Barefoot in the Dark

by Lynne Barrett-Lee

  ‘It’s big, isn’t it?’ she was saying. ‘You’d never guess these houses had such long back gardens, would you? What does it back on to? Is it the railway?’

  Jack started peeling the foil from the bottle of wine that had sat in the fridge since the last high school quiz night and raffle. It could be crap, easily. And the raffle ticket was still on it. He pulled it off. ‘Not quite. There’s allotments before that, just beyond the trees there.’

  ‘Nice in the summer.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know. I don’t intend – I sincerely hope – finding out. Anyway, I don’t use it. It’s not for the flat. I have that rope thing to hang out washing – as if!’ He uncorked the bottle and poured her a glass of wine, then picked up a Becks and opened it. ‘The garden’s Leonard’s. The landlord. That’s just a fire escape, really.’

  She peered into the blackness outside. ‘But you have this little balcony.’

  ‘I have that little balcony. And if I’m still stuck here in the summer no doubt I’ll pop a few tubs of pansies on it. You know. Brighten the place up.’

  She turned round to smile at him. ‘Yeah, right,’ she laughed. ‘Of course you will. But what’s that down the end? That big shed thing?’ She turned back to look outside.

  ‘At the end of the garden? Oh, that’s Leonard’s menagerie. He keeps all sorts down there. He’s got finches and canaries and chipmunks –’

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘Chipmunks?’

  Jack nodded and took a swig of the beer. It wasn’t quite cold enough. He must turn the fridge up a bit more. He had no evidence, but he wasn’t altogether sure that Leonard didn’t let himself in when he was out and turn it down.

  ‘Chipmunks. He’s very fond of his animals, Leonard.’

  ‘Oh, chipmunks are so sweet. I had no idea you could keep them as pets.’

  ‘Oh, they’re not really pets. He doesn’t handle them. Just likes looking at them.’

  Like he was liking looking at Hope now. Her face was reflected in the glass in the door, and she caught his expression before he had time to remove it. She smiled shyly at him. Then turned round.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘So what are your plans for the rest of the weekend?’

  Was she being conversational or up front? She moved back across the kitchen and began studying the list of football fixtures on the fridge door. ‘I found it really strange at first after Iain went. When he had the children. Disenfranchised, you know? I’m sort of getting used to it, but I still feel not quite relaxed. Like I’m skiving off or something. I’m never sure quite what I should be doing.’ She sipped her wine. And didn’t grimace. ‘It must be really strange for you.’

  Making conversation, then. But, hey, the night was young.

  He gestured that they go back in the living room. He would put on some music. Yes, that would be good.

  ‘Like you say, you get used to it. But you’re right. It feels like a whole lot of time to fill sometimes. I only see Ollie Thursdays and every other weekend – this isn’t one of them, as you probably figured – so it’s a big life change, yes.’ He pulled out the CD rack and started flicking through it. Nirvana? Was she a Nirvana kind of person? Or would she be more Lighthouse Family? In which case he was well scuppered. ‘And no. No plans. I’ll spend some time writing tomorrow, probably. Meet up with Dan for a drink at some point, no doubt.’

  She was crossing the room, looking over his shoulder as he flicked.

  ‘Dan?’

  ‘Danny. You met him at the studio, didn’t you?’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Well, anyway, he’s got three kids. One of them a baby. He needs to get out more.’ They both laughed a been-there-and-done-that-one laugh.

  ‘Oh!’ she said, arresting his flicking with her hand. ‘You have the Chili Peppers! I love the Chili Peppers.’ She pulled the CD out and handed it to him.

  ‘Put that on. Track twelve.’

  ‘Yes, miss,’ said Jack. It was one of Ollie’s. It had his little sticker in the corner. Jack put his thumb over it. ‘Right away.’

  By the time he’d put the CD on and an arresting electronic twanging had started up, Hope was back on the sofa and unzipping her boots. She glanced up.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ she said. ‘But my feet are killing me. I’ve been in these all afternoon.’

  ‘Around and about?’ he said, sitting in the armchair the better to view her.

  She yanked them both off and tucked her legs up under her.

  ‘Shopping mainly. As you do. Plus, I had to go down to the Heartbeat shop to sort out the race application forms with Bet. Which reminds me. Are you going to be able to make the meeting OK next Tuesday? We’ve got both our main sponsors coming. I called your secretary but she wasn’t sure what your movements would be.’

  Secretary? Fat chance. But Jack had already put it in his diary. Along with the meeting with Allegra in the afternoon. He was pinning so many hopes on his meeting with Allegra that he didn’t even want to think about it. Getting out of this hole, for one.

  ‘I’m sure it will be fine,’ he said. ‘Another drink?’ Her glass was still a third full but his beer was finished.

  She looked at her watch then shook her head. ‘I’d better not.’

  ‘There’s no rush to go, you know.’ He stood up.

  ‘Go on then. Just half a glass.’

  ‘Great.’ He headed off to the kitchen. ‘What about food?’ he said, though he wasn’t quite sure why. He had no food apart from the Indian for one. But he could always have a take-away delivered. That would work. ‘You eaten?’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she called to him. ‘I don’t want to impose on your evening. I’ll probably have some soup or something when I get home.’

  ‘No rush,’ he said again, bringing the wine bottle back in with him. ‘My evening is more than happy to be imposed upon. And if it’s soup you’re after, I can easily oblige. As long as you like tomato.’ This time he sat on the sofa beside her and put another two inches into what was left in her glass.

  ‘I do, as it happens,’ she said, nodding to indicate there was enough in the glass now. She sipped at it and settled herself back against one of his stylish new cushions. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Isn’t this nice?’

  There were so many routes to a successful seduction, but, for the life of him, Jack couldn’t get his head around what they were. All he knew – all that he could think right now – was that Hope (female, warm, fragrant, soft, smiley, yielding and ultimately, gloriously, alien) was sitting on his sofa, in his flat, and that they were all alone. And she was looking gorgeous. What the hell had he been thinking? There was absolutely no possibility that he was going to let the next hour or two pass without making an attempt at seducing her. He had absorbed all this information at lightning speed around the time, if not before, she had taken her boots off. He was a man and she was a woman and whatever reservations he might have had about the wisdom of getting involved with anyone like her right now, chances were that she had not, he figured, had sex for perhaps even longer than he had. That fact, together with the boots and the dress, was sufficient to make him determined that baggage could bugger off, that biology would out, that two people of the opposite sex in circumstances such as theirs would be committing a grievous crime if they didn’t allow their proximity to reach its evolutionary conclusion. But Hope was a woman. And women didn’t necessarily see things like that.

  ‘The first boy,’ she was saying, ‘that I really fell in love with – well, in that way you do when you’re thirteen – he had two chinchillas.’ She sipped the wine again, glancing at Jack as she said this as if it were the most natural conversational direction imaginable. Now that was a woman thing. That ability to hang on to a train of thought while you were busy talking about something altogether different and plop it back into the conversation seemingly at random. Lydia used to do that. They’d be talking about the cladding on the pipes and she’d suddenly say, ‘did you?’ Did he what? ‘Di
d you speak to Kevin about the life assurance?’ As if they’d had the conversation not yesterday but five seconds ago. But he didn’t want to think about Lydia while sharing airspace with Hope. Didn’t want to think about Lydia, period. Which, happily, he didn’t much. Except as a dusty archaeological artefact capable of throwing light on the present. Like a severed head, or particularly unattractive old urn.

  ‘I had a stag beetle,’ he replied now.

  ‘Ugh.’ She curled a strand of hair behind her ear. ‘I’m glad he didn’t. D’you know? One day when I went round to his house we got talking about a previous chinchilla he’d had that had died. And he dug up the skeleton to show me. Isn’t that bizarre?’

  ‘Very bizarre. Perhaps it was a ritual. Don’t some Amazonian tribesmen give their women the bones of rival tribesmen to ornament their hair?’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. But I definitely remember the jawbone. Chipmunks. Bless. How sweet. We have two hamsters, you know. Ant and Dec. ’

  Seduce her he must. If that was the right word for it, which Jack doubted. Seducing someone involved an element of corruption, didn’t it? It wasn’t as if he was trying to deflower a virgin. He just wanted to have sex with her, and he needed a game plan. The trouble with women, it seemed to him, was that where sex was concerned, so much of the communication had to be non-verbal. Life would be so much simpler if women were more like men. If he could just ask her if she’d like to make love with him and be done with it. It was all the guesswork that vexed him. All the reading of body language. The fretful business of having to work on assumptions all the time. Was she looking at him like that now because she did want to have sex with him, or just because she thought he was nice? He wished he had more yardsticks. More conquests under his belt.

  They’d moved away from mammals and on to teenagers by now, occasioned by more rootling in his CD collection, and her comment that his tastes (which were more than half Ollie’s) were a lot more eclectic than most. She seemed not at all as if she were thinking of going. Indeed, her legs, which were now stretched out in front of her, crossed at the ankle, seemed like they were thinking of staying, if anything. If such a thing could be read into the wiggling of female toes.

  ‘Right. I really should be getting back,’ she said. Jack ripped the last page from his mental instruction manual. Clearly not, then. But then again, women worked this way sometimes. This might just be code for ‘tell me you want me to stay’. He stood up and held out his hand for her glass.

  ‘Why?’ he said. ‘What’s the hurry? Anyway, I thought you were going to have some soup with me.’ He gestured with the glass. She looked undecided.

  ‘No, I really mustn’t. I have to drive home.’

  ‘Get a cab.’

  ‘Listen to you!’

  ‘Go on. My treat.’

  ‘I don’t need treating.’

  ‘Yes, you do. I insist.’

  She seemed to like that. She pulled the sleeve of her dress up and consulted her watch. Chewed on her lip.

  ‘I don’t know –’

  ‘I insist.’

  She pushed the sleeve back down. ‘Oh, go on then. What the hell. I guess I could always cycle over and pick the car up in the morning, couldn’t I?’ She chewed her lip again. She seemed to be waiting to hear something from him. He wished he knew what. This was a very big deal. He wished she’d just tell him what she was thinking.

  ‘Or you could run,’ he offered. ‘It’s probably about three miles, isn’t it?’

  ‘Less than that, even. Yes. Yes, that’s a brilliant idea. I’d be going for a run tomorrow anyway. Yes.’ She uncrossed her ankles and stood up. ‘Yes. What the hell. I’ll have another glass of wine then, thank you very much.’

  Back in the kitchen, Jack was conscious that a highly significant milestone had been reached. Had she not followed him in there he would have mimed a yes! yes! yes! worthy of Beckham scoring against Argentina, perhaps have even knelt down and put his T-shirt over his face. But as she was behind him he had to make do with doing it in his head.

  She drank a full two inches from her wine in five seconds, as if some stellar gateway had sucked her in and spat her out again in a different time continuum. As if some internal switch had been flicked. He remembered a bag of Doritos he had in the cupboard, so he got them out and put some into a cereal bowl. Hope took one and munched on it. She was back looking out into the garden again.

  ‘Where do they come from?’

  He topped up her wine glass and got himself another beer.

  ‘Where do who come from?’

  ‘Not who. What. Chipmunks. America, isn’t it?’

  Jack nodded. ‘The Appalachians or somewhere, I guess. Though I imagine they’re indigenous to pretty much the whole continent, don’t you think?’

  She took another slurp of her wine. ‘Only I was wondering if they felt the cold out there. Wouldn’t they normally hibernate in the winter? You know, in the forest?’

  Jack didn’t have the first idea what chipmunks got up to in the forest, or, indeed, anywhere else. Mating and eating and sleeping, no doubt. And looking cutesy for the tourists.

  ‘D’you know? I don’t actually know,’ he said, trying hard to sound like it was something he might have.

  ‘It probably doesn’t get cold enough,’ she decided. ‘But even so, bless. It can still get pretty chilly. Does he have a heater for them or anything?’

  He really didn’t have a clue. Chipmunks. They weren’t in any sex manual, but Jack was all for trusting to instinct, and his instinct told him right now that if he could oblige Hope’s evident affection for small rodents by taking her down and actually showing her the chipmunks, something useful would be achieved. She was clearly into stuff like that. And the flat below had been dark when he’d last looked. Perhaps Leonard was down the pub.

  ‘Do you want to go down and see the chipmunks?’

  ‘Oh, I’d love to see the chipmunks,’ she said, putting her glass down. ‘I’ll go fetch my boots, shall I?’

  ‘Don’t bother. They’ll only get caught in the fire escape grating. It’s not that cold. Besides, we’ll have to be quiet. Just in case.’

  ‘Oh, if it’s a problem –’

  He shook his head. ‘Absolutely no problem. Leonard won’t mind.’ He would. But what the hell. This was business. Jack unlocked the back door.

  ‘Come on then,’ he said. ‘Let’s go down and see the chipmunks.’

  Hope grinned at him. ‘Barefoot? In the dark? What fun!’

  That was the thing about Hope, really. She was up for it. It wasn’t a quality he’d ever given much thought to, but he suddenly realised that was what he most liked about her. She had a natural joie de vivre. A way of interacting with life that made you feel it could be something other than basically shite, if only you knew how to approach it. She was giggling now.

  Jack held the back door open for her. She was shorter in her stockinged feet – getting on for a foot shorter than him, in fact. It made him feel very masculine. Very protective. Hell, very horny. He clicked up the latch and pulled the door shut behind him, then padded after her down the fire escape stairs.

  ‘It’s a nice garden,’ she whispered when she got to the bottom. Jack, who had always seen gardens as merely another domestic drain on his football-watching time, thought he’d probably have to shoot himself should it ever seem a good idea to have a garden as a hobby. This kind of garden, at any rate. He had no problem with the mad stuff that Irish guy on the telly did. It was only March, but already Leonard had been out and shaved the lawn, as well as tying the daffodil foliage down in little bundles so they seemed to pepper the flowerbeds like eruptions of cysts. Jack generally tried to avoid opening the back door in daylight, as Leonard could talk about hard-pruning his forsythia with a fact-packed obsession that bordered on mania. Like a serial killer in an interview room when the game’s up and he might just as well revel in his work.

  But it was neat and tidy and had big wavy borders. A woman probably would
like it, he supposed.

  They made their way down the little stepping-stone path, each concrete circle of which was etched with a bird, or a frog, or a hedgehog. Hope’s perfume was scenting the air in her wake, and the breeze, which was more of a wind now, lifted skeins of her hair from her neck. It was cold because it was a clear night, an almost full moon and a smattering of stars lighting their way to the sheds at the end. The birds were quiet, of course, but as they approached they could already hear the chipmunks as they streaked back and forth, up and down, round and round, a blur of striped backs and button eyes.

  ‘Round here,’ he said, placing his arm around Hope’s shoulder to steer her along to the side of the shed. Which felt very nice.

  ‘Did he make all this himself?’ she asked.

  Jack didn’t know. ‘I suppose so,’ he said. The chipmunks were housed in what was more giant cage than shed. Though the lowest two feet were panelled in wood, the rest of the structure was simply long struts between reinforced chicken wire, and there were also various wooden assemblages in the cage, nesting boxes and sloped runways, up and down which the chipmunks – he thought there were about six of them – moved at great speed, doing whatever it was that chipmunks did.

  ‘Oh, look, there’s one!’ said Hope. ‘Oh bless. It’s so sweet!’ She had the fingers of one hand laced through the wire.

  ‘And they bite,’ said Jack. She took the fingers out.

  ‘But they’re so sweet,’ she said again. ‘They’re so tiny, aren’t they?’

  ‘Tiny,’ agreed Jack. Women always seemed to like tiny things.

  ‘And there’s another one! Look!’

  They looked. Looked for some minutes, in fact. He didn’t think he’d felt so happy in a long time. The chipmunks were being obliging, Leonard’s flat was still in darkness, it was Saturday night and there was a soft womanly body not five inches from his. He still had his arm around her shoulder, moreover, and she wasn’t making any gestures that suggested she minded. But then he felt a small shiver run through her.