The Playdate (4 page)

“Debs, don’t start,” sighed a voice behind her.

She turned to see Allen, holding a screwdriver.

“I wasn’t . . .” she exclaimed, jumping back, but he turned and walked out before she could finish.

How annoying. Now he’d be watching her again.

That was no good.

Lifting her head, she looked at herself in a mirror above the marble fireplace, and smiled hard till her eyes joined in behind her glasses. Then she walked out of the sitting room into their new Victorian hall. The hall was still making her uneasy. Compared with the tiny box rooms of her purpose-built flat in Hackney, which an architect had seemingly designed by stretching out a human then drawing a line for walls by their head and feet, this hall felt like a cavern. A cavern she was lost in. It stretched up to the crumbling ceiling cornice, where spiders hung watching, then soared up the stairwell to the darkened first floor far above. No. She didn’t like it. But she wasn’t going to tell Allen that. Quickly, she walked along the corridor to the dining room at the back of the house.

“We have our own stairs!” she called, trying to make her voice light. Allen smiled a tight smile, and continued erecting a shelf unit, pushing his glasses up his nose where they’d slipped.

What was she saying? What did he care? God knows he’d
trudged up and down enough stairs in his mother’s gloomy little King’s Cross mews, taking her cups of tea.

“Can you hold this upright a sec, love?” Allen said.

“Course, love,” she replied, holding a piece of MDF shelving as he pushed against it with a screwdriver.

No, she mused, looking down at Allen’s squat, freckled hands twirling the screwdriver, his face set in concentration. Perhaps she’d been too quick to assume the value of having her own stairs in this new house.

But what could she do? It wasn’t her fault. It was all those months. All those months of the woman upstairs coming in at 12:30
A.M.
Clicking her court shoes on the vinyl floor of the communal hall. Always eight steps. Then fifteen thuds up the stairs, eight more clicks past Debs’s door, then fifteen more thuds up to her front door.

“Come on,” Debs would say, lying in bed, her ears stuffed with earplugs, a pillow held round her ears. Surely tonight the woman would get the right key? But no. Mostly she tried two, delaying the inevitable banging shut of her front door, and then the padding across the floor above Debs, before the telly started up, invading Debs’s blackened bedroom with its muffled rumbling for the next two hours as she lay supine, her jaw aching with the grinding, her eye sockets heavy and bruised from hours of staring angrily at the ceiling in the dark.

Allen took the MDF off Debs, making her start.

“Right. I’ve got it. You don’t want to make us a cup of tea, do you, love?”

“Good idea,” she said cheerfully.

Debs wandered into the kitchen, where a box of her own familiar mugs sat next to a box of china teacups from Allen’s mother’s house.

Yes, stairs, she thought, putting tea bags in Allen’s mother’s teapot. She’d spent so much time focusing on finally having her own stairs, she’d forgotten something very important.

Sides.

Terraced houses have sides, too.

And now that Allen was finally occupied with a task, it was something she was going to explore.

“Thanks, love,” he said as she set a cup of tea beside him with a custard cream.

“Right, I might do another box,” she said, trying to sound casual. “If you’re all right here?”

She held her breath. Allen nodded as he drank his tea, his eyes already fixed back on the instructions for the unit.

Trying not to run, Debs returned to the hall and grabbed one of the boxes Allen had so carefully color-coded. Orange for kitchen, red for books, orange and red for cookery books. Grabbing a yellow box—clothes—she headed up the stairs and into the large bedroom at the front of the house that straddled the hall and sitting room below. She shut the door quietly, crossed to the windows, and closed the curtains, sinking the room into a velvety pink glow.

Debs returned to the door, and put the box of clothes gently down on the floor. Then, kneeling beside it, she pushed her ear firmly into the wall that she shared with the American woman. The patterned floral wallpaper smelled of dust. She smoothed her face along it until the raised stalk of a wisteria rested against her cheekbone.

“Aaahh,” she wanted to say. “Aaahh,” with the relief of it.

There was nothing at first. A tiny rustling.

Dust mites, she told herself, pushing her ear harder against the paper. Or ants.

Another moment passed. What was that now? If she held her breath and stayed still she could just pick up a faint tick-tick-ticking. Water pipes, perhaps? Now, that would be OK. She probably wouldn’t even hear that from a few inches away, and certainly not from the bed.

So far so good. She moved herself closer and waited. A minute passed, then another.

Then another. There was no more sound.

She pulled her head away from the wall a little and, as she waited, began to sort through the box, putting Allen’s ties in one pile, and his brown and gray socks in separate ones.

Could she be this lucky? That there would be no . . .

“CAN YOU JUST WAIT TILL I’VE FINISHED, JEZ?”

The muffled shout was such a shock, Debs jerked her head away from the wall, feeling a ping in her neck.

What? Where on earth had that come from?

She stayed crouched on the floor, looking around nervously as if the owner of the voice were in the room.

Debs waited a second, then carefully placed her ear back at the wall. There was a new noise now. Like a tap dripping. No. Lighter, like a . . .

It couldn’t be.

The flush of the toilet right beside her head almost threw her back on her knees. A great gurgling and groaning of pipes followed.

A toilet. There must be an en suite bathroom in the bedroom next door. With a great big noisy toilet that she would hear throughout the night?

Palpitations hammered in Debs’s chest like a brass knocker. A pressurized sensation started in her head, as if someone had put a hand on her scalp and was pushing down.

All of a sudden, the bedroom door nudged her leg.

Allen.

With a start, Debs jerked upright, plunged her hands back into the box of clothes she’d brought up, and pulled them out, sending one of Allen’s cricket ties flying right across the room.

“Everything all right, love?” Allen asked, putting his head round the door and looking at the tie now dangling off the dressing table, then at the closed curtains. He walked over and opened them.

She smiled hard, rubbing her neck. “Just unpacking.”

He wrinkled his nose. “Probably best to wait till we’ve cleared the hall,” he said.

“Hmm, maybe you’re right,” she replied, standing up.

Allen put out his hand to help her. Then he looked around at the large bedroom. The sunlight burst through the windows and spread a great buttery beam across the walls. The bed was freshly made with a cream eiderdown they’d bought, with matching wooden lamps on either side.

“Yes . . . We’re going to be happy here,” Allen said, nodding his head.

It sounded like an order, she thought. And after the last six months, she couldn’t blame him.

Debs heard the front door slam next door and someone leave through the gate. Were they going to make that noise every time they left the house?

“Oh yes, love,” she said, turning back and smiling at Allen. “Yes.”

5
Callie

It takes me a while to realize it’s a phone I can hear ringing.

The thing is, sometimes I dream in sounds. I know most people dream only in pictures, but not me, not since I was a child. Typically, the scenario is that I am sitting somewhere empty like Dad’s potato field in winter under that flat, mouse-gray Lincolnshire sky, hearing nothing but silence. Then the sounds start to build up around me, each tone perfect and unadulterated in my ear. Maybe it begins with the wind breathing past me, rustling branches of a tree. Music starts, like gusts of air blowing through empty irrigation pipes in discordant notes. Then a heartbeat joins in. A heavy, booming heartbeat. That’s usually when I wake up and find myself sweating, my own heart thumping with panic. I jump up, run into Rae’s room, and check to make sure she is still breathing.

But it isn’t my heart beating, or a dream, or even Rae whimpering in her sleep that wakes me up tonight. In fact, it is Tom.

“Hi,” he shouts down the phone. “I got your message. What is it?”

“Hang on,” I say, scrabbling to get the phone by my ear. There is a faint echo from his end. Satellite phone.

“What’s up?” he says, sounding concerned.

“Oh. No. Rae’s fine,” I say, trying to sit up.

“Well, what?” he snaps.

“Tom?” I reply, opening my eyes and blinking. “You know it’s two in the morning?”

There is a silence as he works out that in Sri Lanka he is five hours ahead, and not behind, U.K. time.

“Shit. Have I done it again?”

Tom is a skilled wildlife cameraman who could tell you everything you’d like to know about the breeding habits of a golden jackal or fennec fox, but when it comes to numbers, he is bordering on the equivalent of dyslexic. In the old days, I found it sweet and funny when he woke me at 2
A.M.
from Uganda or Papua New Guinea, and heard his apologetic disbelief that he had cocked up again. “Go on then, tell me what you’ve been doing,” I’d say, burying into blackness under the duvet so I could pretend he was lying beside me, hearing about his day spent searching a cave for a rare wolf spider or getting stuck up a tree with a camera while his guides chased away the mountain lion underneath.

But Tom and I don’t joke anymore. Ever.

We just get to the point.

“I rang because I’ve got some news,” I say.

“What?”

“Um . . . well, I’m going back to work.”

There is a pause. A great big pause that stretches from London across the starry night of the Arabian Sea to Sri Lanka.

Maybe I’ll be lucky, I think. After all, I was lucky with Rae when I told her earlier this evening. She was so excited she spat out the popcorn we were having for our weekly Friday night “midnight feast.”

“You’re going to work?” she had shrieked. “What, like Hannah’s mum? A farmer?”

“A pharmacist,” I laughed, picturing Caroline tossing hay in her Karen Millen suit and highlighted bob. Rae has already told me that Hannah is her big hope for a best friend.

“No, I’ve got a different job. But you know what that means? It means that I won’t be here to pick you up after school.”

“Yippee!” Rae shouted. “So I can go to after-school club with Hannah?”

“Uh, yes,” I replied, confused. Grateful. Already missing her.

So that was Rae. But Tom is Tom.

“What—is that a joke?” he growls on the phone.

“No.”

I sigh.

“Tom, listen. I can’t stay at home forever. It was only meant to be six months, then it was a year. Now it’s five. I have to go back to work sometime.”

He says nothing, so I tiptoe on.

“I actually just rang Guy at Rocket on the off-chance he had a few days’ freelance work, and then he just asked me out of the blue to do the sound for Loll Parker’s first short film—the Swedish artist, who did the thing at the Tate?”

I pause, fighting the small involuntary smile that keeps pulling at the corners of my mouth since I spoke to Guy on Tuesday.

“Bloody hell, Cal!” I want Tom to say. “Well done! Well done for being so good at your bloody job that your old boss has snapped your arm off the minute you ring after five years!”

“Sorry, Cal. Am I missing something?” he actually says. “So, who’s going to look after Rae?”

It still feels like the universe has shifted off its axis when that coldness emerges from Tom’s lips. My Tom always spoke as if there were a joke coming at the end of his sentence. My Tom never spoke like this. Not once in four years. I try to remind myself he’s just worried about Rae.

“Well, she’ll go to after-school club for a few weeks,” I say, trying to remind myself he’ll need time to get used to the idea, just like I have. “Which she’s really excited about, by the way. And the staff are trained in first aid, like teachers. But if the Loll Parker job goes OK and I like it, and Guy offers me more work, then I don’t know . . . I’ll probably find a childminder who can fit round my hours.”

There is another, even longer pause.

“Tom?” I say.

“What?” he replies curtly.

I take a chance. “Look—I know this is a lot to ask, but could you talk it through with me? Guy said that a lot of the tech’s moved on. I said I’m sure I’ll be fine, but actually, I’m completely petrified . . .”

There is another silence.

“Actually, Cal, I couldn’t give a shit. I can’t believe you’re dumping Rae with strangers. After everything we’ve been through with her. And I’m five thousand fucking miles away. What am I supposed to do?”

Tonight Rae and I celebrated my new job. We made “cocktails” of lemonade, apple juice, and pink food coloring, and danced to Girls Aloud.

I take a long breath. Stay calm, I think.

“Tom. I don’t know—maybe . . . You have been away a lot this year, and . . .”

“Yeah, well, that’s what happens when you have two lots of rent to pay, Cal.”

I exhale.

“OK, but the thing is, I don’t think you realize how good she is. She wants to do stuff on her own. I found out from her teacher last week that she took herself off to join the lunchtime choir all by herself, and now she’s excited because they’re doing an end-of-term concert. And you should have seen her today, trying to run to the park with her friend. She’s just desperate to get away from me. She just wants to be normal. I mean, Tom, really, she is normal.”

And then I throw my last attempt into the ring.

“And, you know, it means I’ll be earning my own money again and not asking you all the time. So maybe you won’t have to work away so much . . .”

He actually snorts now.

“You know what, Cal? That’s the thing. It’s always about you.”