Lisa Owens - Not Working

Before Luke, I was embroiled in a long non-relationship, where I’d be summoned via text message late at night to Shepherd’s Bush. I’d make the fifty-minute journey across town every time just to lie next to a man who preferred to kiss a joint and caress his guitar.

In the morning, I reread the heritage application, expecting it to fire me up for a productive day of job-seeking; but minus the eleventh-hour adrenaline, and plus the effect of three cups of coffee, it’s far from the typo-free triumph I’d hoped.

A phone call from my mother; her voice is low and quailing.

“Mum, are you okay?”

“Did you tell Faye that Gum”—she takes a breath—“exposed himself to you?”

“What? No! Oh my God. That’s not—”

“I’ve just come off the phone with Dee,” she says. Dee is her sister, my aunt, Faye’s mother. “She said that at the funeral— at your own grandfather’s funeral —you were making God knows what kind of claims about him. About my father.”

I try to explain that it was probably accidental, that it usually just popped out in the bathroom. I say “popped out” a few times, to play up the atmosphere of spontaneity. I tell her I’d had too much wine at the wake, and maybe I’d made it sound worse than it was.

“The bathroom?” she says, her voice getting higher. “Why would you have been in the bathroom with Gum?”

“To look at his war wounds,” I say. A terrible thought occurs to me. “You haven’t told Grandma, have you? Or Dee — she wouldn’t have said anything, would she?”

“Of course not.”

“Good. There’s really no need for her to know.”

“Just the rest of the family.”

“I’m sorry, Mum,” I say, and I start to cry. “I’ll ring Faye; I’ll ring Dee and tell them it really wasn’t a big deal. He never touched me, I promise.”

“I can’t talk to you right now. I need some time,” she says and hangs up the phone.

We’re in a restaurant with my oldest friend, Sarah, and her newest boyfriend, Paddy, an outing that took many weeks to organize given Luke’s schedule. The boyfriend, whom I’ve only met fleetingly twice before, doesn’t look at Luke or me throughout the meal and directs his few words into the space between us. He works in “industrial interior design”—what this entails is no clearer after ten minutes of interrogation during our meal.

“So tell me: is that like factory design?” I ask.

“Not really,” he says.

“Warehouses?”

“Not really,” he says, then in the same monotone concedes, “kind of, maybe, it depends.”

“What…materials do you work with? Wood?”

A nod.

“Metal?” Luke asks.

“Both of those, yeah. Wood, metal…stuff like that,” Paddy says. It’s the chattiest he has been all evening.

“So you work with your hands,” I say firmly, pleased to be getting somewhere.

“Not really. It’s more kind of concept-driven.” There’s a silence and I nod as though all is now abundantly clear.

“What’s…your favorite thing about it?” I take a long swig of wine. I have been drinking more than my fair share; I must be two glasses ahead of everyone else.

“The hours aren’t bad.”

“And how…did you…end up in that area?” This from Luke. Good one, I think, and nudge him with my knee. He squeezes it in reply.

“Just fell into it, really.”

Sarah is oblivious, delighted by the fact we are finally double-dating and on even more strident form than usual. She corrects Luke when he mispronounces the word “epitome” and laughs longer than the mistake deserves, while Paddy gnaws on his fingers. His nails, I notice, are worse than mine: red and stumpy and sore-looking.

“Now there’s someone who gives nail-biters a bad name,” I say to Luke on the way home.

“If she was really as clever as she thinks she is, she wouldn’t be so desperate to prove it all the time,” Luke says. Hard logic to argue with, but the criticism annoys me nonetheless. I turn silent, going slightly too fast for him to comfortably keep up on the walk from the Tube station to our flat.

A parked car is shining in the road, lacy with suds. I nearly trip over the bucket beside it, brimming with dark water. A film of soap scum slow-swirls on the surface. I didn’t think anyone still washed their car by hand.

When I was a child, my father’s windscreen was always spattered with shit. We must have lived under a busy flight path — or maybe there were more birds around then. Every couple of months when it got too dense, Dad would pull on his odd-job jeans and head out with a bucket and the yellow sponge, a primordial-looking thing that was older than me. I’d beg him to let me help, but after a while I’d start to whine about my soaking cuffs and cold hands. Once, my mother appeared in the driveway with a plate of chicken nuggets, fresh from the oven, and fed me one with her fingers. I had just started to call her “Mum” instead of “Mummy” and stopped holding her hand in the street. The chicken burned, and I sucked down fresh air, flapping my wet hands in front of my mouth while I fought back tears I didn’t understand.

I look around; there’s no one in sight and no door open to any of the nearby houses. I pick up the bucket and toss the water over the car, so the suds won’t dry and leave spots.

A few rings and in comes the smug automaton: “Sorry, but the person you’ve called is not available.”

“The person” is my mother and she’s screening my calls.

“One stupid comment when I was a bit drunk and she’s acting like I said he molested me!”

“You did sort of say that, didn’t you?” Luke butters some toast, apparently confident the stir-fry I’m cooking won’t satisfy his appetite.

“No!” I lift the lid and check the rice. It’s still very far from done. “What I said was, when he showed me his war wounds, I often saw more than I’d bargained for.”

“Can you not hear how that could sound a bit…off?”

I think about it. “I can see how someone could interpret it that way; but it isn’t at all how I meant it.”

“How did you mean it?” He takes a bite of toast — half the slice in one go — and drops another piece of bread in the toaster.

“I don’t know. Funny?”

“Funny ‘ha, ha’ or ‘peculiar’? The distinction is pretty crucial.”

“Both. You met Gum — he was a funny character! My uncle’s speech at the wake was all about his little foibles.”

“Little foibles.” Luke smirks. “I hope you didn’t call them that.”

“Don’t be gross!” I go to kick him, but he’s too far away.

“Seriously, Claire, it is pretty odd. If my sister told me our granddad had done that, I would have said it was weird.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t have a brother to point stuff out to me, and I’m still fine, aren’t I? It’s not some dark secret I’ve carried with me all these years — it was just a thing that happened. Okay, it was slightly weird maybe — but it’s not like I’m scarred . The moral here is, I should say nothing, ever.”

“Well, at least you learned something,” says Luke, while I crunch still-raw rice grains between gritted teeth.

The frothed milk in my latte is — don’t ask me how — so stiff and solid the spoon’s standing up unaided. I know there are worse things going on in the world, but that doesn’t mean I should suffer in silence and drink, or, rather, eat this.