Out on a Limb

by Lynne Barrett-Lee

I started picking at the end of the roll of bandage. What an idiot I’d been letting him run after that bloody dog. He’d been so helpful, so thoughtful, and all he’d got in return was more damage to his knee. ‘You will be,’ I said wryly. ‘That was quite a fall you had. You’ll be stiff as a board by the morning.’

  He put his arms back in his lap and began slowly rolling his head on his shoulders.

  ‘Tell you what,’ I said, leaning over and plopping the bandage in his lap. ‘Grab that while I give your shoulders a quick once-over. Can’t hurt, can it?’

  ‘I’m not so sure. That sounds worryingly like a contact sport to me.’

  ‘No, really,’ I said briskly, splaying my fingers across his shoulder blades and smoothing my thumbs into the gullies either side of his spine. ‘You forget, I’m a qualified sports masseuse.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘It says so on your business card. Ouch!’

  ‘Rel ax. You’re all hunched up where you’ve been tensing. Probably that walk back. I wish you’d let me get the car.’

  I felt his shoulders begin to soften. ‘I’m very glad you didn’t,’ he said. ‘Because now you’re here doing this.’

  And even then I didn’t fathom. I’m not even sure he had. ‘Least I can do,’ I said firmly. ‘Do you good.’

  Though I’m not sure the same could have been said about me. Because it was now fully dark outside, and I hadn’t pulled the blind yet, I could see our reflections in the kitchen window, just as I could when he was here before. Him sitting, eyes closed now, a dreamy half smile on his lips. Me standing behind him. Bent slightly forwards with my elbows sticking out, my hair moving in rhythm with the action of my wrists, in swaying twin curtains either side of my face. My fringe was in my eyes, so I took a breath to blow it, and as I did so I saw that his eyes had now opened. They weren’t all the way open. Just half-awake open. Trance-like. Relaxed. And were looking into mine.

  ‘Feel nice?’ I asked.

  ‘Mmm,’ he said, still gazing at me. Our reflections smiled at each other above the flicker of the candles.

  ‘Good,’ I mouth ed at his now. ‘I’m glad to be of service.’ And I continued to work on the muscles of his shoulders, gloriously innocent. Gloriously unaware. Unaware, that was, until I did become aware. Aware that his eyes were now not just looking, but staring. And suddenly in a wholly discomfiting way.

  And even as I thought that, I watched his hands leave his lap and his arms travel upwards, till all his fingers were resting on top of my own. I stopped moving, my expression in the window still politely enquiring. But he didn’t provide an answer. Just sat perfectly still. We were like a painting in the window now. Or a Byzantine mosaic.

  I raised my brows and met his eyes in the window. His hands were hot. ‘What’s the matter?’ I said.

  ‘You know, I really think you’d better stop doing that,’ he replied.

  When I was about eight, my parents took Pru and I to a bird sanctuary. A swan sanctuary, I think it was. We picnicked in a sunny field next to a farm. We had egg sandwiches, orange squash, crisps and pork pies, and I decided I would organise my feast inside the plastic tray that had held the pork pies. Picnic in hand, I took Pru off to have a potter in the field; there were some cows in an adjacent one, which she wanted to moo at. Except the two fields were separated by a low wire fence. I’d barely brushed it with the tip of my finger when, kapow! – a huge slug of electricity coursed through my body. Just four volts, but it might just as well have been a million. I’d never felt anything so powerful in my life. I leapt feet into the air and screamed my very lungs out. The pork pie was lost forever. The memory was not.

  Which is why it came back to me now.

  I whipped my hands from beneath his as if jet-propelled. And not knowing quite what to do after I’d done that, I walked across the kitchen and yanked down the roller blind. Not least to shut out the image in the window. My temples were thrumming. My cheeks were on fire. How on earth had I let something like that happen? How?

  He said nothing. Just cleared his throat. Feigned utter insouciance. Whatever had passed between us wasn’t up for debate. Best thing too. Only thing. What a thing, frankly. ‘Right,’ I said briskly, ‘let’s get this leg strapped then, shall we?’

  Normally I’d pop the patient’s leg up in my lap at this point, but for reasons that were becoming more insistent by the minute, I didn’t. I bent over him instead, issuing a stream of stern entreaties about rest and recuperation and the importance of proper exercise. Anything to ensure that the ever threatening silence could not be left needing something to fill it.

  And need there now was. It was growing, expanding. It was all at once as if there was a storm heading in. Right into the kitchen. ‘There,’ I said, finally. ‘That’ll do. You’re all set. Keep this on overnight and see how you’re doing in the morning.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said gruffly. ‘Right then.’ He lowered his leg to the floor and winced a little as he did so. I hardly dared look at him now.

  ‘Not too tight, is it?’ I said as I put away the roll of bandage.

  ‘No,’ came the answer. ‘No. Not too tight.’ He seemed almost as embarrassed as I was.

  I took his jeans from the chair back. ‘I’ll…um…let you get back into these then, shall I?’

  I turned away and busied myself at the sink while he did so. Wiping all the surfaces that didn’t need wiping, fussily blowing out all the tea lights on the windowsill, then wiping down the surfaces all over again. God, how had I let this happen ?

  But happen it had. Still happening, it was. I could hear the swish of the fabric as he stepped back into his jeans. First one leg. The good leg. Swoosh. On it went. Then a huff as he balanced to attend to the other. The creak of the table as it took his hand’s weight. I could see him in my mind’s eye, if not in the window. See him tuck in his shirt. See him do up his fly. See the belt, even as I heard the metal jangle, being fed carefully back into buckle and fixed. And then silence. Then nothing. But it was such a powerful sort of a nothing that still I didn’t dare turn around. What the hell had I been thinking, massaging his shoulders? This was not work. We were not in the clinic. How thoroughly stupid was that ?

  I was just trying to arrange my features into something breezy and work-a-day and businesslike and wondering quite how I was going to haul this situation back into some semblance of normality, when I felt his hand touch my hair, at the side of my face.

  I spun around, startled. Wide-eyed. A little dizzy. Proper dizzy now in fact, because I’d forgotten to eat. Since the plane. That was it. I racked my brains. I’d had a muffin. Just a coffee and a muffin. Since then I’d had nothing. I was existing on air.

  Which right now, we were sharing. He was standing so close.

  ‘You ha ve something caught,’ he said slowly. ‘Right here. In your hair. See?’

  He lowered his hand and between his thumb and finger was a little fairy seed inside its gossamer star. It must have caught in my hair in the park. He sat it in his palm and we studied it together, like a pair of zealous biology students on a field trip. ‘Thistledown,’ he suggested.

  ‘Um, no,’ I answered. ‘It’s rose bay willow herb, isn’t it? I think. I’m not sure. We always just called them fairies.’

  ‘In that case,’ he said, lifting his gaze to meet my own again. ‘Now you have to make a wish.’

  His voice was just a whisper. His eyes bored into mine.

  ‘No, you do,’ I heard myself say to him. ‘You found it.’

  He shook his head. ‘No, no. You’re wrong. It found you.’

  He took my hand then and placed it over his upturned one. So the fairy in his palm wouldn’t become skittish and fly away. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Go on. What do you want to wish for?’

  ‘Gabriel, I –’

  ‘What? What’s the matter?’

  ‘You know, right now, I don’t think I’m up for making any wishes.’ I licked my dry lips. ‘Besides, you’re not supp
osed to tell anyone what you’re wishing for or it doesn’t come true.’

  His hands were still cupping my own, between us. I felt his thumb trace a gentle yet deliberate arc ever so slowly across the back of my palm. ‘Simple,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll wish your wish for you. Sort of by proxy. Okay?’

  ‘Er, okay,’ I said, conscious even as I said it that there was something that was far from okay about all this.

  ‘Close your eyes, then.’

  My heart thumped. ‘I don’t think I dare to.’

  We could almost rub noses now. He smiled. ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘Because if I close my eyes now, I think your wish might come true.’

  ‘I told you, it’s your wish.’

  ‘You don’t know what I’m wishing.’

  ‘You want to know something, Abbie McFadden? I think I do.’

  ‘So you lied, then.’

  ‘Lied?’ He looked amused now. ‘About what?’

  ‘About how confident you are about your skills of prediction.’

  I felt the pressure of his hand on mine increase as he spoke. ‘Well,’ he whispered. ‘There’s only one way to find out.’

  I don’t know what happened to the fairy exactly. Though Dancing Diana might, of course.

  Chapter 23

  ‘GABRIEL ASH,’ SAYS CANDICE, drawing little spiral doodles on the appointments book. ‘You know, it occurred to me just then. Isn’t that the name of that character in that film?’

  It’s now Thursday and Gabriel Ash has just telephoned to cancel his appointment for physio next week. She hasn’t said more and I can’t bring myself to ask her, because I can’t trust myself not to turn beetroot. Or weep.

  ‘What film?’ I ask her.

  ‘You know. That one with Alan Bates in. In the Sixties. No, Seventies, probably. Come on, you know. And Julie Christie, wasn’t it? Of the book by Thomas Hardy. God, I’ve even read the bloody thing. And she was called Bathsheba. Come on, you do know. Anyway, wasn’t he called Gabriel Ash?’

  Candice seems to think I know most things, which is flattering. And Candice knows much more than I give her credit for. Which is humbling. So easy to make assumptions about people. But I do know this, because I’ve read the book too. ‘ Far From the Madding Crowd.’ I tell her. ‘That’s the one you mean.’ I think some more. Even thought it pains me to do so. ‘But he was called Gabriel Oak.’

  ‘That’s it!’ She looks pleased. ‘That’s the one. Gabriel Oak, Gabriel Ash. I knew it was something familiar. He was a shepherd, wasn’t he?’

  I suppose, I realise, that it was inevitable that he’d do that. And for the best. Yes, definitely for the best, all things considered. It won’t work any more, him coming here. It can’t. I really hope I never, ever see him again.

  ‘Hellooo?’ Candice flicks her fingers. ‘You still there? He was a shepherd, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, he was.’

  ‘Hey, Gabriel Ash would make a good shepherd, don’t you think? Because he’d be clued up on all that red sky at night stuff, wouldn’t he?’

  I turn the appointment book around to see how the rest of my day is going to shape up. ‘I think it’s the other way around, isn’t it?’ I say. ‘Shepherds are generally good at forecasting the weather, yes. But I’m not sure being good at weather forecasting necessarily means you’re also good with sheep.’

  Or forecasting generally. I wish I could have forecast what’s happened to me. Wish he had. And way before what happened in my kitchen. How could I have let it? How could I? ‘Well,’ says Candice, winking. ‘I’ll just have to ask him when he’s next in, lovely, won’t I?’ Then her grin widens and she whoops and claps her hands. ‘Hey, but he will be! He’s Welsh, love ’ im, isn’t he?’ Which pronouncement she finds so completely hilarious that her cheeks run with tears, she chokes on her coffee, and, still doubled with laughter, she has to retire to the loo.

  Which he won’t be, of course. Any more than I expected him to keep this appointment. Some things are for the best, after all.

  When I was a teenager, I read a book by Malcolm Bradbury. It was called Eating People is Wrong. I don’t recall the plot now; it’s just the title that’s stayed with me. Such a clever one. So gloriously self-evident a phrase.

  Kissing people is wrong, too. There are lots of occasions when it’s not wrong, obviously, but there is still a kernel of resonance between the one and the other. Yes, yes. You can kiss people on the cheek, kiss your babies all over, kiss your relatives, your friends, the more fragrant of your colleagues. But kissing – proper kissing – kissing of a sexual nature – has a very well defined code of conduct. You don’t just kiss people. Ad hoc. Per se. Not without a clear invitation to do so. Because a kiss is almost always the answer to the question that our reproductive genes are continually asking us. Would you like to procreate us with this person? It is a statement of intent. Of bodily commitment. A statement that pre-supposes a mutual acknowledgement that the reproductive process is, at the very least, a distinct possibility. And if not now, then at some future time. Which is not something one tends to think about much. But that’s what kissing is. That’s what kissing’s for. Which is why women tend to feel so uncomfortable when they wake up on the morning after the office Christmas party and think ‘ohmyGod. Him ! I didn’t !’

  Sometimes that’s because you are frankly repulsed, but often – too often – it’s not that at all. Sometimes it’s because they are with someone else. Procreatively committed already.

  None of which was going through my mind then. Far from it. Having thought the brace of thoughts I am biologically programmed to think ( oh! Gabriel’s kissing me and he – no, we – shouldn’t! ), I then stopped thinking rationally altogether. Utterly.

  Which is, of course, why human biology works so very well, and by extension, why babies get made.

  And so we kissed. We kissed hesitantly, lightly at first. A mere featherlight brushing of lips against lips; a tentative exploration of alien skin. But kisses are governed by forces of nature, so unless something crops up to call a halt to proceedings (getting snagged on a tongue stud, inability to breathe, discovering the kissee has breath that could fell a hippo), then they tend to gather pace. Because that’s how they work.

  And so this, had you joined the proceedings at that point, is how you’d have found us. Kissing one another with such terrible abandon that had the world seen fit then to slip off its axis and hurtle into the sun, we’d neither of have been any the wiser. All I knew was that where I’d begun this thinking ‘Oh! Goodness! Gabriel!’ my thoughts had long since changed both their tone and their timbre, and centred on thinking ‘ohhh, Gabriel …’ instead. And as so often happens when kisses reach that level of intensity (or, rather, that point where the kissing itself becomes mostly a metaphor for the carnal intentions you are attempting to pursue via the judicious and speedy shedding of clothing) Gabriel, similarly incoherent on the ‘ohhh’ front, had started to unbuckle his belt.

  The very same belt he’d only buckled up minutes earlier.

  Was it that that did it, perhaps? That necessary logistical break in the proceedings? Who knows. But pause it was. And into pauses fit thoughts. And not necessarily edifying ones.

  ‘Oh my God,’ he said suddenly. Presumably having thought some. Leaping away as if yanked by the hair. ‘Oh, my God, Abbie. I’m so sorry.’ He was shaking his head now. Backing away from me. ‘God, what am I doing? No.’

  H e was speaking mainly to himself as he said this, but even so, it hit home. Because the word ‘no’ is not the word one usually expects to be hearing from a man when he’s speaking to a woman at such moments. Isn’t it normally the other way around?

  I don’t know what it’s like to be a man, obviously, but at that moment, now sans my T-shirt, very nearly sans more, standing like a window display mannequin by my dishwasher, blinking, appalled, under the way-too-bright strip light, I kind of felt I might have an insight or two. All those boys I’d be
ached up at rejection central as teenagers; no I don’t want to dance. No you can’t touch my bra. Don’t do this. Don’t do that. No I don’t want to touch it. I’ve got a headache. You’ve got acne. Ugh. Put that away.

  Yup. That was me now. Discarded by the dishwasher. By a man who had no business kissing me anyway. But more to the point, oh, so much more to the point, I had no business kissing back. What on earth had possessed me to do such a thing? And even more chilling, what might have happened next, had not Gabriel’s conscience (and almost married status, presumably) kicked in? Sex on the floor with my mother looking on? In the absence of gonads and a stiff upper lip, I immediately burst into tears.

  Gabriel, still grimacing and reeling as dramatically as if personally coached by my sainted dear mother, in fact, took a few more awkward steps backwards, fetching up eventually against the kitchen table, arms held up, palms forward, almost in supplication. As if at the behest of a bank robber with a sawn off shotgun.

  With his shirt hanging out and all his buttons undone. I gaped. Had I done that? Yes. Every last one. I snatched my T-shirt from the floor and scrabbled my way back into it, to spare the blushes of my still heaving bosom.

  He was breathing hard. He looked stricken. ‘God, I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I am so, so sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. Oh, Abbie, I’m so sorry. I –’

  ‘Stop saying sorry!’ I snapped at him. I was shaking all over. Top to bottom. Head to toe. Nerve ending to nerve ending. Erogenous zone to erogenous bloody zone. We had so very nearly…so very nearly… ‘God, Gabriel. Why did you do that?’

  I turned around and wrenched some kitchen roll from the holder. But I did it so hard that it just kept on coming, spooling round and around and spewing all over the draining board. Which brought on another wave of almost hysterical tears. I ripped off a wodge of the stuff and slapped it over my face. ‘Why did I do that? God!’ I sobbed into the kitchen roll for a good few seconds, and when I finally lowered it – tremulous, mortified – he was rattling through his shirt buttons as if competing in a school getting-dressed competition. Last one fully-clothed is a ninny!