Reversing Over Liberace Read online

  “Ganda never had any money to leave, though,” I said. “I should know.”

  They all turned to look at me. Even Bree.

  “Yeah,” Ash muttered. “We’ve kinda wondered about that. You were his favourite, you’ve got to admit, Will, and all he leaves you is a mouldy old body part?”

  “Maybe”—heads swivelled again as Bree spoke—“he gave us what he did for a reason.”

  “I reckon he gave Clay that allotment so that he’d have something to come back to.” I looked over at our eldest brother, fussily tidying up the fallen leaves of my spider plant on the window ledge. “You’re always saying you’ll come back to Yorkshire one day, aren’t you? Perhaps he was making a point. This is where your roots are. It’s the kind of terrible pun Ganda used to love.”

  There was a moment of silence. Then I blew my nose and OC rubbed her eyes with her sleeve like a child would. “But Booter and Snag? You have to admit, Wills, they are horrible, even for dogs.”

  I sensed the movement as three pairs of eyeballs turned towards me. I loved my sister, absolutely (although I’d never quite forgiven her for the Barbie incident when I was six), but her cleanliness and tidiness fetish drove all of us to want to run round her immaculate house wearing muddy Wellingtons. “Perhaps,” I said carefully, “it was because you’re the only one of us with the time and space for two spaniels.” Plus looking after something other than yourself and the obnoxiously self-satisfied Paddy will be good practice, I prevented myself from adding. A well-placed kick under the table made sure that Ash didn’t make the point either. Secretly I knew Ganda had thought OC was far too obsessive about her house and he would have delighted in the chaos the dogs would bring. He was probably up there now, chuckling down on our discomfiture.

  Ash poked me with the wine bottle. “Okay, yeah, I can go with all that, and let’s face it, who else would he have left his books to but Bree—but twelve pairs of waders? What did he expect me to do, take my friends fly-fishing?”

  Since all Ash’s friends thought that fresh air was a dangerous perversion, this was unlikely to be the case. I shrugged.

  “Well, I’ve got to be going. Paddy will be home at half past six and I have no idea what I’m doing for dinner.” OC aimed a quick kiss at my cheek. “Wills, why don’t you come down next week for Sunday lunch? Paddy’s got some kind of work do on the Saturday, but he’ll be back by Sunday morning.”

  Oh goody, I thought, torn between my dislike of Sundays and my hatred of Paddy. “Sounds nice, thanks.”

  “And I’d better…” Bree stood up, too. “Bye.” In contrast to OC’s fussy farewell my brother simply melted into the darkness. Clay had taken all the used cups through to the kitchen, which left me with Ash.

  “One less Sunday on your own,” he remarked, handing me the bottle he’d been drinking from and picking up his helmet. Ash always had the knack of sensing my feelings. “You really must be down, Will, if you’d rather spend it with Mrs. Housewife and the Champion Prick.”

  “They’re not so bad,” I said. “And everyone else is off doing couply things. Not you and Bree, obviously, but Katie’s got Dan and the boys, and Jazz’s always at band rehearsals.”

  “I could introduce you to some of my friends.” Ash crammed his bleach blond crop into his helmet and raised the visor.

  “No thanks.” I walked with him to the front garden where he wheeled the huge bike backwards out of the gateway, manoeuvring it carefully onto the road and throwing his leg casually over the saddle. “I’m not quite ready to be a fag hag just yet.”

  “They’re not all gay.”

  “Name one who’s not.”

  He snapped down his visor, ignited the engine and muttered something over the roar. I flicked him the finger and slapped his red-leathered shoulder and he rode off, waving a hand.

  “Willow.” Clay called from the doorway. “Phone for you.”

  I took the handset, presuming that Katie had successfully fought her twins into bed. “Hello.” Then, noticing that Ash had decelerated to take the corner, I let out a wolf-whistle of the magnitude only truly mastered by someone with older brothers. It clearly penetrated his padded concentration, because he raised two fingers and cornered tightly, knee almost to the pavement.

  The phone was silent in my ear for a second. After a moment a male voice said carefully, “Is that Willow?”

  Oh shit. “Um. Yes, hello, Luke. Um. I was just…”

  “Not interrupting anything, am I? I mean, is this a good time to call?”

  I rushed back inside the house and carried the telephone upstairs. “No. Yes, I mean. It’s fine.” He had the loveliest voice, too, did I mention that? Softly spoken and with a gentle hint of an accent. (His father was Welsh and he’d grown up on Anglesey. Oh, I knew all there was to know about Luke Fry. I could have had him as a Mastermind subject).

  “I thought you were talking to someone.”

  “Only my brother.” Oh, be still my heaving stomach. “Actually, could you hold on for one second?” I flung the receiver down on my bed and rushed to the bathroom, teeth clenched, but in the event only managed a couple of retches over the sink before the feeling was gone—but this was still unusual, telephone conversations never affected me—“Hello, sorry about that.”

  “Look, Willow, I was wondering, if you’re not busy or anything, we might have that get-together I was talking about? Maybe tomorrow? If it’s not too short notice for you? I thought, perhaps, towards evening?”

  Diffident. That in itself was cute. He obviously wasn’t one of these drop everything when I call types, just nicely deferential, but I’d played this game before and knew the moves. Never agree immediately, it makes you sound desperate. Pretend your life is so crammed with wonderful experiences that he’ll have to join a queue for your attention.

  “Well, I am a bit busy.”

  But he spoke again, almost over the top of me. “Only I heard you telling that guy in the bar that you weren’t doing anything, so I thought, sorry? Did you say something?”

  “Me? No, just clearing my throat.”

  We agreed to meet at the bar by the City Screen at seven, and he rang off, leaving me breathless and dizzy with the speed of it all. Luke Fry. Oh…my…God.

  Later that evening when Katie rang me, having hog-wrestled the twins to bed and sent Dan out with his mates for a Saturday night restorative, I was knee-deep in my wardrobe looking for a suitable date dress.

  “I don’t want to look too tarty,” I explained with the telephone clamped under my chin, both hands busy rattling through the rails. “But then I don’t want to look as though I’ve got librarians in my ancestry either.”

  “What about your red dress?”

  “Too much cleavage.”

  “The purple one?”

  “Not enough.” I sighed heavily and sluiced an armful of clothing onto the bed. “Honestly, Katie, my going-out clothes make me look like a cut-price hooker and my work clothes make me look like a geography teacher. Why has no one ever pointed this out to me before?”

  Katie coughed. “Um, Will, you don’t think you might be reading a bit too much into all this, do you? I mean, perhaps he really does want to chat about the old days.”

  “Listen, I would dress up to hear Luke Fry read the frigging weather forecast. I don’t care why he wants me there, the fact is he wants to talk to me, and I owe it to my past self to at least feel not like a complete minger while he’s doing it. Now. What about the white dress?”

  “Bit bridal. You don’t want to scare the bejasus out of the poor guy. And don’t you think it’s all a bit sudden? When he, ahem, I mean, you have to admit, Wills, he wasn’t exactly receptive to your charms while we were at uni, was he?”

  “Well, no, but I have changed quite a bit, Katie.” You should have seen me back then. I was a dead ringer for an Afghan hound after a tumble-dry. And so shy, some days I could hardly bear to talk to myself.

  “He recognised you though.”

  Yes, he had. After K
atie hung up to go and have a long, uninterrupted piss, as she put it, I rooted through some of my memorabilia until I found the photograph. It had been taken by my then-boyfriend, a gangly streak of spots called Tom who I’d gone out with because he roadied for Fresh Fingers now and again. He’d been nice enough, quite pretty, too, but the spots had ensured that any attractive tendencies were submerged beneath layers of concealer. So my stomach contents had remained safely content and not avant-garde wall decoration.

  The photograph showed Fresh Fingers, posing outside York Minster. The three other lads were sitting on the steps, but Luke had draped himself over the stonework of the south entrance, arm around a carved saint, and was glowering at the camera from under hair which must have made up half his bodyweight. On the far far left stood the figure of a girl, almost out of shot. She was wearing a gypsy skirt, a loose tartan top, hiking boots and an overlarge black duster coat. An unruly frizzle of blondish hair obscured her face but, yes, you’ve guessed it. Looking like an explosion in a charity shop, with split ends in need of extensive welding treatment, and so hopelessly, helplessly, heartbreakingly in love with Luke that a negative aura seemed to surround me, even in a photograph. I was like a black hole with bad hair.

  I sighed and shoved the photo away. I was no longer that gauche, slightly podgy, badly assembled girl. No, I was a completely different gauche, badly assembled girl and the pudge had transformed into curves, the bad hair into a reasonably sleek shoulder-length style. I waltzed in front of the mirror, embracing a scarlet hook-and-eye-bodiced dress which made me look like a surgical incision, but was, at least, neither tarty nor sternly practical. It was therefore my choice of dress for Luke. Katie had to be pessimistic. She stood as the voice of reason to Jazz and my enthusiastic overreactions. But there was no escaping that not only had Luke recognised me, he’d rung almost straight away. In my book, that meant interest of a more than catching-up kind.

  I yelled a “goodnight” to Clay and went to bed, hanging the dress up from my wardrobe door so that I would see it if I woke during the night, and remember that this Sunday was going to be different.

  Chapter Three

  Sunday evening saw me ready at least three times. I kept making vital errors of judgement, firstly on the makeup front (when I put on so much that if I’d turned round suddenly my expression would have remained where it was), then the shoes (the red dress demanded heels, the distance I had to walk demanded flats). Then, just before I left I realised that the slim skirt made my underwear visible from four counties, and had to discard my big pants for a thong. Which, combined with the heels (put comfort over appearance? Are you mad?) made my entry into the bar a mince-wince-fest.

  Several people looked up at my entrance. None of them was Luke. I ordered myself a grapefruit juice and sat down by the windows overlooking the river, to give me something to gaze moodily at. I was working on a nice case of stood-up paranoia when there was a touch on my arm.

  “Willow? Hello, sorry I’m a bit late.”

  He was folding away his mobile as he spoke and I noticed what a neat, up-to-date little thing it was, what beautifully casual trousers he was wearing, that his shirt looked freshly pressed. Anything rather than look at his face. Even so my stomach was doing its warm-up exercises.

  “Oh, um, hello, Luke.”

  I managed to keep my eyes below neck-level, but any moment now I was going to have to look up, or be thought terminally rude. I flipped a peek up and straight back down again, hoping he wouldn’t think I was fixated with his groin. Despite the supersonic speed of my glance, I noticed that he was smiling at me, holding a chair slightly away from the table.

  “Is it all right?”

  “Oh, yes, sorry, yes, do. Sit. Yes. Down,” I burbled, moving my jacket, bag, the menu, rearranging my glass on the table, anything but look directly at him. “Have you had far to come?” Despite myself, my gaze treacherously slithered upwards and rested on the bridge of his exquisite nose. Oh dear God, but he was gorgeous.

  “Not really. I’m staying in the Moat House across the river until I can find a place to buy.” He indicated the ridiculously pricey breeze-block pile which loomed over the river like a concrete frown. “How about you? You said you live in York now?”

  I struggled to reply coherently. All the while the windmills of my stomach ground and turned, and I fought that grapefruit juice to an internal standstill. We chatted a little more, about university life, the very few mutual friends we had had, including Tom who was now, apparently, a well-regarded glamour photographer. I hoped his spots had finally cleared up.

  “I really fancied you back then, you know.” I half-raised my hand to cover my mouth then realised that I didn’t have to. Amazingly enough, the words had been spoken by Luke.

  “You what?”

  “Yeah. Christ, I’m still ashamed of myself, the way I used to follow you around. I was too shy to do anything about it, of course.”

  I coughed, and the grapefruit juice did a little celebratory dance. “Shy? Were you?” Shy? This man—I met his eye for the first time—this man had regularly taken most of his clothes off on stage in front of hundreds (another of the reasons why I had attended just about every gig Fresh Fingers gave) and been famous for his double-mooning trick in the Union bar.

  “With girls, yes. Terrible. So. Sorry. I bet you’re, what, married now?”

  How did I play it without making myself sound like someone who only dated during total eclipses. “Not really. I mean, no. Not married. In fact”—inventing quickly so as not to sound less attractive than a case of typhoid—“I’ve recently split up with someone actually.”

  Luke let out a long sigh. “Yeah, know the feeling.” We kind of stared at each other for a moment. At least, he stared and I clenched. “Bad breakup?”

  “Pretty bad, yes. I caught him with someone else.” What happened there? I mean, one minute we’re in True Confessions mode, and the next I’m laying down the ‘How I Dated a Serial Cheater’ precredit sequence for Jeremy Kyle’s new TV extravaganza.

  “Shit happens, yeah? Was it the guy from last night? The one with the crazy eyes?”

  Crazy eyes? Jazz? Although, now you come to mention it… “Look, do you mind if we don’t talk about it? I’m still feeling…” a bit like a lying cow. Why hadn’t I simply admitted that my last relationship of any kind had been six months ago? It had ended because I couldn’t find model aircraft flying at all fascinating and we’d broken up sotto voce on his mother’s couch during one of her feted scone and jelly teas. Answer—because I didn’t want to look a total tit.

  “Yeah, course. Sorry. So.” Was it my imagination or did he really look quite sorry to drop the subject of my love life. “What do you usually do on a Sunday night?”

  Oh, you know, the usual. There’s the laundry. If I’m really feeling like pushing the boat out, I might pumice my feet. “Not a lot. Well, sometimes I sing in a band.” Yeah, right. Sometimes, like when Jazz’s band is completely desperate and even its last-ditch singer, the one with a squint and no boobs, has got dysentery.

  “Hey, that’s great. We’ll have to get together sometime, have a jamming session.” Luke leaned across the table and a waft of exclusive aftershave hit me in both nostrils. “I hope you don’t think I’m some kind of weirdo, stalking girls I used to have a thing for. It was completely accidental, but I’d been thinking of you a lot. After so long away, I guess, all the old gang were on my mind.”

  A sudden, grim thought struck me. “You aren’t confusing me with someone else, are you? I mean, we didn’t really move in the same circles much.” And every time I saw you, you completely ignored me. And I’d noted the words “used to”.

  Luke gave a grin so hot that diamonds would have gone runny. “Oh now, let me see. You had longer hair, love the new cut by the way, read English, rode around on a bright red bicycle like you thought you were at Cambridge, wore possibly the biggest boots on campus and hung out with Katie somebody.”

  “O’Connor,” I suppl
ied.

  “Yeah. I was so crippled up with shyness that I could hardly even bear to look at you.”

  Now our eyes met properly. His gaze was level and steady. The stomach churning was becoming unignorable and my throat began to constrict, but the eye contact was luscious with promise. If I ran for the toilets now I might never see a look like that again.

  I made a quick decision—pulled my jacket towards me and pretended to be having a coughing fit, searching for a handkerchief whilst in reality I was throwing up the grapefruit juice into a pocket. It was short, sharp and nasty, but Luke thankfully didn’t seem to notice.

  “So then. Would you like another drink? Or”—he waved a hand at the crowded bar—“would you rather go on somewhere else?”

  I would have toured the inner circles of hell to keep Luke Fry’s attention focussed on me. I mean, how much would it take to make you vomit in your own pocket? We ended up walking through the darkening streets, and before I knew it, he was walking me home. It had started to rain at some unnoticed point and umbrellas were erupting around us. The streets shone, colours bleeding into one another as my eyes glazed with sheer happiness. Our heads bent together in introspective conversation, what with the twirling parapluies, the neon shimmer and the encroaching hush of Sunday night falling on a suburban area, it was like the closing scene of a Jeunet film. Luke bid me a decorous goodnight. (Although I noted, when he leaned against me to give me a peck on the cheek, the bulge in his trousers indicated that he would have gone for something a lot less chaste.) I did the cliché thing of closing the front door and leaning against it breathing heavily. This ended swiftly in a very unclichéd rush to the bathroom, where I stripped off all my clothes from which a slight smell of sick was beginning to waft.

  Chapter Four

  “No, I’m sorry, Luke. I can’t make it tonight. I have a very important meeting to go to. Perhaps some other time?”