The Man Who Didn't Call

by Rosie Walsh

  ‘Look, I know it sounds like a teenage saga,’ I said eventually. ‘And I don’t doubt that you’re pissed off with me. But something has happened to him, I’m certain of it.’

  Jo opened Tommy’s glove compartment to extract a large bar of chocolate, from which she snapped off a chunk with some force.

  ‘Mum?’ Rudi said. ‘What’s that?’

  He knew perfectly well what it was. Jo handed her son a square without saying anything. Rudi smiled at her, his biggest, toothiest smile, and – in spite of her growing impatience – Jo smiled back. ‘Don’t ask for more,’ she warned. ‘You’ll only end up being sick.’

  Rudi said nothing, confident she’d give in.

  Jo turned back to me. ‘Look, Sarah. I don’t want to be cruel, but I think you need to accept that Eddie is not dead. Nor is he injured, or suffering a broken phone, or battling a life-threatening illness.’

  ‘Really? You’ve called the hospitals to check? Had a chat with the local coroner?’

  ‘Oh God,’ she said, staring at me. ‘Tell me you haven’t done any of those things, Sarah! Jesus Christ!’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Rudi whispered.

  ‘Stop that,’ Jo told him.

  ‘You started it. ’

  Jo gave Rudi more chocolate and he went back to his iPad. It had been my present to him from America, and he told me earlier on that he loved it more than anything else in the world. Which had made me laugh and then, to Rudi’s bafflement, cry a little, because I knew he’d have learned that phrase from Jo. She had turned out to be a remarkable mother, Joanna Monk, in spite of her own upbringing.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Of course I haven’t been calling hospitals,’ I sighed. ‘Come on, Jo.’ I watched a row of crows scattering from a telephone wire.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure. My point was just that you don’t know any more than I do what’s happened to Eddie.’

  ‘But men do this all the time!’ she exploded. ‘You know they do!’

  ‘I don’t know anything about dating. I’ve been married the last seventeen years.’

  ‘Well, you can take it from me: nothing’s changed,’ Jo said bitterly. ‘They still don’t call.’

  She turned to Tommy but found him unresponsive. Any residual confidence he’d feigned about today’s big launch had evaporated like the morning mist and he’d barely said a word since we’d set off. There had been a brief display of bravado at Chieveley Services when he’d had a message telling him that three local newspapers had confirmed attendance, but a few minutes later he’d called me ‘Sarah’ in the queue at WHSmith, and Tommy only called me Sarah when he was extremely anxious. (I had been ‘Harrington’ since we turned thirteen and he’d started doing press-ups and wearing aftershave.)

  The silence thickened, and I lost the battle I’d been fighting since we left London.

  I’m on my way back to Gloucestershire , I texted Eddie, quick as a wink. Supporting my friend Tommy; he’s launching a big sports project at our old school. If you wanted to meet up, I could stay at my parents’. Would be good to talk. Sarah x

  No pride, no shame. I’d somehow moved beyond that. I tapped the screen of my phone every few seconds, waiting for a delivery report.

  Delivered , it announced perkily.

  I watched the screen, checking for a text bubble. A text bubble would mean he was writing back.

  No text bubble.

  I looked again. No text bubble.

  I looked again. Still no text bubble. I slid my phone into my handbag, out of sight. This was what girls did when they were still in the tender agonies of adolescence, I thought. Girls, still learning to love themselves, waiting in mild hysteria to hear from a boy they’d kissed in a sweaty corner last Friday. This was not the behaviour of a woman of thirty-seven. A woman who’d travelled the world, survived tragedy, run a charity.

  The rain was clearing. Through the crack of open window I could smell the tang of wet tarmac and damp, smoky earth. I am in agony. I stared vacantly at a field of round hay bales, squeezed tightly into shining black plastic like pudgy legs into tights. I would tip over the edge soon. I would tip over the edge and go into free fall if I didn’t find out what had happened.

  I checked my phone. It had been twenty-four hours since I’d taken out my SIM card and rebooted. Time to try again.

  Half an hour later we were on the dual carriageway coming into Cirencester and Rudi was asking his mother why the clouds were all moving in different directions .

  We were a matter of mere miles from where I’d met him. I closed my eyes, trying to remember my walk that hot morning. Those uncomplicated few hours Before Eddie. The sour-milk sweetness of elderflower blossom. Yes, and scorched grass. The drift of butterflies, stunned by the heat. There had been a barley field, a feathered, husk-green carpet panting and bulging with hot air. The occasional explosion of a startled rabbit. And the strange sense of expectation that had hovered over the village that day, the boiling stillness, the littered secrets.

  Unbidden, my memory fast-forwarded a few more minutes to the moment I actually met Eddie – a straightforward, friendly man with warm eyes and an open face, holding court with an escaped sheep – and misery and confusion tangled like weeds over everything else.

  ‘You can tell me I’m in denial,’ I said to the silent car. ‘But it wasn’t a fling. It was . . . it was everything. We both knew. That’s why I’m sure something’s happened to him.’

  The idea made my breath stick to the inside of my throat.

  ‘Say something,’ Jo said to Tommy. ‘Say something to her.’

  ‘I work in sports consultancy,’ he muttered. Embarrassment bloomed on his neck. ‘I do bodies, not heads.’

  ‘Who does heads?’ Rudi asked. He was still keeping close tabs on our conversation.

  ‘Therapists do heads,’ Jo said wearily. ‘Therapists and me.’

  Ferapists. She pronounced it ferapists . Jo was born and bred in Bow, was a proper, salt-of-the-earth cockney. And I loved her; I loved her bluntness and mercurial temper, I loved her fearlessness (lack of boundaries, others might say), and most of all I loved the tremendous fury with which she adored her son. I loved everything about Jo, but I would still have preferred not to be in a car with her today.

  Rudi asked me if we were nearly there yet. I told him yes. ‘ Is that your school?’ he asked, pointing at an industrial estate.

  ‘No, although there are some architectural similarities.’

  ‘Is that your school?’

  ‘No. That’s Waitrose.’

  ‘How long till we get there?’

  ‘Not long.’

  ‘How many minutes?’

  ‘About twenty?’

  Rudi slumped back into his seat in self-conscious despair. ‘That’s ages ,’ he muttered. ‘Mum, I need some new games. Can I have some new games?’

  Jo said he could not, and Rudi set about buying some anyway. I watched in awe as he matter-of-factly typed in Jo’s Apple ID and password.

  ‘Er, excuse me,’ I whispered. He looked up at me, his little blond Afro an unlikely halo, his almond-shaped eyes cartwheeling with mischief. He mimed a zip being shut across his mouth and then pointed a warning finger at me. And because I loved this child far more than I wanted to, I did what I was told.

  His mother turned her attention to the other child on the back seat. ‘Now look,’ she said, putting a plump hand on my leg. Her nails had been painted in a colour called Rubble for today. ‘I think you have to face facts. You met a bloke; you spent a week with him; then he went on holiday and never called you again.’

  The facts were too painful at the moment; I preferred theories.

  ‘Fifteen days he’s had to get in touch, Sarah. You’ve been sending him messages, calling him, all sorts of other things that quite frankly I’d never expect of someone like you . . . and yet – no response. I’ve been there, love, and it hurts. But it doesn’t stop hurting until you accept the truth and move
on.’

  ‘I’d move on if I actually knew that he simply wasn’t interested. But I don’t.’

  Jo sighed. ‘Tommy. Please help me out here.’

  There was a long pause. Was there any humiliation greater than this? I wondered. A conversation like this, at the age of nearly bloody forty ? This time three weeks ago I’d been a functional adult. I’d chaired a board meeting. I’d written a report for a children’s hospital with which my charity was soon to start working. I’d fed and groomed myself that day, made jokes, fielded calls, responded to emails. And now here I was with less command of my emotions than the seven-year-old sitting next to me.

  I checked Tommy’s eyebrows in the rear-view mirror to see if he was likely to throw anything in. His eyebrows, which had taken on a life of their own when he’d lost his hair in his early twenties, were nowadays more reliable barometers of his thoughts than his mouth.

  They were creased together. ‘The thing is,’ he said. He paused again, and I sensed the effort it was taking to extract himself from his own problems. ‘The thing is, Jo, you’ve assumed I agree with you about Sarah. But I’m not sure I do.’ His voice was soft and careful, like a cat skirting danger.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I predict a riot,’ Rudi whispered.

  Tommy’s eyebrows worked up his next sentence. ‘I’m sure the reason most men don’t call is that they’re just not interested, but it sounds to me like there might be more to this. I mean, they ended up spending a week together. All that time, can you imagine? If Eddie was just after you-know-what, he’d have disappeared after one night. ’

  Jo snorted. ‘Why leave after one night if you can pack in seven days’ you-know-what?’

  ‘Jo, come on! That’s what twenty-year-old boys do, not men of nearly forty!’

  ‘Are you talking about sex?’ Rudi asked.

  ‘Er, no?’ Jo was thrown. ‘What do you know about sex?’

  Rudi, terrified, returned to his fraudulent iPad activity.

  Jo watched him for a while, but he was bent studiously over the screen, muttering in his Russian voice.

  I took a long breath. ‘The one thing I keep thinking about is that he offered to cancel his holiday. Why would he—’

  ‘I need to wee,’ Rudi announced suddenly. ‘I think I’ve got less than a minute,’ he added, before Jo had time to ask.

  We pulled up outside the agricultural college, right across the road from the comprehensive Eddie had gone to. A grey mist of pain hovered as I stared at its sign, trying to imagine a twelve-year-old Eddie bouncing through the gates. A round little face; the smile that would crease his skin into laughter lines as the years passed.

  Just passing your school , I texted him, before I had time to stop myself. I wish I knew what happened to you.

  Jo was suspiciously upbeat when she and Rudi got back in the car. She said it was turning into a lovely day and that she was very happy to be out in the countryside with us all.

  ‘I told her she was being mean to you,’ Rudi whispered to me. ‘Do you want a piece of cheese?’ He patted a Tupperware of rejected cheese slices from the sandwiches Jo had given him earlier.

  I ruffled his hair. ‘No,’ I whispered back. ‘But I love you. Thank you.’

  Jo pretended not to have heard the exchange. ‘You were saying that Eddie offered to cancel his holiday,’ she said brightly .

  And I felt the fissures of my heart open wider, because, of course, I knew why she was finding it so hard to be patient. I knew that of the many men to whom Jo had given her heart and soul (and, often, her body) in the years before Rudi, almost none had called her. And the ones who had called always turned out to have a collection of other women on the go. And each and every time she had let them string her along, because she could never quite give up the hope of being loved. Then Shawn O’Keefe had arrived on the scene, and Jo had got pregnant, and Shawn had moved in, knowing Jo would feed and house him. He hadn’t had one single job in all that time. He’d disappear for whole nights without telling her where he was. His ‘job interview’ today was pure fiction.

  But Jo had been allowing this for seven years, because she somehow convinced herself that love would blossom if she and Shawn worked just a little harder, if she waited just a little longer for him to grow up. She’d convinced herself they could become the family she’d never had.

  Yes, Jo knew all about denial.

  But my own situation seemed to be too much for her. She’d tried to humour me since Eddie had disappeared off the face of the earth, forced herself to listen to my theories, told me he might just call tomorrow. But she hadn’t believed a word of it, and now she’d cracked. Don’t allow yourself to be used the way I have , she was saying. Walk away now, Sarah, while you still can.

  The problem was, I couldn’t.

  I had tried out the idea of Eddie simply not being interested. Each and every one of the fifteen days my phone had remained silent. I’d combed through every glowing, lambent moment of my time with him, searching for cracks, tiny warning signs that he might not have been as certain as I was, and I’d found nothing.

  I barely used Facebook these days, but suddenly I was on it, all of the time, scouring his profile for signs of life. Or, worse – someone else.

  Nothing.

  I phoned and messaged him; I even sent him a pathetic little tweet. I downloaded Messenger and WhatsApp and checked throughout the day to see if he’d surfaced. But they told me the same thing every time: Eddie David had last been seen online just over two weeks ago, the day I left his house so he could pack for Spain.

  Flattened by both shame and desperation, I’d even downloaded a bunch of dating apps to find out if he was registered.

  He wasn’t.

  I craved control over this uncontrollable situation. I couldn’t sleep; the thought of food made my insides convulse. I couldn’t concentrate on anything and I jumped on my phone with the frenzy of a starving animal when it buzzed. Exhaustion pressed at me throughout the day – great fibrous wads of it; a suffocation, at times – and yet I spent most of the night wide awake, staring into the pitchy darkness of Tommy’s spare room in West London.

  The strange thing was, I knew this wasn’t me. I knew it wasn’t sane behaviour, and I knew it was getting worse, not better, but I had neither the will nor the energy to stage an intervention on myself.

  Why didn’t he call? I typed into Google one day. The response was like an online hurricane. For the sake of any remaining sanity, I had shut down the page.

  Instead, I’d googled Eddie, again, had gone through his carpentry website, looking for . . . By that point I didn’t even know what I was looking for. And of course I hadn’t found a thing.

  ‘Do you think he told you everything about himself?’ Tommy asked. ‘Are you certain he isn’t with another woman, for example?’

  The road dipped down into a little bowl of parkland, in which stately oaks had gathered like gentlemen in a smoking lounge.

  ‘He’s not with another woman,’ I said.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I know because . . . I know. He was single; he was available. Not just literally, emotionally.’

  The flash of a deer vanishing into a beech wood.

  ‘OK. But what about all the other warning signs?’ Tommy persisted. ‘Were there any inconsistencies? Did you sense he was holding anything back?’

  ‘No.’ I paused. ‘Although, I suppose . . .’

  Jo turned round. ‘What?’

  I sighed. ‘The day we met, he cancelled a few incoming calls. But that was the only time it happened,’ I added quickly. ‘From then on he answered every time his phone rang. And he didn’t have anyone strange calling him, either; it was all friends, his mum, business queries . . .’ And Derek , I thought suddenly. I had never quite got to the bottom of who Derek was.

  Tommy’s eyebrows were engaged in some complicated triangulation.

  ‘What?’ I asked him. ‘What are you thinking? It was just the first day, Tommy. A
fter that he picked up when anyone rang.’

  ‘I believe you. It’s more that . . .’ He trailed off.

  Jo was noisily silent, but I ignored her.

  ‘It’s more that I’ve just always thought Internet dating to be risky,’ Tommy said eventually. ‘I know you didn’t meet him online, but it’s a similar situation – you have no friends in common and no shared history. He could have recast himself as almost anyone.’

  I frowned. ‘But he made friends with me on Facebook. Why would he do that if he had anything to hide? He’s on Twitter and Instagram for his work, and he’s got a business website. Which includes a photo of him. And I stayed at his house for a week, remember? His post was addressed to Eddie David. If he wasn’t Eddie David, cabinetmaker, I’d know.’

  We were now deep in the old woods that spread across Cirencester Park. Pennies of light flashed across Jo’s bare thighs as she gazed out of the window, apparently at a loss. Before long we’d emerge from the woods, and soon after that we’d reach the bend in the road where the accident had happened.

  At that thought, I felt my breathing change, as if someone had thinned out the car’s oxygen.

  A few minutes later we emerged into the post-rain brightness of country fields. I closed my eyes, still unable, after all these years, to look at the grass verge where they said the ambulance crew had laid her out, tried to stop the inevitable.

  Jo’s hand found its way to my knee.

  ‘Why are you doing that?’ Rudi’s antenna was up. ‘Mum? Why is your hand on Sarah’s leg? Why are there flowers tied to that tree? Why is everyone being—’

  ‘Rudi,’ Jo said. ‘Rudi, what about I spy? I spy with my little eye something beginning with “W”!’

  There was a pause. ‘I’m too old for that,’ Rudi said humpily. He didn’t like being kept out.