Lifesaver

by Voss, Louise

  I found a parking space and squeezed into it, wondering if the foot or so at the front of the car which overhung the neighbouring bus stop would constitute a parking violation. But there was nowhere else to park, so I left it there. Taking a deep breath, I walked up to the heavy wooden door and pushed it open.

  I registered the children first, four or five of them, racing around the hall in a blur of skinny legs in shorts, brandishing felt-tips at each other and fighting over a chocolate biscuit. My heart nearly stopped—which one was he? Which one was Max?

  A woman yelled: ‘Orlando and Spike, stop it! Millie, give Spike his biscuit back. And you, Petra, stop being such a troublemaker. If you can’t all work quietly, you’ll have to go home.’

  No Maxes. In a way, I was relieved—I didn’t think I could have handled meeting him with no preamble like that. The prospect of introducing myself to Adam was nerve-wracking enough. I did another quick scan around the hall, to try to identify Adam. There were three men present: a rather good looking black man in tiny denim shorts, an older, softer, balding man with a small beard, and a rake thin hippie with three rings squeezed into one hole in the side of his very protuberant nose. He looked like a misplaced Dickens character, and had the faint air of surprise to go with it; as if Uriah Heep had been forced into a Little Feat t-shirt and couldn’t figure out why. They were all wearing white stick-on name badges, but I was too far away to read what they said.

  A trestle table in the centre of the room was covered with a large board, at which the men, plus four or five women, were working. Boxes and boxes of tiles lined the walls of the room, all shapes and sizes and colours, some already broken into pieces, most whole. Dust and chips of tile carpeted the worn floorboards, and the children’s shouts mingled with the sharp crack of tile cutters.

  On another, smaller table near where I stood were plates of sandwiches with curled up corners, a tin of Rich Tea biscuits broken like the tiles, and a bowl of sugar with several teaspoons left in it, staining the sugar brown with stirred tea. Beth Orton’s plaintive, tremulous voice was wavering out of a boombox, and a kettle rattled and steamed on the floor nearby, warming my shins with its fresh boil. That’s dangerous, I though, with those children tearing about. I had to suppress an urge to move the kettle to a safer place.

  The woman who had shouted at the kids detached herself from the group of adults, and came over to greet me in the doorway. At first I thought something traumatic must just have happened to her, because her mouth was open in a pained sort of rictus as if she were walking against a particularly biting wind. But when she spoke, she seemed perfectly normal.

  ‘Come to help?’ she asked, far more cheerfully than her appearance suggested, and I nodded. She was younger than me, I saw, hippyish but not offensively so. She wore a lot of heavy amber jewellery, her long straight brown hair was shiny, and her teeth white. It was just that expression which made her look a bit unfortunate.

  ‘I’m Serena,’ she said. ‘Let’s get you signed in, and then I’ll introduce you to the gang. What’s your name?’

  ‘Anna,’ I said. ‘Anna, um, Valentine.’

  I watched as she wrote A-N-N-A on a sticky label, peeled it off, and handed it to me on her fingertip, where I duly stuck it above my left breast. I signed the clipboard she held out to me, adding my fake address, glad that I’d had the forethought to make one up, even if I hadn’t thought I’d be needing it.

  ‘Ooh, you live in Wealton?’ said Serena, looking at me with what appeared to be respect. ‘It’s lovely out there, isn’t it?’

  I panicked, momentarily. ‘Well, I haven’t been there long but, yes, it certainly is lovely.’ I supposed I ought to have been relieved that she hadn’t looked puzzled and said something along the lines of, ‘So, what’s it like living right next to the nuclear power station/sewage plant/maximum security prison?’

  Please don’t ask me exactly where in Wealton, I prayed silently. But she had already turned and was gesturing me to follow. ‘Come and meet everybody else.’

  When we got to the work table, one of the men had disappeared, and I saw from their name badges that neither of the other two was Adam.

  ‘This is Ralph,’ confirmed Serena, nodding towards the black guy. He waved and smiled at me, brandishing a pair of tile cutters, before replacing the plastic goggles he’d pushed back on his head, and breaking a terracotta tile into quarters with two efficient cracks. ‘And this is Paula, Mary, Margie, and Mitch.’

  I instantly mentally rechristened the last three Mary, Mungo and Midge. Midge—Mitch—was the hippie, and somewhat belatedly I realised that he was sticking out a dusty hand for me to shake. ‘Hi,’ I said, taking it. ‘I’m Anna.’

  There was an awkward silence. Whenever you meet a man, I chanted in my head, always try and find something nice to say about his physical appearance. This was a mantra that Vicky and I had always sworn by. Men loved you for it, especially the ugly ones—and Mitch really was almost disturbingly ugly. His hair was a pale gingery colour, long and wispy, and his nose dominated him as though it had been intended for a different and bigger man’s face. His lips were so thin they were non-existent, and the rings in the side of his nostrils looked scummy at the edges. What on earth could I find that was complimentary to say about him, I wondered?

  Just then, a shaft of sunlight came though one of the dusty skylights.

  ‘Haven’t you got lovely hair on your arms?’ I blurted; and indeed, it did look nice at that moment, sort of golden red and shining. Mitch looked ludicrously flattered, and I knew that I’d made at least one ally. The other women exchanged glances they thought I hadn’t noticed, so I decided not to focus on them just yet. Those types of tricks never worked on women. Obviously. And thankfully.

  ‘This is amazing,’ I said, in Ralph’s direction. ‘Did you do this little girl skipping? You’ve captured her expression perfectly.’ I thought of telling him he had lovely pecs, but decided that it would probably be over-egging the pudding somewhat.

  Ralph, too, looked pleased. ‘Thanks. Adam and I did it together.’

  ‘Adam’s the man in charge, isn’t he?’ I fished. ‘Is he here today?’

  ‘Yes. He was here a minute ago—where is he?’

  So that had been Adam. The older, softer one. I felt a second’s stab of disappointment, overtaken immediately by the thrill of having seen Max’s dad.

  One of the women—Paula—lifted up her head. She was the only one wearing a protective mask, and when she spoke her voice was a little muffled.

  ‘He’s just popped out for some milk,’ she said. ‘It’s his turn to make the tea.’

  I noticed then that she was very pregnant, her belly huge and high and round inside baggy dungarees. My heart sank, and I dropped my gaze to study the half-completed panel of mosaic.

  It was beautiful. Like a sort of flawed miracle, in fact - I was amazed at the way that the barest of sketches in charcoal on the baseboard just sprang to life in the finished coloured sections. A woman sitting on a bus, watching a girl skipping outside, fish in a pond, birds flying in a ceramic sky, the yolky whorls of a yellow sun. I couldn’t believe that such detail had been created just from clumsy shards of broken tile. For the first time since I’d arrived I actually briefly forgot about Max, and was consumed with a desire to contribute towards this hard coloured and fractured world.

  ‘It’s fantastic,’ I breathed, and the women relaxed a bit. ‘Are all of you experts at this? I’ve never done it before, I hope that won’t be a problem.’

  ‘Nor had I,’ said Mary, who was a neat middle-aged woman in a stripy chef’s apron. Her hair, although beautifully coiffed, was covered with a thin layer of dust.

  ‘You get the hang of it really easily,’ added Margie, who was younger, with a Dutch accent.

  Serena handed me a pair of plastic goggles, which I self-consciously donned. ‘I’ll show you how to use the cutters’ she said, passing me a pair. ‘You place them on the edge of your tile, at a ninety degree angle to it,
and just press. Don’t put them too far over the tile or it’ll shatter. Do it over a tray so we don’t get bits of debris in the picture. And if you want to make a circle, just ‘nibble’ around the edges, like this.’ She demonstrated, and then gestured for me to try.

  I picked up a red tile, applied the cutters, and pressed. Nothing happened. I pressed harder, and it broke into about fifteen pieces in my hand. ‘Never mind,’ Serena said. ‘That’s the joy of it—we can always use different sized pieces. Just put them in that box over there.’

  ‘Who wants tea, then?’ said a voice from the back of the hall.

  I turned, and there he was—Max’s father. Coming towards me holding a two litre bottle of milk and with a broad smile on his face. ‘Hello’ he said enthusiastically. ‘A new recruit—excellent! I’m Adam.’

  I felt inexplicably weak at the knees. ‘Anna Valentine,’ I managed. ‘We talked on the phone.’

  ‘Yes, of course, I remember—great that you could make it.’

  When I looked at him close up, I saw that he wasn’t as old as I’d thought—late thirties, perhaps. It was just the fact that he was balding and slightly paunchy that had given me that impression. He wasn’t exactly good looking, but his remaining hair was ebulliently curly, he was strong and broad-shouldered, his eyes were astonishingly blue, and his smile was one of those joyful ones to which you couldn’t help but respond. It hurt my heart, knowing how much pain there must have been in there—but then I felt a little ashamed at my deception. I oughtn’t have been privy to that kind of information, not without announcing my identity. It was voyeurism, in a way. I was already watching Adam, without him knowing.

  ‘Hello, Anna,’ he said now, putting the milk down on a bare section of the mosaic board, next to a half-finished overalled builder leaning on a charcoal sketch of a shovel. ‘Nice to meet you. Where did you say you lived?’

  I looked him straight in the eye and pretended that he was my lead man and that we were on stage at the Crucible: ‘I’m new to the area,’ I said without flinching. ‘I’m just renting a little place in Wealton.’

  ‘Lovely,’ Adam said, in the same slightly reverential tone as Serena had. I thought, I must drive out there and have a look at the place—I appeared, inadvertently, to have chosen well.

  ‘I trust Serena’s shown you what to do?’

  ‘Well, she’s told me how to do it. Which bit should I start on?’ It seemed presumptuous, to think that I’d ever be able to add anything creative to such a beautiful mural.

  Adam pointed at an empty corner of the board, which had a rough sketched outline of a basket with what looked like a baguette sticking out of the top of it.

  ‘Can you do that shopping basket? You’ll need two different browns, and if you cut pieces about the same size, you can lay them in alternate colours to look like the weave.’

  Where’s Max? I longed to ask. But instead I nodded, and valiantly took up my tile cutters.

  Two hours later, my right thumb was aching and stiff from cracking tiles, and my hands scratchy and spackled with grey adhesive, but I had weaved my very own brown tiled basket. I felt inordinately proud of it—it even looked like a basket! But it was made of bits of tile! I was surprised at how thrilling it was, watching it clumsily emerge from within the parameters of smudgy black lines on hardboard.

  I didn’t say much at first, just speaking when I was spoken to, but I listened intently to as much of Adam’s conversation as I could. He was on the other side of the table putting the finishing touches to a pond with a beautiful rippled surface, so I didn’t get much of a chance to talk to him directly and, unfortunately, Ralph and Mitch had rather unsubtly worked their way around towards me and were competing shamelessly for my attention.

  I realised with hindsight that my nice-hair-on-arms compliment had been a mistake—Mitch was gazing at me with undisguised lust, and at one point, when I smiled hesitantly in his direction, he lost concentration and cut his finger on a shard of red tile intended for the side of the bus he was working on. At least that got him out of the way for a while, as Mary bore him off to find a big enough plaster to staunch the flow of blood.

  I’d thought that this would be my chance to talk to Adam, but, seeing a window of opportunity, Ralph slid in instead. He was a very handsome man, but something about him rather disturbed me. His shorts were, frankly, disturbing enough - so brief that they resembled a pair of denim Speedos; but it was more the intensity of his conversation. Within half an hour, I had learned that his wife had left him for another man, that he was having problems paying his mortgage, that his youngest child had glue ear and grommets and his oldest child thought the marital break-up was his fault (at that point I wondered if the shorts would be used against him in court as evidence), and that he played golf with a handicap of nineteen. All without drawing breath. My head was reeling with the effort of trying to nod at the appropriate junctures, whilst eavesdropping on Adam’s murmured chat with the women on either side of him, and simultaneously trying to cut regular rectangles of beige and brown tile for my basket. It wasn’t easy, what with the Beth Orton tape in the background and the children’s intermittent piercing squeals as they squabbled over pens and biscuits.

  Just when I was beginning to think there could be nothing left that I didn’t know about Ralph, he excused himself. ‘Just going for a jimmy,’ he said.

  ‘Where’s he going?’ asked Margie, puzzled. She had shown no interest in anything Ralph had said up to that point, so I was beginning to get the impression that the other women had all been through this compulsive-disclosure thing with him already. It was probably some rite of passage that everybody working on the mosaic had to endure.

  ‘For a jimmy. A Jimmy Riddle—it means he’s going to the toilet,’ I explained, my voice feeling faintly rusty with the lack of use since Ralph had been banging on.

  ‘I don’t understand. Why does that mean he’s going to the toilet?’

  ‘It’s cockney rhyming slang. Jimmy Riddle equals piddle. Pee.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, looking none the wiser. ‘I do not understand your English expressions. I would be terrible on ‘Who Wants to Be A Millionaire’, I think. I would not be able to answer the really easy questions. They had one the other day: “It is raining cats and—what?” I thought the answer was ducks. That was for one hundred pounds, and I would have been out.’

  I laughed, and when I looked up I saw that Adam was too. I thought how much more attractive he was when his face relaxed and his eyes creased at the corners.

  ‘I knew somebody called Jimmy Riddle once,’ I said, cracking some thinner pieces of tile for the basket handle. ‘He didn’t even call himself Jim or James. Just Jimmy. He was a plumber, too, so maybe he did it on purpose.’

  Everybody laughed at that, even Paula, the haughty-looking pregnant one. I felt myself relax, and realised that I was enjoying myself.

  ‘So what do you do, Anna?’ Adam asked, just as Mitch, Mary and Ralph all arrived back at the table. Mitch had a bulky bandage around his finger and a tiny little boy sucking a dirty thumb trailing behind him, holding on to the edge of his Little Feat t-shirt.

  I opened my mouth to tell Adam that I was an actor, when Mitch thrust his injured digit into the centre of attention. Blood was already beginning to seep through the white gauze, and I worried that it might drip on my basket. ‘I’d better call it a day, guys,’ he said mournfully. ‘It won’t stop bleeding. Think I might need a stitch or two. So me and Spike will head off. See you tomorrow, yeah?’

  ‘Bye, Mitch, bye Spike,’ everybody chorussed, trying to appear concerned.

  Another child sidled up to the table, his small pointed face so dwarfed by the huge plastic safely goggles that he looked like the personification of a bug-eyed grasshopper. He pulled at Mary’s sleeve. ‘I’m hungry, Mum. Cn’ I have a sandwich?’

  Mary looked at him with exasperation. ‘Orlando, you had an enormous breakfast, and you had three biscuits less than an hour ago. You’ll have to wait.’r />
  ‘I’m hungry too,’ added a chubbier dark-haired girl who appeared behind him. ‘And we’re bored doing colouring. Can we stick some tiles on?’

  ‘Only if you wear the goggles, Petra, I’m afraid,’ said Adam. ‘We can’t risk you getting a bit of tile in your eye.’

  ‘Is she yours?’ I ventured to Adam, trying to sound natural.

  ‘No. She and Millie are mine,’ Serena interrupted. ‘Orlando’s Mary’s son.’

  It felt too contrived to press on and ask Adam if he had any children. I hoped he’d volunteer the information so I could legitimately ask him about Max, but he didn’t say anything further. I was just going to have to be patient.

  But patience was not a virtue with which I’d ever been over-endowed. The next time there was a break in the conversation (some time later, when it was Mitch’s turn to make the tea) I said to the general assembled company, ‘So, are all your kids still on summer holiday?’

  Paula laughed. ‘I can tell you don’t have children, then. There’s another two weeks before term starts.’

  I can tell you don’t have children.

  For a moment I was almost felled by grief, cracked into a dozen sharp pieces. I couldn’t reply. I couldn’t even breathe—it always got me that way, out of the blue. Maybe she could tell. Maybe they could all tell that I was here under false pretences. It had nothing to do with not being aware of term dates. It was to do with my fucked up Tefal-lined womb that nothing or no-one would stick to—they could feel my failure like an airborne virus, leaching out and mingling with the dust in the air… No wonder Paula was standing over the other side of the table, I was probably subconsciously giving off Dr.Death vibes that she could feel as a threat to the perfect child inside her, waiting contentedly, curled up and kicking. It was bound to be a beautiful healthy baby—after all, most women had that sort—and an almost murderous jealousy settled on me, taunting me with light fingers of blame. It was the most basic, instinctive thing in the world. In fact, practically any woman could do it. You didn’t have to be smart, beautiful, or successful to give birth; just screw at the right time, sit around for nine months eating pastries, then open your legs and push. It was a doddle.