by Emlyn Rees
Joe’s enraptured. ‘That’s brilliant,’ he gushes. He turns to me. ‘Mum, I’m on to the next level. It’s easy.’
Fred stands up, handing the paddle back to Joe.
Joe smiles up at him. ‘Thanks,’ he says, his eyes shining with gratitude. ‘Can I go down the shop for some crisps?’ he asks me and I nod.
‘Don’t be long, though, we’re going to the park in a bit, remember.’
Putting the game on pause, Joe scoots past us, the most excited I’ve seen him for a long while.
‘He’s great,’ says Fred, as he follows me back to the kitchen.
‘Well, you’ve certainly made his day.’
I stare after Joe for a moment, before busying myself making instant coffee.
‘How do you take it?’ I ask.
‘Black, no sugar. Thanks.’
‘Right.’ I nod, turning my back on Fred. I feel as if I should know this fact about him. It’s weird not knowing how this stranger likes his coffee, but knowing that he takes his Slush Puppies blue. Come to think of it, I’m probably one of the few people on the planet who could identify Fred in a line-up by the dagger-shaped scar he has on his left elbow where we fell off a go-cart, and yet I haven’t got a clue where he lives or, for that matter, what he does for a living. As I punch a hole in the top of a new jar of instant coffee the coffee grains jump and I must admit that I feel similarly jangled, as if Fred has punched a hole in the vacuum seal of my life, too.
‘So,’ says Fred, when I hand him his coffee. ‘Where do we start?’
I blow a nervous breath on the steam spiralling from my mug. ‘I’m not sure.’
We chat for a while and swap bits of information. I feel like we’re reading out soundbites from our respective CVs, but somehow none of it seems as if it’s particularly relevant. He tells me about his job in computers and I tell him about the move away from Kent.
‘Joe and I stayed there for a while after the divorce, but I didn’t like it much. I kept having to sneak around, avoiding Martin’s friends. I’d already trained as a florist, but I went back to college to do a business course. I always fancied living in London and when this place came up, I applied for a bank loan and thought, what the hell.’ I wave my hand flippantly.
‘That’s you, Mickey. You were always so brave.’
‘Brave,’ I snort. ‘I’m not brave.’
‘Yes, you are.’
I shake my head. ‘Come off it. You don’t know me. I was a teenager the last time you saw me. Since then, I’ve been complete chicken shit.’
‘I don’t believe you. You were never afraid of new things. New adventures. I used to be jealous.’
‘Well, I’m different now.’
‘Are you?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Of course I am. Completely different.’
Fred looks at me and then looks down, and we’re silent for a long moment. Our conversation was bound to run out sooner rather than later. It’s as if there’s a giant skip full of junk from the past and we can’t see past it or over it until it’s cleared away. Fred rubs the handle of his coffee cup and sighs.
I decide to pop the bubble. ‘Why didn’t you write?’ I ask, putting my mug down. I put my hands on my hips and stare at him, but he still looks away. ‘Why didn’t you phone, or anything?’ Even though I’m trying to sound like it doesn’t matter, I can hear the churlish tone in my voice.
Fred looks up at me. ‘I did write,’ he says, but I shake my head to stop him.
‘Don’t lie to me,’ I say, biting my lips together. ‘There’s no need. I mean … not that it matters any more, but …’ I clear my throat. ‘I was so shaken up when you went. OK, so I got that scribbled postcard with your address, but then … nothing. I couldn’t believe you didn’t want to stay in touch,’ I admit, feeling the raw truth sting my eyes. ‘It was such a shitty way to end what we had. I was so upset. Actually, upset doesn’t come close. I was angry …’
‘You were angry? You were angry?’ Fred sounds indignant. ‘I wrote and wrote to you. I was miserable. Christ, Mickey, you have no idea …’
‘I never got your letters. And I wrote to you nearly every day. For ages, as it happens.’ Suddenly I blurt out a laugh, remembering my outpourings, trying desperately to keep Fred close to me, even though he was miles away. ‘Actually, it’s just as well. What I wrote was pretty embarrassing.’
‘Not as bad as my bad poetry, surely?’
‘You sent poetry?’
Fred nods. ‘Well, poetry is going a bit far. It was terrible doggerel nonsense,’ he admits. ‘Roses are red, violets are blue … that kind of thing.’
‘Violets aren’t blue.’ I smile. ‘They’re purple.’
‘I knew you wouldn’t appreciate it.’
‘That’s nothing,’ I confess. ‘I sent you Brut aftershave.’
Fred laughs. ‘Oh, gross.’
And looking at him, I can’t help smiling too. ‘You never said thank you.’
‘I expect my mother intercepted your letters. She was desperate for me not to have any contact. Any reminders .. . you know …’ Fred sighs. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Mine must have done the same. Interfering old bag. I’d never do that,’ I say distractedly, stunned by the magnitude of our parents’ intervention, but nevertheless feeling the words ‘I’m so sorry’ somehow dissipate my anger.
‘You wouldn’t have to. We’d have e-mail and mobile phones. It would be so easy to stay in touch now. Despite parents. Despite everything.’
‘I guess.’
Fred reaches out and covers my hand with his. ‘For what it’s worth,’ he says, ‘I missed you.’
A shudder runs through me and for a moment I feel paralysed. I look down, alarmed at the warmth of his touch. He’s got blond hairs on the backs of his fingers, and I’m aware of how tanned and strong his hands are.
‘Me too.’ I smile, slipping my hand out from under his grasp.
Lisa’s serving a customer and someone is waiting, so I’m busy for a moment when we get back down to the shop. I watch Fred out of the corner of my eye. He stands in the corner, looking around.
‘So tell me about this fiancée of yours,’ I ask when I’ve finished serving. ‘I take it she has a name?’
‘Rebecca,’ he says.
‘Rebecca,’ I repeat. ‘What’s she like?’
Fred blows out his cheeks and looks a bit perplexed. ‘She’s …’
‘Come on, you must be able to describe the lucky woman you’re going to marry,’ I tease.
Fred puts his hands in his pockets and lifts his shoulder to his ears. ‘I don’t know how you’d describe her. She’s in marketing. She’s just got back from Oslo. I’m going over to see her now.’ He trails off.
‘Take some flowers for her. On me.’
‘No, it’s not necessary … really.’
‘Come on, take some roses. This lot will mostly have had it by Monday. Someone might as well enjoy them.’
I stoop down and pick up a large bunch of long-stemmed roses out of the black bucket by the till. I handle them carefully on account of their wickedly sharp thorns. Personally, I don’t like them. I prefer fresh spring flowers; somehow, red roses are so clichéd. Still, they’re expensive and it sounds like this Rebecca has expensive taste, so I’m not going to disappoint her.
‘Mickey. You don’t have to. Not that many. One or two will do …’
‘You’ve got to take a decent bunch,’ I say, generously adding a whole lot more. I wrap the roses in cellophane and brown paper, and tie a large raffia string bow round them. ‘Where’s your sense of romance? There,’ I say, handing them over.
Fred takes them reluctantly. ‘You’re very kind.’
‘It’s nothing. I hope she likes them.’ I clasp my hands behind my back, all too aware of my unladylike fingernails.
Fred looks hesitant and shuffles his feet. He’s almost obscured by the roses.
‘We should meet up again,’ he says and I nod.
‘You know wher
e to find me.’
I walk with Fred to the door and open it. The bell tinkles.
‘It’s good seeing you, Mickey,’ he says.
‘You too,’ I reply. I feel very strange, as if an old emotion has shifted, or lifted. I can’t tell.
Fred stares at me for a moment. We’re so close that I almost wonder whether he can see my heart hammering against my T-shirt. He looks as if he half expects me to kiss him on the cheek, or shake his hand. Instead, I smile and stand against the open door. The large bunch of roses crunches between us as he goes past.
I close the door after him and Lisa comes to join me. We both stare through the gap between the stickers on the glass, as Fred walks away.
‘Who was that?’ she asks.
‘That was Fred Roper.’ I sigh wistfully. ‘My old next-door neighbour.’
‘He’s very dishy, isn’t he?’
‘Tell me about it,’ I reply. ‘Tell me about it.’
Chapter III
Fred
Pink blossom is scattered along the pavement outside Mickey’s shop, reminding me of the wallpaper that patterned my parents’ hallway in the mid-Seventies. As I start to walk, the petals flutter away from my feet, and I find myself feeling self-conscious in a way I haven’t done since my early teens. In true growth-spurt fashion, my body seems alien, and I’m convinced that even the most regular of my movements must appear exaggerated and jerky, like the limbs of a broken puppet.
The cause of all this is, of course, Mickey. I can’t help wondering if she’s watching me and, if she is, whom she sees. Do traces of the Fred Roper she used to know still remain? Or has whatever bond we once shared been lost to her for ever, severed that same grim teenage day that I moved up to Scotland to live with Mum?
I resist the urge to glance over my shoulder. What would I actually be looking for? Confirmation that Mickey still cares for me? Is that why, in spite of my better judgement, I felt compelled to take her up on her offer to call in on her just now? Was it reassurance I was seeking? Was I measuring myself up against the man I once was, so that I could feel I’d done the right thing by leaving him behind? Is that why, after all these years of actively keeping my past at bay, I decided to dig it up? Or rather, was it that seeing Mickey in ToyZone made me realise how much I’d missed her?
It might have been her clothes, the lack of recognisable labels on her jacket and trainers, contrasting with all those carefully displayed marketing slogans and flashy packages in the store, but something about the woman standing beside me in the ToyZone games department made me look.
Even in profile, even though she was undeniably older, I knew immediately that she was Mickey Maloney. Her pretty, tomboyish face – although slightly rounder, perhaps, than it had once been – was still as familiar as my own. How could it have been otherwise? I’d watched her develop from childhood, her cheekbones rising in line with her small, slightly upturned nose, her jawline straightening, growing strong and self-assured, and her short curved lips turning tender and full. Shiny brown hair was tied up on the top of her head and loose curls hung down, longer than I remembered, brushing against the pale, exposed skin of her neck above her jacket collar. I found myself staring helplessly at her, astounded that she could be so close and yet be completely unaware of my presence.
Her jeans were scruffy, the same as they’d always been when we were children. She looked fit and there was the same easy confidence as of old about her whole stance, as if her body were something she’d never bothered about too much or concerned herself with for too long. She was – what? – four or five inches shorter than me. It was hard to be certain with her stretching over, as she was now, to take a console game from the rack. Five inches would make sense. That was certainly the way I remembered her, with my chin resting on the crown of her head as we’d danced.
I looked back up at her face, suddenly swamped again by how much it meant to me. It was a thousand snapshots rolled into one. It was a history of us both. Then she turned her head towards me and the moment vanished as quickly as it had arrived.
Denial and, if that failed, flight. These two had always been my preferred tactics on the (grand total of two) previous occasions when people from my youth had sprung uninvited into my here and now. The first time had been almost a decade before at Manchester University, when I’d convincingly denied my old self to a fellow History undergraduate who’d correctly identified me as the Fred Roper who’d lived up the Avenue from him in Rushton during the early Eighties, the same Fred Roper whose father had … The second occasion – and certainly the more dangerous of the two as far as the risk of exposure had been concerned – had involved a dramatic and pragmatic attack of nausea on my behalf at a house party I’d been at with Rebecca some years later, when I’d spotted a man peering at me in drunken astonishment across the living room and recognised him as Jonny Phipps, a boy with whom I’d been at Greenaway College during my early teens and one who, again, would have known all about me and all about Miles.
And now, here I was being presented with a third occasion, and this woman turning towards me wasn’t just any old person from my past but, rather, the one person, with the possible exception of my mother, who knew more about who I’d once been than anyone else on the planet.
I should have continued to walk, of course, on past the queuing customers, the tills and the bored-looking cashiers, on through the glass swing doors and beyond, out into the evening sunshine and the crowded car park and its safe anonymity. The last thing I should have done was stopped. But I did. And we spoke.
Even afterwards, out in the car park, the pride I should have felt over finally having done the sensible thing, by quietly slipping away when she’d answered her phone, was absent. Instead, an inverted reaction was taking place and I found myself drilled with a shame I couldn’t shake.
For the first time in my life it occurred to me that perhaps what I’d been doing, rather than moving on, had been running away. Surely, I couldn’t help thinking, I owed Mickey more than that. Surely, after everything we’d been through together, I owed her an opportunity to explain. And surely I owed it to myself as well to discover why exactly it was that she’d taken it upon herself to break my heart.
Here, a day later, on the street outside Mickey’s shop, I round the corner and come to a halt. Well, one thing is for certain: if my purpose in calling round was to satisfy my curiosity, then I’ve failed. She never got my letters. My God. Suddenly I see a parallel world of possibilities out there that’s been denied to me. Instead of giving up on us the way I did (assuming that Mickey had already done the same), what if her replies had reached me? What if they’d given me the strength to fight for the life I’d had, rather than letting it be erased? What if I’d guessed – it seems so obvious now – that her parents would have got to my letters first? How different would my life be today? Would Mickey and I have made a go of it together? Would we be making a go of it together still?
Without warning, an overwhelming surge of affection for her races through me, and I smile. With my heart beating loudly in my ears, I’m seized by this crazy desire to spin on my heels and run back to the shop. There’s so much more left to discuss – about our parents and everything that happened, about Joe, about so much stuff over so many years.
The world flares brightly as I remove my shades and wipe the back of my arm across my face. A bead of sweat trickles slowly down my brow and runs along the bridge of my nose before splashing on to one of the roses I’m holding. I stand and stare at it, shining there like dew. Then I gaze at the flowers: a gift from Mickey to me, which I, in turn, am about to transform into a gift from myself to Rebecca.
Rebecca.
What am I thinking of? I can’t go barging back into Mickey’s life on a whim like this, not when I no longer have room for her in mine. And that is how it is, isn’t it? My life is already a fulfilling place to be. That’s what my New Year’s resolutions were all about – ensuring that this would indeed be the case.
OK,
so Mickey was once my best friend and, all right, when our lives went their separate ways I did miss her desperately. But now? After all this time? No, too much has changed between us for us to go back to being anything like we were. She has a son, a new business, a new life and, in four weeks’ time, I’ll be married, settled, content. All I’m doing now is chasing old dreams, searching for closure on a chapter of my life that no longer exists. Mickey doesn’t know the first thing about me any more, not even my name. These are old emotions I’m feeling, echoes from my adolescence. They’ll fade. I know they will, given time. As with Miles, eventually she will disappear.
I replace my shades and walk on in the direction of my home. I have a life here, with Rebecca, today, I forcibly remind myself, and it’s that in which I must immerse myself once more; not in what was, or in what might have been, but in what is. Mickey Maloney is someone I must forget all about. I must see her for what she is: another piece of my past that I’ve buried before and can bury again.
The first thing I do when I get home is open the bin in the kitchen and stuff the roses deep down inside, burying them beneath last night’s pizza box and this morning’s breakfast slops.
Later that afternoon I drive down past the brickwork Victorian railway workers’ cottages on the Queen’s Park estate, and promptly get caught in a heavy and slow-moving tailback on the Harrow Road. During the half-hour journey that it takes me to cover the two miles between here and Rebecca’s flat, I make one phone call, receive one phone call and lose about five litres of body fluids in sweat to the car seat’s leather upholstery.
I’ve owned my car, an early-Eighties red Renault 5, for six years. Rebecca, who drives a customised, deep-sea-blue Saab convertible, hates my Renault with a vengeance, and has, on more than one occasion, proposed trading it in for a more reliable and sophisticated mode of transport (‘Like a donkey,’ she suggested – rather unkindly, I thought). Cars are important to Rebecca and that’s why she refuses to ride in mine. This isn’t something that bothers me. In my otherwise technophile existence, my Renault is the one thing I’m sentimental about. We share history. It’s lasted me through eight mobile phone tariffs, four jobs, two girlfriends and one motorway pile-up. So long as it continues to look after me, I shall continue to do the same for it.