Space Hopper Page 9

  ‘Just spit it out, stop being so fucking mysterious.’

  ‘I can’t. You won’t understand.’

  ‘Oh here we go, lonely middle-aged, overweight blind guy can’t relate to lonely middle-class sighted white girl.’

  ‘You’re white too,’ I said.

  ‘Am I!?’ he said, feeling his face.

  The tiny click of spit that sometimes accompanies a smile gave me away and he said, ‘That’s more like it.’

  ‘And I wouldn’t call you middle-aged,’ I added.

  ‘But overweight?’

  ‘Cuddly,’ I said, and gently pinched his cheek. ‘You’re perfect.’ I looked at my friend. ‘It must be especially hard being gay when you’re blind,’ I said.

  ‘Everything’s harder when you’re blind.’

  ‘I know. But especially dating, I imagine.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘First there’s finding someone who’s okay to go on a date with a blind guy, then you’ve got to weed out the ones that want a charity-date.’

  ‘Sympathy is not a big turn on,’ I said.

  ‘Not to me, or you. But I think a lot of people get off on it. I’d like to meet someone who sometimes forgets I’m blind.’

  ‘That ever happened?’

  ‘I had a few dates with a guy I got on really well with, we always had such a laugh; my stomach would be hurting by the end of the night.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘He said he wished I could see him. He said, sometimes when we were out, people would stare at us with a knowing look, a look that said that if I could see him, I wouldn’t be going out with him. He got insecure and eventually said I should find someone more like me.’

  ‘More blind, or better-looking?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Louis tented his fingertips. ‘So, what is going on with you? I can hear it in your voice, something’s happened. Tell me about it. Come on.’

  Blind people are not possessed with superpowers any more than the rest of us. But Louis knew me well, and prided himself on observation; he knew something was up and I knew he could be like a dog with a bone. He wouldn’t give up until I gave him something. I traced the outline of one of the sticky circular stains on the tabletop.

  ‘I visited my mother,’ I said.

  ‘Go on,’ he said, after a short hesitation. ‘Was it disappointing?’

  ‘Uh. No. Definitely not disappointing, but unexpected.’

  ‘Too vague,’ he said, waving a hand in the air.

  I ran a finger along the gaps in the wood of the picnic table and looked at Louis’s fingers; they were lovely, well-manicured. He was careful with his fingers after years of getting them hurt by not being able to see what he was putting them into. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Well, I haven’t seen her for a long time. And I knew she wouldn’t recognise me. So that was difficult. I turned up unannounced, but actually as circumstances would have it, we did have a lovely conversation, and it was a good visit.’

  Louis didn’t say anything. He just waited, a tactic of his to get a bit more information out of people, and even though I knew what he was doing, I couldn’t resist, so I gave him a little more. ‘While I was with my mother, I got hit by a car.’

  ‘Shit,’ he said, as a waitress put our coffees on the table. Louis raised his hand and gently brought it down in the air, carefully locating his cup, before gripping it with his other hand.

  There was a comfortable silence between us, and I played with the foam on the top of my coffee while I waited for Louis to ask more about the car accident.

  ‘But your mum’s dead right?’ Louis said, and I looked at his vacant, milky eyes, which looked straight back at me.

  ‘Mm-hmm,’ I said. And we sat in silence. It was late morning, and the sun was hot on my legs. People walked past, a conveyor belt of suits, and more than the national average of guide dogs and white sticks. A small brown sparrow landed on our table and pecked at some crumbs that hadn’t been swept away. I watched the jerky sideways movements of its head and its tiny bright, black eyes; I think it was watching us. I didn’t tell Louis the bird was there, but normally I would.

  ‘So you visited your dead mum and got hit by a car.’ He stated it as a fact.

  ‘Mm-hmm,’ I said again.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Yeah, I saved my six-year-old self. I threw myself between her and the car.’

  ‘Excellent!’ he said, and chuckled to himself. ‘You making this up?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Okay. Tell me more. How did you get there?’

  ‘You believe me?’ I said.

  He picked up his coffee and brought it carefully to his lips. ‘Life can be pretty dull, Faye,’ he said. ‘Even duller if you’re blind. Don’t let the blinkies tell you otherwise, or the do-gooders, who think we can live as full and exciting a life as sighted people. If there is any colour in my life, it’s because of people like you. So, do I believe you? Well, I don’t know. Does it matter? Just tell me what happened and if there’s any raunchy bits, don’t hold back.’

  ‘There are no raunchy bits,’ I said, with a smile in my voice.

  ‘Oh, now that is disappointing,’ he said. ‘Tell me anyway.’

  And so it was that I told Louis everything.

  10

  You can imagine the relief I felt simply telling someone the truth about what had happened. The itch to tell Eddie subsided; so much of my twitching desire to share my burden had been unloaded just by saying the words out loud to another human being.

  Telling Louis was like a drug that hid the pain. But I knew it was only a matter of time before it wore off; because telling Louis wouldn’t be enough. I needed Eddie. I knew if I didn’t confide in him, sorrow would seep into my life like water into clay, making it heavy and misshapen. And yet I couldn’t tell Eddie, even though I felt salvation depended on him. However, like an addict, the day I spoke to Louis, none of that mattered, I was on a high. I didn’t feel alone anymore, and that was enough at that moment in time. I came home like a woman who had finally put down a load she barely had the strength to carry. I felt physically lighter. And I knew this too: I had to go back again. I had to go back to my mother, and soon.

  Talking to Louis had thrown up a number of practical and emotional issues that I needed to address. I found him surprisingly logical and, well, useful about the whole thing. He listened, and he helped, he asked none of the predictable questions regarding my sanity. He suggested I get the Space Hopper box out of the loft and put it somewhere that would be less damaging to me when I returned home – somewhere that would provide a softer landing – and also somewhere that didn’t make so much noise. He thought my return trip should be made at night, after Eddie had gone to sleep. He said I should wear clothes that fit where I was going both in terms of weather and decade, and to bundle up around the parts of me most likely to get broken: ankles, arms, neck. He wondered if I should wear a crash helmet, but I just wasn’t sure about that.

  You know what, we stayed at that Turkish café for hours. We had lunch, more coffee, then moved on to the pub and had a cold beer. No one from work rang to ask where the hell we were, and we wondered how many hours or days it would take before someone noticed we were missing. I popped back to the office about an hour or so before I was due to go home, and my boss smiled at me, bright and guileless.

  ‘How’d it go?’ she asked; she was tanned and too skinny and I wanted to take her home and feed her.

  ‘How did what go?’ I asked. I put my bag on the desk and searched for chewing gum in case the smell of beer reached her.

  ‘The experiments,’ she said. ‘Rubber gloves.’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’ I’d forgotten about them. ‘Good, but they took longer than I thought, I’m going to need an extra day or two.’ Lying was getting easier; I didn’t even feel bad about it, as long as it wasn’t Eddie.

  ‘No problem,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you take off early? You’ve been working so hard.’

  I sm
iled to myself: get in late, leave early, and have a long lunch. Sometimes you just need a day like that to get back on track, and it was a great start to the weekend.

  * * *

  By the time Eddie got home that night the girls were in bed and I’d made us some dinner and opened a bottle of wine to breathe. I got the cards out and the eggs, as I always do when we play. I have a wooden bowl, smooth and shallow and beautiful in its simplicity; Eddie bought it for our fifth wedding anniversary. In the bowl I keep ten eggs I bought at a car boot sale: some wooden, some marble, all roughly the size of a real chicken egg. Whoever wins a card game takes an egg from the bowl, until there are none left. Person with the most eggs is the overall winner. It stops us watching too much TV.

  When he saw the bowl, he loosened his tie. ‘Feeling confident tonight?’ he said.

  I put my arms around him and kissed him long and deep.

  ‘I’ve already won,’ I said, looking at his handsome, kind face, and he pulled me into a stronger embrace. He burrowed his face into my neck and we were like two animals reunited, animals who didn’t have the words to say that they were happy to see one another again. His touch told me that he’d missed me, because I’d been distant.

  While he went to look at our sleeping daughters I put a bowl of chilli on the table, some salsa, and homemade tortilla chips to dip. I spray tortilla wraps with oil and sprinkle them with sea salt, then cut them into triangles with a pizza cutter and put them in the oven for a few minutes. The best. Eddie’s favourite.

  He’d put on a sweatshirt and some jogging bottoms and took a large mouthful of wine as he sat down, grunting happily as he scooped up chilli in a chip.

  ‘Good day?’

  Eddie nodded and kept nodding till he swallowed. ‘I had some one-to-one interviews,’ he said. ‘I think they like me, hard to tell.’

  ‘How could they not like you?’ I said.

  ‘You’re biased, but thank you. They have an important job, it’s not just about them liking me; they need to decide if I’m right for this sort of work. The role of ministry is about serving other people well, not just about me thinking I’d be good at it and therefore being allowed to train for it, and then simply doing it. My calling is not the job. The job is an instrument to help me carry out my calling. But it feels like they like me, which makes me feel better.’

  Eddie wanting to train as a vicar was not like applying for any other kind of job. Apparently God calls you (I’m thinking not literally), and you feel it, and then, if you approach the Church, they have the initial job of discerning whether or not your calling is something that can be honed as a role in the Church.

  Eddie had his ‘calling’ from God a few years ago, but didn’t do anything about it. Apparently it got stronger until the point he had to act on it. I guess it must feel exactly like being ‘called’, because everyone uses that expression, don’t they. I’d never asked Eddie what it was like. Was it literal? Did he hear God as clearly as a parent calling their children in for dinner, or was it a feeling, a strong emotional one, like finding out you’ve won a prize? Or a strong physical one, like badly needing to wee?

  ‘What was it like when you got your calling?’ I said.

  He took another swig of wine and dealt the cards. Seven each. Rummy.

  ‘It was a voice, in my head,’ he said, looking at his cards and rearranging them in his hand. He looked at me and I guess my face had the kind of expression that makes you want to reword your last sentence.

  ‘It was my voice – my inner voice – and it was when I was quiet, alone, praying. Especially in church. When I’m there I feel… right, a sense of fulfilment, contented. It was natural. Good. The voice I heard was a bit like when you’re cycling uphill and want to give up; when your inner voice says, You can do it, just a bit further.’

  I picked up a card, laid one down, took a chip.

  ‘But one day I was in church,’ he said. ‘I’d been praying silently. The whole place was candlelit, the choir had just finished singing ‘Allegri Miserere’, and it felt like someone laid a hand briefly and gently, but very definitely, on my shoulder and I heard a quieter voice, and I wasn’t conscious of producing that inner voice myself, so it was more like someone else’s voice that time, and it said, Your purpose. And that was it.’

  ‘That was your calling?’

  ‘It was a part of my calling I suppose. It’s been gradual, taken years. And I guess I always knew, always felt it in me, but hadn’t put a name to it. But at that moment, when I felt the hand on my shoulder, it became more real. I felt God was nudging me, simply giving me a clearer sign. I couldn’t ignore it or keep it in a separate box anymore.’ He picked up, smiled, laid down; he was after hearts. ‘I’m going to get the first egg,’ he said.

  ‘I guarantee it,’ I said, looking at my cards. ‘I’ve got a hand like a foot.’ I had a pair of threes in my hand, but nothing else that went together. I hesitated, let my hand hover over the card he’d just laid down, wondering whether to pick it up and make something of it. Changed my mind, and went for the deck.

  ‘Why didn’t you ever tell me about this calling, if it started years ago?’ I asked, munching another tortilla.

  ‘I don’t know. It wasn’t a case of keeping it from you, or anyone. I suppose I didn’t say anything because I thought, This is ridiculous, who am I to be called by God?’

  ‘I always imagine the voice of God to be a bit thunderous,’ I said, thinking back to the clear, quiet voice Eddie had described.

  ‘Well, in the Bible it’s often quoted as being a big voice. But God was only talking to me in the church, he didn’t need to shout.’ Eddie looked at me. ‘See, it makes me sound conceited, and ridiculous.’

  ‘No it doesn’t,’ I said, putting a hand on his. ‘I’m just sorry I didn’t ask you sooner.’

  ‘Now was always the time for us to have this conversation. The things we need to know will reveal themselves when the right time comes.’

  He was talking about the things I still hadn’t told him. He was telling me he would wait until I was ready, even if it was hard on him.

  ‘How do your parents feel about it?’ I asked. ‘I mean, your mum?’ Eddie’s parents live in France, have done for the past fifteen years or so, and his dad, always a quiet, lovely man, has dementia. Eddie’s mum looks after him at home. She says he’s like a lovely pet; she feeds and cleans him, and during warm days she sits him in the garden with a blanket, while she potters with the flowers, vegetables and bird feeders. On cooler days she makes up a fire and he does much the same, but indoors. She reads to him, although his hearing is not that great. Every day they go for a walk, every Thursday morning they go to the shops and every Sunday they go to church. She’s certain that their simple, regulated, wholesome life keeps her husband content and helps him enjoy his life as much as he can. She’s a good woman.

  ‘My mum wasn’t surprised, and that doesn’t surprise me. We’ve always been a family that quietly believes in God, His presence. He’s always been a part of our lives,’ he said, laying down his cards face up and taking an egg.

  ‘Beginner’s luck,’ I said, and started stacking the cards together to shuffle them.

  Eddie watched me deal and looked thoughtful. ‘Funny thing,’ he said. ‘If I’m honest I kind of wanted my mum to be a bit surprised, or at least seem really pleased. I should be happy that she isn’t one of those mums that thought I was making a terrible mistake, and throwing my life away. She accepted it, and that’s great. But she accepted it like getting change back when you’ve paid for your groceries. It was just another thing that she took in her stride. A little too expected. I suppose she made it seem ordinary, when it felt more important to me than that.’

  ‘You wanted to shock her!’ I said. ‘Like someone who comes out as gay to their parents, and they’re all prepared for the drama of the moment, but instead they just say, “Oh yeah, we’ve always known.” ’

  ‘Something like that,’ he said.

  ‘Shame on
you; it could have been so much worse.’

  ‘You’re right. She accepted it as though it was nothing. The good things about that outweigh the bad.’

  ‘She’s too hearty to be shocked. I was shocked,’ I said. ‘Still am. Hopefully that’s some consolation.’

  He laughed and poured more wine into my glass. I opened a drawer in the table, took out a candle and lit it.

  ‘I think most people have to come to terms with balancing what they have always hoped for from their parents, with what they actually get,’ he said. ‘I’ve been luckier than most. I know a lot of people who are more than a little disappointed with their parents. A lot of people won’t get the answers they dream of from their mum and dad, even if they get round to asking them.’

  ‘And what are the right questions?’ I asked.

  ‘Exactly,’ he said (I’d hoped for a more literal answer to my question). ‘And some of us never even get the opportunity to ask.’ He looked at me and held my gaze; we never really talk about my mother, although Eddie tries to encourage me now and then.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing to be able to go back in time and ask the questions we never thought we’d get the chance to ask, from the people most important to us?’ I said, laying the pack face down and forgetting about them.

  ‘Yes it would,’ Eddie said, shaking his head sadly. ‘I know you must feel like that about your mum, but I also feel like that about my dad. It’s too late, and yet…’ He hesitated.

  ‘And yet what?’ I said.

  ‘And yet, even knowing that one day, maybe very soon, it may be too late to ask my mum all the things that only she can tell me, I’m still not asking her those questions. Why is that?’

  ‘What would you ask her?’

  ‘I don’t even know. Lots of things.’

  ‘Make a list,’ I said.

  ‘I will.’ He nodded firmly and I knew he would actually do it.

  ‘And then go to France, as soon as possible, and ask her those questions before it’s too late,’ I said. I felt suddenly both urgent and passionate that he should do this. My words were a softly spoken and determined order. Eddie needed it, perhaps we all do: a reminder to minimise regret while we still can.