‘So what are you doing in Plumber’s World?’ It seemed an obvious question.
‘I’m here with the builder to choose a bath for our en-suite,’ she replied, still smiling, eyes sparkling as they took him in. She rubbed his arm. ‘Oh it is good to see you. You look great. Is a lady putting that twinkle in your eye?’
She was fishing, thought Shaun. There was no twinkle in his eye, they both knew it.
‘No,’ he said. He noticed she was wearing a wedding band. He was glad she had found someone to love her and give her a child. He knew he had broken her heart and from the way she was looking at him, he also knew she would let him break it all over again. She had told him over and over that she would never love anyone as much as she loved him – he was her soul-mate, her everything.
‘Well, you look happy anyway, Shaun. Plenty of work?’
‘Too much.’
‘That’s good, that’s really good. Especially in this climate. How many builders can say that?’
Her hand had slipped to his wrist and her fingers were circling it, not quite daring to hold his hand. He knew she was waiting for something – any sign of affection that implied they still had some connection. She had adored him to the point of obsession and he guessed that he still lingered in her heart. But he couldn’t give her anything back. She was a stranger to him now. Really she always was.
‘Well, I better get on and leave you to picking out your bath,’ he said, pulling his hand away to scratch at an imaginary itch on his head. A sigh of disappointment snagged on her smile that he didn’t want to chat any more, that she might as well have been stood behind a firewall. She reached up and kissed his cheek again, forcing him close. Her perfume was the same, heavy and spicy and cloying.
‘Goodbye, Rosie. Good luck with the baby.’
‘I hope you find someone, Shaun. Someone you can love.’
He saw tears blooming in her eyes as he walked away and he hated himself for being so cold. But there was no chance to ever be warm with Rosie – there was only frost or stifling heat.
He had met her in a pub in town. One of Shaun’s workers had been getting married and he had agreed to join them for a drink. The plan was that he would show his face, drink a pint with the groom and then go home. Then he met Rosie.
She said she had fallen in love with him at first sight, spotting him across a crowded room. She spoke in lots of clichés. She latched on to him as he was ordering a round, batted her eyelashes at him and persistently talked to him as he waited to be served until he had given her some attention.
She looked good. She was all blonde hair, big blue eyes and pouty pink mouth and was wearing a dress that made the best of her slim figure. The only other person who had ever shown Shaun any real kindness was also called Rose; it seemed like an omen. Shaun had had relationships before, all short-lasting, all usually ended in a flurry of frustrated accusations about his inability to commit and his emotional detachment. Ironically all he wanted to do was settle down and have a home; yet as soon as he was in a relationship, he found himself looking for an out.
He thought that maybe it was time to try harder, give it his best shot – and who better than with a pretty, kind, warm woman who idolised him. Rosie put him on a pedestal and he forced himself to open up to her, told her about his loveless upbringing, how every time he began to settle in a foster home he was taken from it and placed somewhere else, eventually ending up in a home for boys which was little better than a holding pen. Opening up to Rosie had been the beginning of the end.
Rosie embarked on a quest to fix him, heal him, change him. He felt smothered by her constant attempts at therapy. If he never saw another fecking candle scented with destressing oil in his lifetime it would be too soon. Books lined the shelves: Letting People In. Men Who Cannot Love. The Injured Inner Child. He became her life project. Even when he told her that enough was enough, she went underground: her attempts became less obvious but she didn’t stop.
He did want to love her, she was the perfect wife, but he couldn’t. Then he discovered that she had stopped taking the pill and he panicked. A child would be good for them, she said. It would help him focus outwards instead of inwards. He started to wake up feeling as if someone were pressing a pillow over his face. She was giving, giving, giving, but why did it feel as if she were taking, taking, taking from him, leeching from his history, making him her project, her life’s work? He didn’t want a child. He couldn’t stay with Rosie, not even for the sake of a child: she was suffocating him with her giant caring heart. What if he couldn’t love the child when it arrived? What if something happened to Rosie and him and the child ended up in foster care and the whole cycle happened again? He knew he had to get out soon. He stopped sleeping with Rosie; she got more frustrated and hurt because of his emotional withdrawal. He didn’t want to smash her heart by breaking up and tried to do it by degrees, but he was killing her with his coldness as much as she was stifling him with sunshine. They split up.
Seeing her again brought it all back, those horrible fears that she might get pregnant deliberately. She had no interests outside him, nothing to talk about but therapies and theories – she was even planning to conceive a child as a form of treatment. He often dreamt that his child had been born and was unhappy, suffering and would grow up unable to love, to connect. Just like its father.
He paid for the tap and walked out of the shop. There was a pink Volkswagen Beetle painted with yellow roses in the car park with plastic eyelashes on the headlights. He knew that it must be Rosie’s car.
He got in his van and took a deep breath before starting the engine. He was damaged beyond repair, he knew that. He would have been better off staying with his durty whore of a mother, not being fed, not being washed, not being looked after properly, for then at least he would have had connections with people, a sense of home and a heart that worked. Shaun McCarthy was adrift with no anchor. It was more of a curse than a life.
Chapter 58
After the first hour in her new temping job, Carla was bored rigid. On the second day she wanted to grab her handbag, walk out and find refuge in Leni’s teashop, with the others. What theme had Leni decided for today? she wondered. Would today be Tolstoy Tuesday? Or maybe a tribute to D. H. Lawrence? But instead Carla sighed, treated herself to a compensatory coffee from the machine and carried on pumping numbers into her PC. After five days she was ready to hang herself from the fluorescent light on the ceiling. She found herself making tally cards of how many quarter hours were left until home-time. When the clock nudged its big hand on five o’clock on the last day, Carla didn’t wait another second to down tools. She made as dignified an exit as she could, even though she wanted to turn the sort of cartwheels that would have had Olga Korbut ringing her for tips. Never had she felt a Friday feeling like it.
There was a little corner shop on the way to the train station. She called in, picked up a bottle of over-priced red wine and contemplated buying herself a bunch of flowers. But the offerings were pathetically skinny – they couldn’t have cheered anyone up.
Carla missed floristry so much. She had loved her last job working in Marlene’s Bloomers where Marlene Watson, the owner, was quite happy sitting in the back room smoking her fags and reading Hello and OK! for the last few years of her working life. She left the running of the shop totally down to Carla, knowing that her business was in safe hands. Even though she was quite shy by nature, Carla was perfectly capable of dealing with customers in the shop. She loved delivering the buttonholes and bouquets to excited soon-to-be newly-weds, some young and some not so young. She was brilliant at putting together a quick bouquet for someone who wanted to buy an impulse present. She loved the smells and colours and shapes of the flowers, the packed velvet heads of roses, the phallic anthuriums, the pungent stargazer lilies with their oriental perfume, the jaunty birds of paradise, the giant-headed sunflowers. There wasn’t a flower that Carla couldn’t recognise or wasn’t able to put together with others for best effect.
Despite her misgivings, she bought one of the scraggy flower sprays. She’d make it her mission tonight to fashion something presentable out of them.
The train was cancelled and when it eventually arrived it was full to the brim with commuters so Carla not only had to stand, but she had to endure being crushed against the bulk of a large man who kept coughing on her without covering up his mouth. The train dumped her at Barnsley station at quarter to seven and she was drenched by the time she reached the car, thanks to a flash summer storm of heavyweight proportions.
The lights were on in Dundealin when she pulled up in the drive. For a few moments she sat in the car with the wipers on and marvelled at it. The odd-looking house had become a cosy haven that she couldn’t wait to get in to. She switched off the engine and dashed to the front door, getting even wetter than before.
Will was in the kitchen snapping the ring-pull off a can of coke.
‘Bloody hell, is it raining?’ he laughed, watching her drip all over the floor.
‘It’s terrible,’ said Carla. ‘It was at full pelt when I crossed from the train station to the car park and I thought that was as bad as it could get, but apparently not.’ She eased off her coat to find the rain had soaked through her blouse. She made a quick check that she wasn’t treating Will to a Miss Wet T-shirt private show before hanging it up, but it was mainly her sleeves that were soggy. She should change, but first she pulled the wine out of the carrier bag and Will instinctively reached behind him to get her a glass out of the cupboard.
‘You look as if you need a big one.’ Then he added, ‘glass of wine, that is.’
‘I need a massive one. Wine, that is,’ smiled Carla, screwing off the top and pouring out the liquid. ‘Would you . . . ?’
‘Nah thanks. Just opened this. I think your flowers might be a bit water-drunk.’
The bunch looked even more sorry now it had been saturated.
Carla tipped her head back and took a long, long sip of wine. It was a little on the cool side, but it was dark and fruity and still hit the spot. She felt it spread around her system and up to her brain where it zapped away all images of numbers out of her head.
‘What do you do for a living, Carla?’ asked Will. He had been curious and now was an ideal time to ask.
‘Well,’ began Carla after another glug, ‘I’m doing some temping at the moment. Office stuff. I’ve spent five days in a bank inputting data.’ She shuddered. ‘By trade I’m a florist though.’
‘Didn’t put them together did you?’ Will winked as he pointed towards the apology for a bouquet.
‘I did not,’ said Carla with mock fierceness. Will chuckled. He could see Carla quite easily as a florist; he couldn’t picture her in a bank, sitting in front of a computer though. ‘How come you’re not a florist any more then?’
Carla took out a towel from the drawer and used it to wipe her hair and dab at her face. She hadn’t checked but she bet her mascara had run and she was standing there talking to her lodger with a face like Pierrot.
‘The lady I worked for retired. And there don’t seem to be any vacancies in that line of work so I’ve had to diversify.’
‘Ah, that’s a real shame. Did you work for her a long time?’
‘Fifteen years.’
‘You must know your stuff.’ He looked impressed.
‘I do,’ said Carla proudly.
‘You should set up on your own. Be a shame to waste all that experience.’
Carla gave a hoot of laughter. ‘Me? With my own shop? I wouldn’t know how to start.’
‘I’d like to say that working for yourself is the best job in the world, but I’m not sure I’m that qualified any longer.’ Will gave a little laugh of his own.
‘You’ve worked for yourself then?’ asked Carla, not getting his joke.
‘Most of my adult life. Built up my business then lost the lot by putting all my eggs in one basket. Lost the house, lost the fancy car, lost the wife. Now I have nothing left to lose except my honour. Even lost my ability to climb a ladder.’
Carla’s eyes widened. ‘What?’
‘I’ve become scared of heights.’ There, he had admitted it to someone else besides Nicole. He surprised himself with the ease with which he confessed it. It didn’t feel half as embarrassing saying it to Carla as it had to his wife.
‘God, that’s awful,’ said Carla. ‘I’m presuming it’s a symptom of anxiety. If so, it’s probably a temporary thing. Sortable, if that’s a word.’
‘You think?’ He remembered Nicole’s reaction, which had been very different. She had ridiculed him. You’re losing money hand over fist and now you’ve lost your nerve. What’s next? Because let’s face it, you haven’t that much left to lose have you? You’re a fucking joke, Will Linton.
‘Are you going to see a doctor about it?’ asked Carla. Nicole hadn’t suggested that, obvious as it might have been. She had flounced off and refused to talk about it, and he had been embarrassed enough to not bring it up again either.
‘I thought it might go away by itself, but it hasn’t. I keep testing myself to see if my mojo has come back. Even went into B&Q the other day and started climbing their ladders. God knows what the security guards watching the CCTV must have thought.’
Carla put her hand over her mouth to still the laughter.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t laughing at you, just the way you’re saying it.’
Will grinned too. ‘Couldn’t make it up, could you? Ain’t life a bag of laughs sometimes.’
‘You’re telling me,’ said Carla. ‘I’m the widow of a man I was never married to.’
‘Eh?’
No one could have been more amazed than Carla to find herself launching into the tale of Martin and the funeral and Julie Pride so easily, to reassure her lodger that it wasn’t only for him that things were screwed up. There was a certain comfort to be had in knowing that even on life’s scrapheap, there was good company to be found.
*
She’s working late again, thought Shaun. He could see her through the teashop window, wrapping a parcel. He considered that she might be looking out of the window and thinking that he was working late and wondered if she was working late for the same reason he was: that he didn’t want to go home because there was nothing there for him.
Home for Shaun was a large, heavily gabled house at the end of a lane between Higher Hoppleton and Maltstone. Gothic in appearance, it had been empty for years, run down, neglected, forgotten; a project only for the insane to take on, which was where he came in. It was yet another house he wanted to put roots down into, another house big enough for a family – for some reason he always picked family-sized houses. Shaun McCarthy was a master builder, there was nothing in the building trade that he couldn’t lend his hand to. He could put a roof on, dig out a cellar, rebuild walls, construct staircases . . . but he couldn’t make a house into a home. Fallstones was a perfect mix of the old classic and new practical. He had stripped it of everything but the original features worth saving and, where needed, had matched in cornices and ceiling roses and made them look as if they had been there since day one. Architecturally it was stunning, but it still felt cold, cavernous, empty inside. There was no feeling that Fallstones had ever been lived in, even though local reputation was that it was haunted by an old lady who had died there over a hundred years ago. The atmosphere in every room was that of the Dead Sea, as if nothing could live in it. Not even spectres.
Shaun McCarthy was an expert at taking the run down, the unwanted, the forgotten and crafting it into something fresh, beautiful, wanted. He could do it easily with buildings, but not with his own life.
*
Carla had just got to the part of the story about taking the keys to Julie Pride when her hand flew to her mouth to stem the words rushing out.
‘I am so sorry,’ she said, realising how long she had been talking for. ‘I don’t know why I’m boring you with all this.’
‘I’m not bo
red at all,’ said Will, getting up and bringing a wine glass to the table. ‘Go on then, I will have one with you.’
‘Help yourself,’ Carla invited.
‘Thanks.’ Will tipped the bottle into his glass after he had filled up Carla’s. ‘You know, I’m strangely comforted by the fact that there are other people at a stage in their lives when they should be sorted but find they have to start all over again. There must be a lot of us about.’ He looked straight into her eyes and she saw how grey and warm his were. Nice eyes, kind eyes.
‘True,’ said Carla, feeling a blush creep over her cheeks. Will Linton was too easy to chat to. She couldn’t imagine sitting in her kitchen talking to Rex Parkinson like this.
‘Like I said, you ain’t boring me,’ he repeated, sensing she hadn’t believed him when he said it the first time. ‘If anything, I’m fascinated. It’s like the plot of a film. You should write it all down and make a book out of it.’
‘Not me,’ laughed Carla. ‘I love reading them, but I’ve never been interested in writing. And if I read this one, I’d abandon it for being too far-fetched.’
‘Listen,’ coughed Will. ‘I was going to treat myself to fish and chips tonight. How about I get two lots and you can tell me the rest of the story?’
‘Oh,’ said Carla, about to say that she was all right thanks, but somehow the words metamorphosed in her throat. ‘That sounds nice. Although that’s really all I have to tell.’
‘Well, you can eat instead of talking, then. Or you can make something up,’ he smiled. He has a nice smile, thought Carla. White, even teeth, full bottom lip. The word sexy slipped into her head but she batted it away. She didn’t want to go down that route, thinking about this man that she hadn’t known two minutes having a sexy smile.
‘I’ll get me coat,’ said Will. ‘My treat.’
‘Well, I’ll butter some bread in that case.’ Carla jumped up. ‘And put the kettle on. You have to have tea, bread and butter with fish and chips. And lots of salt and vinegar.’
The Teashop on the Corner Page 20