Virtual Strangers (19 page)

Into each life and so on.

Everybody has to have some downer in their life. Everybody has to have their own personal
bête noire
. A well managed
bête noire
is like a dose of cod liver oil. Whatever social ordeal I find myself enduring, I can always remember I could be worse off. My most enduring
bête noire
is the habit of barn dancing, particularly as applied to the Cefn Melin community hall during a blizzard. And, boy, did we have a blizzard that night.

I have nothing against barn dances
per se
. This is not a blanket grievance. But neither do I have a fully toned pelvic floor. Plus I don’t care for cowboys, I don’t much like hay, I loathe Country and Western music, and I can’t doh-se-doh.

But despite that, we went. We went because Ben and Dad and Hester thought it would be fun to traipse through the snow and spend an evening in the village hall being bullied by a man with a fiddle. I, understandably, did not think it would be fun, and though that might lead me to suppose that everyone’s needs would be best served by them going and me staying at home with a curry and a bottle of wine and the video of Trainspotting (for self-esteem restoration purposes), they, it seemed, did not subscribe to this view.

Their considered opinion was that it would be fun only if I came as well. Because (so the reasoning went) if I didn’t come then they’d be forced to come home early and see the New Year in with me, because if they didn’t come home early to see the New Year in with me they were convinced (to a man) that I would sulk or cry or feel quite unreasonably sorry for myself, and seeing as how I’d been so funny just lately, they all decided it was just too big a chance to take. And though my father had the good grace not to mention my hormones, I could tell he had not ruled early menopause out.

Thus it is with families. But I drew a firm line at Hester’s spare gingham skirt.

And I had a fine time, as you very often do when your expectation is one of only stupefying boredom and wet pants. We did have to leave early, however, as Ben’s asthma had grown steadily worse through the evening, not helped by the hay and the chilly night air. As the two of us walked the snowy half mile home, he was breathing in gasps and continually coughing, and had run out of discs for his inhaler as well.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘I’d had enough anyway. And there’s bound to be something mindlessly entertaining on TV.’

Which no doubt there was, but by the time we arrived home, TV was the last thing on my mind. It was with some relief that I put my key into the lock.

The telephone was ringing as I opened the front door.

‘Charlotte?’

My Dad.

‘Something up?’ I replied.

‘No, no, dear. Everything’s fine. It’s just that I’ve just brought Hester home and the weather, quite frankly, well, it’s looking rather nasty, and she suggested I stay the night. She has a Z-bed and a sleeping bag and we thought... well, what do
you
think? Will
you
be all right, dear?’

Bless him.

‘Dad, I’ll be fine. (I’ve been fine thus far, haven’t I?) I’m going to call the GP out and get Ben fixed up with some steroids or something. I have Hester’s number. If I need you, I’ll call you. Okay?’

‘Are you sure? I mean if the lad’s really poorly, then I think my place is there with you.’

‘Dad, don’t set out again now. You’ve just trudged a mile in the opposite direction. We’ll be fine here. Really..’

‘I don’t know. Are you sure?’

‘Dad, I’m
sure
.’

‘In that case -’

‘Night night.’

I realised that my father was no more in control of his primeval urges than Ben. And that the probable only difference between the wooing of Stablefords senior and junior was in the viability of the evolutionary outcome. So that was it. Here we were. All alone and being snowed on. Me and the cat and my poor sick child.

Since being on my own, I dreaded the boys being ill. It was the time when the fact that it was all down to me crystallised most sharply on my consciousness; became the most stark of all those stark parental realities. The doctor, the hospital, the emergency services; all were just a phone call or short drive away. But that overwhelming sense of being the one they relied on sometimes threatened to overwhelm me.

Tonight though, as I dialled the surgery and asked for a home visit, I realised I’d reached some sort of maturity watershed, because that the fact that my father would not be back till the morning, made me feel, unaccountably, better, not worse.

But crikey! (And then some.)

What did I have forty minutes after this inspired realisation? Standing on my doorstep? Come to answer a call to attend my sick son? Not the taciturn Dr Spalding. Not the young Dr Pang. Not even a nameless and world weary locum. Oh no. What the halogen had brought into being was Griffith. Was Adam. Was Dr Adam G Jones.

My maturity watershed collapsing around me, I stood there and gawped at him, fifteen again.

I should have known, of course, shouldn’t I? Because they didn’t come to the Barn Dance. And when I rang the surgery, there should have been some part of me - some rational, functioning part, that said to itself, ah! Adam must be working! And wouldn’t it be funny if he turned up here now? And yet the thought, despite the plethora of Adam thoughts already jostling and crowding it, never crossed my mind for the tiniest instant. Which in some ways was a blessing. Had it done so I might have been tempted to abandon the surgery and take my chances with the no doubt over-stretched casualty department instead.

I couldn’t, at first, take in that it was actually him on the doorstep, blinking, as I was, against the glare of my overstated uPVC white-out of a porch. The short walk from the car had crowned him with a cotton wool head dress and he was wearing not the familiar jeans, but a suit.

‘Oh!’ I said. ‘Adam!’ I’d nearly said Griffith.

‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Yes. Do I get to come in?’

A tattoo started up in my chest then and there, and as I ushered him past my massed ranks of glittering white branches, my temple joined in with a beat of its own. What to do? How to play this? I tried a smile, which he didn’t return. He looked very stern.

‘Righty-ho,’ he said, clearing his throat. ‘Where’s the invalid?’

I pointed upstairs and then followed him up. He had pearlescent glitter all over his jacket, and a tidemark of snow around the toes of his brogues. I mumbled the asthma attack’s natural history and hoped my tremulous larynx wouldn’t give me away. We entered Ben’s room.

‘That’s lovely,’ said Adam, sounding not in the least like himself. Then, ‘Hello, Ben. Thank you, Charlie.’ All in one practised utterence. I was, I realised with relief, being dismissed.

Back in the kitchen while Adam attended to Ben, I flapped about in an agony of pinging nerve endings, surging hormones, and an alarming countercurrent heat exchange in my face. I then realised (with a sudden, and thus worrisome, excitement) that a similar rush of unwelcome proximity-related chemicals must also,
must
also, be ensuing for him. Except he had had thirty or so minutes to prepare himself, having been the GP to have accepted the call.

The kettle boiled just as he came back into the kitchen.

‘Nothing to worry about,’ he said, stuffing his hands in his jacket pockets and not looking at me. ‘I put him on the nebuliser, and he’s much better now. He’ll be asleep soon I expect, so if you want to, I don’t know, tuck him in or whatever -’

‘I’ll just go up then, ‘ I said. ‘Would you, er - I mean, if you have time, of course, perhaps you’d like to -’

Complete
paralysis of sentence-finishing neuronal pathway. Rats.

I flapped my hand about in the general direction of the kettle. He nodded.

‘Er. Great. Yes. Yes, please. I could kill for a coffee.’

‘Great,’ I echoed. Stupidly. With the cringy addition of an inane tinkling laugh. ‘I’ll just -’

He smiled a little then. Shrugged. Took one hand out of his pocket. Moved it across a chair back. Pulled an earlobe. Put a - Oh
God
.
Stop
it, Charlotte! ‘Shall I get on and -’ He gestured. I nodded. Laughed again.

Bloody
hell
.

‘Yes. Absolutely. It’s that cupboard. Fridge
here
and spoons
there
and - well. I won’t be a moment.’

I bolted up the stairs to find that Ben was already asleep, his chest rising and falling with a reassuringly relaxed height and tempo. I perched on the edge of the bed and tried to still my own ridiculous pulse. Outside, the snow was falling in fluffy fifty-pence discs, tinged orange by the warm sodium glow in the street. Adam’s car was parked not on the road, but beside mine on our drive, which lent a poignancy to the reason he was actually here.

The fact of our solitude resonating all around me, I counted out the twenty two steps that took my feet back downstairs. Adam had gone into to the living room, and was standing in the middle of it, holding the coffees. He had dispensed them into a pair of horrible chipped mugs. The most horrible mugs in my entire mug dynasty. Typical. He turned as I entered.

‘Just admiring your tree.’

‘Oh. Thank you. It’s a bit of a thing with me, the tree. All the sparkle. All the frippery. That’s me. That’s what I’m best at. All very insignificant and boring. Ha, ha. Though I don’t admit to actually making my own stuffing.’

(Why not? What was wrong with making your own stuffing? Davina probably made two types of stuffing to ram up
her
festive bird’s acquiescent bum.)

I heard myself embellish this rubbish with yet another self conscious titter. I couldn’t seem to think of anything else to add.
All
those emails. All that easy, comfortable talk about nothing. And now I had nothing whatsoever to say.

‘I know,’ he said, handing me my coffee and smiling properly at last. ‘You told me all about it.’

So I had. At length. Ad nauseum.
Drunkenly
.

‘And you shouldn’t knock yourself,’ he went on. ‘You have a real talent for it. The room looks beautiful.’

I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t knocking myself; that I thought tree decorating to be a fine and noble calling, and that my attempts at being self effacing were simply the nervous ramblings of a woman completely fazed by the awesome possibilities inherent in her predicament. But I didn’t. Instead I gestured to the sofa, which he obediently sat on.

‘We don’t make much of an effort at home, as you’d imagine. No kids to do it for, so we tend not to bother. And what with work and so on -’ He shrugged and settled himself back against the cushions. His tie matched the upholstery perfectly. (The ‘we’, however, clashed dreadfully).

I perched at the other end, clutching the chipped bit of my mug.

‘Of course. You’re both very busy, I’ll bet. Three hundred lights,’ I twittered, clinging on hopefully to the last vestiges of the topic, in case a more unsettling one should jump up and bite us. He made a face of approval. ‘And those stars?’ I pointed. ‘They’re new this year. I made them from preserved birch twigs. I’m particularly proud of them. Even if I have added a silver burnish to the kitchen table. Ha, ha.’

He smiled and nodded gravely, as if all this bilge was of desperate importance. As if my sad dalliance with glycerine related floristry was of the least interest to a man who made life and death decisions on bank holiday evenings and carried a morphine vial around in his bag. Twit, twit, twit.

‘Didn’t know you had so many hidden talents,’ he observed.

‘Oh, none hidden, I assure you. This is it. The full range.’

He raised one eyebrow and then stood up again, filling the room. ‘But no shell boxes on display, which is a little disappointing.’

He put his face in his coffee as he said this, so I couldn’t quite catch his expression. And I hoped he’d keep it there a while, because a slow, warm, inexorable flush had found it’s way out of the top of my (checked - yuk!) shirt and arranged itself tastefully over my cheeks. I waved my arms around as a diversion.

‘Oh, I’m crap at those. But if you want one, I do know someone in Tenby.’

His next utterance, which began, ‘Charlie -’ was partly drowned out by my explosive guffaws, which were becoming more alarming by the moment.

So he said it again. ‘Charlie -’ On a rising note. Oh no.

‘But he hasn’t got a bucket,’ I interrupted, avoiding his eye.

He sat again. About half way up the sofa, this time. And turned back towards me in a way that made it absolutely clear that this was no laughing matter. And certainly not an occasion for tittering or guffawing, and that he wanted me not to avoid his gaze but to make a connection with it, and that he wasn’t going to be deflected by any amount of diversionary banter. I looked at him properly. Took in each perfect contour. And found myself quite unable, then, to look away.

‘This is all a little difficult, isn’t it?’ he said.

‘You’re telling me!’ I exclaimed, exhaling ten minutes worth of backed up gulps and swallows. ‘You are
telling me
! I have to be the most embarrassed person I know right now. Which is why I’m not sure we should even be having this conversation. I’m finding it a little difficult to - oh, I don’t know. It’s -’

‘The word ‘strained’ springs to mind.’

The eyes held fast, then he dropped his and sighed.

‘Yes, doesn’t it? ‘ I agreed. ‘Which is so silly. Because actually there’s no earthy reason why we should feel -’

‘Yes there is.’

Just like that.
Yes there is
.

‘Not really,’ I said. ‘It’s not as if -’

‘Charlie, you
know
there is.’ He stopped. Then said. ‘That’s assuming I haven’t entirely misread things from your end. In which case -’ And then he ground to a halt again. Which was so exasperating. I couldn’t be doing with all this huff puff stop start stuff. It was making me feel twitchy. But while I was chewing all this over, he chipped in with, ‘Have I?’

To which I could have answered, ‘well of
course
you have! You didn’t think - well, goodness me! Heavens! What on earth gave you the impression I was interested in
you
!’ etc., but he knew very well that it was a load of compete tosh. I had my shag list to thank for that. I told him so. I said,