll get in touch.”
She saw his face register disappointment. Nia held out her hand across the table and he took it gently.
“No, I promise. I will. This has been nice, Tom. Unexpected, but really nice.”
She was distracted by the driver’s entrance. The driver theatrically tapped his watch.
“Look, I have to go,” she said. “Don’t worry. I mean it. I’ll text you, okay.” She squeezed his hand encouragingly but Tom was already feeling the sensation of loss.
Tom watched her leave the cafe. He liked the way she moved, the bounce of her hair, and the quick, over the shoulder gaze towards him as she opened the cafe’s door excited him. He turned his chair to watch her through the heavy condensation on the windows as she moved through the haze of the late morning drizzle and into the waiting car. He continued to watch as the car pulled away from the curb and disappeared into traffic.
He replaced his air pods and took out his phone. Something cinematic he thought and chose Jon and Vangelis ‘Friends of Mr Cairo’. He hit play then switched screens to his web browser and typed her name into the search box. His eyes scanned the results. “Holy fuck,” he said loudly enough for the people at the next table to turn around with displeasure.
Outside, rain drizzled down the car’s windows and Nia pushed herself deeply into the warm, pliant leather of the rear seats. She was tired. She had been excited to return home and get back into the regular routine of her life but the last hours had been something completely surprising. She wasn’t a stranger to desire; indeed, it was something of another occupational hazard. She had drifted in and out of relationships, but they were usually fun, short, and shallow. Love wasn’t a reality any more, she had thought. It wasn’t that she couldn’t love. There had been several lovers, but very few loves. Fewer loves than her marriages. There was at least the big one, but she had convinced herself that that relationship was the ONE true love of her life. It was partly why she had never attempted to build a lasting relationship since. Oh God, she thought, Tom would find it on Google. She was interested in seeing Tom, again but she grimaced and remembered another airport scene over seventeen years past.
Chapter Four
London, 2002
Nia’s career was on a high. A regular role as a femme fatale on a beloved weekly drama series had made her a household name. There were rumours that Hollywood would come knocking. Nia had been thrilled by the role and the accompanying public profile, but the lens of fame quickly lost its glitter. Her anonymity had been replaced with requests for selfies and gossip columnists couldn’t separate her role from her reality. Her first husband, married and divorced in her early twenties, sold salacious stories to the press along with some racy, intimate photos. Paparazzi caught her tired and emotional at parties or after award shows. There was talk of voracious appetites for wine, coke, and men. Little of it was true. She liked a glass or two of wine, she believed she had her cocaine problem under control, and there weren’t men, there was a man.
He was a fellow actor, of course, leading man material, recently discovered by Hollywood. He was a Goldenboy. Nia found him beautiful and tender, clever and witty. He wore a background of Harrow and Cambridge with a faux lightness. He charmed her, as he did everyone, and she found herself in love with him. He loved her, too, but conditionally. He was voraciously ambitious. The press presented them as the golden couple when they were dating. There were wedding photos in Hello but then the failings of their two-year-long marriage was played out in the full glare of the public. There were the rumours of affairs, his; accusations of crockery being thrown, hers. There were private stories leaked by so-called friends, and there were the public fights in restaurants, at parties, and then, finally, Heathrow. Goldenboy left her standing broken and crying on a concourse, while he flew off for a movie shoot. The marriage was over. He never returned to her or to the home they had shared. Goldenboy sent his agent to collect his possessions, all but one.
Nia’s heartbreak, but not her secret, played out in a very public forum. Goldenboy’s charm offensive worked wonders with the British press and the Hollywood glitterati. Her working class, fuck you attitude didn’t sit well with newspaper editors and gossip column hacks and so she was viewed as the villain of the piece. While Goldenboy, all cool and collected, was seen as a potential future James Bond, she was the fiery, mouthy Celt. Nia discovered that most of her friends were actually Goldenboy’s friends. Doors closed. For the first time since she was a young teen, she felt alone and, worse, abandoned. But, not completely alone, there was the little life she carried and her agent, Jane, provided some support and comfort.
Against Jane’s advice, Nia decided to take a break. Discussions with her TV show runner didn’t go well, they wouldn’t give her the time away that she needed. She had tough decisions to make and she made them. Her character was written out of the weekly TV gig. It was a professional and financial blow, but Nia felt it was freeing. She hoped that she would have something good from the whole personal debacle. She travelled alone seeking some anonymity, solace, and healing. Then, her hopes for a new kind of future came to a distressing and bloody end in a small Scottish hospital where Nia lost her baby and was left utterly bereft.
Nia let her life spin out of control. She drank too much, had too many one-night stands, and let herself slip into the arms of a deep depression. She knew that she was punishing herself but felt that she deserved it. It was Jane, her agent, who saved Nia from herself. Jane used job options as a kind of therapy for Nia. There was some regional theatre, TV guest roles, the West End, and then back as TV recurring characters. Nia threw herself into the parts with determination and effort. She was a good actor and parts continued to come. She reforged a professional life while, outside of the public eye, she continued to nurse her personal wounds. Her upbringing had made her resilient but the experience with Goldenboy and her baby hardened her heart. She moved on determined to guard her emotions closely and to never let anyone get close enough to hurt her again.
It didn’t help that her personal reputation remained damaged. With every career success the Goldenboy enjoyed, the press would regurgitate a Nia rumour just on the safe side of slander. The press always seemed to like to juxtapose a photo of Goldenboy, usually staged, all tan and teeth and expensive suit, with a gotcha photo of Nia with no make-up, gym-wet hair, leaving a supermarket clutching a frozen meal and a bag of toilet paper.
***
London and the Marches. Present. November 21st
Nia and Tom separately made their ways home. Tom walked to the nearby Tube station then on to Euston and then on to points north. Nia headed east across the city. She arrived at her home long before Tom arrived at his. The driver helped her with her bags. She opened her front door and stepped inside, putting her bags down in the hall. A dog came running up to her signalling joy with its wagging tail. Nia squatted down to rub the dog’s head. She stood up and said loudly to the interior of the house, “Darling, it’s me. I’m home.”
***
Chester train station was grey with rain. Tom’s sister, Rachel, was waiting for him inside the station. She caught sight of him and waved as he walked across the station’s small concourse. He’d snoozed only lightly on the train but felt more refreshed than he had in years. They hugged.
“How was Canada?” Rachel asked.
“It was good. It was great to see Jacques. He sends his love,” Tom replied.
“Flight okay?”
“It was… fine.” Tom paused and then added, “It was quite interesting, actually.”
Rachel cocked her head quizzically.
“What?” he said.
“What?” she said.
“What nothing,” Tom said emphatically.
They stepped outside. He looked over to the vehicle she had driven.
“Oh, Rachel, you had to bring the bloody Land Rover? I hate those things.”
“You know the more you get used to these kinds of things the better it will be. Look at it, it’s blue not army green,” she replied.
Rachel drove and they talked of his trip to Canada, Jacques Gagnon’s PhD defence and subsequent party, the food, hotel rooms, the flights again. Tom looked out of the Land Rover’s windows at the increasingly familiar countryside. Icy frost still clinging to hedgerows and trees sparkled in the afternoon sun. It felt magical, it felt different, more vivid somehow. He shut his eyes momentarily wanting to enjoy the memory of the recent flight.
Rachel had looked after Tom’s Jack Russell terrier while he had been on his Canadian trip and she talked about the terrier’s enjoyment of farm life. She talked of the farm, how hard her husband Owain still worked, pushing sixty. But Rachel sensed there was something. She had been concerned that Gagnon’s post-army accomplishments, a career position with Canadian military intelligence and now the doctorate, would send Tom deeper into his shell. Tom’s reticence worried her and she began to fear that the trip had not gone well.
“It’s going to snow,” she said.
“Looking likely,” Tom answered. Ah, the comforting feeling of the classic British conversational topic of the weather, he thought.
Almost as soon as they entered Rachel’s farmhouse the kettle was put on. “Tea?” she asked more of a statement than a question. Jack, the Jack Russell, bounded up to Tom, Tom knelt, with some difficulty keeping his right leg outstretched, and rubbed his dog’s powerful chest. Jack licked Tom’s hand repeatedly.
“She does look good,” Tom said.
A few minutes later Rachel passed him a big mug of tea; steam twirling from the mug.
His tiredness was mixed with a fresh excitement.
“Okay, little brother,” Rachel began emphatically. “Tell me what’s up.”
Tom stared into his tea.
“It’s crazy but I think I’ve met someone,” he said. He surprised himself with the remark as he and Rachel, although close, increasingly so over the past five years, did not regularly share personal intimacies. But Tom felt the need to say something. He felt lighter for saying it as if sharing the information made it more real somehow.
“You think? Well, you either met someone or you didn’t.” Rachel then twigged. “Oh, I see, you think you MET someone.” She was stunned.
She knew her brother had the occasional fling with women he would meet in a canal-side pub or a single female boater who made herself available; two narrowboaters that pass in the night. He was a good-looking chap, but Rachel knew that he had avoided any real connection since leaving the army. She didn’t think it was because of the residual feelings for the ex-wife, those wounds had long healed. She looked up towards the sideboard to the framed picture of Tom in dress uniform. Other wounds were taking a lot longer.
“Yes,” Tom smiled. “Met in that way, but I’m not sure.”
They both sat down at the kitchen table, cups of tea in hand.
“Well, you can’t just say something like that and go all quiet on me,” Rachel said. “Come on, who is she, what’s she like?”
Tom felt embarrassed by candour, but in for a penny in for a pound.
“She’s smart and funny and lovely. She’s an actress,” he said. “Quite well known, apparently.”
“Oh yeah,” Rachel responded. “Would I know her?”
“Maybe. Nia Williams.”
Rachel’s face registered shock.
“Oh my God, the Welsh Spitfire?”
***
Rachel dropped Tom and Jack off at the narrowboat basin at the small, pretty Welsh village of Llangollen. Light flakes of snow seemed to drift in a mild breeze. Tom unlocked the rear door of his narrowboat. Home. He had had no idea what he was going to do after he left the army, but remembering an enjoyable family holiday from his youth, he impetuously sold his house, his Mini, and bought a forty-eight-foot narrowboat.
The boat, Periwinkle, was in good shape when he purchased it. He asked the boatyard about changing the name but was advised not to as changing boat names brought only bad luck. The boatyard gave him a thorough training on the boat operations and maintenance and even accompanied him on a thirty-minute test sail. After about another thirty minutes of solo boating, he was hooked. He had since spent five years living on the Periwinkle and had travelled a few thousand miles on the canals of England and Wales. It had become his lifestyle, his profession, his therapy. Tom loved the Llangollen canal and the region around it, its proximity to Rachel, and had decided to winter up at one of the canal’s marinas.
He stepped down into the boat, dropped off his small flight bag. Everything was familiar but everything felt different. The boat was cold and Jack immediately curled up on her bed in the front cabin. Periwinkle was plugged into an external electrical outlet, so Tom switched on a small electric heater, while he started a fire in the boat’s little pot-bellied Danish Morso stove. He fired up the kettle and emptied the contents of a supermarket plastic bag he’d carried under his arm. It contained a few essential groceries and a selection of DVDs which spilt out onto the small galley table. They were the fruit of his and Rachel’s labours of visiting several video shops and supermarkets. Rachel had curated a small collection of Nia Williams’ work. As the boat’s cabin warmed nicely, he took a seat in one of his two comfy chairs, Jack jumped up into his lap, then, tea in hand, he pressed play on his small TV/DVD combo. The first DVD was of a two-decade-old TV drama; within ten minutes of watching, a young Nia emerged on screen. She was playing a pugnacious teen runaway. She turned to face the camera and Tom thought she was stunning, her dark eyes sparkled through the screen and through the years. He ached to be with her again. He took a sip of his tea and wondered what she was doing at that moment.
***
In her London town home, Nia was remembering how nicely Tom had smiled. Ben, the handsome young man who had greeted her, was shouldering a rucksack and was about to push his bike through the open front door. Nia held the door for him and passed him an envelope containing an overly generous amount of cash. She knew the young actor struggling for parts would need it.
“Thanks again for house-sitting,” she said.
“No problem darling. Anytime. You have such a lovely house. It was fun to stay and eat all your food and drink all your booze.” Ben leaned down and patted his Lab on its head. The dog licked his hand. “We love it here. Do let me know if you need me again.” Ben looked at her. “You are positively glowing darling. Jet lag must be good for the skin.”
“I’m just happy to be home,” Nia said recognising it was only a half truth.
Nia held the door open to watch Ben cycle off into the city followed by his trotting Lab. She closed the door and leant against it as if catching her breath. She was tired, almost overcome with fatigue. She would unpack her bags later.
“Time for a cup of tea,” she said out loud, her voice echoing in the empty house.
Tea made, Nia sat down in her study surrounded by the books she loved so much. She wondered whether she should get a dog. She sipped her tea thinking back on her last few weeks. The job had been fulfilling, fun, and well paid. Bills would be paid; savings account would be topped up. Nia wouldn’t have to worry about her finances, but she was anxious for the next role, the next job. There were some scripts to read, auditions to prepare for, and call backs were already on her calendar. She didn’t care for auditions but was rarely just given roles these days, and she had accepted that as another part of the actor’s life. But now, there was this Tom guy and, for the first time in a long time, her thoughts weren’t just about work. As she went through the rest of the day, her imaginings filled her house, making it feel less empty.
Over the next da
y, Nia and Tom went on with their separate and regular routines. As they moved through what was so familiar; boat duties, making cups of tea, talking with agents, sitting down with a book, listening to the news, they both, unknown to the other, felt attached by a gossamer-thin thread of connection.
Chapter Five
Llangollen, November 22nd
Tom woke to a cold cabin. He exhaled breath clouds as he slipped out of bed with an audible ‘brrrr’ and, put on slippers. Jack moved from the foot of the bed to the warm spot Tom had just vacated. Jack watched Tom throw on sweatpants, T-shirt, and a sweatshirt before Tom made his way down the narrowboat. His limp was more obvious on cold mornings. Tom went to light the little Morso stove in the forward cabin. He was always good with fires and the kindling took immediately. He placed a few coal bricks on top of the kindling and waited for the first wafts of warm air. He closed the stove’s grill and held out his hands to absorb the heat. Sufficiently convinced that the fire would now hold, he made his way back down the cabin to the small kitchen. His phone was plugged in, charging. He held his breath involuntarily while checking his texts. Nothing. It’s still early, he told himself. He put the kettle on. The window, above the small cooktop and sink, was almost at water level. Tom watched a few hardy ducks and coots navigate the semi-frozen canal, drawn to the narrowboat’s window in the hope of some crumbs. Tom opened the window and supplied some as he always did. The canal bank opposite opened on to a meadow, tinged with heavy frost. Tom, now with tea in hand, watched a dog fox scuttle home, like an anxious husband who had stayed out too late. Perhaps there was a vixen waiting, perhaps kits, in a nearby den. Or, perhaps, like Tom, the reynard was alone. A loner, Tom considered, but not necessarily alone. There was Jack and Rachel and her family. His thoughts then turned to Nia.
Fit For Purpose Page 4