Ben shook his head, slumped back against the leather seat running along the wall of the pub as a bowl of steaming wedges was delivered to them.
Evan lifted out the small pots of sour cream and sweet chilli sauce. ‘I have these images in my head of Holly and me as young kids, then teenagers, then adults.’
Ben nodded as he tentatively took a bite from the edge of a steaming hot wedge. ‘Now do you see where I’m coming from when I talk about a sibling for Ava?’
Evan nodded. ‘Mind you, Holly and I used to get into scrapes too. Did she ever tell you about the night we damaged Mum’s car?’
‘Holly? Do you mean my wife, Holly, who only last week was teasing me about reversing into a bollard outside work?’
‘Yep, that’s the one.’
‘What happened?’
‘Mum used to stress about us taking the car to the city full stop, thinking it would get damaged if we parked outside bars and the like. Anyway, we promised we would drive to the station in Huntley and park near all those posh houses and commute to the city. We missed the sodding train, and we didn’t want to miss out on the live band at the Kitten Club, so …’
‘You drove to the city,’ Ben concluded for him.
‘We figured what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. I can’t even remember whether it was my idea or Holly’s; I really want to say it was hers, but I suspect we both egged each other on. Anyway, we parked as close to the club as we could, and when we got back to the car someone had driven into the side of it – we were in the end space of a group of cars – and they’d driven off, no details left or anything. I still remember shoving Holly into Mum’s bedroom first and making her tell her. Holly was fuming at that.’ He laughed. ‘But I told her if she didn’t, then I’d tell Mum she hadn’t really stayed at her friend Amy’s the week before.’
‘Who was she with?’
Evan tapped the side of his nose. ‘I really can’t say.’
‘I bet there are a thousand stories I don’t know about you guys. I’ll be asking Holly later, don’t you worry.’
‘Hey, what goes on tour stays on tour … I can’t divulge everything or Holly would kill me.’ He finished the other half of the wedge he had bitten into. ‘I know that to you guys I’m just Holly’s younger brother who’s carefree, not tied down and never wants to be, but that’s not the case, not anymore.’
‘So now you’re Evan, the responsible primary school teacher who’s ready to settle down?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Shit!’ Ben dropped the wedge on to the table as it burnt the roof of his mouth. He took a sip of beer to take the edge off the discomfort. ‘Glad you think it’s funny.’
‘Sorry, mate, a bit of light relief from the conversation, I think,’ said Evan, still smiling.
Ben took another, this time a much smaller, cooler one. ‘So, as much as I want to talk about your nuts all night, let’s change the subject.’
‘I’d be happy to.’
‘What’s happening with this girl, Maddie?’
Every time he heard her name, his body froze, his mind hovered on the memory of the little time they had spent together.
‘Not much,’ Evan shrugged.
‘What does she make of the whole ball situation?’
‘Nicely put, Ben, nicely put.’
‘Does she know?’
‘Oh, yes, she knows all right.’
‘What does that mean?’
And then Evan blurted out the whole sorry story: the fantastic first date, the fact that he had never felt this strongly about a girl, how Maddie’s face fell the moment he told her.
‘She’s awesome, Ben.’
‘Bloody hell, you must’ve scared the crap out of her.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Have you called her, or texted her?’
‘No. But I did bump into her down the beach.’ He noticed Ben’s hopeful gaze. ‘I was out for a run, so was she.’
‘And …’
When Evan didn’t answer, Ben shook his head. ‘Why don’t you call her?’
‘How can I? How can I expect her to be with me when I’m having one of my balls chopped off and God knows what the test results will be? Firstly, she doesn’t deserve that, and secondly, I don’t want her to be with me because she feels sorry for me.’
Ben put both elbows on the table and scratched at his head with both hands. ‘You need to call her, mate. If she tells you to get lost then you’ll know she wasn’t worth it, and you’ll feel better. But if – and I suspect that this is more likely to happen – you talk to her, you might feel better when you realise she had a great time on your first date and doesn’t want this to be the end either.’
Evan shrugged.
‘Don’t shrug like that. You’re being defeated before you’ve even had the operation.’
‘And what happens when she finds out I’ve got a fake ball?’
Ben almost spluttered his mouthful of beer across the table.
‘I don’t like the idea of hanging too loose down there,’ Evan explained. ‘I considered going back at a later date to have a fake ball put in, but I don’t think I can go under the knife twice.’
Ben took a confident swig of beer now. ‘Who cares? Remember Ashley Torrington?’
Evan pulled a face, shuddered. ‘How can I forget? One shag and I couldn’t get rid of her.’
‘Yes, but do you remember Ashley Torrington?’ This time Ben upturned both hands and gestured out from his chest as though he had a weight in each palm.
‘Ah, you mean the enormous breasts?’
‘That’s right. And were they real? I think not. But it didn’t put you off, did it? In fact, when she burst through the door of that bar in the city that night you were gaga over her. She just turned out to be a bit of a psycho, that’s all, but you didn’t get rid of her because of any fake part of her anatomy.’ He sniggered into his beer.
‘You’re very funny.’
‘Oh come on, my point is that, fake or not fake, it didn’t stop her getting the men, and your fake ball won’t matter one iota to Maddie or any other girl you end up falling into bed with.’
The problem now was that he didn’t want to fall into bed with just any girl. He wanted it to be Maddie, and he wanted it to be right in every possible way. What was happening to him?
‘She’s a gorgeous looking girl,’ said Ben.
‘She is. She’s funny too, and I feel as though I can trust her – I must’ve thought that to tell her. And she has a certain confidence that I like, but not so much that I don’t want to pull her in tight and hold her.’
Ben pushed his fingers down his throat. ‘Get me a bucket! You got all that from one date?’
Evan dug his brother-in-law in the ribs.
‘It’s sod’s law, Ben. I really like this girl and now … well, now I don’t know what’s going on.’
‘You need to get in touch with her. What have you got to lose?’
*
Over the weekend Evan tapped out text messages to Maddie and subsequently deleted them. His fingers had hovered over the keys to call her, but by Monday morning he still hadn’t heeded his brother-in-law’s advice.
‘Well done, Oliver, but what’s this one?’ His first task of the week was to introduce his year ones to pastels and the task of drawing their dream garden. He crouched down beside a red-headed boy.
‘That’s my spaceship,’ said Oliver.
Evan’s raised eyebrows prompted him to explain.
‘In my dream garden it would come down from the sky, land and take me off on adventures.’
How could you argue with that? ‘You’ve got a great imagination, Oliver. But could you try adding some greenery, some flowers, maybe even a super cool water feature.’
Facing your own mortality opened your eyes to what was around you already. Cancer, or the possibility of cancer, was life altering and it made Evan subconsciously reassess his life, his routine. He’d had plenty of girlfriends, but none of them lasted
, and now, the one he wanted to be a keeper probably didn’t want to come anywhere near him.
Still, his personal life may be a shambles, but at least his professional life didn’t need changing. He knew too many friends who were dissatisfied with their jobs: Jack, a Financial Advisor, was at odds with his lazy manager; Simon was restless and demotivated as a lawyer; and Will never knew whether he had done the right thing by setting up a building company with his brother. Evan classed himself as one of the lucky few in a job where the only clock-watching he did was when he flew into a panic that he would run out of time for everything he wanted to teach.
Of course, there were the down sides of teaching too: constant colds when he first took up his post, to which he developed an immunity after a while; the time he got nits and Holly had kindly treated his hair with stinking shampoo and picked each of the little buggers out; the admin side of the job, which nobody could claim to love.
Evan rolled up his shirt sleeves and moved towards a table at the back.
‘Millie, this is great.’ They were studying bugs in the garden this week, and Evan marvelled at her creative streak. He looked down at the ginormous snail painted in brown with purple spots. ‘And who are they?’ he pointed to the two small people up against this dinosaur-like creature.
‘That’s me,’ she said, dipping her brush into the sunshine yellow paint and adding a strip to either side of one of the heads to represent her blonde, straight hair. ‘And the other one is my sister.’
Evan tapped Gabriel on the shoulder as he sat, tongue jutting out between his lips in concentration, painting streaks of brown for the trunk of a tree. ‘You need to do up your shoelace so that you don’t trip over.’ The boy obediently crouched down and did a pretty good job of it. The best lesson Evan had been taught at the school where he began his teaching career was to never tie a boy’s shoelaces if they were wet. There was every possibility the child’s laces had trailed along the floor in the boy’s bathrooms.
Come five o’clock, Evan was exhausted. He’d dealt with stragglers running in for forgotten lunch boxes, left-behind cardigans and school hats; he’d had back-to-back meetings for lesson planning; and he’d gathered together the marking he needed to do tonight. By the time he left school, his tiredness hit like a tidal wave as he passed a few children making the most of the sunny, still afternoon by whizzing on the supernova and clambering up and down the climbing net.
As he drove home his mind churned with the two women in his life he knew he needed to speak to, to explain. Jem knew something was up already, she had quizzed him over the phone, but he knew he would have to tell her about the cancer face-to-face, and tonight he didn’t have the energy to manage it.
The other woman was Maddie. He was still fighting the inner battle as to whether he should contact her, or whether it would be fairer, easier all round if he didn’t. But when every spare moment seemed to feature her, how could he possibly ignore that?
Chapter Eleven
Maddie reached out and found the glass of water beside her bed. Each swallow echoed around the room as she sat upright and pulled her sheets around her as a shudder took hold. When she lay down, the colours of the parachute in her dream were still there: red, gold, lime green and a white that matched the clouds. She had been skydiving in her dream, with Evan and Riley. All three of them had been holding hands in a circle, smiling as wide as the biggest rainbow as they fell through the air with a feeling of freedom and peace. Then Maddie had pulled open her parachute, but the men fought over the single parachute remaining, wrenching it back and forth, and when Maddie saw the burst of colour and one man floating safely towards the ground, she had no idea who had survived, Evan or Riley.
That was when she woke up, and lying there now, big fat tears rolled out the corners of her eyes and on to the pillow. The nightmares had passed over the years, but ever since Evan appeared in her life, they had resurfaced. It was even getting to the point where she dreaded going to bed, knowing when she shut her eyes, she may see things she wished she wouldn’t. Last week she had spent a quiet night watching The Wizard of Oz, and she had fallen asleep part way through, waking with tears already streaming down her cheeks. She had dreamt Riley was walking around Oz when Maddie’s house fell, trapping him beneath it just like the witch wearing the ruby slippers.
Her happy-ever-after felt as though it was getting further out of reach all the time, and some days she wondered whether it would ever come.
Maddie checked the clock: almost 4 a.m. Her alarm was already set for 4:30 a.m., anyway, with her next masterpiece awaiting decoration so she could deliver it to her patient, Arnie, when he came in today.
She switched off the alarm, and in the kitchen she pulled out ingredients, clattered around in the utensils cupboard and pulled out everything she needed to make the icing. She did her best to ignore the dull ache behind her eyes that reminded her of her nightmare and the resulting lack of sleep.
The night before, she’d made one sponge using a pudding basin – this would form the domed part of a mortar board for Arnie’s daughter’s graduation cake – and another sponge in an oblong tin to make a textbook that would have ‘Congratulations Jess!’ piped along its spine.
Once she’d wiped down the surfaces to clean up the icing sugar that had escaped during weighing at this incredibly early hour, Maddie spread each cake with the butter icing. She used a decorating comb to pull along the edge of the oblong cake to create the effect of pages. She carefully balanced the chocolate slab on top of the domed part of the hat and attached the fondant tassel to complete the mortar board.
Maddie wondered what other things she should add to her shopping list if she wanted to launch this hobby into a real business. She already had plenty to fill her kitchen – tins in all shapes and sizes; spatulas large, medium and small; stainless steel kitchen scales as well as a digital scale for when small, precise quantities were essential; piping nozzles; a decorating comb; a fondant ribbon cutter; half a dozen moulds with everything from a Santa face and reindeer heads, to a Halloween mould. Since Evan’s confidence boost at dinner that night, she had dared to dream of one day owning her own premises: a shop where people could buy over the counter, sample before they placed an order. But for now, if Rachel Khoo of The Little Paris Kitchen fame could run The Smallest Restaurant in Paris from a tiny studio flat, then Maddie Kershaw could make do with her apartment.
Satisfied, Maddie clipped the cake carrier in place, ready to transport the cake to Arnie when he came in for his appointment today. The distraction of baking had worked wonders yet again, and for that Maddie was grateful as she headed to the shower to wash away the final traces of last night’s nightmare.
*
‘Thank you for bringing me, Evan.’ Jem linked her grandson’s arm as they walked down Collins Street.
‘Don’t be silly, you should’ve told me before, and I’d have made the appointment for you.’
‘I’ve hurt one wrist, Evan. I’m perfectly capable of making a telephone call.’
Evan held the door open to a glass-fronted building for his ever-independent, one-hundred-year-old grandmother as Jem checked a piece of paper with the address. ‘Which floor?’ he asked.
‘Fourth.’ She followed him into the lift and up they went.
It was only as they made their way along the carpeted corridor that he saw the sign saying Palmers.
‘Jem, did you know this is where Maddie works?’ He waited for her answer, but she came over all innocent.
The sensation of his heart soaring took him by surprise. Half of him hoped Maddie would be here, on duty, but the other half of him didn’t want to see her. He hadn’t called her since the day he saw her on the beach and now he felt like a prize bastard for the way things had worked out. She knew he had his reasons, but it still didn’t seem like much of an excuse. ‘In limbo’ – that was what an ex-girlfriend, Bec, had said she’d been when he never got in touch. Bec had told him she couldn’t care less if he never wanted to see her
again, but it would’ve been nice to be told.
He gingerly pushed open the heavy glass door and held it for Jem, whose face wasn’t giving anything away. She stood behind a man in the queue.
‘Evan, would you look at this cake?’ Jem was admiring the cake tucked inside a plastic container by the man’s feet.
It had to be one of Maddie’s, no doubt about it. Evan looked at the cake, clearly for a graduation. With talent like this, Maddie had a real shot at turning her hobby into a business. She’d be crazy not to, crazy to stay in a job for which she lacked a genuine passion.
She was close by, he could tell. His heart quickened as Jem launched into a repartee with the man about the cake and the talents of its creator.
Evan pushed his hands into the pockets of his jeans in case they were shaking, and he was about to take a seat when he saw caramel, wavy hair shining beneath the downlights as Maddie came into the reception.
‘Evan?’ She looked about as shocked as he was, and he had had prior warning given that they were about to cross paths.
‘G’day, Maddie.’
He didn’t have to think of something to say because Jem had already launched into fancy-seeing-you-here’s and lovely-to-see-you-again’s. Maddie took Jem through to a treatment room and Evan ignored Jem’s request that he go too.
‘I’m fine just here, Jem.’ He picked up the broadsheet on the table and opened it to stop any more protests. He didn’t focus on a single word.
Twenty minutes later and Jem was back in reception accompanied by Maddie.
‘It’s not broken, just strained,’ Maddie explained. ‘I’ve bandaged it up so that it’s easier to rest it, and it should come good. If it doesn’t’—she turned to Jem—‘please come back and see me.’
Evan wondered whether Jem had really hurt her arm; it seemed a miraculous recovery given her insistence that it needed to be seen to.
‘Jem, I’ve been thinking,’ said Evan. ‘Perhaps you should give more thought to moving in with Mum. You know, if you’re going to hurt yourself like this.’
Handle Me with Care Page 8