Cold Enough to Freeze Cows

by Lorraine Jenkin

  Louisa climbed the stairs proudly holding the keys, attached to a shiny new key ring, to her flat. However, she was a bit worried that she wouldn’t know which door to go through. Esther had insisted on seeing the place that her daughter was now supposedly “living” in, but in which she’d only ever spent about half an hour. Louisa, in a fit of trying to improve her relationship with her mother, had offered to give her a tour.

  Louisa put her key into the door of 40B and gave it a twist. And then another one. She gave the door a shove. She could feel her father behind her itching to get involved, but that made her more determined to get it right herself. After another couple of attempts, she gave up in frustration. “Oh, this is ridiculous. The agents must have given me the wrong key.”

  “Well it’s always let me in,” said David and took the keys from her and reached past her scowling face to open it smoothly and with only a hint of smugness.

  “Right,” said Louisa, trying to regain control of the tour, “we’ll start in the lounge, I think,” and she motioned her mother to the lounge door.

  “Very nice, Louisa,” said her mother, peering in, “very nice.”

  “What? It’s horrible! Needs a good lick of paint before anyone could say that about it!” Louisa laughed, still in the hallway.

  “Well, it looks lovely to me,” said Esther.

  “Yes, well, I think that this wall here will probably need another coat, but the rest have had two and I think it’s made a real difference,” David said as he walked past his daughter. “Look here, Esther, it’s got those curtain rails that we used to have – you remember? In our first flat?”

  “Oh yes, so it does! And, I do like that fireplace – you said that the landlord will put a new fire in there didn’t you?”

  “Yes, it’s going in next Thursday; I’ve asked for one of those real-flame effect ones? And look, these shelves will be really handy; I’ve firmed them up a bit – some of them were a bit ropey, but they’re nice and strong now…”

  Louisa, slightly confused, followed them in and was amazed by the transformation. “Yes, yes they are, aren’t they? That’s what I thought it would be best to do,” she said, trying to get back into the action, “anyway, come and look out here, Mum.”

  “Hang on, let me see the view from your lounge. Oh, look, David, you can see the park from here; it’s nice isn’t it?”

  “Yes, and the market place – that’ll be nice to watch on market day?”

  “What, cows?” said Louisa, obviously now bored, “lovely.” She left the room and called her mother after her to see the bedrooms. “It’s a bit cold in here,” she said, rubbing her arms with her gloved hands, “shall we go and get that coffee we were talking about?”

  “Hold on!” Esther said. “Let me see the kitchen; it’ll be where you’ll be spending most of your time, believe me!”

  Louisa rolled her eyes. She doubted it.

  “Well, this is nice enough, isn’t it, Louisa? Bit small, but plenty big enough for one, or for a couple?”

  Louisa shrugged. “Dunno really, bit of a state still. Look at the cupboard doors – they’re all on the gimp, and see, they didn’t even bother to clean up after the last person – chips all over the floor! It looks like someone was rolling round in their chips, rather than eating them. Urgh!”

  David dropped to his knees and gathered them up. “Sorry, they were mine. I had some the other night when I was painting – hungry work!” He scuttled to the bin and dropped them in, sheepishly wiping his hands on his jeans to a frown from Esther. “But, anyway, Louisa,” he said, “never mind a few chips, surely you’re pleased with the work that I’ve done? Surely it looks a hundred times better than it did at first?”

  Louisa could feel them both looking at her. Her father had spent night after night in the place and she was grateful, but she just, well, she just wasn’t that interested. However, she knew that a wrong move at this point could mean the work grinding to a close. She smiled. “Course it is! Thanks, Dad, you’ve done a great job. Come on, let me say thank you by treating you to that coffee…”

  Johnny walked into the kitchen with a big smile on his face. However, it was soon replaced with concern as Nain came scuttling across the room with a pile of washing in her arms, to meet him.

  “Have you seen her?” she said, puffing with the exertion of her trot.

  “Who?”

  “Tansy, of course. She’s gone home!”

  “Home? What home?”

  “Hers. I hoped that she’d found you still there, or that you’d pass her on the way. I saw Iestyn drop the truck off and assumed that she was with you?”

  “No, we had to detour via the shop for more pasties for Iestyn; she must have passed us then. How can she go home – there’s no water or heating?”

  Nain was looking close to tears, “Oh, I know, I know. I tried to stop her, but she wouldn’t have it…”

  “Greg?”

  “Yes, he phoned and she got all upset and said that she would leave straightaway and that it would all be fine – apparently she told him that they would start again and be a proper family – that’s what she said, a proper family.”

  Johnny opened the door and started running towards his truck, “Open the gate, Nain, I’ll go and get her!”

  “Good boy, love, you bring her back. She can’t last without clean water with a baby, they’ll get ill, if they don’t freeze first…”

  Johnny crunched the truck into reverse and with a frown of concentration, he bumped through the gate held open by his waving grandmother. He looked in the rear-view mirror and saw her wiping a tear from her eye with her cuff; poor Nain, she’d grown so fond of Tansy and Gwennie, it’d be awful if it ended like this.

  For the second time that day, he pulled up outside Tansy’s house. Good, her car was there – she was still in the house. He saw a very clean Focus parked perfectly parallel to the pavement – that must be Greg’s. Damn, what should he do? Be calm? Forceful? Reasonable?

  He knocked tentatively at the door: there was no answer.

  He could hear raised voices inside, then the sound of Gwennie crying. He knocked again, louder this time. Still nothing.

  He ran to the window and peered in, the curtains still being tied in a knot. He could see Gwennie sitting, howling, in her car seat on the sitting room floor, but there was no sign of Tansy or Greg.

  Panic rose within him – that was his baby. If no one else was going to protect her, then he must. He tried the door, but it was locked. Johnny searched for something to smash through the pane of glass next to the Yale lock when he remembered – he had a key!

  He grabbed it from his jacket pocket in the truck and crashed in through the door. “Tansy!” he cried, “Tansy, it’s me!”

  The shouting stopped and two faces peered, confused, out of the kitchen door. Tansy’s was swollen with crying and Greg’s was white with rage. “What the hell are you doing back here?” he roared. “Get out of my house!”

  “Johnny?” shouted Tansy, then she made a break and ran to get Gwennie from the lounge.

  “Tansy, you can’t stay here – come home with me!” He walked towards Tansy, who now stood by the lounge door, swinging Gwen gently in her car seat to soothe her.

  “Whoa – hang on,” shouted Greg, his face now contorted with anger, but neither Johnny nor Tansy were paying any attention.

  “Come home,” Johnny said as gently as he could, “come and live with us… Come on, we’ll take care of you – you and Gwennie…”

  “Now, hang on, hang on,” Greg stormed between them. “What’s Lover Boy doing here – in my house? Geddout you tosser!” He strode towards Johnny and started pushing him towards the door, but the eleven-stone quantity surveyor wasn’t a match for the fifteen-stone farmer. Big cows sometimes tried to shove Johnny, but never if he didn’t want them to…

  Johnny was being inconvenienced by the man, but was looking over Greg’s shoulder at Tansy, standing sobbing with the baby. “Please, Tansy, come home;
we miss you, we want you back. I want you back!”

  Greg gave up on Johnny as his daps were sliding about on the damp chipboard floor and he turned back to Tansy.

  “Tell him, Tansy, tell him to get lost! I thought we were going to be a family – that’s what we said, wasn’t it? Tell Lover Boy to fuck off back to the shit-hole that he came from…”

  Johnny took a deep breath – shit-hole? Lover Boy? He could feel his fist beginning to clench. He hadn’t hit anyone properly since fifth form when Del Roberts had called him a sheepshagger with a small cock, but he was beginning to feel that it might happen pretty soon.

  However, then he saw Tansy’s eyes, desperately trying to decide what to do, looking from man to man, as if clocking them both and weighing up the situation. Some wisdom inside Johnny’s guts which had never really made an appearance before, told him that if he laid out Greg, then he, Johnny, would become the bad guy and Tansy would have to choose Greg, if only to stop the bleeding.

  Instead, he took a deep breath and tried to calm down. “OK, OK, this has all gotten a bit out of hand, yeah?” Greg turned to him – he’d obviously been expecting a punch rather than a chat. “I think we need to hear what Tansy has to say?” Tansy looked up, she’d taken Gwennie out of the car seat and the crying had stopped as she cuddled her to her shoulder as if for a buffer between her own sanity and the insanity that had erupted around her. Johnny could see that she was in no state to be making such decisions or sorting anything out.

  “Tansy,” barked Greg, “can we just get this twat out of here? He comes barging into our house, shouting the odds – and for your information, Lover Boy, she is at home. Look, it was very good of you to help her, but we’re OK now – we can sort ourselves out, we don’t need you sticking your oar, or your penis, in.”

  Johnny saw Tansy looking a little miffed at what Greg had just said, and so he took his chance. “Tansy,” he said as gently as he could, “I came here this afternoon to take you back to us – to me. We miss you, I miss you and little Gwennie…”

  “Gwennie? That’ll be changing, that’s for sure…” snorted Greg.

  “…you see, I love you, I have done since I first clapped eyes on you – you’re so strong, so beautiful and little Gwennie – and she’s fuckin’ staying Gwennie,” Johnny spat as an aside to Greg – “well, I’ll treat her as my own. I don’t care who the father really is, or how she was conceived, if you’ll let me, I’ll treat her as my own – I love her as if she was mine already…”

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” Greg cried, his hands up in the air. “What the hell is going on? What’s this, bloody Jerry Springer? What – you give birth on this bloke’s carpet to God only knows whose child, and three weeks later he loves you and wants to bring up baby as his own? Give me strength!” Greg laughed slightly manically, as if it were all getting a bit much for him. “Go home, Lover Boy, save yourself the worry – by the weekend, you’ll be back out drinking with your silly friend and breathing a sigh of relief that no one believed you. Go on, do yourself and everyone else a favour and fuck off…”

  Johnny stared at Tansy and Tansy stared at Johnny.

  “Well,” he said quietly, “what do you want to do? I meant what I said, I promise. If you want me to, I can go now and leave you in peace, but all you have to do is get in my truck with Gwen and I’ll sort everything else out, I promise. You won’t owe me anything – you can come back here when everything is fixed up and you won’t ever need to see me again, or, well, we can live happily ever after – you, me and Gwennie. It would be up to you.”

  Greg dropped to his knees and groaned. “I can’t believe this is happening! Happily ever after? What the fuck is going on – Cinderella? Did Cinderella get up the duff by a big bad wolf or something and I haven’t realised?” He took his hands from over his head and then looked at something on the floor beside the hall dresser. “Hang on, isn’t that my claw hammer? Yes, it bloody is, and my chisel! Tansy – did you get these out of the garage and not put them away again?”

  “What? What are you going on about?”

  “This hammer and this chisel – they’re supposed to be on hooks in the garage, not scattered about the place willy-nilly. I left these here because I had no place to store them. I trusted you to look after them, Tansy, I trusted you. And besides, what were you doing with a hammer and a chisel anyway? You use a mallet with a chisel, a mallet – stops it denting the handle…”

  Suddenly, Tansy seemed to make a decision and from the look on her face it was as easy as choosing to have the tea and not the coffee, thanks. She picked up Gwennie’s car seat, swept her bag off the door handle, hitched Gwen up a little higher on her shoulder and walked past Greg, still on his knees holding his tools up at her with an incredulous look on his face.

  She planted a kiss on Johnny’s cheek. “Thank you, Johnny, thank you for coming to rescue me – us,” she smiled. “Come on, let’s go home.” She swung the door open, turning at the last minute to address Greg. “Greg, I’m really sorry that it’s worked out the way it has. I never meant to be a crap wife and I’m sorry for what I did, but, well – I think if you have another relationship with another woman at any point in your life, make sure she builds dolls’ houses or makes matchstick boats or something, otherwise she’ll be ignored and bored shitless as well… Y’know, I think the mistake we made was buying a house that needed work, and a garage. If we’d just stayed in the flat, we could have been happy. We used to have fun, me and you: lately it was as if Jewson’s was the third person in our marriage – no wonder it was crowded… Come on, Johnny, let’s get out of here.”

  Johnny held the door open for her, and then looked back towards Greg. A little malicious thing inside him made him whisper, “Oh, and I took the lid off your wood glue and didn’t put it back – sorry!”

  Tansy was shaking by the time she was sitting in the passenger seat of the truck and Johnny had to sort the straps of Gwennie’s seat, aware that Greg was standing in the doorway, looking shell-shocked, but also slightly menacing, with two hammers and a chisel in his hand. What would he do when he discovered that when Iestyn had stuffed the measuring device into the drawer, he had left it on…the battery wouldn’t half have run low.

  The truck pulled away, Tansy looking straight ahead and Johnny staring blackly at Greg. As soon as they got around the corner, Tansy burst into tears. “It’s OK, it’s OK,” said Johnny, patting her arm, “let’s just get a bit further away and then we can stop, yeah?”

  Johnny was aware that for Tansy, it wasn’t all about coming to him, she was also leaving her husband at the same time. He’d left her, now she’d been the decisive one and was leaving him. Also, she’d just had a baby, so everything hurt, her hormones were running riot, her house was a damp shit-hole, her hair was greasy and her backside was huge – yep, perhaps they’d better drive a bit further away than round the corner before they stopped and chatted…

  Eventually, Tansy’s sobs subsided and she gathered her composure and blew her nose on an old scrap of tissue from her pocket. “I’m sorry, Johnny, I really am. I’ve caused nothing but trouble since the moment you met me and I’m so sorry. I used to think that I was quite an uncomplicated person who had a straightforward life, but these last few months – Jesus! They’ve taken their toll and you’ve had the brunt! And, sorry also – you shouldn’t have had to see that…”

  “Tansy, don’t worry, really. You’re not trouble, and you’re a pleasure to have around. It’s just tough for you that these things all came together.”

  Tansy sniffed again. “Actually, can we stop a moment? I just need to sort a few more things out with you before we get back to the farm and then we’ll have a clean slate.”

  Johnny pulled over into a gateway and turned the engine off. They were facing out over a spectacular view of the fields coated in snow, with bare trees poking up through. The sun was setting over the far hill, a glorious red orange ball sitting on top of the crest. For a while, they both just sat and watched, Gwenn
ie sleeping soundly in her seat between them. Tansy seemed nervous, Johnny was content and at ease.

  “Johnny,” she began, “about all that you said earlier…”

  “I meant it.”

  “Well, even if you did, perhaps you need to know a few things about me, about Gwennie…”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “If you are even remotely considering taking Gwennie on as your own, you probably need to know who the father is and how it – happened? She’s not Greg’s you know.”

  “Tansy…” Johnny grabbed her hand, leaning over Gwennie. “Actually, get out a minute – perhaps Gwen shouldn’t hear this!”

  They both jumped out into the snow and met again at the front of the truck. Johnny held out his hand and Tansy took it and they trampled over to the field gate, Johnny rejoicing in how soft and gentle her hand was against his own rough skin, and they looked out across the valley, neither seeming keen to break the spell.

  Tansy shivered, so Johnny stood behind her and wrapped his arms around her, his chin gently resting on her shoulder. “Tansy, I don’t need to know about Gwennie’s father or how it happened or why it happened – unless you want him to be a proper dad? I do know how these things happen, believe me! Since meeting you, I’ve thought a lot about what I used to do and it wasn’t always pleasant, to say the least! So, I don’t need to know and it wouldn’t help me to know and it wouldn’t help you if I knew and it wouldn’t help Gwennie. But, you need to know that I meant what I said. I love you, Tansy; I’ve never felt as strongly about anything and I know that I will feel like this forever,” and he leant around and kissed her gently on the cheek, then she turned her face and their lips met.

  There was no grabbing of crotches, no squeezing of breasts. No teenagers watching and no smell of burgers. Neither grabbed the other’s hand and leapt into the field to finish the job, nor did they feel the need to act the innocent, nervous about being corrupted. It was just a beautiful first kiss on top of a mountain with the sun going down and their daughter sleeping contentedly a few feet away from them.