by Jenny Oliver
Anna thought of her movie-inspired leap into his arms that she’d rehearsed in her head and the idea of it seemed so preposterous that it almost made her laugh out loud, which she didn’t do, given the look on Seb’s face. ‘Where have you been?’ she said instead.
Seb ran a hand through his messy hair and then grabbed a bunch of it, looked to the ceiling and almost shouted, ‘Why did you have to make everything so complicated?’
Anna stiffened where she was standing. ‘I didn’t.’
‘Yes you did. You always make everything so hard. Why can’t you be simple? Why can’t you let life be simple?’
‘I don’t think you’d like me if I did that. I think that’s why we’re together.’
‘Oh you think so? Really. Christ, Anna, I could handle a bit of simplicity.’ He put both hands on the wooden surface and braced his body against them. ‘You know what would be my dream? A cheese fucking sandwich. Just that nothing else, just cheese. A simple cheese sandwich.’
‘OK, Seb, well you can have that any time you like.’ She made a face like he’d gone mad.
‘I can’t. I can’t have that because we only have posh cheese. We don’t have cheddar, we have brie and stilton. And I want that bread, the crap stuff that looks like polystyrene. I want crap bread and crap cheese.’
Anna didn’t say anything; Seb was pacing, small steps up and down as he listed his sandwich. She wondered if Mrs Beedle was listening out the back but she could hear the tap running, so hoped that might block his insanity out.
‘I spent the night with Melissa Hope.’ He said mid-pace. Turning to look at her with an expression of utter exhaustion.
‘You did what?’ Anna leant forward, trying to place the name and suddenly remembering some blonde girl with huge boobs from the year above them who was friends with Seb’s brother, Jamie. She angled her head slightly towards him, hoping that he might say it again and she’d hear differently if her ear was closer to his words.
‘I spent the night with Melissa Hope. I didn’t have sex with her, but I kissed her and I slept in her bed and I have no idea why I did it and I didn’t want to do it but, fuck, you made everything so complicated.’
Anna held up a hand. ‘You can’t blame me for this.’
‘I can.’ Seb nodded helplessly. ‘I can because this isn’t me. I don’t do this. I live a normal, simple fucking cheese sandwich life and now suddenly I’m waking up in the bed of the girl who shagged the whole rowing team at school.’
‘She works in the pub sometimes, doesn’t she?’ Anna said.
‘So?’ Seb had his hand back raking through his hair, and turned to glare at her.
‘Nothing.’ Anna shook her head, ‘It just means I have to see her, that’s all.’
‘That’s all? That’s all you can think about. That you’ll have to see her. Anna… I have slept in the bed of someone else when we are meant to be getting married. Don’t you think this is odd? Don’t you think you’re missing the point?’
She took a step closer from where she was standing and bit her lip, looking at him in his dishevelled clothes. ‘Don’t you think maybe I’m trying to miss the point?’
‘See—’ He held his arms out wide, ‘See that’s exactly my point. Fucking complicated. Fucking complicated,’ he said again and turned around and stalked away. He got as far as the doorway, rested one hand on the frame and turned around to look at her. ‘I—’ He started, then swallowed. ‘I was really drunk. I think I just wanted a bed to lie down in. But I’m sorry. I’m really angry, but I’m sorry.’
Anna didn’t reply, just ran her tongue over her lips. She pushed her shoulders back and raised her chin just a fraction, her feet defaulting to third position almost as if locking her armour into place. Say you’re sorry, a voice inside her said. But then another, much more powerful one said, Better to stay aloof, darling. Never apologise, never explain. It keeps you one step ahead. It’s always worked for me. Aloof poise, there’s no way to better it. If no one can break you, Anna, then they can’t hurt you. Do you understand?
As Seb strode out and his figure faded into the mist, Anna found herself suddenly braced over the edge of the chest she’d just polished, her forearms on the cool mahogany, her head bent over, taking deep breaths that when she exhaled fogged up the shiny surface so she couldn’t see her reflection.
When had it worked for her mother? was all she could think. What example did she have? Her father had had an affair and she’d never forgiven him. Now she dated young Spanish men and had too much Botox. His rejection was still a parasite eating away at her from the inside out. Aloof. Anna wondered if, as she watched the mist of her breath disappearing, aloof just meant bottling everything up. Her mother was still champing for revenge twenty years later.
When she stood up straight, Anna felt Mrs Beedle walk out of the stockroom, heard her put fresh mugs of tea down on the counter and then come to stand next to her. After a second she heard her say, ‘Why don’t you help me?’ Then she nudged a block of sandpaper in Anna’s direction like you might with a stray cat and a saucer of milk.
Anna felt herself stare at it for a second, her eyes blurring in and out of focus then, without telling them to, she felt her fingers inch forward to trace over the rough grain of the paper, felt the shuddering rasp of her nails as they grazed over it. Picking it up, she felt the solid weight in her hands and, for a moment, forgot about the conversation seconds before.
Mrs Beedle didn’t say anything else, just went back to the chest and began rhythmically sanding, as Anna took a few tentative, trance-like steps forward. Once there, she rested her hip on the edge of the chest and, bending her knees slightly, took one downward swipe with the sandpaper, watching the dust sprinkle satisfyingly to the floor. Then she changed her grip on the block so she had it firm and could really apply some pressure and started to really rub the bloody chest of drawers, sanding it down so that the layers of old paint and varnish in the grooves disappeared and nothing but bare, beautiful oak was left behind.
They worked together on it silently, on the framework and the drawers until the whole thing had been stripped back and there was barely a trace of paint. The air swirled with balls of paint dust like tumbleweed and there was a smell like burning from the sanded wood. Great drops of sweat fell from Anna’s forehead like she was in a Bikram yoga class and it felt like she was purging everything from inside her. As she stood up, her back felt like it might snap in two. It was like the feeling after a particularly gruelling session with Madame LaRoche. Down through the ball of your foot, and lift your arabesque higher, Anna, up toward the sky from your hip socket, higher, into pencheé. This leg pushes the body down. It cannot do it by itself, Anna. OK, no, it’s not right, back to the barre.
Mrs Beedle straightened her back and took her paint-dusted glasses off to give them a wipe on an old rag. ‘Very nice. Good work. Good for someone who once didn’t want to chip their nail varnish.’
Anna scoffed. ‘I don’t mind about my nails.’
Mrs Beedle raised a disbelieving brow and swiped a hand over the surface of the roughened wood. ‘What a beauty. What a beauty they were hiding.’
Anna helped her put the drawers back in and they both stood and stared at it, ‘Someone didn’t know what they had, did they?’ Anna said in the end.
‘No. No they didn’t, which is often the case with the world.’ Mrs Beedle went over to the counter and touched the side of her mug to see if, by some miracle, the tea had remained hot. ‘I’m going to microwave this, do you want me to do yours?’
Anna shook her head. Mrs Beedle paused before she went out the back. ‘You did well, it looks good.’
‘I don’t think my side is as good as yours.’
‘That was a compliment, Anna. You should just accept it.’
‘Well I just…’ She shrugged, embarrassed. ‘I think I was more enthusiastic than skilled.’ She shook her head. ‘Look, here‒’ She pointed to a bit where the paint was deep in the groove still. ‘I don’t think I�
��m very good at it.’
As Mrs Beedle swept through the curtain, she said in a voice just loud enough for Anna to think she may have misheard, ‘You were good enough, Anna.’ And Anna felt herself stiffen in surprise at how much the sentence seemed to affect her. ‘Now go home.’
Chapter Eleven
But Anna couldn’t go home. The idea of it made her feel quite ill. She had images of Seb shouting in the shop, the wild panic in his eyes at his own behaviour, the feeling that she always pushed until something bad happened, the mental pictures of him touching some other woman’s body like the cutaways in Nine and Half Weeks ‒ all breathy, soft-focus and intense ‒ and she had to shake her head, like a dog with fleas, to make it all go away.
As the afternoon had worn on, the mist had started to lift, but something else was taking its place, a hanging humidity that left her skin feeling moist. When she pushed her hair off her face it stayed there, tiny droplets of moisture slicking it into place. The square was deserted, too hot for anyone to even sit outside the cafes. Rachel’s bakery was closed, as was the bistro, and the gift shop was just turning over its closed sign.
Paris, Milan, New York, Nettleton. She paused in front of the T-shirt in the window. They had no problem believing Nettleton was as good as New York.
She didn’t stop walking when she got to her hatchback, instead she took the alleyway down the side of Dapper, a clothes shop that had a three -piece suit in the window, complete with riding crop and top hat, the arm of the sleeve draped around a mannequin wearing a cream-and-blue flowered blouse, matching knee-length skirt and wide brimmed hat. A banner with, Just right for Ascot had been stretched across the window. At the end of the alley was a small cottage-lined road that forked one way into more houses, and the other way towards the fields. Instinctively, she went right. The way she had gone for years after school, down the road, past a cluster of apple trees where Hermione claimed to have lost her virginity, over a wooden fence with the same Keep Out Private Property sign dangling off an electrical tag that had always been there and into a field that stretched out with raspberries as far as the eye could see. What felt like miles and miles of bushes with their little red fruits glistening, plump in the heavy humid air.
It was a Pick Your Own field and Anna and Hermione had worked there one summer term, every afternoon after school for a week, when they were about nine. Mr Milton had paid them in fruit and they’d eaten so many raspberries that Anna puked bright-red sick all over herself. She’d arrived home looking like Carrie and everyone had laughed when she’d pretended she was dying some grizzly death.
Now she walked through the canes of green leaves, plucking the odd fat fruit and eating it without thinking, walked knowing exactly the route, finding it strange that her school bag wasn’t on her shoulder and her shoes weren’t Doc Martins and her clothes weren’t her school uniform ‒ the marl-grey sweatshirt and dark-grey worsted wool skirt she had to wear.
She trudged on and on, midges collecting in clouds around her head, her ankles itching from patches of long grass, her skin slick from the cloying warmth. She thought about Seb, about the look on his face in the doorway, about New York, about sitting on the floor in their Bermondsey apartment and sobbing when they had realised how much debt they were in, the humiliation of calling everyone to let them know the wedding was postponed, of sitting for hours on the phone to the administrators getting more and more frustrated and shouting until a woman on the other end cut her off, of hearing her redundancy speech and walking out of her job with all her things from her desk crammed into her Michael Kors tote, a spider plant trailing over the edge, of leaving her scrap book on the bin and not looking back, of standing in the shower and watching the water as it rolled off her, knowing then that the world that she had constructed was built on sticks. It was her own personal Kerplunk, and too many had been pulled out for her to save it. She had been living on sticks since the day her mum had driven her from Nettleton and her dad had leant in through the window and said, ‘No matter what, I lov—’ but her mum had floored the accelerator so he’d had to stop mid-sentence and jump back or else face decapitation. And her mum had said, ‘Love? Useless bugger doesn’t know the meaning of the word. The only person he loves, Anna, is himself.’
Ahead of her, through the rows of raspberries, she could see the sky start to change before her eyes, the fuzzy white tendrils of mist left over from the day were getting heavier ‒ clumping together like marshmallows. The heavy blue of the sky was darkening, like dirty paint-water that eventually always turns grey. The smell in the air was changing, from hot and sticky like warm bread to sharp and tangy, like fresh-cut grass and dew in the morning. A flock of black birds darted up from among the bushes and flew away en masse, deserting the field. Anna pushed her hair back from her head and paused for a moment, knowing exactly what was coming. Knowing that in a second there would be a crash and she would be engulfed in a wall of rain and she would be standing in the middle of a field with as much distance behind her as in front of her. She had no raincoat, no umbrella, no cafe to dart into. She was going to get wet.
And then someone tipped over a bucket in the sky.
Rain cascaded in sheets all around her, shaking the little raspberries off their stalks, shuddering leaves, pounding on the dry, cracked earth at her feet, and pouring down her face like tears. She stopped and put her head back and shut her eyes and let herself get soaked. Soaked until her feet were sloshing in their shoes and her clothes were stuck to her body and her hair clumped and dripped water down her back.
Then she ran. Her feet were squelching so she took off her shoes and ran bare feet, splashing through the pools of mud, jumping from the thunder. Ran so the wet earth flicked up on her calves and pushed up through her toes, ran with her arm outstretched so it flicked the dancing leaves, ran so the water blinded her eyes and blurred everything ahead of her.
At the far gate she climbed up the now somewhat more impressive metal gate that kept intruders out better than the one she’d scaled to get into the field. Her hands slipped as she tried to straddle the top rung, wobbling precariously, and then she stumbled down half of it to the other side, landing in an ungainly heap. When she stood up, she saw her clothes were all muddy and her knee grazed. Swiping the blood away, she darted across the road, up the wonky path and sheltered under the porch of the house that she had grown up in. The old cherry-red Mercedes in the drive, the unexpected rain bouncing off its beautifully waxed exterior. She hadn’t been here for years. It took her a second to summon the courage to ring the bell.
‘Hang on!’ She heard after so long had passed that she’d assumed no one was home. ‘Anna!’ Her dad answered the door in his dressing gown.
‘Who is it, Patrick?’ She heard Hermione call.
‘Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me. It’s the middle of the afternoon.’ Anna shook her head, and took a step back.
‘Anna, wait, come in. It’s pouring.’ Her dad beckoned for her to come closer.
‘No shit.’ She yelled, shaking her head and backing out into the deluge.
She marched away through the warm rain that bubbled now in puddles on the street and, blocking her ears to her dad’s shouts, wondered where the hell she was going to go. She wasn’t sitting around with those two, post-coital, in their dressing gowns. And there was no way she could get back over that fence.
The rain lashed warm fat droplets as she put her head down and marched, her knee stinging as the water rolled over the cut. The road ahead looked endless.
‘Anna?’ She heard a female voice say behind her. ‘Anna, what are you doing here? Are you OK?’
Anna turned to see Rachel cycling up the road, a big, red waterproof cape on that covered practically the whole bike as well as herself.
‘You look like Little Red Riding Hood,’ Anna said, because they were the only words that would come to mind.
Rachel laughed, looking down at herself in the pouring rain. ‘I suppose I do.’ Then as she hopped off her bike and cr
ossed in front of Anna to open the gate to her wisteria-draped cottage, she said, ‘You’re soaked. Do you want to come in?’
Anna paused, looked from Rachel standing with her bike to the beautiful white cottage with a tabby cat sitting in the window and the huge purple flowers bunched like big, juicy grapes over the front door and she realised suddenly that it wasn’t Hermione that she had got the job picking raspberries with, it was Rachel. And she hadn’t gone to her own house, but here, to Rachel’s parents’, that was why no one had got cross with her about the raspberry juice because Rachel’s mum had taken her clothes and washed and dried them before she’d gone home. It was Rachel’s mum who’d laughed at her Carrie impression. And as the tumble dryer spun, Anna had sat in Rachel’s dressing gown while Rachel’s mum had laid out a Victoria Sponge, plump with cream and jam and dusted with icing sugar, and home-made lemonade that clinked with ice cubes as it was taken out of the fridge. When the big chunks of lemon had tumbled into her glass, and she had watched as Rachel had heaped in a teaspoon of sugar, Anna had said with a touch of panic, I’m not allowed sugar. I can’t have it, it’s part of my training. Rachel’s mum had looked at her like she’d never felt so sorry for someone and Anna had tried to smile. Without saying anything, she’d swapped the lemonade for a glass of tap water and then sliced the smallest sliver of Victoria Sponge, rested her hand on Anna’s shoulder and said, I reckon this won’t do too much harm. When Anna had eyed it nervously, Rachel’s mum had sat down and cut a massive slice for herself, winked at Anna and said, Don’t worry, we won’t tell, will we, Rache?
But, after Anna had left for London and only come back to Nettleton for holidays, she had found herself cutting all ties to Rachel for exactly that reason ‒ because she held nothing for her except memories of carefree days. She couldn’t come back to stay with the father she resented, brittle and armoured up from the EBC School and still frolic in fields or sit on high stools and drink lemonade and eat Victoria Sponge. She couldn’t even eat carbs by that point. It was all too much, all too confusing, too much swirling around in her brain. So she had just severed their friendship without a word. She hadn’t even sent a card when Rachel’s mum had died.