فصل 10

CHAPTER TEN

I emailed Nathan. The answer came back:

Lou, have you started on strong meds? WTAF?

I sent him a second email, filling in a little more detail, and his normal equanimity seemed to return.

Well, the old dog. Still had some surprises for us, eh?

I didn’t hear from Lily for two days. Half of me was concerned, the other a tiny bit relieved just to have a brief interlude of calm. I wondered if, once she was free of any fairytale ideas about Will’s family, she might be more inclined to build bridges with her own. Then I wondered whether Mr Traynor would call her directly to smooth things over. And I wondered where Lily was, and whether her absence involved the young man who had stood and watched her in my doorway. There had been something about him – about Lily’s evasiveness when I asked about him – that had stayed with me.

I had thought a lot about Sam, regretting my rapid exit. With hindsight, it had all seemed a bit overemotional and weird, running away from him like that. I must have seemed the exact person I kept protesting I wasn’t. I resolved that the next time I saw him outside the Moving On Circle I would react very calmly, perhaps say hello with an enigmatic, non-depressed-person smile.

Work sagged and dragged. A new girl had started: Vera, a stern Lithuanian, who completed all the bar’s tasks wearing the kind of peculiar half-smile of someone contemplating the fact that they had planted a dirty bomb nearby. She called all men ‘filthy, filthy beasts’ when out of earshot of Richard.

He had begun giving morning ‘motivational’ chats, after which we all had to pump the air and jump and shout, ‘YEAH!’ which always dislodged my curly wig, at which he would frown, as if it was somehow a failure indicative of my personality, not an inbuilt hazard of wearing a nylon hairpiece that didn’t actually stick to my head. Vera’s wig stayed immobile on hers. Perhaps it was too afraid to fall off.

One night when I got home I did an internet search on teenagers’ problems, trying to work out whether I could help to repair the damage of the weekend. But it had quite a lot on hormonal breakouts and nothing on what to do when you had introduced a sixteen-year-old you had just met to her dead quadriplegic father’s surviving family. At half past ten I gave up, gazed around at the bedroom in which half my clothes were still stored in boxes, promised myself that this would be the week I did something about it, and then, having reassured myself that I totally would, fell asleep.

I was woken at half past two in the morning by the sound of someone trying to force my front door. I stumbled out of bed, grabbed a mop, then put my eye to the spy-hole, my heart thumping. ‘I’m calling the police!’ I yelled. ‘What do you want?’

‘It’s Lily. Duh.’ She fell through the door as I opened it, half laughing, reeking of cigarettes, her mascara smeared around her eyes.

I wrapped my dressing-gown around myself, and locked the door behind her. ‘Jesus, Lily. It’s the middle of the night.’

‘Do you want to go dancing? I thought we could go dancing. I love dancing. Actually, that’s not entirely true. I do like dancing but that’s not why I’m here. Mum wouldn’t let me in. They’ve changed the locks. Can you believe it?’

I was tempted to answer that, with my alarm clock set for six a.m., funnily enough, I could.

Lily bumped heavily against the wall. ‘She wouldn’t even open the stupid door. Just shouted through the letterbox at me. Like I was some kind of … vagrant. So … I thought I’d stay here. Or we could go dancing …’ She swayed past me and headed for the music system, where she turned up the sound to a deafening level. I raced towards it to turn it down, but she grabbed my hand. ‘Let’s dance, Louisa! You need to bust some moves! You’re so sad all the time! Cut loose! C’mon!’

I wrenched my hand away, and rushed to the volume button, just in time for the first thumps of outrage to land from downstairs. When I turned, Lily had disappeared into the spare room, where she teetered and finally collapsed, face down, on the camp bed.

‘Oh. My. God. This bed is soooooo rubbish.’

‘Lily? You can’t just come in here and – Oh, for God’s sake.’

‘Just for a minute,’ came the muffled answer. ‘Literally a stopover. And then I’m going dancing. We’re going dancing.’

‘Lily. I have work tomorrow morning.’

‘I love you, Louisa. Did I tell you that? I really do love you. You’re the only one who …’

‘You can’t just collapse here like –’

‘Mmph … disco nap …’

She didn’t move.

I touched her shoulder. ‘Lily … Lily?’

She let out a small snore.

I sighed, waited a few minutes, then carefully removed her tatty pumps, and the contents of her pocket (cigarettes, mobile phone, a crumpled fiver), which I took into my room. I propped her on her side in the recovery position, and finally, wide awake at three a.m., knowing I would probably not sleep for fear she would choke, sat on the chair, to watch her.

Lily’s face was peaceful. The wary scowl and the manic, overeager smile had stilled into something unearthly and beautiful, her hair fanned around her shoulders. Maddening as her behaviour was, I couldn’t be angry. I kept recalling the hurt on her face that Sunday. Lily was my polar opposite. She didn’t nurse a hurt, or contain it. She lashed out, got drunk, did God-knew-what to try to forget. She was more like her father than I’d thought.

What would you have made of this, Will? I asked him silently.

But, just as I had struggled to help him, I didn’t know what to do for her. I didn’t know how to make it better.

I thought of my sister’s words: You won’t be able to cope, you know. And just for a few still, pre-dawn moments, I hated her for being right.

We developed a routine of sorts, in which Lily would turn up to see me every few days. I was never certain which Lily I would find at my door: manically cheerful Lily, demanding that we go out and eat at this restaurant or look at the totally gorgeous cat outside on the wall downstairs, or dance in the living room to some band she’d just discovered; or subdued, wary Lily, who would nod a silent greeting on her way in, then lie on my sofa and watch television. Sometimes she would ask random questions about Will – what programmes did he like? (He barely watched television; he preferred films.) Did he have a favourite fruit? (Seedless grapes. Red ones.) When was the last time I’d seen him laugh? (He didn’t laugh much. But his smile … I could picture it now, a rare flash of even white teeth, his eyes crinkling.) I was never sure whether she found my answers satisfactory.

And then, every ten days or so, there was drunk Lily, or worse (I was never sure), who would hammer on my door in the small hours, ignoring my protests about time and lost sleep, stumble past me with mascara-smudged cheeks and missing shoes and pass out on the little camp bed, refusing to wake when I left in the morning.

She seemed to have no hobbies, and few friends. She would talk to anyone in the street, asking favours with the unembarrassed insouciance of a feral kid. But she wouldn’t answer the phone at home and seemed to expect everyone she met to dislike her.

Given that most private schools had finished for the summer, I asked her where she was when she wasn’t at my flat or visiting her mother, and after a brief pause, she said, ‘Martin’s.’ When I asked if he was her boyfriend, she pulled the universal teenage face in response to an adult who had said something not just spectacularly stupid but revolting, too.

Sometimes she would be angry, at others rude. But I could never refuse her. Chaotic as her behaviour was, I got the feeling my flat was a safe haven. I found myself searching for clues: examining her phone for messages (pin-locked), her pockets for drugs (none, apart from that one joint) and once, ten minutes after she had come in, tear-stained and drunk, staring down at the car outside my block, its horn blaring intermittently for the best part of three-quarters of an hour. Eventually one of my neighbours went downstairs and thumped on the window so hard that the occupant had driven off.

‘You know, I’m not judging, but it’s not a good idea to get so drunk that you don’t know what you’re doing, Lily,’ I said one morning, as I made us both coffee. Lily spent so much time with me now that I’d had to adjust the way I lived: shopping for two, picking up mess that wasn’t my own, making twice the hot drinks, remembering to lock the bathroom door to avoid shrieks of Oh, my God. Gross!

‘You are totally judging. That’s exactly what “it’s not a good idea” means.’

‘I’m serious.’

‘Do I tell you how to live your life? Do I tell you that this flat is depressing, and you dress like someone who has lost the will to live, apart from when you’re being a gammy-legged porno pixie? Do I? Do I? No. I don’t say anything, so just leave me alone.’

I wanted to tell her then. I wanted to tell her what had happened to me nine years previously, on a night when I had drunk too much, and how my sister had led me home, shoeless and crying silently, in the early hours. But she would no doubt greet it with the same childish scorn with which she greeted most of my revelations, and it was a conversation I had only ever managed to have with one person. And he wasn’t here any more. ‘It’s also not fair to wake me up in the middle of the night. I have to get up early for work.’

‘So give me a key. Then I won’t wake you up, will I?’

She blasted me with that winning smile. It was rare and dazzling, and enough like Will’s that I found myself giving the key to her. Even as I handed it over, I knew what my sister would say.

I spoke to Mr Traynor twice during that time. He was anxious to know Lily was well, had started to worry about what she was going to do with her life. ‘I mean, she’s plainly a bright girl. It’s not a good idea for her to drop out of school at sixteen. Do her parents not have anything to say about it?’

‘They don’t seem to speak very much.’

‘Should I have a word with them? Do you think she needs a university fund? I have to say, things are a tad tighter than they were since the divorce, but Will left a fair bit. So I thought that might be … an appropriate use for it.’ He lowered his voice. ‘It might be wise, though, for us not to mention anything to Della just now. I don’t want her getting the wrong idea.’

I resisted the urge to ask what the right idea might be.

‘Louisa, do you think you could persuade Lily to come back? I keep thinking about her. I’d like us to all try again. I know Della would love to get to know her better too.’

I remembered Della’s expression as we had tiptoed around each other in the kitchen, and wondered whether Mr Traynor was wilfully blind or just an eternal optimist.

‘I’ll try,’ I promised.

There is a peculiar sort of silence in a flat when you are on your own in a city on a hot summer weekend. I was on earlies, finished my shift at four, arrived home by five, exhausted, and was secretly grateful that, for a few brief hours, I had my home to myself. I showered, ate some toast, took a look online to see if there were any jobs that either paid more than the minimum wage or were not zero-hours contracts, then sat in the living room with all the windows open to encourage a breeze, listening to the sounds of the city filtering in on the warm air.

Most of the time, I was reasonably content with my life. I had been to enough group sessions now to know that it was important to be grateful for simple pleasures. I was healthy. I had my family again. I was working. If I hadn’t made peace with Will’s death, I did at least feel like I might be crawling out from under its shadow.

And yet.

On evenings like this, when the streets below were filled with couples strolling, and laughing people spilled out of pubs, already planning meals, nights out, trips to clubs, something ached inside me; something primal telling me that I was in the wrong place, that I was missing something.

These were the moments when I felt most left behind.

I tidied up a little, washed my uniform, and then, just as I was sinking into a kind of quiet melancholy, my buzzer went. I stood and picked up the entry-phone wearily, expecting a request for directions from a UPS driver, or some misdirected Hawaiian pizza, but instead I heard a man’s voice.

‘Louisa?’

‘Who is this?’ I said, though I knew immediately who it was.

‘Sam. Ambulance Sam. I was just passing on the way home from work, and I just … Well, you left in such a hurry the other night, I thought I’d make sure you were okay.’

‘A fortnight later? I could have been eaten by cats by now.’

‘I’m guessing you weren’t.’

‘I don’t have a cat.’ A short silence. ‘But I’m fine, Ambulance Sam. Thanks.’

‘Great … That’s good to hear.’

I shifted, so I could see him through the grainy black and white of the little entry video screen. He was wearing a biker jacket instead of his paramedic uniform, and had one hand resting against the wall, which he now removed, and turned to face the road. I saw him let out a breath, and that small motion prompted me to speak. ‘So … what are you up to?’

‘Not much. Trying and failing to chat someone up through an entry-phone, mostly.’

My laugh was too quick. Too loud. ‘I gave up on that ages ago,’ I said. ‘It makes buying them a drink really, really hard.’

I saw him laugh. I looked around at my silent flat. And I spoke before I could think: ‘Stay there. I’ll come down.’

I was going to bring my car, but when he held out a spare motorbike helmet, it seemed prissy to insist on my own transport. I stuffed my keys into my pocket and stood waiting for him to motion me aboard.

‘You’re a paramedic. And you ride a motorbike.’

‘I know. But, as vices go, she’s pretty much the only one I have left.’ He grinned wolfishly. Something inside me lurched unexpectedly. ‘You don’t feel safe with me?’

There was no appropriate answer to that question. I held his gaze and climbed onto the back. If he did anything dangerous he had the skills to patch me up again afterwards.

‘So what do I do?’ I said, as I pulled the helmet over my head. ‘I’ve never been on one of these before.’

‘Hold on to those handlebars on the seat, and just move with the bike. Don’t brace against me. If you’re not happy, tap me on the shoulder and I’ll stop.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘You any good at interior decorating?’

‘Hopeless. Why?’

He fired up the ignition. ‘I thought I’d show you my new house.’

And then we were in the traffic, weaving in and out of the cars and lorries, following signs to the motorway. I had to shut my eyes, press myself against his back and hope that he couldn’t hear me squeal.

We went out to the very edge of the city, a place where the gardens grew larger, then morphed into fields, and houses had names instead of numbers. We came through a village that wasn’t quite separate from the one before it, and Sam slowed the bike at a field gate and finally cut the engine, motioning for me to climb off. I removed the helmet, my heart still thumping in my ears, and tried to lift my sweaty hair from my head with fingers that were still stiff from gripping the pillion handlebars.

Sam opened the gate, and ushered me through. Half the field was grassland, the other an irregular mess of concrete and breeze blocks. In the corner beyond the building work, sheltered by a high hedge, stood a railway carriage and, beside it, a chicken run in which several birds stopped to look expectantly towards us.

‘My house.’

‘Nice!’ I glanced around. ‘Um … where is it?’

Sam began to walk down the field. ‘There. That’s the foundations. Took me the best part of three months to get those down.’

‘You live here?’

‘Yup.’

I stared at the concrete slabs. When I looked at him, something in his expression made me bite back what I was going to say. I rubbed at my head. ‘So… are you going to stand there all evening? Or are you going to give me a guided tour?’

Bathed in the evening sun, and surrounded by the scents of grass and lavender, and the lazy hum of the bees, we walked slowly from one slab to another, Sam pointing to where the windows and doors would be. ‘This is the bathroom.’

‘Bit draughty.’

‘Yeah. I need to do something about that. Watch out. That’s not actually a doorway. You just walked into the shower.’

He stepped over a pile of breeze blocks onto another large grey slab, holding out his hand so that I could step safely over them too. ‘And here’s the living room. So if you look through that window there,’ he held his fingers in a square, ‘you get the views of the open countryside.’

I looked out at the shimmering landscape below. I felt as if we were a million miles out of the city, not ten. I took a deep breath, enjoying the unexpectedness of it all. ‘It’s nice, but I think your sofa’s in the wrong place,’ I said. ‘You need two. One here, and maybe one there. And I’m guessing you have a window here?’

‘Oh, yes. Got to be dual aspect.’

‘Hmm. Plus you totally need to rethink your storage.’

The crazy thing was, within a few minutes of our walking and talking, I could actually see the house. I followed the line of Sam’s hands, as he gestured towards invisible fireplaces, summoned staircases out of his imagination, drew lines across invisible ceilings. I could see its over-height windows, the banisters that a friend of his would carve from aged oak.

‘It’s going to be lovely,’ I said, when we had conjured the last en-suite.

‘In about ten years. But, yup, I hope so.’

I gazed around the field, taking in the vegetable patch, the chicken run, the birdsong. ‘I have to tell you, this is not what I expected. You aren’t tempted to, you know, get builders in?’

‘I probably will eventually. But I like doing it. It’s good for the soul, building a house.’ He shrugged. ‘When you spend all day patching up stab wounds and over-confident cyclists and the wives whose husbands have used them as a punch-bag and the kids with chronic asthma from the damp …’

‘… and the daft women who fall off rooftops.’

‘Those too.’ He gestured towards the concrete mixer, the piles of bricks. ‘I do this so I can live with that. Beer?’ He climbed into the railway carriage, motioning for me to join him.

It was no longer a carriage inside. It had a small, immaculately laid-out kitchen area, and an L-shaped upholstered seat at the end, though it still carried the faint smell of beeswax and tweedy passengers. ‘I don’t like mobile homes,’ he said, as if in explanation. He waved to the seat, ‘Sit,’ then pulled a cold beer from the fridge, cracking it open and handing me the bottle. He set a kettle on the stove for himself.

‘You’re not drinking?’

He shook his head. ‘I found after a couple of years on the job that I’d come home and have a drink to relax. And then it was two. And then I found I couldn’t relax until I’d had those two, or maybe three.’ He opened a caddy, dropped a teabag into a mug. ‘And then I … lost someone close to me, and I decided that either I stopped or I would never stop drinking again.’ He didn’t look at me while he said this, just moved around the railway carriage, a bulky, yet oddly graceful presence within its narrow walls. ‘I do have the odd beer, but not tonight. I’m driving you home later.’

Comments like that took the weirdness out of sitting in a railway carriage with a man I didn’t really know. How could you maintain a reserve with someone who had tended your broken, partially unclothed body? How could you feel anxious around a man who had already told you of his plan to take you home again? It was as if the manner of our first meeting had removed the normal, awkward obstacles to getting to know someone. He had seen me in my underwear. Hell, he had seen under my actual skin. It meant I felt at ease around Sam in a way I didn’t with anyone else.

The carriage reminded me of the gypsy caravans I had read about in childhood, where everything had a place, and there was order in a confined space. It was homey, but austere, and unmistakably male. It smelt agreeably of sun-warmed wood, soap and bacon. A fresh start, I guessed. I wondered what had happened to his and Jake’s old home. ‘So … um … what does Jake think of it?’

He sat down at the other end of the bench with his tea. ‘He thought I was mad at first. Now he quite likes it. He does the animals when I’m on shift. In return I’ve promised to teach him to drive around the field once he turns seventeen.’ He lifted a mug. ‘God help me.’

I raised my beer in return.

Perhaps it was the unexpected pleasure of being out on a warm Friday evening with a man who held your eye as he spoke and had the kind of hair you slightly wanted to ruffle with your fingers, or maybe it was just the second beer, but I finally started to enjoy myself. It got stuffy in the carriage, so we moved outside onto two fold-up chairs, and I watched the chickens peck around in the grass, which was oddly restful, and listened to Sam’s tales of obese patients, who required four teams to lift them out of their homes, and young gang members, who tried to attack each other even as they were being stitched up in the back of his rig. As we talked I found myself sneaking surreptitious glances at him, at the way his hands held his mug, at his unexpected smiles, which caused three perfect lines to span out from the corner of each eye as if they had been drawn with fine-point precision.

He told me about his parents: his father a retired fireman, his mother a nightclub singer, who had given up her career for her children. (‘I think it’s why your outfit spoke to me. I’m comfortable with glitter.’) He didn’t mention his late wife by name, but observed that his mother worried about the ongoing lack of a feminine influence in Jake’s life. ‘She comes and scoops him up once a month and takes him back to Cardiff so she and her sisters can coo over him and feed him up and make sure he has enough socks.’ He rested his elbows on his knees. ‘He moans about going, but he secretly loves it.’

I told him about Lily’s return, and he winced at my tale of her meeting with the Traynors. I told him about her perplexing moods, and her erratic behaviour, and he nodded, as if this were all to be expected. When I told him about Lily’s mother he shook his head. ‘Just because they’re wealthy doesn’t make them better parents,’ he said. ‘If she was on benefits, that mother would probably get a little visit from Social Services.’ He lifted a mug to me. ‘It’s a nice thing you’re doing, Louisa Clark.’

‘I’m not sure I’m doing it very well.’

‘Nobody ever feels they’re doing well with teenagers,’ he said. ‘I think that’s kind of the point of them.’

It was hard to reconcile this Sam, at ease in his home, caring for his chickens, with the sobbing, skirt-chasing version we heard about in the Moving On Circle. But I knew very well how the persona you chose to present to the world could be very different from what was inside. I knew how grief could make you behave in ways you couldn’t even begin to understand. ‘I love your railway carriage,’ I said. ‘And your invisible house.’

‘Then I hope you’ll come again,’ he said.

The compulsive shagger. If this was how he picked up women, I thought a little wistfully, then, boy, he was good. It was a potent mix: the gentlemanly grieving father, the rare smiles, the way he could scoop up a hen one-handed and the hen actually looked happy about it. I would not allow myself to become one of the psycho-girlfriends, I told myself repeatedly. But there was a sneaking pleasure to be had in just flirting gently with a handsome man. It was nice to feel something other than anxiety, or mute fury, the twin emotions that seemed to make up so much of my daily life. The only other encounters I’d had with the opposite sex over the last several months had been fuelled by alcohol and ended with a taxi and tears of self-loathing in the shower.

What do you think, Will? Is this okay?

It had grown darker, and we watched as the chickens clucked their way indignantly into their coop.

Sam watched them. He leant back in his chair. ‘I get the feeling, Louisa Clark, that when you’re talking to me there’s a whole other conversation going on somewhere else.’

I wanted to come back with a smart answer. But he was right, and there was nothing I could say.

‘You and I. We’re both skirting around something.’

‘You’re very direct.’

‘And now I’ve made you uncomfortable.’

‘No.’ I glanced at him. ‘Well, maybe, a little.’

Behind us, a crow lifted noisily into the sky, its flapping wings sending vibrations through the still air. I fought the urge to smooth my hair and instead took a last swig of my beer. ‘Okay. Well. Here’s a real question. How long do you think it takes to get over someone dying? Someone you really loved, I mean.’

I’m not sure why I asked him. It was almost cruelly blunt, given his circumstances. Perhaps I was afraid that the compulsive shagger was about to come out to play.

Sam’s eyes widened a little. ‘Woah. Well …’ he peered down at his mug, and then out at the shadowy fields ‘… I’m not sure you ever do.’

‘That’s cheery.’

‘No. Really. I’ve thought about it a lot. You learn to live with it, with them. Because they do stay with you, even if they’re not living, breathing people any more. It’s not the same crushing grief you felt at first, the kind that swamps you, and makes you want to cry in the wrong places, and get irrationally angry with all the idiots who are still alive when the person you love is dead. It’s just something you learn to accommodate. Like adapting around a hole. I don’t know. It’s like you become … a doughnut instead of a bun.’

There was such sadness in his face that I felt suddenly guilty. ‘A doughnut.’

‘Stupid analogy,’ he said, with a half-smile.

‘I didn’t mean to –’

He shook his head. He looked at the grass between his feet, then sideways at me. ‘C’mon. Let’s get you home.’

We walked across the field to his bike. The air had cooled, and I crossed my arms over my chest. He saw, and handed me his jacket, insisting when I said I was okay. It was pleasingly heavy, and potently male. I tried not to inhale.

‘Do you pick up all your patients like this?’

‘Only the live ones.’

I laughed. It came out of me unexpectedly, louder than I had intended.

‘We’re not really meant to ask patients out on dates.’ He held out the spare helmet. ‘But I figure you’re not my patient any more.’

I took it. ‘And this isn’t really a date.’

‘It isn’t?’ He gave a small, philosophical nod as I climbed aboard. ‘Okay.’