Читать книгу Carry You - Beth Thomas, Beth Thomas - Страница 8

Daisy Mack

is making a multidimensional cosmological model using superstring theory, entanglement theory, and papier mache.

Jenny Martin Wtf???

Suzanne Allen Sounds like you have way too much time on your hands, my friend. I’m sure you must have something else you could be doing????

Daisy Mack Suze, yes I have, but this is metasystems modelling, it can’t be done quickly.

Georgia Ling Give me a call, hun? Xx

I’m not really doing that. Failed science, remember? I’m on Abby’s sofa, under my duvet, watching Notting Hill on Abby’s DVD player. How cool is Hugh in this one? Not geeky at all. Supersmooth, even when he meets a superstar. Makes me fall in love with him all over again. And that makes me feel guilty about Colin, which means I’ll have to watch a couple of episodes of Pride and Prejudice afterwards. That’s OK, I’ve got loads of time before Abs or Tom get home from work.

Tom is Abby’s lovely boyfriend. He’s some kind of regional manager for a brand of sportswear I think. I know it’s sportswear, and I know he’s quite high up, but that’s about all I do know. Oh, no, I also know that he feels it’s his duty, being in the sportswear line, to keep himself incredibly fit and well-toned; and I know he walks around the flat without a shirt on sometimes. But it’s OK. I’m so flabby, white and spotty at the moment that his being here, looking like that, doesn’t do anything to me. It’s a bit like what it would be like to be a little pebble looking up at a daffodil. Or a lump of mud looking at the Taj Mahal. The Taj Mahal is not in a million years ever going to look back, so the lump of mud doesn’t pay much attention to the Taj Mahal either. At this point in its life, it’s not even looking at other lumps of mud to be honest, let alone stunning white marble Indian temples.

When I first got here a week ago, with my cardboard boxes full of stuff and my blotchy tear-stained face, Tom was amazing. I mean, you know, in a Taj-Mahal-ish kind of way. He’s got that sort of face that makes you think of churches. I don’t mean literally churches. Not the actual building. That would be ridiculous, if he had a face like a church. What I mean is, his face makes me think about the pictures you see in churches. Those blokes with shiny light round their heads. Saints and holy people. And when we got to the flat and Abs opened the door, he came out into the hallway with his hands clasped, as if he was just about to deliver a blessing, or marry us, or something. He gave a sad smile to the air somewhere near my head, pressed his lips together, then helped us carry the boxes from the car and into the spare room. Then he made us both a hot chocolate with a generous splash of Baileys in it, and cleared off. He did give another sympathetic smile to the room I was in, and touch my shoulder, but he could have been touching a rack of tracksuit tops for all we both cared. Lovely guy, though. How many boyfriends would happily let their girlfriend’s slobby, depressive friend move into their spare room indefinitely? Abs is so lucky. They’re always kissing, or just touching each other’s hands or arms when they pass each other. He’s so affectionate and sensitive. It’s very moving.

Ooh, this is the bit where Julia Roberts turns up at Hugh’s place looking for a haven. That’s where I would go if I could. Not that I’m not grateful to Abby and Tom for providing a roof over my head in my hour of need, but there’s no way Hugh would have dragged me reluctantly round a load of shops the day after moving in like Abs did. He would have doubtless brought me some croissants in bed, with orange juice and coffee, kissed my head really tenderly, then left me alone to wallow in my misery. Or made energetic love to me all afternoon. Either one would have been good. Frankly, all I wanted to do at that point was lie in bed under a duvet, with or without a naked Hugh, but Abby wasn’t having any of it.

‘Get up,’ she said, yanking the curtains back at something like five a.m. ‘I’ve made a plan.’

I pulled the duvet up over my head. ‘Jesus, Abs,’ I whined. Yes, I know I was whiney, but I was dog-tired, I couldn’t help it. ‘It’s the middle of the night. You know I’m not sleeping well at the moment, seriously. I didn’t get off until gone two, and five or six hours’ sleep just isn’t enough. I can’t get up yet. Call me in a couple more hours.’

‘It’s midday.’

I didn’t move for a second or two, then took hold of the edge of the duvet and dragged it slowly down, gradually exposing my entire pale face. ‘What?’

She nodded. ‘Yeah, for someone who’s not sleeping well at the moment, you sure do sleep a lot.’

I stared at her a moment, making the extremely rookie mistake of engaging in direct eye contact with her almost straight away. She raised her eyebrows and put her hands on her hips, and I felt that oh-so-familiar feeling of resignation.

‘Come on, Daze, you need to get up. We’ve got things to do.’

I knew resistance was futile, but I gave it one more try anyway. She would not have respected me if I hadn’t. ‘Yes, I know I’ve got things to do. It starts with “s” and ends with “leep”. Or “ob”. Or maybe “igh”. All three of which require that I remain horizontal, right here.’

‘Oh no you don’t, young lady,’ she said, snatching the duvet off my cold miserable body, leaving me curled up in the foetal position, trembling. ‘Come on, get up.’ She strategically positioned herself two millimetres from my face. ‘We’re going shopping.’

‘Abby, I don’t want to go shopping. You know I don’t. There’s no point anyway. I’ve put all this weight on and I’m not buying anything until I’ve lost it all.’

‘I don’t care about that. Come on, get up, we’re going out like it or not. You’ve got half an hour.’

I have no idea how it is that Abby manages to make me do things I absolutely do not want to do. When she starts talking, I have that feeling in my head, that absolute granite determination, that no matter what she says, I will not do it. I am in charge of me, not her; I can simply refuse. Like those people who go to presentation evenings for the free champagne, sniggering to each other about the poor saps who get taken in by it all; and then come away with two weeks a year in a flat in Beirut. They’re scratching their heads, thinking ‘How the fuck did that happen?’ No one else in my life has ever managed it with me. Not Mum; not Naomi; not even my dad, when I saw him (and, being less familiar with him, he was always more scary). Naomi once tried so hard to get me to do something – lend her my denim jacket for a date, I think – that she lost her temper and kicked a hole in her bedroom wall. But I didn’t relent. Actually, that just made me more determined. I didn’t need the jacket that night, wasn’t going out and never wore it much anyway. But if she thought she could get me to do what she wanted, just because she went red in the face and performed an impressive karate kick, she was wrong.

I felt instantly sorry for her of course. As soon as she’d done it, she froze, clapped her hand to her mouth, then sank to the floor and started sobbing. I got down there on the floor with her and cuddled her for ten minutes until she’d calmed down. Didn’t loan her the jacket though.

It took me just over an hour to get ready for Abby’s shopping trip, which is probably my personal best for extremely slow and reluctant preparation for an outing I have no interest in and don’t want to be a part of. Twenty minutes after that, we were walking across the car park in town, heading towards the main shopping precinct.

‘Trainers?’ I was saying, trailing a good four or five feet behind her.

‘Yes.’ She turned her head to the side as she spoke to me, in recognition of the fact that I was behind her, but she refused to turn all the way round to face me. ‘You liked those trainers of mine, didn’t you? The ones you wore last week when we went out for that short walk?’

I shrugged. She couldn’t see me. ‘Mnyer,’ I said – the audio equivalent of a shrug.

‘Good,’ she said decisively, interpreting – no doubt deliberately – my indeterminate sound as a positive. ‘You need some proper trainers for the MoonWalk, and you need them straight away so that you can train in them. Tom’s told me what to look for, and where to go, so it won’t take long.’

‘Oh.’ Insanely, I actually felt a bit disappointed. Then I realised I was insane, and cheered up.

We found my perfect pair of trainers in the first sportswear shop we went in. Thank God. I had never been in a sportswear shop before then, and I felt about as comfortable in there as a flabby, spotty lamb in a slaughterhouse full of fit, attractive lambs. The salesman – Martin – made me get up on a treadmill right there in the middle of the shop, in front of absolutely everyone, then turned it on and made me walk on it while he filmed me. I felt like I was somehow starring in my very own porn film. No doubt the footage will find its way onto YouTube eventually. Truly horrific. I actually lost the ability to walk sensibly. I’m twenty-eight, for God’s sake, and have been able to walk competently on and off for the past twenty-six years; but when that rubber surface started to move, I was Bambi on ice. My feet went behind me before I had even worked out what was happening and my body stretched out until I was almost horizontal. ‘Move your feet, Daisy,’ Martin said helpfully, nodding to encourage me. ‘Try to walk normally.’ Abby clapped her hand to her mouth at this point, and said nothing.

‘How fast is this?’ I panted, desperately dragging my feet forwards in a pseudo-run as fast as I could to bring my body back upright.

‘Four K,’ Martin said. ‘About two and a half miles an hour. Get your balance, then we’ll speed things up a bit.’

I panicked. I must have done. There’s no other explanation. One minute I was upright, walking confidently and calmly, even starting to enjoy it in some insane way, then Martin leaned over and pushed a button and everything went wrong. The ground whizzed away beneath me and my feet went sideways instead of forwards and hit the non-moving edge of the platform briefly. I lost my balance and had to grab the handrails to steady myself, but didn’t manage to get a proper grip in my panic. My shoes scuffed the walking surface repeatedly and I kept staggering forwards, my arms flailing in the air. Eventually I managed to grab the handrails again and lifted my entire body weight off the platform, but my elbow gave out and I collapsed suddenly back down onto the walking surface, and fell onto my knees.

‘YAAH! HELP ME!’ I yelled out as I was gently and smoothly transported to the end of the conveyor and deposited into the insoles display.

‘Christ alive!’ Martin yelped, and leaped into the air in a rare moment of abandon, as the entire rack of insoles teetered for a few seconds, then finally tilted forwards and showered me soundlessly with weightless packets of feet-shaped foam. ‘Jesus tonight, are you all right?’ He touched down lightly by my side and bent over to look at my humiliation more closely.

I nodded. ‘I’m fine. But I need to put my bruised ego in your accident book.’

He blinked, then frowned a little. ‘Oh, right.’ He straightened up and glanced quickly at Abs, who was by now folded in half with one hand over her mouth and the other wrapped round her belly. He looked back at me, then craned his neck anxiously towards a door marked ‘Staff Only’. ‘Well then, I’d better just go and get … the …’ It was obvious he was struggling to understand whether I was serious, so I let him off.

‘No, it’s fine, I’m fine, don’t worry.’ I stood up and picked boxes of feet out of my hair. ‘See? No harm done.’

Martin visibly brightened. The thought of paperwork was clearly bringing him down. Obviously one of those types who excelled at sport at school. ‘Oh, great! Well … I think we probably got enough footage there, so …’

I was frankly astounded by that statement. As far as I could work out, the only footage he’d have captured featured me upside down in the air, which wouldn’t have told him an awful lot about my walking technique. Oh, except for the fact that I wasn’t very good at it. But I had no intention of having another go, so I didn’t argue.

Abs – red-faced and still amazingly silent – and I followed Martin over to the wall of trainers and he talked us through which pair he thought would be most suitable.

‘Now Daisy,’ he began earnestly, ‘the interesting thing about the way that you walk is …’ But it wasn’t interesting at all. My attention immediately wandered over to some movement behind the demon treadmill. Two boys in hoodies, both around fourteen or fifteen, were glancing furtively around the room, then focusing back towards the in-store pharmacy. They were obviously about to start shoplifting things. I wondered vaguely whether to mention it to Martin, but it was far more interesting to see what happened. They moved closer together so their hoodies met up and formed a kind of hoodie tunnel for them to talk in. They conversed for a few seconds, re-emerged and looked around again, then edged nearer to the display. After one more quick scan of the room they were satisfied that no one was watching, so advanced finally to the display and, in a lightning-fast and clearly well-practised manoeuvre, seized a small, familiar-looking purple box each. The boxes flashed briefly in the air between them before being instantly concealed somewhere about their person and they moved off quickly. I turned back to Martin to alert him, but then noticed that the boys were slouching über-casually over to the tills. Of course. They weren’t shop-lifting; they were buying their first condoms. Romance isn’t dead.

Eventually I had to tear my eyes away and pay the million pounds Martin wanted for the space-age trainers he’d selected. Apparently they were made with some kind of new technology, involving a recently developed innovative substance probably derived from something that fell to earth from a galaxy far, far away, and would improve my balance, increase my fitness and tighten up the overall tone of my buttocks and thighs as I walked.

‘Wow,’ I nodded, exaggeratedly impressed. ‘Are they bringing an end to suffering and world poverty too?’ I handed over a thick wad of cash.

Martin looked from side to side, a tiny frown confusing his face. ‘Er, well … no. I don’t think so. Not really. I’m not sure that’s … You know, because they’re not made in the …’

I sagged with disappointment. ‘Oh. What a shame.’ Then I brightened. ‘Well, never mind. It’s certainly a relief to hear that the scientists are all keeping themselves busy.’

Martin glanced at Abs, then back at me. ‘Erm, I’m not sure that I …’ He trailed off.

I smiled and nodded. ‘Yeah, you know, after that whole cure-for-cancer fiasco.’

‘Right, OK, well, thank you very much,’ Abby said suddenly, grabbing my arm and dragging me towards the exit. ‘Bye!’

So I had the magic trainers. In a cardboard box, in a carrier bag, on the back seat of Abby’s car. As we drove, the bag jangled softly, and little gold and rainbow-coloured sparks erupted from it then evaporated in the air. Abby kept up an excited monologue all the way back to her place, about how great it all was, and how I could now finally start my proper training, and get out on the streets every day, starting tomorrow, even if it was just for twenty minutes to begin with, and then I could build up to an hour by increasing by ten minutes every day. And she would join me at weekends, and some evenings. And we would both get fit and toned and healthy and then complete the MoonWalk next month really easily and feel fantastic and a huge sense of achievement as well as raising a bucketful of cash for the cancer that killed my mum, which would in turn contribute towards improving research and treatment and could in the end help save someone else’s mum or daughter or sister or grandmother or auntie. I said nothing. I wasn’t feeling it. One step at a time, I thought. No need to get carried away.

OK. Julia Roberts has just told Hugh that she’s just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her. I adore this bit. Internationally worshipped multi-millionaire A-list movie star falls for witty and diffident but obscure small bookshop owner, and propositions him. It makes you believe that anything is possible. Like maybe one day I’ll be standing in Tesco by the hair removal cream and Matt Damon will happen to have popped in for cotton buds and a travel iron, and he’ll see me and tell me he’s actually just a simple man who’s fallen in love with a simple girl or something, and all he can offer me is his heart, no more, no less. And unlike Hugh I’ll snatch his bloody hand off and jet off with him straight to his Beverly Hills mansion for a life of parties and extravagance.

Hugh has turned her down though. Big mistake. Huge. But it all works out in the end. Of course it does, it’s a film. I’m a bit distracted this afternoon, actually. Can’t concentrate properly on the story. Well, I do know the story already, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t get something new out of it each time I watch it. The problem now is that it’s already half past three, and Abs is likely to get in from work anywhere between four and five, without warning. Being her own boss, she can finish work as soon as she’s had enough. No, all right, probably not as soon as she’s had enough. Not that exact second. She probably has to finish the lesson she’s giving before packing up for the day. Be a bit much if she just leaned over on the bypass, opened the driver’s door and gave her current pupil a good shove to send them tumbling out, then drove home. But she’s a professional, I’m sure she doesn’t do that. She probably pulls over first. Anyway I have no way of knowing what time she’ll get in, which means I have to be ready. I wait for a good shot of Hugh’s face, then pause the film. I can come back to that. I need to shut my computer down, put my quilt back on my bed and get the magic trainers on before she gets home. Then I can tell her I’ve just got back from a twenty-five-minute walk.

My messenger makes the popping noise just as I’m about to close the web page I’m on. I have to move quickly now. That message is bound to be Abby checking up on me.

Daisy Mack

Is alternating contact with the ground of the lowest appendages of my body for 30 sweeps of the long hand. It’s more difficult than it sounds, people.

OK, that’s that done. Hey, no one ever said that what goes on to Facebook has to be truthful.

I click on the message and find that it is from Abby and my body floods with relief. I’ve still got plenty of time to get sorted before she gets home. I relax down into the sofa again.

Abby Marcus What you doing?

Daisy Mack Hi Abs! Just got back from a walk. What are you doing?

I’m pretty pleased with myself there. Straight away I’ve given her the impression that I’ve been out walking, no hesitation. Add that to my status when she reads it later and she’ll have to believe me. No, wait. Maybe I should have not answered her for ten minutes or so, then I could have said I’d just got back. Would have been much more believable. Never mind, never mind, it’s too late now. Anyway, I can save that one for tomorrow. Yes.

Abby Marcus You’ve been online a long time. Are you sure you’ve been out??

Shit shit shit. Of course. Facebook always tells you the other members known to you who are online at the same time as you, so you can instant message them if you want. Which is clearly what she’s just done. Why didn’t I realise that? I’ve been on here for hours.

Daisy Mack Yes, definitely. Twenty-five minutes, to the park and back, just like you said. Must be some kind of error on your computer. Have you refreshed the page recently?

Yeah, I know, pretty lame. But Abs is so trusting, bless her, she’s bound not to even question it. Or maybe she just assumes that no one would ever dare to do anything other than what she’s told them to do. That’s probably more likely.

Abby Marcus How odd. I just assumed you’d left your computer logged on when you went out for your walk.

Bugger it. Bugger bugger bugger. What the hell is the matter with me? God, if I’d thought it through properly and not panicked, I’d have realised that of course I would have left the laptop logged onto Facebook while I was out walking. Because I was only going to be out for twenty-five minutes max, so I could simply pick up where I left off when I got back.

Abby Marcus You didn’t really go out, did you? Be honest, Daze.

Shit.

Daisy Mack Course I did, Abs. Do you really think I would be lying about it? What would be the point of that??

Abby Marcus Yes I do. And the point would be to get me off your back.

Daisy Mack

Actually, I don’t really know what to say here. She’s completely and utterly, absolutely, one hundred percent right. And I am exactly the same amount in the wrong. She’s my best friend, she’s really been there for me since Mum died, kind and supportive, helping me out with all the hideous arrangements, checking up on me all the time; and now she’s taken me in and let me have her spare room while I pull myself together and sort myself out somewhere to live. And she’s only making me do this MoonWalk thing for my own good. Everything she’s doing right now is for my own good. I absolutely cannot lie to her any more.

Daisy Mack Well actually, Abby, to be totally honest, I’m pretty upset that you’re even questioning me about it. Of course I have been out walking. I said I would, didn’t I? And I didn’t want to tell you that I’d left the laptop on while I was out because I was a bit ashamed that I was wasting your electricity. But don’t worry, I’ll make sure you’re recompensed for that.

Don’t look at me, OK? I’m only lying to her for her own good. I want to make her happy, that’s all.

Abby Marcus *pokes out bottom lip* I’m so sorry Daze. I do believe you, of course I do. Well done for getting out there, I’m proud of you. Hey, shall we get a take-away and watch Notting Hill tonight? I haven’t seen that one for ages!

Daisy Mack Brilliant idea. I love that film. What time are you getting home?

Abby Marcus Finishing in about half an hour. Will get food on the way home. Fire up the DVD player!! Xx

Daisy Mack I’m warming it up even as we speak!

Don’t look at me, I said. I’ve been through a tough time. I need empathy and understanding.