by Lia Louis
‘No.’ I laugh.
‘Well, I know you, and sometimes you say batshit things, especially when you’re tired. Or drunk.’
‘Or nervous,’ adds Theo.
‘Well, I didn’t. I just said we should stay in touch.’
‘Well, there you go.’ Charlie straightens like she’s solved it, like that’s that and the leaflet is now safely out of the bin, folded neatly, and in Sam’s back pocket where it should be. ‘Staying in touch so mild-sounding. So benign and friendly.’ She looks at Theo as if he’s an oracle and not a Greek deli owner. ‘What’s he got to be afraid of?’
‘Well, a number of things,’ says Theo measuredly.
‘Maybe he got the vibe,’ I say. ‘That I was sort of checking out his nice jaw, and his broad shoulders and imagining just a bit what he might look like up a mountain in nothing but bear skins …’
Theo shakes his head. ‘Nah, we don’t pick up on things like that,’ he says, a hand resting on Petal’s little curved back. ‘No, I think it’s fear. It feels like fear, sounds like fear …’
‘I don’t suppose we’ll ever know.’ I shrug. ‘Plus, it wasn’t all bad, I––’ And I stop the second I feel the words working their way up my throat. I want to tell them about Ed, of course I do. I tell them everything. But I haven’t told anyone, yet, that I’ve seen him, because I know they won’t approve. Mum might, she always loved him. But everyone else in my life has filed him under various permanent labels, including ‘spineless, dirty little dweeb’ (Charlie) and ‘Knob-Ed’ (Dilly) and ‘Stupid, Little Cretin. Am I allowed to say cretin?’ (Ian). There’s some sort of law, isn’t there, that when you break up with someone, they’re forever remembered and defined by their behaviour when you broke up, and anything after. Everything they did before that is null and void. Even the happy memories. Even all the love you gave each other. Means sod all if they walk out on you during what was supposed to be a very adult, grown-up goodbye in Pizza Hut and leave you crying into a bowl of ice cream you piled with an embarrassing amount of jelly tots from the ice-cream factory. That’s how it really ended. No tear-filled farewell at the airport, no sobbing in his bed, wrapped in his old hoodie. Just a ‘let’s meet for pizza and say goodbye’ lunch that turned into a ‘go fuck yourself’ lunch when Mum called my phone three times in a row, when Ed sighed, and when I thought he was having a dig about his move without me when he ordered a ‘barbecue Americano’ pizza. He walked out. I ate too much. I vomited when I got home. Not quite the heart-breaking, romance movie goodbye I’d imagined us having after twelve years together.
‘It was just nice to have someone there,’ I say to Charlie and Theo instead, ‘even if it was fleeting.’ Petal starts to cry, tiny hiccupping mews. Theo shushes her through his bristly beard, kisses the top of her head.
‘I reckon he’ll be back,’ he says, swaying, his hand circling Petal’s back. ‘I reckon there’ll be more. Things happen in threes. And destiny …’
‘Destiny,’ I say with a laugh, although I’m not sure the laugh was real enough to convince anyone, because destiny is exactly what I was thinking about when I saw Sam push through those double doors. Those stars beneath my skin. That something I sensed. And then I felt like an idiot when I saw that leaflet balled up. A stupid, gullible, stars-in-her-eyes twat.
‘Destiny can’t be deterred,’ finishes Theo.
‘Exactly,’ says Charlie with a quick smile as she straightens, snapping her bento box closed. ‘Anyway. I need to go.’
‘Already?’ says Theo, over the growing sound of Petal’s crying.
‘I’m packed out with appointments, Boo.’ Charlie whisks her beige chunky-knit cardigan on. ‘Got one in five minutes. Bloke coming for the outline of a back tattoo and then another in for a sleeve. Proper intricate and pain-in-the-arse.’
‘Oh. I thought you said …’ starts Theo. ‘Never mind.’ And I can’t help but notice something in Theo’s eyes as he looks down at Petal’s fluffy little head. Disappointment, maybe. A glimmer of worry.
‘I’ll be home at five,’ says Charlie to Theo, but pressing her cool, powdery cheek to mine.
‘Bye, Elle. Text you later about the cinema.’ And she’s gone, the bell above the shop door jangling, the posters stuck to the glass of the door curling at the edges from the breeze.
Theo looks at me sadly, and there’s silence for a moment.
‘I’d better go. Mum wants me to take a trip into town, go to the market for some stuff. And I want to get some hydrangeas. Saw this amazing arrangement on Instagram and I want to try it out.’
‘I like your amazing arrangements on Instagram. I loved the daffodil one you put up a couple of weeks back. Beautiful.’
I smile. ‘Thanks, Theo. You two are always my first likes.’
‘Your biggest fans,’ he says, proudly, with a nod. ‘And I told you about Mum’s coffee kiosk in the station, didn’t I? That it’s available. Up for rent. I said to Char … Could be a flower stall.’
I look at him. ‘I wish, Theo.’
‘Ask the universe and you’ll receive.’ He grins, then he pulls his lips into a grimace, like he’s gearing himself up to say something. ‘Noelle,’ he says, ‘does er – does Charlie seem OK to you?’
‘Erm.’ I hesitate, glance at the invisible trail Charlie made beside me when she left. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I think so. Why?’
Petal groans on his chest, little fists breaking free from the sling, skimming Theo’s beard. ‘She just – I dunno, I can’t help but think there’s something going on. She doesn’t seem herself at home. We don’t … talk, like we used to. I mean, I try but she just says she’s fine. But – oh, I don’t know. I just wonder if there’s something she isn’t telling me.’
‘Really?’
Theo gives an almost shameful shrug and I remember for a moment, how happy Charlie was when they first met, and how she described him after their first date. ‘He’s so calm and gentle, Noelle,’ she said. ‘He reminds me of like – Jesus or something. Or like Ben Affleck if Ben Affleck was Greek and converted to Buddhism or something. You know?’
‘She’s always rushing off, rushing out,’ Theo carries on. ‘And she said today she didn’t have a lot on, but you saw her. She dashed out of here all of a sudden like there was a bloody fire. I worry there’s something she isn’t telling me. I feel that’s what it is.’
‘Maybe it’s tiredness. For you both,’ I say, carefully, but Charlie from a few weeks ago, outside her shop, blinks into my mind. ‘Am I still her? Am I still Charlie Wilde?’
‘I don’t know too much about babies,’ I carry on, ‘but you have a newborn, Theo. Everything is so new and everything’s changed, and – well, you wouldn’t be the first husband in the world who felt disconnected from his wife two months after they’ve had their first baby. Right?’
Theo hesitates, then gives a stiff nod. ‘You’re right,’ he says. ‘Maybe it is tiredness. Tiredness makes you paranoid, doesn’t it? A bit distant?’
‘Definitely,’ I say. ‘Plus, sleep deprivation is used as a torture tactic. If that helps.’
Theo laughs, his bushy eyebrows meeting in the middle. ‘It does, Noelle. Very weirdly it does.’
I walk to my car, and half-expect (and half-hope) to see Ed as I pass the train station on my way to the car, and can’t help but let my mind wander. Say if we did just need the break? It doesn’t exactly sound unrealistic, does it, to say, ‘My boyfriend went and worked abroad for two years and we broke up, but when he came back, we realised how much we missed each other and that was it. The rest, as they say, is history!’ Cue: cheesy Hello!-magazine-style photo of Ed and me, laughing in a sunlit apple orchard, me in one of those floppy summer hats. No. No, come on, it was just once. One coffee. One twenty-minute coffee. But after seeing him at the hospital, I can hardly believe I was so nervous to see him. It was – nice. Like putting on an old comfortable cardigan, or something. Something you lost that fit perfectly, that you then find again, and it fits just the same, wraps perfect
ly around you, and you wonder why you’ve left it so long. The thought of Sam niggles at me though every single time I think of the hospital, and it twists in my chest. Embarrassment, I think. Total bloody cringe. Why did he throw my number away? And why did I have to go and be all ‘Ha, ha, let’s do a Steve and Candice who wrote to each other! And then fell in love! And then got engaged! Who me? No, I’m not intense at all, Sam, not intense in the slightest!’
I get to my car, slot the key in the door. It jams. Last time this happened, Sam wriggled it, unlocked it for me on the frozen road, gave me that small smile … then – I freeze, my hand full of keys. Is that … it is. I can see her on the other side of the street. Charlie. In her car, driving in the complete opposite direction, away from the tattoo studio she so desperately needed to get to five minutes ago.
Chapter Fourteen
When I get home from work today, I’m met by a full house and the smell of hot tea and freshly sliced cucumber. The sound of the strumming of a bass guitar emanates through the floorboards and Ian sits eating a triangular half of a ham sandwich at the kitchen table, reading out loud about Veganism. It reminds me of what it used to be like, a few years ago. When Dilly was at home, when Ian lived next door, when there was always someone whisking in, whisking out, the kettle working itself to the bone.
‘I just couldn’t do it, Ian,’ Mum is saying, as Ian stares down at his iPad. ‘I couldn’t give up my crumpets and butter.’
‘Mm.’ Ian nods. ‘Although I’m not quite sure all crumpets fall under the animal product umbrella, Belinda.’
‘Oh,’ says Mum, her new hospital-prescribed crutch leaning against the kitchen counter. ‘But then what about bacon – oh, Noelle, hello, darling. We’re just having a cuppa and a sandwich. Do you want a sandwich? Ian got some lovely ham, didn’t you? From that meat man on the corner.’
‘Colin,’ he says. ‘The owner of Meat Man Plc. And good afternoon, Noelle.’
‘Hiya. And I will actually,’ I say, taking a seat at the table, shrugging off my denim jacket, draping it over the back of the chair. ‘But are you sure you’re OK to do it? Your leg …’
‘No, no,’ Mum says. ‘It’s good to move it, they say, or it gets all stiff, and Christ knows, I have enough trouble as it is. I don’t want to be going back, all seized up, God knows what they’d do with me then …’
Since the hospital, Ian has been coming round more and more and I’ve loved so much, having him here again. The other day, he even stayed until nine and helped Mum up to bed for me, and I watched the pair of them slowly taking the narrow steps of our little two-up-two-down, Ian’s arm lovingly holding Mum, and felt a tug at my heart. Ed’s right. Ian does love Mum. And I often wonder whether Mum has no idea, or if she has in fact every idea but is too frightened to look it in the eye – this person who loves her for everything she is – not everything she was, or the idea of who she could become. When Ian sat us down and told us about Pam, I thought she’d tell him – because I really do think that she loves him too. Except she didn’t. She clapped her hands together, she beamed like a quiz-show host, she strangled a tea-towel in her hand as if it was the neck of a mortal enemy, then told him how happy she was for him. Then she denied the floods of tears she cried while watching Coronation Street later that night and the six slices of toast she stress-ate while she did were for any reason but the excellent script-writing and ‘can’t a woman eat bloody toast in her own home without being psychoanalysed?’
‘He’s a trained botanist, would you believe,’ Ian continues now, placing a crust of bread on the plate in front of him. ‘But working with meat – he said it was one of the only things he felt he could do. Once he got out of prison.’
‘Sorry – who?’
‘Colin.’
I look blankly at him, and Mum says, ‘The man we got the ham from.’
‘Meat Man Plc,’ adds Ian.
Ian knows everyone and everything in this little town. He’s lived here his whole life. Even worked here, at a local secondary school as a geography teacher before he retired early and then filled his time with the Neighbourhood Watch forums and watching YouTube tutorials on anything from pruning cucumber plants to asserting yourself when making a complaint in a luxury hotel, despite having not actually stayed in a hotel for twenty-two years. I honestly never thought he’d move from next door – leave his little pride and joy of an immaculate everything-in-its-place house. I didn’t think he’d leave Mum, either, of course. But then, what is it Ed said? You can’t wait around forever. And maybe Pam turned up just as he’d given up waiting.
‘I don’t know what he was in prison for,’ Ian continues, as the low buzz of bass guitar upstairs comes to an abrupt stop. ‘But I said to Belinda, your Mum’ – Ian always says this, as if I need reminding of who my mother is – ‘If I was a betting man, I would put a small sum of money on burglary. Looks the sort, you know. Eyes far too close together.’
Mum nods seriously, buttering two slices of bread at the counter, as the clomp of feet pummel the stairs. ‘Oh, that’s true that is,’ she says.
‘I don’t think it is,’ I laugh. ‘I mean, if you think about it, Dilly’s eyes are actually––’
‘Uh? What’s this about my pork pies?’ Dilly arrives in the doorway, his drummer, Dwayne following dutifully behind him, a black woolly hat pulled down to his eyelids. ‘Oh, and is that ham? We’ll take one of those, won’t we, mate? The Storm loves a sandwich.’
And as if on the set of an advert, to my surprise and apparently nobody else’s, Dwayne says, ‘Ham from Meat Man Plc? Good stuff, that. I’ll happily take one.’
The two of them barrel into the room, plonk themselves on a kitchen chair each, and Mum frantically butters bread. Dilly and Dwayne (or The Storm since he’s gone ‘method’ slash mad) have been in what must be close to a hundred bands together now, since secondary school. Five Catastrophes is their latest project. And surprisingly, they’re good. Really good. I suppose that’s what years of absolute obsession, practice and crying during rock concerts does. Dilly fasted once, for thirty-six hours, ‘like Gandhi’, he said, but for the cause of Iron Maiden.
‘Oh,’ says Mum. ‘Noelle, Ian has something to ask you. Don’t you, Ian?’
Dilly takes the plate from Mum before I can even raise a hand to take it myself. Then he smirks and slides it over to me, his eyebrows wiggling ‘gotcha’ at me across the table. But suddenly I don’t want it. I know that face of Mum’s – the eager eyes, the big gaps between blinks.
‘Ah, yes. Of course.’ Ian interlaces his fingers together like a newsreader. ‘Are you familiar with Farthing Heights, Noelle?’
‘No,’ I say at the same time Dwayne says through a mouth full of bread, ‘Great book.’
‘No,’ says Ian. ‘No, that’s Wuthering Heights. No, see, Farthing Heights is the estate on the way to Newham Park, and I play squash with a man called George who says his neighbour, Frank, is looking for a cleaner, for his flat there. And of course, I thought of you.’
Mum’s eyes are fixed on me. I nod, my hands at the plate in front of me, but my heart sinks like a stone in a tank at those final words. Because I’m already working a lot, and when I’m not working, I’m running errands for Mum, and since Mum’s leg, so much more of the housework. I wanted to start a video course I’ve found online, about making table arrangements, but I’ve barely found the time. I wanted to meet with Candice, at a wedding fair last week, but couldn’t fit it in. Charlie and I were also meant to go to the cinema last week to see an old black-and-white film at the Tivoli, but we ended up cancelling because I’d got home too late from Jetson’s. My own time – it’s running from me, at the moment, like a downhill stream.
‘And I’m not exactly sure what’s happened, Noelle,’ Ian carries on, ‘but this man needs to move, and before he moves, he requires a cleaner to aid him in clearing his home. He’s elderly.’
‘You’re used to the elderly, aren’t you, darling?’ says Mum hopefully. ‘What with Betty, the old lad
y you sometimes clean for. She’s good with them, aren’t you?’
Dilly laughs to himself, mouth jammed with sandwich. ‘Good with them,’ he says under his breath.
‘I said I know just the woman,’ Ian says excitedly. ‘I said, you won’t find a more trustworthy and more diligent cleaner, even if you searched the whole of England.’
‘Oh.’ I smile weakly. ‘Thanks, Ian. And I’m … it’s not that I’m not happy that you thought of me …’
‘Of course.’
‘But my time is so … I mean, I only really have Tuesday afternoons and Sundays free at the moment.’
‘Yes.’ Ian considers these words and nods, slowly, his round little head bobbing like a balloon in the breeze. ‘Hm. Yes. I can’t say I don’t understand that, Noelle. Well. Never mind.’
Mum doesn’t say anything, but she turns, twists the tap, starts filling the sink with water. And I can feel it swelling in the air, like a thick cloud, threatening to burst and pour down upon us all. The worry. The expectation. The unspoken words of ‘But we’re struggling with money. But I’m up at night worrying, and I’m not sleeping and there’s a job, Noelle. A job that pays money.’ And I wish she’d look at Dilly like this. But she won’t because he’s Dilly. Dilly, her baby, Dilly the bloody walnut, and she wouldn’t want to worry him. Plus, he’s following his dream. The touring, the music. What am I doing? Besides fannying about with cut-price flowers and scaring away mountaineers in waiting rooms anyway.
‘Did they say when they needed a cleaner by?’ I ask eventually.
Ian looks up from his iPad, surprised. ‘Oh. Yes. As soon as humanly possible, George said.’ He chuckles to himself.
‘Tell him I might be interested,’ I say, as Dwayne and Dilly tear into their sandwiches like hyenas, both scrolling on their phones.
‘I’ll enquire with George again tomorrow.’ Ian taps away on his iPad. ‘There we are. I’ve even set an alarm. This reminder, which is linked also to my smart watch, will tell me to speak to him just as we’re having our post-match elevenses.’