Love Lives

by Emlyn Rees

  Denny closed the catalogue and rested his hand on the cover. There was a long pause.

  Verity held her breath.

  ‘You know, Verity,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t believe what everyone says about me.’

  At that moment the waterfall feature that Denny had rigged up to gush over a line of surfboards at the back of the shop started with a gurgle. Verity jumped and Denny laughed. Embarrassed, she adjusted the strap on her bag.

  ‘It’s just that around here, people tend to pigeon-hole you, you know?’ Denny continued.

  She knew he had a reputation for hanging around all the tourist girls who came in the summer and everyone knew he was a bit of a show-off on a surfboard. He’d certainly been out with stacks of girls, but right now, with just the two of them together, none of that seemed to matter. ‘I don’t really listen to what people say, Denny,’ she said, her voice catching.

  ‘Good,’ he said, as if deliberately lightening up, wiping away his vulnerable admission with a cheerful smile.

  Verity smiled back.

  ‘You know, I think you and I are quite similar,’ he said. ‘People look at you and see a successful, talented person and yet they don’t see the real person underneath. They expect you to be this …’ Denny rubbed his fingers in the air ‘… star all the time. In here it’s my job to watch people,’ he continued, tapping his temple. ‘I have to tell how they’re going to react … what they’re going to buy, what their motivation is.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of it like that before,’ she said.

  ‘I watch people. And sometimes I get to watch you as you come past here with that girl …’

  ‘Treza.’

  ‘Whatever. And I can tell just by looking at you that you’re so much classier than all those other girls around here. It’s the way you hold yourself. Your posture, your height. I mean, you’re stunning and I bet you don’t even realise it.’

  ‘Don’t,’ Verity said, starting to blush.

  Denny waved his hand in dismissal. He smiled reassuringly at her, as he deliberately tidied up the catalogues. Verity felt light with the implied respect in his little gesture and she could feel herself smiling at him. There was a pause.

  ‘I’d better …’ Verity pointed at the door and started towards it. She was acutely conscious that he was watching her. She was nearly at the door before she heard him laugh. She turned. ‘What?’

  He glanced down at his hands, shaking his head. ‘I know it’s a long shot,’ he said, ‘but … would you go out with me some time? Just you and me?’

  Verity was so shocked that she finally lost her cool and gawped.

  ‘Nothing heavy,’ he went on, ‘I mean … you probably already have a boyfriend and I don’t want to tread on any toes –’

  ‘No, no,’ Verity blurted out. ‘I’m not seeing anyone … right now.’

  Denny grinned at her and even his eyes seemed to smile. ‘Right,’ he said, stroking his beard. ‘Right. Well, um, how about this Saturday night?’

  Verity grinned back and shrugged. ‘OK. Saturday’s fine.’

  *

  Verity stood on the pavement outside Denny’s shop, feeling as if she’d just stepped out of a virtual reality ride. ‘Wow!’ she finally allowed herself to say out loud, before swinging her bag over her shoulder and setting off down the street in a run.

  By the time she reached the bus stop – just in time to see the back of the bus disappearing into the distance – her head was pounding with so many implications of her meeting with Denny that she decided she didn’t care whether Treza was with Will or not, she had to tell her what had happened.

  Stopping, she crouched down and pulled open her bag to find her mobile phone. It was only then that she saw the carrier bag that Jimmy had given her. Unwrapping it, she found a home-made CD and turned it over in her hands. Why on earth would Jimmy Jones give her this? she wondered, checking the name of the R&B bands on the cover. It wasn’t exactly the kind of music she expected him to be into.

  She picked up her phone but, now she thought about it, decided she wouldn’t call Treza. She was too excited and Treza was bound to put a damper on it. After all, Treza hadn’t talked to Denny. She didn’t know how different he was, how charming and how understanding. No, Verity thought, heading off to school on foot, she’d keep Denny Shapland to herself for the time being.

  She was still grinning twenty minutes later as she walked up through the residential cottages towards the top of the hill. Even when a crazy-looking dog started barking furiously at her from behind a window, she didn’t alter her pace, or stop grinning. Whoever said that dreams never came true?

  Chapter IV

  NED SPENCER WOKE to the frenzied barking of his half-mad, one-eyed collie dog. He groaned, picturing the delinquent animal cheerfully battering himself against the cottage’s bay window downstairs, no doubt intent on terrifying some hapless passer-by to death. ‘Shut up!’

  It would have been a scream, but with his face wedged into the pillow, Ned’s words came out muffled. Not that it mattered: they’d been more of a plea than a command. Ned knew his limitations in relation to the dog. He was aware that even if he’d shouted at the top of his voice, he would have been ignored. Because as well as having been blind in one eye since birth, the dog had developed Ned-orientated deafness in both ears since.

  Wobbles, as in collie-wobbles (Ned’s daughter’s idea), was two years old. Working on a ratio of seven to one, this made him an adolescent in canine years, Ned had calculated, thereby explaining the creature’s current anti-authoritarian streak. It was a phase Wobbles was going through, Ned was convinced. The barking, the battering, the drooling and the occasional leg-humping were all symptoms which he’d shed as soon as he exited his doggy-teens and became a mature and responsible member of society. Which let Ned off the hook of dealing with the problem now.

  As the barking continued, and the smog of his hangover began to dissipate, Ned concentrated instead on what the day ahead held in store for him. He had to be up at Appleforth House to supervise a delivery of flagstones and their accompanying black slate insets at eleven (the supplier had already delivered the wrong sizes once). But that aside, he could think of no pressing reason to be at the building site any time sooner. And should such a reason have slipped his mind, he knew that Dan, his foreman and right-hand man, was more than capable of taking over, as well as keeping Ned’s small army of plasterers, plumbers and electricians busy at their allotted tasks.

  Which meant Ned had time for a shave and a shower and a bite to eat. Which meant he could then start his working day with a clear head. Which went some way to alleviating his guilt over having nursed himself to sleep with whisky and cigarettes the night before.

  Releasing the pillow round which his arms had been wrapped all night, Ned rolled over on to his side and propped himself up on one elbow. He blinked and rubbed his eyes, the bedroom still a blur without his glasses. Then he blinked again, more purposefully this time, suddenly aware that he wasn’t alone.

  The creature at the end of the cast-iron bed stared back at him – through him, it felt like. Its eyes were wells of unfathomable blackness. The flesh on its forehead and jaw was streaked with lugubrious lines of congealed blood which, even as Ned watched, appeared to ooze and slide down its face, before settling into a slick of gory and macabre drool on its chin. Yellow warts patterned its cheekbones and stalks of rhubarb branched outwards from its tangled mess of blonde hair.

  ‘Rhubarb?’ Ned muttered aloud.

  He fumbled for and finally retrieved his round wire-framed glasses from where he’d hooked them over the bedpost the night before. As he slipped them on, the room shifted into focus with a jarring violence, which made his dark-brown eyes ache.

  Blinking once, then twice, he leant forward over the crumpled duvet and examined the creature again. But he hadn’t been mistaken the first time: the red protrusions – four of them, to be precise – were most definitely plants of a type more likely to be found covered in
custard than sprouting from a satanic scalp. And there, come to think of it, didn’t those warts bear an uncanny resemblance to Rice Krispies? And wasn’t that blood’s consistency reminiscent of Heinz tomato ketchup, and those dark bags beneath the eyes the exact same texture as Marmite?

  ‘Boo!’ the creature shrieked, before collapsing into a fit of giggles and ducking out of sight.

  Ned lay back and gazed up at the skylight in the white ceiling. He smiled. He loved his daughter with all his heart. Even now, when by rights he should be grouching around the place like a bear with a sore head, Clara’s very presence warmed him, like a burst of bright sunlight on a cold winter’s day.

  ‘Help!’ he croaked, his voice reverberating around his skull. ‘The Bogeyman’s come to get me!’

  ‘Not the Bogeyman, silly,’ Clara chastised him, resurfacing at Ned’s end of the bed. ‘The monster Messooder,’ she explained, waggling her head at him so that the rhubarb stalks swayed from side to side, causing the mass of Sellotape holding them there to crackle like static.

  ‘Ah,’ Ned said, finally understanding their relevance.

  He’d shown his five-year-old daughter a picture of Medusa, the snake-haired monster slain by Perseus, in an illustrated book of Greek mythology the night before. Ned read to Clara every night he could. Lying on the bed beside her, looking at the pictures and slowly turning the pages, he watched her succumbing to the illusion of it all, to the clear story book division between right and wrong, and to the inevitability of a happy ending every time. He watched her and he envied her, but could never feel the same himself.

  ‘Where’s Debs?’ Ned asked.

  ‘Downstairs,’ Clara answered. ‘She told me to come and see you. Because she says she can’t believe the mess I’ve made in the kitchen. And because she’s gone to have a bath.’

  ‘I see,’ said Ned, also seeing that the parental buck stopped here.

  Adjusting his pillow behind him, he leant back against the bedhead and picked up the pint glass of water from his bedside table. He was aware of Clara watching him as he drank, her head cocking gradually and subconsciously to one side, as if mimicking the tilt of the glass.

  ‘You look poorly,’ she commented suddenly, gazing up at him.

  And feel it, too, he thought, retorting aloud instead, ‘And you smell of Marmite. Which’, he added, putting the empty glass back down, ‘is very good news, seeing as I’m going to have to eat you.’

  Clara’s jaw dropped in surprise. ‘Eat me?’ she checked.

  ‘Eat you,’ Ned confirmed.

  Her eyes narrowed. ‘But why?’

  ‘Because I’m a dad and any monster I meet, I eat. Otherwise’, he explained, ‘they might scare my daughter. And I can’t have that.’

  ‘But I am your daughter,’ she declared.

  Ned ran his fingers through his short fair hair. ‘No,’ he said, ‘you couldn’t possibly be my daughter Clara.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because she’s ever so pretty. But you: you’re all covered in gunk and goo.’

  ‘But Dad!’ Clara wailed. Then an idea struck her. ‘What if I go and wash it all off?’ she asked.

  ‘What?’ he checked. ‘Every last bit?’

  She nodded her head furiously. ‘Yes.’

  Ned stroked his chin. ‘Well,’ he contemplated aloud, ‘I suppose that if you did that then, instead of having Messooder for my breakfast, I’d have to have … oh, I don’t know … toast?’

  ‘Brilliant!’ Clara exclaimed, kissing her father hard on the cheek to seal the bargain, before spinning on her heels and running for the door.

  Ned exhaled as he watched her go, feeling like an inexperienced actor who’d just scraped through a tricky audition. He touched the sticky residue of ketchup she’d smeared across his jaw and sighed.

  As with Wobbles, so with Clara: discipline wasn’t exactly his speciality. He considered himself better suited to the more collaborative aspects of his daughter’s upbringing: like dishing out pocket money, and building sandcastles with her down on the beach, and treating her to fish and chips and ice creams on the way back home – or ‘the fun stuff’, as Debs liked to call it.

  The other stuff – the bad cop stuff, as he still couldn’t help thinking of it, in spite of his thirty-six years – he tended to leave to Debs. This included all things confrontational: the regulation and management of table manners, television, bedtimes, bath times, mealtimes, tantrums and sulks. To name but a few.

  Ned was determined to remain Clara’s friend, not her foe. He wanted to be there for her throughout her life, always available and always accessible. He never wanted her to feel she couldn’t talk to him or that when she did he wouldn’t listen. The way he saw it, life was too short and too important for it to be any other way.

  Getting out of bed, Ned stepped over the decapitated head of a furry toy rabbit which Wobbles had deposited in a pool of dog slobber at the foot of the wardrobe. He walked to the window and gazed idly out, watching the slate-grey clouds sweeping across the sky, but picturing in his mind’s eye his snug Cheltenham house and the people he knew there.

  He thought fleetingly about the personal belongings he’d put into storage when he’d rented out his Cheltenham home and moved here to Shoresby last year: his CDs and his DVDs, his books, his photographs, his paintings and his precious architectural drawings. He hadn’t expected the Appleforth House project to take this long (already over a year), but the more it went on, the less Ned missed his possessions and the less he missed his friends.

  In two more months, though, three at most, his work up at Appleforth House would be done and he’d be out of this rented cottage, and Clara would be out of her temporary school. They’d return to Cheltenham and then everything would become permanent again, inescapable and smothering. He’d be claimed once more by his old life, swamped by all the reminders of his past, which he’d left behind him without regret.

  Ned turned round and faced the room. Paracetamol, that’s what he needed now. Paracetamol, a cold shower and some food. And then he could get on with the rest of his day.

  Forty-five minutes later – having dropped Clara off at school and Debs down at the shops – Ned stepped off the wind-racked High Street and into the warmth of the Jackpot Café.

  Ned had worked on enough properties around the country to know that the Jackpot was nothing special. It could have been anywhere, on any street in any town in England, Ireland, Scotland or Wales. The blackboard menu above the service counter was the same, with the same specials chalked up at the same low prices. The tea was always weak and the coffee always stale, the radio was always loud and the counter always greasy. But it didn’t bother Ned. The service was quick, the food freshly cooked and he didn’t plan to eat it in here anyway.

  ‘Hi, Ned,’ said the twenty-something red-haired girl behind the counter as he walked up to her. Keeping her elbows resting on the tabloid she’d been reading, she cupped her pale, freckled face in her hands and flashed him a smile.

  ‘Hi …’ Lucy? Katie? Emma? Ned flicked through the possibilities in his mind. She’d told him her name a couple of weeks ago, the same morning she’d asked him what his star sign was and read him his horoscope, and informed him that the two of them were an ideal astrological match. Emma, he thought Emma, but he wasn’t sure enough. ‘How are you?’ he settled for instead.

  ‘Aching,’ she said, rolling the sleeve of her grey woollen top up over her elbow to expose her toned forearm. ‘Yoga,’ she explained. ‘How about you?’ she asked. ‘How’s work going up at the old house?’

  ‘OK.’ Ned wasn’t surprised she knew where he worked, even though he hadn’t told her himself. A lot of townspeople, especially the shopkeepers, had an interest in the work Ned was overseeing up at the Appleforth place, what with its history being pivotal to the tourist trade and, of course, the fact that a lot of the workers Ned had employed spent time and money down here in the town.

  ‘Let me guess,’ Lucy-Katie-Emma said. ‘One scram
bled egg and bacon roll and one tea, milk no sugar …’ Again, she shot him that smile. ‘Because you’re sweet enough as it is …’

  Ned nodded, embarrassed by the attention. He knew she liked him, in the same way that he knew she was pretty. But that’s all it remained: knowledge, facts. He couldn’t seem to engage beyond that. He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d met someone new and felt anything even close to desire. He smiled briefly at the girl now before looking away, out of the half-steamed window and on to the deserted street outside. He caught a glimpse of her reflection in the window as she cracked eggs over a bowl and whisked them with a fork, but he didn’t turn round.

  His phone buzzed and he checked it for messages. There were a couple of work-related texts, which he left for later. Then there was one from his mother, asking him if he wanted to spend the weekend with her and his father at their holiday cottage in West Wales in two weeks’ time. He keyed her back that he was too busy, partly because it was true and partly because he’d only just seen them both last month. He’d already agreed to spend Christmas with them as it was (it had been his parents-in-law’s turn last year), so it wasn’t like they were being deprived of Clara’s company or anything. And although he knew they wanted to see him, too, he liked to keep his own life as separate as he could.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t love them; he did. It was just that he found their constant worrying over his, Debs’s and Clara’s wellbeing undermining. He wasn’t a kid any more. He’d rejected that precious only child image a long time ago. All he wanted now was to be left to make his own decisions about his own life.

  A few minutes later he was leaning up against the Jackpot’s external red-brick wall, tucking into his roll and swigging down his tea from a warm polystyrene cup. Weather allowing, whenever he visited the café he always ate his food out here. There was something curiously intransigent about it that appealed to him, like he could have been anyone, a traveller passing through, with no particular place to go and no particular responsibilities awaiting him when he got there.