by Ajay Close
The floor creaked as Kit approached the window. ‘And you don’t love him, so that was another reason to put it off.’
He was standing beside me. I watched the flies’ zigzagging frenzy in the electric air. The single bed behind us felt less innocent now.
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said.
‘No? All right then, tell me. Tell me how you feel about this guy you haven’t seen for weeks. I’m asking Freya Cavalle here, not the Weegie WAG or Mrs silver BMW Gran Turismo—’
He was bluffing, boundary-testing, as all young men do, but the words he didn’t necessarily mean still had power in his mouth.
‘You want to know what it’s like to love someone, but you’ve not got the guts to break his heart, so you’re going to have a baby.’
Outside the open window it began to rain.
‘Are we talking about me or about you?’ I said.
When I got back with the Vaseline and tissues he was sitting on the bed. I had to scrub quite hard, one hand clamped on his head to hold him steady. It took a while, but gradually the boy I knew re-emerged through the grease.
‘Kit, if the bank manager says no tomorrow…’
He opened his eyes.
‘I might be able to help you out.’
Baby
What was different about that day? A part of me says nothing. It was a day like any other, when the potential became actual in its inevitable way. And yet the air was so warm and the gale so wild, bludgeoning the windows when I awoke, scrawling a queasy excitement on the blank canvas of the sky. Margo had been up before first light. Wet sheets and towels thrashed on the line.
Frankie was early. There was a split-second’s awkwardness before we kissed, and another when he noticed my jeans: fine for the farmyard, but not to sit in a chintz armchair surrounded by women in Hobbs and Jigsaw. I reminded him that I went every day, and never wore anything else. There was no point hanging around the clinic for an extra half hour, so I gave him a tour of the farm. The milking parlour. The churchy hush of the grainstore. The kitchen, where Margo challenged him to explain why there was nothing but rubbish on telly these days. After ten minutes, I put on my coat, tipping his half-drunk tea down the sink, rattling the crockery in the cupboard as I slammed the back door behind us. I was no calmer in the yard, snatching the keys out of his hand, stalling the car, doing a passable impression of someone fleeing the scene of a crime.
The receptionist did a double-take when we walked in. I was old news, but Frankie hadn’t shown his face in weeks. So then they all looked: the Glasgow blonde and her pony-tailed escort, the Sinhalese couple with the Mercedes convertible, the husband and wife who’d given me a card for their country house hotel. The door from the car park opened. A man and a woman came in: mid-thirties, good-looking, moneyed. Even before I saw what they were carrying I recognised the glamour of an Event.
The baby was knobble-headed with skin the colour of a household candle and the prognathous jaw of Early Man. His mouth shaped itself around the absent nipple, his toes curling and uncurling as his feet, held at right angles to his puffy ankles, kicked their slow spasmodic jig. At the sight of his beauty, the women in the waiting room uttered a collective ‘aah’, our gym-toned hips spreading, the strain on our faces dissolving. The receptionist held him first, over her shoulder. He watched us with unblinking eyes while she whispered in his ear. A smiling delegation of pyjama girls came through from the medical wing. The father basked in their questions, while the mother’s vigilant gaze followed her son around the room. One of the doctors planted him on her knee, cupping his neck between forefinger and thumb, rubbing his back till she became drowsy with her own caresses and lacked a free hand to cover her yawn. The Glaswegian hoisted him in the air and made pop-eyed faces. The hotel manageress winded him until he burped. The Sinhalese woman rocked him in her arms like a plaster Madonna and surveyed the room with a heart-breaking smile. My turn. He was lighter than his swaddling suggested, but so solid between my hands. There is a stretch of me from throat to breast that has one too few protective layers. I held him there. His head with its silky weave of colourless hair was warm against my cheek, his drool soft on my neck, his fontanelle pulsed, our heartbeats kept time. I breathed him in, strolling away from the cluster of people, making the low crooning that was my secret language with babies. I knew there was someone in my path, but was so caught up with the life against my chest I gave the obstacle no thought until I looked up into Kit’s face. The baby gave a little stutter of referred shock and I cuddled him quiet as Kit reached out to take him. For a moment, we held him between us.
The receptionist was taking a call on her mobile. The hoteliers discussed a staffing problem in lowered tones. Beside me, Frankie keyed some interminable email into his phone. Kit was back in his usual corner with Nikki. They were going through a rocky patch. I never knew when I was going to walk into the bathroom and meet the scroll of his naked back, his eyes in the mirror. I always said sorry, though he was the one who left the door unlocked.
When Nikki and I had consecutive appointments I could stare at him without apology, and he could return my stare, like the strangers everyone supposed us to be. That’s if anyone noticed amid the comings and goings, new patients filling out paperwork, deliveries of surgical supplies, girls in blue pyjamas popping through to use the vending machine. He’d ogle when they bent to retrieve the goodies from the slot and I’d watch his gaze moving over their curves, knowing my watching was part of his pleasure. That day, Frankie’s presence ruled out staring, but I sneaked a glance. He was slumped low in the chair, his long legs stretching across the carpet. There was a crump from outside as a wheelie bin blew over. I was suddenly, shamingly, aware of our geometry, the straight line through my body to the apex of the triangle formed by his legs. I shifted position, but every nerve was aware of him, turning the aftertaste of coffee and the glossy weight of Vogue’s thickened pages into ciphers for the signals I was jamming.
When Frankie touched my wrist I jumped.
‘What goes clip-clop clip-clop bang?’ He only told jokes in the presence of other men.
‘I don’t know. What?’
‘A drive-by shooting in Perth.’
The pony-tailed Glaswegian laughed.
Kit got up and walked over to the vending machine. He was wearing the low-riding jeans that showed the waistband of his boxers.
Frankie waited till his back was turned. ‘Funny, me forgetting you were staying with a fellow-customer.’
‘It’s his mother’s farm. His wife fixed me up there.’
‘Did I know that?’
‘I don’t know, did you?’
Before Frankie could say anything more, Kit collected his Coke and crossed the room towards us.
Nikki closed her magazine and walked out.
He watched her go, then took the chair positioned as a companion to our seats. ‘Some weather,’ he remarked.
Frankie put his phone away.
‘Haven’t seen you here for a while.’
‘We’re two men down at work.’ Frankie glanced pointedly at my midriff and the inadvertently exposed pucker of the laparoscopy scar.
‘Who d’you fancy for the Champions League?’
My husband’s gaze circled the faces in the waiting room. They weren’t even pretending not to listen. ‘Ladbrokes are offering seven to four on Inter Milan.’
‘But you think?’
‘The French are in with a chance.’
‘FC Lyon’s looking good.’
‘Or Bordeaux. They’ve picked up some strong players. Huysman, Bradjek.’
Football. The lingua franca of masculinity. What was a wife compared with a stoater of a goal?
Frankie gave my navel another meaningful glance. The day I took Lilias to the hospital, he’d shouted Jesus! and looked away. He could never stand the sight of blood. But now the wound was fully healed, and still it turned his stomach. Funnily enough, I resented this.
I undid anothe
r button.
‘Makes a change, you feeling too warm,’ Kit said.
I returned my shortest smile.
He grinned, man to man. ‘It’s been a shock for her, finding out Perthshire doesn’t have a thermostat. I lent her a jumper a couple of weeks back, this is the first day she’s had it off.’
We each decided to overlook this unfortunate phrase.
‘She doesn’t like the cold, or mud, or getting wet. Or cows. Farting all day, melting the ice cap. But she doesn’t want them slaughtered, they’ve to die of natural causes. Still, we’re making progress.’ He paused, his eyes wide. I had felt the flattery of this look, as my husband was feeling it now. ‘Yesterday I caught her getting wired-in to a ham sandwich.’
Frankie looked me in the eye. ‘Did you now?’
Kit pulled the ring on his can of fizz. ‘It wasn’t the first time either.’ He leaned in confidentially. ‘Chicken drumstick, two weeks ago, when she thought I wasn’t looking.’
As it happens, I hadn’t eaten chicken or ham, any more than I had borrowed his jumper, or ventured an opinion on the cows’ carbon footprint, but to have denied any of it would have confirmed to my husband that Kit and I were habitual flirts.
Frankie wrapped an arm around my neck. It might have looked like a cuddle but it felt like a wrestling hold. ‘The thing about Freya is she’s selective. She’ll rescue baby birds from next door’s cat, but you should see her battering seven shades of shite out of a wasp with a rolled-up newspaper.’
‘Only if it stings me.’
Kit shrugged at Frankie. ‘Self-defence.’
‘A couple of years back she thought we had mice. We needed a licence from the UN for all the poison she bought.’
‘What is this,’ I said, ‘gang up on Freya day?’
Dr Ross appeared, escorting the Sinhalese woman to the door. It was our turn next. I stood up.
‘Could I have a word, Mr MacKewon?’
Frankie gestured for me to go first.
The consultant’s glance shuttled between us. ‘Just yourself for the moment, if you don’t mind.’
I sat down again, while Frankie followed her through to the consulting room. I imagined his face as she told him – what? That she could use a couple of tickets to the next Old Firm game? That his wife and another patient’s husband had been eyeing each other up in the waiting room? Just then a pyjama girl arrived to show the Glaswegians out and collect the hotel manageress. The husband withdrew to the carpark for a cigarette. The Sinhalese couple had gone by then. The receptionist opened a drawer and took out a laminated card asking visitors to ring the bell for attention. ‘I’m away for my lunch,’ she said, pulling on her coat and stepping out into the wind.
Kit and I were left alone in the waiting room.
There was no trace of the joker he had been a moment before. The phone on the reception desk rang twice, then stopped. He pushed himself out of his chair to kneel on the carpet in front of me. His hands slid between my thighs. For one dizzying moment I thought the unthinkable, then I realised he was lifting the unbuttoned flaps of my shirt. I watched my hand remove his beanie. His hair crackled with static. I wove my fingers into its flossy mass. He dipped towards my navel and I felt the scratch of soft bristle as his lips fastened on my scar.
His hearing was more acute than mine. He was up off the floor and back in his chair before my husband emerged from the medical wing. I caught the look on Frankie’s face and my stomach lurched, but it was as if he didn’t see me. He made for the door to the car park.
‘Frankie?’
His head turned. ‘I have to go.’
‘What about our appointment?’
‘It’s postponed.’
I scrambled up from my chair.
He put out a hand to ward me off. ‘I need to get back.’
A problem at the studios, I thought bitterly, a thirty-second clip they needed him to redub. But generally he relished a crisis. The man in front of me showed every sign of falling apart.
‘Is somebody hurt?’ I asked.
‘No, it’s fine.’ He pulled at the door, which refused to yield. ‘I’ll talk to you tonight.’
He couldn’t get away from me quickly enough.
‘I’m walking back to the farm then, am I?’
‘What?’ Finally he worked out the door had to be pushed open.
‘I’ll see she’s all right.’ Kit was on his feet behind me. I felt the pressure of a finger on my spine.
‘Thanks, son,’ my husband said.
Banana
The Sunday after I slept with Kit dawned cloudless. Women in gilt-monogrammed shades drank iced frappuccino at the pavement tables along Byres Road. The fruit shop smelled of chrysanthemums and vegetables newly pulled from the earth. Wasps hovered above the Victoria plums. The pineapples flown in from Brazil, the Israeli avocados and Chilean grapes were upstaged by greengages and damsons with a mouth-puckering bloom, football-sized cauliflowers, carmine-stemmed beets, the plums’ baroque tumble of rose and gold.
Frankie passed me a yellow courgette. I was stuck with the basket while he took the role of hunter-gatherer. Next came a plantain, and a carrot that could have doubled as a police baton.
‘Are you around this week?’
I stiffened. Why would he ask me this unless the clinic had phoned to tell him I had not been back? On the other hand, if he knew, why hadn’t we had a row about it?
‘I wasn’t planning to be,’ I said. ‘Why?’
He parted the stringy leaves of a sweetcorn cob to check the plumply snaggled kernels. ‘I’m away to Sicily Tuesday morning, coming back Friday.’
His work continued undisturbed, while I had used all my holiday and was now on unpaid leave. My belly was bloated from the daily hormones, my skull was bursting, my blood roiling, my heart beating nineteen to the dozen. ‘Like PMT,’ the nurse had warned before the first injection, but my cycle had always been tension-free. I had felt like this for six weeks. I couldn’t put myself through another six (or I couldn’t without the sweetener of sleeping with Kit). I had come back to have the conversation with Frankie. Not an easy thing to do. All our hopes, all that money. But when I thought about the despair I felt every time I crossed the clinic threshold, every cell in my body told me I was right.
‘I thought I’d make bouillabaisse tonight,’ he said.
My favourite, a terrible fiddle to prepare.
‘What have I done to deserve this?’
He brought his lips to my ear. ‘Have you forgotten already?’
We had made love that morning. The first time in six weeks, unless I counted the mingling of bodily fluids in the lab.
This was my chance. If I came home, we could make love any time. I would have said it, only he spoke first.
‘There’s something I need to tell you.’
I recognised our neighbour Johann at the other end of the shop and stepped away from him. Lilias had left me squeamish about displaying intimacy in public places. ‘Oh, yes?’ I said.
‘Never mind, it’ll keep—’
If he’d given any sign that it was important, I would have pressed him.
‘D’you fancy some Jerusalem artichokes?’
I picked one up. It was flaccid to the touch. I made a face and dropped it back on the display.
He leaned across to feel for himself. ‘Like an old feller’s balls.’
‘I hope that’s not the voice of experience, big man.’
We turned. A fleshy, appealing, puppyish face. The football shorts showed off his muscular legs, scumbled by mud and glinting gold hairs.
‘You’re out of luck, chum,’ Frankie said, ‘Gordon’s picked his squad for Spain.’
The stranger flashed a set of very white teeth in very pink gums. ‘He could do worse. Man of the match, scored four minutes in. First of three.’
‘Whose goal?’
‘Funny guy!’ He struck Frankie in the solar plexus, a playful blow too soft to wind him but too quick for him to tense his abdomina
l wall. ‘You should give it a shot. Mens sana in corpus etcetera. Blooter the ball up the park, wee foul when the ref’s not looking, volley over the keeper into the back of the net. Cannae whack it, man. It’d tone up the middle-aged spread.’
‘That’s solid muscle, pal.’
‘Scott,’ he said suddenly, putting out his hand.
I took it. ‘Freya.’
‘Scott’s on the Saturday panel,’ Frankie said in a neutral tone I understood perfectly. He turned to Scott. ‘I need to keep her up to speed. She’s got better things to do than watch the old man on telly.’
Scott took a grape from the display and popped it in his mouth. ‘So you’re a pitch widow Saturday nights?’
‘Get your own bird,’ Frankie growled. We all laughed.
‘See me, doll, I’d get you into Hospitality, take you out after the show.’ He ran a hand through his gelled hair. ‘What’re you doing next Saturday?’
‘I’ve got a date with a duvet.’
‘Bring it along.’
‘I’m warning you, she snores.’
I gave Frankie a look to say the joke had run its course.
A woman pushed between us to get to the tomatoes. I sidled a couple of steps nearer the till.
‘Well…’ I said concludingly.
Scott shifted into the space I had left, keeping the triangle equilateral. ‘I was gonnae call you about this midweek thing.’
I felt the kick in Frankie’s stomach from three feet away.
‘What thing’s this?’ I said, so he didn’t have to.
‘A two-hander. Something different. Stevie Connell’s idea. A wee bit of banter, youth and, eh,’ he grinned, letting us fill in the gap before he finished the sentence with ‘experience.’