‘Do you get much trade in the shop?’ enquired Lou, guessing exactly why he had closed up that line of conversation.
‘Loads,’ said Tom, happy for the turn of subject-matter. ‘You wouldn’t believe how far people will travel to have a poke around. Whatever anyone wants, however obscure, I guarantee to get it for them. I love that whole detective part of it.’ He twiddled the ends of an imaginary Hercule Poirot moustache. ‘I have a store on the
internet too. My sister runs that side of things for me, as she can do it from home so it’s handy for her, but me–I like being surrounded by all that stuff far too much to give it up. I always did, even as a kid. I worked with my Uncle Tommy any chance I got. I recently sold off the cement side because we have too much work on as it is, but I like getting out in the skip wagon and meeting nice people…’ Tom coughed, embarrassed. ‘Anyway, this is all about me. What do you do for a living?’
‘I’m a part-time accounts clerk,’ said Lou, aware that it was a conversation-stopper also, but not half as interesting as Tom’s had been with his Italian kisses. If she’d had a pound for everyone who had said, ‘Ooh, an accounts clerk? That’s interesting, do tell me more,’ she wouldn’t have a single pound. At least now, she had a pleasant conversational codicil to offer.
‘But I’m in the process of setting up a business with my friend Debra,’ Lou went on. ‘We’re both qualified chefs, you see. We wanted to set up a business a few years ago but plans got altered,’ which was putting it mildly, she said to herself, ‘so…better late than never, we’ve started looking for premises with a view to launching ourselves upon an unsuspecting public.’
Tom was leaning forward with wide-eyed interest. ‘A restaurant business? Wow! What sort of food?’
‘By a startling coincidence, an Italian coffee-house, specializing in proper coffee and incredible cakes. There are plenty of over-priced conveyor-belt services out there but not a lot of quality and value for money going on.’
‘I love cakes. Can you tell?’ said Tom, jiggling his tum which looked pretty solid to Lou. She found herself
wondering if he had a little line of hair stretching down from his navel. A small silence hung between them before Tom broke it with a loud tut.
‘Harrison’s Waste, eh?’ he said, shaking his head accusingly. ‘I don’t know. You give someone superior service and look what they do to you.’
‘Defecate to the enemy, like you said,’ said Lou.
At Lou’s unconscious misuse of her native language, Tom’s grin appeared again. It was lopsided and wide, but she saw it for what it was, gentle and teasing and totally devoid of any malice. She had misread him over the twin business.
‘More coffee?’ she asked, guiltily avoiding his gaze.
‘Thanks, but no. I’ll be running to the loo all day if I have any more.’ Disappointingly he got slowly to his feet and stretched, banging his hand on the beam above.
‘Oh, your airer’s up, I see,’ he pointed.
‘Yes, tell your brother thanks,’ she said.
He smiled and turned to get his still-damp and steaming coat off the radiator.
‘Look, thanks again for taking care of Clooney. Can I…I don’t know…buy you lunch or something to say thanks?’
Lou smiled regretfully.
Damn.
‘Thank you, um, but I don’t think that would really be appropriate.’
He interjected, ‘Yes, of course, I understand. You don’t have to explain. It was just lunch. I shouldn’t have…I wouldn’t…’
‘Oh, of course! I didn’t think that you meant anything else,’ Lou interrupted back, over-anxious to make sure he didn’t think that she thought that he might fancy her, which he didn’t anyway, clearly. It was just one of those
polite offers that was said in the hope it would be refused, that was obvious–like saying to Des and Celia or Fat Jack and Maureen that they ‘simply must come and spend Christmas with us.’ Ugh! Tom would have run a mile if she’d not played the game and said, ‘
Ooh yes, lunch would be lovely
.’ Which it would have been, actually.
Tom stood in the doorway and looked down at her.
‘Well, I’d like to say thanks, other than just saying “thanks” if you know what I mean. What can I do for you?’
Don’t answer that, Lou Winter, she said to herself with a bit of a sneaky giggle. Her imagination jerked hard at its rein. She thought for a moment, sensibly though. There
was
one thing she needed.
‘Tell you what,’ she said tentatively. ‘If you don’t mind–if it’s not too much of a cheek after my betrayal…’
Tom urged her to answer with beckoning hands.
‘OK,’ said Lou, taking a big breath. ‘That skip outside will be getting picked up anytime now, so…I’d like one of your mini-skips, please.’
‘I’ll get Eddie to drop one off for you this afternoon,’ said Tom.
‘I don’t need it until Saturday morning.’
‘It’s no trouble. Actually, it’s better for me if he does it this afternoon, Saturday morning is going to be quite busy for us.’
‘Oh, OK then. That’s great, thank you.’
‘Obviously there will be no charge,’ said Tom.
‘No! I didn’t mean for free!’ Lou protested.
‘You don’t think I’d take any money off you after what you did for Clooney, do you? Oh no.’
‘No, really, I—’
‘NO! I said no charge,’ he insisted, quelling her argument with a big arresting palm. It was quite nice; him being so masterful made her feel all little and girly. Why didn’t Phil make her feel like that when he was reciting the rules?
‘Just ring and tell me when you want me to pick it back up.’
‘As near to four o’clock on Saturday afternoon as you can, please,’ she said.
‘OK then,’ said Tom, wondering why the precision, but not wanting to be intrusive.
Clooney jumped to his feet as Tom opened the back door. He went down the two steep steps to ground level and turned to Lou. He was still taller than she was.
‘And look, I’m sorry if I went too far with the twin joke. I really am.’
‘You must have thought I was a real bimbo,’ admitted Lou quietly.
‘God, no, Lou. I think you’re—’ He stopped and started again, but the pause told her that it wasn’t the original intended ending to his sentence. ‘You’re not someone I’d feel happy about upsetting, that’s all. Thanks again.’
He went, he turned back, he waved. Lou waved back, she came inside, closed the door, and slid down it.
Lou.
He had called her Lou.
‘Can I ask you a question?’ said Lou at work the next day when she was halfway through her yogurt.
‘Ask away,’ replied Karen, wolfing down a piece of lemon meringue pie, which was so dire she couldn’t wait to get to the end of it.
‘When you were still married to your husband…’
‘Lou, come on, are you trying to make me throw up?’
‘No, really. Please this is important. When you were with him,’ she began again, ‘in the early days, when you were happy before…well, did you ever look at anyone else?’
Karen, who had been expecting a frivolous conversation, put down her fork. ‘As in other men, you mean?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ said Lou, trying to make the whole conversation sound hypothetical. Something she realized must have failed dismally as a wide and wicked grin threatened to split Karen’s face in two.
‘Why, Lou, have you got a
friend
that this has happened to?’
‘No, I’ve got my reasons for asking and they aren’t anything like you think. So, did you?’
The tone of Lou’s voice made Karen suspend the teasing. It was pretty obvious why she was asking, whatever she might have said. The only mystery was the ‘who’, but Lou was a pretty private person and if she was going to tell her more, she would do so in her own time.
Karen leaned on the table and looked back under the dust-sheets at her life with Chris, the father of her babies, who had run off with her best friend’s mother. Of course he realized he had made a big mistake, when the thrill of varicose veins ran thin, and wanted to come home. But Karen was a girl with a strong sense of self-worth. She had told him
no
in no uncertain terms, and indicated somewhere very warm where he could go forth and multiply instead. She allowed herself a rare mental trawl back through the carnage his affair had caused. In saying that, he was back in the kids’ lives and was shaping up to be quite a good dad, but he would never be allowed back in hers. He’d killed that chance the moment he let his zip be opened by someone else’s teeth, but boy had it taken some strength to tell him that. It did, when you loved someone as much as she had loved him. So
had
she ever looked at anyone else when they were in that love-you-forever place?
‘Well,’ Karen began slowly, ‘Chris had a friend–James. I used to think he was nice, really good-looking and so funny.’
‘But did he make your heart go faster when you were in the same room as him?’
‘No, not really,’ said Karen, thinking back to how it was. ‘He was a lovely man–your typical tall, dark and handsome catch. I actually fixed him up with one of my other friends–although it didn’t last, which was a
shame. I could
appreciate
him, but I didn’t want anyone else but Chris in those days.’
There. That was Lou’s answer. It wasn’t normal behaviour, looking at other men when she was in love with the one she had. So she needed to get a grip.
‘Although,’ Karen clicked her fingers in recognition of something Lou had said about her heart beating faster, ‘before Chris, I was going out with this guy called Creighton. We were OK together, you know. He was incredibly good at cricket. Boring bastard game, though, I never went to watch him. Then along came this Ryan chap who had come over from South Africa to spend the summer playing for the town side. Looked like a young Michael Caine.’ Karen smiled as long-forgotten memories made themselves known with a warm ‘hi’. ‘We started talking and I realized I quite fancied him. In fact, the more I saw him the more I liked him, until I couldn’t get him out of my head. I started going to the cricket matches but only to see him because just being around him made me…glow.’ She sighed. ‘My life seemed to be on hold during the week. I couldn’t wait for Saturdays when I knew I’d see him again. Nothing happened between us, not even a kiss, but he switched on feelings in me that I’d never felt for Creighton, never felt for anyone before. I didn’t think I was missing anything until I met Ryan. I suppose he made me realize I wanted more than I had, whereas with Chris I felt totally satisfied. When I had him, I felt I had everything. Does that answer your question, Lou?’
‘I’m not sure,’ said Lou, trying to apply what Karen was telling her to her own situation.
‘Some people just can’t help themselves chasing that
bit of excitement, however good they have it. Like Chris–he was always looking for greener grass. But me, I’m the faithful type, as you know, Lou,’ continued Karen. ‘I wouldn’t have even looked at anyone else, had I been as happy with Creighton as I thought I was.’
This was, and wasn’t, what Lou wanted to hear.
‘Hello, is that Sue?’ asked Phil, knowing full well it was.
‘Yes, it is. Who is this, please?’ she said efficiently.
‘This is Phil Winter about the green MG.’
‘Well, hello,’ she said, like a female Leslie Philips, warmth flooding her voice.
‘It’s coming in Saturday morning. Would you like to see it?’
‘Saturday morning? Let me just look at my diary.’
Of course she will, thought Phil.
‘Yes, what time do you open?’
‘Well, to the public, nine a.m., but I could give you a private showing at eight,’ said Phil. ‘It won’t be on my shop floor long, I warn you. She’s an absolute beauty. You’d look well together.’
‘OK, I’ll be there,’ she chirped.
‘Come to the side door, to the right of the building as you’re looking at it head on.’
‘Knock three times and say a password?’ she giggled.
‘Absolutely,’ said Phil lightly. Resisting the urge to joke as to what the password could be. ‘Shag-me-senseless-big-boy’, for instance.
‘So, see you Saturday first thing then.’
‘Look forward to it, Sue,’ smiled Phil, deliberately using her name. Women liked that.
Softly softly, he thought as he put down the phone. Softly softly.
Later that afternoon, Lou found Zoe in the toilets reapplying her eye make-up.
‘You OK?’ she asked.
‘Sort of,’ said Zoe with a very wobbly voice. ‘No, I’m not, actually. I hate that bitch, Lou. I’m going to smack her right in the gob someday soon. How can she get away with bullying people like she does?’
‘You should learn to ignore her. You do realize she feeds off you getting all upset?’ Lou said gently.
‘But why, Lou? Why would you want to go around upsetting people to make yourself feel good?’ asked Zoe, shaking her head. Judging people by their own standards was the disadvantage nice people would always have.
‘I don’t know, love, it could be any number of reasons. Sometimes when people aren’t in control of some areas of their lives, they find something else they can control to make themselves feel on top of things.’ Lou thought of herself, wrestling with that chair on the day she was angry at herself for not telling Phil about Deb.
‘I think it’s simpler than that: I think she’s just a psycho.’
Lou laughed and gave her a comforting squeeze. ‘The best way to deal with her is not to let her have any inkling at all that you are bothered by her petty behaviour,’ she said encouragingly.
‘But that will make her do it more, until she can see that I
am
bothered, surely?’ sighed Zoe.
‘You know, the more she taunts you, the more of
her
energy and
her
headspace she is spending on you. Rise
above it, lovey, have a sense of worth. Think of it as the more she tries to bring you down, the more important a threat you are to her.’
‘I am going to have her,’ snarled Zoe, subconsciously curling up her fist.
‘Trust me, that would be a very hollow victory,’ said Lou, pulling Zoe round to face her, square on. ‘Promise me you won’t do that. It would get you sacked instantly and cause trouble for you if you tried to get another job. Not to mention the fact that she might or might not press charges. Then she
would
have fun and games, mentally torturing you.’
‘But it would feel good, wouldn’t it, for those few seconds?’ grinned Zoe, savouring the thought of her fist crunching into all that metal.
‘No, because then she would have won. You’d instantly turn into the bad guy. Trust me, in real life you wouldn’t feel half as good after doing it as you might think.’ Lou wished someone had given her this advice, before she lamped Phil’s other woman in the middle of a crowded Boots in Barnsley town centre.
Tom was as good as his word–Eddie had delivered the skip as promised. As yet, it sat there waiting, hungry for the things from the loft, although wouldn’t it be nice if she could use it to put Nicola in instead and save everyone in the office from her sadism, Lou mused as she left the cloakroom. She pictured her trapped in the skip, unable to get out, possibly anchored to the sides by her magnetized gnashers. Then creepy Des and Celia could join her, and Victorianna, and Carl Ball, who used to chase Lou
mercilessly at school with daddy-long-legs, and big Shirley Hamster with her scissors, and Martine McCrum up the road, who told her that Santa had died in tragic circumstances, thus ruining her seventh Christmas. And Susan Peach with her startled-poodle perm and skinny open legs.
And Michelle, and Renee, and Phil!
her mind screamed. The shock of those last three additions brought her game to an abrupt end.
That lunchtime, and after work, Lou went clothes shopping and was surprised to find that she had dropped a whole dress size. The changing-room mirror experience was as horrific as usual, but in a gentler
Dracula
AD
72
way, as opposed to a more frightening
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
way. She’d gone slightly mad in celebrating her new size and bought far more than she intended to. Now, hot and exhausted, Lou opened the front door to 1 The Faringdales, tapped in the code to turn off the burglar alarm and dumped all the carrier bags on the table.
She pulled out a couple of size fourteen skirts, one stone, one chocolate; both long and flattering with fish-tail hems that made her waist look smaller than it was, and a really nice leaf-green crossover top that she felt very elegant in and which suited her colouring down to the ground. To accompany it she had invested in a jacket, scarf and pendant, all in very brave colours for her and a break from all-forgiving black.
According to the article’s laws of clutter-clearing, for every thing she brought into the house, she should throw some other thing away. The house was looking pretty minimalist these days by comparison to how it used to look, but visualizing all the people in the skip had given
her an idea. Apart from the loft, there was one place she hadn’t yet visited for cleansing.
Lou got a coffee and went into the office where she kept her big Filofax. She turned to the address pages, which were a mass of scribbles, Tippex and alterations, and ripped them all out. Then she took some fresh blank sheets and started to copy some, but not all, of the names back in. Her current doctor, dentist and electrician, the man who mended vacuum cleaners and Anthony Fawkes the hairdresser were musts. But there were addresses of friends from so far back in time she probably wouldn’t recognize them if she bumped into them in the street, and if she did, they’d probably have nothing to say to each other. Not any more, anyway. There was a bunch of people with whom she had exchanged Christmas cards for years, but contact in between Decembers had long ceased. At first the cards had been chatty and newsy, and then over the years they were reduced to a signature or a short message, if she was lucky. Then the round robins started–long, rambling impersonal typed
CV
s of how wonderfully the Fartington Family were doing at their badminton and gymkhanas, and how they could only manage the fourteen skiing holidays that year.
The cards were sent out of habit now and no longer out of a genuine desire to keep in touch. Her Great-Auntie Peggy was an obvious exception. Her old scratchy writing always made Lou smile, even though she hadn’t seen her since she was a child and probably would never see her again. Likewise she enjoyed writing her Christmas letter to lovely Anna Brightside, with whom Lou had once worked and in whose gentle company she
had positively basked. Lou put both Peggy and Anna’s addresses back into her book, but her old friend Sarah’s Christmas cards had become almost a game of one-upmanship. Gone were the funny quips and gushing catch-ups, now it was all how many medals the children had won for junior nuclear physics, how many millions her brilliant Ph.D husband was pulling in, how much work they’d done on the (manor) house, how many times they’d been to Mars in their his-and-hers Porsches and how they simply must get together that year–as they had been going to do for the last fourteen. Lou had found herself responding with the same tarted-up codswallop: how great her job was, how successful her husband was, how happy she was…Lou didn’t write Sarah’s name on the new pages.
Two coffees later, her address book was decidedly lighter. Maybe the deleted entries would send her Christmas cards this year, but she was sure that when they weren’t reciprocated she would be deleted from their lists too. She knew it would cause a momentary sadness because somewhere in the dark caves of their hearts existed the ghosts of the people they once were, clinging onto the friendships they once had. It was time to let go though, and only the people who were relevant to the Lou she was now would be part of her life from here on–people who meant something to her and to whom she meant something. Lou knew the time had definitely come to fill the last skip.