Cath Staincliffe - Split Second

‘Get a glass,’ Val suggested, but he caught the lack of conviction and knew it would be better all round to leave them to it. Good for Val too; she confided in these friends unreservedly. Their friendships went back years, and although at times they all met up as couples at social events, the men, their other halves, never made independent arrangements. He realized there was no one he saw of his own accord any more. He’d be hard pressed to know who to invite out for a pint and a session putting the world to rights if the fancy took him. Everyone had disappeared into marriage and children and he assumed that they, like him, relied for intimacy on their families.

‘I won’t, thanks.’ He was aware of the slur in his words, his tongue clumsy. ‘I’ll, er…’ He was going to say get a shower, but suddenly that sounded callous. He waved one hand upstairs.

He was cold to the core. He hadn’t had a bath in years, but now he ran one, deep and hot. His skin prickled as he stepped in, goose bumps breaking out on his arms and legs. He took a drink from the brandy and set it on the side. He sank back, gasping at the heat, until only his face and knees protruded.

Jason aged five, in the bath, screaming in terror as a large moth batted about inside the lampshade. ‘It’s only a moth,’ Andrew kept saying, ‘it can’t hurt you,’ as he rigged up the stepladder.

‘I hate moths,’ Jason had sobbed. ‘Take it away, Daddy.’ Hysterical with panic, then screaming, and Val getting him out of the bath into a towel, an edge to her voice. ‘That’s enough, Jason, stop it now.’ Disliking his display of fear. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she’d said.

‘He can’t help it,’ Andrew had protested. The furry moth still smacking into the shade, little puffs of powder exploding as it collided with the glass.

Val glared at him. The wrong response. She believed they must be consistent with Jason, and to be fair, they did see eye to eye on most aspects of parenting, but Andrew recognized in her an impatience, a hardness even, that he didn’t share. She talked of toughening Jason up, and resilience and independence, and Andrew would look at the small boy and wonder why love and protection weren’t enough for now. The child’s neediness, his dependency, seemed to rankle with Val, a burr under her skin. She was a practical, dispassionate nurse whenever anyone was ill; caring for her baby with chickenpox in the same manner as she’d looked after her parents when they each became infirm: her mother with dementia and her father with a series of strokes.

Her whole family had been like that really: practical, unsentimental, sharing a belief in hard work, common decency, moderation and frugality. Val’s father had taken over the family ironmonger’s in the late fifties and expanded into general hardware. They’d all worked in the shop, Val after school and on Saturdays until she escaped to university. Once their parents were gone, dying within a year of each other when Jason was seven, her brother got out too. Single and in his thirties, he decided to travel. To everyone’s astonishment, he had entered a monastery in Thailand. He informed Val by postcard. She never heard from him again. They didn’t even know if he was still alive.

They had no way to tell him about Jason.

Andrew had found Val a little intimidating on first acquaintance. Beautiful, with that fine blonde hair and her cool cover-girl looks, but overpowering. It was a union meeting, local authority branch in the upstairs room of a pub. The first he’d attended. He’d have died of boredom but for the antics of this young woman, who repeatedly challenged standing orders and queried points of procedure. He didn’t follow all the ins and outs but could see that some sort of power struggle was under way. Val was a shop steward in environmental health. The meeting ended, they adjourned to the bar downstairs and Andrew ended up sitting opposite her. She interrogated him about the proposed cuts in the planning department and invited him to a fund-raising benefit for anti-apartheid.

He thought she was just drumming up business, but she gave him her undivided attention at the event. He offered to walk her home, and she laughed and said she was hoping for more than a walk. She took him back to the room she had in a shared house and they slept together.

The bathwater was cooling. Andrew drained the last of the brandy and got out. As he lay in bed, he could hear the cadence of conversation downstairs. He woke just after three and his head was throbbing, his stomach cramped. He made it to the bathroom just in time, puking over and over again until he was spent and the waves of nausea receded.

He fed the stove, took some ibuprofen and lay down on the sofa. Waiting for morning to come, for the day to pass, for another night to descend.

Louise

More snow had fallen, smothering everything thick and white. Clouds hung feathery in the sky, their edges an oyster sheen. Louise threw scraps out for the birds and watched them come: the robin and the sparrows. A white Christmas. It was cold, too; she could feel the bite of frost in the air, the snap of it as she breathed in.

Much of the country had ground to a halt, airports closed, cars abandoned, trains marooned. It seemed fitting somehow: the muffled unreality of the weather, the suspension of normal life, the eerie hush, the extreme cold and glittering white world an apt backdrop to Luke in his frozen state, in his white sheets in his quiet white room.

Carl had gone home for Christmas. He had offered to stay, said to Louise that he didn’t like to leave her when she was in the middle of a crisis.

‘You’re fine,’ she insisted. ‘We’ll spend most of the time at the hospital anyway. Besides, your mother’d kill me.’

He’d grinned. Carl had told her all about his mother, an old-school matriarch who would clout her kids for the slightest indiscretion and was fierce as a tiger in their defence. Carl was the baby. He tried to get back once a year, at Christmas time. He’d spend almost three days travelling there on coaches and trains.

‘We’ll take our presents in to Luke,’ Louise told Ruby on Christmas Eve. ‘Open them there.’

‘I thought we weren’t doing anything.’ Ruby was practising her dance routine; none of their rooms were really big enough, but it was too muddy for her to do it outside. After the holiday she’d be able to use the school dance studio during lunch break.

‘Well I’ve got you both a little thing,’ Louise said. ‘I’m not taking it back. And you’d better have got me something.’ Knowing full well that Ruby had done her Christmas shopping and had made a point of asking Louise on three separate occasions what her favourite colour was.

‘Tuck your chin in,’ Louise said.

‘Since when were you the expert?’ Ruby asked, altering her stance and doing a sidestep and slide.

‘You look like you’re straining, that’s all, like a nervous chicken.’

‘Mum!’

‘Suit yourself.’ Louise went into the kitchen. ‘Soup or soup?’ she called.

‘Soup – tomato.’

‘Right first time.’

Shrek 3 was on the box. Louise had a shower and sat with Ruby to watch the second half. Ruby was texting every few minutes. Her phone trilling with each reply.

‘That Becky?’ Louise asked.

‘Yeah, she wants me to go over Boxing Day, sleep over.’

‘Good idea.’

‘I don’t know,’ Ruby said.

Louise wanted Ruby to have a break, escape the tension and tedium of hospital visits. She was aware that Ruby was worried about her, was keen to be there and help, but Louise wanted her to have a chance to relax with her friends, the freedom to set it all aside for a few hours. ‘Hey.’ She waited for Ruby to look at her. ‘I’ll be fine, it’ll do you good.’