The Man Who Didn't Call

by Rosie Walsh

  I highlighted the number. Call? my phone asked.

  ‘Sarah?’ It was Jo, calling from the kitchen. ‘Can you check this soup?’

  ‘Coming!’ I pressed ‘Call’.

  The phone started ringing and adrenaline mushroomed, pressing out at my skin like gas in an overfilled balloon. I leaned against the wall, hoping he wouldn’t answer, hoping he would. Wondering what I would say if we spoke, wondering what I’d do if we didn’t.

  ‘Hello. This is Eddie David, cabinetmaker. Sorry I’m not here to take your call. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you soonest, or try my mobile. Bye!’

  I hung up. Flushed the toilet. I wondered if it would ever stop.

  I had been spending the month of June in England for nineteen years. Normally, I stayed three weeks in Gloucestershire, with my parents, and one in London, with Tommy. London was close enough to Gloucestershire for this to work well. This trip, however, had turned out to be quite different. Granddad’s sudden and total immobilization had prevented Mum and Dad from coming back. Trapped three hours away in Leicester, they divided their time between caring for him, trying not to kill him and searching for a carer who would also try not to kill him. Any spare moments were spent on the phone to me. ‘We feel so awful that you’re there and we’re here,’ Mum had said miserably. ‘Is there any way you could stay a bit longer?’

  I had agreed to stay an extra two weeks and moved my return flight to 12 July. I’d promised Reuben I’d start working remotely as soon as my holiday finished, and to prove it, had accepted an invitation to speak at a palliative care conference organized by our one and only British trustee.

  Until I resumed work, however, I was staying here in London. The prospect of my parents’ empty house – with Eddie’s place a mere mile away – was too appalling to consider. Zoe had been away most of this time, so it was just me and Tommy: exactly what I’d needed.

  But the lady of the house was back now, just in from an EU roundtable on tech law; tired yet immaculate as she stood by the stove in a sleeveless silk blouse, stirring the ramen I’d made to welcome her home.

  I hovered embarrassedly in the doorway, watching her. She was one of those people who had no need for an apron, even when wearing silk. A woman of precision and economy, Zoe Markham, not just of speech but of body. She took up only a slim column of space and seldom saw fit to enlarge it with gesticulation or noise. In fact, had it not been for her behaviour around Tommy during the first year of their relationship, I wouldn’t even have been able to swear that we were of the same species. She’d been reassuringly human back then; hadn’t been able to take her hands off him; was always forcing him into sentimental selfies and even hired a pro photographer to take pictures of them training together.

  ‘Ah, Sarah,’ she said, looking up. ‘I rescued dinner.’ She gave me a smile that made me think of cold cream.

  You never knew what anyone did behind locked doors, I thought, but the idea of Zoe hiding in a toilet, calling some man’s workshop at 8 p.m. – in spite of him having cold-shouldered her for three weeks – made me suddenly laugh.

  Tommy, who had no idea what I was laughing at, but who was nervy as a cat this evening, joined in.

  Zoe sat still as marble as I served, watching me through grey eyes. It was one of the things about her that unsettled me most. The lack of speech, the incessant bloody watching . (Tommy once said it was this quality that made her such a successful lawyer. ‘She misses nothing,’ he’d told me, as if this were a trait to be celebrated in the real world.)

  ‘I hear you’re pining for a man,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t think pining ’s the right word,’ Jo said quickly. ‘She’s more . . . confused.’

  Zoe’s eyes swivelled over Jo, but she said nothing.

  I’d been surprised to see Jo tonight. She didn’t like Zoe and it never seemed to have occurred to her to pretend otherwise. (I didn’t love Zoe, either, but I’d agreed with myself that I’d keep on trying. Zoe had lost both of her parents in the King’s Cross fire of 1987, and you had to forgive people with an excuse like that.)

  Zoe tucked a wedge of ice-blonde hair behind an ear. ‘So what’s going on?’

  ‘The story’s just as Tommy probably reported,’ I said. ‘We had a week together. It was . . . well, special. He went on holiday, said he’d call me before his plane took off, but he didn’t, and I haven’t heard from him since. I think something has happened to him.’

  A tiny frown crossed her face. ‘Such as what?’

  I smiled weakly. ‘I’ve driven Tommy and Jo quite mad with my theories. There’s probably no point going over them again.’

  ‘Not at all,’ Tommy said. ‘We’re as baffled as you are, Harrington.’

  And Jo, who was not as baffled at all, but who couldn’t bring herself to stand shoulder to shoulder with Zoe, agreed.

  ‘It’s quite a mystery,’ she said. ‘Sarah’s put a note on his Facebook page asking if anyone’s heard from him, yet nobody’s replied. He hasn’t been on WhatsApp or Messenger for weeks, and all of his social medias are quiet.’

  ‘Media,’ Zoe smiled. ‘“Media” is the plural.’ With a small, skilful movement of her wrist, she lifted a perfect coil of noodle from her broth. She ate for a moment, looking thoughtful. Then: ‘Let him go,’ she said, decisively. ‘He sounds weak to me. You deserve better than a weak man, Sarah.’

  The conversation turned to the bombings in Turkey, but I realized that I’d drifted back to Eddie after a few minutes. What is wrong with me? I wondered desperately. Who have I become? No matter what I did, no matter how serious the events around me, I seemed able to focus only on one thing.

  I might have to let go of him, was the thought that kept circulating. I might have to accept that he simply changed his mind. The idea left me immobilized, torpid with disbelief. And yet three weeks had passed since we’d said goodbye, and in that time I’d heard nothing from him. And nobody had replied to – nobody had even acknowledged – my appeal for information on his Facebook wall.

  ‘We’ve lost her again,’ Zoe said.

  I blushed. ‘No, no, I was just thinking about Turkey. ’

  ‘We’ve all loved and lost,’ Zoe said briskly. ‘And at least your BMI is down.’

  ‘Oh.’ I was thrown. ‘Is it?’

  It was not impossible. My appetite was terrible, and I’d been out running every day, solely because it gave me a different type of chest pain to deal with.

  ‘I could look at any woman on earth and tell you her BMI.’ Zoe smiled.

  I didn’t dare look at Jo, but I was pretty certain that ‘I could look at any woman on earth and tell you her BMI’ would make an appearance in conversations to come.

  ‘One of the key benefits of a broken heart,’ Zoe went on. ‘Slimming down, toning up. You look fantastic!’ She crossed her perfectly slim, perfectly toned legs and fished a prawn out of her bowl.

  I was exhausted by the time I cleared the table. Too exhausted to unwrap the artisan chocolates I’d bought with the intention of pretending I’d made them myself. Too exhausted, even, to care about openly checking Eddie’s Facebook wall while I made coffee.

  So I ended up staring emptily at his profile for a good while before I realized that someone had finally replied to my appeal for information. Two people, in fact. I read their posts once, twice, three times, then moved across the kitchen and slid my phone into Tommy’s vision.

  Tommy read the posts a few times before handing my phone to Zoe, who read them once, said nothing and handed the phone to Jo.

  Thoughts spiralled like a tornado.

  ‘Well,’ Tommy said, ‘I think we might owe you an apology, Harrington.’ He glanced at Zoe, who had probably never apologized to anyone.

  Hot. I was too hot. I took off my cardigan and it fell to the floor. My head thrummed as I bent down to pick it up. I was too bloody hot.

  ‘Blimey,’ Jo said, looking up from the phone. ‘Maybe you were right.’

  ‘Oh, come on!’ Zoe lau
ghed. ‘This post doesn’t mean anything!’

  But for the first time in as long as I could remember, Tommy took her on. ‘I don’t agree,’ he said. ‘I think this changes everything.’

  This afternoon someone whose name I didn’t know, an Alan somebody, had replied to my post: I just looked up his profile for the same reason and saw your post, Sarah. He went AWOL after cancelling our holiday the other week. Has anyone messaged you about this? Let me know if you hear anything.

  Then someone else, a Martin someone, had written: Was wondering the same. He hasn’t turned up at football for a few weeks. Admittedly, he is not known for his reliability, but this is beyond the pale. I’m sorry to say that tonight we were thrashed 8–1. A shameful episode in our long and magnificent history. We need him back.

  A few seconds later the same guy, Martin, had posted a photo of Eddie and had written: Find this man. #WheresWally

  And, finally: It doesn’t sit well with me that you can’t punctuate hashtags.

  I stared at the photo of Eddie, holding a pint.

  ‘Where are you?’ I whispered, horrified. ‘What’s happened?’

  Into the ensuing silence, my phone rang.

  Everyone watched me.

  I picked it up. It was a withheld number. ‘Hello?’

  There was a silence – a human silence – and then the line went dead .

  ‘They hung up,’ I told the room.

  ‘I think you were right,’ said Jo, after a long pause. ‘Something very odd is going on here.’

  Chapter Twelve

  DAY TWO: The Morning After

  I should have been jet-lagged. Deeply exhausted and probably hungover; certainly uninterested in waking before midday. Instead, I woke at seven o’clock feeling like I could take on the world.

  He was there. Asleep next to me: Eddie David. A hand snaked out in my direction, resting on the soft shelf of my stomach. He was dreaming. The hand on my navel twitched occasionally, like a leaf in a half-hearted wind.

  His curtains frilled at the bottom as the morning moved silently through the open window. I drew in a great lungful of air, drawn straight from the valley like water from a spring, and looked around the room. Mouse was sitting with Eddie’s keys on an old wooden campaign chest.

  I hardly knew this man, of course. I’d met him less than twenty-four hours ago. I didn’t know how he liked his eggs, what he sang in the shower, whether he could play guitar or speak Italian or draw cartoons. I didn’t know what bands he’d loved as a teenager or how he was likely to vote in the referendum.

  I hardly knew Eddie David, yet I felt like I’d known him for years. Felt like he’d been there too when I’d been running around the fields with Tommy and Hannah and her friend Alex, building dens and dreams. Exploring his body last night had been like returning to the valley here; everything familiar and right and exactly as I’d left it last time.

  My first time with Reuben had been confused, brief and hopeful; the bonding of two lost little souls in someone’s spare room with the thunder of an air-conditioner and a carefully planned soundtrack on the CD player. And it had meant everything to us at the time, but in the years that followed we’d smiled ruefully at how bad it had been. There had been no such awkwardness last night. No misplaced fumblings or self-conscious questions. I bit my lip, smiling shyly at Eddie’s sleeping face.

  He made a snuffling sound, stretched out and rolled in closer towards me. He didn’t wake up. Just reached out an arm and hooked it round me. I closed my eyes, committing to memory the feeling of his skin on mine, the gentle weight of his hand.

  The world and its unsolvable problems seemed a very long way away.

  I went back to sleep.

  When I woke up again, it was gone midday and the air smelled richly of baking bread.

  I put on a sweatshirt of Eddie’s and crept out of his bedroom into the big space he lived in. Light streamed in through skylights and dusty windows, spliced and jigged by a network of old beams, full of rivets and pits and rusty hooks.

  Eddie was moving around the kitchen at the other side of the room, talking to someone on the phone. Fine particles of flour lifted off the work surface he was wiping down with his spare hand, shifting in a sunny cloud under the roof lights .

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘OK, Derek, thank you . . . Yeah, you too. Speak soon, OK? Bye.’

  After a brief moment of stillness he turned on a radio hiding behind glass bottles on a windowsill. Dusty Springfield was coming to the end of ‘Son of a Preacher Man’.

  His phone rang again.

  ‘Hi, Mum.’ He rinsed a cloth and ran it over the surface. ‘Oh, she’s there already? Brilliant. Good . . . Yes, I . . .’ He paused, leaning against the worktop. ‘That sounds nice. Well, have a great time, OK? I’ll pop over on my way to the airport if I don’t hear from you before then.’ A pause. ‘Of course, Mum. OK. Bye.’

  He put the phone down and wandered over to the oven to peer through the window.

  ‘Hello,’ I said eventually.

  ‘Oh! Hello!’ He spun round. ‘I’m making bread!’ He beamed at me and I wondered if this was all just some sort of psychedelic dream, a desperate escape from the quotidian trudge of divorce papers and accommodation searches. This ebullient, handsome man, sweeping into a part of the world I’d come to dread and painting everything in bright colours.

  But it wasn’t a dream; it couldn’t be, because the commotion in my chest was too great. Somehow, it was real. (Would we kiss on the mouth? Would we hug, as if we’d known each other for years?)

  There was a breakfast bar separating the kitchen from the rest of the room, a wide, polished plank of something beautiful. I took a seat at it and Eddie smiled, throwing his tea towel over his shoulder and walking towards me. He leaned across the bar and answered my question by kissing me decisively on the mouth. ‘I like you in my sweatshirt,’ he said .

  I looked down at it. It was grey, worn ragged at the wrists. It smelled of him.

  Dusty Springfield gave way to Roy Orbison.

  ‘I’m very impressed that you made bread,’ I said. ‘It smells incredible.’ Then I frowned. ‘Oh, hang on a minute. Are you one of those terrifying people with hundreds of skills?’

  ‘I’m a person who can do a lot of things badly but with great enthusiasm,’ he said. ‘You can call that skilled, if you like. My friends have other names.’ He pulled up a stool on the other side and sat opposite me, pushing some orange juice in my direction.

  I felt his knees press against mine. ‘Tell me some of your non-skills,’ I said.

  He laughed. ‘Um . . . I play the banjo? And the ukulele. I’m teaching myself the mandolin, which is trickier than I thought. Oh, and I learned to throw an axe recently. That was brilliant.’ He mimed it, making a thwacking noise.

  I grinned.

  ‘And . . . well, sometimes I challenge myself to try to make things out of bits of limestone I find in the woods, only I’m especially bad at that. And I bake bread quite often, although again without any great skill.’

  I started to laugh. ‘Anything else?’

  He ran a finger round one of my knuckles. ‘Don’t invent some fiction in your head about me being a high-achiever, Sarah, because I’m really not.’

  An alarm went off and he got up to check the bread. Eddie’s sense of place was so strong, I thought, imagining him combing the local woods for things to carve. It was almost as if he were a part of this valley, like an oak. Pieces of him would be flung into the wider world during season change or wild weather, but his core stayed in the earth. This earth, in this valley .

  The thought came to me suddenly that I didn’t feel like that about LA. I loved it: it was my home. I loved the heat, the scale, the ambition, the sense of anonymity it gave me. But I wasn’t the dust of its deserts or the waves of its ocean.

  ‘Bread needs a little more time,’ Eddie said, sitting back down. ‘What are you thinking about?’

  ‘I was thinking about you as a tree and me as a desert.’
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  He smiled. ‘That doesn’t make us very compatible.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that. It was . . . Oh, ignore me. I was being weird.’

  ‘What sort of tree was I?’ he asked.

  ‘I went for an oak. An old one.’

  ‘Can’t go wrong with oak. And I’m forty in September, so old’s reasonable.’

  ‘And I was just thinking how rooted you seem to be. Even though you say you still work in London quite often, it’s like . . . I don’t know. Like you’re a part of the landscape.’

  Eddie looked out of the window. Below us, clumped lavender leaned on the breeze.

  ‘I hadn’t thought about it like that,’ he said. ‘But you’re right. No matter how many times I go up to London to fit a kitchen, play football, see friends – and find myself thinking, I love this city – I come back to this valley. I can’t not. Do you get that same wrench when you leave LA?’

  ‘Well, no. Not entirely. But it’s where I’ve chosen to be.’

  ‘Right.’ There was a slight pinch of disappointment in his voice.

  ‘But it’s funny,’ I went on. ‘Listening to you talking about all these things you do, these hobbies you have, I realized how much I miss all of that. You can get anything and everything in LA, at any time of night, have it delivered, downloaded . . . I mean, they’re talking about deliveries by drone at the moment. There’re no limit to what’s possible. But for all that, I can’t remember the last time I made anything, other than my bed. I rarely exercise; I don’t play an instrument; I don’t go to evening classes.’

  How flat I sound. How two-dimensional.

  Eddie just looked thoughtful.

  ‘But who cares about hobbies if you’re spending all your time doing a job you love?’ He twirled a strand of my hair into his fingers.

  ‘Mmmm,’ I said. ‘I do love it, but it’s . . . challenging. Non-stop. Even when I come back to the UK for my holiday, I work.’

  Eddie smiled.

  ‘Choice,’ I said, eventually. ‘You’re going to remind me I have a choice.’