Lifesaver (12 page)

‘Can you do that shopping basket? You’ll need two different browns, and if you cut pieces about the same size, you can lay them in alternate colours to look like the weave.’

Where’s Max? I longed to ask. But instead I nodded, and valiantly took up my tile cutters.

Two hours later, my right thumb was aching and stiff from cracking tiles, and my hands scratchy and spackled with grey adhesive, but I had weaved my very own brown tiled basket. I felt inordinately proud of it—it even
looked
like a basket! But it was made of bits of tile! I was surprised at how thrilling it was, watching it clumsily emerge from within the parameters of smudgy black lines on hardboard.

I didn’t say much at first, just speaking when I was spoken to, but I listened intently to as much of Adam’s conversation as I could. He was on the other side of the table putting the finishing touches to a pond with a beautiful rippled surface, so I didn’t get much of a chance to talk to him directly and, unfortunately, Ralph and Mitch had rather unsubtly worked their way around towards me and were competing shamelessly for my attention.

I realised with hindsight that my nice-hair-on-arms compliment had been a mistake—Mitch was gazing at me with undisguised lust, and at one point, when I smiled hesitantly in his direction, he lost concentration and cut his finger on a shard of red tile intended for the side of the bus he was working on. At least that got him out of the way for a while, as Mary bore him off to find a big enough plaster to staunch the flow of blood.

I’d thought that this would be my chance to talk to Adam, but, seeing a window of opportunity, Ralph slid in instead. He was a very handsome man, but something about him rather disturbed me. His shorts were, frankly, disturbing enough - so brief that they resembled a pair of denim Speedos; but it was more the intensity of his conversation. Within half an hour, I had learned that his wife had left him for another man, that he was having problems paying his mortgage, that his youngest child had glue ear and grommets and his oldest child thought the marital break-up was his fault (at that point I wondered if the shorts would be used against him in court as evidence), and that he played golf with a handicap of nineteen. All without drawing breath. My head was reeling with the effort of trying to nod at the appropriate junctures, whilst eavesdropping on Adam’s murmured chat with the women on either side of him, and simultaneously trying to cut regular rectangles of beige and brown tile for my basket. It wasn’t easy, what with the Beth Orton tape in the background and the children’s intermittent piercing squeals as they squabbled over pens and biscuits.

Just when I was beginning to think there could be nothing left that I didn’t know about Ralph, he excused himself. ‘Just going for a jimmy,’ he said.

‘
Where’s
he going?’ asked Margie, puzzled. She had shown no interest in anything Ralph had said up to that point, so I was beginning to get the impression that the other women had all been through this compulsive-disclosure thing with him already. It was probably some rite of passage that everybody working on the mosaic had to endure.

‘For a jimmy. A Jimmy Riddle—it means he’s going to the toilet,’ I explained, my voice feeling faintly rusty with the lack of use since Ralph had been banging on.

‘I don’t understand. Why does that mean he’s going to the toilet?’

‘It’s cockney rhyming slang. Jimmy Riddle equals piddle. Pee.’

‘Oh,’ she said, looking none the wiser. ‘I do not understand your English expressions. I would be terrible on ‘Who Wants to Be A Millionaire’, I think. I would not be able to answer the really easy questions. They had one the other day: “It is raining cats and—what?” I thought the answer was ducks. That was for one hundred pounds, and I would have been out.’

I laughed, and when I looked up I saw that Adam was too. I thought how much more attractive he was when his face relaxed and his eyes creased at the corners.

‘I knew somebody called Jimmy Riddle once,’ I said, cracking some thinner pieces of tile for the basket handle. ‘He didn’t even call himself Jim or James. Just Jimmy. He was a plumber, too, so maybe he did it on purpose.’

Everybody laughed at that, even Paula, the haughty-looking pregnant one. I felt myself relax, and realised that I was enjoying myself.

‘So what do you do, Anna?’ Adam asked, just as Mitch, Mary and Ralph all arrived back at the table. Mitch had a bulky bandage around his finger and a tiny little boy sucking a dirty thumb trailing behind him, holding on to the edge of his Little Feat t-shirt.

I opened my mouth to tell Adam that I was an actor, when Mitch thrust his injured digit into the centre of attention. Blood was already beginning to seep through the white gauze, and I worried that it might drip on my basket. ‘I’d better call it a day, guys,’ he said mournfully. ‘It won’t stop bleeding. Think I might need a stitch or two. So me and Spike will head off. See you tomorrow, yeah?’

‘Bye, Mitch, bye Spike,’ everybody chorussed, trying to appear concerned.

Another child sidled up to the table, his small pointed face so dwarfed by the huge plastic safely goggles that he looked like the personification of a bug-eyed grasshopper. He pulled at Mary’s sleeve. ‘I’m hungry, Mum. Cn’ I have a sandwich?’

Mary looked at him with exasperation. ‘Orlando, you had an enormous breakfast, and you had three biscuits less than an hour ago. You’ll have to wait.’

‘I’m hungry too,’ added a chubbier dark-haired girl who appeared behind him. ‘And we’re bored doing colouring. Can we stick some tiles on?’

‘Only if you wear the goggles, Petra, I’m afraid,’ said Adam. ‘We can’t risk you getting a bit of tile in your eye.’

‘Is she yours?’ I ventured to Adam, trying to sound natural.

‘No. She and Millie are mine,’ Serena interrupted. ‘Orlando’s Mary’s son.’

It felt too contrived to press on and ask Adam if he had any children. I hoped he’d volunteer the information so I could legitimately ask him about Max, but he didn’t say anything further. I was just going to have to be patient.

But patience was not a virtue with which I’d ever been over-endowed. The next time there was a break in the conversation (some time later, when it was Mitch’s turn to make the tea) I said to the general assembled company, ‘So, are all your kids still on summer holiday?’

Paula laughed. ‘I can tell you don’t have children, then. There’s another two weeks before term starts.’

I can tell you don’t have children
.

For a moment I was almost felled by grief, cracked into a dozen sharp pieces. I couldn’t reply. I couldn’t even breathe—it always got me that way, out of the blue. Maybe she could tell. Maybe they could all tell that I was here under false pretences. It had nothing to do with not being aware of term dates. It was to do with my fucked up Tefal-lined womb that nothing or no-one would stick to—they could feel my failure like an airborne virus, leaching out and mingling with the dust in the air… No wonder Paula was standing over the other side of the table, I was probably subconsciously giving off Dr.Death vibes that she could feel as a threat to the perfect child inside her, waiting contentedly, curled up and kicking. It was bound to be a beautiful healthy baby—after all, most women had that sort—and an almost murderous jealousy settled on me, taunting me with light fingers of blame. It was the most basic, instinctive thing in the world. In fact, practically any woman could do it. You didn’t have to be smart, beautiful, or successful to give birth; just screw at the right time, sit around for nine months eating pastries, then open your legs and push. It was a doddle.

But
I
couldn’t do it.

‘Are you all right?’ Adam asked, and the concern in his voice was almost the final straw. I felt my knees begin to buckle, and I dropped the tile cutters onto the table, chipping an edge off Paula’s tiled streetlamp.

‘Fine,’ I managed. ‘Sorry, I, er—I’ll be back in a minute.’

I turned and, trying not to run, walked unsteadily towards a door by the stage with a sheet of A4 paper sellotaped to it, bearing the word TIOLET written in a childish hand in different shades of felt tip pen. Tiolet, like violet, I thought vaguely. A much more attractive word than toilet. I pushed open the door and found myself in a short corridor, with another, open door at the end leading to the aforementioned ‘tiolet’. I squeezed in and sat down on the toilet seat, shaking. It was a shabby room with pipes running up the flaky marooned-painted walls. Marbled drops of red in the tiny cracked basin in the corner indicated that this was where Mitch’s finger-bandaging operation had taken place.

The air in the little bathroom was scented with a not-unpleasant smell that I hadn’t smelled for nearly thirty years, but which came back to me immediately as soon as I breathed in, a welcome distraction from the pain in my head and heart: it was the exact scent of the cages I used to keep my hamsters in, when I was a child. Either the cages themselves, or the wood shavings they used for their bedding. The memory felt like an unexpected gift, in a way, and I remembered how much I’d loved those hamsters, the tiny light balls of fluff with their shiny eyes and caramel coloured fur.

I put my head in my hands and thought of my dad giving me the hamsters for Christmas, remembering his glee at my reaction, and then I thought what a terrible shame it would be if Ken never became a father. Despite his excessive working hours (although, who knew, perhaps a baby might be reason enough for him to cut back on the work commitments) he’d be a fantastic dad.

Suddenly I wanted to go home. This was futile, ridiculous. Running the taps first in the sink first, to rinse out Ralph’s bloodstains, I washed the tile and cement dust off my hands, and splashed my face. Then, taking a deep breath, I walked back into the hall.

‘Sure you’re all right?’ Adam asked again.

I pretended to look surprised. ‘All right? Yes, of course, I’m fine.’ I looked exaggeratedly at my watch. ‘But I’m afraid I’m going to have to shoot off now—I didn’t realize how much time had passed.’

‘You will be back again soon, won’t you?’ asked Ralph plaintively, and I nodded. ‘Yes, I’ve really enjoyed myself.’ That much at least was true. I felt a very satisfying glow of having accomplished something for the community. OK, so it was only a tile basket, and OK, so it wasn’t even my own community, but that didn’t really matter. Secretly I didn’t think for a moment that I
would
be back, the preposterousness of the situation once more settling on my shoulders almost palpably, like a heavy snowfall, but no matter. Not really. I hadn’t met Max but at least I knew that Adam was—unless I was an utterly terrible judge of character—a good man and a loving father. There was nothing really to gain from meeting Max. He couldn’t replace Holly or the others, and I really ought to have been looking forwards, not backwards.

I said my goodbyes to the group, and Adam came over to shake my hand. His own felt large, dusty and cracked and hard, and I thought, those are the hands he hugs Max with. He looked me in the eye and said, like he knew there was more to it than a desire on my part to crack tiles: ‘I’m sorry we didn’t get a chance to talk properly. I do hope I’ll see you again.’

I smiled until my cheeks ached and nodded enthusiastically, waving behind me when I got to the door and carolling more ‘byees’ to everyone; but as soon I got outside the fake enthusiasm fell away from me like a discarded overcoat, my shoulders slumped, and I felt the corners of my mouth droop.

I wished I’d never gone there.

I wept most of the way home, steady tears dripping into my lap. The tears weren’t just for Holly - it would have been Dad’s birthday that day, a fact that I’d managed to push to the back of my mind in the earlier excitement of meeting Adam.

I tried to calculate how old he’d have been, bearing in mind that he died when I was eighteen, in 1986, aged fifty-two, but I couldn’t make my brain do the maths. I couldn’t bear to think of us all having a jolly birthday party round at Lil’s, probably, with Olly and Russ, and a lavish birthday cake; Dad sucking at his pipe and grumbling mildly about his advancing old age, reading his cards and smiling. It hurt.

‘You’re a user, Anna,’ I said out loud. ‘It’s your fault he’s not alive.’ A large bug crashed and exploded on my windscreen, and for a moment I wished myself into similar instant oblivion. I use everybody, I thought bitterly, and I always have done. I remembered with shame my ‘nice hair on arms’ comment just that day, and shuddered. Then I remembered further back, to Dad. I hadn’t plunged a bread knife between his ribs or anything, but I was haunted by the thought that I might just as well have done.

My father had died immediately after he found out that I was having an affair with his best friend Greg. He’d had a heart attack in the pub, the local that he and Greg always frequented. It was called the Fox and Goose, a dingy place with maroon walls and sticky purple lino, which seemed to have Whitesnake perpetually on the jukebox. It wasn’t that either Dad or Greg liked Whitesnake particularly—Greg was into Prog Rock, and Dad had been more of an Acker Bilk man - but they had been drinking there so long that they probably ceased to notice the dubious music years before.

Greg had taken Dad there that night to break the news that he was in love with me. They’d have been at the small table in the corner, anyway, furthest away from the jukebox. Greg would have been smoking Silk Cut, squeezing his eyes shut, inhaling each drag deeply from the side of his mouth and drinking chasers with his pints; whilst Dad stuck to bitter and tinkered with his pipe, laying out all the pieces of pipe-smoking paraphernalia on the table in front of him, but rarely touching a match to the tiny bird’s nest of tobacco in the cherrywood bowl.

I wish I could have stopped time right at that moment, at that table, in that pub; rushed in and put my hands over Greg’s mouth to hush him up, so that I could be driving home to celebrate Dad’s seventy-whateverth birthday with him now, instead of replaying the scene over and over in mind as I’d done for the last sixteen years…I would so loved to have been driving home to celebrate Dad’s birthday with him.