Читать книгу The Perfect 10 - Louise Kean - Страница 7

Here’s what they don’t tell you when you lose seven stones in weight.

They don’t mention the loose skin. They forget to tell you that you’ll end up with a rice cake-grey stomach that wrinkles and crumples beneath pinched fingers like tissue paper. They don’t divulge that on the upper inside of freshly toned thighs two flabby folds of stretched skin will stand guard over your pelvis, like a pair of spitefully unskinned chicken breasts, with a Stalinist determination not to budge. They don’t let on about the pubic pouch that they guard so angrily, that refuses to deflate in line with the rest of you, lending your naked profile a hermaphrodite edge.

They make believe your life will be a series of ketchup-red headlines yelling, ‘Now Sunny Can Wear a Swimsuit and Feel Fabulous!’ or, ‘Sunny Buzzes With So Much New-Found Energy She Could Burst!’

The truth is that the energy reserves alone can be spiteful. Some days I’m woken at dawn by the sun streaming in through the cracks in my curtains, and I’ll roll over in bed, hug my pillow, and determine to drift in and out of sleep until it’s too hot to stay under the duvet any longer. My new ‘healthy lifestyle’ denies me this simple pleasure. As soon as I open my eyes I am buzzing. I can no longer spend an entire Sunday in front of the television with the papers strewn out before me, carelessly picking at the foreign news, munching on Maltesers. My metabolism is so wired I wake up feeling like I’ve been drip-fed crack in my sleep. My body wants to run everywhere: to the train station, down supermarket aisles, from my bed to my wardrobe in the morning. It disconcerts people. They assume I am running from something, and maybe I am. They don’t tell you that some days you will fall so violently off the diet wagon that you will consume a family-sized tub of salted peanuts in twenty-five minutes – your hand dipping rhythmically in and out, passing nuts to lips without thought or care, and that it won’t matter an ounce if you run to the gym the next day. The perception is that anybody who loses a lot of weight has an iron will, and this is simply not true: you are mostly good, and occasionally bad. Detoxing is for monks, or freaks. A rogue band of particularly freakish monks actually invented the concept. They had remarkably clear skin, but they were still mad.

They won’t tell you that your nearest and dearest will inhale sharply if you eat a Quality Street in front of them, secure in the knowledge that the second you digest its seventy nutrition-free calories, you will regain every pound of weight you have previously lost. All seven stones of flesh will instantly bubble and gurgle under your skin – not gone, just hiding – until you suddenly and violently explode like a puffer fish into your old fat self. Despite the effort and determination and willpower you alone have mustered, people will still believe that you need to be protected from yourself. Thus the phrases, ‘But you’ve done so well so far!’ and, ‘Move the chocolates over here out of temptation’s way.’ Cue a kindly smile in your direction. Try not to speak with your fists when this happens.

They don’t tell you that you won’t find anything you actually want to wear in any of the clothes shops you were too humiliated to enter pre fat busting. The kind of shops where skin-and-bones teenage assistants used to eye you suspiciously if you so much as glanced at their carrier bags.

They don’t tell you how vain you will become. They won’t alert you to the fact, in advance, that you won’t know how to cope with looking in the mirror and seeing something you actually like, without succumbing to self-obsession, and fixating on the bits that refuse to become perfect, no matter how many miles you run, or how little dairy you eat. They don’t tell you that you will replace an addiction to food with an addiction to losing weight.

And they won’t tell you that you won’t be in love with Adrian any more.

Adrian, who couldn’t see past your belly, and who shouldered the burden of your unrequited love for so long.

Adrian, who was responsible for so many tears in front of the TV on lonely Saturday nights.

Adrian who inadvertently squished your soul daily for three years.

You just won’t love him any more, and it will really confuse you.

Because you’ll sleep with him anyway.

The sun is up, omelette yellow by 6 a.m. I am lucky enough to live in a suburb where the leaves are swept away by anonymous brooms before I leave my house in the morning. On holiday in Jamaica three years ago, my body clock refused to adjust to the time difference, and I woke every morning at 5.30. Stepping out on to my balcony to another postcard day, I witnessed an old muscled Rastafarian who called himself ‘The Original’, trawling our private beach for fish with handmade nets, before the tourists stumbled out of bed with cloudy heads full of last night’s rum, and the aftereffects of a ‘cigarette’ bought from a kitchen hand. Nature wasn’t allowed to hamper my holiday, didn’t mar my swimming and splashing fun, and living here is the same. You spend your money, you get your return. Nature – in this case excessive leaf droppage – doesn’t tamper with my walk to Starbucks in the morning.

I blow on a Grande Black Coffee-of-the-Day, put aside twenty-seven Two-Fingered Fondler orders that came in yesterday, comfortably cross my legs, and sit back.

At the outside table next to me is a guy, twenty-eight, thirty maybe. He wears jeans, and a T-shirt that demands in screaming yellow on grey ‘Who’s the Daddy?’ It tells me everything. There is no need to go to the effort of talking to anybody new any more. Just lower your eyes, and read the logo on their chest. It will say more about who they want to be than a month of conversation. My favourite T-shirt is pink, and says ‘Prom Queen’. Now you know everything you need to know about me: if you have to state it like a sandwich board hanging around your neck, it probably isn’t obvious.

His hair is spiky, and has been styled with care, if not expertise. He has ill-advised highlights that a cute gay boy-band member might get away with, but not your Average Joe. He fondles a Frappuccino and has just sat down, pulling up his chair with a confidence that suggests it has been reserved for him, for life. He has the look of a man waiting for somebody to arrive. But he is neither anxious nor nervous; he doesn’t glance around himself with apprehension, or casually pretend to read the discarded money pages left behind on his table. He waits with pleasure. His whole manner suggests that these are a few perfect moments to be snatched before whoever he is waiting for turns up, and ruins the image he has of himself, sitting at a coffee shop in a wealthy London suburb, on a perfect autumn morning, ruling the world.

And I know he’ll do it before he does. I see an almost natural blonde exit the newsagent’s and swing her hips past my table before she strays carelessly into his eye line; like a clay pigeon sprung from its contraption, I can hear a voice scream ‘PULL’ in this guy’s head. She carries the Sunday papers – one serious offering whose ten other sections will be discarded as soon as she finds the enclosed fashion magazine, and the obligatory news of the screws, which will be devoured first. She wears a pair of dirty low-slung jeans over a small pert peach of an arse. She has the messed-up dirty-blonde hair and clean clear skin of an early morning angel who has been forced out of bed to get Sunday’s essentials and is now, half dreaming, making her way back to her bed, and the man in it. She wears her genetic luck comfortably. She is the woman every man would like to wake up to. The Daddy inhales as he watches the Peach amble across the quiet road in front of us. And he watches her lightly jump to the kerb and the soft bounce in her peach of an arse as she does it. I hear his stomach grumble with hunger. There is nothing apologetic in his leer. As she moves round a corner, almost out of sight, his eyes remain fixed on those low-slung jeans, and his stare emits a residue that leaves a filthy film on my fresh coffee.

For a while I thought it was love that made the world go round, in my younger foolish days. Now I know it all comes down to sex in the end. It’s the constant screwing in every continent that makes the world turn. Every sexual spark that fizzes inside all of us sends out a peculiar energy into the stratosphere that spins us, like the men who ride the back of the waltzers at the fair – scream if you wanna go faster! – and the sun and the moon, gravity and all of that other stuff has nothing to do with it. It’s all about sexual sparkles. If everybody stopped thinking about sex, all at once, our little star would fall out of the sky like a yo-yo snapping off its string. Working on this theory I realise that I am actually placing mankind in jeopardy, not doing my fair share. But feeling defensive only hardens my heart.

The Peach disappears, and the Daddy sits back, crossing his legs, glazed and freshly raised, like his morning muffin. Moments later a reasonably attractive brunette with wide hips and a foundation line that skims her jaw appears behind him, and taps him on the shoulder. I see all the faults first these days, passing instant judgements. I’m not proud of it, but it happens automatically, and is almost impossible to stop. My therapist finds it ‘concerning’. I tell him I find his collection of snow globes concerning, but he ignores that.

The Daddy turns towards Wide Hips Foundation Line, and though the glint in his eye disappears, he shamelessly kisses her with a lust she didn’t earn. When I see his tongue flick into her mouth I look away embarrassed. She smiles, pleased and flattered by this unusual passion, then hurries inside to buy a coffee to avert any embarrassment when he makes no offer to buy it for her. She obviously doesn’t like confrontations. She doesn’t have the confidence to say, ‘Couldn’t have bought my coffee while you were buying yours? Couldn’t think that far ahead? Couldn’t be bothered? Or am I just not special enough to warrant a bagel?’ The Daddy and I wouldn’t last five minutes. He turns back and stares at the corner where the Peach disappeared moments earlier. Wide hips returns, juggling change, a cheese-covered bagel and a cappuccino, and pulls up a chair. I silently do the calorie sums. That’s too many for breakfast. She is comfort eating. I blame him, in my head. She begins to chat, and I notice that she has a habit of flicking her ring finger as she talks, stroking a band of gold with an embedded diamond, and I know what she will never know. She will never realise that in those brief moments before she arrived, her fiancé just traded up for the Peach. I can’t watch them any more.

I sip my coffee, which is still so hot that it burns my tongue. I take it strong and black, like my dustbin liners – that’s the only comparison I can truthfully make. There is no room for calorific drinks in my diet, I just need the caffeine. I look up at still trees, and yellow-brown leaves that cling to their branches, knowing their days are numbered. I glance around at a litter-free street; even the teenagers consider it rude to drop their wrappers here. A rare saloon car passes noiselessly as I wait for something important to occur to me in the way that it should when you are just watching the world go by. I have always felt that time spent on my own, in a public place like this, should be full of magnificent thoughts. It makes sitting on my own less self-conscious. But mostly it’s just shopping lists, credit card bills, errant vibrator orders, and late birthday cards. Then I generally read Vogue. But today a thought does occur to me: there may be nothing at the end of this long hungry road, and I’d be a fool to disregard it. There may be no emotional pot of gold, I may still be alone, and I’d be immature – no naïve, no breathtakingly stupid – to ignore it.

But I still ignore it.

It will be a lighter kind of lonely at least. I close my eyes and quickly dream a little dream of being emotionally dependent on somebody else, somebody bigger than me. I could maybe be a little weak, possibly a trifle pointless, just for a while. I could let somebody else make the decisions, just for once. I also decide to ignore the fact that, traditionally, arm’s length has always seemed like the perfect length to me. It’s what I’m used to, at least.

As a child, while my sister and the other girls on my street were playing kiss chase with the boys down the road, I was searching my parents’ newspapers and scouring pre-watershed television for a fat role model: a woman who was big and really beautiful. But I grew up in the eighties, when aerobics grabbed the attention of the Western world, and Olivia Newton-John sang about getting physical, and leg warmers even became fashionable outside the swing doors of the local gym. My favourite film as a child was Grease, and I would spring out of bed early on Saturday mornings and watch it on our video player before my parents woke up. ‘You’re the One that I Want’ was their weekend alarm clock for many years. I must have seen it hundreds of times, maybe even thousands, and I can still recite every character’s dialogue when it comes on at Christmas, or over Easter weekend. At the end of Grease Sandy, in hooker mode to snag her man, wore black satin trousers that were so tight they had to sew her into them.

Try as I might, I couldn’t find my fat femme fatale. In magazines or on TV fat women existed only as the big old butt of the joke, and in films fat women never made the romantic lead. But instead of just biting the bullet instead of the cake and going on a diet, I decided to be my own role model, to be big and beautiful myself. Then maybe as I grew older, little fat girls might pass me in the street and know that everything might turn out OK in the end, in the same way that I desperately scoured streets with my eight-year-old eyes to find a reason to be hopeful, even then.

But I didn’t even manage to convince myself. I didn’t think that you could be both big and beautiful in anything other than an advertising slogan, and yet I tried to live it, clung to it as a philosophy that justified my choice not to diet. As I got older, as long as I’d take in front of the mirror meticulously applying make-up each morning, concentrating solely on the face and hair and never looking down at the body beneath, I knew the body was there, bulging and bruised, and I hated it. I just wouldn’t admit it to myself.

I brush the crumbs of my Skinny Blueberry Muffin from my running trousers and note childish screams and the noisy padding of developing feet running somewhere behind me. I turn to face the commotion: three children, one barely out of nappies, one roughly three years old with a shock of red hair completely dissimilar to his brothers, one older, maybe six, and precocious. Their mother is mousy but elegant, tall and exhausted, and has wild tired eyes that dart from the pavement to the shop to the road, her long slim fingers desperately hanging on to little hands that don’t want to be held.

I turn back to my coffee and take an apprehensive gulp, but this time it doesn’t burn my tongue. I sit under the umbrella that shields me from the early Sunday morning sun, and try to regain some semblance of peace. I hear chairs being pushed back and open one eye to see the Daddy and his ignorance-is-bliss girlfriend hastily moving off down the road, away from the fresh childish din. I daydream that I might spring to my feet and shout, ‘Don’t be a fool, Wide Hips Foundation Line! He can’t be trusted!’ But of course I don’t. I don’t draw attention to myself like that.

It’s becoming harder, being seen. I notice people looking, men looking, and although these should be tiny triumphs, glances that spell sexual desire from the opposite sex, they unnerve me. I don’t want men looking at me uninvited, thinking things about me that I can’t control. I don’t want them picturing me late at night with one hand on the remote and the other in their pants, the way that men do with women they’ve seen during the day. And yet here I am drinking my low-calorie drink, about to go to the gym, to burn and bruise off this week’s two pounds of fat, on a quest ultimately to prove to the man that didn’t want me that he was wrong, that he should have had some imagination, should have guessed what I could be.

It is frightening to go unnoticed for so long and then suddenly pop into everybody’s sight with a magician’s puff of smoke and screaming ‘Ta-da!’. Some women have dealt with it all of their lives and either enjoy it or ignore it or have at least learnt to live with it. I was invisible before, which is ironic considering I took up twice the space. Nothing suddenly gets simple, no matter what the WeightWatchers Slimmer of the Year might tell the Sunday Mirror. When you win a bit, you always lose a bit too.

The three brothers grim descend on to the table next to me, landing themselves on metal chairs that scrape the pavement, squabbling. The red-haired horror shrieks as his older brother snatches away the piece of wood he has been playing with, and begins banging it on his legs and the table. And this is no musical child prodigy; I can’t even make out a rhythm, never mind a tune.

‘Charlie, give it back to Dougal,’ their tall and exhausted mother demands.

I smirk at the name Dougal, although I don’t know why. You hear much worse these days. I can’t think of a soap star called Dougal at least. Strangers sometimes smirk at my name when they hear it for the first time, but I am proud of it. I think that anybody who fails to see something positive in Sunny must have their own issues to deal with.

‘Sit there and be quiet. No, actually, come with me.’

All the children shriek in unison, and the youngest tugs at his mother’s hand to drag her into Starbucks. I pray she will usher them inside, but she accosts a stray waitress who has, in a moment of craziness, decided to come and clean tables. The mother asks for three fruit juices and a Skinny Mocha, and tries to settle the boys at the table again. I stare off into the distance until the oldest brother begins to run round and round my table, and little shrieking Dougal follows his lead. Short stumpy slightly unsure legs make a dash for a tree ten yards away. I glance over my shoulder to see what their mother is doing while they run amok – she is negotiating a straw into the youngest one’s mouth while furtively glancing towards her other two sons. I don’t know what I expect parents to do with their children, I just don’t think they should be allowed to shriek. If I ever have children of my own they will be impeccably behaved in public. They will have character, and be witty and charming, but they will not bang things, and they will not scream. They will only be allowed to do those things at home.

‘Dougal, come back here! Charlie, for God’s sake put it away!’ Their mother’s voice raises at her eldest son, who has decided to urinate up against the tree. Both children momentarily freeze, and Charlie pops his little penis back into his shorts. They start running round my table again – children burn off so many calories without even realising it. The older boy, Charlie, nudges my chair every time he passes, and I hastily put my coffee cup back down on the table rather than risk a stain on my white Lycra vest top with built-in cooling something or other. I check my watch – the gym will be open in twenty minutes. It is an 8 a.m. start on a Sunday, as if God won’t allow exercise before morning has truly broken on his day. Only ten more minutes of the shrieking before I can go.

Even this early, even for a Sunday, the road is peculiarly quiet. It’s getting late in the year for the tourists, despite the heat. Because of it nobody managed a good night’s sleep last night. Maybe now they are tossing and turning and kicking off sheets, trying to rescue another hour’s rest.

Charlie stops running, and stands in front of me, staring.

‘Yes?’ I ask him flatly, unimpressed.

‘Who is going to look after your dog when you die?’ He motions his little head towards an old sleeping Labrador chained to a railing five feet in front of me.

‘It’s not my dog,’ I say, and Charlie shakes his head at me and ‘tut’s.

I ‘tut’ back. Charlie raises his six-year-old eyes at me and starts running towards the tree again.

I guess the dog belongs to either an old man, practically knocking on heaven’s door at the Garden Café a little further down the street, or an elderly lady at one of the other Starbucks tables, resting from the heat. The weathermen have predicted that today will be one of the hottest days of the year, despite it being 27 September, and yet she wears a heavy charcoal-grey overcoat that looks as if it was standard issue in 1940, and a claret woolly hat with a fraying bobble. I look away quickly, gulping back tears. Her vulnerability is almost poetic. If she tried to sell me a poppy I’d be hysterical. Of course, now, as she wipes some lazy dribble from the side of her eighty-year-old collapsing mouth with a handkerchief, I am repulsed. It’s old people with all their facilities intact that I appreciate the most.

The kids are still running and screaming, and I thank merciful God that I have never had enough sex to get pregnant. Obesity was a great contraceptive at least.

A man walks past my table. He is average, forty-ish. I see his back, his jacket, his jogging bottoms, a balding head covered by thinning hair that is too long.

Before us all, an audience paying little attention, he walks calmly towards the tree ten yards in front of our tables, and with one jerky movement scoops up Dougal, and carries on walking south, away from us. I don’t see his face. Admittedly I am appreciative of the drop in noise levels, but I am also confused, and I straighten my back, turning to face his mother, to somehow check that this is OK, that he must be the child’s father, or uncle, or a family friend. Because things like this just don’t happen right in front of you. She isn’t looking up, but instead tries to wipe fruit juice from the edges of her youngest son’s mouth.

I say, ‘Excuse me,’ nervously but loudly, and she glances at me and then automatically in the direction of her elder sons. Her naturally concerned expression falls, as if all the muscles have just been sucked out of her face by a Dyson, and her eyes widen. She pushes herself to her feet as she sees Dougal’s red hair over the shoulder of the man quickly walking away. Her mouth opens and a scream leaps out as if it’s been waiting in her throat for the last ten years.

She darts forward two paces, but she hasn’t let go of her toddler’s arm and he screams. I jump up. She tries to move forwards, hoisting her youngest child in the air by his little arm as he cries out in pain, and Charlie, who has resumed urinating against the tree, turns around in confusion as he hears his mother’s cry.

‘He’s got my child! He’s got my child!’

I can’t quite believe this is happening, but I kick back my chair and start to run.

Ahead of me I can see the Stranger has his hand clamped over Dougal’s mouth, and as they turn the corner at the end of the street he breaks into a jog. They were always called Strangers when I was a child, and they were a constant threat. There were washed-out adverts tinted a dirty orange or a grubby yellow, warning us not to get into their brown Datsuns, or go and look at their puppies, or accept their sweets. Now they have longer medical-sounding names that I’m sure children don’t understand. The idea of a Stranger still scares me, and I am nearly thirty. These new words just can’t put the same fear of God into a child.

My trainers bounce off the pavement and the sudden rush of adrenalin through my muscles is sickening. My calves and thighs expand and contract as I round the corner and see the Stranger holding a struggling Dougal, but he is sprinting now towards the alleyway across the road. I have only been down that alleyway once and it scared the hell out of me: I kept expecting to see a corpse. It is full of gates to gardens and nooks and hiding places.

Feeling sick, I run faster. The man is by the road and he almost runs into a car, dodging it only at the last moment, but he isn’t as fast as I am. I push myself on, not aware of my breathing, not looking at anything but Dougal’s shock of ginger hair, which was so unfortunate five minutes ago, but is now vital. I can run five kilometres in twenty-seven minutes now. This time last year I couldn’t run to the bus stop without throwing up. Thankfully for me, for Dougal, I’ve streamlined since then. Far behind me, back by the Garden Café, I can hear his mother screaming his name, but I just run.

I hear the Stranger breathing now, wheezing and coughing hard, ten feet in front of me, making for the alleyway. My strides are long and elegant, I run on my toes, my arms pumping at my sides, my chest open, and I feel sick as my biceps and quadriceps push me on. There are no rolls of flab bouncing or ripping at my stomach now.

Three feet from the entrance to the alleyway I am almost within touching distance of the Stranger but he stops sharply and spins around to face me: he looks scared and sick as well. I see a bead of sweat streak down the centre of his nose. I slam on my own brakes as he removes the hand that is covering Dougal’s mouth, and swings it, arm outstretched, clenched fist towards my face. Uncorked, Dougal starts to scream, his face as red as his hair, his eyes wide and watery and desperate. We are all scared. I try to lurch out of the way, but the man’s punch strikes the side of my head. I stumble like a speeding car hitting a boulder in the road. I have never been punched before. I am on the pavement and cry out at an awful evil feeling that shoots behind my eyes, and I am momentarily blinded. I blink back tears, but my calves and my thighs spring me up off the floor.

I turn into the alley twenty steps behind the Stranger, who has shifted Dougal and jammed his tiny head into his shoulder to muffle his screams.

Overgrown bushes swipe at my face as I run along the dirt track alley. All of our actions seem loud, louder than usual. Every twig that snaps, my breathing, the Stranger’s breathing, the pounding of our feet hitting the dirt track. He keeps running, but he’s slowing down and tripping, and I’m getting faster, but wincing at the aching knife of pain that has been forced through my temples where his dirty hand smashed at my forehead. I open my mouth to shout at him to stop, but a feeling of dread silences me, a need not to call attention to the fact that I am a woman, chasing a man down a lonely passage.

The alley is three hundred metres long and narrow like a bicycle lane. The bushes are overgrown and make it dark, but the morning sun is so hot and bright that I can see him ahead of me. He hasn’t ducked out of sight into any openings in the shrubs, and he can hear me closing in on him in my trainers and running trousers, as if I got up this morning and chose my best ‘chasing a child snatcher’ outfit. Sweat is pouring off us all and I focus on the damp patches spreading across the back of his dirty beige polyester jacket. He is wearing his best ‘child snatcher’ outfit himself. The air is filled with flies, and smells rotten, and even though it cannot possibly be this man who smells so bad, I can’t help but believe that it is.

I am almost at his side, and I throw a hopeful arm out for Dougal as I launch myself into the Stranger’s back, terrified.

We fall messily.

Dougal is on to all fours in front of us, scraping his little hands and knees on dirt and leaves. The Stranger slams face-first into the wall and I stumble down behind him, onto him, and the dirt. Instantly we are both scrambling to get up. I hear him mutter ‘shit’ as he crawls forward to get to his feet, and I am surprised that he speaks English. He looks English, but still I am shocked.

I can hear my heart and my head pounding, and another man’s voice maybe fifty feet behind us, shouting, but I can’t tell what. The Stranger lurches to his feet, as I am on all fours, and I scream, ‘Dougal, get behind me!’

The terrified mop of red hair and tears and bloody knees, and a bruised face with the Stranger’s fingerprints embedded in his cheeks, runs as fast as his ridiculous small legs will allow, behind me, before the Stranger is fully upright.

I can hear the cries of a man getting closer behind us, shouting, ‘You sick bastard, you sick bastard …’ and the pounding of his feet on the dirt. I look up and notice that the Stranger’s glasses have smashed, and his face, an average forty-five-year-old face, is red and stained with dirt and sweat. He looks down at me, with either confusion or fear or disgust, and then his eyes dart upwards and behind me at the menacing sound of larger feet than mine running towards us all, and I can clearly hear the chasing man’s voice now, shouting, ‘You sick fuck! You sick bastard!’

I raise myself onto my knees as the Stranger lunges forward. His dirty old badminton trainer makes sharp hard contact with my stomach, and seems to sink further in than it physically should. I scream in pain, folding forwards. He calls me a ‘bitch’, but in a tone that lacks conviction.

Dougal screams as I hear a blurred and breathless voice behind me yelling, ‘You sick fuck! I’ll fucking kill you!’

The Stranger turns and runs down the alley, towards the sunlight at the other end. I lie on my side and clutch my stomach, and moan at a pain I have never felt before. I have never been kicked in the stomach before. Dougal is behind me crying and pawing at my back. I push myself up onto knees that nearly buckle, and my stomach yells with pain, and my head thuds noisily with pumping blood and bruising. I turn and accept a screaming, crying red-faced child into my arms. He holds on to me tightly, then pushes me away, then holds on again.

The pounding of large feet slows, but passes us, and the chasing man shouts as he speeds up again, ‘Go back the other way,’ and then coughs so hard I am positive he won’t catch him.

I pull little Dougal’s head away from my chest, and hold it between my hands, and ask him if he is hurt. He nods his head, and continues to cry. I push myself to my feet, and holding Dougal in my arms, ignoring the thrashing pain in my stomach, and the thumping in my head, and the aching in my legs, and the tightening in my chest, I struggle back down the pathway, back the way we came.

Dougal quietens down slightly as we walk the long walk – we were two-thirds of the way down the alley. Where was the man planning to go? Did he even have a plan? Or was it just an impulse, a shocking unexplainable moment of opportunity?

Eventually I say into Dougal’s ear, ‘There’s your mummy,’ as we reach the sunlight. His face whips around to see his hysterical tall mousy mother clutching at her other two children. Dougal starts to kick and scream and struggle with me to be set free, and I lower him to the ground. He runs into his mother’s arms, and falls instantly silent, as she cries loudly for the both of them.

I lean against the wall, wiping stinging beads of sweat out of my eyes, clutching at my stomach, trying to control my breathing. It only takes a couple of seconds for me to start to cry as well.

I hear the wail of police sirens coming close, and see a small gathering of people across the street staring at this strange soap opera by the opening of the alley. A police car screeches up, and I shield my eyes from its electric-blue lights, which remind me of the flashing neon signs outside strip clubs in Soho.

The doors burst open as the wailing siren stops, and a radio full of static says, ‘We’ve got him this end.’

I wipe my eyes, and want my mum to hug me too. I want to tell her that a Stranger with broken glasses and a rotten smell hit me, and he kicked me, and I’m finding it all suddenly very personal. He wanted to hurt me. I cry because I am scared by what I did. I am scared at the thought of chasing a child snatcher, a Stranger, down that alley. I cover my eyes with my hands and feel sick, as a nauseous sliver of pride turns my stomach and a voice in my head whispers what I know before I can silence it. I ran fast.

I throw up a cup of black coffee and half a Skinny Blueberry Muffin on the street. That’s all there is.

Staring down at the pavement, I feel proud.

Cagney has the sick little fuck up against a wall, and the sick little fuck has the audacity to tremble. Cagney can’t punch him, but not because he doesn’t want to. Cagney wants to obliterate him, wants to bring the wall down upon him, wants to see his nose battered and black and pouring with blood, and to hear him moan as the life and the evil seeps out of him. But a policeman has a firm hold of Cagney’s arm at the elbow, and is forcefully prising him away. They should let him smash the sick little bastard apart with the fury of God; they can’t do it themselves, at least not in public, without being accused of police brutality, and sparking a peaceful protest of civil rights banners waved by bored housewives and fools. Cagney, on the other hand, has never been a policeman, so he can punch whomever he wants, if he is willing to take the consequences. And in this instance, the end very surely justifies the means. Still a constable pulls his arm away forcefully.

‘Let go of him. We’ll take it from here – let him go.’

‘You sick fucker, you want to mess with kids? They should let me kill you now!’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do it,’ the man whispers as tears stream down his face.

The rage inside Cagney surges up like a twenty-foot Atlantic wave, but a second policeman grabs his other arm, and pulls him off, throwing him to one side. They spin the man around and slam the side of his face up against the wall, slapping a pair of handcuffs on him.

‘Whatever you do, it’ll be too good for him! There’s no justice any more.’ Cagney bends over with his hands on his hips, and coughs loudly. Speaking has pushed his body over the edge. His chest feels magnificently precarious; it may collapse at any moment. He feels bile rise in his throat, and throws up a little, at the end of the alley. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, stands up and leans back against the wall, clutching his sides.

He knows better than to run. A man in his condition shouldn’t run. There is no official medical term for his condition. He just knows it by the affectionate term ‘Jack Daniel’s’. He has a minor case of ‘Marlboro Reds’ as well, but he doesn’t think that one is terminal. Neither of his conditions need be life-threatening, as long as he remembers not to run.

One police car pulls off, carrying the man, and Cagney glares after it, trying to catch his breath. A policeman from a second squad car approaches him with his hands on his hips like a sheriff of a small town, about to quick-draw.

‘Are you ready to go, sir?’

Cagney looks up at Constable Cary Grant, and shakes his head, aware that nothing may come out when he tries to speak, that his trachea may have combusted from the heat and the fury in the back of his throat.

‘What?’ It is all Cagney can manage, with any clarity.

‘Sir, we’ll need you to come down to the station with us.’

‘Why?’

‘To file a report.’

‘Why?’

‘So we can prosecute that bastard for snatching kids.’

Cagney is repulsed at the constable’s efforts to appeal to some shared sense of old-fashioned ethics while nobody else is listening. He knows that in a court of law the policeman wouldn’t be calling that bastard a bastard – he’d be too busy looking over his shoulder at all the do-gooders and politically correct morons.

‘I can tell you everything I know here.’ Cagney inhales as deeply as he can, and concentrates on not falling to the ground. He steadies himself against the wall as casually as he can. ‘Some woman starts shouting outside my office …’ take a breath, ‘“He’s got my child,” et cetera …’ Breath. ‘I get downstairs, and some girl has already gone haring after him, but the mother is beside herself …’ huge breath, redness of the face, lung collapsing, ‘and what else can I do?’ Pause for emphasis, and oxygen. ‘But it’s the girl you want to talk to. She’d already got the kid back by the time I caught up with him.’ And relax. And fuck it, breathe hard.

Cagney looks down at his feet, wheezing, suddenly aware that he is impressed, which is rare these days. The girl was stupid, she was doubled up when he ran past, probably badly hurt, but it was impressive none the less. Stupidly impressive. Cagney nods his head once, in approval. And then shakes it. She got lucky. She couldn’t have fought him off if he’d gone for her instead. Some things are still meant for men to deal with.

‘You need to come and file the report, in the proper way.’

The constable looks at Cagney with confusion; Cagney shrugs it off. Why isn’t he grasping his hero moment? – that’s what this fool is thinking. But he doesn’t know Cagney, and it’s going to take a lot more than a bit of a jog and a man half his size to make him want to wear a medal.

‘I’m not involved, just speak to the girl.’

‘If you didn’t want to be involved you should have stayed in your office. Now we have to go.’

The policeman grabs Cagney’s arm, and Cagney gives up, allowing himself to be guided towards the police car. He has used up his energy store for the month. Cagney hasn’t been in a police car for ten years, but it smells the same – of fear and disinfectant – and he feels just as caged. He looks down at his lap as they stop at traffic lights, and passengers in passing cars stare in.

‘You did well today, mate,’ the officer remarks from behind the wheel.

Cagney ignores him.

The police radio crackles, and Officer Charm chats away for a minute, letting out a brief snort of laughter.

The radio lazes into a stream of static, and the officer turns round to face Cagney as the car sits at a pedestrian crossing, allowing an elderly couple with a black Lab to idle across like they own the road.

‘I don’t know what they’re putting in the coffee in Kew, but the girl didn’t want to come down the station either. She wanted to go to the gym! The pair of you have probably saved that kid’s life today, and we’ve nearly had to cuff you both to get you to make a report!’ The policeman laughs again, but Cagney looks at him with disdain. The officer turns back to the wheel, shaking his head, and muttering, loudly enough for Cagney to hear, ‘Rude bastard.’

Cagney concentrates on the view, appalled.

She wanted to go to the gym? She saves a boy’s life, and she wants to go and lift weights?

‘What was that?’ The officer partially turns his head towards Cagney in the back of the panda car.

Cagney repeats himself, loudly.

‘The world’s gone to hell.’

I fidget outside of the police station, waiting for a taxi to arrive. I said they shouldn’t waste a squad car on dropping me back home; I don’t pay taxes for them to ferry me around. In truth I didn’t enjoy the experience of sitting behind the thick smeared glass in the back seat. It reflected me badly. I’m going to go to the gym, but it’s not as if exercise is the only thing I can think about, especially after this morning’s incident. I just need to clear my head. They kept calling it ‘an incident’ in the station. There was an ‘incident report’, and it makes it sound less threatening if I think of it that way. I just need to run it out of my thoughts. I don’t want to go home and sit around and dwell on what could have been.

I was in the station for a couple of hours. It was quiet, not frenetic the way it is on the television. I didn’t see gruesome pictures hanging on the walls of dismembered prostitutes. A couple of people came and went, I had another cup of coffee, eventually, and the policemen seemed to crack a lot of jokes, appearing to enjoy their crime fighting.

It took an hour for the medical. It was all conducted in a small green room with a neon strip light, behind a battered white screen on wheels, on a tired old hospital bed that looked like it was playing host to the biggest germ party ever thrown. I was rigid with discomfort for the entire examination, afraid that I’d catch something itchy from the foam in the bed, embarrassed at the skin crêpes around my stomach when they made me lift up my top. And then, of course, I kept crying. They said it was shock – a young policewoman with stern hair and thick eyebrows held my hand a couple of times and called me brave, which made me cry even more. I’m not great with compliments, any kind. My hand would involuntarily dart up to shield my eyes, as the tears started to swell anew, but she kept yanking it down, to test my blood pressure, or witness my shame – I’m not sure which.

The result of one dirty fist to my head, and one badminton-trainer kick to my stomach is nothing more than some nasty bruising. I was surprised. I felt sure something must have been broken or ruptured, a vein popped or a bone cracked. At the time of being kicked, being punched, the pain had been obscene. It wasn’t just the force of the blows, it was the shock.

I tried my best not to forget anything. I told them about the smell in the alleyway, which seems to have smeared itself permanently on my skin like Satan’s own brand of moisturiser, but I don’t think they wrote that down. They said that the assault charges against me will actually be vital in prosecuting the Stranger, as ‘kidnapping’ for such a short period of time could be hard to prove. It seems so odd to me that the man’s intention was clear – to take the child – and yet now they have to prove it to people that weren’t even there, and the events of the morning will be painted differently by his lawyer in court. He may be able to plead temporary insanity or something similar. I told them that I thought he was scared by himself, not insane, but they didn’t write that down either. The policeman said they’d be in contact, with the details of what happens next. There is, of course, the prospect of a trial, as well as some kind of trauma counselling that I can go for, as the victim of a violent crime. When they said this I explained that he hadn’t used a gun, and they looked at me strangely again. They gave me their phone number and said I could call them if I remembered anything else, and that the counsellor would be in touch shortly, so I said fair enough, as nonchalantly as I could muster.

I didn’t tell them that I already have a therapist. It feels indulgent. I started seeing him about eight months ago, when I first realised that I might need to talk as well as run. I like to discuss abstract theories, and he likes to make me find some relevance to them in my life. Given a heavier case load, I don’t think he’d still be seeing me, but I pay my money and he listens. I find it interesting, although I’ve learnt that he doesn’t deal in answers. He doesn’t think we are talking about the right things. He thinks I am avoiding my own issues, that I need to focus on the real. He nudges me in the same direction every week, and I dodge it. But as I say, I pay my money …

I already know that I don’t want to talk about the incident, relive it or even think about it. Even with only a few hours’ hindsight it seems strangely unimportant, because I did it, I suppose. I can’t say that to my therapist; he’ll have a field day. But to retell it will make it terrifying, will give me nightmares that I am sure won’t creep up on my dreams unless I am forced to rehash it all. It almost never happened, and in fact it was over in a matter of minutes, and hopefully Dougal is young enough not to be scarred and scared for life. I have come out of it with nothing more than a black eye and a bruised midriff.

I jump up and down on the spot a few times, then lean against a railing, and check my watch. Taxi drivers always claim to be no more than ten minutes away. They are liars. The only time a taxi will ever arrive on time, or early for that matter, is on an evening when you are going out and you haven’t decided which shoes to wear. In these instances they will be tooting their horn angrily outside of your flat before you’ve even hung up the phone to taxi control.

I hear a lung-disturbing cough behind me. I turn round and shield my eyes from the sun, and make out a figure standing rigidly about fifteen feet away under an old Judas tree. I recognise him as the man who chased the Stranger this morning. He is close enough to lean against the tree trunk, but he doesn’t. He is wearing a thick, black roll-neck jumper, and black trousers – doesn’t anybody listen to the weather forecasts except me? It must be thirty degrees, and it’s not even midday yet. His arms are folded in front of him.

He is tall, over six feet. I approximate that he is late thirties, but it’s hard to tell because his face is scrunched up, squinting at the sun, so that his expression makes him seem older than he actually is. He could be thirty, or fifty, but the negativity pinching at his eyes suggests he is one hundred. He is still very red in the face, and I’m not sure if it is the heat or the run that has caused it. He looks like a man who has had the life knocked out of him, who has just lost a custody battle to a promiscuous and alcoholic wife, or finally had his sentence quashed after fifteen years in jail for a pub bombing he did not commit. I wonder what could make a man look so drained. Maybe the Stranger attacked him, and there was some kind of fight …

His face is broad and pale, and he could do with stepping out from that shade and into the sun for a while. His hair is dark and short but slightly bushy on top – he must have to tame it every morning – and I can tell he finds this irritating. I’m sure he hates his hair. It is peppered with grey around his temples, and he has distinguishable sideburns, also dusted with grey. His features are strong but cold, his eyes are deep-set and his nose is positively Roman. He reminds me, standing there staring off into the distance, of those old sepia photographs of ageing Hollywood leading men you see in documentaries, who were a harshly flawed attractive that seems inexplicable these days. He looks like a closed book that wants to stay closed, and the dust is already starting to settle on his hair. It is hard to see what is muscle and what is fat beneath his black jumper, but I only realise that I am staring when his eyes dart upwards and catch mine. Our gazes lock for a frame – not even a second – but it is enough for my cheeks to flush pink with humiliation. I spin round, and walk two paces forwards to check for my cab, but the road is completely empty, and I feel like a fool.

I hear him cough again, but not to attract my attention. His cough is out of his control – this is clearly not a man who runs regularly. My breathing had regulated itself minutes after the incident, moments even, whereas his lungs sound as if they may still collapse. I glance back over my shoulder to approximate how much he weighs and his eyes dart up and catch mine again.

I touch my toes, for no reason other than to do something quickly, and I feel ridiculous. It must actually look like I am trying to impress him with my arse, or worse, my flexibility. I am giving him the impression that I actively seek out children to rescue on Sunday mornings in an effort to meet men. But can I walk over there and explain that I was merely working out his body-fat-to-lean-matter ratio? I’m not sure, given the circumstance, which version will sound less appalling.

I am going to have to speak to him. If I see him at the trial I will die of shame. I need to clear up this awkwardness, and make it plain that I don’t find him attractive. It’s an old habit that is refusing to die, the need to reject first.

I push myself up from the railing I am leaning on, and inspect my running trousers for specks of my morning vomit, summoning up the courage to small talk. I cross my arms, and walk determinedly towards him with my head down. I hear him cough again, uncomfortably. I glance up only when I sense that I am a few feet away, feeling the temporary coolness of the shade of the tree above me.

He stands very straight and looks at me, and then away furtively for somebody that might rescue him this time, but we are the only heroes in town today. I’m going to clear this mess up as quickly and as cleanly as possible, and walk away.

‘Hi.’

He just stares at me.

I feel my throat contract, but continue, ‘I’m Batman, you must be Robin …’

I laugh; he stares at me blankly.

‘We both ran after the same man this morning … the man who took the child …’ I can’t bring myself to say the word ‘snatched’.

Even though I am now blocking him from the sun, the scrunched-up expression on his face doesn’t budge.

‘This morning, literally,’ I check my watch, ‘a couple of hours ago? We ran down that alley … I was on the floor, you ran past and told me to go back the other way …’ I am speaking too quickly, I know. And my cheeks are flushed, I know this too. ‘You know, this morning? Surely you can’t have forgotten already?’

‘I haven’t forgotten. Yes.’

‘Yes?’

‘Yes I am that man.’

‘Oh. I thought you meant “yes?” as in “what do you want?”.’

I laugh sharply. He looks away. And maybe even shrugs his shoulders in agreement, but I might be dreaming that. Finding me unattractive is not a reason to be this rude, although most men I’ve met think it is reason enough to cut me dead.

‘I thought I recognised you, but I wasn’t sure because, you know, I was on the ground when I saw you the first time, which is why I was looking at you just then to make sure it was you … Anyway, I’m just waiting for a cab, to take me home.’ I try to finish brightly, but it just sounds needy.

He stands in silence.

I could walk away, of course. I may never meet this man again, we may be on different days of the trial – who cares if he thinks me rude? I could just walk off as if I hadn’t said a word …

‘I can’t believe how long it took, in there,’ I say. I gesture towards the police station with my head. ‘But some of that was the medical. I’m a little bruised.’ I point to my stomach.

I get nothing, no reaction whatsoever. I should just walk away.

‘But of course it’s nothing really, considering what happened. I guess you caught him then? Good for you.’ I give him a thumbs-up gesture, and actually recoil at myself.

Silence. Why can’t I stop talking?

‘I don’t really know what I was thinking, but I guess in those situations you don’t really think, do you? You just do … I mean you just act … or you don’t know how you’ll act … you can’t plan for it … why would you?’ My voice trails off pathetically into a whisper, ‘Or whatever …’

I think I might cry again, from the effort. My eyes start to sting. A lump grows in my throat.

He is properly older than me; a grown-up. I only ever feel like an adult if I am holding a baby. Twenty-eight doesn’t feel as mature as I dreamt it would when I was a child, and it seemed that my life would be sorted and settled by twenty-five at the latest. He looks around, and I look around, and he smiles weakly at me, unimpressed. I thought he might be different from the rest, given his efforts this morning, which makes me feel stupid. It was a rare moment of heroism that you rarely witness these days, but it doesn’t really say anything about him. I never feel that I am meeting anybody new. We are all trying to be the same person, the same ideal, and the result is that we blend into a big ugly gloop of unexceptionality. The same hair, the same clothes, the same trainers, the same opinions, the same jokes, the same lives. Why would I expect this man to be any different? I am not interesting to him, not blonde enough, not bubbly enough, or whatever his criteria, and that is all that matters in his head.

But then he juts out a hand, to be shaken. ‘Cagney, Cagney James.’

My eyes widen involuntarily. That’s not a name, it’s a 1950s detective show, complete with black-and-white opening credits, and old-fashioned sirens under the theme music, and bad edits and childish graphics.

I remember my manners and offer my hand to be shaken. ‘I’m Sunny. Sunny Weston. Just Sunny.’

I see his eyes widen too. He has trained his face into deadpan but this time his reaction was too quick to suppress. I wonder if he is ever caught so off guard that he smiles.

‘Your name is Sunny?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sunny?’

‘Yes …’

‘Like Perky, or Happy, or any of the other dwarfs?’ He looks at me with incredulity.

‘And who was Cagney?’ I ask. ‘The dwarf who liked to drink and sleep with hookers?’

We are still shaking hands, our fingers clenched in a mutual rage. Given the chance I believe we would break each other’s bones. Simultaneously we pull away, equally alarmed.

I wriggle my hand to cast him off me, and pray my cab will arrive and toot its horn and that will be that. I glance up at his face but he is staring at his fist. I won’t call it electricity. It was just … funny. Weird funny, not ha ha funny. Not good funny.

I step backwards when he speaks.

‘That was a stupid thing you did this morning, Smiley.’

‘I’m sorry, Caustic, I don’t understand.’

‘No surprise there. This morning, running after that bastard. You shouldn’t have done it. I was only a few feet behind you; you should have waited. You could have been hurt. Or can’t bad things happen in fairyland?’

‘I was hurt, as it happens, but my ego survived, getting the child back and all, and not losing a lung in the process.’

I stare at him, shocked at my own tone, shocked at his. I need to make this normal. I don’t know why I am behaving this way.

‘Anyway … he looked really scared, actually. I don’t think he quite knew what he was doing …’

‘And that justifies it, does it?’

He straightens his back. I cock my head. I feel angry, and I can’t explain why.

‘Of course not. But it’s not black and white, is it?’

‘Not black and white? Snatching a child is not black and white? Is it the colour of ice cream and butterflies, Sunny? Is it a magical adventure on a unicorn?’

‘No, but it’s not black like your lungs or white like your hair …’

‘Well, Miss …’

I stare at him expectantly until I realise he has forgotten my name, and is waiting for me to fill in the blank. ‘Weston,’ I say irritably.

‘Well, Miss Weston, what is it exactly? I’m dying for the insight.’

‘Look, Cagney,’ I enunciate his name with sarcasm, and instantly regret it, feeling ridiculous.

He looks at me with disdain.

‘I obviously didn’t mean that it was OK to do what he did.’

‘How else could you mean it?’

‘I meant that, although not making it right or justifying it in any way, there must be a reason why he did it.’

‘He is a sick bastard. That’s all the reason there is.’

‘Well, yes, he probably is sick, in some way. But he wasn’t just made that way. As a baby, he wasn’t born wanting to hurt people or … snatch children … or whatever.’

‘Of course he was! Some people are born sick.’

‘You don’t really believe that?’

‘Utterly. What do you believe, that he wasn’t breast-fed until he was eighteen and his daddy was a drunk, and it’s all his parents’ fault?’

A line of sweat trickles down the back of my neck. I hate him.

‘Is that your excuse, Mr James?’

‘I think, given who we are comparing me too, I turned out OK.’

‘Yes, ignorant and angry is very healthy.’

‘I might not be hugging this tree but I’m not hurting anybody.’

‘Maybe not hurting, but boring. I pity your wife.’

The skin around his eyes tightens and his jaw locks. My hands are shaking with rage.

‘Do I look stupid enough to be married?’ he fires back at me.

‘You look stupid enough to do most things.’

Two policemen walking into the station glance at us suspiciously as I raise my voice, and I smile at them as sweetly as I can. I wait for them to go through the swing doors, and turn to Cagney, half expecting him to be gone. But he is standing in exactly the same position, staring at me with what can only be contempt.

‘I wouldn’t be stupid enough to do you,’ he says flatly, and I flinch.

‘I, like most women, wouldn’t be stupid enough to let you try,’ I say, my voice as controlled as I can manage.

‘Well, women today are too busy burning their bras, and lifting weights,’ he motions with his eyes, just in case I didn’t realise he was talking about me, ‘to know a good man when they see one.’

‘Burning their bras? Are you still trying to pay in shillings? News flash: it’s the twenty-first century. If you see a good man do point him out to me because I’m not sure they still exist. I’ve missed them all so far!’

‘Maybe they saw you first.’

Cagney glares at me, and I glare back. If I wasn’t outside a police station I’d slap him.

‘Hello?’

We both spin violently towards the voice and see a tall, elegant but gaunt woman approaching us. It takes me a heartbeat to recognise her as Dougal’s mother. Her eyes are swollen from crying. None of the children are with her, thank goodness. Cagney and I stare at her in disbelief. This is a strange day.

‘I really, really have to say thank you, to you both.’ Dougal’s mother puts her long arms on her hips, then removes them and clasps her hands nervously, then flicks hair from her eyes, then wrings her hands in front of her. An awful thing has happened to her this morning. I feel some of the rage ebb in my stomach like sweet relief, and I am overwhelmed with gratitude to this woman for shattering whatever it was that had gripped Cagney James and me just moments ago. I wasn’t myself – that is my only excuse.

‘Please, there is no need to thank us … me.’ I glare at Cagney. ‘Anybody would have done the same thing. I’m just glad it’s … you know … as OK as it can be.’

She smiles a weary smile at us both, and flicks the hair at her eyes again.

I take a step towards her, away from Cagney.

‘The boys are with their father. Dougal is terrible – shaken and upset and … anyway, Terence, that’s my husband, Dougal’s father, when I explained, well, he can’t thank you both enough, of course. And he suggested that you both come to dinner, next week – we live locally, in Kew – and that we might say thank you that way, although of course it will never be enough to say thank you, but he suggested it, so I thought I might still catch you here …’

I am horrified. I gag with disbelief. This poor woman has been through an unspeakable horror only hours ago, the kind of hell that a mother can only dare imagine, and she is offering to make us dinner? It is the most inappropriate thing I have ever heard.

‘Oh, I really don’t think that’s necessary. I think we probably just want to forget all about it …’

‘Oh, my goodness, no, you must come. Terry wants to thank you himself, and it’s the least I can do. It won’t be anything elaborate. Probably duck, or whatever the butcher has in fresh …’ Her voice trails off and her eyes become a matt version of their previously glossy selves. I have a feeling they will be permanently matt soon: any joy she has is being slowly replaced by fear …

But her reaction is as if she has dropped a plate from my chinaware, or spilt red wine on my trousers. It is so horribly embarrassing I don’t know what to say. I stand open-mouthed, completely aghast. So she carries on talking.

‘Of course, you must bring your partners, or somebody, of course you must, but do please say you’ll come. Next Friday?’

I turn to face Cagney, who at least looks equally as appalled.

‘I just … I don’t …’

‘Please do say you can make it.’

‘Well then, I guess, I suppose … I can make it.’ I shudder as I accept.

‘That’s fantastic. Thank you. And you?’

‘Cagney James. I can make it on Friday.’

‘I’m sorry I didn’t catch your name. I’m Deidre Turnball.’ She offers her hand for me to shake and, as anticipated, she just rests her fingers in my palm for a few moments before offering it to Cagney as well.

‘Sunny Weston.’

Deidre scrambles for a pen and paper in her bag, and scrawls down ‘The Moorhouse, 12 Wildview Avenue’ for us both, and offers us separate scraps of paper. She has written ‘7 o’clock’ as well. I stare at it with disbelief.

‘See you then,’ Deidre says, flicking her hair from her eyes, turning quickly and striding elegantly away.

I look down at the paper, and hear a car toot its horn, and an old man leans out of a minicab and shouts my name.

‘She hasn’t left her phone number,’ I say numbly.

‘Probably ex-directory as well,’ Cagney replies, reminding me he is there.

I look up at him, and he looks baffled, and embarrassed as well. And then I remember that the last thing he had said to me, before Deidre appeared, was some kind of insult. I try to speak, but when nothing comes out, I exhale loudly in his direction, and walk away.

I sit in the back of the cab, close my eyes, and go over what has happened.

I can’t believe the morning I have had.

I can’t believe I have to have dinner with Deidre, and Dougal, and the whole Turnball family, next Friday, at 7 p.m.

I can’t believe I have to see Dougal again so soon. I can’t imagine what it will do to him to see me again so soon.

I cannot believe I have to sit at a table and play polite with a man as offensively archaic as Cagney James.

And I bet it won’t be low fat.