by Dani Atkins
Jamie’s face was a picture of astonishment as I spun on my heel and placed my hands on his shoulders. It wasn’t a passionate kiss, but our lips lingered long enough to ensure that anyone watching us couldn’t mistake it for a casual greeting. Jamie was caught off balance in every sense of the word, and with his hands still buried in his pockets it’s a wonder we didn’t end up on the pavement being trampled underfoot by the Saturday morning shoppers.
We’d only just broken apart when a voice called out my name, just as I’d known it surely would.
‘Mandy, what a surprise… seeing you here, I mean.’
I think we all knew Mrs Blake was probably more surprised by the kiss she’d just seen than by bumping into one of her neighbours in the high street, which – let’s face it – was hardly surprising at all.
We exchanged the usual round of ‘how are you?’s and ‘how are your parents?’, and all the while we were speaking I kept my arm firmly hooked through Jamie’s.
‘And is this your young man?’ Mrs Blake asked eventually.
Why had I waited so long to find this courage? Why hadn’t I realised how wonderfully liberating it would be to look up at the tall handsome boy beside me and say with a proud smile: ‘Yes. Yes it is. This is Jamie, my boyfriend.’
*
Sometime between my bold show of confidence in the high street and half past seven that evening, my fearlessness had begun to ebb away.
‘Are you sure it’s a good idea?’ Jamie had asked, as we’d nibbled on paninis in our favourite café. ‘Maybe we should ease your parents into the idea a little more gradually?’
I swallowed down a mouthful of practically molten cheese before answering him.
‘No. We should definitely do this. I’m only suggesting that you knock on our front door and pick me up this evening – it’s not like I’m asking them if you can move in.’
Jamie gave a shrug and a crooked half-smile, looking so much like he belonged in an indie rock band that the waitress walking by our table did a visible double take. Jamie didn’t notice. He never did.
‘If you’re sure,’ he said, his voice still weighty with doubt.
‘I’m sure,’ I declared, reaching for his hand across the tabletop and entwining my fingers with his.
And I had been sure: when we’d kissed goodbye on the street corner; when I’d watched him leave to spend the afternoon fixing a mate’s car; even when I was meant to be thinking only about the machinations of Oliver Cromwell as I wrote an essay, I’d still been convinced my plan was sound.
The doubts started creeping in as I stood beneath the shower, with Molton Brown gel pooling in bright orange puddles at my feet. What would Dad say when he opened the door and saw Jamie standing on the doorstep? A horrible image of him simply shutting it in my boyfriend’s face got caught in the loops of my imagination and refused to leave it. No. Dad wouldn’t be rude, would he? Not to Jamie’s face?
I glanced at the clock as I towelled myself dry. There was still time to call it off, to save this confrontation for a less turbulent period for my family. But as I was reaching for my mobile to change our plans, my grandmother’s face seemed to materialise before me, like a senior citizen version of Jiminy Cricket. Do the right thing, it said. With a worried sigh, I laid down my phone.
All I’d told them was that a friend was calling for me on the way to the cinema. Not exactly a lie, but not entirely the truth either. All I had to do was make sure that I was still upstairs when the doorbell rang and that Dad answered it, and the rest… would hopefully fall into place. Admittedly, it wasn’t a particularly well-thought-out plan, so it was hardly surprising that things didn’t work out the way I’d hoped.
I was in my room, dressed and ready to go but pretending not to be, when Jamie messaged me with a prediction:
Your front doorbell is about to ring in ten seconds.
He was right, but what he didn’t know was that so was the home telephone. I was peering through a crack in my bedroom door and heard Dad call out ‘I’ll get it’, but I had no way of knowing if he meant the door or the phone.
Murphy’s Law decreed that it was Mum who emerged from the kitchen to answer the front door. Given that she’d as good as admitted that she knew I was still seeing Jamie, his arrival had far less impact than I’d anticipated.
‘Hello. It’s… er, Jamie, isn’t it? Why don’t you come in for a moment? I don’t think Mandy’s quite ready yet.’ She glanced up the staircase and caught me hanging over the banisters watching them.
‘I’m on my way,’ I called down, hopping around on one foot as I hurriedly fastened my sandals. I was already halfway down the staircase when Jamie stepped into the hallway.
‘Thank you,’ he replied, giving my mother his most charming smile. ‘Jamie McDonald,’ he introduced, going for an unexpected handshake. ‘It’s very nice to finally get to meet you properly, Mrs Preston.’
There was something wrong with the hand I saw him extend to my mother, and it took me several moments to realise what it was. It was red, or at least an exceedingly deep shade of pink, as though it had been scrubbed within an inch of its life to remove every trace of oil that it would have been covered with after working on his friend’s car. He’d done that for me, I knew that, and all at once my heart seemed to need much more space in my chest cavity than it usually required. Jamie was also wearing a far more formal shirt than a trip to the cinema necessitated, and instead of being rolled up to reveal his forearms, it was securely buttoned at his wrists and almost up to his neck. There wasn’t a single tattoo in sight. It was a strange moment to suddenly realise that I was in love with this boy, but then recently my life had been full of strange moments.
Something that didn’t seem likely to happen, however, was the opportunity to reintroduce Jamie to my dad. The phone call was proving to be a lengthy one and didn’t sound as though it was winding to a conclusion anytime soon. Dad had always been a phone pacer, and tonight was no exception. He was patrolling the kitchen as he spoke, glancing our way every time a circuit took him past the open doorway. The glimpses I caught were too fleeting to decipher. Perhaps that was just as well.
‘It was very nice meeting you again, Jamie,’ said my mother, surprisingly sounding quite sincere. She’d always been a sucker for good manners, and no one could deny that Jamie’s had been impeccable. ‘I hope we’ll see you again soon.’
I waited until we were outside and the front door was securely shut behind us before letting out a long, low breath of relief.
‘I think that went quite well.’
‘At least your Dad wasn’t sitting on the porch cleaning his shotgun,’ Jamie said with a laugh. It was funny, but from the look in his eyes I suspected he was only half joking.
25
‘Bravo!’
It was the second time in less than an hour that my grandmother had congratulated me. The first occasion had been in Sunnymede’s lounge, as I finished playing her the last of the pieces for my forthcoming piano exam. On a nearby armchair, Josie was clapping with the kind of delighted enthusiasm that brought a genuine lump to my throat. And she wasn’t alone, for the lounge had filled steadily with other residents, who’d happily settled down to enjoy the impromptu concert.
I beamed back at them as the applause travelled around the room like a Mexican wave. I knew every face and every name. Without intending for it to happen, I seemed to have been unofficially adopted as an ‘honorary granddaughter’ by many of Sunnymede’s residents, bridging a gap left by family who lived too far away, or who didn’t visit regularly.
‘Play like that and you’ll certainly impress the examiner,’ Gran said, getting to her feet and laying a proud hand on my shoulder.
‘She’ll knock their bleeding socks off,’ added Helena, an ever smiling octogenarian whose colourful language hinted at an interesting past, or a mild case of Tourette’s. ‘She’s bloody amazing.’
Admittedly, my audience was biased, but the greatest approval, the only one that reall
y mattered to me, had been warmly given and gratefully received. Back in Gran’s suite, she insisted on opening a celebratory packet of bourbon biscuits – a sure sign she was delighted with the progress in my playing.
‘It’s all down to you, Gran,’ I said, taking a biscuit from the willow-patterned plate she was holding out to me. ‘I had the very best teacher.’ I met her faded green eyes, which were a time-slip version of how mine would look in the future. ‘And not just in music.’
Gran’s virtually invisible eyebrows rose a little.
‘I’ve learnt something even more important from you. I’ve learnt that nothing matters more than the people you care about, and how you have to stand up for them… and also for yourself.’ I looked down at my hands, unaware I’d been quietly picking away at the edge of my thumbnail. I drew in a deep breath. ‘So from now on I won’t be hiding my relationship with Jamie from Mum and Dad.’ I lifted my head up, almost surprised to hear my voice growing thick with tears. ‘I’m very proud to be his girlfriend.’
Gran nodded gently in encouragement as I added, ‘Dad’s wrong about him, and if he can’t see that, then I’m sorry for him, but I’m done with hiding someone who’s that important to me.’
‘Bravo, child, bravo! I’m very proud of you.’
‘Dad isn’t going to like it,’ I predicted with an unladylike sniff.
‘Your father will get over it,’ Gran replied, passing me a perfectly laundered linen handkerchief. ‘Beneath all that bluster and nonsense there’s actually a gentle and sensitive man, who’s just trying to protect his family, the only way he knows how.’
‘Families,’ I declared, in a can’t-live-with-them, can’t-kill-them kind of way, which made us both laugh. It also made me think of Josie, who had no family of her own, and who’d once again chosen to remain in the lounge rather than join us in Gran’s suite. That was going to have to stop, I vowed.
In that weird, almost telepathic way that Gran and I had, she said then, ‘I really hope I get an opportunity to meet this young man of yours, very soon.’
She did. But not in the way that any of us had planned.
*
I liked Thursday afternoons. There were blank spaces on my timetable with the words ‘study period’ on them, which every sixth-form student knows is simply a euphemism for ‘go home early and do absolutely nothing’. I was probably breaking some sort of unwritten honour code by actually studying during my free hours that afternoon. But with both parents at work I had the house to myself, and was taking full advantage of the peace and quiet. The only sound in the kitchen was the quietly ticking clock on the wall, and the mouse-like scratching of pen on paper as I filled page after page of an exercise book with neatly written notes. I’d always been a hard worker, but right now it seemed even more important to prove that it was perfectly possible to date someone with totally different career and life goals, and still not let your grades slip.
I was humming to myself as I scanned through my work, when the muffled sound of my phone’s ringtone interrupted me. Papers flew up and fluttered to the floor like autumn leaves as I rummaged hurriedly beneath the collection of books and sheaves of notes for my mobile. I found it one ring short of switching to voicemail.
It was a landline number, but one neither I nor my phone recognised. For a long moment there was silence on the line, and then the sound of breathing. Ragged breathing. I’ve seen enough Scream movies to know there were jokers in my year group who’d think this kind of prank was absolutely hilarious.
‘Okay. I’m hanging up now,’ I warned when the caller still hadn’t spoken. I was two seconds from pressing the disconnect button when someone said my name; it was sandwiched between two long, raw-sounding gasps.
‘Hello?’ I said cautiously, bringing the phone closer to my ear. ‘Who is this?’
There’s that awful moment when, without visual confirmation, it’s practically impossible to distinguish between laughter or tears. And then I felt my stomach take a lift-dropping plummet as I recognised her voice.
‘Gran? Gran, is that you?’
A small hitching sound – was that a stifled sob? – and then a cough as she fought to regain control. ‘Mandy, yes. It’s me.’ She sounded dreadful, worse even than when Grandad had died. Her voice was trembling, and sounded hollow and unsure. ‘Mandy, something terrible has happened.’
My parents, I thought, feeling ice flood through my veins. They’ve been in an accident. I wasn’t thinking straight, because the sane part of my brain knew they were both at work, but I was a child again. And whatever it was that was making my grandmother sound like this had to be bad. Very, very bad.
‘Gran, what’s the matter? What’s happened?’
‘It’s Josie.’
A relief I vowed I would never, ever share with her washed over me, swiftly followed by a cresting wave of guilt.
‘What’s happened to Josie, Gran?’ I asked urgently, already fearing I knew the answer to that question. No, God. Don’t you do that to those two sweet old ladies. You take it back right now. Perhaps someone up there heard me.
‘They had to call an ambulance for her. The paramedics took her away. They think she’s had a heart attack.’
As devastated as I was to hear Gran’s news, at that moment my concern was focused one hundred per cent on her.
‘Oh Gran, I’m so sorry. What can I do to help?’
‘I have to get to the hospital. There’s no one with her and she’ll be so scared. I’ve been waiting to see if someone from the home could take me, but they’re all so busy. So I’m just going to go.’
‘By yourself?’ My voice went up several octaves in concern.
‘I can’t leave her there all alone.’
‘No, of course not. But you shouldn’t be going alone either.’ By then I was already rummaging for my discarded shoes beneath the kitchen table. ‘I’ll come with you. I’ll get a cab or an Uber and be with you as soon as I can.’
I doubt very much my Gran even knew what an Uber was, but the relief in her voice was so humbling that I could feel tears welling up in my eyes.
‘Would you, Mandy? Could you do that?’
‘Absolutely. Just hang on, Gran. I’m on my way.’
*
Afterwards, I wondered why I called him instead of phoning for a cab. But in a crisis you instinctively reach out for the person you need to get you through it. Gran reached out for me, and I reached out for Jamie.
I never phoned him at the garage – I wasn’t even sure if he was allowed to keep his mobile on him in the workshop – so he must have realised something was up even before I began explaining what had happened.
He blew air from his lungs in a single long exhalation, as though about to give an expensive estimate for car repairs. ‘Shit. That’s scary. How’s your Gran coping?’
‘She sounded really shaky,’ I admitted.
‘She’ll feel better once we get her to the hospital.’
I was so distracted that I didn’t immediately pick up on his meaning. He was asking me for the name of the hospital when his choice of pronoun finally filtered through the haze.
‘We?’
‘Of course, “we”,’ he said, and just like that I fell a little bit more in love with this boy. ‘I can be with you just as quickly as a cab could. I’ll ask the boss if I can borrow one of the run-arounds.’
I wanted to thank him, to say that wasn’t why I’d phoned him, that I’d called him because… I ran out of steam and answers to that one, but it didn’t matter because Jamie was suddenly the sensible adult here, and I was happy for the moment to let him take over.
‘Be with you very soon, babe.’
*
If the garage had been further away I might have debated for longer on whether or not to call my parents. As much as I felt they ought to know where we were, the fact remained that Gran had called me and not them. She’d trusted me with news about Josie, not just once but twice now, and I wasn’t about to betray that. With Jamie’s
arrival imminent, I decided to compromise; I ripped a page from my exercise book and scribbled out a brief message.
Have taken Gran to the hospital. Will explain all later.
I propped the note up against the kettle, where it was sure to be seen by whoever walked through the door first. Two short blasts of a car horn from the street gave me no time to worry any further about my parents.
When he’d said ‘run-around’ I’d visualised an old banger with a different coloured paint job on every door and smoke belching out of its exhaust, so the gleaming, practically new vehicle waiting at the kerb was my first surprise. The second was slower to dawn on me as I jumped in and hurriedly clipped my seat belt in place. This was the first time I’d ever been in a car driven by Jamie. It was doubtless something else that my father wouldn’t approve of, but there was no time to worry about that now.
I might have only eight driving lessons under my belt, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t recognise good driving when I saw it. The afternoon traffic was heavy, but Jamie wove expertly through the congestion as I directed him to Sunnymede.
‘Does the garage know you’ve taken this car?’ I asked, as Jamie fiddled with switches on the dashboard, which looked more like a plane’s cockpit than the humble model I was learning on at the driving school.
He took his eyes off the road just long enough to flash me a smile. ‘Why? Did you think I’d stolen it?’
Jamie was teasing me, I knew that, trying to smooth out the lines of anxiety I could feel my brow had furrowed into. He took one hand off the wheel long enough to squeeze mine reassuringly. ‘Pete – the garage manager – was really good about it. I told him my girl’s gran needed to get to the hospital and he didn’t even hesitate, just threw me the keys. Family comes first, he said. He’s a great bloke.’
An unfamiliar warmth had crept into my stomach, which I was pretty sure had come after hearing that Jamie had referred to me as ‘his girl’. It had ignited all kind of fires within me that I never wanted to put out.
