How I Wonder What You Are

by Jane Lovering

  It worked. ‘Hey, nothing is quite that bad. And, you know, a trust fund makes up for quite a lot.’

  We shared a moment of complicit silence during which he stopped trying to wipe everything out and rested his hands on the main keyboard.

  ‘You’d better …’ I nodded at the notebook.

  ‘What? Oh, yeah, sure. You’re right. Wouldn’t want to keep the happy birthday grandma market waiting, would I?’ There was that tinge of bitterness again.

  ‘Link …’

  ‘No. It’s okay.’ A renewed cheeky grin. ‘Honestly. It’s really okay.’

  While he was tapping away at the keyboard with a look of concentration so intense that it even made me poke my tongue out of the corner of my mouth, I went upstairs and sat on the edge of my bed. My stomach was rolling and my head hurt, not through any physical cause but because I’d started to see myself through someone else’s eyes, and what I saw wasn’t pretty.

  Mine hadn’t been a shit childhood, whatever Link had meant by that. Not really. Plenty of my schoolmates either never knew, or had never met their fathers too. Plenty of us were raised by mothers who had to work all hours, lots of us wore second-hand uniforms and at least I’d had the riding lessons – I’d joined the school pony club and fallen in love with all things equine, and Mum had paid.

  My mother had fallen pregnant during her first year of teacher training. To her credit she’d never considered giving me up, she’d worked extra hard to afford childcare while I was small, and then had simply worked around my school hours. But she didn’t seem to have considered my feelings in any of this, she’d simply carried on the life she’d always wanted without taking into consideration that a child might feel a little … well, left out of things.

  She’d sit up late writing reports and lesson plans, and while I sat in our little front room working on essays about the causes of the Second World War, she’d been in the kitchen with a pile of exercise books, marking. I think she’d positively encouraged me to ride because it meant I spent my Saturday mornings at the local riding school and she could spend those hours drafting out schemes of work for her department.

  And when I started dating, it wasn’t boys that attracted me. Not for me the hours spent sitting in a teenage boy’s bedroom while he stared at a games console and perfected the art of ripping the heads off things in ‘Silent Hill’. While my friends were standing cheering on chilly touchlines or sharing single student beds with earnest, acned lads, I was being driven in natty little sports cars by men who should have known better.

  All of them older. Considerably, sometimes almost ridiculously, older.

  All of them wealthy, or at least by my standards. Flattered, usually, by the attentions of a moderately attractive, fairly intelligent girl. Easily manipulated.

  I felt myself blush, and lay down to hide my face in the pillow. Suze and I hadn’t been a million miles apart really. Although I hadn’t consciously damaged anyone, I was beginning to see how I’d tried to find something in each of these men that none of them had to offer, that I had, as Caro said, been looking for a father all that time.

  A man who would love me uncritically, unconditionally, however badly I behaved, however much I rode roughshod over his feelings or desires. Suze, and her longing for a famous, eye-catching husband with an up-and-coming career, really wasn’t very different to me.

  From downstairs I heard a tentative throat clearing. ‘Molly? I’ve done with the laptop, thanks.’

  I stood up. My skin felt tight, as though it might split and shed at any moment. ‘Good. Yes, okay.’

  Another bout of throat clearance. ‘And what I said earlier … all that stuff?’

  I poked my head onto the landing to look directly down the stairs at him, standing uncertainly in the hallway. ‘Don’t worry, Link. I’m not in any hurry to hurt him any more than he already has been.’

  Link’s face seemed to inflate, the chubby innocence coming back to his cheeks and the spark to his eye. ‘Right. Great. Thanks, yes.’

  ‘But I think you and he ought to talk about it.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking the same thing myself. Maybe I’ll head on down to London, try to meet up with him. Or I could go back to Bristol, he’ll probably head home when he’s done with the filming. Try to catch up with his research or something.’

  He paused, as though about to say something else, then jerked his head sideways as though the thought was too petty to put into words, and let himself out of the front door.

  Chapter Twenty

  Phinn sat in front of the enormous TV screen in the hotel bedroom, cursed his cancelled train and tried not to think. But, it turned out, even Babylon Five repeats weren’t enough to block out everything, despite the sound being up so loud that the people in the next room knocked on the wall. He kicked his shoes off and drew his knees up to his chin, forcing his eyes to remain on the Vorlon ambassador striding up and down in forty-inch HD glory across the flat screen.

  He wanted someone to talk to. But someone real, not one of the programme crew or some plastic-faced publicity person, someone who’d understand what he was talking about and not keep smiling and telling him that he was doing a great job and this series was going to be the success of the decade. He knew he was doing a great job. He was wired up to do a great job. Not to fail, not to slack off and cruise on past success but to keep on expanding knowledge, studying, researching. That was what he did. Not to walk away from an unknown situation but to patiently work at it until he could comprehend its parameters, then scrutinise those until a workable theory could be reached.

  And in television, that was easy.

  His treacherous brain slithered towards those thoughts he didn’t want to have and he curled his arms around his legs, trying to use motion to distract them. On the screen a Minbari ship floated by and he amused himself for a while trying to work out where the still shots of the external universe had come from. It didn’t help. Of course it didn’t help, even standing in front of a full film crew hadn’t helped, there was no way that sitting alone in this room with a television, however large, was going to take his mind off things to any extent.

  He stood up. I could go down to the bar. Have a few … no. That way led to ripping all my clothes off and begging to be abducted – hardly my macho moment of the year. I’ll just have to sit it out, catch the morning train to Bristol. After all, it hardly matters whether I get there tonight or tomorrow, does it? There’s nothing there for me, apart from the university and I shouldn’t think they’re desperate to see me, given the way I carried on over the last year.

  It hit him hard, again, the feeling that no one knew where he was, and even fewer cared. Oh, the BBC people sort-of cared, they didn’t want their new leading light to be involved in anything that might produce the wrong sort of publicity, but that was where their concern began and ended.

  He flicked at his camera-friendly hair, took his glasses off – interview frames today – and polished them on a corner of the sheet. Wondered what Link was up to. Wouldn’t let himself wonder about Molly, it was bad enough that he could still feel the weight of her head against his heart, still smell that sun-ripened berry scent of her hair. Thinking about her wouldn’t help this loneliness. Nothing would.

  She’s my unknown parameters. Something that I should have worked on, worked out. But the equation for something like that … good woman, strong woman who’s got her life under control and really doesn’t need a fuck-up like me falling into it; the horses, and the river and why am I so bloody SCARED all the time?

  He opened his bag and looked at the left over antidepressants, innocently bubbled in their plastic, that he carried like a talisman. 20mg per kilogramme of bodyweight is a toxic dose. Why do I know that? Why do I even care that I know that? Why have I really kept them?

  Why am I so pathetic?

  And then he found the little foil packet that Link had shoved into his pocket. He’d taken it out and slipped it between the sheets of prescription drugs, hadn’t
wanted it to fall out at some inopportune moment and show him up as the kind of man who, not only can’t ride in and do the ‘white knight’ thing, but a guy who’d need chemical help to get his armour on.

  Four tablets. Enough.

  His hand shook as he unfolded the metal foil, and he closed his eyes as he swallowed.

  * * *

  It rained all night, I knew because I didn’t sleep. Oh, I tried, lay in my bed with the covers pulled up to my face, but whenever I closed my eyes instead of the peaceful darkness all I could see was Phinn’s smile. Not his rather tense, wary smile but the one he’d had when he’d addressed those diners on YouTube. That wide, confident grin, the one that reflected mischief in his eyes. The smile he smiled when he was happy.

  And I knew he’d been right to go. Knew that I could never make him smile like that, me, with my background in passive manipulation, my use of men as status symbols, my hopeless power kick. I’d been stupid to ever think that beautiful man ought to be within a million miles of me – I was only slightly less bad for him than botulism.

  My cheeks flamed again. He’d been right, all the time, he’d been right. If we’d had sex in that tent up there on the moor, surrounded by the lights and the snow, we’d have fallen into something that neither of us could handle. For all Caro’s assertions that I’d grown up and moved on from the needing-a-daddy thing, I would still have used Phinn. And him? Maybe he was too weak for me, too insular, too cerebral, maybe I did need someone who’d challenge me, face me down, argue with me.

  But Phinn does that too.

  And I’d just let him walk away. But what else could I have done? Been all controlling and demanding, thrown a temper tantrum and made him stay? Seduced him? Been like his wife?

  I breathed out and the duvet puffed around me like a living skin. No. I’d had to let him go. For the first time I’d done the right thing and let a man walk away from me when every line of his body had said that he wanted to stay. I’d been strong, we’d both been strong. It had been the only way.

  So why did it hurt so much?

  In the morning the rain was still grumbling across the windows and dawn hardly bothered getting started under skies stacked with cloud like folded linen. I had a long, hot bath and contemplated wandering over to see Caro, give her a hand with the mucking out, even being up to my shins in wet straw and horse muck would beat skulking around in my kitchen.

  But in the end I just dressed in my most comfortable old clothes and curled back up in the armchair with the book of folktales in my lacklustre hand.

  I couldn’t focus. My eyes were tired and the print so small that it blurred and danced and refused to be pinned into words. Coffee. I needed coffee.

  As I padded into the kitchen on softly socked feet, I heard a knock at the door. Waited for the inevitable bursting in amid flurries of drizzle, but it never came, so it wasn’t Caro. Thinking it must be Link again, sufferer from the archaic form of manners as taught in all-boys boarding schools, I slithered my way along the lino to open it.

  ‘You can just walk in, you know. It’s not like you’re going to catch me naked or anything,’ I said, and pulled the door to reveal a plump, glossy man dressed in clothes that would have suited someone twenty years younger, standing on the step. We stared at one another for a moment.

  ‘So you are here,’ Tim said. There was almost a note of accusation in his voice, as though I’d been deliberately pretending to be elsewhere, rather than deliberately pretending to have ceased to exist. ‘May I come in?’

  I hesitated. Glanced over his shoulder to where the brand-new sports car was precisely parked, currently having one wheel-arch piddled on by a small scruffy dog. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’ve taken considerable trouble to come here, and because I know you have the manners to at least let me over the threshold to discuss our business in private, rather than yelling it from the doorstep.’

  I held the door wide and he moved past me into the hallway. As he went I noticed the smell of cigars which moved along with him like another skin, and the memories that came associated with that smell made my heart squeeze just a little.

  ‘How did you find me?’

  Tim gave me a cool look. ‘Does it matter, Molly? I came to talk. Through here?’

  ‘No! Anything you want to say, you can say to me in the hallway.’

  A wry cocked eyebrow told me that he’d expected this and that my behaviour had fulfilled some kind of promise he’d made to himself. Or a bet. ‘All right. But why not put the kettle on?’

  Fussily he peeled himself out of his jacket and turned to hang it up on the end of the banister rail, patting its folds into place as though reassuring it that it wouldn’t have to hang in this lower-class establishment for much longer.

  Had he always been this prissy? I knew the answer to that too, as I knew the answer to so many questions suddenly.

  ‘Maybe I will later.’

  ‘Oh, do stop sulking,’ he said, carefully positioning himself against the newel rail, arms folded. ‘It doesn’t suit you and it doesn’t do either of us any good.’

  I noticed suddenly that Tim was fatter and balder than he had been, or maybe it was simply my exposure to a man who made coat hangers look a little plump and whose hair struggled even to fit on the ‘unstylish’ continuum.

  ‘I’m not sulking,’ I said carefully. ‘I’m angry. And do you know the stupid thing? The person I am most angry with is myself.’

  All of a sudden the front door flew open so fast that the inner handle banged against the hallway wall with a noise like pain. There in the doorway, with his hair plaited by rain and his jacket streaming, stood Phinn.

  ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Sorry about the door. No, not sorry. Not sorry at all.’

  Tim looked him up and down. ‘Oh dear Lord. Is this how you chose to replace me, Molly?’

  I ignored him. Looked instead at Phinn, whose eyes were wide, pupils huge and blazing, in his pale, pale face. ‘What are you doing here? I thought you said it was better if you went?’

  ‘Went. Came back.’ Leaving a trail of watery footsteps on the lino, Phinn advanced towards me. ‘I can’t do it, Molly, can’t walk away like this. Wanted to see you again, wanted to explain properly.’ A sudden shake of his head sent water flying, splashed my cheek and made Tim wipe ostentatiously at his forehead. ‘I can do this. It was stupid to leave, to think I should just go, without facing up to what was happening.’

  ‘Oh, bravo.’ Tim started clapping. ‘What an excellent performance, very touching.’

  ‘Phinn,’ I said, a bit weakly, ‘this is Tim.’

  Phinn turned slow, heavy eyes. Water was pouring from his Prada jacket, teeming in little rivulets from the AllSaints jeans. He looked like he’d walked right out of the river.

  ‘This.’ His voice broke off and I saw him turn his fingers inwards, pinching at his palms. ‘This. Is. Nothing. To. Do. With. You.’ The anger weighted his words, made them drop and bend the atmosphere around them. ‘I think you should go.’

  Tim straightened but he was a good head shorter than Phinn, whose lanky body seemed to have acquired more substance suddenly. ‘I need to talk to Molly.’ But the words sounded reedy, apologetic. ‘It’s important.’

  ‘Not so important that you couldn’t hang around to sneer at me. No, if it was really important you’d have said it already.’ Phinn gave Tim a steady stare. ‘Go.’

  ‘Phinn …’ I went to touch his arm, to reassure him, calm him, I don’t know what, but he jerked the wet leather sleeve away from my hand and stepped to the door which still stuck open, the handle half-embedded in the wall. With a wrench that made more water torrent from his shoulders he pulled the door free.

  ‘Out. If you really want to talk to Molly, come back tomorrow. Afternoon. We’ll be in then.’

  My mouth opened but refused to say anything.

  Tim looked from me to Phinn and then at the door, but the smugness was gone from him now. ‘But I—’

  ‘Tomorrow. Now
piss off.’

  Tim fussed towards the door, looking anxiously at the sky. He pulled a face as he stepped outside and the rain began to hit him. ‘Er. Could I have my jacket?’ He gestured to his pure wool coat, hanging from the banister as though he, not I, lived here.

  Phinn moved, picked up the coat and flung it out through the open door past Tim, who failed to catch it, and out into the garden, where it hooked itself on the hedge and trailed a dismal, expensive hem into the mud. ‘And that’s for the fucking cordon bleu lessons! Learn to cook yourself!’ And Phinn swung the leading edge of the door so that it flew across in front of us and slammed resoundingly, leaving my last impression of Tim’s expression as one of complete surprise.

  I stood speechless as Phinn leaned against the door and closed his eyes. He slid, slowly down the painted wood leaving a snail-trail of dampness behind him until he came to rest on the floor, knees pulled in and head thrown back. ‘That was amazing,’ he said. ‘Why did I never do that before?’

  ‘Because you’re the nice one.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He scooped his dripping hair back. ‘And look where nice got me. Sitting in a hotel bedroom contemplating … never mind. Nice got me nothing, Molly. Got me a wife who cheated, a best friend who lied. Nice gets you shat on from interstellar space. While that …’ he indicated Tim by bumping the back of his head against the door gently. ‘That got you. That fat, officious, patronising git had you, Molly.’

  ‘He’s bald as well,’ I added helpfully.

  ‘Not making it better. But seeing him walking into your house … I knew who he was, you didn’t have to tell me. He even looked like the kind of bloke who’d make you take cooking lessons, and pick up an award that you both won! And he was walking in here like he owned the place, like he owned you still, after everything he’d done.’ Phinn sighed a ragged sigh and closed his eyes. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interfere, I just felt …’ His eyes opened, blinked, and he pulled his glasses off to shake them free of water. ‘It wasn’t fair.’