Hubble Bubble

by Jane Lovering

  ‘Oh, you know what I mean. I want to be able to remodel the house without having anyone distracting me. I’m taking an evening class,’ she added proudly.

  ‘In not being distracted? Gosh. That’s a bit specialised isn’t it?’ Megan dunked a biscuit in the hot tea and dribbled consequent chocolate down her chin.

  ‘In interior design. It’s an old cottage we’ve got, sixteenth century, and I want to do it up as close to the original plans as possible. If it works I’m thinking of starting up my own business, sort of fifteen-hundreds’ bed and breakfast.’ Now I came to look at her, Isobel was looking better too. Her acne seemed to be clearing up finally and her hair had extra shine. It might not have been her wish coming true but she clearly had a new lease of life.

  ‘Pallet and pottage?’

  ‘So, Holly. I take it that you didn’t collect my candles and go straight to the police?’ Vivienne sat opposite Eve, a poised cup and saucer on her lap and a cat staring down from her shoulder.

  ‘Ah. Yes. Been meaning to talk to you all about that …’

  On the way home in the car Megan finally lost her boggle-eyed expression. ‘He held you at gunpoint? And locked you in a shed,’ she said wonderingly. ‘And Kai rescued you?’

  ‘Only technically. I was well on the way to rescuing myself, but the bomb went out. Good grief, that’s a weird sentence.’

  ‘God, Holl.’

  We were silent again for a bit, watching the hypnotic windscreen wipers fighting the downpour. It had begun to rain with a vengeance and going anywhere at the moment was a bit like sailing the Atlantic. ‘It was frightening,’ I admitted at last. ‘I got taken in by the whole “looking sexy” thing, and by the time I realised that he was as mad as the Planet of Spoons, it was too late.’

  ‘Handsome is as handsome does,’ Megan nodded wisely. ‘And I was thinking about what you said before. About Rufus. He does treat me like a goddess, and it’s my own stupid fault for not being more specific with my wish that I’ve got a big hairy dog instead of … well.’

  ‘A big hairy man?’

  ‘Yes, that. But then, I have met more men since I’ve been walking Rufus than I ever did at work. It’s not noted for its straight male demographic, British Home Stores but it’s amazing how many people will come and talk to you when you’re out with a dog.’

  ‘There you go then. You’ve got your wish, but just obliquely.’

  ‘Obliquely? Those are pillars, aren’t they?’

  ‘Obelisks, Meg. But maybe that’s the price we’re paying for doing the spell with all those weird photographs and bits cut out of books and things. I mean, my excitement is very odd, and then there’s Nicky’s wish …’ I had to explain the whole ‘girlfriend with big tits’ thing then and Megan didn’t stop sniggering all the way back to her flat.

  ‘It does serve him right a bit,’ she said. ‘But it makes you wonder. If it’s all gone, um, oblique, then what about Vivienne? And Eve? And why hasn’t anything happened to Isobel?’

  I shook my head. Things were moving in such mysterious ways that they were positively heading the Ministry of Silly Walks, but was it just my imagination? Would everything have happened this way anyway? Were we all guilty of falling for the, very human, desire to be able to put the universe into order? Or … I felt the fairy-fingered tickle of wonder rise up my spine … was there really more to this ‘magic’ than I realised?

  ‘I’ve got an address.’

  ‘That’s nice. So much better than the old no-fixed-abode thing which, I have to say, wasn’t really working out for you.’

  ‘Ha.’ Kai swept a load of crumbs off the table and then gazed around in search of something. ‘Have you seen the vacuum cleaner? Cerys must have left it – I’d have noticed if she’d tried to smuggle that back to Peterborough, surely?’

  ‘With the amount of stuff she had? I doubt it.’

  ‘What did she do, stuff it in a giant condom and make Nicholas carry it up his backside?’ Kai opened a cupboard and peered inside. ‘And there’s pickled beetroot in here. That has to be Cerys, I hate the stuff. God, I miss her.’

  Not as much as I miss Nicholas. My hand still wandered to the telephone receiver every morning, my heart thumped whenever I saw a text from him ping onto my phone. It felt like a death in the family. Knew I had to let him go, to let him make a life for himself, ashamed of how it felt … Ashamed of the blank hours, hours I had used to spend running up to his flat to make sure he’d eaten, washed his clothes, taken his meds; it was only now that I was realising how many of those hours there had been.

  ‘What’s this address then?’ I tried to distract him, well, both of us. We were still skirting around our relationship like a couple of deserters from a battlefield trying to avoid capture.

  ‘From the PI in Leeds. Strange, really.’ He sat down on the newly uncrumbed table, putting his feet up on one of the stools and picking at a thread on the knee of his jeans. ‘She only lives a handful of miles from here. Think, I could have walked past her in the street without knowing.’

  ‘So, what’s the next step? Do you write to her, or what?’

  He stopped picking and stared down at the floor. ‘No. She wants to see me, well, I’m not giving her any time to prepare, I want to see her as she really is, not as she’d have me see her. Does that make sense?’

  ‘Isn’t it a bit unfair on her?’

  ‘I don’t think I have to be fair. I think I’m entitled to be as fucking unfair as I feel like.’ He kicked his feet off the stool and stood up, opening cupboards at random and slamming doors.

  I watched him for a moment as he turned his fear and longing into anger and activity. ‘When do we do it?’

  ‘Soon,’ his voice was muffled in the boiler cupboard. ‘Yeah. Soon. Before Christmas anyway.’

  ‘That’s only a couple of weeks away.’

  ‘Yeah. Maybe New Year. Or … Oh, here’s the vacuum. Jesus, more beetroot, what did she do, bath in the stuff?’

  ‘It makes you go orange.’ I didn’t want to think about Christmas. With Ma and Dad so far away in Scotland, the last few years it had been Nicholas and me, with the occasional addition of Megan if her dad and stepmum had taken off on another cruise. I’d shopped and cooked and we’d gone to midnight Mass and it had all been a bit … thin, somehow. Nick couldn’t drink on his medication and I hated drinking alone, so we’d sat stone cold sober and eaten fruit cake neither of us liked. Now Nick was going to have his first true family Christmas with Cerys and the twins and her mum and dad who, apparently, adored him and I was here, looking down the barrel of the festive season alone. Kai had only mentioned Christmas once, in the context of how much he was looking forward to escaping it by working on a piece about Afghan rebel fighters in their native habitat.

  ‘Before Christmas might be best. She’ll spend Christmas knowing that she’s got a granddaughter and two great-grandchildren.’

  ‘Come on, Holl, you’re behaving as if she’s been in stasis since she gave me away. She’s probably had a bunch of children and loads of grandkids and I’ll just be one more, tacked onto the family like some kind of prosthetic.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  ‘No. I don’t.’ He stopped slamming around and stood in the corner, resting his head against the wall with his back to me. ‘I am so, so bad at this.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s something you can practise.’ A little bit tentatively I went over and touched his shoulder. I had to stand on tiptoe to do it.

  ‘I meant, forgiveness. I know, deep down, that it probably wasn’t her fault, that she didn’t want to … to leave me, but then I think about Cerys. You know she got pregnant by accident? She and her boyfriend’—he spat the word as though it was the same as steaming pile of shit—‘had only known each other for a matter of weeks. And then she’s having twins and he’s having second thoughts. But she never, never considered giving them up.’

  ‘Kai.’ I ran my hand up and down his arm. ‘Thirty-six years ago the world was a d
ifferent place.’

  ‘You don’t know.’

  ‘No, but I did history at school,’ I said sharply. ‘You can’t make any judgements until you know, that’s all I’m saying. Yes, Cerys kept the twins, but she’s got a rich, successful journalist for a supportive father, and a nice mum and an extra dad who were both behind her all the way, and her own flat …’

  ‘Bought by her rich, successful journalist father,’ Kai put in, but he was sounding a bit more cheerful now.

  ‘You see? Not exactly life on the breadline for our Cerys.’

  ‘Cerys would toast and eat the breadline.’ He turned round now, biting his lip. ‘I am such a jerk, Holly. A screwed-up, cowardly jerk.’

  ‘You forgot self-pitying.’

  ‘Oh yeah, that too.’ He traced my cheek with a finger. ‘Why do you hang around with me?’

  ‘I’m after your money.’

  ‘Ah. Thought that might be it.’ He smiled and I tried to keep my knees from wobbling. ‘How about tomorrow?’

  ‘How about what tomorrow?’

  ‘We go and find my mother.’ Now his look was challenging, as though he was expecting me to bottle out.

  ‘Okay, yeah. Right. Fine.’

  ‘Holly.’ Kai grabbed my wrist. ‘Don’t go home tonight. Stay. Please.’

  ‘Kai, she’s your mother, not a man-eating hyena, this isn’t your last night on the planet.’ I felt that I had to be sensible for both of us.

  ‘Are you regretting the sex the other day?’ He let go of me suddenly. ‘Is that it?’

  ‘God, no. And, if you remember, it was me who told you to sort your head out before you started any kind of relationship.’ I watched him flip his hair nervously, tap his ring against the table edge, twitchy and edgy.

  ‘I know. I … We don’t seem to have talked. I mean, properly talked, about anything. About us. I admit, I freaked a bit with all these feelings crashing down around me, all stuff I’ve never felt before and don’t know how to handle. But, there you are, still. Like this kind of constant. And that’s something I’ve never managed to keep, Holly, constancy. I had ten years of it, and I took it for granted then, but … I couldn’t hold it, and now I don’t know how to … I’ve never looked for it in any of my relationships, I thought transience was all there was.’ He put his hands either side of the sink and leaned forward, seeming to be looking out of the window, but really looking inside himself. Those strange, yellow eyes lost focus and he went very still.

  ‘Are you afraid you’re going to blow it?’ I asked softly. ‘Because I am.’

  A flick of the head and he was looking into me again. That intense stare that twisted my stomach and made my heart slide sideways in my chest. ‘Yes.’ It was a whisper, barely even that. ‘Yes, I’m afraid I’m going to blow it.’

  ‘One day at a time, Kai.’ It took all my concentration not to tear his shirt off. There was something purely sexual about his look, and yet something deeper than sex, something that spoke to my soul. ‘Let’s take it slowly. You do what you have to, to keep your head straight, and I’ll do what I have to.’

  His eyes were suddenly alive, moving like flame, darting across my face to my lips, down my neck and back up again. ‘I want you to stay, be with me tonight, keep me from backing down, backing out, running away, because that’s what I want to do too.’

  ‘Don’t run from me, Kai.’

  He touched my face, ran a finger down where his eyes had already licked my skin. ‘At the moment I’d be lucky if I could walk.’ Mouth followed fingers following eyes, and then we just let the hormones do the communicating for us. He pushed me up onto the table, rucked up my skirt and, with a suddenness that made me inhale like hiccups, he was inside me.

  I tried to speak but he kissed the words away, kissed me till the kitchen spun, moved until the air went black and sparks rose, fanned to fire and then burned to embers. And then did it all again. Finally he lay above me, boneless and wordless, damp hair in both our eyes. ‘Good, yes?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ I stared at the ceiling cornices, chuckling demons and something that looked half-man half-pig. ‘Yes.’

  He pulled me up into a sitting position next to him. ‘Let’s not leave it so long next time, yeah? In fact, let’s do this a lot more.’

  ‘Hey now, don’t get reckless.’ We let our legs dangle off the side of the table. ‘One of us is going to have some work with the Dettol before we have dinner.’

  ‘So you’ll stay then?’

  I looked at him, dark hair counterpointing those eyes and stubble-scattered cheeks. ‘What, turn down a man who makes love to me on the kitchen table? Do I look mad?’

  ‘At the moment you look flushed and very, very sexy.’ He kissed me again, long and slow. ‘And now Cerys is gone, I’ll make love to you all over the house if you want.’

  ‘Only if you want.’

  He gave me the most evil grin and pushed my hand down. ‘Oh yes, I want,’ he said. ‘See?’

  ‘Where do you get your energy from?’ I closed my fist and he closed his eyes.

  ‘Same place as you.’ It was a groan, not real words. ‘I sold my soul to the Devil …’

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  ‘Do I look all right?’ Kai asked for the hundredth time. ‘It’s not too … you know, scruffy?’

  ‘You look gorgeous, as you well know. That poor waitress nearly dropped the coffee pot, can’t you tone it down a bit?’

  ‘How does one tone down one’s natural sex appeal?’

  ‘Well, one could try not wearing jeans that are quite so tight, for a start.’ I rubbed a patch of steam off the café window and peered out onto the street. Outside, another shower blustered down the road, sweeping a week’s worth of newspapers before it and depositing them in a pile of leaves and chip shop debris. The little town where Kai’s mother evidently lived was clearly not having a good day – everywhere looked grey and underpopulated and the cobbles which lined the main street looked treacherously shiny.

  ‘You didn’t complain this morning,’ Kai blew in my ear. ‘In fact, I distinctly remember having to get dressed twice.’

  ‘That was your fault, with the …’ I made a general gesture which pretty much indicated his whole body, ‘and the leather jacket and the earring.’

  ‘I just want to look good.’

  ‘Kai, she’ll know you’re successful. Bin men don’t wear Prada.’

  He rested his elbows on the sticky table. ‘Funny, having to tell your own mother your name.’ Now he looked out through the smeared condensation. ‘I’ve been here loads of times. I had the Jeep serviced over there,’ he jerked his head. ‘Never knew she was here, this close.’

  ‘No reason you would.’ I looked at his empty cup. ‘Are you ready?’

  ‘Yes. No.’ He held his hand up. ‘Look, I’m shaking. What kind of a way is this to behave?’

  ‘A natural one.’ I gathered up my bag and kicked my high heels back on. All right, I admit it, I’d dressed up to meet Kai’s mother. Not that she’d be looking at me, of course, she’d be struck blind by the glamour of her son, who was working the battered leather jacket, long hair, silver jewellery thing to death. But I wanted her to … what? Think me suitable? Not assume that I was his minder? To those ends I’d worn a black jacket and skirt, with heels and matching bag and I’d put my hair up. I looked like I was off to a high-class funeral.

  He watched me without moving. ‘I’m going to introduce you as my girlfriend,’ he said. ‘It won’t freak you out too much, will it?’

  ‘I think I can cope.’ I shoved a fiver under a saucer. ‘You look like an entrant in Britain’s Next Top Model.’ He still wasn’t standing up. ‘Kai, you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.’

  ‘No, I do.’ Now he stood up and blocked out what little light was coming in to the tea shop. ‘I really do. And I have to do it in the next ten minutes, because I think that’s as long as my breakfast is going to stay down.’

  ‘Hey.’ I grabbed his hand. ‘Come on. You n
ever have to see her again, if you don’t want to.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’ A weak smile brought a little colour to his face and a shine to his eyes. ‘I’ve faced the Mujahideen and been less scared.’

  We walked along the street up the hill towards the twelfth century castle ruins that lay picturesquely overlooking the town. ‘This is it,’ Kai stopped outside a white-painted little house which fronted straight onto the road. ‘Seventeen. God, Holly.’

  ‘She might not even be in.’ I stared at the innocent window, framed by cream curtains. ‘There’s no lights on.’

  ‘Well, she’d better be, because I’m not coming back.’ He braced his hands on his knees, leaned down and took two deep breaths. ‘Okay. C’mon Rhys, you can do this.’ Then he knocked, knuckles sounding hollow against the door.

  I watched him slip from scared civilian into journalist mode. He set his face against disappointment and dismissal, narrowed his eyes, drew his mouth into a line. His back straightened and his shoulders squared. He gave me a tiny wink. And if I hadn’t known it was all an act of massive bravado, I would have been impressed. But I did, and I knew how fragile he was under it all.

  There were footsteps. We could hear them through the door, shuffling towards us, the tapping sound of a stick against a wooden floor. Kai’s eyes widened, his head came up and I thought for a second he was going to run, but he stood his ground, although I could almost see his heart beating through his jacket. The door opened.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ I said, but I needn’t have spoken at all. They looked at each other.

  ‘David,’ said Eve, softly. ‘I would have known you anywhere. You look just like your father.’ Then she noticed me. ‘Holly?’

  ‘I repeat, bloody hell!’

  There was a moment of three-way staring. ‘You know David?’

  ‘It’s Kai. Kai Rhys,’ Kai said sternly. ‘Holly is my … we’re together.’

  Eve couldn’t take her eyes off him. ‘David,’ she kept saying. ‘You found me.’

  ‘Do you think we could come in?’ I asked eventually. ‘I’m afraid he might fall down if we stay out here.’