We remain in silence and I drain my glass. I tut and leap off my chair. I am getting another. Sod him. I can drink even if he can’t. I avoid looking at him. When I go to sit back down, I notice people around us are staring. The atmosphere between Warrick/Rick and I is palpable.
“So, Rick,” I begin in a glib voice, “if I get drunk today and stupid, will you return the favour I once offered you? I am feeling in the mood to bury myself in the bottle.”
“What’s happened?” he asks in a concerned tone of voice, turning his eyes to mine.
“Just answer me one thing… Rick, will you?”
“What? Come on, let’s have it out.”
“Do you fancy me or what? Cos if you do, I think I should go back to hunting and lone sequins, otherwise this is gonna get real awkward, you get me?”
I definitely sound like Alfred in my Year Nine class. Aw’right, mate.
Warrick narrows his eyes and looks pretty angry. He is steaming behind his mock façade of calm. I wonder why. Why is he doing this to me? I don’t feel right anymore. I haven’t all week.
His face scrunched up with shock, he tells me in an aggrieved manner, “Go hunting, then. Go… right now. Go. I couldn’t fancy you any less right now, talking like that. Silly woman. Don’t be so chuffin’ ridiculous.”
I laugh. What else is there to do? I am as he says, ridiculous. I am falling for him and I am asking in a roundabout way whether he fancies me. His mouth twitches with a smile. I relax when I see his teeth shining back at me and even though I know I should run a mile right then, something in me cannot help but fight to still keep him in my life, no matter how much we piss each other off. He has improved my existence so vastly within just a few days.
We laugh raucously and I guzzle the pint down.
“Sorry for my language. I don’t think chuffin’ suits me, though.”
“If you’d been where I have, you’d understand why I renounced all evil,” he smirks, and lands his soft eyes on mine. The punters in the pub are all quiet, watching us like we’re a soap opera. What might we do next to enlighten their otherwise deathly quiet Saturday afternoons?
He makes me feel so happy. When he pulls me toward him with a hand on my shoulder, he rubs my arm and kisses my hair, taking deep breaths of it. I rinsed a conditioning treatment through it this morning, especially for him.
“Take me home,” I grumble, rubbing my forehead. “I have had a right horrible week.”
“Okay,” he says softly and necks his drink.
We walk back to mine and I loop my arm through his. We don’t talk very much. I suspect as I glance at him sideways that he is feeling pretty proud to have me on his arm so I yank it away. It was so stupid of me to give him an inch! Look at him now! All cocky and… irritating.
“What? What?” he asks, feigning innocence.
“You just… look, I have had a drink alright. My arm slipped through yours by accident.”
“Admit it. You like having me around, beer swilling wench that y’are,” he says, in a poorly executed country boy accent.
I scowl but I can’t stay mad. We are nearing my park but with two pints swilling in my otherwise empty stomach, I am feeling inebriated, perhaps squiffy. A touch jolly.
“Cheer me up, Ricky. Do the dance.”
He raises a sadistic eyebrow and totters off ahead, before filling the surroundings with his awesome voice and questionable moves. His hips gyrate like a proper pervert and it makes me squeeze my eyes shut with laughter. He almost moves me to kiss him. I must be drunk.
We get inside and he puts me in bed. He crawls up behind me. I excuse myself by pretending, “Bad week, tiredness, you know.”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever. You just want me for my hugs, I get it. Sleep now, wench.”
“Stop calling me wench!”
“Stop drinking dirty pints then!”
We wake from the most blissful afternoon nap and I groan, it was so good. I have had a hellish week.
“Better?” he asks, still laid behind me.
“Much,” I agree, “very much improved.”
“I can go then, can I? I can shake a leg and slope off.”
“No you bloody can’t. I think if you can feed those paupers you don’t even know, you can fucking feed me.”
There’s a moment. He laughs loudly, without care, and buries his face in my hair from where he is resting behind me. He is still laughing when I tense and he notices, suddenly realising what he is doing.
“I said feed me not breathe me.”
I wrestle myself out of bed and head for the bathroom. I try to shake off whatever else I am feeling too but it isn’t happening. I return and discover he’s moved into the living room. He’s sitting in the couch flicking channels.
“Oh please, make yourself at home. Bloody cheek.”
“I am procuring your dinner, your breeze block of chocolate and… wine! So…”
I grin and put the kettle on. Flipping man thinking he’s got his feet under the table. We decide on Chinese and he orders it to be delivered, wine and chocolate added at an extortionate cost, but so worth it if it means we don’t have to venture out into the cold night at all.
In the spirit of things, I actually clear the table so he can sit there with me and we spread the plastic cartons all over the top. We attempt the chopsticks and make each other laugh until giving up and using our forks. The horror!
It’s such good food and I shovel. He seems to enjoy watching me.
“You do like your grub. I thought you were kidding. But look at you.”
“Truth is, I haven’t eaten all day. I had a really bad week. Took one of your hugs to drench it from me.”
Sat opposite me, he cannot hide his reaction. He’s worried and concerned. I brush it off and continue eating.
“Tell me what happened.”
I want to tell him but I insist on quid pro quo.
“If I open up, you have to. If I tell you about my week, I want you to tell me why you act like a saint.”
“I don’t ac‒”
I wave my chopstick at him. It is more purposeful as a mini baton than a utensil. I butt in, “Nope. I accept no nonsense. I may be Miss Ice Queen and you may be Mister Nice but we both have to spill.”
“Okay,” he relents with a heavy sigh.
“Well, where do I start,” I begin, musing over a prawn cracker dipped in soy sauce, “I got told at the beginning of the week that yet again, my pay is frozen still, probably for the next century. It has been the past few years. I live in this shit tip so it doesn’t really matter. But it started as that tiny snowball and rolled into a giant, pronged beast of a daddy ice ball, clattering through my week until it was full of dangerous twigs and bicycles… like in Spirited Away… do you know what I mean? The monster becomes real. Full of carcasses it picked up along the way…”
I breathe and shake my head. I am rambling. He seems enraptured but I continue, “Anyways, pay freeze was number one. Number two was Headmaster Jack the Dickhead telling me that my workers are shoddy and he wants to throw one or two out. Hell, I played hell, Warrick… Rick… Ricky?” I narrow my eyes and beg a preference.
“Rick.” He smiles and his eyes betray amusement, but also, lust. I bury that deep down.
“If he just fucking let me get the star students to their A stars then we’d all be alright, but no, he wants me to teach a spread. A spread. I mean, what is a bloody spread when it’s at home? A spread?”
I devour a chicken ball and munch, telling Rick, “The bastard is a proper porker, Rick. He has these bloody pig eyes. Pig nose. Pig belly. Pig. Pig. Pig.”
I am digressing.
“Tell me what happened next,” he says with a cheeky grin, chomping on his own chicken ball.
“Well, I said, fine, let’s try out his way. The classes are a mess. Betsy and Hugh haven’t been teaching their plans. They have been winging it. It’s a mess.”
“That is management’s fault too, not just yours,” he insists.
; “I know that. I do. But this is the way I work… I am a perfectionist. Can’t keep a thing left untouched. I have had to rewrite the plans for three sets of D minus students. I now have… to try… and get them up to speed. It won’t do, Rick. It just won’t.”
The stress is getting to me. I have to stand up and pace. He pours more wine into my glass and thrusts it at me.
“Quick, before I have it and get blotto. Quick, please.”
I take it and neck it. I feel so much better. I take a deep breath and pace with my hands at my hips, like I am a presidential aide considering the best course of action in a world-threatening situation. He hands me a cig from my bag and I pretend to puff.
“Breathe,” he reminds me, and I do. I breathe the yellow tip.
“Why did they let it get that bad and why didn’t they tell me, Rick?”
He looks sad and I swear I could kiss him.
“Clearly they were struggling, yet they never said. Never came to me. Why?”
“I don’t know why,” he gulps.
I do. I know why.
“I had a nervous breakdown when Laurie… and… I thought nobody knew. I thought… until I swear one day Betsy nearly let slip she knew. I swear she just seemed to have this almighty inkling of it… she knows too many people, you see. She’s a blabbermouth. If the headmaster is shitting, she knows about it. If the caretaker’s taking the rubbish out, she’s there spying on what he’s taking out of the bags for himself.”
He hiccups a laugh and covers his mouth.
“They are afraid of upsetting you?”
“Maybe, I wish that wasn’t the case. But maybe.”
“What else? I know there is something else. I can see you chewing it out of your cheek.”
The smile he draws from me hurts my face, it’s so broad, but I inwardly hate myself. He reads me so easily.
“I discovered… I discovered… I can’t say it.”
“Can’t say what?”
He stands and opens his arms, which I accept. I am on the verge of tears and he knows it. I take some deep breaths in his bear hug and enjoy his hair against my cheek.
“I discovered a natural-born writer in one of the lower sets. A prodigy, Warrick… Rick.”
I pull back and bite my lip and hold my cheeks. Relief and shock are still burning through me.
“You can call me Warrick if you like‒”
I tell him excitedly, throwing my hands in the air, “Rick, Ricky, baby! A genius! Do you know how good this feels? And yet, it defies everything. I gave them all a practice test to gauge their abilities and she wrote… the most stunning answers in a piece about Romeo and Juliet.”
I am rambling and on edge. This was a big shock for me this week. Huge. Monumental. Epic. Off the scale. This is why I decided to teach in the first place yet I was always told that these things never happen. Nope. Never will you find a genius lurking among the lower sets of St. Clare’s.
I go to my desk in the bedroom and grab the paper. I hold a hand at my forehead and tell him, “Listen, listen… I’ll read it to you… okay. This is Roms and Jules yeah, pig’s swill in Shakespeare’s canon, yet listen… The playwright executed swift delivery of the plot, outlining the premise in the very early stages. Two families at war and a secret union that might make them or break them even further apart… A nobody pupil, Rick!”
His eyebrows raise in disbelief.
I continue reading: “This is not a tragedy in the true sense. The tragedy plays are those with more developed characters, definitively haunting soliloquies and a set formula of the fool as the narrator, a journey, a reunification and then an inevitable breaking because of the protagonist’s fatal flaw…”
“She stole it from the Internet,” he says so surely.
“I asked her to stop behind after class. She told me she goes to her local library, sits in a corner and reads every Saturday. Reads and reads. Her mum and dad have to work in a chip shop and she’s always left alone. So she reads!”
I am joyful and still, equally miffed. With myself. I may have missed this hidden treasure.
“I questioned her. I discovered her favourite book is Jane Eyre. She has already read Frankenstein and Dracula. She likes vampire stories for fun. She reads the critique books if she is feeling in a mood. This girl… she is so unaware. So blasé. She could be a bloody poet!”
“Sensational,” he says.
His eyes are bright. I nod at the glass and he fills me up again, spilling loads on the table while he waves the bottle around willy-nilly, hoping it might hit my glass. He’s staring at me. I gulp another massive swallow down my gullet and ignore the wine covering my table that he still hasn’t noticed he spilt.
“But why do you not seem entirely happy about it?”
He knows. I return to the table and hold his gaze. I chew on a large, fat, deliciously deep-fried chip and mumble, “I may have never known she was there.”
As I hold my cheek, I realise my face is hot and I am hyped up. I take a deep breath and he reaches across the table to grab my hand.
“Friends again?”
“Friends, always,” I insist.
“Big week for you then, snowballs and all?”
I nod, grinning sheepishly.
“I am exhausted. I think that’s why I feel like I am bouncing off the ceiling!”
“Understandable.”
We finish our meal and he washes up. I watch the sequins and then some slasher film that he gives me a hilarious commentary of in a Steve Martin voice. He uses so many alternative words for fuck that I almost piss my knickers with laughter.
At bedtime, he looks at the door as if he is going to leave, but I beckon him with my eyes to the bedroom. When he slides in under the covers, t-shirted and boxer-shorted, I burrow into his chest and around his body. He holds me tight and kisses my forehead. It’s as close as we dare let ourselves get.
I realise I never got his confession out of him, but there is always tomorrow.
Chapter Thirteen
Jules
It is morning and I have slept blissfully. I am on his chest still and neither of us appear to have moved a muscle. Through the material of his t-shirt, I sense a flat wall of broad hardness. I’d like to feel his skin and see whether he has curly hair on his chest matching that on his head. I never liked curly hair. Not until him.
“Morning,” he says, interrupting my errant train of thought.
“Hi.”
“Sleep well?”
“Like the dead.”
It is so warm and I am secretly so thankful to have someone with me. He makes me feel safe. I don’t think either one of us dare move, though I need to stretch because my legs have been stuck together all night. I use the clock as an excuse to move and look up from his chest.
“Crap. 10.30! What the hell! This is totally unabashed of me.”
“Listen, can you stop using big words. I may have to get a pocket dictionary otherwise.”
“Oh, brazen, I meant brazen!”
“Yeah, that you are. I have been awake an hour and a half. I was waiting for you,” his tone mock-aggravated.
“Bloody hell.”
I slam my cheek back down on his chest and he yelps.
“Why d’ya do that, wench?”
“It’s too cold. Need to stay warm.”
It is October now and creeping toward a time of the year I hate.
“What do you have planned for today?”
“Marking. Same as every Sunday. Oh, and whatever is left of the chocolate.”
He rolls me off him with the agility of a cat and pins me beneath him. He seems large in size hovering right above me. He hesitates as if he might kiss me and then leaps off the bed and heads for the bathroom, or rather runs. He must be desperate for a slash. I seriously thought he would kiss me. His breath stank of soy and chips but I wanted him to. I am so messed up. I don’t even fancy him! I just, don’t know! What is going on?
He emerges from the bathroom and puts the kettle on. This is
seriously couple behaviour, isn’t it?
When he comes back and places a cup on my bedside I sit up and check my chest. Thank goodness. I remembered to keep a bra on underneath my see-through top. He sits on the edge of the bed and scratches his hair like a dog. He has a really good old scratch and I watch, amused.
“What do we label this?”
“What?”
“This. Us. What do we label it?”
“You women and your labels,” he complains.
“I know you fancy me.”
“How do you know?” he begs with amusement.
Because you had another big bang-on this morning tenting my duvet.
“Why else hang out with me? I am not good company. Must be after the merchandise.”
He rubs his face with his hands and chuckles.
“Let’s have the merchandise then and I shall be on my merry way, all the more educated in the ways of the wench I expect.”
I smile but my face falls. He overstepped the mark.
“Please don’t call me that anymore, Rick.”
“Fine.”
We watch morning telly in silence. It’s depressing and I would rather be marking but for some reason we are both frozen in anger and unsaid frustration. I realise I still have questions. Thoughts swirl round and round my head for ages. Where do I start?
“Why did you really become a social worker?”
“Mother was one,” he replies straight.
A silence elapses and he takes a breath, so deep, his nose whistles.
“She had a stroke and died unexpectedly. Few years ago now. When I came out of the Force, seemed as good as any other job to take up.”
“So you’re not a saint, just honouring your mother?”
“No, I just care about people. That’s all. No hidden motive.”
I want more information from him, like he seems to get from me. I sense something gnawing away at him.
I look at his legs. They are hairy and long. Ordinary. They stretch from the sofa to the coffee table. Sometimes I forget he is even a man or a sexual being. He is my friend. I see him as that but I am beginning to rely on him more and more. I kid myself it is the sexual creature in me that wants to kiss him, not the real me.
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