Lifesaver Read online

  As I put the plug in the bath and turned the taps on full, I thought of Ken on the tennis court, his lovely legs dark brown and muscular in his white shorts and his top riding up to expose his hairy tummy when he served. We used to like making love in the mornings, but that hadn’t happened for a long time—more often than not, Ken left the house while I was still asleep.

  Then I imagined him on the train, showered and glowing with slick black wet hair, his Blackberry bleeping quietly in his jacket pocket like a small electronic animal, or a Clanger perhaps. I thought of him getting newsprint on his fingers from somebody else’s abandoned copy of Metro. What I didn’t like to think of was all the female office workers who might be staring at him with admiration, surreptitiously checking to see if he was wearing a wedding ring, and then feeling disappointed when they saw that he was.

  I climbed in the bath and lay there for a long, long, time. The only sound in the house was the slow steady plink of the cold tap dripping into the water, and a bluebottle whizzing around the bathroom, so fast it was a blur. I tried to focus on it for a while, watching it zigzag, and then fly in concentric circles, as if being spun from a string on the ceiling. No wonder it kept bumping into things—at that speed, how could it possibly see where it was going? And when it crashed into the window, how come it didn’t knock itself unconscious?

  In many of the ‘inspirational’, life-after-death books I’d read in the past six months, people who had lost loved ones were graced with the presence of, say, a rare bluebird, or a butterfly in winter, hovering or fluttering around them and making them feel the spirit of the deceased was with them still. I put the word ‘inspirational’ in inverted commas because those books depressed the hell out me. Why hadn’t I ever got visitations from a beautiful but unfamiliar cat, who would appear just when I was feeling at my lowest? All I got was this big fat irritating bluebottle, and I doubted that it had any messages of wisdom and eternal wisdom with which to succour me.

  I contemplated getting out, but closed my eyes instead and sank back under the water, letting it close over my head and face, feeling the tickle of my hair on my cheek as it floated around me. I had nothing else to do, not until the party that afternoon. I supposed I could have run through the script for my audition the following day, but I couldn’t be bothered. It was only a part in a West Country cable soap, nothing huge.

  The character I was up for was the glamorous but tired mother of twin babies - which was a little close to the knuckle. My agent, Fenella, sounded like she was walking on broken glass when she told me about it, full of apologies and qualifications; she knew I might not feel up to it, but it was decent money for a cable—over fifty grand a year. Which indeed wasn’t bad, and it would probably do me good to have some regular work. But then, having to hold babies…I wasn’t sure.

  I wondered how Ken felt about me going up for an audition. In the old days he’d have helped me go over my rehearsal piece, prompting and encouraging me, bringing me cups of tea and sending me little break-a-leg cards to wish me luck. I couldn’t even remember if I’d mentioned this one to him or not. He certainly hadn’t referred to it lately, if I had. He just told me to ‘take it easy,’ and buggered off to play tennis.

  Ken assumed that because I spent so much time lolling around the house, ‘taking it easy’ was a treat for me. He didn’t realize that it was actually my idea of Purgatory: empty house, time on my hands, frustration, boredom, depression. And the guilt… knew I ought to have gone to the gym, or the supermarket, or for a walk; but I’d rather be bored and cloistered at home than be out during the day, because the daytime was when the mothers roamed. They were everywhere, and with such an array of equipment: prams, buggies, papooses, car seats, scooters, push-along trikes. ‘It’s like being roadie to the world’s smallest rock star’, Ken used to joke, when he thought he was going to be a dad. But I didn’t think that joke was funny anymore. Anything could set me off: the squeak of a pushchair’s wheel, a tiny dropped sock, trickles of melted ice-cream running over a chubby dimpled chin.

  If I went out during the day, my hands felt limp and loose at my sides without anything, or anyone, to push or carry, and it just made me want to crawl indoors again.

  I lay in the bath and watched the bluebottle until my eyeballs ached with the exertion of darting around the room after it, and the water was almost stone cold. Suddenly I really wanted the part in the cable soap. I wanted to have my hands full of baby again. With a watery swoosh I climbed out of the bath and dried myself with a towel which probably ought to have been washed about three weeks ago.

  The phone rang just as I’d got back into our bedroom and was knotting the belt of Ken’s towelling bathrobe around my waist. I picked up the extension by the bed.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hi, Anna, just ringing to check you’re still on for the party today. Crystal can’t wait to see you! And thanks again for Saturday, by the way. It was fun.’

  ‘Oh, hi Vic; yes, it was,’ I lied. ‘Thanks for coming.’

  We’d had Vicky and her husband Peter over for dinner. Maybe it was just that we were somewhat out of practice in hosting dinner parties, or maybe it was the presence of my goddaughter Crystal and her baby brother Pat, but the whole thing had been hideously unrelaxing. Vicky and Peter’s babysitter had pulled out at the last minute, and Vicky had entertained the fanciful notion that her children would go to sleep at our house instead. Fat chance. Both Crystal and Pat had decided that fighting and crying for Vicky’s attention was a far better way to pass a few hours away from home, way past their bedtime.

  The fact that neither Ken nor I really like Peter very much wasn’t very helpful, either. Peter had this great thick mass of reddish hair, and freckles, and in my opinion didn’t pull his weight with the kids nearly enough. Every time I saw him it reminded me of the words of my favourite childhood book: Anything to me is sweeter/Than to see Shock-headed Peter. Crystal was the image of him but, being four, she still managed to be incredibly cute.

  Much as I adored Crystal, I had only recently been able to face her again; to actually want to spend any time with her. It still hurt, seeing each new thing she did and said and learned. I couldn’t help thinking about my little Holly, and how left behind she’d got. She would have looked up to Crystal so much. Crystal could have taught her all her bad habits. Given her lessons in Advanced Hypochondria, Primal Screaming, and of course, Tantrum Throwing II—The Full Monty.

  This was a bit unfair, although Crystal was going through a bit of a difficult phase. She was fine around me, but she didn’t half give poor Vicky a hard time - the expression ‘drama queen’ could have been minted just for her.

  ‘What did you do yesterday?’

  I tried to remember. ‘Um. Not much. Ken played golf with some people from the office. I went over my audition script.’

  ‘What audition? You didn’t tell me you had an audition! When? For what?’

  Vicky sounded slighted, and I felt too lethargic to protest that I had definitely brought up the subject of the part. ‘It’s tomorrow. Only a regional cable soap, plus I’d have to be away filming for days at a time, most weeks, down in Bristol. I’m not sure I want it.’

  ‘Oh, Anna, go for it. I’d kill for a part like that—regular work, and fame, but only regional so you don’t get papped every time you’re seen rolling out of a bar with your skirt stuck in your knickers and your lipstick sliding off.’

  The wistfulness in Vicky’s voice gave it another edge; a hologram of longing. She was dying to get back to work, but hadn’t been offered any parts since she got pregnant with Pat. It was hard enough for her to get away for the auditions, let alone to commit to any sort of theatre runs or filming schedules.

  ‘Yeah. I suppose I could handle being famous in the West Country.’

  ‘That’s the spirit. Anyway, see you at four for the party, yeah? Come round to me and we’ll go in my car.’

  Ten minutes after we hung up from each other, I was still sitting in Ken’s bathr
obe on the unmade bed. Eventually I roused myself enough to trudge downstairs, fill the kettle, and half-listen to a heated radio phone-in, something about congestion charging. I let the different voices wash over me and remove me from myself, like sleep. The kettle boiled, but I didn’t notice. I forgot about the audition. I made myself switch off, click, like the kettle, and just sat. It was something I’d done a lot in the past six months, like a mobile epidural. Instant numbness. I craved it, and I’d become quite adept in achieving it. I looked at it as a technique to be perfected, like a Stanislavsky exercise, or yogic breathing.

  I really thought I’d only been there for ten minutes or so, until I looked at the clock and realized with a lurch that almost an hour had gone by, and I hadn’t moved. No wonder I felt stiff. Time treated me strangely these days. It was either stretched out into endless skeins of sticky minutes that I didn’t know what to do with, or it compacted itself into hard little atoms which moved so fast I couldn’t keep up with them.

  I wished that I didn’t have to battle with time like this. I oughtn’t even have been aware of it, that’s what was so unfair. It made me feel cheated. Right then, I ought to have been making pipecleaner butterflies with felt-tip decorated wings, or sticking cork flooring down in a wendyhouse. Having other children round to play; sewing name tapes into coats; washing sticky hands and polishing small fingerprints off the French windows, or any of the dozens of things that Vicky moaned about having to do. If things had been different, I would not have had the time to sit motionless on a stool in the kitchen for over an hour and a half, still in a dressing gown.

  Still, I thought, at least Lil and I were friends again. Got to try and be positive about something.

  I was just concluding a more successful attempt to make myself a cup of coffee when I heard a sickeningly loud grinding, churning sound from outside. The bin men! If their cart was churning, it meant that they’d already picked up our neighbours’ black bags and were getting ready to leave for another week, the cart’s huge metal fangs sinking relentlessly down as it accelerated slowly past.

  I sprang into action—it was almost a relief to make a sudden move - leaping out of the front door, throwing the lids off the bins, and charging into the road, two full bin liners in each hand. The bin men cheered half-heartedly as I tossed the bags into the cart’s grinding maw, and I smiled equally half-heartedly back again, before turning to plod back to the house in the warm and intensifying drizzle.

  It really was about time I got dressed. Even I thought it was a bit shaming to be outside in just a dressing gown and sparkly flip-flops—but then the neighbours already thought we were slatterns. Our house was a lovely tall Victorian semi, but neither Ken nor I had had the heart to do anything to it, despite the elaborate plans we’d made when we first moved in, when I was seven months pregnant. Wisteria choked the gutters and covered the upstairs windows at the back; the once-white paint on the front door and the garage door was as patchy and flaky as psoriasis, and weeds sprouted enthusiastically from the gravel in the drive. I bent down and yanked out a dandelion, as if this might atone for my state of public undress.

  The neighbours never mentioned Holly. They hadn’t known me well enough to come over and commiserate when it had become apparent that there was a bump and then no baby; and as time had gone on, it had clearly become harder for them to address the issue. So they’d never bothered. Consequently we hadn’t made any friends in the street. Ken didn’t care, of course, because he was never there; but there were times I thought it would have been nice to have someone over for coffee and a chat about the poor quality of the street lighting in Grosvenor Drive, or the copious amounts of dog poo on the pavements.

  As I was chucking the weed behind our now-empty dustbins, the postman cycled up. His long lank hair was tied into a ponytail, and the ever-present roll-up stuck to his lips like it was part of the uniform. He parked his red bike by the gate, rootled around in his bag, and handed me a pile of envelopes of different sizes, the top one softened and damp from the insidious rain, its address blurred.

  He never spoke, this postman, but nodded and smiled at me instead, which made the roll-up between his lips flap up and down and occasionally scatter ash. Our post always smelled of cigarette smoke, but at least he was friendlier than most of the neighbours.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, wiping dandelion milk off my fingers onto my dressing gown before thumbing through the stack: subscription Vogue, book club magazine, postcard from my brother Olly, on holiday in Ibiza with his boyfriend Russ, Airmiles junk, and a letter, addressed to me; a thick, real envelope, hand-written in unfamiliar writing. My brain clunked through the various processes of elimination one made when receiving unexpected correspondence, discounting all the potential candidates: Agent? No, she’d have rung. Party invitation? Possibly, although the envelope wasn’t the right shape for an invite. Distant relative? Unlikely - I recognized most of my relatives’ writing.

  There was something vaguely thrilling about receiving a proper letter in an email age. I hoped it wouldn’t turn out to be something tedious like an invitation from my doctor’s for a smear test.

  Back indoors, I sat on the bottom stair and examined the envelope. There was no forwarding address on the back, and I couldn’t make out the postmark. The writing was fat and loopy; unusual. I had no idea who it might be from.

  Relishing the experience, I slid my thumb underneath the glued down flap and ripped, slowly, pulling out two folded sheets of lined paper—covered, curiously, with handwriting different to that which was on the envelope. It appeared to be from the Gillingsbury Technical College, which confused me even further—until I began to read.

  27th July 2002

  Dear Mrs. Sozi,

  You don’t know me—us, I mean. My name is Adam Ferris, and my son’s name is Max. He’s four years old, and the reason I’m writing to you now.

  Two years ago, Max was extremely ill with Acute Myeloid Leukaemia. You saved his life with the bone marrow donation you so generously gave him. As I’m sure you’re aware, the Anthony Nolan Trust do not permit any contact between donor and recipient for at least two years after a transplant, but I’ve wanted to get in touch ever since Max got the all-clear eight months ago. I put a note in my diary to remind me of the exact date at which I’d write this letter to you, because it makes me so happy, and so grateful, to be able to do so.

  I could fill pages with thank yous, but it still wouldn’t come close to expressing my gratitude to you. You have given my little boy’s life back. You have given him back to me, when I thought he was going to be taken away—oh hell, and now of course I’m crying, writing this… How could I not? Max means everything to me, you see. He’s my only child. My wife and I are separated and, although I know she loves him very much too, she handles things differently. We haven’t seen her for some time. Anyway, I’m sure you don’t want to hear about that! I suppose I just feel sort of close to you, now that you are a part of my son—the part which saved his life.

  I know nothing at all about you, Anna (I hope you don’t mind me calling you that), not even your actual address—as you will see, this letter will have been forwarded to you by the Anthony Nolan Trust. You may well have a family of your own—in which case, you will certainly understand the extremes of fear and joy I’ve been through since Max was diagnosed at the age of two. I must admit that I’m very curious, and would love to get to know a little more about you. Of course we will respect your wishes if you decide not to be in touch with us—at the Trust they tell me that this is quite common, understandably, especially in cases where the transplant fails. Time will tell with Max, but at the moment, thank God, he is most definitely in remission, and as healthy, happy and bouncy a kid as you could ever meet. So if you do fancy writing back, or emailing, please do (address at top of page: it’s my work email - I teach pottery and ceramics. Not full time, but it gives me plenty of time to be a dad). Max and I would both love to meet you one day to say thanks in person.

  Yours t
ruly and eternally gratefully,

  Adam (and Max) Ferris

  I was barely aware that, as I slowly read each word of the letter, I had walked up the stairs, along the landing, and into the smaller of our two spare bedrooms. It wasn’t intended as a spare bedroom, but I’d insisted that the elephant and butterfly frieze, matching curtains and primrose yellow walls be obliterated by yards of bland biscuit coloured emulsion. The carpet was still the same blue one we’d bought for Holly, though. The only visible reminder of the nursery, and the only freshly-decorated room in the house. There was a brand new bed in there, but nobody had ever slept in it.

  I missed that elephant frieze, the walls still seemed bare without it. But I didn’t regret the decision to rip it off. Some people kept their children’s bedrooms as shrines, but that made no sense to me. I supposed it might have been different if the room had held memories of Holly herself, but she’d never even got to see her elephants and butterflies.

  I dropped the letter on to the soft blue carpet, then slid down the wall next to it, putting my head in my arms. I couldn’t hear anything except the blood roaring in my ears, and the faint sound of a plane high in the sky.

  Gradually, I became aware that I was beginning to smile. I re-read the words two, then three times, and even as my throat was constricting, my smile got slowly wider. It was the first time I’d smiled in that bedroom since it had been redecorated.

  Chapter 3

  ‘I think I’ve died and gone to hell,’ Vicky yelled over the din, as we stood in the entrance hall of UltraBowl. Even Crystal, usually so confident, clutched my hand and shrank into my legs. The noise was intense; teenaged boys with shaven heads crouching in the saddles of stationary motorbikes, their eyes glued to the screens and their bodies swaying as they roared around one-dimensional corners of non-existent speedway tracks; slot machines bleeping and crashing; snooker balls cracking on ten tables to our left… I began to feel out of place for not wearing an oversized death-metal band t-shirt or body piercings.