How to Make Time for Me

by Fiona Perrin

  Wilf still seemed distant from me after his reaction to Sunil, polite enough but as if he was already trying to create artificial distance between us. It was hurtful and confusing, but all I could do was keep trying to spend any of the dwindling days left with him. I’d tried to talk to him again but got a worse brush-off than before.

  I dropped into Seymour House on my way home and there he was, sitting with his grandparents in their new flat, alongside a very comfy-looking Pete. Mum and Dad looked a bit dazed and confused but Wilf was nodding enthusiastically.

  ‘Ah, here’s capitalism in action,’ Pete said when he saw me, ‘back from the daily grind.’

  I wanted to tell him to get his idealistic arse out of my parents’ lives but instead I said, ‘Hey, guys, how are you doing?’

  ‘I’m exhausted,’ shouted Mum.

  ‘We’ve completed a lot of activities and had a lot of discussion,’ Dad added.

  Pete got up but said as he passed me, ‘Best to let them acclimatise without too much visiting in the first few days.’ I gave him a big glare but my folks and Wilf all started immediately talking about how inspiring he was, so I figured it must just be me that thought he was a freeloading numpty.

  They’d been spending time dancing, playing cards and learning new online skills as well as mixing, I heard. ‘Do you think you might be overdoing it?’

  ‘Enough time to rest when we’re dead,’ Dad said cheerfully. Mum was, however, now asleep in her chair.

  ‘Do you want to come to the Resilient session?’ I asked Wilf. ‘It might help when you move.’

  ‘Is it with that guy Sunil?’ I nodded and Wilf shook his head. ‘I think I’ll stay here for a bit instead.’

  *

  A meeting of Resilient was like being at a Billy Graham concert but with no Billy and a lot more Sunil. So, lots of clapping and cheering but no mid-western Christianity; instead lots of criticising the establishment. The hall of the youth centre was full of Sunil-worshipping teenagers. He came on stage, gave pretty much the same speech as he had on TV to much cheering, and then everyone took part in a training session to build resilience. Lily joined in guardedly alongside Aiden, who’d come along with her.

  ‘It’s goals to be Zen,’ he’d said when I’d invited him.

  ‘Oh, hun,’ Lily had said adoringly, giving him a big kiss in the kitchen.

  ‘Ewwww, PDAs are so 2017,’ Daisy had said in disgust. ‘Get a room.’

  ‘Are you coming to the session?’ I’d asked.

  ‘No, my only goals right now are revision,’ she’d added, her face uncharacteristically worried. ‘And no grafting on Sunil, even though he is peng.’*

  Aiden joined in with the breathing exercises, clutching Lily’s hand while they inhaled and exhaled, but much more interestingly, from my vantage point at the back of the hall, I could feast my eyes on Sunil, who was leading the session with gorgeous gusto. He even looked fanciable when he was slow breathing.

  ‘It’s a huge task,’ Sunil told me as he came to find me at the end. ‘We’re looking at nothing less than a crisis in teenage confidence.’

  I tried really hard to think of something intelligent to say. ‘You’re doing great work,’ I managed, and he gave me one of his devastating smiles. I needed to concentrate on my breathing, just as the kids had learned, just to manage any semblance of normality.

  ‘Will you come to another session on Friday?’ he asked softly.

  ‘I… we’d… love to,’ I managed.

  ‘I was wondering if you’d come out for a drink with me afterwards, Callie? I really enjoy being with you.’

  A million OMGs. A billion ‘woohoooos’. A trillion ‘can this really be happening?’s… but it really, really was.

  ‘I’d love to.’ It was difficult not to grin like the Cheshire Cat.

  ‘It’s a date.’ Sunil smiled back.

  *

  A date. A date. And not just any old date in my loveless life but a date with unbelievably gorgeous Sunil. I was back on the horse. Back in the room.

  I sang loudly along to the radio as I drove Lily and Aiden home, my face one big smile. ‘Don’t be afraid to catch fish, ha…’

  Lily immediately started laughing really loudly. ‘Oh, Mum!’ and Aiden joined in.

  ‘What?’ I knew I wasn’t Aretha Franklin but my singing wasn’t that bad.

  ‘It’s “catch feels”,’ she snorted from the passenger seat.

  ‘What? Not fish?’

  ‘No, feels. You know, like emotions! Everyone knows that.’

  ‘I’ve been singing fish for years and now you tell me?’

  They both laughed like drains while I felt like a dinosaur from the other side of an ice age.

  ‘And, Callie?’ Aiden piped up from the back.

  ‘What?’ I smarted under their ridicule.

  ‘That other song, “Another one in the basket”, isn’t about online shopping either.’

  *

  I felt like I’d emerged from a chrysalis and was fluttering about on early spring flowers, like a tentative butterfly the next day. I bounced around the office until Greg started going on about Prozac in my breakfast cereal; then after work listened eagerly while my folks, Wilf and Fishy Pete played me an impenetrable demo of electronic squawks; and smiled appreciatively at the kids as they let me cook them a meal with little or no thanks. After dinner, Wilf worked on his bike with Patrick.

  He was easy to have around, squatting beside the upside-down bicycle outside the back door and discussing chain oil and tyre pressure with Wilf. I went out with a mug of tea and he took it with a ‘Cheers, mate,’ but, aside from that, he resisted too many other jokes.

  Instead, he sat at the kitchen table after the bike-fixing session with another mug of tea in his hand and talked about how he missed kids and couldn’t wait to go back to work in September.

  ‘Did you always want to be a teacher?’

  ‘No, I wanted to be a pro footballer like every other kid. Then a pro cyclist.’

  I smiled. ‘If it makes you feel any better, I really, really wanted to be an HR person in the automotive industry.’

  ‘But when I wasn’t good enough, I worked out it’s pretty cool working with kids who still have that dream,’ he said. ‘Bugger, I sound like someone off the X Factor.’

  ‘To do that, you’d have to be on a journey,’ Daisy piped up from behind her laptop.

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to be revising?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah. Hey, Pat-the-Teach, are you any good at French?’

  ‘Bien sûr, je suis an expert,’ said Patrick in perfect Franglaise with no effort at an accent. ‘Je m’appelle Pat-the-Teach.’ If I’d made that kind of joke, Daisy would’ve rolled her eyes in disgust, but with him, she sniggered and went out of the room.

  He was so easy with kids it was difficult not to think back to when he was talking about not being able to have any. ‘You don’t talk about your old life much,’ I said in a leading conversational tone, which made him smile.

  ‘Nothing to see here,’ he said. ‘Very boring person, me.’

  I ignored him. ‘So where did you grow up?’

  ‘Village on the south coast, m’lud, near Southampton, called Wittering. Yes, really. One sister named Mandy, also a teacher. Now married. Two parents, still living – in said village on south coast. Now retired. Also teachers. Everyone is a teacher. It’s what we do. No one knows why but no one has the key to break the curse.’ He said this last sentence in the gravelly tones of a film trailer voice-over artist.

  ‘So you went to uni?’

  ‘Roehampton,’ he confirmed.

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Signed up as – guess what? – a teacher. Stayed in south London aside from “gap yahs” and travelling.’

  ‘Never got married?’

  ‘Yes. Did get married.’ I raised my eyebrow: this was new news. Bodger also looked up expectantly. ‘To a woman named Saffy. She was American. The marriage didn’t last because we were both young
– and, frankly, I was probably a bit of an arsehole at the time.’

  ‘What kind of arsehole?’

  ‘Your standard kind of arsehole. Kind of married to her but still running round the world with a backpack as if I wasn’t – and not taking her with me, that kind of arsehole. Anyway, it was what you call a “starter marriage” – no kids, split up after two years when we were both twenty-eight, she went back to America. Sometimes we still talk on Skype.’

  I nodded. ‘Go on, please.’

  ‘Cor blimey, m’lud, all right. So, then I eventually got on with being an actual teacher and lived for several years, in Clapham this time, in a shared house with some other teachers.’

  ‘Other male teachers with frequent visitors of female teachers?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, one of us was gay.’

  ‘All right, you know what I mean.’ I was impatient.

  ‘And then when everyone else had got married and all that stuff, I met Louise, and, after a couple of years, we decided to try to have a family – and then there were about five years in which we tried and failed to do that and then we eventually split up and sold our flat.’ He spoke quickly at the end, as if he wanted to get the sentences out and over with.

  ‘How long ago was that?’

  ‘A year now. It was horrible and then it was less horrible. But I also wanted a promotion and the one at Whitebury came up.’

  ‘Not too many applicants, huh? Do they pay you danger money?’

  He laughed. ‘And it’s newly trendy here, in case you hadn’t noticed. And so, I gave up work at Christmas, did another bunch of backpacking – South America this time – and then decided to come to Seymour Hill and settle in.’

  ‘Which so far means hanging out fixing bikes?’

  ‘And some supply teaching,’ he said. ‘And some running. And fixing up my flat. And making friends with my neighbour and her multiple offspring.’ He pretend-doffed his cap to me, I smiled, and he got up, putting his mug in the sink.

  ‘They’re great kids,’ Patrick added as he got to the door. ‘I can totally see why you haven’t got time to go out with men right now.’

  I felt a bit guilty when he said that. But it was true when I was explaining it to him and, I reasoned, that was before Sunil asked me out. Sunil didn’t really count as men, did he? When someone like him asked you out, then the usual rules went out of the window. Who wouldn’t make time in their life for him?

  *

  Marv was beside himself at the thought of me going on a date with a hot, younger guy and immediately insisted on me going to Polish and Blow with him after work the day before, to spend Abby’s loyalty points. There was no way I was having Botox, I told him again – ‘What if I end up with a face like a bag of Birds Eye peas for my date?’ – but, yes, an eyebrow shape and a bit of waxing wouldn’t hurt.

  Polish and Blow was minimal-but-tasteful. As we arrived I glanced round me at the other clients, and tried to guess how many of them were going to have their faces injected with paralysing agents or filled with foreign bodies. We sat down in the waiting room. It was hard to ignore the screen above the fake marble fireplace, with the ‘before’ and ‘after’ videos.

  ‘She’s got no make-up on in the first one and full-on Kardashian in the second. First one a track suit and the after shot, she’s dressed up like she’s going to a wedding,’ I hissed under my breath to Marv, after one particularly duck-to-swan photo set, featuring Julia, a lawyer from Milton Keynes.

  ‘It’s not even the same woman,’ Marv said and we both started snorting.

  The next video was for tooth-whitening. Models turned and ‘tinged’ their newly snowy gnashers to me on screen.

  ‘Not just white, but Daz bluey-white,’ said Marv, just as I was called in to be waxed, scrubbed and plucked all over, like a turkey ready for the Christmas dinner table.

  ‘All in a good cause,’ Marv said afterwards when I moaned about the extreme pain that went with being a beautiful person. ‘Making you visible – very visible – to Sunil.’

  ‘I’m pretty sure they’ve ripped hair out of bits of me that should never be visible to anyone.’ But all Marvin did was smirk.

  *Gorgeous. Nope, no idea where it comes from or why.

  20

  It was finally Friday. Daisy, who’d walked around all week saying: ‘Je voudrais deux baguettes, s'il vous plâit’ and similar under her breath, had managed to smile when she came out of French but said she was off round to Clare’s to get some more help for the next exam on Monday. She was going to chill with her mates afterwards – ‘no parties, I promise’ and I believed her for once – and stay the night with Clare.

  Wilf was down at the centre with his grandparents. I’d dropped in to find him and Pete sitting in a corner of my folks’ flat; Mum and Dad were both fast asleep. I made a mental note to check up on whether they needed to do quite so many activities every day.

  ‘We’re going to another Resilient session tonight, Wilf,’ I said as he held a headphone to the side of his face and rocked from side to side. ‘Do you want to come along?’

  He blushed in a way I didn’t quite understand and then said, ‘I thought if you were going out, I might go round to Dad’s and sleep there. Petra says it’s good to get used to it and she said she’ll make some food like they have in South Africa. With meat even though she doesn’t eat it.’

  I felt immediate rage at Petra. What happened to her food tasting like polystyrene? But as I opened my mouth to say something, I could see Pete standing back, one blond eyebrow raised, as if he was waiting for my reaction. I took a breath, determined to stay calm for Wilf and make all this as easy as possible for him.

  ‘OK,’ I said slowly. ‘But if you want to come home you know where we are.’

  Wilf nodded and bent down to the decks again.

  ‘Tell these guys to chill a bit,’ I said to cover my hurt, indicating my snoring parents.

  ‘Their tiredness just reflects engaged brains, Callie,’ sang Pete. I stomped off down the corridor, telling myself that it was natural for Wilf to make baby steps towards his new family, but it was very, very hard to watch it happen.

  Getting ready to go out with Sunil was a big distraction. Telling myself there was nothing wrong with spending money on new clothes for myself in my quest to be the best version I could be of me, I’d bought a new camisole-style top from Zara on the way back from Polish and Blow. I felt quite naked in it, as if I were going out in my underwear, but Marvin assured me that it was on trend and very flattering. Now, I pulled a jacket on top of it and surveyed myself in the mirror. I still looked like a forty-three-year-old woman in jeans and a nice top, but I was a shinier, more upbeat version. I shivered with apprehension and anticipation. What if it went really well with Sunil, he whisked me home for a nightcap and got to see the newly waxed bits of my body? I shivered again.

  The session was about how to understand the impact of negative online images. ‘Beauty comes in all sorts of forms,’ Sunil told the group, who stared up at him adoringly. I just hoped my sort of form, especially after all this effort, was the kind he’d approve of.

  Afterwards, Aiden came over, holding Lily’s hand. ‘I was wondering if Lil can come back to mine as it’s Saturday tomorrow and she hasn’t got any exams?’

  It was a clever ploy – getting Aiden to ask me for a sleepover in a public place, rather than Lily asking at home.

  Hmmm. I wanted Lily close to me to make sure no harm came to her; I also really wanted to be able to go out for a drink with Sunil without having to worry about any of the kids. ‘OK, this once,’ I said. ‘You sure your folks are OK with it?’

  ‘They invited me, Mum,’ Lily said. ‘And I feel so much better.’

  ‘And we’ll practise our breathing exercises round at mine,’ Aiden went on.

  I bet you will, although it might be deeper and faster breathing than was recommended. Still, most of all I wanted Lily to be happy.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘But make sure you ge
t an early night.’ They looked at each other with glee and disappeared out of the door.

  It suddenly occurred to me that I was about to go out with a man, a gorgeous man, and there were NO KIDS AT HOME. That didn’t mean anything, of course… but it did add a frisson of possibility.

  A huge frisson.

  *

  We went to a pub and I listened to Sunil talking about his campaigns and how he’d been so dedicated to his ‘mission’ that he’d found it hard to develop a close relationship with a woman. Actually, I didn’t listen much, just sipped three gin and tonics while he talked and gazed at his beautiful face.

  He grinned. ‘It’s great being with you, though, Callie – you understand me.’

  I didn’t know whether I did but that seemed quite irrelevant.

  ‘Shall I walk you home?’ he offered eventually. I’m sorry to say that the first thought that came into my head was my empty house. It felt as if the gods had aligned to make this happen on exactly the same night as I was out on a date with a man for the first time in years. And not just any man, but Sunil.

  As we got to the gate, I gave a quick glance round to make sure that there was no sign of Patrick, and then invited Sunil in, trying to remember how to do a seductive smile.

  He looked at me and grinned.

  ‘The kids are all out,’ I said, and I guess, from then, we both knew what was going to happen. Certainly, I had one thought on my mind – the same thought I’d had from the moment I saw him.

  I parked him on the sofa with a beer and nipped to the loo. Peering in the mirror, I looked flushed and excited with a heightened colour. I pushed back a strand of hair and took a deep breath.

  By the time we’d finished the beer and Sunil had told me some quite serious stories about his run-ins with ‘the establishment’, I felt intoxicated. We had clinked bottles and were now quite close on the sofa.

  It was then that he said, ‘Callie, I… well, I just wanted you to know, that I think you’re great.’ Subconsciously, I waited for the ‘but’. It was very difficult to believe that this activist Adonis really liked me.