Reversing Over Liberace (12 page)

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 attached.

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.”

I snorted and took one. It was egg and cress and delicious. Then I had four more. Cal opened a bottle of wine which had been dangling in the green water and we shared it and some strawberries and before I knew it, I was telling Cal all about Luke, the engagement and the flat. I moved on to Katie and Jazz, my family and then I was pontificating about Ash.

“And, d'you know the stupid thing? Now he's prannying about in Prague or wherever, instead of being here. An' he should be here, really, shouldn't he? I mean, really. Go on, you can tell me.” It was dawning on my system that we were at least halfway through a second bottle of wine and maybe now was the time for me to shut up. But sounding off about Ash always overrode the system.

“Do you know where I met Ash?” Cal asked suddenly, lying on his stomach facing away from me.

“No.”

“We were both in therapy.”

“Therapy? What, you mean lying on a couch telling everyone how unhappy your childhood was?”

“More or less.” Cal poured me some more wine, then he took a deep breath. “Ash was there because of his family relationships. Did you know that?”

I shook my head. “My brother never tells me anything. I think he hates me.” My lip trembled. I'd reached that stage down the bottle.

“Uh-huh.” Cal was a little uncoordinated too. “He was in therapy because he felt he was living in your shadow, that you were the bright one and he was just Ash, I suppose. You got a degree, the house and a life and he's got nothing.”

“I thought he liked it that way.” I downed the wine in one gulp because it was beginning to taste like paint-thinner. “Why were you in therapy? You seem really sorted.”

“Sorted? Me?” There was an uncharacteristic bitterness in his voice for a second. “No, I was in therapy because I was mad. Totally, unalterably mad, you see.” He added a little cackle for effect. “But I'm fine now. I have come to terms with the fact that I'm Napoleon.”

“No one ever imagines that they're plain old Mrs. Biggins, do they?”

Cal rolled over on his back. “I don't think it quite works like that, you know.” He laid an arm over his eyes to block out the sun. So I couldn't see his face when he asked, “Have you set a date for the wedding yet?”

“Not yet. Luke's still getting the showroom up and running, so he's hopping over to the States a lot. We have to wait until that settles down before we can finalise details.”

“Hmmm.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. But he's okay, this Luke, is he?”

“He's…yes, he's fantastic. Totally gorgeous. I mean, he probably wouldn't do it for you. He's nothing like Ash after all. But he's got a great body. Not that I'm commenting on Ash's body, you understand. I mean, yuk, but—”

“What do you mean, ‘he's nothing like Ash'?”

“Well, he isn't. Ash is kind of gawky and angular while Luke is—”

“Yes, I get that. But what I meant was, why would I want to compare him to Ash, for God's sake?” Cal uncovered his face and sat up to look at me.

“Because I know you gay guys usually go for a type, that's all.” I sat up, too, although it made my head swim a bit.

“Hang on.
I'm
gay? When did that happen?”