‘Chris?’
‘Hello, babe. How’re you doing?’
‘I’m at work.’
‘Well, that’s one of us, at least.’
That brought her up short. ‘Where are you, then? Showing?’
‘We’ll talk later. Are you up for lunch?’
There was a pause. Too long, really, for just a lull. ‘I don’t want to see you in public today, no. But we do … need to talk.’ She hated using her mother’s overworked phrase, but somehow nothing else quite fitted the bill.
He sighed. Surely, they had talked it out and talked it out all over the weekend. ‘What do we need to talk about now? I thought we …’
‘A new client came in today. She had some time to kill before her therapist was ready.’
Chris was puzzled. He held the phone away from his ear and looked at it, as though the answer to his confusion might be written there, but no. ‘Sorry, babe. Have I missed a line or two? What’s she got to do with us having to talk?’
Again, there was a pause. Then, the bombshell. Or, if not a bombshell a piece of small ordnance which made a breach in the wall and let the darkness in. ‘We got chatting. Not a very nice woman, I didn’t think. A bit strange. Wore too much makeup, for one thing. Very bright lipstick.’
The black dog dropped a ball, dark as night, heavy as a black hole, at his feet and looked up at him, panting.
‘Her name was Louise. Louise Taylor. Apparently, she’s a friend of yours.’
Sound of Silence
*
It was only when he found himself walking down the street with an overnight bag in his hand that Chris Rowan realised he had no friends. Not just no good friends, mates from way back, blokes he went to preschool with, no – he just had no real friends at all. Mark the pharmacist, the only one he was still vaguely in touch with, had, inadvertently, started this spiral of chaos, so he didn’t really count, not any more. He didn’t even have the usual raft of fake ones on Facebook; he had decided within a few days of starting his profile that life was too short to spend hours telling people he had just had a cup of tea and discovering that they had all just done the same. The shock of his sudden thought was so severe it made him stop dead in his tracks. He half-turned, back to the little, over-mortgaged house he had just left, back to the only place he felt even moderately safe, but he knew that would do no good. It didn’t matter that he had left Megan standing in the hall, blind with tears and sorrow. She didn’t want him to go, he knew that. But also he knew that she couldn’t let him stay. He ran the conversation – if sobbed, screamed, whispered words of despair could be called a conversation – through his mind as he walked, every footfall sounding like soil thumping on the coffin of his life.
They had met back at the house. She clearly didn’t want to meet in anywhere public and all he wanted was to hunker down in familiar surroundings. Like Kyle, he didn’t like challenge or change at the best of times and this could hardly count as the best of any time. He had never known a week like it for emotional ups and downs and felt as if he had been through a wringer. His chest hurt from the tension and he felt as though he was carrying a bowling ball in the pit of his stomach. His head was light and his eyes were on a timer set a few seconds after reality, causing a halo of light to form around everyday objects as he looked around. It was such an extraordinary feeling he couldn’t leave it alone and his eyes darted everywhere, checking it was still happening, dreading it, yet loving it. Could it still be a dream? He shook his head; no – all his dreams had a dog in them. But not in a good way.
Megan was calm. But again, not in a good way. She had driven back to the house and had parked her car carefully. He had been watching from the lounge window and he saw her go through her usual ritual, turn off the engine, check once more she was out of gear, reach for the handbag, check for errant mascara in the rear view, check once more she was out of gear, look round the car interior just in case there was … well, he’d never really known what she was looking for but it clearly wasn’t there, because she got out and closed the door, bending to look just one last time. God, he loved that woman.
He hadn’t locked the door so she was inside in minutes, standing in front of him, uncertain, trembling. He could see now that everything wasn’t normal. Her makeup had clearly been fixed over tears, her mouth was trembling even before either of them spoke. They were so close together in the little room, full of the detritus of a family life: Kyle’s lego box under the window; Megan’s slippers, kicked off anyhow that morning, toes pointed inwards, the backs trodden down; Chris had dropped the Sunday supplement beside his chair the night before and there it still lay, TV page for Monday uppermost. They were planning to watch The Walking Dead, to see which of their favourite characters had been killed off this time. They had been planning to watch it …
‘Megs …’
‘Chris …’
Neither of them had the strength to say anything else. There was at the same time too much and too little to say. He had been sacked, but somehow her problems still took precedence. He was at the disadvantage that he had no idea what Louise Taylor had told Megan. He didn’t want to meet that trouble halfway, so, lacking anything else to do, he just sat down in his usual chair. He had no choice; his legs had ceased to hold him up. He wanted to be sick.
‘What are you going to do about the job?’ Megan broke the ice, her voice tight and quiet with the effort to be civil.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, because he didn’t. ‘I need to check my contract.’
‘Couldn’t you apologise?’
He blinked. ‘What for? For beating you up? For lusting over some raddled old bat on the stairs? I didn’t do either of those things.’
Her smile was small, cold and cynical. ‘No, that’s true. But you did screw a client in an empty house.’ Her words fell like stones.
‘Megs, I …’
‘She was very specific,’ she said, still with no inflection. ‘In fact, she was so specific – and, as you probably recall, she has a certain charisma and a particularly penetrating voice – she was so specific I had to take her into a back room. People were beginning to stare.’
She waited for him to say something, but he couldn’t. There seemed to be something stuck in his throat and he could scarcely breathe, let alone speak.
She gave a little laugh, cold and lonely, like an echo in a night-street, a reminder of what they had once had. ‘Apparently,’ she said, ‘there are quite a few things I have been leaving out of our sex life – which is leaving you very unsatisfied, by the way – that you just adore. For example, I had no idea you liked …’
‘Stop!’ He found the strength to stand. He went over to where she sat, huddled back in one corner of the sofa and fell to his knees in front of her. He didn’t miss the fact that she flinched. ‘Stop.’ This time his voice was gentle, soft and far away. ‘I don’t know this woman. We talked it all over, only yesterday we were talking it all over. How can you still be worrying about her? I love you.’
‘Louise …’
‘Don’t!’
‘I have to use her name, Chris. I can't call her “that woman” forever. She is a real person now, not just some ghost in our machine.’
He bowed his head, resting his forehead on her knee and she pushed him away, but gently.
‘Louise told me that you said otherwise. Don’t worry, I didn’t believe her; I know you love me. But … she says you have known each other for years …’
‘I met her years ago, yes. That’s not like knowing someone for years, though, is it?’
‘She knew everything, though. She knew about where your mum works, she knew about when we moved here, how Kyle was three weeks early and didn’t make a sound when he was born … she can't have found out all that stuff unless … well, unless you’ve been telling her. When you meet. For sex, she says. Do you know,’ she dashed a tear away, ‘do you know what she said?’ She dropped her voice into a lower key, the rather husky tone that Louise Taylor spoke in. ‘Sh
e said, “Oh, don’t worry, Megan. It’s purely physical for me. I don’t want Chris full time, though I could have him if I wanted him. I just want him for his body. And that’s what he wants of me.”’ She went back to her normal tone. ‘And, do you know, that might have been okay.’ She found a smile from somewhere. ‘But … but, you know, Chris, it’s not okay! She’s older than me, she’s fatter, she’s …’
‘That’s not an issue,’ he said, raising his head. ‘I don’t care who’s older, fatter, younger, all that. I only want you. I haven’t seen Louise Taylor for years, not before last week. I don’t even like the bloody woman!’
‘Doesn’t that make it worse? Doesn’t that just prove her point?’
Suddenly, Chris had had enough. He was arguing, he realised, about a relationship with a woman which didn’t exist. He was justifying behaviour which he had not indulged in. It had to stop and of course, the pit of his stomach told him, it would never stop. If they got over this blip, there would be another blip along the road, and another, and another, and yet another, like evil speed humps, slowing their lives down for ever and ever. He stood up and looked down at her, tear sodden, curled in her corner. ‘Do you want me to go?’
She bowed her head and the seconds passed like years until she finally nodded.
‘Right. I won't argue with that.’ He turned for the door, then paused. ‘I don’t know how we’ll sort the money out. I appear to be unemployed. But something will come along, doubtless. Perhaps you could go and live with your mother for a while.’ He enjoyed twisting that knife. ‘I happen to know that the market is very buoyant for this kind of house; it won't linger long once you put it up for sale. I don’t want anything if there should be a profit. I’m not sure when I will be in a position to give you anything for Kyle.’
She twisted round and looked at him over the back of the settee. ‘You seem to have the finances all sorted.’
He shrugged, but turned away. He knew that a shrug didn’t go with the expression in his eyes. ‘I’m an estate agent,’ he said. ‘I can't help it.’ He waited for her to say something, to stop him, but the avalanche was too far down the mountainside by now and was carrying all before it.
And so now, here he was, walking down the road with a couple of shirts and a change or two of underwear in a bag and precious little else. He didn’t look down, but he knew the black dog was pacing at his side, tongue lolling, tail wagging, waiting for the next bit of excitement to begin. The adrenalin which had flooded his body while he was with Megan was receding and in its place was the bitter bile of fear. He had never been homeless in his life. He had gone from his mother’s house to a shared flat to his home with Megan without so much as a night on a sofa in between. He had met a lot of people who had no home; of course he had – he was a letting agent, after all. He had helped them find somewhere, if he could, but as he walked, a list of reasons he couldn’t help them came unbidden into his head, churned out by his hindbrain in time to his heavy tread. No job. No partner. No money. No references. He tried to keep the last reason at bay, but eventually, he said it out loud. ‘No hope.’
Megan sat on the settee, huddled in the corner like a frightened child. She still couldn’t believe quite what she had done. She had thrown out the only man she had ever really loved, the only man she wanted to start a family with, the father of her child because some mad woman – she had to be mad, surely, to talk the way she had done with no fear of being overheard – had told her … and that was where her sensible self shut down and the child took over. She had said some things which had made Megan’s scalp crawl with middle-class loathing. Self-loathing, more specifically. This woman had delved into the innermost parts of her lack of confidence and had exposed it, like a cadaver on a medical school slab. There was no possibility that she had not slept with Chris, not once, not twice, but many times over the years. And the pillow talk had clearly been very specific. All the things she thought he disliked, had no need for in bed or elsewhere, apparently, these were all the things he craved the most. She blushed again, all by herself in her corner of the settee.
She had almost – to her amazement – dropped into the sleep of the emotionally exhausted, when she was woken by the phone. She almost managed a smile as she looked at the clock. He had managed to hold out for almost half an hour!
‘Chris?’ She snatched the phone up and held it to her ear with both hands, snuggling down further to wait for his loving answer.
There was a pause. ‘No, it’s Sam. Is everything all right? You sound a bit … I don’t know … fragile.’
The trouble with having a friend like Sam, Megan had decided years ago, was that dissembling was pointless. She had x-ray eyes, she always said and they could see into a person’s soul. ‘No …’ she decided to give it a go anyway, ‘No, everything’s fine. I was just expecting it to be Chris, that’s all. We …’
‘Don’t give me all that bullshit, Megan.’ Sam was crisp and businesslike. ‘You haven’t taken my calls all week, not since I was round at yours. I’ve heard … let’s call them rumours, shall we, about Chris. If you don’t know about them, it’s time you did.’
Megan felt a tear roll down her cheek. ‘I’ve heard them,’ she murmured.
‘You have?’
She didn’t need Skype to see her friend’s eyebrows disappear under her fringe in disbelief. ‘Yes.’
‘What? The one about him and that woman? In the house?’
Megan was tired. She was tired to her very bones and she had had enough, even of Sam. ‘Yes.’ Her voice was flat. ‘Yes. The one about him fucking Louise Taylor’s brains out on the bedroom floor. Yes, the one about him doing precisely that, minus the bedroom floor detail, for years, from before he met me and since at every opportunity. Yes …’
It took a lot to shut Samantha Cormack up but this time she had nothing to say.
‘Yes. I know. And yes, I know he’s lost his job. And yes …’ her voice fell to a whisper. To say it out loud would be to make it real. ‘He’s gone.’
Sam spoke finally, and they were the only words Megan wanted to hear, though not from her. ‘I’m on my way.’
Chris pushed open the door of the little café halfway across town and as he did so, several clichés crossed his mind. One was that he remembered nothing of how he had got there. He had crossed roads, negotiated people on the pavement, possibly even spoken to the odd one or two, but since shutting his ex-front door, he had hardly any memory. The other was that he had run home to mummy. He had never seen himself as quite that person, but it seemed that he was, indeed, a mummy’s boy after all. It just remained to be seen how much of a boy’s mummy his mother was, when push came to shove.
It wasn’t often Chris looked at his mother without her knowing he was there. It was a shock to him to see her looking tired; mothers are immortal, everyone knows that. But she looked pale and a little flustered, with a queue at the counter and no other help in sight. She was smiling – she was always smiling – and he could hear her clipped tones making small talk as she sliced cake and made another pot of coffee. The little café was run as a charity by her husband’s church and they didn’t have too much in the way of hi-tech coffee making equipment but looking at her now, that was probably just as well. He took a step forward and something about his movement caught her mother-radar and she looked straight into his eyes. And knew.
It only took a second for her to ping into action mode. ‘Oh, Chris! Darling! Thank goodness you’re here. Sally has had to shoot off – crisis with the children, I think. Can you grab a pinny and give me a hand.’ She beamed around the room and raised her voice a little. ‘Don’t worry, anyone still waiting for toasties and other goodies. My son has arrived; the Seventh Cavalry.’ She focused her smile more directly on her son and it pulled him in like a tractor beam in Star Trek. ‘Come on, Chris. Spit spot.’ He and his sister had loved Mary Poppins books as children and his mother had never forgotten.
He put his bag down at the end of the counter and ducked under the
flap. It had a dodgy catch and it was best not to put it through its paces too often. He had never forgotten the day when he had brought Megan round, showing off his girlfriend to his mother and Megs had leaned on it and had crashed to the ground, complete with a Victoria sponge and a plate of brownies. Sarah Green had fallen in love with the girl then and there as she lay there, licking cream and jam off her fingers. All she had said was ‘Mmm. Yummy.’ He shook himself to get rid of the memory.
‘Right, mum,’ he said, tying on Sally’s discarded pinny. ‘What first?’
She gave him an absentminded hug and he realised with a lurch how little she was, how frail her arm felt around his waist. She wasn’t old, of course she wasn’t. But somehow nothing felt very permanent today. ‘Can you make two cheese and onion toasties for those ladies over there … no, wait. I’ll do those. If you could do the coffees, teas, cakes for a minute, then we can draw breath. It’s really busy today.’
The next hour passed in a whirl of slicing, pouring and giving the wrong thing to the right people, or vice versa. Then, suddenly, everyone was gone. The place looked like a bomb had hit it, with chairs all anyhow and crumbs to further order. Sarah Green didn’t stand on ceremony at the Chat Café; she knew almost every one of her customers by name and more. She knew their little joys and sorrows – she was that kind of woman. Or at least, she was that kind of woman when it came to customers; with her family, as Chris and Claire could both attest, not so much. Chris was nearly mad with frustration as she went around the room, straightening, wiping, replacing sugar packets and depleted paper napkins. He managed to keep it under control until she reached for the hoover; that was a step too far.
‘Mum! Will you just sit down for a minute? Please?’
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