One Day, Someday

by Lynne Barrett-Lee

‘When the tanker hit the juggernaut. The tanker was overtaking the juggernaut when the tyre blew and the Mondeo was behind the tanker - middle lane - and I was in the outside lane, about to overtake the Mondeo, and the tanker and the juggernaut skidded into the outside lane so I swerved back into the middle lane, bounced off the Mondeo, spun, veered left, hit the emergency phone, hit the barrier, ended up on my side.’ He flipped his good hand over to illustrate. ‘Can I smoke?’

  ‘No, you can’t. Anyway, I see, then.’

  ‘No, you don’t.’

  ‘No, you’re right. I don’t.’

  ‘And the bitch - well, I think the bitch has told them I was doing a ton.’

  ‘A ton?’

  ‘Yes, a ton. Which I wasn’t, naturally, because the car wasn’t up to it.’

  Which it was.

  ‘But you were going too fast.’ It sounded horribly plausible. And was obviously true. He turned to face me and put on a petulant voice.

  ‘Yes. Probably. I was going too fast.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ I said, easing my foot from the accelerator pedal. ‘So the police think you might have made it worse than it would have been.’

  He growled. ‘Exactly. But that’s not the point. Well, it is, from a penalty-point situation, I suppose, but the main thing’s the insurance.’

  ‘Your insurance?’

  He nodded. ‘If the tanker’s insurers get a sniff of contributory negligence they’ll do everything they can to reduce the pay-out.’

  ‘On my car?’

  He nodded again. ‘If they pay out at all.’

  ‘So your insurers will have to pay, then.’

  ‘Exactly. Which means my no-claims is up the bloody swanee.’

  Tough, I thought. Tough. ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘And what sort of damage is there? Is it likely to cost a lot? And where is it, for that matter?’

  A lorry full of lambs thundered past us so I couldn’t hear his answer. But obligingly he said it again anyway.

  ‘It’s a write-off. I told you.’

  ‘A write-off ? A complete write-off ? My precious car?’

  ‘Look, it’s not your problem.’

  ‘Not my problem? How do you work that out?’

  ‘Because it’s not. We’ll have to get you a new one, won’t we?’

  ‘But it’s irreplaceable! And, God! I just spent six hundred pounds having it serviced!’

  ‘Jeez - they saw you coming, then.’

  ‘And it was a special edition. A classic! It could be three months before I - you - find another one like it!’

  ‘So? We’ll rent this one!’

  ‘This one? We certainly won’t! Anyway, that’s not even the point! It was my father’s car! And you’ve just - just - ‘ it was beginning to sink in now. The toe-rag. ‘- just demolished it. Killed it! Just like that!’

  I decided I must be having some sort of delayed psychosomatic response to Joe’s accident because I was more furious than I had felt in a long time. I glared through the windscreen and grieved. Appropriately, low cloud was massing ahead. How dare he do a ton in my car? How dare he? I could picture him doing it. I was not happy.

  ‘I’m mad at you. Mad.’

  ‘It wasn’t my fault.’

  ‘Yes, it was. If you hadn’t been speeding—’

  ‘I wasn’t!’

  ‘You were!’

  ‘Eighty-five, tops.’

  ‘Eighty-five? Eighty-five miles per hour - in my car?’

  ‘God, listen to you - you sound like my granny. Lu, give it a rest, will you? I’ll sort it, OK?’

  ‘That’s not the point. It’s the principle of the thing. I lent you my car in all good faith and now I find you treated it like a - like a - like a bloody Maclaren!’

  ‘Drove it.’

  ‘Hammered it!’

  ‘OK, hammered it, then. But it’s a car, Lu, not a bloody kitten!’

  ‘Was a car! And my car. Not your car. My car!’

  ‘Err, ex-car,’ he quipped.

  His jauntiness, I supposed, was an attempt to lighten the atmosphere a little. But it certainly didn’t.

  ‘Exactly! Men! You’re all so irresponsible! And how can you joke about it? Here you are with a hundredweight of plaster up your arm, a face like bloody Bluebeard—’

  ‘Blackbeard.’

  ‘And query cracked ribs and—’

  He swivelled in his seat and slapped his good hand on the dashboard. ‘Exactly! Exactly, Lu! IT’S ONLY A BLOODY CAR!’

  2

  I have never been much of a planner.

  I never planned to become a French teacher. I never planned to fall in love with a scumbag. I certainly never planned to get pregnant by one. Having done so, I will admit that I did, briefly, nurture a rather juvenile affection for the prospect of a wedding babies happy-ever-after / roses-round-the-door type arrangement. But not for long. Oh, no. Turned out he had other plans.

  ‘I have a plan,’ I had said to my sister.

  We were now ten years on. And this had been six months earlier. A cheerless late November afternoon.

  ‘A plan?’ she’d asked, narrowing her eyes. ‘What sort of plan?’

  We were sitting in her kitchen. She, I remember, had been making mince pies at the time. With mincemeat she’d remembered to buy back in August, and puff pastry she had remembered to rest.

  ‘A life plan,’ I told her. ‘I have decided upon a life plan. I am going to resign from my job.’

  She stopped cutting pastry circles and peered at me over her glasses. ‘Goodness. As plans go, that’s a fairly radical one, Lu. Resign from your job and do what, exactly? Go to another school?’

  ‘Nooo. I thought - well, I thought I might go back to college, actually.’

  ‘College? Whatever for?’

  ‘I haven’t decided yet. But something creative. Something - oh, I don’t know. I just don’t feel I’ve ever really had time to explore that side of my personality, you know? So I thought I might do an art degree or something.’

  ‘A degree?’ She blinked at me before resuming her cutting. ‘Uh-huh. Just a minor career shift, then. And what are you and Leo going to live on while all this artistic exploration is going on?’

  I picked up a piece of raw pastry and nibbled at it. ‘I know you think it’s stupid, but I’ve been doing some sums and I think it’s feasible. I really do. I’ve got to get in, of course, which will mean producing some sort of portfolio or something, so I thought the best thing would be if I got some sort of job in the meantime, something nine to five, for a change - something without a marking component, at any rate - and maybe do an access course or something in my spare time.’

  She began popping her circles into a greased bun tin. ‘Hmm. Sounds like an awful lot of somethings, Lu. Couldn’t you just carry on as you are and do something at night school? See how it goes for a while?’

  I shook my head emphatically. ‘That’s exactly what I don’t want to do. That’s exactly what I can’t do. If I don’t do this now, then I never will. I know I won’t. I know what I’m like. I’ll just keep bumbling along like I always do and then one day I’ll look around and Leo will be grown-up - off to college himself, with any luck - and I’ll still be teaching, and still hating it … And, well. I just know. It’ll all be too late.’

  ‘And it’s what Dad would have wanted for you, by any chance?’

  Del was right. It had been a mortality thing. My father had died, very suddenly, that summer. Died, without warning, one rainy June morning and left the pair of us grief-stricken, rootless and bereft. But also with a little money. Not a huge amount, but still substantially more than I’d ever seen in my life before. Enough, at any rate, to make me feel restless. Enough that I’d begun to greet every school morning with the knowledge that I wanted to be somewhere else.

  The thing about best-laid plans, of course, is that unless you are my sister and have sensibly planned something biddable and brick-based like an extension, what generally follows the mice and men bit is a long, long row o
f dots. Because, though I had indeed left my job and filled in all sorts of encouraging-sounding forms, it turned out that getting into university might prove a slightly more intractable problem than I had at first anticipated, mainly because just about everybody else in the entire world seemed to want to do an art degree as well. So I would just have to wait and see. In the meantime, I had an exciting temporary job at a company that installed boilers. And I had, at that moment, a written-off car.

  But all was not lost. The one bright spot on my rather watered-down artistic horizon was the fact that I had enrolled at night school, as Del had suggested. On a course that, though rather unimaginatively entitled Impressions of the Impressionists, was actually proving to be very enjoyable. It ran for an hour every Tuesday evening, and though it was only a mere splodge on the vast landscape of my portfolio requirement, it was beginning to look like offering other interesting areas of development.

  His name was Stefan Llewellyn, and he was the tutor. And I, for all my no-nonsense, sensible planning was - suddenly - in the grip of an intoxicating crush.

  But, speaking of impressions, I am not very impressed with Joe Delaney. Only a bloody car, indeed! This one, this hateful old crate, is the colour of a custard slice and drives like a Sherman tank. And looks like it’s been driven by a tank battalion. Of TAs, on some sort of weekend manoeuvre. And, quite possibly (given that we’re talking Wales here), with a couple of recreational sheep in the back. It has ash in its ashtrays. It has Big Mac boxes in its glove compartment. It has the remains of a green wine-gum welded to the edge of the driver’s seat. Mainly, however, and how ridiculously this rankles, it is a Micra - the best they could do at such short notice - which means that as I park opposite the museum entrance this evening, I have been deprived of that small glow of pleasure that being in my dear little car always brings.

  Isn’t that childish? Isn’t that silly? But I can’t help it. Much as I know that such preoccupations are juvenile, my little MG is - was - very dear to me. It had been my father’s last car - his one small extravagance - the car he’d only just bought when he died. The car he had left me, the car that still smelled of him, the one piece of him I could still keep as my own. And here I am in a grubby old, smelly old, horrible old Micra. Grrrrr. Horrible car.

  I turn my back on it and scan the front of the museum.

  And there is Stefan. He is waiting on the steps. Sitting on one of them, shaggy golden hair corralled in a ponytail, face in the sunshine, clipboard in hand. I’m not sure quite why Stefan brings a clipboard to Impressions of the Impressionists because he never actually does anything much with it. I think Stefan carries his clipboard because it makes him feel important. Different from his eclectic bunch of mature students, at least. The tutor. The man to whom we all must pay homage. Which makes him seem vulnerable, somehow. And I love him for that.

  Oh, I have such a thing for Stefan. Which is stupid, but nevertheless lovely. He is lovely. He is an artist, for one thing. A creator of beauty. And, were that not sufficient, he is beautifully packaged. In a glorious, breathtaking six feet three inches of sculpted and exquisite masculine flesh. Of course, Stefan doesn’t know quite how I feel about him and as, until last month, he was still at the tail end of some sort of unsatisfactory relationship with another student (who has now, happily, abandoned her art-appreciation endeavours), I have no intention of telling him. There has been a definite frisson between us for some time - of that I am sure - but to date we have only skirted around the penumbra of the periphery of the possibility of the reality that we might just become some sort of serious item in the near future. But we have only been out together four times so our relationship is not sufficiently advanced to allow me to play fast and loose with delicate things like admitting I am completely besotted with him, or, indeed, interpreting feelings, and, as history will testify, I’m not much good at doing that anyway. For now, it is sufficient he knows that I like him. That I fancy him. That kind of fun, non-threatening stuff.

  But he hasn’t noticed the car anyway. Cars are not big on Stefan’s personal agenda. Stefan cycles to college. Stefan likes bikes.

  ‘You’re early,’ he remarks, without giving the statement any particular inflection. He smiles, though, and pats the space beside him on the step, so I judge that he’s pleased to see me.

  I’m early because I have had to deliver Joe to a pub in Pontcanna, which for some reason he felt would be a more therapeutic activity than simply going straight home to bed. I put my keys in my bag and sit down on the still warmish stone.

  ‘My boss had an accident,’ I tell him. ‘On the motorway. On his way back from London. He’s broken his arm and he’s written off my new car.’

  Stefan nods at this. As if writing off cars were the only natural end product of being silly enough to drive them. Then asks me how such a thing came about. So I tell him, in the manner of a reluctant teenager. Which, bar the reluctant bit, is how he generally makes me feel.

  ‘Well,’ he says, rising and elbowing the sun out, ‘I must say, I think you were very silly.’

  I stand up again as well. And groan. ‘I know.’

  ‘I mean, couldn’t the guy have simply hired a car in the first place? Why did he need to borrow yours?’ Stefan smiles as he says this. A polite, enquiring, sensible smile. A smile without any undermining ulterior motives. A very, very kissable smile.

  ‘Because his car was in the garage and he didn’t know it wasn’t going to be ready until seven and he had to get to London for a meeting, and—’

  He waves to someone behind me. ‘So why didn’t he take the train?’

  ‘Because he - well, I suppose because he—’

  ‘It would have - hello, Cerys - been simpler, surely?’

  I turn and wave a hello at my fellow student, an overweight twenty-something with a very pretty face and a penchant for violently coloured patchwork dungarees. Yes, I think. Of course it would have been simpler. But Joe obviously didn’t see it like that. Taking a train involved sitting next to people, organizing tickets, adhering to someone else’s timetable. Being generally trammelled. I shrug and nod.

  ‘But instead he asked if he could borrow your car and you said yes. Yes?’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t using it, was I? Well, I was, but only to get home. And he said he’d pay for a cab, so it didn’t seem - well, anyway, yes. I did.’

  Stefan makes no response to this other than to nod his perfect, leonine head. He swings his eyes back towards the road, and stretches. Then squeezes my arm. Then strokes it a little. Woweee.

  ‘You’re too kind, you know that,’ he tells me gently. He’s so gorgeous. ‘You should have said no. People take advantage, Lu.’

  ‘Oh, bloody hell,’ says Del, when, an hour or so later, I arrive at her house to pick Leo up. It’s a little after seven, and the night has yet to draw its breezy tendrils around the ebullient spring light of the day. Through the window, I can see Leo and Simeon making some sort of den in the living room. They both wave a hello, then return to their game.

  ‘Oh-bloody-hell what?’

  ‘Oh-bloody-hell I just remembered it’s Wednesday tomorrow and I haven’t finished hemming Simeon’s Harry Potter outfit.’ Her eyes drift across their immaculate front garden and blink at the Micra. It looks hunched and insubstantial and faintly shamefaced in the gloom. ‘Whose car is that?’

  Sighing, I shrug my bag from my shoulder and step past her into the hall. ‘It’s a rental car. Mine is a write-off apparently.’

  She gapes at me. ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, Del,’ I groan. ‘I’m such a klutz. I let Joe borrow it yesterday. And—’

  ‘Why?’ She closes the front door behind me then shuffles me into the kitchen. ‘Why would Joe need your car?’ She feels the kettle for warmth and flicks the switch on.

  So now I tell her. And she listens, then snorts.

  ‘You are unbelievable, you are,’ she decides. ‘I mean, how crazy can you get!’

  ‘I know. I know! Oh, God, Del. What on ea
rth possessed me? But what else was I supposed to do? No, don’t answer. But how could I say no? It was a reasonable enough request, and the accident wasn’t his fault, after all. No, stuff it. I don’t know why I’m even bothering to defend him. But he says he’s going to get onto it tomorrow, and if he doesn’t …’

  Del pours hot water on a tea bag for me and snorts again. She has long since perfected the art of the big-sisterly snort.

  ‘But, in the meantime, I’ve got that Micra.’ I angle my face doorwards. ‘Leo! Ten minutes!’ Then I sigh. ‘Trouble is, it could be for months.’

  She shakes her head and plonks the tea down in front of me. ‘Lu, what are we to do with you?’ she says.

  ‘Aurora? Lucienne Aurora? Is that for real?’

  I couldn’t see Joe, of course, because he said this down the telephone. Because he had, for some reason, telephoned me. I had returned from my sister’s and had finally managed to get Leo to bed. No small feat when his activity of choice that evening would have been to drive straight to Swindon and track down what was left of my car. He had apparently left twenty-six Pokemon cards in the glove compartment. I was not very popular. And I was not in a good mood. I sat down wearily on the floor by the phone.

  ‘Of course it’s for real. My mother was French.’

  ‘Well!’ he exclaimed. ‘I’ve never heard anyone called that before. Lucienne, eh? And Aurora. With an A? Is it actually a name?’

  ‘She was a goddess in Roman mythology, apparently.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘And it means “light of the morning”. “Dawn”.’

  ‘Ah! Yes, of course. As in Aurora Borealis.’

  ‘Exactly. Joe, is there a point to your question?’

  ‘Of course.’ I could hear rustling. ‘I’m sorting out your insurance.’

  I looked at my watch. It was almost ten. ‘At this time?’

  ‘Of course. When else do I get a chance to deal with this crap?’

  He sounded tired. ‘But why sorting my insurance?’ I asked him. ‘Wheels To Go already have all my details.’

  ‘Indeed they do, Lu. But I’ve decided I’m going to put you on my insurance.’

  ‘Why?’