Fallout (5 page)

‘Like bitter, do you?’ he asked and she glared at him. ‘Much of a beer drinker?’

‘Shouldn’t I be?’

‘Do what you like,’ he said, shrugging.

‘Thanks very much.’

But then she smiled and he found himself telling her his car had packed it in – which was true – and would she happen to know of anyone who might be able to give him a lift to Seston to meet the playwright? He had seen her parking over the road in a bright blue Mini Cooper, noticed her bottom as she got out of it and took his chances.

‘I’ll take you, if you like,’ she’d said, and he felt such warmth that he smiled right into her frighteningly direct gaze, and she smiled back.

Leigh’s hands gripped the wheel, pleased that she was driving and not Paul. Producer, know-all-seen-everything Paul Driscoll.

She didn’t know how someone could be her age, and so sure of his place and his plan. Where she fitted in, Leigh had no idea. She was quite clear about the great many things that made her angry. Being called a
bird
,
chick
,
love
,
darling
,
poppet
,
dear
,
darling
,
baby
made her angry. Being called
posh
,
soft
,
southern
,
blue-stocking
, and asked if she’d like a sweet sherry and if she were an actress or a model made her furious. She didn’t like to be persuaded. She knew the things she loved. She was reading History, English Literature and French at Sheffield and loved all three of those. She loved Sheffield even though it had been very hard on her at first; the whole of the first year had felt like being in a boxing ring, on the ropes with her gloves up. She loved to write stories but she never told a single soul about that. She drank bitter although she hated it and left to herself it would be port and lemon every time. And she was shy. She was painfully shy; an unlikely affliction given her warrior heart. Guarded and untried, she was terrified of falling in love. The very term summed it up:
falling in love
, as if it were tripping over a brick into a chasm. Romantic love felt to her like the cheapest fairground con around; being dragged along for a ride on a wobbly circus bicycle and then falling flat on your face in a pie to the laughter of the cynical universe. Her childhood had been full of her mother’s tears over her father’s relentless faithlessness. She had seen clever girls turned into bleating sheep and reasonable boys unmanned by love, her own parents reduced to children. So Leigh decided a muscular intellect was the best defence against baseless weeping over someone you’d grow out of in a year anyway – someone like Paul Driscoll, apparently so impressive with his neat hair and man’s strong face, peering uselessly at the map in his hands.

‘Are you getting anywhere at all with that?’ she asked. ‘I think we should stop if you can’t manage.’

She had the idea Paul took her for an idiot. She did not see that he quaked and had a suspicion she was a lesbian.

‘If you’d stop driving like a maniac I might have a chance.’

‘I don’t see how it makes any difference what speed I go. If you can’t read the thing, you can’t read it.’

They had bickered the whole journey, quite easily. Paul came from a big bickering family, Leigh from a small bickering family; both felt quite at home.

When the rain began to fall she pulled sharply into a sliding muddy track, switched off the engine and the headlights and turned on the light inside the car, above the rear-view mirror.

‘I have to turn the headlights off, the battery is a bit dicky,’ she said, ‘so don’t be too long. Apparently it’s the alternator.’

He was hugely impressed by her casual use of the word alternator but did not show it. ‘Thanks.’

He lit a cigarette, offered her one, and studied the map. The rain drummed on the car roof. Leigh flexed her chilled hands, smiling at the thrill of going into the unknown on bona fide theatrical business, but—

‘Seston? It’s the back of bloody beyond,’ said Paul, so Leigh kept her naïve delight to herself.

‘You should let me drive.’

‘It’s my car. And I hate being driven.’

‘I’m a good driver.’

She glanced at his profile, outlined by the dim little bulb. She liked his shoulders, which were broad, the taciturn presence he had, and that he didn’t flirt with her. He seemed reliable. She liked reliable. She pressed her thighs more closely together and rolled down the window.

‘Don’t let the rain in,’ he said, not raising his eyes.

‘Don’t bloody smoke then!’ she retorted.

He reached across her to flick the burning fag-end out of the car, his arm, shoulder, then his head and clean short hair, all inches from her face. She had never been that close to a man without him trying to kiss her before.

He returned to his side of the car. ‘I think we missed the turn,’ he said. ‘The one you said. Three or four miles back.’

‘Oh.’ She smiled at him, forgiving. ‘We’re so late.’

‘Where did you get those cheekbones?’ he asked, almost before he’d thought it. ‘Your face is lovely.’

‘Woolworths,’ she said. ‘Special offer.’ And she started the car.

They found Seston and drove round it and through it and back across it with increasing speed and irritation as the rain poured down, their squabbling increasing with their lateness and Leigh’s rising resentment following the cheekbones remark. Now she knew. The great Paul Driscoll had only asked her because he fancied her and needed a lift in her Mini Cooper. It wasn’t that she didn’t like men, she thought, with rage – as he popped Polos and argued with her – it was that she didn’t like being cajoled and persuaded, tricked as if she were a seven-year-old. However many papers she wrote, rallies she attended, opinions she formed, here she was again, chased down in the absurd game of How Will I Get Into Her Knickers. She gave a snort, and laughed.

‘Hello?’ he said, drily.

‘We should just ASK somebody!’

‘We’re fine.’

‘Fine. We’re fine.
Fine
.’

‘All right, we’re lost.’

‘Thank you!’

‘No bloody thanks to you.’

‘Me? I’m just the taxi driver! You’re the one who’s lost.’

‘Well, ask someone then!’

She sped down the dark and narrow road, overtook a bus, violently, and through the driving rain saw the back of someone with a too-big greatcoat and no umbrella – walking.

She slammed the brakes on in a two-pedal skid, and stopped, next to him, on the wrong side of the road.

She wound down the window just an inch.

She looked up and she saw Luke Kanowski.

‘Excuse me.’

‘Hiya,’ he said.

I know you
, she thought – except she almost didn’t think it, so small a thing was it, so delicate, that as soon as the words formed in her head they were gone. She didn’t know him. He was a stranger to her. His hair was dripping rain and he looked very alive, as if he were happily interrupted in the middle of something. She looked up at him through the gap in the window.

‘We’re completely bloody lost—’ shouted Paul.

And Luke had got into the car behind her with a rush of cold air and the almost imperceptible fresh scent of another human being – the skin, flesh and bones of a new creature.

They all introduced themselves. Leigh held her hand behind her and he took it. And it was then, when he was unseen and close to her – exactly then – that she would always remember.

She drove on. Paul spoke and the boy, man – Luke – answered. Leigh, straining her eyes to see the road through the wet night ahead of her, had only the impression of him, bright with rain – no picture, nothing literal, just her own jolted recognising stop at seeing him.

He was giving them directions. His intonations were odd, almost as if he were speaking in translation. Not foreign exactly, no accent, but – Luke K . . . ? She hadn’t caught it. What sort of a name was it? They talked. It was funny the way he wanted to know their business and didn’t care what they thought, and she couldn’t fathom his lack of self-consciousness; his downright, open-wide
friendliness
– open but to her still unreadable.

They found the pub. Paul left her alone with him to go to the bar, bought her the drink, made his call, and Leigh took comfort in the acceptable silence of women.

When Luke asked her about the playwright, he had smiled at her and she had offered him the little piece of paper knowing it was warm, as if she were showing him a part of her self. Then Paul mocked him, feeling him out, making it funny that he hadn’t ever got out of Seston and hadn’t been to the stupid Playhouse – and her discomfort was so intense that she couldn’t watch, she’d had to leave. He was too guileless. His honesty was laid out to be picked at. It had felt as though she were watching herself, not him, put upon a table and dissected.

There was no sentiment, no softness in her feelings for him. It ought to have been laughable, pleasurable, but it was so frightening. She was invaded. Undone. And it was exactly as she had feared; it was like falling. A lurching tumble into the dark. She had left them at the table and stood in the dingy pub toilet not moving, too scared to look at her face in the mirror and have the change in herself confirmed. Wanting to cry. There was no reason to care this much, no reason at all. She didn’t even know him.

They left the pub, piled back into the stale, smoked-drenched Mini and Luke took them to Parker’s Pies, at the top of Market Street.

‘Is it always like this here? You’d think they’d dropped the bomb,’ said Paul.

There wasn’t a single soul about, just the driving rain and the wind blowing some wet chip-paper against a lamp-post outside as they pushed open the door, making the little lace curtain tremble and the bell ring.

‘Not always.’ Luke was a little defensive. ‘It’s Tuesday,’ he said, pushing his hands into his coat pockets and pacing up and down the shiny wooden counter.

He jumped onto it, leaning on his forearms with his feet off the ground, craning to peer into the back, while Paul and Leigh stood in the doorway.

‘
Thebes, city of death
. . .’ said Paul.

‘Shut up,’ hissed Leigh, and turned to look outside at the street. She had just seen that Luke wore odd socks, one black and one grey, showing between his trousers and shoes as he hung off the counter.

‘Hel-lo?’ said Luke, just as a waitress emerged from the back, stuffing a frilly apron into a carrier bag, looking up at Luke and blushing.

‘Hiya,’ she said, flatly, then looked over at Paul and Leigh, suspicious.

‘Hiya, Mandy – serving?’

‘Closing,’ she said.

Leigh saw Paul was trying not to laugh. She took his hand and gripped the little finger viciously, to stop him. It stopped him all right; it hurt, he looked at her in startled confusion.

The round-faced pimply girl stared at Luke. Leigh had the idea they knew one another well – or that the girl thought they did.

‘I’m just off,’ she said. ‘Jim’s closing up.’

‘It’s not nine.’

‘It’s too late!’

And with that she marched past them on short legs and left, slamming the door.

Luke faced Paul and Leigh with his hands jammed into his trouser pockets, bouncing a bit from side to side, and gave them a sideways smile. ‘Not looking like pies, then.’

They looked regretfully at the tables, neatly wiped; empty tucked-in chairs on which they would not sit. Leigh and Paul paused in the doorway of the squeaky-clean dead-as-night restaurant, then Paul seemed to make a decision. He clapped his hands together and rubbed them.

‘Right, then. That’s that. We’d best get back anyway.’

‘We could try Rousham’s . . .’ said Luke. ‘But it’s dear.’

‘We should go. Leigh?’

Leigh felt panic. Luke felt it too, seeing that it was over; they wouldn’t be staying or talking more about theatre to him, telling him where they had come from and what they knew.

‘I could . . .’

What could he do? Invite them back to his for a vodka with his dad? Rustle up a roast dinner and seduce them both into staying in Seston for ever? Show them his collection of theatre programmes, his records, the four-foot glass crucifix in his bedroom, now complete and completely sodding mental-looking?

‘I’ll tell you the way,’ he finished. ‘It’s easy to get out of Seston.’

Now that was just a flat-out lie.

They said goodbye on the pavement in front of the curved Parker’s Pies glass-front, all three feeling there ought to be some reason to meet again, knowing there wasn’t. They shook hands, awkwardly, getting wet with standing there. Luke opened the car door for Leigh and she got in without looking up.

‘Thanks,’ she said.

‘We’ll give you a lift back to yours, if you like,’ said Paul.

Luke shook his head. ‘I’ll walk.’

‘If you see Joe Furst, tell him he can give me a ring if he likes,’ said Paul.

‘What if I see Joe last?’ said Luke, for something to say.

‘Yeah, funny.’

‘Where’ll you be?’ asked Luke, too sharp, too keen. ‘Where do you stay?’

‘I’ll be back in London. I’m in the book.’ And he got into the car.

Leigh’s door was still open with the rain falling onto the steering wheel and her legs. She was shivering.

‘Bye, then,’ said Luke.

‘Bye.’

And she slammed the car door on the whole wet ugly street, and him, and all of it.

In the weeks that followed his meeting with Paul Driscoll and the girl, Luke cast round for something to fix on about them that had meant so much to him. Back and forth from work, to home, to the asylum, he thought about that night, and all the things he did not do. He pulled out his books of plays, programmes from Sheffield and Manchester, London and the Playhouse – everything he was missing, the things he had not seen, and was angry with himself. Paul was right, it was a matter of an hour, less, there were buses, trains, there were ways. People did these things. It wasn’t as if he needed to make his world so bound, so closed, so idiotically, frenziedly, obsessively, monomaniacally – face it, he told himself, so
insanely
closed as he did. He had made himself a prison.