Page 51 of We All Live Here
It is so long since Lila drank that she has no idea what she should buy. And she is not sure that there is anything in this twenty-four-hour convenience store much more sophisticated than lighter fuel. She peers at the shelves behind the counter, watched by the guy at the till, who bears the wary expression of someone who has long learned that even benign-looking forty-two-year-old women may yet hurl themselves onto the cash register, start singing a national anthem, or wet themselves beside the freezer cabinet. She gives him a reassuring smile to suggest she will do none of these things, which he doesn’t return. She has never liked red wine, and beer might make her gassy, so she finally points at a bottle of vodka and grabs some tonic, then hands it to the man. “What do you want?” Jensen is behind her. He asks for a couple of no-alcohol beers. “I’m driving you back later,” he says, as if she has forgotten.
It is raining heavily by the time they are driving down Westling Street, and as they pass Bill and Francesca’s bungalow, she averts her gaze. It gets her, even now. She can picture her mother waving from the front porch, the way she would always brush her hands on her jeans as she walked toward Lila along the path, as if perennially caught in the middle of doing something. Lila had not understood the comfort shehad drawn from walking into that house every week until her mother was gone. It is then that she notices Jensen patting his jacket. By the time he pulls up a short distance down the road, he has patted every pocket at least twice and seems preoccupied. He cuts the engine, thrusting his hands deep into his pockets as, without the wipers, the windscreen is slowly obscured by the rain. Then he reaches over to the glove box, opens it, rummages inside, and lets out a quiet curse. She looks at him.
“Flat keys,” he says. “They’re not in my pocket. I was in a hurry when you called and I have a horrible feeling…I might have left them on the side.”
“Don’t you have a spare?”
“Yes…In the flat.”
He stares through the windscreen at the block, as if he could somehow will himself inside. “My sister has a set but she works nights so I won’t be able to pick them up till tomorrow. I’m…really sorry.”
The feeling that hits Lila is unexpectedly bleak. All her plans ruined. Again. She knows this is a childish way to look at the world, but right now, she feels it, a foot-stamping tear-inducing rage.
Jensen sits back, thinking, then suddenly leans forward, his hand shuffling around again in his glove compartment. He pulls out a key on a small leather fob. “We could go to Bill’s?” She looks at his palm, at the little brass Chubb key. “His spare. He gave it to me after…I think he just likes to know that someone could get in if need be.”
Lila looks back up the road to where she can just make out the bungalow, set back behind a neat privet hedge. Quiet and empty, its windows like empty eye sockets in a blank face. “I…can’t. Not in there. I mean—it’s where my mum lived. Since she died it always feels…I just can’t. Sorry.”
He nods, not pushing her. He glances up at where the rain is now hammering on the roof of the car as the engine ticks down. Both of them are briefly lost in their thoughts. Lila can feel the bottle of vodka,disproportionately heavy in her lap. She wonders whether to just wrench off the top and take a swig or if that will make her feel worse. A forty-something woman drinking from a bottle in a pickup truck.
“Could you just…drive me home?”
“Bill’s studio,” he says suddenly. “He keeps the key to the studio in the kitchen. That’s just his space, right? Not your mum’s? Would that still be weird?” And suddenly Lila is alive again.
•••
It takes Jensena couple of minutes to let himself in and unlock the side gate to the garden. Lila bolts from the truck, throws the door shut, and runs in, her jacket over her head, the bottles tucked under her arm, her feet slapping through the puddles. Jensen hits a switch, shaking the rainwater from his shoulders, and the neon strip light above them flickers into life, illuminating the racks of tools, the worktable, the clamps and jigsaws. Sheets of graded sandpaper are stacked in a rack on the wall, the floor littered with wood shavings and sawdust. A piece of graph paper with some measurements and a pencil drawing of a table lie on the edge of the table, beside a tape measure and a hand plane with a burnished wooden handle. For all Bill’s rigid sense of order at home, his studio is a reassuring mess of creativity and clutter. There is a stool in front of his scarred wooden table, and a newly finished garden bench alongside the door, probably another project for a neighbor. Since he let go of his business Bill has regularly made pieces to order. She has always suspected he would do it even if it wasn’t for the money: for Bill, woodworking is meditative, calming, and she cannot remember a day when he hasn’t been engaged in making something. Even on the day of her mother’s funeral he had carved a little bird which he had placed on Francesca’s coffin.
Jensen motions her to the bench and pulls the little stool over so that he sits alongside it.
“I grabbed you a mug from the kitchen,” he said. “I didn’t know where he kept the glasses.”
“Classy,” she says, as he pours in some vodka, then tonic. The strip-lighting buzzes quietly overhead, making them both look pale and shadowy-eyed.
“Do I look as awful as you?” she says, glancing up at it.
“Significantly worse. I’m always camera-ready.”
She glances around her. “Look.” There are two dark green paraffin lamps in the corner. Of course there are. Bill is prepared for every eventuality: power cuts, food shortages, earthquakes, and atomic bombs. She lights the lamps, turns off the fluorescent bulb, and suddenly the little workshop is restful, and oddly intimate.Right, she thinks. And takes three emphatic glugs of her vodka and tonic, ignoring Jensen’s look of surprise.Right, she thinks.I’ll show you, Eleanor.
•••
The taste andstrength of the alcohol are so disguised by the tonic that it takes a second mugful before she realizes it is having any effect at all. It is actually quite pleasant to feel so swimmy, to have the sharp edges of the day so delightfully blunted. Jensen is nearby on the stool drinking his alcohol-free beer and the rain is drumming on the flat roof and she is in a wood-scented cocoon, away from all the stress and conflict of drama.Why don’t I drink more often?She has another swig. She is not entirely sure she’ll go through with this, but it’s perfectly pleasant being here, in this space, beside a man she feels comfortable with, as he talks about a walled garden he restored in Winchester.
“So,” she says, raising her glass, “tell me something interesting about you.”
“Something interesting? Is my walled garden boring you to tears?”
“The breakdown. Tell me how it happened.” He looks a little startled again, so she adds: “Only if you want to, of course. I mean I’m not being…nosy.”
“You are, a bit.”
“I’m making conversation.”
“Really? ‘Tell me about the most traumatic thing that happened in your whole life’?”
“Tell me something else, then. Tell me about…Lipstick Woman. Your ex-fiancée.”
While he speaks, she is looking at the way his shoulders move under his T-shirt, his broad hands. What would it feel like to have those on her skin? What would it be like to have sex with someone who wasn’t Dan? When they had first got together, she and Dan had spent whole days in bed, the duvet scattered with sections of Sunday newspapers, the sheets full of crumbs from Marmite toast. They had so much sex in the first month that she had got cystitis and spent two days doubled over glugging cranberry juice. Then she thinks about the last six months they had lived together, the loneliness of having someone in your bed who didn’t even seem to see you, the racing thoughts, the endless arguments in your head, the cold back of doom facing you night after night.
