Send Me A Lover

by Carol Mason

‘No.’

  I groan.

  ‘He said it was some abnormality with my blood…’

  The word leukaemia strides through my brain.

  ‘He didn’t seem overly concerned,’ she says. ‘I’m sure it’s nothing.’

  ‘How can you be so dismissive?’

  ‘What’s the point of being anything else until we know for certain? Anyway, on another topic… I’ve got a bit of a dilemma I could use your input on. Georgios wants to see me again. He wants me to go there again.’

  ‘You can’t!’

  ‘Thanks. Now I’m definitely going.’

  ‘Not until you get your test results back.’

  ‘I know. Keep your tresses on. Anyway… I’m not going, I don’t think, am I?’

  ‘I don’t know! Why are you asking me?’ I thought she just said she was! I remember what Georgios said I should ask her. ‘Mam, tell me something. Are you in love with him?’

  ‘No,’ she says, like that didn’t take much thinking about.

  ‘Okay.’ I didn’t expect her to be so blunt. Poor Georgios. ‘I think you’re mad, if you want my opinion. What’s wrong with him?’

  ‘Nothing!’

  ‘Well if nothing’s wrong, then… I don’t understand.’

  She’s quiet for a bit. ‘There’s no future with him, is there?’ she eventually says.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘‘Because I’m sixty and he’s forty-five, Angela.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that? He’s clearly not bothered. He likes older women.’

  ‘Yes but will he still like me when I’m eighty and he’s only in his mid-sixties?’

  I smile. ‘He might like you more! Or then again, he might trade you in for a ninety-year-old. Now wouldn’t that be an insult?’

  ‘You shouldn’t make fun of old age. One day that’ll be you, then the shoe will be on the other foot.’

  ‘Oh mam! Why don’t you just wait until you get your results, then if everything’s good, go there, stay for the harvest, pick the olives, have a fantastic time, have a bonk, come home, and if that’s it and you don’t want to see him again, tell him.’

  ‘Have a what?’

  ‘A bonk.’

  ‘Angela!’ I feel her smile. ‘I don’t bonk. I’m too ladylike to bonk.’

  ‘What do you do then?’ I fish. ‘I’m curious? Tell me.’

  Of course I know she’s not going to answer.

  ~ * * * ~

  In Stanley Park, I’m surprised to run into Richard and Emma. They spot me first. Or, rather, Emma does. I hear the patter of tiny feet narrowing the distance behind us, and when I turn, her little hand is just reaching out to surprise-tap me on the shoulder.

  ‘Emma!’ I light up, and look up to see Richard standing there smiling at me, in a very special way. His face is a little flushed. It crosses my mind that he’s blushing.

  ‘Hi,’ I say.

  ‘Hi,’ he says back.

  Then the tension becomes so thick you could slice it.

  ‘Richard…’ I try to force offhandedness, try to not be bothered by the way he’s looking at me. Because he is looking at me oddly.

  He seems to snap himself out of it, throws his hands up. ‘Of all the parks, in all the world, you had to be walking in this one…’ He comes and gives my cheek a quick kiss.

  It takes me moments before I notice the tiny black puppy that sets about chomping on the top of my foot, its teeth like lasers. ‘Ooooh!’ I bend down to pet it. ‘Is it a he or a she?’ I ask Emma.

  ‘She’s a he. I mean…’ she slaps a hand over her giggle. ‘She’s a she. She’s called Spot.’

  ‘Spot?’ I laugh as her little wet nose sniffs my hand and then she decides to take a bite of it too. God those teeth hurt!

  ‘Because of the marking on her ear,’ Emma supplies, just as I register the little white splash that looks like a black ear dipped in white paint.

  ‘She’s beautiful. How old is she?’ I feel Richard’s eyes on me intensely.

  ‘Nine weeks.’

  ‘Emma’s birthday present,’ Richard says, kneeling down and petting the dog, his leg, with its auburn fuzz, not far from mine. I think of the very odd dream I had, Richard’s ever-steady presence throughout my getting over Jonathan, and then suddenly something dawns on me. Is Richard in love with me? Just a little? Has Jonathan sent me Richard? Is this why Richard is leaving Jessica, and I’ve just realised something about his possible feelings for me? Is my destiny to be with my husband’s best friend slowly unfolding now, right before my eyes?

  I snap back to the present. ‘Oh no! Did I miss her birthday?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he says, combing me with his gaze, his eyes answering those questions for me. ‘It’s next Saturday. Only we had to bring the puppy home yesterday from the shelter, and we realised we really couldn’t keep her hidden for a week without Emma finding out she was there. They can only manage those sorts of perfect family moments in the movies.’

  Perfect family moments… Yes, why would he be bringing a puppy into their home right when they’re splitting up? To make it easier for Emma?

  ‘Ten is a very important age,’ Emma tells me, and I run a hand over her long sleek hair, lifting it up off her shoulders, holding it back like a ponytail, thinking, if she were mine I’d loved her to bursting point.

  ‘Walk with us?’ Richard asks, looking at my face, steadily.

  I hesitate.’ Erm… sure.’

  We walk in silence for a while, before he says, ‘Are you okay? You seem…’ He doesn’t finish.

  ‘I’m fine.’ I glance at him but can’t meet his eyes, so I bring my attention to the path ahead. Emma and Spot walk on ahead, Emma clearly proud by how many oohs and ahs her new puppy is attracting.

  ‘How are you, though, really? It seems when we went out last week all we did was talk about me.’ He asks it in that intimate way of a friend (Subconsciously I hear my mam: Why is it that Canadians always want to know how you are? Do they all have a Doctor complex?)

  ‘Oh, I’m fine. Sometimes I get a bit panicked thinking maybe I should have hung onto a paycheque while I had it, but, no, generally, I’m okay, I think.’

  He studies me closely. Richard’s eyes always brim with affection for me; they did from day one. But I always thought that’s all it was. I feel guilty for the fact that it always might have been something else.

  ‘I’ve made some headway with Write Strategies,’ I tell him. ‘You’d be proud of me. And I’m just trying to contact Kevin our tenant. Remember he worked for a design house? I’m hoping he might give me a cheap price on doing a website. I feel that if I can’t put www on my letterhead, I’m not real yet; I don’t exist. When we’re born we should be given a name as well as a web address, shouldn’t we?’

  He laughs. ‘Are you excited about it?’

  Little Spot stops to sniff a black Lab’s pee, and Emma pulls her back. ‘Gross!’ she says.

  ‘I think so. But I’m nervous too because I need some money coming in soon.’

  He looks uncomfortable, just as uncomfortable as that day he forced me to take nearly eighty thousand dollars from the law firm to help me from going into default on my mortgage. I instantly regret bringing up the word money.

  ‘You know if it’s money you need, Angie –’

  ‘Thanks, Richard, but I’m going to fend for myself this time.’

  ‘Well you know you can always think of me as your last resort.’

  ‘You’re a first class, five star resort, Richard, you really are.’ I pop a friendly kiss on his cheek.

  We walk in silence for a while, Richard keeping a close eye on Emma as the scampering Spot drags her all over the place. The understanding that passed between us earlier seems to linger there between us, as this sort of thing would. It’s all made somehow clearer, and yet more blurred, when he says, ‘I’m not leaving her.’ He stops walking and holds my eyes. ‘Don’t misunderstand me. It’s not that I no longer want to, or that anything I told you was untrue�
� It’s just… there’s what I want to do, Angie, and there’s what I can do—what I’m going to do…’ He gestures to Emma’s back. ‘How can I tell her that there’s no real reason why her mother and I are splitting up, we’re just wrong for each other, and expect her to understand? And expect her to not hate me?’ Emma turns around and looks at us, like she’s got some sort of inkling that we’re talking about her, so we start walking again.

  I think of my mother. If she’d said she was leaving my dad, I think I would have understood. But not at ten. I’d have needed to have my own first taste of demolishing disillusionment before I could have understood somebody else’s. ‘I guess you can’t. She’s too young.’

  ‘It was a moment of my imagination running wild,’ he says. His arm innocently grazes mine as he moves aside to let some speed-walkers pass. He must feel the contact too, but he doesn’t move away. ‘I briefly got carried away with hoping for something that might be, only now of course I can see it’s very unlikely, if not completely unrealistic.’ We stop walking again. He looks at me. A heavy piece of auburn hair flops onto his forehead. I want to push it back, but don’t. His eyes are studying, regretful, and full of his customary kindness. ‘Do you have any idea what I’m talking about?’ he asks me.

  We know each other too well for lies. ‘Yes. I think I do.’

  ~ * * * ~

  In bed, I talk to Jonathan for the first time in ages. ‘You have to make something good happen for me soon.’ I don’t know what I want or expect him to do any more, only making a general plea can’t be a bad thing. He always knew me long before I really knew myself.

  Today, I got a bank statement from the machine, and I was shocked to see how anaemic my balance looked without my regular two-week injection of cash. Also, today there were no new messages: not on my email, not on my phone. I’ve made ‘personal’ contact—that is, spoken to a real person—at forty-one real companies, all of whom were pleased for me to send them my bio and information, but not one has called back to hire my services. It crosses my mind—madly for one moment—to call David and ask for my old job back. At least sitting on a couch all day listening to him drone on about his past fantasticness isn’t so bad if he’s paying me to do it.

  No, Angie. What sort of a cop-out is that? I imagined Jonathan saying. Sometimes I think Jonathan is driving fire into my brain. Yet I’m lying here asking him to help me, which feels nothing if not desperate, and bordering on mad.

  The progress of the day, was that Kevin is going to do me a fantastic website, and he’s not going to charge me. He got evicted from our house when the new owners moved in, for playing his music too loud. This made me smile. I remember the night Jonathan and I got back from Barbados, the day before he died. We lay in bed trying to sleep, the heavy metal boom of Kevin’s sound system seeming to shake our whole house.

  ‘You wouldn’t mind if it was a tune, but it’s just noise isn’t it?’ Jonathan breathed heavily. ‘We may have to kick his ass out Angie. I mean, it’s one thing to have the extra grand a month rent, but I can’t go to work on three hours sleep because some fucker likes to play heavy metal till five in the morning. I think this weekend I’m going to have a small talk with master Kevin.’

  I’d seen Jonathan and his small talks. They usually consisted of him pinning somebody to a wall by the skin of their shoulder blades. I promised him I’d have a word with Kevin instead, even though I knew Jonathan wouldn’t really kick him out, because Jonathan knew Kevin didn’t have a great deal of money, and Jonathan had a soft heart, even though he’d hate you saying that about him. He’d forgiven Kevin’s late rent cheques on more than a couple of occasions. And Kevin knew Jonathan was one of life’s good guys.

  I never got around to having the talk with Kevin. The next time I spoke to him was to tell him that Jonathan was dead.

  ‘I won’t charge you a dime,’ Kevin told me when I met him for coffee this morning.

  ‘I think you guys would have thrown me out long ago, but you didn’t. I think I owe you.’ He smiled at me. ‘This one’s for Jonathan.’

  ~ * * * ~

  But good news is often countered by bad news isn’t it? This morning, when I wake up, after having had very little sleep from having so much on my head last night, I pick up the mail from downstairs. In my hand are two envelopes. I rarely get envelopes these days, at least not proper ones. It’s mostly junk mail, or direct mail campaigns from charities. (ooh, something to discuss with Epilepsy on Wednesday: the cost/benefit of a mail drop. Budget, I make a mental note. I’ve got to get them to talk about money then we know what we’ve got to work with.)

  I look at my two non-junk pieces of correspondence. One is from a law firm whose name I don’t recognise. The second is my Royal Bank statement.

  I plonk down in the chair.

  I really don’t need to find out how poor I am again today. So I open the law firm envelope first.

  Twenty Two

  They’ve recently hung Venetian blinds at the windows—they weren’t there when I came to visit Ms Elmtree before I went to England. I used to have sheer white curtains up. Nets my mam called them.

  ‘They’re not nets!’ I remember correcting her. ‘They’re Thai silk sheer drapes! They cost a damned packet.’

  ‘I could have sent you the same thing from Sunderland for an eighth of the price, including postage.’ (loaded pause where I felt another insult for Canada coming). ‘Do they rip you off EVERYWHERE you go in Canada Angela? Or do they just have a particular pen-shant for home furnishings?’

  I try not to look in their windows, but to focus, instead, on the house opposite: old Ms Elmtree’s. The garden’s a mess now: dandelions all over the lawn. Jonathan used to mow it for her when he did ours. The grass is dry and long, because since she died nobody’s been in to look after it.

  I do her trick with the sticky garden gate—lifting and wiggling—walk up the path and sit on the front step, looking across at the house where Jonathan and I used to live.

  The will was quite straightforward, according to the lawyer. Ms Elmtree had no family. The house was to go to me. Whatever little money there was in the bank was to be donated to the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design.

  This house, this place where an old woman lived, across from the place where I lived with my husband, is mine. It takes some sinking in.

  I take the key I collected when I went to the lawyer’s office to sign the transfer, and go inside. It’s strange being in her house without her here. I walk the narrow, creaky hardwood passage into the living room, half expecting to hear her whistling kettle in the kitchen. Because the place still feels lived in. It still feels like she’s here. It doesn’t feel of death. I feared it would. I feared this place would feel of death and our old house opposite would look of death. But neither of them does. They feel remarkably like… life.

  I stare at all the paintings on her walls. The ‘Gauguin’ rip offs. She obviously really admired him to claim she was related to him. Now they’re mine. I can’t exactly flog them on eBay. Maybe I can donate them to a community centre or somewhere where they might get displayed for a while.

  I’ve never been upstairs in Ms Elmtree’s house. The stairs creek as much as the main level floors. But it’s a wide staircase with a big landing up top and a big skylight from which I see cloudless blue sky. The corridor is surprisingly narrow and uncharming, but it leads off to three bedrooms—one quite big with another skylight above the bed, a spare room, and then a room she had converted into an artist’s studio. I go into the master bedroom, wondering whose idea it would have been to put a skylight over a bed: obviously not somebody who needed complete darkness to fall asleep. Someone who liked to connect with heaven? I wonder what it’d be like to lie down every night staring at the sky and the stars.

  Maybe it would be very nice.

  ~ * * * ~

  ‘I might have to sell,’ I tell Richard and Jessica. We’re sharing a bottle of wine at my place—an invitation that’s long overdue. I did consid
er avoiding Richard for a while. But he’d know what I was doing, and that would only make matters worse. ‘I don’t think I can take living there, looking over the street all the time.’

  ‘Ditch it and buy a condo,’ Jessica examines her gel-nails as she sits on my sofa. ‘You could probably get something brand new downtown with what you’ll get for the old house. Imagine brand new granite countertops. Stainless steel appliances. It’d be small—you’re obviously not gonna get a penthouse. But after all, there’s only you.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I tell her.

  Richard and I glance at each other. Jessica is off in a smiling daydream. ‘You’d be mortgage free,’ she says. ‘Imagine that. Everything you earn is yours to spend. Think of all the clothes you could buy…’

  ‘Or you could stay,’ Richard says, clearly sensing Jessica is saying all the wrong things and I might jump on her and attack her in about two seconds’ time. ‘You could move in, give it a few nip and tucks to get it looking like it’s your place and not her place, and see how you feel then.’ He studies my lack of obvious enthusiasm. ‘As your self-appointed financial advisor, Angie, I am urging you not to sell. The market’s on the upswing. You could be doing yourself out of a nice little profit if you don’t hang on to it for a while longer.’ He chinks his glass to mine and smiles, only the smile is thin and some sadness seems to hide behind it.

  ~ * * * ~

  Sherrie and I sit on Ms Elmtree’s front lawn, drinking a bottle of champagne from two polystyrene cups, getting slightly curious looks from people as they pass by: my potential new neighbours.

  Sherrie insisted we go round to the house to ‘christen’ it, even though I told her I’m still not sure I’m keeping it. She wouldn’t sit inside though. ‘It reeks of old woman!’ She’s got a plastic bag with another bottle of champers in it. But this one’s to toast her leaving. She’s off in two weeks. It’s come around so fast.

  ‘We can’t drink two bottles,’ I tell her. ‘We’re not a couple of alcoholics.’