by Danny King
One person could do it all at a push, as indeed I had done on a number of occasions when Godfrey’s sulks had become too unbearable to share a car with, but I would be damned if I was going to let him off the hook yet again when I had better things to be doing tomorrow evening myself. A trip to Boston meant I’d be late home as it was. I wasn’t about to make myself even later just because Godfrey didn’t want to miss Newsround.
“Yes Godfrey, I want you to come as well. I’m not doing it all on my own again tomorrow and no arguments, so make sure you’re here by nine and wearing a suit.”
“This is unbelievable!”
“No Godfrey, this is not unbelievable, this is part of your job description.”
“I don’t think so, Andrew. You show me where it say in my contract that I have to come in half an hour early to go to Boston.”
“Godfrey…”
“I’ll tell you what, let’s flip for it; heads or tails?”
“No, that doesn’t…”
“Fine, I’ll call. Heads. [flip] There, look see, I don’t have to go.”
Needless to say, this argument went on all afternoon and equally needless to say, Godfrey didn’t turn up for work the next morning. I waited until ten o’clock in an effort to catch him sneaking in late when he thought I might’ve already set off but Godfrey didn’t show up at all.
I tried his mobile, to no avail, and even thought about digging out his address but Elenor told me that wouldn’t do any good.
“He’s got a job interview this morning,” she told me. “Didn’t he tell you?”
“No.”
“Probably thought he could get away with it while you were on park review and not have to book it off as holiday,” she grassed.
“The little bastard. Why couldn’t he have just told me yesterday instead of letting me sit here like a duck egg half the morning making myself even later?” I fumed, looking at my watch and screaming inside.
“Don’t know, wanker ain’t he?” Elenor speculated then added; “Look, do you want me to come with you? I can use a camera and take notes just as good as that virgin.”
As much as I needed the help, I wasn’t exactly bowled over by the idea. Did I really want to spend a whole day in a car with Elenor and all the baggage that came with that situation? If you’d asked me a few months ago I would’ve probably looped-the-loop but now the idea just left me cold.
On the other hand, I did need someone’s assistance if I was to get back home before nightfall and one phone call aside Elenor and I had never really gotten the chance to clear the air, so I figured I could kill two birds with one stone, although knowing how mischievous Elenor could be at times I was equally aware that I could be letting myself in for a day from hell.
But then I thought, hang on a minute, what am I talking about? A day from hell was waiting in the hospital as doctors operated on your wife to discover the extent of her cancer. A day from hell was trying to pick her up after she’d been told she would never fulfil her dream of motherhood. A day from hell was every day you had to wait to find out if the chemotherapy was working.
Sitting in a car for a few hours with a flirtatious young colleague I was foolish enough to once lust after didn’t even come close.
“Okay Elenor, you’re on. Grab some petty cash from accounts and the digital camera and I’ll meet you downstairs.”
*
The journey to Boston was encouragingly uneventful. We talked about work and the telly and then about Godfrey’s mystery job interview, and even a little about Sally, then Elenor announced the thing we needed was music and spent the rest of the journey playing with the radio and flipping from station to station every time a song came on that she didn’t like. Which was every other song.
After a brief bite and a cup of tea on the A16, we found the caravan park a little after two o’clock and got to work.
The manager was a guy called Chris who was so full of himself that I wondered how he got into his shoes. He bored me to pieces about his life and expanded every point almost beyond comprehension until I was ready to uppercut all six of his chins.
“… because the thing you have to understand about natural drainage is…”
“Actually Chris, can I stop you there?” I finally interrupted. “That’s absolutely tons and tons of information and I’ve got to get on.”
“No, can I just make this last point?”
“Seriously Chris, that’s more than I could use over four articles.”
“It’s an important point young man,” he exclaimed, incredulous at being stopped in full flow at such a crucial juncture.
“Nevertheless, I’ve really got enough,” I told him, folding my notepad to illustrate this fact.
Chris wasn’t to be deterred and carried on regardless, as if the meat of his point would somehow rekindle my interest and cause me to phone the repro house to “stop the presses”. Alas, there wasn’t any meat to his point. In fact, he barely had a point. He just wanted to moan about his job and savour the experience of having someone listen to him for a change.
“… because it doesn’t do itself, you know…” he was saying, as he hung onto my elbow and followed me outside.
“Yes yes I understand. Thank you. Thanks very much, that’s great.” I continued to try to repel him until I spotted Elenor halfway down the park taking snaps of a couple of elderly holidaymakers.
I caught her attention with a wave and pointed to my watch to ask her how much more she had to do but Elenor just came bounding over with girlish enthusiasm. I wondered if she’d still be bounding after another seventy of these park reviews.
“I was just talking to those people,” she informed me, cutting right across Chris’s diatribe as if he wasn’t even there. “They’ve been coming here for sixteen years. They must be mad.”
Something had changed and it took me a moment to realise what. Chris had stopped talking. I turned around to double-check he hadn’t fallen into one of his drainage sink holes and saw that he’d completely clammed up in the presence of my vibrant young colleague. I took the opportunity to thank him once more in order to draw a line under our acquaintance but Chris just mumbled something about it all being part of the job as he tasted Elenor with his eyes.
“One thing I haven’t got is any interiors. The old lady didn’t want to invite me in because her caravan was a bit of a mess and I can’t seem to find anyone else at home,” Elenor explained.
I asked Chris if he had any vacant caravans we could look inside and he sorted us out with a set of keys. “Pitch 38, half way down near the wash hut,” he said, barely able to look up in case he accidentally caught Elenor’s eye. “I have to get on, just bring them back when you’re finished.”
“God, what a weirdo!” Elenor remarked, before we were barely out of Chris’s office. I wondered if she’d deliberately wanted him to hear or if she’d simply not cared before deciding it amounted to pretty much the same thing. She continued to run Chris down as we made our way over to pitch 38 and let ourselves in to look around.
The caravan was a standard four-berth job with kitchen, main bedroom and fold-down fixtures and fittings and I took the camera from Elenor and took over the snapping, seeing as I knew what needed to be snapped.
I’d just folded back the little bathroom door and was taking a photograph of the chemical toilet when Elenor called me from the bedroom. “Andrew, come in here a moment. Bring the camera.”
“Hold on a sec,” I replied, filling the bathroom with flashes before pulling closed the door again and making my way through to the bedroom.
When I got there, I could scarcely believe my eyes.
Elenor had stripped down to just her bra and thong and was lying on the bed, trailing her fingers up and down the length of her body.
“Want to take a couple of pictures of me?” she giggled, pulling down one of her cups to flash me a nipple. “Or do you just want to join in right away?”
Some people probably get these sorts of invitations every day
; rock stars, film stars, important politicians and casting directors, but for me this was a first and it struck me momentarily dumb. Not because I was considering it, please understand, but simply because my reactions had no precedent to go to and were left fumbling in the dark as to the proper etiquette of such a situation.
Elenor must’ve taken my hesitation as deliberation because she spooned an extra layer on where it wasn’t needed and told me no one would ever know, although I was fairly confident the news would somehow filter its way back to Godfrey.
“Put your clothes on Elenor and stop mucking around,” I finally replied, gifting her a get-out to preserve her feelings.
But Elenor didn’t want to take it. Much like Chris, she seemed to think if she pressed hard enough she could bring me around and leapt from the bed and stood in front of the door to bar my exit.
“Oh no you don’t. I know what you want and I’m not going to let you leave until you’ve had it,” she smouldered. “Now kiss me.” She presented me with a pair of pre-puckered lips and closed one of her eyes, but the two-dimensional version of Andrew Nolan didn’t fancy her any more than the three-dimensional version had.
“Elenor seriously, we haven’t got time for this,” I replied, and inserted another get-out for her. “So wind me up when we’re back at the office, but let’s just get this done and go home, shall we?”
“This is no wind up,” she smiled, before attempting to melt around my waist, but I jumped back out of her arms and told her to pack it in.
“No Elenor, no. I don’t want to,” I insisted, sharpening Elenor’s eye and tightening her lips.
“Don’t want to! You don’t want to!” she steamed. “You wanted to back at the Christmas party though didn’t you?”
I thought about lying but figured this would only stir the pot some more so I told her that that was then, this was now.
“You’re just changing your mind? Well you can’t do that,” she spat, taking a big step into my face.
“Elenor. Elenor, please calm down,” I implored her, rapidly running out of room in which to retreat.
“Calm down? Calm down? You bastard! Call yourself a man?” she growled, scrambling across the bed after me, while keeping herself between me and the door at all time. “You’re not a man, you’re just like Godfrey.”
“Elenor, this is…”
“I don’t care. I don’t care at all. What are you going to do? Are you going to run away and cry? ‘Boo-hoo-hoo, the little girl frightened me’,” she mocked, snapping her bra clasp with one hand so that it fell to the floor. “Or are you going to get me on that bed and show me what sort of a man you really are.”
With this, she launched at me, pinned me to the wall and tried to rape a kiss out of me. I did all I could to untangle myself from her but she had more arms than Ganesh and a couple of them almost made it into my trousers.
“NO!” I shouted, pushing her back onto the bed but falling on top of her when she pulled me off my balance. “I’m married,” I told her, but this cut little ice with Elenor.
“You were married back in January and your wife wouldn’t have known then and she won’t know now, so come on, just fuck me. Fuck me, fuck me! Do it now, I know you want to,” she bucked, wrapping her legs around my waist and pounding back against my loins.
I was finally all out of get-outs and squeezed her wrist until she squeaked with pain. Her hold loosened just long enough for me to rip myself from her arms and once I was free I hurled myself through the door and out of the caravan into daylight. I half-expected a witness or two to be waiting for me, but there was no one to note the state of my appearance, so I quickly pulled myself together and straightened my clothes before fat Chris blundered by.
Once respectable, I sucked in a few deep breaths to try and calm my jitters and took stock of what had just happened.
Elenor had lost it. Big time, as it turned out. That was the long and the short of it. Elenor had lost it…
… and it had all been my fault.
I’d started this whole sorry saga and it had ballooned into a nightmare. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t gone through with it at Christmas or that it took two to tango or whatever other excuse I could think of. All that mattered was that Elenor had believed I was there for the taking because at some point I had led her to believe this. Everything else was immaterial.
What a mess!
Any second now she was going to come through that door kicking and screaming all over again and I didn’t know what to do. I’d calm her and I’d talk to her and I’d reason with her but there were going to be consequences from this day’s work, of that I was in no doubt.
And this was the last thing Sally needed. All her incredible progress and all her hard work could be undone in one foul and immensely foolish swoop. And next to everything else that was running around in circles inside my panic-stricken brain that was the one thing that really terrified me.
I had to make Elenor understand that this was no longer about me. I had to go back in there and speak to her. I mean, I knew I had to do that anyway. I couldn’t exactly just drive off and leave her in the middle of Lincolnshire. No, I had to bite the bullet, grab the bull by the horns, grasp the nettle, seize the day and…
Unfortunately, before I could do any of those things, a blur of hair and colour came bursting out of the caravan and sprinted past me in the direction of the woods. She left me for dead (much as I would’ve loved to have done for her) and reached the trees before I got my feet moving.
“Elenor, wait!” I called after her, locking my sights onto her red top and tracking her as she weaved her way through the shadows of the trees. But Elenor didn’t wait. She just kept on running, through the bracken and around the maze of leaves and branches, desperate to put as much distance between herself and me as she could. “Elenor please,” I called again, but Elenor only slowed when she couldn’t find a way through the thickening undergrowth and only then to try another route.
At first, I thought she was just running away to inconvenience me. You know, a kind of vindictive ploy to delay our departure and make me even later home, but then I heard a sound that stopped me in my tracks – it was the sound of Elenor crying. I faltered for one indecisive moment then redoubled my efforts to catch up with her.
“Elenor wait, Elenor!” I shouted, charging through the brush and pleading with her to stop.
“Go away,” she cried back weakly.
“Please Elenor, wait.”
A branch whipped me in the face and I slipped on ditches, tripped over roots and ran until my shoes were full of thorns, but still Elenor wouldn’t stop. She’d had the foresight to wear trainers, so she was better equipped for the terrain, but Elenor was running blind, which gave me the tactical edge. This paid off when Elenor suddenly came across a rusty old barbed wire fence. She turned and followed it along as far as she could go, but then an enormous prickly shrub barred further progress so that I had her cornered. That was when she decided to go through the fence.
I guess Elenor must’ve had about as much practice of going through barbed wire fences as I’d had of fending off rampant nymphomaniacs because she snared herself halfway through and her sobs quickly turned into yelps as the spurs dug into her skin.
“Ow-uh-uh-uh,” I heard her hollering as I caught up.
She’d all but given up trying to yank herself free by the time I reached her and was now crying with pain as she gored herself on rusty wire.
“Help me,” she wept, her voice quaking with misery.
“Hold still, Elenor. Just hold still, I’m going to get you out,” I told her. I took a moment to quickly assess where she was stuck, then put my foot on the middle strand and pulled on the top strand.
“Ow! Ow! Ow!” Elenor blubbed as she rubbed against the barbs.
Her top was still caught so that when she tried to back out, she pulled herself into the spikes all over again. I told her to keep still and picked her top free until she could safely extract herself, but then her
hair and her skirt got caught and it took a little bit more picking until Elenor was finally free.
She stumbled back the moment she was able to and I thought she was going to run off all over again, but instead she just stood there shuddering and nursing her cuts, the picture of human misery.
“Elenor, I’m so so sorry,” I said, reluctant to approach her in case I freaked her into bolting again. “Really I am, please, let’s just talk a moment.”
I found some napkins in my pocket and offered them to her and she took them and blew her nose and dabbed her cuts.
“This is all my fault,” I told her. “And I should never have let it come to this, but…” I swallowed hard, “back around Christmas I really thought I wanted you. And I allowed myself to get carried away with the idea. So much so that for one insane moment I forgot I was married.”
I edged a little closer and Elenor held her ground.
“But that would’ve been wrong. So so very wrong, because I love my wife very much and that would’ve destroyed everything. Please, I hope you see. I was such an idiot. Such a dickhead.”
Elenor sniffed.
“I just feel really silly,” she warbled, her shoulders now barely six inches apart.
“Don’t. God don’t. You have nothing to feel silly about,” I reassured her, closing to within a couple of feet if her now. “If anyone should feel silly, it’s me.”
“I’m embarrassed,” she sniffed, her mouth a perfect down-turned crescent.
“Embarrassed? What about? I’m the one who’s embarrassed,” I insisted. “I’m the one who chickened out and ran away if you remember. If anyone should be embarrassed, it should be me. What a wally I am! How boring!”
I placed my hands on Elenor’s arms and she instantly fell into my chest. I slipped my arms around her gently and tried not to fling her back into the barbed wire when I felt a load of snot trickle down the back of my neck.
“There there, let it all out,” I whispered.
“I’m so unhappy,” she suddenly blubbed. “Nobody likes me.”