51

‘You’re not going out there,’ ordered Mum.

I was scrabbling through the pile to find my shoes as Mum, in pointless protestation, pulled the bolt across the front door.

‘What are you doing that for?’ I said, annoyed.

‘Because you’re not going out there,’ she said.

Her teeth gnashed. I couldn’t figure out whether she was angry or afraid. Regardless, my decision was made.

‘I’m going to talk to Lou!’ I shouted to Mal in the bedroom but more for Mum’s benefit. He didn’t answer.

‘Well, I’m going to call the police,’ she snapped. ‘It’s trespassing, technically. It doesn’t matter who she is. That’s our front garden. She has no right just to turn up and pitch a tent there without our express permission. She has no right at all.’

As she talked I listened less and less, until eventually she became background noise. I could see her pursed lips forming little shapes. I could see her slender eyebrows snaking. I could see the wild gesticulation of her hands cutting the air in an angry dance. But it meant nothing to me.

‘Mum,’ I said, ‘do whatever you like, if you think it will make life easier.’ I felt big, readied. A man. ‘But I’m going out there to speak to Lou. Let me find out what she wants.’

Mum’s head bowed until her chin rested against the sharp bony plate of her chest and her force field, which until now I’d not been able to detect, slowly disappeared. Steadily, and without meeting my eye, Mum shuffled into the living room. Dad waited there with a hot cup of tea in his hand for her, his timing impeccable. Mal still hadn’t said a word. As I pulled on a thin summer jacket to combat the brisk morning chill, I peeked through the gap above the hinges of the bedroom door. The sheet was still above his head and only his swollen traffic-light green feet were on show, poking out from the edge of the bed like the upturned heads of two rakes in the grass. Begging to be stepped on.

Removing the latch from the door a nervous sickness growled in my stomach, so I waited and swallowed and waited again until it eased to a gentle purr. And then, slowly opening it, I trod out into the cool babysteps of the day. Only when I heard the hairy crunch of the bristled doormat underneath my feet did I look down to find that I was accidentally wearing odd shoes. I was thinking about Mal as I crossed the small stretch of grass to the tent, where I heard her humming, a siren singing me to shipwreck.

Standing outside, I cleared my throat. It sounded horrible. Apprehension wriggled and popped in my legs.

‘Hello?’ she said.

‘Hello,’ I replied.

My fingers fidgeted at my side, jerking the way a quick-draw cowboy’s would at his holster when there are fractions of seconds before he or his foe fire the first and fatal shot at high noon. The zip began to unfasten from the inside. I watched it crawl down the tent, and then there she was, sitting in the porch of it.

‘Hello,’ she smiled. ‘It’s good to see you.’ She remained amazing. ‘You’re probably wondering what I’m doing here.’

My voice box filled with thick impossible foam, and so I just nodded like the stupid greedy dogs that waited for Red Ted to sling malformed sausages from the doorway of the butchery.

‘Perhaps,’ she said, moving aside, ‘you had better come in.’

I dropped to all fours.

The tent was little bigger than a coffin and had that stifling smell of hot vinyl. In the pockets of the lining were a few supplies. Food, flasks, water bottles. A mirror. Clean underwear. Magazines. A picture of her dad that had fallen from her purse. He looked sad and thin. A pillow. A sleeping bag. Wet wipes and cosmetics she didn’t really need. I sat facing her as she tied her hair back, quickly and professionally so that not a single strand of it still hung down over her face when she’d finished. I’d rehearsed this and rehearsed it again but only ever in my head. Now I’d arrived at the show, in costume, only to find I’d had my lines cut without my prior knowledge.

‘How’s Mal?’

‘Fine,’ I lied.

Truth is, I didn’t really know.

‘Do you think I can see him?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. I mean, well . . . It’s not just you, Lou. He’s not had any visitors. None at all.’

‘I see,’ she sighed.

‘So,’ I wondered, ‘where have you been? What have you been doing?’

‘I moved back in with my dad.’

‘How is he?’

‘He just sits there and thinks about Mum. Like he’s waiting for her to come through the door, and if she did he’d just stand up and put the kettle on like nothing had happened. I think he thinks bad things like that don’t happen to people his age. He’s wrong. It can happen any time, I suppose.’

I wanted to tell her she was doing the same.

‘I guess that’s love for you,’ she said.

I wanted to tell her, it wasn’t, but what did I know?

‘I’ve tried to forget him.’ I could see it in the contours of her frown. In the pressure in the S-bend of her tongue, coiled up like a viper in her mouth. ‘This isn’t what was supposed to happen.’

‘You won’t be able to forget here. Camped out on our garden,’ I said.

The cogs and pulleys and chains of my body geared up to perform the simple pattern of movements required for me to land a caring, conciliatory hand on her knee but the engine didn’t fire and I remained rigid in my place. She stayed quiet. Sat there, rocking her heels to and fro, clacking them together like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, which I’d seen on television once. A childhood trait of hers kicking through into womanhood.

‘What are you doing here?’ I said. ‘I mean, the tent and all. We were all a bit surprised.’

‘I know, I’m sorry. What did your mum think?’

‘She was going to call the police.’

‘Will she?’

‘I doubt it.’

‘Do you think I can speak to her? I’d like to.’

‘I’ve no idea,’ I said, unable to find inside me the correct way of saying no. It was not in me to explain just how things had changed, just how normal Mal being in bed had already become. ‘So, why?’ I asked again.

‘Why am I here?’

‘Yes.’

‘I still love him, I always will. And so a little piece of me will always be here. This tent will be here to remind him, for as long as it needs to be.’

I pushed my two upper front teeth downwards into my smooth bottom lip. Then came the beep beep and third impatient beep of a car on the road outside. I poked my head out and saw Red Ted, ghouls of smoke pumping from his exhaust pipe. He was chomping contentedly on a snack-sized pork pie with the circular jaw motion of a giddy camel and listening to some meaningless foreign sporting encounter on the radio.

‘I have to go to work,’ I said.

Lou didn’t say goodbye. Instead she laid her hands out on the floor in front of her, rocked her weight onto her arms, lifted her bottom into the air and leaned forward to kiss me on the cheek. It remained there, that feeling, long after the contact was broken. I copied her grin, magnified it and sent it back in her direction. Then I backed slowly out of the tent so as not to knock it to the ground in my clumsy odd shoes and zipped it up behind me with the caring hand of a newly qualified surgeon. If I could have told her that I loved her, perhaps that would have lasted a lifetime too. The trouble was that there wasn’t room in her for any more. Mal’s love had taken it all, and now it was squatting inside.

I climbed into the car and dropped my head to Red Ted. He didn’t mention the fact that I had just emerged from a tent on my own front lawn, that my shoes were two completely different colours or that a beautiful lipstick butterfly had landed on the side of my face. It stayed there all day, basking in the sunlight that fell into the shop.