by Lesley Kara
I feel like an invalid who’s only just been allowed up. Someone who still has to be looked after but is now well enough to do a few basic chores for herself, as long as she is sitting quietly, within sight of the restorative water, gleaming like grey silk cloth beyond the window. Perhaps this is how I’ll heal, being here with Josh, in this beautiful house. Perhaps this is where my future begins.
I see it then, on top of the microwave. A half-empty bottle of red. My throat dissolves. They didn’t even finish it off. One bottle between two grown men and there’s still a couple of glasses left. How is that even possible? Unless, of course, it’s another bottle. It must be, surely.
Josh disappears for a few minutes. My hands tremble. There’s a roaring sound at the back of my head. The knife slips through my fingers and clatters on to the glass board. I pop the ends of the tomatoes into my mouth and suck the juice out of them, forcing my eyes away from the bottle and towards the tap sticking out of the wall, but its image is burnt into my retinas. If I’m going to tell him, it has to be now. The longer I leave it, the worse it will be.
But when Josh returns, his dad’s with him.
‘Hi there, Astrid,’ Richard says. ‘How are the sketches coming on?’
‘Bloody hell, Dad! Give her a chance.’
My laugh comes easily. More out of relief than amusement.
‘I should have something to show you in a few days.’
A few weeks, I should have said. A few weeks. Why am I putting myself under pressure like this? I haven’t even started them yet. Too scared I’ll have forgotten how.
Richard grins. ‘Fantastic.’
His eyes take in our food preparations. ‘Right, I’m nipping out to the yacht club for a quick pint and a sandwich. I’ve got to wait for the plaster in the bathroom to dry out.’ He taps the side of his nose. ‘That’s my excuse, anyway.’
When he’s gone and it’s just Josh and me, alone in the kitchen, my heart starts to thud because I know what I have to do. And I have to do it now, before my resolve wavers. I have to tell him why I’m really here in Flinstead. Why I’m back home with my mum again after all these years.
‘I’m glad Dad bought this house,’ Josh says. ‘It’s given him a new lease of life. He looks happier than he has in years.’
I focus on cutting my hard-boiled egg in half. The bottle of red wine is still making its presence felt from behind my head. I really like Josh. I mean, really like him. I like his dad too, and I know he’ll ask me to paint the trompe l’œil for him, just like I know I’ll say yes. I can’t wait to get stuck into something creative again, to prove to myself that I’m not completely washed up. The thing is, if I tell him the truth, then everything will be spoiled before it’s even begun.
‘It’s funny,’ Josh says, ‘but everyone always thinks he’s such a positive, energetic kind of man – and he is, he really is – it’s just that they don’t see what’s behind all that energy, what’s driving it.’ He rests his fork on the side of his plate. This clearly isn’t the time to talk about me and my drinking. I should have spoken up sooner.
‘My mum’s name was Lindsay,’ he says. His eyes are somewhere else now, some place in the past. ‘She was a dance teacher.’ He looks down at his plate and pushes the salad around with his fork. ‘She died the year I started uni.’
I don’t ask him how she died. Maybe you have to have lost a parent to know what is, and isn’t, the right thing to say. Maybe that’s why Simon and I clicked so easily, because we’d both lost our dads. Josh will tell me if he wants to, when the time is right.
‘I was twenty-six when my dad died.’ My throat has closed up and my voice sounds weird, as if it belongs to someone else. Josh reaches across the table and traces a little pattern on the top of my hand with his finger. We finish our lunch in silence, but there’s nothing awkward or uncomfortable about it. That one simple gesture is all the communication we need and I wonder whether we’ll go upstairs later and make love on that soft, white duvet. I hope so.
Afterwards, I wash the bowls and cutlery in a washing-up bowl on the table with hot water from the kettle and Fairy Liquid. Then Josh rinses everything under the cold tap over a bucket and hands me each item, one at a time, for me to dry with a stripy linen tea-towel that has a clean, pressed look about it, and though part of me is disappointed that he isn’t leading me upstairs to make the most of his father’s absence, another part thinks how wonderful it is not to rush things, to take care over the preparation of a simple salad, to clean up afterwards, quietly, methodically, the skin of our elbows brushing up against each other, the anticipation of more, much more, thrumming gently between us. Why have I never known this before?
That night I have a dream. A nightmare. I’m kneeling before the assembled residents of Flinstead and Mistden in the community hall. Josh’s dad is reading a list of my transgressions, every last sordid one, in that weird, monotonous voice poets sometimes use. Every so often, he looks straight at me with those intense blue eyes and I shrink before his gaze.
There are gasps and tuts from the audience. My mum and my nan are both there and so are all the people from AA. Rosie and Jeremy and Helen, and all the rest of them. Josh is there too, sitting at the back in his wetsuit with his head between his hands, water dripping from the ends of his hair on to the dusty parquet floor.
I’m not aware of Simon at first, but then my skin begins to prickle and I sense his presence on the stage, glowering at me. And then at Josh. The hall is now a theatre and he’s an actor in a play. He’s standing over a small heap of clothes on the floor. But then the clothes begin to move and it’s a young woman, struggling to get up, her finger pointing straight at me. And all the while a child screams. My stomach turns over on itself.
‘Haven’t you forgotten something?’ she says, her voice ringing out in the hall. Angry and accusing.
But when I wake up, instead of relief, I feel dread. Cold, creeping dread that runs in my veins like a bad drug.
11
Mum’s already up and moving about downstairs when the clanging of church bells penetrates my sleeping brain. I didn’t think I’d ever get off again after that nightmare, but here I am, rubbing the sleep from my eyes and yawning. I should have kept my window shut.
There’s a knock on my bedroom door. ‘Astrid? Are you awake?’ She says it in such a way that, if I weren’t already awake, then I would be now.
I pull the duvet over my head and don’t answer. I know what she’s going to say because she says the same thing every Sunday morning. She’s going to ask me if I want to go to the meeting house with her and do whatever it is Quakers do. Sit around in silence communing with God. Holding things ‘in the light’.
‘Will you come with me today?’ she says.
Why does she persist with this? Surely she must have got the message by now.
‘I’ll take a rain cheque, Mum, if you don’t mind.’
Her silence thrums on the other side of the door. I want to shout, Isn’t it enough that I’m going to AA? but I press my lips together and wait for her to leave. I’ve nothing against Quakers – as far as religions go, it’s the least offensive and I know it’s helped Mum cope with losing Dad. She probably wouldn’t have embraced it so readily if it weren’t for that – but it’s not for me and I wish she’d accept that.
‘Well, if you change your mind, I’m not leaving for another half-hour.’
‘I won’t change my mind. I need to get on with those sketches.’
I hear her steps move away from the door, then stop. ‘There’s some tea in the pot if you want some.’
‘Thanks.’
She waits for a few seconds, then goes into her bedroom and shuts the door. How does she do that? How does she always manage to make me feel like such a shit? As soon as she opens her mouth, I’m catapulted back into bolshie-teenager mode. Jesus Christ, those bells are annoying!
When Mum’s gone, I get up and go downstairs. It might be a sunny day, but the back of the house is dark and chilly on account of it
facing north, so I take my sketch pad and pencils and sit outside on the front step, where it’s warm and bright, and where the pressure to create something good won’t be as strong because I can kid myself I’m a little girl again, doodling to pass the time.
Even so, my hand is unsteady and the marks on the paper are clumsy and childlike. I rip the first sheet up and crumple it into a ball. It should be like riding a bike, shouldn’t it? A skill I already possess. I just have to start doing it again and trick my brain into remembering how.
It isn’t till I’ve covered the second page with squiggles and squirls and random, interlocking shapes that I start to relax into it. I’d forgotten how good it feels to get lost in the moment, to feel the pencil moving almost of its own accord, to forget my own mind and its incessant babble. I’m out of practice, for sure, but if I spend this morning getting a feel for it again, maybe I’ll go down to the yacht club later and try sketching some of the boats.
A young mother with a pushchair walks past the house. I don’t think she’s the one who tutted at me the other day, although she could be. She stops for a moment to comfort the toddler, who is whingeing loudly and trying to undo the harness.
The grating sound of the child’s cry and the sight of its back arching stiffly away from the seat of the pushchair makes me remember my dream from last night, and the back of my neck feels cold and clammy. Somewhere in the distance, another set of church bells starts up, and when finally she settles the child and sets off again I turn over a fresh page in my sketch pad and exhale slowly. But any confidence I thought I’d regained has evaporated and my fingers are too sweaty to grip the pencil.
Monday morning. I stoop down and gather the post into my hands. Still nothing from the DWP. I open the front door, wondering if it might have slipped through the postman’s fingers and be lying on the porch mat.
Shock roots me to the spot. Shock and fear. There’s no mistaking it: the distinctive aroma of Joint by Roccobarocco trapped in the stuffy porch. He’s been here. Simon has been to the cottage, stood where I’m standing now. I’m not going mad. This is really happening.
All of a sudden, lightness floods through me. My head falls back and I slump against the door frame, laughing at my own stupidity. It’s the postman I’ve been catching whiffs of all this time. A postman who likes to smell nice, drawn to a scent that’s a little bit different, that as far as I know you can only get online. This isn’t Simon’s smell after all. The scent in my nostrils is mixed with the chemicals in another man’s skin, a swarthy, thickset man in standard-issue Royal Mail T-shirt and grey trousers. It explains why I’ve smelled it out and about too. I must have seen him loads of times, trundling his red trolley along the streets.
I open the porch door to release it and take a lungful of fresh air. What a fool I’ve been.
Mum’s finishing off her breakfast and doing a crossword in the dining room. I put the pile of post next to her plate.
‘Still nothing about my benefits.’
‘Never mind. You’ll hear from them soon, I’m sure you will.’ Her voice is light, friendly. We’re both making a supreme effort to be nice to one another.
‘I hope so. I hate not being able to give you any money.’
She nods and takes a sip of her tea. ‘I meant to ask you about Saturday. You were out a long while.’
‘We went for a walk on the beach. Then he made me lunch.’
‘That’s nice.’
She wants to say more, I know she does. She wants to give me another warning about not getting too involved, but she focuses on her crossword instead. I can see that it’s a huge struggle for her, not saying what’s on her mind. I lay my hand on her shoulder and give it a squeeze. She tilts her head to the side so that her cheek rests briefly on the top of my hand.
In the kitchen she’s laid a tea-towel over the counter so that half of it is hanging off. This is what she does to let them dry out. It’s one of those hard cotton ones with pictures of herbs and their names on it. It must once have been white but now it’s dull and grey. It’s perfectly clean, but there are old tea stains on it. I think of the soft linen one in Josh’s dad’s house, how even though they’re in the middle of a major refurbishment and the kitchen is a shell, they still have lovely things. Well-sharpened, good-quality knives, pretty crockery and pristine tea-towels.
‘By the way,’ Mum calls out, ‘don’t be surprised if someone pops round in the next day or so to have a look at the house.’
‘Why? You’re not thinking of selling up already, are you?’
She comes into the kitchen and gives me an incredulous look. ‘Why would I want to do that? No, it’s someone who used to live here when she was a child. A young woman. I’ve seen her standing across the road looking at the house a couple of times lately, so when I saw her this morning I called her over and had a few words. She said she’d be interested to look round, for old times’ sake.’
Mum dunks her breakfast things in the washing-up bowl. ‘I was in a bit of a hurry to go out, though, so I said she could drop by next time she was passing.’
‘Bet you wouldn’t have said that if she’d been a man. You want to be careful. She could be anyone.’
Mum stares at me. ‘What do you take me for? A fool?’
‘No, of course not. But there are some desperate people out there.’
She gives me a level look. ‘You think I don’t know that?’
12
‘I was expecting them to be good, but not this good,’ Josh says, peering over his dad’s shoulder. ‘I’ve never seen such intricate sketches. They’re works of art in themselves.’
My cheeks flush at the compliment. ‘Don’t be daft. They’re really rough. I’ll do better ones if you’re happy with these designs.’
‘Happy?’ Richard says. ‘I’m delighted. So when can you start the painting?’
Josh shoots him a look. ‘Don’t you think you should ask her if she wants to first?’
Richard lifts his glasses up and wedges them on top of his head. ‘Astrid, I’d very much like to commission you to produce this painting for me. Would you please do me the honour of accepting the job? You’ll need to tell me what it will cost, of course.’
Even though I’ve been expecting this, I’m still tongue-tied. Agreeing to do privately commissioned work isn’t something I’ve ever done before. I’m not even sure I can competently execute a trompe l’œil. Will I really be able to create something that stands up to daily inspection? I mean, it’s one thing painting a backdrop in a theatre which the audience views from a distance. Their attention is focused on the forefront of the stage, on the actors and the play itself. The words, the music. But taking on something like this, something Richard Carter will have to look at every day of his life, something that will, by its very nature, be scrutinized by guests and visitors – it couldn’t be more different.
‘I’ll need to have a think about the cost. I’d probably paint it on to canvas first, then transfer the image to the wall once you’re happy with it. I’ll need to see if I can find an easel from somewhere.’
‘No need,’ Richard says. ‘There’s one in the attic.’ He looks at Josh and the room stills. ‘It used to belong to my wife – a hobby she never quite took up. In fact,’ he says, now bright and jolly again, ‘why don’t I give you some cash for the materials right now?’
He puts his hand in his pocket and draws out a fat wallet. ‘Will a hundred and fifty do for starters? Get the best paint you can buy, and whatever else you need. I’d recommend the new art shop on Flinstead Road.’
I stare at the wad of notes he’s thrusting towards me. I know I should be more professional about this and tell him to wait till I’ve done an estimate, but my brain is all scrambled. I can’t think straight. I’m meant to be a freelance set designer, for God’s sake. I should have got my act together yesterday and worked out some figures.
‘It’s okay,’ Josh says. ‘Dad wouldn’t be flinging money at you if he didn’t trust you.’
Richard is still holding the notes out in front of me. It seems too much, but if he wants top-quality paint, that doesn’t come cheap. I’ll need some new brushes too. It might not even be enough. I take the warm bundle of notes and zip them into my coat pocket.
‘You’re not going yet, are you?’ Josh says. ‘You’ll stay for coffee?’
Richard holds out his hand again, this time for me to shake. ‘Welcome to the Carter family decorating team.’ His hand is warm and dry. He smiles and the skin round his eyes crinkles. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a Pilates class to go to. All this decorating does my back in.’
Josh makes coffee in a cafetière. He presses the plunger down with the flat of his palm.
‘It’s decaf, I’m afraid. Dad usually gets proper coffee in for guests but the tin’s empty.’
‘It’s fine.’
Decaffeinated coffee. Salad lunches. Swimming. Pilates. Bottles of wine that last more than one day. It’s like an advert for healthy living. I don’t belong here.
So why do I feel like I do?
I don’t know whether I’m three or four sips in when I’m aware of Josh looking at me over the rim of his mug. Those kind green eyes drinking me up. Except it’s not kindness I’m seeing now. It’s desire.
‘Let’s take our coffee upstairs,’ he says.
His skin has its own perfume – sweet and warm and dry. I stand, my back against the white wall. He faces me, his hands pressing into the wall so that I’m caged between his arms. I see the shape of his muscles through the thin cotton of his T-shirt. Their strength. He leans forward and brushes his lips against mine. A light, feathery sensation. When I feel the heat of his tongue inside my mouth, I close my eyes, lose myself in the rhythm and intensity of the kiss.
Our coffee grows cold on the windowsill.
Josh is deliberate, thorough. Gentle. Insistent. I thought he’d be shy to start with. Tentative. I thought I might be the one to take the lead and coax the lover out of him, the one he’s always dreamed of becoming, but I’m much too late to that party.