Don't Get Me Wrong

by Marianne Kavanagh

  “Let Harry finish his coffee first.”

  “It’s OK,” said Harry. “We can go now. I don’t mind. Are you coming?”

  But Kim shook her head. “I’ve got stuff to do.”

  The minute she heard the front door slam, Kim slumped back into her chair, squashed, like a mess of roadkill. It was all so much worse than she’d expected. Harry was different. It was as if he’d been taken over by aliens. When she first saw him, standing on the doorstep, there had been a rush of recognition. Dark skin, dark eyes, black curly hair—the years fell away, and she was thirteen again, flustered and furious. But after that nothing was the same. He was courteous, careful, and polite. No jokes. No teasing. It was as if something had sucked out all his personality and left behind a flat 2-D image, bland and glossy, like a picture in a shopping catalog. Otis still made him smile. But the rest of the time, he didn’t seem like Harry at all—just a man in his midthirties with his mind elsewhere.

  It’s like he doesn’t even see me, thought Kim. It makes me wonder if I exist. Maybe it’s me who’s been taken over by aliens.

  “What can you expect?” said Damaris on the phone from Melbourne. “You cut off all contact for months. I don’t expect he likes you very much.”

  “I thought you were on my side.”

  “I am,” said Damaris. “Always. But I still think you were wrong.”

  Sometimes, in the early hours, Kim stared into the darkness wondering whether she should talk to Harry and try to explain. I went mad for a while. I made you the focus of my grief. I’m sorry. But as daylight returned, she lost courage. They had a fragile truce. It seemed better not to stir up the past.

  Harry made it very clear that he didn’t want to do anything that might disrupt Kim’s normal routine. He usually came round on Saturdays. In the morning, he took Otis to the kids’ class at the boxing gym. In the afternoon they went to the Science Museum, or a West End matinée, or the London Aquarium.

  To begin with, Kim was grateful. Stan, who owned the hardware shop where she worked—in Peckham, sandwiched between a takeaway selling fried chicken and a small grocer’s that smelt of cumin and garam masala—expected her to be there most weekends, and finding child care for Otis on a Saturday had been almost impossible.

  “Paint?” said her mother. “You’re selling paint?”

  “It’s as close to housing as I can get in this market,” said Kim.

  That had been the deal she made with herself in Monterey, after all. Come home, back to London. Get a job that fits round school hours. Spend time with Otis. And it wasn’t all bad at the hardware shop. They’d even let her mix half a liter of emulsion the other day.

  But gradually, as the weeks passed, she was surprised—and irritated—to find herself feeling left out. Harry had somehow made it obvious that he didn’t expect her to get involved in what he and Otis were doing. But she wished sometimes that he would suggest an outing they could all enjoy together.

  Although she didn’t want to go out in the Porsche. Which he still drove. Ostentatiously.

  Otis, in Harry’s company, became almost chatty. Sometimes Harry came round on a Sunday afternoon. If it was raining, or Otis had a cold, the two of them took over the living room—building complicated models of spaceships from Legos, or towers out of playing cards—and Kim, catching up with emails on her laptop at the kitchen table, eavesdropped as they discussed Formula 1, or how planes fly, or what kind of bees make honey. Once she heard someone picking out chords on the guitar. She thought of Eva and sat for a moment, staring into space.

  Money was still an issue. Whenever Harry was around, she was tense all the time, waiting for him to seize an opportunity to show off his extreme wealth. She managed to close her eyes to the cost of theater tickets and meals out at pizza restaurants. Harry always asked her permission beforehand, and she reasoned that she couldn’t really expect them to do nothing but wander round London’s cold and rainy streets.

  But once he went too far. Otis kept asking if it was going to snow and didn’t seem happy with any of their explanations. As soon as Otis was out of earshot, Harry said, “I could always take him skiing. At Easter. Kids love it. Just a week somewhere.”

  “No,” she said.

  She turned her back so that he couldn’t see how that panicked her, the sudden vision of Otis falling down into a crevasse, buried by an avalanche of cold, suffocating snow.

  Harry never mentioned it again.

  He made her uncomfortable. She could see that he was behaving with tact and consideration—sensitive to her feelings, careful not to make excessive demands—and she hated it. It was like sitting on an unexploded bomb. Were these her rules or his? Who’d made them up? What were the penalties? Most of the time, the only thing Kim could be completely sure about in Harry’s company was that she would end up feeling anxious and confused. She’d waste hours after he left going over and over what he’d said and how he’d said it, as if she’d watched a complicated film in a foreign language and couldn’t quite be sure of the plot.

  This annoyed her. She hardly talked to him and spent no time with him. But he had somehow wound himself back into her life like Japanese knotweed.

  “I think you’re doing really well,” said Izzie, back from Liverpool for the weekend. She’d taken pictures on her phone—Hannah’s flat, the Cavern Club where the Beatles first played, Penny Lane, Strawberry Field, Hannah herself.

  “You know,” said Kim, “she could be a model.”

  “Six foot one and an Afro,” said Izzie. “You can’t really miss her.”

  “How’s the sitcom going?”

  “It’s gone,” said Izzie. “The BBC turned it down. They said the sit- bit was all right. But not the -com.”

  “Oh, Iz,” said Kim sadly. “And you worked so hard.”

  “I think it was the subject matter. People always say you should write about what you know. But I think you should write about what you don’t know. There’s more chance of making yourself laugh.”

  “So what now?”

  “There’s always stand-up.” She shrugged. “I’ll have just to work on some new material. Something deeply interesting so that the nation takes me to its heart. I’d quite like to be a national treasure. Like Stephen Fry. Or Judi Dench. So they write nice things about me in the Daily Mail.”

  “It’s still your flat, you know. You can chuck us out anytime.”

  “Because you secretly want to live with Harry.”

  Kim shot her an evil look.

  Izzie laughed. “I meant what I said. I think you’re doing really well. Both of you. Working really hard to make Otis happy.” She stood up, stretching her arms above her head. “You’ve mellowed in your old age. Just like you always wanted. You used to be all fire and brimstone. And now you’re more like a radiator.”

  Kim’s smile was a little taut. She wasn’t sure she liked being compared to central heating.

  • • •

  One Tuesday evening at the beginning of June, Kim was just settling down to watch Working Girl—she’d found the DVD in an Oxfam shop and had now seen it so many times that she knew most of Melanie Griffith’s lines off by heart—when the doorbell rang. As usual, her heart sank. She was slightly more sociable these days. Otis—happy, outgoing, and relaxed—had made so many new friends that Kim had to grit her teeth and talk to their parents. But she still preferred an evening alone in front of the TV. Her job at the hardware store meant she had to be nice to people all day—flirtatious painters in white overalls, taciturn builders covered in a thin layer of plaster dust, anxious house owners with bruised thumbs. She had been promoted to assistant manager, so she could sometimes delegate the jobs she really hated, like serving customers. But she still got home in the evening with her face aching from the effort of smiling all day.

  Clattering down the stairs to the main front door, Kim ran through the possibilities. One of the parents from school? Someone collecting for charity? Or maybe a delivery for the flat below.

 
Never in her wildest imaginings could she have seen herself opening the door to Jake.

  “Oh,” she said, staring.

  He looked exactly the same—fair hair sticking out like thatch on a roof, an intense gaze, and an expression of studious superiority. But the jeans had gone. He was wearing a baggy dark suit with a faint stripe, a white shirt, and a navy blue tie. Tatty but conservative. You could almost imagine him on the floor of the House of Commons. Maybe he is, she thought. A lot can happen in eighteen months.

  “I was just passing,” he said.

  Liar. No one ever just passes Sydenham. What do you want?

  Upstairs in the flat, Kim fought the urge to rush round and pick up newspapers, bits of Legos, and dirty coffee cups. “Would you like something to drink?” Not that I have anything, she thought. “A cup of tea?”

  “Chamomile?”

  Kim shook her head.

  “Shame. So health-giving.” Jake smiled. It took Kim a moment to realize that something had changed. His front teeth—which had once stuck out slightly, as if thrown forward by the volume of words—were now straight. Braces? Crowns? “So tell me everything. Life must be so different as a single parent. And my spies tell me you disappeared up north for a year. Where are you working now?”

  Kim would have liked to have steered the conversation to somewhere less personal. But this was Jake. Somehow not answering his questions was impossible. “I work in a hardware store.”

  Jake looked shocked, like a Victorian lady who’s just found mouse droppings in her seed cake.

  “It’s local. And they’re very understanding if I need time off,” said Kim defensively.

  “And do you?”

  “What?”

  “Need time off?”

  “Only if I can’t afford child care over half term.”

  “So they don’t pay well.”

  “Not particularly.” Desperate to switch topics before he annihilated her completely, she said, “What about you?”

  “Me? Oh, you know.” Jake wandered over to the bay window and stood with his back to her, his hands in his trouser pockets. “Bit of a career change. Working in health these days. Still championing the physical and emotional well-being of the British public. But in a slightly different way.”

  “What kind of way?”

  “A sort of government adviser,” said Jake, turning round. Oh, thought Kim, I recognize that smirk. He’s intensely proud of this. “Providing a framework for the reassessment of hospital care. As it moves, if you like, from local generalism to regional specialism. Investing for the long term.”

  Kim frowned. “Closing hospitals?”

  “That’s a little simplistic. There will of course be some closures during the program of rationalization. But the ultimate aim is to commit to excellent service for all UK customers going forward.”

  I might have tried to argue years ago, thought Kim. But I don’t think I’ve got the energy anymore. Maybe that’s the secret to becoming less hotheaded. Work long hours and look after a child.

  “Are you still living in Stockwell?”

  Jake looked surprised. “Oh no. Moved some time ago. Wandsworth. Between the commons.”

  “How lovely.”

  “Quite a lot of work remodeling the house. Not in a bad state when I bought it, of course. But a bit tired.”

  I know the feeling.

  Jake looked at her directly. Those pale blue eyes, thought Kim. I’d forgotten how they pin you to the spot. “I don’t want to rush this conversation. It would be delightful if we could talk all night. But I recognize that you are fully committed time-wise on a number of different fronts. So let me come to the point. I came here to find out whether you might consider a career shift.”

  “A what?”

  Jake sighed. “Do you want a job, Kim?”

  She stared.

  “I have never met someone quite so good at firing people. My plans involve massive redundancies. When I was asked to cost them more fully, I thought of you.”

  “I’ve already got a job.”

  “Oh, come on, Kim. Not this kind of job. Six-figure salary, two-year contract, five weeks’ holiday, private medical insurance?”

  The numbers pinged about in her brain like balls in a squash court. “So this isn’t working for the NHS?”

  “The NHS, Kim,” said Jake, “but not as we know it.”

  • • •

  For the next few days, Kim wandered round in a dream. She’d pick up a T-shirt shrunk in the wash, the seams so stretched you could see the ladders of stitches, and think, If I took that job I could throw this away. She’d open a kitchen cupboard, stare at the packets of chickpeas and lentils, and think, If I took that job I could fill a whole supermarket trolley with impulse buys—smoked salmon, asparagus, aubergines, mangoes—and not even think about the cost. She imagined hailing a black cab, splashing out on a bunch of flowers, ordering an iPhone, buying a car.

  The last of her father’s money had disappeared a few weeks ago, swallowed up by the gas bill. She had cleared her overdraft. But she was back to the daily struggle of trying to make ends meet.

  I resent the time it takes, she thought. Every waking moment is a calculation. Should I walk or take the bus? Buy shampoo or a bunch of bananas? Can I afford a new pair of shoes for Otis? Tea bags? A newspaper?

  Otis is the one who would benefit most. If I took the job, I could start saving for his future. For university fees. So he won’t be strangled by debt all his life. I’d be a proper role model. Someone with a career. Someone going out every day and making a difference.

  Then she’d remember Jake’s penetrating stare and shiver. Why am I even considering working for him again after the way he’s treated me?

  She was tired of thinking about it. At least, she thought, scouring burnt egg from the bottom of a saucepan, he’s the devil I know. I won’t be shocked if he tricks me, outwits me, lands me in it, fires me. He’s indestructible. One of life’s survivors. There’s no self-serving, double-crossing maneuver he can come up with that would surprise me at all.

  And I don’t imagine, she thought, as she stared at the chipped tiles behind the kitchen sink, her hands motionless in the soapy, scummy water, that he has designs on my body anymore.

  I am thirty years old. I’m broke. I live in a rented flat with a badly paid job. I’m responsible for the well-being of my sister’s child. What choice do I have?

  • • •

  They could hear the crowd from the dressing room. Restless. Talking. Laughing.

  “They’ve sold out,” said Izzie. “Not a seat in the house.”

  “That’s what happens when you go viral.” Hannah was sprawled on one of the swivel chairs. She was wearing black army boots, fishnet tights, a pink glittery leotard, and a white tutu. They are so well suited, thought Kim. Every day is a costume drama.

  “I haven’t forgiven you.” Izzie’s reflection was framed by old-fashioned lightbulbs all round the edge of the mirror. “I was only mucking about. You weren’t supposed to be filming it.”

  Hannah raised her eyebrows.

  “I’m serious. What if Mam sees it?” Izzie dabbed at her cheeks with blusher, her face tragic. “She’s got very peculiar since Otis left. Into social media. Using Flickr and Facebook and putting chintz on Pinterest.”

  “I read somewhere,” said Hannah, “that twenty-five percent of the over-fifty-fives are on tablets.”

  “High blood pressure?”

  “Ha ha. Have you ever thought of going into comedy?”

  They heard a knock. Hannah stood up and opened the door. A draft of air wafted the smell of old dust into the room. “Two minutes,” said a disembodied voice in the corridor.

  Kim wasn’t the one performing. But her heart skipped a beat all the same. This was a big venue. The biggest so far.

  “Right.” Izzie stepped back from the mirror. “How do I look?”

  She was wearing royal-blue bloomers, a red velvet top, and a huge white lace collar. Her hair fe
ll in tangled curls round her shoulders. She looked like an early-twentieth-century lady cyclist who’s just discovered the joys of trousers. Or perhaps a seventeenth-century Cavalier.

  “Beautiful,” said Hannah.

  Izzie and Hannah looked at each other. There was a moment of stillness as if time had stopped. Then Izzie said, “You know what’s so strange? I’ve spent my whole life worrying about the way I look. And I didn’t realize the answer until now. If you want an opinion about your looks, or your character, or your career, or the way you live your life, you should always ask someone completely biased in your favor. It’s the only truth worth having.”

  “Well you know what they say,” said Hannah. “Love is blind.”

  They knew when Izzie had reached the stage. The crowd roared, like a lion.

  • • •

  The final argument with Harry was bad. It came from nowhere, a sudden storm.

  Harry had brought Otis back as usual in time for tea on Saturday. Kim, who hadn’t been into work that day, opened the front door looking self-conscious. Harry did a double take.

  “I know, I know,” said Kim. “It’s a bit drastic.”

  Otis looked at her, his eyes anxious.

  “It’ll grow,” said Kim. “In a couple of months’ time, it’ll be back the way it was.”

  “It suits you,” said Harry. But there was something in his expression she didn’t understand.

  Otis was still staring. Kim put up her hand to the nape of her neck. She still felt a bit exposed.

  “And a new shirt,” said Harry. “Special occasion?”

  “I was just fed up of wearing black.”

  But she looked down to avoid his eyes.

  Upstairs in the flat, Otis showed her the program from the Cambridge Theatre and talked about how they’d gone to Chinatown to eat dim sum. Then he pottered off to watch TV, and Kim put the kettle on. I don’t want Harry to stay too long, she thought. But I can’t be unfriendly. There’s time for a cup of tea.

  Harry said, “He keeps talking about playing guitar.”

  “Yes.”

  Neither of them mentioned Eva.

  Harry hesitated, choosing his words carefully. “I just wondered if you’d thought about getting someone to teach him. I’d be happy to pay.”