The Man Who Didn't Call

by Rosie Walsh

  He shrugged. ‘Look, not many people set up a children’s charity from scratch. But everyone needs downtime. Non-thinking time. It keeps us human.’

  He was right, of course. I seldom delegated. I held my work close, cloaked myself in it: I always had; it was the only approach I knew. But for all that activity, all that industry, was I there ? Was I really there, in my life, the way Eddie seemed to be in his?

  This is not the conversation to be having with a man you’ve barely known twenty-four hours , I told myself, but I seemed unable to stop. I’d never had this conversation with anyone, including myself. It was like I’d turned on a tap and the bloody thing had come off in my hands.

  ‘Maybe it’s not a city-living thing, or even a job thing,’ I said. ‘Maybe it’s just me. I do sometimes look at other people and wonder why I can’t find time to do all the things they seem to do outside of work.’ I poked at a cuticle. ‘Whereas you . . . Oh, ignore me. I’m rambling. It’s just that it all feels very natural, being here . . . Which is confusing, because normally when I come home, I can’t wait to leave.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh, I’ll tell you another time.’

  ‘Sure. And I’ll teach you the banjo. I’m terrible, so you’ll be in great company.’ He turned over his hand and put mine in it. ‘I don’t care what hobbies you do. I don’t care how hard you work. I could talk to you all day. That’s all I know.’

  I stared at him with wonder.

  ‘You’re great,’ I said quietly. ‘Just so you know.’

  We looked straight at each other, and Eddie leaned over again and kissed me. Long, slow, warm, like a memory brought back by music.

  ‘Do you want to hang around for a while?’ he asked, afterwards. ‘If you don’t have anything to do, that is? I’ll show you my workshop downstairs and you can make a mouse of your own. Or we can sit around kissing. Or maybe we can take potshots at Steve, a little bastard of a squirrel who lives on my lawn.’ He rested his hands on my legs. ‘I just . . . Sod it. I just don’t want you to go.’

  ‘OK,’ I said slowly. I smiled. ‘That sounds lovely. But your mother . . . ? I thought you were worried about her?’

  ‘I am,’ he said. ‘But she – well, she doesn’t have explosive breakdowns, more just gradual declines. My aunt’s come to stay because I’m off on holiday on Thursday. She’ll be keeping a close eye on her.’

  ‘You’re sure?’ I asked. ‘I don’t mind if you need to go and see her.’

  ‘Quite sure. She called earlier, said they’re off to the garden centre. She sounded well.’ Then: ‘Trust me,’ he added, when I looked doubtful. ‘If things were even approaching serious, I’d be there. I know what to look for. ’

  I imagined Eddie watching his mother, week in, week out, like a fisherman watching the sky.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Well then, I think you should start by telling me about Steve.’

  He chuckled, flicked a crumb, or maybe an insect, out of my hair. ‘Steve terrorizes me and just about every species of wildlife that tries to live here. I don’t know what’s wrong with him; he seems to spend almost all of his time in the grass, spying on me, rather than up a tree where he belongs. The only time he gets off his backside is when I buy a bird feeder. No matter where I hang the bloody things, he manages to bust in and eat everything.’

  I started laughing. ‘He sounds great.’

  ‘He is. I love him, but I also dislike him very intensely. I have a machine-gun-grade water pistol – we can have a go at him later if you like.’

  I smiled. A whole day with this man and his squirrel, in this hidden corner of the Cotswolds that reminded me of all the best parts – and none of the worst – of my childhood. It was a treat.

  I looked around me at the vestments of this man’s life. Books, maps, handmade stools. A glass bowl full of coins and keys, an old Rolleiflex camera. At the top of a bookshelf, a collection of garish football trophies.

  I wandered over towards them. The Elms, Battersea Monday , said the closest one. Old Robsonians – Champions, Division 1. ‘Are these yours?’

  Eddie came over. ‘They are.’ He picked up the recent one; ran a brown finger along the top. A little ruler of dust slid off the edge. ‘I play for a team in London. Which might sound a bit odd, given that I live here, but I’m up there quite a lot doing kitchens and . . . well, they’ve proved very difficult to leave. ’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I joined years ago. When I thought I was going to give London a proper go. They’re . . .’ He chuckled. ‘They’re just a very funny group. When I moved back to Gloucestershire, I couldn’t quite bring myself to retire. Nobody can. We all love it too much.’

  I smiled, looking again at the jumble of trophies. One went back more than twenty years. I liked that he’d held friendships so long.

  Then: ‘No!’ I breathed. I plucked out a book from further down his shelves: the Collins Gem Birds, the exact same edition that I’d had as a child. I’d spent hours poring over this little tome. Sitting in the fork of the pear tree in our garden, hoping that if I stayed there long enough, the birds would come and roost with me.

  ‘I had this, too!’ I told Eddie. ‘I knew every single bird off by heart!’

  ‘Really?’ He came over. ‘I loved this book.’ He turned to a page near the middle and covered the name of the bird with his hand. ‘What’s this?’

  The bird had a golden chest and a burglar’s mask across his eyes. ‘Oh God . . . No, hang on. Nuthatch! Eurasian nuthatch!’

  He showed me another.

  ‘Stonechat!’

  ‘Oh my God,’ Eddie said. ‘You are my perfect woman.’

  ‘I had the wildflowers one, too. And the butterflies and moths. I was a precocious little naturalist.’

  He put the book to one side. ‘Can I ask you something, Sarah?’

  ‘Of course.’ I loved hearing him say my name.

  ‘Why do you live in a city? If you feel like this about nature? ’

  I paused. ‘I just can’t live in the country,’ I said eventually. Something about my face must have told him not to pry further, because, after watching me for a few seconds, he ambled off to get out the bread.

  ‘I had the trees book.’ He looked around for an oven glove, settling eventually for the tea towel on his shoulder. ‘Dad got it for me. It was he who got me into woodwork, in fact, although he certainly never imagined I’d make a career of it. He used to take me to help him collect firewood from the log man in autumn. He let me smash some of the logs up to make kindling.’

  He paused, smiling. ‘It was the smell. I fell in love with the smell at first, but I was fascinated by how quickly you could turn a tough-looking log into something completely different. One winter I started pinching bits of the kindling to make stick men. Then there came the toilet-roll holder, and the worst mallet in history.’

  He chuckled. ‘And then there was Mouse.’ He opened the oven; pulled out the baking tray. ‘My pride and joy. Dad wasn’t particularly impressed, but Mum said it was the most perfect little mouse she’d ever seen.’

  He put a round, fragrant loaf onto a wire rack and closed the oven.

  ‘He left when I was nine. Dad. He has a family on the Scottish border, somewhere north of Carlisle.’

  ‘Oh.’ I sat back down. ‘That must have been rough.’

  He shrugged. ‘It was a long time ago.’

  An easy silence fell while he retrieved butter, honey, a jar of what looked like homemade marmalade from the fridge. He passed me a plate with a deep crack running through it (‘Sorry!’) and a knife.

  ‘Does your mum know I’m here?’ I asked, as he started slicing the bread .

  ‘Ow!’ He wrenched his hand away from the loaf. ‘Why am I so greedy? It’s far too hot to eat.’

  I laughed. If he hadn’t gone straight in, I would have.

  ‘No,’ he said, protecting his hand this time with the tea towel. ‘Mum doesn’t know you’re here. I can’t have her think her only child is a dirty
old mating goat.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘Maybe if I’m really good, we can do some more mating,’ he said, throwing a red-hot slice of bread in the direction of my plate.

  ‘Certainly,’ I said, sticking my knife into the butter. It was full of crumbs. Reuben, who liked to serve butter hipster style, smeared onto a piece of slate or some ridiculous rock or other, would have hated it.

  ‘You’re great at mating,’ I added, and I didn’t blush.

  Eddie did. ‘Really?’

  And, because I didn’t seem to have any choice in the matter, I got up, marched round the planky island thing and closed my arms around him, kissing him hard on the mouth. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘This bread is too hot even for me. Let’s go back to bed.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  Dear Alan,

  Please forgive this message from out of the blue.

  You replied to my post on Eddie David’s Facebook wall earlier today. I’m a bit worried, and wanted to share what limited information I have.

  Prior to your holiday with Eddie, I spent a week with him in Sapperton. I left on Thursday, 9 June, so that he could pack, and he said he’d call me from the airport.

  I never heard from him again. After trying several times to contact him, I gave up, assuming that he had changed his mind. I never fully believed it, however, and when I saw your reply to my post, I knew I hadn’t been deceiving myself. Below is my phone number. I would really appreciate you sharing any thoughts or info that you might have. I am not a stalker! I just want to know he’s OK.

  Best wishes,

  Sarah Mackey

  Eleven p.m. leached silently into midnight. My phone buzzed and I hurled myself at it, but it was just Jo saying she’d got home safely. No reply from Alan. I lay back in bed and felt my heart straining in my chest. It hurt. It actually hurt . Why did nobody tell you that a broken heart wasn’t just a metaphor?

  Midnight turned into one, then two, then three. I imagined Tommy and Zoe in their giant bed along the hallway, and wondered if they held each other while they slept. I remembered Eddie’s body, wrapped around mine, and felt a longing so fierce it seemed to bore through my skin. Then I spent a while intensely disliking myself, because in Istanbul there were bodies in bags, whereas Eddie was – quite probably – a man who simply hadn’t called.

  At four, having caught myself in the act of searching online for death notices in Eddie’s area, I let myself quietly out of Tommy’s flat. Dawn was pressing grey smudges into the sky, and a lone street sweeper was already at work, shuffling slowly past Zoe’s smart Georgian terrace. It would be another couple of hours until the city reached full throttle, but I couldn’t take another moment of the suffocating silence and the buzz of dark theories, each more terrible than the last.

  At Holland Park Avenue, I started running. For a short while I sailed effortlessly past bus stops sheltering tired-looking migrants on their way to work, cafes with grilles still down, an inebriated man stumbling back from Notting Hill. I tuned out the whine of night buses and taxis, allowing only the slap of my trainers and the warble of the dawn chorus.

  My effortless sailing didn’t last long. As the road began to climb towards Notting Hill, my lungs started to burst, as they always did, and my legs gave up. I walked up to the Portobello turn-off.

  There’s nothing crazy about what I’m doing , I thought, when I could force myself to run again. London is awake already. A workers’ cafe was packed out with tradesmen in hi-vis vests; a man was opening a coffee cart on Westbourne Grove. London was on the move. Why shouldn’t I be? This was fine .

  Only, of course, it was not, because my body felt tired and miserable, and I was the only runner I saw for the duration. And because it was still only 4.45 a.m. by the time I got back to Tommy’s.

  I showered and slid into bed. I tried for five minutes not to check my phone.

  One missed call , the screen advised, when I gave in. I sat up. It was a withheld number, at 4.19 a.m. A message had been left.

  The message comprised two seconds of silence, followed by the sound of a human pressing the wrong button. After a brief scrabble, the caller managed successfully to hang up.

  Briefly, I wondered if it was Eddie’s friend Alan, but according to Facebook he had not yet read my message.

  Then who?

  Eddie?

  No! Eddie’s not that person! He’s a talker! Not some shady crackpot who calls at 4 a.m.!

  By the time I woke at lunchtime, Alan had read my message. He had not replied.

  I stared at my phone dementedly, refreshing it again and again. He couldn’t just ignore it. Nobody would do that!

  But he had read it, and he had ignored it. The day passed; I heard nothing. And I felt frightened. Less, as each day passed, for Eddie, and more, as each day passed, for myself.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Rudi was absolutely still.

  He stood and stared at the two meerkats closest to the fence, and they stood and stared at him, paws resting casually on their soft bellies. Rudi, without realizing what he was doing, had straightened up and had rested his own little paws on his own little belly.

  ‘Hello,’ he whispered reverently. ‘Hello, meerikats.’

  ‘Meerkats,’ I corrected.

  ‘Sarah, be quiet ! You might frighten them!’

  Tommy alerted Rudi to the arrival of another meerkat and Rudi whipped round, forgetting in an instant that I existed. ‘Hello, meerikat three,’ he whispered. ‘Meerikats, hello! Are you a family? Or just best friends?’

  Two of the meerkats started burrowing in the sand. The third shuffled over his sandy hill to give what looked like a hug to another member of the tribe. Rudi almost trembled with wonder.

  Jo took a photo of her son. Five minutes ago she’d been telling Rudi off about something; now she smiled at him with a love that had no edges. And watching her, trying to imagine that sort of towering, immeasurable devotion, I felt it again. An acute poke from the lumpy cluster of feelings I kept in a remote corner. It was right that I wasn’t going to be a mother, of course, but the pain of lost possibility sometimes left me breathless.

  I extracted my sunglasses from my bag.

  My parents had found a carer for Granddad and would be back in Gloucestershire tomorrow. Rudi wanted a farewell tea at Battersea Park Children’s Zoo before I left to go and see them, although this, I suspected, had more to do with a recent television programme he’d watched about meerkats than it did with saying goodbye to Aunty Sarah.

  I checked my phone, a reflex as common now as breathing. After the dropped phone call I’d had in the middle of the night last week, there’d been another one, a few days ago, and it had lasted a full fifteen seconds. ‘I’ll call the police,’ I’d said, when whoever it was refused to say anything. The caller had hung up immediately and there hadn’t been anything since, but I was certain it had something to do with Eddie’s disappearance.

  I wasn’t sleeping very much at all now.

  Tommy unpacked the little tea he’d made and Rudi came running over to eat, recounting a poorly remembered joke about eggy sandwiches and eggy farts. Jo told him off for talking with his mouth full. A child nearby was whingeing about missing out on feeding the coati. And I sat in the middle of them all, unable to eat my sandwiches, a miserable churning in my stomach.

  Not long before leaving the sixth form, I’d studied Mrs Dalloway for my English A level. We’d taken turns narrating the book, exploring Woolf’s ‘unique narrative technique’, as Mrs Rushby called it.

  ‘The world has raised its whip,’ I read aloud when my turn came; ‘where will it descend?’

  I had paused, surprised, and then read the sentence again. And even though my classmates were watching me, even though Mrs Rushby was watching me, I had underlined the sentence three times before moving on, because those words had described so perfectly how I felt, most of the time, that I marvelled that anyone other than me could have written them.

  The world has rai
sed its whip; where will it descend?

  That was it! seventeen-year-old me had thought. That perpetual alertness! Watching the skies, sniffing the air, bracing for calamity. That’s me . And yet here I was now, nineteen years on, feeling exactly the same. Had anything actually changed? Had my comfortable life in California been mere fantasy?

  I had another look at my egg sandwich, but it made me heave.

  ‘Oi,’ Jo said, in my direction. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m just enjoying my tea.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Jo, ‘given that you’re not actually eating it.’

  After a pause I apologized. Told them I knew I must seem insane. Told them I was trying so very, very hard to pull myself together, but that I wasn’t having much luck.

  ‘Did he break your heart?’ Rudi asked. ‘The man?’

  Everyone stopped talking. Neither Jo nor Tommy could look at me. But Rudi did, Rudi with his little almond eyes and his perfect child’s understanding of the world.

  ‘Did he break your heart, Sarah?’

  ‘I . . . Well, yes,’ I said, when I found my voice. ‘Yes, I’m afraid he did.’

  Rudi wheeled from side to side on his heels, watching me. ‘He’s a villain,’ he said, after careful consideration. ‘And a fart.’

  ‘He is,’ I agreed .

  Rudi gave me a hug, which brought me to the very edge of tears.

  Tommy was holding my phone, staring thoughtfully at Eddie’s Facebook page. ‘I do wonder about this man,’ he said, after a long silence.

  ‘You and me both, Tommy.’

  ‘The WheresWally hashtag, for starters,’ Tommy said. ‘Isn’t that a bit odd? His name’s Eddie.’

  Jo opened a packet of dried fruit and nuts for Rudi. ‘Eat them slowly,’ she told him, before turning to Tommy. ‘Where’s Wally? is a series of books, you plonker,’ she said. ‘Don’t you remember? All them pictures of crowds with Wally hidden in them?’

  Rudi began picking out raisins and discarding the nuts.

  ‘I know what Where’s Wally? is,’ Tommy said. ‘I just think it’s a strange thing to say about someone whose name is meant to be Eddie.’