We Were On a Break

by Lindsey Kelk

  ‘Oh. My. God.’

  ‘He’s here,’ Dad replied.

  I turned to see my friend silhouetted in the front door, clutching a twenty-pound sack of cat litter. Without a second thought, he threw it to the ground and ran straight through the cloud of litter dust, sweeping me off my feet in a huge hug.

  ‘You’re back!’ he yelled in my ear. ‘Why didn’t you call me?’

  ‘You know me,’ I coughed with a lung full of litter. ‘I don’t like a fuss.’

  ‘I’ve got to get back to Dr Khan’s and Mr Punk’s broken leg,’ Dad said, smiling as he backed away, the smile never leaving his face. ‘I shall speak to you later.’

  ‘You look amazing,’ David said, dragging me into the breakroom and immediately turning on the kettle. ‘Is your hair pink? It’s shorter. What did you eat? Did you do naked karaoke? Tell me everything.’

  ‘It was pink, it’s washed out now,’ I replied, combing my fingers through the ends. ‘But yes, it’s shorter. I ate loads of stuff and I don’t know what films you’ve been watching but I don’t think there is such a thing as naked karaoke. Will that do?’

  ‘No,’ he said bluntly, flicking a teabag in my face. ‘Specifics. I need details. And why didn’t you tell us you were coming home?’

  Before I could reply, the phone started singing in reception. Automatically, I reached over the front desk and answered.

  ‘Dr Addison and Associates,’ I answered without thinking. ‘How can we help today?’

  ‘It’s Mr Beavis.’ The voice on the other end of the line was not a happy one. ‘Gerald Beavis. It’s my Valerie, she’s not well, not well at all.’

  ‘Of course, Mr Beavis,’ I replied in my most professional voice while David gagged and shook his head back and forth. ‘Do you want to bring her in?’

  ‘Is Dr Addison not working today?’ he asked with hesitation.

  I closed my eyes, took a deep breath and exhaled.

  ‘My dad’s in surgery right now, Mr Beavis,’ I said. ‘Can I help?’

  ‘She keeps being sick,’ he said, his voice wavering. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong, she won’t stop.’

  ‘Can you bring her in?’ I asked as kindly as possible. ‘We might need to do some tests.’

  ‘I don’t want to move her,’ he replied, pausing to clear his throat. ‘She’s really not well.’

  ‘I’ll come out,’ I said, standing up and shaking off my jet lag.

  ‘Thank you, Dr Addison,’ Mr Beavis said with only a slight hesitation. ‘We’ll be waiting.’

  David looked at me with a sour face as I hung up the receiver.

  ‘I hate that cat,’ he said. ‘It’s really old anyway. Fuck it, Liv, let’s go and get wasted.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I replied, grabbing my white coat from the rack. All that was missing was my cape. ‘I’ve got to go and see a man about a cat.’

  ‘And then you need to come and see me about a drink,’ he said forcing one more hug on me before grabbing his phone from the side. ‘I’ll round up the troops.’

  ‘I’ll let you know when I’m done,’ I promised, swapping my suitcase for my bag of instruments and heading out the door. ‘Hopefully I won’t be long.’

  I’d been back in the village for less than thirty minutes and it already felt like I’d never left. I looked up at the window of my flat and saw a fluffy tail flicker past a curtain. With something like a smile on my face, I set off down the road.

  Mr and Mrs Beavis only lived five minutes away and the walk was just what I needed to clear my head. It was already turning cold but I barely felt it, I was so wired. Japan had been incredible. For years I’d watched it in movies and built up a version of the country in my head, something between Memoirs of a Geisha, Lost in Translation and Godzilla, full of karaoke and Harajuku girls and Hello Kitty and fish. To be fair, giant lizards aside, I hadn’t been far off. Every day, for five weeks, was sensory overload, from one extreme to the other. I landed at Narita international airport after two connections, with nothing more than my suitcase, backpack and a two-night reservation at a Tokyo hotel. I went from the mind-boggling madness of cities that didn’t know how to stop, to a kind of serenity I’d never known, lodging with monks in Mount Kōya. And while Tokyo didn’t give me much time to think, lodging in the temples gave me nothing but. No internet, no mobile service, and not even a TV. I had never felt so far away from myself and I was forced to find another me. If I’d gone looking for a break I’d found one, but it only presented me with a new problem. I’d assumed that once I got my time-out everything would magically fall into place, that my world would suddenly make sense, but instead it turned out to be just like my mum had said. Nothing good or real was that easy.

  The Beavises’ semi was just a couple of streets over from Adam’s house. Valerie was in her bed, perched on top of a newspaper-lined kitchen table and not looking the slightest bit pleased with her lot in life.

  ‘She started being sick this afternoon,’ Mr Beavis said as his wife busied herself by putting on the kettle for what I had to imagine was the hundredth time that day. ‘I can’t imagine there’s anything left in her now, the poor thing.’

  ‘And it only started today?’ I asked, pulling out my beloved stethoscope and listening for poor Valerie’s weak heartbeat. ‘She’s been fine the rest of the week?’

  ‘Absolutely fine,’ he nodded. ‘She’s been eating fine, doing her business, playing outside.’

  I gently pressed on Valerie’s abdomen, squinting out the kitchen window.

  ‘There’s no blood in the vomit?’ I asked.

  ‘We saved some,’ Mrs Beavis said, holding a rancid yoghurt pot under my nose. ‘It’s in here.’

  Wrenching my head back, I took it from her, quickly shifting to breathe through my mouth.

  ‘Is that an oak tree?’ I put the Not-a-Yoghurt down on the kitchen sink and pointed at a large tree at the bottom of the garden.

  ‘Yes,’ Mr Beavis replied, gently stroking his cat’s head as she mewed her displeasure. ‘Do you think she ate the leaves? Are they poisonous?’

  ‘OK, I can’t be sure until she’s had a scan but I think Valerie has eaten something she shouldn’t have. It looks like, and it definitely smells like, she’s got a blockage and most often it’s something like an acorn. I think it’d be best to take her to the animal hospital in Nottingham and get an endoscopy done.’

  ‘Can’t you do it?’ he asked, clutching his wife’s hand. ‘I’d be much happier if you could do it. Valerie doesn’t like strangers messing with her.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, surprised.

  I watched as they ran around preparing the cat carrier, packing up her favourite toys and favourite food and looked at Valerie with a small smile on my face.

  ‘We’ll sort you out,’ I promised in a whisper. ‘Don’t you worry.’

  ‘Didn’t you say this was going to be epic?’

  ‘He did,’ Tom confirmed to Cass, standing back to survey our work. ‘He definitely used the word epic.’

  The three of us stood in front of my workshop, staring at my masterpiece. The idea was simple but spectacular. I’d win Liv back by recreating the aisle of the supermarket where we had first met, fill it with equal parts candles and pasta then beg her to forgive me. We’d skip over the bit where she’d been shagging around with some bloke from Tinder, turned down my proposal and run off to Japan, and then I’d propose. Again. It was the most romantic idea in the world.

  Except the execution wasn’t quite as romantic as the concept.

  Tom had done an excellent job with the pasta but unfortunately, even after I sent him out twice, we still only had about forty boxes of penne and thirty boxes of orecchiette and though seventy boxes of pasta sounded like a lot, when I pulled my workshop shelves into the middle of the room to create a makeshift supermarket aisle, we only managed to fill two of the five shelves on either side. And thanks to a leaky can of wood stain and the month of shit weather, the whole workshop smelled like damp death. In my he
ad, it was going to be an exact replica of the moment we met, with better lighting and fewer lecherous comments from my dad, transporting us back in time to a moment before I’d been such an incredible dickhead. But instead of a loving recreation of our most special moment, it looked like I was building a corner shop set for a post-apocalypse zombie movie. And a shit one at that.

  ‘The candles look nice though,’ Cassie said, desperately looking for a bright side the way Liv said she always did. ‘You’ve done a lovely job with the candles.’

  Even that was a lie. I’d always thought there were more candles in those bags of tealights you got from Ikea. The overall effect was definitely more ‘unexpected power cut’ than anything else.

  ‘This is ridiculous!’ I kicked one of a thousand plastic bags across the room. ‘What a stupid idea.’

  ‘It’s a lovely idea,’ Cass argued. ‘And Liv will love it.’

  ‘I don’t know …’ Tom slipped his hands into his pockets and clucked. ‘If you’re going to propose to a woman, you need to do it right. And I’m not sure this is right.’

  ‘Bloody men,’ Cass said loudly. ‘There is a woman in the room, you know. Who happens to be one of the best friends of the woman you’re planning to propose to. Anyone thought to ask me my opinion?’

  Tom and I shared a glance. We really hadn’t.

  ‘Liv will love the effort,’ she agreed, gesturing to my sub-Netto pasta aisle. ‘But all she really needs to hear are the words. Did Chris tell you how he proposed to me?’

  ‘On holiday in Italy,’ I answered, Tom nodding in agreement. ‘In Venice, wasn’t it?’

  ‘We were in Venice,’ she confirmed. ‘And he’d hired a gondola and booked a fancy dinner and all that nonsense, but do you know when he actually proposed?’

  ‘Not on a gondola or at the fancy dinner?’

  ‘When I was in the toilet,’ she replied flatly. ‘I was in the lav, you know, finishing up, and he started babbling about something outside the door, saying how he had been thinking about this for weeks and nothing felt right but he had to say it, and when I opened the door, face covered in zit cream, he was standing there with the ring in his hand. He looked like he’d been bent over and shagged backwards.’

  ‘Funny how he never mentioned any of this,’ I said, looking at my disastrous handiwork.

  ‘And you still said yes?’ Tom was amazed.

  ‘I said yes because I wanted to marry him,’ she replied. ‘I didn’t care how he asked me, I didn’t care about the ring, I said yes because I love him and I want to be with him.’

  She thought about what she had said for a moment, glancing down at her ring.

  ‘I cared about the ring a little bit,’ she conceded. ‘But the main thing was that he asked. The how, the where, the when wasn’t important at all.’

  ‘I don’t believe her,’ Tom whispered in my ear. ‘My girlfriend is an event planner.’

  ‘And how many of the events your girlfriend plans are women proposing to their boyfriends?’ Cass asked. ‘Or even women proposing to other women? Trust me, this thing has got totally out of hand. Just go round to her house, say you’re sorry, and ask the woman to marry you.’

  ‘I’m not going to argue with her,’ Tom said, stepping back. ‘Not just because I’m scared of her but because, well, anything’s better than this.’

  He picked up a box of orecchiette and turned it around in his hands.

  ‘You’re going to be eating pasta and sauce for the rest of your life. I should have got you some Ragú.’

  ‘All Liv cares about is you, her friends, her mum and dad, and Daniel Craig,’ Cassie said before turning to Tom with an explanatory pat on the back. ‘Her cat. But she does care about human Daniel Craig as well.’

  ‘Who doesn’t?’ Tom replied.

  ‘You’re right,’ I said to Cassie, scattering tiny candles all over the workshop and nodding at Tom. ‘She’s right.’

  ‘Also, this place is a complete fire hazard,’ he said as he turned on the overhead light. ‘You really need to get your workshop cleaned up, mate.’

  ‘We don’t even know when she’s coming home,’ I said, the absurdity of the situation hitting me like seventy boxes of pasta. ‘I’m stockpiling pasta in a damp workshop to impress a woman who has turned me down once and is currently halfway around the world. I got carried away.’

  Sinking down onto my workbench, I watched as the wind knocked itself out of Cass and Tom’s sails.

  ‘I ought to get back to Gus,’ Cass said, starting towards the door. ‘Seriously, Adam, don’t give up. She’ll love this.’

  I couldn’t help but wonder whether or not she truly believed herself or if she still just felt guilty.

  ‘I’ve got to get off as well, mate,’ Tom said, clapping me on the back. ‘You know Liv better than me. If Cass says she’ll love it, I’m sure she’ll love it.’

  Hmm.

  ‘The ring is beautiful though,’ he added. ‘You can always lead with that.’

  I watched as they walked down my driveway, leaving me alone in the saddest supermarket the world had ever seen.

  26

  ‘For someone who isn’t sure if she wants to be a vet any more, you’re awfully bloody good at it,’ David said, sliding Valerie back into her cage to rest after we had removed her blockage. As predicted, someone had been eating acorns and it wasn’t Squirrel Nutkin. ‘And it doesn’t seem as though you hate it.’

  ‘I never said I didn’t want to be a vet any more.’ I reached in to stroke her sleepy head and quiet a twitchy paw. ‘I felt trapped.’

  ‘And now you don’t?’ he asked, turning the lights down low and following me out into the breakroom. ‘Five weeks in Japan and poof, everything’s sorted?’

  Collapsing onto the settee, I loosened each shoulder and rolled my head around on my neck. We’d been in surgery for almost an hour, followed by a good twenty minutes on the phone to Mr and Mrs Beavis. I was grateful, not just because we’d saved Valerie’s life, but also because I couldn’t begin to imagine what kind of a state they’d have been in if things hadn’t gone so well. Explaining to a grumpy man in his mid-fifties that he could not sleep on the floor of the surgery was not how I’d envisioned spending my first night back at home. Still, I hadn’t planned to spend it sleeping in the same hospital myself but it looked like I was going to have to, at least until Valerie came round from her anaesthetic.

  ‘I wouldn’t say everything,’ I said, curling up into a little ball on the settee. ‘There’s plenty that still needs sorting out.’

  ‘Domo arigato,’ he replied. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I took a deep breath. ‘Go and see Mum? Go and see Abi? Make Cass come and see me? Make up the fold-out bed and wait for an anaesthetized cat to wake up?’

  ‘You can call me crazy, but there seems to be a certain option missing from the list,’ David replied. ‘Go and see Adam isn’t an option this evening?’

  I closed my eyes and groaned.

  ‘Planning to leave that until I’ve had a shower and got changed,’ I said. ‘And you know, worked out exactly what I want to say to him.’

  ‘Didn’t you have five weeks to do that?’

  ‘And it was not long enough,’ I opened my eyes to see him brandishing a Penguin above my head. I almost snatched his hand off. ‘The only thing I really worked out was that none of us have any kind of clue what we’re doing.’

  David contemplated my wisdom while biting his own Penguin in half. ‘Learn that from a Buddhist monk?’

  ‘I watched Eat, Pray, Love on the plane over,’ I replied. ‘Turns out Japan’s not really a very good place to find yourself. Getting lost and hanging out in hot springs and being touched up by businessmen on the subway, yes. Finding yourself? Not so much.’

  ‘Then what took you so long?’ he asked, kicking me in the shin. ‘We’ve been dying over here without you.’

  ‘It was much easier to pretend all the horrible stuff I left behind never happened f
rom a few time zones away,’ I confessed. ‘When you’re trying to order something to eat that doesn’t have eel in it you don’t have a lot of time to worry about suggesting to the entire village your boyfriend’s brother has a tiny penis.’

  ‘Point taken,’ David said. ‘And speaking of said boyfriend?’

  I closed my eyes and held my hand out for another Penguin.

  ‘He’s missed you,’ he admitted with great reluctance. ‘He wanted to take Daniel Craig. Cass says he’s barely left the house the whole time you’ve been away and I’ve seen him walking around with a face like a slapped arse.’

  ‘I want to pretend that makes me happy but it really doesn’t,’ I replied. ‘I still don’t know what to do.’

  We sat quietly for a moment.

  ‘Everyone’s had time to think about stuff while you were away,’ my friend said slowly. ‘Adam included. Go and see him.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Liv, while you’ve been off on your adventures, I’ve been sitting here for five weeks with no idea when, or even if, you were planning to come back, putting up with your dad, and having to deal with a very nice but – let’s be brutally honest – not especially entertaining new vet. He doesn’t watch telly. At all. We had nothing to talk about. And you haven’t even come to a bloody decision about what you want. So help me god, I’m going to take the endoscope and shove it somewhere very uncomfortable if you don’t go and see Adam Floyd right now.’

  David’s threats always carried more weight than they should, ever since he threw Abi’s phone out of a moving car on the way to Glastonbury.

  ‘I’ll go and see Adam then.’

  Standing on unsteady feet I scraped my hair back into a bun and pulled out one of a million lip balms from a drawer underneath the kettle.

  ‘Go,’ David commanded as I started to mess around with my hair in the mirror. ‘You’re bringing me and the cat down and she’s been unconscious for two hours, so just think about yourself for a minute.’