‘I know what I’ve got, thank you very much.’
‘OK. Right. In again, then. OK, now right hand down again. Right hand. Hard down. Hard down. That’s it. Dustbins, remember - the dustbins behind you. Dustbins. Dustbins, Lu. Slow up. Slow up. Jesus! That’s—’
‘Oh, for goodness sake, stop flapping about the bloody dustbins, will you? I’ve seen the dustbins, OK?’
‘But you’ve only got—’
‘Yards, OK? I’ve got yards.’
There is a hint of a whisper of a suggestion of contact. The lightest of kisses. A sort of muffled ‘ker-phut’. I don’t think he hears it. He couldn’t possibly have felt it.
‘There!’ I exclaim loudly, just to be on the safe side. ‘That should do it, I think, then. No problem at all.’
I turn round to face him. He is silent and ashen.
‘No sweat,’ I add. ‘So, how was it for you?’
We are half-way down Queen Street before he deigns to speak to me again.
‘Hrmmph. I’m giving up smoking anyway,’ he says.
Once we’ve arrived at the office, Iona smiles. ‘Giving up smoking again, Joe? Well, that’s nice. That’s nice.’ She shunts her glasses on to her head in order to plant a kiss on Joe’s scab-free cheek. Then to me. ‘He’s certainly a trier, aren’t you, Joe? Always trying, at least, aren’t you, cariad?’ I should say so. ‘And I always say it’s better to try and fail than not to have tried at all. Yes, lovely? Now, my Dai, on the other hand - you haven’t met Dai yet, have you, Lu? - he’s a complete bugger. Fifty a day, every day, and there’s not a row in the world that’ll budge him an inch. Pah. They’ll be the death of him. Anyway, cakes,’ she finishes, nodding her glasses back down. ‘I’ve been and bought a bag of ring doughnuts from Gregg’s, and I’ve just put the coffee on the go.’
Joe rolls his eyes and stomps off to his office.
Best place for him. Trier, indeed.
4
‘Well, I think you’re absolutely bonkers. It sounds like a complete dream. Why would you want to be stuck in an office all day when you can be swanning around in an XJR? You lucky thing! God, I’m really jealous!’
By the time I had finished work, prised the car from its wraparound day bed (having pointed out that when a rubber strip of bumper touches a plastic dustbin at 0.0001 mph., there is obviously going to be nothing in the way of damage at anything above a molecular level), taken Joe home and driven on to Del’s, I had pretty much decided that chauffeuring, even as a temporary career choice, definitely wasn’t for me. Even though it was marginally less tedious than translating French boiler specifications, I had decided that (a) the British Isles were not the place for cars the size of Wester-super-Mare and (b) I would most probably have to kill Mr Delaney if forced into a confined space with him for too long.
But Del, as was her dear, sweet way, could see only Honor Blackman in plaid slacks and a head scarf, careering up a mountain with James Bond on her tail. (In contrast, all I could see was the Gabalfa roundabout and the unbearable smallness of multi-storey car-parks.)
She placed a rubber-gloved hand on the car’s back bumper and swept it squeakingly and lovingly over its contours.
‘But he called me a bag. Del. I mean - a bag!’
She paused to laugh at this, clutching her stomach. Why was everyone laughing at me today?
‘Well, you most probably were being one, then. You do have a very spiky side to you, Lu. So. Why did he call you a bag?’
‘I don’t know - he wasn’t talking to me at the time. But I presume it was because I wouldn’t let him smoke in the car. He muttered it to Iona this morning. He said, “God! She’s a bit of a bag, that one.” It’s been niggling at me all day.’
Del stripped off a glove to rub a spot from the paintwork. Then slipped her arm through mine and led me into the house. She’d been cooking and the kitchen was fragrant and warm. Simeon and Leo were out in the back garden, happily hitting each other with sticks.
‘Look, be reasonable,’ she chided, rapping on the window and flapping a tea-towel before stripping off the other glove. ‘The poor guy has just had a pretty nasty accident. He’s probably in shock still. I’m sure he didn’t mean it. And if he did, it was probably because you forget he’s not a fifteen-year-old with ten Rothmans and an attitude problem. No - don’t look at me like that. You know what you’re like.’
‘But—’
‘Forget it. There are far worse things to be called. And, besides, I have very, very, very exciting news.’
Let me tell you something else about my sister. She’s completely manic. Not manic in a sectionable sense, of course, but nevertheless fairly exhausting to be around at times. Fortunately, she had had the good sense to marry someone quiet and sensible and generally sane. Though I have to say Ben, who is a doctor, has been seeing a psychotherapist called Mrs MacDougall on a monthly basis for the last nine years. No secret. He’s fairly evangelical about her. He started seeing her when Simeon’s (complicated, premature) birth had the misfortune to occur on the same day as the clinical section of his FRCS part two examination - which he then failed, and had to retake, and ever since, it was like, Baby! Uuurgh! Exam horror! Help! and so on. A classic negative-association situation. That was the problem he started with anyway. Now I think she’s just an all-purpose de-stressing tool. Wish I had a Mrs MacDougall right now.
‘Well?’ I asked.
‘Bingo! We’re in!’ Del said gleefully.
‘In? In where?’
‘Well, it’s not a one hundred per cent cast-iron certainty in, but almost. And we will be, won’t we? How could we not be? Tra-la! Isn’t that exciting?’
I sat down on one of the kitchen chairs. There was a pile of still-warm Welsh cakes on the table, and the smell of something wholesome and life-affirming coming from the oven. And I was a bag.
‘In where?’ I repeated.
She tsked. ‘Roomaround, of course! Look! Here’s the letter!’
I took it. Noted the swish TV production-company logo. Oh, God. Of course. Oh dear.
‘But I thought we decided we weren’t going to bother?’
Del sat down beside me, picked up a Welsh cake, took a bite and shook her head. ‘No, no,’ she corrected me, swallowing. ‘We didn’t decide that. We decided that there probably wasn’t much chance we’d get on it, I’ll grant you, but that it was still worth a try. You remember.’
I didn’t remember it like this at all, but I also knew there was really no point in arguing about it.
‘But that was last year.’
‘I know. Isn’t it a lovely surprise? Look.’ She took the letter back from me. ‘Someone’s pulled out, and, as you know, we’ve been on the reserve list.’ I knew no such thing. As she well knew. ‘We have to call now and confirm that we still want to go ahead, and to arrange for them to come down and check us out. It’s all a bit short notice, I know, but are you still up for me doing your living room?’
‘Oh, God, I don’t know, Del. You’re right. It is all a bit - ah! There’s a thought. We can’t do it, can we? What about the couples thing? There had to be the four of us, didn’t there? And there’s not, now, is there? No Mark any more.’
I’d been seeing Mark for much of the preceding year. He was a teacher too (we’d both taught at the same school), long divorced, and had been sweet, kind and amiable. Sadly, if predictably, we’d fizzled out fairly rapidly after my father had died; when it had become clear that what I now wanted from life (complete career rethink, creative nirvana, to embrace the lost opportunities of my youth, etc.) no longer dovetailed with what he wanted (caravan in Brittany, Renault Espace). But any relief I might now have felt about this development turning out to be the silver lining in the big swell of cumulus that generally constituted what passed for my love-life, was, it seemed, to be very short-lived.
‘No,’ Del said slowly, as if I was being really, really thick about this, ‘but there is Stefan.’
‘Stefan!’ Had I been eating a Welsh cake too I would have choked on
it. ‘Stefan! You have to be kidding, Del. No.’
‘Pah!’ she said. ‘Don’t be such a wet blanket. He won’t mind. He’s an art tutor, isn’t he?’
I didn’t pause to consider what these two statements had to do with one another, because I was way too busy trying to imagine the conversation. ‘Stefan, I know we’ve only been seeing each other for a few weeks, but would you have any objection to pretending - to fifteen million plus television viewers - that we are a kutchy, suburban, permanently cohabiting couple so that I can have my through-lounge creatively butchered by my sister while you and I spend a weekend emulsioning her bedroom?’ The response ‘He will mind’ seemed pitifully inadequate.
‘He won’t even know. Because I’m not about to ask him.’
‘Oh, come on, Lu. It’ll be a laugh.’
‘No, it won’t. It’ll be the end of a beautiful and very promising relationship. He’d run a mile. No. I’m sorry, Del, but no. It’s not fair.’
She got up and put on an oven glove. A bad sign. She was obviously regrouping for a lateral attack.
‘Look,’ I continued, ‘it’s not that I wouldn’t like to do it,’ which wasn’t strictly true: it suddenly seemed not half so much of a good idea as it had seemed when I first considered it, and I was pretty reluctant even then, ‘it’s just that I know how it would seem. Quite apart from the fact that he’ll think it’s stupid, he’ll also think I’m trying to pin him down. Monopolize him. Snare him. You know? It’s difficult enough, what with …’ I was forming the words ‘me having Leo’ but, thankfully, they stuck in my throat. I could not, would not, go through life apologizing for my son’s presence in the world. I started again. ‘What I mean is, well, I’m treading carefully. I don’t want to push things along too fast. I’m—’
‘You should stop doing that. It’s a bad habit,’ she said obscurely, waving the glove at me. She pulled open the oven door and her glasses misted up.
‘Doing what?’
‘Treading carefully.’ She mimed it while she wiped them.
‘I don’t mean I’m—’
‘Yes, you do,’ she said. ‘You always do with boyfriends. As soon as you find one you go completely ga-ga over them and become a complete wimp. You should be more assertive. Do what you want to do. Be the person you want to be. Be a bag, if you feel like it. You managed it just fine today with your boss.’
Nice regroup, Del. A full-frontal on me. And an accurate one. She started to smile, but she could see from my expression that today it wasn’t going to win any friends and it certainly wasn’t going to influence any people. Least of all me.
‘Thanks very much. And where does being a bag fit into all this? We’re talking about me terrifying a guy I’ve barely got to know by asking him to play house with me - not having a row about who’s going to pay a restaurant bill or something!’
She slammed the oven door on whatever she’d been prodding. ‘I know. I know. But come on, Lu. You’re going out with him this evening, aren’t you? Couldn’t you at least ask him?’
‘No! Couldn’t you just find someone else to do it with? I mean, surely one of your friends would be up for it.’ I said this without much conviction. I was quite sure the only reason she had asked me in the first place was because none of them would do anything so rash.
She shook her head. ‘Jules was pretty interested in the first place, as it happens, but Richard wouldn’t hear of it. Anyway, he’s working in Germany at the moment, and she’s all over the place with her job, so I didn’t ask her. I did think we could maybe get Ben’s mum to come and stay. Pretend she lived with you. That would certainly count, but—’
‘Oh, come on. She’s eighty!’
She grinned. ‘But I knew you wouldn’t go for it. So go on. Pleeease. At least ask him. OK?’
‘OK. I’ll think about it.’
She pressed the letter into my hand. ‘Promise?’
What a bloody day.
I am a bag. I am a spiky bag. And, God, I feel like one right now.
When I get home the telephone is ringing. It is my sometime babysitter, Emma, to tell me she can’t sit for me after all. Great. As Emma’s mother is the Julia in question, I am tempted to ask her to come to the phone and to offer her an obscene amount of cash to stand in on Roomaround for me. But that is the reason Emma can’t sit anyway. She has to babysit her brother because her mum has had to go out. Lucky, lucky her.
Bag. Spiky bag. Dateless spiky bag. Great.
But not dateless, at least, as it turned out. When I called Stefan to tell him I was stuck without a sitter he merrily suggested that he’d cycle up to my place instead. Which was both good, but not so good. Good because it meant I’d be seeing him. But not so good in that the couple of hours I’d anticipated spending removing my entire epidermis with a loofah and slathering myself in exotic unguents, I had to spend washing up, dusting, and hoovering the lounge. Not to mention having to bribe Leo to go to bed early enough that there was a half-chance he’d be asleep by the time our little tryst was due for kick-off. Mr Pokemon, I thought, as I came back downstairs, must truly be raking it in.
But it will, I am quite sure, be worth it.
‘I’m so sorry to drag you all the way up here,’ I say, as I usher him over the doorstep.
‘No, no,’ he says, blue eyes all a-twinkle and shining. ‘This is just fine. Better, even.’
Stefan, who has arrived at my house bearing a large pad of cartridge paper in a Sainsbury’s carrier, pulls his arms from the sleeves of his prehistoric tan leather jacket, and hands me a bottle of wine. His hair is hanging loose, and he’s a little red in the face. It’s a long, long cycle from Canton to Cefn Melin, and most of it is uphill. Still, I quip, at least it will be an easy ride home.
He smiles in such a way as to make it clear that gradient simply isn’t an issue for him, and follows me into the lounge.
Del thinks I’m lucky, of course. Del thinks that because I am single and over twenty-one and am not generally considered grotesque by the opposite sex that I have ready access to the sort of wild and wacky sexual adventures that she likes to read about in Chat. And furthermore, that I, were I given the opportunity, would take full advantage of my non-married status and shag every buck who happens along.
But it isn’t like that. Really it isn’t. For starters, I have a child to consider. For the main course, I hardly ever meet any anyway. And for pudding, I have to live with a chronic feeling of sexual anxiety, which reasserts itself with an ever-increasing intensity every time there is somebody new in my life. Not that there have been many. The words ‘toddler’ and ‘torrid’ don’t sit well together, and though life’s long since been no longer nappy-and sick-based, it’s still essentially child-based.
And this is still my child’s home. Which does rather muddy the water somewhat, if I dip into the pool of available men.
And I have never been very good with men anyway. I don’t know why. But I just don’t seem to be able to get the hang of it.
Actually, scrub that. Why do I think all these things? It just makes me sound like a complete divvy. Which I am most emphatically not. It’s just that relationships - oh, I don’t know - never seem to pan out, you know?
Anyway, the point is that here I am, half-way to seventy, and I’m all in a flap because a man’s in my house. What to wear, what to say, what impression to aim for, whether even, for God’s sake, to put the bloody light on or not. Oh, I wish we were at his place. I can’t relax here. I feel judged and uncomfortable. Way too exposed.
I am all in a flap, period. Del is right, I have gone ga-ga. Just looking at him makes me all gooey. He loops a skein of gold behind his ear and casts an eye over his surroundings. The neatly plumped cushions, the implausibly full fruit bowl and the little dish of Scents of the Sea pot-pourri.
And looks amused. ‘Wow,’ he says, sprawling himself across my Debenham’s sofa. ‘Do you clean houses for a living, Lu, or is this just your fetish?’
Which makes me feel awful. And, yes, I
’m sure I’d feel like that sitting in my living room if I were him. Not just because he’s so heart-stoppingly handsome, but because he’s a hedonistic, unstructured, painty sort of person. There is turps in his hair and dried gouache on his denim. I undo the clasp that is holding my hair back and try to pretend I am too.
‘Some wine?’ I suggest, while he fingers the apples.
‘Not for me,’ he says. ‘That’s for you. I’ll have some water. D’you have bottled?’
Of course not.
‘I think so,’ I say gaily. ‘I’ll just go and see.’
Even though I have not the slightest intention of mentioning it to him, the Roomaround question manages to broach itself, because as I turn to go into the kitchen for our drinks, he springs up from the sofa and follows me there. I open a couple of cupboards to make it look like I generally have a stash of Evian about the place, and when I turn to announce that I haven’t, he is standing against the washing-machine, reading the TV company’s letter, which he has pulled from the board on the wall by the door. He nods at it.’ “Dates for filming,” ‘ he reads out. ‘Hmm. Who’s the TV star, then?’
‘Oh, that’s nothing,’ I say. ‘Just my sister, that’s all. She’s hoping to go on Roomaround.’ There. Done. Mission sort of accomplished. I open the wine. ‘Shall we go back in the lounge?’
‘Roomaround?’ He looks at the letter again. ‘I don’t think I’m with you.’
‘Oh, you know,’ I say, herding him back into the hallway. My eyes have alighted on a pair of my pop-socks that must have dropped from the washing when I brought it downstairs. ‘The makeover programme on TV. The one where people do up a room for each other. You must have seen it. It’s very popular.’
He knits his eyebrows. Perhaps he doesn’t have a telly. But then he nods. ‘Oh, yes,’ he says, sitting back down on the sofa. ‘I do know the programme you mean.’ He shakes his head as if marvelling at the unbelievability that people actually do that sort of thing for fun. ‘Mad,’ he says. ‘With that designer - what’s her name? With the diamante toolbelt.’
I shrug. ‘Africa O’Brien, you mean?’
One Day, Someday Page 4