Reversing Over Liberace (29 page)

“Er, sorry, Will.” Gradually I became aware that the sound had stopped and opened my eyes, to stare into the knees of Cal. “Wasn't expecting anyone, so the alarms were enabled.” He helped me to my feet. “I should know better, really. Last time I was working with the doors open, the bloody goat got loose. I'm in the middle of a really tricky piece of analysis and suddenly it sounds like a buffalo mating with an elephant seal. I go outside to shoo her off, forgetting I've got my headset on and all the team can hear me shouting ‘fuck off and leave me alone you evil bitch' with the full-scale racket going on in the background.”

“Sounds nasty.”

“It was. They thought I'd been raided. All shut their systems down, all off-line, couldn't reach anyone for a week.” I was upright but he hadn't let go of my hand. “So. You came back.”

“No. I'm a hologram.”

“Won't bother offering you a drink then. Don't tell me, you're deeply in love with my goat and you've come to ask for her hoof in marriage?”

“I wouldn't take that thing's hoof in anything less than a curry.” He was smiling down at me in a way that made me itch inside. “Cal, I think someone's calling you.”

“What? Oh, yeah, right.” He flipped the headset back up from around his neck, but even his voice was smiling as he spoke into it, “Yo, Zak! What's the news? What? Yes, Willow's here, how could you…oh, did I? Shit. Hey, down boy, that's for me to know and you to forever speculate on. Now…” Turning away from me he walked back into the barn but I didn't follow. I wanted five minutes.

I walked behind the barn and leaned on the paddock gate looking up the hill towards the moor. Winnie stopped scratching her bum on one of the fence posts and eyeballed me balefully. “I'll even miss you, you evil-smelling lawn mower,” I whispered. As philosophical as I'd been about the lack of council funding coming my way, the thing I was really regretting was the loss of this place. Ever since the notion of buying it had come to me, the farm had felt like home. The smells, the dust, the dry rot and peeling paintwork, all had got under my skin and had become part of me, as much as I felt I had become part of them. And now, although Luke's treachery had allowed the desire for score-settling to fill me, the inability to buy the farm made me far sadder. “I wonder if that makes me really deep or incredibly shallow?” I closed my eyes and let my chin rest on the gate, the smell of pine resin trickled up my nose and made me think of forests and clean toilets.

“Penny for them.”

I jumped.

“Sorry. You looked completely lost there. Making plans for turning all this into an herb nursery? Or just herself into goat-burgers and a bedside rug?”

I looked up at him, leaning beside me companionably. Those eyes were like a total eclipse. “I can't buy the farm.”

His shoulders tensed, drew away from me. “Oh. Right.” Our thighs had been touching, now there was a handspan between them. “Okay. Thanks for letting me know.” And then he was turning, turning away from me and setting himself to limp back towards the barn. He looked beaten, defeated.

“I would if I could.” I half-called after him.

A shrug. “Doesn't matter. Don't worry about it.”

“Cal.” I caught him up in the middle of the yard. “Look, I really am sorry.”

A beat. Then he grabbed me by the shoulders, pushing me back against the wall of the barn, leaning his full weight into me, catching my hair in his hands and using it to tip my head back and up. I had time for a tiny whimper before his mouth came down hard on mine, kisses like bruises, tongue teasing, reckless, shuddering,
wild
.

“What the hell was
that
?” I asked, when he let me go, my face flaming flamingo-pink and my mouth doubling in size with the ferocity of the kiss.

“That, Willow”—Cal moved back lazily—“was goodbye.”

“Good
bye
?” Confusion was streaming from every pore. “Why? What have I done?”

“I could live with you fooling with Luke, setting him up, maybe even one quick last fuck to keep him onside until the
denouement
, but I can't live with you deciding to write it all off. Or, rather, I'm going to have to, aren't I, but, well. Goodbye, Willow.”

“But I haven't.”

His eyes flared. “So, you've decided off your own bat that you don't want the place? Oh, come on. Give me some credit. I've seen the way you've been around here—you love it. You kind of
belong
here, somehow. I mean, even that fucking
goat
behaves for you. And now, suddenly, you don't want it? Yeah, right, there's a man behind a decision like that, and I can only think of one who'd let you pass up on your own happiness for the sake of his.”

“Listen, you arrogant, sexist shit, not every decision I make revolves around men. You're so self-obsessed, what, you think I've got a brain that doesn't work unless some guy's swinging his dick at me?”

On adrenaline-fired legs, I wobbled off across the yard, attaining a decent march by the time I reached the paddock. Winnie gave me an “oh God, it's you again” stare and clambered into the far corner, from where she watched me turn up the lane and head towards the hill with my fists clenched and my jaw rigid. How
dare
he? Was that what he really thought of me, that I was so gullible and trusting that I'd get back with Luke, after everything he'd done? I power-walked up the track, not acknowledging the nettle stings peppering the backs of my legs, or the tiny flag-wavings of butterflies celebrating the thistle flowers.
Bastard
. Did he see me as some weak-willed, pathetic little woman, having to have a big, strong man at her side in order to feel vindicated? Even if that big, strong man was a double-dealing fraud? That even
Luke
was better than nothing?

Halfway up the hill my anger and I ran out of steam and I sat down on the sandy bank overlooking the farm. I couldn't see Cal, no movement apart from the goat shuffling around her drinking trough and some bumblebees lazily torpedoing the gorse blossoms. Maybe he'd gone inside the barn and plugged himself in to his machines, called up the team and told them to stop their work on my behalf. Not needed anymore. With that scared, tortured look back on his face, the look he'd lost come to think of it, since I'd told him I loved him.

And then, with the perfect clarity of hindsight and the additional focus of the microscope of guilt, I realised.

This wasn't about me. It was about him.

Cal, with his fear of being rejected again. He'd let down his guard, let me in, showed me who he truly was. He'd told me things, trusted me, and I'd done the metaphorical equivalent of kneeing him in the nuts. He didn't think Luke was better than nothing, he thought Luke was better than
him
! His worst nightmare had come true, he'd been living in dread of this moment, and I'd done nothing to reassure him. Cal wasn't like Luke, wasn't tough, uncompassionate. He was scared, fragile,
damaged
.

And here was me, bringing my flamethrower approach to relationships.

I got up, dusted down my backside and left the hillside, cantering down the slope and arriving in the yard with a kind of braced-knee sliding stop. I'd been wrong. Cal hadn't gone into the barn. He was sitting on the edge of an old churn-stand, his weaker leg drawn up under his chin and his hair hiding his face. “Cal.”

He jumped. “Oh, yeah, you'll be needing a lift back, won't you?”

“Um, no. Actually. I need to explain to you…stuff.”

“There really isn't any need. You don't have to justify yourself to me, Willow.”

But now I knew what he was doing. Not pushing me away, not withdrawing, he was performing damage limitation.

“Cal, listen. I didn't get the council money, all right?
That
is why I can't buy the farm. Nothing to do with anyone else.” The quick hope on his face left me weak. “So, now you know. It's not that I don't want to, it's because I
can't
.”

“Oh.” Cal wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. There was blood on it. It had been quite a goodbye kiss. “Oh,
fuck
. I'm sorry, Willow.”

I did a shrug very similar to his.

“No, really. Oh, God. What have I done? I only wanted…look, I…shit.” He lopsidedly jumped down from the stone platform and ran his hands through his hair. “What can I do to make it up to you?”

My smile started slow and I watched the answering fire spark in his eyes. “Are you
kidding
?” My voice was slow, too. “That kiss was the most erotic thing I have
ever
had done to me.”

His mouth twitched. “You really had me going there, you cowbag.”

“Well, you've got me going here, bastard.”

“Then come into my tent and let me attend to you. I have scented unguents and liquors with which to pander to your every whim.” He led me into the barn, one hand clamped around my wrist as though afraid I'd suddenly change my mind and run.

“Why the hell would you want to panda to me? Don't they sort of mate once every twenty years or something?”

“Ah, but they know the value of foreplay.”

And with that, he proceeded to show me the value of foreplay, until I was drunk and drugged and intoxicated with it, and each time I threatened to crash he'd catch me up and lift me again until he finally whispered me into making love so completely that only the feel of the straw around me kept me earthbound.

We only realised how uninhibited we'd been when a distant and tinny round of applause broke out from the computer speakers and a voice said, breathlessly, “Sandman, whatever it is you're on, get me some.”

“Shit, Fortune, you could have turned your 'phones off,” Cal said languidly, lying beside me with his fingers tracing my ribs.

“What, and miss fifty quid's worth of entertainment? You should webcam, man. You'd make a killing.”

“Ha fucking ha.” Leaning across me, Cal flipped the switch that sent the machine into deaf-blindness. “Sorry. Forgot to turn the boys off.”

“I think quite the opposite was true.”

“Hmm, yes. Look, Will, I've been thinking,”

“What about?” I pushed his hair off his face.

“Mostly about how can anyone who's seen Johnny Vegas believe in evolution, and that Beatrix Potter must have been smoking some serious weed to come up with
The Tailor of Gloucester
. Oh, and that I love you. And, instead of giving up on the idea of this place, why don't we
both
move in here.”

“What?” I propped myself up on my elbows.

“
I
don't want to sell, but I can't keep the place on because of the legwork, ha.
You
love it here. You could turn it into a going concern. I could drop the consultancy work and increase the, ahem, other stuff. What do you think? Between us, it shouldn't be too much of a job making the place habitable. I'll get a lift put in so that I can get all the way up to the attics, make some extra space that way.”

I looked at the rough, whitewashed walls of the barn and out of the doorway into the yard. Tiny plants had forced their way up between the cobbles and down between the stones of the walls and were now blooming in random spurts of yellow in unlikely sites all around the enclosed space. It looked like an explosion in a sun factory. I loved every last weed-infested inch of the place.

“Oh, yes.”

“Of course, there's a downside.” Cal shook his shirt out and began putting it back on. “There's the fact that you'll be stuck with me, dragging myself around the place like a sexually obsessed Quasimodo.”

“Quasimodo
was
sex obsessed.”

“Was he? I thought he was just misunderstood and lonely.”

“Yes, well, I used to think that about you.”

“Ha. Fine, all right, dragging myself around
exactly like
Quasimodo.”

“Except for the hump.”

“Willow, will you please shut up? Thank you. Right, okay, so there's me, and then there's the winters up here.”

I gave a little shiver. “Mmm. Snowed in with nothing but a bottle of whisky, and staying in bed until the snowplough gets through, wasn't it?”

“Disadvantages rapidly turning into an upside, and there's the goat.”

“Just needs a firm hand.”

Cal groaned. “Oh, stop. But you know what I'm saying? It'll be tough. And there may be winters so bad that you lose all the herbs.”

“I'll make things with them. Candles, soap, that sort of thing. When the herbs themselves are out of season. That way there'll be back up.”

Cal looked impressed at my forward planning. He would have been even more impressed if he'd seen the pile of magazines in my room. Shut up, not the bridal ones. I suspect he would have made rude remarks about grown women dressed as toilet-roll covers if he'd seen those. I mean the rural-small-business ones, the start-your-own-smallholding ones, the North York Moors' publications of rules, regulations and grants for new businesses within the National Park. Ever since the thought of buying this place had crossed my mind, I'd been researching.

I'm not stupid, you know.

Except, possibly, about violet-eyed, tight-trousered science graduates. Which really wasn't my fault. Besides which, I wasn't alone in that particular stupidity. Which reminded me.

“How's the planning going for next weekend?”

“Mmm? Oh, not bad. Ratboy's had a few bites. We're taking it from there. You found a hotel yet?”

“I've booked the honeymoon suite. It's absolutely fabulous. Katie came to look at it with me. There's a whirlpool bath in the middle of the floor and this huge four-poster all done up in silver gilt. It looks like the Beckhams' spare room.”

“I find a perverted pleasure in hearing about the scene of your seduction of another man.”