Carry You. Beth Thomas

whether or not I should tell my beautiful, kind and generous best friend Abby about the strange goings-on I witnessed in the hallway of her home two days ago, involving her statuesque yet stilted boyfriend, and a mysterious and (if I’m not mistaken) slightly older, other woman?

      No. Nothing to do with me.

      ‘Aha,’ a voice says suddenly behind me and I look round to find a tall, scruffy-looking bloke with messy dark hair, wearing an old grey tee shirt, frayed jeans and dusty, scuffed work boots. I don’t know him so I turn back. Maybe I could get one very small carton. They don’t weigh much at all. Ooh, wait, they’ve got chocolate flavour …

      ‘That’s cold,’ the voice says behind me, blatantly stating the obvious. I glance quickly to my left and right but can’t see anyone else nearby. He must be one of those losers who feels the need to commentate on everything around him, as if the rest of the world is permanently gripped by his mundane and totally apparent observations. My Aunt Hazel does that. ‘Phone’s ringing,’ she’ll say. Or ‘Car won’t start.’ When she hears a siren approaching on the street, she’ll either announce ‘ambulance’, ‘police car’, or ‘fire engine’, depending on the type of siren. I don’t really care what’s coming as I’m always far too busy panicking and trying to drive my car off the road and into a parallel dimension to make sure I’m well out of the way.

      I carefully ignore the man behind me, to make it clear that he’s wasting his time with me. And everyone else, in fact.

      ‘You don’t recognise me, do you?’ he goes on, relentlessly. ‘Perhaps if I was holding a wheelbarrow …?’ And suddenly, it clicks. This is Wheelbarrow Man from last week, the man I have been frantically trying to avoid meeting again by walking, literally, all round the houses. And now here he is, by the milk in Sainsbury’s. At exactly the same moment I am. Don’t you just love irony?

      I turn slightly, not fully round this time, just enough to catch sight of him and let him know that I’m acknowledging him, and give a half-smile. ‘Oh, yeah, sorry. Hi.’ I turn back to the impossible milk choices before me.

      ‘I thought you were coming back with a clapometer,’ he says now, and I can hear that he’s grinning. ‘I worked so hard on some new material; never got a chance to test it out.’

      What the hell is he going on about? I have no idea, so I give a meaningless ‘huh’ noise and shrug without turning. Hopefully he’ll realise that I need all my concentration to decide on the milk.

      A hand reaches into the picture and closes around a four-pinter of skimmed. I only get a view of it for a couple of seconds before it retreats with its prize, but in that time I can see that it’s generally grimy all over, and there is black filth under all the fingernails. My lip curls. Right here is the reason why I’m not buying milk today.

      ‘See you on the tour then,’ he says to my back. I give a minimal nod without turning, and wait for a couple of seconds until he moves away. Thank God for that. Filthy people always give me the creeps. Or maybe it was just him.

      On the way home, I have to walk through the housing estate. I love this bit of the walk, for two principal reasons. Firstly, it’s all good solid pavement, so no mud, loose shingle, scary bridges or eight-legged freaks. The going is good to firm, with no elevation or dangerous foliage. There are lots of large hydrangea and lavender bushes bursting out of gardens, some of which overhang badly over the pavement which is a little bit annoying, but they’re easy enough to avoid. The homeowners shouldn’t really let them get into the sort of state that affects pedestrians, but at least if they do brush me as I pass, I don’t get stung or scratched. I frown in the general direction of the house windows when this occurs, hoping someone might some day see the inconvenience they’re causing and do something about it. It hasn’t worked yet.

      The second reason I like this part is that it’s so interesting to look into the gardens and un-becurtained windows of the houses and observe a snapshot of the lives playing out behind them. It’s a bit like watching a soap, except less murder and brawling and more hoovering. For me, it’s a little tether to normality, at a time when I’m feeling adrift and directionless.

      ‘It seems so weird that life is just going on as normal,’ I said to Abby once when we walked past here. ‘Everyone carries on buying milk and hanging out the washing and paying the leccy bill and arguing and loving, as if everything’s fine and nothing devastating has happened.’

      ‘Yes, I know,’ she said, looking at me pointedly. ‘It’s hard to believe sometimes that thousands of people have died or lost their homes in floods and earthquakes in some parts of the world, isn’t it?’

      There’s one particular house along here that I’m looking forward to passing today. It’s got such a beautiful front lawn, very green and smooth, no weeds, it’s plainly obvious that someone lives here who really cares about it, and has got the time to spend on it. The edges are really crisp, too, where it meets the flower borders. It pleases me, the sharpness of the earth there. It looks like the inside of a slice of mud cake, with grass icing.

      The houses along here remind me very much of Mum and Graham’s house. Well, technically it was Graham’s house, but when they got married Mum sold our old place and put all the money she got for it into extending Graham’s, so there was enough room for all of us. I think a lot was spent on updating it too. He’d lived there on his own for years, so it was in a terrible state. Really gruesome. He had wallpaper in the kitchen that featured pictures of cutlery; an avocado bathroom suite; and bright red swirly patterned carpet everywhere. There were only three bedrooms, so they had a huge two-storey extension built at the side which made a bedroom each for me and Naomi, and a second bathroom for us to share. Darren and Lee – Graham’s two boys – didn’t live there, but he wanted them to have a room each anyway, for when they visited.

      Ah, there’s a woman standing on the driveway of the house with the lovely lawn. Is she tending it? I’d love to know how she gets her edges so crisp. I turn the music off but leave the earphones in, as a kind of disguise. It’s a great way to look like you’re deaf to your surroundings, while straining every nerve to hear what’s going on, just in case something interesting happens. Also it tends to stop weird strangers from talking to you. Having said that, wearing earphones has on at least one occasion actually encouraged one of the weirdos out there to approach me. It was while I was walking along the canal bank a couple of days ago, and there was no one else around. This particular weirdo was shirtless and carrying a lager can in one hand, two factors that immediately made me feel apprehensive. I dropped my gaze and moved quickly to the extreme edge of the path, employing my standard tactic for avoiding any kind of contact with weirdos: the old classic ‘if I don’t see them, they can’t see me’ manoeuvre. In my peripheral vision I could see that he was lurching towards me, looking directly at me, and that his mouth was moving. He was clearly slurring something to me. There was absolutely no way I wanted to engage in any kind of interaction with this grinning freak, so it was crucial to make not the slightest eye contact, even accidentally, and to maintain the stance of being completely oblivious to his presence in front of me by shunning him in every way possible.

      ‘Pardon?’ I said politely, stopping and taking one earphone out of my ear. Oh damn, shit, bugger and balls! My good manners, bred into me relentlessly by my mum, had kicked in automatically – testament to her top notch parenting. Thanks to her, I was completely unable to ignore another human being when he was clearly addressing me, even though he was half naked and wholly drunk – exactly the sort of stranger Mum would have wanted me to avoid at all costs. Great. Now I had engaged him in conversation. Thanks, Mum.

      ‘I said, can I press my cheek against yours and listen to your music with you?’ he repeated, coming even nearer and smiling still more broadly. He swigged from his can enthusiastically. For one alarming moment I thought he was going to embrace me.

      ‘Um, no,’ I said, stopping myself at the last minute from adding ‘thanks’. I don’t have to be polite to this one, I kept telling myself. You can ignore him, just get away from him as quickly as possible. I resumed walking and plugged my earphone back in as I did so. But not before I heard him call after me, ‘Will you have an affair with me?’