The World at My Feet

by Catherine Isaac

  ‘It’s a bit strange finally coming face to face, isn’t it?’ I say, lamely.

  ‘Does it sound weird to say that I kind of feel like I know you already?’ My heart constricts. He tilts his head to try to gauge my expression. ‘Sorry. Is that too full on? I didn’t mean to—’

  ‘No,’ I interrupt. ‘Not at all. I feel exactly the same.’

  ‘I mean, when did we send the first message? Three weeks ago? Can’t have been much longer than that?’

  ‘Sixteenth of April.’ I look up and wince. ‘About then anyway.’

  But now he laughs and it’s clear that I don’t need to be nervous. He really does like me, of that I’m fairly certain.

  Over lunch the conversation turns to travelling, and while I could watch him talk so animatedly all day, it also makes me acutely conscious of the dearth of stamps in my own passport. I shift the topic to his yoga, and we chat about how and where he learnt it, before we drift to the subject of meditation. He tells me not to knock it until I’ve tried it.

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of knocking it!’ I insist. ‘Though I’m not convinced I’d be very good at it.’

  ‘Well, I thought that too once. But I guess it just… enhances my appreciation of the world. Improves my self-awareness. Does that make sense?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. Did you say you write poetry too?’ I ask, recalling one of our messages.

  ‘Oh… did I tell you that?’

  ‘You did,’ I confirm.

  He inhales. ‘I must have had a couple of glasses of wine.’ He grins. ‘Well, yes I do – but I don’t tend to show it to anyone.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I only write it for myself really. Though… maybe I should share some. I’ve been writing every day since I met you. You seem to have inadvertently become my muse. How did that happen?’

  ‘No idea, but happy to be of service.’

  We drink some more. We talk some more. I never allow the conversation to drift to the dangerous territory of why exactly I’m here, living eleven steps away from my parents’ house.

  Eventually, when he says he’s going to have to make a move, it feels like it’s come to an end far too soon – though when I glance at the clock I realise he’s been here for more than three hours. I try not to show my disappointment.

  ‘I think you should give me a tour of your garden first though, now that the rain’s passed,’ he says.

  Outside, sunshine is pushing through the clouds and raindrops are glistening on the petals. The garden always looks good in early summer, with the irises and peonies in full, succulent bloom and fuchsias spilling out from the hanging baskets and pots that line up against the house. I babble about herbaceous borders and mood boards and some of the challenges I’ve had with drainage, until it occurs to me that this is a subject particularly ill-suited to seduction.

  ‘You really are good at this, aren’t you?’ he murmurs. Then he turns and gently slips his arms around my waist. Exhilaration blows through me like a gale.

  I have a heightened awareness of the iron rigidity of his arms. The hard breadth of his chest. And that scent, the top notes of which I now realise cannot be attributed to any essential oil, but the smell of a living, breathing man.

  As he leans in and brushes his lips against mine, my heart surges. He kisses me as though it is an art, guiding and gliding. The rhythm of his mouth directly related to the tension in my shoulders, which falls away like a silk scarf drifting to the floor. I eventually become aware that he is pulling back, and my eyes flutter open to find, mortifyingly, that he is smiling at me.

  ‘You are utterly gorgeous,’ he says emphatically, as he backs away. ‘I’ll be in touch, okay?’

  Chapter 14

  Harriet, 1990

  Harriet felt as though she’d hardly set foot in her Clapham flat lately. She’d only just unpacked after her trip to Sri Lanka, where civil war was raging, when her news editor phoned with the next foreign assignment. She didn’t mind too much. Her love affair with London was already teetering at its pinnacle, like a diver about to plunge off a board. She’d become so irritated by the dirt and heat on the Tube lately, not to mention how much it was costing her to live in a glorified shoebox.

  This time, she was to join a convoy of humanitarian volunteers who planned to travel to a crisis-hit corner of Eastern Europe in lorries and vans packed with supplies sent by members of the British public. Her spirits were lifted by the numbers involved, ordinary folk doing their bit in a corner of Europe nearly a thousand miles away from the United Kingdom. There were nurses and builders, doctors and electricians, all of whom, in this case, had been mobilised by a small group of teachers from the Bucks Catholic Primary Partnership. Among their ranks was a maths teacher called Colin.

  He didn’t look to her like a teacher: her preconceptions came from her father, a sober and disinterested parent who’d had a 26-year career as a physics master, something he’d considered to be the direct cause of his later needing a triple heart bypass.

  Colin, on the other hand, was optimistic and kind, the first to roll up his sleeves and get stuck in with anything that was required, from loading up to making tea. He had sleepy eyes and a smile that changed the shape of his face altogether, rendering him all teeth and laughter lines. He clearly didn’t take himself too seriously and wasn’t especially well read beyond an apparently limitless number of sports biographies, but he was interested in politics and cared about the state of the world. His old-fashioned sense of decency shone through and was one of the reasons she pegged him as a man prepared to stick out his neck, to get things done.

  ‘Have you been involved in anything like this before?’ she’d asked, scribbling on her notebook to make it clear this was an interview, not merely that she was interested… though she definitely was.

  ‘Nothing,’ he confessed, with a look that suggested he was still surprised he was doing it. ‘I don’t think I’d ever considered myself the type. But then, nobody probably is the type until they just do it. After we’d seen the news reports, I got chatting in the pub with Martin the deputy head and Diana, who teaches the first-years. We’d had a few, admittedly, but it got us wondering whether we could do something practical, instead of just watching on the television.’

  The three launched an appeal that ultimately involved local churches, other schools and small businesses. There were three-legged races with the infants, bring and buy sales in the juniors and endless appeals for all the ‘junk’ – his words – contained in the lorries. That included gallons of paint, toothpaste, soap, shampoo, blankets, two brand new hi-fis, toys, bikes, boxes of chocolates, medical supplies, mattresses and vitamins. Colin had twisted the arm of someone in the PR department of P&O to give them free ferry travel, while Diana had negotiated a substantial discount on the petrol.

  There had been reports of similar convoys being ambushed by bandits in the hills, yet after mobilising so many people and businesses, there was a strange and possibly inappropriate air of excitement as the volunteers made the slow trek across Europe. But nobody could help it. They were doing a Good Thing, possibly the most significant they’d ever done in their lives. It was as Colin was expressing this that Harriet realised she’d stopped scribbling and was instead focusing on the faint line that ran all the way from his hairline to the bridge of his nose.

  ‘Scary, eh?’ he said, touching the scar with his finger.

  ‘Oh! Sorry, I didn’t… I wasn’t…’ Oh, but she was.

  ‘I got it sledging when I was a kid.’

  She chuckled. ‘You might want to keep that story to yourself if we run into those bandits. Tell them it was a shark attack.’

  The four-day trip turned out to be blessedly bandit-free, though one of the lorries did get a flat tyre in Germany and Nigel, who was driving one of the vans, had an acute attack of lumbago that meant Colin had to take over. He was unbelievably slow. Ordinarily, this would have frustrated the hell out of Harriet, but the main thing she would remem
ber later involved listening to ‘Black Velvet’ by Alannah Myles on the radio, while Colin asked her about her job. There were so many questions about her that more than once she said, ‘Who’s interviewing whom exactly?’

  ‘In all these dangerous places, have you genuinely never thought to yourself: This is it, I could really be in trouble here?’ he asked.

  They were somewhere in the vicinity of Vienna at the time and the weather on the autobahn was torrential and cold. Harriet felt surprisingly warm.

  ‘You mean have I ever thought I was going to die?’

  ‘That would be the blunt way of putting it,’ he said, amused.

  ‘Generally not, though Uganda was a close thing,’ she replied.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked, clearly anticipating a hair-raising tale of gunmen, hand grenades or power-hungry militia.

  ‘Tummy troubles,’ she shrugged. ‘That’s the polite term. I lost a stone, then lost consciousness and ended up spending eight days in casualty.’

  ‘God.’

  ‘My photographer just about managed to get me to the airport. I passed out as we landed on British soil, at which point I was dispatched into an ambulance and off to hospital.’

  ‘Was it something you ate?’

  ‘I suspect it was the water. It’s fine if you boil it, but it’s not always easy to find somewhere to plug in a kettle.’

  They talked about friends and families, journalism and teaching. He was a good listener and she found herself discussing things she usually avoided, for the simple reason that they were difficult to articulate.

  ‘It’s sometimes hard trying to convey why I love this job so much,’ she told him. ‘I’ve seen some awful sights, I can’t deny it. But I don’t feel hardened to any of it. There would be something very wrong with you if you did. I’ve discovered that you see the best of humanity, as well as the worst. Enough to make me steadfastly optimistic about the future of the human race.’

  They pulled to a stop at a traffic light and she decided to stop talking now, for fear that she was rambling. But he turned to look at her.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked, touching her neck self-consciously.

  He merely shook his head and looked back to the windscreen, smiling. ‘Nothing,’ he replied. ‘Though you might be the most fascinating person I’ve ever met.’

  Chapter 15

  Ellie

  The story of my life and how I came to be living in my parents’ outbuilding – because I’m aware that that’s what it is, Farrow and Ball paint or not – is not one I plan to tell Guy any time soon.

  The incident at Disneyland felt like the start of something. I never mentioned it to anyone in the year or so afterwards, when I oscillated between suppressed, low-level dread and occasional, fully realised panic. It felt as though my internal alarm system was faulty: I would be hit by bouts of irrational fear in situations the sane part of me knew posed no threat whatsoever.

  I kept this mysterious eccentricity to myself. On the surface, my life as a young teenager was exactly like that of every other girl I knew. A time of raging insecurities, laughter on the bus that leaves you woozy and aching, behind-the-back whispers and sleepovers every weekend.

  I attended a Church of England all-girls school, where I thrived. I got a kick out of achieving, being in the top set, seeing the pride on my parents’ faces when I brought home an A-plus. My abilities by this stage felt like a gift: I didn’t know who had bestowed them upon me and why, but I was not going to waste them. The centre of my world was not exams though, but my little circle of friends. Unlike my sister, I always loved the idea of fitting in, of belonging.

  Colette once suggested that might be why I’m drawn to Instagram, not merely for the camaraderie, but the validation. Who knows? But in my early teens I was part of a close-knit group of four that made me feel a part of something, a piece in a jigsaw, a cog in a wheel. I loved that.

  Of those, my closest friend was Jo. We were so perfectly attuned that we would finish each other’s sentences like an old married couple. We shared obsessions about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Lush bath bombs, the books of Judy Blume and cross-country running. Jo had the benefit of sporty parents and very long legs – and until I met her it had never occurred to me to put my own to competitive use. I loved making her happy. I hated it when she was sad. When her first big crush walked onto the bus with his arm round another girl, I spent my pocket money on a glittery notebook and took it to her house with cupcakes I’d baked and topped with luminous blue buttercream.

  In those days, I could never imagine a time when I would be without her – though this assumption turned out to be completely wrong. I had no idea at the time how easily I’d go on to lose her. And for reasons that were all my fault.

  Still, despite all the embarrassing secrets we shared back then, the idiosyncrasies of my brain were not among them. Eventually, the point came when I could hide them no longer.

  One weekend in January, when we were about thirteen, our foursome went to spend our Christmas money in Aylesbury. After several hours of applying make-up at Helen’s house, we emerged linking arms and feeling invincible in the way only teenage girls can. I was standing in HMV as Jo picked up the new Spice Girls album, when fear swept in like a cloud of dry ice. I began to hyper focus on my breathing, engulfed by an almost supernatural feeling that if I didn’t consciously draw in air and expel it, I would not be able to breathe at all.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Jo asked, lowering her CD.

  ‘I feel a bit weird.’

  She reached out and clasped my fingers. ‘You’re all clammy. Come and sit down.’

  A crowd began to gather, peering faces that made the sides of my head pound. A woman knelt in front of me and, although her green eyes were kind, I felt an overwhelming urge to topple her over like a skittle and run for my life.

  ‘I just feel sick,’ I managed. ‘I need air. Sorry.’

  I scrambled to the door as a film of cold sweat gathered on the back of my neck. I heard Helen tell Isabel that she’d seen something on the news about Mad Cow disease and wondered if they needed to seek urgent medical attention. Once I got outside, I pressed my back against the glass and slid down to the ground. Jo appeared and I began to shiver. A couple of concerned onlookers followed us out and were talking about deep breaths and ambulances. I felt weak with fear and my hands began to shake, movements that were surreally dramatic, as if I was doing a bad impression of someone having a fit.

  Above all, I was certain I was going to die.

  ‘You should go and see a doctor,’ Jo said, her expression filled with concern as she sat on the pavement and put her arm round me.

  ‘I just need to go home.’

  The conversation between my friends continued as if we were underwater. Helen couldn’t leave yet as it was absolutely essential that she went to Boots to get an exfoliator. Isabel needed to stop at WHSmith for some new ring binders. Jo was raising her voice angrily at them and she never did that. Later, she and I sat on the bus and she held my hand, releasing it only to give a middle finger to two boys who called us a pair of lezzers. By the time I was back home and Jo was filling Mum in, I felt as if I’d dreamt the whole thing. I described it as best as I could after my friend had gone. The thudding in my ears. The rushing of blood around my body. My certainty that death was imminent.

  Mum tried to swap her shift the following day to take me to the doctor, but she had a big court case to cover so I went with Dad instead.

  The GP was a locum. She had black hair flecked with silver and worn in a bun at the nape of her neck. Her name suggested south Asian ancestry and she had an air of total serenity, in sharp contrast to the harassed receptionist battling with her computer keyboard on the way in.

  ‘Are you worried about exams, Ellie?’ she asked, checking my blood pressure.

  ‘No,’ I said truthfully.

  She unstrapped my arm and turned to Dad. ‘Would it be possible for me to speak to Ellie alone, please?’

  Dad
looked surprised, not offended or worried as such, but something like it. When he left the room, the doctor turned to me. ‘Is anything else troubling you that is going on at home?’

  There was no subtlety to her suggestion. Her implication was clear and made the heat of anger rush up around my temples.

  ‘Absolutely not. I’ve got the best parents in the world. There is nothing going on at home.’

  Sufficiently convinced – or more likely bombarded – by this defence, she invited Dad to return.

  ‘Physically, I can’t see anything to be concerned about,’ she told us. ‘But, Ellie, you’re at an age when you’re going through lots of changes and the symptoms you’ve experienced can be the body’s response to the idea that you’re in acute danger.’

  ‘I was only in HMV,’ I pointed out.

  ‘The brain is a magical thing. Sometimes it can play tricks on us, make us believe we’re in danger when we’re not. I think you had an overload of anxiety.’

  ‘But I’ve got absolutely nothing to be anxious about,’ I protested.

  ‘I wouldn’t worry about the reasons for it. These things are common in teenagers. You just need to remind yourself that if you have these feelings again, there is no emergency. It will pass, exactly like it has before.’

  Dad turned to me and forced a smile. We hoped that was that. It wasn’t.

  Chapter 16

  My first date with Guy is followed by another. Again, it is at my place and involves lovely food that I’m too nervous to eat, a little too much wine and long conversations that stretch into the night. He talks about his childhood and his experience of boarding school from the age of nine. The fact that he even went surprised me at first. He doesn’t seem the type, though I’ll admit I am no expert on what the type is. Either way, he hated it and says he spent the first year bewildered about what made his loving, devoted family put him through it.