Not Playing the Game

by Jennifer Chapman

  Mickey could see that Mr Evans saw the whole thing as a joke.

  ‘It’s a bit embarrassing,’ he continued, trying to remain serious, ‘explaining this to you.’

  ‘Put it in plain language please, Mr Evans,’ Mickey said, deciding that the man sitting opposite her could well be one of those game-playing buffoons who would spend most of his life behaving as if it was Rag Week.

  ‘Ah, plain language,’ he echoed her, pausing. ‘Well, I’m afraid I urinated into the radiator.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘It was enough.’

  ‘Mr Evans, you’re not taking this seriously.’

  ‘I am finding it difficult.’

  ‘I find it hard to believe the police would charge you with the offence they have if the circumstances were as you’ve described.’

  ‘Indecent exposure,’ he said with mock gravity.

  ‘Mr Evans, it’s the sort of charge they don’t make lightly, and certainly not for what sounds . . . what sounds like a desperate measure.’ She chose the phrase in an attempt not to sound priggish.

  ‘You mean it’s reserved for perverts?’

  ‘Well yes.’

  ‘Do you think I’m a pervert?’

  Mickey didn’t answer.

  ‘You don’t, do you?’ he persisted, affecting an expression of dismay.

  ‘I think you should take this more seriously,’ she repeated.

  He leaned forward, the pose of amusement vanishing. ‘I do.’

  He sounded a little angry now.

  ‘How the hell do you think I feel about it? The only way to cope with something so monstrous is to try not to take it seriously.’

  Mickey stared at him, perhaps he was not the ridiculous idiot she had labelled him.

  ‘The police,’ he continued, ‘seemed to think that I’d been driving. They intimated that the girl had just been put behind the wheel in order to save my licence. They didn’t like it. I suppose they felt thwarted or something so they got me on this other charge. Nice of them, wasn’t it?’

  ‘It’s no good taking that attitude,’ Mickey said, softening a little.

  ‘What am I supposed to take as an attitude?’ he enquired, roundly.

  ‘You could be a little contrite.’

  ‘You must be joking! Isn’t that how a pervert would be expected to behave?’

  ‘I don’t think there’s any point in discussing it any further now. I would like some time to consider the case and I’ll need the names and addresses of the other people who were in the car.’

  ‘Does that mean you’ll take the case?’

  ‘You want to plead not guilty?’

  ‘What do you think!’

  She thought he was about to lose his temper. He’d already stood up to leave.

  ‘Mr Evans,’ she called to him as he reached the door.

  He turned.

  ‘Did it work?’

  He looked puzzled for a moment.

  ‘The radiator?’ she added.

  A week later the case was heard in the local magistrates’ court. David Evans pleaded not guilty and the case was dismissed.

  Afterwards, outside the court building, in the early warmth of a spring sun, he threw his arms around Mickey, kissed her and apologized for taking such a liberty.

  ‘It’s the pervert in me,’ he said. ‘By the way, how about coming out to dinner with me tonight – to celebrate?’

  She hesitated a moment but couldn’t think of an excuse.

  Mickey was ripe for love, though she didn’t know it. She was nearly twenty-six years old and had never been in love. She’d had casual relationships with men but through years of law studies most evenings she’d never given herself the chance to get to know any of them properly. She worked too long and hard but this was largely because there was little else in her life and the flat she’d at first shared with two girls was not hers alone, the others having married two brothers and bought a large house they’d split between them.

  She told David Evans about this: the big house, split in two with a connecting door that was thrown open for parties. They talked and talked, conversation springing out of nowhere. Neither remembered much of what was said, although each was listening to the other intently, taking in the sound of the voice, tilt of the head, shape of the neck.

  They fell in love that first evening, although neither could believe it and nothing was said. They were still formal. When they left the restaurant, David went to his car and Mickey to hers. They even shook hands.

  Mickey didn’t sleep and neither did David, and in the morning he telephoned and the tone of his voice was different.

  ‘Can I see you tonight?’ he asked, as if there was something important to discuss.

  He went to the flat that evening and kissed her straight away, long and hard until she felt dizzy. He didn’t say he loved her, they didn’t discuss it at all then; anything besides going to bed would have seemed banal. Both felt urgently the need to touch and feel the other’s naked flesh.

  They made love twice, but in between they were calm and reflective and inordinately happy. They traced their fingers over one another’s bodies and didn’t attempt to defuse the absorption of being together.

  Later, when they were dressed again, they opened a bottle of wine and sat in the flat’s dreary little living room with its mustard decor and ill-matching furniture. It was where Mickey had studied for her final examinations, after the other two had departed. Alone and engrossed, she’d never really noticed the degree of grimness about the room, but now, sitting in it with David, she wished the setting could have been more splendid, or at least more comfortable. There was something about a man who had just made love and meant it, something incredibly vulnerable.

  The sofa he was sitting on was low, so that his knees were at a level with his chest. As he watched her move about the room, fetching glasses, opening the bottle, he seemed a little bewildered, as if what had happened between them was more than he had expected.

  Mickey could feel the silence they now had becoming distance, caution creeping in, uncertainty. If either spoke now it might be in the stifled language of good manners.

  Instead they took refuge in the mundane.

  ‘Is Mickey your real name?’ he asked.

  ‘Michaela,’ she answered him. ‘My parents got their first television set when my mother was expecting me. There was a programme she liked on underwater photography. The woman in it was called Michaela.’

  ‘It’s a nice name.’

  ‘I like it, though “Mickey” has stuck now and that’s not a very solicitorish sort of name. Edith or Philippa would be better.’

  ‘I must admit, I expected an Edith sort of person the first time I came to see you.’

  ‘And you were disappointed?’

  ‘No, I mean yes, although you were rather intimidating.’

  ‘I didn’t think you were taking it seriously.’

  ‘I had the ghastly impression you were. You made me feel like a full-blown “flasher”.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘When did you change your opinion?’ he asked, smiling a little, sounding self-conscious.

  She was sitting opposite him, the bottle of wine between them on a low table.

  ‘I haven’t,’ she said.

  His expression changed and she realized how little she knew him. The thought exploded in her head that he might now be looking upon her as ‘an easy lay’, that she’d misread everything.

  ‘You don’t think –’ she began, earnestly.

  ‘Mickey,’ he stopped her, leaning back into the sofa, his eyes smiling again, ‘this is silly.’

  This is silly, she thought for the third or fourth time the next day. She was finding it difficult to maintain concentration for even short lengths of time. Her mind kept reverting to David, continually savouring the smaller details of expression and movement as if by passing up these urges to replay and remember, she might lose the memory altogether.

  At five o’
clock Wilma came in to her office to collect the post. It had been on her desk for two hours but Mickey had completely forgotten about it and the letters Wilma had typed remained unsigned. Hastily, she applied her signature to each sheet while Wilma stood by, watching, vaguely disdainful, Mickey thought, because the letters would have to go out unchecked.

  She handed over the sheaf and gave the older woman what felt like a simpering smile, though it hadn’t meant to be.

  ‘Sorry, Wilma,’ she mumbled as the door closed. Past five o’clock and David had not telephoned.

  Pessimistic by nature, Mickey couldn’t decide whether to stay on late at the office in the hope he might still ring or leave early and go somewhere she couldn’t be contacted. It was a choice between the possible and the blessed relief of the impossible: to be able to tell herself that he might have rung and she hadn’t been there, or to go on with this nerve-racking hope. Since mid-morning she’d experienced something akin to an electric shock each time the phone had rung.

  At six o’clock she was about to leave when Dan came into her room and invited her to have a sherry in his office. She hesitated, but then accepted, glad of a diversion from this ridiculous state of anxiety.

  She sat down in one of the leather-covered chairs in his office and gazed across the large desk, quite bare of files and papers these days.

  Dan poured the drinks.

  ‘How did you get on with the Evans case?’ he asked in a conversational tone.

  An involuntary twitch knocked some of the liquid from the glass as Mickey held it to her lips.

  ‘He got off,’ she said, in such a way as to capture more of Dan’s attention, though not deliberately.

  ‘A technicality or was he innocent? It’s not often they are.’

  ‘Oh, innocent, quite innocent in that sense,’ Mickey said.

  ‘How did the charge come about, then?’

  She told him and he laughed.

  ‘He sounds a real character.’ Dan said.

  Mickey smiled and for an instant felt proprietorial.

  ‘He’s not that sort actually. He’d had rather a lot to drink, that’s all.’

  She realized that she didn’t want Dan to think of David as ‘a real character’, though why it should matter . . .

  ‘The local paper will love it,’ he was saying.

  ‘Will they? Yes, I suppose they will,’ she said, bleakly.

  ‘Mickey, is anything the matter?’ he asked, sounding a little concerned.

  ‘No, nothing, nothing at all,’ she assured him.

  He looked at her steadily for a few seconds but he wasn’t the sort to pry. He thought he knew her well, and that she regarded him more as a friend than the senior partner, but perhaps he’d expected too much and had no right to the edge of disappointment he felt at that moment. Summoning the resilience he’d battled to achieve over the past three years, he composed an invitation, a positive move. There was no reason why he shouldn’t ask her to have dinner with him. They got on well, they were friends, and if there was reticence on her part it was probably his fault for failing properly to remove the barrier of his seniority.

  His feelings towards her were fond. He would be dishonest with himself if he didn’t also recognize a degree of desire, but this was perhaps no more than simple need, which in his case would not have been tenable without liking and respect. Lust, groin-stirring passion, he did not expect to experience again and was not sure he wanted to; it had disturbed him to discover how powerfully the sensation had gripped him when Charlotte had said she no longer loved him, how he might so easily have lost control and taken her by force, even in the brief time when he’d hated her.

  ‘A top-up?’ he said, holding the sherry bottle over Mickey’s glass.

  In another room the phone had started to ring.

  ‘Let whoever it is ring back tomorrow,’ he said.

  ‘No, it’s alright. Actually I’m expecting someone to ring,’ she said, getting up.

  While she was out of the room his resolve fluctuated. He wondered whether it would ever be possible to contemplate a relationship with a woman without thinking of Charlotte, and whether perhaps it would be wrong to even attempt anything, unfair on the other person, crippling.

  When Mickey returned she seemed quite different, fully there, quite animated. Dan was about to ask her who it had been, ringing so late, but instinct checked him. It was obviously none of his business and he realized with a sudden and paradoxical sense of loss, that he was too late.

  Chapter Three

  For those who knew Mickey, and they were few, it might well have seemed that David had come into her life at dangerously the right moment. Newly qualified as a solicitor and therefore freed from the discipline of study, there was a huge gap to be filled, but more importantly a balance to be restored, or rather introduced.

  During her last two or three years at school, the time when her body had reorganized itself and her features settled into an oddly attractive expression of slight preoccupation and confusion (this contributed to by the thick, unruly hair), she’d become what her mother termed a ‘swot’.

  ‘You’ll strain your eyes and have to wear glasses,’ Molly had predicted, as if there could be no worse fate to befall a girl, the predilection of men being to make passes at those who didn’t wear glasses.

  With lamentable disregard Mickey had swotted on, relentlessly heading for the opticians. She was ‘hooked’ on study and throughout her three years at university found little interest in anything else. She allowed herself to be seduced by her tutor but afterwards plied him with questions of an academic nature when all he wanted to do was smoke a cigarette and go to sleep.

  Part of her stood back and watched herself behaving in this strange, obsessive manner. She saw it with clear sanity and yet somehow she was unable to do anything to alter herself, to present a more acceptable, sociable front to the world. She wondered whether it was down to deep-rooted shyness: a weird, self-defeating defence mechanism. Wondering didn’t seem to do any good, though, and as she had no great inclination to be like the other students she decided to abandon any efforts she might have made in their direction. Perhaps she was a late developer, she didn’t know, but she couldn’t spare the energy to worry about it just as the other students were not prepared to expend too much of theirs on her.

  The three years passed remarkably quickly, Mickey neither happy or unhappy, just engrossed. Emerging from university she did perhaps look up, but only briefly, during two months of that summer when she worked in her father’s toy factory. The women there were a goodhearted bunch although at first they were suspicious of her, until they saw what a duffer she was at assembly work. As soon as they realized this they liked her and went out of their way to include her in their conversations during tea breaks. Then they insisted that she go out with them on their weekly hen nights and took her dancing and drinking and mud wrestling. They kept an eye on her, watching for reaction, knowing they were all as much a curiosity to her as she was to them. But one of the women had a son who became a nuisance. He wanted Mickey to go out with him. She accepted more because she liked his mother than she did him and the evening was a disaster. He slobbered over her in a dark corner of a pub, his hands like octopus tentacles furtively finding their way to the various parts of her body that interested him most. He became angry and unpleasant, his face red and fearsome when she told him to stop and he realized she meant it. After that it wasn’t quite the same at the factory. Mutterings soaked into her back as she worked at the assembly bench and she was glad when the time came to leave.

  Starting at Marriott and Lovell she regressed to study, the brief interlude of the factory seeming a vivid period of unreality in comparison with the familiarity of solitary hours spent at a desk. At the back of her mind Mickey held the thought that everything was still in store for her, that all she had done so far was mere preparation for the time when she would start to live. That her contemporaries were already doing so – the girls who shared the flat,
people she’d known at school – seemed unrelated to her own situation.

  A couple more times she glanced up: the first when she decided to join the local archaeological society but soon realized that its major activity was not excavating but forming committees to prevent opposing agencies, such as road builders, from doing so. Sites were being ‘saved’ all over the place but there was never any time left to explore them.

  The second time was when one of the probation officers she’d met in court invited her to an evening of folk songs. Gareth was tall and lean and had a long, sensitive face. He took Mickey to hear the folk songs in a scout hut crowded with clapping people who all seemed to be wearing clothes that were too big for them. Afterwards he took her to his room and made instant coffee and talked about nuclear war. Gareth was depressing company but Mickey found him interesting and sexually attractive, the more so because he didn’t attempt anything for weeks. She didn’t think about him much when they were not together but the relationship lasted for nearly a year. At some stage in the middle they went to bed, but more by accident than Gareth’s design. It was late one night and pouring with rain, and as Gareth didn’t have a car to take Mickey home she ended up staying the night, uncomfortably, in his single bed. It seemed to her that Gareth made love to her only because the bed was so narrow. He performed the act without passion, as if it was little more than the other things that had to be done before going to sleep, like brushing his teeth or setting the alarm clock. She liked him, though. He was undemanding and slightly mysterious, and for some reason she couldn’t quite pinpoint, she felt sorry for him.

  The sexual period of their friendship was only ever spasmodic and by the end of the year when he moved away to work in the north, they were simply friends and nothing more. Mickey’s head went down again but an inner voice whispered to her. It had an edge of panic and said, ‘When will it start, when and how?’

  The end of Gareth was three months before her final examinations and six months before David and the beginning.