Page 31 of Autumn in Sycamore Park
‘Like a lemon biscuit!’ Amy said.
Tom wandered over, as the first people began to disperse. ‘Well, that was interesting,’ he said. ‘Looks like she’s got her decision set in stone. We’ll have to do more to convince the other two.’
‘And Rome fell,’ Downton said, turning to Jennifer and Amy. ‘I’ll see you two on Monday. Don’t let your activism get in the way of your teaching. If I spot any camouflage paint or bumper stickers, you’ll be in my office for a ticking off.’
As he wandered away through the crowd, Angela clapped her hands together. ‘Who’s up for a slice of maple and apple cake and a war council in the café?’
‘Me, me, me!’ Amy shouted.
Jennifer looked at Tom, who smiled and shrugged.
‘Come on, then,’ Jennifer said, just as the first drops of rain began to fall.
15
Philosophy
Jennifer wokeon Sunday to find Bonky sleeping under one arm and James under the other. As she shifted, the dog just rolled over, one ear flopping over his face, while the cat gave her a playful bat with his paw before jumping down and ambling over to his regular window seat.
The skies were clear, sunlight shining in through the window. Jennifer got up and wandered into the kitchen to make breakfast, still trying to make sense of how a morning protest had turned into an all-day event centred at first around Angela’s café, and then the entire community as they first printed and then distributed leaflets asking local residents to show their support for Big Gerry by contacting the council. Then followed an attempted late afternoon picnic, only for the rain to come rolling in to spoil it in true autumn style, and a relocation back to the café.
And through it all, Jennifer had somehow managed to resist both telling Amy that she had spoken to a woman at Rick’s house, and falling in love with Tom.
She just couldn’t go there. The underlying snob part of her—the rule that she should always aim for someone higher in station than herself drilled into her by her mother throughout her teenage years—felt reluctant to get involved with a man who worked as a glorified gardener, while the moral part of her felt it inappropriate, and the sensitive part just wasn’t ready. It had barely been a couple of months since she had left Mark, and she just couldn’t go there again.
Even if Tom really had the nicest of smiles.
Focusing her attention elsewhere seemed the most appropriate thing to do, so she busied herself for an hour trying to find Bonky’s vaccination certificates, sure he was due for one soon, only to find that it didn’t need doing until January. And then there was setting up the coffee table she had bought just before moving in, but that only took half an hour, and then it wasn’t even lunchtime and she couldn’t think of anything to do except stare at her phone and maybe stalk Mark on social media.
She had deleted all of her own that she could, and blocked him on the others she wanted to keep, but he hadn’t done any such thing to her. His Facebook profile came up as public, even though they were no longer friends. Jennifer hesitated just a moment before clicking and quickly scrolling down, hoping perhaps for some misery, a few heartbroken posts, a plea perhaps that he could get back together with the ex who had run out on him.
She didn’t have to look far, however, to have her worst fears confirmed. The first new photo was of some exotic golf course with palm trees along one side of the fairway and a distant seascape suggesting it was somewhere overseas. Mark’s only comment was “Next on the list!” to which a handful of his golfing mates had replied with various comments in agreement. None seemed perceptive enough to mention where exactly it was. The date was just a week before, but when Jennifer scrolled past, the next picture hit her like a falling piano.
Mark’s face in close-up, with a woman’s pressed so tightly against it that was as though they were waiting for glue to set. Both wore beaming smiles, their faces nearly blemish free, a sign of early nights and juicers and more fantastic sex than Jennifer could imagine from a man who had largely left her to sleep alone once their initial honeymoon period had faded.
The only comment was a fat red heart that Jennifer wished she could reach into her phone and pop with a virtual needle.
Even worse was that the woman was familiar: Heather Wilton, a colleague at Mark’s whatever-he-does company, whom Mark had occasionally name-dropped in a casual manner, and whom Jennifer had even met at a couple of social events. Worse was that the girl was as pleasant and personable as it was possible for a rival to be, completely impossible to dislike, harmless yet interesting, polite yet full of life, dressed down yet quietly beautiful.
The comments, those which contained words rather than lines of emoticons and nausea-inducing kisses or hearts, were all congratulatory, praising a relationship now made official.
Jennifer cleared her phone’s screen and narrowly resisted throwing it against the nearest wall.
Then, grabbing a bottle of water, because that was all she could find in her fridge which wouldn’t require any preparation effort, she sat down on the sofa to cry.
It wasn’t that he had moved on. She was happy for him. It was that the hole her absence from his life had left had been so quickly and efficiently filled and raked over it was as though she had never existed at all.
Bonky jumped up on the sofa to join her in her misery.
‘Who am I, Bonky?’ she said, patting the little dog on the back. ‘Who on earth am I?’
Bonky just gave a little bark, ready for his morning walk.
Oak Leaf Caféwas shut so Jennifer got a coffee from Pete’s van and led Bonky over to Tom’s shack, a mischievous part of her wanting to do something reckless to overcome her current unbearable lightness, but God or fate or karma wasn’t biting and the shack was locked up and quiet, Tom nowhere to be seen. Instead she wandered aimlessly through Sycamore Park, letting Bonky chase the pigeons, watching the joggers and the other dog walkers, a group of teenagers practicing a dance routine outside the theatre, a young couple leaning on each others’ shoulders on a bench, an old man picking around in a flowerbed, perhaps looking for something he had lost.
The sun was shining, the air crisp and cool, but Jennifer couldn’t overcome the feeling that she should bedoingsomething, moving her life forward, improving herself, changing the world. She led Bonky off the slope, up to the top of the grassy knoll from where she could see all corners of the park: the playground, the theatre and the library, the duck pond, the crazy paving courtyard over which Big Gerry resided, the south entrance and Pete’s burger van, the north where Angela’s café stood closed. She felt at the centre of a world; whether it washerworld, she couldn’t be sure. But letting Bonky nose around in the grass, she lay back, staring up at the clear blue sky, and let the revolving machine beneath her spin on.
It was sometime later when she opened her eyes to find a silhouette standing above her, backlit by the noon sun.
