Whatever You Love (4 page)

It was autumn – the town was unexpectedly golden, that year. It had been a good summer and holiday trade was up. There were optimistic reports in the local newspaper amidst talk of building a pier. Most seaside towns lament their tacky tourist image. We aspired to it. I was thinking of how I should make the effort to get out more. My life post-Mum was distant, indistinct, and I was vaguely aware that I was using it as an excuse. I had a nice bunch of friends at the clinic and we went out drinking once in a while. I still saw a man I thought of as my university boyfriend, Nick, who came over every other weekend but was due to move up north soon to take up a teaching post. My life was comfortably suspended between that of a student and that of the woman I imagined I would be in some misty future elsewhere, but only if the future was the one who took the initiative. I wasn’t unhappy, just apathetic.

I was writing up some notes in my office when there was a light tap at the door. It was Mary, one of our occupational therapists. ‘Can you take my four o’clock?’ she said. ‘The school have just called.’ She already had her mac on. She was only halfway in the door and drumming her fingers on the edge of it, impatient to be off. Mary annoyed me – we were constantly making allowances for her childcare crises. Later, of course, I changed my tune on that issue, but that afternoon, I lingered long enough over my answer to give her a moment’s doubt over whether I had been the right person to choose. ‘I was really hoping to finish this lot…’ I waved my hand vaguely over the papers on my desk, half of which were completed already. In truth, I wasn’t busy that day. When Mary tapped on my door, I had been thinking about whether or not I should join a dance class of some sort to keep fit. Flamenco, perhaps. I had been picturing my hand movements and wondering how long it took to get good enough to wear a frilly dress and those severe eyebrows. The Town Hall did Ceroc every Tuesday but I fancied something a bit more dramatic. With flamenco, it wouldn’t matter that I didn’t have a partner, presumably. I could concentrate on clapping.

‘Jamie’s off,’ said Mary, although she was too proud to allow a pleading note to creep into her voice, like most of us would have done, in her position.

I sighed, shrugged. ‘All right then, tell your four o’clock where I am.’

‘Thanks,’ she said, stepping into the office and handing me the folder which she had ready in the other hand.

While she retreated, I pushed my papers to one side and laid the folder down. I opened it and glanced at the registration form: David Needham.

There was another light tap. ‘Come in,’ I said.

I had the impression that he stooped slightly as he entered, although of course he wasn’t taller than the door frame – it was more a gesture of politeness, as if he knew he’d been fobbed off on me and was apologising for how much of him there was to fob.

I glanced up and thought immediately, oh, it’s him, but again, he showed no sign of recognising me. Why should he? It was our third meeting in four years. He moved towards the chair in front of my desk but I gestured towards my examination table, which had a fresh sheet of paper on it. I looked down at his file as I said, ‘Would you remove your shirt for me, please?’

He sat on the edge of the examination table and removed his shirt slowly while I watched. When he had taken it off, he stood up, took a step towards the chair in front of my desk and tossed the shirt over the back of it, then went back to the examination table and sat on the edge of it again, all without looking in my direction. His nipples were dark brown, and taut in the cool of my office. He had a thick mass of chest hair that tapered towards his belly button. He sat up very straight, holding his stomach in. I had noticed over my years of examining patients that men did that every bit as much as women. ‘Is that how you sit when you’re at your desk?’ I asked, allowing a note of scepticism in my voice.

‘Well, I work at a drawing board,’ he said, a little defensively, meeting my gaze. ‘It’s difficult not to hunch.’

I looked down at his records and asked him some questions, then we went through the usual routine; stand in front of me, hands on hips, bend forward and back, then from side to side… My women patients usually respond well to this, understanding what I need and wanting to be helpful, whereas men are embarrassed by it, unused as they are to being observed. David, however, did not look embarrassed. He met my gaze steadily – it was hard not to take this as a challenge.

‘Would you mind lying on your front while I examine you?’ I gestured towards the bed. I stayed seated while he lay down, then said, ‘Actually, I think it’s better if we do this on the chair. Sorry. Would you mind?’ He raised his head. I indicated the chair. ‘Sorry,’ I said again.

He sat up. ‘Should I put my shirt back on?’ There was a hint of irritation in his voice.

I paused. ‘Not just yet.’

As he walked to the chair, I rose from behind my desk. ‘Do you do much sport?’

‘Football sometimes,’ he said. ‘Walking, does that count?’

‘Depends how fast you walk. I think it would be a good idea to tape your back.’

‘Tape it?’

‘Sit up straight, shoulders here.’

I positioned myself behind the chair, rested my hands lightly on his shoulders and pulled them backwards, so he was in the correct posture. ‘We aren’t designed to sit, I’m sure the occupational therapist has told you. We’re designed to lie down, stand and squat, that’s it. Sitting isn’t natural and if you slump like you do… I’ve checked your neck and your shoulder girdle; now I want to take a look at your joints. Would you raise your arms please?’

I get sleepy in the afternoons if my office is warm so I always keep it a little too cold for patients. He had goose pimples on his upper arms. His biceps were taut – he must have weight- trained at some stage.

‘How’s my posture generally?’

‘Terrible, but that’s common with tall people. I’m going to check your soft tissue.’

He had a lot of fine dark hairs across his shoulders and back. They were quite curly, which surprised me because the hair on his head was almost straight. There was a substantial scattering of white amongst the black: a premonition, as it turned out. He was to go grey not long after Betty was born. ‘Okay, you can put your shirt back on now.’

He looked at me as I went back behind my desk and picked up my biro. ‘I thought you were going to tape my back.’

I looked back at him as he picked up his shirt from the back of the chair and pushed his arms into the sleeves, shrugging it on to his shoulders. ‘You’re very hairy,’ I said.

‘Thank you,’ he replied with a smile.

I smiled back. ‘It wasn’t a compliment, Mr Needham, it was an observation. Before I can tape you, I need you to go home and shave. I can tape your shoulder blades in place and it will improve your posture, but it’s sticky tape. When you take it off, it will be like ripping a plaster off.’

He pulled a face. ‘How much of this tape do you put on?’

I stood up again, slowly this time, and walked around the desk that stood between us. He stared at me, not yet the hot- eyed stare but something that was moving towards it, something that was observing me. I walked toward him. He was silent. I stood behind his chair, and paused for a moment. Then I lifted my hands and placed them lightly on his shoulders – very lightly. He had stopped buttoning his shirt mid-way and was quite still. It was an office shirt, a blue one, short-sleeved, the optimistic remnant of a summer wardrobe. Even though I had already touched his naked torso, there was something about the firmness of his shoulders through his clothing that was almost unbearably arousing. I loved his shoulders, not too broad, but sinewy. For a man who claimed not to exercise there wasn’t an ounce of fat on him. I rested my hands there for a minute, then let them dribble down his shoulder blades, fingers splayed, as if they were two cascades of water. ‘I place two strips here, going from top to bottom of your shoulders, like bra straps…’ I paused. He didn’t move or speak. I wanted him to turn around in his chair, put his arms tight around my waist and bury his face in my stomach – no, more, I wanted him to push me back on to the examination table and raise my skirt. My God, I thought, I’m sexually harassing a patient. ‘Then I take another piece, and get you to sit upright, in a good posture, and I place it horizontally across here.’ I drew a line from one imaginary strap to the other with the tip of my finger.

‘Will this involve my nipples at all?’ he asked quietly.

Phew, I thought. Now – technically speaking – he is sexually harassing me.

‘Your nipples are quite safe,’ I said quietly. I paused, removed my hands from his back, then walked back behind my desk.

He watched me but didn’t speak. I sat and made a note on his file, acutely aware of how intently he was looking at me, and aware that neither of us was attempting a wisecrack of any sort. It was stalemate. In the formal scheme of our relationship – patient and physiotherapist – I was in the position of power, but it was as if we were now balanced precariously on either end of a see-saw, each of us waiting for the other to shift their weight. I sensed it was up to me to indicate whether or not I would welcome a further advance on his part.

I closed his file. ‘I sometimes shave patients myself,’ I said. ‘It’s quite difficult to reach your own back and you’re very hairy. Do you have anyone at home who could do it for you?’

He pulled a face, lifted his hands to show me his palms were empty, then let them drop. ‘No one.’

‘Neither do I,’ I said quickly, drawing breath immediately afterwards. Strictly speaking, that was not a piece of information that he needed.

His smile seemed to take about five minutes and stretch from one wall of my office to the other. His teeth were neat and white.

I was twirling the biro between my fingers as we looked at each other. All at once, it slipped my grasp and somersaulted across the desk. I made a clumsy attempt to grab at it.

‘Do you often drop your biro?’ he asked, still smiling.

‘How’s the pen factory?’ I said.

‘Great,’ he said. ‘I’ve been promoted. I get free pens. I’ll get you some if you like. You obviously lose them quite a lot.’

‘Why didn’t you call?’ I asked. ‘Is that a euphemism?’

‘The pens? Absolutely. Why did you run off?’ he replied. ‘You’re always running off.’

‘I didn’t,’ I said, hunting self-consciously for the biro amongst my paperwork.

‘You did,’ he said, ‘but if you shave my back I’ll forgive you. Let’s do it at your place. Maybe we should go now.’

‘My place is a mess.’

‘I’ll help you tidy up.’

I sat back in my seat and looked at him. How had this happened?

We looked at each other then he said, his voice thoughtful and soft, almost as if he was talking to himself, ‘You’re so slender. I’d probably snap you like a twig.’

His smile died – he stared at me, that unmistakable, brown- eyed stare. I felt my lips part, almost imperceptibly. I looked away. I smiled at the wall, then looked back and, yes, of course, he was smiling too and I felt dizzy with lust, wildly happy and very confused. ‘Your front teeth are slightly longer than your canines,’ I said. ‘Has anyone ever told you that?’

‘Is that good or bad?’

I finally located the biro, which had managed to slip between two sheets of paper. I made another note, closed his file, then looked at him and said something I had wanted to say to him ever since we first met that time in a pub, all those years ago. ‘My name is Laura.’

We had sex that evening, up against a tree in the park. I had never done it on a first date before. I had never had sex like that on any sort of date – the boys I had gone out with previously were nothing like David. Physiotherapists tend to attract men who want mothering – and nothing could have been further from David Needham’s mind.

*

After we had finished the professional part of our encounter, in my consulting room that afternoon, David looked at his watch and said, ‘What time can you get out of here?’

‘Five o’clock,’ I replied.

‘I’ll wait in Reception,’ he said, rose from his chair and left. Most men would have suggested it, rather than stating it. Most men would have waited outside the building, or arranged to meet me somewhere else entirely. He knew what he wanted. He didn’t care what anyone thought.

At two minutes past five, we got into my car, parked behind the hospital. I felt a vague unease, based entirely on social propriety, that I might somehow lose face if we went straight back to my flat. ‘I’m going to take you to my local,’ I said, as I started the engine. ‘Does great chips. That’s if you’re sure you don’t have to go back to work?’ I glanced behind me, began to reverse the car slowly.

‘I rang my office and told them I was in a lot of discomfort and wouldn’t be coming back today,’ he replied, taking my hand from the steering wheel and placing it on his groin, so that I could feel his erection through his trousers. ‘Which is absolutely true.’

I braked. It was still light outside. I glanced around the car park to make sure that none of my colleagues were within sight, then leaned over and kissed him on mouth. His lips parted immediately. My tongue grazed the hard-wet enamel of his teeth for a fraction of a second before I pulled back, squeezed his erection lightly, then withdrew my hand and returned my attention to reversing the car.

‘Fuck…’
he whispered under his breath, sitting back in his seat. I was grinning hugely, unable to believe my own daring. At that point, it was a toss-up which I was enjoying more – his blatant lust or the sheer surprise of my own. I have never behaved like this before, I thought delightedly, as I drove us to the pub.

We got mildly drunk together on a great deal more than alcohol. We clutched each other’s thighs beneath the table. We kissed, in open view of the other drinkers. We fed each other chips. Halfway through the evening, his mobile phone rang repeatedly – he didn’t answer but I could hear it in his pocket.

‘Do you need to get that?’ I said, on the third ring. He shook his head. When it rang a fourth time, he extracted the phone and, without looking at it, turned it off, then smiled at me. ‘Let’s go,’ he said, softly, reaching out his hand, then placing it gently on the side of my head, just touching my hair. After all his hard flirting, his directness, the tenderness of the gesture made me melt.

I was over the limit so we left my car parked in the street and walked back to my flat. It was his idea to take a short cut through the park. The angle was difficult. He had to hold up one of my legs with his forearm hooked beneath my knee and bend his own knees, then guide himself in. Even though it was only autumn, the temperature had plummeted during the evening. My coat and dress were hitched up around my waist. I was wearing opaque black tights. He tore a hole in them. Later, I found pieces of bark inside my knickers. I was shivering with cold and the fear of discovery by passing youths or dog-walkers, so much that I couldn’t come. He withdrew just in time and, with a deft hand gesture, came over his trousers. He kissed me ferociously and said he was sending me the dry-cleaning bill. The whole encounter was clumsy and only partially satisfying and drove me lunatic with desire when I thought about it afterwards.

*

The early days of David were delightful and feverish and, also, a kind of hell. I thought about him incessantly. I thought about him so much I felt nauseous sometimes, drunk with it. I would think of him even while I was talking to him, even while we debated, in a desultory fashion, whether or not to see a film or just get something to eat. I wanted him even while I was having him: having him wasn’t enough. My desire for him was so raw I was reduced to masturbating in the shower. I took to doodling his initials on bits of paper at work. If no paper was available, I wrote them on my hand. I thought about his haunches – an unprofessional word for an unprofessional assessment of that part of his body; part thigh-bone, part buttock, part muscle where it tensed against me. The word took on a sickening allure:
haunches
. Most people think it’s buttocks that do the thrusting, the gluteal muscles. In fact, it’s the piriformis, two small muscles deep inside the buttocks that join the hips to the legs. Male lecturers at university always took great pleasure in demonstrating the action of the piriformis muscles in front of female students.
Haunches
, though, a collective noun, and one that had appropriately animal implications – there were two of them, the haunches, and two hands, two eyes – the eyes, the stare, the stare he gave when he held my head between his two large hands, immovable. Round and round they went, my thoughts of him. I wore out my images of him and then had to see him again to get a fresh set, only to find the old ones coming back again the minute we were apart, tumbling together and breaking apart like the shards of colour in a kaleidoscope. I would stop, in the middle of writing a report on one of my elderly patients, my pen lifted, momentarily confused that I was there, at my desk, writing a report, and not with him. My colleagues kept asking me if anything was wrong.

It was hard not to pester him – I knew enough of him and men in general to realise that would send him running for the hills. So instead I was left, day after day, with my fantasies and my longings and the sick little feeling I felt inside, all the time, at the memory of the way he held my head still while he kissed me. I never once chased him. I waited for him to call me, and when he did, I always experienced a small shock at the casualness of his tone. ‘Hey you, how are you?’ he would say. Was it possible he didn’t realise how much I had been thinking of him? And I would respond, equally casual, ‘Fine, how are you?’ and be doubly shocked at myself. He’s just a man, I would say to myself, while we exchanged news. He gets up in the morning, he showers and shaves and eats breakfast, and the rest of it. There are a million other men like him in the world. It’s ludicrous to make him into something special: what do you know of him except he has a nice line in banter and fucks like an express train? So what?

He liked to put his hands in my hair when we made love, to hold my head still so that he could stare into my eyes. ‘Give yourself to me,’ he said once, fiercely, and I stared up at him baffled – we were having sex, what did he think I was doing? He hated it if he thought I was holding anything back.

I hated him sometimes, too – he drove me crazy, sometimes; often. I hated the way he would end a phone call abruptly if it occurred to him there was something else he should be doing. ‘Listen, I’ll call you later,’ he would say, almost mid-sentence, then hang up. If he was busy, his definition of ‘later’ could stretch to several days. I tried it on him once. He got cross. He didn’t like to hear about ex-boyfriends of mine. That made him cross too. He changed the subject irritably and was grumpy for a good hour or two – but he would have died before he admitted he was possessive. Once, in the early days, I caught him with my mobile phone in his hand, punching buttons with his thumb.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

‘Checking what ringtones you’ve got,’ he replied. ‘You’ve had that one for ages.’ Just before he turned away, I saw that he was flicking through my call log. I should have been worried or offended – if any of my previous boyfriends had done it, I would have gone berserk – but instead, and this bothered me, I was pleased, flattered.

He had very good table manners – for a large man, his movements were surprisingly small and neat. He had a strange grace. I never saw him drop anything, or trip over, whereas I did both all the time. He had no physical tics or mannerisms that I could discern and teased me mercilessly when I flicked my hair. He only moved if there was a purpose to the movement, yet beneath his apparent stillness was a sense of coiled energy. He asked questions all the time. I never saw him bored.

He was only half Welsh, on his mother’s side, but in terms of his personal mythology it loomed far larger than half. He had grown up in a small coastal town not far from Aberystwyth but his family moved to Eastley when he was thirteen, where he promptly got into fights with English boys as soon as he opened his mouth. His accent was slight but became more pronounced when he was angry or felt threatened. He followed Welsh football matches, although he was indifferent to rugby. He teased me about being posh because of my English accent, which annoyed me because there had been a lot more spare cash floating around his childhood than mine.

When his mind was elsewhere, it was pointless trying to get his attention. ‘I’m task-orientated,’ he said loftily, when I complained to him. We were in bed at the time. I groaned out loud and put a pillow over my face. ‘What?’ he said. ‘What?’

Just before he had an orgasm, he would swear profusely, which I found amusing, although I was careful never to tell him that.

*

‘There’s only one way to make sure a boy’s family likes you,’ my mother had told me when I was still a gawky adolescent, ‘and that’s to make sure they didn’t like the girlfriend that came before you.’ Her face was becoming expressionless by then, the muscles increasingly immobile, speech slurred. She stared a lot. She rarely blinked. I had to remember how her face moved when she used to speak and add a layer of animation over her demeanour, along with volume to her words, a smile.

*

I was invited to meet David’s family at a large gathering to celebrate the seventieth birthday of a favourite aunt, Lorraine. David had one sibling but an inordinate number of aunts and uncles and cousins who had formed an established Welsh enclave in Eastley long before his family arrived. It was winter, we had arrived after dark, sleet was falling softly. The world looked good but felt bitter. We had been on the doorstep in the cold, ringing the bell repeatedly, for some minutes, huddled together beneath the yellow light above the porch. Music was thumping from the bay window of the sitting room at the front of the house but the curtains were closed. David said if there was no answer in a minute he was going to bang on the window even though it would mean trampling a flowerbed.

At that point, Aunt Lorraine flung the door open saying, ‘Yes, yes, all right…’ Seeing it was us, she stood back to make a careful appraisal. She nodded once, leaned forward and hissed, ‘You’ll do very nicely,’ before grabbing my arm and pulling me inside.

Then she turned to David, still on the doorstep, and declared, ‘But you can piss off, boy!’ and slammed the door in his face. I saw his expression just before the door closed and guessed that this was a joke played many times before and one he found excruciating. I, on the other hand, had had a large gin and tonic on an empty stomach in the pub before we came and thought it rather funny – mad, but funny.

Lorraine’s hallway was decked with foil streamers. She was a hefty woman in beige, her face alight with a beamy smile. She cackled affectedly and pushed at my arm. I heard merry laughter from above and looked up to see that an uncle was descending the stairs, zipping his flies and ho-ho-ho-ing like Father Christmas. Lorraine linked her arm with mine and, leaving David on the doorstep, pulled me towards the sitting room, which bulged with people, noise and cigarette smoke. She flung the door wide and pushed me into a large number of coloured balloons and curious faces. The furniture and decor were lost behind the faces and balloons. ‘Here she is!’ Lorraine shouted above the music.

Before I could speak, another aunt was upon me. ‘Ooh, let’s take a look at you, girl, we’ve all been waiting.’ I felt her fingers plucking at my coat sleeve. ‘Well, you’re a big improvement on the last one, I must say.’ She leaned in close to me. Her breath smelt of gherkins. ‘Wore a lot of synthetic fibres, did the last one.’

David was at my elbow. He didn’t look amused. ‘Leave her alone until she’s got her coat off,’ he grumbled.

Someone thrust a drink into my hand. ‘Try this punch. It’s disgusting.’

David removed it from my hand and said in my ear. ‘Kitchen. Now.’

In the kitchen, he turned to me and said drily, ‘God, they get more like a bad sitcom every time but hey, you’re a hit and you haven’t even opened your mouth yet.’ He pulled at the fridge door, which resisted, relented. He took out a bottle of wine.

‘What was wrong with the last one?’ I asked, equally drily, sliding my coat off my shoulders, looking around for somewhere to hang it, then dropping it over the back of a kitchen chair. We had been going out for three months – I had just started counting in months rather than weeks. I longed to stop being sardonic with him. Why were we still wisecracking in private – in public, yes, but between ourselves? When could I stop pretending I felt less than I did? When would the signal come from him and how would I recognise it?

He rolled his eyes. ‘She was an accountant. She had a voice like this…’ He pinched his nostrils together and made a nasal sound.

‘Stuck-up little cow,’ said Lorraine as she blustered into the kitchen carrying a blue, oval-shaped platter, empty but for a few wisps of flaky pastry. ‘We were terrified our David was going to marry her.’ She pronounced his name the Welsh way, Dav-
eed
. She dumped the platter in the sink, on top of what was there already, and picked up another, full platter from the counter top, whisking off some cling film to reveal a neat arrangement of tiny withered samosas with cherry tomatoes dotted between. ‘Thank God she got wise to him before that.’ She handed it to me. ‘You know what they say about Welshmen, don’t you, girl? They make wonderful fathers cos they’re such children themselves, but terrible husbands mind.’ She turned away, then said over her shoulder, ‘Be a love and take that through for me. I’ve still got the spring rolls in the oven. They’ll be hot, anyway, even if that lot isn’t.’