Playing for Keeps

by Rosa Temple

  I darted across the road and positioned myself behind a large tree with a wide, knobbly bark and waited. As it was Sunday afternoon, people were out doing Sunday afternoon things. Dog walking, riding up and down on a scooter and looking suspiciously at people standing behind trees.

  I’d been behind that bloody tree for twenty minutes and my patience was waning, dramatically. Half an hour passed and Stella was still there. During that time, a man who had walked past me earlier and whose terrier had desperately wanted to use my tree to do his business before I growled my annoyance, started on his way back. This time the terrier was off the leash and decided to make a beeline right for me and began yapping at full volume. I looked across the road, expecting Hugo and Stella to come out to see what all the fuss was about.

  ‘Shh,’ I said to the dog. I batted my hand to imply it should go but the dog was convinced I wanted to see a few tricks. It jumped up high, as if it wanted to take off, and barked with each bound. I stared hard at the owner, hoping he would call the dog off. But instead he just laughed as he trotted towards the tree, expecting applause for his somersaulting pooch.

  ‘Go away,’ I hissed between gritted teeth but the dog just ran around my feet in circles, yapping like nobody’s business and totally pissing me off. ‘Do you mind?’ I said to the owner. ‘I’m not really a dog person.’

  ‘Oh no?’ the owner said as if I was the only person in the world who didn’t like dogs. ‘Here, Bud!’ he called, slapping his thigh. The dog took an absolute age to obey the command because it kept returning to me, jaw open, tongue out and panting away.

  The owner had to grab his dog and wrestle the lead back on before I could return to spying on Stella and focusing on operation ‘Cheer up Hugo’.

  Next it was the turn of the children who had been scooting up and down. Two children, a boy and girl of about six or seven, halted by my tree and stood, one foot on their scooters, one off, just staring at me in silence. They continued like that; each time I looked over my shoulder at them they hadn’t moved an inch.

  ‘Problem?’ I asked them.

  ‘You got a problem?’ the girl said.

  ‘No,’ I said, looking back at the house because I thought I heard a door close.

  ‘What you looking at then?’ the boy asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. Just then Stella walked away from the house. I put my finger to my lips.

  ‘Is that your friend?’ the girl said in a rather loud voice. Stella was about to turn around so I pinned my back to the tree and hoped she couldn’t see who it was the children were talking to.

  The children shook their heads and scooted off. I furtively turned to looked around the tree trunk and saw Stella turn onto the Portobello Road and walk out of view.

  ‘Hey!’ Someone tapped my shoulder. I swung around, ready to pounce.

  ‘Would you just leave me the f—’

  I swallowed my abusive comeback. Hugo was standing in front of me with a puzzled look on his face. I clutched my heart and exhaled.

  ‘Hugo, you frightened the life out of me. What the hell are you doing here?’

  ‘Well, I live down this road,’ he said. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

  ‘Me?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Me?’ I repeated. ‘What am I doing here?’

  ‘I just asked you that.’

  ‘Well, I came here to see you of course.’

  Hugo looked up at the tree.

  ‘Lost something?’ he asked.

  ‘No. I mean yes. I couldn’t remember the number of your flat. I must have walked up and down a hundred times thinking I’d remember the blinds in your window. But I didn’t. I got tired. All that walking and so I…’ I turned to pat the tree. ‘I thought I’d take a rest and then give you a call or something.’

  Hugo shook his head. ‘Magenta, I told you I wanted to be alone.’

  ‘Marlene Dietrich gets to be alone, Hugo. You don’t get to be alone.’ I was panting as I followed his long strides across the road to his flat. ‘Not while I’m around and not until you…’

  ‘Drop down dead?’

  I took a breath and rolled my eyes. Idiot! What was I saying?

  Hugo pushed open the gate and jogged down the concrete steps. I followed, shaking my head to reprimand myself. Don’t mention death, Magenta, whatever you do.

  ‘Tea?’ Hugo said as he turned the key in the lock.

  ‘Oh, I’m dying for a cup.’ I slapped my hand to my head. ‘Shit!’

  He stood aside to let me in first. ‘Go through to the kitchen. I’ll put the kettle on.’ He was laughing to himself as he entered the kitchen behind me.

  I hopped onto a high stool by the counter.

  ‘I can never seem to say the right thing,’ I said. Hugo held up two packets of tea and jiggled them in front of me. ‘Peppermint, please.’

  He filled the kettle, found two tall mugs from a cupboard and plopped a teabag into each.

  ‘And what is the right thing?’ he asked, turning back to me.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what you’d like me to say and I don’t know how to act around you if I’m honest.’

  Hugo walked towards me. My back was to the counter as I sat on the stool. He leaned each hand onto the counter, one on either side of me, his face almost touching mine.

  ‘If you’d done as I’d asked,’ he said, ‘you wouldn’t have to find the right words. What part of leave me alone didn’t you get?’

  The yellowness of his skin was still apparent though he looked pale at the same time. The whites of his eyes held a slight yellow hue and the intensity of blue was missing from his irises. He looked older flecks of grey in his light-brown hair more pronounced. He had never looked that much older than me once upon a time but now the ten-year gap in our ages showed. The creases by his eyes were deeper and there were furrows in his brow that seemed to have sprung up from nowhere.

  Within him, though, I could detect the slightly cheeky and boyish charmer who walked over to me all those years ago sporting a dark T-shirt, spiky hair and a goatee. I remember Hugo as having an answer for everything. He spoke fast, had a dry sense of humour, and I could detect an accent behind the London one he had adopted since moving down from Cumbria. He was also a talented musician and I wondered if he played the drums any more. I knew he was a competent pianist and guitarist too; I’d listened to several of his recordings. But there was no evidence of anything musical, apart from the radio on the counter near the kettle, in his flat at all.

  ‘That’s bullshit, Hugo, and you know it.’

  Hugo sprang back. The kettle had begun to hiss to boiling. For once Hugo was speechless. The kettle clicked itself off after covering the tiled wall behind it with condensation from the steam.

  ‘Admit it, Hugo, it’s utter crap when you say you want me to leave you alone,’ I continued. I jumped off my stool and poured hot water onto the teabags, almost overfilling the cups because my hand was shaking. I’d found a boldness I wouldn’t have had if not for Hugo’s circumstances and it shocked me. I turned to face him.

  ‘Are you going to back that up with anything?’ he asked, edging himself onto the stool I’d just vacated, one foot on the floor, the other hooked on the foot rail.

  ‘For one thing, what are you doing in London?’ I said.

  ‘I came to get treatment.’

  ‘And they don’t have hospitals in Brazil? If you thought they weren’t good enough, wouldn’t it have been easier to fly to the States?’

  ‘My dad is here.’

  ‘Your dad is in Cumbria. You rented a flat in London.’

  ‘I told you. I didn’t want my dad to see me go through… go through it. Not again. It wasn’t fair.’

  ‘I’m pretty sure your own father would prefer that his only son, the last member of his immediate family, be near him at a time like this. No, I think you’re in London for another reason.’

  ‘That being?’

  ‘Me, Hugo. Don’t deny it. I know you still lo
ve me and I know you’re here because…’ The bravado I felt cracked with my voice as I tried to swallow the need to cry. ‘You wanted to say goodbye.’

  Immediately Hugo’s head dropped. It hung so low I thought he might topple off the chair. I walked over to him, lifting his head with my hands. He was crying, silently. Tears streamed down his face, the pain in his eyes almost too unbearable to watch, yet I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

  ‘It’s true,’ he said in soft a voice. I thought I’d only imagined him saying anything. ‘I was scared. I felt alone out there. The only person I could think about, the person I thought could help me through it, was you. I tried, Magenta, but I couldn’t stop the way I felt about you. I wanted you to come to Brazil, be with me, but I knew it would be too much to ask. I didn’t have the right.’

  I put my arms around him and felt the shudders running through his body as he began to weep aloud.

  ‘I thought I could be brave about it but I can’t,’ he said, his breath catching as he tried to calm himself. ‘I don’t know what’s coming and I’m scared. I seriously don’t know how Mum did it. She never asked me to come back. Never told me she was ill. Just dealt with it. Why can’t I?’

  I sniffed, rubbed my streaming face with the flat of my hand, my running nose with the back.

  ‘What are you saying, Hugo? Everyone will deal with a thing like this differently. Think about it. Think about what your life has been like. You were always on the move, always seeking out an adventure. You have a lust for life and now, before you’re done with it, before you’ve finished your adventure, your life is ending. Of course you’re afraid. Anyone would be. Afraid. Angry. Cheated. You must be all those things and more. I’d be afraid. I’d be petrified, Hugo. But one thing I wouldn’t do is push people away when all they want is to make what you have left the best it can be. Please, just let me do that.’

  ‘Because it will make you feel better?’ he asked, tears stopping now.

  ‘Yes, yes it will. But also, it’s why you came here. You needed to see me and here I am.’

  We were silent for a long time until an electrical click from the wiring in the kitchen prompted us to continue.

  ‘I missed you,’ Hugo said. ‘So much. I had a dream you were mine, I wasn’t sick and we lived happily ever after.’

  I smiled.

  ‘That’s a wonderful dream,’ I said. ‘I had a similar one when I was eighteen and we first met.’

  ‘I’m sure you did but I managed to nause that up big time.’

  ‘You’re telling me. I bet if you hadn’t left me for ten years you would never have got cancer.’

  Hugo burst out laughing, spluttering into my face. I laughed along with him but, oh, how I wished it were true. We wiped our faces, sniffed until our noses stopped running.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Our tea is getting cold. Do you want your teabag in or out?’

  ‘For peppermint tea? Out. Like you.’

  I turned a little to smile at him for remembering something so small. I squeezed the teabags out and dropped them in the bin. We carried our mugs of lukewarm tea into the living room and sat on the sofa staring at the photographs on the wall opposite the window. The blinds were down and the room was dim. I couldn’t hear the children out on their scooters but I imagined they were there, across the road, wondering what the hell I was really doing behind a tree on a Sunday afternoon, in the cold.

  ‘Most people would offer their guest biscuits too,’ I said.

  Hugo let out a big laugh again and it was nice to see his face like that for a change. Not nonchalant, not miserable either, and, most importantly, not scared.

  ‘Actually I don’t have any food here. Stella has been shopping for me, poor thing, and I moan at her constantly.’

  ‘Hugo, that’s awful. You know you really owe that woman a lot.’

  ‘I know. I don’t know how I’m going to make it up to her. Maybe I’ll leave everything I have to her in my will instead of to that one-legged beggar I met in Rio.’

  ‘You didn’t!’

  ‘No, I lost all my money in a game of Blackjack.’ He grinned, took my hand. ‘Let’s go.’ He pulled me to standing. ‘We’re going to buy biscuits and when we come back we’re going to make some hot tea to dunk them in.’

  ‘Sounds like a marvellous idea,’ I said, smiling.

  I trotted out of the flat after Hugo. We held hands, hugged each other and giggled as we walked for about twenty minutes up the Portobello Road before realising we were unlikely to find a convenience store on that stretch of the road.

  ‘There’ll be something open towards Holland Park,’ I suggested, knowing full well that had we continued that far up we would have been very near to the pub where we’d first met. It was probably best not to go there.

  ‘If we cut down here we’re bound to find a shop open on Ladbroke Grove,’ Hugo said as if reading my mind.

  ‘Let’s do it.’ I linked my arm around his.

  As we laughed and joked along the way, Hugo told me the true story surrounding the one-legged beggar and a very risky game of Blackjack he once played in Porto Alegre. I forgot all about the cancer. I forgot about my history with Hugo: the time he promised to call me and I didn’t see him again for ten years; how we met up again and the feeling that he might be the one; being on the verge of going back to Brazil with him. He was my first real love, my first proper heartbreak, and the first man to make me feel I would die if I never saw him again.

  I forgot all that because Hugo had a way of making you forget. He was the bad boy who could make a good girl do anything just with his cheeky grin or the right string of words. It was no wonder I’d loved him and it was no wonder Stella was in love with him now.

  We walked slowly back to his flat. All the storytelling seemed to have knocked the wind out of Hugo and he took a deep breath at the top of the steps leading down to his front door when we arrived back.

  ‘Everything okay?’ I asked him.

  ‘Why wouldn’t it be?’ He shrugged off my hand as I went to relieve him of the plastic bag he was carrying and went down the stairs. It took him an age to retrieve his key from the front pocket of his leather jacket.

  We’d managed to get a swag of Rich Tea biscuits and chocolate digestives, albeit in an obscure brand. In the kitchen we put on the lights as it was already turning dark. I clicked on the kettle and Hugo put on the radio. We’d devoured at least half a packet of chocolate biscuits before the tea was even made. It was late and neither of us had really eaten anything since breakfast.

  ‘Should I order some real food?’ Hugo asked hours later when the sky outside was inky black.

  We’d been looking at Hugo’s photographs on the wall and he’d told me a story about each location, even the one where he’d first met Stella.

  ‘I suppose,’ I said, looking around the room for a clock. I’d completely lost track of time. I involuntarily looked at my wrist although I wasn’t wearing a watch.

  ‘You need to be somewhere?’ Hugo asked.

  ‘Um…’ I raised my eyes to the ceiling in contemplation. It was probably about eight o’clock. Anthony would have emerged from the studio, seen I wasn’t back yet, eaten pasta and gone back to paint. He hadn’t called to see where I was. He’d probably assume I was at Anya’s. I spent any spare time I could there because I couldn’t get enough of the baby. Let him think that. I was having fun and, besides, Hugo was the one who needed me.

  ‘Go on then,’ I said. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Tell me,’ said Hugo. ‘Just what are you dying to eat?’

  I burst out laughing again, putting my fingers to my lips to try to stop.

  ‘You are so bad,’ I chastised him. ‘So bad.’

  We ordered curries, at least three because everything on the menu looked good. Enough rice to feed a starving continent and some samosas for good measure.

  ‘I think we overdid it,’ I said when Hugo got off the phone.

  ‘Who cares, you only live once, right? How about we ta
ke a trip to the offie to get some booze in. We need lagers.’

  ‘Let’s just have tea. You look a bit tired, Hugo.’

  ‘Nonsense.’ He got to his feet and was heading out before I could dissuade him. We did the schlep back to Ladbroke Grove to a dodgy-looking off-licence and purchased four cans of beer and cracked one open each as we waited for the delivery.

  Fully stuffed with food a couple of hours later, I looked across at Hugo’s plate and saw it was still piled quite high. In fact I was pretty sure I’d done most of the eating. Hugo had only picked at his food but had been the one to consume most of the beer. He looked paler than earlier and so tired.

  We’d sat on opposite sides of the coffee table, on our knees, to eat. We’d talked about Brazil, the rainforest, man bags, handbags and false arrests in Paris. The time flew by as we listened to Smooth FM via the television, the aromas of lamb madhuri, chicken dopiaza and masala sauce wafting around the room.

  ‘That’s it for me,’ I said. ‘How are you feeling, Hugo?’ I didn’t want that hint of worry to escape as I spoke, or to have a look of concern in my eyes because of how worn out Hugo looked.

  He dragged himself round to my side of the coffee table and sat beside me, our backs against the sofa.

  ‘I’m fine, just completely stuffed,’ he said, putting the back of his hand onto his forehead, eyes closed, head resting on the seat.

  ‘Me too. I never eat that much.’

  Hugo opened one eye and looked at me sideways.

  ‘Shut up, Hugo. I only pig out once in a while. Besides, I go for a run on a regular basis. Leave me alone.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with a woman with an appetite. I hate skinny girls.’

  ‘Do you think I’m fat?’

  Hugo sniffed and eased himself up to lie on the sofa. He ran his hand down my hair.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he sighed. ‘You’re perfect.’

  We stared at each other for a while, smiles on our faces. I’d had one of the best evenings I’d had in a while and I didn’t want it to end. I wondered, though, if I should go and let him have some rest. I’d come to cheer him up but seemed to have fatigued him in the process. I couldn’t leave him, I decided. Instead I clambered onto the sofa beside him and curled my body into his, my back to his front.