Reversing Over Liberace Read online

  “Luke’s waiting until his dad has got over his heart surgery,” I explained to Katie. “He’s been really poorly and Luke wants to wait, rather than mention it when everything is all oxygen tents and monitors.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Three, two, one…you’re back in the room,” came from under the table and I stood up.

  “Right. I’m off. Going over to Cal’s tomorrow and I wouldn’t want to tangle with him if I was hungover.” Beneath the table there was now the sound of an enthusiastic amateur Scissor Sisters impersonator murdering “Take Your Mama Out”. “He’s all yours, Kate.”

  “Gosh, thanks.”

  Due to Jazz’s prodigious consumption of alcohol causing the evening to end a little earlier than usual, I found myself at a bit of a loose end. I could have gone home with Katie but, although I adored her twins, I frankly found them completely exhausting. So I found myself wandering around York, through the narrow, picturesque streets in the Shambles area, heading towards the river, along with most of the jogging population of the city. The smell of muscle spray filled the air, and the hissing and cracking of water bottles being sucked echoed off the concrete of the embankment like the sound of a Dalek life-support system.

  I looked up at the windows of our flat-to-be. On impulse I crossed the bridge and went through the glass and metal foyer to stand in the hallway which led to the lifts. People had already started living in some of the flats. I could tell by the lights which shone onto balconies and the shadowy figures moving about within. Anticipation nudged its way around my heart like a dolphin in an aquarium.

  Soon two of those figures would be mine and Luke’s, cooking dinner together, flopping on the sofa with a glass of wine and a DVD, deciding on a colour scheme for the bedroom. All things I was totally unpractised at, comfortable, domestic things. Our lives seemed to run along parallel to one another, with occasional passionate collisions and exciting interludes in hotels or on beaches—very romantic, but hardly real life. I thought about Luke’s reasoning, that moving in with me wouldn’t exactly be a gentle initiation into what married life could be, but more a baptism of fire—what with Clay, Ash, and the vagaries of our working lives—frenzied, and we’d hardly ever see each other.

  I walked outside, into the freshening breeze, and gazed up at the building. We’d got the deposit together between us and Luke was going to the estate agent on Monday to put in the offer. Once the flat was secured, we could go ahead and set a date for the wedding, and then the wagons would be rolling. Although rolling was probably not the word, more like accelerating rapidly downhill. My wedding had been planned in great detail since my first boyfriend had twanged my bra strap. Now it really only remained to weed out the place settings for the relatives who had since died.

  I was considering dress styles, lengths and appropriate materials (was raw silk a little too passé or could I get away with it?) when I arrived home. The house was quiet, in that buzzy kind of way which meant that there was nobody else home, rather than the hushed-quiet-with-background-stereo which might indicate that Clay was hanging upside down in the loft, or whatever it was he did up there. Maybe he’d got a Friday night date. Or maybe he was roaming the streets with his apotheosistic face on, sketching unwary buildings. Anyway, who cared? After being out almost every night this week, I was in the mood for a long, soapy bath, candles and an early bed.

  There, accusingly direct on the mat, sat another brown envelope. I felt a curious sense of violation, as my heartbeat sprinted blood through my veins and the back of my neck tingled with a feeling that something malevolent had put a dark mark on my home. After all, who thought they were entitled to tell my family we didn’t deserve what we had?

  I tore open the flap and flicked the single sheet open. “You don’t deserve it.” Again the same handwriting, the same graphic approach to indefinite one-liners. Did they think that this cloak-and-dagger approach made it better somehow, more palatable? And there was something laughable in the repetition. My stalker couldn’t even manage originality.

  As I had done with the last letter, I scrunched this one up into a ball and dropped it into a drawer in the hall dresser. There was simply no point in getting angry over such vague hints which couldn’t be said to amount to a threat, was not much more than a simple point of view, unattributed and unattributable. So why did my thoughts keep coming back to it?

  I was still shambling around the house in dressing gown and slippers when Cal turned up at the door next morning.

  “God, you’re early.” I let him in and shuffled back through to the kitchen for more strong tea.

  “Great thinkers never sleep.”

  “Do they drink tea?” I brandished a mug.

  “All the time. Noted for it. No milk, two sugars and I could slaughter a piece of toast.”

  “Bread. Toaster. Butter. Marmalade. Teapot.” I pointed as I spoke, my arm jerking randomly around the kitchen. “I’m going to get dressed.”

  By the time I came back down, wearing my best goat-proof clothing, Cal had made a stack of toast, which leaned dangerously over the edge of the plate, defying gravity only through the adhesive powers of marmalade.

  And then he ate it. All of it. I watched, with my jaw becoming more and more slack, until the final crust was chewed and swallowed, and he noticed me.

  “What?”

  “You’re so skinny! How can you eat so much and be so thin?”

  “Genuinely interested, or is this a women’s comment type thing?”

  “No, I really want to know. I mean, do you have worms or something?” I heard the sound of footsteps on the stairs and unthinkingly poured tea into another mug, holding it at arm’s length just in time for Clay’s entrance into the kitchen. Cal glanced at Clay and carried on talking to me.

  “I am, in reality, incredibly fat. I have an enormous pleat which runs down my spine. Observe how I never walk away from people, only towards them. This is to prevent them noticing that said pleat stretches into Lancashire.”

  Clay, decidedly less deific at this time in the morning, looked puzzled. “Who the hell are you?” And then, a misplaced sense of realisation dawned. “Oh, right. You’re, um, with Willow, yes?”

  I broke the embarrassed silence by dropping Cal’s toast plate into the sink. “This is Cal. He’s a friend of Ash’s.”

  “Oh. Is Ash back then?”

  “Er, no.” I grabbed a jacket from the back of the kitchen door. It didn’t look very goat-resistant, but I wanted to get out of there before Clay really got started. “See you later, Clay, okay?” I hustled Cal, as swiftly as he would let himself be hustled, to the front door.

  “And Clay is?” Cal stopped on the doorstep, rummaging in pockets.

  “My brother. Eldest.”

  Cal brandished a set of keys. “Right.”

  I stared at him. “You’re driving?”

  “Well, yeah. It’s a bloody long way for a piggyback.”

  “No, I just…” I managed to shut myself up.

  “You didn’t think I’d be able to drive, did you?” Cal waved the key fob and across the road the lights on the tattiest Metro I’d ever seen blinked in response.

  “It’s not that.” I bridled at the implication, “I kind of assumed you’d have a bike.”

  “A bike?” This said in Lady Bracknellesque tones.

  “Yes. Like Ash.”

  “Oh, a motorbike. I see. No, sorry to disappoint any fantasies you might have about slipping your leg over my tank. If it makes you feel any better I could strap you to the bonnet?”

  Since the bonnet of the Metro looked semipermanent at best, I declined his kind offer and wriggled my way into the passenger seat, negotiating three Aero wrappers, an empty sandwich packet, a full bag of crisps (cheese and onion) and a lone sock on my way.

  Cal was the worst driver in possession of a full licence that I’d ever sat next to. In complete silence, because his concentration was almost palpable, we ricocheted through the streets of York, along the road
north and up onto the moors, where we were overtaken by several curious sheep and a bunch of octogenarian walkers. At last we pulled in to the top of the path to the house and got out. Cal was almost immediately disadvantaged.

  “Sorry,” he said. “It’s the bloody mud. Can’t get my balance. One of the reasons why I don’t reckon I can hang on to the place.”

  “You could tarmac the path as far as the first field, then have a kind of gravelled parking area and it’s not so much of a stretch to the house.”

  Cal looked at me sideways. “You’ve clearly thought about it.”

  “Well, when I was here with Ash, I wondered how you’d get a car down. How did your great aunt manage?”

  Cal turned his attention back to the path, down which he was edging slowly. “Oh, she carried everything. On her back. Built like King Kong, my great aunt, thighs like a set of welding equipment.”

  “Cal,” I warned.

  “Oh, all right. She had a pony and trap. The ultimate in four-wheel-drive.”

  We rounded the last bend and stopped, by silent agreement, to take in the sight of the tiny white cottage stamped in the green field. A few late daffodils fluttered flags of yellow in the grass, puffs of cloud scratting about overhead. “Wordsworth would have wet himself,” I said.

  “Wordsworth never had to pick up the maintenance bill for picturesque.” Cal gave a sigh and leaned against the gate. “If any of the Romantic poets had ever had to contend with damp courses, they would have taken to writing obscene limericks.”

  “I dunno. I always suspected Coleridge would have been handy with a routing tool.” I leaned alongside him, arms on the top bar, chewing my lip. “Cal, are you sure you want to sell?”

  “No. But, ach, sometimes everything’s wrong, you know?” Briskly he pulled himself off the gate. “Right. Let’s go and find the old bitch, shall we? Are you going to be all right? I mean, she’s hefty, and she’s got a whole circus of tricks up her…what I shall have to describe, for now, as a sleeve.”

  “If you’d really thought I couldn’t handle her, you wouldn’t have asked me to come along, would you?” I asked with impeccable logic. “Lead the way. If not the goat.”

  We found the goat, a Toggenburg improbably enough named Winnie, grazing in the orchard next to the house. It was a fairly simple matter to grab her by the leather belt she wore around her neck and haul her through the gateway. Throughout the whole experience, Winnie maintained a typically goatlike expression of aggrieved surprise and only tried to injure me seriously once. I, however, had trained up on small, evil ponies, every one a semiprofessional in maiming, and steering a goat presented few problems to a woman who has once rolled a Shetland down an embankment.

  “That was incredible.” Cal spoke from the safety of the sidelines, as Winnie, with a look of execration in her satanic eyes, peed all over my foot, then trotted to the river, managing to drink whilst still staring at us from under her eyebrows.

  “Thank you.” I squelched my way out of the field. “And for my next trick, I shall smell of goat’s piss all the way home.”

  “You don’t have to. If I get the Aga lit, you could have a bath.”

  “Have you got a towel?”

  “In the car. Oh, and if you’re going up, there’s a cool bag in the boot with some food and drinks in.”

  “Anything else? I mean, if I say I fancy listening to some music, are you going to tell me that you’ve got the Manchester Philharmonic in the glovebox?”

  “Er, no. But there is a digital radio under the passenger seat.”

  “Oh, aren’t you the well-equipped one.”

  “Never had any complaints yet,” Cal said, archly. I rolled my eyes at him and started the soggy-socked process back up the hill towards the parked car. The sun was shining through the leaves, lime green with newness, which made it feel as though I was walking along the bottom of a river. A feeling which the silence and the occasional stickleback dart of small birds only enhanced. In the time it took me to riffle through the vehicle’s contents (loads of clothes and CDs, two bottles of beer, an unopened packet of condoms and more rubbish and wrappers than I would have believed a Metro could hold), only two cars and a tractor passed the lane end.

  I trotted back down to the house with the fluorescent pink cool bag under one arm and a striped beach towel under the other, to find that Cal had managed to fire up the ancient farmhouse range which occupied the kitchen like a rusty squatter.

  “Give it an hour or so, then we’ll have more than enough hot water for you to get clean. Pass me the lunch, I’ll pop the bottles in the stream to cool down.”

  While he was gone I had an in-depth look around the little house. Okay, it smelled of damp and cabbagey old ladies but… “This really could be a lovely place,” I said, descending the vertical, and bannisterless, staircase. “That front bedroom with those beams, it’s perfect.”

  “Used to be mine, when I was a kid. If you open the cupboard in the corner, there’s a secret set of ladders leading to the attics.”

  “And the views. How much land comes with the place?”

  Cal looked at me quizzically. “Why the interest?”

  I was suddenly ashamed. Whilst I’d wandered upstairs my imagination had taken over and I had seen the master bedroom all fitted out, the smaller back room painted pink, carpeted and with a tiny cot taking pride of place. Outside I could almost have sworn that I had seen my future self trailing a lazy finger over knee-high herbs in an area currently occupied by the spitting-mad goat. Even the archaic bathroom fixtures had a kind of Country Living charm. “I think the place has potential, that’s all.”

  “Yes, it’s potentially a house. Slightly unfortunately it isn’t one at the moment. Look, I’ve got some work to do. Would you like to cruise around the acres for a bit? I won’t be long and then we can have some lunch.”

  “Do you need a hand with anything?” There was a short pause during which I had time to wish I could bite my tongue off.

  “I’ll be fine.” Cal spoke a little stiffly. “I’ll give you a shout when I’m done.” And he walked carefully and precisely out into the courtyard, around to one of the little barns, went in and shut the door with a kind of “bugger off” finality.

  I went back upstairs and became slightly disenchanted with the bathroom. Then I further explored the bedrooms, finding the cupboard Cal had mentioned and ascending the rickety ladders to the dust-haunted attic beyond. A dormer window let more light in up there than any of the lower rooms could boast, and the view across the valley to the purple hills beyond was spectacular.

  The place was absolutely and totally the house I would have picked for myself, mouldy floorboards and all. It had everything, seclusion, outbuildings, cosy rooms with open fireplaces. The range sitting in the kitchen could have comfortably cooked a meal for forty, and heated enough water to wash it all up in. And, as instinctively as I knew that I could happily live here, I knew that Luke would hate it.

  I sighed and looked out of the window which opened onto the courtyard. There was no sign of Cal and the barn door was still firmly closed. From the field beyond, the goat gave me a narrow-eyed look of hatred, and I was sure I could hear the music from The Exorcist.

  “Sod it.” I was bored now, and hungry. The barn door was invitingly ajar as I crossed the yard. “Cal? Sorry, I just wondered…” I pushed the door open slowly and put my head around, in time to catch Cal whipping off a pair of headphones and starting to his feet.

  “Oh, fuck it. Come in here, Willow, and shut the bloody door!” I was taken aback by this uncharacteristic ferocity. Cal was usually laid-back and so indirect that you needed a map to get his point. In here, though, he seemed to have become someone else. His hair was tied behind his head, his gaze direct and incisive. “Sit over there for a second, I’m nearly done.” Indicating a bale of straw in one corner of the barn, he was already turning to the screen in front of him, replacing the headphones and sitting on the ergonomic seat with the keyboard set on the table atta
ched.

  I could only stare. In contrast to the charmingly unmodernised cottage, the barn was, well, shit hot. A machine even I recognised as a state-of-the-art computer was humming away to itself on the wall, a green light flashing on and off beside it. Cal sat before a screen the thickness of a credit card, tapping on the keyboard at rattling speed, every now and then speaking into a microphoned headset. Two laptops were running, set on the side of an old hayrack and the air smelled of technology.

  A couple more snapped remarks into the microphone and Cal snatched it off, shutting down monitors and shushing noisy units with a well-pressed button. A flick of a master switch and all the lights went dead, leaving us in the windowless dark and new silence.

  “Well,” said Cal, and there was a slightly different tone in his voice.

  “Well?” I realised that I was trapped here, in this barn, on this nameless farm, with a man I didn’t know. And someone had been sending me anonymous letters. And no one knew where I was. “Well,” I repeated, and my voice had a little wobble to it.

  “Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m bloody starving. Come on.” The big door was pulled open and sunlight spilled like butter through the gap. Cal loosened his hair from its ponytail and was back in the land of the vague again. Even his eyes lost their focussed expression. “I would race you, but we all know about the tortoise and the hare, don’t we, and I wouldn’t want you to have to bear the humiliation.”

  Almost bursting with questions, I followed him down a pretty little garden path which led between low-growing beds of alpine phlox and thrift to where the garden seemed to fold in upon itself. It was an almost obscenely sexual place.

  “It’s like having lunch in a porn star, but there you go. My great aunt, bless her, wasn’t the most perceptive of people and she liked the shape of the garden here. The stream was an accident, but I’m afraid the judiciously planted ferns were her doing.” Cal nodded towards a group of feathery fronds jutting pubicly just above the stream’s trickle. “Have a sandwich. Just thank God it’s not sausage.”