Phil hadn’t really taken all that nonsense seriously about Lou starting up the coffee-house business. Where would she get the money for it? Because he certainly wasn’t going to lend it to her and she had no money of her own, and the bank would laugh her out of the building. Surely for a posh café to be successful, it would have to be in a town-centre location where the rent would be extortionate.
Lou might have been clever at doing a few accounts, but that wasn’t going to be enough. She and that other silly bitch wouldn’t survive five minutes baking fancy buns in a gritty Northern town! However, he found himself on the horns of a dilemma. He didn’t dignify it by mentioning it again, although he was pretty cool and monosyllabic towards her, but he needed her on-side because he’d invited Des and Celia plus brats around for Sunday dinner. He’d got a lovely Audi in and Des was interested but wavering like a total old woman. A nice piece of lamb cooked the Lou way could just tip the balance in his favour. Still, for the lying and wet dog episode and meeting that Deb again business, his wife needed to know he wasn’t happy by a long chalk.
He made sure that Lou knew he’d got up an hour earlier than normal that Saturday morning and that she saw him putting on a shirt for work that he only ever wore for best. He made a point of humming merrily because he never hummed and that was bound to raise her suspicions.
‘Just in case you try to get hold of me later, I’d better warn you that my mobile might be off for a while,’ he threw behind him as he headed out, filling the air with his expensive ‘going out’ after-shave and not his usual daytime one. ‘I’ve got an important business meeting.’ Phil could hear the cogs cranking up in her brain already.
Lou parked up at the supermarket but her head was back at the house, watching Phil go through his morning routine. The differences were subtle ones, but they were definitely there. Of course she had noticed the best shirt and the after-shave and the time, as she was meant to. And he never turned off his mobile; it was on vibrate if he didn’t want to be disturbed. Did he want her to think he was up to mischief? To throw her off-balance for seeing Deb again? Or was he really up to something? She knew she must keep it all in perspective.
No
. He wouldn’t have another affair–not after last time.
Sue Shoesmith was there waiting when Phil got to the showroom. Slipping off his wedding ring, he stuck it in the glovebox before getting out of his Audi.
‘Oh no–am I late for you?’ He made a big show of looking at his watch, although he knew he was on time. The
for you
was a sweet personal touch, he thought.
‘No, I’m just keen,’ said British Racing Green-eyed Sue with a glossy red smile.
‘Come on in before you get cold,’ he said, even though it was a May-mild morning.
He went through his routine of disabling the alarm, switching on the lights and putting on the coffee percolator. As she waited, he could see she was champing at the bit to view the car. Opening the door to the showroom, he led her through with an extravagant courteous flourish.
He had to admit, the MG did look bonny. He’d only had a cursory look at it the previous night when it came in and he’d left Bradley to give it a valet. Sue gasped open-mouthed and Phil knew he had sold it. She walked around it, her eyes like saucers.
‘It’s absolutely gorgeous,’ she breathed.
‘Told you,’ he said.
‘Can I get in it?’
Phil opened the door and she climbed in elegantly. Nice legs. Very nice, in fact. She was rehearsing how it would be to drive it, checking the pedals, adjusting the rearview mirror, fondling the steering wheel.
‘Can I take it for a test run?’ she asked.
‘I’d have to come with you,’ he replied almost apologetically.
‘Oh, of course,’ she said smokily.
‘Quick coffee before we head off?’
‘That would be lovely.’
She didn’t get out of the car as gracefully as she got in. He got a lovely flash of her thighs and some stocking lace. They both knew that was deliberate.
After Lou had unloaded the food shopping from her Saturday-morning supermarket trip she changed into her
scruffy clothes. Despite telling herself to keep Phil’s little
game
in perspective, she had spent the last two hours’ worth of headspace ripping apart that little domestic scene this morning like Quincy did with a corpse, laying all the viscera out to see what it meant, or what it could mean. Finally she had managed to convince herself that Phil wouldn’t be playing Happy Families with Des and Celia on Sunday if his head was being turned by another woman, so in a perverse way she was glad they were coming. She would make it extra jolly and push out all the stops: homemade broth to start with, meat and five veg, Yorkshire puddings with thick homemade onion gravy and a chocolate and cream tarte to follow. He was just trying to unsettle her for talking to Deb again and letting Clooney into the house. He would be far more secretive if he were having a frisson, not flash it in front of her face. Silly woman–she was just being paranoid.
Sue put her foot on the accelerator and the car zipped forward.
‘Wow, powerful, isn’t she?’
‘Oh yes. Quick as a cat, but the control is all yours–we’re both in your hands,’ said Phil graciously.
Sue gave a throaty laugh. ‘Well, in that case, I may just be ready to slip it up a gear and see what happens,’ she said with obvious double-meaning.
Phil responded with a shy cough and a comment about the nifty gear system. Not too much, too quick, he thought. Slowlee slowlee catchee monkee. Women always tried a bit harder when they couldn’t have what they wanted on demand.
Armed with her binliners, Lou pulled down the loft ladder and with a fortifying deep breath inside her, she climbed up the steps. She switched on the light, and the low-wattage bulb cast a dull glow over the stored items. It was so quiet and still up there under the eaves; it was as if everything wanted to remain there undisturbed in the shadows, to be left alone in peace. But the things up here didn’t rest in peace, did they, said Lou to herself. Their energies were far from dead and threatened her with their old seductive promises of how life should be but never would be. Lou went back downstairs for a 100-watt bulb.
After the paperwork was completed and the monies transferred, Phil presented Sue with a
P.M Autos
fob bearing her new keys and a bottle of Moët that he had just sent the new lad Dennis to the nearby supermarket for–no cheap fizz for this customer. She was flushed with excitement from her new acquisition, especially because she could take it home there and then. Here was a woman who didn’t like to wait for things, thought Phil.
‘There’s a full tank of fuel for you and a set of new car mats,’ he winked in a ‘You are
so
special–I don’t do this for everyone’ kind of way.
‘And if I have any problems with anything, can I call you…personally?’ she asked, her eyes not blinking as they locked with his.
‘I would expect you to,’ he said, smiling and softly stroking the bonnet of the car as if it were a woman’s skin. He could sense her brain purring. ‘What a very special lady. And the car’s not bad either.’
‘Aw!’ she said, taken aback with delight at his compliment.
‘You take good care of yourself,’ he said, feigning bashfulness as if he had just gone too far and was knocking down to first gear again. ‘Drive carefully, but enjoy her. Life’s too short not to have any thrills.’
‘You’re a man after my own heart,’ she said.
And after your knockers and after what lies at the top of those stockings as well, he added to himself.
Sue British Racing Green Eyes climbed into the driver’s seat and started up the engine. She beeped the horn and waved goodbye to him out of the window with a long elegant arm. She’d call, of course, on some pretext or other. He gave it three days.
Lou looked around in dismay at the amount of Phil’s rubbish: electric razors that he had long since replaced with all-singing all-dancing ones, three ancient portable TVs, lamps and other odd bachelor bits that she remembered transporting to the loft when she first moved in. It was hard work carrying them downstairs and she was soon looking like a Dickensian chimney-sweep child. Her hair was stiff with dust and she doubted she’d ever get the grime out from under the few remaining nails she had left. The thought of a good long soak brought with it the far more unpleasant one of Bloody Keith Featherstone, and she wondered if she should just write off the money and go and get someone else to finish the job. At least that way he would be cleared out of her head. Then again, she had paid him a
lot
of money. And why should he get it for doing absolutely nothing? The issue consigned itself back to the ‘to do’ tray in her head. Again.
She had a small break for lunch–a nice long glass of clean sparkling mineral water and a thick egg and spring onion sandwich to fortify her for the task ahead. Her stomach had obviously shrunk recently because the
sandwich filled her adequately, but her hand reached automatically for the biscuit barrel anyway. The chocolate digestive had just touched her lips when she realized she didn’t really want it–it was just habit. She was clearing out the house but still filling herself up with rubbish. Lou threw it away and headed, once again, up the stairs.
Back up in the loft, Lou found a box full of souvenirs from school containing a purse that an old penfriend had sent her from Australia, made from a kangaroo scrotum. There were exercise books and paintings and her handwriting-practice jotter in pencil and scratchy ink,
I hate Shirley Hamster
in her best copperplate on the cover. Then there was her school diary with a photograph of herself aged eight stuck on the first page. She flicked through it and found the story of when Dad took her to the zoo and she heard a bear trump, which made Lou laugh out loud to read again. She remembered it so well, still. She could even recall that when her dad had paid the entrance fee she was given a fold-up map, blue on the front with a big black and white zebra’s head and they’d had a bag of vinegary chips sitting on a bench. She had bought her mum and her baby sister a Wade Whimsie each as a souvenir of her very lovely day. For a moment it felt as if that young Lou was a separate entity from herself, one blissfully unaware of anything but the pleasures of childhood, who didn’t know that her father’s heart would start to fail in a few years and that he would be taken away from her for ever. The little girl in the photo had no inkling that she wouldn’t have his love to lean on when she would most need it, when she discovered that all men weren’t like the benchmark he had
provided. Lou wanted to reach back into her past and cuddle that little girl, and tell her she would survive when pain crashed into her life like a juggernaut at full speed. She looked so little to have all that future hurt to face.
There was a broken cuckoo clock that her dad had bought her from Germany. Victorianna had pulled it from the wall during one of her tantrums–although Lou had then propelled her little sister out of the back door by her blonde pigtails and thrown her headfirst in their dad’s compost heap. Lou put the clock into the bin-bag, then immediately brought it out again. She couldn’t let it go–it would be like saying goodby e to her dad all over again–yet hadn’t she kept it unlooked-at for years? Lou smiled tearfully. She took some time and thought it through until a clear voice of reason, made both from the words of the article and her own commonsense, directed her what to do. She didn’t need the corpse of a broken clock when she had the living memory of walking into her bedroom and seeing it hanging there on her wall for her. Her mother had gone mad because no one could sleep through its cuckooing in the night, but Dad had said it was staying and eventually they all got used to Klaus the cuckoo. She wasn’t betraying her father by throwing away the clock; she wasn’t letting
him
go by letting
it
go. Lou didn’t care how ridiculous it was, but she kissed the broken old clock and said, ‘Goodbye, Klaus,’ before she bravely put it back in the bin-bag.
Next came a suitcase containing old summer holiday clothes that she remembered from their Corfu trip: her ethnic wraparound skirt and bright T-shirts and Phil’s sandals that they’d both laughed about because they were
flat boat-like things that they could have sailed home in, had the plane been indefinitely delayed. There was a pair of his red shorts that looked so narrow in the waist, ticket stubs from the excursions they’d taken, seashells from the beach. It was the last time she could remember feeling truly content with Phil–getting off the plane into the hot Greek sunshine, discovering the little bay where they snorkelled with the fishes, eating meze in a taverna surrounded by lemon trees and she feeding the local stray cats with tins of pilchards.
Lou didn’t need the clutter-clearing article to tell her she had kept this case in order to hold onto a fortnight of time, a time when she was lovable. She couldn’t go back to those days, however many reminders she had kept of what life had been like before she and Phil had started drifting apart, before Phil had his affair with Susan Peach. She manoeuvred the bulky case down the loft ladder then took it straight out to the skip. That was the easy bit over and done with.
Lou knew only too well what lay in the hoard of boxes and carrier bags in the binliners which were coated with nearly two years of dust. Handbags and shoes that she had bought when Phil had left her, purchases made in the hope of stemming the crater-sized hole in her heart–a five-second fix with every thirty quid spent. There were hundreds of pounds’ worth of goods there–never used or worn, each one immediately sullied by the reason she had bought it and each one a reminder of that awful build-up to Christmas when her eyes just wouldn’t stay dry. She had been a sad island in a sea of jolly festive merriment, drunks with daft hats on and excited children crowding in shops. Hell had nothing on that
year, trudging around stores doing obligatory Christmas shopping, desperately craving the arrival of cold, dull January whilst soul-piercing brass bands threatened to break down the crumbling wall which was keeping the tears back in public places. Everywhere she went, carols pumped out around her with their lyrics of love and joy. ‘Simply Ha-av-ing a Wonderful Christmas Time’ tortured her in every shop. She had made a mental promise that year that if she ever met Paul McCartney, she would ram that record right up his rectum.
The well-used clutter-clearing article sat in her pocket but it had been long absorbed into her psyche. She knew her struggle to let these purchases go was all to do with feeling obliged to make use of them. They were emotionally blackmailing her with their price tags, making her feel guilty for wasting so much money.
You can’t get rid of us, we cost too much.
Things had controlled her, she now realized. They were trying to force their way into her life with all their negative connotations. Well, she didn’t want them. Pretty as they were, they made her feel sad to look at them.
As she carried them downstairs she knew the Heart Foundation women were going to have a field day, but it gave her some comfort to know that items bought in such a deeply sad way would have their energies reversed. People would re-buy them in happier circumstances and the charity would profit. It was a win-win situation, really. Taking them down to the garage, she put them straight into her car boot for drop-off first thing on Monday morning before work.
Downstairs the phone rang, but Lou ignored it. There
was just the one corner left in the loft to clear and she needed to do this now, with no interruptions. Steeling herself, she took a deep breath and pulled off the dustsheet which covered the items beneath. There they were, the pieces of cot, never constructed, the carrier bags of soft baby clothes, still in their packs, nappies that moths had started to nibble, a baby intercom, sheets and blankets, a mobile of cotton-woolly lambs that would never hang above a sleeping baby, but it was the bag of tiny white socks that sent her crumpling to the floor. And yet people said you couldn’t grieve for what you never had.
Just after they married, Phil suddenly announced that he didn’t want children, and no amount of pleading with him would change his mind. Then two years later, he just as suddenly announced that if she still wanted to try for that baby, then they would. Lou threw her pills away with a happy flourish, but whatever time of month they did it, the longed-for baby never arrived.
She started fantasizing about Phil and his twins reconciling and visiting. She imagined going shopping for sweets and treats for them and even planned how she would decorate two of the bedrooms for them to stay in, but that dream had died the day they met them in Meadowhall.
‘Chuffing hell, it’s Sharon and the kids,’ Phil had said with abject horror.
A passing glance at the blonde woman told Lou she was indeed every bit as pretty as Phil’s sighing recollection of her (whenever he wanted to stir up Lou’s insecurities) made her out to be. It was the children, however, who stole her attention. They were beautiful: honey-haired with huge chocolate-brown eyes and thick
dark lashes. How could any father not have wanted them? But Phil’s extreme reaction made it perfectly clear that Lou would even be denied a stepmother-ship. She never mentioned to him the grief that followed, when she couldn’t get their little faces out of her head. She would lie in bed in the dark and transpose herself and Phil into a Santa-queue scene with their own little boy and girl. But that was when she still had a heart full of hope that they might have children of their own, a hope that died a little more with the bleed of each passing month.
Then, not long after he returned home from his affair with Susan Peach, Lou’s periods stopped. Not only that but her nipples ached and she felt decidedly queasy. Lou didn’t need to do a pregnancy test–it was obvious she had caught on. Of course it would have been wise to wait and not buy stuff yet, but stocking up on a few odd things wouldn’t hurt, surely? And buying them forced her pregnancy to be real. She had a true taste of happiness arriving at the hospital for her first scan. There had been a shop there and she had bought those little socks, knowing she was shortly going to see on the screen the little feet that would one day wear them.
The doctor at the hospital had been kind. Her scan, and the following urine sample, said there was no baby. He explained that in rare cases, the body can cruelly mimic the signs of pregnancy to this degree.
‘A phantom?’ Renee had said. ‘I thought only Labradors had those!’
‘Pull yourself together, love,’ Phil had said, when she told him that night through tears that there was no baby growing inside her. He tried not to sound as relieved as
he felt when he clumsily comforted her with the words, ‘You can’t miss what you never had.’
But Lou knew that you could.
Lou couldn’t bring herself to pass these baby things onto the charity shop. They stank of rank energy and bad luck, not the best inheritance for a fresh new baby–a baby that would always belong to someone else. She knew now that saving these things had not helped to keep her dreams of being a mother alive; they had done exactly the opposite, serving only to remind her of what she would never be.
As Lou piled them all into the skip she knew she was saying that final goodbye. It felt as if she had ripped part of her heart out and put that into the skip too.
Back upstairs, she swept the naked loft, barely able to see what she was doing as her eyes started to leak years of stagnant pain. As it became too much to hold back, she let the brush fall and sank to her knees, howling from some primal place within her which held the mother-lode of her agony. The tears cut clean paths through the dirt on her face and the saltwater stole into her mouth. Letting go of that dream life, cutting it loose from her and watching it sail off into the sky like a precious party balloon, made her feel empty and lost–and so very, very alone.
At four o’clock exactly, Tom reversed the skip wagon up the drive. She wasn’t there to greet him so he left Clooney in the cab. As soon as he saw what was in the skip, he understood completely why she wanted it cleared away that day, and he could only guess what it
must have been like for her to let those things go. He felt her sadness acutely on this day–the same day when his sister Sammy had brought her new little daughter into the world.
He didn’t usually knock when picking up from customers. He had no reason to now but he rapped hard on Lou’s door. He had the weirdest feeling she was
in
, and, inappropriate as it might have been, he so much wanted to see that she was all right. No, more than that, he wanted to put his arms around her and hold her.