The Wish List

by Ruby Hummingbird

  Maria felt grateful tears spring up. She had felt more emotions in one day than in the last year of her life. Albie’s death had triggered so much. To think she would normally be sat in her apartment on her own with only a launderette visit to break up the monotony.

  They ordered lunch and Maria found herself pushing the food around the plate as Keith told her stories about Albie, and she learnt more about the man she had so admired.

  Pauline joined them at the table, plates of carrot cake set down in front of them. ‘Fresh today,’ she explained, handing Maria a fork.

  Keith sipped at his cappuccino, taking a forkful of cake. ‘Wow!’ he said, a hand covering his mouth. He swallowed, looking at Pauline. ‘This is the best carrot cake I’ve had in a long time. I always thought a soft cheese topping was compulsory but just a drizzle of lemon and a sprinkle of demerara really works.’

  Pauline raised a neat eyebrow at him. ‘You sound like you know your baking.’

  Keith shifted in his chair, his voice lower, a hand lifted to rake through his hair, before stopping once he realised the long strands had gone. ‘I used to work in a restaurant in London. A long time ago now.’ He looked up at her with solemn brown eyes.

  ‘London, eh?’

  Keith’s eyes slid away from them both as Pauline sat back in her chair. ‘And what do you do now then?’

  Maria gave Keith a panicked look. What would he say? He seemed such a different person from the man huddled in the doorway only a few hours before – would he want to hold onto this illusion a little longer?

  ‘He’s currently seeking employment,’ Maria interjected, biting her lip and hoping Keith wouldn’t mind.

  He gave her a relieved smile and Maria returned it.

  ‘That’s right, I’m looking. It’s been… a bit difficult.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Pauline said, distracted by the sound of the bell, a group of women pushing inside, one on a mobile, one with a baby in a sling, another chatting to a friend. The small space was suddenly filled with noise, discussions of where to sit, scraping of chairs, laughter. Pauline left to help them and it seemed the spell of the last hour or so was broken.

  ‘Right,’ said Keith, placing his palms flat on the table in front of him. ‘Well… Thank you for everything, Maria. I’m so pleased you found that list, that we met. Albie was right about you.’

  She was too shy to ask exactly how and too sad to find the words back. She felt the energy she had needed to face the day leaking away, and there was only ever a limited supply these days.

  Keith picked up his carrier bag and went to say goodbye to Pauline. Then he returned and before she could fret or worry what to do next, he reached out and with one arm pulled her into a hug. ‘Thank you,’ he whispered.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she mumbled into the suede of his new coat, alarmed to see a tear stain as she pulled away. She was like a full-on waterworks these days. Albie’s death had opened up this well of unshed tears.

  Keith left quickly and she felt her heart lurch as she watched him walk past the glass of the café, a hand wiping at his face. He had loved Albie too.

  She waved a goodbye to Pauline, left a generous tip, knowing Albie would have done just the same. Then she pushed back outside and headed home, alone.

  • Pay for him to get a haircut ✔

  We had headed up to London, her first trip there, and the start of a love affair with the place. The top deck of a double-decker bus, her tiny face, one large open mouth as we moved through busy streets, out along the sparkling Thames, the Houses of Parliament, Big Ben… these familiar landmarks she had only ever seen in books. Right here in front of her. I loved listening to her commentary.

  Off to the Tower of London to see Beefeaters and look at the dungeons, admire the Crown Jewels. She had been convinced she would meet the Queen – ‘If the flag is up, she’s at home’ – and had looked at me appalled when I had admitted that might not happen. ‘But she lives there,’ she had stressed as if the Queen was simply waiting for her. She had even brought the Polaroid camera so that we could take a photo with her.

  We had eaten at a restaurant cloudy with smoke, bouncing on her chair as I tried to distract her with her new Magna Doodle. She could spend hours at home drawing and sliding the little bar along, but today it held no interest, wanting to keep going, keep seeing everything.

  ‘London is huge,’ she had said, eyes round.

  I could see the future, a girl bright with energy desperate to explore. London was huge and suddenly in that moment I just wanted to be at home with her, listening to one of her favourite stories on the cassette player and plaiting her hair. I didn’t want her to know about this big, wide world yet – I loved our world together in Brighton, just us.

  Fourteen

  She’d never been to Devon, so she had booked a room in a B&B in Barnstaple for the night before to be fresh in the morning. Sitting in a small downstairs room for breakfast, just one other solitary guest shaking cornflakes from a box, she tried to imagine what he would be like, the man who had saved Albie’s life. It was this thought that had driven her to pick up her landline, search for Timothy’s name, track him down to the furthest reaches of Devon. Curiosity had given her the confidence she needed. This trip spanning half the country had been the furthest she had ventured in more than thirty-six years.

  The bus was leaving in less than an hour and she wanted to finish her breakfast and make herself presentable, her stomach leaping at the thought of meeting a perfect stranger. She wanted to make a good impression.

  She had tried not to think of Albie’s other request, convincing herself it was a different beach, a different sea. Still, the thought of all that water, the sight of the horizon in the distance, made her hairline bead with sweat, her palms damp. She pushed unpleasant thoughts to the back of her mind and tried to focus on what she had to do: meet Timothy, thank him for saving Albie. Maria thought she might burst with the intrigue: what had happened?

  Timothy had hinted at his lack of mobility on the telephone and when she arrived off the bus in the heart of Lynmouth, he was already waiting in his wheelchair by the drop-off point. He had combed-back steel-grey hair, a long face and deep lines around a generous mouth. He was sitting impossibly straight in the chair, chin jutted upwards, meeting her gaze.

  ‘Maria,’ he said, his voice booming across the space.

  She stuck out a hand, immediately tongue-tied.

  ‘Would you mind giving me a steer?’

  He directed her along the pavement crossing a babbling river, water coursing between stones and boulders, a line of deckchairs stacked on a grassy verge beneath them.

  ‘Hardly any tourists at the moment. Thought I could show you what Lynmouth has to offer.’

  Maria was happy to be pushing him from behind, feeling more able to chat to a stranger without the intensity of eye contact. She found herself relaxing as they moved past shops selling trinkets, fudge, buckets and spades. Gulls screeched overhead, swooping across the sky thick with clouds. A large plastic ice-cream cone almost blocked their path and Timothy was nearly deposited in the road as Maria navigated round it.

  ‘Nice driving,’ he chuckled as she just kept him on the pavement. ‘I thought we could head down to the beach further along here. It’s out of season so always a lot nicer and dogs are allowed on it. I like to live vicariously through other people’s pets since Monty, my Labrador, died last year.’

  ‘Oh…’ Maria stopped short. The beach. She felt her scalp prickle, gripped the back of the wheelchair, her knuckles turning white. ‘If it isn’t a problem, I was rather hoping we could stay inside. I’m quite spoilt for beaches.’ She laughed, trying to make light of her unusual request, glad he wasn’t looking directly at her.

  ‘Brighton,’ Timothy said, not missing a beat, ‘I should have thought.’ He swiped a hand through his hair, angling his head to the side to speak to her. ‘Of course, we can go to a café in Lynton, an excuse to ride the Cliff Railway at least. The
y do excellent cream teas, if you like that, Maria.’

  She felt a swell of relief course through her, that he had been so easily distracted and hadn’t picked up on her nerves, or her desire to change his plan.

  ‘That sounds wonderful, a proper Devonian cream tea.’

  ‘We can fight over which comes first on the scones, the cream or the jam,’ Timothy said in his booming voice. ‘It’s the cream obviously but some foreign folks are strange.’

  Maria laughed, happy at how easily the conversation was flowing. ‘I’m not here to start an argument, cream it is.’

  ‘Excellent!’ He clapped, making her jump, and pointed in the opposite direction. ‘Steer on, we need to go left here,’ he called out from in front of her, ‘towards the harbour. See that pub, The Rising Sun? It’s just around the corner there.’

  Maria directed them over a bridge further along the river, skirting a harbour crammed with fishing boats tilted at an angle on the mud at low tide. Seaweed clung to the walls and the smell of salt hit her hard. She tried not to breathe it in, focused on pushing Timothy, distracting herself with a string of questions about the village.

  Don’t think about it, don’t think about it.

  ‘Oh, for years now… there was a flood in the fifties… busy in the summer… used to be a shop that sold the best pasties…’

  Passing the pub, they rounded the corner, Maria’s eyes firmly in front of her, aware of the sea to her right, grey and forbidding. In the distance across the water lay Wales, as Timothy was pointing out. She nodded and sped up, pushing him along the road and past an information centre, glad of his running commentary.

  Don’t think about it, don’t think about it.

  They stopped at the bottom of a cliff face, a strip gouged out, tracks running up the length of it. A green carriage was ascending slowly, as one was descending from the top, cables working on some kind of pulley system.

  ‘They’re powered by water.’ Timothy pointed to the lower green carriage, where water cascaded out of the bottom, as Maria craned her neck to see a second carriage.

  ‘Two cars attached to each other. Once the top one becomes heavier, it starts to descend and the bottom one goes up. It’s unique – well, there’s one in Portugal but we don’t like to shout about that.’

  He paid for two tickets from the booth and they waited, the first passengers for the next trip up.

  ‘How clever,’ Maria said, marvelling at the engineering, staring at the passengers out on the small balcony of the carriage as they moved slowly to the bottom of the cliff face. A bell clanged and they filed out, Maria steering Timothy onto the empty car.

  It filled up and they started to move up once the doors closed, the sound of the water gushing from below, the cables cranking as they rose higher. Looking out through the glass windows, she could make out the stretch of dull sky, cliffs opposite, cars winding around the road that seemed to cling to its side. The village was lost somewhere below them, its roofs and streets insignificant from this height. Maria was glad to arrive at the top and push Timothy out, her stomach lurching.

  He directed her to a café on the high street, opposite a hall that was running a market to raise money for the RSPB.

  ‘Shall we pop inside?’ he suggested, pointing to the building. ‘They have an excellent second-hand book section in there and I rarely come up here…’

  ‘Of course,’ Maria said, glad to be on the move, doing something. Timothy was more forthright than Albie, so she couldn’t make too many excuses.

  The hall was full and scattered with tables crammed with jewellery, scarves, pottery, locally made honey, cheeses and more. People manned stalls, some on stools, others standing. They moved their way around, Maria glancing up at the wooden stage at the back of the hall, realising there was no way of them getting the chair up the small stairs.

  ‘It must be frustrating,’ she remarked, knowing Timothy was looking over at a high-up stall that sold walking sticks, tweed hats and wellington boots.

  ‘At times,’ he said, cheerfully distracting her with a stall offering free chunks of tablet fudge to passers-by. They bought a bag each, the sweet, indulgent taste filling Maria’s mouth.

  ‘What a treat!’ she said as she pushed Timothy out through a side door and into the second-hand books section. The smell of dust and air freshener mingled as they entered the labyrinth of shelves, browsing the titles and remarking on those in front of them.

  ‘I used to talk to Albie about books. He loved thrillers and books set in World War Two…’

  ‘He was a reader?’ Timothy asked, his voice raised in surprise.

  ‘Oh yes! We shared a similar taste in books,’ she said, wondering whether that was strictly true. Certainly, she devoured every book he suggested, wanting always to share in the experience with him, swap thoughts, soak up his thoughts.

  ‘Surprises me. The Albert I knew couldn’t sit still long enough to read a book – I was always trying to civilise him.’

  ‘Well, I suppose the older one gets…’

  Maria thought back to when she was younger, in that other world she tried not to mull on too much, when she had been a keen tennis player, in between rushing from meetings to events to networking parties to home. That had all ended after that day… She had lost her taste for tennis, knowing her partners and opposition might have heard what had happened, that she might be forced to let them into her life – and the heartbreak that governed it. She had taken up running instead, sometimes out for hours pounding the streets in any weather, running to try and force her mind blank. Then one day she had stopped doing even that, she hadn’t run for years.

  ‘Maria… Maria?’

  She realised Timothy had been trying to get her attention for some time.

  ‘I’m sorry, I was somewhere else.’ She blushed.

  ‘Shall we head off and have that tea? I know you don’t have too long…’

  The café was on a corner of two roads, two enormous glass-fronted windows making the place light and airy, even on the dreary day. Seaside prints lined the walls in bright turquoise, yellows and greens, and Maria’s eyes slid past them, not wanting to think about that today. A waitress in a black peaked cap ambled over to take their order and move a chair out of the space Timothy needed.

  ‘Thank you, thank you,’ he said in a hearty voice, clearly trying to put her at her ease. How frustrating it must be to have to constantly ask for furniture or things to be moved simply so you could sit down like any other person.

  The cream teas arrived, small pots piled high with delicious, thick-looking cream, others with bright red jam packed with strawberries. The dough was warm to the touch as Maria sliced it open and laughed as Timothy watched her.

  ‘I remember what you said,’ she said, reaching for the cream and allowing him to relax.

  ‘Excellent, excellent.’

  ‘Wow, these are good,’ she said between mouthfuls, hand over her mouth so she didn’t spray crumbs. The cream smooth, the jam sweet, the scone warm.

  ‘These would be my last meal,’ Timothy agreed, loading his up so that Maria thought the whole thing might topple. ‘You can never have too much clotted cream.’

  A companionable silence descended as they ate, the room filling up with other people, a clash of delicious smells – bread, cheese, herbs – wafting from the kitchen at the back.

  A man of similar age arrived and made his way over to the table, greeting Timothy warmly. A local firmly at home, she thought as he roared with laughter and the promise to meet soon.

  ‘Used to play squash with him, good man,’ Timothy said by way of explanation.

  ‘How long have you had to use a wheelchair?’ Maria asked, realising for an active person the limitations must be tiring.

  Timothy patted the right wheel. ‘A year or so now. I was struggling to get around – denial, I suppose – and then I realised I had stopped leaving the house, which wouldn’t do at all.’

  ‘Has it changed things?’

  Tim
othy thought for a moment, his gaze steady. ‘You learn to ask people for help more. It’s made me a little nicer perhaps.’ He chuckled as he forked his chip. ‘Worried if I’m not, people will stop pushing me around.’

  ‘I’m sure not,’ Maria laughed.

  ‘I don’t like being on a different level though, people talking over you like you’re a child.’ His expression changed, his mouth turning down as he spoke.

  Maria didn’t know what to say, appreciated her own luck, no need for a replacement hip or a walking stick. She hadn’t done enough in her life to warrant getting things replaced; she hadn’t done nearly enough. She had a thought then – Albie had wanted them to donate to a charity, perhaps Timothy would be keen to donate money to a cause that would help the disabled?

  ‘It’s why it’s nice to be sat opposite you now,’ he said, popping the last of his scone in his mouth.

  ‘And tell me more about how you knew Albie,’ Maria said, keen to change the subject to cheerier things – and keen to know more about her dear friend.

  ‘Albie was my best friend at university in Exeter. He used to come and stay in the summer here, worked at The Rising Sun for a while in fact, but we lost touch soon after we started work.’

  ‘A falling-out?’ Maria asked, after swallowing.

  ‘No, nothing like that,’ Timothy said, shaking his head. ‘I worked abroad for years and we were both pretty hopeless pen pals. This was before email and Facebook, of course. My granddaughters are always talking about FaceTime. They go to another country and call you as if they’re in the room next door. But I thought of him often, wondered what he was up to. I heard he never married…’

  An eyebrow was raised in question and Maria felt a little warm, one hand covering the other, ‘No… no, he never did marry.’

  For a second a name flitted across her mind: Cathie. Who was the mystery woman? Had Albie planned to marry her?

  She realised with a slow horror that she could feel tears build within her. She mustn’t cry in front of Timothy. She coughed and covered her hand with the other one. ‘I found this list,’ she said suddenly, ‘I think I mentioned it on the phone, let me show you.’