by Rosa Temple
‘That’s awful, Andy. But she came back and you still had feelings for her?’
‘Yes. And after a while I thought I could sense she liked me too, and not just as a friend. Your letter was right. Don’t hold back you told me and just go for it. Some of the things you said didn’t quite make sense to me, but I thought you just wanted to cover every eventuality.’
‘You’re so right. So, when I saw you both at karaoke the other night, you’d broken the ice already?’
‘Sure had. Now everything is sweet between us. Who knows what could happen next? Don’t want to jinx it but I’m thinking wedding bells.’
Andy winks and I feel a desperate call from my carrier bag that says: Eat us Sydney. Eat us now. Damian does not fancy you in the slightest and you’ve made a massive fool of yourself.
‘Oh well,’ Andy says, tapping my arm. ‘I best be off. Skeleton staff on Sunday nights. You coming by later?’
‘Er, no.’ I raise my carrier bag. ‘Already bought dinner.’
‘Right you are.’ With that he rushes off up the road to Frankie’s and I am yet to move one foot in front of the other.
Could I really have gotten that so wrong? I was and am still convinced that Damian has taken a liking for me. Either that or he is a big fat flirt who should be castrated before serving his next custard flan. What was with all the smiles, leading conversations and seeming so desperate to serve me the best cakes in the house? I don’t get it. And didn’t that weirdo, Jed, say his brother had his sights on someone. It could still be me. Just because Damian isn’t Anon, the object of his desire could still be me. The signs are all there. And when I think about it, Damian isn’t the type to write a letter anyway.
I head for home and try to think back on all the times I’d spoken to Damian and piece the whole of this mystery together once and for all.
Chapter 31
I stare at Carey’s artistic block capitals on the sticky note she left on the hallway mirror when I come downstairs on Monday morning. I’ve got a delicate tummy after an overdose of chocolate and I’m in desperate need of coffee. Peeling off the note and heading for the kitchen I miss the smell of fresh coffee. Carey is usually up before me and has some brewing. I guess I have to make my own. I also need to get a move on because I’ve slept in and I don’t want to be late for work. There’s a lot to do today. I have to finalise the article about Frankie’s. I feel very happy Andy and Ruthie have found each other. Or re-found each other, and I’m hoping some of their luck in love will rub off on me.
It goes without saying that I comfort ate myself into oblivion when I discovered Damian wasn’t Anon. Then I soaked in the bath for ages having the chocolate sweats and wishing I’d saved at least one of the family-sized bars for Carey. Before falling into a deep, chocolatey slumber I’d decided it would only be a question of time before I could strike up some kind of relationship with Damian. I’d never seen him flirt with anyone but me, so I’d bide my time and wait for an appropriate opportunity to be straight with him. For right now, I would be work focussed which meant downing my coffee, munching through a slice of toast and taking a quick shower.
I’m ready quite quickly for work but just as I go to pull my bedroom door to, I notice that Carey’s isn’t tight shut. It’s unusual for her to leave it like that. Maybe she left in a hurry. In all the time I’ve been here, I’ve always felt her bedroom was off limits to me. She would come into my room for a chat, but it never seemed to happen the other way round. I knew she didn’t much like to be disturbed when she was in her studio so the end two rooms on the landing, her bedroom and the studio, have been a bit of a mystery. The same goes for the dark room in the garden but I assumed she’d show me around when the weather improved in spring.
Something about how far open her door is makes her room suddenly irresistible and all I need is a quick peek in before getting off to work. Even though I know she’s not here, I still look down over the bannister at the front door for signs of Carey coming home early. She won’t, I’m sure, but my heart beats a little faster as I approach her bedroom.
I expected Carey’s room to be big, bigger than mine, and it is. The décor is stunning, I’d seen the colour from the times I’ve stood at the threshold. Carey always made a point of coming out of the room and closing the door behind her on the few occasions I happened to find myself there. I don’t go right in now, just a few steps. The walls are painted a dramatic shade of pink. The windows, tall, and in keeping with the rest of the house, are draped with white silk curtains and chiffon nets which swoop and swirl from rose gold rails. Carey’s bedroom looks onto the garden. She’d be able to capture some of it, in particular the tops of the trees from her king size bed. The bed covers are purple velvet, clashing with the walls but in a contemporary and stylish way.
An old-fashioned dressing table with a puffy stool in front of it leans up against one wall, another is fitted with a modern shelving unit and cupboards. I want to take a quick look inside her cupboards. I’ve never seen Carey in the same outfit twice, not even her pyjamas get repeated. Somehow, I resist and stay put by the door. The door to her en suite is open and I can smell expensive shower gel and shampoo coming from it. Again, I resist the urge to nose around although I’m dying to see what products Carey uses. For a woman in her forties, she is a flawless beauty and I should nip in quickly to pick up a few tips and secrets.
I jump out of my skin when a bird caws and flaps by the second window and lands on the sill. I look over at the bird which immediately takes to flight. It caws as it soars upwards. A small writing table and chair is neatly tucked away under the window and my eye is drawn to it now.
Carey is a writer? I think to myself. And now I have to walk into the room. There’s no laptop on the table just a few photography books stacked in one corner, a couple of notebooks and some pens. I assume she uses this as a place to sketch but then I see a letter writing pad with a silver pen next to it. A letter writer. Everyone texts or emails but Carey has someone she is communicating to the old-fashioned way. I stop in my tracks when I recognise not only the paper from the writing pad but the handwriting too. I’d seen stacks of letters on this same writing paper and I’d read every word. The letters to Dear Vicky signed by L were written here. I’d worked out that L must be a woman, but I would never in a million years have guessed L was Carey. The writing on her sticky note on the downstairs mirror hadn’t given her away. But this!
So, Carey is the broken hearted L whose life has fallen apart but whose letters are so cryptic, she never really says how her heart broke. She uses abstract language to hide the real facts so that all we know is L is sad about something and has been holding onto it for years. Right in front of me is the next letter to Dear Vicky. Carey has written a few lines and this is the one thing I can’t stop myself looking at. I reason with myself that as ‘Vicky’ I’ll see it soon anyway.
Dear Vicky
I haven’t written for a while. You remember I told you that people from my past were descending on me and I had no way of stopping them? Well you were the one who encouraged me to allow them to come and I don’t regret it.
I remember the dinner party of Carey’s friends. The one in which she continued to reveal nothing. Nothing of her past with those people and she’d revealed nothing of her feelings to them either. Not even when I spied on them by the front door when they were leaving did I get even a sniff of what was going on with Carey.
I thought seeing them, my old friends from the past, would help me to heal but I am more disconnected and unsure about my future than ever. One thing I know for sure is I can’t go on
How could Carey stop mid-sentence like that? Without a full stop I don’t know if she means she can’t go on with her life or go on seeing her old friends, or what. What can’t she go on to do? Carey does everything possible to stop me gleaning her emotional state. Hiding her face. Freezing me out and not talking to me and temporarily shutting down. I’d put up with all that because Carey is a person you can’t help
but like, and her idiosyncrasies, although downright annoying at times, were never a deal breaker. If I was as good a friend to her as she has been to me then maybe I should have asked questions, demanded she tell me what was wrong.
As it is, I can’t question Carey about the letter. Look at how I’ve come across it. Nosing around in her room. If she found out I was here she would shut down completely, hide behind her hair. I wouldn’t be surprised if she gave me my marching orders. No, I’m stuck with this knowledge. Carey is in pain and I can’t help her. I can’t reveal my identity, the fact I was spying. I have no idea how I can make her tell the whole truth.
I hear a creak from downstairs. It sounds like a floorboard and I’m rooted to the spot. If that’s Carey, a) I didn’t hear her come in and b) no matter what happens now she’ll know I was in her room. I freeze frame for a few seconds, listening for her footsteps on the stairs or in the corridor but I hear nothing. Has she stopped still? I don’t breathe for a second and hear the creak again. I breathe a sigh of relief when I recognise the sound as one of the many creaks and groans this house emanates because of the central heating. I’m alone here but it’s time to leave.
I exhale, looking at the desk and the rest of the room, making sure nothing has moved out of place. As I turn to leave, I notice a framed photograph on the wall by the door, easily missed until now. The light from the window reflects off it so it’s hard to make out what the subject is until I’m up close.
The photograph doesn’t follow the usual theme of all the others. There’s no lone woman appearing in colour amidst black and white surroundings, looking lost, lonely and out of place. This is a colour photograph of two hands. The forefinger of an adult male hand is slightly outstretched, the others curled together, and the tiny hand of a baby holds his forefinger. The baby, whose arm is chubby and small can only be a few months old. There is something sweet and emotive about this photograph. I can sense the love in the scene and marvel at how it was possible to capture the moment.
When I’d guessed Carey had left a family behind, had I been right? Is she a mother who abandoned her child? Putting up a photograph that only shows their hands must be significant. Maybe she doesn’t want anyone to identify them, thus revealing Carey as the mother who ran away from her family. Or may it’s too painful for her to look into their faces but she needs to have some sort of reminder of their existence. But this is a painful reminder which means Carey wants to torture herself for abandoning her baby. Yet somehow, it’s hard to see Carey as the sort to leave a family. Maybe these are the hands of her father and her, taken by someone else. Either way she must have loved whoever is in the picture. Again, as I’ve been snooping, I can’t ask Carey about this photograph either.
I leave her room realising that unless I confront her directly, Dear Vicky is the only chance I’ll have to find anything out about Carey.
As I close the front door, finally on my way to address the impending publication day for Bridley Green, I feel an immense pressure on my shoulders. I can’t take back what I’ve seen but I know that not saying anything to Carey, ever, is the wrong thing to do. I just don’t know when or what I’ll say. I really don’t know how.
Chapter 32
L’s letter never made it into the office by the time we published and I haven’t slept in days. I wish so much I could write my own Dear Vicky letter and ask her to get me out of the stomach- churning mess I’m in. Up to a week or so ago, things seemed to be running more or less smoothly, or as smooth as my life can get given everything I have going on. It just seems as if, the minute I thought everything would change for the better, when I’d finally had the talk with Rob and Helena, when I thought I had found a new friend and when I thought I might even have a boyfriend, things took a nose dive and I’m more depressed now than when I first arrived in Bridley.
Let’s start with Rob. He does nothing but send me email updates about what’s happening with the flat. With every email comes five or six additional pages about how sorry he is and how it’s not too late to stop the sale of the flat, no one has come to view as yet. Then he rounds his pleas off with a well-selected memory of our past. A wonderful moment we shared, promises we made, baby names we’d picked out. I know it’s emotional blackmail but in my current state I’m wondering if maybe I’ve been too rash. I do still miss all the things we had and would love to relive some of those memories. Rob is so easy to love and it’s better the devil you know. Isn’t it? Perhaps I can learn to forgive Rob one day and take him back.
Which brings me to the next thing. Having a boyfriend. Damian continues to show an interest in everything that goes on with me at the office. He keeps me chatting in the coffee house for ages and just as I think he is on the brink of asking me out or I get up the nerve to ask him, something happens. A lasagne burning in the oven, a customer walking in wanting cakes, an interfering mother. And then there’s his brother Jed. Jed has this annoying way of showing up like the proverbial bad penny. I didn’t see him for weeks and now he springs up at whatever bar or shop I happen to be in. Always at a weekend. I never see him during the week so it’s usually safe to go into Damian’s Coffee House and not run into him there. I have no idea where he spends his weekdays and I didn’t think I cared but every time I see him, he evokes some kind of chemical reaction in me that I can’t explain. Then, as soon as he opens his mouth, I feel the need to clobber him one.
I’m as frustrated as hell about the Damian situation because my desire to hook a guy so I can move on from Rob more quickly doesn’t give me time to iron out my third dilemma. What to do about Carey. My current tactic of letting sleeping dogs lie for now doesn’t sit well with me. I want to ignore the letter and the photograph in Carey’s room while I clear my head, but I can’t. I see Carey so differently now and because she neither finished the letter nor sent it in to the problem page, I’m scared I’ll come home and find she’s ended it all. It’s gotten so bad, apart from losing sleep, I’m not eating properly and every day I make up a reason to call her before I go home to make sure I don’t walk in to find her lifeless body in the hallway with a suicide note beside it. I’ll ring her and ask, Should I buy milk? Has she run out of her favourite coffee because I’m passing the posh shop and I could always stop. And when she’s away for work I’m looking at my phone constantly, expecting bad news about her to reach me from a complete stranger. As far as I know Carey doesn’t have a next of kin. The emergency services might track me down to her current address via her phone or her dental records. If a policeman showed up on the doorstep, I don’t know what I’d do.
‘Back at your old vantage point?’
Jed’s voice brings me down to earth with a bump.
‘What the hell do you mean by that?’ I snap and rest my eyes on his big feet next to my table. I’m back at Daisy’s where I seem to have spent the last few Saturdays, scribbling in my notebook and yes, assuming my vantage point of Damian’s Coffee Shop.
‘I just mean,’ Jed says, sliding into the plastic seat opposite mine, ‘that since you’re writing in your notebook then maybe you’ve found your subject matter. For the book, that is. You’ve found something to write about and you can watch it all playing out from here.’
I slap the pages shut.
‘I’m not spying on your brother.’
‘What? I never said you were. I thought this was your story.’ He casts a casual hand at the window. ‘The village? Or village life? Maybe there are certain aspects of it you’ve found to write about after thirty years of not having any experiences whatsoever.’
‘You know you can really be an insensitive, arrogant …’
‘Bastard?’
‘No. Freak. You never have a single nice thing to say to me.’
‘I thought I was being friendly. Showing an interest in your work. You’ve never asked about mine by the way.’
‘Aren’t you Damian’s intern?’
‘Funny. No. I’m just helpful. He hasn’t recruited anyone for Saturday’s yet and he gets busy in
the run up to Christmas. Maybe you could apply. You know the shop well and you obviously don’t have much happening on a Saturday. Unless of course you really are writing your magnum opus and I’m just being a nosey … what was it? Freak?’
‘Let’s settle for nosey. I won’t resort to name calling.’ I fiddle with the pages of my notebook and then start rattling my pen against it. I’m rattling away so hard my wrist is aching and Jed won’t stop looking at the fidgety hand, a big smirk on his face.
‘What now?’ I say through gritted teeth.
‘Nothing. I’ve just never seen a writer in progress, so I’m intrigued. Perhaps you could tell me a little about your process, you know, in case I ever decide to write a book.’
‘Forgive me, Jed but I can hardly see you as a writer. Not a serious one anyway.’
‘Really, and what do you see me as. Apart from nosey?’
‘I couldn’t say and I should keep my opinions to myself.’
‘And so should I?’ He grins and I seriously could belt him one around his smug chops. I wish he wasn’t so flipping handsome, a black eye would ruin his features. ‘But,’ he drones on as I hurriedly start packing up to leave, ‘if I could give you my opinion on one thing?’
‘If you must.’
‘I’ve read your articles on the magazine. I really like your writing.’
I’m standing now but no one can resist a compliment when they get one. Especially when it’s coming from the person you’d least expect to compliment you.
‘Oh, yes?’ I try to be as nonchalant as I can. ‘What exactly do you like about it?’ In other words, what is it you can see that all the editors I ever pitched to, on the nationals and magazines, could never see in my writing?
