Katie Fforde - Going Dutch

‘Ooh!' said Hamo. 'I've never been to a barbecue,' he simpered. 'Can I come with you?'

‘No,' said Tom firmly. 'Come on, Dora.' He took her hand and heaved her to her feet with more strength than courtesy.

‘Sorry about that,' said Tom when they were crossing the bridge back to reality. 'They're really nice people, but I'd forgotten they can be a bit scary to girls like you.’

Dora was indignant, although she knew exactly what he meant. 'What do you mean? I'm a grown-up, you know.'

‘But you need to get out more. We've agreed that.’

Dora didn't answer. They'd reached the mainland now and she felt more confident. 'Let's go to the barbecue. That's getting out, isn't it?'

‘Not really. I'm not sure I really want to go now.’

‘Well, I do need to check in with Jo.'

‘Why don't you go and find her and then meet me back here and we can decide? I need to blag a shower off someone.’

Dora was leaning up against the rail of a barge when Tom found her. She had seen Jo and they had both made sure the other was all right, and now she had begun to get bored and was very pleased to see him. He smelt of shower gel and toothpaste and looked slightly damp but very clean. It seemed that his shower had given him extra bounce and enthusiasm.

‘Hello,' she said.

‘Hello yourself. Listen, why don't we go downriver to this pub I know?'

‘Aren't we supposed to be going to a barbecue?'

‘Well, yes, but there's only so much of the middle classes I can take.’

Dora smiled at him. 'I'm middle class. And so are you.’

‘I know, but I'm trying to get over it.'

‘So why did you come to the rally?'

‘I thought I might pick up some work on something that actually moves. Now, do you want to come or not?’

Not entirely sure if going with him meant handing in her membership card of the Middle Classes he so muchdespised, Dora considered. She didn't want to disappoint Tom, and nor did she want him going off without her. It wasn't as if she wanted to go to the barbecue either. 'What's the pub like?'

‘Nice.' He took this question as her agreement. 'Listen, I'll just go and ask Bill if I can borrow his tender and he can tell Jo where you're going.’

Dora decided she would go with Tom to the pub. Recently, her resolutely middle-class, middle-England roots had started to bother her. But although she liked Tom, and he was very easygoing, she didn't feel entirely comfortable being alone with him. The trouble was, she'd forgotten – if indeed she'd ever known – how to be with a boy who wasn't John. She didn't want to give out the wrong messages by mistake. John, she considered, had hardly ever been a boy – he was always a young man. Tom would have called him a Young Fogey, she knew. Which would have made her, she supposed, a Young Fogeyette. She shuddered.

‘Right,' said Tom, bouncing into view. 'I've got Bill's tender. We're going downriver a bit.’

Dora didn't ask what a tender was, assuming, correctly, that she would find out soon enough.

Tom was very good at rowing. Dora sat back in her seat in the stern and watched him pulling the oars, some how making the little boat go where he wanted it to, with only the occasional glance over his shoulder for direction. At first Dora felt a bit nervous about being in the middle of a big river in such a tiny craft, but Tom quickly brought it into the side a little, where she felt safer.

‘We just had to get out of the current. We're fine here, in the eddies.’

Dora decided she didn't need to know what an eddy was, and thought she'd more or less worked it out anyway.

`So, tell me about this pub. It'll have to be good to make it worth all this exercise.’

Tom grinned. 'I haven't noticed you taking much exercise, madam.'

‘Watching you is quite enough for me.' She made a face and hoped it wasn't a smirk.

He laughed and pulled more strongly at the oars, his heels pressed against the stretcher in the bottom of the boat, his thighs taking the strain.

‘You'll have to row home again,' she said, as at last he directed the boat into a slipway.

He glanced over his shoulder to see where he was going. 'Oh no, it'll be your turn then.'

‘But I've never rowed a boat in my life! We'd capsize or go round and round in circles.'

‘That is probably what would happen, but how have you got to be your age and not learnt to row? Now you stay sitting down while I get the boat up.' He leapt ashore and pulled the boat until the stern was ashore. Then he came and helped her out. 'Well?' he said.

Dora, who thought it had been a rhetorical question, put her nose in the air. 'I'm very young and I've led a sheltered life.’

Tom laughed. 'Maybe I should unshelter you. We'll start with getting you a drink you've never had before. Are you OK for sitting outside? It's a lovely evening.’

The pub was crowded and almost all the tables outside were taken but Tom spotted one where the people were just leaving and nipped over to it. 'Right, I'll get us some drinks.’

While he was gone, Dora watched the people around her and then the birds swooping and diving, catching insects. She tried to identify them; they were swallows, swifts or martins, but she could never remember which was which.

They reminded her of Tom a bit, swooping and diving on life, apparently at random, yet purposeful.

He put a drink down on a mat in front of her. It was in a half pint glass and was cloudy.

‘It looks like an enlarged version of a very dodgy urine sample,' she said. 'What on earth is it?'

‘Scrumpy, rough cider. Actually, it's a bit of a tough one to start with.’

Dora took a sip. It tasted of vinegar that might have been apples a very long time ago. 'It's vile.'

‘But it's cheap.'

‘It's not fair,' said Dora, risking another taste. 'You invite me for a drink and then give me something only fit to clean brass with. Now that's something I know a lot about.'

‘What?'

‘Cleaning brass. My mother used to make me go and clean it for an old lady when I was a Brownie.'

‘How sweet. I can just picture you in a Brownie uniform.'

‘I had those culotte things and a yellow baseball cap. My mother used to help out. She made me sew on all my own badges, although the other girls' mothers always did it for them.'

‘Was your mother quite strict, then?'

‘Depends what you mean by strict.'

‘I mean – did she let you bunk off school to go to Glastonbury? Things like that.’

Dora put down her glass so she could react with appropriate horror and disbelief. 'You have got to be joking! My mother wouldn't have let me go to Glastonbury even if it didn't involve bunking off. And she made my dentist appointments during the holidays so I wouldn't miss a second of school. It might have been because I'm an only child, she only had me to focus on.'

‘Right, a full-on mother then. I'm an only child too, but fortunately, my mother was a bit more laid-back. I went to my first festival when I'd done my GCSEs – it was after my exams so Mum was fairly cool with it.’

Dora took time to imagine a mother as relaxed as that. Now she came to think about it, Karen used to go to festivals, but maybe that had been after Dora had started going out with John. She took the tiniest sip of cider she could manage so she couldn't actually taste it; it came a close second to the home-made wine. 'I haven't ever been to a festival. John wasn't into that sort of thing.'

‘John?’

She hadn't meant to mention John, but as he was largely responsible for how she'd spent the most recent part of her life, he had been bound to crop up. 'Ex-everything. We went out for ever, were engaged. Not any more.'

‘So, are you suffering from a broken heart?' he asked with a lightheartedness that took away any embarrassment Dora might feel.