Redemption Song

by Wilkinson, Laura

  Chapter Sixteen

  ‘Right, get that down your neck.’ Ceri plonked a pint of lager in front of Saffron.

  ‘Not sure I can drink all that. A half would have been fine,’ she said, eyes darting round the pub, settling on the door. He wouldn’t come, she knew it. Might as well accept it and enjoy the night. Ceri was great company.

  ‘Do your best. All I ask. Cheers.’

  Saffron raised her glass, beer slopped over her fingers. ‘Congratulations. Here’s to a long and successful career in child-minding.’

  Ceri spluttered, spraying lager over the table. ‘Bollocks to that. I want the low-down on our man with wood before he arrives,’ she said with a glint in her eye. ‘What is going on with you two? I’m mad jealous, of course, but as a friend I have to say well done, he’s bloody gorgeous, he is.’

  ‘There’s nothing going on.’ She took another sip, the beer tasted bitter and harsh, the slight fizz shooting up her nose and into her brain. She shuddered.

  ‘That’s rubbish, that is. I see the way he looks at you. Have to be blind not to.’ Ceri emptied almost half of her glass in one long gulp.

  Unable to reply, Saffron stared at her drink, heat rising from her breast, creeping up her neck. So she hadn’t imagined it, after all. Pleasure and guilt stole to the back of her throat. She tried to take another drink. The smell made her heady. She forced it down, allowing the rush to dizzy her mind further. She didn’t deserve such happiness, did she?

  The feeling of joy didn’t last. Though she had expected it, Joe didn’t show, and her disappointment was crushing. Friends of Ceri’s turned up shortly after ten and though Saffron knew this was a perfect opportunity to make new connections, friends even, she used it as an excuse to bow out of the evening. Ceri was too drunk to make a concerted effort to persuade Saffron to stay, but wobbled to the door with her to say goodbye.

  ‘Sure there’s a perfectly good reason why he’s not here,’ Ceri slurred, an arm draped over Saffron’s shoulders. ‘Don’t you fret. Love is in the air, I know it.’

  ‘Thanks, Ceri. You’re a pal.’ They were both mistaken; Joe didn’t like her. She suppressed an urge to cry.

  ‘I meant to ask. Have you met my dad yet?’ Ceri leant against the door frame, propping the door open. Saffron heard cries of protest from inside the pub. The night air was cold. ‘He’s working on the chapel. First job in ages. He’s so grateful to your mother I think he might convert!’ Ceri laughed.

  ‘How bizarre. What a coincidence.’

  ‘Not really. Small place. Everyone knows everyone, and their business. See you!’ She fell back into the pub.

  Everyone except for Joe, thought Saffron. No one seems to know much about him. Or me.

  As Saffron turned the corner, tears pooling, a combination of the sharp breeze and childish disappointment, she caught the outline of a figure sitting on a garden wall up ahead. A figure she’d recognise anywhere.

  ‘Joe?’ Her voice quivered.

  ‘Hope I didn’t make you jump.’ He stood.

  ‘How long have you been there?’ She moved towards him, swallowing back her tears, determined he should not notice.

  ‘A while.’

  She stood before him, his face half lit by the street lamp.

  ‘A long while. Walk with me?’ He extended his hand.

  She took it.

  Weaving through the twisty back streets of pastel-coloured houses, they climbed the rise into Upper Coed Mawr in silence. There were no words to describe the feeling between them, no words Saffron could find. She focused instead on the sensation of his hand wrapped over hers and was glad she hadn’t worn gloves. He felt hard and warm and tender; calluses on his fingers rubbing against her untarnished flesh. Every now and again, he would give her hand a small squeeze, one of reassurance, or encouragement, but for what Saffron didn’t know, or care. She just liked him pressing himself into her finger bones.

  A fox’s cry jolted them from the magic of the walk, the floating up the hill. Joe turned to look over his shoulder and whispered, ‘There he goes.’ A dog fox slinked across the road, following the call of the female. Saffron gazed up at Joe, a tug in her belly, a weakening in her spine. Kiss me, kiss me, she longed to say. But he wasn’t watching her, instead he looked beyond her and she wondered what he thought, what he felt, his inscrutable features giving nothing away.

  Joe couldn’t look at Saffron. He felt her gaze, like the sun on cold cheeks, but he didn’t dare turn and lower his eyes in case they revealed too much. Instead, he allowed himself to be swallowed up by her scent – musky, heady, sexy, unmistakably her – to be consumed by her presence. Intoxicated and woozy, he closed his eyes.

  ‘Look at me,’ she urged.

  And it was impossible to resist her demand.

  He swept her ragged fringe from her forehead and ran his fingers from her temples to her chin. He bent forward and his mouth met hers in a kiss. A kiss like he’d never kissed anyone before. A first kiss. No, his first kiss was a let-down. Sixteen years old, at a party held at Freddy’s parents’ house while they holidayed in St Tropez. A girl: beautiful, heavily made-up, drunk, she’d tasted of vinegar and nuts. Saffron’s touch promised passion, peace, danger, release. Contradictory, unpredictable, irresistible. He wanted it to last for ever.

  She craved Joe like nothing and no one before. Was this what love felt like? Was this what people meant when they spoke of an almost unbearable ecstasy? Or was she confusing it with infatuation? And how did people tell the difference? She was falling from a cliff, out of control. Unstoppable.

  No. She could not lose control.

  She pulled away and embarrassment enveloped her. Was he able to sense her need, her fear? He hadn’t let go of her hand. He rubbed his thumb between the metacarpal bones.

  ‘Let me show you my home. Let me cook for you. Feed you,’ he said at last.

  ‘What, now?’

  He laughed, quietly, and let go of her hand. Cold air brushed her palm, but like an amputee who claims to feel the missing limb, she imagined he was still there, like a glove, shielding her. ‘Tomorrow. About eight. I need time to get the ingredients … Decide what to cook.’

  ‘I don’t know where you live.’

  ‘I’ll draw a map. Drop it through the letterbox tomorrow morning, before you go to work.’

  ‘An address? A telephone number?’

  ‘I’ve only a work phone. Don’t use it for anything else.’

  ‘You could make an exception?’ Why didn’t he want to give her his number?

  ‘Not yet.’

  She didn’t ponder on his foibles. He’d asked her to dinner – like a date – and she wanted to jump up and down, squealing, like a kid on their birthday.

  Stay cool, Saffron, stay cool.

  ‘You’ll find my place. Don’t tell anyone.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  He kissed her again, chastely, on the cheek and said, ‘I’ll walk you to your door.’

  Her mum was already in bed, reading her Bible, as she always did before she fell asleep. Saffron popped her head round the open door and offered to make camomile tea, knowing she would find it hard to sleep. Rain thanked her but declined.

  Saffron lay in bed staring at the ceiling, replaying the scene on the rise over and over. The memory of the kiss awakening her body time and time again.

  Rain put the phone down and tried to stem her anxiety. The member due to lead the midweek service later that day had come down with flu. He was younger than most of the congregation, though not by much, so she wasn’t overly concerned about his health per se. No, she was more concerned about her workload that morning. She had home visits to attend, a flower arranging class to oversee, brasses to polish and now she had a service to think about and plan. Ordinarily, she might have been able to bring her planned Sunday service forward, but this week she’d been unusually tardy and hadn’t given that service any thought yet.

  The brass-polishing was the obvious thing to drop but Rain couldn’t bear
to see it so dulled. It reflected her love of Christ and she needed it to shine, shine, shine. Now more than ever, it seemed. Anxiety was an ever-present threat to the equilibrium of her day to day existence once again. She’d thought she had it under control but it had reared its ugly head. She blamed it on the state of the roof. There was no roof. She felt as exposed as the chapel, her lid right off. She wished they’d hurry up but the weather had slowed progress on occasion, too wet and wild to be safe for the men to work.

  You need to be ever-vigilant against anxiety’s presence, she pondered, rummaging in the drawer of the kitchen table, sure there was a bottle of diazepam buried in amongst the bills, batteries, biros and other debris. Ah-ha, there it was! She squinted at the label, the print small and faded, and reached for her reading glasses. They were not on the table. Bottle clutched in her palm she raced to the living room. No sign. She pounded upstairs to check her bedside table. No sign. Her heart rate rose, a combination of rushing through the manse – it was large and she was unfit – and her anxiety gathering momentum.

  Remain calm. Think.

  She’d taken her Bible into the bathroom that morning. Sure enough, her glasses rested on the ledge behind the tub. She read the label. The prescription was over eighteen months old; it must have been one of her early ones. Why hadn’t she finished the course? Did drugs have a sell-by date like food? Surely, they couldn’t do any harm?

  She threw a pill to the back of her throat and turned on the tap. As she drank she realised she could think about her message while she polished the brasses. If she took a notepad, she could jot down ideas if she deemed it necessary. Services were not over-planned or rehearsed. She liked to have a theme and a broad outline with three or four quotes ready to repeat. There had to be a degree of spontaneity, to allow the words of our Lord Jesus Christ to flow through her. She was his conduit. Drug swallowed, she turned off the tap. Her heart rate slowed. She wished she’d not panicked. How foolish to resort to the diazepam.

  Thank you, Lord, for providing the solution. Forgive me my weakness.

  Taking a deep breath, she made her way downstairs and gathered her things for the home visits, noticing for the first time that Saffron still wasn’t up. The coffee in the pot would be cold.

  Joe, Tyson, and Eifion sat on the lush grass at the back of the chapel, sheltered from the wind, eating their lunch, slurping on wet sand-coloured tea made by the piano player who always arrived early to run through the hymns for the forthcoming service. Joe had been disappointed to discover that the beautiful organ with its ivory pipes hadn’t been touched in decades. Instead, the congregation sang along to an electric keyboard set to piano mode, the lyrics displayed in large type on a roll-down screen suspended from the balcony. The chapel was a quirky mixture of old and new. An iMac sat on a table alongside the pulpit, wooden pews lined the space with modern easy chairs at the back for the infirm.

  ‘How long do these things go on for?’ Tyson said, between chews on a pasty. Usually, on Thursday afternoons, he disappeared into town, or Joe sent him to suppliers or on other work-related missions.

  ‘An hour and a bit,’ Joe replied, without looking. ‘And shut your gob while you’re eating. I don’t want to hear you chomping or see the masticated remains of your lunch.’

  ‘The what?’ Tyson said, mouth full.

  ‘Never mind.’ Joe glanced at Eifion who smiled and lifted his eyebrows.

  Clouds gathered in the sky, obscuring the weak sun. A downpour was forecast and the service was unlikely to finish much before four o’clock. Joe could feel damp seeping through his jeans. He stood. ‘Take the rest of the afternoon off. You’ve worked like Trojans.’ Especially you, Eifion.

  ‘Nice one, la,’ Tyson said, leaping to his feet, brushing his hands over his backside. ‘I’ll see yas in the morning.’ He disappeared, leaving half a mug of tea on the grass.

  ‘Lazy beggar,’ Eifion said, bending to collect the mug. ‘Bet he’s always got a woman to clean up after him.’

  ‘What about you?’ Joe asked.

  ‘Divorced.’

  ‘Sorry to hear that.’

  ‘Don’t be. We had some good years, got a beautiful daughter. We just weren’t designed to make the course. Not everyone is.’ He finished his tea and picked up Joe’s empty mug too. ‘What about you? Anyone special?’

  ‘Came close once. Not sure I’ll ever go there again.’

  ‘We all get our hearts broken at least once. We all recover and go round the block again. It’s the human way.’

  ‘Most. Not all.’ Was Joe’s heart mended? He couldn’t be certain. Its strength hadn’t been fully tested; he’d not seen her since that final terrible day. Joe wasn’t sure why he was sharing this with a man he hardly knew. He trusted Eifion, unlike Tyson and almost everyone else he could think of. He was solid, honest. Dependable. Everything Freddy wasn’t; everything Allegra wasn’t.

  ‘Look, are you sure there’s nothing I can be getting on with? There’s nothing for me to go home to,’ Eifion said.

  Joe tried to think. He needed to get to the supermarket to buy food, but there were hours before Saffron was due and he needed to keep himself occupied. All afternoon his mind had whirred; it had been hard to concentrate on anything other than Saffron de Lacy. He couldn’t get her out of his head. Perhaps he was healed.

  His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of singing – ‘My Jesus, My Saviour’ – heartfelt, totally unlike the singing in his school chapel where boys mumbled, voices flat, and the masters scowled at those not singing at all.

  ‘Lovely, isn’t it? Singing like they mean it,’ Eifion said.

  A single voice rose above the crowd, loud and passionate, and completely out of tune. Both men laughed. ‘That’ll be the minister,’ Eifion said. ‘Can’t sing for toffee. Was the talk of the town when she first arrived. Never heard anything like it, they said. And she’s Welsh! By birth. Spent too long in England, some said.’ He was laughing, but Joe detected affection.

  People only tease those they’re fond of.

  ‘I like her,’ Joe said.

  The older man turned away, too late to disguise the blush creeping up his face.

  ‘Go in. Watch the service,’ said Joe.

  ‘Long time since I attended chapel. Not sure they’d have me.’

  ‘They’ll have anyone. They’re desperate.’

  ‘Even you?’

  Joe hadn’t considered going in himself. He knew it would please Rain, but that could lead to more badgering to attend coffee mornings and the like. He should keep a low profile in the town, especially after the latest news from Simon. But Saffron would have had to attend service after service as a child. How must that have been for her?

  Eifion spoke again. ‘Might be an education.’

  Another hymn caught Joe’s attention. Sung in Welsh this time, the emotional punch all the more powerful for it.

  ‘Ah, “Calon Lân”,’ sighed Eifion, his hand to his chest, ‘gets me every time.’

  ‘And the Rev can’t join in, which helps,’ Joe said.

  Eifion smiled. ‘I hear she’s trying to learn, so enjoy it while you can.’

  Joe’s curiosity got the better of him. ‘OK. You’re on. But I might duck out without warning.’

  Rain was addressing her audience when they slipped in. She offered a prayer, eyes scrunched, chin tipped to the roof. They lowered themselves into the wide chairs at the back and an elderly lady nodded and smiled. ‘I’m Mary,’ she said, more loudly than Joe thought polite.

  Rain offered prayers for various members of the church and their friends; she thanked God for the work on the chapel, for the wood the builders worked with, for their skill and perseverance. Joe wondered if she’d seen them enter, if she’d peeped while praying. Taller than most, he looked over the sea of grey and white hair and wondered how many came to the church later in life, as the spectre of death loomed ever closer. Rain continued her sermon. Without anything before her, no paper notes or prompt cards, she spoke of
the wind of the Holy Spirit, the pure, clean, oxygen required for the spirit to cleanse, that in order for a fire to burn it needed air. She likened the removal of the roof to a cleansing for the church and all its members. Her testimony seemed to come from the heart; no monotonous reading from the Bible for her. She spoke casually and personally, a stream of consciousness.

  Joe was admiring the craftsmanship of the pews when Rain’s testimony caught his ear again. She asked for the members to offer a prayer for someone close to her, a non-believer.

  ‘I ask that you pray that she may find peace. For she is troubled, dear friends. She cannot forgive and she will not open up her heart, but I feel her pain, Lord. Save her, love her, protect her. Show her the way forward.’

  Joe knew Rain addressed her God but she could have been talking to him. She could have been speaking about him, but he could hardly teach Saffron about forgiveness.

  The first bars of the next hymn rang out and the congregation stood. Some raised their arms, palms open, as they sang. Eifion leaned over and whispered, ‘You ever wish you had that kind of faith?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ Joe mouthed back. The old lady on his left, Mary, rapped his arm and smiled broadly at him.

  Christ, she’s going to try and convert me if I don’t get out of here fast.

  He joined in the song – it was the only traditional hymn of the service and the only one he knew. As it finished Mary leant over again. ‘Me, oh, my, you have a wonderful voice, young man. A gift, aye, a gift,’ she said in her Scots burr. Joe nudged Eifion and indicated that he needed to go. He slipped out, leaving Eifion to admire Rain.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Before she left work, Saffron snooped around the underwear section of Wynne’s on the pretext that it needed tidying. Customers regularly pulled pairs of knickers out of the five-packs and it was quite a job folding them correctly so they slipped back into the plastic wallets neatly. Assuming the full five were still present, which often they weren’t. It was a well-known shoplifting ploy: a single pair did not set off the alarm. Saffron admired the ingenuity.

  Like everything else in the shop, the bras and pants selection was miserable and on the whole the quality was poor. Skimpily cut, thin fabric, trimmed with stiff, scratchy lace. There was a tiny range of more luxurious items but even with Saffron’s staff discount (a measly ten per cent) they’d come to more than she could really afford. And it was kind of sluttish, to invest in pricey underwear on the eve of a date. It wasn’t as if she was even sure it was a proper date. They weren’t going out. She hadn’t got a clue what to wear and she couldn’t dress up too much in case Rain starting asking awkward questions. She’d been fretting about it from the moment she’d woken up.