Authors: Jojo Moyes
And he was rarely home, even on a Friday or Saturday night. What with his training and my work hours we seemed to have become used to spending less time together. I could follow him down to the track and watch him push himself round and round in circles until he had completed the requisite number of miles, or I could stay home and watch television by myself, curled up in a corner of his vast leather settee. There was no food in the fridge, apart from strips of turkey breast and vile energy
drinks the consistency of frogspawn. Treena and I had tried one once and spat it out, gagging theatrically, like children.
The truth of it was I didn’t like Patrick’s flat. He had bought it a year ago, when he finally felt his mother would be okay by herself. His business had done well, and he had told me it was important that one of us get on to the property ladder. I suppose that would have been the cue for us to have a conversation about whether we were going to live together, but somehow it didn’t happen, and neither of us is the type to bring up subjects that make us feel a bit uncomfortable. As a result, there was nothing of me in that flat, despite our years together. I had never quite been able to tell him, but I would rather live in my house, with all its noise and clutter, than in that soulless, featureless bachelor pad, with its allocated parking spaces and executive view of the castle.
And besides, it was a bit lonely.
‘Got to stick to the schedule, babe,’ he would say, if I told him. ‘If I do any fewer than twenty-three miles at this stage of the game, I’ll never make it back on schedule.’ Then he would give me the latest update on his shin splints or ask me to pass him the heat spray.
When he wasn’t training, he was at endless meetings with other members of his team, comparing kit and finalizing travel arrangements. Sitting amongst them was like being with a bunch of Korean speakers. I had no idea what any of it meant, and no great desire to immerse myself.
And I was supposed to be going with them to Norway in seven weeks’ time. I hadn’t yet worked out how to tell
Patrick that I hadn’t asked the Traynors for the time off. How could I? By the time the Xtreme Viking took place, there would be less than one week of my contract left to run. I suppose I was childishly refusing to deal with it all, but truthfully, all I could see was Will and a ticking clock. Not a lot else seemed to register.
The great irony of all this was that I didn’t even sleep well at Patrick’s flat. I don’t know what it was, but I came to work from there feeling like I was speaking through a glass jar, and looking like I had been punched in both eyes. I began painting concealer on my dark shadows with the same slapdash abandon as if I were decorating.
‘What’s going on, Clark?’ Will said.
I opened my eyes. He was right beside me, his head cocked to one side, watching me. I got the feeling he might have been there for some time. My hand went automatically for my mouth in case I had been dribbling.
The film I was supposed to have been watching was now a series of slow-moving credits.
‘Nothing. Sorry. It’s just warm in here.’ I pushed myself upright.
‘It’s the second time you’ve fallen asleep in three days.’ He studied my face. ‘And you look bloody awful.’
So I told him. I told him about my sister, and our sleeping arrangements, and how I didn’t want to make a fuss because every time I looked at Dad’s face I saw his barely concealed despair that he could not even provide his family with a house we could all sleep in.
‘He’s still not found anything?’
‘No. I think it’s his age. But we don’t talk about it. It’s … ’
I shrugged. ‘It’s too uncomfortable for everyone.’
We waited for the movie to finish, and then I walked over to the player, ejected the DVD and put it back in its case. It felt somehow wrong, telling Will my problems. They seemed embarrassingly trivial next to his.
‘I’ll get used to it,’ I said. ‘It’ll be fine. Really.’
Will seemed preoccupied for the rest of the afternoon. I washed up, then came through and set up his computer for him. When I brought him a drink, he swivelled his chair towards me.
‘It’s quite simple,’ he said, as if we had been in conversation. ‘You can sleep here at weekends. There’s a room going spare – it might as well get some use.’
I stopped, the beaker in my hand. ‘I can’t do that.’
‘Why not? I’m not going to pay you for the extra hours you’re here.’
I placed the beaker in his holder. ‘But what would your mum think?’
‘I have no idea.’
I must have looked troubled, because he added, ‘It’s okay. I’m safe in taxis.’
‘What?’
‘If you’re worried I have some devious secret plan to seduce you, you can just pull my plug out.’
‘Funny.’
‘Seriously. Think about it. You could have it as your backup option. Things might change faster than you think. Your sister might decide she doesn’t want to spend every weekend at home after all. Or she might meet someone. A million things might change.’
And you might not be here in two months, I told him
silently, and immediately hated myself for thinking it.
‘Tell me something,’ he said, as he went to leave the room. ‘Why isn’t Running Man offering you his place?’
‘Oh, he has,’ I said.
He looked at me, as if he were about to pursue the conversation.
And then he seemed to change his mind. ‘Like I said.’ He shrugged. ‘The offer’s there.’
These are the things that Will liked.
‘You saw my dad in town the other day.’
‘Oh. Yes.’ I was hanging washing out on a line. The line itself was hidden in what Mrs Traynor called the Kitchen Garden. I think she didn’t want anything as mundane as laundry polluting the view of her herbaceous borders. My own mother pegged her whites out almost as a badge of
pride. It was like a challenge to her neighbours:
Beat this, ladies!
It was all Dad could do to stop her putting a second revolving clothes dryer out the front.
‘He asked me if you’d said anything about it.’
‘Oh.’ I kept my face a studied blank. And then, because he seemed to be waiting, ‘Evidently not.’
‘Was he with someone?’
I put the last peg back in the peg bag. I rolled it up, and placed it in the empty laundry basket. I turned to him.
‘Yes.’
‘A woman.’
‘Yes.’
‘Red-haired?’
‘Yes.’
Will thought about this for a minute.
‘I’m sorry if you think I should have told you,’ I said. ‘But it … it didn’t seem like my business.’
‘And it’s never an easy conversation to have.’
‘No.’
‘If it’s any consolation, Clark, it’s not the first time,’ he said, and headed back into the house.
Deirdre Bellows said my name twice before I looked up. I was scribbling in my notepad, place names and question marks, pros and cons, and I had pretty much forgotten I was even on a bus. I was trying to work out a way of getting Will to the theatre. There was only one within two hours’ drive, and it was showing
Oklahoma!
It was hard to imagine Will nodding along to ‘Oh What A Beautiful Morning’, but all the serious theatre was in London. And London still seemed like an impossibility.
Basically, I could now get Will out of the house, but we had pretty much reached the end of what was available within an hour’s radius, and I had no idea how to get him to go further.
‘In your own little world, eh, Louisa?’
‘Oh. Hi, Deirdre.’ I scooched over on the seat to make room for her.
Deirdre had been friends with Mum since they were girls. She owned a soft-furnishings shop and had been divorced three times. She possessed hair thick enough to be a wig, and a fleshy, sad face that looked like she was still dreaming wistfully of the white knight who would come and sweep her away.
‘I don’t normally get the bus but my car’s in for a service. How are you? Your mum told me all about your job. Sounds
very
interesting.’
This is the thing about growing up in a small town. Every part of your life is up for grabs. Nothing is secret – not the time I was caught smoking at the out-of-town supermarket car park when I was fourteen, nor the fact that my father had re-tiled the downstairs loo. The minutiae of everyday lives were currency for women like Deirdre.
‘It’s good, yes.’
‘And well paid.’
‘Yes.’
‘I was so relieved for you after the whole Buttered Bun thing. Such a shame they shut the cafe. We’re losing all the useful shops in this town. I remember when we had a grocer, a baker and a butcher on the high street. All we needed was a candlestick maker!’
‘Mmm.’ I saw her glance at my list and closed my notepad. ‘Still. At least we do have somewhere to buy curtains. How’s the shop?’
‘Oh, fine … yes … What’s that, then? Something to do with work?’
‘I’m just working on things that Will might like to do.’
‘Is that your disabled man?’
‘Yes. My boss.’
‘Your boss. That’s a nice way of putting it.’ She nudged me. ‘And how’s your clever old sister getting on at university?’
‘She’s good. And Thomas.’
‘She’ll end up running the country, that one. I have to say, though, Louisa, I was always surprised you didn’t leave before her. We always thought you were such a bright little thing. Not that we still don’t, of course.’
I raised a polite smile. I wasn’t sure what else I could do.
‘But still. Someone’s got to do it, eh? And it’s nice for your mum that one of you is happy to stay so close to home.’
I wanted to contradict her, and then I realized that nothing I had done in the last seven years suggested I had either any ambition or any desire to move further than the end of my street. I sat there, as the bus’s tired old engine snarled and juddered beneath us, and had a sudden sense of time racing, of losing whole chunks of it in my small journeys backwards and forwards along the same stretch. Round and round the castle. Watching Patrick go round and round the track. The same petty concerns. The same routines.
‘Oh, well. Here’s my stop.’ Deirdre rose heavily beside
me, hoisting her patent handbag over her shoulder. ‘Give your mum my love. Tell her I’ll be round tomorrow.’
I looked up, blinking. ‘I got a tattoo,’ I said suddenly. ‘Of a bee.’
She hesitated, holding on to the side of the seat.
‘It’s on my hip. An actual tattoo. It’s permanent,’ I added.
Deirdre glanced towards the door of the bus. She looked a bit puzzled, and then gave me what I think she thought was a reassuring smile.
‘Well, that’s very nice, Louisa. As I said, tell your mum I’ll be round tomorrow.’
Every day, while he was watching television, or otherwise engaged, I sat in front of Will’s computer and worked on coming up with the magic event that might Make Will Happy. But as time went on, I found that my list of things we couldn’t do, places we couldn’t go to, had begun to exceed my ideas for those we could by a significant factor. When the one figure first exceeded the other, I went back on to the chatroom sites, and asked their advice.