The Man Who Didn't Call

by Rosie Walsh

  ‘This isn’t what it looks like,’ he said, when he saw me. ‘I’m not really drinking and smoking outside a kids’ party.’ I told him not to worry and asked for directions to the joke shop. He pointed down Hollywood at a store covered in graffiti and murals. ‘Can I come with you?’ the clown asked. ‘I’m traumatized. I trained with Philippe Gaulier in France. I’m meant to be a theatre practitioner, not a kids’ entertainer.’

  I asked what the difference was. Turned out it was quite considerable.

  ‘I tell you what,’ I said to him, pausing on the steps of the joke shop. ‘If I promise not to tell on you for drinking and smoking outside a kids’ party, will you do me a favour? A fairly big favour?’

  So this poor bloke, who probably smelled of cigarettes and alcohol, followed me into the Children’s Hospital and paid Casey a visit.

  As we approached Casey’s ER cubicle, I felt his energy change. ‘From this moment on I will be Franc Fromage. Don’t use my regular name,’ he instructed, even though I didn’t know what his ‘regular name’ was.

  Franc Fromage arrived at Casey’s bedside and produced a ukulele. He sang a song to her arm, about it being broken, and even though Casey was still frightened and upset, she couldn’t help but laugh. And then he asked her to help him make up the next verse, and she was concentrating so hard on that that she forgot where she was and how frightened she was. Soon after, she agreed to let the doctors set her arm.

  Monsieur Fromage told me he’d enjoyed the visit very much. He got very overexcited and started using all sorts of theatrical and psychological terms I didn’t understand. I was rescued by a nurse asking if Franc Fromage would come back, please, because all the other kids wanted to meet the ukulele man with the red nose.

  When we finally left, he gave me his phone number and – visibly terrified – told me I owed him a drink. ‘My name is Reuben,’ he said gravely. ‘Reuben Mackey.’

  So I called him and we went for a drink. Reuben said he’d been reading about hospital clowning since he’d met me and apparently it was a real thing with a method and studies. Some guy in New York had set up the first charity in the eighties. I want to train with him, he said. Use my skills to actually help people, not just make them laugh.

  Nothing happened that night. I think we were both too shy. Besides, Tommy and Jo were watching us from a table across the street ‘in case he turns out to be one of them clowns that murders people’, as Jo put it.

  Then Mrs Garcia asked if I could get Franc Fromage to come to the hospital again because Casey was having her plaster cast removed. He said OK, but only if I bought him another drink.

  He not only helped Casey get her plaster off but he spent hours with the other kids in orthopaedics, too. He only stopped when he realized his hands were trembling with hunger. ‘Please come back!’ one of the nurses implored.

  The problem was, he couldn’t afford to work for nothing. He was living in a tiny shared apartment in Koreatown, he told me, couldn’t afford to earn a cent less.

  That’s when I said, ‘How about I raise the money for you to do one day per month?’ I told him I worked for all these wealthy people and how news of his time in the hospital had spread fast.

  And that’s how it began. My relationship with a clown and the birth of our company. He went to New York to train with psychotherapists, child psychologists and theatre practitioners. Then he came back and we got going. He visited the sick children and I stayed in the background raising money and organizing, which suited me perfectly. I wanted to be involved – I wanted it more than he knew – I just didn’t want to be on the front line.

  I was good at it. Reuben was good at it. People saw and heard about what we did and they wanted us to visit their sick kids. We hired three more people; Reuben trained them. Before long we founded our first little training academy. We got married, rented a flat in Los Feliz, near the Children’s Hospital. Years later the hipsters moved in and Reuben was in his element .

  As for me, I had a purpose, and a direction, and I had no time to think about the life I’d left. I had a man who needed me to be strong when he was weak and vice versa. Our love was based on reciprocal need and strength, and it worked perfectly.

  For a long time that kind of love was all I thought I needed. When I promised to love and honour him forever, I meant it. But, of course, I changed. As the years passed, I no longer needed him, and so our balance was fatally disrupted. We cared so much about each other, Eddie, but without that balance of need, the scales couldn’t settle. My inability to give him a baby was the final straw. After the car accident I couldn’t stand being near kids; couldn’t bear the thought of a child suffering. The very idea of bringing a child into the world – a defenceless baby like my little sister had once been – created a storm of blind panic.

  So I stuck to helping sick children from behind the scenes. It was bearable, and it was safe. It was the best I could manage, but it just wasn’t enough for Reuben. He wanted to hold his own baby in his arms, he told me. He couldn’t imagine a future in which that wasn’t possible.

  By the time he had the courage to end things, I realized I had no idea what love should feel like. But when I met you, I finally knew what it should be. Our few days together weren’t a fling for me, and I don’t believe they were for you, either.

  Please write to me.

  Sarah

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  DRAFTS FOLDER

  You’re right, Sarah. It wasn’t just a fling. And it wasn’t just a week, either; it was a lifetime.

  Everything you felt about you and me, I felt, too. But you should stop messaging me. I’m not who you think I am. Or perhaps I’m who you think I’m not.

  God, what a mess. What a terrible mess.

  Eddie

  ✓ Deleted, 00:12 a.m.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  After a mere four days with my parents in Gloucestershire, I returned to London. I was to lunch in Richmond with Charles, our trustee; then I would speak at the palliative care conference he had helped organize. I would stay the night with Tommy and begin my five-and-a-half-thousand-mile journey back to Los Angeles early the next morning.

  I sat on the train up to London in quiet stillness, unable to tell if I was numb, or simply resigned. I said the right things to Charles over lunch, and at the conference I spoke with precision but no passion. Charles, as I left, asked if I was all right. His concern brought me to the edge of tears, so I told him about my separation from Reuben.

  ‘Please don’t tell anyone,’ I begged. ‘We want to announce it properly at our next board meeting . . .’

  ‘Of course,’ Charles had said quietly. ‘I’m so very sorry, Sarah.’

  I felt a terrible fraud.

  Tomorrow , I promised myself, as I headed back to Central London on the train. Tomorrow I would regain control. Tomorrow I would get on a plane and I would fly back to LA, where I’d rediscover the numb of the sunshine, confidence and my best self. Tomorrow.

  My train pulled into Battersea Park Station and I rested my head against the greasy window, watching the scrum on the opposite platform. People were squeezing themselves onto a train before those on board had had a chance to get out. Shoulders were braced, mouths compressed, eyes were down. All of them looked angry.

  I watched a man in a red-and-white football kit fight his way off the train, a suit folded over his arm. He walked towards the empty benches outside my own train, and I stared blankly as he folded his suit carefully into a satchel. After a while he straightened out and checked his watch, glanced briefly at me and then away, then hauled the satchel over his shoulder.

  And then, as my own train began to pull away from the platform, I turned my head to follow his back as it walked off towards the exit steps, because I suddenly registered what it said on his football strip. Old Robsonians . Est. 1996.

  In the hope of having another Google route to Eddie, I had tried many times to remember the name of his football team. Beyond the word ‘Old’, though,
nothing had materialized. My train began to accelerate and I closed my eyes, concentrating hard on the memory of Eddie’s football trophies. Old Robsonians ? Is that what they’d said?

  I remembered Eddie’s finger, sliding a snake of dust off the top of one of them. Yes! Old Robsonians, The Elms, Battersea Monday. I was certain of it!

  I looked back out of the window, even though the station had long since fallen away. Behind an old gasworks, the skeleton of a huge construction block was being fussed over by dizzying cranes.

  That man plays in Eddie’s football team.

  Old Robinson footnalk , I typed, but Google knew what I was looking for. A website was offered. Pictures of men I didn’t know. Links to fixtures; match reports; an article about their US tour. (Is that where he’d been? The States?)

  In the corner of the page, I scrolled through their Twitter feed: match results, banter, more pictures of men I didn’t know. And then, a picture of a man I did know. It was dated a week ago. Eddie, in the background of a post-match pub photo, drinking a pint and talking to a man in a suit. Eddie.

  After staring at the photo for a long time, I selected ‘About Us’.

  Old Robsonians played on an AstroTurf pitch right by Battersea Park Railway Station on Monday nights. Their kick-off was at 8 p.m.

  I checked my watch. It wasn’t yet seven. Why had the other man been there so early?

  At Vauxhall, I teetered at the door of the train, unsure as to what I should do. There was no guarantee that Eddie was in London, or playing tonight. And according to the website, the football pitch was in the grounds of a school: I either marched right up to the perimeter to brazenly confront him or I didn’t go at all. It wasn’t like I could casually stroll by.

  The train doors rolled shut and I remained on board.

  At Victoria, I got off and stood, paralysed, on the crowded concourse. People bulleted and ricocheted off me; a woman told me outright not to ‘stand there like a fucking idiot’. I didn’t move. I scarcely even noticed: all I could think about was the possibility that Eddie, in less than an hour, might be playing football a few minutes from where I was standing.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Dear You,

  Today is 11 July – your birthday! Thirty-two years since you forced your way out into the bright starkness of the world, stunned fists moving in the air like little tentacles.

  Out you came, into the warm, blurred glow of love. ‘She’s too small,’ I cried, when they let me visit you. I could feel your ribs, a hopelessly fragile palisade around your tiny beating heart. ‘She’s too small. How can she survive?’

  But you did, Hedgehog. I remember now as then the fantastical brimming of love for which I was so wholly unprepared. I didn’t mind Mum and Dad spending all their time with you. I wanted them to. I wanted your ribs to grow stronger, to strengthen and thicken around that tiny lamp of life in your chest. I wanted you to stay in hospital for months, not days. ‘She’s fine,’ Mum and Dad told me, again and again. Dad made me a banoffee pie because I was so afraid for you I cried. And yet you were fine. That heartbeat went on and on, through the day and through the night, on and on as seasons changed and you grew and grew.

  Did you know it was your birthday today, Hedgehog? Has anyone told you? Did someone make you a cake, covered in chocolate stars, just how you liked it? Did anyone sing for you ?

  Well, if not, I did. Maybe you heard me. Maybe you’re with me now, while I write this letter. Giggling about how much neater your handwriting is than mine, even though you’re younger than me. Maybe you’re outside, playing in your tree house, or reading girls’ magazines in your den up on Broad Ride.

  Maybe you’re everywhere. I like that idea most. Up there in the pink-flushed clouds. Down here in the dampness of daybreak.

  Wherever I go, I look for you. And wherever I am, I see you.

  Me xxxxx

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  On my last night in London I turned up at a six-a-side football game in Battersea in the hope of finding a man I’d met once, a man who’d never called.

  What I did that night would lie way beyond the splintered edges of sanity. But as I stood on the concourse at Victoria Station earlier on, trying to reason with myself, I had realized that I wanted to see Eddie more than I cared about the consequences.

  And now here I was, crammed into a hot corner of the 7.52 to London Bridge via Crystal Palace, first stop Battersea Park. Less than two minutes’ walk from the station I would find an AstroTurf pitch, and on it – my stomach flipped like a February pancake – Eddie David. In a football kit, warming up for his eight-o’clock match. Right now. Passing to a teammate. Stretching his quads.

  His body. His actual, physical body. I closed my eyes and crushed a surge of longing.

  The train was slowing down already. The squeal of brakes, a pulsing wave of commuters forcing me down the steps, and then – suddenly, shockingly – I was standing on Battersea Park Road. Behind me, the amplified bark of ticket-sellers’ voices, an echoing busker’s guitar. Above me, the heave and groan of the train viaducts and thickset white clouds like beaten meringues. And ahead of me, somewhere up an unpaved lane, Eddie David.

  I stood there for some time, breathing slowly. Two further waves of passengers poured out around me. One of them, wearing a red-and-white football shirt with ‘PAGLIERO’ written in black on the back, sprinted up the lane towards the pitches, trying as he ran to send a text message and affix shin pads to his legs. His green satchel swung round and hit him in the face, but he carried on running.

  That man knows Eddie , I thought. He’s probably known him for years.

  As the pitches slid into view, everything that I’d seen online was confirmed. The pitches were surrounded on all sides by high wire fences, train viaducts, buildings. There would be nowhere to hide. And yet here I was, all five foot nine of me, striding ever closer in my smart conference blouse.

  This is the most appalling thing I will ever do.

  But my legs kept on walking.

  The players on the pitch closest to me were warming up. A referee jogged towards the centre with a whistle in his mouth. Everything moved slowly, like an old VHS tape starting to jam. The air smelled of greasy rubber and exhaust fumes.

  My legs kept on walking.

  ‘Turn round and run,’ I instructed myself in a loud whisper. ‘Turn round and run, and we’ll forget this ever happened.’

  My legs kept on walking.

  It was at that moment I realized that, apart from the PAGLIERO man, there were no other players in the Old Robsonians’ red-and-white strip. There was a team in blue and a team in orange on the pitch nearest me, and on the other one, black-and-white versus green .

  PAGLIERO was putting his shin pads back in his bag. After a moment he straightened up, noticing me.

  ‘Are you an Old Robsonian?’ I asked him.

  ‘I am. A very late one. Are you looking for someone?’

  ‘Well, all of them, I guess.’

  PAGLIERO had the mischievous smile of a boy. ‘The game got moved to seven p.m. I forgot. They’ve already played.’

  ‘Oh.’

  He picked up his satchel. ‘But they’ll be over there now, having some post-match beers. Would you like to join us?’ He gestured over to what looked like a shipping container.

  I peered at it. It was a shipping container. How typically London. A craft ale taproom, probably, in a bloody windowless container. ‘Please do come and join us,’ he repeated. ‘We like visitors.’

  PAGLIERO looked too disorganized to be a rapist or a murderer, so I fell into stride beside him, making small talk I couldn’t even hear. I wasn’t in charge of my own mind anymore, so this was all fine.

  ‘Here you go,’ PAGLIERO said, holding open a door carved into the side of the container.

  I was staring at the naked backside of an adult male for quite some time before I realized what was happening. Before I realized that I was staring at the naked backside of an adult male, with a towel ro
und his neck and his back to the door, singing something with great enthusiasm and minimal musicianship. Other men, more fully clothed than this one, were sitting on benches, arguing about the match. Around them, a jungle of discarded football shirts read, ‘SAUNDERS’, ‘VAUGHAN’,‘WOODHOUSE’,‘MORLEY-SMITH’,‘ADAMS’, ‘HUNTER’.

  Over by the door to what I realized now must be the showers, the naked adult male pulled on some boxer shorts .

  ‘Oh no,’ something deep inside me said, but it didn’t make its way to my mouth. Behind me, in the direction of PAGLIERO, I heard a man laugh.

  ‘Pags!’ someone said. ‘You’re an hour late.’ Then: ‘Oh. Hello.’

  I came back to life. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I whispered, turning to leave. PAGLIERO, laughing, moved to one side to let me out.

  ‘Welcome!’ someone else said, close behind me. I staggered outside, wondering how I would ever get over this. I had just walked into a changing room full of barely clothed men.

  ‘Hello?’ The man had followed me out. He, at least, was fully clothed.

  He put on a pair of glasses, and from inside the container I heard the stunned silence lapse into laughter that I thought would never stop.

  He shook his head in the direction of the door, as if to say, Ignore them.

  ‘I’m Martin. Team captain and manager. You’ve just walked into our changing room, and while it’s an unorthodox move, I sense that you might need some help.’

  ‘I do,’ I whispered, clutching my handbag to me. This must be the Martin who’d written on Eddie’s Facebook page. ‘I need quite a lot of help, I think, but I’m not sure you can offer it.’

  ‘It could happen to anyone,’ Martin said kindly.

  ‘It could not.’

  He thought about it. ‘No, I suppose you’re right. We’ve never had a woman walk into our changing room, not in twenty years. But Old Robsonians is a modern team, embracing innovation and change. Showering after every match is one of our oldest principles, but there’s no reason why we can’t build new features into the practice – guests, maybe a live band, that sort of thing.’