The Playdate (5 page)
What? I feel Mum’s temper rising in me. I gulp.
Count to ten.
“I actually don’t think for a second this has anything to do with what is good for Rae, Cal. I think it’s about what is good for you . . .”
“Tom—that’s not fair!” I hear myself exclaim down the phone.
Please, I think. Don’t do it, Callie. Don’t let him do this.
“Yeah?” he says. “You reckon? That’s exactly what it’s about, it’s . . .”
It’s no good. When Mum’s temper comes, it comes out of some place deep down inside me. I wish, not for the first time, that she’d been around long enough to teach me how to control it.
“Tom?” I say. “Why don’t you just . . . oh, just . . . oh, FUCK OFF!”
And it’s all too late. Slamming the phone down, I turn over in my bed and scream into my pillow.
Idiot!
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I’ve done it again. Every time.
I lie there, keeping my face buried in the soft cotton, annoyed with myself. It dampens quickly with my breath. Somehow the warmth is comforting.
Oh God. I bet Kate, his camera assistant, was there, listening to all of it. I bet she was lying with her head on Tom’s shoulder, with that amazing hair, the color of blackberries, tumbling all over him.
Why do I let him get to me?
Groaning, I roll out of bed and walk through to the sitting room, shaking my head. I will not cry. I will not cry. I will not let Tom rip away the tiny bit of forgotten self-esteem that Guy gave me back this week.
Aimlessly I pick up my address book, desperate to talk to someone, already knowing there is no point. The grubby pages are tattered, full of crossed-out contacts and out-of-date entries. I keep meaning to replace this book but secretly I know that if I removed all the school friends I left behind in Lincolnshire, and the college and work friends who eventually gave up calling when I gave birth at twenty-seven to a child with a heart condition and was too tired to meet them for a drink or even answer the phone for three years, there would be hardly anyone left.
I look at the few contacts who have hung on determinedly. They are fading away of their own accord, the ink blurring with age. I consider them for a second. Fi’s dad died three months
ago in hospital in Lincoln and I haven’t been in touch since she first rang from home to tell me, because, to be honest, she mentioned that her friends were “helping her through” and I realized, with a pinch of pain, that she didn’t include me in that category anymore. I can hardly ring in the middle of the night and ask her to listen as I pour all this out. And then there is Sophie. I count the months she’s been in Zurich on secondment. Four already, and I still haven’t got round to writing in the Swiss phone number she sent me on an ironic postcard of a mountain milkmaid—an almost-forgotten reference to the night she cried with laugher while I drunkenly tried to show her how to milk a cow on our bemused old cat—and have now probably lost it altogether. I suspect she sent it as a formality anyway, out of loyalty to a friendship that has gently dissipated into air.
I put the book down.
When did I lose the ability to keep and make friends? When did it become just Suzy?
Even though it’s only June, the air is balmy and thick. I undo the latch on the old wooden sash window. It lifts with a heavy creak. The tiny crack in the corner pane is spreading, I notice. I keep meaning to tell the landlord. One day I will open the window and it will just fall out.
A light catches my eye. The new woman at No. 15 is up, too. She is standing up, putting books on the shelf in her sitting room. There are hundreds of them. Just like Mum used to have. The shelves are nearly full, packed around the fireplace.
A book, I think, watching the woman. When was the last time I read a book? Mum and I used to devour them, passing them between us, waiting to see what the other one thought. Now I am just too tired even to open one. Tired with what, I sometimes think? Shopping and cooking. Washing and drying.
Taking lots of things to lots of places: Rae to school, the bins to the gate, our ancient car for inspection. My mind has become like a car engine with a faulty clutch. It revs too fast, without actually going anywhere.
The woman’s presence is oddly comforting. She looks quite old, with a thick, graying bob and black-rimmed glasses. I saw her husband coming back from the shop earlier. He is shorter than her, with longish sandy hair, sideburns, thick glasses, and a nose that looks too big for his face.
The woman turns round. That’s funny. She is wearing one of those soft velour dressing gowns that Mum used to wear, too. I touch the cracked windowpane and test it gently with my finger.
Up and down Churchill Road, darkened windows stare back.
Oh God. I can’t live like this anymore.
Rae’s illness has sucked us dry. I am a husk. An empty shell. No wonder other women avoid me. They sense that I will suck them dry, too. Maybe Tom is right. Maybe it is all about me. Me and my endless problems. Women sense I need everything and have nothing to give back in friendship. All of them, that is, apart from Suzy.
I watch the woman a little longer, staring at a cover. Will I ever meet her, I wonder? Or will we pass wordlessly in the street like I do with everyone else around here?
A memory drifts back to me. A warm evening the color of buttercups. I am eight, and walking shyly toward our farm cottage, entrusted with a tray of lasagne to take to our new farm assistant and his wife. It is almost too hot, the tea towel placed carefully on my outspread hands no longer absorbing the burning heat. I walk among the dried-mud tractor ruts of the farm track to a patch of nettles on the corner, where our
cat, Tuppence, lies grooming herself beside a pile of rusty old fence posts. The couple are lifting a sofa in through the cottage gate. The woman, who is wearing a spotty headscarf, turns and looks at me, and I see her eyes drop to my tray. My stomach lurches with doubt. What if they don’t want the lasagne? How does Mum know they will want it? Panic overcomes me. I stop and turn. Mum is watching me from the farmhouse window, willing me on with a fluttering hand, and I just know then, in my eight-year-old way, that sometimes you have to make an effort with people. You have to be brave; put yourself out there to get to know them.
And I did that for a while. I did it fine when I grew up. Then I forgot how to do it, and Mum wasn’t there to wave me on with her fluttering hand and reward me with a kiss when I returned.
I watch the woman across the road. She shuts her book and turns off the light. Maybe it’s because her dressing gown reminds me of Mum, but right at that minute I decide that it’s time to change things. She just looks nice.
Suzy woke up with a start.
Something was wrong.
“Mummy . . .” Henry murmured.
She rolled over, and pulled Henry’s body close to her.
“It’s OK, hon,” she said, not sure if it really was.
She lifted her head off his little wooden bed, where she’d been lying with her long legs tucked up, and looked at his bunny rabbit clock, its ears timed not to pop up till 7
A.M.
The face said 2:40
A.M.
She turned round and sat up. “Jez?” she called into the darkness of the house.
Nothing.
Slowly, she pulled away from Henry limb by limb, till she could maneuver her body out of his warm little bed. Pulling her cardigan around her pajamas, she padded silently down the stairs to the hallway, where a single lamp continued to perform its duty of waiting for Jez to come home. Nothing. His shoes
and coat were not there. Still on his Friday night out with Don Berry. His third night out in town since he’d got back from Vancouver on Monday.
She padded upstairs again and sat in the hallway. If she looked up to the second-floor ceiling above, then down to the hallway below, this is where she had the most space. God, how she craved space.
She shut her eyes and summoned a picture of home: hiking out onto the mesa, through silver birch and juniper bushes dotted like bristle across a plain, above which pristine clouds scudded at breakneck speed against a deep blue sky; finding a place to camp against a rock, where she could sit and watch the deer trail past, the crunch of their feet on ice the only sound out there apart from the occasional plane landing in Denver, twenty miles away. If she tried hard now, she could even conjure up in her mind the soft dusk there, and the way the light bathed her skin in gold dust before twisting into great swirls of violet and crimson across the atmosphere. And oh, the stars. Millions of them—not the occasional dim glow you saw in the mean piece of murky sky that topped London like a badly fitting lid.
Homesickness knotted in her stomach. Surely he couldn’t have just forgotten Colorado. Who she was?
A new memory floated into her mind. Of Jez appearing at work one Friday and motioning her over with a smile. In his hand, he dangled a key.
“Bob’s lent me his cabin for the weekend,” he’d said in that deep English voice that sent teasing reverberations through her body. He raised his eyebrows and dropped his arm behind her back.
“Cool,” she said, smiling, feeling his fingers stroke her gently, desperate already for more.
She had taken him for his first wilderness hike that weekend. They’d climbed down into a ravine hewn by water from towering rock over millions of years, and walked along the sunlit river for hours till they reached one of her favorite lakes. Nobody else had been there so they’d laid out a blanket on the bank and swum naked out to the center of the lake, her arms round his neck, feeling him close. There was something about the fact that she knew he couldn’t get home without her that had thrilled her that day. Jez was all hers.
“You like it?” she’d asked.
“Yes,” he’d smiled, rubbing one hand down over her buttocks and thighs, her skin taut in the chilled water.
“There are lots of places like this. Where nobody goes. I can show you.”
“Don’t you get scared?” he asked her. “Out here on your own?”
“Of what?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Bears?”
“Bears are OK,” she replied. “You just throw a stone—shout. Wave your arms.”
She remembered how he laughed. “You’re an interesting girl,” he said, pulling her farther into him.
Back at the cabin in the late afternoon they’d found a hot tub out back.
“You know, I think this may be the best day of my life,” she’d murmured drunkenly in his ear, as they’d sat naked, their legs entwined, drinking beer, steam floating around them.
“Hmm,” he’d said, nuzzling farther down into her neck. She’d waited for him to agree.
But he never did. And she was going to have to face up to it—he never was going to.
Her husband had been an enigma then, and he was an enigma now.
Suzy yawned and headed past Henry’s room to her own bedroom, and climbed into the middle of her empty, king-sized bed.
The sheets were cold. She hugged herself close for warmth.
Tomorrow. Tomorrow she’d make the phone call. What choice did she have?
It was eleven o’clock in the morning when the doorbell rang. Debs lifted her head in the bedroom upstairs, surprised. Who was that? Who would be calling on a Saturday morning? Had Allen’s cricket match been called off?
The sun was back in the bedroom today, projecting laser displays of dust beams. She had held out her hand to touch one earlier, watching particles of human skin, loam, and hair left by the people who had slept here for a hundred years dance round her fingers.
She hadn’t slept too badly in the end, dropping off about 3
A.M.
Thoughts of the Poplar girl hadn’t kept her awake, for once. Allen had spent the night, in his green paisley pajamas, firmly on the other side of the bed. She had wondered if that would change when they moved to the new house, but so far there was no sign of it.
She’d heard the toilet next door flush once and not again. That would be bearable, she supposed. She’d have to wait and see. She hadn’t noticed her neighbor upstairs in Hackney for
three years. And then one night she heard the door opening, her heels clacking on the stairs. Then it never stopped.