He manufactured reasons to return to Polly’s office after that, either feigning a misunderstanding or checking that the two reps who reported to him were also filling in their expenses forms correctly. Often, if Polly wasn’t too busy, he’d get a couple of fair-trade coffees from the machine closest to her office and chat for a while. He found himself sitting in meetings on core competencies and knowledge growth, nodding his head sagely while replaying every word of their conversations.
About two months after their first meeting – when Billy was in her office on yet another pretext – Polly looked at her watch. ‘It’s lunchtime,’ she announced. ‘How about we finish this conversation in the Slug and Lettuce?’
Billy was happy to. He stood up and waited for Polly to stand, but instead she wheeled herself from behind the desk. ‘You don’t mind pushing, do you?’
Billy had had no idea that Polly was disabled, but then remembered he’d never actually seen her when she hadn’t been sitting behind her desk. ‘Happy to,’ he said, hoping that his voice had remained neutral and not betrayed an element of surprise.
The Slug and Lettuce was about three hundred yards from the office in the direction of the promenade. Billy manoeuvred Polly’s chair down the ramp at the front of the office and then pushed her along uneven pavements to the pub, careful not to jolt her when they went up or down kerbs. Once inside the Slug, he cleared two chairs from a table to make room for her wheelchair and then went to the bar to order a baked potato with cheese for her and a ham sandwich for him. He returned with a glass of white wine and a coca-cola.
‘You’re not drinking?’ she asked.
‘If I drink at lunchtime I fall asleep in the afternoon,’ Billy replied. ‘Besides, I’m driving.’
They laughed at his joke, and once again Billy wondered when he’d last been so amusing. The answer was obvious: it was the last time he’d been with Polly!
He took a sip of his coke and then asked Polly how long she’d been in the wheelchair. Strangely, he didn’t feel the least bit uncomfortable asking her this question. Conversation was always so easy with Polly.
Polly looked at her watch. ‘Let’s see, I climbed into the wheelchair at eight o’clock this morning and it’s now one o’clock in the afternoon, so I’d say about five hours.’
‘Oh, now I see,’ Billy said. ‘Something happened to you last night! I was thinking that you were confined to the wheelchair. Did you have a fall or something?’
Polly laughed. ‘You’re a bit credulous, aren’t you, Billy? But it’s a nice quality to have.’
Billy looked confused. ‘You haven’t just been in the wheelchair for five hours then?’
‘I’ve been in it since I got up this morning – that’s the five hours I was referring to,’ Polly smiled. ‘I suppose I shouldn’t make light of the situation but it’s my situation, so why not? I don’t see any point in getting depressed about it.’
‘Is it spinal?’ Billy ventured. ‘Are your legs paralysed?’
‘My spine and legs are fine, thanks. It’s my feet – I don’t have any.’
Billy had just taken a drink of coke and some of the fizzy drink now found its way down his nose.
‘Oh Polly,’ he gasped. ‘That’s fantastic! – I mean, fantastically bad luck!’ he quickly added, hoping that his joy wasn’t detectable.
‘So those aren’t your feet then,’ he said, pointing to her shoes.
‘No, they’re prosthetics. I can walk with sticks, but it’s more comfortable using a wheelchair. I’ve always liked sitting.’
‘Me too,’ Billy said. ‘I’ve always preferred sitting to walking as well. Jean and her mother go walking together but I never join them. I’ve always thought feet were overrated.’
‘I wouldn’t go that far!’ Polly said, annoyed by his remark. ‘If I had to choose between having feet and not having feet, then I’d have feet any day of the week. They allow you more freedom.’
‘What… what happened?’ Billy asked, slightly disappointed by her reaction.
‘I was in a car accident – a bad one,’ Polly said. ‘The only way they could get me out was by amputating my feet.’
‘How awful,’ Billy sympathised. ‘Were you driving?’
‘No, my boyfriend was. We’d been arguing, and he decided that the best way to resolve the argument was by getting me home and out of his car as quickly as possible. He took a bend too quickly and lost control, smashed into a tree. That was seven years ago.’
‘What an idiot!’ Billy blurted out. ‘What a stupid idiot! And I bet he climbed out without a scratch on him, didn’t he?’
‘Not quite,’ Polly said. ‘He was killed on impact.’
Billy was about to say something to the effect of how it had served him right, when he saw the look in Polly’s eyes (green ones, he noticed). ‘I’m sorry to hear that, Polly. Very sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.’
A barman brought their food to the table and conversation drifted to more mundane matters, namely Polly’s baked potato and his ham sandwich. Billy wondered why she’d chosen cheese as her topping rather than tuna and sweetcorn, and she asked him why he’d opted for white bread instead of brown. ‘I never eat white bread,’ she said. ‘Wholemeal’s a lot healthier.’
After they’d finished their meals Billy picked up the tab and Polly, determined that this should be a corporate rather than a personal expense, told him which column to put the claim in. ‘It was a work related conversation, remember,’ she said.
That evening, Billy sat in the hotel bar drinking pints of lager. He had a lot of thinking to do. Could Polly really be the woman who’d haunted his thoughts for so many years, the soul mate his phobic mind had longed for?
Although the image of a woman with no feet had first popped into his head when Henry Halliwell had been describing the plight of a patient, it had taken up permanent residence there after Jean’s legs had started to travel independently from her body and the two of them had moved into separate beds. He remembered that Jean had been pregnant with Katy at the time and that Katy was now almost seven. He did the sums and realised that it was the same time Polly had been in the car crash. Surely, there was more to this than just coincidence!
He recalled his first meeting with Polly, his immediate ease in her company. Not for one moment had he ever felt anxious or threatened when he was with her. Although the fact of her handicap had only been revealed to him that day, he believed now that he’d always intuitively known she had no feet.
He thought of Jean and wondered if he still loved her. He thought he did, but couldn’t decide if it was love or just the fact that he’d got used to living with her. If Polly was the woman he was meant to be with though, how would he break the news to Jean, and how hurt would she be? Probably not too hurt, he eventually decided – more likely inconvenienced.
But if he left Jean and moved south, how would he ever maintain a close relationship with his daughter? Katy he did love. Maybe she could move south with him, he thought, but then wondered how on earth he’d ever afford a house in the south of England.
The stupidity of the thought suddenly struck him. He didn’t need to buy a house. He and Katy could move in with Polly!
But then Billy caught himself. He knew that he loved Polly – there was no other way to describe his feelings for her – but how did Polly feel about him? Did she feel the same way or see him only as a friend? Would she even want him and Katy to move in with her and, more to the point, would she allow them to eat white bread? There was no point planning anything until he knew the answers to these questions, and at this stage in their relationship he didn’t feel comfortable asking Polly outright.
He needed to be more subtle, he decided, make her realise she loved him without actually suggesting it to her. But how? It was then he remembered something Polly had said over lunch – something about feet giving a person more freedom than a wheel
chair – and a plan of action fell into place as if purposely presented to him on a plate. That’s exactly how he’d do it! He’d make the town wheelchair friendly for her and make her realise that feet weren’t the be-all and end-all of life and that she was no worse off without them. And he could do this in the evenings and on his own time instead of kicking his heels in the hotel.
On subsequent and unnecessarily frequent visits to the office, Billy put his plan into action. For two months he visited pubs and restaurants in the town and checked access and toilet facilities for people confined to wheelchairs, and where he found shortcomings he asked for the manager and reported his findings, mentioning in an off-hand way that he worked for the biggest consumer of services in town.
All appeared to be going well until the day he was asked to step into his boss’s office for a chat. (‘Chat’ was such an innocent word, but its connotations were always ominous.)
‘Billy, I’ve been asked to have a quiet word with you,’ his boss said.
‘What have I done?’ Billy asked nervously. ‘Am I in trouble?’
‘You will be if you don’t stop going around town telling people how to run their businesses. It’s not within your managerial remit to speak on behalf of the company and threaten them with a boycott unless they improve their facilities for the handicapped.’
‘I don’t think I’ve ever threatened that,’ Billy said cautiously. ‘I certainly never intended to.’
‘Whether it was your intention or not, they thought there was an implication to your words. It’s not your business to make places wheelchair-friendly, Billy, and it’s not mine. That’s what governments and local councils are for.’
‘I was only trying to help things along,’ Billy replied. ‘It’s not always easy for people like Polly to get around.’
‘And that’s another thing,’ his boss continued. ‘Have you been dipping your pen in company ink?’
‘No,’ Billy replied carefully. ‘I don’t even have a fountain pen.’
His boss smiled and shook his head. ‘Let me put it another way, Billy: Have you been fucking Polly?’
‘Me? Good grief, no! We’re just friends. Why on earth would you ask such a thing?’
‘Because Polly’s had an off the record word with HR, and believe me you don’t want to get to the stage where it’s on the record. You’ll really find yourself behind the eight ball then!’
His boss told him that Polly was starting to feel pestered by Billy’s constant visits to her office, his numerous texts and emails, and certainly didn’t appreciate being called at home in the middle of the night.
‘She says she’s told you this time and again but that you don’t listen. And another thing, she thinks you’ve got a weird fascination with her prosthetics and it’s making her feel uncomfortable.’
Billy left the office gobsmacked. How could Polly have said those things, told those lies? She made him sound like some kind of pervert. He didn’t remember her ever telling him those things. He wanted to confront her there and then, but remembered his boss telling him that her office was now out of bounds to him. This was so wrong, so very, very wrong.
Even though it was only 3:45pm, Billy packed away his laptop and returned to the hotel. The bar was shut and so he headed to the Hole in the Wall, an all-day pub by the pier with an indiscriminate clientele. He looked out of place in his suit and wished he’d changed into a pair of jeans before leaving the hotel. Ignoring the stares, he ordered a pint of lager and took it to a corner table in the back room. There was so much to think about, so much he had to put right.
In hindsight, lunch with Polly at the Slug and Lettuce had been the apogee of their short non-relationship, but they had lunched at the George about three weeks later when Billy had updated her on his crusade to make the town more wheelchair-friendly.
‘I hope you’re not doing this for my sake,’ Polly had said.
Of course he was doing it for her sake! How could she not realise this?
‘No, I’m doing it for all the town’s handicapped,’ he’d lied.
Looking back on things now, maybe the George hadn’t been the right occasion to tell Polly that he’d been dreaming of her for seventeen years. Certainly she hadn’t taken it as the compliment he’d intended, and it was disconcerting to have her stare at him for so long with her mouth open.
After that, the conversation had dipped and become stilted. Billy blamed himself for this: he always became nervous and tongue-tied when relationships transitioned and there was no guarantee of a happy ending. Too much now hinged on his relationship with Polly for him to simply relax and enjoy her company and, as always happened in such situations, he said the wrong things and became as dull as dishwater. He’d worried at the time that Polly might have noticed this, but after a nightcap in the bar that evening decided she hadn’t and that their relationship was still on track.
Billy asked Polly out several times after that but she’d always declined, saying she was too busy and planning to eat at her desk – al desco dining, as the bollocksurfers called it. He’d still found excuses to drop by her office, but wondered now why he’d needed an excuse. Why couldn’t he have just dropped by? That’s what friends did, wasn’t it, and he and Polly were definitely friends. In fact, he remembered her emphasising that point to him on a number of occasions, certainly the time he’d invited her out for dinner. Come to think of it though, hadn’t she used the phrase just friends and unnecessarily reminded him that he had a wife and daughter.
He’d asked her at the time – hypothetically of course – if her answer would have been different if he’d been single, and she’d told him no. She looked upon him as a friend (she’d used that word again!), and was anyhow romantically involved with another – a doctor.
The news that she was seeing someone jolted Billy, and he’d returned to his desk despondent. Having misheard her, however, and thinking that she’d said her doctor instead of a doctor, he’d done some research on the net and returned to her office the next day with the sad news that their relationship was unethical, and that if the practice ever got wind of it her doctor friend might well be struck off – not that he himself had any intention of telling the practice.
He remembered her getting annoyed, raising her voice and telling him that her personal business was hers and hers alone, but that if he really wanted to know, the doctor she was seeing was an academic doctor and not a medical practitioner, and that he’d lost a leg in a skiing accident and wasn’t too happy about having a missing limb either, unless of course Billy wanted to phone him and tell him that legs were overrated too!
This news made Billy more despondent still. How could he compete with someone who was a doctor and an amputee? ‘I’m only looking out for you, Polly,’ he’d stammered. ‘It’s your best interests I have at heart. You must realise this.’
But it appeared that Polly didn’t realise this. Why else would she complain to HR about his late night phone call? All he’d said to her was that she’d left the bathroom light on. Surely, it wasn’t a crime for one friend to be concerned about another friend’s electricity bill and, come to think of it, what was so wrong about sitting outside someone’s house listening to the car radio at night? It was a free country, wasn’t it?
And that time he’d followed her and another girl from the office to the train station and been caught by Polly observing her from behind a pillar. There was nothing peculiar about that. He’d explained to her at the time that he was just concerned about the amount of metal in her wheelchair and wanted to make sure she didn’t fall on the track and get electrocuted. This was normal behaviour by any standard. Why did she have to make it sound so sinister?
After finishing his third pint, Billy left the Hole in the Wall and walked to the nearest restaurant and ordered a pizza. He drank a large glass of Chianti while waiting for the food, and another while he ate his meal. He looked around the room and saw c
ouples talking, laughing, touching. He was the only person sitting alone. Why wasn’t he there with Polly? He should have asked Polly to join him for dinner. They could have talked things through and committed to a fresh start. They were made for each other – surely she realised this? It wasn’t by chance they’d met. It was… fate. Yes that was the word – fate! They were fated to be together. Polly needed to know this and he was the only person who could make her understand. He drained the last of his wine and resolved to make this clear to her in the morning. This time tomorrow, he told himself, everything would be fine, everything hunky-dory.
Billy left the restaurant and, on the spur of the moment, bought a packet of cigarettes from a late-night shop. Tobacco, he’d heard, focused the mind, and it was imperative that his thoughts were marshalled to military precision by the time he spoke to Polly the next day.
The first cigarette made him cough and feel lightheaded, and the second, which he’d lit from the glowing embers of the first, made him feel sick. He threw up in a skip at the back of the hotel, but took the unpleasantness in his stride: there was no gain without pain, he reasoned.
He reached his hotel room and splashed water on his face and rinsed out his mouth. He opened the mini-bar and the room’s windows: he needed to drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes and get himself in shape for the morning’s encounter with Polly. There was no time for sleep.
Despite his best efforts to remain awake, however, Billy fell asleep on the floor shortly after 4am and woke up four hours later. He looked at the blurry image on his watch face and cursed: ‘Jiminy Cricket!’ Polly would already be on her way to the office. He had to get there before she made it through the door and went off-limits!
His head hurt like a tractor had run over it during the night, but there was no time to shower or change into fresh clothes, shave, comb his hair or brush his teeth. He left the hotel and half-walked and half-ran to the company offices, struggling to maintain a straight course and occasionally losing balance and bumping into other pedestrians on the street. He arrived out of breath, just in time to see Polly wheeling herself across the still largely deserted car park.
The Last of the Bowmans Page 16