Love Byte

by David Atkinson

  Being a mother as well as a father would be doubly hard at that stage and I wasn’t looking forward to it. I began to understand some of Lindsay’s motivation in trying to get me a new girlfriend. Lindsay would have thought all this through of course, that’s what she spent her last few months doing. She told me loads of times that terminal cancer was great for focusing the mind.

  As the day wore on the mist disappeared and it tipped down with rain. We spent the remainder of the afternoon in John Lewis. I kept a wary eye out for ‘psycho’ Ellen and was fully prepared to hide should she make an appearance. There were several false alarms, one of which almost had me ducking behind a display of crystal glasses, but thankfully it appeared that Sunday wasn’t one of her John Lewis days.

  I found it amazing that even as a bloke who was averse to shopping, I could while away four hours in one store. It helped that Amy loved the toy department, and I found it relatively easy to regress to being a child in such an environment.

  I then decided to have dinner in the restaurant as I realized there was very little food in the flat, and I couldn’t be bothered going to the supermarket in the rain. Amy was happy with the arrangement, and filled the kid’s meal option box to the brim with inappropriate junk that I had to sneakily remove when her attention was elsewhere to avoid a tantrum.

  I opted for some pasta and a glass of Diet Coke. Wisely I avoided my preferred option of red wine due to the antibiotics.

  I noticed the restaurant was full of families and I was the only man alone with a child. I received a few sympathetic glances from some mothers, who probably thought I was divorced and trying to grab a few precious hours with my daughter. I’d hate to be divorced with restricted access to my child. How much you must miss.

  The bill for dinner came to over fourteen pounds, and it occurred to me that with zero income coming in I would not be able to maintain such extravagances indefinitely.

  Later that evening, spurred on by that realization, I decided to take stock of my finances and consulted my iPad after Amy was asleep.

  I had a number of different accounts, prudently deciding to spread my funds between banks after the banking crisis. All of my funds were in cash getting next to nothing in interest. I probably should have made some longer-term investments. The banks were always calling me about this, but as I was unsure about how long I was going to stay in the apartment, I wanted the funds handy for buying a house. Cash seemed like the best option and I resisted the sales calls.

  I had worked out a great strategy for dealing with those calls, especially the ones that originated from the sub-continent. I simply flipped the phone onto loudspeaker and handed it to Amy.

  The conversation usually went like this:

  ‘Hello, is that Mr Andrew?’ (For some reason they always thought my first name was my surname which was annoying in itself.)

  Amy then said, ‘No.’

  ‘Oh, is that Mrs Andrew?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can I speak to Mr Andrew please?’

  ‘That’s my daddy.’

  ‘This is Robert.’ (It wasn’t, it was usually more likely to be Zaheer or Ahmed.) Can I speak to your daddy please?’

  Amy then usually looked to me and I shook my head.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Robert’ was stumped. ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Amy.’

  ‘Hello Amy, is your mummy or daddy there?’ I’d shake my head again.

  ‘No.’

  ‘There must be someone with you?’ At this point, if I had him to hand, I’d hold up Barney the purple dinosaur.

  Amy squealed, ‘Barney!’

  ‘Oh, can I speak to Barney please?’

  ‘No. He’s a poof.’

  By this point I was usually doubled up with suppressed laughter with the picture in my head of ‘Robert’ frantically looking through his procedures manual, in case there was a section relating to homosexual babysitters and why they couldn’t talk on the phone.

  Eventually either Amy tired of the game or the cold-caller gave up, which was a shame because it would have entertained me all evening.

  Back on my iPad, I calculated that with the funds from the house sale, the life assurance money and the payout from Lindsay’s pension scheme, I had in total £327,000 in various accounts.

  If I added to that total my six months of salary and the £3000 for my ‘benefits’ that added up to an extra £23,000. It was a relief then that I didn’t have to contemplate selling the Big Issue just yet.

  The money, though nice to have, didn’t occupy my thoughts. At first I had felt incredibly guilty as it was only there due to Lindsay’s death. As a couple we were spenders not savers, and although we had a good standard of living, neither of us had two beans in the bank, so this situation was new to me. Now I was very glad it was there, especially if I didn’t get another job anytime soon.

  I was tempted to check my emails but resisted as I was exhausted. It had been a stressful few days so I went to bed. If I had any dreams I didn’t remember them.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I woke up the next morning and realized it was the first Monday in a long time when I didn’t have a job to go to. Although I was technically still employed, Perennial Mutual had effectively put me on garden leave which was ironic as I didn’t even have as much as a window box. Instead of getting out of bed and heading for the shower I lay and thought for a while. Amy was still asleep so there was no pressing reason to get up.

  It occurred to me that I would have to register with recruitment agencies soon. Although I was in no hurry, I knew that securing a part-time role would be much more difficult than if I was available for a full-time job. I also realized that the salary was likely to be depressingly less than I earned at PM. It made me wonder what kind of house I would be able to afford in my new impoverished state. When I last went house-hunting the economy was buoyant and mortgages plentiful, I probably wouldn’t need a mortgage this time but running a house was still likely to be more expensive, and my city was one of the most expensive places in the UK to live.

  They call Edinburgh The Athens of the North. This, as I understood it, had nothing to do with ruined buildings, (although there are more than a few of them) and certainly nothing to do with the weather which is as un-Athens-like as it is possible to get. I believed it was to do with the city once upon a time being a centre of ‘enlightenment’.

  Nowadays, in my opinion, it is no more ‘enlightened’ than any other city, but it is a nice place to live. Edinburgh has a real sense of history and attracts hordes of tourists from April until mid-September, who rush around photographing everything and anyone that don’t move. I even once spotted a Japanese lady photographing a dog-turd outside Waverley Station. Maybe they don’t have them in Japan.

  I was born and grew up in the city, spending my early childhood in a small flat in the West End. It was part of a sixties’ development and characterless. Later we moved to a more spacious three-bedroom place in a tenement block three streets away from the previous development, but light-years away in terms of architectural style. The tenement was built in 1853. I know that because above the common entrance door is a huge sandstone block with 1853 carved onto it. The first-floor flat inside had original cornice ceilings and stained-glass windows in the hall and bathroom. It always felt to me like I was peeing in church, but my mum loved it and refused to change it. She still lives there, and although the stairs were beginning to cause her problems, she’d vowed never to leave until she was ‘carried out in a box’. I assume she means her coffin and one day I wouldn’t suddenly be asked to get a big cardboard carton from Tesco to put her in.

  I did leave Edinburgh for a time, moving to Preston to study for my degree, but I had always planned to come ‘home’ afterwards. Lindsay was originally from Dunfermline, a large town in Fife just across the Forth Road Bridge from Edinburgh. Her mother mi
grated across the Forth soon after her father left them. Lindsay was only three at the time and she had no memory of anything except the New-Town flat where they lived until she got her job with ‘Logical Fix’. She then rented an apartment near Hibernian’s football stadium and remained there until she met me. Lindsay wasn’t big on change.

  We then bought our first – and as it turned out, only – house together.

  When we went house-hunting it was an exciting but frustrating time for me. We’d go to see a perfectly nice house and I would think, ‘That’s a nice house, I could live here’, only for Lindsay to say, ‘It smells funny’.

  I’d look at her incredulously thinking she must be joking, but no she wasn’t, so 27 Darnley Drive was knocked on the head because it was offensive to Lindsay’s nose. 7 Colquhoun Walk was condemned because the house next-door was yellow and had a very untidy garden. 42 Cherry Tree Gardens was a beautiful old semi-detached house full of character and charm. It had a wonderful kitchen-diner with French doors opening onto a lovely low maintenance garden. I loved the place, but Lindsay reckoned because of its age it would have mice, and she didn’t want to share her house with a mouse.

  Eventually she fell in love with a stone built semi-detached house: 11 Bridgewater Close. It was almost as old as the house in Cherry Tree Gardens, but for some reason the mouse thing didn’t come up and I didn’t mention it. I was just glad to find somewhere that didn’t smell funny or was the wrong colour. We bought it and it became our family home. The three bedrooms were often fully occupied at weekends before we were married, as friends and relatives (mostly Lindsay’s) came to stay. The first year we lived there we had someone staying over every weekend during the Edinburgh Festival which ran for the whole of August.

  Even after we were married, and Lindsay was heavily pregnant, we had regular friends over most weekends. It was only after that I found myself alone most of the time. Whether that was because most of our friends were ‘couple’ friends, and now that I was no longer part of such an arrangement I was off limits, or whether it was simply that they only wanted Lindsay’s company, I didn’t know.

  I still caught up with Jamie of course, but not for drinks anymore, usually just a quick brunch like the previous day. Our idea of a good night out had been a few beers followed by a few more beers whilst we set the world to rights. Then we would get some chips and stagger home, usually sometime after midnight.

  It was not so easy waking up with a hangover now, as Amy would be up at the crack of dawn demanding attention and making a huge amount of noise. It was as if she had a sixth sense of when I had a hangover and upped the decibels. As a result I didn’t drink much anymore. Jamie of course didn’t have any children (or, as he would often say, ‘none that he knew about’) and with the way current events were shaping up it might be a while before he was in a position to change that. It was likely we would not see as much of each other in any event.

  I was distracted from my thoughts by Amy’s little voice shouting ‘Daddy’ and my day had begun.

  After breakfast I tried to put on a Barney DVD for Amy. Unfortunately the DVD player wasn’t working.

  ‘Amy, why is there a banana in the DVD player?’

  Amy ignored me and started playing with her doll. I sighed and realized that ‘Why is there a banana in the DVD player?’ was up there as one of the sentences I never thought I’d say. When you have a toddler you have quite a few and I’d started to keep a note of them:

  ‘Don’t stand on the piano’ – when Amy was trying to jump on her electric keyboard.

  ‘Stop swinging on the fridge’ – when Amy was hanging off the handle of the American-style fridge-freezer.

  ‘Watch that giraffe doesn’t fall on you’ – when Amy was trying to pull over a life-size toy giraffe in Hamleys.

  ‘Amy, put your umbrella down. It’s not raining in the car’ – whilst driving to a country park.

  ‘Amy, why is there a dinosaur in the freezer/toilet/my slipper/my cornflakes?’ The plastic dinosaur got around.

  After I’d scooped the mashed banana from the DVD player and cleaned it up the best I could, Amy decided she wanted ET on instead. Initially I had thought ET would be too grown up for Amy but she loved it. It was obviously mentally challenging for her as every time it was on she asked me lots of questions. Usually I could answer them.

  ‘Why is ET sick?’ – ‘He’s eaten too many sweeties.’

  ‘Why does he walk funny?’ – ‘He needs to go for a poo.’

  ‘Why does he talk like that?’ – ‘He needs to go for a poo.’

  ‘Why are the bad men chasing him?’ – ‘They’re trying to get him to go for a poo.’

  ‘Why does he want to go home?’ – ‘He wants to have a poo at home.’

  ‘Where does ET Live?’

  The last one stumped me for a while. Whilst bowel movements would satisfy many of Amy’s questions, sometimes it wasn’t practical. I had thought about trying to explain how ET comes from a different planet a long way from Earth, but that would have raised even more questions from Amy.

  Eventually Amy’s voice got louder and louder as it tended to do when I didn’t answer her. ‘Where does ET live?’

  Lacking a better answer I said, ‘Dundee.’

  ‘Dundee?’

  ‘Yes, Dundee.’ Amy’s Aunt Millie lived in Dundee.

  ‘Near Auntie Millie?’

  ‘Yes, right next door to Aunt Millie.’

  The next time Pauline took Amy to see her sister she would insist on going next door to see ET, but at least it got me off the hook for the time being.

  After ET, we headed out. I took the car and we drove to a garden centre several miles outside the city. Amy liked playing in the playhouses and sheds, and inside they had a toy department and garden furniture, including garden swings which were effectively comfy couches that swung back and forth. We sat and played on one of those for ages until a grumpy ‘associate’ (that’s what they called their staff) told us to move.

  We didn’t buy any plants as I had nowhere to put them. I could have bought some pots I suppose and put them on the deck outside the apartment, but I knew I would forget to feed and water them and they would die. It took me all my time to remember to feed and water myself and Amy. To illustrate the point, as usual there was no food in the apartment so I picked up some fish and chips on the way home. Amy liked fish and chips. They were not particularly nutritious but they were quick and I didn’t have to coax her to eat them.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The next few days drifted by quietly – well, perhaps with a 2½-year-old around, quietly was not the best description. I took Amy to a few of her classes and Pauline took her for most of Wednesday, which allowed me to register with some agencies which specialized in financial jobs. None of them were confident in finding me a job anytime soon. They of course didn’t use the word ‘job’, they drifted into jargon, typically saying, ‘A suitable position may be difficult to secure in the current economic environment as firms are typically within a contracting phase of their development.’

  In other words, like Perennial Mutual, they were booting people out rather than hiring new ones. I spent a depressing morning on the phone, then just as I had finished lunch, my mobile pinged signifying a text. I expected it to be Pauline with an update on either what Amy had eaten for lunch, or confirming that she had undergone a bowel movement. I was never particularly bothered about Amy’s toilet habits; only once had she been constipated and simply upping her fruit intake had resolved that. Pauline and my mother, however, were obsessed with how often Amy went to the toilet and what her stools were like. Maybe it was an older generational thing. I had no wish to ponder on the firmness or otherwise of her stools.

  When I read the text it was from Lindsay.

  Hi sweetie, I’ve sent u yet another email, so read it when u get a chance. Linz xxx

  I st
ill couldn’t get used to Lindsay contacting me. It felt like I should be able to pick up my phone and speak to her but I knew her old mobile was still sitting in a box somewhere in the spare room. I had a sudden and aching longing to speak to her, just to hear her voice, to hold her, smell her hair. . . .

  I shook my head. I had to stop that thought process. It would only lead to pain and discontentment. I fetched my iPad from under the couch where Amy had left it after playing with some of her Talking Friends apps. She would spend ages shouting at the pussy cat who simply repeated back exactly what she had shouted except in a slightly more shrill tone. It invariably gave me a headache.

  Even the thought of reading an email from my wife was weird, especially as her ‘latest’ email had been written nearly a year ago. The whole thing was bonkers.

  Love Byte 4 – 31st October

  My gorgeous husband

  Hi again,

  It’s been nearly two weeks now since I last contacted you – well in my world anyway – I think it’s only been a few days where you are – I’m beginning to lose track I have to say. You might remember this week (in my time) as I’ve had a few very bad days but I’m feeling better today – one of my remission days. I notice I’m getting less and less of them now (not a good sign.)

  It’s Halloween today and it seems appropriate to spook you out a bit!! Whoooo lol.

  Anyway I’ve played my ace today so you should get a response very soon. I hope I’m doing the right thing – but time will tell – well, it will for you, for me I’m afraid time is running out.

  I’ll be in touch again soon – not sure how much longer I can keep this up. I hope you are taking good care of my little angel. God, I wish I could see her grow up. . . . No, no, I need to stop those thoughts. Nothing I can do to change things.