Send Me A Lover (37 page)

‘Thanks,’ I tell her.

Richard and I glance at each other. Jessica is off in a smiling daydream. ‘You’d be mortgage free,’ she says. ‘Imagine that. Everything you earn is yours to spend. Think of all the clothes you could buy…’

‘Or you could stay,’ Richard says, clearly sensing Jessica is saying all the wrong things and I might jump on her and attack her in about two seconds’ time. ‘You could move in, give it a few nip and tucks to get it looking like it’s your place and not her place, and see how you feel then.’ He studies my lack of obvious enthusiasm. ‘As your self-appointed financial advisor, Angie, I am urging you not to sell. The market’s on the upswing. You could be doing yourself out of a nice little profit if you don’t hang on to it for a while longer.’ He chinks his glass to mine and smiles, only the smile is thin and some sadness seems to hide behind it.

~ * * * ~

Sherrie and I sit on Ms Elmtree’s front lawn, drinking a bottle of champagne from two polystyrene cups, getting slightly curious looks from people as they pass by: my potential new neighbours.

Sherrie insisted we go round to the house to ‘christen’ it, even though I told her I’m still not sure I’m keeping it. She wouldn’t sit inside though. ‘It reeks of old woman!’ She’s got a plastic bag with another bottle of champers in it. But this one’s to toast her leaving. She’s off in two weeks. It’s come around so fast.

‘We can’t drink two bottles,’ I tell her. ‘We’re not a couple of alcoholics.’

‘Speak for yourself!’ she says, and tops me up a little too keenly. Golden fizz fizzes over the poly cup, decadently watering the grass.

‘Don’t spill it then! For God sake…’ I admonish her. ‘Here,’ I hold my glass out to her. ‘Fill up what you spilt.’

The garden is an absolute disaster, even worse than when I saw it last, because we just had some relentless rain and then a few days of sunshine. The grass is about two feet long, and weeds are strangling all the once-lovely plants in the borders. We talk about everything, including my thought that, if I do decide to keep this place, I could bring my mother here to live with me.

‘Do you want to graduate onto the concrete step?’ I ask her, when we’re almost through our first bottle, and I want to follow the last patch of the evening sun.

So we do. And then we find ourselves with two very sore bums. ‘You gotta get better patio furniture than this, hun!’ Sherrie says. A pleasant-looking man walks past us with his black Lab, looks across the stone wall, smiles. Sherrie’s gaze follows him down the street.

‘Couldn’t you handle some nice sex right about now?’ she asks me, and lies back, awkwardly settling herself against the step, tilting her face up to the last of the evening rays.

‘I haven’t thought about it in a while,’ I lie, still remembering my confused but horny dream.

‘That’s not the answer to the question.’

I glance at her lying back like that with her eyes shut.

‘Yes,’ I tell her. ‘Okay, yes, I could handle it.’

She opens her eyes, turns her head slightly, looks at me. ‘So what are you going to do about it?’

I scowl. ‘What
can
I do about it? Call upon Jonathan to send me a lover? I tried that once. It didn’t work.’

She sits up, rubs her back, says, ‘Man, I’m uncomfortable.’

I titter. ‘Me too.’

She sits cross-legged, grips her champagne cup between her knees. ‘Start giving off ‘available’ signals. If a nice man walking a black Labrador looks at you in that certain way, give him it back, hun. Don’t look so unapproachable.’

‘What? Him? Oh, I’m sure he’ll be married with a couple of kids.’

‘That’s perfect.’

‘No it isn’t!’

‘If you’re scared of falling in love again, Ange, a married man will at least get you back in the sack. And if he doesn’t really have feelings for you, but he’s bored at home, he’ll really go for it. It could be a lotta fun.’

‘Seriously, can we….’

‘Change the subject?’ She delves in the plastic bag, pulls out the second bottle. With some deft manoeuvrings, she pops the cork. ‘You need lube-ing up,’ she tells me. ‘Don’t worry, we’ve a bottle to go. Who knows what might be along in the meantime?’ She cranes her neck down the street. ‘Irish Wolf Hound approaching with one tall, dark –’

‘Stop it!’ I elbow her and we giggle as we thrust out our glasses to catch the drops.

~ * * * ~

That night I fall asleep thinking of kindness. Yes Jonathan was good to Ms Elmtree when he sued the property developer for her. And yes I used to run to Safeway and get her the odd bag of groceries. I only lived beside her little more than eighteen months, yet in looking at her, I saw what my mother could become in twenty-five years. Essentially family-less and left to her own devices. And I hoped that anything that I might do for my elderly neighbour might somehow get done for my mother, by some sort of divine karma. I might not believe in promises made by dead husbands, but I do believe in karma…

But still, was our little bit of neighbourly kindness enough to deserve being left a house? I remember the strange way she told me about Jonathan sitting in his car. I wonder if he ever told her about losing all our money; if she knew more than she was letting on. Then again, she knew I was forced to sell our house, so maybe that’s why she came to my rescue. But the lawyer told me when the will was written. It was before I sold.

Maybe I’ll never truly know how I’ve come to inherit a house. Maybe sometimes it’s best not to wonder too much.

~ * * * ~

‘I don’t usually think creatively in the shower,’ I tell the room, ‘but an idea did come to me the other morning that I think might carry the right mix of message and drama that we are looking for in a campaign approach.’

It’s my third meeting with Epilepsy Canada. Our previous two discussed strategy and now we’ve moved on to the bit that everybody likes and wants to get their hands on: the fun part, what the campaign’s going to look like. My art boards with my terrible attempt at drawing, lay face down on the boardroom table, alongside cold coffee and a plate of peanut butter cookies, in this tiny room on a warm late summer evening.

Crystal, Bill, Giles, and Kye, the good-looking PE teacher, are present. I notice—again—that Kye has a habit of rotating his pencil—I remember it annoying me in the first meeting. I wonder if it’s because I’m boring him. The upshot is though, it makes me look at his hands. They’re evenly-tanned, with long and quite artistic fingers, and very clean, pink nails. Somehow you could look at those hands in isolation, and know that the owner of them would be a very fit, fresh and attractive young fellow in his twenties: a PE teacher, perhaps, maybe of Nordic descent.

‘With the limited media that we can afford,’—focus, Angela; focus,—‘we need a singular, powerful message that will take epilepsy right into the hearts and minds of a broad target base—everyone from young people to old. It’s a lot to ask of—’

The pencil comes sailing out of Kye’s hand, as though he’s flicked it right at me.

‘Any single, visual message,’ I finish, trying not to react.

‘Sorry ‘bout that,’ he says, and lunges across the table to get his pencil back.

Bill titters.

I’ve lost my train of thought. ‘Erm…remembering…. yeah… that… the bus shelter ads and the limited print media campaign are there mainly for awareness and to trigger a call to action... I think a powerful creative route would be to go with…’ I unveil my 3’x3’ white board…. ‘Tada!’ I skim their faces, the looks of surprise, and engagement.

In the centre of my whiteboard I have drawn an image of the human brain. The brain is all rigged up like a bomb hooked up to a detonator. Underneath, in bold black type, is the simple tagline: Living With Epilepsy.

Kye whistles. Crystal smiles. Bill scowls, wags his pen at the board. ‘Don’t we need to have more writing to say that living with epilepsy means your brain is essentially a ticking time bomb?’

I shake my head. ‘The image says that. The line connects the idea. You don’t need to explain the obvious. In advertising, less is definitely more. All we need is a line underneath indicating the website, and the 1-800 number—the call to action. Powerful advertising demands—and will get—action.’

‘I agree,’ says Crystal. ‘If you have to explain the joke then you’re assuming the listener is slow.’

‘I think it’s very good,’ Giles says. ‘Powerful.’

‘It kicks butt,’ Kye adds, which makes me smile.

‘Let me show you how I see it translating to the website…’ I tell them now that I seem to have them on side…

~ * * * ~

As I’m packing up my stuff to go, Crystal says, ‘Angela, may I talk to you?’

‘I’ve been meaning to call you and ask you how busy you are. I mean, with your work.’

Oh God, I don’t need more things to do that I’m not getting paid for. ‘Oh, erm –’ I’m slow to make up bullshit on my feet.

‘The reason I ask, Angela, is that I’m very interested to talk about how
Write Strategies
could help me. It seems that half my staff at Zeit can’t write as well as they think they can. I would quite like to talk about hiring your consultancy services.’

‘You would?’ I perk up. I catch Kye looking at me, as he slowly puts papers in his bag, the last to leave the room.

‘I don’t know how it would all fit, but may I have my HR person call you tomorrow for a chat?’

I reach out and offer her my hand, trying to contain my glee behind an air of professionalism. ‘I’ll look forward to it.’

As I’m about to leave, she says, ‘We’re very impressed with you here. We’re glad you came to us.’

I smile broadly. ‘Thank you,’ I tell her, and when I get out into the corridor where she can’t see me, I dance up and down.

~ * * * ~

I walk out of the building into the early evening sunshine, still smiling. Kye is sitting on the wall. For a moment I think he must be waiting for a ride from somebody. I stop a few feet in front of him. ‘Sounds like you’ve got something to celebrate,’ he says.

‘My first client, possibly,’ I beam. ‘With a bit of luck.’

‘
First
client?’ he narrows his eyes at me, looking amused. ‘But I thought you were a really successful writing coach.’

I smile again. ‘It’s called selling yourself. It’s in the things you
don’t
say.’

‘I must remember that,’ he says. ‘You certainly had me convinced.’

‘Have a good night,’ I tell him, giving him a quick glance over before I start walking.

‘Hold up a minute,’ he says, after I’ve gone a few steps. I stop, turn around. ‘Would you like to go get some
real
dinner? Something a bit more substantial than peanut butter cookies?’

When I don’t immediately answer, he says, ‘Maybe even a beer with it?’

~ * * * ~

He’s hard inside of me.

Definitely more substantial than peanut butter cookies.

Different to Jonathan. I’d almost forgotten what variety is like.

How did we get here? I can’t quite believe how fast I fell into the sack. This might actually be an all-time record. If you don’t count Jonathan.

His body is even nicer with his clothes off. We stick and slather, and when he moves away from me to admire my body. His heart isn’t into it, of course. I know that. But his body is. I’d forgot what sex is like without love. We had a great chat. We connected. We drank a few drinks. And then I ended up naked with him moments after he walked me home and gave me a seemingly innocent kiss.

It’s good.

He isn’t into my feet, doesn’t care to kiss my toes, or the backs of my knees, or the inside of my elbows. But he goes a long time, and the rhythm is nice.

‘I’m one half German and one half Swedish, actually,’ he says when we’re finished, answering the question I asked him about an hour ago.

I laugh. I fall off him and flop onto the other side of the bed, and we lie there on our backs, panting and smiling. We lie like this for a few minutes, until we’ve recovered; it takes me longer than him; I’m obviously out of shape, or out of practice. My eyes skim over his bare chest, the handsome quite devastatingly sparkling white teeth and blue eyes, as he props himself on an arm and looks down at me. ‘You’re quite the surprise,’ he says.