Lisa Owens - Not Working

“It depends when they find it, but honestly, until you know more there’s no point in getting so worked up.”

“Will you try her? Please? She might answer you.”

“Of course I will,” says Luke, my shining knight.

—

He calls back about five minutes later — during which time I’ve been contorted at the sink, trying to drink water from the wrong side of the glass, while also keeping one eye on my phone. The front of my T-shirt is drenched, but the hiccups seem to have dwindled.

“Okay,” he says, all business, “so firstly, it isn’t your mum — it’s your grandma’s bowel.” I look up, mouthing vague words of gratitude. “And it sounds as though everything is probably fine. She’d eaten beets for lunch, forgotten and got a fright the next day when she thought she saw blood in the toilet. So she called herself an ambulance and they took her in for tests.”

“But she said there was still a question mark,” I say, feeling bad about how much less I care now I know it’s only Grandma.

“There were shadows showing up on the scans,” he says, “which the doctor thinks are probably just benign cysts, but they’re waiting on results to confirm. She didn’t sound worried at all.”

“Good. Phew. Okay. How did she sound?”

“The way she always does. Normal.”

“Really? Good. That’s good. Did she ask about me?” He doesn’t reply straightaway. “Luke?”

“She asked how you were.”

My heart leaps. “And? What did you say?”

“I said you were well, that you were keen to sort things out.”

“And? Luke! What did she say to that?”

He hesitates. “She…said she’d prefer to…She said she would be in touch.”

“When?”

“When she’s ready, was the implication.”

“Don’t call her, she’ll call me?”

“Something like that.”

“Well. Thanks anyway,” I say, gulping back a straggling hiccup.

There goes another great song, ruined by the ad man to sell a fancy car.

Chugging my way around the park, I pass a blind lady and her guide dog out for a stroll. Who is walking who? I wonder — and then — isn’t that true of all dogs and their owners?

“Blah! Blah! Blah?” shouts the barista, competing with the milk steamer’s vicious hiss while holding a paper cup aloft, Statue of Liberty — esque. I laugh, delighted, at this strange mutiny, before it dawns on me that what she is holding is my double-shot macchiato, and what she is shouting is my name.

I’ve found the solution to the rising clothes mountain: everything-goes-in-the-washing-machine.

Some nights our bed feels much too small: hot and hard with elbows and knees, and the cloying stickiness of flesh against flesh, not just Luke’s skin on mine, but my own on me, inner thigh cleaving to inner thigh, arm to armpit, breast against breast, and I long to be alone and stretch out asterisk-like; but then, of course, there are also the nights when the space between us is chilly and wide, and my reaching fingertips yield no response, or sometimes a slight shrugging-off.

This tiny brown tidbit on the living-room floor: mouse dropping or…peppercorn?

If I can just digest enough TED talks, self-improvement podcasts, overviews on the Aristotelian sense of purpose and firsthand accounts of former city workers who set up artisan businesses from their kitchen tables, then surely the answer will reveal itself to me, in its own time and own way?

“But what do you do to fill your time?” the quiz-show host asks the retired lab technician from Worcester.

“Why are you dressed like an unwell teenager?” says Luke when I enter the kitchen.

“I need to be able to focus on the road. I can’t have my hair falling into my eyes or my sleeve getting caught on the emergency brake.”

We are hiring a car to visit Luke’s parents; therefore my attire (headband, tracksuit bottoms, thin-soled tennis shoes — no laces) has been carefully chosen for maximum comfort and minimum hazard.

“Time I dusted off my driver’s license,” I said when I first had the idea. “Take control, be bold. Brave new world.”

“You go, girl.” Luke had snapped his fingers to and fro, though his eyes remained faithful to the soccer game.

Now he says, “Are you sure you’re okay to do this? I’d be really happy to drive.”

“Thanks, but I’ll be fine. I really want to,” I say.

—

In the car, I puff out my cheeks a few times and slowly release the air. I pat the gearshift, grip the steering wheel, tweak the mirrors, grind the seat back and forth on its rails.

“Ready?” says Luke, thumbing the sat nav.

“No,” I say. “Give me a minute. I need to get my bearings.”

“We’re heading that way,” says Luke, gesturing behind.

“I meant my bearings inside the car. Wait, I thought north was that way?” I point to the windshield.

“You do know north isn’t always just straight ahead of you?” says Luke. I shake my head in faux-disgust, faux because his assumption was right on the money.

—

“Bear left.” I slap on the blinker. “ Bear, bear left, not turn.”

“What does that mean? I can’t go left: it’s just straight road. Luke! What am I doing?”

“Never mind — keep going. You’re doing fine.” His hand floats out and knocks the signal light back to neutral.

A bit later, he says, “You could swap lanes now. There’s nothing behind.”

We’ve been sitting pretty in the slow lane ever since I first edged, terrified, onto the highway.

“Quite happy here, thanks,” I say, daring to tap my fingers on the wheel in time to R.E.M. on the radio.

—

Luke’s phone buzzes. He looks at it and swiftly returns it to his pocket.

“Who was that?”

“Work.”

“Who? Danny?”

“No.”

A pause. “Who, then?”

“Hm?”

“Who was the text from if it wasn’t Danny?”

“Fi?”

“Fi, as in Fiona? I know who Fiona is.” He shrugs. “You know I do. What did she want?”

“It’s…too boring to go into.”

“Okay.” I check the rearview and side mirrors, think about changing lanes, think again. “Does she have a boyfriend?”

“Who?”

“Who do you think? Fiona. Does your colleague Fi have a boyfriend?”

In fact, I already know the answer to this from a recent online binge, starting innocently enough with a cursory scan of her Facebook page; but the curiosity soon slithered into dark, oily fascination, which eventually saw me, at some point long past midnight (Luke must have been in bed or at work), clicking through a series of bikini shots from a 2010 trip she took to India, while lifting up my sleep T-shirt to pit her abs (taut) versus mine (disappointing). The boyfriend is a relative newcomer named Pete, who is, in my professional opinion, slightly too good-looking for her.

“Um,” says Luke. He flicks open the glove compartment and peers in, flips it shut. “Sort of, I think. Guy sounds like a douche. Why do you ask?”

“Pass me, then, if you’re going to,” I say to the Mondeo that’s practically kissing my bumper. “ I think she might have a little crush on you.”

“What? Fiona? No,” he says. “No way. Where did you get that? You’ve never even met her.”