Sally

by Freya North

  Like an eavesdropper, Richard clearly heard the words as they were uttered. Premeditated and planned for days and weeks, they had been proclaimed previously in the safety of his head, during the privacy of a run, in a lunchtime daydream, in late-night, sleep-greeting sanctuary. And yet he took himself by surprise as the words tumbled away, out into the open unchecked by any better judgment. He recognized the sound of his own voice and heard the words he was saying; they were familiar, he knew them well, yet they induced a surge of adrenalin to course through his body and reach his stomach in a wave of nausea that was at once awful and pleasant. Though his head was high, his heart was full, his eyes were alight and his body trembled, Richard was racked with anxiety at the portent of his words. The very meaning of them engulfed him, the consequences they would have on his life, the effect they would have on Sally.

  The very effect they will have on Sally is something Richard cannot foresee. Why should his words, spoken after all with honesty and great depth of emotion possibly bring her anything but great happiness and security? Why indeed? Because, poor man, they are the wrong words for someone who is only just feeling comfortable with the trimmings, trappings and whole idea of being in love.

  The ensuing silence was unbearable. Richard was perturbed by the absence of the smile he was so desperate to see. Sally gulped, both with her eyes and her throat. Fear flickered across her face; it was manifest in the twitching and creasing of her brow, the purse and pucker of her lips.

  ‘Talk to me,’ Richard demanded, his voice breaking. Sally didn’t trust her voice at all but the tears that she was desperate to vanquish threatened to choke her instead. Richard cradled her head in his hands, wove his fingers through her hair, pressed her face against his chest where she could feel his heart pounding and it frightened her.

  ‘Talk to me, talk to me, talk to me,’ he murmured over and over again, rocking her in rhythm to his words. Sally’s mind raced and ran so fast that it was impossible to pin down her thoughts, to analyze her churning emotions, to organize them into sentences coherent enough to be said out loud. Richard was patient, his soliloquy had now a soothing effect on him, he felt light; a weight had been shifted.

  Little did he realize how it had fallen twice as heavy on to Sally’s half as broad shoulders.

  ‘Sal?’ he implored after what he considered to be a reasonable length of loaded time. She raised her face and slowly shook her head. Richard looked unbearably sad and Sally was surprised at how swiftly his pain restored her voice.

  ‘Don’t know, Richie, just don’t know. Too soon, perhaps, I think.’

  For some reason, she found it impossible to form a grammatically correct sentence. ‘Can’t think just right now. Can I think, go away and have time to think?’ Her eyes were wide. ‘Richard? Can I? Seems too big, scary and I don’t know. Too much, don’t know. Frightened. Need time and space. Can’t answer you, it’s too big. Richie?’

  Richard looked at her and decided that he would grant her all the time in the world in the hope that she would find her answer quickly. As long as it was the answer he wanted to hear. He nodded at her and was rewarded with her smile. Sally’s smile said ‘thank you’. It said something else too, Richard could see it quite clearly but refused to believe it until she said it.

  But Sally did not, she just could not quite say it to him that night.

  In bed, warm and alone two hours later, she said ‘I love you, Richard’ out loud. She spoke the four words with conviction, a veritable proclamation. She heard her voice, she knew it was hers. She heard the words and knew they came from her head as much as from her heart.

  As Richard and Sally had strolled across Waterloo bridge, they had passed the balloon boy. Minus his balloon.

  ‘Where’s your balloon gone?’ Sally asked.

  ‘It just flew away, I let it go – just to see – and it just flew up and away. It went over there somewhere.’

  ‘That’s a pity. But I think there are plenty more back inside. I’m sure they wouldn’t mind you taking another.’

  He smiled at Sally and she saw how young he was, his dirty face fresh and just pubescent. He looked a little like Marcus. ‘There are plenty more,’ she reiterated.

  ‘No,’ he said wisely, ‘I don’t want another one. I would just want to let that one go too.’

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  It is a quiet, fresh Saturday morning. Sally has woken, thankfully alone, and is staring at nothing in particular through the gap in the curtains. Feeling small, tearful and sorry for herself, she is reluctant to rise and wants to start the day with a good old cry in the comfort of her little bed (a double bed, in fact, but so cosy and safe that Sally always thinks of it as her little bed). We’ll leave her be awhile and travel southwestwards to Notting Hill where Catherine has just popped by, accidentally on purpose, to see how her husband’s (soon to be father of her first child) best friend is faring today.

  ‘Hey, Catherine!’

  Richard, resplendent in grey marl jogging bottoms and a dark red sweatshirt, greeted her with a kiss on both cheeks. ‘I was just off out for a run but it can wait. Come in, come in! Coffee? Tea? Juice? Juice coming up! Grapefruit? Orange? Both freshly squeezed in the groovy juicer-whatsit. What a great Christmas present. I did thank you, didn’t I? Profusely, I seem to remember.’

  Catherine was swept through into Richard’s sitting-room, borne along on the stream of his cheerful bearing.

  I have before me a happy boy. Thank goodness! she thought. Come on Richie-ard, tell me do! Reveal to me the provenance of your smile, the reason for the spring in your step, the song in your voice!

  Richard, however, was whistling too sonorously to tune into Catherine’s attempted telepathy.

  She slid into his leather recliner and wriggled off her shoes. Daffodils caught her eye. Wherever she turned, their golden fanfare greeted her. The flowers were shoved into vases, crammed into jugs; haphazard and glorious.

  Much much better than those de rigueur hothouse tulips, she thought, and smiled. With relief, she saw that Bach came before Bizet and, on the shelf below, Hendrix came after Genesis. Through the archway, she could see Richard slicing the grapefruit with fell swoops, nonchalantly tossing the halves into the juicer gadget. Watching him from behind, seeing his broad shoulders, tapered waist and neat bottom, she was happily transported back to memories of college days. Those evenings, what fun! Food and wine, on a budget but heavenly, lounging around, smoking joints and travelling to the dark side of the moon and back with Pink Floyd. Bob and Richard; fit as fiddles, keen chefs and devoted flatmates. Catherine had felt special to ‘the boys’, madly and deeply in love with Bob but treasuring too the platonic closeness and openness of her friendship with Richard. She had loved to watch dinner for four, a familiar occurrence, take shape. She enjoyed seeing Bob and Richard vie for space in their small, cramped but outrageously well-equipped kitchenette. She thrilled to their fondness for each other, manifest in every half-finished but intuitively understood silence, in their easy laughter, their incessant teasing, in their generous pats, slaps and nudges. She remembered how she would marvel at the flexing in Bob’s forearms as he whizzed his knife through an innocent cucumber, how he would look up, hold her gaze and smile his dashing, winning smile, before setting to work on the carrots. Always Bob-and-Richard-and-Catherine. And X.

  X was invariably long-legged and luscious but on the scene for so short a time that her name was a foregone forgotten inevitability.

  Bob had proposed to Catherine a year or so later in a kitchen, a different kitchen but a kitchen all the same. He had cut his finger, she had laughed at his ever-so-injured face and had kissed the droplet of blood away. As she wrapped a wadge of paper towel tenderly around his finger (having caused him to squeal at the undiluted disinfectant) Bob had asked her to marry him nevertheless. Dumbstruck, she could only squeeze his wounded digit so hard in acceptance that he very nearly reneged his proposal. Here she was, a decade later, the very Mrs Woods, watching Richard, the self-sam
e Richard, still King of the Kitchen.

  Something’s missing, something’s changed.

  Sally was most noticeable by her absence. Catherine was struck by how alone Richard looked tinkering in his kitchen. He looked wrong, awkward somehow, minus his shadow, his Sally; getting in his way, sticking her finger in this and that, sniffing and fiddling and tasting, her eyes never leaving him. Catherine had watched her well; she had recognized something, a vestige of herself in Sally. She had seen her gaze at Richard’s forearms, she had seen the smile spread as Richard wielded his Sabatier with gay abandon along the length of an unsuspecting cucumber. Catherine had watched Richard too, observing how he gently guided Sally away from his path with a tender push at her waist, his hand, inevitably, lingering.

  It won’t be long, Catherine had thought, before he’s proposing to her. Whether it would happen in the kitchen she could not know, but she hoped that it might. A good omen, a good beginning.

  But of course, Sally’s not here.

  Catherine returned, somewhat reluctantly, to the day at hand and wondered instead just what it was about a man expertly slicing cucumber that solicits utter admiration from a woman, inspiring a flutter both to heart and groin. Here she was, Catherine Woods-née-Daniels, married and pregnant and blissfully happy, being handed juice in an elegant wine glass by Richard Stonehill who drew up a chair and sat astride, cowboy style, opposite her.

  ‘How’s the morning sickness?’ he enquired, matter-offactly.

  ‘It’s evening sickness and it’s terrible and I love it!’ she hooted, consequently snorting into her grapefruit juice and finding much mirth in the mess.

  ‘Want a bib, Catherine?’ Richard laughed, handing her a piece of patterned kitchen paper. ‘I’m so chuffed for you both. I hope it goes without saying that I’ll be godfather. I mean, who else could you trust to show your child the way? I’ll teach him/her the Stonehill Statutes; I’ll ensure that my morals are engraved at the very centre of their being. What better start in life, hey?’

  ‘Lord help the little thing!’

  ‘Seriously, Catherine, Bob’s utterly thrilled. Thrilled to the extent that he’s becoming a domestic bore. I’m going to be a dad! I’m going to be a dad!’ Richard mimicked, then took a contemplative sip and continued, nodding earnestly. ‘Seriously, though, it’s great news. What names have you decided? When is it due? Do godfathers have to be at the birth? Phew! Can you start thinking about names now? Or does one buy the pram and nappies and decide when the thing arrives?’ Richard was manic and Catherine laughed. He carried on in two voices:

  ‘Mmm, looks red and wrinkly to me, must be a Roger.’

  ‘Nonsense, his name’s Bert, it’s written all over his face!’

  ‘Have you got a pram?’

  ‘No, but I have a baby in my womb called Janet-if-it’s-a-girl and John-if-it’s-a-boy.’

  ‘Stop, stop!’ Catherine pleaded. ‘If you split my sides there won’t be a baby! But to answer your question, we’ll call her Sally, or we’ll call him Richard.’

  Richard jerked. His face was startled and the sparkle in Catherine’s eyes eluded him. She reached forward and placed a hand on his arm. ‘Joke, it was a joke,’ she assured him, ‘but I’m sitting here with curiosity enough to kill a pride of bloody lions let alone a humble cat, wondering when on earth you’re going to tell me how it went!’

  ‘It?’

  ‘Rich-ard!’ The silence was excruciating but Catherine held her ground as she held Richard’s gaze. She felt well within her rights to expect a not-too-ambiguous response and she was rewarded as Richard began to smile and cast his eyes downwards, coyly even. Chuffed, to be sure.

  ‘Sally?’ she prompted.

  ‘I think,’ he faltered, ‘that the definitive happy-ever-after is on the horizon.’

  He raised his head and looked at Catherine directly; the light of the still relatively new year streamed through the elegant sash windows and struck his eyes with an aesthetic ferocity to add drama and impact to his words.

  ‘She needs some Time with a capital “T”. But the signs are there. In her eyes, in her confusion, in her willingness to listen, in her need and request to think. I never thought that I’d want someone, actually really want someone. I don’t need her, I just want her, plain and simple. And I’ve told her what I want. You see, Cath, I can see through her veil and behind her outer reserve. I know they’re there for her protection and self-preservation and I understand, I respect that.

  ‘I don’t know what it’s been like for her in the past, the way she’s felt, other men. It’s always been nothingy for me, as you know only too well. There’s something private and guarded with Sal, yet I have no desire to pry. I want her to realize that that’s her past and it’s passed. And that my only request is that she unwind herself and lay herself bare, that she accept me and my true desire to make her happy. She’s a steel butterfly, my Sal, a steel butterfly. Beautiful and strong, fragile yet determined. Awesome! I think, Catherine, no, I know … I know she’s going to come around. She just has to shake off her fears and greet herself with honesty and courage. Like I have. And I feel happy. I’m a happy man. I’m in love and it’s the best thing in the world. Funny how I ridiculed Bob all those years ago when he talked about you, and him and you. He said to me once, “The time comes when you know, you just know.” And the funny thing is, you do, you just do!’

  Richard knocked three and a half minutes off his best time on his run half an hour later.

  Catherine returned to Bob, threw up the grapefruit juice, thought, Shit, morning sickness, and told him that she thought she could hear bells. Bob didn’t understand, he thought perhaps it was a vagary of pregnancy and made her a cup of tea. But two days later, when he saw Richard who slaughtered him at squash, he understood. He could hear bells too. Faint. Distant. But there.

  Diana heard bells, phone bells. Sally! she thought intuitively.

  ‘Of course I’ll come over, of course it’s not a problem. No, it’s not inconvenient. Will you hush, dear girl, I don’t have anything planned. And even if I did, you silly old thing, nothing takes precedence over my Sally! You’d be the same for me, wouldn’t you? ’Xactly! ’Bye-bye, I’m there already.’

  Sally had been morose all morning. She had dithered and shilly-shallied and had been thoroughly incapable of pulling herself together. In fact, subconsciously and somewhat perversely, she had made a concerted effort to keep herself entrenched in her low ebb. There was something rather cathartic about being maudlin; Samuel Barber’s ‘Adagio for Strings’ filled the flat and she even read the closing pages of Black Beauty.

  ‘My troubles are all over, and I am at home,’ she wailed out loud with a good sniff.

  Well, they’ve only just started and I wish I was far away.

  Sally bumbled her way through Saturday morning half-doing only half the jobs she’d earmarked. She was continually, uncharacteristically, distracted. With half a shirt badly ironed she hurried to her bedroom to change the bed-linen but did not manage the pillowcases because the bath implored her to scrub it instead. She even heard herself calling ‘Mummy, Mummy’ out loud yet her mother was the last person but one that she wanted and she had never called for her before. So why now? Sally heard her voice. It was worryingly quiet and feeble.

  Sal! Get a grip!

  Phone Diana.

  I’ll phone Diana.

  Lifted a little by the anticipation of her friend’s imminent knock on the door, Sally charged about her flat collecting debris and retrieved a piece of crockery from every room. On each, the remains of some food or other lay forlornly: a piece of toast, a boiled egg, a portion of corn flakes. Spasmodically half-eaten, the egg was now cold, the toast bendy, the cereal soggy. No time to feel guilty chucking them all away, there was so much to do: the ironing, the cleaning, the thinking …

  What thinking?

  The Richard-Thing thinking. He wants you, remember – the whole shebang? Remember?

  Gracious Good Lord, I can’t even t
hink straight, let alone have the time to think at all.

  Of course you do. You may have relegated it to the furthest reaches of your mind, but it is still there.

  Well, I’ll take down the net curtains to wash instead. Yes. No, no! I must empty the Hoover and oil the wok. Diana will be here in a mo’.

  Knowing she was soon to be saved by the bell, Sally continued her chores humming the theme to Love Story.

  As Diana wriggled her arms through her red duffel coat and jostled with the mittens (black) attached playground-style to elastic, she thought how fragile Sally sounded. Not desperate as she had done on Other Woman Day, just frail and feeble. Half an hour later, Little Voice Lomax welcomed Diana in to the warmth of her relatively tidy Highgate home and the knots of her troubled soul. Initially, Sally was still falling over her grammar and sentence construction but Diana tried her best to sift and make sense of the bits and drabs offered. Soon Sally was pouring out the details of the previous evening, in a veritable torrent. Out came Richard’s proclamation, the balloon boy, the milk man with the beautiful hands. Diana had an idea for a painting, no, maybe a lino cut, so much more emotive.

  Hush now! Listen to Sally, help her through.

  ‘So, have you thought about it?’

  ‘Di-anarr! It’s only the next day. But I have thought about it quickly, and quite frankly I don’t know what I think. It’s like I’m trying to think of so much but there isn’t the space. I feel so bewildered, like I don’t know what’s going on. Like I have no control. What is happening to me? Why don’t I feel overjoyed, over the moon, high as a kite? I don’t know, Di, I just feel sort of low and overawed and overwhelmed and not very happy. I thought, if and when I fell in you-know-what, that I’d be singing from the roof-tops and floating and smiling and feeling invincible. Instead I feel rather vulnerable and utterly confused.’