by Beth Thomas
‘Oh for goodness’ sake,’ Naomi said, taking hold of my arm. ‘Come on, we gotta go back.’
‘What’s happened, Nomes?’
She didn’t answer, just marched me back across the bridge to Mum’s side. When we got there, I could see that Mum’s left hand was wrapped around the lower part of the railing so tightly that not just the knuckles had gone white, her whole hand had. And, oddly enough, her face. I looked at her and was horrified by the terror in her eyes.
‘Mummy?’
‘It’s OK, Daisy Duck,’ she croaked, skinning her thin lips back from her teeth. I recoiled, and I remember wondering if this was really my mum squatting there or some other being inhabiting her body. A frightened, weak other being.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked tremulously.
‘I’m OK,’ she said, trying to smile again. I didn’t like it when she did that. I wished she’d stop.
‘Mum, you’ve got to move,’ Naomi said at this point. She put her hand on Mum’s white fingers and tried to unwind them from the railing, but Mum started shaking her head and moved her other hand on top of the first one.
‘Can’t,’ she whispered, probably hoping I wouldn’t hear her. She was very fond of telling me there was no such word.
Naomi sighed and let go, then sat down on the ground next to Mum. ‘Might as well sit down, Dozy,’ she said. ‘We’re likely to be here for a while.’
‘Why? What’s going on? Why won’t you tell me?’
‘May I be of assistance, ladies?’ a male voice broke in at this point. The three of us all turned and looked up at a man in jeans and gleaming white trainers, standing above us. I remember that his jeans had a crisp crease running down the centre of each leg.
‘We’re fine, thanks,’ Mum half-whispered immediately, trying to give the impression of strength and capability. She was pretty convincing, in spite of a bloodless face and tremors in her voice.
‘You don’t look fine,’ he said, crouching down to mirror her pose. ‘Seriously, won’t you let me help you? You can’t live here – the council won’t allow it.’
‘Thank you,’ Naomi said at this point, standing up. ‘My name is Naomi, that’s my sister Dozy, and this is our mum, Anne.’
‘Nice to meet you all,’ he said, glancing briefly at me, then focusing back intently on Mum. ‘My name is Graham.’ He extended his hand to her. ‘Take hold of my arm; I’ll help you get across.’
Daisy Mack
Getting high. Not good.
Suzanne Allen Certainly sounds good. Although, of course, I would have absolutely no idea whether it’s good or not. It’s all a complete mystery to me. Unknown territory as it were.
Jenny Martin Suzy you’re protesting far too much lol!
I’m at the footbridge now. Actually I’ve already been standing here for a few minutes, trying to get up the courage to go over it. My stomach is churning and my heart is thudding as if I’ve just bumped into Hugh Grant. I don’t know how Mum even began to cross that bridge in London back then, when she had two children with her. I feel nervous enough carrying my iPod across. For some reason it feels like everything I’m holding is in danger of going over the side.
OK, there’s nothing to be done other than put one foot in front of the other until I reach the other side. I’ve discovered that if I sing that old song ‘Help’, it really does help.
‘Why don’t you close your eyes?’ Abby said to me, the first time she walked over it with me.
‘How will that help?’
‘Well, you won’t be able to see how high up you are.’
‘Again, how will that help?’
Right, I’m on the bridge. I am not going to look anywhere except straight ahead. I am not paying any attention to the cars and lorries speeding past below me.
‘Afternoon,’ says a voice unexpectedly, and I suddenly realise that under the whoosh of the blood rushing in my ears I’ve just heard some light footsteps approach behind me.
‘Hi,’ I say weakly, as a man in tight black Lycra shorts and a clingy vest top jogs easily past me. As he passes, he turns slightly, makes eye contact and gives a little smile. His blond hair is falling beautifully across his forehead in a floppy curl, and the eyes that meet mine are clear and crystal blue. My knees, already dangerously weak, practically give out at this point. ‘Come on then,’ he says, and makes a forward sweeping gesture with his arm, as if he’s moving over to allow me to go past.
I shake my head. ‘N’th’nks,’ I manage to croak out, the combination of the footbridge and his thighs making me virtually unintelligible. Oh God, I used to be good at this. And I don’t mean walking.
‘Come on!’ he repeats, turning again and grinning more broadly. Then, to my utter horror, he actually runs backwards on the bridge for a few steps and I almost vomit. I have to look away as my heart stops dead in my chest and even though I’ve turned away, I squeeze my eyes shut too. He’s going over, he’s so going over, he’s definitely going over. I cringe and tense, clenching my fists and my jaw, my whole body a taut muscle waiting for the trip, the shout of terror, the scream; and after two or three seconds of heavy anxious breathing, I don’t hear it. I crack one eye open. Sunny day; bridge; man jogging lightly away. Now I’m just a very tense woman watching a fit man jogging. With effort I relax my shoulders and loosen my fists, turning to face forwards again and straightening up a little. Thank God he didn’t see that.
He’s almost at the other end of the bridge now. If I’d been jogging like him, I might have reached the other side too. I might also have caused a deep, ancient fault in the concrete finally to splinter under the thud of my feet, and have tumbled to my death in a sickening avalanche of twisted metal and rock. I shake my head and accidentally catch sight of a couple of cars and a lorry speeding past below me, which makes me gasp and wobble. I have to stop and grab hold of the handrail quickly and bend my knees. Somehow getting my centre of gravity six inches nearer the ground seems to help, even a million feet up in the air.
‘See you again!’ the runner calls back to me from the safety of the path on the other side. I’m frozen here, thanks to him, and I realise as his beautiful buttocks bounce out of sight that I had been kind of hoping he would come back and rescue me, like Graham did for Mum more than twenty years ago.
‘I don’t need any help.’ Her voice between gritted teeth sounds in my head, and I remember that once Graham offered to help her, she managed to stand up and get moving without once taking his arm. She was such an inspiration to me: so incredibly strong and capable. Even when sheer, undiluted terror had her in its grip and reduced her to a gibbering jelly, she was still able to make herself get up and get moving because she had had to learn to rely on no one but herself.
I’m nothing like that. It is totally unnatural for this bridge and this path to be up here in the air. It defies gravity and surely can’t hold out much longer. I feel so exposed and unstable up here, as if the whole thing is about to disintegrate beneath my feet and send me plummeting the two hundred thousand feet to the motorway below, where I will be smashed and broken before being pulped under the wheels of a ninety-ton lorry, five cars and a camper van. I curl my fingers more tightly around the railing and lower my body further towards the path. I’m rigid with fear now, completely unable to think about moving, or think at all, and there’s only one thing I can do. I reach round behind me very slowly and pull my phone out of my pocket; then, keeping my entire body absolutely still apart from my left hand, I write a text.
Abs, I need help
Seconds later, the phone vibrates in my hand as the reply arrives.
Daze, I’m wrking. Client in 15. You gotta get yrself across on yr own.
I can’t.
NO SUCH WRD. Just do it.
Am paralysed. There is no ‘just do it’.
Nikes sake, stfu. NOT paralysed. Get on with it. It’ll mak you strnger.
What a great friend she is.
Ten minutes later I reach the other side of the bridge, and s
tand up. Fortunately no one walked past me as I crossed, and after I’ve brushed the dirt off my hands and knees, you can’t even tell what I was doing.
When I get back to Abby’s flat half an hour later, I hear raised voices in the kitchen as I let myself in. It’s a man and a woman, although Abs said she had another client so she shouldn’t be home yet. I stand in the hallway and take my magic trainers off as quietly as possible. So that the two people arguing aren’t embarrassed about being overheard, of course; nothing to do with wanting to hear what they’re saying.
‘That’s not what I mean,’ the man’s voice says and I realise that it’s Tom. He was the obvious choice of course, this being his home, but I was thrown by the quantity of words being said.
‘Well, what do you mean?’ says a woman’s voice. This one I don’t recognise. Definitely not Abs. The kitchen door bangs suddenly and I jump as a woman, presumably the owner of the voice, marches through it and towards me. She stares at me oddly and I realise that I am standing completely stationary with one shoe on and the other one in my hand, half bent over. I drop the shoe quickly and lift my other foot to start undoing the laces.
‘Don’t leave it like that,’ Tom says, coming through the door. ‘Sally, for God’s sake.’ He reaches an arm towards the woman, then sees me and drops it abruptly back to his side. His alabaster face has a very faint pinkish tinge to it, and three or four of his hairs have become displaced. The man’s a mess. ‘Daisy,’ he says, glancing awkwardly at me, then looking away. ‘I didn’t hear you come in.’
I’m not used to talking to him directly and I’m not sure how to go about it. In the end I just smile and say, ‘Oh.’
‘I’ll see you soon, Tom,’ Sally says, then pulls the front door open and marches at top speed through it. ‘Nice to meet you,’ she says to the street, presumably meaning me, then disappears and slams the door.
In the ensuing silence, Tom and I stare at each other for a second or two. His face looks different somehow and it takes me a moment to realise what it is. His eyebrows have moved. They’re fractionally closer together than usual, which changes his entire appearance. He looks … pained. Distraught, almost. He stares at me with those eyebrows – there’s even a faint crease in the skin between them – and he looks like he’s pleading with me.
‘Daisy,’ he says, his voice one semitone higher than normal, unrecognisable from his usual monotone. It’s practically cracking with emotion.
‘Erm, I gotta have a shower,’ I say quickly, before he has a chance to ask me not to tell Abby what I heard. I limp past him on one trainer towards the bathroom, trying not to add it up, trying not to put the two twos together. But each time I think about it, no matter how hard I try not to, I just keep on coming up with four.
SEVEN
Daisy Mack
Is facing a bit of a dilemma …
Suzanne Allen Anything I can help with?
Daisy Mack Not really. Thanks anyway.
Abby Marcus Whatever it is, forget it. It’s not important.
She’s wrong. It is important. Very much so. It’s so important it has been occupying my mind constantly for the past ten minutes. And it affects her directly. The question is this: should I buy Jaffa Cakes, milk, or both?
I’m in Sainsbury’s. I’ve walked here. This means of course that I will have to walk back, and anything I buy will have to be carried. This will make the walk home fairly hard work and pretty uncomfortable, unless I only buy small, light things. Round things. Spongy things covered in dark chocolate. They will fit nicely in my rucksack and I won’t even know they’re there.
That is my dilemma. Abby has asked me to get both while I’m out today, milk and Jaffa Cakes, but I so don’t want to carry the milk home.
Were you thinking that my dilemma was whether or not I should tell my beautiful, kind and generous best friend Abby about the strange goings-on I witnessed in the hallway of her home two days ago, involving her statuesque yet stilted boyfriend, and a mysterious and (if I’m not mistaken) slightly older, other woman?
No. Nothing to do with me.
‘Aha,’ a voice says suddenly behind me and I look round to find a tall, scruffy-looking bloke with messy dark hair, wearing an old grey tee shirt, frayed jeans and dusty, scuffed work boots. I don’t know him so I turn back. Maybe I could get one very small carton. They don’t weigh much at all. Ooh, wait, they’ve got chocolate flavour …
‘That’s cold,’ the voice says behind me, blatantly stating the obvious. I glance quickly to my left and right but can’t see anyone else nearby. He must be one of those losers who feels the need to commentate on everything around him, as if the rest of the world is permanently gripped by his mundane and totally apparent observations. My Aunt Hazel does that. ‘Phone’s ringing,’ she’ll say. Or ‘Car won’t start.’ When she hears a siren approaching on the street, she’ll either announce ‘ambulance’, ‘police car’, or ‘fire engine’, depending on the type of siren. I don’t really care what’s coming as I’m always far too busy panicking and trying to drive my car off the road and into a parallel dimension to make sure I’m well out of the way.
I carefully ignore the man behind me, to make it clear that he’s wasting his time with me. And everyone else, in fact.
‘You don’t recognise me, do you?’ he goes on, relentlessly. ‘Perhaps if I was holding a wheelbarrow …?’ And suddenly, it clicks. This is Wheelbarrow Man from last week, the man I have been frantically trying to avoid meeting again by walking, literally, all round the houses. And now here he is, by the milk in Sainsbury’s. At exactly the same moment I am. Don’t you just love irony?
I turn slightly, not fully round this time, just enough to catch sight of him and let him know that I’m acknowledging him, and give a half-smile. ‘Oh, yeah, sorry. Hi.’ I turn back to the impossible milk choices before me.
‘I thought you were coming back with a clapometer,’ he says now, and I can hear that he’s grinning. ‘I worked so hard on some new material; never got a chance to test it out.’
What the hell is he going on about? I have no idea, so I give a meaningless ‘huh’ noise and shrug without turning. Hopefully he’ll realise that I need all my concentration to decide on the milk.
A hand reaches into the picture and closes around a four-pinter of skimmed. I only get a view of it for a couple of seconds before it retreats with its prize, but in that time I can see that it’s generally grimy all over, and there is black filth under all the fingernails. My lip curls. Right here is the reason why I’m not buying milk today.
‘See you on the tour then,’ he says to my back. I give a minimal nod without turning, and wait for a couple of seconds until he moves away. Thank God for that. Filthy people always give me the creeps. Or maybe it was just him.
On the way home, I have to walk through the housing estate. I love this bit of the walk, for two principal reasons. Firstly, it’s all good solid pavement, so no mud, loose shingle, scary bridges or eight-legged freaks. The going is good to firm, with no elevation or dangerous foliage. There are lots of large hydrangea and lavender bushes bursting out of gardens, some of which overhang badly over the pavement which is a little bit annoying, but they’re easy enough to avoid. The homeowners shouldn’t really let them get into the sort of state that affects pedestrians, but at least if they do brush me as I pass, I don’t get stung or scratched. I frown in the general direction of the house windows when this occurs, hoping someone might some day see the inconvenience they’re causing and do something about it. It hasn’t worked yet.
The second reason I like this part is that it’s so interesting to look into the gardens and un-becurtained windows of the houses and observe a snapshot of the lives playing out behind them. It’s a bit like watching a soap, except less murder and brawling and more hoovering. For me, it’s a little tether to normality, at a time when I’m feeling adrift and directionless.
‘It seems so weird that life is just going on as normal,’ I said to Abby once when we walked past
here. ‘Everyone carries on buying milk and hanging out the washing and paying the leccy bill and arguing and loving, as if everything’s fine and nothing devastating has happened.’
‘Yes, I know,’ she said, looking at me pointedly. ‘It’s hard to believe sometimes that thousands of people have died or lost their homes in floods and earthquakes in some parts of the world, isn’t it?’
There’s one particular house along here that I’m looking forward to passing today. It’s got such a beautiful front lawn, very green and smooth, no weeds, it’s plainly obvious that someone lives here who really cares about it, and has got the time to spend on it. The edges are really crisp, too, where it meets the flower borders. It pleases me, the sharpness of the earth there. It looks like the inside of a slice of mud cake, with grass icing.
The houses along here remind me very much of Mum and Graham’s house. Well, technically it was Graham’s house, but when they got married Mum sold our old place and put all the money she got for it into extending Graham’s, so there was enough room for all of us. I think a lot was spent on updating it too. He’d lived there on his own for years, so it was in a terrible state. Really gruesome. He had wallpaper in the kitchen that featured pictures of cutlery; an avocado bathroom suite; and bright red swirly patterned carpet everywhere. There were only three bedrooms, so they had a huge two-storey extension built at the side which made a bedroom each for me and Naomi, and a second bathroom for us to share. Darren and Lee – Graham’s two boys – didn’t live there, but he wanted them to have a room each anyway, for when they visited.