Being a bloke. Especially with Nathan. Occasionally, before the evening routine, they would go and sit at the end of the garden and Nathan would crack open a couple of beers. Sometimes I heard them discussing rugby, or joking about some woman they had seen on the television, and it wouldn’t sound like Will at all. But I understood he needed this; he needed someone with whom he could just be a bloke, doing blokey things. It was a small bit of ‘normal’ in his strange, separate life.
Commenting on my wardrobe. Actually, that should be raising an eyebrow at my wardrobe. Except for the black and yellow tights. On the two occasions I had worn those he hadn’t said anything, but simply nodded, as if something were right with the world.
‘You saw my dad in town the other day.’
‘Oh. Yes.’ I was hanging washing out on a line. The line itself was hidden in what Mrs Traynor called the Kitchen Garden. I think she didn’t want anything as mundane as laundry polluting the view of her herbaceous borders. My own mother pegged her whites out almost as a badge of pride. It was like a challenge to her neighbours: Beat this, ladies! It was all Dad could do to stop her putting a second revolving clothes dryer out the front.
‘He asked me if you’d said anything about it.’
‘Oh.’ I kept my face a studied blank. And then, because he seemed to be waiting, ‘Evidently not.’
‘Was he with someone?’
I put the last peg back in the peg bag. I rolled it up, and placed it in the empty laundry basket. I turned to him.
‘Yes.’
‘A woman.’
‘Yes.’
‘Red-haired?’
‘Yes.’
Will thought about this for a minute.
‘I’m sorry if you think I should have told you,’ I said. ‘But it … it didn’t seem like my business.’
‘And it’s never an easy conversation to have.’
‘No.’
‘If it’s any consolation, Clark, it’s not the first time,’ he said, and headed back into the house.
Deirdre Bellows said my name twice before I looked up. I was scribbling in my notepad, place names and question marks, pros and cons, and I had pretty much forgotten I was even on a bus. I was trying to work out a way of getting Will to the theatre. There was only one within two hours’ drive, and it was showing Oklahoma! It was hard to imagine Will nodding along to ‘Oh What A Beautiful Morning’, but all the serious theatre was in London. And London still seemed like an impossibility.
Basically, I could now get Will out of the house, but we had pretty much reached the end of what was available within an hour’s radius, and I had no idea how to get him to go further.
‘In your own little world, eh, Louisa?’
‘Oh. Hi, Deirdre.’ I scooched over on the seat to make room for her.
Deirdre had been friends with Mum since they were girls. She owned a soft-furnishings shop and had been divorced three times. She possessed hair thick enough to be a wig, and a fleshy, sad face that looked like she was still dreaming wistfully of the white knight who would come and sweep her away.
‘I don’t normally get the bus but my car’s in for a service. How are you? Your mum told me all about your job. Sounds very interesting.’
This is the thing about growing up in a small town. Every part of your life is up for grabs. Nothing is secret – not the time I was caught smoking at the out-of-town supermarket car park when I was fourteen, nor the fact that my father had re-tiled the downstairs loo. The minutiae of everyday lives were currency for women like Deirdre.
‘It’s good, yes.’
‘And well paid.’
‘Yes.’
‘I was so relieved for you after the whole Buttered Bun thing. Such a shame they shut the cafe. We’re losing all the useful shops in this town. I remember when we had a grocer, a baker and a butcher on the high street. All we needed was a candlestick maker!’
‘Mmm.’ I saw her glance at my list and closed my notepad. ‘Still. At least we do have somewhere to buy curtains. How’s the shop?’
‘Oh, fine … yes … What’s that, then? Something to do with work?’
‘I’m just working on things that Will might like to do.’
‘Is that your disabled man?’
‘Yes. My boss.’
‘Your boss. That’s a nice way of putting it.’ She nudged me. ‘And how’s your clever old sister getting on at university?’
‘She’s good. And Thomas.’
‘She’ll end up running the country, that one. I have to say, though, Louisa, I was always surprised you didn’t leave before her. We always thought you were such a bright little thing. Not that we still don’t, of course.’
I raised a polite smile. I wasn’t sure what else I could do.
‘But still. Someone’s got to do it, eh? And it’s nice for your mum that one of you is happy to stay so close to home.’
I wanted to contradict her, and then I realized that nothing I had done in the last seven years suggested I had either any ambition or any desire to move further than the end of my street. I sat there, as the bus’s tired old engine snarled and juddered beneath us, and had a sudden sense of time racing, of losing whole chunks of it in my small journeys backwards and forwards along the same stretch. Round and round the castle. Watching Patrick go round and round the track. The same petty concerns. The same routines.
‘Oh, well. Here’s my stop.’ Deirdre rose heavily beside me, hoisting her patent handbag over her shoulder. ‘Give your mum my love. Tell her I’ll be round tomorrow.’
I looked up, blinking. ‘I got a tattoo,’ I said suddenly. ‘Of a bee.’
She hesitated, holding on to the side of the seat.
‘It’s on my hip. An actual tattoo. It’s permanent,’ I added.
Deirdre glanced towards the door of the bus. She looked a bit puzzled, and then gave me what I think she thought was a reassuring smile.
‘Well, that’s very nice, Louisa. As I said, tell your mum I’ll be round tomorrow.’
Every day, while he was watching television, or otherwise engaged, I sat in front of Will’s computer and worked on coming up with the magic event that might Make Will Happy. But as time went on, I found that my list of things we couldn’t do, places we couldn’t go to, had begun to exceed my ideas for those we could by a significant factor. When the one figure first exceeded the other, I went back on to the chatroom sites, and asked their advice.