Games People Play

by Voss, Louise

  ‘Billy Estes Mechanics, Billy speaking.’ His familiar voice wavered a little over the distance, and I imagined with wonder the speed of it, travelling through sea-bed cables.

  ‘Hi, Billy, it’s me.’

  There was a pause, infinitesimally longer than the transatlantic delay. ‘Hey, Susie, how are you, honey?’ He sounded formal but friendly.

  Not your honey any more, I thought. ‘I’m OK. I’m in England, staying at Corinna’s.’

  ‘Yeah. I ran into Audrey at the drug store and she mentioned you were taking some time out after your ski trip, and that she was feeding the cats. How was it, by the way, your trip?’

  ‘Terrible. Rachel broke her leg really badly. She still can’t walk on it. She might not be able to play again for a year.’

  I heard him exhale. ‘Wow, that’s awful. Tell her I’m sorry, would you?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Another pause, more awkward this time. Annoyingly, my eyes filled with tears.

  ‘So, how have you been?’

  Now he sounded tender, and I bit my lip so hard I tasted blood.

  ‘Well. You know. Not great, really. I want to come home, but I don’t want to …I can’t face…’ Come on, Susie, I told myself. Hold it together. I took a deep breath. ‘There’s been all kinds of awful stuff happening here. Gordana’s got cancer—’

  ‘Oh, man, that’s terrible.’

  ‘That’s not the half of it. Ivan got arrested for downloading child porn. He’s waiting to go on trial, in a total state. Swears he didn’t do it. And Anthea’s dumped him – it turns out he’s been sleeping with some young player behind her back; well, behind mine, too, it started when we were married….’

  As usual, once I began, it all came falling out. I could imagine the surprise on Billy’s face; the way he’d be looking into the middle distance, frowning with concentration as he tried to keep up with my torrent of words. It was such a relief to talk to him. I’d missed having him to confide in, so much.

  ‘Jeez, Susie, sounds like you landed right in it there. But what about you? Are you OK?’

  He keeps asking me that, I thought irritably. ‘No, like I said, Billy, not really. I’m coping fine. I think I’m even maybe starting to get over you. But I’m worried about Rachel and shocked about Gordana and feeling sorry for Ivan, believe it or not. I want to come home to Lawrence, but I feel trapped here by everything that’s going on, and it’ll be a long time before I’m really going to be OK again.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Another pause. ‘Susie. Look, I really am sorry about what happened …’

  ‘I don’t want to hear it, Billy. Don’t tell me. I’m sorry I called – I just missed you. I wanted to hear your voice.’ The tears came back, although I was fighting them as valiantly as I could. I had to go before he heard them creep into my voice.

  ‘I miss you too, Suze,’ he said quietly.

  I leaned back in Corinna’s huge beige leather sofa (‘Taupe, sweetie,’ she called it). It made a loud farting noise for which I hoped Billy wouldn’t think I was responsible.

  ‘I’ve got to go now,’ I said, feeling worse than before.

  ‘When are you coming back?’ he asked, a plaintive note in his voice.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I need to make sure Rachel’s all right first. And Gordana. Even Ivan, in a weird sort of way. I just heard something on the radio which might possibly help him out. I was about to call him when for some reason I found myself calling you instead …’

  ‘Well, give me a holler when you’re back. It would be…I mean… Can I ask you one thing? Have you, you know, met anybody else? You and Ivan seem to be more close than you used to be …’

  I rolled my eyes and tried to sniff discreetly. ‘Would you care if I had met someone else? Or got back together with Ivan?’

  ‘I know I’ve got no right to …but yeah, I guess I would care. Sorry. I know it’s out of order of me.’

  Sorry for what? I thought. Sorry for caring that I’d met someone else, or sorry for blowing my life apart? All these sorries, none of them making a blind bit of difference to the way things were, and would be, forever.

  ‘Yes, Billy, it’s way out of order.’

  I considered telling him about Karl, but decided against it, mostly because nothing looked like it would ever actually happen between us, and I wasn’t even sure if I wanted it to now.

  ‘But for what it’s worth, no, I haven’t met anybody new. Or re-met anybody old, either. And I don’t even want to …I really am going now. Take care, OK?’

  ‘You too, Susie.’

  There was a pause into which I was sure, absolutely certain, that we were both silently whispering ‘B.I.L.Y.’ to one another. I put down the phone, made a note of the length of the call so I could reimburse Corinna for it, and then howled into one of her expensive embroidered silk cushions. I had to replace it upside down on the sofa, in the hope that she wouldn’t notice the large teary mark all down the middle of it.

  What the hell did I go and call him for? I thought. As if I wasn’t missing him enough already.

  Later, when I’d calmed down again, I reflected on how odd it had been to hear Billy hesitant like that. One of his most endearing qualities was his utter naturalness. You could put him into any situation and he would be completely at ease. Even when I plunged him into an Anderson family Christmas that time, with Ivan glowering and Gordana fussing and Anthea uptight enough to cause stress to a coma victim, even then he took it all in his stride. He just sat back, beamed at everyone, offered to help as if he’d known them all for years, and generally exuded calm.

  Or perhaps he’d been high …Oh well, whatever the cause, it was his default characteristic, and he sounded different without it. I remembered when we first got together, that too had seemed so natural that I felt none of the pressure of a first date or a new relationship. Billy had just said to me one day at the Crossing, after Ivan and I had split up and I’d moved back to Lawrence: ‘Hey, I’m going to the grocery store. Wanna come with me?’

  I’d shrugged; my heart simultaneously leaping. As it happened, I was out of Cheetos and bin-liners. ‘Sure,’ I said, even though I’d never before exchanged more than a little chit-chat and a few meaningful smiles with him, and in fact hadn’t even seen him for nearly fifteen years. He hadn’t aged much, just got a little softer around the edges. As soon as I clapped eyes on him again, the latent attraction I’d always felt for him came roaring back in a tidal wave.

  The visit to the grocery store turned into a round trip to unload both our loads of shopping, then dinner at Billy’s place, blissful sex on the rag-rug in his living room, and a year later we were engaged. You’d think I’d have been wary of committing again so soon, but this was Billy; my Billy. I just knew I’d finally met the right man.

  Chapter 50

  Gordana

  So it is Christmas already. It does not seem a moment since I was last arranging the wooden Nativity characters on top of the Pembroke table by the fireplace: Joseph with his nose chipped off; the cow with three legs from when Ivan threw it against the wall once, when he was little. And yet here we are again, with so much in between …It has not been an easy year – at least – not the last couple of months.

  It’s very nice, though, to be sitting in my warm flickering church at a quarter to midnight; it is like a cocoon, with the wind howling outside, and inside golden and sacred. The smell of incense is so comforting, like the feel of Ted’s hand in mine, and the deep colours of the priest’s Christmas robes. I am alive, and I am not in pain. My family is here, now. Not one of us will be here forever, this is true, and I must accept that it is not up to me when I go.

  I look along the pew: my Ted next to me, his wrinkled eyelids closed in prayer. I bet he prays for me, and I love him for it. I hold his hand very tight. We are in this together. I am glad I told him all my secrets, even the bad ones. He says he is glad to know them, even though they are hard to hear.

  Then there is Ivan; and it must be a Chri
stmas miracle but even though this awful thing is still hanging over his head, he look more peaceful. Good grief, I think he is almost smiling…Next to him is Susie, who has trouble of her own, but who always thinks first of everyone else. I know she is still here because she feels so guilty for Rachel’s accident, but I also think perhaps it is good that she’s stayed. We are all healing slowly, in our own ways, and the best way she can heal is by believing she’s helping us all.

  Then Karl. I have decided I like Karl very much. Somehow he seems like part of this family already. I like that he is sitting between Rachel and Susie, even though Susie told me in private that she thought Karl wanted her at first, and that she was hurt when he turned out to love Rachel …But there is no awkwardness between them, not like there was for years between Elsie and the garden gnome man, Humphrey, at the tennis club. Elsie thought he liked her – ha! As if! – when all along he like Valerie. She never spoke to him again, but that is Elsie for you. And I think he was very relieved by this.

  I must have some Christmas spirit when I think of Elsie, but even the Blessed Virgin herself would find that hard, I bet. Anyway, Susie is nothing like Elsie.

  At the end of the row is Rachel, so she can stick her leg out the side into the aisle. She is still with the crutches, but her leg brace is hiding beneath a long black velvet skirt, and there is a big red flowery clip in her hair. I approve very much of this skirt, although she grumbled when I bought it for her. She is a good girl. She is wearing it for me. Although now she’s with Karl, I have noticed that she does not wear the terrible tracksuit bottoms so often any more. And she wear lipstick now too. She is lovely looking, especially now that she isn’t frowning so much. She has – what’s that word – flowered? No. Blossomed.

  Susie looks sad. She always tries to hide it, but when she think nobody is watching her, it leaks out of her. Now we are singing ‘In the Bleak Mid-Winter’, and I see how her lip wobbles. How was it that the Queen described her very bad year? Her annus horribilis. We have all had an annus horribilis, that is for sure.

  The bells strike midnight, and we hug and kiss and shake hands with everyone in the nearby pews, smiling and chatting like nothing is wrong. One more carol; the collection – even though Ted and I give weekly to the church on a standing order from the bank, I still always put money in the collection bowl. I know that God is aware of our standing order, but my fellow parishioners are not, and I do not want them to think I am mean.

  A little chat with the priest on the way back out into the frosty car park in front of the church – he looks tired, his eyes are bloodshot and his handshake limp. I want to make him a hot toddy and send him to bed, because the poor man doesn’t have a woman to look after him.

  I clutch Ted’s hand even harder, and he makes a face as my rings dig into him.

  ‘Sorry, darling.’

  I put both my arms around him, right there in the car park, and kiss him full on the mouth like we are two young lovers. He kiss me back, and the others laugh as we stand there. But nobody except Ted knows that I’m crying and kissing at the same time, because my back is turned to them.

  ‘Merry Christmas, Dana,’ he whispers, and holds me tight.

  Chapter 51

  Susie

  I was on a mission to help Gordana prepare the best Christmas they’d ever had in that house. I was determined it would be a good day. We would be a family, however fractured; we would be together and we would have fun. Even Ivan, who had recently done a good impression of someone who doesn’t know the meaning of the word.

  By mid morning it was all going to plan, although in a more subdued atmosphere than I’d have liked. There was a large turkey crammed into the Aga – we’d had to stuff it in, apparently resisting all the way – and, in the hall, a fir tree of a size which wouldn’t have looked out of place in a shopping mall. Ivan was out somewhere. Being Ivan, nobody knew exactly where, and it could hardly be a business meeting on Christmas morning, but we all knew there was little point in asking. Rachel and Karl had gone for a quick pre-lunch visit to Karl’s friends in Hammersmith, and Doris Day’s voice was warbling festive songs from a boom-box on the kitchen counter.

  So it was just Ted, Gordana and I at home, in the kitchen preparing vegetables for dinner. Sprout leaves were mounting up in a pile beside the chopping board as I scored crosses in the bottoms of the undressed buds. Ted stood next to me, and I watched his knobbly old hands paring the parsnips; long dull gold strips fell next to the cut green curls of the sprouts, reminding me of the floor of a hairdresser’s. Ted wasn’t looking particularly well either these days – he was much more subdued than he used to be. But I supposed we were all getting older, and he’d had so much stress lately, it was bound to take its toll. Because it all concerned other people, I thought he was probably quietly absorbing it into his once-broad shoulders, trying to soak up the problems of others like a big sponge. Sometimes it was painful to see him and Gordana. But I was determined not to let today be painful.

  ‘Funny, isn’t it, how regional some vegetables are, but not others …’ I said, trying to inject more levity into the not-quite festive enough atmosphere, despite Doris’s best efforts. ‘…I remember you telling me ages ago, Gordana, that you never had sprouts in Croatia; and Billy had never heard of parsnips when I first met him. I brought some over to him from England once, after a trip home, and when I cooked them for him, he treated them with such suspicion anybody would think I’d sprinkled them with arsenic…’

  I remembered Billy’s face, the hesitant tasting of the unfamiliar vegetable through pursed lips, like a child being forced to eat his greens; and it gave me another big pang of missing him.

  A traditional British Christmas Day was in itself fairly alien to me – in fact, something of a novelty, which was another reason I wanted to make the most of it. I missed the family Christmases of my childhood – and the festivities in Lawrence had always been unconventional, with assorted hippie guests for lunch, and the cashew and cheese roast I used to make, because the hippies were always vegetarian. There was no wishbone or church service or post-prandial country walk, just a sort of stoned befuddlement which settled on the house after lunch. Billy and I used to sneak off upstairs to make love, because all our guests had fallen asleep and there was nothing else to do except the washing up. After a couple of years, this became one of our traditions: the Christmas cuddle, as we called it.

  No Christmas cuddle for me this year. I wondered jealously if he and Eva would continue the tradition themselves, and momentarily lost concentration on the job in hand, nearly cutting off the end of my thumb with the vegetable knife. Blood oozed out of a half-inch cut and splashed neatly into an upturned boat of sprout shell.

  ‘Oh darling, I will get you a plaster,’ said Gordana, who was sitting at the kitchen table peeling potatoes into a washing-up bowl. She made to get up when she saw my injury, putting her palms flat on the tabletop to help press herself into a standing position, and she looked so exhausted it was almost unbearable.

  The knowledge that she’d finished the first round of chemo, and that the doctors seemed pleased with her progress, was a relief to everyone. But I supposed that she and Ted were just too worn out really to celebrate.

  For a moment I felt guilty about trying to chivvy them into a big festive day when probably all they wanted to do was go away to a country hotel somewhere and let other people do all the work. Although they had vehemently insisted they wanted to host lunch.

  ‘No, don’t,’ I said hurriedly. ‘You stay there, just tell me where they are.’

  ‘Cabinet in Rachel’s bathroom,’ she said gratefully.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘No problem.’

  With Jackson trotting beside me, claws clicking on the tiles, I walked down the hall and round the corner towards Rachel’s room.

  She was living here more or less permanently, with Karl already a regular visitor. Apparently he was looking for a flat nearby. They had been inseparable ever since the day Ivan
had confronted us in the coffee shop. I did, undoubtedly, feel a sting of rejection – had he only ever been interested in Rachel, and not at all in me? I suspected as much, but I didn’t want to know for sure. The fact that it mattered to me, even slightly, was just a shallow, egotistical reaction; and whenever I saw the bloom in Rachel’s cheeks, or the smile back on her face, I couldn’t possibly begrudge her her happiness. There was no way I’d have been ready for a new relationship anyway. And besides, Karl was far too young for me…

  I was about to push open the door of Rachel’s room when I heard a noise from inside, and hesitated. I pressed my ear up against the wooden panel and listened, genuinely wondering what it was. At first I thought it was Jackson yelping, until I remembered that he was sitting at my feet. He was looking up at me with an expression which seemed as puzzled as my own. As soon as I realized what was going on in there – Rachel and Karl had evidently sneaked in for a quickie, not saying hello first in case they got roped into spud-bashing – colour flooded up over my face, and I leaped away from the door as if it had scalded me.

  I cantered back down the hall, mortified, my bleeding thumb still rammed in my mouth, and my blush still warming my cheeks. Thank goodness I hadn’t burst in …

  Still, at least Rachel appeared to have overcome her fear of intimacy, and for that I felt relieved. The accident had changed her in a lot of ways: her priorities, her dependence on Ivan, her lack of confidence. Her new relationship seemed a further indication of this new-found maturity. I had a sudden flash of intuition for her, that she should embrace this new life, not go back to the old. Things were different now. Perhaps there was no going back.

  ‘Come on, Jackson, let’s keep it under our hats, OK?’ I whispered to him outside the kitchen door, stooping to pat his bristly neck. He panted obligingly and licked my hand.