by Lucy Lawrie
He put it into the microwave and pressed the buttons. Then he leaned back against the counter, crossing his arms.
‘So how’s the world of employment law?’
‘Oh, fine . . . great!’ I didn’t want to go into the whole Bobby Spencer fiasco. Malkie knew me from a time when I’d been the highest scoring law student in the year, with creamy skin and glossy, swinging hair. Now, there was no hiding the dark circles and flat hair, but at least I could feign some professional competence.
‘You okay? You look a bit spaced out.’
‘Just . . . er, a little dizzy. Too much coffee, probably. I’m fine.’
I wasn’t at all sure that this was true. But I wasn’t about to reveal that to Malkie – I didn’t want him to know I’d become a neurotic wreck, the sort who’d spent the last three evenings Googling brain tumours.
With him standing in front of me, it all seemed so ridiculous, as though I could just step out of that skin, and go back to being who I was supposed to be. But who was that, exactly? The different versions of myself seemed to shimmer in front of me.
‘Are you sure you’re fine?’
Why was everything happening in slow motion? I looked up at Malkie’s face, then at my own hands, stretching the fingers experimentally. I shook my head hoping that might sort it, but it was a mistake because something in my brain seemed to go into free fall. My vision lurched; I stepped towards the counter to steady myself but the floor seemed to slide from under my feet. I fell into him; I actually fell into him and he caught me, bringing me to rest on my knees on the floor.
‘Woooahh, steady! Are you okay?’ He was still holding on to me, his hands gripping my upper arms.
Sandra, one of the bossiest secretaries, came rushing over. ‘Cassie? What happened? Shall I fetch the first aider?’ She seemed to be speaking from somewhere very far away.
‘Cassie?’ repeated Malkie.
‘No, honestly,’ I said, rubbing my forehead with the back of my hand, hiding my eyes. ‘It was just a dizzy spell. I just slipped, it’s fine honestly.’
‘Here, sit down,’ said Sandra, wheeling a chair over. Her voice wobbled, barely able to contain her excitement. I managed to stand up and lower myself into the chair but my legs shook and could hardly hold me. Malkie jerked forward, reaching for my arm to steady me.
‘It’s okay, Malkie, I’ve got her. Can you go and get Julie, the first aider? She’s on the second floor. Now Cassie, just sit here and take some deep breaths.’
*
Malkie came down to see me a little while later.
‘Feeling better now?’
‘Yes, thanks. Much better.’
But my concern was mirrored in Malkie’s face.
‘I’m fine, honestly.’
‘You should get it checked out. You don’t look too well.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I said in a whisper. ‘Bloody Sandra has organised a GP appointment for me. Apparently they had a cancellation. I expect they bumped a poor sick old lady off her appointment – anything to get Sandra off the phone.’
‘I’ll drive you. I’ve got a stack of witness statements to work through and I was going to do it from home anyway, to get some peace.’
‘No, it’s fine.’
‘I won’t have you going on your own. No arguments, or I’ll tell Sandra you’ve just fainted again and she’ll phone an ambulance.’
*
Malkie brought his car round from the car park so I didn’t have to walk. As I got in and pulled the door shut I felt the years fall away again, like pages sliding free from an old book. Many of our difficult scenes had been played out in his car, parked up at some desolate spot. It felt as though threads of old conversations were still hanging there, waiting to be continued.
I glanced over at him; he was frowning in concentration as he negotiated a right turn into the traffic on Queen Street. The dizziness had receded into a not entirely unpleasant wooziness, and combined with the adrenalin fizz of his close proximity it felt like being slightly drunk. Perhaps it would be okay just to surrender to it for a while, just to sit back and watch him.
With Malkie it had always been about chemistry. It had even started with an experiment in a grey concrete University tower block one rainy evening in June, the day after I’d finished my English Lit finals.
Helen and I had had to walk five floors up the stairwell to find the psychology lab, white and stark under fluorescent lights. Helen’s friend Jo – who had appeared at our flat the night before, begging us to take part – was there to meet us, and she checked us off on her clipboard.
‘Help yourselves to some refreshments,’ she said, pointing to a table with white plastic cups set out in rows.
‘Orange squash and custard creams!’ remarked Helen. ‘I feel like I’ve been transported back to Primary Three.’
‘I know. I keep expecting Mrs Murray to walk in.’
We stood sipping our juice, glancing at the other participants – all young women around our age. It felt surreal to be a lab rat, under scrutiny in such clinical surroundings – my head was still full of T.S. Eliot, and the Brontës.
One by one, we were summoned to a table where we had to place a plastic mask over our nose and mouth. Jo screwed a series of jars – which seemed to contain crumpled t-shirts – on to a hose that was attached to the mask, and we were instructed to take several deep breaths.
The first four were variations on B.O., ranging from cheesy to acrid. But the last one was altogether different. It was an outdoorsy, rainy smell, like forgotten washing brought in from the line last thing at night.
After we had rated each smell Jo threw open a set of doors into an adjoining lab, where there were six tables set up, with a young male student seated at each one. Jo motioned to the first table. ‘Cassie – you pair up with Malkie, please.’
Helen later told me that you could feel the chemistry, spitting and crackling in the air, as soon as I turned to face him. For me it felt like a state of heightened awareness, every sense tuned into him. While Jo gave us our instructions – which I registered only as an annoying background buzz – he sat back in his chair and put his hands behind his head, pulling back his elbows in a stretch. I glimpsed two dark circles of sweat, before he straightened up and smiled. ‘Shall we get started then?’
He had to describe the house he’d grown up in, and I had to draw it on a fresh, white sheet of A3. However, I couldn’t really concentrate on what he was saying. The sound of his voice was stirring me up, melting me, like a warm spoon in honey.
‘Just take it a bit more to the left . . . that’s it. Yes, that’s it, right there . . .’
Whenever I drew something the wrong way he’d laugh in a knowing, masculine, spatially aware sort of way. Whenever I got something right he’d nod and grunt excitedly.
‘Hmm,’ he said afterwards, craning his head round. ‘Doesn’t look much like a council house in East Kilbride, but hey.’
I blushed. It looked like a crooked Hansel and Gretel house. Something a four-year-old might have drawn.
‘Okay,’ he said, picking up a pen. ‘Your house next.’
I began telling him what to draw.
‘Bloody hell,’ he said, halfway through. ‘That’s the twenty-sixth window. Did you live in a stately home or something?’
‘No,’ I muttered. ‘I grew up in a sheltered housing complex for the elderly.’
‘What?’ He screwed up his face like a wee boy.
‘My mum was the warden. She was a nurse by training, but she took that job to fit around looking after me. We had a little flat on the ground floor.’ I pointed over to one of the windows he’d drawn. ‘There.’
‘Cool,’ he said quietly. He bent close over the paper and drew a tiny smiley face and a stick hand, waving.
Afterwards, I walked back to the flat in a daze, Helen laughing and pushing my back to propel me faster along the pavement.
Suddenly I swung round. ‘What if he’s not there next week?’
�
�He’ll be there,’ said Helen.
‘Well it’s obviously about pheromones or something, isn’t it? What if this week was attractive men, and next week is . . .’ My voice trailed off in horror at the thought.
‘It doesn’t matter. He’s going into his final year of law, you said? You can always track him down in the law library.’
But I didn’t need to worry. When we got there the following Thursday, Malkie was already there with his friend Kev, loitering beside the refreshments table.
‘This week,’ said Jo, ‘We have a different task for you. Helen – you pair up with Kevin again, please. Cassie, you go with Malkie.’
I wanted to throw my arms around her, as though she was some kind of wild-haired, bespectacled fairy godmother.
This time we each had to describe our ‘family’, and the other person had to draw a picture of it.
‘Well, there’s my mum,’ I began. ‘She’s big. Size twenty or so. But she’s pretty . . . she’s got nice skin and rosy cheeks and she always has expensive clothes. Usually she wears pearls.’
Malkie’s pen hovered over the page, as though he wasn’t sure how large he should actually make her – in the end he made her a tactful size sixteen or so.
‘And you could draw me, I guess.’
He nodded, and with a flick of his eyebrows he put pen to paper again.
‘I don’t have a dad,’ I said in a rush.
‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Me neither.’
‘I mean – he’s dead. I don’t remember him. Do you think you should put him in anyway?’
‘I’ll draw a father-shaped space,’ he said.
How did he know? How could he have known that this was how I’d always thought of him? That I’d never been able to imagine him with a face, despite the slim Kodak envelope in the bottom drawer of Mum’s desk, with its six faded holiday snaps and strips of slippery, baffling negatives.
In the next exercise, I was given a blindfold and Malkie had to direct me through an obstacle course, steering me round a series of cones, along a bench, and up and down a small set of steps. There wasn’t supposed to be any physical contact, but he was so close that I could feel his breath against my cheek. At one point, I lost my balance and his hand shot out to steady me. A thought slammed into my mind, on the back of a thousand volts.
He is meant for me.
I stopped, and drew a deep breath, and it felt like the first time I’d ever breathed oxygen.
He lifted the blindfold from around my eyes, sliding it over my hair with two gentle hands. ‘My turn now.’
‘My goodness,’ I said, after I’d walked him across the low wooden bench, the kind we’d used in school for gym. ‘We’re much better than everybody else.’ Students were tumbling over cones everywhere and one girl was lying sprawled on the floor giggling. She pulled her partner over on top of her as he tried to help her up.
‘Ha!’ he said. ‘That’s because you didn’t have any of the orange squash.’
He drew a hip flask out of the pocket of his jacket. ‘Vodka,’ he said. ‘Kev and I thought it would make for a more interesting experiment. Want some?’
But when we turned up for the follow-up session the next week, we got to the lab to find a notice on the door, and a small cluster of experimentees standing around chatting. The notice said that the experiment had been cancelled – Jo had been forced to abandon her Masters, due to ‘unforeseen circumstances’. A wave of disappointment hit me. However, a moment later Malkie came up behind us, hands thrust deep in the pockets of his shabby navy jacket. ‘Anyone coming to the pub?’ he asked casually.
I got really quite drunk and I don’t remember much of the evening, or the walk back to Malkie’s flat later. I registered that it was in a row of tenements somewhere near Arthur’s Seat, four flights up an echoing stairwell, and that it had a distinctive smell – musty, sandy, damp, the smell of old stone.
As he shared his one-bedroom flat with another guy, he had turned the living room into his bedroom. It looked odd – a swirly carpet and an ugly fake stone fireplace, and a bed made up with navy and grey striped bedding. My head was spinning, so I lay down on it and shut my eyes.
Then it all came out – how I was supposed to be going to Massachussets to do a Masters in American Literature, how I desperately wanted to go but was so scared at the prospect of leaving everything and everybody behind. ‘And I’m worried about what I’m going to do later. I mean, Emily Dickinson is incredible . . . and Henry James, and Hart Crane . . . and, oh God, all of them . . . but they’re not going to get me a job, are they?’
Malkie, propped up on one elbow beside me on the bed, gave me a quizzical look, as though he wasn’t sure who I was referring to. Ineffectual careers advisers, perhaps.
‘Maybe I should do a law conversion course instead.’
‘Maybe you should,’ he said in a low, deep voice. ‘We could play footsie in the law library.’
‘Yes, but Malkie. It’s because . . because . . .’ Because of what? My head was spinning. ‘Oh yes. Financial Security.’
‘Yep,’ he said, without missing a beat. ‘That’s something all those twats with rich parents will never understand.’
‘Exactly!’ I twisted myself up to look at him. ‘They will never understand. All those people with two parents.’
He shook his head. ‘They won’t have a fucking clue.’
I fell back on the bed with a dramatic sigh. ‘Have you got a traineeship yet, then?’
‘Nah. I’ve had a few stage-one interviews with human resources, but I’ve never gotten through to stage two. They’re only interested in one thing,’ he said bitterly.
‘What’s that?’ I breathed, horrified. Were the HR women after him for his body?
‘What school you went to,’ he said. ‘They think I’m a scaff.’
‘I think you’re amazing.’
Then everything went quiet; the noise of the traffic and the passers-by outside seemed to fade away. And there in the room, on that bed, there was a pause; a sense of something being weighed in the balance. Silently it resolved itself, as he lifted his hand to stroke my hair. I could smell cigarettes off him, and something else; the essence of him, that far-away rainy night scent.
He lowered his face and closed his mouth over mine. Silver lightning coursed down the backs of my legs. I pulled his narrow body on top of mine, and he paused to look at me, and murmured three words. They were the same words looping through my mind. ‘We fit together.’
At around midday, I woke up to Malkie groaning, ‘Jings . . .’ in a voice even more gravelly than normal. I felt the bedsprings bounce as he sat up next to me. Thrilled to be in bed with someone who said things like ‘Jings’, I opened my eyes and gazed at him admiringly as he stumbled through to the kitchen to get two pint glasses of cold water and some paracetamol.
We took a bus into town and went to Princes Street Gardens. We picked our way down the grassy slope, past office workers with their shoes kicked off, sunburnt students, and young families with buggies and picnics and sensible hats. We found a spot under a tree, and lay on our backs, staring up at the leaves as they shifted gently in the breeze. Green against the deep, deep blue.
Malkie eventually broke the silence. ‘I’ll wait for you, you know.’
I sat up and turned to look at him, awkward in his old navy jacket, jeans and grey trainers. His face was even paler than usual, almost white, with a sheen of hangover sweat.
‘I know that you’re going away. But I’m kind of in trouble here. I think I’ve fallen for you.’
So why did he look almost ill at the thought of it? His eyes were heavy, full of discomfort.
He walked me to the bus stop, where he grabbed me into a brief, fierce hug, then turned and walked away without a word. I ached for him. Oh God, I ached for him. But already, it felt more like a death than a beginning.
*
It was about half past four by the time I left the doctor’s surgery – the appointments had been running behind. Mal
kie was still waiting for me in his car. I shimmied into the passenger seat and pulled the door shut with a clunk.
‘What did they say?’ he asked, handing me a cold bottle of juice and a packet of paracetamol. He must have gone to the corner shop while he was waiting for me.
‘How did you know I had a headache?’
He shrugged. ‘You just had that kind of hazy look.’
It was strange. We’d hardly spoken for nearly a decade. But this little bit of drama had cut through the awkwardness, and the old dynamic had clicked back into place. It was undeniably still there, this connection that was grounded in physical chemistry but was not limited to that. He’d always ‘got’ me, effortlessly, instinctively, without the need for stumbling explanations.
‘Oh, she just said there were millions of different things that can cause dizziness. Most of them not serious. She said I should make a note of when I feel dizzy to see if I can see a pattern or connect it with anything I’m doing. Maybe if I’ve not eaten for a long time or something. Or if I’m particularly tired – but that’s all the time, really. I did say that, but I don’t know if she was actually listening.’
I released a shuddering breath.
‘You sound stressed,’ he said. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘I don’t know. I feel a bit wound up.’
‘Wound up how?’
‘Like something terrible is going to happen. Or sometimes . . . I feel a bit spooked. Like somebody might be following me or something.’
‘Jesus, Cassie. Somebody’s been following you?’
‘No. At least I don’t think so. I think you’re right, I am a bit stressed.’
‘Being tired won’t help. It must be hard with kids around.’
‘Yeah. Only one kid. She’s only little.’
He put his left hand on the gearstick and wiggled it. But rather than starting the ignition, he turned to me and spoke again, his voice soft and improbably low. ‘Cassie, I don’t want to say the wrong thing, but something seems up with you. What is it we’re talking about here? Is it stress, or is it something else? Post-natal depression?’