Reversing Over Liberace

by Jane Lovering

  “Well, I dunno. Willow.” Luke scratched at his stubble and rubbed his knuckles. “I mean, how do I know I can trust you? How do I know that you’re not going to go running off with psycho-killer boy here whenever my back is turned?”

  I felt a sudden rush of indignation. Forgetting that the romance with Luke had been fake from the moment he’d pretended to knock into me in this very bar, I reacted like any girl would, being accused of infidelity. “I was not up to anything with Jazz. If I was, why the hell would I do it in here? Luke.” I lowered my voice and moved closer to him. “You are the man I’m going to marry, you are the man I’m in love with. Not Jazz.”

  I was slightly surprised that the bar didn’t fill with the smell of brimstone at the totality of the fib, or that Jazz didn’t burst out laughing. But it’s probably quite hard to laugh with a cracked jaw. Besides, I had to say something. The thought of Luke—filled with unnecessary hurt pride—dumping me just when I was sorting out the kind of revenge most women can only dream of, made me feel sick. Then I came up with something that would swing things my way completely. “Come on.” I pulled at his arm. “Let’s go somewhere and buy a bottle of champagne.”

  Luke was still looking stern, but his face softened. “You mean?”

  “They’ve paid up.” I put a little wobble of excitement into my voice. “The council wrote me a cheque this afternoon for four hundred and fifty thousand pounds. But, of course”—I let my voice drop, cast my eyes repentantly downward—“if you don’t want to, I’ll understand.”

  “I’m not sure.” Luke ran his hands through his hair. “Can you really promise me, Willow, that nothing is going on between you and him?”

  Jazz had regained his seat and his pint and was looking at me with the hurt air of a dog which has had its tail trodden on. But at least he was quiet. I beamed good thoughts at him. “I can totally promise you that.”

  Luke still looked stern, his mouth tight and his eyes narrow. Would he dump the prospect of nearly half a million pounds? Had we all underestimated him? Did he really have a sense of pride, of love for me, was I the woman he wanted for herself not her wallet?

  “Well, all right. I do believe you.”

  Obviously not, then.

  “I’m sorry, Willow. I’m under a lot of pressure at the showroom. The thought that you might be fooling around was unbearable.” Luke smiled at me. “We’ll say no more about it.”

  Hang on. Did that still make it sound as though I had been in the wrong? And with a daggy guy like Jazz? At least if he’d caught me with my hand in Cal’s jeans I could have gone out with a sense of pride at my good taste. “We really weren’t…”

  Luke put his hand in the small of my back to guide me out of the Grape. “I believe you,” he said, in a tone which made it clear that he didn’t, but was being tolerant. We got to the Pitcher and Piano, and ordered a bottle of the finest champagne (£140, I was beginning to regret my lie about the money, I hoped he wasn’t going to suggest we went on somewhere equally pricey for dinner) before I realised what he was doing. Making me feel guilty, unsettling me, forcing me to try to buy him back with grand gestures. He was bloody good at it, I had to admit, generosity itself with his “I really don’t mind that you met up with your ex without telling me,” and yet just the tiniest bit withdrawn. No handholding under the table, no suggestive winks or casual remarks about our future. Cool enough that, had our relationship been for real, I would have been more than a little bit panicky by now. Smooth. You had to admire it.

  So, since I was pretending that our love affair was real, I also had to pretend that I wanted his approval again. I told jokes and took him to dinner (although it wasn’t the hugely expensive one he’d clearly set his heart on, it wasn’t exactly cod and chips twice). We ended the evening with many references to my condition “down there” and an encounter which, although not the full back against the wall shag, wasn’t exactly cod and chips twice, if you get my drift. He dropped me at my door after an “I’ve forgiven you” snog and I dashed straight in to phone Jazz and apologise.

  First thing on Saturday morning, I cadged a lift up to the farm on the back of Ash’s bike. We were both glad to get away from home, where Grace had discovered the joys of colic and had therefore kept us all awake most of the night.

  “It’s not that I mind, as such, but it’s not even my fucking baby.” Ash pulled the bike up onto its stand and leaned against it in the lay-by.

  “Ooh, not getting broody now, are you?” I nudged him and after a moment he nudged back.

  “Not for kids, no. But, don’t you ever think you’re getting old, Will? With nothing to show for it?” He pulled off his helmet and ran a hand through his spiky brush of hair, making it stand on end and himself, in consequence, look about twelve.

  “We’re thirty-two, Ash. It’s not exactly cardigan-time.”

  “Yeah, but, I was clubbing last night and, know something? For the first time I felt old. There’s loads of guys there, all about nineteen, all totally fuckable but it’s like there’s nothing going on apart from clubs, drugs and sex.” There was a pause.

  “I’m still looking for the bad in that statement.”

  “Well, there is more to life than that, isn’t there? I want to buy a house, Will. I want to live with someone, eat breakfast with them, get a dog. Be real. Don’t you ever feel that you want to be real?”

  I inhaled heftily. “I think it’s called growing up.”

  “I guess. Right, I’m going, leave you here with Gorgeous Boy.” Ash threw a derisive look at the Metro, slewed into its parking space in the worst example of parallel parking since the Exxon Valdez. “I’ll see you back at the ranch house.” Helmet on and engine started, he threw up the visor to yell, “Give him one from me,” and roared off into the scenery, which briefly became less scenic with the addition of a Yamaha 750 and concomitant exhaust fumes.

  As I crossed down over the field, I could see that the door to the barn was open a touch. Nothing visible inside, of course, he was too careful for that. All the machines were tucked away in the far, dark corner, ticking and flickering and purring to themselves out of sight of any casual passersby.

  “Hello?” Forgetting exactly who I was dealing with, I tugged at the slightly open door. The resulting noise drove me to my knees, both hands clamped over my ears. The noise was so big it had character.

  “Er, sorry, Will.” Gradually I became aware that the sound had stopped and opened my eyes, to stare into the knees of Cal. “Wasn’t expecting anyone, so the alarms were enabled.” He helped me to my feet. “I should know better, really. Last time I was working with the doors open, the bloody goat got loose. I’m in the middle of a really tricky piece of analysis and suddenly it sounds like a buffalo mating with an elephant seal. I go outside to shoo her off, forgetting I’ve got my headset on and all the team can hear me shouting ‘fuck off and leave me alone you evil bitch’ with the full-scale racket going on in the background.”

  “Sounds nasty.”

  “It was. They thought I’d been raided. All shut their systems down, all off-line, couldn’t reach anyone for a week.” I was upright but he hadn’t let go of my hand. “So. You came back.”

  “No. I’m a hologram.”

  “Won’t bother offering you a drink then. Don’t tell me, you’re deeply in love with my goat and you’ve come to ask for her hoof in marriage?”

  “I wouldn’t take that thing’s hoof in anything less than a curry.” He was smiling down at me in a way that made me itch inside. “Cal, I think someone’s calling you.”

  “What? Oh, yeah, right.” He flipped the headset back up from around his neck, but even his voice was smiling as he spoke into it, “Yo, Zak! What’s the news? What? Yes, Willow’s here, how could you…oh, did I? Shit. Hey, down boy, that’s for me to know and you to forever speculate on. Now…” Turning away from me he walked back into the barn but I didn’t follow. I wanted five minutes.

  I walked behind the barn and leaned on the paddock gate l
ooking up the hill towards the moor. Winnie stopped scratching her bum on one of the fence posts and eyeballed me balefully. “I’ll even miss you, you evil-smelling lawn mower,” I whispered. As philosophical as I’d been about the lack of council funding coming my way, the thing I was really regretting was the loss of this place. Ever since the notion of buying it had come to me, the farm had felt like home. The smells, the dust, the dry rot and peeling paintwork, all had got under my skin and had become part of me, as much as I felt I had become part of them. And now, although Luke’s treachery had allowed the desire for score-settling to fill me, the inability to buy the farm made me far sadder. “I wonder if that makes me really deep or incredibly shallow?” I closed my eyes and let my chin rest on the gate, the smell of pine resin trickled up my nose and made me think of forests and clean toilets.

  “Penny for them.”

  I jumped.

  “Sorry. You looked completely lost there. Making plans for turning all this into an herb nursery? Or just herself into goat-burgers and a bedside rug?”

  I looked up at him, leaning beside me companionably. Those eyes were like a total eclipse. “I can’t buy the farm.”

  His shoulders tensed, drew away from me. “Oh. Right.” Our thighs had been touching, now there was a handspan between them. “Okay. Thanks for letting me know.” And then he was turning, turning away from me and setting himself to limp back towards the barn. He looked beaten, defeated.

  “I would if I could.” I half-called after him.

  A shrug. “Doesn’t matter. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Cal.” I caught him up in the middle of the yard. “Look, I really am sorry.”

  A beat. Then he grabbed me by the shoulders, pushing me back against the wall of the barn, leaning his full weight into me, catching my hair in his hands and using it to tip my head back and up. I had time for a tiny whimper before his mouth came down hard on mine, kisses like bruises, tongue teasing, reckless, shuddering, wild.

  “What the hell was that?” I asked, when he let me go, my face flaming flamingo-pink and my mouth doubling in size with the ferocity of the kiss.

  “That, Willow”—Cal moved back lazily—“was goodbye.”

  “Goodbye?” Confusion was streaming from every pore. “Why? What have I done?”

  “I could live with you fooling with Luke, setting him up, maybe even one quick last fuck to keep him onside until the denouement, but I can’t live with you deciding to write it all off. Or, rather, I’m going to have to, aren’t I, but, well. Goodbye, Willow.”

  “But I haven’t.”

  His eyes flared. “So, you’ve decided off your own bat that you don’t want the place? Oh, come on. Give me some credit. I’ve seen the way you’ve been around here—you love it. You kind of belong here, somehow. I mean, even that fucking goat behaves for you. And now, suddenly, you don’t want it? Yeah, right, there’s a man behind a decision like that, and I can only think of one who’d let you pass up on your own happiness for the sake of his.”

  “Listen, you arrogant, sexist shit, not every decision I make revolves around men. You’re so self-obsessed, what, you think I’ve got a brain that doesn’t work unless some guy’s swinging his dick at me?”

  On adrenaline-fired legs, I wobbled off across the yard, attaining a decent march by the time I reached the paddock. Winnie gave me an “oh God, it’s you again” stare and clambered into the far corner, from where she watched me turn up the lane and head towards the hill with my fists clenched and my jaw rigid. How dare he? Was that what he really thought of me, that I was so gullible and trusting that I’d get back with Luke, after everything he’d done? I power-walked up the track, not acknowledging the nettle stings peppering the backs of my legs, or the tiny flag-wavings of butterflies celebrating the thistle flowers. Bastard. Did he see me as some weak-willed, pathetic little woman, having to have a big, strong man at her side in order to feel vindicated? Even if that big, strong man was a double-dealing fraud? That even Luke was better than nothing?

  Halfway up the hill my anger and I ran out of steam and I sat down on the sandy bank overlooking the farm. I couldn’t see Cal, no movement apart from the goat shuffling around her drinking trough and some bumblebees lazily torpedoing the gorse blossoms. Maybe he’d gone inside the barn and plugged himself in to his machines, called up the team and told them to stop their work on my behalf. Not needed anymore. With that scared, tortured look back on his face, the look he’d lost come to think of it, since I’d told him I loved him.

  And then, with the perfect clarity of hindsight and the additional focus of the microscope of guilt, I realised.

  This wasn’t about me. It was about him.

  Cal, with his fear of being rejected again. He’d let down his guard, let me in, showed me who he truly was. He’d told me things, trusted me, and I’d done the metaphorical equivalent of kneeing him in the nuts. He didn’t think Luke was better than nothing, he thought Luke was better than him! His worst nightmare had come true, he’d been living in dread of this moment, and I’d done nothing to reassure him. Cal wasn’t like Luke, wasn’t tough, uncompassionate. He was scared, fragile, damaged.

  And here was me, bringing my flamethrower approach to relationships.

  I got up, dusted down my backside and left the hillside, cantering down the slope and arriving in the yard with a kind of braced-knee sliding stop. I’d been wrong. Cal hadn’t gone into the barn. He was sitting on the edge of an old churn-stand, his weaker leg drawn up under his chin and his hair hiding his face. “Cal.”

  He jumped. “Oh, yeah, you’ll be needing a lift back, won’t you?”

  “Um, no. Actually. I need to explain to you…stuff.”

  “There really isn’t any need. You don’t have to justify yourself to me, Willow.”

  But now I knew what he was doing. Not pushing me away, not withdrawing, he was performing damage limitation.

  “Cal, listen. I didn’t get the council money, all right? That is why I can’t buy the farm. Nothing to do with anyone else.” The quick hope on his face left me weak. “So, now you know. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s because I can’t.”

  “Oh.” Cal wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. There was blood on it. It had been quite a goodbye kiss. “Oh, fuck. I’m sorry, Willow.”

  I did a shrug very similar to his.

  “No, really. Oh, God. What have I done? I only wanted…look, I…shit.” He lopsidedly jumped down from the stone platform and ran his hands through his hair. “What can I do to make it up to you?”

  My smile started slow and I watched the answering fire spark in his eyes. “Are you kidding?” My voice was slow, too. “That kiss was the most erotic thing I have ever had done to me.”

  His mouth twitched. “You really had me going there, you cowbag.”

  “Well, you’ve got me going here, bastard.”

  “Then come into my tent and let me attend to you. I have scented unguents and liquors with which to pander to your every whim.” He led me into the barn, one hand clamped around my wrist as though afraid I’d suddenly change my mind and run.

  “Why the hell would you want to panda to me? Don’t they sort of mate once every twenty years or something?”

  “Ah, but they know the value of foreplay.”

  And with that, he proceeded to show me the value of foreplay, until I was drunk and drugged and intoxicated with it, and each time I threatened to crash he’d catch me up and lift me again until he finally whispered me into making love so completely that only the feel of the straw around me kept me earthbound.

  We only realised how uninhibited we’d been when a distant and tinny round of applause broke out from the computer speakers and a voice said, breathlessly, “Sandman, whatever it is you’re on, get me some.”

  “Shit, Fortune, you could have turned your ’phones off,” Cal said languidly, lying beside me with his fingers tracing my ribs.

  “What, and miss fifty quid’s worth of entertainment? You should w
ebcam, man. You’d make a killing.”

  “Ha fucking ha.” Leaning across me, Cal flipped the switch that sent the machine into deaf-blindness. “Sorry. Forgot to turn the boys off.”

  “I think quite the opposite was true.”

  “Hmm, yes. Look, Will, I’ve been thinking,”

  “What about?” I pushed his hair off his face.

  “Mostly about how can anyone who’s seen Johnny Vegas believe in evolution, and that Beatrix Potter must have been smoking some serious weed to come up with The Tailor of Gloucester. Oh, and that I love you. And, instead of giving up on the idea of this place, why don’t we both move in here.”

  “What?” I propped myself up on my elbows.

  “I don’t want to sell, but I can’t keep the place on because of the legwork, ha. You love it here. You could turn it into a going concern. I could drop the consultancy work and increase the, ahem, other stuff. What do you think? Between us, it shouldn’t be too much of a job making the place habitable. I’ll get a lift put in so that I can get all the way up to the attics, make some extra space that way.”

  I looked at the rough, whitewashed walls of the barn and out of the doorway into the yard. Tiny plants had forced their way up between the cobbles and down between the stones of the walls and were now blooming in random spurts of yellow in unlikely sites all around the enclosed space. It looked like an explosion in a sun factory. I loved every last weed-infested inch of the place.

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Of course, there’s a downside.” Cal shook his shirt out and began putting it back on. “There’s the fact that you’ll be stuck with me, dragging myself around the place like a sexually obsessed Quasimodo.”

  “Quasimodo was sex obsessed.”

  “Was he? I thought he was just misunderstood and lonely.”

  “Yes, well, I used to think that about you.”

  “Ha. Fine, all right, dragging myself around exactly like Quasimodo.”