Barefoot in the Dark

by Lynne Barrett-Lee

  ‘She’s too nice.’

  ‘You what? How can she be too nice?’

  Jack pulled his towel from his shoulder and hung it on a hook. ‘Because I don’t mean “nice”, Dan, I mean “nice”. A nice person. A caring, intelligent, principled person. Someone with whom you wouldn’t generally associate the word “shag”.’

  Danny rolled his eyes again. ‘You do talk some crap, mate.’

  Yes. He knew that. He did. Truth be known, he didn’t know quite what it was he did think about Hope Shepherd. Only that much as he liked the idea of shagging her, he wasn’t sure he was so keen on the idea of shagging her. And who was to say he’d get that lucky anyway? With her background, it didn’t seem likely that she’d jump into bed with the first guy who asked her. And he wasn’t up to fragile, or vulnerable, or untrusting, frankly. Too big a remit. He was in no shape for that kind of responsibility right now.

  Not ready. He stepped into a shower cubicle and trained the shower head over his face. She was nice, no question. If he was honest with himself, she was probably exactly the sort of person he could see himself ending up with. No. He didn’t mean that. Exactly the sort of person that he’d be happy ending up with. Just, well… just not yet. He wasn’t stupid. There was no way in the world he was going to become some wizened Lothario. It was just the “ending up” thing that bothered him. The notion that if he started getting involved with the sort of woman he might end up with, what happened to the bit in between? All the dreams, all the plans, all the shagging scenarios (however preposterous) that had sustained him through the doldrums thus far? The Jack bit of his life. The him bit. The me bit. He was just, only just, getting the hang of being single, and he didn’t want to slam shut all the doors that had just opened for him as a result of that state. He wasn’t ready yet.

  He knew exactly what it was that he did want. That was the problem. He wanted the same thing he’d been wanting for the last umpteen months. Some uncomplicated congress with the opposite sex. Some sex, in fact, period. Not commitment, or a life plan, or to have to spend months and months manoeuvring-in-hope. Just some sex. Some fun. Like the rest of the world. Everything would feel different once he’d crossed that particular hurdle. So why wasn’t he getting any? Everyone else seemed to manage to do it. Why not him?

  He wished he could see himself the way everyone else seemed to see him. Wished he could morph into the rabid, testosterone-fuelled automaton of Danny’s imagination. Perhaps then he’d actually have some hope of getting his shagging campaign off the ground. But he fretted too much. That was the trouble. When he first got divorced it had all seemed so simple. He’d get out there, God help him, and he’d have a good time. Trouble was, it hadn’t turned out to be easy being rabid and rampant, not when he spent so much of his time seeing himself as the person Lydia had always seen him as, which was understandable given that they’d been married so long. It wasn’t easy to have to start all over with your self-image. To pick over the clutch of adjectives that were generally associated with him (unambitious, a little introspective, no great shakes in any department) and remodel them into less damning ones – like free-spirited, creative, a catch.

  Perhaps he was a little fragile himself. But why should he be? Deep down he knew he probably was the same person he’d always been. It was just his perception of the value of that person that had changed. Lydia, on the other hand, had changed a great deal. In that oh-so-well documented way that women, or so he’d been told, always did. Thus their paths had diverged. That was it. Yes. He should keep reminding himself of that. A simple case of divergence. It had been the OU course that had started it.

  ‘I feel unfulfilled,’ she’d announced one day, apropos of nothing. ‘Like my life is slipping past me and that I haven’t achieved anything.’

  Fine, he’d said. Great, he’d said.

  ‘I need to go back to college and learn something new.’

  Fine, he’d said. Great, he’d said. Whatever you want to do.

  Except that they couldn’t afford for her to go back to college. Not with Ollie’s school fees and the mortgage and everything else – the carpets, conservatories, industrial expresso makers – that Lydia deemed necessary for bearable living. It was out of the question for her to give up work. Which was Jack’s fault, of course.

  He couldn’t blame her. They had both, he knew, approached life with a number of expectations, and it was to both their discredit that they hadn’t bothered consulting each other about what exactly those were.

  So she’d started studying part-time with the OU, and re-acquainted herself with the self she’d once been. And acquainted herself with someone else too.

  He had about eight letters after his name, a chair in epitheliology or some such, a Caterham Seven and a pied-a-terre in Bordeaux.

  Jack had a radio show, two columns and not-quite-half-a-book about football. No contest, really. So she took him (and all his bloody letters) to bed.

  He rinsed the shower gel from his hair and let cold water stream over his body for a few moments. ‘Still,’ Danny was shouting at him now, from the other cubicle. ‘She’s worth a shot, don’t you think?’

  As Jack had failed to hear what had been said prior to this, it made little sense to him.

  ‘What? Hope?’ he shouted back.

  ‘No, you dick. Forget her. Allegra Staunton! Didn’t I tell you?’

  Oh God. ‘What about Allegra?’

  ‘She collared me in the corridor yesterday. God only knows what she was doing there.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘And what about it?’

  ‘She told me to send you her love.’ Danny’s shower curtain zipped back with a tinny rattle. He pulled Jack’s open too and stood there naked and dripping before him. Then winked. ‘She’s gagging for it, mate. Gagging for it. No baggage with that one. Like I said, def worth a shot.’

  It was only after Jack had got home and sorted his kit out that it occurred to him what Danny had meant. Well, as long as Danny didn’t know about the TV thing, that was OK. Let him enjoy his vicarious pleasures. He pulled Hope’s card from the inside pocket of his jacket and frowned. Danny was right. Best not to go there. Not now. He propped it on his bedside table with a sigh.

  The only other object on Jack’s bedside table was a photograph of his parents. Looking at this photo now filled him with woe. Made him yearn to scuttle back to the bolt hole of his youth. To all the safe summer holidays and Christmasses of his childhood. Try as he might, in almost all of his memories, it seemed it was one or the other. Or his birthday. Egg sandwiches, paper streamers, butterfly cakes. And lollies made with Kia-Ora orange squash.

  And woe. How’d it go? That was it. Monday’s child is full of grace, Tuesday’s child is fair of face, Wednesday’s child is full of woe, Thursday’s child has far to go… That was him. Wednesday’s child. He hadn’t known what the word ‘woe’ actually meant, then. He could remember asking his mother as if it were yesterday. Right down to the smell of custard tart cooking in the kitchen. Right down to her warm floury hand on his cheek. ‘It’s when you’re feeling a bit forlorn,’ she’d said. He hadn’t known what ‘forlorn’ meant either. ‘You know,’ she’d said. ‘When you’ve got that little serious face on of yours.’ His serious face. He had it on now. He could feel the weight of its creases on his forehead. Well, he sure knew what woe meant now.

  He picked the photograph up. It had been taken when his father must have been almost exactly the age he was now. Black and white. A little faded and creased at the corners – until Jack had dug it out, it had resided in his dad’s photo box for many years. He smoothed his finger across the dust that had settled there. His mum and dad, hand-in-hand on a beach in West Wales. He couldn’t recall where now. Only that it was a picture that he himself had taken. He didn’t remember doing so, but his father had told him he had. Also in the photo, was his precious tin bucket. The one with the farmyard frieze around the side, abandoned upside down in the sand, by his s
pade. There they’d all been, a happy family. A happy couple. So where was he right now? At this same point in his life? He put the picture back down and looked ruefully around him. At the stained anaglypta, the listless, sprigged curtains, the clumsy marquetry on the junk-shop chest of drawers. How did they get to there and he get to here?

  This really wouldn’t do. He checked his watch. It wasn’t late. After he’d called Ollie to sort out tomorrow, perhaps he’d ring the nursing home and say hello to his dad.

  Chapter 9

  OK, then. Since when was it decreed that there were just the two categories of women – those that did and those that didn’t, and that those that did were strictly for the doing of it with, and those that didn’t were strictly for, well, the not doing of it with, and that never the twain should be confused? Jack, who had awoken to find himself dragged reluctantly from a happy hypothetical re-visit to the contours of Hope Shepherd’s body, was trying very hard to talk himself out of mindless chivalry. He had lived his life following all sorts of daft rules like that and precisely where had it got him? In under-stairs cupboards with girls who looked as if they might actually be up for most things if encouraged, but then in a church vestry with a woman for whom sex was, and always would be, like root-canal work. Uncomfortable, unfortunate, but one of those things. And then divorced. Oh yes. And that.

  Well, perhaps that should tell him something. That changes were long overdue. In that department of his life, at any rate. Other departments, Jack knew, must stay reassuring constants. Life rafts to cling to. There were his columns, the one he did for the Mail, which paid his half of the mortgage – and the one, though less well paid, less high profile, less everything– that he wrote for the Echoon the junior league. He’d been doing the column since Ollie started at the Cougars, his arrival on the scene having happily coincided with the coaching retirement of the already-retired headmaster who’d been writing it (pretty listlessly) for the last fifteen years. He had a whole page to himself, so seriously was the junior league taken, which he’d fill with noteworthy snippets about the various league matches, and the sort of photographs – taken by himself, wherever possible – that he knew would be cherished long after the subjects had grown and the ink had all but faded to grey. They would be put in fancy frames, or stored lovingly in albums, to be brought out, decades later, for grandfatherly chit-chats about days and excitements and triumphs long gone. Being part of the making of these small, unremarkable but precious pieces of history gave Jack more pleasure than almost anything he did.

  There were other constants, of course – there was his book, for one. Jack had embarked, several years back, on an ambitious project. To write a definitive sporting and social history of his father’s beloved Portsmouth Football Club. It was a daft project, the sort of project you didn’t discuss with people at parties. And moreover, there were at least two such books to his knowledge already in print. Why on earth did the world need another? But the enormity of what he’d already done (300-odd pages and rising) coupled with the enormity of what he still had to do (at least that again) compounded with the reality that, having done it, he would have to find someone to publish it, made him feel so anxious that he tried not to think about it when he wasn’t actually doing it, in case he became so frightened that he never picked it up again. He remembered Lydia’s scathing eye-rolling whenever he ventured to mention it. Now the manuscript sat on the chest of drawers in Ollie’s room, and, except on those days when Ollie inhabited it, it was there, siren-calling him every time he passed. But finish it he must. Because it was his dad he was writing it for.

  The other constant Jack loved in his life was coaching the Cougars. He’d been a helper there since the day Ollie started, believing, then as now, that the opportunity of watching your child play football on a Saturday morning to be one of the greatest privileges parenting could bestow.

  Though right now, he decided, there might well be others. This particular Saturday was not shaping up well.

  They were playing the Roath Rovers, and their manager, a man he’d had few dealings with except on presentation days, was not in the jolliest of moods. Earlier there’d been dissent about which pitch they should use – many of them being more mud-bath than playing field – and Jack, refereeing, and therefore nominally in charge, had had to stand firm on his choice.

  No surprise then, that not long into the first half the boys were already chopsy and scrapping. While he was helping up a lad who’d slipped in the mud just in front of him, almost tripping him up, there’d been a corker of a cross towards the open goal. So conscious was he now of the two lads on a collision course to receive it, that he was only belatedly aware of the linesman – the Rover’s manager – blowing his whistle, and of some sort of ruck that was already underway.

  Jogging across to break up the tussle, Jack chided himself that he’d missed the tackle. He was sure it was no big deal, but he was ever conscious that he needed to be impartial where his own son was concerned, and Ollie, it seemed, was a part of this spat.

  ‘Come on, lads,’ he yelled equably as he approached. ‘Break it up!’

  Ollie was holding his hand to his face. Jack shoved the gaggle to one side. They were still sniping at each other.

  ‘Bollocks!’ Ollie was saying, ‘You bloody elbowed me on purpose!’

  ‘Hey, hey, hey –’ Jack began.

  The other boy scowled, his face hot with rage. They were all breathing heavily. The ground was like treacle and the air prickly in his nostrils. Breath clouded in front of him.

  ‘I did not!’ said the boy vehemently, stabbing a finger in Ollie’s general direction. ‘It was an accident! Anyway, you fucking chopped me!’

  ‘I didn’t!’

  ‘You bloody did!’ He turned to Jack. ‘He bloody did!’

  A couple of the boys from the Rovers nodded mutely. He turned to Ollie.

  ‘Well?’ he demanded.

  ‘Look, OK – it was a late-ish tackle, but you bloody elbowed me on purpose!’

  ‘I didn’t!’

  Jack took a closer look at Ollie’s reddened cheek. ‘OK, OK, calm down both of you. Ollie, you can come off till half-time and we’ll put something on that swelling.’ He looked towards the Rovers coach who was doing the right thing and not interfering. He could speak to him afterwards. Best thing, experience told him, was that they just calm down and get on with the game. ‘And… you… er, what’s your name, son?’

  ‘Tom,’ said the boy.

  ‘Why do I have to come off?’ demanded Oliver. ‘I don’t want to come off. He was the one who elbowed me. He –’

  ‘I fucking didn’t!’ said Tom.

  ‘Boys, boys, boys!’ began Jack, who managed such hormonal outbursts at least once every Saturday and knew there was no point trying to tease any more facts out of either party right now. ‘Will you both cut this out, now, so we can get on with the game!’

  ‘you hear me?’Thomas!’ came a voice. A strident, shrill, and indisputably female one. ‘Thomas Shepherd! If I hear so much as onemore expletive come out of your mouth, you are grounded till next Christmas! Do

  Jack turned towards the sideline, where the small gathering of parents had parted to allow a woman in a grey duffel-coat-thing to march through. He blinked. A woman he recognised.

  A woman, he realised as he watched her approach, that other bits of him recognised too. And why not? If they did, then so be it. She wasn’t the Vicar of Dibley, for God’s sake.

  ‘Hello!’ he called out to her. But even as he did so, he felt a bump against his shoulder, as the Roath boy, Tom, pushed angrily past him and stalked off towards the edge of the pitch.

  Hope Shepherd drew level. ‘Oh dear,’ she said, her voice now substantially lower and her expression one of mortification. She glanced behind her. ‘I am so sorry.’

  ‘Please,’ said Jack, spreading his palms. ‘There’s no need to be.’

  She was shaking her head. ‘Yes, there is. I am so sorry. I’ll go and… well, er, look, I think I�
��d better go after him, hadn’t I?’ She frowned. ‘I’m reallysorry.’

  She turned on her heel and stomped angrily after him, leaving Jack with the lingering and not unpleasant image of the two carmine spots that had flamed on her cheeks.

  ‘I have never – never– been so embarrassed in my life. Do you hear me? How dare you behave like that! Is this what professional footballers do? Isit? Do you consider that to be sportsman-like behaviour? Well?’

  Tom sat, sullen and damp and still perspiring in the passenger seat while Hope drove furiously home. ‘Well?’

  ‘But he chopped me, Mum! He knew exactlywhat he was doing. He chopped me!’

  She took a hand from the steering wheel and flapped it angrily in front of him. ‘He chopped you, he chopped you… So what if he did? Does that make it right to stick your elbow in his face?’

  ‘I didn’t meanto. I –’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I simply don’t believe you, Thomas. Do you think Alan Shearer would have behaved like that?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, sulkily. ‘He –’

  ‘I don’t thinkso, young man. I don’t thinkso. I have never been so embarrassed in all my life. And your language!’ She changed gear and the clutch screeched an expletive of its own. ‘It’s not the point, anyway. Whether you meant to or not is irrelevant. You should have apologised!You don’t go around barging into people and shoving them out of the way with your elbows and then expect everyone to believe it was just –’

  ‘Mum, God!It’s football, OK?!’

  ‘Don’t you “God” me! And don’t you “it’s football” me either, young man! It won’t wash, I’m afraid. And don’t give me any more excuses. I’m not interested whether he chopped you or not, quite frankly. It’s –’

  ‘But he should have blown for it!’

  ‘Well, he didn’t. So deal with it. Because that’s life, my boy, and you –’

  ‘But it’s not fair.And it’s notlife either, it’s just because he’s his son!’

  Hope’s head snapped round.