In Too Deep (10 page)

It wasn't so surprising, I suppose, that I should have failed to recognise her. Fourteen years had passed and a lot of toll had been taken. Life, some people call it; the daily grind of growing up and taking on the scars and nests of wrinkles that come with raising kids, trying to mine a lively ore from the stupor of a teaching post, secretarial work or something yet more manual and muscle-aching, saving hard – basically doing whatever it takes to ensure survival. People change like the wind, outside as well as in.

That afternoon, I found myself on a street in a relatively far-away town, attending to some inoffensive manner of business and trying to spend some of the spare minutes until my appointment doing a spot of window-shopping, when, without the least bit of warning, the heavens opened. Not just rain, either, but a deluge. The sky convulsed and the rain fell in great heaves, the low gloom spouted flames of lightning, and thunder clapped and rippled overhead, the angriest sound in the whole world short of a bitter wife scolding a long-whipped husband.

In a mass of panic, people began to run for cover, barging their way into every available shadowy recess or gaping doorway. I ran too, blind to direction, all notions of logic pumping from my mind with every flailing gasp of drenched air. All along the way, bodies huddled against shop-front windows while candy-striped canopies and awnings strained and sagged above their bowed heads in a valiant effort to protect them from the worst edges of the onslaught. I blundered past these walls of terrified faces, up along the street, my own fear as thick as a second apple in my throat, my feet battering something jazzy out of the pavement.

It must have been mere seconds, surely no more than a minute at the most, but the weather's beating was so intense and brutal that I had just about surrendered to my fate when sanctuary revealed itself, in the form of an already occupied telephone box. A door wrestled partially open just as I was about to pass, a God-given chasm barely enough to reveal a beckoning hand of mercy. Without thought or consideration, I plunged inside.

‘Thank you,' I gasped, just as soon as I could catch a swallow of breath, and I felt myself nodding a few times, as if the gesture could add something in the way of gratitude that no mere words could hope to approach.

The owner of that helping hand, a woman of somewhere around my own age, did something with her mouth, a certain leftward dragging of her lips that seemed to resonate with the oddest sense of familiarity, but then she turned her dishevelled gaze out through the scratched plastic-glass walls to the traumatised day beyond and whatever had stirred awake in my mind or in my heart drifted back into its slumber again.

‘It's like the end of the world out there,' she said, just as a sodden sheet of newspaper wrapped itself hard against the angle of the box. Instinctively, I squinted to read the headline, something about a triumphant piece of deconstructive surgery on a set of conjoined twins, the swapping of organs and eyes and that sort of thing, a genuine honest-to-goodness miracle, but before I could gather in any sort of really worthwhile details, a cross-wind hit and dragged the sheet free to go flapping and tumbling on down the street.

She glanced at me after a moment had passed. ‘You okay now?'

‘Yeah, I guess so.' I tried on a smile that wrinkled the bridge of my nose, and shrugged. ‘That'll teach me to go out without checking on the weather forecast,' I added, words that felt and tasted stupid as they lay jumbled in my throat, but which sounded ten or a hundred times worse once they had jarred themselves free into actual sound. Wind howled at our backs and all around us, buffeting the phone box in a truly bullying way. ‘Thanks again for letting me in,' I said. ‘If you hadn't I'd very likely be on my way to Oz right now.'

‘It's fine,' she said, and reached up to pull a rope of tawny fringe from her eyes. There wasn't room for so much as a handkerchief between us, hardly the situation to find yourself in with a stranger, unless that stranger happens to be a beautiful woman, yet even in this confined space she managed to study me up and down. That rolling stare felt familiar too, its detached consideration swinging between clemency and judgement, and I tried my best not to flinch, not to yield too much detail so early on in the game.

‘You're soaked right through.'

Her large witch-hazel eyes glistened with a magical intensity, set to heightened life by her own harried encounter with the storm, and perhaps too by finding my stranger's body in such close and sudden proximity with her own. After a veritable black hole of a pause her mouth shifted again, restless with more to say.

Trying to help, I refreshed my smile, that same pinch-nosed smirk that, even with the hindrance of a lazily sprouting beard, had this way of making a fourteen-year-old boy out of my face.

‘I'm sorry,' she said, after a silence began to pool between us. ‘It's just, well, do I know you? I mean to say, you look familiar to me. At least, I think you do. You're not a teacher at my son's school, are you? I know it's silly, but there's something …'

‘I'm Billy,' I said, and had a go at raising and offering my hand. The result wasn't a triumph, but she recognised the effort at least and played along. We grasped hands with some awkward flexing of wrists.

‘Rebecca.'

And that, for me anyway, was the key to the door.

‘Rebecca,' I said, putting on a thoughtful act. ‘I knew a Rebecca once.' She deserved the chance to catch up; it felt like the very least I could do, in the circumstances. ‘Except she was a Becky then, not a Rebecca.' I shrugged my shoulders again, even though the slightest movement had consequences here in the confines of this box. ‘Well, that was a long time ago. In Douglas. And I suppose she would have outgrown the Becky sooner or later. I mean, we all have to grow up, don't we?'

All that witch-hazel blazed, and I was overcome with details of such intensity that I just had to wonder how they could ever have been forgotten. Golden summer times spent climbing trees, building bonfires, tossing a ball around and catching frogs; then, later on, holding hands and learning the rules of different games.

‘In Douglas? Oh my God, I don't believe it. Not Billy … It is, isn't it? Billy, from …'

I smiled again, while all around us the veils of time just slipped away. She looked the same, I realised now. The skin around her eyes was a little more stretched, her hair was done differently and her mouth had lost some of its younger ease, but those were minor alterations. With very little effort I could see her as she used to be: bossy, sharp as a wasp's peck, and lovely. None of this made sense, of course, but I had grown used to that a long time ago.

For the next ten minutes or so we were twelve or thirteen again, had pitched back in time to balance once more on that tricky cusp where things said in jest carried serious implications quite often far into the future, where the need to know everything about everything and everyone felt as critical as breathing or learning off the latest chart-topping hit, and where tomorrow seemed years off in the misty distance and the age of some such ridiculous number as twenty or, God forbid, thirty was too mind-blowing to even contemplate.

By mutual consent, the formalities were bypassed, the questions about parents and siblings, that sort of thing. ‘I've read some of your work,' she said, her tone a coin toss really between disparaging and complimentary, but most likely neither, just a typical echo of the pragmatism I so well remembered now. I smiled, but ventured no further down that road; not wanting to have my feelings hurt, I didn't press the subject. It was enough, I suppose, to know that she was aware of me, that I had crossed her mind at least occasionally in all the years since we'd been apart. I enquired about her own lot in life, not trying to probe, honestly wanting the answer to be somewhere in the affirmative. She was a housewife, she said, daring me to respond. Her husband was an accountant with a well-known firm here in town, had just recently, in fact, stepped up into a senior position. He was older than her – ‘by a few years
'
was how she put it – but they were really quite deliriously happy. Life had found a good shape for her, granted her all manner of precious gifts.

Together, she and Zachary – Zachary being Mr Perfectly Right – had been blessed with two beautiful children, a boy, Raymond, and a girl, Elisabeth, a nice house in the suburbs and two cars. All in all, she had lucked into an exceedingly comfortable existence. So, yes, she had carved out a wonderful life for herself. I wanted to ask about her medical ambitions, at exactly which point along the teenage road did dreams of surgical greatness begin to dissipate and, also, why she and the clearly wonderful Zach had chosen such full and cumbersome names for such young children, but I wasn't certain that our time apart could be scaled so easily as to allow me such ease with the facts of her current and recent world, and I certainly didn't want to start a fight, at least not while we were standing almost toe to toe in a telephone box.

‘Are you married?' she said.

I had noticed her checking out my hand for signs of a ring, but of course not every married man wore a wedding ring. I shook my head, not quite sure why I was even considering telling a lie. On a page, I can lie with the very best of them, but that's because no one has to watch my lips move. And Becky had always had a natural radar when it came to my tall tales and excuses. Don't ever try taking me for a fool, she used to say, stating the patently obvious. I didn't doubt that Rebecca would have inherited a lot, if not all, of Becky's hard-earned talents.

‘No,' I said, trying to make nothing out of the fact. ‘So far, I've been able to dodge that particular fastball.'

‘Well, is there someone special?' I remembered her as one of those children who could never let a cut just heal. Her nails were forever picking at a scab, as if in the flow or trickle of blood there could be wondrous secrets to behold. Her picking hand had crept up into view now; she held it crooked between her chest and mine, and when she spoke, her fingers shifted and flittered, seemingly of their own accord, but almost as if they were directing the words.

I looked into her eyes and recalled games played back in overgrown fields, games of chase, of hide and seek and, as time went by and her curiosity became catching, contests of truth or dare.

‘No,' I replied, knowing that it was what she wanted to hear, whatever her reasons. ‘No one special. Not for a long time.'

The rain outside the box began to sag and, rather too quickly, abate. The breeze held sway a little longer, and the glass walls around us continued to groan against the strain. Thunder rolled, but with less vehemence than before, and I knew that the storm had already put miles between itself and this street. Occasional streaks of lightning continued to flicker glare into the afternoon, though hardly more now than spastic twinkles, little obligatory reflexes of light. Our time was up all over again; people were already peeling themselves from their places of shelter, and now was the time to pick up the dropped treads of our lives, such as they had become. In another few minutes, our situation, a man and a woman pinned together into a telephone box built for one, strangers or, worse still, age-old friends, would rightfully cause eyebrows to start twitching skywards.

‘Listen, Becky, I mean Rebecca,' I said, deciding to make things easy for her, whether or not easy was what was required. ‘I've got an appointment that I really should try to keep. But this has meant the world to me, running into you like this, really, it has. Here,' I added, just as the phone-box door's accordion hinges bent into action and spilled me out onto the street. I went into an inside pocket, found a pen and a small notebook and scribbled down a number and, after a moment of pause, an address too. She took the piece of paper I held out, read it in her old meticulous way then folded it into perfect quarters, or at least as close to perfection as could be achieved on a page with a perforated fringe, and tucked it into her purse.

‘Thanks,' she said, promising nothing. A little thaw was probably too much to have hoped for, but I was still dis-appointed.

‘I wish to God we had more time,' I said, meaning that with all my heart. ‘There's so much I'd like to ask you, and it would be great to go back over old times.' A smile was probably pushing the boat out beyond its safe depth, but I'm not the worst swimmer in the world. ‘We had some good ones, didn't we?'

‘We were kids,' she said, her words dismissive but not unyielding, and she did that thing with her mouth again. I watched, feeling like the gesture was for my benefit, that old Zachary didn't get nearly the same feeling of warmth from that tiny tugging. Most likely, he wouldn't even have noticed it, just as he probably missed the way she liked to touch the little silver hoop in her earlobe whenever she listened to a song she liked or how she had always tried to deny a fancy for a particularly vibrant shade of the colour red. Or maybe I had him wrong, maybe his accountant's hawkish eyes logged everything, and understood them, treasured them for what they were, his wife's beautiful foibles.

I nodded and held out a hand. She took it, her fingers as cool and delicate as I remembered, and delicious in my grip. I did my best not to hold on too tight, but she winced anyway, ever so slightly. Perhaps that had become a reflex reaction for her. ‘Well, Rebecca,' I said. Then, with a smile, I nodded goodbye.

‘Wait,' she said, with enough urgency of tone to make her blush.

I stood there, half-turned.

‘I have your number,' she said, ‘and I promise to call. But you know how it is, Bill. With the best intentions in the world, things happen. We get locked into other tasks and plans get delayed, a week or two, then a month. Then, before you know where you are, another fourteen years have rumbled by. You start covering up the first grey hairs and counting the wrinkles, and soon enough you've run clean out of time.'