Say You Love Me

by Marion Husband

  ‘No.’ His voice was hard. ‘I want you to stay.’

  ‘He’s upset…’

  Ben laughed nastily.

  We sat down. Straight away Ben said, ‘Steven works as a porter at the hospital, Mark. That’s how we met. I saw him and I thought…Well, you can imagine what I thought.’

  Mark flicked cigarette ash. ‘Can I? Actually I’m afraid I can’t.’

  ‘Oh, come off it, Mark!’ Ben laughed. ‘Look at him!’

  I squirmed. I looked down at my drink, watching the bubbles rise to the surface. I felt my face colour and I never blush. I head Ben sigh and he sounded just like Dad – the same angry, fake patience that makes that horrible shock of fear dart through you. I glanced at Ben, wondering if he realised he sounded so much like Danny. Catching my eye he smiled apologetically and the likeness to Dad disappeared.

  Looking at his cigarette Mark said, ‘I’m sorry about this, Steven. I can see it’s embarrassing for you.’

  ‘No – really. I know this must be a shock –’

  For a second he managed to meet my eye. Coldly he said, ‘You’re not shocking, Steven. I only wish Ben had saved you from all this awkwardness. He should have told you I want nothing to do with you or your family.’ He drained the half-pint of beer Ben had bought him and stood up. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me I’m going home.’

  ‘Oh for Christ’s sake, Mark!’ Ben stood up too and caught his arm. ‘Why do you have to be such a bloody child? The boy’s here now – he wanted to meet you! He’s actually a fan of yours! Read all your books, haven’t you Steven?’

  I didn’t know where to look. The two of them were standing over me, both of them like prize fighters squaring up to each other. I imagined standing up between them, a hand on each of their chests saying, ‘We want a nice, clean fight, boys,’ calm as any referee. Instead I took a sip of my drink, hoping they wouldn’t notice my blushes.

  Ben sat down again. After a second Mark did, too. Just for something to break the silence I said, ‘That fire’s hot, isn’t it?’

  ‘Do you want to sit somewhere else?’ Ben asked.

  ‘No – it’s fine. I like it.’

  ‘We have an open fire at home,’ Ben said. ‘Only ever light it at Christmas. Messy things. Lovely but messy. You have a fireplace in the flat, don’t you, Mark?’ Ben turned to me. ‘Mark lives in Hampstead, Steven. Quite near the heath.’

  I nodded as if I knew where he meant. Then, just to make a bigger fool of myself, I said, ‘I’ve never been to London.’

  ‘No? Honestly?’ Ben laughed as though truly amazed. ‘Good God!’

  Mark leaned forward and for a second I thought he was going to pat my knee like people do when you’ve been patronised. Of course he didn’t, only flicked ash into the ashtray. I noticed his hands, capable, strong-looking. I started to imagine the weight of one of those hands on my thigh; I started getting a hard-on and felt disgusted with myself. I cleared my throat.

  ‘I’ve heard of Hampstead Heath.’

  Ben said, ‘Our parents lived there, before they came to Thorp. Mum often used to take us back to visit friends of hers. Do you ever see Moira and Charles, Mark?’ Ben frowned. ‘No, of course. Charles died, didn’t he?’

  Mark ignored him. Afraid of the silence I said, ‘They’re Londoners, then, your Mam and Dad?’

  ‘No, Mum came from Stoke-on-Trent, I think. Dad’s family was from York, that’s right, isn’t it, Mark?’ It was obvious he didn’t expect a reply. He went on, ‘Granddad came to Thorp just after the war, to set up his own practice as a GP.’

  Mark snorted. ‘Granddad? You speak as though we knew him!’

  ‘He died before we were born.’ Ben turned to me. ‘I feel as though I know him from all Dad’s told me.’

  Mark seemed to force himself to look at me. He said, ‘Ben’s told me your father is dying?’

  I thought of Danny as I’d seen him that morning, sitting in his high-backed chair by the ward window in a square of sunlight. He liked the sun on him; he said he could never get warm enough. He was wearing the worn out tartan dressing gown the hospital had found for him and his wrists stuck out of the sleeves thin as twigs. The backs of his hands were purple and orange and black where they’d stuck needles. No one had bothered shaving him and the grey stubble made him look like an old tramp so that I’d thought I might have a go shaving him myself, only I knew I couldn’t bring myself to be so intimate with him. I’d pulled up the visitor’s chair and sat at arm’s length. The nurse came, that cheerful redhead. She’d smiled at Danny, ‘How are we feeling today?’ and Danny smiled his don’t-concern-yourself-with-me smile, cringing like Uriah Heep.

  Mark said, ‘He has lung cancer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Ben said, ‘Did you visit him today?’

  ‘Yes, he was out of bed, sitting up –’

  Mark frowned as though deeply concerned. ‘He was sitting up? How long does he have?’

  ‘For pity’s sake, Mark!’ To me, Ben said, ‘They have good and bad days. I’ve spoken to his consultant Mr Hughes about his pain relief.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Mark stood up. ‘I really have to go. I’m sorry, Steven, but I can’t listen to this.’

  Ben and I watched him walk out. Ben said, ‘Sorry. Perhaps you were right, I should have made sure he was used to the idea of you before allowing you to meet.’

  Allowing . Ben couldn’t help talking like a boss. I sipped my drink, knowing he was watching me. At last he said, ‘Mark is a difficult man.’

  ‘He’s all right.’

  ‘He’s self-conscious around strangers.’

  He hadn’t seemed self-conscious to me, only angry as though we’d conspired to play some nasty trick on him. Suddenly I wanted to follow Mark outside. I wanted him to know that I wouldn’t cause him any trouble and that I really admired him and would like to be his friend if I could. But more than that, I wanted to tell him I knew what it was like to be him. I knew I would have sounded mad, though, like some sort of psycho stalker.

  I was looking towards the door, still thinking of chasing after Mark, when Ben said gently, ‘Steven, do you mind if I ask you something – something rather difficult?’ He sat forward, his hands clasped together so that his knuckles were white. He opened his mouth to speak, only to close it again and glance towards the door as though wishing he could make the same escape Mark had. At last he said, ‘Did Danny ever hurt you and your brothers?’

  I had an urge to laugh: that was it, the big question he had to work himself up to ask! I gazed at him, wondering what he wanted to hear, what would disturb him least.

  He said, ‘You’re smirking. You think it’s a stupid question.’

  ‘No, not really, not if you need to know.’

  ‘I don’t know what I need to know.’ He exhaled sharply. ‘I’m sorry. This is difficult for me.’ Looking down at his drink he said, ‘When Mark and I were taken into care…well, Mark was very ill, in hospital. Simon – the man who became our father – would sit me down and tell me how poorly Mark was…he didn’t actually say it but I knew he meant that Mark might die.’

  ‘That must have been scary.’

  ‘It wasn’t intended to scare me. He meant me to take sides, Mark’s against Danny’s, my dad’s.’ He laughed shortly. ‘Dad – Simon – was always taking me out for walks, just the two of us, trying to talk to me, to get me to understand the seriousness of it all…that Danny wasn’t about to come back.’ Sighing, he said, ‘All I wanted was to go back home to my dad. I didn’t care about Mark. Mark was a cry-baby – I thought he was pretending to be sick just to get Dad into trouble.’ He smiled crookedly. ‘Mixed-up kid, wasn’t I?’

  I tried to picture him as a child, a tough little boy ready to kick this Simon in the shins and run off in search of Danny, loyal to him. I finished my drink. Nodding at his empty glass I said, ‘Do you want another?’

  ‘No.’ He sighed. ‘I should go.’

  He had a very young wife – a beautiful wife
and a baby boy. I knew all this before I met him; you hear a lot hanging round a hospital ward waiting to take a patient to theatre. The nurses would say to some poor sod on the gurney, ‘Mr Walker is lovely – the very best, there’s absolutely nothing for you to worry about!’ Most of the nurses had a crush on Ben Walker, although he wasn’t my type – too butch, too hard. He glanced up at me from twisting his empty glass around and I felt this pity for him, this soft, sentimental feeling that made me reach out and touch his hand lightly.

  ‘Don’t look so sad.’

  He laughed, fishing in his pocket for his car keys as if to have an excuse to draw his hand away from mine. ‘I’m not sad – not really. Do you need a lift home or anywhere…?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  We walked to his car. A few metres away he pressed the remote on his keys and its lights flashed as if it was excited to see him. He stopped and shook my hand. ‘Steven, thank you for coming to meet Mark tonight.’

  I wasn’t sure why he felt the need to thank me. I’m sure he knew how much I wanted to see Mark. Perhaps he didn’t – I was afraid of giving myself away, after all, of appearing too desperate, too scarily me.

  He climbed in the car. He said, ‘I’ll see you at the hospital. Tomorrow afternoon, if I have time.’

  Ben knew that I visited Danny each lunchtime. I’d take my sandwiches and sit by his bed instead of sitting in the staff canteen or outside on the scrubby bit of grass that used to be the hospice garden. The hospice had moved years ago to a bigger, brighter plot past the Church of the Holy Trinity and the little garden was forgotten, its rose bushes leggy and diseased, the Leylandii, planted to give the dying a bit of privacy, racing to block out the sky. No one else seemed to know about the garden. It was peaceful there, just me and the starlings that shared my sandwiches. When Danny was first admitted I used to think that one day I’d borrow a wheelchair and take him to the garden. I imagined asking him stuff there. Stuff! There was only one question, really, the big Why? The wheelchair was never borrowed, of course. I couldn’t have him in my peaceful, private space; taking him there was just a fantasy I had.

  I had lots of fantasies when I was a kid. The most enduring was the one where I’d been stolen as a baby, that Mam had liked the look of me and lifted me from my shiny, well-sprung pram and whisked me off to her mad house. Mam was always telling me how bonny I was and that she didn’t know where I’d come from. Her family is ugly as sin, her brothers especially. Graham calls them the Potato Men, not realising that he’s becoming a Potato Man himself. Our Uncle Mick brought Graham up. When Colin was eleven he ran away and when the uncles found him trying to sneak on a train to London, Uncle Mick took him in as well. That left me and Mam. Mam and me and Danny, when he wasn’t inside.

  The first time I went to bed with Nichola, after the sex when we were cuddled up and she was all soft and loving, she said, ‘You’re funny, aren’t you?’

  ‘Funny?’ My heart skipped because I thought she’d found me out.

  She lifted her head from my chest to smile at me, her face all stupefied like a happy drunk’s. ‘Different. Weird. In a good way.’

  ‘How good?’

  She groaned softly and flicked my nipple with her little pink tongue. ‘Lovely. Gentle.’ She seemed pleased with this adjective. She frowned, nodding as if tasting the sound it made. ‘Gentle.’

  The first time I went to bed with Carl, as I was getting undressed, scared, desperate, he said, ‘I’ll be careful with you.’ I didn’t want care; I wanted him to be careless, cruel, so I didn’t have to think. I didn’t know Carl very well then, didn’t realise that cruel was beyond him.

  I watched Ben drive away and walked home. I thought about Mark and the best way of reaching inside his heart and head. I was thinking about him as I went to bed, as I drifted off to sleep. I dreamt of him, that I’d somehow saved him.

  Chapter 11

  With breathless care Kitty lowered Nathan into his cot. She covered him with his quilt then waited, keeping as still and silent as she could in case any noise or movement might wake him. His bottom lip trembled and for a moment she was afraid that he was about to start crying again, but he slept on and she allowed herself to hope that he was too exhausted to wake. Piglet lay at her feet, dropped a couple of hours ago when she’d lifted Nathan from his cot, soaked and screaming. She hugged the pink plush toy to her chest before tucking it gently beside her baby and creeping from the nursery.

  She’d been about to run a bath when Nathan had woken, now she couldn’t be bothered. Lying down on the bed she looked at the alarm clock. Ben would be home soon. He would smell of cigarettes and beer; he would be angry – tetchy; he wouldn’t speak, wouldn’t be able to bring himself to discuss his evening with his brother. She wouldn’t dare ask how their discussion had gone, afraid of his temper that lately seemed so ready to erupt.

  Outside an owl hooted. Ben had told her once that a mouse skeleton could be assembled from an owl dropping, the tiny, indigestible bones and skull all neatly wrapped and disposed of so that boys like him could come along and fit the mouse together again as though it was an Airfix toy. There was something about bones, Ben said, that was utterly fascinating; as a child he would dissect the dead creatures he found, rats and sparrows and mice, even a mole once. He said he had wanted to discover how they worked and how they died. He had laughed at the disgust on her face. ‘The mole,’ he’d said, ‘was particularly exciting – such shy creatures, you hardly ever laid eyes on them.’ He’d smiled, remembering. ‘Poor thing. Its paws were almost like human hands.’

  Kitty rolled onto her back. If she undressed quickly she could be under the covers, eyes closed feigning sleep before Ben came home. Not that he’d believe that she was sleeping, or particularly care. He would pull her into his arms, slipping his hand inside her tee shirt to cup her breast. He would murmur into her hair and call her his sweet girl, his baby. His erection would nudge her backside, its hard urgency contradicting his soft words.

  Eventually she would roll over to face him, pretending still to be sleepy, malleable, just as he liked and expected her to be. She wouldn’t have to do anything energetic; he would slip inside her easily as she lay on her back and it would be over quickly. There would be no performance to prove his youth and virility and skill. But she would wrap her legs around his waist still, she would still moan a little and cry out as he came. But she would be thinking of the mice trapped inside the owl pellets waiting for Ben’s dextrous fingers, for their resurrection. She would be thinking of the little mole’s hands, pink and pathetic, and she would be reminded how powerless she was although she loved him and fancied him still. Fancied. It was a word from her school days, those wasted, restless years, when no one had found certain boys as beautiful as she did. She had kept her peculiar fancies to herself. She didn’t want her friends to think her weird, after all.

  She began to undress, dropping her clothes into the Ali Baba basket in the corner of the en-suite bathroom. She stood in front of the wash basin and stared into the mirror above it. Her mascara was smudged as though she had been crying, but it was only the tears that came from yawning. She noticed that the mirror was splattered with tiny flecks of toothpaste. The glass where their toothbrushes were kept had built-up a white sludge and should be cleaned, as should the basin and the bath and the beautiful, expensive floor Ben’s first wife had chosen. The whole house needed a thorough clean, although it looked presentable enough. The dirt, Kitty knew, lurked in places where visitors wouldn’t notice it, and this seemed terrible to her and dishonest. The dirt was real slut’s dirt; she was slovenly, lazy, she couldn’t be bothered. She wished her mother would come, energetic, organised, quick, and take her in hand. She needed to be rescued.

  She sat on the edge of the bath and brushed her teeth. In bed, she listened for the owl and for Ben’s car, watching for the pattern its lights made on the ceiling as he turned into the drive. She sometimes thought she could sense his impatience in this pattern of light; she wished he w
ere calmer, like her father. Her father was easy going and fatalistic, certain always that life would work out if left well enough alone. ‘Don’t pick at scabs, pet,’ he told her, and ‘Don’t go looking for trouble, not when it looks for us so determinedly.’ She guessed that Ben thought her father was a waster.

  The day after their first date in the posh hotel, Ben had taken her to Whitby. They had walked hand in hand up the abbey steps and looked out over the grey North Sea. He had put his arm lightly around her shoulders and pointed out a ship on the horizon and suddenly he said, ‘My brother Mark was in the Marines. During the Falklands War. His ship was torpedoed – or bombed or something – and he only just escaped with his life.’ He’d turned away from the sea’s horizon to frown at her. ‘Do you remember the Falklands War? Have you even heard of it?’

  She’d bristled. ‘Yes, I’ve heard of it.’

  He turned back to the sea. ‘Why did I tell you about him?’ He smiled at her awkwardly. ‘Mark and I aren’t close although we pretend to be for our father’s sake. And for our mother’s sake too, when she was alive.’ After a moment he said, ‘Mum died last year, of cancer. Dad and Mark are the only family I have.’

  She had taken this as her cue to tell him about her family and the ordinary broken home she came from. As she talked he took her hand again and led her through the abbey’s graveyard. She sensed he was listening carefully. He asked blunt, incisive questions and she found herself telling him more than she had intended to, about her mother who she suspected was disappointed in her, about her father who she wished had stayed, or at least asked her to go with him. That night, when Ben had kissed her goodbye and she waved to him from her mother’s front door-step, she realised that she knew next to nothing about his family, except that he had a brother who had been a Marine and was almost killed in a war she’d barely heard of. She’d imagined Mark as much older than Ben, a doddery man, frail as the veterans that laid their poppy wreaths at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday. She’d been shocked when she finally met him.