Playing Truant

by John Eider

  ‘And I told you that no one brings a woman to a friend’s house who they’re not at least interested in.’

  ‘You’re only worried I’ll flirt with her.’

  ‘Well, don’t go thinking this gives you permission.’

  ‘I’ve told you, it’s just how I am – I’m a sensual guy, I get off on a woman’s touch.’

  ‘You’re sure it’s not you touching them?’

  Sylvie wasn’t sure if she’d developed feline hearing some time that evening, or whether their hosts were aiming at being overheard. But even as she was speaking to Finn she was still catching every word the other pair said to each other, no matter how far she tried to remove herself from hearing. In their own parallel conversation on their side the room, Finn asked Sylvie,

  ‘Are they arguing?’

  ‘Some couples do.’

  He observed, ‘Well, they always were an odd couple.’

  ‘How so?’ asked Sylvie.

  ‘Well, I mean, Jack was a mate and all, and I loved him, as you do with your mates. I would have died for him. But now I look back, he was horrible to girls.’

  ‘A lot of lads are.’

  ‘He’d mess them about, break their hearts, send them fake Valentines, all for a laugh. And back in school we thought he was a hero. We loved it, we couldn’t get enough of it, we laughed our heads off.’

  ‘Cruel boys,’ she uttered jokingly.

  ‘If there’s a mystery here, it’s only that I’ve always been amazed that they’re together.’

  ‘Sylvie, a drink for you.’ Jack approached her with a bottle. Finn had half expected it to be one of the stubby little Bavarian ones he and Jack would buy by the dozen from the German discount supermarket. But in a sign of more cosmopolitan times, this beer was Indian and in larger, thick-necked bottles. ‘And one for you, Finn.’

  Chapter 22 – Disassociation

  As if outside himself, taking his beer, Finn looked at the four of them there in the large back bedroom – he and Sylvie with their drinks; Jack managing the icebox with the proud bearing of a dad at a barbecue; Belinda looking upward to the ceiling with a distracted air. And Finn saw them, whether this impression was fair or even accurate, as overgrown children the lot of them, holding on with gripping fingers to teenage freedom.

  This freedom didn’t save them from the jobs he and Sylvie had to do, or from whatever Bel was up to with those folders on her desk, (meanwhile Jack’s current occupation remained a mystery). Nor did it save them from the weekly shop, the cost of gas, of rent, or the need to follow the news and keep up with the world. But what it bought them, it seemed to Finn at that moment, was the ability to hold off deciding what they wanted to do with their lives, way beyond the age when any previous generation could have put-off those decisions.

  Being back in this bedroom with Belinda, where they’d played so much as kids, worked on projects in the Sixth Form, played Connect Four on the floor, Finn couldn’t help but go back to ‘the old days’. How old were their parents now? How old had they been then? He could clearly remember his father’s fortieth birthday party; and knew that at the rate the years were flying then his own would not be too far off. His parents had always seemed so grown-up – of course they had, he had only known them so. Yet Finn could not pretend that something hadn’t happened between their time and his.

  On a coffee table by Belinda’s little sofa, between a quarterly on the arts and a bi-monthly on antique furniture, was a nature magazine. Finn could appreciate the others, but it was this one that caught his attention. The cover was a deep gloss photo of a zebra on the African savannah. And Finn was gripped then with a yearning envy for the animals and their freedom. Just as he always was when birds flew over him on a bright blue day. He longed for the liberty to move, to run, to fly, to occupy such easy and open arenas. And accompanying this yearning was its familiar fellow feeling, that of asking himself how humans, in their drive for progress and civilisation, had conspired to rob themselves of the freedom of the African plains?

  Meanwhile, the open skies were for the most part still beyond humans, hanging over their gridlocked roads and earthbound offices like a cruel taunt. It had been a long-held fantasy of Finn’s to just raise his arms and move bird-like into that blue yonder. To swoop and swerve as if a swift, and rest on thermal currents like a bird of prey.

  As a child Finn had once dreamt that he had flown down the stairs, righting himself to land at their base in the hall. He had been so young when he’d had this dream that for years he’d thought it had actually happened, before becoming old enough to know that it couldn’t possibly have done. It was quite a common dream apparently, flying, though not one his mind had ever repeated.

  Remembering his own childhood made Finn think of those people whose ambition was their children. People who, perhaps with a yearning in themselves but no idea where to place it, instead raised families and put their hopes and belief into their own kids. Teaching them that they were amazing and could reach for the stars; and in so doing become amazing people themselves. This was a kind of time-bomb, Finn had always thought – potential stored up for a future generation.

  ‘Grown-up’, he realised now, boiled down to the big three commitments of marriage, mortgage and mouths to feed. And any of these could sound to Finn like the prison doors closing at the start of Porridge. But why? Were any of them bad things, when he knew that they were all that many people dreamt of? A part of him yearned for a family and a home of his own. But how could he embrace them, give his partner or his child the time they so deserved, when he was yet to be free?

  Finn felt something similar when it came to those friends, colleagues and neighbours who wanted only to help him fill every waking hour between leaving the office and going back to it, with leisure and activity. Time is short, he found himself thinking. Do you want it crammed with distraction? Can’t we make an effort to savour it?

  Yet he despaired in memory of his efforts at trying to explain these real and sincere feelings to even those he knew quite well. ‘Don’t you want to do more with your evenings and weekends?’ they would be asking, and Finn knew that he would sound mad to them. And so he made excuses, and kept it to himself. For though he loved his activities, Finn also took equal pleasure in the prospect of having time coming up where, if he wished it, he could do absolutely nothing at all. That was the deal he made with life.

  He had read a story on a news website recently, of volunteers punching a series of air-holes through the Arctic ice sheets to free a school of whales trapped beneath. Each air-hole was near enough to the one before it to be taken with one giant whale-breath.

  When Finn thought of his free hours now, he saw them as cubes of air spaced out before him, stretching off into the near future. And he knew that too many days ahead without a clear space and he would began to feel panic, claustrophobia. He would be like a prisoner not allowed out of his cell to visit the recreation ground – was it true that there were men inside who hadn’t felt rain in twenty years?

  The volunteers had saved two of the whales, another grew too weak. And so Finn knew a whale could die beneath the Arctic ice for want of an air-hole – even calling this image to mind brought a tightening in his chest as real as if a belt was being pulled around him.

  Finn had his pleasures though, and spent a good part of his time studying the lives of high achievers and those who had done something unique. He took what lessons he could from their lives – the library was filled with biographies, so he couldn’t be alone in this pursuit.

  Ferruccio Lamborghini, for instance, didn’t even think to build sports cars until he was already making tractors. So should he, Finn, then just get on with making tractors, so to speak, and let the sports cars take care of themselves? That metaphor rather seemed to suggest though that he go back to slugging it away at the mortgage office, until Destiny came calling. When surely Destiny, if she was to call at all, at least needed a door to knock at?

  Finn didn’t want to go back there, he r
eally didn’t want to. He felt that if he did, then any glinting nugget of potential he held would be forever delayed in being revealed. Finn didn’t want that, he’d never wanted it: he only wanted to play his own small part in the drama of life. He just hadn’t had the call yet from the casting director.

  For there needed to be a few odd people who didn’t do as all else did, who stepped sideways from society with all its cloying overbearingness, and reported back on the view from outside. Was there not then a bravery in the person who kept a clear mind, and their options open? But to Finn it felt impossible; he could see no way out.

  He couldn’t quite find the words to express all this rushing through his head now. And it certainly wasn’t simply about wanting extended leisure time or an easier life – though, Lord knows he found it no easier than anyone else. It might just be that a good long weekend-morning with his journal was required. He needed his diary. He needed an hour with his diary.

  All this fear of encroaching pressure and of life trying to rob him of his vigour came, Finn knew, from his own ill-realised ambitions. The fact that, nearing middle-age, they remained unfulfilled. He spent as long trying to understand them as pursue them. For he only knew that he wanted to do something, with no idea what it was. And how long had he got left?

  And then he realised how brief a generation was, and how quickly the next had to follow on its heels. A population then, a nation, was a precarious thing – it could be taken out with one illness, one disease, an infertility plague, and they wouldn’t make it out of the next century. ‘Oh God,’ he realised, the negative thoughts were coming back. ‘Get positive,’ he thought, ‘get positive.’

  But how now to express all of these thoughts? His yearning? Where could he be free? Finn didn’t know, he only longed again for his diary, to add to that private archive of tens, hundreds of thousands of words; where all he was could be poured out, and every hope and fear absolved and forgiven in the simple act of writing them down; panic and stress and confusion released in the movement of pen on paper.

  Life could be stifling; and a need for air to breathe was the hardest thing to justify in a world full of danger and protection. Though perhaps they would just muddle on though, like humanity always had always done before. Just like the Romans had when the Barbarians came calling…

  ‘Finn?’

  He was distracted from his train of thought by Belinda calling.

  ‘You in your own little world there?’

  ‘He’s had a lot on his mind lately,’ explained Sylvie, his de facto carer.

  ‘“The Absent-Minded Professor”, my dear Dad used to call him,’ remembered Bel.

  ‘Never quite clever enough for that,’ muttered Finn beneath his breath.

  Chapter 23 – Back in the Room

  ‘Is your Dad..?’ asked Sylvie.

  Bel nodded.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘Oh don’t be, it was back when Finn was still here.’

  ‘He was a good man,’ remembered Finn.

  ‘The best.’

  From there they settled into a relaxed conversation, beers passed around, the seriousness of earlier for now forgotten. Yet their talk had barely resumed and Finn hardly started his drink before that easy-going portion of the evening was over.

  ‘Lord, look at the time,’ declared Bel. ‘How has it gotten so late?’

  Sylvie looked to the clock on the Belinda’s wall – wonderfully, it was still one of those oversized wristwatches that hung five feet down from the coving. This was a teenage detail that Belinda had evidently wished to hold on to. It read only seven-fifteen. ‘Still early,’ thought Sylvie; and then she remembered their own schedule.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll have this later,’ said Jack, palming the cap back onto Finn’s bottle.

  ‘We’ll pick up your friends, and drive you back to town,’ instructed Bel. ‘Right, I’d better get my coat and shoes on.’ She jumped up to go downstairs.

  ‘I’ll start the van up,’ said Jack. ‘She was a bit sticky last night.’ And then he stopped, remembering something. ‘Finn, you haven’t seen the Beemer, have you.’

  Finn had to shake his head.

  ‘Come on then, it’s in the garage.’ Jack jumped up to lead him, forgetting to keep up any pretence that he didn’t spend half his life at the house. Finn followed him out.

  ‘She’s nice,’ whispered Belinda to Finn as they met on the stairs. ‘And Finn, I hope you find a way to be happy.’ She placed a hand on his arm. ‘You know, don’t you, that that’s all I ever wanted for you.’

  Finn felt the things he could have said at that moment. And so he held his tongue – for he knew that in her mind Belinda truly believed that.

  These quick departures gave Sylvie a chance to breathe perhaps. But they also left her alone. Alone in the room of the woman who she was certain must once have had Finn’s heart stashed with her other keepsakes in that secret drawer beneath the dressing table mirror.

  Being around Finn in his recent mood was making her too inward, considered Sylvie. And she didn’t like it – she was an outward person, who moved in the real world, not in a mental landscape. Perhaps this was a necessary phase, but that made it no more comfortable. For all the snugness of the bedroom, Sylvie wished she wasn’t there. She wished she wasn’t even in that city.

  ‘You ready?’ called Belinda up the stairs. Coming down to meet their hostess, Sylvie saw her stood below in wide-lapelled sheepskin coat and furry boots. Sylvie pulled her own check coat tight around her.

  And then Sylvie remembered something. She quickly asked Belinda about it on the stairs,

  ‘What was that you said when we got here, about the Grand Hotel being distracting?’

  To which Bel snickered, before answering in a tone of feminine conspiracy,

  ‘We used to think that that was where the men went with their mistresses.’

  Sylvie remembered the scene of canoodling she’d witnessed in the hotel bar, and said,

  ‘I think it is.’

  PART FOUR – SOMMERHILL ARTICULATE

  Chapter 24 – Champions

  Beside the house on its corner were an odd arrangement of garages. As the women arrived outside, so they saw the men at one of these with its doors open, stood before the square-angled nose of a German saloon.

  ‘Isn’t she a beauty?’ Jack was asking. ‘Best year they ever produced. Stay there, Finn. I’ll turn the engine over for you.’

  ‘We don’t have time,’ called Bel; to which Jack grudgingly concurred,

  ‘At least you got to see her anyway.’

  On a broad drive in front of the garages, was the small white van. It had side-windows, so was really more of a minibus. Across its back and both sides was borne the legend SUPERCLEAN CHAMPIONS. Beside the words were an image of a bucket and mop, and a mobile phone number.

  Unlocking, Belinda hopped up into the high driver’s seat.

  ‘I didn’t think you drove?’ asked Finn. As he asked, Belinda slid the side-door open for them from the inside.

  ‘I had to learn for this job.’

  ‘Only three accidents this year,’ noted Jack as he climbed into the passenger seat.

  ‘Only one of those was an accident, thank you,’ smiled Belinda. ‘The other two were… parking indiscretions.’

  ‘Well, I’d believe you, millions wouldn’t.’

  ‘Oh damn, I’ve not brought the log book with me. Where was it last?’

  Belinda jumped out to go back into the house to find it. When she didn’t return after a minute, Jack went after her to help. Left alone in the middle row of seats, Sylvie asked Finn,

  ‘Did you..?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Fancy her?’

  ‘Who wouldn’t?’

  ‘Did you get silly over her?’

  ‘I don’t care to remember.’

  ‘Did it spoil things?’

  ‘Kind-of.’

  ‘That can happen sometimes.’

  The host coupl
e clambered back in. And with a cheery, ‘Found it. Everybody strapped in?’ they left for the forecourt of the pub.

  The night was dark now, and the roads were free of traffic.

  ‘I’ll go and fetch the others,’ offered Sylvie as they pulled up on the carpark. Though this was more to have a chance to speak to Jemima than out of philanthropy.

  Having fetched them from the same barroom table, Sylvie delayed her friend a moment, leaving a bemused Jasper to climb into the van alone.

  Stood outside with Jemima, Sylvie asked her,

  ‘Everything okay?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t it be?’

  Sylvie hadn’t time for niceties, and might not have another chance,

  ‘You know he’s married? And has a family?’

  ‘Honestly,’ was all Jemima answered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You think every meeting with a man’s about sex?’

  ‘Well, tell me this one isn’t?’

  ‘Gah! I can’t believe you, Sylvie.’

  ‘Well, what’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘It means, don’t judge everyone by your standards. You think you’re the World’s Expert in men. But look at you, you’re thirty and single and no-one on the horizon.’

  Each woman was as shocked as the other that the preceding exchange had just taken place. Jemima quickly scrambled into the van, leaving Sylvie to say to herself,

  ‘I don’t know what’s gotten into everybody – one night out of town and we’re falling apart!’

  Chapter 25 – Associated Something

  ‘Everything all right?’ asked Belinda once the group were boarded. Now, there was a woman, Sylvie felt, whose enthusiasm for every little thing might after a while become slightly wearing.

  ‘In fact,’ their hostess then declared, ‘I’ve just had a brilliant idea. Finn, there’s something you’ve got to see.’

  ASSOCIATED STYLISTS

  Such was the name spelt out in large metal letters across the first floor brickwork of the building that Belinda had parked outside. A stone’s throw from the Sommerhill Grand, Jasper and Jemima had since left to make their way back to the hotel. But Bel had brought the party to this spot especially, and now Finn and Sylvie stood with Jack and her outside.