As we worked, he told me some more about his job. It had its downsides, obviously, such as when he was called out to help the victim of a drunken gang fight outside a nightclub and got set upon himself as he tried to save the guy’s life.
‘Fortunately, I do a lot of martial arts. Taekwondo. Still, that was one night I would not want to repeat.’
But for the most part, he assured me, he loved what he did for a living.
‘We see a lot of happy stuff too,’ he said. ‘I’ve delivered eleven babies – two of them were named after me – and ninety-nine times out of a hundred, at some point during the day I will be reminded of everything that’s good about the human race. Most people want to help. Like tonight. You girls and your quick thinking saved a life and brought a street together. It could have been a tragedy. It turned into a party. This will go down as one of the best results ever. One day like this in a decade makes all the bad stuff worthwhile. Thank you.’
‘Thank you. Our first-aid knowledge isn’t as good as our epic firefighting skills.’
The last of the plates had been dried up.
‘And thank you for helping to wash up,’ I added.
‘You missed a bit.’ He handed back a plate that wasn’t quite clean.
‘Clearly my washing-up skills aren’t as good as my firefighting either.’
‘Do you share this flat with you sister?’ Tom asked.
‘No. She’s just here for a few days while . . . while her flat is decorated,’ I lied, but of course I couldn’t help thinking about the real reason.
‘You look a little sad,’ Tom observed as I put the dirty plate through another rinse.
‘Do I?’
‘Yes. You know, it can hit you like that, later on. At the time, you’re swept along by adrenaline, but afterwards, when everything goes quiet, the reality of what happened sinks in and you start to wonder what it means for the rest of your life. A brush with mortality really puts things in perspective. It makes you realise how little time there is and you ask yourself whether you’re making the most of what’s left.’
I turned towards him.
‘You did a really brave thing today.’ He was talking about Mrs Kenman and the chip-pan fire. ‘A lot of people would have waited for the fire brigade to turn up and sort things out. If you’d left it that long, your neighbour might well have died. You saved her life by taking the decision to act.’
‘Oh, it was Clare really. I probably would have waited downstairs. She’s the reckless heroine in the family.’
‘That isn’t how she tells it.’
‘Really?’
‘Really. She says she wouldn’t have done it without you. Having you beside her made her brave.’
‘Having her beside me makes me brave too.’ I realised it was true as I said it. ‘She definitely makes life more exciting.’
The conversation petered out.
‘Well, I suppose I’d better go,’ said Tom after all the plates were stacked and the tea towels were folded. ‘Got to get some beauty sleep.’
‘Me too. God knows I need all I can get now I’m thirty.’
‘I wouldn’t have said that.’ Tom grinned at me.
‘Did you bring a coat?’ I asked to change the subject.
I knew Tom hadn’t brought a coat. I walked him to the door.
‘I’ve had a really lovely evening,’ he said. ‘I hope you enjoy the rest of your birthday. Perhaps I could give you a birthday kiss.’
I proffered my cheek. Tom lightly pressed a kiss upon it, but he didn’t step away right afterwards. He seemed to be waiting for something. I nervously wiped my hands, damp from the washing-up, on the front of my jeans.
‘I’ll see you around, I expect,’ he said. ‘I don’t live far from here. We’ll probably bump into each other in one of the bars or something.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Enjoy your holiday, won’t you?’
‘Can’t wait.’
‘Where are you going?’ I asked.
‘Majorca,’ he said. ‘Ever been there?’
‘No,’ I said. After a moment’s hesitation, I added, ‘Though my colleague was there last year and I hear it’s great.’ There was no point getting into my own Majorca story.
‘I hope so. I need a holiday.’
‘I’m sure you do.’
‘I’ll send you a postcard,’ he said. ‘I know the address. What’s your surname?’
‘Sturgeon,’ I said. ‘Sophie Sturgeon, like the fish. You can imagine what that was like at school.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Tom. ‘My surname’s Sandwich. I know exactly what that must have been like.’
And then he left, backing away down the path and waving until he was out of sight.
I went back into the kitchen. The party was almost over. There was just one more guest to leave. My sister and Jason from the builder’s yard had stayed outside and smoked cigarettes while Tom and I did the washing-up. I didn’t know that my sister smoked, but evidently she did and with some aplomb. She held her cigarette like a silent movie star and blew rings that suggested years of practice.
Jason and Clare were still outside. I could hear their whispered voices through the open window. I wasn’t able to make out the words, but something my sister said made Jason laugh out loud. His laughter was followed by much shushing on Clare’s part. She reminded him that the children next door were asleep.
I was more than ready to go to bed, but didn’t especially want to change into my PJs and tuck myself up on the sofa if Jason was going to wander through at any minute. I thought I would give my sister a little hint that it was time to bring the busy night to a close by gently shutting the kitchen window. I had to lean over the sink to do it. And while I was leaning forward, I caught sight of my sister and Jason silhouetted in the light from the last burning hurricane lamp.
No wonder they had gone quiet at last.
They were kissing.
I didn’t dare look too closely. I decided against closing the window right then. The sound of the window shutting would have drawn attention to the fact that I had seen Clare and Jason mid-snog and I wasn’t sure that I wanted them to know. What would I say? Instead, I slipped back and stepped away from the open window without making a sound. I went into my bedroom and got into my bed for the first time since Clare’s arrival. She could definitely sleep on the sofa tonight.
It was at least another hour before Jason left. I lay awake for the whole of that time, occasionally hearing the sound of my sister’s laughter drift into the flat, wondering what to say to Clare once he was gone or if I should say anything at all. Clare was engaged to be married. She should not have been kissing some other guy. Evan would be devastated if he found out. He had every right to be. On the other hand, it was just a kiss. A kiss at the end of a long and exciting day that had culminated with far too much sangria. It probably didn’t mean anything. In which case, there was no point mentioning it, was there? No point turning a little indiscretion into something that could break Evan’s heart. And possibly my sister’s too. Evan was such a lovely man. To lose him over a drunken lapse of judgement . . .
In the end, I decided that I would say nothing. That was the only way. What I had seen would have to remain my secret until the day I died. Still, when Clare crept into the room and asked me if I was awake, I pretended that I was fast asleep because I didn’t have a clue what I could say without making it obvious that I was shocked and a little bit disappointed.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Unsurprisingly, my thirtieth birthday began in earnest with a killer hangover. Evil elves wearing four-inch-high Louboutins stalked up and down my brain. They were relentless. From time to time they did a spot of dancing. I woke with a desperate thirst and reached for a glass on the bedside table, only to discover that the water in that glass must have been there for several days and was covered in a thin film of London dust. The shock made me gag. Thanks, Clare, I thought. I had to get up and find something to take away the taste. Clare was already in
the kitchen, groaning to herself over a big mug of coffee. She definitely deserved a headache.
‘Happy birthday,’ she said, coming round the table to give me a squeeze.
‘Careful,’ I said. ‘I feel queasy.’
‘Then you won’t want a cooked breakfast?’
She indicated some sausages, left over from the night before. I could barely look at them, sitting there in a pool of congealed grease.
‘I can think of nothing worse,’ I assured her.
‘Me neither. You got some cards.’
She had arranged the post in a small pile on the kitchen table. It didn’t look too exciting. There were four cards addressed to me, from various aunts and uncles and my godparents. I recognised the writing; plus hardly anyone in our generation sent real cards any more. Though I was turning thirty, Auntie Mel sent me a card decorated with a kitten. She’d been sending kitten cards since the day I turned four. Never mind that I had developed a lifelong fear of cats, having been mauled by her enormous grey Maine coon when I was three.
Still, I suppose it is the thought that counts and, twenty-seven years after that awful afternoon, I didn’t always have to cross the road when I saw a moggy.
Clare arranged the open cards on the mantelpiece while I logged on to check first the weather in Majorca and then Twitter, where I found that Mum had tweeted birthday greetings and accompanied them with a TwitPic of me on my very first birthday. In this particular picture, I was sitting in a tin bath in the garden of our grandmother’s house. I was sharing the bath with the West Highland terrier that was Grandma’s pet at the time. I was, appropriately, wearing nothing but my birthday suit. The dog, whose name I seemed to remember was Adonis, was looking at me with barely concealed disgust. And barely concealed teeth. It was a wonder that shared bath hadn’t become another terrible incident that scarred me for life.
Hannah and Alison assured me by email that they had been thinking about me too. They sent their very best wishes and commiserations about the photo my mother had posted on Twitter.
‘Very cute, though,’ wrote Hannah. ‘And makes a change from her tweeting about the menopause.’
They also promised that they would take me out for a birthday drink just as soon as I got back from my fortnight away. Alison suggested we go to some new place in Clapham that was ‘rammed with hot blokes’ on a Saturday night. She and Hannah would have me fixed up with a new man in no time. Their joint email did not mention Callum that morning. They did, however, ask how I had felt as the clock ticked over midnight and I hit the big 3-0. They were both still twenty-nine. Was I OK with my new advanced age, or was I feeling sad? What was I doing when it happened?
‘I spent the evening at a beach barbecue,’ I said.
‘Oooh! Send pictures!’ Hannah texted.
‘We could,’ said Clare when I told her. ‘I’ve got some.’
‘No,’ I said firmly.
There were plenty of other birthday texts and emails from friends old and new. Someone sent me an e-card in which a man asks a woman to show him her tits and she lifts up her skirt to show him exactly how far her bosom has sagged. That made Clare roar with laughter. I was not quite so thrilled by the implication. Thirty may have been the new twenty-one, but my correspondence that morning didn’t suggest it. Everything was about HRT and getting a cat. If being a woman meant twenty years of HRT jokes before you got there, then no wonder my mother was so determined to tweet her way through her menopause.
‘It’s OK,’ said Clare. ‘You’ve got nearly two years before you’re really over the hill like me. You still look great. Not a day over twenty-nine. Look at this.’
Clare showed me the screen on her camera. She was scrolling through the pictures she had taken the previous day. She landed on a photo of me and Rosie lazing on deckchairs in the afternoon, a couple of hours before Mrs Kenman’s fire and the excitement that followed. We didn’t look half bad. Clare had an eye for a good angle. The photos of Jason had also come out very well.
‘Pretty good, eh? Mind if I upload them to your laptop? You should have a record of the moment you turned thirty.’
I let her go ahead.
I couldn’t help but be impressed by the results Clare had managed to get from her camera and a pile of builder’s sand. Clare’s pictures really did make it seem as though we had been by the sea. She paused on a photograph of me sitting next to Tom. I didn’t remember her having taken it. I didn’t remember sitting next to Tom like that. Well, I remembered sharing a beach towel for the time it took me to eat a sausage in a bun, but I didn’t remember him being so close to me, or looking at me quite like that.
‘Nice,’ said Clare. ‘You know what? You should post this one on Facebook.’
‘No way. If Callum sees that—’
‘Soph, that’s the whole point.’
Clare enlarged another one of the images on the screen. ‘It’s so realistic. He does look as though he’s very happy there, sitting on the sand with you in Majorca. And look at that,’ said Clare, as she found a third pic of Tom and me together. ‘He really fancies you!’
I shook my head. ‘He’d had a lot of sangria,’ I reminded her. I had to admit, though, it did look very cosy. In fact, I looked hot and bothered. Had Tom noticed I looked that hot and bothered? I wondered now. How embarrassing if he had.
‘If I didn’t know better,’ Clare continued, ‘I would say that you were just about to embark on a holiday romance.’
‘Instead, this morning he’ll be attending some road-traffic accident in Tooting while I am trying to work out how I’m going to get rid of all that sand.’
‘Hmm.’ Clare had forgotten about that. ‘Do you have to get rid of it? I mean, it isn’t doing anyone any harm. And you’ve got the children coming over.’
‘Imagine it in the winter. Wet and cold.’
‘It isn’t winter yet,’ said Clare. ‘The summer has only just begun.’
I took another look at those photographs. There was one in which Tom was looking at me intently, while I grinned for all I was worth. If I didn’t know better – if I didn’t know that I had spent the evening being as entertaining as a wet fish – the expression in Tom’s eyes suggested I had just said something that made him want to hug me. I wondered, had Callum ever looked at me like that? He must have done at some point, but certainly not lately. Even the photograph from last Valentine’s Day, the one I had put into the frame Mum bought for my birthday, did not suggest the same degree of closeness. Callum was smiling, sure, but his eyes told another story and his arm, though round my shoulder, seemed stiff and uncomfortable. It was as though he had been asked to put his arm round someone he hardly knew. Looking at it now, I saw that we weren’t leaning together but leaning ever so slightly apart. If a picture was worth a thousand words, what was that photograph saying? Had Callum been on his way out even then?
Though I had denied it vehemently when Callum suggested that things might not be as good as they had been, as the days in our hideout ticked by, I looked at the last few months of our relationship with a more critical eye. Had I let things slip? Had I worn my grey tracksuit bottoms once too often? Had I left it slightly too long between bikini-wax appointments? Was Callum hankering for the days when I bought a new set of lingerie for every night we spent together? That period of our relationship had cost me an absolute fortune, and half the lingerie I’d bought had only been worn once or twice. It was all too uncomfortable. When it came down to it, I preferred wearing my plain black knickers from John Lewis, under those grey trackie pants.
Could we change all that? If this time apart had made Callum reconsider, could we both agree to make an effort and get our relationship back to what it had been before? Or is it simply the case that once the novelty has worn off, you can never get it back? It doesn’t matter how much time you’re prepared to spend in the gym or at the beauty salon. It doesn’t matter if you grow your hair here and wax it off there and never let yourself be seen without lipstick. It doesn’t matter if you rack
up a four-figure overdraft in La Perla. Once a man has become accustomed to a woman, no matter how beautiful she is to everyone else, perhaps he never really sees her any more. It doesn’t matter if you wear tartan shirts and trackie bottoms or nothing but pearl earrings and a smile. He can’t see the real you any more. The next shiny thing he sees will attract his attention and pull him away.
My iPhone was busy all morning with birthday greetings, but the one name I wanted to see did not appear. There was nothing from Callum. Not so much as a text. Though I told Clare that I didn’t expect to hear from my errant ex, and she had agreed it was for the best, of course I had been hoping, assuming even, that he would send a birthday greeting. I didn’t think our having ‘split up’ would have kept him from doing that. It was flat out cold, his decision not to acknowledge my birthday – such a significant birthday – in any way. Not even with two words. Had he forgotten we were supposed to be spending my birthday in Majorca? Did he feel embarrassed about acknowledging my birthday when he had effectively ruined it? It took the edge off every other kind wish I received that day.
Anyway, the sun was still shining, so I went back outside to my birthday beach. I left Clare inside. Having started the day with a great deal more enthusiasm than me, she claimed that her hangover was at last catching up with her. She said that the sun was too bright for her while her head was in such a fragile state.
So I kicked back in a deckchair and flicked through some of Clare’s magazines. I tried not to dwell on the lack of correspondence from Callum or get too upset when Hannah wrote to say that ‘Callum looks OK today. I think he has a new suit on.’ What new suit? Had I ever seen it? The fact was that if Callum didn’t change his mind, there were soon going to be an awful lot of aspects to his life that I knew nothing about. I’d never cuddle up with him inside a changing room again, getting a quick fumble while the shop assistant outside asked whether he needed another size. Though I was trying to put a brave face on it, I was sure that day I felt more distant from him than ever.
What I Did On My Holidays Page 16
