Your stuff. How clever of me. As if it wasn’t him that was moving in, just his shirts and boxers.
He was quiet for a bit and I wondered if I had pushed my luck, revealed my hand too early. ‘Do you think you can cope?’ He said it quietly, seriously.
‘What, with your unpredictable shift patterns and your being knackered all the time and never knowing when you’ll be home?’ I asked.
‘No …’ he said, thoughtfully. ‘With me shagging the living daylights out of you every second I am home.’
*
My parents rang the doorbell on the dot of 10 a.m. one Sunday, exactly when they had said they would. I was still sorting through piles of my clothes that I had heaped onto the bed to make room: a pile for Oxfam, a pile to keep, another pile that occupied the grey area in between and would probably be shoved into plastic bags and stored on top of the wardrobe until I had the courage to throw them out. Matty was in the sitting room and when the buzzer went, I heard him open the door to the flat and start to run down the stairs. As I came out onto the landing, he was saying, ‘Mr E, come in, come in!’
I looked past Matty down the stairs. My father was carrying two drawers from the chest unit, one under each arm.
Matty ran down the steps to take them from him. ‘Where’s the boss?’ he said.
‘Getting the other drawers out of the boot,’ Dad replied, shaking his head at Matty to indicate that a drawer handover halfway up would be more trouble than it was worth.
‘She shouldn’t be doing that, you should have given us a bell.’ As Matty said this, there was a clattering noise from further down the stairwell and Mum’s head appeared. She was holding the other two drawers, awkwardly.
‘Come on, missus,’ said Matty, leaping down the stairs. ‘You can’t do that. I’ll take those, you go up and help Lisa get the kettle on.’ They began to grapple with the drawers between them, Mum a little flustered by Matty’s chivalry. Chivalry had never been my dad’s forte and she didn’t know quite how to cope.
I descended a couple of steps but Mum had already eased her way past Matty and Dad and was coming up towards me, shooing me back into the flat. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘I think the men want us to leave them to it.’
I put the kettle on, as I had been bidden. ‘Dad’s got to go straight off to Uncle Jim’s when we’ve unloaded,’ Mum said, as I made coffee in the red cafetiere they had bought me for Christmas. I actually fancied a cup of tea but I knew it would please them to see me using it. ‘I can stay for a coffee.’
Dad and Uncle Jim played bowls on Sunday mornings. Mum would go home to make the lunch – even though it was just the two of them, they still had a roast most Sundays.
While Mum and I had coffee in the kitchen, Matty reassembled the chest of drawers in the bedroom. ‘Lis’!’ he called through, after a while. ‘You want to come and see this is right?’
Mum and I both went through to the bedroom, clutching our cups. ‘Are you sure you don’t want a coffee, Matthew?’ said Mum, her voice full of concern.
‘Nah, you’re fine, thanks,’ Matty said, then to me, ‘You definitely want it here, you don’t want me to measure the alcove?’
The three of us stood in the bedroom, looking around, as if the items of furniture in it were flowers in a vase that could be easily rearranged, as opposed to bulky and unmanageable objects that were mismatched and didn’t really suit the room they were in. I had a brief vision of the whole house that Matty and I could have one day when he was a consultant, when I sold this place and when he sold his flat in Brockley, wherever the hell that was. We would have built-in wardrobes with mirrored doors. Suddenly, the phrase built-in wardrobes had an almost poetic allure.
Matty scratched the back of his head. ‘Course, you could always put the wardrobe in the alcove instead, that might work. I could measure up.’
‘You can’t do that on your own, Matthew!’ my mum cried. ‘You’ll have to wait until George can come back and help.’
He isn’t on his own, I thought. I’m here.
‘What would the lady of the house like?’ Matty asked me. ‘Chest of drawers here or there?’
‘Let’s try there first,’ I said, pointing. ‘Then we’ll see what that looks like.’
‘Okey-doke.’
As Mum and I went back into the kitchen, she said, ‘He can’t keep moving it all on a whim, you know, you can’t mess him around.’
It took Matty a few minutes to push the chest of drawers into the right place and slot the drawers in. As he came into the kitchen, Mum said, ‘Matthew, you are a wonder.’
He winked at me, a conspiratorial wink that my mother couldn’t see, then said, ‘Think I’ll have that coffee now.’
*
Half an hour later, the three of us were in Matty’s car, driving Mum home. She had said she was happy to walk, but Matty wouldn’t hear of it. ‘It’s freezing out there today, you can’t possibly walk!’ Mum was in the front passenger seat and I was in the back, on the left-hand side behind Mum, with my head resting against the side window. Matty and my mum were talking to each other and it was giving me a headache.
‘No, it suits you, seriously, I like it. Makes me wonder what Lisa would be like with short hair.’
Mum petted her own head, checking that the haircut still had bounce. She didn’t get her hair done all that often. ‘Well, I wasn’t too sure. When you get to my age.’
‘You’re no age!’
I was thinking, how easy it is to be a young man. How interesting it would be to try it, just for a week or so, to walk around having allowances made for you all the time, to earn praise for just smiling and being ordinarily polite – or for slotting the drawers into a piece of furniture.
‘How’s work? Are you working this weekend?’
‘No. In fact, I might be coming off A & E soon. Well, I mean coming off earlies, lates, nights, that rota.’
I leaned forward. ‘You didn’t tell me that.’
He glanced in the rearview mirror. ‘Well, it isn’t definite. I was going to wait until it was, and surprise you. I know it’s hard for you.’ I couldn’t recall having complained about his rota. ‘You know, comes a point,’ he continued, ‘when you want things to be a bit more normal, bit more regular hours … other priorities.’
My mother looked over at him. He was still glancing at me, then back at the road, and didn’t pick up on it – but I did. Oh Mum, just stop, I thought.
‘What will you do?’ Mum asked.
He turned the steering wheel to pull into the road before the Close. ‘Fracture Clinic. I’d still be the on-call registrar for A & E.’
There was a fast-approaching blur of silver, then, and the side window that I had been resting against a moment ago pulled away and slammed into my head. Three other things happened in the same moment. My mother declared, ‘Ooh!’ in a high exhalation, as the airbag in the passenger seat inflated. Matty shouted. ‘Fuck!’ There was an enormous bang.
In the next moment, I was still sitting where I had been in the back seat, but my head was ringing. Our car was skewed diagonally across the road. Matty was leaping out of the driver’s seat.
I looked to the side. There was a small grey car on our left, at another diagonal, with the driver, a man, slumped over the wheel. I couldn’t tell how young or old he was but I could see the bald patch on top of his head.
Matty pulled the handle of my door but it didn’t open. ‘Are you alright?’ he said through the glass. I looked at him. A long diagonal crack in the glass was bisecting his face. I nodded. ‘Are you sure you’re not injured?’ I shook my head slowly. It was still ringing.
‘What about you, missus?’ he said calmly to Mum.
‘Yes, yes, I’m okay,’ Mum squeaked, her voice somewhat higher than usual.
I watched as Matty ran to the other car. By now, the driver was sitting upright in his seat. He was in his late fifties, maybe, his hair sparse. His face was scrunched tight with pain, his eyes closed and his lips pressed together. The d
river’s door of his car was hanging off its hinges. Matthew reached inside and clamped both hands around the driver’s neck.
I sat very still for a moment. Although I had told Matty I wasn’t hurt, I was still interrogating my body before I moved. I tried lifting the soles of my feet one by one, to check my legs worked, and moving my head slowly from side to side. While I did this, I watched Matty. He was speaking to the driver but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. He still had his hands clamped around the man’s neck. Beyond Matty and the car, standing on the pavement, was a couple in their teens. The boy was looking at Matty with his mouth open. The girl was on her phone.
‘Are you alright, Lisa?’ My mother’s voice was still high-pitched.
‘Yes, sorry Mum, just a bit stunned. Are you?’
‘Yes, I’m fine. Are you really alright? Should we get out of the car or wait for Matty?’
‘I think we should get out.’
When I pulled on my door handle, it didn’t work from the inside either. I unclipped my seatbelt and moved myself gingerly across the back seat to exit the other side.
Mum and I were standing on the grass verge next to the young couple as an ambulance swayed around the corner and came to a halt. The driver was a young woman. The man who leapt from the passenger seat was large, well over six foot, in his fifties I guessed, and exuded authority. As he approached the car where Matty was still holding the man’s neck between his two hands, the paramedic said, ‘Okay, son, we’ve got this now.’
With no fuss or flurry, Matty said, ‘I’m a doctor. Get the neck brace.’
My mum said quietly, ‘That chicken needs to go in the oven. Your dad will be back before we know it.’
*
Matty applied the neck brace, then let the paramedics extract the driver from the car, lay him on a stretcher and put him in the ambulance. We all watched the ambulance pull off, and then Matty came over to us. ‘I’ll wait for the police, to deal with the cars,’ he said. ‘You get your mum home and give her some tea with sugar. Two sugars for both of you, that’s an order. Okay?’
We both nodded bravely. Matty looked at me. ‘The absence seizures, were they ever brought on by a blow?’ I shook my head slowly.
He looked from one of us to the other, holding each of our gazes. Then he winked at my mum and said, ‘Sorry for the bad language, Mrs E.’
I gave him a wan smile, wishing I had received a small injury, nothing serious of course, but enough to snap Matty out of professional mode and to make myself the centre of his attention. Then I berated myself for feeling envious of a man who, for all we knew, had a broken neck.
Matty leaned towards me, put both of his hands very gently on my shoulders and kissed the top of my head. ‘You really okay, you sure?’ he whispered.
I nodded again.
Mum said, ‘Oh Matthew, what would we have done without you?’
We were less than two hundred metres from my parents’ house but Mum and I walked slowly down the Close. I had hold of her arm, or perhaps she had hold of mine. A neighbour came out from number forty-four and said, ‘Bridget, are you alright?’
Mum said, a little stiffly, ‘Yes, I’m fine, thank you, my daughter’s here.’
Inside the house, I sat Mum down on the sofa and went to the kitchen and became aware that my legs were shaking fiercely, the muscles shuddering against the bone as I moved around the small square kitchen. I filled and turned on the kettle that always leaked. I hoped I wasn’t going to pass out, not when I was in charge of looking after Mum. I switched on the oven for her, to start warming it up. I knew she would start fussing about lunch as soon as she had had her tea.
Matty must have tracked Dad down by phone at the Bowls Club as twenty minutes later, while we were both still drinking tea, there was the sound of his key in the door. He stood in the doorway of the sitting room looking at us and said, ‘So, I heard.’
Mum burst into tears.
*
When we got home early that evening, I found a bruise on my left-hand temple, a small but dense one, with a slight swelling beneath, that looked as though it might spread down my face. I went up to Matthew and stood in front of him, pushing my hair back from my face to show him, wincing – a little melodramatically – as he examined it. He gave a pale smile and said, ‘You’ll live.’
We weren’t all that hungry but I made us toasted sandwiches and while we ate them, I talked through what I had seen of the accident, how I felt, wanting to replay the incident the way people do, as if to get the story straight, cement it into anecdote. Matthew indulged me, nodding and adding the odd phrase, but I sensed his heart wasn’t in it. Perhaps he thought I was milking it a bit. It was pretty minor, after all, in comparison with what happened in his world. Nobody had died; Mum and I were okay; the other driver had severe whiplash and his car was a write-off. The fate of Matty’s car was yet to be decided.
We took a glass of wine each over to the sofa and, while he slumped down and picked up the television remote, I went back to the kitchen to make tea to go with the wine. By the time I returned, Matty was asleep with a slight frown on his face, lying backwards at an awkward angle, one leg hanging off the sofa, foot on the floor. His glass of wine was on the floor and I went over, picked it up and put it on a coaster on the coffee table. I sat down in the armchair opposite and watched him sleep. As I did, I felt I was seeing his job in A & E through fresh eyes, the adrenaline of it, and I saw how it must be when that drained away later, when his blood quietened again. As I sat there, on that armchair, while an antiques show played in the background with the sound off, I resolved to be more understanding.
Was it really a desire for understanding on my part – or the less noble thought that came out of that afternoon’s small incident: if something happens, this man can look after me? How deep that goes in our DNA, how seductive it is – is there a woman alive who hasn’t known since she was a small girl that there are things and people out there that can hurt her? The thought of handing over responsibility for our personal safety – isn’t it just so hard, in our tired and teary moments, not to want that? We all get exhausted, from time to time, men and women both, we all have our moments of weakness – and don’t men have their own equivalent, like the moment when Matty had laid his head on my shoulder as I let us into the building after our night at Spaghettini? What was that, if not a desire to abdicate, momentarily at least?
Perhaps I had a little of my own delayed shock, even though I had received nothing more than a small bump on the head – even a small bump was anxiety-provoking for me, given my medical history. In truth, I was a little disappointed Matty hadn’t made more of a fuss of me once we got home and all at once I, too, was exhausted by the events of a day that had begun so ordinarily, with a chest of drawers and making coffee for my mum; with a short drive and a conversation about a haircut – perhaps I was exhausted by my own sudden understanding. I loved this man who had come into my life, loved his unpredictability and his strange moods and his sudden weaknesses, and it was always going to be difficult, because if you were going to love someone who dealt with life and death and whose day was a constant round of dramas and adrenaline, then you had to go with the flow, their flow, that much was obvious to me now. You couldn’t use your own small dramas to compete with their ups and downs. It was like being on a boat that was being lifted and dropped by the swell of the sea. You just had to point your bow into the rise of the wave and go with it.
I was proud of myself for bringing that metaphor to mind. I’d learnt the thing about waves on a sea-kayaking trip with a group of friends from my BA Education course, a weekend adventure I had agreed to, rashly, in a spirit of feel-the-fear-and-do-it-anyway. I had hated every minute, particularly the journey back, as the swell of the sea grew beneath us. You mustn’t panic, when the sea starts to swell, and you must never let the waves take you broadside, you’ll flip over. Be brave, point your bow into an oncoming swell, and ride it even if it takes the bow of your boat upwards until it points
at the sky. I was frightened then and I was frightened now, but I was a thirty-five-year-old secondary teacher – I’d had enough of life being ordinary and I couldn’t afford to take six months off and visit Australia or India. Matty was going to be my adventure instead.
How fine is hindsight. Perhaps I didn’t think any of this at the time, as I watched Matty sleep and dreamed that if I stayed with him I would be protected in a car crash. Perhaps all I thought was, yes, this one. Him. Perhaps, as a woman who didn’t have a driving licence and couldn’t climb a tree or ski or perform any action that relied on balance, I was just too easily impressed by physical competence. Do we ever really know why we decide on one person rather than another?
Matty stirred in his sleep, opened his eyes briefly, gave a half-awake smile, then opened his arms for me to go and join him. I rose happily, slotted myself in between him and the back of the sofa, half-lying across him, and he wrapped his arms around my shoulders. Holding each other, pressed close, we dozed for a while.
After half an hour or so, he sat up a little, still holding me. Our tea had gone cold but he reached out for his wine glass, lifted his head awkwardly to take a sip, replaced it on the table.
‘God,’ he said, his voice husky from sleep, ‘I’ve just remembered I’ve got to go to Nottingham tomorrow, one-day course.’
I stroked his arm, thinking that I didn’t want him to ever leave the sofa, let alone go to Nottingham, thinking that I loved this sort of intimacy more than sex.
He sighed.
‘What time you got to be up?’ I asked.
‘Early,’ he said. ‘I’d better check the trains, give me your phone a mo.’
‘Where’s yours?’ I asked, as I took my phone out of my pocket.
‘Over there,’ he said. He waved a hand in the direction of the kitchen counter, then pulled me in a bit closer, one arm still around my shoulder, bending his head to kiss the top of mine as I unlocked my phone with one hand.
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