2000 - Thirtynothing

by Lisa Jewell

  She turned feebly to face the empty street and shouted at the top of her voice, ‘Will someone help me—please!’

  And then the man moved, moved just a few inches, and groaned. Nadine spun round and stared at him. He groaned again.

  ‘Oh God—you’re alive! Oh thank God!’ Tears of relief began to flow down Nadine’s face.

  The thin, wet figure turned slightly from where he lay on his stomach, on to his side, and began moaning under his breath, ‘Oh my leg, my fucking leg.’

  Nadine stopped in her tracks—she recognized that voice.

  ‘You dopey cow, you dopey fucking cow—what ’ave you done to me?’

  He was beginning to sit up now, his back to her, clutching his knee and rocking back and forth. Nadine definitely recognized that voice. And, now she came to think of it, that hair was pretty familiar, too. And those jeans. And that raggedy old jumper.

  ‘What the fuck were you playing at?’ The man turned to face Nadine with this last question, and his jaw dropped when he looked at her.

  ‘Nadine!’

  Oh God, thought Nadine, her eyebrows dancing in disbelief, this can’t be happening, this just can’t be happening.

  ‘Phil!’ she reciprocated painfully, staring in horror at her worst nightmare. ‘Christ—are you OK?’

  THIRTY

  Nadine peeled down Phil’s sodden and grimy jeans while he perched on the edge of her bath, wincing and clenching his teeth. He was, she noticed, wearing lemon underpants. She hoped they weren’t the same pair he’d had on on Wednesday night.

  As his jeans unfurled she sucked in her breath.

  ‘Oh Jesus,’ she said. His lower thigh was blooming into huge, misshapen roses of black and purple and grey. There was a small trickle of blood seeping from a deep graze where the corner of her number plate had embedded itself into his skin. His knee was swollen up to twice its normal size. ‘Oh Jesus,’ she said again. ‘I’m taking you to the hospital.’

  ‘No,’ stated Phil, too firmly.

  ‘Yes,’ retaliated Nadine, disbelievingly, ‘come on.’ She got to her feet and held her hand out to him.

  ‘No. No hospitals. It’s only a bruise. I just need to rest it.’

  ‘Phil—you’re bleeding. And look at the size of your knee, for fuck’s sake. Now will you please let me take you to the hospital—you should have this X-rayed.’

  ‘No,’ he stated again, ‘I’m not going to the hospital. If it hasn’t gone down by tomorrow, then I’ll go.’

  Nadine took a deep breath. ‘OK. Fine,’ she said, ‘so let me take you home.’

  Phil winced again and doubled over in agony. ‘Aaaah,’ he moaned under his breath, ‘aaah. Have you got any painkillers?’

  Nadine passed him a couple of Advils from her bathroom cabinet and headed towards the kitchen to get him a glass of water. As she stood over the sink, staring through the broken and taped-over window into the wet blackness outside, she started feeling a little uncomfortable. She still hadn’t asked Phil what exactly he’d been doing hanging around in the rain outside her house at half past nine on a Friday evening and she wasn’t sure that she wanted to.

  She turned off the tap and headed back to the bathroom. Phil wasn’t there. Her heart missed a beat. Maybe he’d gone. Gone away. Stumbled back out into the darkness. A selfish and worried voice deep inside her said, ‘I hope so.’

  She stuck her head around the living-room door—no sign of him. Neither was he in the toilet nor in the entrance hall. She pulled back the 1950s Homemaker print curtains in her living room and surveyed the street outside. It was empty.

  And then she wandered into her bedroom, not expecting at all to find him sprawled all over the Bollywood duvet cover on her bed in nothing but his lemon briefs and a pair of black ribbed socks, smoking a cigarette and with the remote control for her TV in his hand.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, when what she’d really wanted to say was ‘Get the fuck off my bed and take your horrid lemon pants with you!’

  ‘Had to lie down,’ he said, sucking on his Rothman and wincing a bit theatrically. ‘Don’t suppose you’ve got a TV guide, have you?’ He blew out a stream of smoke and regarded Nadine defiantly through faded-denim-blue eyes. He was challenging her, daring her to make him leave, to get off her bed and out of her flat.

  Nadine flinched a little in the face of his audacity. She didn’t want him on her bed. She didn’t want him in her flat. She didn’t, in fact, want him anywhere within a five-mile radius of her. But what could she do? She’d nearly run him over out there. That was her fault. Bad driving, lack of concentration. And just look at the state of his leg—there was no way he’d be able to walk on that unaided, and she couldn’t force him into her car, she couldn’t force him to do anything.

  She approached her bedside table stealthily and placed the glass of water on a mother-of-pearl coaster embedded with tiny little mirrors.

  ‘There you go,’ she said, in her best jolly voice. ‘I’ll—er—just get you a TV guide, then. Won’t be a sec.’

  ‘Cheers.’ He was staring ahead at the TV, not even looking at her.

  She glanced at him as she left the room, at the rock-star pallor, the twelve-year-old-girl legs, the white skin sprouting incongruous black hairs in places, the thin arms and the yellow briefs. An involuntary shudder worked its way up her body.

  But the minute she walked into her living room she started feeling bad. Oh God, she thought. Poor Phil. Poor poor Phil. He’s got no one. He’s all alone in this world. His parents are dead. His fiancée’s dead. His house is burned down. And now I’ve run him over. None of this is his fault. None of it.

  And it was me—me—who invited him back into my life. It was me who phoned him out of the blue and me who sat in a pub with him, ghoulishly pushing him for more and more details about the tragedy that was his life. He didn’t ask to get involved with me again. He didn’t force me to take an E. He didn’t force me to have sex with him.

  She remembered what Murdo, the Scots landlord, had said to her in the pub on Wednesday night, about looking out for Phil. He was right. Phil was her responsibility now—she’d taken on that responsibility when she’d agreed to go back to his flat. Murdo had warned her and she hadn’t listened and now she was paying the price. She sighed and began pulling animal-print cushions from her sofa as she searched for last week’s Culture section from the Sunday Times. It was only one night, she told herself. Just one night. She would let him stay in her bed—she would sleep on the sofa—and then she’d drop him home tomorrow on her way to the airport.

  It was the least she could do.

  THIRTY-ONE

  The front door slammed, staccato heels clattered down the front steps and Digby bounced joyfully on to Dig’s bed.

  ‘OK,’ thought Dig, chucking him under the chin, ‘I’m awake now.’ It was eight forty-five. Dig couldn’t remember the last time he’d been awake before eleven on a Saturday morning. And not just awake, but unhungover and somewhat refreshed. He’d been in bed by ten thirty the previous night—because Delilah had wanted to turn in early—and pretty much stone-cold sober.

  He stepped out of bed into a little rectangle of sunshine that was warming up his seagrass and strolled towards the window. As he pulled his curtains apart he saw Delilah on the street below. She was standing on the corner of Hilldrop Crescent and Camden Road looking around distractedly for a cab. She was wearing her sheepskin over a very smart suit and high heels, and her hair was held back from her face with sunglasses. In one hand she held her incredibly expensive-looking little Hermès doeskin attaché case and in the other a huge Hamleys carrier bag, poking from one corner of which was the tip of what looked like a large rabbit’s ear. Dig scratched his head and wondered where the Hamleys bag had come from, what the rabbit was doing in it and how come he hadn’t noticed it when he’d cleared the living room for dinner last night. Delilah must have hidden it somewhere. Why?

  He watched as Delilah impatiently paced the corner, back and forth, back
and forth, swivelling her head constantly as she listened for the rumble of a cab. She glanced at her watch a couple of times. Dig untwisted the security lock on his sash window and lifted it up a couple of inches, letting in a blast of fresh autumn air and the roar of early morning traffic.

  A cab appeared on the horizon and Delilah lifted the attaché—attached hand to hail it. Dig pushed his head further through the gap in the window, stretching his legs backwards into the seagrass to flatten himself out and straining to hear Delilah’s voice above four lanes of traffic.

  He was sick of this. Sick of tiptoeing around Delilah and avoiding the truth. Sick of not being able to discuss anything of any importance with her, sick of doing everything in his power to make her life comfortable and easy while she rewarded his efforts with nothing more than evasion, avoidance, bad moods and the dubious honour of looking after her dog and putting her bed away every fucking morning.

  Yesterday night had been the last straw. He had, officially, run out of patience.

  It was clear to Dig that the only way he stood a chance of getting close to Delilah now was to know all her secrets, to know everything that Dr Rosemary Bentall knew. And if she thought that he was too immature and unprepared to deal with them, then he was going to uncover them for himself.

  He poked his head a little further through the window and, as if by magic, just as Delilah grabbed hold of the cab door-handle and twisted her head towards the driver to tell him where she wanted to go, a hush fell across Camden Road. The traffic stopped and the wind died and Delilah’s words were carried from her lips on a puff of fresh air and deposited on Dig’s window-sill.

  ‘Waterloo Station, please.’

  Dig cracked his head off the window, withdrawing too quickly in his panic to reach his jeans and top and get out of the flat.

  ‘Ow fuck…’ He rubbed his head.

  Within two minutes he had dressed, knocked back half a mug of cold coffee left by Delilah in the kitchen, thrown on his leather coat, scooped Digby up in his arms and was pacing up and down Camden Road looking for a cab.

  He briefly wondered at this strange, alien world, this early-morning-Saturday world peopled by the kind of men and women who didn’t spend every Friday night down the pub, who didn’t go to bed at two in the morning and who didn’t have to spend their entire Saturdays stumbling from one attempt at curing their hangovers to another. There was something appealing about that, something refreshing. A whole new array of possibilities. His thoughts returned once more to the golden world of Nadine’s imagination—the one with the kids and everything. It was becoming more alluring by the minute.

  Dig flapped his free hand up and down like an overexcited schoolboy who knows the right answer when he saw a little amber lozenge glowing mutely in the distance.

  The cab pulled up next to him.

  ‘Do you mind taking a dog?’ Dig asked pleasantly, as the bleary-eyed driver looked disapprovingly at the quivering furball in his arms.

  ‘Trained, is ’e?’

  Dig nodded frantically. ‘Better trained than me,’ he joked feebly.

  ‘OK—get in. Any mess though, an’ you’ll ’ave to clear it up.’

  Dig nodded again and placed Digby on the ribbed plastic floor.

  ‘Where you going?’ asked the driver brusquely.

  ‘Waterloo station, please—and I’m in a real hurry.’

  ‘No problem,’ said the driver, his face relaxing at the prospect of a breakneck drive around the near-empty streets of London. ‘No problem at all.’

  THIRTY-TWO

  It was five thirty a.m. and Nadine was doing one of her five-minute, condensed, early-morning preparations. It was possible, if in a big enough rush, to do everything one normally squeezed into forty-five minutes in only five. She’d packed the night before, laid out her travelling outfit, put coffee, milk and sugar in a mug, and had a good long soak in the bath just before she had gone to bed so she wouldn’t have to shower.

  The only thing she had to do this morning that she didn’t normally have to fit into her five-minute regime was to make sure that Phil was up and ready to go. She’d spent the night on her sofa, and when her alarm went off, the first thing she’d done was throw open the bedroom door and switch on the overhead light. It was cruel, but she didn’t care—this was a military-style operation.

  ‘How’s your leg?’ she’d said, when she popped her head around the door thirty seconds later, her toothbrush protruding from between frothy lips.

  ‘Uuuuuppphhhh,’ Phil had said, throwing his arm over his face.

  ‘Come on,’ she’d said, all brisk efficiency, ‘all you have to do is put your clothes on—here.’ She lobbed them on the bed. ‘I left them on the radiator overnight so they’ll be nice and dry and snug. You’ve got’—she looked at her watch—‘two and a half minutes. Chop-chop.’

  Thirty seconds later and Phil did not appear to have moved a muscle, let alone a limb.

  ‘Phil! Will you please move it!’

  ‘Fucking hell, Deen,’ he mumbled, squinting at her from beneath his own elbow, ‘you’ve turned into a right little sergeant-major.’

  ‘Yes—well—lots of things about me have changed,’ she said. ‘Let me have a look at your leg.’ She strode around to his side of the bed and flung the duvet back mercilessly.

  Phil watched her carnivorously, a smug smile twitching the corners of his mouth. ‘Ooh yes,’ he drawled, ‘I like you much more like this. All stern and Miss Whiplashy. Are you going to spank me?’ He said this last in a flesh-crawlingly horrible little-boy voice.

  Nadine blanched and her face dropped in horror. Jesus. Who was this repulsive person?

  ‘Hey,’ he said, attempting to sit up a little, ‘this is like Misery, isn’t it? You could just leave me tied up on your bed all weekend and then come back next week, tie my ankles together and hobble me!’ He laughed, too loud, and searched Nadine’s face for a trace of amusement. He raised his eyebrows in a ‘suit yourself’ sort of way when he failed to find one and lay back against the pillows.

  She tutted and turned her attention to his leg, which resembled an overcooked chipolata sausage, all gnarled and blackened and knobbly. ‘Jesus,’ she said, ‘you really are going to have to do something about that leg, you know. Do you want me to drop you at the hospital now, or can you make your own way there from home?’

  Phil looked at Nadine with bemusement. ‘I don’t think I’m going anywhere, to be honest.’

  Nadine let the duvet drop back over Phil’s legs and regarded him with growing horror. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean—this leg ain’t going to get me anywhere beyond the bedroom door, not for a while, anyway.’

  ‘What? But it was fine yesterday—you walked all the way from the road to here and then you made it on your own from the bathroom to the bedroom and…’

  Phil nodded sagely. ‘Yeah—that was yesterday. It’s sort of seized up overnight.’ He wiggled his chipolata leg and winced. ‘You know, it’s gone all stiff. I can hardly move it. I reckon I’m gonna need a wheelchair to get me out of here.’

  Nadine gulped. Her five-minute plan was unravelling—this was a nightmare. Wheelchairs, cripples, lascivious comments, men in her bed—at five thirty in the morning. Part of her thought Phil was lying about his leg—the swelling, as far as she could see, appeared to have gone down, and Phil was in mighty high spirits for someone who was supposed to be a cripple. But what could she do? She could hardly accuse him of lying, could she? She couldn’t say, ‘Oh yeah, pull the other one, it’s got bruises on,’ and yank him out of bed and into her car. The only thing she could do was believe him. And if she was going to believe him, then she was going to have to get the situation sorted. She couldn’t leave him in her flat—alone—without her. It was unthinkable. She looked at her watch again. She had a bit more time now that she didn’t have to drop Phil off at Finsbury Park, time to organize things.

  Think—think—think…But the only thing that Nadine could think was that
it was five thirty in the morning and there was no one—not even her father—who she would feel comfortable phoning at this time of day to help her remove an immobile ex-boyfriend from her flat.

  She reached for the phone book.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Phil, suddenly alarmed.

  ‘I’m going to call the hospital, see if they’ll send someone round for you with a wheelchair.’

  ‘No!’ snarled Phil, grabbing her wrist, ‘I told you—no hospitals.’

  Nadine loosened his grip on her arm and eyed him uncomfortably. ‘OK.’ She placed the phonebook carefully on the floor. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because,’ he said, ‘because it’s…er…I’ve got some stuff in my bloodstream that shouldn’t be there—comprende? And the last thing I need right now is a bunch of fucking hassle off a load of junior doctors—all right?’

  ‘OK—OK. I won’t call the hospital. But I’ve got to call someone. Is there anyone I can call?’ she asked hopefully. ‘A friend or something—maybe that Jo girl—who could come and collect you, or sort out a wheelchair for you?’ She bit her lip, hoping that her sense of selfish desperation hadn’t come through too loudly in her words.

  Phil winced again and shook his head. ‘Not at this time of the morning,’ he breathed, ‘no way. Jo’s probably still out clubbing and, as you know’—he eyed her poignantly—‘there’s no one else…’ He lowered his eyes and let his shoulders slump forwards.

  Nadine was harpooned, once again, by guilt. Oh God. She kept forgetting. Every time she started feeling antipathetic towards Phil, he would say something or do something to remind her how mean-hearted and self-centred she was, she who had everything, a family, friends, a future, a beautiful home—legs that worked.