Barefoot in the Dark

by Lynne Barrett-Lee

  ‘Charlie Jones,’ said the woman, extending a hand and pumping Jack’s enthusiastically as they drew level outside the building. ‘Building site’ might have been a better description, for there were girders everywhere, cranes clawing at the skyline and the whole area, once just a back basin of the docks, was speckled with a mid-makeover patina of dust.

  ‘Did you manage to get a parking space all right?’ she asked as they walked. ‘Dreadful day for it, isn’t it? Though I have to say, I always think it’s better to see a place when the rain’s hammering down and it’s blowing a gale, don’t you? So easy to be seduced by the sunshine.’ She smiled at him, revealing a row of perfect white teeth. Her hair was as ebullient as her manner, milk-chocolate brown, wild and very curly. In a different universe, one in which he wasn’t pining for someone else so wholeheartedly, he would have fancied her, for sure. Yet she wasn’t young, she wasn’t blonde and her legs weren’t even long. Hell, truth be known, did he really even go for young, long-legged blondes anyway? No, thought Jack. He went for petite elfin types with long liquorice hair. It was a very reassuring revelation. As if a weight had been lifted from his loins.

  ‘I parked in the multi-storey and walked over,’ he told her, increasing his pace as they approached the entrance so he could open the door for her.

  ‘You’ll have your own garage underneath, of course. And they’ve already started the second phase of the development,’ she told him. ‘There’s covered visitor parking there, too. Have you looked at much already?’

  She was right. There was no sunshine to be seduced by. Just a choppy, leaden sea under an irritable sky. But it did have a kind of moody beauty about it. Perhaps that was why it worked. Perhaps that was why he could sort of see himself here. The door drew open with an expensive sigh and his feet hit yielding blue carpet.

  ‘There’s twenty-four-hour security, of course, and a gym – planning permission for a swimming pool, too. But I’m not officially allowed to say so yet. That won’t be finalised till phase three.’ Her smile was warm, uncomplicated. A smile of contentment. She wanted a sale, but everything in her manner told him she liked her life very much anyhow, thank you, so if he didn’t go for it, well, c’est la vie.

  By the time Jack got back into his car he was feeling quite positive. He liked the notion of ‘phases’. The idea that the way he felt now was just one of them. That a new, better one, was in the offing, rising phoenix-like from the ashes of the past. He watched Charlie Jones stride across the car park and get into her car, then headed off to get into his. It was getting late, and he still had today’s script to finalise, not to mention an article for the Express to get finished, and all his football kit to get washed, too.

  He’d just reached the car when his mobile started up. It was Allegra. Oh ho. At last.

  ‘Lunch’, she commanded, in her oh-so-forward style. Not a sniff of a mention of their date. Just ‘lunch’, then ‘today’ then ‘well? How you fixed?’, then, ‘Come on. Just an hour. I’ll pick you up.’

  Was it Jack’s imagination or was she sounding a little sharp? Her manner when they’d parted had suggested this was not the way she’d be. Quite the opposite, in fact. Or was this yet another woman with a date-to-phone-call egg timer? Had he got on the wrong foot even with her?

  ‘Hi there!’ he said cheerily, refusing to join in. This was a business relationship as well, after all. ‘Look, hey, I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch –’

  ‘Jack. Look. I’m sorry too.’ She sighed. ‘Look, I may as well tell you now. It isn’t going to happen for us, OK?’

  Jack felt a surge of relief. So he’d been let off the hook.

  ‘Allegra, I’m so glad you feel like that, because, well, you’re right. I’ve got a –’

  ‘Jesus, Jack!’ Her explosion of exasperation was so loud he had to hold the phone away from his ear. ‘I’m not talking about us, you dope! I’m talking about the bloody show!’

  C’est la vie. It hadn’t taken too long, the complete dismantling of everything he had been building his future career happiness on. Just the hour, which he’d spared her – she’d indeed come to work and collected him – and a brief resumé of why it had been axed. Nothing to do with him, as it turned out. Just that someone else, another thrusting producer, had come up with a different format and a bigger big name, and the powers that be, being powerful powers, had decided in the end to go with that. This was the way it worked in television. Nothing was set in stone until it happened. As with the highs, the hard knocks were very hard.

  Strangely, he felt kind of OK. Not OK in a leaping-joyfully-up-and-down sense, but OK in the sense that now that the almost worst had happened he’d only the actual worst left to deal with. He had his job on the radio, he would continue to have his job on the radio. It was seem – all the excitement had been in the anticipation.OK. Actually, a stress off his plate. It was something he didn’t have to think about any more. As with Allegra, it seemed – and it did

  It was Allegra he felt sorriest for. Though she was at great pains to sympathise with him – she had other irons in the fire, of course, other projects to get green-lighted – it soon became clear to Jack that all was not as cut and dried as he’d thought. She’d squeezed his arm as she dropped him back at the BBC car park. Asked him to phone her. Pouted even. Looked shy. Asked why he hadn’t phoned her. Strange how his one ignoble brush with a sexual appliance should have injected this marked shift in the dynamics of their non-relationship. It could have been pity, he thought, compassion, even, but everything in her demeanour told him otherwise. Something had changed. Her hold over him, maybe? His reason to cultivate her affection, for example, which, though it had left a slightly unpleasant taste in his mouth in the long nights following their unfortunate encounter, seemed to have been some sort of unspoken contract between them. And now he was no longer being cultivated by her, he held the cards, suddenly. The ball was in his court.

  Which made it doubly important he made his position clear.

  ‘Look, Allegra,’ he said as he climbed out of her car, ‘What I said before about us –’

  But she was having none of it. She obviously valued her dignity too much. ‘Us? You big pussy! We’re pals, you and me, right? Let’s keep it that way, OK?’

  He’d gone back to his own car, then, and sat in it for a moment or two. The rain had stopped and the sun had emerged from behind the remaining wisps of high cloud. He was happy enough to sit a minute and let it warm his face. He hadn’t even realised he’d fallen asleep until a ringing sound jolted him back into consciousness.

  It was the matron at the nursing home.

  ‘We’ve got your father a place at the hospice, Jack.’

  C’est la vie. It was now. The actual worst was on its way.

  The doctor was in residence when Jack arrived at the nursing home. She was a tall, commanding woman, with aggressively sharp tailoring but the sort of face that made you want to ask her to hug you. She emanated care and empathy and goodness and warmth and she wasted no time telling Jack anything positive, just that it was important that they get his father installed in the hospice as soon as possible and that they do their level best to get to grips with his pain.

  Again, a sense of events moving up a gear washed over him. The fact of his father’s imminent death was no longer something he’d have to dwell on, alone, in the car. It was out of the closet. Official. Jack’s father was going to a hospice, therefore he was going to die sooner rather than later. And with that came an almost welcome realisation that no one would tell him to try not to worry any more.

  There was lots of other talk as they moved him from bed to wheelchair to corridor to ambulance. What a wag Jack’s father was. How he’d always charmed all the nurses. The way he liked to go to sleep with his earphones jammed in. Book at Bedtime, or Radio Three, or even Red Dragon, sometimes. How they’d all miss him so much. It was strange, thought Jack, how these people had taken ownership of his father. How they’d become his new family. His final family.
How he, himself, had been relegated to visitor status. He still felt a degree of guilt about this. When his father’s health had begun failing, Jack and Lydia were at the start of the slope they were about to tumble down maritally, but they both, nevertheless, had entreated Jack’s father to come live with them. They would manage, they assured him. They would look after him. They wanted to look after him. But Jack’s father, the painfully diminished form semi-conscious in the chair beneath his hands now, had been bigger then. Stronger. And would not be swayed.

  Jack had tried again, afterwards. More than once. But his father, if anything, was even firmer in his refusals. He did not, he’d said sternly, want to go to his grave knowing his only son wasted his formative years mopping up after a doddery old man.

  His father’s head nodded up as they entered the lift.

  ‘Teeth,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, Dad?’

  ‘Teeth,’ he said again.

  Jack squeezed around the side of the chair to face him. The lift, though capacious, held Jack, his father, Shelley, another nurse, and a porter. If there was little room to swing a cat there was so much less for dignity.

  ‘Teeth?’ he asked him again. His father looked fairly lucid.

  ‘They’re in his toilet bag,’ said Shelley.

  ‘It’s all right, Dad. They’re in your toilet bag,’ Jack said.

  His father blinked at him and nodded.

  ‘You told Liddie?’ Jack’s father had always called her Liddie. ‘She came last week.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘She worries about you.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I worry about you.’

  ‘You don’t have to.’

  ‘How’s that girl of yours?’

  ‘What girl?’

  His father rolled his eyes. ‘What girl! Listen to him! The girl you were telling me about!’

  Out of the corner of his eye, Jack saw the two nurses exchange covert grins.

  When they came out of the lift, Jack was gripped by a powerful vision of an elderly man, in a chair much like this one. Only the elderly man was himself, and the son pushing the chair was Ollie. In that instant Jack decided that it mattered very much that he live to be very, very old, and that he die very quietly in his sleep.

  The entourage finally made it out to the forecourt. The ambulance, its jaws open, stood ready to receive his father, while the nurses made minor adjustments to his drips. The doctor patted Jack’s shoulder and said she’d see him at the hospice. Jack wanted to ask her how long his father had, but he couldn’t. It felt a little bit too much like he wanted to organise his diary.

  He was just about to get into his car when another nurse, a young girl he didn’t recognise, emerged from the front porch and started calling out to him.

  He left the car and walked across the drive towards her.

  ‘Mr Valentine? Oh, I’m glad I caught you. I’m ever so sorry,’ she said, drawing level with him. She must be new. He didn’t know her. ‘But I forgot all about these.’ She had a large cardboard box in her arms, which she now raised towards him. It said ‘Venflon’ on the side. ‘They’ve been sitting in the office since we cleared your Dad’s things out. Matron had thought you might be happy for us to send them on down to the local primary school. They’ve got their Spring Fayre coming up and she thought they could maybe sell them. Seeing as how they’ve not been opened or anything. But they can’t. You know, health and safety. Sell by dates and all that. Anyway… ’ She proffered the box.

  Jack took it from her, confused.

  ‘These?’ he asked.

  ‘The wine gums.’ She nodded at the box. ‘There’s packets and packets of them. You know what elderly people are like for hoarding things.’ She paused, whether from uncertainty about the possible impropriety of what she’d just said or simply because she had nothing else to say, Jack didn’t know. He flipped the box top open. Inside there were, indeed, packets and packets of wine gums.

  ‘Bless him,’ said the nurse. It was getting increasingly blowy and the little tails on her nurse’s cap were dancing in the breeze. ‘Anyway,’ she said briskly. Nursily, in fact. ‘I’m sure you’ll find a use for them. Get through them in no time if you’re anything like me!’

  Jack looked up from the box at her young, untroubled face. Wine gums. Splendid, son. Just the jobby.

  He cleared his throat, which felt tight. ‘Would you like them?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘I mean, would the staff like them?’

  She grinned at him.

  ‘Is the Pope catholic?’ she said.

  Jack watched her go back inside, returning her wave as she entered the building, his other hand gripping the open car door, the strengthening wind lifting his jacket lapels. He felt so small all of a sudden, so young and vulnerable, so unprepared, so not ready to relinquish his father. So not ready to face the rest of his life without him. So ill-equipped to become him now. But it was about to happen. The ambulance was already moving off down the hill. He got back in the car and poked the key into the ignition, swallowing hard at the pain in his throat. He had never felt so much like curling up into a ball and crying.

  Chapter 24

  Go away, Hope thought. Perhaps that’s what she should do. Once the run was done, maybe she would take the children off somewhere. To a caravan, or a cottage, perhaps, just the three of them. If she could just remove herself from her normal life for a few days perhaps she might shake off the gloom. If she could just findher own life, amid the muddle of everyone else’s, perhaps she might find a path that would make her feel hopeful again.

  But right now she had to keep her happy face on. Because it was Kayleigh’s eighteenth birthday and they were having a bit of a do.

  Any excuse for a party, Madeleine had said, and that was what this was turning out to be. An excuse for a party. An excuse of a party. A dozen of them, gathered in the main office on a Wednesday, drinking champagne and eating take-away pizza, and everybody getting drunk. Not that Hope was. The pizza had looked like something that had been disgorged by a bilious buzzard after a heavy night’s carnage, so she’d stuck to the champagne. Only a prudent one and a half glasses, but it was nevertheless fizzing and buzzing in her brain.

  Kayleigh, by now, was certainly drunk, and clearly also of the opinion that it was her duty to provide the entertainment. She had fished out a Kylie Minogue CD from her back-pack, and someone had found a CD player, and now she was dancing with a box file.

  It was only just gone seven, but already Hope was trying to formulate an excuse of her own. One that would sound plausible enough to get her out of the place. She wasn’t quite sure what she’d like to do instead, only that she was tired and crotchety and not feeling very sociable. And Simon was beginning to cloy.

  ‘They’ve done a good job,’ he was saying to her now – shouting to her, in fact, even though his mouth was but inches from her ear. ‘With the radio build-up. Don’t you think?’

  She nodded. Simon had been trailing around after her since five. Trailing pointedly, persistently.

  Betty, who’d come over from the shop, nodded vigorously. ‘You can say what you like about these celebrities, but I must say your Mr Valentine’s come up trumps for us, hasn’t he? We’ve been listening to him on the radio. He’s been ever so good.’

  Hope nodded.

  ‘You going to do the run yourself, dear?’ she asked Hope.

  Hope nodded again, about to speak, but Betty’s attention had been diverted by Simon, who was nodding pretty frantically himself. ‘We both are, Betty,’ he interrupted happily. ‘We’re becoming a bit of a double act, actually. We’ve been in training together.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ said Betty.

  ‘Haven’t we?’

  He smiled at Hope. She nodded again.

  ‘I was even wondering if we shouldn’t have a couple of T-shirts printed. You know. “Two Hearts Become Run” or – get this – “Beauty and the Beast”. You know, “beauty dot dot dot… ” on yours and �
��… dot dot dot and the beast” on mine.’

  Hope felt appalled. But she nodded again. ‘Ri-ght.’

  Betty looked at Simon, then at Hope, and then at Simon again. Simon glugged down champagne and beamed.

  ‘That’s nice,’ said Betty.

  Simon beamed some more. ‘This year the fun run – next year the London marathon, eh?’

  ‘I don’t really see myself running a marathon,’ said Hope. ‘Five K is plenty for me.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ said Simon, reaching for the nearest bottle and filling his glass to the brim for at least the fourth time. ‘It’s only a question of commitment. Only a question of us getting in training for it, Hope. You’re very fit. She’s very fit,’ he added, to Betty. ‘Always keeps me on my toes, I can tell you.’ He did a little running mime then patted his stomach. Which was certainly a little smaller. The ‘us’ however, loomed fearfully large. He patted his stomach again. ‘I’ll probably have lost a stone by the time she’s finished with me!’

  ‘You’re looking well now, Simon,’ Betty said. ‘I was only saying to Iris the other day how well you’re looking these days. You always used to look so peaky. Nice to see. So, the transformation’s all down to you, then, is it, Hope?’

  ‘Hardly –’

  ‘Absolutely!’ said Simon.

  ‘That’s nice,’ said Betty. ‘You make a nice pair, you two.’ She smiled. ‘Nice to see.’

  Simon beamed.

  She’d kept away from him after that. But she was still conscious of his eyes, which seemed permanently angled towards her, as if connected by invisible string. She had never ignored Simon so pointedly, and she could tell he was aware that she was doing it now. Which was why she should have really seen it coming. But when an hour later she became aware of his sudden absence, she simply assumed (no, hoped) he’d gone home.

  ‘No, he hasn’t,’ corrected Madeleine, who was getting the birthday cake out of its box. ‘His coat’s still on the coat stand. He’s probably gone off to the office or something. Perhaps he had to make a call. Perhaps he’s beavering away on some anomaly in the purchase ledger. You know what he’s like. Go and fetch him, will you, sweetie?’