Page 12 of Autumn at the Oak Leaf Café
It was a quarter to six in the evening. Madeline had just turned around the CLOSED sign. Day one: survived. Who knew what day two might bring?
She went back into the café and tidied up. Angela didn’t have a dishwasher, and as Madeline stared with dismay at the pile of dirty cups needing to be washed, she wondered whether she ought to hire someone to help. Angela had told her she was perfectly welcome to do as she wished, providing that she kept an eye on the bottom line.
After clearing up a little—deciding to leave the rest until the following morning—she went for a walk around Sycamore Park before going home. There was a scattering of people still around, several dog walkers, a handful of children in the playground, some old ladies throwing bread to the ducks in the pond. Old memories started to resurface, some good, some bad. Here, on this corner by the duckpond, she had been dumped by her first boyfriend. That she had been twelve at the time and he had broken up with her because her bike was more expensive than his made the memory more amusing than anything else. Madeline smiled at the way Martin Eggert had stamped his foot before climbing onto his bike and riding off, the chain rattling as it struggled to catch on the gears.
She passed the stump where she had shared her first kiss with Rory, refusing to dwell on it, but a little further on was the bench where they had held hands for the first time, looking out over the duck pond. An old couple sat on it now, their hands entwined, and for a moment Madeline felt such a sliding doors moment that she almost broke into tears.
It hadn’t been all that bad, had it? After all, they had been together for three years. They had both gone to the same school, but Rory, three years above her, had never so much as looked at her until she’d met him at Exeter University where he was a junior tutor. She had fallen for him over late-night coffee and long, often humourous discussions of cultural issues. He had still lived in Brentwell, commuting to Exeter by train, while Madeline had stayed in Exeter after graduation, living in an expensive flat with a couple of friends. She had worked a boring office job while she waited for some way to make use of her Modern Culture and Society degree, which had proved as worthless as the paper it was written on until she had started to look at work overseas.
Rory had been like one of those placid lakes filled with chemical runoff: beautiful and pristine to look at, but deadly if you got too close or dared get your feet wet. On the one hand he was a budding academic with one foot in the door at a prestigious university, but on the other he was a whiny, drunken mummy’s boy who couldn’t save time let alone money, wasting all his money in the pub or on unnecessarily expensive clothes and man toys. He had a Fender Stratocaster even though he only knew a handful of chords, one of those expensive radio-controlled cars that could go over thirty miles an hour, a small sailboat sat on a trailer next to his caravan, the awning that covered it caked with mud and dried leaves from years of disuse. He wore clothes that looked like regular clothes except that he’d bought them from expensive boutiques online, and handmade shoes that cost three hundred quid a pair which had never come within a mile of a brush and polish.
And after watching him fritter his money away, he had expected her to be happy about the chance to move into a caravan in his parents’ garden.
No thanks, Rory. I’m good.
Yet there had been good times. Rory had been a listener, always ready to lend an ear to her problems. It had been Rory who suggested she look at working overseas, although she doubted he had actually thought she would go. Certainly, the tantrum he had thrown at her announcement suggested as much.
That had been eight long years ago. After going overseas, Madeline had cut off all social media contact with him, preferring to make a clean break. On the couple of times she had been home since, she had thought about dropping by his parents’ old house, seeing if he was there. Jonas had suggested that he still lived in town, so what was stopping her? Maybe he had changed.
The old couple got up from the bench and wandered off, walking hand in hand. Madeline waited a few seconds, then claimed their old seat.
This was temporary. Angela would be back in the New Year, and Madeline would be off again on her next adventure. Part of the reason she had broken up with Rory had nothing to do with his juvenile behaviour. Once she had the travel bug, she hadn’t wanted any ties. A clean break. And from the people she had met while travelling who were still in long-distance relationships with someone back home, her decision had been justified. Without exception they had been miserable; either pining to go back to their absent loved one, or wracked by guilt every time they did anything remotely exciting or interesting, while Bob or Michaella or Tristan or Olivia worked themselves into the ground back home.
Surely it wouldn’t hurt just to see what he was like these days, would it? Just to say hello? They had both moved on. There probably wouldn’t even be an attraction there. Perhaps the opposite: they would have grown so far apart that they were practically like strangers.
No, no, no. Don’t do it.
She stood up, facing north, the direction she would need to go in order to get to Rory’s parents’ house.
Then, as though fighting against a magnetic force, she made herself step back and turn, heading south, away from the memories, away from the temptation, away from the chance to screw up her future—
‘Watch out, you stupid hippy!’
She barely saw the bike as it came past her in a blur of colour, jerking to the side to avoid a collision. The rider let out a cry of horror as the bike pitched sideways, throwing him out of the saddle. He landed on a waist-high line of privet, bounced over the top and crashed down on the other side. The bike too struck the hedge, the front wheel sticking, the back wheel continuing to revolve, the spokes clicking gently as it slowed.
‘Oh, so sorry!’ Madeline cried. She hurried over to the hedge and leaned over. The rider was a man about her age, wearing an unfashionable tracksuit and sports shoes. She could only see his chin because the helmet had twisted in the fall to cover his face.
‘Can you do something useful?’ he snapped. ‘Call an ambulance. I think I’ve broken my wrist.’
8
The therapist
‘I thinkyou’ll be all right,’ Jonas said. ‘I mean, he can’t sue you, can he? He wasn’t supposed to be riding there.’
‘It was after six p.m., so apparently it’s allowed,’ Madeline said, staring into space as her dinner went cold.
‘He’d have to prove the exact time he fell off,’ Jonas said. ‘And it sounds like he was riding too fast.’
‘The paramedic was scolding him about that,’ Madeline said. ‘His excuse was that he was late for work and decided to cut through the park instead of going around the outside. She said that hopefully he’d learn his lesson. I also heard her tell him it was only a sprain.’
‘Well, that’s good news, I suppose.’
‘I still feel guilty,’ Madeline said. ‘I did kind of launch myself backwards into his way. I kind of deserved to be called a stupid hippy really. Do you think I ought to cut my hair?’
‘Don’t be silly. It’s your hair, you have it how you want. The guy’s an idiot. What on earth were you doing anyway?’
‘I was … it doesn’t matter now.’
