His eyes are on my face, reading me. “Stop thinking,” he says.
He pulls me to him, and I relax. This man spends each day out here, on the bridge between life and death. He understands. “You think too much.”
His hand slides down the side of my face. I turn toward him, an involuntary reflex, and put my lips against his palm. “Just live?” I whisper.
He nods, and then he kisses me, long and slow and sweet, until my body arches and I am just need and want and longing.
His voice is a low rumble in my ear. My name, pulling me in. He makes it sound like something precious.
• • •
The next three days were a blur of stolen nights and brief meetings. I missed Idealization Week in the Moving On Circle, because he turned up at the flat just as I was leaving and we somehow ended up an urgent mess of arms and legs, waiting for my egg timer to go off so that he could dress and race to pick Jake up on time. Twice he was waiting for me when I returned from my shift, and with his lips on my neck, his big hands on my hips, the indignities of the Shamrock and Clover were, if not forgotten, swept aside along with last night’s empties.
I wanted to resist him, but I couldn’t. I was giddy, diverted, sleepless. I got cystitis and didn’t care. I hummed my way through work, flirted with the businessmen, and smiled cheerfully at Richard’s complaints. My happiness offended my manager; I could see it in his chewed cheek, the way he sought ever more feeble misdemeanors for which to tell me off.
I cared about none of it. I sang in the shower, lay awake dreaming. I wore my old dresses, my brightly colored cardigans, and my satin pumps, and let myself be enclosed in a bubble of happiness, conscious that bubbles only ever existed for so long before they popped anyway.
“I told Jake,” he said. He had half an hour’s break, and he and Donna had stopped outside my flat with lunch before I went off for a late shift. I sat beside him in the front seat of the ambulance.
“You told him what?” He had made mozzarella, cherry tomato, and basil sandwiches. The tomatoes, grown in his garden. burst in little explosions of flavor in my mouth. He was appalled at how I ate when I was alone.
“That you’d thought I was his dad. He laughed more than I’ve seen him laugh for months.”
“You didn’t tell him I told you his dad cried after sex, right?”
“I knew a man who did that once,” said Donna. “But he really sobbed. It got sort of embarrassing. The first time I thought I’d broken his penis.”
I turned to her, openmouthed.
“It’s a thing. Really. We’ve had a couple in the rig, haven’t we?”
“We have. You’d be amazed at the coital injuries we see.” He nodded at my sandwich, which was still on my lap. “I’ll tell when you don’t have your mouth full.”
“Coital injuries. Great. Because there aren’t enough things in life to worry about.”
His gaze slid sideways as he bit into his sandwich, so that I blushed. “Trust me. I’d let you know.”
“Just so we’re straight, my old mucker,” said Donna, offering up one of her ever-present energy drinks, “I am so totally not going to be your first responder for that one.”
I liked being in the cab. Sam and Donna had the no-nonsense wry manner of those who had seen pretty much every human condition, and treated it too. They were funny and dark and I felt oddly at home wedged between them, as if my life, with all its strangeness, was actually pretty normal.
These were the things I learned in the space of several snatched lunch hours:
Almost no men or women over the age of seventy would complain about their pain or their treatment, even if a limb were actually hanging off.
Those same elderly men or women would almost always apologize for “making a fuss.”
The term “Patient PFO” was not scientific terminology but “Patient Pissed and Fell Over.”
Pregnant women rarely gave birth in the back of ambulances. (I was quite disappointed by that one.)
Nobody used the term “ambulance driver” anymore. Especially not ambulance drivers.
There would always be a handful of men who would answer, when asked to describe how much pain they were in from one to ten, with “eleven.”
But what came through most, when Sam arrived back after a long shift, was the bleakness: of solitary pensioners; of obese men glued to a television screen, too large even to try to get themselves up and down their own stairs; of young mothers who spoke no English, confined to their flats with a million small children, unsure how to call for help when it was needed; and of the depressed, the chronically ill, the unloved.
Some days, he said, it felt like a virus: you had to scrub the melancholy from your skin along with the scent of antiseptic. And then there were the suicides, the lives ended under trains or in silent bathrooms, their bodies often unnoticed for weeks or months until somebody remarked on the smell, or wondered why so-and-so’s post was now spilling out of their pigeonhole.
“Do you ever get frightened?” He lay, oversized in my little bath. The water had turned faintly pink with the blood from a patient’s gunshot wound that had gone all over him. (I was a little surprised at how swiftly I had got used to having a naked man in the vicinity. Especially one who could move by himself.)
“You can’t do this job if you’re frightened,” he said, simply.
He had been in the army before he’d joined the paramedics; it was not an unusual career arc. “They like us because we don’t scare easy, and we’ve seen it all. Mind you, some of those drunk kids scare me far more than the Taliban ever did.”
I sat on the loo seat beside him and stared at his body in the discolored water. Even with his size and strength, I shivered.
“Hey,” he said, seeing something pass across my face, and reaching out a hand to me. “It’s fine, really. I have a very good nose for trouble.” He closed his fingers around mine. “It’s not a great job for relationships, though. My last girlfriend couldn’t cope with it. The hours. Nights. The mess.”
“The pink bathwater.”
“Yeah. Sorry about that. The showers weren’t working at the station. I should really have gone home first.” He looked at me in a way that showed me there had been no chance of him going home first. He pulled the plug to let some of the water drain away, then turned on the taps for more.
“So who was she, your last girlfriend?” I kept my voice level. I was not going to be one of those women, even if he had turned out not to be one of those men.
“Iona. Travel agent. Sweet girl.”
“But you weren’t in love with her.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Nobody ever says ‘sweet girl’ about someone they were in love with. It’s like the whole ‘we’ll still be friends’ thing. It means you didn’t feel enough.”
He was briefly amused. “So what would I have said if I had been in love with her?”
“You would have looked very serious, and said, ‘Karen. Complete nightmare,’ or shut down and gone all ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’”
“You’re probably right.” He thought for a bit, wiped his hand down his face. “If I’m honest I didn’t really want to feel much after my sister died. Being with Ellen for the last few months, helping look after her, kind of knocked me sideways. Cancer can be a pretty brutal way to go.” He glanced over at me. “Jake’s dad fell apart. Some people do. So I figured they needed me there. If I’m honest, I probably only held it together myself because we couldn’t all go to pieces.” We sat in silence for a moment. I couldn’t tell if his eyes had gone a bit red from grief or soap.
“Anyway. So, yes. Probably not much of a boyfriend back then. So who was yours?” he said, when he finally turned back to me.
“Will.”
“Of course. Nobody since?”
“Nobody I want to talk about.” I shuddered.
“Everyone’s allowed his own way back, Louisa. Don’t beat yourself up about it.”
His skin was hot and wet, making it hard for me to hold on to his fingers. I released them, and he began to wash his hair. I sat and watched him, letting the mood lift, enjoying the bunched muscles in his shoulders, the gleam of his wet skin. I liked the way he washed his hair, vigorously, with a kind of matter-of-factness, shaking off the excess water like a dog.
“Oh. I had a job interview,” I said, when he finished. “For a thing in New York.”
“New York.” He raised an eyebrow.
“I won’t get it.”
“Shame. I’ve always wanted an excuse to go to New York.” He slid slowly under the water so that only his mouth remained on the surface. It broke into a slow smile. “But you’d get to keep the pixie outfit, yes?”
I felt the mood shift. And, for no reason at all other than that he didn’t expect it, I climbed fully clothed into the bath and kissed him as he laughed and spluttered. I was suddenly glad of his solidity in a world where it was so easy to fall.
• • •
I finally made an effort to sort out the flat. On my day off I bought an armchair, and a coffee table, and a small framed print, which I hung near the television, and those things somehow conspired to suggest someone might actually live there. I bought new bedding and two cushions and hung up all my vintage clothes in the wardrobe so that opening it now revealed a riot of pattern and color, instead of several pairs of cheap jeans and a too-short Lurex dress. I managed to turn my anonymous little flat into something that felt, if not quite like a home, vaguely welcoming.
By some strange beneficence of the shift-scheduling gods, Sam and I both had a day off. Eighteen uninterrupted hours in which he did not have to listen to a siren, and I did not have to listen to the sound of panpipes or complaints about dry-roasted peanuts. Time spent with Sam, I noted, seemed to go twice as fast as the hours I spent alone. I had pondered the million things we could do together, then dismissed half of them as too “couple-y.” I wondered whether our spending so much time together was wise.
I texted Lily one more time.
Lily, please get in touch. I know you’re mad at me, but just call. Your garden is looking beautiful! I need you to show me how to look after it, and what to do with the tomato plants, which have got really tall (is this right?). Maybe after we could go out dancing? x
I pressed send and stared at the little screen just as the doorbell rang.
“Hey.” He filled my doorway, holding a toolbox in one hand and a bag of groceries in the other.
“Oh, my God,” I said. “You’re like the ultimate female fantasy.”
“Shelves,” he said, deadpan. “You need shelves.”
“Oh, baby. Keep talking.”
“And home-cooked food.”
“That’s it. I just came.”
He laughed and dropped the tools in the hallway and kissed me and when we finally untangled ourselves, he walked through to the kitchen. “I thought we could go to the pictures. You know one of the greatest benefits to shift work is empty matinées, right?”
I checked my phone.
“But nothing with blood in it. I get a bit tired of blood.”
When I looked up he was watching me.
“What? Don’t fancy it? Or is that going to stamp all over your plans for Zombie Flesh Eaters Fifteen? . . . What?”
I frowned, and dropped my hand to my side. “I can’t get hold of Lily.”
“I thought you said she’d gone home?”
“She did. But she won’t take my calls. I think she’s really upset with me.”
“Her friends stole your stuff. You’re allowed to be the one who’s upset.”
He started to pull things out of the bag, lettuces, tomatoes, avocados, eggs, herbs, stacking them neatly in my near-empty fridge. He looked up at me as I texted her again.
“Come on. She could have dropped her phone, left it in some club, or run out of credit. You know what teenagers are like. Or she’s just throwing a massive strop. Sometimes you need to let them work it out of their system.”
I took his hand and shut the fridge door. “I need to show you something.” His eyes lit up briefly. “Not that, no, you bad man. That will have to wait till later.”
• • •
Sam stood on the rooftop and gazed around him at the flowers. “And you had no idea?”
“None at all.”
He sat down heavily on the bench. I sat next to him and we both stared at the little garden.
“I feel awful,” I said. “I basically accused her of destroying everything she went near. And all the time she was creating this.”
He stooped to feel the leaves on a tomato plant, and then straightened, shaking his head. “Okay. So we’ll go talk to her.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Lunch first. Then the cinema. Then we’ll turn up on her doorstep. That way she won’t be able to avoid you.” He took my hand and raised it to his lips. “Hey. Don’t look so worried. The garden is good news. It shows that her head’s not in a totally bad place.”
He released my hand and I squinted at him. “How come you always make everything better?”
“I just don’t like seeing you look sad.”
I couldn’t tell him that I wasn’t sad when I was with him. I couldn’t tell him that he made me feel so happy I was afraid of it. I thought of how I liked having his food in my fridge, how I glanced at my phone twenty times a day waiting for his messages, how I conjured his naked body in my imagination in the quiet minutes at work and then had to think very hard about floor polish or till receipts just to stop myself glowing.
Slow down, said a warning voice. Don’t get too close.
His eyes softened. “You have a sweet smile, Louisa Clark. It’s one of the several hundred things I like about you.”
I let myself gaze back at him for a minute. This man, I thought. And then I slapped my hands heavily on my knees. “C’mon,” I said, briskly. “Let’s go watch a movie.”
• • •
The cinema was almost empty. We sat side by side at the back in a seat where someone had knocked out the armrest, and Sam fed me popcorn from a cardboard bucket the size of a dustbin, and I tried not to think about the weight of his hand resting on my bare leg, because when I did I frequently lost track of what was happening with the plot.
The film was an American comedy about two mismatched cops who find themselves mistaken for criminals. It wasn’t very funny, but I laughed anyway. Sam’s fingers appeared in front of me, bearing a bulbous knobble of salted popcorn and I took it, and another, then, as an afterthought, kept hold of his fingers between my teeth. He looked at me and shook his head slowly.
I finished the popcorn and swallowed. “Nobody will see,” I whispered.
He raised an eyebrow. “I’m too old for this,” he murmured. But when I turned his face to mine in the hot, dark air and started to kiss him, he dropped the popcorn and his hand slid slowly up my back.
And then my phone rang. There was a hiss of disapproval from the two people at the front. “Sorry. Sorry, you two!” (Given there were only four of us in the cinema.) I scrambled off Sam’s lap and answered. A number I didn’t recognize.
“Louisa?”
It took me a second to register her voice.
“Just give me a minute.” I pulled a face at Sam, and made my way out.
“Sorry, Mrs. Traynor. I just had to— Are you still there? Hello?”
The foyer was empty, the cordoned off queue areas deserted, the frozen-drinks machine churning its colored ice listlessly behind the counter.
“Oh, thank goodness. Louisa? I wondered if I could speak to Lily.”
I stood with the phone pressed to my ear.
“I’ve been thinking about what happened the other week and I’m so sorry,” she said. “I must have seemed . . .” She hesitated. “Look, I was wondering if you thought she would agree to see me?”
“Mrs. Traynor—”
“I’d like to explain to her. For the last year or so I’ve . . . well, I’ve not been myself. I’ve been on these tablets and they make me rather dim-witted. And I was so taken aback to find you on my doorstep, and then I simply couldn’t believe what you both were telling me. It all seemed so unlikely. But I . . . Well, I’ve spoken to Steven and he confirmed the whole thing and I’ve been sitting here for days and digesting it all and I just think . . . Will had a daughter. I have a granddaughter. I keep saying the words. Sometimes I think I dreamed it.”
I listened to the uncharacteristic flurry of her words. “I know,” I said. “I felt like that too.”
“I can’t stop thinking about her. I do so want to meet her properly. Do you think she’d agree to see me again?”
“Mrs. Traynor, she’s not staying with me anymore. But, yes.” I ran my fingers through my hair. “Yes, of course I’ll ask her.”
• • •
I couldn’t focus on the rest of the film. In the end, perhaps realizing that I was simply staring at a moving screen, Sam suggested we leave. We stood in the car park by his bike and I told him what she’d said.
“There, see?” he said, as if I had done something to be proud of. “Let’s go.”
He waited on the bike across the road as I knocked on the door. I lifted my chin, determined that this time I would not let Tanya Houghton-Miller intimidate me. I glanced back, and Sam nodded encouragingly.
The door opened. Tanya was dressed in a chocolate linen dress and Grecian sandals and she looked me up and down, as she had when we first met, as if my own wardrobe had failed some invisible test. (This was a little annoying, as I was wearing my favorite checked cotton pinafore dress.) Her smile stayed on her lips for just a nanosecond, then fell away. “Louisa.”
“Sorry to turn up unannounced, Mrs. Houghton-Miller.”
“Has something happened?”
I blinked. “Well, yes, actually.” I pushed my hair from the side of my face. “I’ve had a call from Mrs. Traynor, Will’s mother. I’m sorry to bother you with this, but she’d really like to contact Lily, and as she’s not picking up her phone, I wondered if you’d mind asking her to call me?”
Tanya gazed at me from under perfectly plucked brows.
I kept my face neutral. “Or maybe we could have a quick chat with her.”
There was a short silence. “Why would you think I would ask her?”
I took a breath, picking my words carefully. “I know you have strong feelings about the Traynor family, but I do think it would be in Lily’s interests. I don’t know if she told you but they had a rather difficult first meeting the other week and Mrs. Traynor would really like the chance to start again.”
“She can do what she wants, Louisa. But I don’t know why you’re expecting me to get involved.”
I tried to keep my voice polite. “Um . . . because you’re her mother?”
“Whom she hasn’t bothered to contact in more than a week.”
I stood very still. Something cold and hard settled in my stomach. “What did you just say?”
“Lily. Hasn’t bothered to contact me. I thought at least she might come and say hello after we got back from holiday but, no, that’s plainly beyond her. Suiting herself, as usual.” She extended a hand to examine her fingernails.
I stared at her. “Mrs. Houghton-Miller, she was meant to be with you.”
“What?”
“Lily. Was moving back in with you. When you got home from your holiday. She left my flat . . . ten days ago.”
18
We stood in Tanya Houghton-Miller’s immaculate kitchen and I stared at her shiny coffee machine with 108 knobs, which had probably cost more than my car, and ran through the previous week’s events for the umpteenth time.