The Man Who Didn't Call

by Rosie Walsh

  My phone vibrated and I snatched at it. At last. At last.

  But it was a text message from Dad. Darling, if you haven’t yet left for Gloucestershire yet, don’t. Your grandfather’s been sacked by his brand-new carers. We’ve given up and are taking him down to ours to care for him ourselves. We’ll put him in Hannah’s old room. Please don’t cancel your trip down to see us. We love you (and need you . . .). But if you could delay until tomorrow, we’d be very grateful. DAD x

  I went straight back to my Messenger, oblivious to Reuben, Kaia, everyone.

  There was no message. Eddie was still online, but the speech bubble had disappeared.

  I felt my face collapse. My heart.

  I made myself look at Kaia, who was talking to me. ‘I saw two of your Clowndoctors in an oncology ward a couple of years ago,’ she was saying. This couldn’t be happening. Where is the message? ‘There was this little boy and he was so sick and sad and pissed about his chemo programme and he shut down when your guys showed up. Just turned his face to the wall and pretended they weren’t there.’

  ‘I explained that that often happens,’ Reuben said proudly. ‘It’s why they work in pairs.’

  ‘So clever !’ Kaia beamed. ‘They work with each other so the child can decide whether or not to join in. Right?’

  ‘Right,’ Reuben said. ‘That way, the kids are in charge.’

  Oh my God. Who was this tedious double act, and where was my message?

  ‘So he turned away and your clowns started doing all these improvisations together, and he couldn’t resist them. I mean, they had me in stitches! By the time they left the ward, he was laughing non-stop.’

  Grudgingly, I nodded. I’d seen it often enough.

  Desperate for something – anything – to concentrate on that wasn’t Eddie, I launched into a tale about the first time I’d seen Reuben working with kids after he’d trained as a Clowndoctor. Kaia watched me as I rambled on, her little brown chin resting on her little brown hand, the other holding Reuben’s. I stopped eventually and looked at my phone, already picturing the physical shape of his reply, the length of the message, the grey oblong that held it.

  But it was not there. It was not there, and Eddie was offline again.

  ‘Can I get anyone a drink?’ I asked, pulling my purse out of my bag. ‘Wine?’ I looked at my watch. ‘It’s a quarter past twelve. Perfectly respectable.’

  I wrapped my hands around my torso as I waited at the bar, although whether it was to comfort myself or hold myself together I didn’t know.

  Twenty minutes later, by which point my solo glass of wine had begun to offer a faint numb, Kaia excused herself and went off to the toilet. I watched her slender legs move under her skirt and tried to imagine Kaia coming to pick Reuben up after work so they could go for dinner, or maybe an evening hike in Griffith Park. Kaia coming to our Christmas party or our summer barbecue; having lunch with Reuben’s sweet, nervous parents at their house in Pasadena. Because all of that would be happening. (A much better choice , I imagined Roo’s mum saying. She had never quite trusted that I wouldn’t eventually return to England with her son.)

  ‘She’s lovely,’ I told Reuben.

  ‘Thank you.’ He turned gratefully towards me. ‘Thank you for being so friendly. It means a lot.’

  ‘We needed each other,’ I said, after a pause, surprising us both. ‘And now we don’t. You’ve met a nice girl and I’m happy for you, Roo. I mean it.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, and I could hear the joy deep in his heart. It was like Reuben had taken one of those long, slow breaths you had to do at the beginning of a yoga class, but he’d never gone back to his normal rhythm .

  ‘Hey,’ Reuben began. He looked uncomfortable. ‘Hey, look, Sarah, I . . . I have to say, your emails yesterday were kind of out of character. You sounded . . . not very businesslike. And you sent those documents to our trustees without talking to any of us. Not to mention agreeing with a child that you’d send some of our clowns to her sister without even calling the hospital in question. I was at a loss.’

  Kaia was weaving her way back to our table. ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I had a bad day. It won’t happen again.’

  He watched me. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Fine. Just tired.’

  He nodded slowly. ‘Well, shout if you need me. We make mistakes when we don’t follow protocol.’

  ‘I know. Hey, look, we need to talk about the hospice pitch.’

  ‘Sure,’ Reuben said. ‘Now?’

  ‘We can’t talk about it with Kaia here.’

  Reuben frowned. ‘Oh, she won’t mind.’

  ‘I do. This is business, Roo.’

  ‘No,’ Reuben said gently. ‘No, it’s charity. Not business. And Kaia gets it. She’s a friend, not a foe, Sarah.’

  I made myself smile. He was right. Everyone except me was right these days.

  Reuben and Kaia left forty minutes later. Reuben insisted on making a plan for our hospice pitch, in spite of what I’d said. And I’d gone along with it, because how could I not? Kaia had at least offered to go and sit outside while we talked. (‘No, no!’ Reuben said. ‘There’s nothing secret about this.’)

  Kaia kissed me and then gave me a hug. ‘So great to meet you,’ she said. ‘So great. ’

  And I said ditto, because there really was nothing about this woman that wasn’t nice.

  After they’d left, I turned my phone off and my laptop on and I worked. People came and went; tuna salads and chips with wobbling pyramids of mayonnaise; wine glasses smudged with workday lipstick and pints of hoppy ale. Outside, the sun was covered with grey sheets. Rain fell, wind blew, the sun returned. The South Bank steamed; umbrellas were shaken.

  It was on day five of our affair that I’d looked at Eddie David and thought, I would spend the rest of my life with you. I would commit to it, right now, and know I wouldn’t regret it.

  The boiling weather had finally broken and a storm was rampaging across the countryside, flashing and bellowing, hammering on the roof of Eddie’s barn. We were lying on his bed under a skylight, which he said he used mostly for stargazing and weather-watching. Lying top to toe, Eddie massaging my foot absent-mindedly as he stared up at the wild sky.

  ‘I wonder what Lucy the sheep thinks of all this,’ he said. I laughed, imagining Lucy standing under a tree, baaing disconsolately.

  ‘The storms we get in LA are crazy,’ I said. ‘Like Armageddon.’

  After a pause he said, ‘How do you feel about going back there?’

  ‘Uncertain.’

  ‘Why?’

  I propped my head up so I could see him properly. ‘Why do you think?’

  Pleased, he tucked my foot under his head and said, ‘Well, you see, that’s the thing. I’m not sure I’m willing to let you go back.’

  And I smiled back at him and thought, If you told me to stay, if you told me we could start a life together here, I’d stay. Even though I’ve known you only a few days, even though I swore I’d never come back. For you, I’d stay.

  It was nearly four by the time I packed up to leave. I switched my phone on, although by now I had no expectations. But there was a text message, from a number I didn’t know.

  stay away from eddie , it said.

  No punctuation, no greeting, no capitals. Just, stay away .

  I sat back down. Read it a few more times. It had been sent at exactly three o’clock.

  After a few minutes I decided to call Jo.

  ‘Come to mine,’ she said immediately. ‘Come straight to mine, babe. Rudi’s at his granddad’s. I’m going to give you a glass of wine and then we’re going to call this person, this freak, and find out what’s going on. OK?’

  The rain had closed in again. It raged at the Thames like a grey tantrum, pelting, hammering, screaming, just like the storm Eddie and I had watched from his bed. I waited for a few minutes before giving up and walking out, coatless, in the direction of Waterloo.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Dear
Eddie,

  You started writing to me earlier. What were you going to say? Why did you change your mind? Can you really not find it within yourself to talk to me?

  I’ll pick up where I left off.

  A few months after turning seventeen, I was in a terrible car accident on the Cirencester Road. I lost my sister, that day, and I lost my life – or at least the life that I’d always known. Because after a few weeks I realized I couldn’t live there anymore. Frampton Mansell. Gloucestershire. England, even. It was a very dark time.

  I was broken. I called Tommy. He’d been in LA for two years. He said, ‘Get on the first plane you can,’ and I did. Quite literally: I flew the next day. Mum and Dad were so good about it. So extraordinarily unselfish, letting me go at a time like that. Would they have been so generous if they’d known what it would do to our family? I don’t know. But regardless, they put my needs first, and the next morning I was at Heathrow.

  Tommy’s family lived on a residential street called South Bedford Drive that was as wide as the M4. Tommy’s house was a strange taupe-coloured affair that looked as if a Spanish bungalow had mated with a Georgian mansion. I stood in front of it on my first day, sick and dizzy with heat and jet lag, and wondered if I’d landed on the moon.

  In fact, it turned out that I’d landed in Beverly Hills. ‘They can’t afford to live here,’ Tommy said grimly, when he showed me round. There was a pool! A swimming pool! With a deck with chairs and tables and vines and roses and tropical flowers hanging in pink clouds.

  ‘The rent is crazy. I can’t imagine how they’ll keep it up, but Mum loves telling people back home that Saks is her corner shop.’

  Even though Tommy’s mother had become barely recognizable, and even more preoccupied with things like clothes and treatments and lunches where she surely couldn’t be eating anything, she was kind enough to see that I needed a break. She told me I could stay as long as I wanted, and told me where to get the exotic-sounding frozen yoghurt Tommy had written about in his letters. ‘But don’t eat too much,’ she said. ‘I can’t have you get fat.’

  Beyond the neatly mowed squares of their high-fenced garden stretched a city that stunned me. I’ll never forget the first time I saw a road lined with palm trees reaching up into the sky; giant street names hanging off traffic lights; mile upon mile of squat little buildings, chequered with flowers, engineered for earthquakes. The never-ending whine of planes, the nail bars and rugged mountains and valet parking and clothes shops full of stunningly expensive and beautiful clothes. It amazed me. I spent weeks just staring. At the people, the festoons of fairy lights, the huge expanse of pale gold sand and the Pacific, crashing away at Santa Monica every day. It was a miracle. It was Mars. And for that reason it was perfect.

  I realized soon after arriving that Tommy’s invitation for me to stay hadn’t been purely philanthropic. He was lonely. True, he’d escaped the relentless savagery of his classmates, but nothing about his family, his relationship with himself or his trust in humanity appeared to have changed for the better. Those early signs of body consciousness he’d had when he left England seemed now to have blossomed into something a lot darker. He ate nothing or everything, he exercised sometimes two or three times a day, and his bedroom was full of clothes from which he’d not even removed the labels. He looked embarrassed when I went in there, as if a part of him remembered who he’d been before all of this.

  I asked him outright one day if he was actually gay. We were at the farmers’ market, queuing for tacos, and Tommy was already beginning to mumble some falsehood about not being hungry. I remember standing there, fanning my face with our parking-lot ticket, and the question just kind of tumbling out of me.

  Neither of us was expecting it. He stared at me for a few seconds and then said, ‘No, Harrington. I am not gay. And what the hell does that have to do with tacos?’

  From behind us there was a quiet eruption of laughter. Tommy cringed deeply into himself; I turned round to see a girl, maybe a couple of years older than me, laughing quite openly. ‘Sorry,’ she said, in a London accent. ‘But I couldn’t help overhearing. You, mate’ – she pointed at me, still laughing – ‘you need to work on your bedside manner.’

  Tommy agreed.

  So did I.

  An hour at a rickety table eating tacos led to a lifelong friendship. The girl, Jo, was working as a mobile beauty therapist and living in a crummy apartment share nearby. Over the next few months, before she ran out of money and was forced to go back to England, she bullied us back to a semblance of happiness and functionality with which we could move forward. She made us talk – something we were failing at quite miserably – and she forced us relentlessly out to parties, to the beach, to free concerts. She’s as spiky as a porcupine, Jo Monk, but she’s a woman of infinite kindness and courage. I miss her terribly when I’m not in England.

  September came and I had to go back to England to finish my A levels. Only I couldn’t go. Whenever I phoned my parents and they talked about my return, I’d start crying. Mum would fall silent and eventually Dad would have to pick up the extension outside the downstairs loo and crack jokes. Mum did her best to seem resilient – cheerful, even – but it slipped out one day, as if she had turned her back on her voice just for a moment: ‘I miss you so much it hurts,’ she whispered. ‘I want my family back.’ Self-loathing blocked my throat and I couldn’t even manage a reply.

  In the end they agreed I should postpone my A levels for a year to stay a while longer. They came to visit me, and although it was a relief to see them, it was acutely painful that Hannah wasn’t there. They kept wanting to talk about her, which I found almost unendurable. I was relieved when they left.

  Then I met Reuben, and got a job, and decided it was time to become someone I could respect. I’ll tell you about that next time.

  Sarah

  P.S. I’m going home to see my parents tomorrow. Granddad is staying with them for a bit. If you’re in Gloucestershire and you’re ready to talk, call me.

  Chapter Twenty

  ‘Sarah!’ Dad, who looked exhausted, hugged me tightly. ‘Thank God,’ he said. ‘Thank God you’re here. Our still, small voice of calm.’

  He offered me some wine, which I refused. After my meeting on the South Bank yesterday with Kaia and Reuben, and the text message warning me off Eddie, I’d gone to Jo’s and drunk far too much. My body had told me this morning that it would not tolerate an alcoholic drink for some time.

  ‘Oh, Sarah.’ Mum hugged me. ‘I feel awful about the last few weeks. I really am so sorry.’ My mother spent a lot of time apologizing for her failings, in spite of having done nothing but love and look after me from the day I was born.

  ‘Stop saying that. I had a lovely time. You saw me in Leicester. Was I not happy?’

  ‘Happy enough, I suppose.’

  I still wasn’t sure why I hadn’t told them about Eddie. Perhaps because I was supposed to be home for the anniversary of the accident, not having sex with a handsome stranger. Or perhaps because, by the time I had arrived in Leicester, I was beginning to worry.

  Or perhaps, I thought now, handing some flowers to Mum, it was because a part of me already knew it wouldn’t work out. The same part of me that had stood facing Reuben on our wedding day and thought, He’ll be taken away from me eventually. Just like Hannah.

  Mum put my flowers in one vase and then swapped it for a different one. And then a different one still. ‘Mind your own business,’ she said, when she caught me watching her. ‘I’m a retiree now, Sarah. I’ve earned the right to opinions on flower arranging.’

  I smiled, quietly relieved. Last time I’d seen Mum, she had seemed diminished somehow, squashed, like a carton flattened for recycling. Which didn’t feel at all right, because, save for the odd lapse, she had seemed so splendidly robust in the years following the accident. In fact, her fortitude was the only thing that assuaged my guilt at having just cleared off and left them in all that pain and chaos.

  Today she –
and Dad, for that matter – were how I’d always held them in my mind’s eye: kind, solid, assured. And mildly alcoholic , I reminded myself, as Mum poured herself some wine, even though we were soon to leave for the pub. Don’t put them on a pedestal. They’ve just dealt with things in a different way.

  I glanced up at the ceiling and lowered my voice. ‘How’s it been? How is he?’

  ‘He’s a rotten old bastard,’ Mum said squarely. ‘And I’m allowed to say that because he’s my father and I love him and I know what a rough time he’s had. But there’s no denying it – he’s a rotten old bastard.’

  ‘He is,’ Dad admitted. ‘We’ve been keeping tally of the number of complaints he’s made today. So far we’re at thirty-three, and it’s only a quarter to one. Why aren’t you drinking?’

  ‘I’ve a hangover.’

  Mum slumped. ‘Oh, I feel terrible when I’m mean about him,’ she said. ‘He’s impossible to be with, Sarah, drives us mad. But underneath it all I feel very bad for him. He’s been on his own so long now. His quality of life is awful, cooped up in that house on his own, nobody to talk to.’ My grandmother, a woman so round she had seemed almost spherical in the photographs, had died of a heart attack when she was forty-four. I had never met her.

  ‘Well, at least he’s got you two. I’m sure he appreciates the company, even if it might seem otherwise.’

  ‘He behaves as if he’s been kidnapped by terrorists,’ Mum sighed. ‘He actually said this morning, when I gave him his pills, “I can’t believe you dragged me down to this godforsaken place.” I was very close to putting an end to his suffering.’

  Dad laughed. ‘You’re an angel with him,’ he said, and gave her a tender kiss. I looked away, mildly disgusted, very touched and, actually, a little bit jealous. They were still so happy together, my parents. Dad had taken Mum out every day until she’d agreed to marry him; he’d telephoned her, written to her, sent her gifts. He’d taken her to concerts and let her sit at the sound desk with him. He had never left her hanging. He had never not called.