by James Hannah
Finally I opt for dunking fingers and thumbs into mine, Laura’s, and Becca’s with one hand, and carrying yours normally in the other.
Laura is not impressed.
“Ugh, Jesus!”
“’Scuse fingers,” I say.
“Some sort of tray?” you suggest.
“Would have been an option,” I say, and genuinely wish I’d been sharp enough to ask for one.
There’s still no spare chair, so I settle the glasses and crouch between you and Becca. You make to move, but I gesture that you should stay seated.
“All right, come on, share,” you say, patting the seat beside your thigh. “You can get half a bum on there.”
We sit slightly back-to-back in a halfway sort of way. Sustained contact.
“So what do you do then,” you say, “seeing as you’re evidently making enough to splash the cash?”
“Well, that’s me wiped out for the night,” I say, the one eighty making a neat but blatant rectangle on the thigh of my jeans.
“Has it? Oh dear! Well, don’t worry. I’ll buy you one back,” you say. “So how do you know Becca?”
I explain.
“Oh, I see. Ah, I bet all you boys are madly in love with her, aren’t you?”
“Ah, she’s lovely,” I say, ultracarefully moderating my tone. “Not my type, though.”
“No? I’d have thought she was everyone’s type.”
I shrug. “I’m not everyone then, I suppose.”
Do you hold my gaze for a second longer than normal? I’m sure—
At this moment Becca leans across the table. “Cheers, ears!”
“Cheers!” I say and turn to you. “To a really good gig.”
We all strike glasses, but you pull me up short.
“No, no, you’re not doing it right. You’ve got to maintain eye contact when you’re clinking glasses,” you say.
“Oh, is that what you’re supposed to do?” asks Becca.
“Wasn’t I?” I say.
“No, come on. Do it again,” you say. “Cheers!”
“Cheeeers—” I say and malcoordinatedly proffer my glass. “This is hard. I should be looking at the glass.”
“Nope, then it doesn’t count,” you say. “Try again. Cheers!”
“Cheeeer—”
The glasses knock together: t-tinggg.
“OK?” I say.
You scrunch your nose up. “Well, technically it needs to be a cleaner ding.”
I try again, looking deep into your eyes. “Cheers.”
Tinggg.
“Perfect!” you cry, and grin at me.
“It’s the spontaneity, I think, that really made it special,” I say.
Definitely a lingering look there. Definitely.
My phone, trapped between us, buzzes once more in my pocket. You jump.
“What’s that?”
“Oh, sorry,” I say, hopping up from my half of the chair. “I keep…I keep getting calls.” I look down at Mal’s flashing name and cry, “Leave me alone!” rather weakly at the screen.
Feeble. Feeble.
I look down at you, and you’re watching me with amusement. “You must be very popular.”
And still, your look sustains.
I don’t know what it is about you, but for the first time in…in years?…I can feel a little of the anxiety beginning to slip away. I’m able to keep your gaze. And it’s only now I realize how unconfident I’ve become lately.
My phone ceases vibrating.
I say, “You have lovely eyes.”
There it is. I have said it. Matter-of-fact.
“Well, thank you,” you say, a little taken aback. “That’s a sweet thing to say.”
No! It’s a terrible thing to say! Everyone will have said this to you!
But you smile.
And I smile too.
“Ivo?” calls Laura.
“What?” I look up at her, and she’s holding out her phone.
“Mal wants you.”
And I can’t stay. I can’t fucking stay.
“I’m really sorry,” I say. “It’s been lovely to meet you, but I’ve got to—”
“Ivo…” Laura’s shaking her phone at me.
“Tell him I know,” I snap at her.
“Oh, right,” you say disappointedly. You look instinctively away, and I can feel the disconnect.
“You coming?” says Becca to me, as she gathers up her bag and coat.
“Yeah, yeah,” I say, trying hard to think of some way to pick up again on what we just had. “Hey, listen—I know we’ve only known each other for about three minutes, but would you maybe fancy coming out for a drink with me at some point? Unless…”
“Oh,” you say, surprised. “Well, yeah, yeah. That would be nice.”
“Brilliant. I’ll get your number off Becca maybe, and—” My phone starts again. “I’ve got to go. I’ll ring you, OK?”
“OK.”
I stumble my way across the pub, trying to answer my phone and catch up with Laura and Becca.
“Y’all right, our kid?” says Mal on the end of the line. “Where’ve you been? I’ve been ringing for ages.”
I feel a tug on my arm, and I turn around to see you holding on to my sleeve. I mouth “What?” at you.
“Sorry,” you say. “I was forgetting… I’m going home tomorrow. I mean home home, back to my mum’s up in the Lakes for Easter.”
“Ah, shit.”
“You what?” says Mal.
“But, you know, after then perhaps?” you say.
“Yes, definitely,” I say.
“Here, let me get a pen, and I’ll write down my mum’s landline. Maybe give me a call there?”
You root around in your bag while Mal’s voice in my ear demands to know what’s going on.
“Just hold on,” I say to him testily.
“Here you go,” you say, pulling out an old pen. “Have you got some paper?”
“Write it on here,” I say, offering the back of my hand.
You twist my wrist around with your palm and write the numbers out nice and clear and render a very professional-looking treble clef at the end.
“So you remember who it was in the morning.” You smile.
Ears
Ears. I haven’t thought about this for years.
It’s you again: it’s you, just after that Easter, on the railway station platform, surrounded by all those people.
Hours we’ve spent, talking on the phone this holiday. And it’s been so comfortable and warm, talking about anything and everything, how you missed your mum all term, but five minutes was enough to drive you crazy. And we’ve got the tragic dad stories out of the way too. And it feels—it feels right with you. I’ve told the dad story a thousand times, and I always find people embarrassingly backpedaling. I constantly have to reassure them everything is fine and so on and so on. But when you told me about your dad, I was struck by how matter-of-fact you were.
“Yeah, my dad left—what, back when I was fifteen? He was a drinker. Still is, I think. And he couldn’t give my mum what she needed. I mean, for years they stuck at it, but it was never going to work. They were a real mismatch.”
“Oh, right.”
“I don’t blame him for it, though—he’s had some rough times, made some bad choices. But it doesn’t make him a bad man.”
“No, I suppose not.”
“I don’t see that much of him, because I think it sends him off the rails a bit. I think he feels bad, and I don’t want to cause that. It’s sad. But, you know, I don’t let it define me.”
I was almost able to hear your shrug on the phone. So I embarked on the thousand-and-first version of my dad story and sort of found myself mimicking your matter-of-fact tone. It felt for
the first time like I was telling it in a way that I wanted to tell it.
So now I know: I don’t have to be Laura about it. I don’t have to amp up the melodrama, because it’s a thing that has happened. It was sad, and it remains sad. No one’s going to take that away, for good or bad.
You called it sad-dad top trumps. “Ah, dead dad beats nonviolent alcoholic every time.”
After weeks of talking almost every night until the early hours, I can’t believe we’ve only met once before.
You said, “How are you going to recognize me at the train station?”
“Of course I’ll be able to recognize you.”
“Ahhh, yes, it’ll be my lovely eyes.” Teasing me for what I said on our only actual meeting. “I’ll fix them on you like a gorgon and draw you across the station concourse.”
“Nooo—actually, it’d be your enormous, deformed ears.”
You gasped and slammed down the phone. As a joke. I think.
Now I’ve managed to work out which train is going to be yours, and after the anxious eight extra minutes’ wait, my limbs tingling with the anticipation, it has flashed up as “arrived” on the board, and I’m beginning to worry that I genuinely might not recognize you. And if I don’t recognize you immediately, you’re totally going to read it in my face, and that will be the end of everything.
As the passengers begin to flow through, first in small numbers, but now in an unmanageable surge, my eyes flit around for the sight of you. The sight of something familiar. Something I might be able to recall from that night three weeks ago.
I’m wondering whether I’ve built all this up too much. And of course I have. I mean, face-to-face there might be nothing between us, no chemistry, no low pub lighting to give a bit of atmosphere. Just the flattened dabs of black chewing gum on the platform, the squat coffee shop, offering the same old coffee since 1989, only this time in a cardboard cup with a plastic lid, exactly not quite like the posh coffee chains.
Still no sign. I look behind me, half expecting to see you leaning against a wall, looking at me and tapping your foot in disappointment.
When it all comes down to it, what the hell am I doing, leaving myself open to all this?
But no, look: there you are. Bobbing along the platform, already looking at me, already smiling, half hidden behind a disordered group of students. That’s you. I totally would have recognized you. And nestled unselfconsciously in your hair, a pair of pink bunny ears bounce over your face like exclamation marks.
“Hello!” you say, dropping your bag when you finally reach me and giving me a kiss on the cheek and an enthusiastic hug.
“Hello,” I say, and all of my anxiety melts away with the warmth and ease of our greeting.
“It’s so lovely to see you finally,” you say.
“Yeah! You too,” I say. “So, what’s with the ears?”
You frown and look at me noncomprehendingly.
“Ears?”
Aha. I get you.
“Oh, nothing,” I say.
“Right,” you say airily. “So, are we getting the bus then?”
You turn and bend down to pick up your bag.
A fluffy white bunny tail, elasticked to the back of your jeans.
No, I’m not going to mention it.
I’ve got a laugh smoldering in my chest all the way to the bus depot.
• • •
Urgent electric siren now sears my ears and seizes my brain, jolts me awake, and my heart pound-pounds and the sweat starts to prickle and emerge out onto the surface of my skin.
What’s…?
I look around for some sign about what I should do. What should I do?
The siren settles in, oppressive on my ears, redrawing the shape of my skull with each regular blare.
It’s punctuated now by the sound of urgent footsteps.
I see Sheila flash past my doorway and stop a short way along the corridor.
Then a male voice, buried among the echoes. Jef, I think. I can’t make out the words.
“No,” replies Sheila. “Yes, but it’s been opened. Have you got the key?”
Another Jefish sound from off down the corridor, and I see Sheila relax and stroll back up toward my room.
She notices me and stops half in and half out of my doorway.
“Sorry about this,” she calls, keeping an eye up the corridor. “People are always pushing on the alarmed door. It says it right there: ‘Alarmed door.’ What do they think’s going to happen?”
“I haven’t seen anyone around,” I say.
“No.” She sighs, without surprise. “It’s a bloody nuisance. Everything’s on electrics. They say to you, Oh, it’s going to be a big improvement on what you had before, and the next thing you know the whole bloody place has been improved out of all usefulness.”
She keeps an eye out the door and rolls her eyes to Jef as he strides past, flipping a small bunch of keys in and out of his hand.
The door is slammed shut, its echo rolling down the corridor, and the blare stops dead, leaving the ultrasonic imprint in my ears, and my heart racing.
Was it you who sent a gust of wind to open the alarmed door and assault my ears?
Sometimes I could be persuaded.
Calm now, calm.
Hzzzzzzzzz.
Ah, there. Old Faithful.
“Thanks, lovey,” Sheila says to Jef as he comes back past.
“All right,” he says.
“It won’t be long before they’re putting the respirators on the same circuit as the coffee machine,” she says, coming fully into the room. “And we’ll have a double-shot latte and a side order of dead resident.”
She dumps herself in the visitors’ seat and strains to lift her foot up to her other thigh, pushing her finger inside her shoe to ease an ache.
“I’m sorry,” she says wearily. “I probably shouldn’t be talking like that to you, should I?”
I smile, more troubled by the presence of her foot. “Don’t worry about it. It’s good to see you care.”
“Well, I do care. This is supposed to be a place of peace and tranquillity. But you still have to deal with all the efficiencies and management brainwaves like anywhere else. If you can’t escape the red tape here, you can’t escape it anywhere, can you?”
F
Feet
Lying on the sofa, I cannot bring myself to speak.
Mum comes and lifts my legs and drops them back across her lap as she sits on the seat beside me.
A cartoon is on TV with the sound down, but I’m not watching it.
I can see she’s found my card. Or the rattly collection of macaroni, sugar paper, and glue that the stand-in teacher sent us all home with. Mum must have dug it out of the bin.
Happy Father’s Day.
Mum rubs my feet, carefully avoiding the ticklish areas. She looks sometimes across at my face.
“Takeout tonight, kiddo?”
I can’t answer.
Looking down at my foot, she says, “Looks like it’s just you and me then, foot. How are you feeling? Are you feeling sad?”
After a short pause, my foot nods sadly.
“And how about you,” she says, collecting up my other foot, “are you sad too?”
It too is sad.
“Oh dear,” she says. “Oh dear.” And she sits there, considering, while I clutch a cushion to my belly and look at the screen.
Long silence. Long, long silence, full of cartoon noises. Bullets and boings.
“I tell you what,” she says, addressing my big toe, “let’s have a talk about what you’ve done today. Let’s talk about your shoes. What shoes have you been in today?”
My foot thinks for a while and looks across the room, toward the door.
“Your Hi-Tec Silver Shadows?” she says. “Are the
y your favorite shoes?”
Foot nods.
“And what about you?” she asks the other foot. “Have you been wearing Hi-Tec Silver Shadows?”
The other foot nods too.
“Of course you have. It’d be silly to wear something else, wouldn’t it? Then you’d be in odd shoes. Did you like wearing your Hi-Tec Silver Shadows?”
The left foot nods yes, and the right foot shakes no.
“Er…”
I say, “They like them, but one rubbed a bit.”
She leans in to my feet. “Who’s that?” she whispers, gesturing up toward my head.
Both feet shrug.
• • •
“Do you have tingly feet at all?”
Dr. Rhys.
“Do you have tingly feet?”
“Mmm…sometimes? Maybe?”
“Yes, you see, that’s not normal. With diabetes that could indicate the onset of nerve damage. Which can mean you get sores that don’t heal and become infected, and then we might have to amputate. I’ve got four people in this district who have a cupboard full of useless left shoes as we speak.”
• • •
This is it. This is good.
I’m walking. I’ve left my bed and I’m walking down the corridor and it was my idea.
I’m so rubbish at having the idea myself. I have to imagine what you would say to me. What would you say? You’d say:
Imagine yourself there. Then you’ll recognize it when you get there.
I’m walking, I’m walking.
I’m doing something with my life.
And it’s good. Good to keep the feet moving.
Got my blanket on my back, your arms around me.
It’s nice. Take it slowly.
One foot in front of the other.
Push, slip my way through the fire doors. They chunk shut behind me.
It gets the circulation going. Gets the brain going. Gets the thoughts, the ideas going. It’s good; it’s positive. Something as simple as things to look at, new things to take in. Makes you look more kindly on the world.
Wish I’d done it earlier.
The coffee machine, there it is. The Café Matic 2. There’s a big stack of mugs beside it. All different. The staff brings them in. I Love London. Phantom of the Opera. A Room of One’s Own… Virginia Woolf.