Sally

by Freya North

  ‘Sal?’

  Sally whizzed around, spiralling with phone cord around her body like a helter-skelter. No one could hear her and no one was particularly interested anyway. First Break was a very precious twenty minutes. There were cups of tea by which to be relaxed and weary eyes to rub. Had Diana been there, her eyes and ears would have been perked to straining point, but she was in the studio, making preparatory sketches for a screen-print of a solitary silhouette against a window.

  ‘Hullo,’ Sally replied in a hushed and gentle voice.

  ‘Can I see you? Tonight at eight? Go for a walk. Talk?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Somewhere different. Let’s meet somewhere like Covent Garden. No, the river, let’s meet on the South Bank, outside the Hayward Gallery. By that sculpture.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Goodbye, Sally.’

  ‘’Bye-bye Richie.’

  Richie, she called me Richie. Maybe all is not lost.

  Hope tided Richard along for the rest of the day and the chairman’s metaphorical pat on the back for the Georgian folly put a spring in his stride as he left the office for the weekend. Hope in his heart, his eyes longed for the sight of her.

  ‘Good night Sandra, Mary.’

  Sally felt quiet and timid, not nervous, not particularly excited. Just quiet and private. She looked hard in the mirror before she left for town. She scanned that familiar face, scouring for external proof of what she felt inwardly. She smiled benevolently at the furrowed brow and winked at the startled eyes.

  ‘Hey hey, Sal,’ she murmured comfortingly. She looked at her face so hard and for so long, staring relentlessly, until it assumed strange contortions and was her face no longer. She remembered doing the same as a child, staring and staring so her face would metamorphose into a completely strange visage: the face of your husband, the playground legend had said. But as she stared no man’s face replaced her own, she was but a privileged fly on the bare wall of her mind’s eye. She saw not merely into herself, but she saw herself. She liked her. She was standing on the threshold of something huge and daunting. But she had trust and she had faith. At that moment she loved Sally Lomax and she knew her very well.

  No acting, she promised, no acting.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Our girl from Highgate felt like a mole above ground, a timid creature thrust into the glare and not-quite-glamour of Friday Night In Town. Sally felt like a stranger in a very different and rather extraordinary country. Normal people sit safe at home, or celebrate the end of the week and welcome the weekend with a trip to their local locals, don’t they? So who were these people littering the pavement and wearing down the concrete five yards either side of each and every aesthetically grimy pub? Men and women, and all in suits. Navy is the order of the day! Pints all round! I’ll have a half. Mine’s a double.

  Ah-ha! It’s the work-force that keeps the town ticking.

  They seem like normal people, Sally thought, but what are they all doing here? In the centre of town? They’re not tourists. Maybe they don’t have local locals. Maybe they even live in Zone 1 of the Underground network. Surely not?

  Sally thought them a happy race. As she weaved her way through Covent Garden, she observed how the scenarios she passed by were repeated with alarming regularity and subscribed religiously to unadventurous conventions. She witnessed the casting of wanton glances, she picked up on the licentious edge to the voices, she took note of the obvious-over-risqué double-entendres. Chit chat, chatter, chatter. Ah-ha! It’s a chat-up! They’re not talking shop; they’ve forgotten about the exchange rates, the press releases, and they’ve put the computers to bed until Monday morning. They are here to try and unravel the person behind the job, see if there’s an inkling, a chance of post-work extra-curricular activities. Suggestions fly of ‘this nice little restaurant I know’. It’s Friday night! It’s cliché time!

  ‘I’ve had too much to drink.’

  ‘Let me take you home.’

  Travelcards open the gates to the tackily upholstered world of the tube train which will carry their loads weekendward and away from the safety of their weekday workaday personae.

  ‘Want to come in for a coffee?’ What will they say at work?

  ‘I’m married, you know, but it’s all over.’ Well, it is, isn’t it?

  A hasty reinterpretation will always auger the faintest but sincerest hope that indeed ‘it might be different this time’.

  Who are they? Each and every one has a life, a home, a chest of drawers full of undies and shirts, a fridge with shopping and a front door that is opened and then shut tight and private for the night. I don’t know any of them, not one! But they all clean their teeth, these people; they’ve all been ill at some point, cried, flown into a temper. They all fart! And all are naked beneath the navy. They have families, they’re someone’s little boys and little girls. They have secrets and sacred late-night last thoughts. And I’ll never know. But they’ll still be living! Every day they’ll be waking up and doing things, saying things, thinking things – just like I do! I don’t know them, nor they me. I’ll go on with my life but they’ll still Be. I’ll never know them, these living people, and there are so many and they’re all real! Do they see me? Might they wonder about me?

  As she scurried her way through the throngs of these strange yet native folk, Sally occupied her racing mind with her usual intoxicating meanderings. It was far too scary to think of Richard. She was less than a mile, less than twenty minutes away from him. Her nerves coursed through her body with gay abandon, her mind raced faster than her legs and walking was further impeded by her quivering knees. Come on, Sally, do get a grip. It’s only Richard. Nothing to be afraid of. Enjoy!

  Funny, Sally thought, how one can wander and wonder and be all absorbed in a world of funny old thoughts and yet still have your legs carry you to where you must be at 8 o’clock; negotiating traffic, dodging pedestrians and mastering all heights of curb, seemingly without the aid of eyes or ears or mind. From A to B as easy as ABC. And see, here is the Hayward sculpture, winking and humming its semi-broken neon welcome.

  It is 8, just gone; late, a little – a woman’s prerogative indeed but still her tardiness, insubstantial as it is, irritates her. Is he there? Is he there?

  Richard, where are you?

  He is there. Here he is, coming towards the girl who has taken his whole being and turned it upside-down, thrown his machismo and reserve away and far, rid him of his vices and banished his negativity. Richard had watched Sally as she looked everywhere but at him. Now the two of them are tantalizingly close, within reach. Sally can see the legs of his trousers, even if she closes her eyes his smell tells her he is almost upon her, yet still she cannot look at him. So close now, almost there, almost together again. Sally’s mouth seems full of something that is not anything at all, Richard has a lump of nothing stuck in his throat. Where are the cameras? Where are the violins? A drum-roll at the very least. But there is nothing but silence thumping around the heads of these two people. Both wish they were a million miles away and alone, yet both would not be anywhere else than the here and now, together. They are reeling with relief. Their combined euphoria is tangible after so long, too silly long apart. See how Sally brushes past Richard and he catches her around the waist and draws her tight and close and quick. Watch him kiss her cheek. She kisses him back hurriedly, awkwardly, her teeth grazing the side of his chin. Happiness and hope are encapsulated in their silence, in the very fabric of their quaking bodies.

  ‘Hullo, Sal!’ Richard coos, but Sally doesn’t reply. He looks at her face and sees her eyes shine and glisten in the chill and darkness of the night around them. He shakes her gently and she looks at him with such menacing intensity that it is Richard who darts his eyes away and rests them on the couple strolling huddled under an umbrella even though it is not raining. Sally takes stock of his profile; so clean and sculptured, his cheek-bones high, his cheeks hollowing slightly under them, his strong and defined jaw lin
e. She is looking at him objectively and sees how quintessentially good-looking he is, yet she finds that she has the ability to see behind too, and there she finds his soul and his being and she likes what she sees, she loves what she sees.

  ‘Hey, Richie,’ she replies eventually. They look and they smile, sincere and open. Their eyes talk and say what they cannot utter with their mouths because those words are too clumsy and their voices are still too delicate. Very, very, intoxicatingly slowly, Richard cups Sally’s face in his hands. Her cheeks feel so cold and soft and they look like porcelain under the romantic glow of the South Bank lights. Sally knows she is about to be kissed and she knows that this kiss will probably hold more import and be more loaded than any kiss she has had or will ever have. As Richard plants the gentle press of his mouth against hers, he sows into her heart and his a message that would seem inevitably trite if spoken with words.

  They went and sat with Bailey’s in plastic cups at one of the incongruously rustic picnic tables by the river outside the Royal Festival Hall. There was a chill in the air but they were snug in each other and glad to be gone from the brightness and the noise and the ladies-and-gentlemen-please-take-your-seats. As they fidgeted into relaxed positions, a young Waterloo boy jerked his cold and homeless way towards them. He only wanted 10p but Richard pressed a nugget of a pound coin into his twitching fingers. The smile on the boy’s face was quite extraordinary as he graciously thanked him and bowed his way away from them and into the Festival Hall.

  ‘Makes me sad,’ Sally said gently. Richard raised his glass and they drank to him. Richard had planned what he wanted and needed to say, but the imminence with which he could instigate it was daunting and had rendered him verbally impotent. He was about to tell her that he had missed her, a lot, you know, when the young beggar emerged from the lights and warmth and made a bee-line for them. In his hand, he held on tight to a helium balloon, silver and blue. It had broadened his smile into a near-manic contortion.

  ‘Look! Look what they gave me! It’s a balloon!’ His naiveté and happiness were at once charming and saddening. So much pleasure and thanks for merely a pound, for just a balloon. Who said that money could not buy love and joy?

  ‘It’s a fine balloon,’ confirmed Sally.

  ‘They gave it to me. There are plenty in there, maybe you could get one too. I think it’s brill!’ he concluded as he broke into a twitching trot away from them, looking back every other stride to check his balloon was there. It was his, his own, it had been given to him. It was his metaphorical friend, his substitute dog on the end of a piece of string. Pleasure had been brought into his life. Richard scanned Sally’s face unseen. She was watching the boy and his balloon disappear into the labyrinthine concrete. She was watching after him, she was saying a prayer for him, futile she knew, but she had to. Richard saw the prayer and the care in her face and knew he was in love with what he saw. Her pretty face, her funny face, her familiar and Sally-face. She was transparent and he was warmed by what he could read there. The beauty of it.

  ‘Sal?’

  The boy was gone from sight. She turned to Richard and looked at him in anticipation with eyes that were large and soft and just a little timid.

  ‘Talk?’ she implored him tentatively. He held her eyes and though she wanted to look away from the enormity of what she prophesied was about to be said, his eyes and their deep and dark sincerity caught her in a magnetic hold.

  ‘Sally, I love you. It’s a word and not a very good one. But it’s a word that we are brought up to understand, to trust and believe in. Believe me. I want you to know that falling in love with you has been an utter revelation. I realize that whatever I felt before for anyone else was not love at all. I’m desperate for you. I want you so much. You excite me, you calm me, you make me so frighteningly happy. I didn’t think it could be like this, I wasn’t expecting to find this in my life. I’d always sort of thought that I’d walk on through my life, having fuck-flings, meaningless dalliances with women I could categorize as beautiful or fun – but never did I think that another person could so enhance the quality of my life. It’s not as if I felt life was lacking before you came along, I never thought that something was missing, that life would be better if only dot dot dot. But now that I’ve had you, that I’ve felt you and loved you and discovered how you can make me feel, in my mind, in my body – now I know that I don’t want not to have you here with me. Now I know that without you there will be a void, an emptiness which no one else can possibly fill. I want you to fill my life and I want to be there for you. Only you. There is no one else for me. I want you.’

  There was silence, stunned silence. Sally mulled over Richard’s words and replayed them to herself. She acknowledged the solemnity of the occasion, she was struck by his courage and volition. There was still a part of her that wanted to run, but there was a stronger impulse now to stay and for the first time it neither scared nor repulsed her.

  But it did tie her tongue. She wanted to say to him, ‘Yes, I feel it too.’ She wanted to confirm that love was the last thing she had been looking for when she met him, that she had previously deemed love overrated, somewhat pointless and inherently dangerous. But Sally could not say a word, she certainly could not manage the ‘L’ word though it no longer terrified her so. All she could do was to reach out a cold and fragile hand and place it against Richard’s cheek. She turned it over and stroked his face with the back of her hand, then she switched it back and laid her palm still, her thumb just resting on the corner of his mouth, her fingertips touching his ear-lobe, his neck, and the start of his hair.

  ‘Quite frankly, Sal,’ launched Richard in a businesslike and decided way but let her hand stay as it was, ‘I want to do something about it.’ Sally took her hand away from him and waited, head cocked and eyes soft. Richard glanced at his cup and saw that it was empty though he could find no trace of Bailey’s in his mouth or his memory. He asked Sally if she wanted another; her cup was practically full but she nodded anyway. Richard disappeared and left Sally wondering what his breath had been bated to say. She looked out across the river and thought how beautiful London looked for once. The lights from the Embankment fell into golden shards across the water and the buildings loomed elegant and proud behind. Staring at St Paul’s, ghostly and emotive in the floodlit night, she was thinking about nothing in particular when Richard returned.

  She greeted his approach with a soft little smile. But who is that walking beside him? Richard was accompanied by the crustiest, dirtiest person Sally had ever seen. ‘Godforsaken’ was the word she thought of later that night. He was Richard’s height but half his build and wore the filthiest clothes, baggy and torn, shiny in parts with grease, dull in others with grime. His hair was hacked to an uneven, precarious mohican, tinged in green and peroxide. Little of his face was visible under the scraggly beard and tattoos which webbed over his cheeks and throat. The earrings, of which there were many, were not confined to his ears but were in both nostrils, on his right eyebrow and on his lower lip. As Sally recoiled she chanced upon his hands.

  He had the most beautiful hands, she noticed, as he placed them flat on a table near her. Very much like Richard’s; long, shapely and manicured. She was transfixed. Intrigued by her captivation, Richard curled her fingers around the cup for her and sat down astride the bench, cowboy style, just like Sally. Was it, that person, upsetting her? Would she rather they move? No, not at all. She was compelled by the man. The figure was immediately pathetic, even menacing, and yet he exuded a composure and elegance which were mesmerizing. Richard could see that she was neither frightened nor repulsed so they sat and sipped and looked at each other while casting frequent furtive glances to their neighbour.

  With a slug of Bailey’s to bolster him, Richard decided to bite his bullet and drew a deep breath accordingly.

  ‘Sally,’ he started, taking her hand and turning her face towards him. He cleared his throat but she kept her eyes trained on the other man. Richard took another deep
breath but Sally pipped him to it with a whisper fringed with awe.

  ‘Look, Richie, look!’ she implored. Richard followed her eyes and they sat and watched in amazement and pity the man with Richard’s hands. From every pocket in his old combat trousers and jacket, he retrieved a seemingly unending supply of the little free cartons of UHT milk and coffee whitener. Food; free.

  Methodically he placed them to form a line. And another. And still they came. Another line, and another. He paused and looked steadily at the four even rows in front of him. Sally scanned them, ten in each, forty altogether – a glass-worth?

  With concentrated and pedantic dedication, he systematically peeled the lids back from each pot. Again he stopped still and just regarded.

  Like a teacher, thought Sally, presiding over a class.

  Carefully he lifted each pot to his mouth and drank his way, daintily, scrupulously, up and down the rows. Sally saw his tongue dart to salvage every last smear. With maddening precision, each pot was conscientiously returned to its place in the row. Empty. Soon they were finished and the meal was over. He stood still a moment longer and then took his beautiful hands away from the table, out of Sally’s sight, and buried them deep into his jacket. He rumbled off, oblivious to his audience. In silence, they hoped he had had enough, that he was satiated, that he might have a square meal tomorrow, though they doubted it.

  Richard looked at Sally and saw how her eyes were smarting with tears. With his fingertips he gently eased her face away from the pregnant space left in front of the empty cartons. He felt no need to draw a brave breath.

  ‘Sally.’

  She looked at him. She was open and there, ready and committed to listen.

  ‘I can’t be bothered with game-playing and acting and waiting. I propose that we move in together. I want to live with you, I want to have you beside me every morning and night. Quite frankly, I can’t be having the two or three times a week. I think we should move in together. Soon. Now. With a view to the Big “M”. We have enormous potential. I’ve never wanted anything more and I don’t want to settle for anything less.’