Reversing Over Liberace (11 page)

Having been spark out at one a.m., I was a bit confused to find myself wide awake and sweating at three.

I was getting
married
? How the hell had that happened? My treacherously antisleep brain replayed the proposal moment over and over again, with added close-ups. And I'd
said yes!
Now my reading material was made up of articles on outdoor catering and big pictures of spot-free women wearing whipped cream and curtains.

I turned onto a cool patch of sheet.

We'd only been dating for, well, since we only usually met in the evenings, but factoring in the weekend in the Lakes,
hours
. But he said he knew, said he'd known from the moment he set eyes on me again in the Grape and Sprout, that I was the One. And how could he
not
be the One for me when he'd been my obsession throughout my twenties?

My heart was steadying now. After all, it wasn't some nobody from the back of beyond. It was
Luke Fry
asking me to marry him. He of the violet black eyes and the sexiest little bottom this side of an Angel DVD. How could we fail? He loved me with, let's face it, quite a lot of passion. And I loved him with…
did I?
Oh, yes, I loved him. Of course I did, with a ten-year back-catalogue of longing. The sex was great, we laughed at more-or-less the same things, we both wanted our lives to be a success—compatibility was assured.

With this thought comforting my mind, I turned onto my side and floated off into fluffy dreams of white dresses and rose petals and Luke inexplicably taking close-up photographs of me.

Chapter Fourteen

The next week further advanced my opinion that Luke and I were right together. He rang me at work several times a day, and the real clincher was that
he didn't ring to say anything
. I got the collywobbles every time the phone rang now, thinking of him standing in the midst of the showroom renovation (apparently the place was a wreck) thinking of me enough to whip out that little silver phone and dial, to say hi and exchange no factual information at all.

Katie, of course, was mad-on jealous and now refused to answer the phone on the grounds that it was bound to be some limpid-eyed man wanting to simper at me, which was unfair because the only men ever to call were Luke and occasionally Cal. Whom she'd never met, and was therefore not in any position to pass opinion on the limpidity of his eyes, which I had at first taken to be an insult until I got home and wrestled my dictionary down from the shelf, to find that I had been thinking of limpets.

“What on
earth
would I be meaning, saying ‘limpet eyes'?” Katie asked. It was Friday night and we were well stuck into anything that came in a bottle in the Grape and Sprout. Which was rather a lot. Jazz swore they sold bottled spit to visitors.

“How should I know? That's just what I thought you said.”

“Could be kind of, you know, sticky, hanging on to you like limpets hang on rocks.” This was Jazz's contribution.

“Luke does not have sticky eyes,” I pouted. “He's wonderful. In fact, he's taking me away for the weekend again in a few weeks, that's how wonderful he is. Cornwall, before you say anything.”

Katie made a face. “So, how come he's never around at weekends? He's all over you all week and then come Friday night he vanishes, unless he's whisking you away to some expensive hotel, where the only view you get to see is the bedroom ceiling.”

Jazz made a “that's not fair” noise in his throat, his mouth being full of beer.

“He works all day at weekends.” I poured myself a hefty glass of wine. “Sometimes he goes back to Wales to visit his dad.” Katie and Jazz gave each other A Look, and I turned down the corner of my mental page to bookmark this for future reference. “Or sometimes he has to go to Boston to check up on James. He knows that I've got stuff that needs catching up with at weekends, too. So we've agreed, for now, to keep our weekends apart.”

Katie sniffed. “When Dan proposed to me, I wouldn't let him out of my sight until we'd got up that aisle.”

“Yeah, but you were living in that tiny little house in Acomb at the time. He
couldn't
get out of your sight, not without climbing into the understairs cupboard.”

“So why aren't you and Luke moving in together yet? Surely you're not going to marry him without living with him for a while first? That's so old-fashioned, it's…” She groped for the right word. “Well, actually it's quite sensible. That way you're safely hitched before the disillusionment can sink in.”

“What disillusionment? He hasn't got a two-inch dick, has he?”

“Jazz.” I spluttered my wine.

“Well?”

“No!”

“That's all the disillusionment I can think of. Nothing worse than getting a guy into bed and finding out that he's got a knob like a matchstick.”

Katie hiccupped. “I meant, like finding that he uses the sheets as a hanky in the middle of the night, and that he hums all the way through
Desperate Housewives
, and that if there's no toilet roll left when he has a shit he doesn't bother to wipe, and—”

“Stop!” shouted Jazz and I, as one. “Jesus, Katie, we've got to look Dan in the eye again sometime.”

“Oh. Sorry, yes. I didn't mean… It's not all Dan, if that's what you were thinking. I kind of amalgamated previous fellers.”

“So then, you two. Why the funny look when I mentioned Luke's dad?”

Jazz took another enormous mouthful of beer, leaving Katie to answer. “You haven't met Luke's father yet, have you?”

Jazz swallowed noisily and then nearly choked himself trying to do a Darth Vader impersonation, hissing into his beer glass, “Luke, I
am
your father.” He'd clearly reached the stage of drunkenness where we could expect
Little Britain
quotes at any minute.

“No,” I said, ignoring him.

“Hasn't Luke wanted to introduce you? Or hasn't Luke told him yet that he's got a fiancée bobbing around in York? And”—she rounded on Jazz—“how do
you
know there's nothing worse than getting a guy into bed who turns out to have a micro-penis?”

Jazz pointed at her with the end of his glass. “
I
listen to women. I am a New Man.” Then he burped resonantly, grinned and fell off his stool.

“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
motor
bike. 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?”