Crazy Paving

by Louise Doughty

  Not long after the wedding, Annette went to work for the Capital Transport Authority and, six months later, Sarah moved to an estate agent’s. They still saw each other regularly. Sometimes Annette went over to dinner and the three of them played cards until late. She never felt the odd one out. She got the vague impression that maybe Jason did. At the same time, she began to realise that she and Sarah had little in common. They had become friends because they had even less in common with the people around them. Sarah seemed not to realise this and still confided in her, still rang Annette when she and Jason fought, still begged her to come with them when they went out to wine bars or parties.

  Their relationship reached a nadir when they went through a phase of introducing Annette to Jason’s friends. It happened so often that Annette began to suspect they were working their way through his address book, one by one.

  ‘There’s someone else coming, by the way,’ Sarah would say to Annette, over the phone. ‘Timothy. Nice bloke. Friend of Jason’s.’

  Annette’s heart would sink. She would imagine Jason saying over the phone to Timothy, ‘There’s someone else coming, by the way. Annette. Nice girl. Friend of Sarah’s.’ Timothy’s heart would be sinking. Often, when she actually met Timothy (or David, or Rakesh, or Paul) they would turn out to be perfectly presentable. Friendly. Moderately interesting. Nice blokes. They would shake hands or smile at her and their eyes would meet. A moment of mutual understanding would pass between them. No, I don’t fancy you either but we might as well be pleasant to each other, to humour Jason and Sarah.

  The phase passed with the arrival of Dawn, as Jason and Sarah realised that single women friends were actually rather useful. Annette forgave their unthinking change of heart, just as she forgave their tactless jokes about maiden aunts and sell-by dates. She settled for the comfortable knowledge that she and this family would know each other for the rest of their lives and their relationship would always be a gentle cosy mixture of fondness and exasperation.

  For some reason, Jason and Sarah’s baby daughter fell madly in love with Annette. It was not reciprocated. Annette found babies sweet but liked to hand them back when they got sticky. Dawn was stickier than most. She grabbed at Annette’s hair or earrings with plump, jammy fingers, making a sort of low throaty sound which, had it come from a corpse in a thriller novel, would have been called a death rattle. She was slow to pick up full words and for many months the death rattle was all her parents got. When she eventually said, ‘Tur-tur,’ Sarah and Jason went into paroxysms.

  ‘Oh darling!’ shrieked Sarah, pushing past Annette to grab her infant daughter and sweep her up into her arms. ‘You said turtle. Aren’t you clever!’

  Annette sat on the carpet while Sarah and Jason whirled their daughter round the room. She was holding the green and yellow plastic turtle in her hands. She turned it over. It was a bulbous little creature, with a sadistic grin and wheels where it should have feet. Dawn had begun to cry.

  Sarah later confided that Jason had been a little upset that his daughter had given her first word to Annette. Jason loved Dawn with the fierce, illogical passion of a man experiencing an emotion of which he has previously believed himself incapable.

  Annette got off the train at Lewisham and went straight round to Sarah and Jason’s flat. She let herself in with her own key. They were going out at seven, for dinner with Jason’s parents, but would have bought her a microwave meal and bottle of wine to have with it. In the living room the television was on and the carpet scarcely visible for toys. Annette picked her way through a menagerie of rubber hedgehogs and purple plastic dolphins. She sat down in an armchair, picked up the remote control and flicked over to the news. Jason and Sarah were running round the flat in a frenzy. Once in a while, they passed the living room door and called out to her.

  ‘The number’s in the book,’ called Jason.

  ‘Go to sleep if you want,’ cried Sarah.

  Annette said yes she knew, and yes she would.

  She did. She ate the microwave meal, she drank the wine, and a Clint Eastwood film finished her off. She was slumbering in the armchair with the television still churning softly when Sarah came into the room.

  ‘Hi . . .’ Sarah whispered. ‘How was it?’

  ‘Fine,’ Annette murmured, pushing her hair back from her face. Her neck was stiff. ‘What time is it? How was dinner?’

  Sarah pulled a face. ‘Gone twelve. Jason’s checking Dawn. Let’s sneak out and take you home.’

  Ah, thought Annette, another row. When the evening had gone well, Sarah and Jason would come in together. Annette would turn off the telly and they would all drink beer. If Sarah wanted them to sneak out it meant she had some complaining to do.

  In Sarah’s Mini, on the way to Catford, Sarah began to cry. She kept her hands tightly on the wheel and looked straight ahead, sniffing and snuffling. In the darkness, Annette could see the tears streaming down her cheeks. ‘I’m sick of it,’ she sobbed. ‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I’ve done everything I can. I thought this was all sorted out before Christmas but now it turns out he still expects me to make allowances. It’s so unfair. My parents are in Wales, for God’s sake. He doesn’t have to make allowances . . .’ Once in a while, Annette prompted her gently with questions. ‘So what did he say then?’ or, ‘What do you think she meant?’

  As they turned the corner into Annette’s cul-de-sac, Sarah, still sobbing, said, ‘It’s such a nightmare, this whole bloody thing of being married. You don’t know how lucky you are. You don’t know how jealous I am.’

  Annette felt suddenly cold. She had always known that Sarah was jealous of her; that came as no surprise. But all at once she thought of William. William – was his marriage a nightmare? Had he been out to dinner with his in-laws that night? Had he and his wife argued in the car coming home? At the thought of the word, wife, a jolt of pain went through her, as real and as physical as if someone sitting crouched in her stomach had poked her with a knitting needle. William did not just exist in the lift of the Capital Transport Authority. He had a context, a whole world that she knew nothing about, was not a part of. Nothing. She was a moment, that was all. She had no idea how he felt about her.

  Sarah was still talking as she parked the car. ‘Do you know what my first thought was in the hospital when they gave her to me?’ she was saying. ‘Thirty-six hours in labour, and they gave me this red-blue screamy thing with a pointy head. And do you know what my first thought was? I looked at her and thought, so you’re what’s put me through this . . .’

  She pulled a man-size tissue from the box that sat beside her and blew her nose noisily. Then she said, ‘Are you coming bowling on Thursday?’

  One of the neighbours had organised a trip. Annette knew most of the group who would be going: Sarah and Jason, Winston and Paulette – maybe Paulette’s step-sister Jayne, who was a social worker. They were always good for a laugh.

  ‘Yes, probably.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll ring,’ Sarah said, wiping make-up from underneath her eyes.

  Annette got out of the car. As she turned and waved goodbye, Sarah blew her nose again and gave a bleak little smile.

  Annette let herself in, pushing at the front door because a clothing catalogue had been dropped through the letterbox and was in the way. She picked it up and closed the door behind her. In the darkness she could see the two tiny red rectangles on her answer machine: no messages. She flicked on the light and then went to close the curtains. The central heating had not come on – the thermostat was on the blink. Her house was cold.

  The phone rang at five o’clock the following day, Saturday afternoon. Annette was expecting her mother to call. She picked it up and said hello in the tense, friendly way in which she always said hello to her mother.

  ‘Annette? It’s William.’

  Annette’s stomach folded in on itself.

  ‘Listen, I’ve only got ten pence. Can you ring me back?’ He reeled off the number.

  She did
n’t even hear the phone ring at the other end before he answered, ‘Hi.’ In the background, there was traffic. The phone made the regular peep-peep noise that public call-boxes made on incoming calls.

  ‘How are you?’ Peep-peep.

  ‘Fine. How are you?’

  ‘Fine.’ Peep-peep. ‘Listen, I’m sorry, you’re probably busy,’ Peep-peep. ‘But are you doing anything tomorrow afternoon? Are you going out to lunch or anything? I don’t know what you do.’ Peep-peep.

  Annette kept her tone casual. ‘Nothing special, no, nothing really.’

  ‘It’s just could I come round. Oh God.’ In the background a dog had started barking. The peep-peep sound chimed in with its high-pitched little yap. ‘There’s a dog!’

  ‘What?’ shouted Annette. She could hardly hear William above the racket. She had automatically raised her own voice, as if that would help.

  ‘Dog. Outside. Waiting to make a call.’

  ‘What?’ Peep-peep.

  ‘No, the owner, not the dog,’ William started to laugh. ‘Look, about half past one. Can I come over?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is that okay?’ Peep-peep.

  ‘Yes . . . yes . . .’

  ‘Okay.’ The dog was going frantic. ‘See you then.’ He rang off.

  Annette put down the phone. She sat down on her sofa in her suddenly silent house and wrapped her arms around herself. She smiled a very large smile.

  William waved off Alison from the doorstep. His final image was of his son’s face watching him out of the back windscreen, white and cheery, his little hand flapping. As soon as they were round the corner, he sprinted upstairs to take a shower.

  Bowling down the A21 to Catford, he began to worry. What on earth had Annette made of his call? He hadn’t made it clear whether he was expecting lunch or not. He hadn’t made anything clear.

  In less than an hour, everything was clear. In less than an hour, he and Annette – having skipped the preliminaries of eating or drinking – were in each other’s arms on Annette’s sofa. William was leaning up against the corner, two cushions supporting his back. Annette half leant against him. His arms were round her from behind and her head lay back against his shoulder. They were talking quietly. He was moving one hand up and down her left forearm, very slowly, while her hand rested on his thigh. He had an erection like a rock.

  ‘I had a navy blue blazer and a grey pleated skirt,’ Annette said. ‘They tried to introduce straw boaters in the summer term but they never really took off.’

  ‘Sounds posh.’

  ‘It was. My parents paid for me. I was the only one in our road. I hated it. Walking home each day I used to go past a row of kids from our estate – the local comp got let out half an hour earlier than us. They used to sit on the low wall outside the dental surgery and throw stones at me. They never threw very hard. I think they were just bored.’

  ‘So how come you ended up at the Capital Transport Authority?’

  Annette laughed. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’

  She turned in his arms and smiled up at him, a wry smile. ‘Yes you did,’ she said. ‘You meant, how come I’m only a secretary if I went to a posh school?’ She pushed herself up and kissed him lightly on the lips. Then she turned back to her original position. He could not see her face. ‘The thing about being a secretary is,’ she said, ‘it makes things so straightforward. People ask you what you do and you say I’m a secretary and people say oh, and that’s it. End of conversation. They think they know then. And actually, you’ve told them nothing, nothing about yourself at all. It’s like saying I have fair hair or brown eyes, less even.’

  William was frowning and thinking, that doesn’t answer the question.

  ‘My parents had high hopes, I suppose,’ Annette continued. ‘My mother sometimes says at least my father died at the right moment.’ She paused. Her voice was still light. ‘Downward curve, I guess. Row of As at O level, then English, Geography and Maths A levels; A,B,C, the kind of result you can sing. I didn’t even apply to college or anything. I didn’t want to read anything any more. I wanted to be out there; the real world.’

  ‘Okay,’ William said carefully, ‘that’s the version that goes on your CV. Now let’s have the real one.’ He wanted to know. He wanted to know what had turned a clever young girl in a grey pleated skirt into this careful woman.

  She turned again and pulled herself up until her face was very close to his. ‘Hey,’ she said softly. ‘What is this?’ She smiled. Then she brought her mouth onto his. First, there was the soft plump dryness of it. Then, as their lips parted, there was the wetness of her tongue as it moved against his, the grazing sensation as the differing textures of their mouths met; the mingling until – very soon – they tasted the same.

  William moved so that he could wrap his arm round her. The vestige of a question was still in his head. She had told him that her first job in Beckenham had lasted five years. She had been at the CTA for two. What had she done between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four?

  She lifted her mouth away from his and laid her cool smooth cheek against his rough warm one. ‘I don’t want to talk,’ she said, the words slurred.

  He slid a hand underneath her jumper and began to pull her top gently up through the waistband of her skirt. ‘Is it okay?’ he whispered.

  She looked at him and raised a hand to stroke his face, her eyes wide with amusement at his question. ‘Yes.’

  As he drove home, William rehearsed his story. When Alison got back from lunch with her Aunt Willie and Uncle George, she would be tired and bad-tempered. Paul would be over-excited. Alison would be happy as long as he took Paul off her hands and let her sit down and read the paper. She probably wouldn’t ask what he had been doing, so there would be no need to explain that he had driven all the way to the new DIY centre at Surrey Docks only to find he had left his credit cards at home, so he hadn’t been able to buy that shelving for Paul’s room that she had been on at him to get for weeks.

  ‘What do you mean, you’ve lost it?’ Alun Hardy did not look up from his Weetabix. His wife was standing in the kitchen door.

  ‘Oh Alun, what do you think I mean?’ Joan turned away, back to the handbag which was sitting on the telephone table in the hall. ‘What do you think I mean?’ she muttered again, into the bag, but quietly this time because she had begun to cry and she didn’t want Alun to notice. If he saw her crying he would start to realise it was serious.

  She opened her purse again. It was useless going through the bag. She had gone to the building society in her lunch hour at work the previous day, Friday. Then she had folded up the sixty pounds and put it in the back of her purse, the way she always did. Now it was gone: sixty pounds. The weekend was ruined. She opened her passbook again, just to check. Yes, she had taken out sixty. She looked through the crevices of the bag, her make-up pouch. I knew it, she thought furiously, the day of the storm. I knew that bad things were going to start happening, that it was all going to blow up in our faces. It started yesterday, when Helly and Annette had that row. That was just the beginning. Now this.

  Oh pull yourself together Joan, she thought, taking a neatly folded tissue from the purse and wiping her cheeks. Silly to cry over money. Where on earth could it have gone? She had folded it up and put it in her purse. Helly and Annette had watched her do it.

  When she broke the news to him, Alun agreed that it was silly to cry over money. He thought it more sensible to shout. He thought it particularly sensible to shout, repeatedly, ‘In heaven’s name, woman, how could you? How could you just lose sixty pounds! Nobody loses sixty pounds. How could you?’

  Eventually, she put on her coat and told him she was going up the Walworth Road. If she got a move on she could get to the building society before it closed. She was going to withdraw another sixty pounds and carry on with the rest of the weekend as normal. The missing sixty could be sorted out on Monday. She refused to spend the entire weekend discussing it.
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  This solution did not please Alun. The money was gone and sixty pounds was a lot to lose. It had been in Joan’s care and was now no longer in her possession. If she was capable of losing the sixty pounds she got out on Friday what made her think she could hang on to the same amount the following day?

  ‘I have to go to the chemist, dear,’ she responded, gritting her teeth but keeping her tone meek. ‘And we need some frozen puff pastry for tomorrow, and I want to look at swimsuits.’

  Alun raised his eyes heavenwards. We’ve just lost sixty quid and the woman wants to buy a swimsuit, his look said.

  Oh say it, Joan thought in response. If you don’t want me to buy a bleeding swimsuit then say so. But Alun would never say. Joan did all the cooking and cleaning and brought in a third of the household budget. She sent Christmas cards to their friends and visited Alun’s father at the old people’s home. In addition, she had to interpret his extensive vocabulary of glares, scowls and sighs and behave accordingly. Alun could shout, but only to express rage. The words he shouted never contained any information, they were just noise. He might as well shout their telephone number or postcode.

  She wrapped a tartan woollen scarf around her neck and fumbled in her pockets for her mittens. ‘I shan’t be long,’ she said in a conciliatory tone.

  As she walked down Denmark Hill she thought, I’m going to pay for this. Boy am I going to pay.