I can’t help but chuckle. Then I realise this is a chance to extract myself from Sally’s clutches.
“Would you like me to set it up for you?”
“If you could, my love, you’ll be saving me from a potential coronary.”
I drag a chair from the front of the desk and position it next to Brenda. She nudges the laptop towards me like it’s emitting a bad smell.
“I don’t know how people have the patience to deal with these bloody things.”
I consider referring her to Lucy’s service but I suspect Brenda will always be an unwilling adopter of this new-fangled technology.
“Don’t worry. We’ll have this sorted in no time.”
Brenda hands me a memo from head office with basic instructions for setting up pages on Twitter and Facebook. I quickly scan and discard them. Brenda is right — whoever wrote the instructions is clearly an idiot. I show her how to set up an email account and then I create the Twitter page, explaining the steps as I go. Quite what they’re expected to tweet about is anyone’s guess. I move over to Facebook but Brenda doesn’t appear interested in listening to any more of my condescending commentary and changes the subject.
“How are you getting on with Sally?” she asks with a wry smile.
“She’s…friendly.”
Brenda lets out a huge belly laugh. “That’s one word for her. Predatory might be another.”
I’ve been set up.
“Right, I get it,” I groan. “You knew she was some sort of man-eater when you stuck her in there with me.”
Brenda’s laughing becomes almost hysterical. I sit with an indignant look on my face until she eventually calms down.
“Sorry, my love, I thought it might help take your mind off things.”
“Yes, well, it certainly did that.”
Brenda dries her eyes on her sleeve and finds some composure.
“Sally is harmless really. Poor woman has had a tough time of things and is just trying to eek out whatever joy she can from life. Don’t take it personally.”
“I see. What tough times has she been through?”
Her smile quickly subsides and she pauses for a moment, perhaps uncomfortable with the direction our conversation has taken.
“Sally’s daughter had a miscarriage,” she replies, her voice low. “Must have been seven or eight years ago now. That’s why she volunteers here.”
“What’s her daughter’s name?” I ask, knowing the answer but I need to hear it.
“Megan. Least it was, poor soul.”
A small word with huge implications. “What do you mean, was?” I gulp.
Brenda sits back in her chair and appears to drift off in her own thoughts for a moment.
“Brenda,” I say gently, nudging her back to reality. She stares blankly at the desk but eventually replies in a hushed voice.
“Every woman who works here has been touched by miscarriage at some point in their lives. I lost a baby myself, long time ago. Sally took the hardest hit though. She lost a grandson and a daughter because of a miscarriage.”
“What? How?”
“She was five months in, her first child. Megan was a career woman and left it late to have kids, late-thirties I think. Anyway, she suffered a catastrophic miscarriage in the bathroom at home and collapsed unconscious. She lost so much blood. By the time her husband came home she was already gone. Poor girl, God rest her soul.”
Brenda slips back into her own world which is just as well because I’m lost for words. I feel like I’ve been kicked in the gut by a horse. I had imagined a hundred different lives that Megan could have lived without me. The possibility of such a tragic ending never crossed my mind.
The now-familiar feeling returns. I feel faint, dizzy, sick.
“I need to take an early lunch,” I croak.
Brenda continues to gaze into space but nods.
I stagger out of the office and through the shop onto the street. I stand dazed, trying to get my head around the fact Megan is dead. I have to repeat that fact over and over again because the words make no sense on any level. Megan is dead. She can’t be. Jesus, she can’t be. It’s beyond unreal, beyond any nightmare.
A deep panic ensues. I grapple with my breathing as lungs and mind lose connection. Shards of light flicker in the corner of my eyes as my blood pressure soars and my heart hammers like a piston. I have to sit down before gravity puts me down.
l stagger across the pavement and fall to my backside, propped up against a brick wall. A hundred anxious questions clamour for attention. My mind is too fragile and I can’t bear to face any of them, except one — what have I done to deserve this? Every time I think I’ve turned a corner, found some stable ground, fate unleashes another seismic blow in my direction. How many more hits before I fall, never to get up again? How much more grief can one man take?
I wait for my breathing to settle down. When I’m sure my legs can support me, I clamber to my feet and stagger away.
I walk aimlessly with no thought to time or place. Mental images of my life with Megan rotate in a slideshow as I walk. Most poignant of all is the picture of Megan in a hospital bed after we lost Jessica. Clearly Megan had an undiagnosed condition that lay dormant, ready to strike once she fell pregnant. This life, that life; it didn’t matter. I remember the depth of her grief when she was first told about the hysterectomy, and that she would never be a mother. Obviously we never knew it at the time but when they removed her womb, they removed a death sentence. All those years we thought fate had played us the cruellest of hands when, in reality, it had saved Megan’s life. Fate wasn’t so forgiving this time.
From nowhere, my train of thought arrives at a damning conclusion — this is life teaching me a lesson.
Rather than accepting what I had and making the most of it, I used an improbable opportunity to apply a lazy fix. I spent most of my adult life wishing things were better but never considered how they could have been worse, much worse. I grasped negativity and clung to it while the positives drifted by unnoticed. I could have changed any part of my life without a thirty-year trip to the past, but I didn’t. I sat and complained, felt sorry for myself, but did nothing to change it. I wasted my opportunities and now I’m being punished for it — my own personal purgatory.
My wife is dead. My mother is dead. Those twelve people on the coach are dead. Christ, even I’m dead.
There is no way to spin any positivity from this. My selfish, misguided plan for a better life has royally fucked everything.
10
I take a slow walk back to the shop, burdened by a crushing guilt. My analytical mind searches for even the most tenuous strand of positivity but there’s nothing there. It feels like I’m stood on the edge of a cliff with the spectre of my past urging me to jump. Perhaps I should. Who would care? Perhaps all that is stopping me is the realisation that it would, once again, be the easy option. The very reason I’m suffering this life is because I’ve always sought the easy option. If I take it again, it would prove I have learnt nothing,
But I do wonder how many more times I can skirt that dark place before I’m tempted to enter.
I arrive back at the shop ten minutes late and apologise to Brenda. She reminds me that I’m an unpaid volunteer and therefore my wages won’t be docked. I head back to the stockroom, actually hoping Sally is there. She is.
“There you are. I was beginning to think I’d scared you off,” she grins mischievously.
“Sorry Sally. I was helping Brenda with something from head office.”
“Never mind. I’ve got you to myself again now.”
I don’t need this. What I actually need is to talk to the only person who can begin to understand my grief. I get straight to the point.
“Brenda told me what happened to your daughter.”
Her head slowly drops as her shoulders slump. She suddenly looks more like the mother-in-law I once knew.
“Brenda had no right to tell you,” she scowls.
I
ignore her protest and try the empathy angle.
“My girlfriend miscarried, years ago. It was touch and go at one point but she lost our baby and they had to conduct an emergency hysterectomy. It’s why I volunteered here.”
She doesn’t say anything but slowly sits down on a crate and puts her head in her hands.
“I didn’t mean to upset you Sally. If you don’t want to talk about it, I understand.”
She lifts her head and looks up at me.
“Her name was Megan, my daughter. She was only thirty-eight. No offence, Craig, but I’ve talked about it a thousand times to a thousand people. Makes no odds. I lost my daughter and my unborn grandson on the same day. There are some things people can never understand. Some things you never come back from.”
Sally doesn’t know it, but I understand exactly how she feels. I let the silence hang in the room for a moment.
“What was she like, Megan?”
Her face brightens a little and a faint smile appears.
“She was an amazing woman. She worked so hard and didn’t take shit from the people who tried to hold her back. She worked her way up from PA to director of a financial services company in London. She had it all: big house, doting husband, incredible career. But the one thing she always wanted was kids. Maybe she left it too late. Maybe if she’d tried earlier, rather than working all hours, things might have turned out differently.”
Her smile fades. “That’s all I have now. A whole heap of maybes.”
“I’ve got plenty of those myself,” I reply gently. “Along with a ton of what ifs.”
She looks at me quizzically. “I probably should have asked before I made a spectacle of myself. Are you married?”
“I was, in another life.”
“But not now?”
“Technically not. I was, err, estranged from my wife but I found out recently I’m actually now a widower.”
By recently, I mean just over an hour ago.
“Oh, God, I’m sorry. You seem so young, you know, to be a widower.”
I drop my head and ignore her question. Discussing the same woman in a different context is too surreal. I switch the conversation back to Sally.
“What about you, Sally? What happened to your marriage, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“No. It’s okay,” she murmurs. “We never really got over losing Megan. Then Trevor’s brother died and he went off the rails. He started drinking too much and losing his temper over stupid things. I just couldn’t live with him.”
Trevor had two brothers, one of which was Malcolm Franklin, my old boss at Video City. I try to think of a way of establishing which brother died.
“Probably little consolation but at least Megan and her uncle are together now.”
Such a crass, clichéd thing to say but it was the best I could do on the spur of the moment.
Thankfully Sally smiles. “That’s a sweet thing to say. Megan was really close to her Uncle Malcolm so maybe you’re right.”
Having got away with such a puke-inducing statement, I do some quick calculations in my head. Malcolm would have been in his mid-seventies when he died so he clearly never married Mali Surat or moved to Thailand, both of which he did in his late-fifties in the original timeline. A tiny consolation I guess.
“What did Megan’s husband do for a living?”
“Graham? He worked for the same company as Megan. Still does I guess, but I haven’t spoken to him in a long while. They’d only been married for three years so I didn’t know him that well. Don’t get me wrong, he was a lovely guy but he was only in her life for a relatively short time. I’d imagine he’s moved on now.”
I think back to the day Sally and Trevor arrived at the hospital when we lost our baby. They cut me out of their grief on that occasion and I wonder if they did the same to Graham. Only natural I suppose, but it still hurt to be excluded.
“Anyway, isn’t it about time we got on?” Sally huffs. “This conversation probably isn’t doing either of us any good.”
She gets up from the crate and sets about sorting through another bag of clothes. I guess it is time to get on.
Despite the subdued atmosphere in the stockroom, the afternoon passes quickly. Sally’s overt flirting doesn’t resurface and we only talk about matters relevant to the job in hand. I’m not sure if she’s embarrassed, or scared I’ll quiz her about Megan again, but she appears keen to avoid any meaningful conversation. It helped to be in her company though. I doubt I could have coped without Sally. Even though she didn’t know it, just talking about Megan probably stopped me falling over the edge.
Before I leave, Brenda takes me aside and slips a piece of paper into my hand. Her home phone number. She makes me promise to call her if I feel down or just need somebody to talk to. I gratefully agree.
As I start on the long walk back to the flat, my mind wanders to tonight and drinks with Lucy. I’m minded to postpone. As much as I want to spend the evening in her company, I’m not in the right frame of mind. Then again, maybe I need a release. I can’t carry on taking hit after hit without blowing off some steam. Maybe a few drinks and some frivolous conversation will balance me out, take my mind off things.
I’m still undecided when I walk through the front door of the flat.
Dinner is a concoction of wholemeal pasta with mozzarella, tomatoes, and pesto sauce. If nothing else, it’s filling. After eating, I decide to take a bath. The tub takes an age to fill but I’m rewarded for my patience as I finally ease myself into the steaming water.
I lie there for a while, content to do nothing and think about nothing. It’s only when the water begins to cool that I hurriedly shampoo my hair before ducking my head beneath the water to rinse. The absolute silence and opaque light beneath the surface prompts a question — what would it be like to drown? It’s hard to imagine this calmness descending so quickly into unimaginable panic. The thrashing of arms and legs as your lungs balloon with water and you desperately gasp for air that isn’t there. Thinking about it makes me shudder and I force my head back above the surface and inhale a deep breath. No, drowning is not for me. I think I’d much rather swallow a handful of sleeping tablets and drift away from my woes, never to come back. Painless, peaceful. It’s an almost enticing prospect.
As both the bathwater and my thoughts lose clarity, I get out and check the time; forty-five minutes until I’m supposed to meet Lucy. Too late to cancel? Do I want to cancel? As I get dressed in the best of my budget clothing, I’m still undecided. Maybe I can just go along, have a drink or two and then make my excuses if I don’t feel sociable. I agree with myself that it’s a workable plan, and head into the bathroom to make myself look vaguely presentable.
Half-an-hour later I enter Bar Mirage. This used to be a traditional spit and sawdust pub before some faceless public company acquired it and ripped out the soul. Now it’s all muted colours, mirrors, and minimalism. It’s achingly trendy. On the plus side, it’s surprisingly quiet for a Saturday evening, or maybe I’m just unfashionably early. I’m served with an overpriced pint of lager within a minute, and find refuge at a table in a darkened corner.
I sit and watch my fellow patrons as I nurse my pint. Young, happy, and spirited. Everything I’m not. I feel a million years old and a million miles from my comfort zone. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, least the venue wasn’t. I stare at my pint and try to ignore the feeling that everyone is looking at me, judging me. I focus on the beat of an obnoxious track playing from a speaker above my head. I’ve never heard it before and wouldn’t be disappointed if I never heard it again. Still, I close my eyes and let the rhythmic bassline lull me away.
The track ends just as I sense somebody stood nearby. I open my eyes and look up.
“Keeping you up?” Lucy chuckles.
I snap back to reality and hurriedly stand, bashing my shin on the table leg in the process. It’s an innocuous knock but hurts like hell.
“Fuck! Bastard! Sorry,“ I wail.
Lucy f
ights hard to hold back laughter as I hop towards her and plant a kiss on her cheek. Assuming I’ll adhere to the correct social etiquette, she moves her head to present her other cheek. I stand motionless for a moment before I realise she was also expecting a kiss on both cheeks. I move in but Lucy turns back to face me. I catch her puzzled expression a split second before our foreheads thump together.
Great start.
I retreat a few steps and apologise profusely while Lucy nurses her forehead. Any preconceived ideas she may have had about my coolness have just been shattered.
“I’m so sorry. Are you okay?” I fumble.
“Um, I think so. Never been head-butted on a date before, but I’m sure I’ll live.”
“Drink?” I ask. “Or shall I just book a taxi?”
“Wow, you don’t mess around. We’ve only just got here.”
“Christ, no…that’s not what I meant,” I splutter.
She keeps a poker face for a few seconds before a smile breaks.
“I’m kidding. I know what you meant and I’ll have a white wine, large please. I’ve got a feeling I’m going to need it.”
I return an embarrassed smile and head to the bar.
As I wait to be served I take the opportunity to study Lucy’s attire, reflected in the mirror behind the bar. This version of Lucy appears a little more confident, her outfit more revealing than anything I ever saw the old Lucy wear. Her brick-red skirt hangs a good few inches above the knee, contrasting with her luminous, tanned legs. Her top is some sort of cream-coloured lace number, cut short at the shoulders to reveal her tanned arms. If I didn’t know her, which I sort of don’t, I’d say she was well out of my league, or at least Craig Pelling’s league. I may be physically different now but the lack of confidence and hang ups are the same.
The barman cuts my lecherous thoughts short as he asks what I want. He disappears briefly and returns with Lucy’s drink. I turn away with little change from a fiver and limp back to the table.
“Sorry about the wait.”
“I’m just glad you made it back in one piece,” Lucy giggles before she takes a large gulp of her wine.
Beyond Broadhall (The '86 Fix Book 2) Page 8
