by Jan Ruth
When Kate stood to go and order more drinks, the books she’d bought were nudged out of their brown paper bag and Al inclined his head sideways to have a look. He watched her head over to the bar. Nice legs, from what he could see. She was wearing pale denims with a long, tunic style top and flat boots. The ensemble would make a lot of women look frumpy but Kate had an air of confidence about her, something which broke through the thin veneer of fashion and said, this is me, like it or lump it.
She placed two drinks down then gave him a rather critical look.
‘Well, do you approve?’
‘Yeah… very nice. I always liked blue.’
‘What? The books. You’ve had them out of the bag,’ she said, pointing.
‘Oh.’
‘Well?’
‘I didn’t really take them in, I was watching you,’ he said, then began to tell her about Maisie’s idea, about the piles of manuscripts gathering dust and animal hair at Chathill. He wouldn’t put it past George to set fire to them, which made him feel incredibly anxious.
‘I need to get them onto a computer.’
‘You’ll need a scanner for that,’ she said, then studied him over the rim of her wine glass. ‘Do you want me to do it? I can put them on a disc or a memory stick, and then you can load the books onto your new laptop.’
‘Really? That would be amazing,’ he said, wondering what she was talking about. She laughed though, and it altered her whole face, made her seem vibrant with colour.
‘So, what kind of books are they?’
‘Mine? They’re a spoof series about a private detective, but he gets easily distracted by women and, well he never really solves anything.’
‘Tell me about him.’
Encouraged, he began to tell her about Jim Silver. The conversation mostly lasted through lunch and a shared dessert, and he liked the way he was able to hold her attention, even when the sticky toffee pudding had gone.
‘Should I rewrite the whole thing and make them current?’
‘Absolutely not.’
‘Niche?’
‘Absolutely.’
Two hours later they left the pub to find it already getting dark, despite it only being mid-afternoon. It added an unwelcome misery to the house clearing job but Kate said it was good, the neighbours couldn’t nosy what was going on. By the time they’d loaded the car with all the bags and he’d dropped Kate back at Chathill, it was later than he’d planned. He climbed out of the passenger side, and she left the engine running, collected up her handbag and they collided on the changeover. He caught hold of her arms briefly and she offered a hurried cheek-to-cheek embrace. Her hair had a perfume like musky rain.
‘Thanks, Al. I really appreciate you doing this.’
It was only seconds, like two heart beats, and then she was gone, running over the puddles into the house. Al adjusted the driver’s seat and looked through the rear view mirror at the considerable belongings of a dead cyclist squashed against the windows.
A steady drizzle smeared the car windscreen.
Chapter Six
Al.
The drive to Delamere was miserable, that slow creep towards November darkness, the wind and rain stripping the last of the old leaves from the trees. He hit the rush hour as well, and the traffic slowed to a crawl. One or two of the drivers in the middle lane were clearly on mobile phones, calling home.
Al used to do that, when he used to have a home and when someone was expecting him, making a meal maybe or the children were playing up. He called Jo.
‘Where the hell are you?’ she snapped.
‘Stuck in a jam, sorry.’
He could feel the animosity down the phone. She never used to be like this, it must be her raging hormones and then she probably felt insecure, being pregnant and everything, but he was sure he could fix most of that.
‘Look, let’s go out for dinner, I’ll tell you when I’m a couple of minutes away, run down and meet me.’
‘We can’t talk about this in a public place!’
The line of cars suddenly lurched forward and a bin liner full of inner tubes and pedals hit the back of his head. Al swore and dropped the phone into his lap, and for a while he could hear Jo shouting at his genitals, until the phone finally slid into the footwell. A whole heap of things balanced on the back seat keeled over into the passenger side, some of it still muddy.
Both charity shops in the village had been long since closed of course, one of them with a clear sign, ‘Do NOT leave items on the step outside’. Some brave fool had done just that, but he couldn’t leave a whole car load could he? It felt disrespectful, and Kate had been so grateful to him for shifting it all. Maybe he could store it in Jo’s garage for a while. And then there was Kate’s enthusiasm over the boxes of manuscripts in his room and the idea of sorting and scanning them seemed to present something of a pleasurable job to her.
‘Do you mind if I make a start?’
‘Help yourself.’
His mind on Jim Silver, he drove round to Jo’s flat, and she must have been watching for him because she gave him no chance to locate his phone and call her first to warn her. She opened the passenger door and looked at the bulging contents with a blank expression. It didn’t smell too good either. Lots of rubber. Before he could open his mouth, she slammed the door and walked purposefully back across the car park leaving a subtle trail of Jo Malone scent. Al switched the engine off and made after her.
Inside the flat, the atmosphere was strange, charged with some invisible fear. She’d left the door open but she had her back to him and her head was bowed in one of those classic ‘don’t touch me’ poses. But Jo wasn’t really like that, it was one of the reasons he’d been so attracted to her, her quiet independence, and she’d never displayed drama queen tendencies. Helen held the on-going award for that.
‘Jo?’ He touched the back of her arm and to his immense relief, she turned into him and he could hold her properly. ‘I’m sorry about the car being full of tyres and pumps and… stuff,’ he said into her hair and started to explain about Greg, but she pushed him away and passed a hand across her eyes.
‘Al, just… I need to tell you something, and I need to tell you before I bottle out.’
She steered him to the sofa and they sat next to each other, holding hands. It felt like a Victorian drama and he didn’t like the way she gave him the full eye contact. She looked especially pretty, dressed for a dinner he hadn’t booked and she hadn’t wanted to go to. Her grey eyes were dull and stormy.
‘Right. Al.’ She swallowed and looked down at their hands. ‘Thing is, I don’t want a baby right now.’
A beat.
‘Marry me.’
There was a deadly silence, a yawning chasm of nothing, before she sighed. ‘Oh, Al. Are you hearing me? I don’t want marriage and children.’
It took several seconds to digest this, mostly because it was incomprehensible that a fit healthy woman in her early thirties who was childless, and who had a man willing to marry her and take care of both her and the child, actually didn’t want any of it. He must have looked gormless, he knew he felt it.
‘Look, I’ve had some time to think,’ she said. ‘I’m really, really sorry and I know you would be right there for me, but it’s just not going to work.’
‘What’s not going to work? Why?’
‘Why?’ She almost rolled her eyes, but then took several deep breaths and squeezed his hands instead. ‘When I met you, I was so pleased that you had a family, a grown-up family that no longer needed you. We could just be a couple.’
‘I see.’
She searched his eyes for a moment. ‘You don’t though, do you? Not really. Children were never on my agenda, you must have sensed that. I’m surprised they are still on yours!’
The tension shifted up a gear. In truth, he was slightly wrong-footed by her. Her perception of all matters emotional pierced his bubble like a heat- seeking missile, straight to tar
get with a few well-chosen words. There was no hysteria and no sugar-coating. Snatches of Kate’s conversation came back into his head, but Al had no need to remind himself. Jo was far too astute to be flattered by a marriage proposal. The female race had changed quite a lot since 1972.
‘I thought we discussed it all last night?’ he said.
She shook her head slightly. ‘You did all the talking, remember? All about your family and how it was the best years of your life.’
‘I was on a high.’
‘I know, and I didn’t want to-’
‘What?’
‘I was taken aback by your reaction,’ she said slowly, carefully.
‘Oh, which one was that? The caring one? Or the excited one?’
She got up from the sofa and went into the tiny kitchen. After a moment, Al realised she was crying. It was a silent affair and certainly not manufactured for his benefit. She turned to face him, and the cold realisation of what he saw there, had his insides looping. This was it, the final countdown to death and destruction. His voice came out as if it belonged to someone else.
‘Jo… please. Don’t do anything rash. You’ll regret it forever.’
‘I’m sorry, Al. I’m sorry, but I’m booking a termination. I shouldn’t have told you anything should I? I should have just dealt with it myself. I could have saved you all this hurt, and myself all this anguish!’ She crossed to the worktop where there was an open bottle of wine and sloshed some of it into a large glass. ‘You just want to turn the clock back. You don’t want me, you just want a baby.’
‘I want both of you!’
She spun round at this, her eyes flashing. ‘But I don’t want to be a wife and I certainly don’t want to be a mother! For chrissakes, Al, I can’t say it in any other way!’
She yelled all of this, then downed most of the wine before he snatched the glass from her and slung what was left of the contents haphazardly down the sink. He upended the bottle as well for good measure. It felt better to be doing something physical, something which expressed how he felt because the blockage in his throat would not allow anything coherent to be voiced. He was astonished to see her lip trembling.
On the face of it, Jo came across as a tough cookie and played hard at work in a male-dominated arena, but emotionally she was a mass of contradictions to Al. Despite the fact that she took no shit at work and drew very hard lines on herself, she was always soft and loving towards him and he always took the lead in the bedroom. It was maybe the one area of her life where she was prepared to be submissive.
She told him she loved him frequently. He used to think she was a thoroughly modern woman who could have it all, but he hadn’t factored in that perhaps she didn’t actually want it all. She was maybe too intelligent to realise that having it all meant a compromise somewhere, but that was where Al came in, and until this evening he’d been sure of the goalposts.
‘I’m so sorry, I know I’m hurting you,’ she said.
He allowed himself to be steered back to the sofa again, adding to the sure knowledge that he had no control over the situation at all. His feelings, his grand gesture and the respect he felt for her as the bearer of life, held no weight whatsoever. She placed her hands around his face, channelling his full attention.
‘I know you don’t love me,’ she said, almost in a whisper but the certainty of it, of her conviction, made him shudder inside.
‘Of course I love you!’
‘I know you don’t love me, because you are still in love with your ex-wife.’
She kissed his silent lips, and then she kissed her way through the tears on his face until he stopped her, dragged her hands away and held her wrists.
‘Jo, I’m begging you. Please don’t have an abortion.’
*
He didn’t feel like staying over. Once she’d promised not to do anything rash, he wanted to be alone with his miserable thoughts. She was only a few days gone, so that meant he had time on his side. On the other hand, so did she; at least twelve weeks to book a no-questions-asked termination in a private clinic. That would take them beyond Christmas.
He sat in the cold car for a while, shivering and desperate to light a cigarette, but he found some sweets in the glove compartment and managed to resist. On the drive back to Chathill, his mobile rang somewhere under the seat. Thinking, or maybe hoping it was Jo, he pulled over and scrabbled around in the dark.
It was Helen, in a bad mood.
‘At last! Where the hell are you? Do you not realise that your solicitor is trying to get hold of you? I’ve just been to the house and picked up two letters from Jones and Jones, one of them weeks old with a footprint on it. I’ve got them now, I’ll send them on to you shall I? I see all your stuff has gone at last, thanks for letting me know. Did you realise you’d left the back door unlocked? You idiot. Oh, and you need to hand the house keys over to the agent and you must have all the garage keys as well because I can’t find a single set. Have you still not been in to the office in Delamere?’
‘No, forgot.’
‘Oh for fuck’s sake!’ A long sigh, then a slow intake of breath. ‘Right, can you please, please respond to your solicitor, and get the house keys to the agent. It completes tomorrow!’
‘Oh, sorry.’
‘You sound like you’ve got a cold.’
‘Yeah, don’t feel too good.’
‘Where are you anyway? I can hear traffic zipping past.’
‘Dunno. In a lay-by, somewhere.’
‘What? Oh, don’t bother answering that! Where are you staying?’
‘Chathill’
‘What?’
She disconnected on him and he stared at the handset in mild disbelief, his guts churning uncomfortably with both hunger, and probably stress. Where did she think he was staying? Like he had a choice?
He’d signed his house - and almost his marriage - away forever, and soon he’d be forced to accept the same fate onto his unborn child. So it was true, women really did rule the world. They certainly held all the cards. His mother had the trump card though, the one with the joker on it. He couldn’t believe Jo had thrown that in his face.
‘Why don’t you have the baby, and I’ll look after it,’ he’d said, or something like that.
‘You mean give it away, like your mother did to you?’
‘How’s that the same? I don’t even know who my real father was!’
It had been stupid, it was one of those throwaway statements people make when they’ve gone all round the houses with an argument, talked themselves into a dead-end and then just hit out. All the same, he was surprised how much it got to him, even after forty-five years, the abandonment by his mother remained a touchy subject. Jo had apologised, of course, even hugged him, but it was too late by then. He wondered if his adoption and the disinterest of his birth mother had anything to do with his fierce feelings now.
Of course it fucking did.
He’d only ever met Ruby Martinez the once, his mother. How crazy was that? He’d tracked her down, when Bill and Doreen Black passed away in 1999. It had been easy, she’d been a well-known American actress at the point of his adoption in the fifties, and a drunk too, it was all well documented. The double bereavement had fuelled a despairing mix of sadness and deep curiosity about Ruby. It was strange to think that, although he’d lost a mum, he still had one, of sorts. He’d taken dozens of photographs with him of Helen, his wedding day, his children.
Al imagined Ruby would be so overcome by his appearance he’d be welcomed with open arms and enjoy a long, heart-felt reunion. At the very least he imagined he’d get some honest answers, about his father, and all the relatives he didn’t know about. A second rejection had never been on the agenda, but in retrospect, that’s what it had amounted to. The bitch didn’t want to know.
That’s when his life had imploded.
He turned the key in the ignition and pulled out into the traffic. An hour later, he could glimpse th
e midnight-blue sea in Llandudno bay, a ferocious wind throwing the waves against a spotlighted section of The Orme.
You’re still in love with your ex-wife.
The hotel looked quiet. He patted his inside pocket, the presence of the little packet a reassuring motivation to actually go and open the door. His heart leapt with gratitude to see her, alone, on the reception desk, head bent over a diary and chewing a pen. She only glanced up at the last second, and at first there was a beautiful smile, but that was quickly replaced by something else when she recognised him.
‘What the hell do you want?’
‘I’ve brought the keys, thought you could take them where they’re supposed to go.’
She held out her hand. Instead, he fumbled for the present and shook it out of it’s cheap paper bag. The excuse for a mussel shell rolled across the desk and she frowned at it, then frowned at him. ‘What’s this about?’
‘Mussel shells have pearls in them sometimes, don’t they?’
‘This is from the arcade. It’s plastic.’
‘I know but it’s just symbolic, you know? Thirty years is pearls and we nearly made it, didn’t we?’
‘We didn’t make it though, Al. Are you saying we were tat? A shell of a marriage is about right!’
‘No! I’m saying a slightly belated happy anniversary, that’s all. There’s no hidden message. And we had a fantastic marriage, until I fucked it up.’
‘That’s an understatement, but thank you for being so honest. Now get lost!’
Defeated and deflated, he placed his house keys and a bunch of garage keys onto the desk. Helen rummaged into her handbag and slapped down the aforementioned letters. Then she pulled her engagement and wedding ring off and slung them across the desk, and lobbed the mussel shell in his direction too, just missing his eye. By this point, there were tears streaming down her face.