by Emlyn Rees
She had something she needed to ask him about before she picked Clara up from school, she’d said. And Dan, the foreman, had told her that Ned had gone into town to get some accounts photocopied (Ned’s excuse for sneaking off early for a drink). ‘So why not meet up now?’ she’d requested, because she’d already been in town, too.
And so Ned had suggested here – ‘on the Esplanade, next to the funfair’ – because (as with Dan) Ned hadn’t wanted Debs to discover that he’d been about to start his Friday night out at four in the afternoon.
Only as he’d been waiting for her, it had started to rain. And now Ned wished he hadn’t agreed to the meeting at all. He pulled his phone from his now soaked jeans and stabbed Debs’s number into it.
‘Where are you?’ he practically barked into the phone as soon as she answered.
‘Here,’ she whispered into his ear, appearing at his side and snapping her phone shut and then her umbrella, before sitting down (with considerably more grace than he’d managed) on the seat opposite him in the other half of the elephant’s abdomen.
Ned glared across the tiny grey plastic table that separated them. Debs turned up the dry collar on her dry denim jacket and began to fidget with its dry French Connection buttons. The rain drummed down on the elephant’s back and Ned’s corduroy jacket hung damp and heavy against his chest.
‘What took you so long?’ he demanded. ‘You’ve been fifteen minutes.’
Debs ignored the reprimand, taking a bunch of tissues from her bag and putting them on the table between them.
Picking up the tissues, Ned wiped the cold water from his brow and neck. It was a token gesture, though; everything he wore, right down to his paint-spattered canvas trainers and cotton socks, was drenched. He squeezed the tissues into a soggy ball and placed it in the centre of the table.
‘I always had you down as more of a T-Rex fan,’ Debs commented, gazing across the picnic area towards the dismally unrealistic plastic dinosaur to their left. She absent-mindedly traced her fingers over the smooth convex moulding of the elephant’s right bum cheek, then caught Ned’s eye.
He found it impossible to ignore the contagious mixture of excitement and apprehension on her face and, despite himself, he smiled. ‘Come on, then,’ he said, rubbing his hands together, ignoring the ache in his back from being forced to crouch this low. ‘What’s so important that it couldn’t wait until I got home?’
‘I want to go to Argentina.’
‘With Scott …’
‘How did you know?’
How could he not have known would have been a harder question to answer. Debs had been spending every spare second she had either with Scott, or talking to Scott on the phone, or talking about Scott to her friends. On Scott’s days off over the last week or so, when Ellen had been up in London, he’d occupied his time by taking Debs out on trips around the nearby coastal attractions during her free time. Their nights out together had grown longer, too, with Debs staying over with Scott at the cottage whenever Ellen had been away.
‘Let’s just call it an educated guess,’ Ned said.
A cold blast of wind sprayed rain across them and Debs folded her arms, hugging herself to keep warm. ‘It’s for a month,’ she said. ‘In January. Scott’s got a gig there – a football tournament – and he wants me to go with him.’
‘It’s a great opportunity.’
‘You mean you don’t mind?’
Ned smiled. ‘That depends if you’re asking me for a month off to go on holiday, or if you’re handing in your notice. If it’s the first, I’ll cope,’ he said, ‘but if it’s the second, both Clara and I are going to be gutted. Either way, though,’ he reassured her, ‘it’s your life and you’re a friend and I’ll do everything I can to help you to do what you want.’
She reached across the table and briefly squeezed his hand. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
They looked at each other in silence.
‘So are you going to put me out of my misery?’ he asked.
Her face creased up in consternation. ‘What? Oh!’ she laughed, realising what he meant. ‘It’s the first: holiday. Don’t worry,’ she hurriedly added, ‘I’ve got not intention of quitting.’
‘Phew,’ Ned said with an exaggerated sigh.
‘If it goes well in Argentina,’ she told him, ‘then Scott was saying that there’s this small production company a friend of his runs in Cheltenham … and he’s been asking Scott to join up with him for ages and …’
‘I get the picture,’ Ned interrupted to save her from justifying herself any further. ‘You two have got a chance of a future together.’
‘Hence Argentina.’
‘Scott’s a good guy,’ Ned said, meaning it. Anybody who could make someone’s eyes sparkle with happiness as Debs’s were now doing was all right by him. ‘I hope it all works out for you.’
‘What about you?’ Debs asked.
‘Like I said, I’ll cope.’
‘No, I mean you and Ellen …’
The name came at Ned like an accusation, simultaneously angering him and putting him on the defensive. He’d wanted to make what had happened between them a part of his past. Each one of the four days that had gone by since Ellen had come up to the site and seen him, Ned had wished into years. He’d wanted to be able to remember her as someone distant, faded, a voice at the end of a phone line, or a snapshot in a photograph album forgotten in a drawer. What he hadn’t wanted was for her to have remained immediate and vivid, as she had. He hadn’t wanted to have been blindsided by her time and time again.
It had been as if the harder he’d tried to dismiss what had happened between them – and not just the sex, but the way she’d made him feel during the sex – the more undeniable it had become. He’d kept on imagining her reappearing at the front door of his cottage on Saturday night. And he’d kept on remembering how she’d looked when he’d woken up the next morning to find he’d wrapped his arms round her as they’d slept.
‘How did you –’ he started to ask Debs.
But he already knew. She and Scott must have put two and two together about where Ellen had stayed on Saturday night when she’d lost her keys. Or maybe Ellen had even confided in Scott and he, in turn, had confided in Debs.
Not that it mattered either way, Ned reminded himself. Nothing was going on between them and nothing would. He’d certainly made that clear enough to Ellen on Monday. And it was still clear enough to him, wasn’t it? They had no future. He felt things for Ellen, all right. Oh, yes, he knew there was no way he could deny that. He felt desire, and fear, and sadness, and joy. He wanted to be with her and to hide from her, to run towards her and to push her away. All these conflicting emotions were knotted together inside him, but all they did was confuse him more.
She would return to London and he would return to Cheltenham. And soon it would be as if none of this had ever happened.
‘Let’s just call it an educated guess,’ Debs joked.
‘Or an entirely misinformed one,’ Ned answered flatly.
The smile faded from Debs’s face. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘but I thought –’
‘Well, you thought wrong.’
Her mouth opened slightly, as if she were about to say something, but Ned had already heard enough. ‘This rain doesn’t look like it’s going to stop,’ he told her, ‘and it’s time I got going.’ He stood up and promptly cracked the back of his head on the hard plastic above. ‘Fuck!’ he snapped, scrambling outside and kicking the elephant’s flank as hard as he could.
Ned didn’t say goodbye to Debs. He turned his back on her and trudged across the playground and on to the road. With the wind and the rain buffeting against him, it was like walking into a waterfall, but he was determined: he could already see the Hope and Anchor shimmering like a mirage in the distance, the warming glow of its windows visible, by now, in the fading light.
But the further Ned walked, the more his anger switched focus. It became less about the stupid elephant and less about De
bs trying to play at happy couples with him. The truth was, Ned was genuinely happy that Debs had found someone she wanted to be with and he could understand that she wanted the same to be true for him. No, Ned wasn’t angry at the elephant or Debs. Ned was angry at himself. He was angry because, like Debs, he realised that his heart had been snagged by hope. And he was angry at himself for not giving it up, even though he knew that what he hoped for could never be.
Aside from the silent and scrawny barman, who didn’t so much as raise an eyebrow at Ned’s apocalyptic appearance as he stepped in out of the rising storm, the Hope and Anchor was empty. The bar stank of last night’s cigarette smoke and spilt lager, and Ned dripped on the scuffed floorboards as the barman slowly pulled him a pint. In the background some frenetic and dated early-Nineties house tune played on the jukebox, fleetingly reminding Ned of the five-year period he’d spent in London after graduation.
Ned paid for his drink and carried it over to a table beside the giant porthole-shaped window, which offered a panoramic view of the bay. He sat down on the bench and tried shuffling along it towards the open fire, only to find that something had caught on his jeans. As he stood, he saw a grey-as-gristle sinew of chewing gum stretching from his thigh to the edge of the bench. He shifted sideways, snapping the gum, and sat motionless for a moment, gazing into the fire’s flickering flames, luxuriating in the blast of its heat. Then he lifted his pint glass to his mouth.
But the moment he’d been savouring wasn’t to be: something caused him to recoil, to put the glass back down on the table instead of pressing it against his lips.
He stared at his pint for a moment, trying to work out why he’d just done what he had. It made no sense to him at first, whatever instinct had driven him, but then, here in this gloomy off-season tourist pub, it suddenly became incredibly clear. The same as the couple of nights each week he went out to binge-drink himself stupid, he’d come here to find oblivion. But it hadn’t been that knowledge which had stopped him drinking just now. What had stopped him had been the realisation that, for the first time, it hadn’t been the unanswerable questions about Mary he’d come here to forget, the questions that snapped at his heels like a pack of famished wolves, demanding his blood each and every day.
Where had he been when Mary had needed him? Why had he buried his head in the sand and pretended that the doctors had been making everything right, when it had been plain to see that the happy, optimistic girl he’d married had all but disappeared? Why had he been at work that day, that hour and that exact minute when everything had finally become too much for her?
No, the realisation which had so shaken Ned just now was that he’d been attempting to flee the thought of Ellen, not Mary. It had been Ellen he’d been aiming to erase from his mind with a bellyful of beer, just the same as he’d tried doing with the joint he’d smoked in the bathroom after they’d had sex last Saturday night.
The sex. He’d thought about it all right, each night since, lying there in bed at night, wanting to pick up the phone and call her, wondering if she was in London or Shoresby, wondering if she’d ever forgive him for the way he’d treated her, wondering if she was with her boyfriend and was no longer thinking about him at all.
He loathed thinking about it, the complacency he’d callously dished out to her at the site on Monday, the way he’d acted as though what had happened on Saturday night had been just sex. It filled him with shame. He was ashamed because he’d hurt her. He knew he had. He’d witnessed it in her eyes. He’d seen the same pain she would have seen in his eyes the moment he’d turned his back on her and his casual and disinterested front had shattered. But he hadn’t allowed her to see that, had he? He’d hidden it from her instead. And that filled him with shame, too. He’d lied to her about something fundamental: that he did care about what had happened and he did care about her.
Just sex … good sex … Ned sighed and shook his head. If she only knew the truth. What had happened between them on Saturday night had been nothing less than monumental for him. When he’d woken the morning after, and felt her skin against his and smelt her perfume and listened to her softly moan as she’d closed her fingers round his forearm, he’d suddenly – crazily – seen a way forward for them both.
He’d imagined a distant Sunday in the back garden of an immaculately white house. There he’d been, in the heat of noon, walking across the green and sun-drenched lawn, casting barely a shadow. He’d stopped, stretching out and snipping free a perfect yellow rose, before walking on past a child’s trampoline and swing, to the terraced dining area at the end of the garden. He’d sat down on a bench and poured himself a cup of hot coffee from the china pot before him. The coffee’s aroma had mixed with that of the freshly cut grass and he’d turned to see Ellen beside him, shaded beneath a wide-brimmed straw hat and wearing a blue cotton dress. He’d placed the rose on the newspaper she’d been reading and she’d turned to him and smiled. He’d heard the sound of laughter and had looked up to see two girls rushing through the french doors at the back of the house. He’d immediately recognised the older of the two as Clara. She’d grown taller, yet her face and her smile had remained the same. The younger child he’d never seen before, but in her features he’d seen both Ellen’s and his own and, immediately, he’d understood.
But then the vision had dissolved, running away from him like a drawing made of sand, which someone had lifted up to scrutinise.
Ned stared into the embers of the fire. The vision of perfection was one he knew he’d only destroy. Because – the opposite of his professional life – that’s what he did in his private life, wasn’t it? He built something perfect and then he sat back and watched it collapse into ruin. That’s what he’d done with his life with Mary. He wasn’t to be trusted. He didn’t have what it took to take care of someone else. He was no good. He’d failed to give Mary a reason to live. And he had no right to drip the slow poison of his inability into another person’s life again.
Ned stood up and walked to the bar. ‘Call me a cab, will you?’
‘Something wrong with your drink?’ the barman asked, picking up the wall phone’s receiver and glancing over at Ned’s full pint on the table.
‘No,’ said Ned, ‘just the drinker.’
He dug down into his jacket pocket for some change, scooping the coins out in his fingers, along with the piece of Ellen Morris’s fake fur coat that Wobbles had torn off nearly a month ago.
Ned counted out the cash on the bar top. He stared at the piece of fur, before dropping it into the ashtray for the barman to clear.
He went over to the window to keep a lookout for the cab. He needed to see Clara now. He needed to be back at the cottage with her, watching her trace the raindrops down the window-panes and asking her what shapes she could see. He wanted to hug her and prove to himself that his heart wasn’t half empty, but was overflowing with love. He wanted to know once more what he no longer did: that his life was complete and enough.
Chapter XXI
THE COMMUNITY HALL was nearly full by the time Verity finally caught a glimpse of Jimmy. He was coming in at the back and Verity put her hand up to try to catch his attention. But Jimmy didn’t look in her direction. Instead, he shuffled forward and Verity could see that there was something subdued and sad about him, as he wrapped the leather jacket round himself. Even from this distance he looked dishevelled, as if he hadn’t slept for days.
She longed to yell out to him, but with so many people between where she was standing by the stage and the back of the hall, it was impossible. She stood up on the step to the stage, shielding her eyes against the overhead spotlight, in order to see him, but he was lost in the crowd. Verity was desperate to talk to him. After the film Jimmy had shown her the day before yesterday, she hadn’t been able to sleep. Yesterday morning she’d been up early, eager to see him, as she’d made her way into their Friday morning English class, but Jimmy hadn’t turned up. Since then, she’d been worried sick. She needed to tell him what was on her mind
, and she had a horrible feeling that if she didn’t tell him soon it would be too late.
Verity had even gone to Carlton Court to find him yesterday afternoon, but there’d been no names on any of the door buzzers and she hadn’t been able to find anyone who could tell her which flat Jimmy lived in. She’d been so distracted that it was only when she’d returned home that she’d realised she’d missed her piano exam. Her mother had reacted with typical fury, berating Verity for letting her herself and her mother down. But Verity didn’t care any more. She hadn’t deliberately missed the piano exam, in some mad act of rebellion, as her mother had suggested. But missing it had made her realise that there were much, much more important things in life.
Verity had tried all day to find a moment to slip away and find Jimmy, but there’d been a dress rehearsal and then, at home, she’d had to get dressed and the time had completely vanished. Now the concert was nearly starting and Verity only had precious minutes to talk.
The straps of her high-heeled black shoes dug into her ankles and the waistband on her Fifties-style black dress hurt her ribs, as she strained to get a better view of Jimmy. She was wearing pink-tinted lip gloss and her hair was piled high on her head, the pins sticking into her scalp. She’d never felt more uncomfortable, and wished she were in her jeans and trainers, and could run to the back of the hall and escape with Jimmy.
Mr Peters pulled her back down, saving her from teetering over the edge of the steps. He was wearing a multicoloured bow tie and a pink evening jacket, and he had a sheen of sweat over his cheeks. He was carrying a bundle of music, his conducting baton on top. ‘You know the running order.’ He sounded panicky over the noise of the school orchestra tuning up at the back of the stage. His green eyes looked concerned as he stared out from under his greasy blond fringe. ‘You start, then Clive will make the speech and we’ll run straight to the interval.’
