by Katey Lovell
She flicked a flyaway strand of hair out of her face and planted a fake smile.
A bitter taste filled my mouth. “It makes me sick how people who’ve worked hard all their lives are expected to sell their homes when they need care.”
“It gets to me too, but there’s no other option. I was angry at first, but I’ve accepted it now. I’m fortunate, I earn a decent wage and my outgoings aren’t that bad, it’s just I’ve got used to having a disposable income. The past few months I’ve been putting aside as much as I can afford, and along with my savings I’m already halfway to a deposit.”
I put my arm around my friend’s shoulder, pulling her in close in a sideways hug.
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” What amazed me most was how she’d managed to keep it to herself when anyone else’s secrets are spilled within seconds.
“I only made the decision just before your birthday, and I wanted to tell you, but I had this sense that you were distracted. I didn’t know if it was down to the milestone birthday or something else, but you weren’t your usual self. Then you went off the radar…”
“I’m sorry. I should’ve been there for you when you needed me most.” If I’d known I would have been banging her door down with a bag of her favourite sugar-coated jam doughnuts in one hand and a bottle of something strong in the other. “I had my head up my bum. New Year and my birthday made me reassess everything and when I realised how much I was spending it was a wake-up call. I’ve been trying to make cutbacks too.”
“You taking a step back from the social scene did me the world of good too, to be honest. I stopped spending as much on nights out and made more time to see Mum. If you saw her now, Sophie, well, you wouldn’t recognise her. Sometimes, rarely, she’s the same as before, but there’s an emptiness in her eyes as though she’s looking but not seeing. She knows who I am, mostly, but she talks about the past as though it’s the present. She was even talking fondly about my dad the other day.”
“No way. I don’t think I’ve ever heard her mention him without an expletive attached to it somewhere.”
Eve smiled. “I know. It’s bizarre. Although I have to admit it’s been nice in a way. I knew they must have loved each other once, but after all those years of her cursing him, it’s been good to hear her reminisce about the happy times.”
“I always imagined the two of them as being totally in love with each other, lacing daisies into each other’s hair,” I said with a fond smile. “I bet the love they had was all-consuming. A lifetime of love in one summer.”
Eve’s dad had moved to London when she was a baby, which was probably why Lucille – even with all her hippy-dippy talk about free-love – found it hard to be positive about him. It couldn’t have been easy being a young single parent.
I’d met Eve’s dad a few times over the years. We’d spent a week with him once, staying in the flat he lived in above the tattoo parlour he ran (nothing like the sterile places you see on every corner these days. This was a grim, dark shop that smelled of mould and weed, around the corner from Chalk Farm tube). He’d been friendly and laid back, with the same wide easy smile as Eve, but dressed like he ought to be at Woodstock, with a loose cheesecloth shirt, flared blue jeans and a heavy statement pendant swinging around his neck.
“They were young. Eighteen, the pair of them.”
“So young.”
“And I don’t blame Dad for leaving. Even now he’s like a kid, so imagine what he must have been like then. The way Mum’s been talking about him, I can tell she was love-struck. ‘Greg with the dimple’ she keeps calling him. I never even knew he had a dimple. He’s had that bushy beard for as long as I can remember, well before the hipsters brought them back into fashion.”
“Any fashion comes back round if you wait long enough.”
“Very true.”
We drifted into the car boot sale as we talked. The amount of unwanted stuff was insane, especially kids’ toys. Every car seemed to be selling a plastic dolls house or two-storey garage and the tables were piled high with jigsaws (probably with half the pieces missing) and assorted board games. There were also indiscriminate items, like a glitter lava lamp, a mug tree, a set of oversized cushions… anything people had bought and then regretted, or more likely been given for Christmas by someone who didn’t know them especially well.
Nothing grabbed my attention, but Eve made a beeline for the back of a black 4x4, eagerly grabbing my arm to pull me towards whatever it was she’d spotted.
When we reached the trestle table, I knew immediately why she’d dragged me to this car. There, slap-bang in the centre of the other life detritus, was a serving bowl I’d seen many times before. Not the exact one – that would’ve been impossible, because the version I knew had been accidentally broken fifteen years earlier – but still, the similarity was striking.
“Sophie.” Eve’s grip tightened on my arm until I could feel each of her fingers digging into my flesh. I imagined the small round bruises the size of five-pence-pieces that the pressure would leave on my skin. “It’s Mum’s bowl.”
I didn’t correct her. We both knew it wasn’t the actual bowl.
“I’ve got to have it,” she said, letting go of my arm to touch the bowl. “It’s ugly, but…” She ran her fingers along the rusty orange, olive green and tan pattern that followed the ripples of the fluted edge of the bowl.
“I know.”
The bowl was so retro it was untrue, but even looking at it I could taste Lucille McAndrew’s lunch offerings. Tossed salads dripping in balsamic vinegar, spiced lentil dahl, enough pasta to feed the whole street… for a moment I was a teen again, sat around the drop-leaf table in Eve’s dining room, being exposed to vegetarian foods my own parents would never have dreamt of serving without a side order of chicken or steak. It shocked me how an inanimate object could bring back such evocative memories.
“Let me buy it for you.” I reached into my bag to pull out my purse, before asking the woman how much she wanted for the bowl.
She asked for a nominal sum before telling us the bowl had been a wedding present.
“My mother-in-law gave it to us,” she confided, quietly. “It’s not to my taste but she told me it was a family heirloom. I’ve only kept it for the past forty years to be polite.”
“Won’t you get into trouble for parting with it now?” Eve asked.
“She died in March. It was a relief, in some ways. She never thought I was good enough for her son even though I’ve been working full time, raising four boys, running a home… She criticised me once for buying a birthday cake for my youngest’s tenth birthday – it was one of those caterpillar ones they sell at Marks, you know? He’d been dropping hints about that cake for months, so of course, I bought him one. ‘Shop-bought, Andrea?’ she’d tutted. ‘I always made cakes for my children. I always think you can taste the love in a home-made cake.’ Dale’s twenty-two now and he asks for that same cake every year. But with each birthday I remember how much that comment hurt.”
“We had a bowl just like this when I was growing up so it has nothing but good memories for me,” Eve said, hugging the bowl to her chest. “My mum would fill it to bursting and then anyone who was at our house at mealtime was welcome to dig in. She was the best cook.”
“She really was,” I agreed, my eyes misting over.
I offered the lady a note, but she didn’t take it, instead shook her head slowly. “You girls have the bowl, it obviously has a sentimental value. It wouldn’t feel right to take your money. Enjoy it, and make sure it gets used. It’s been at the back of our kitchen cupboard for goodness knows how long. Fill it up with some of your mum’s recipes.”
A lump rose in my throat at the kindness of the gesture.
Eve clutched the bowl like it was her firstborn child as she gushed her thanks, her delight in the object filling me with pleasure. It was worth the stinking hangovers that forced us out of the house and into the world to see her happy.
“Thank you so
much,” I said. “You’ve no idea how much this means to us.”
“Oh, I think I do,” she said gently. “I could tell from the way you were pulled to it. You’re meant to have it.”
We said our goodbyes and shuffled along to the next table, chock-a-block with CDs of nineties artists I’d long forgotten and DVDs of popular comedy series. We passed a table covered with a jumble of children’s clothes that looked as though they’d seen better days, then came to another which displayed, amongst other things, a manky looking foot spa, a pineapple shaped ice holder and the world’s ugliest Toby jug.
As I reached for a simple glass vase to examine its condition, my hand skimmed that of a man. When I looked up I found myself once again face to face with Max.
I quickly drew my hand back towards my body, but the heat of my cheeks told me I was blushing.
“Sophie!” He sounded surprised, but he couldn’t have been any more surprised than I was.
“Max,” I managed, but although his name was about as short as they come I still fumbled over it. What was it about him that got me all flustered? “This is my friend, Eve,” I said finally. “I don’t know if you remember her from Johnny’s party?”
“By sight,” he said, with a radiant smile. “Lovely to meet you properly, Eve.”
I noticed him taking in the bowl as he offered his hand, probably wondering what possessed her to buy such an ugly, dated piece of tableware.
“You too.” Eve carefully juggled the bowl in the crook of her arm to accept his handshake. “It’s about time, Sophie’s always talking about you.”
I shot Eve a glare.
“Really?” His eyebrows rose above the upper rim of his glasses.
“Maybe not always,” Eve hurriedly corrected, the corners of her mouth twitching the way they always did when she got nervous. I continued to stare, prompting her to dig herself out of this hole. “Just a few times. Probably only once or twice, actually.”
“I thought you might have phoned,” he said, and the way he looked at me was so intense that it was as though he was looking right inside me, as though he could see my soul laid bare.
I liked him. A lot. If it hadn’t been for Darius taking up so much brain space I would have phoned him, for sure. But something in the back of my mind was sowing seeds of doubt. Was I really ready to jump headlong into a new relationship?
June
Chapter 18
Going back to work after a bank holiday weekend was never anything other than bog-awful, but having Kath, Jane and Marcie’s full attention made it marginally more bearable. They’d spent all morning grilling me for information about my weekend, and as I gave them the full story, from how Tawna’s Friday night matchmaking attempts had backfired right through to the meeting with Max at the car boot sale, they oohed and aahed in all the right places. By the time I’d told them everything, they were armed with questions which they fired at me at pace.
“Are you going to see Max again?” (Jane)
“Did you invite him back to your place?” (Kath)
“What happened to the vase? Did you buy it?” (Marcie)
“What did Eve think of Max?” (Jane)
I answered as honestly as I could. “I promised to drop some unwanted clothes into the charity shop soon so I’ll see him then. Of course I didn’t invite him back to my place. Neither of us bought the vase; it had a hairline crack along the bottom and we thought it would leak. Eve thought Max was lovely, but I think she’d say that about anyone who wasn’t Darius. Any more questions?” I’d laughed, while secretly enjoying my moment in the spotlight. The weekend debriefs usually centred on Kath’s latest conquests rather than my messed-up attempt at adulthood.
“So is Darius finally out of the picture for good?” Marcie asked, to looks of disbelief from our colleagues.
I avoided making eye contact, not wanting to think about the money he’d asked me to loan him. We were already in June, I had little more than a fortnight left to make a decision about whether or not to give him the cash. And as lovely as Max seemed, the same thought played on repeat in my mind – could someone I’d known a matter of months compare with the person I’d thought was my forever?
“Obviously. Duh.” Kath’s look was scathing.
“She loved Darius for years,” Marcie snapped back. “You can’t rub those feelings away. Our hearts aren’t whiteboards that can be wiped clean.”
Trust Marcie to go for an office-based analogy, I’d thought, wondering why people were again doing that irritating thing where they talked about me as though I couldn’t hear them.
“He doesn’t deserve our Sophie,” Jane said and, like a mother hen, passed me the tub of luxury rocky road chunks, as though they were the answer to all my problems. The decadent dark chocolate melted unveiling the springy texture of the marshmallows and a raisin burst, its tangy juices mingling with the chocolate. It was orgasmic, briefly taking my mind away from the battles of my heart and head. My junk food intake was mainly limited to whatever was going begging at work and so the good stuff tasted particularly divine.
“You don’t need to worry about me,” I said, through a mouthful of chocolate. “I know what I’m doing.”
I tightly crossed the fingers on both of my hands. Know what I’m doing? Yeah, right.
I still hadn’t made my mind up about giving Darius the money. Trying to rid my mind of Summer’s innocent face had been all but impossible. In a particularly hormonal moment, I’d considered calling the credit card company to see if they’d issue me with another card on my account seeing as I’d paid well over my minimum repayments, but every time I’d started dialling the number I’d quickly pressed the “end call” button, knowing they’d laugh me out of town. It would only ever have been a query, not an action, but like Marcie and Tawna have pointed out, Darius and I have a history. There’s a sense of loyalty and although I hated to admit it, even to myself, there had been moments recently when being near him had made my stomach clench in a not-entirely-unpleasant way.
But then there was Max, who seemed to be a decent, kind man, driving me to distraction. I didn’t know him well enough to judge his character – he could be into bondage or hurting kittens or something really perverse like eating baked beans cold from the tin – but there was a definite attraction. Would it be worth risking everything on the unknown? Everyone has flaws, but at least Darius’s were familiar. Nothing he could do would surprise me, and maybe it really was better the devil you know: since starting my challenge I’d become so used to the “make do and mend” mentality that the thought of a new anything, even a new man, seemed unnecessary and frivolous.
But Max makes you happy, said a little voice in my ear. Think of how free you feel when you’re with him.
But Summer, whispered a voice in my other ear, but Summer. But Summer. But Summer.
By the time Saturday rolled back around, I’d done enough overthinking to last me a lifetime. Tawna called with the sole purpose of letting me know Darius had been asking Johnny after me on a lads’ night out (reminding me the deadline for the loan was just over a week away, as if I could have forgotten), and Eve had been gushing about Max’s positive attributes with such gusto that it wouldn’t have surprised me if she’d announced she was going to make a play for him herself. Well, not quite, because Eve wasn’t like that, but she’d delighted in reminding me how he’d been interested in me and my well-being. “Not like Darius,” Eve had said snarkily, “where everything was always about him.” That was when I made the decision to be proactive and ask Max on a date. A real, honest-to-goodness date.
When I reached Max’s charity shop (because that’s what it’d be known as forevermore in my mind) it was much warmer, and the heat, combined with lugging the bags full of Marie Kondo-ed clothes (which seemed far heavier after carrying them for a while with the handles cutting into my palms) meant I was a sticky mess. It was almost enough to make me wish I’d picked up the phone and rung Max rather than being hell-bent on doing this in person.
The door was closed, unlike the last time I’d been there, and I debated whether or not I could open it by pushing the handle down with my bum so I didn’t have to put the bags down. I was preparing to carry out the manoeuvre when the door swung open.
“Come in, come in,” sang a rainbow-haired teenager wearing a pair of denim dungarees. She was young enough for them to look like a fashion statement rather than as though she’d been painting and decorating as a sideline. “I saw you through the window and wondered if you were dropping off donations.”
I lifted up the bags and grinned. “Yep. My wardrobe was in dire need of a sort out.”
“We’re always glad of good quality women’s clothes,” the girl said, relieving me of the bags. They must have been even heavier than I’d thought as she hunched double, the bags plummeting to the floor as she said incredulously, “What have you got in here? Lead weights?”
“There are a few pairs of jeans,” I admitted, thinking of the high street denim I’d almost put on eBay, before realising they’d cost a fortune to post. “Oh, and a fur coat. Fake, not real, obviously.” The black fur peeped out from one of the bags, as though a panther was trapped inside waiting to pounce.
“Thank you,” she said, shaking the sting from her hands.
I clenched my hands into fists before flicking out my fingers to stop rigor mortis setting in. The deep red mark that followed the curve of my lifeline where the handles had left their imprint was bad enough.
“I’ll take them out the back to the stockroom when it quietens down in here,” she said.
Her comment made me realise the shop was busy – not quite the Metro Centre on Boxing Day, but there were a few people browsing. A woman pushing dresses along a rail, the hangers scraping like nails down a chalkboard. A mum and a young girl rifling through the dog-eared basket of children’s books. A man in a turquoise polo shirt flicking through the vinyl. Max was behind the counter, serving a pocket-sized grey-haired lady with one of those annoying wheelie trollies that women of a certain age drag behind them, clipping at the heels of anyone who dares to obstruct their path.