After You (12 page)

‘Hold on to those handlebars on the seat, and just move with the bike. Don’t brace against me. If you’re not happy, tap me on the shoulder and I’ll stop.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘You any good at interior decorating?’

‘Hopeless. Why?’

He fired up the ignition. ‘I thought I’d show you my new house.’

And then we were in the traffic, weaving in and out of the cars and lorries, following signs to the motorway. I had to shut my eyes, press myself against his back and hope that he couldn’t hear me squeal.

We went out to the very edge of the city, a place where the gardens grew larger, then morphed into fields, and houses had names instead of numbers. We came through a village that wasn’t quite separate from the one before it, and Sam slowed the bike at a field gate and finally cut the engine, motioning for me to climb off. I removed the helmet, my heart still thumping in my ears, and tried to lift my sweaty hair from my head with fingers that were still stiff from gripping the pillion handlebars.

Sam opened the gate, and ushered me through. Half the field was grassland, the other an irregular mess of concrete
and breeze blocks. In the corner beyond the building work, sheltered by a high hedge, stood a railway carriage and, beside it, a chicken run in which several birds stopped to look expectantly towards us.

‘My house.’

‘Nice!’ I glanced around. ‘Um … where is it?’

Sam began to walk down the field. ‘There. That’s the foundations. Took me the best part of three months to get those down.’

‘You live here?’

‘Yup.’

I stared at the concrete slabs. When I looked at him, something in his expression made me bite back what I was going to say. I rubbed at my head. ‘So… are you going to stand there all evening? Or are you going to give me a guided tour?’

Bathed in the evening sun, and surrounded by the scents of grass and lavender, and the lazy hum of the bees, we walked slowly from one slab to another, Sam pointing to where the windows and doors would be. ‘This is the bathroom.’

‘Bit draughty.’

‘Yeah. I need to do something about that. Watch out. That’s not actually a doorway. You just walked into the shower.’

He stepped over a pile of breeze blocks onto another large grey slab, holding out his hand so that I could step safely over them too. ‘And here’s the living room. So if you look through that window there,’ he held his fingers in a square, ‘you get the views of the open countryside.’

I looked out at the shimmering landscape below. I felt as if we were a million miles out of the city, not ten. I took a deep breath, enjoying the unexpectedness of it all. ‘It’s nice, but I think your sofa’s in the wrong place,’ I said. ‘You need two. One here, and maybe one there. And I’m guessing you have a window here?’

‘Oh, yes. Got to be dual aspect.’

‘Hmm. Plus you totally need to rethink your storage.’

The crazy thing was, within a few minutes of our walking and talking, I could actually see the house. I followed the line of Sam’s hands, as he gestured towards invisible fireplaces, summoned staircases out of his imagination, drew lines across invisible ceilings. I could see its over-height windows, the banisters that a friend of his would carve from aged oak.

‘It’s going to be lovely,’ I said, when we had conjured the last en-suite.

‘In about ten years. But, yup, I hope so.’

I gazed around the field, taking in the vegetable patch, the chicken run, the birdsong. ‘I have to tell you, this is not what I expected. You aren’t tempted to, you know, get builders in?’

‘I probably will eventually. But I like doing it. It’s good for the soul, building a house.’ He shrugged. ‘When you spend all day patching up stab wounds and over-confident cyclists and the wives whose husbands have used them as a punch-bag and the kids with chronic asthma from the damp …’

‘… and the daft women who fall off rooftops.’

‘Those too.’ He gestured towards the concrete mixer, the piles of bricks. ‘I do this so I can live with that. Beer?’ He climbed into the railway carriage, motioning for me to join him.

It was no longer a carriage inside. It had a small, immaculately laid-out kitchen area, and an L-shaped upholstered seat at the end, though it still carried the faint smell of beeswax and tweedy passengers. ‘I don’t like mobile homes,’ he said, as if in explanation. He waved to the seat, ‘Sit,’ then pulled a cold beer from the fridge, cracking it open and handing me the bottle. He set a kettle on the stove for himself.

‘You’re not drinking?’

He shook his head. ‘I found after a couple of years on the job that I’d come home and have a drink to relax. And then
it was two. And then I found I couldn’t relax until I’d had those two, or maybe three.’ He opened a caddy, dropped a teabag into a mug. ‘And then I … lost someone close to me, and I decided that either I stopped or I would never stop drinking again.’ He didn’t look at me while he said this, just moved around the railway carriage, a bulky, yet oddly graceful presence within its narrow walls. ‘I do have the odd beer, but not tonight. I’m driving you home later.’

Comments like that took the weirdness out of sitting in a railway carriage with a man I didn’t really know. How could you maintain a reserve with someone who had tended your broken, partially unclothed body? How could you feel anxious around a man who had already told you of his plan to take you home again? It was as if the manner of our first meeting had removed the normal, awkward obstacles to getting to know someone. He had seen me in my underwear. Hell, he had seen under my actual skin. It meant I felt at ease around Sam in a way I didn’t with anyone else.

The carriage reminded me of the gypsy caravans I had read about in childhood, where everything had a place, and there was order in a confined space. It was homey, but austere, and unmistakably male. It smelt agreeably of sun-warmed wood, soap and bacon. A fresh start, I guessed. I wondered what had happened to his and Jake’s old home. ‘So … um … what does Jake think of it?’

He sat down at the other end of the bench with his tea. ‘He thought I was mad at first. Now he quite likes it. He does the animals when I’m on shift. In return I’ve promised to teach him to drive around the field once he turns seventeen.’ He lifted a mug. ‘God help me.’

I raised my beer in return.

Perhaps it was the unexpected pleasure of being out on a warm Friday evening with a man who held your eye as he
spoke and had the kind of hair you slightly wanted to ruffle with your fingers, or maybe it was just the second beer, but I finally started to enjoy myself. It got stuffy in the carriage, so we moved outside onto two fold-up chairs, and I watched the chickens peck around in the grass, which was oddly restful, and listened to Sam’s tales of obese patients, who required four teams to lift them out of their homes, and young gang members, who tried to attack each other even as they were being stitched up in the back of his rig. As we talked I found myself sneaking surreptitious glances at him, at the way his hands held his mug, at his unexpected smiles, which caused three perfect lines to span out from the corner of each eye as if they had been drawn with fine-point precision.

He told me about his parents: his father a retired fireman, his mother a nightclub singer, who had given up her career for her children. (‘I think it’s why your outfit spoke to me. I’m comfortable with glitter.’) He didn’t mention his late wife by name, but observed that his mother worried about the ongoing lack of a feminine influence in Jake’s life. ‘She comes and scoops him up once a month and takes him back to Cardiff so she and her sisters can coo over him and feed him up and make sure he has enough socks.’ He rested his elbows on his knees. ‘He moans about going, but he secretly loves it.’

I told him about Lily’s return, and he winced at my tale of her meeting with the Traynors. I told him about her perplexing moods, and her erratic behaviour, and he nodded, as if this were all to be expected. When I told him about Lily’s mother he shook his head. ‘Just because they’re wealthy doesn’t make them better parents,’ he said. ‘If she was on benefits, that mother would probably get a little visit from Social Services.’ He lifted a mug to me. ‘It’s a nice thing you’re doing, Louisa Clark.’

‘I’m not sure I’m doing it very well.’

‘Nobody ever feels they’re doing well with teenagers,’ he said. ‘I think that’s kind of the point of them.’

It was hard to reconcile this Sam, at ease in his home, caring for his chickens, with the sobbing, skirt-chasing version we heard about in the Moving On Circle. But I knew very well how the persona you chose to present to the world could be very different from what was inside. I knew how grief could make you behave in ways you couldn’t even begin to understand. ‘I love your railway carriage,’ I said. ‘And your invisible house.’

‘Then I hope you’ll come again,’ he said.

The compulsive shagger.
If this was how he picked up women, I thought a little wistfully, then, boy, he was good. It was a potent mix: the gentlemanly grieving father, the rare smiles, the way he could scoop up a hen one-handed and the hen actually looked happy about it. I would not allow myself to become one of the psycho-girlfriends, I told myself repeatedly. But there was a sneaking pleasure to be had in just flirting gently with a handsome man. It was nice to feel something other than anxiety, or mute fury, the twin emotions that seemed to make up so much of my daily life. The only other encounters I’d had with the opposite sex over the last several months had been fuelled by alcohol and ended with a taxi and tears of self-loathing in the shower.

What do you think, Will? Is this okay?

It had grown darker, and we watched as the chickens clucked their way indignantly into their coop.

Sam watched them. He leant back in his chair. ‘I get the feeling, Louisa Clark, that when you’re talking to me there’s a whole other conversation going on somewhere else.’

I wanted to come back with a smart answer. But he was right, and there was nothing I could say.

‘You and I. We’re both skirting around something.’

‘You’re very direct.’

‘And now I’ve made you uncomfortable.’

‘No.’ I glanced at him. ‘Well, maybe, a little.’

Behind us, a crow lifted noisily into the sky, its flapping wings sending vibrations through the still air. I fought the urge to smooth my hair and instead took a last swig of my beer. ‘Okay. Well. Here’s a real question. How long do you think it takes to get over someone dying? Someone you really loved, I mean.’

I’m not sure why I asked him. It was almost cruelly blunt, given his circumstances. Perhaps I was afraid that the compulsive shagger was about to come out to play.

Sam’s eyes widened a little. ‘Woah. Well …’ he peered down at his mug, and then out at the shadowy fields ‘… I’m not sure you ever do.’

‘That’s cheery.’

‘No. Really. I’ve thought about it a lot. You learn to live with it, with them. Because they do stay with you, even if they’re not living, breathing people any more. It’s not the same crushing grief you felt at first, the kind that swamps you, and makes you want to cry in the wrong places, and get irrationally angry with all the idiots who are still alive when the person you love is dead. It’s just something you learn to accommodate. Like adapting around a hole. I don’t know. It’s like you become … a doughnut instead of a bun.’

There was such sadness in his face that I felt suddenly guilty. ‘A doughnut.’

‘Stupid analogy,’ he said, with a half-smile.

‘I didn’t mean to –’

He shook his head. He looked at the grass between his feet, then sideways at me. ‘C’mon. Let’s get you home.’

We walked across the field to his bike. The air had cooled, and I crossed my arms over my chest. He saw, and handed me his jacket, insisting when I said I was okay. It was pleasingly heavy, and potently male. I tried not to inhale.

‘Do you pick up all your patients like this?’

‘Only the live ones.’

I laughed. It came out of me unexpectedly, louder than I had intended.

‘We’re not really meant to ask patients out on dates.’ He held out the spare helmet. ‘But I figure you’re not my patient any more.’

I took it. ‘And this isn’t really a date.’

‘It isn’t?’ He gave a small, philosophical nod as I climbed aboard. ‘Okay.’

That week, when I arrived at the Moving On Circle Jake wasn’t there. As Daphne discussed her inability to open jars without a man in her kitchen, and Sunil talked of the problems of dividing up his brother’s few belongings among his remaining siblings, I found myself waiting for the heavy red doors to open at the end of the church hall. I told myself it was his welfare I was concerned about, that he needed to be able to express his discomfort at his father’s behaviour in a safe place. I told myself firmly that it was not Sam I was hoping to see, leaning against his bike.

‘What are the small things that trip you up, Louisa?’

Perhaps Jake had finished with the group, I thought. Perhaps he had decided he didn’t need it any more. People did drop out, everyone said. And that would be it. I would never see either of them again.

‘Louisa? The daily things? There must be something.’

I kept thinking about that field, the neat confines of the railway carriage, the way Sam had strolled down the field with a hen under one arm, as if he was carrying a precious parcel. The feathers on her chest had been as soft as a whisper.

Daphne nudged me.

‘We were discussing the small things in day-to-day life that force you to contemplate loss,’ said Marc.

‘I miss sex,’ said Natasha.

‘That’s not a small thing,’ replied William.

‘You didn’t know my husband,’ said Natasha, and snorted a laugh. ‘Not really. That’s a terrible joke to make. I’m sorry.
I don’t know what came over me.’

‘It’s good to joke,’ said Marc, encouragingly.

‘Olaf was perfectly well endowed. Very well endowed, in fact.’ Natasha’s eyes flickered around us. When nobody spoke she held up her hands, a foot apart, and nodded emphatically. ‘We were very happy.’

There was a short silence.

‘Good,’ said Marc. ‘That’s nice to hear.’

‘I don’t want anyone thinking … I mean, that’s not what I want people thinking when they think of my husband. That he had a tiny –’

‘I’m sure nobody thinks that about your husband.’

‘I will, if you keep going on about it,’ said William.

‘I don’t want you thinking about my husband’s penis,’ said Natasha. ‘In fact, I forbid you to think about my husband’s penis.’

‘Stop going on about it then!’ said William.

‘Can we not talk about penises?’ said Daphne. ‘It makes me go a bit peculiar. The nuns used to smack us with rulers if we even used the word “undercarriage”.’

Marc’s voice was now tinged with desperation. ‘Can we steer the conversation away from – back to symbols of loss. Louisa, you were about to tell us which small things brought your loss home to you.’

I sat there, trying to ignore Natasha holding up her hands again, silently measuring some unlikely invisible length.

‘I think I miss having someone to discuss things with,’ I said carefully.

There was a murmur of agreement.

‘I mean, I’m not one of those people who has a massive circle of friends. I was with my last boyfriend for ages and we … we didn’t really go out much. And then there was … Bill. We just used to talk all the time. About music, and people,
and things we’d done and wanted to do, and I never worried about whether I was going to say the wrong thing or offend someone because he just “got” me, you know? And now I’ve moved to London and I’m sort of on my own, apart from my family, and talking to them is always … tricky.’

‘Word,’ said Sunil.

‘And now there’s something going on that I’d really like to chat to him about. I talk to him in my head, but it isn’t the same. I miss having that … ability to just go, “Hey, what do you think of this?” And knowing that whatever he said was probably going to be the right thing.’

The group was silent for a minute.

‘You can talk to us, Louisa,’ said Marc.

‘It’s … complicated.’

‘It’s always complicated,’ said Leanne.

I looked at their faces, kind and expectant, and completely unlikely to understand anything I told them. Not
really
understand it.

Daphne adjusted her silk scarf. ‘What Louisa needs is another young man to talk to. Of course she does. You’re young and pretty. You’ll find someone else,’ she said. ‘And you, Natasha. Get back out there. It’s too late for me, but you two shouldn’t be sitting in this dingy old hall – Sorry, Marc, but they shouldn’t. You should be out dancing, having a laugh.’

Natasha and I exchanged a look. Clearly, she wanted to go out dancing about as much as I did.

I had a sudden memory of Ambulance Sam and pushed the thought away.

‘And if you ever do want another penis,’ William said, ‘I’m sure I could pencil in a –’

‘Okay, everyone. Let’s move on to wills,’ said Marc. ‘Anyone surprised by what turned up?’

I got home, exhausted, at a quarter past nine, to find Lily lying on the sofa in front of the television in her pyjamas. I dropped my bag. ‘How long have you been here?’

‘Since breakfast.’

‘Are you okay?’

‘Mm.’

Her face held a pallor that spoke of either illness or exhaustion.

‘Not feeling well?’

She was eating popcorn out of a bowl and lazily scooped her fingers around the bottom of the bowl for crumbs. ‘I just didn’t feel like doing anything today.’

Lily’s phone beeped. She stared listlessly at the message that came through, then pushed it away from her under a sofa cushion.

‘Everything really okay?’ I asked, after a minute.

‘Fine.’

She didn’t look fine.

‘Anything I can help with?’

‘I said I was fine.’

She didn’t look at me as she spoke.

Lily spent that night at the flat. The following day, as I was leaving for work, Mr Traynor rang and asked to speak to her. She was stretched across the sofa and looked blankly up at me when I told her who was on the phone, then finally, reluctantly, held out a hand for the receiver. I stood there as she listened to him. I couldn’t hear his words, but I could hear his tone: kind, reassuring, emollient. When he finished, she left a short pause, then said, ‘Okay. Fine.’

‘Are you going to see him again?’ I said, as she handed back the phone.

‘He wants to come to London to see me.’

‘Well, that’s nice.’

‘But he can’t be too far away from
her
just now in case she goes into labour.’

‘Do you want me to take you back there to see him?’

‘No.’

She tucked her knees underneath her chin, reached out the remote control and flicked through the channels.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’ I said, after a minute.

She didn’t respond, and after a minute or two, I realized the conversation was over.

On Thursday, I went into my bedroom, closed the door and called my sister. We were speaking several times a week. It was easier now that my estrangement from our parents no longer hung between us, like a conversational minefield.

‘Do you think it’s normal?’

‘Dad told me I once didn’t speak to him for two whole weeks when I was sixteen. Only grunts. And I was actually quite happy.’

‘She’s not even grunting. She just looks miserable.’

‘All teenagers do. It’s their default setting. It’s the cheerful ones you want to worry about – they’re probably hiding some massive eating disorder or stealing lipsticks from Boots.’

‘She’s spent the last three days just lying on the sofa.’

‘And your point is?’

‘I think something’s wrong.’

‘She’s sixteen years old. Her dad never knew she existed, and popped his clogs before she could meet him. Her mother married someone she calls Fuckface, she has two little brothers who sound like trainee Reggie and Ronnie Kray, and they changed the locks to the family home. I would probably lie on a sofa for a year if I was her.’ Treena took a noisy slurp of her tea. ‘Plus she’s living with someone who
wears glittery green Spandex to a bar job and calls it a career.’

‘Lurex. It’s Lurex.’

‘Whatever. So when are you going to find yourself a decent job?’

‘Soon. I just need to get this situation sorted first.’

‘This situation.’

‘She’s really down. I feel bad for her.’

‘You know what makes me feel down? The way you keep promising to live some kind of a life, then sacrifice yourself to every waif and stray who comes across your path.’

‘Will was not a waif and stray.’

‘But Lily is. You don’t even
know
this girl, Lou. You should be focusing on moving forward. You should be sending off your CV, talking to contacts, working out where your strengths are, not finding yet another excuse to put your own life on hold.’

I stared outside at the city sky. In the next room, I could hear the television burbling away, then Lily getting up, walking to the fridge and flopping down again. I lowered my voice: ‘So what would you do, Treen? The child of the man you loved turns up on your doorstep, and everyone else seems to have pretty much handed over responsibility for her. You’d walk away too, would you?’

My sister fell briefly silent. This was a rare occurrence and I felt obliged to keep talking. ‘So if Thom, in eight years’ time, had fallen out with you, for whatever reason – say he was pretty much on his own, and was going off the rails – you’d think it was great if the one person he asked for help decided it was altogether too much of a pain in the arse, would you? That they should just bugger off and suit themselves?’ I rested my head against the wall. ‘I’m trying to do the right thing here, Treen. Just cut me a break, okay?’

Nothing.

‘It makes me feel better. Okay? It makes me feel better knowing I’m helping.’

My sister was silent for so long I wondered whether she had hung up. ‘Treen?’

‘Okay. Well, I do remember reading a thing in social psychology about how teenagers find too much face-to-face contact exhausting.’

‘You want me to talk to her through a door?’ One day I would have a telephone conversation with my sister that didn’t involve the weary sigh of someone explaining something to a halfwit.

‘No, doofus. What it means is that if you’re going to get her to talk you need to be doing something together, side by side.’

On my way home on Friday evening I stopped off at the DIY superstore. Back at my block, I lugged the bags up the four flights of stairs, and let myself in. Lily was exactly where I was expecting to find her: stretched out in front of the television. ‘What’s that?’ she asked.

‘Paint. This flat’s a bit tired. You keep telling me I need to brighten it up. I thought we could get rid of this boring old magnolia.’

She couldn’t help herself. I pretended to be busy making myself a drink, watching out of the corner of my eye as she stretched, then walked over and examined the paint cans. ‘That’s hardly any less boring. It’s basically pale grey.’

‘I was told grey was the in thing. I’ll take it back if you think it won’t work.’

She peered at it. ‘No. It’s okay.’

‘I thought the spare room could have cream on two, then one grey wall. Do you think they go?’ I busied myself with unwrapping the paintbrushes and rollers as I spoke. I changed
into an old shirt and some shorts and asked if she could put on some music.

‘What sort?’

‘You choose.’ I hauled a chair off to one side and laid some dust sheets along the wall. ‘Your dad said I was a musical Philistine.’

She didn’t say anything, but I had her attention. I cracked open a paint tin and began to mix it. ‘He made me go to my first ever concert. Classical, not pop. I only agreed because it meant he would leave the house. He didn’t like going out much in the early days. He put on a shirt and a good jacket and it was the first time I had seen him look like …’ I remembered the jolt as I had seen, emerging from the stiff blue collar, the man he had been before his accident. I swallowed. ‘Anyway. I went preparing to be bored, and cried my way through the second half like a complete loon. It was the most amazing thing I’d ever heard in my life.’

A short silence.

‘What was it? What did you listen to?’

‘I can’t remember. Sibelius? Does that sound right?’

She shrugged. I started painting, as she came up beside me. She picked up a brush. She said nothing at first, but she seemed to lose herself in the repetitive nature of the task. She was careful, too, adjusting the sheet so that she didn’t spill paint on the floor, wiping her brush on the edge of the pot. We didn’t speak, except for muttered requests:
Can you pass me the smaller brush? Do you think that will still show through on the second coat?
It took us just half an hour to do the first wall between us.

‘So what do you think?’ I said, admiring it. ‘Think we can do another?’

She moved a dust sheet and started on the next wall. She had put on some indie band I had never heard of, light-hearted
and agreeable. I started to paint again, ignoring the ache in my shoulder, the urge to yawn.

‘You should get some pictures.’

‘You’re right.’

‘I’ve got this big print at home of a Kandinsky. It doesn’t really go in my room. You could have it if you want it.’

‘That would be great.’

She was working faster now, speeding across the wall, carefully cutting in around the large window.

‘So I was thinking,’ I said, ‘we should speak to Will’s mum. Your grandmother. Are you okay if I write to her?’

She said nothing. She crouched down, apparently absorbed in carefully coating the wall to the skirting-board. Finally, she stood up. ‘Is she like him?’

‘Like who?’

‘Mrs Traynor? Is she like Mr Traynor?’

I stepped down from the box I was using to stand on, and wiped my brush on the edge of the tin. ‘She’s … different.’

‘That’s your way of saying she’s a cow.’

‘She’s not a cow. She’s just – It takes longer to get to know her is all.’

‘That’s your way of telling me she’s a cow and she’s not going to like me.’

‘I’m not saying that at all, Lily. But she is someone who doesn’t show her emotions easily.’

Lily sighed and put down her paintbrush. ‘I’m basically the only person in the world who could discover two grandparents I didn’t know I had, then find out that neither of them even likes me.’

We stared at each other. And suddenly, unexpectedly, we started to laugh.