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 sounded. Lily tended to use it only in the small hours of the morning, or when she had forgotten she now owned a key. And as she so kindly pointed out, I had no other friends. Or at least none that were likely to come to my home. 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 by 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 paramedics uniform, and had one hand resting against the wall. He took his hand off the wall and turned to face the road. I saw him let out a breath, and that small motion that 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. I figured if he did anything dangerous he had the skills to patch me up again afterward.
“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 handles.
Sam opened the gate and ushered me through. Half the field was grassland, the other an irregular mess of concrete 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 toward us.
“My house.”
“Nice!” I glanced around. “Um . . . where is it?”
Sam set off down the field. “There. That’s the foundation. Took me the better part of three months to get that 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 out where the windows and doors would be. “This is the bathroom.”
“Bit drafty.”
“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 concrete blocks onto another large gray 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. It felt as if we were a million miles away from 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 toward invisible fireplaces, summoned staircases out of his imagination, drew lines across invisible ceilings. I could see its overheight windows, the banisters that a friend of his would carve out of 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 overconfident cyclists and the wives whose husbands have used them as punching bags and the kids with chronic asthma from the damp . . .”
“. . . and the daft women who fall off rooftops.”
“Those too—” He gestured toward 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 railway 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 gestured 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 the mug. “And then I . . . 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 cum residence 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 of 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 anymore.
While he was making tea, I gazed around me at the little space. It 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 smelled agreeably of sun-warmed wood, of 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 mug of 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 his 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 looks 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-pointed 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.”
He went quiet for a while after that.
I told him about Lily’s return, and he winced at my tale of her meeting with the Traynors. I told him about her moodiness, and her erratic behavior, 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 his mug to me. “It’s a great 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, with his chickens, with the sobbing, skirt-chasing version that we heard about in the Moving On Circle. But then I knew better than anyone how the persona you chose to present to the world could be very different from what was really 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 in the past eighteen months had been fueled 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.
“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 over 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 entirely sure why I asked him. It was almost cruelly direct, given his circumstances. Perhaps I was afraid that the compulsive shagger was about to come out to play.
Sam’s eyes widened just a little. “Whoa. Well”—he looked 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 anymore. 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, 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. It had finally cooled off, 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 supposed to ask patients out on dates.” He held out the spare helmet. “But I figure you’re not my patient anymore.”
I took it. “And this isn’t really a date.”
“It isn’t?” He gave a small, philosophical nod as I climbed aboard. “Okay.”
11
Jake wasn’t there when I arrived at the Moving On Circle that week. As Daphne discussed her inability to open jars without a man in her kitchen, and Sunil talked of the problems of dividing up his brother’s few belongings among his remaining siblings, I found myself waiting for the heavy red doors to open at the end of the church hall.
I told myself that it was his welfare I was concerned about; that he needed to be able to express his discomfort at his father’s behavior in a safe place. I told myself firmly that it was not Sam I was hoping to see, leaning against his bike, waiting.
“What are the small things that you find trip you up, Louisa?”
Perhaps Jake had finished with the group, I thought. Perhaps he had decided he didn’t need it anymore. People did drop out, everyone said. And that would be it. I would never see either of them again.
“Louisa? The daily things? There must be something.”
I kept thinking about that field, the neat confines of the railway carriage, the way Sam had strolled down the field with a hen under one arm, like he was carrying a precious parcel. The feathers on her chest had been as soft as a whisper.
Daphne nudged me.
“We were discussing the small things in day-to-day life that force you to contemplate loss,” said Marc.
“I miss sex,” said Natasha.
“That’s not a small thing,” replied William.
“You didn’t know my husband,” said Natasha, and snorted a laugh. “Not really. That’s a terrible joke to make. I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me.”
“It’s good to joke,” said Marc encouragingly.
“Olaf was perfectly well endowed. Very well endowed, in fact.” Natasha’s eyes flickered around us. When nobody spoke she held up her hands, a foot apart, and nodded emphatically. “We were very happy.”
There was a short silence.
“Good,” said Marc. “That’s nice to hear.”
“I don’t want anyone thinking . . . I mean, that’s not what I want people thinking when they think of my husband. That he had a tiny—”
“I’m sure nobody thinks that about your husband.”
“I will, if you keep going on about it,” said William.
“I don’t want you thinking about my husband’s penis,” said Natasha. “In fact, I forbid you to think about my husband’s penis.”
“Stop going on about it then!” said William.
“Can we not talk about penises?” said Daphne. “It makes me go a bit peculiar. The nuns used to smack us with rulers if we even used the word undercarriage.”
Marc’s voice was now tinged with desperation. “Can we steer the conversation away from—back to symbols of loss. Louisa, you were about to tell us which were the small things that brought your loss home to you?”
I sat there, trying to ignore Natasha holding up her hands again, silently measuring some unlikely invisible length.
“I think I miss having someone to discuss things with,” I said carefully.
There was a murmur of agreement.
“I mean, I’m not one of those people who has a massive circle of friends. I was with my last boyfriend for ages and we . . . we didn’t really go out much. And then there was . . . Bill. We just used to talk all the time. About music and people and things we’d done and wanted to do, and I never worried about whether I was going to say the wrong thing or offend someone, because he just ‘got’ me, you know? And now I’ve moved to London and I’m sort of on my own apart from my family, and talking to them is always . . . tricky.”
“Word,” said Sunil.
“And now there’s something going on that I’d just really like to chat to him about. I talk to him in my head, but it isn’t the same. I miss having that . . . ability to just go, ‘Hey, what do you think of this?’ And knowing that whatever he said was probably going to be the right thing.”
The group was silent for a minute.
“You can talk to us, Louisa,” said Marc.
“It’s . . . complicated.”
“It’s always complicated,” said Leanne.
I looked at their faces, kind and expectant, and completely unlikely to understand anything I told them. Not really understand it.
Daphne adjusted her silk scarf. “What Louisa needs is another young man to talk to. Of course she does. You’re young and pretty. You’ll find someone else,” she said. “And you, Natasha. Get back out there. It’s too late for me, but you two shouldn’t be sitting in this dingy old hall—Sorry, Marc, but they shouldn’t. You should be out dancing, having a laugh.”