The Curious Heart of Ailsa Rae

by Stephanie Butland

  Deep breath. Four-four time heart.

  www.myblueblueheart.blogspot.co.uk

  (DRAFT – UNPUBLISHED)

  A Big Decision

  Advisory: swearing (you know I don’t generally swear) and the kind of behaviour that might make you spit teeth.

  I’m stuck on something and I need you to help me with it.

  I can’t ask you to make this decision cold. You need some backstory.

  It’s the story of how my parents met.

  My father lived in the flat below the one my mother stayed in with her mates when they left university and were finding their feet in the city, working their first jobs. My father lived on his own and worked in a bank; Mum, Tamsin and Una could set the clock by his coming and going. They laughed at him because he looked so boring and ordinary, the way they were determined not to be. But at the weekends he played Usher, loud, and he opened all the windows and he baked – not cooking, baking, cakes and biscuits and all sorts, and the three women upstairs would always be hungover from Friday night, and too disorganised to ever have done any shopping in the week. And there was this Saturday-morning smell of baking. My mother would lie in the bath, listening to the music coming up through the floor and smelling vanilla and chocolate. And one Saturday afternoon, when Tamsin and Una were away, Mum knocked on my father-to-be’s door and said, ‘If you’re going to bake with the windows open, then you need to share. It’s fucking torture otherwise.’

  And he said, ‘If you’re going to laugh like that until two a.m., then you need to tell your neighbours what the joke is. It’s fucking rude not to.’

  He was tall and skinny, with blue eyes and straight brown hair cut ‘like a schoolteacher’ (whatever that means) and my mother thought: I like you. And before you could say ‘Dundee cake’, they were a couple. He was nice. He seemed like an adult to her, and she still felt like a wain, even though she was working, and paying rent, and her friends were getting married. My grandma was still sending food parcels from Inverness, and my grandparents used to come down for weekends and help Mum rub down awful old bits of furniture she’d found in second-hand shops and repaint them, so she’d have something to go in the hypothetical flat she was saving a deposit for.

  When Mum introduced my father to her parents, he shook hands with them and they talked about house prices and she thought: I’ve grown up. This is real life.

  I asked Mum once if she had loved him and she thought for a long time and said, ‘I think so. It’s hard to tell now.’

  Over the next year she saved up half of a deposit on a flat, and my grandparents gave her the other half. She got a mortgage, and the only place she could afford to buy is now my home. Though it’s in a positively desirable spot these days, in the nineties it was the sort of place where you took your life in your hands every time you went out of the front door.

  My father helped her to do it up.

  And then my mum got pregnant.

  If they talked about abortion she hasn’t said so. They decided that she would move in with him, and they would finish doing up her place and rent it out. Mum thought – she laughs when she talks about this, but not in a funny way – she couldn’t have found anyone steadier.

  Foetus-me grew, and so did Mum, and my father cooked and generally took care of his pregnant girlfriend.

  They made a shortlist of names. If I’d been a boy, my father wanted Liam, but Mum thought he was joking and laughed herself stupid when he suggested it. She says it was the only time he was ever really offended. She wanted to call boy-me Hal. She wanted my name to be something no one could shorten. (People do try, with Ailsa, but it’s not very successful. ‘Ails’ is actually harder to say than ‘Ailsa’, because your mouth doesn’t want to stop at the s. Try it, you’ll see what I mean.)

  And then one day, out of nowhere, my father came home and said he’d been offered a promotion, his own bank branch to manage, but he’d need to move to Guildford. She said OK. It’s not like her life was going to much of a plan, and she thought she could raise me as well in Guildford as Edinburgh. But my father looked away and said he thought it was best that he went on his own. He spun her a line about needing to get settled, and sending for her, but she called him on it – according to her she said, ‘You’re not a pioneer, and I’m not a fucking army wife, so either I come with you or you have the balls to say you’ve changed your mind.’

  He said he’d changed his mind.

  And that was that.

  He went to Guildford.

  He’s never seen me, or asked after me, as far as I know. He has paid maintenance.

  When life was short, it was too short to care about people who couldn’t be bothered.

  Now that there’s a bit more room to breathe in this life of mine, I’ve got curious.

  I’m resigned to not knowing much about where Apple is from. The provenance of my heart is her own business: the people who agreed to give her to me did not expect to be tracked down.

  But now that I’ve a longer life ahead, not knowing where half of my chromosomes come from feels like too much missing information.

  I don’t think the man who didn’t bother to wait to see me born can be curious. I still live in the flat my mother bought just before she got pregnant. There have been no letters or birthday cards.

  But my parents were twenty-four when I was born. I’m twenty-eight and I can’t even organise my washing so I’ve always got a clean pair of jeans.

  Will I look back on the decisions I’m making now and think I’ve done everything right? Or will I look back and wish I’d done some things differently?

  Here’s the question. And I really don’t know the answer to it. I can line up all the arguments, one way and then the other. But Apple has no idea which way to jump.

  Do I find my biological father?

  To vote YES click here.

  To vote NO click here.

  I’m giving you a week.

  ‘It’s in,’ Ailsa says, and then, looking at the clock, calculating, building in a bit of slippage in case she’s sliced the aubergines too thickly, ‘it should be ready at about eight. Do you want another beer?’ She’d insisted on buying the food, but Seb had taken his own basket and filled it with wine, cider and beer. There’s now more alcohol in Ailsa’s flat than she can ever remember there being. She’d said as much. Seb had said, ‘Well, I wasn’t thinking we’d drink it all tonight.’

  ‘I’m OK for now,’ he says.

  ‘Right you are.’ She sits down next to him; he pulls her in, like he did on the top deck of the bus.

  ‘I read what you wrote,’ Seb says. ‘I can see why you’re thinking about it.’ He rests his cheek against the top of her head for a moment, squeezes her shoulder, and then, ‘You’re not going to put this on your blog, though, are you?’

  ‘I haven’t decided yet.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’ Ailsa’s least favourite medics were the ones who tried to coax and coach her to what they thought were the right decisions: ‘Do you think going home would be the right thing to do, given how poorly you’ve been this week?’, or ‘Is your mother going to agree, do you think?’ She hopes Seb isn’t about to become her least favourite sort-of boyfriend. She suspects that if Hayley was listening in on this conversation, he would be shooting up in her estimation.

  She feels him shrug. ‘It’s up to you. But – you’ve been on the receiving end of other people writing about your life. You know what it’s like.’

  ‘I don’t think any of this is private. Give my mother two glasses of wine and she’ll tell you the story herself. With swearing.’

  ‘You and me doing the tango wasn’t private. We were in a public space.’

  ‘I suppose.’ She doesn’t suppose – she knows. She was never going to publish this, however much she kidded herself that she would. She might not like the way Hayley still wants to manage her life, but she wouldn’t do this.

  She sighs. He kisses the top of her head, and then there’s a beat, a
second of waiting, before he asks, ‘Dinner at eight?’

  ‘About that,’ she says.

  ‘And ratatouille doesn’t spoil, right?’

  ‘I thought you didn’t cook,’ Ailsa says.

  ‘I don’t. I’ve got a mate who’s been in Educating Rita, though. You learn a lot from helping people learn their lines.’

  ‘Don’t you just,’ she says, and she gets to her feet, takes his hand, and leads him to her bedroom. She switches the timer off on the way through the kitchen. The stirring, after all, is optional.

  *

  The ratatouille doesn’t spoil. They eat at nine, with candlelight and music and a plenty-of-time-for-talking-later quietness.

  And in the morning, the first thing she sees is his sleepy smile. He cups a palm over his bad eye, opens the other. ‘BlueHeart. We don’t have to get up yet, do we?’

  ‘We need to leave at ten,’ Ailsa says, sliding her body against his, ‘ten fifteen at the latest.’ She starts work at eleven, and he needs to be at the Dragon’s Nest for eleven thirty. He could, if he wanted, come and have a coffee before he goes to join the cast for the read-through. She hasn’t asked him, because she’s not sure if she wants him to. At the moment, at work, she’s Ailsa the ordinary. It’s nice, not being BlueHeart, now that she’s been there for long enough to get to know people a bit. If she brings Seb in she might become Ailsa Who Knows That Actor Who Was On StarDance.

  ‘Are you straight back to London after the read-through?’

  ‘I’m booked on the six o’clock train,’ he says, ‘so probably. There’ll be drinks afterwards, I would think. Nearly everyone’s from Edinburgh, or Glasgow. Roz isn’t stupid. She’s not paying to put people up for the run if she can help it. But we can go and have a drink at the station, if you like.’

  ‘I don’t finish work until six,’ Ailsa says.

  Seb, who has been starting to sit up, stretch, both eyes cautiously open now, while Ailsa lies beside him, stops mid-move, looks down at her. The angle makes him look like a hall-of-mirrors version of himself, all chin and nostrils. ‘Can’t you bunk off early?’

  She laughs. ‘Coffee doesn’t make itself, you know.’

  ‘But I thought you could come, towards the end, and we could show them how to tango.’

  The laugh bursts out of her. ‘Us? Tango? In front of everyone? I can’t imagine anything worse.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Seb says. She has to check to see that he’s not really offended – it’s funny, how sex and sleeping can make you think you know someone – and she takes his hand. His fingers are warmer than hers.

  ‘I mean – I’m not used to being on show. And I’m not that good. If you want to show them the tango, you need someone better than me to dance with.’

  A squeeze to her hand. ‘But we’re great at tango. It feels – like something.’

  ‘I know.’ She thinks about his heart, her heart, always opposite each other, and the way he moves, making it so clear what her next step should be. And then she remembers the photo. ‘It feels great, dancing with you. But I don’t think I’m exactly demonstration standard. And I don’t like people looking at me.’

  ‘Ah, you’ll soon get used to that,’ Seb says. ‘We could practise. Right now.’ He straddles her, kneeling, runs his hands over her; his eyes watch his hands, or maybe her body beneath them, learning her. She watches his face, to see if his fingers or his gaze snag or falter on the scar, but they don’t seem to.

  She laughs and says, ‘This isn’t tango.’

  ‘No,’ Seb says, ‘next best thing, though.’

  *

  It’s ten thirty by the time they are dressing. Ailsa squeezes past him, to the wardrobe – this bedroom has only ever been arranged for one, even though there’s a double bed in it – and he holds her by the waist, pulls her in.

  ‘I know I said you were looking better and better, but I might need another look.’

  His skin is damp, his hair, where he’s towelled it dry, sticks up and makes him look a bit more like a man who hasn’t just stepped off a screen. She’s in her underwear and tights, is heading to the wardrobe for her purple skirt. She usually wears jeans to work but she didn’t do her washing yesterday, didn’t want damp clothes all over the radiators.

  She sticks against his skin, stands there for a heartbeat before she moves past. ‘I’ll be late if I don’t get a move on.’

  He lets go of her. ‘Are you sure you can’t bunk off?’

  ‘No, I can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’ His tone is light – or rather, light-ish.

  ‘Because it’s my job.’

  His brows draw together in what’s presumably meant to be comic puzzlement. ‘It’s making coffee.’

  ‘That’s not the point. I need to earn.’ Hayley’s voice in her head: I didn’t bring you up to be a WAG.

  ‘It’s only a day.’

  ‘It’s my job. It’s all I’ve got, for now.’ She zips up her skirt, pulls a top over her head and straightens it. Seb’s still naked, apart from the towel slung across his shoulders. Well, if he’s not ready, she’ll just have to go without him.

  ‘You’ve got me.’ He’s pouting. The sash windows give a rattle. It might be the last of the wind that blew all night, although right now, to Ailsa, it seems more likely to be Hayley’s laughter coming all the way from Glasgow and trying to get in. He has to be joking.

  She kisses him – it’s so good, to be wanted like this, to want. But she is her own self now. ‘I know. But we didn’t really plan today. And anyway, what am I supposed to do? Sit downstairs in the bar? Bring the drinks?’

  He pulls on his boxer shorts and jeans, and turns to her as he finishes buttoning his fly. She isn’t quite ready to reach for him, touch him, now that he’s half dressed. ‘I thought you’d want to make the most of me being here.’

  He sounds wounded. More wounded than he has any right to feel. She glances at the clock. ‘I’d say we’ve made pretty good use of the time we’ve had.’ She closes her hand around the hand he’s held out, smiles at him. ‘I really do need to leave in five minutes.’

  And suddenly, it’s all right. Well, sort of. The air in the room has changed from stern to smiling. He touches her cheek, looks into her face, close enough for her to see the broken zigzags of stitches. ‘That all came out wrong. Sorry. It’s just – it would be nice to spend the day together.’

  ‘Yes, it would,’ she says. It’s on the tip of her tongue to say: Let’s make it another day, let’s get our diaries. But Apple breathes a warning into her blood. She’s not sure of the rules. She’s seen him when he’s been recognised in the street, asked for selfies; as the women who’ve asked for photos walk away from him she can see that he’s made them feel like the centre of his world, for the fifteen seconds that he’s saying hello, smiling into their phone camera lens. She needs to be careful. And not just because her mother says so.

  www.myblueblueheart.blogspot.co.uk

  2 July, 2018

  A Big Decision

  Well, my dear faithful readers, today’s post is short and sweet.

  I have a dilemma and no clue what to do about it.

  It’s an espresso of a post, short and sharp, because there’s really no other way to serve it.

  All the background I can give you is:

  I’ve never known my biological father. I’ve never wanted to. But lately, I’ve been wondering about him.

  Should I look for him? What do you think?

  I’ll give you until the 8th.

  To vote YES, Ailsa, he’s part of your history, click here.

  To vote NO, Ailsa, you’ve managed without him so far, so you don’t need him now, click here.

  73 comments

  Results:

  YES

  82%

  NO

  18%

  www.celebritynewshub.co.uk

  1 July, 2018

  Romeo and Juliet Hit the Town

  American TV and theatre star Meredith Katz has been seen out and about in
London this week with darling of British TV Sebastian Morley, who has made dark glasses his trademark look following a corneal transplant early this year. Morley and Katz are to star as Romeo and Juliet in a production of Shakespeare’s play at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August. They were snapped attending a charity auction to raise funds for a children’s hospital.

  Seb was unsuccessful in his bid to win a helicopter flight over London, but Meredith outbid all opposition to claim a bespoke, made-to-measure shirt for her new leading man. ‘He’s going to have to up his game if he wants to be seen with me,’ she quipped. ‘I know all you Brits love Marks and Spencer, but I’m looking for something with a little more – oomph.’

  Morley – who once featured in a Guess jeans advertising campaign, which won him the Rear of the Year award – laughed and responded, ‘I tried to claim I couldn’t see well enough to choose my best shirt for tonight but that excuse cut no ice with Meredith.’ The pair then got into a taxi together and headed in the direction of Chelsea, where they were later spotted talking intimately over a bottle of wine.

  2 July, 2018

  Ailsa forgot to take her phone to work. When she gets home, just after three, she finds she has nine missed calls, two texts, both from Hayley. One says, simply, ‘WTF’, and another, twenty minutes after the first was sent: ‘Finish work at 2, see you by 4’.

  Six of the missed calls are from Hayley and three are from Tamsin. There are two voicemails. One is Hayley, muttering ‘fuck’s sake’ under her breath and hanging up – she’s not a lover of leaving messages – and the other, Hayley again, says, ‘Call me when you get this, would you?’, in a voice that’s one part upset, three parts anger.