by Sarah Bourne
‘Yeah, he’s got me. And now you’re here.’
‘Want to go somewhere else then? Your mate’s got nurses to look after him now, hasn’t he?’ she asked.
‘Yeah, Brian’s okay for now. Let’s go somewhere else. Unless you fancy the hospital canteen?’
She put her arm through his and turned him towards the door. ‘I think we can find somewhere better than that, don’t you?’
‘I was only joking,’ said Tim.
‘I know.’ Alice wished she’d laughed. It would have made him relax a bit.
They got an Uber back to Ealing rather than waiting for a bus, and the driver dropped them off at The North Star, the pub he’d recommended. Alice relished the warmth of Tim’s hand in the small of her back as he guided her towards a table in the corner.
‘What’ll you have?’
‘My round,’ she said, and wouldn’t take no for an answer.
At the bar she ordered a vodka and lime for herself and a pint of Dutch courage for Tim.
‘A what?’ asked the barmaid, laughing.
‘Oh, sorry, did I say that out loud?’ said Alice. ‘It’s just that the guy I’m with is a bit, you know, backward in coming forward.’
‘Well don’t get him too drunk or he won’t be able to do anything. There’s a fine line between brave enough and stonkered, if you ask me.’
Alice was still smiling as she put Tim’s pint of lager down in front of him and he looked at her but didn’t ask what she was smiling at.
She questioned Tim about his life, his job, his likes and dislikes. After another pint, he relaxed and didn’t seem to mind being in the spotlight so much. She watched the way his mouth moved as he talked, his slightly overlapping front teeth, the dimple that appeared on his left cheek when he smiled. He reddened when he talked about his painting, and changed the subject quickly, asking her about her singing.
‘I’m gonna keep at it,’ she said. He reached for her hand and squeezed it. Alice took it as her opportunity to move in closer. She snuggled into his side and sighed.
‘What do you want to do now?’ asked Tim.
Alice knew exactly what she wanted but she didn’t want to scare him away.
‘Your turn to choose – I chose to meet you at the hospital, the Uber driver chose the pub.’
Tim pulled away and looked her in the eye, unsmiling. Alice wondered if she’d blown it. Perhaps she’d been too forward, or maybe he liked girls who took the lead. Everything was so hard to gauge at the beginning of a relationship. Was this even the beginning of anything? She saw something flicker across Tim’s face, but couldn’t read what it was. He bit his lip and looked over her shoulder as if searching for his lines on the wall behind her.
‘I don’t live too far from here,’ he said just before Alice thought she couldn’t hold her breath any longer.
‘Sounds like a plan. I’d like to see where you live.’
‘We could get a takeaway, if you’re hungry.’
Alice laughed. ‘Yeah, if that’s what you want.’ Anything to make him relax, she thought.
With an Indian takeaway and a couple of cans of beer, they turned away from Ladbroke Grove Station and Westway along a busy road. After a few minutes, they turned right and Tim stopped in front of an old house.
‘It’s not much. Just a bedsit,’ he said.
‘That’s okay. I wasn’t expecting Buckingham Palace.’ Alice’s heart did sink though. The area was shabby, the three-storey terraces in need of repair, and the front gardens were full of weeds and broken bits of furniture.
She followed Tim up the cracked stone steps to the front door and into the hallway where she was surprised to smell new paint. The walls were pale yellow, the woodwork startling white.
‘The landlady let me do a bit of painting. Only finished the day before yesterday.’
‘It’s fresh,’ said Alice. ‘Classy.’ She tried not to imagine what it had been like before.
Tim looked pleased. ‘Must have known you’d be coming.’ He led her up the stairs. On the top landing he opened a door and ushered her into a large room with two more doors off it, both closed.
‘Bathroom’s there if you need it.’ He pointed to one of them. ‘I’ll get plates for this.’ He held up the bag of food and headed through the other door.
Food was the last thing on Alice’s mind, but she realised Tim wouldn’t be rushed. She thought he was as keen as her, or else why would he have suggested coming back to his place? But maybe playing host like this was his way of putting her at her ease, of telling her he wasn’t just into her for sex, and she liked that.
She looked about. Inside was definitely better than outside. There was a bay window with a seat built into it, an old sofa and matching armchair in front of a fireplace with a gas heater instead of an open fire. A table with two wooden chairs stood in one corner. There was a poster of Florence and the Machine on the wall, a couple of charcoal sketches, a small bookcase full of paperbacks by people Alice hadn’t heard of. The carpet was threadbare, but clear of all the clothes and other junk she let spread about her own room. She liked that he was a tidy type, that he looked after things. She let her bag slip off her shoulder onto the floor.
Hearing the ping of a microwave she turned to see Tim coming back into the room. The smell of curry wafted towards her.
‘Here we are then,’ he said, putting plates and food containers on the table and pulling cutlery out of his back pocket.
‘No bed. Are you a vampire?’ she asked.
‘What?’ His eyebrows shot upwards.
‘Like in Twilight – Bella goes to Edward’s house and he doesn’t have a bed because he’s a vampire.’
Tim still wasn’t getting it.
‘Vampires don’t need to sleep, see?’
‘Oh!’ Light dawned, and Tim blushed scarlet and looked anywhere but at Alice, who clapped a hand over her mouth.
‘Sorry – I didn’t mean – oh God. I just noticed that – where do you sleep?’ She felt her own blush heating her cheeks. What a stupid thing to say.
But Tim was laughing, gripping the edge of the table, tears in his eyes. ‘Sorry,’ he gasped, ‘but you should have seen your face just then.’
Alice smiled. It wasn’t often she was lost for words, but none came now. She sat down and enjoyed watching Tim’s laughter. If he hadn’t been relaxed with her before, he was now.
‘Sorry,’ he said again, when he’d managed to stop. ‘It’s there – a pull-down job. It saves space.’ He pointed to what looked like a tall cupboard.
‘So how does it work?’ asked Alice, going over and inspecting it. She ran her hands down one side trying to find a button or a lever. She felt Tim behind her, reaching over, their bodies so close she could feel the warmth of him, smell the faint, end-of-the-day aftershave on his skin. He took hold of the top of the cupboard and pulled the bed down. The duvet was held in place by two straps. Alice undid them and sat down.
‘It’s comfy,’ she said, smoothing the cover.
She looked at Tim who was staring at her. She smiled and lay back, holding a hand out to him. He took her hand and she pulled him to her, pleased he didn’t resist, that he lay along the length of her, fitting himself to her curves. Alice sighed and stretched, and felt Tim’s eyes on her. She started undoing his shirt, slipped a hand inside and felt the smoothness of his skin. He removed his trousers as Alice wriggled out of hers.
Tim took her top off and started stroking her breasts. She quivered as he kissed her all the way along her neck, setting something off in her belly.
His phone rang. He looked over at it.
‘Not now.’ She pulled him close, kissing him greedily. Tim’s hands stroked the length of her torso and she shuddered, her nipples hardening.
The phone rang again. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’d better get it. It’s Brian.’
Alice rolled away from him, crossed her arms over her chest.
‘Yeah, course I will, mate. Okay. See you soon.’
T
im sat up. Alice knew what was coming and was suddenly furious. How dare that man expect Tim to leave her and go to him. And how dare Tim even contemplate it. She was giving herself to him and he obviously thought of her as a worthless chick to be played with and dropped on a whim? No one treated her like that and got away with it. And to think she’d thought he really liked her. What a fucking joke.
She got out of bed, started gathering her scattered clothes.
‘I’m so sorry, but I can’t leave him. He’s discharged himself. I gotta go.’ Tim reached out to her.
Alice was too angry to respond. Tim started getting dressed, hopping around on one foot as he pulled a pair of jeans on.
‘I’ll call you,’ he said. ‘Can I?’
‘Do what you like.’ She took her clothes into the bathroom and got dressed. When she came out, he was standing by the door. He reached for her but she swept past him and down the stairs.
‘Alice… please…’
What was she going to tell her friends?
6
Sandeep
Sandeep rubbed his eyes and replaced his glasses, then bowed his head in silent prayer. What a terrible thing, to take one’s own life. It was a sin. God would not let that man into Heaven. He would be damned for all eternity, his soul burning in the fires of Hell, destined never to be reborn. Sandeep stopped, realising that yet again, he had strayed into his Hindu roots. His new religion did not believe in rebirth. He thought it a shame – the only problem with Christianity, in fact. The idea that his soul, imperfect and prone to minor sins as it was, would be cast into purgatory until the end of the world, whereafter it would be reunited with his body until the end of days, was little comfort. He prayed for salvation for the man who had killed himself. He hoped that when he died he would go straight to Heaven and walk in the presence of the Lord.
He raised his head and opened his eyes. They had stopped in the middle of a field. He didn’t spend any time in the countryside these days and the greenery reminded him of his parents’ village in Maharashtra after the rains, when the parched land guzzled down the deluge and became almost obscenely fecund overnight. As a child, before he and his parents had left India, Sandeep had seen it for himself and understood that God was in this place. In those days God was Shiva, the one to whom his mother prayed, to whom the shrine in their home was dedicated. After the rains they thanked Indra, too, for his continued bounty.
He felt a mixture of sadness and anger when he thought of his parents. They would not even try to understand his new religion, much less accompany him to church. His mother had cried for weeks when he told her he was going to be baptised. His father had threatened to beat him but he wouldn’t be shaken from the right path. And anyway, he was thirty years old, a full head taller than his father and twice as broad. These days they didn’t talk about religion at all but he felt his mother’s yearning when he was home, waiting for him to come back to her and her false gods.
He sighed and turned his thoughts away from all that. He had a long day ahead – one of his boss’s clients was way behind in his tax returns and the inland revenue – revenue and customs, he corrected himself – was after him. Barry had passed the problem on to him, so he was going to be knee-deep in receipts and paperwork all day. And he was having dinner with his parents which also meant staying the night at their house and enduring more of his mother’s disappointment over breakfast. He slumped further into his seat.
A phone trilled and a young woman sitting over the aisle in an army surplus coat many sizes too big for her looked at it and typed furiously on the screen. When she looked over their eyes met and Sandeep looked away, embarrassed.
‘Wonder how long we’ll be here,’ she said, and Sandeep realised she was talking to him.
He shrugged. ‘It is difficult to say with these things.’
‘Has it happened to you before then?’
‘Oh, no, I just meant I don’t know how long it takes for the police and–’ He realised he had no idea who else was involved in situations such as this.
‘Were you praying before?’ asked the woman, eyebrows raised.
‘Yes, I was praying for the soul of the poor man who saw no alternative but to kill himself.’
‘It might have been an accident. He might’ve fallen.’
‘From where?’ asked Sandeep, looking out the window. ‘There is no bridge near here and he cannot have fallen from the sky, I think.’
‘Stranger things have happened,’ said the woman, and turned back to her phone, leaving Sandeep wondering what things she was referring to. Perhaps the miracle of the loaves and fishes, still one of his favourite stories from the Bible – and little David taking on Goliath was another good one. He had thought they were metaphors written to teach people something, but Dave, the leader of their study group, explained that the Bible was the Word of God, and literal. There was evidence these people had lived in just the way it was written and that miracles were what set Jesus apart. Whether they were real or not, there was a mystery and magic in them that Sandeep was drawn to. When he was little he’d always loved his grandmother telling him stories from the Mahabharata, the great battle between the Pandavas and the Kauravas. He particularly liked sitting on Aji’s lap, imagining the elephants lined up in their battle dress, the chariots, the soldiers with their spears and the archers with bows and arrows at the ready. And he loved the bit where Krishna revealed himself in his true, divine form to Arjuna, who had thought he was just a charioteer. What a surprise it must have been to Arjuna, and yet, he, Sandeep, had known it all along! It always made him feel clever to have outwitted Arjuna, just as Krishna had. He smiled, and thought perhaps it was time to make a trip back to India to see his Aji. She was too old to come to see him and had always been unwilling to leave her village. Maybe he would read to her now, since her eyesight was failing, and together they could remember the victory of the Pandavas. He decided to look into flights.
The whoosh of the connecting doors made him look up. The guard came through the carriage, clearly trying to avoid speaking to anyone and this time Sandeep left him alone. The last time he’d asked what had happened and learned of the death and although he wanted to know when they might be on their way again, it seemed callous to ask. Death kept to its own time frame and had to be honoured. He wondered if the body would be buried in a proper graveyard or whether it would be condemned to dwell forever away from God’s grace, in unconsecrated ground. And was it a body anyway – what did the remains of someone look like when hundreds of tons of train had run into them? He shifted in his seat and bowed his head again. This time he was praying for the driver, the last man to look into the eyes of the deceased. Sandeep prayed he would find comfort in God’s loving care and forgiveness.
Raising his head, he gazed out into the field and thought how much Abby would like wherever it was they were. She’d talked about maybe moving out of Milton Keynes to the countryside when they were married. She’d been raised on a farm and was used to helping with the animals and baling the hay or whatever they did with it. The idea made his blood curdle. He may have been born in a village in India but his parents had transplanted him to another country, to the greatest city in the world and he could not countenance the idea of a backward step, for that’s what it would be. It had been bad enough having to move to Milton Keynes for his previous job and now not being able to afford to buy a house back in London.
The girl in the oversized coat was reading, her cheeks red. He hoped she was all right – one casualty was enough for one day. The man next to her cleared his throat and she glared at him and tried to shift further away from him although she was already crammed against the window. He wondered how the two of them would cope if ever they went to India, where the concept of personal space was so different – almost non-existent. Whole families lived in one or two rooms, or extended families built extra rooms onto existing houses so they could all be together. In his parents’ family home in the village, cousins and brothers and sisters had all sha
red one room, sleeping top to toe on the mattresses, arms and legs thrown over each other in sleep’s intimacy.
He sighed and got back to the problem of what to do about Abby. Or rather, how to tell her they would not be living the country idyll if he had a say. He loved her, of that there could be no doubt. He had met her when he started attending the church where she was also a parishioner. She’d been going there since she had moved to Milton Keynes four years previously and had taken him under her wing, him being a novice in the ways of Christianity. He’d only stumbled into the place because there wasn’t a temple nearby and he was lonely and wanted to meet people. And it was such a friendly congregation. At first, the singing and dancing had been rather confronting. He wasn’t used to people behaving in such a way in a place of worship. He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but given the usual British stiff upper lip he hadn’t been prepared for the informality, the fun they were having. It took him a while to get used to it but in the end it was intoxicating. As was Abby with her wide hazel eyes and open smile. He would go home after the service and spend the rest of the day thinking about it. About her. They were one and the same to him, he realised. You couldn’t have one without the other. Abby and the church. His respite from the busyness of business. His sanctuary. As long as he put his foot down about moving to the country.
With a jerk and a bit of clanking the train started moving again. Sandeep checked his watch. He’d be two hours late to work. He’d rung his boss to let him know he was on his way, and the reason for his lateness, the words faltering on his lips. Normally if he was late, which he rarely was, he’d stay to make up the time but his mother had been adamant that he was to be there at six on the dot tonight for a special dinner she’d been preparing for one minor festival or another. He had stopped listening when she was telling him about it. He felt a pang of guilt. He should be a better son, a better Christian. He decided he’d get her a bunch of flowers and maybe a box of her favourite Indian sweets.
