Is This the Way You Said? Read online

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Fiction

  Ulverton

  Still

  Pieces of Light

  Shifts

  Nineteen Twenty-One

  No Telling

  The Rules of Perspective

  Poetry

  Mornings in the Baltic

  Meeting Montaigne

  From the Neanderthal

  Nine Lessons from the Dark

  This ebook is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form (including any digital form) other than this in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Epub ISBN: 9781446426937

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Jonathan Cape 2006

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Copyright © Adam Thorpe 2006

  Adam Thorpe has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs

  and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  First published in Great Britain in 2006 by

  Jonathan Cape

  Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA

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  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9780224074971 (from January 2007)

  ISBN 0224074970

  Often you meet your destiny on the very path you took to avoid it.

  Jean de La Fontaine

  CONTENTS

  Heavy Shopping

  In the Author’s Footsteps

  The Problem

  The Silence

  Dead Bolt

  Bright-Green Trainers

  The Concert Interval

  Karaoke

  Trolls

  Abandon

  The Orchard

  Preserved

  You Never

  Wanderlust

  Is This the Way You Said?

  HEAVY SHOPPING

  He was on a high-intensity bash in Stirling when the news came through. Phil McAllister, the operations manager, found him in the corridor.

  ‘I’m a father,’ Alan said, blowing his nose. ‘She’s in an incubator. She’s OK.’

  ‘That’s cracking, Alan,’ said Phil, in his dull Dumfries voice.

  ‘She’s two months wotsits – premature.’

  ‘It’ll be alright, Alan. They can do anything, these days. You don’t need a womb.’

  Sophie had called him in the middle of the pre-breakfast induction meeting, twenty minutes ago, and Alan had excused himself because it was Sofe, though he’d pretended it was business. Sophie hadn’t phoned him at work since the end of their unfortunate little fling three years back.

  Roger Unwin had been in the middle of one of his lectures, grinding on about establishing an organisation culture in an era of flat management while Hairy Mary took notes. It was easy to slip out. It was a relief, frankly: the air was full of his colleagues’ pre-breakfast flatulence, unwashed mouths, overdone roll-on deodorants.

  Sophie was phoning from the hospital. He had a little girl.

  He couldn’t believe it. He’d had a few too many in the bar on arrival last night and didn’t feel one hundred per cent. The unbelieving part of him was watching him from the outside, with folded arms, cool as a cucumber.

  He had a little girl.

  ‘Why?’ he asked, like a kid.

  ‘It happens.’

  ‘That’s a little bit of a surprise.’

  He was amazed at how calm he was being. It wasn’t normal. It wasn’t even a good thing. The reception was lousy and made Sofe sound breathless. Or maybe she was breathless.

  ‘Look, how’s Jill?’

  ‘Jill’s just fine,’ said his wife’s best friend.

  ‘And my little girl?’

  ‘Alan, she’s two months premature but they’re very good.’

  ‘I know she’s two months premature.’

  ‘They’ve put her in an incubator. They’re very good.’

  ‘She’s going to be alright, obviously,’ he said.

  ‘They’re very good.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with her?’

  Sophie sighed. ‘They know what they’re doing, Alan.’

  ‘Beautiful, is she, obviously?’

  ‘She’s very—’

  The line fuzzed and drowned Sophie out, but he thought he’d heard ‘tiny’. She’s very tiny. All babies are tiny. He walked along the corridor with the mobile pressed to his ear and the fuzz died down in front of a Greek bust that Brian Wallis had said looked like Pat Ryan after the latest sales figures had been posted. A brass plaque on the base said: Athene Ergane, Working Athena. The Premiere Company Working for You. He wished life could be simpler.

  ‘Sophie? Hello? Hello? Fuck. Hello?’

  She came back on line again.

  ‘Sophie, hiya, sorry about the reception. I’m in this bloody conference centre way up in Stirling. Where’re you phoning from?’

  ‘The hospital.’

  ‘And mother and baby – they’re OK?’

  ‘I said, they’re OK, Alan. Keep calm.’

  ‘Right. That’s good.’

  How could she be telling him to keep calm? He was amazingly calm. He knew deep down that everything would be A-plus.

  ‘She’s very little,’ said Sophie, her voice cracking.

  He nodded.

  ‘Obviously. When was she born?’

  ‘At 5.50.’

  His heart took a quick breath as if he’d fallen deeply in love. Then it was slamming again.

  ‘In the morning, obviously.’

  ‘Sorry?

  ‘In the early hours.’

  ‘It felt like the night.’

  ‘Why didn’t you phone earlier?’

  ‘It wasn’t our first thought, Alan. Our first thought was Jill and the baby.’

  ‘They’re OK?’

  ‘Yes, Alan.’

  ‘I mean, you know, they’re not in danger, obviously?’

  ‘They’re in very good hands, Alan. I think Jill would like you to be here. I’ve got to go now.’

  ‘Of course I’ll be there,’ he said. ‘Of course I will. We’ll sort it. Tell her to keep her pecker up and she gets a very sloppy kiss from me.’

  He didn’t know whether to be over the moon or gutted. So he was neither. He was empty where he should have been full. He was watching himself as people do on operating tables. He was acting, he was actually acting alarmed. In fact, a large part of him just wanted to get back into the meeting and have Roger Unwin bore the knickers off him again.

  The baby had been born way too early. Over two months early. Was that dangerously early? Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe they whacked them all into incubators, just to be sure. Premature. His little girl. The cheeky little scrog couldn’t wait to get out, she was obviously going to be precocious. Precocious. A better concept than premature. He’d wanted to talk to Jill herself but Sophie had told him she was too tired. She wasn’t asleep, she was too tired, and her mobile was switched off. He could always try texting her.

 
; Well done you I love you both very much xxxxxxx

  I’ll bet she’s on an oxygen mask, he thought, sending the message off and immediately thinking how pathetic it was. Bloody oxygen mask – that’s why she can’t talk. Sophie’s protecting his feelings. Or maybe Jill doesn’t want to talk to him because he’s a man and these are two women working together as women do, shutting him out.

  He phoned Sophie again and told her he very much wanted to talk to Jill, she didn’t have to talk back, and Sofe asked him why he was sounding angry and he denied sounding angry. He could hear voices behind her voice, and distant metallic crashes and bangs. He said it sounded as if she was on a building site and Sofe said they were at the Hull General, or whatever it was called, but they weren’t allowed to use mobiles in the wards so she was walking down the corridor towards the lifts.

  ‘Kingston General,’ he said, ‘on Beverley Road? You sure? Not the Royal Infirmary?’

  ‘I’m sure, Alan.’

  ‘Our local hospital’s the Royal Infirmary.’

  ‘They took her to the nearest one. She was out shopping in the Prospect Centre.’

  ‘Shopping? You mean she wasn’t at home?’

  The Greek bust glared at him under very wavy hair with what looked like a pair of Ray-bans on the top of its head: it was a Grecian hair-clasp.

  ‘She’s not always at home, Alan.’

  ‘What happened exactly, Sophie?’

  ‘In the Prospect Centre.’

  ‘Give us the gen, Sofe. Please.’

  His neck started to hurt, twisted over the mobile. His shoulders were raised like a hunchback’s.

  ‘She was out shopping late yesterday,’ said Sophie, ‘in the Prospect. It’s late closing on Fridays. She felt all faint at about seven o’clock. Basically, her waters broke in front of Foot Locker and she went into labour. They called the ambulance. They were very good, the paramedics. Saved the baby’s life, though it wasn’t delivered until about ten hours later. It ought to’ve been a miscarriage, they said. Everyone’s being very good, here.’

  He lowered his shoulders with difficulty.

  ‘I phoned her yesterday,’ he pointed out. ‘At about five. She was full of beans. She was watching a re-run of Falcon Crest. She didn’t say anything about a shopping trip.’

  Sophie didn’t reply.

  ‘Was she carrying something heavy? Lots of bags or something?’

  ‘Just her own shopping basket. The jute one with bamboo handles that she really likes. It only had a few things in. I’ll take it back and feed Benji at the same time. Does he need taking out?’

  ‘No. Just the biccies, the beef ones, in the big bowl that says Simply the Finest or he’ll go all daft. I can’t understand why you didn’t call me last night, Sofe.’

  ‘I didn’t know where you were. We thought you were in Stockport.’

  ‘Jill knew it was Stirling this year. Anyway, what about the mobile?’

  ‘You’ve just changed the number,’ she said.

  ‘I gave her the new number. I was very careful to give her that, obviously. It was on a Post-It by the knife-rack. I can hardly remember it myself.’

  ‘She was a little bit out of it, Alan.’

  She sounded annoyed.

  ‘I’m worried,’ he said, as if instructing himself. ‘In fact, I’m extremely bloody worried. I’m so far away.’

  ‘It’s not that far, Alan. It’s not right up in the Highlands, is it?’

  ‘A good five hours. You’ve got to get round Edinburgh. I came up in Brian Wallis’s new Mondeo, with a couple of the others. I haven’t even got the bloody car, Sophie.’

  She said her credit was about to run out and it did so just as she was giving him the number of the hospital, having taken about five minutes to find the bit of paper. That was Sofe all over. Then he’d suddenly found himself crying. He’d been staring at the mobile, his thumb hovering, wondering about trains from Stirling to Hull, wondering how Roger Unwin would take his early departure before the key meeting tomorrow on strategic management for personnel planning, at which he was supposed to spout forth wonders and generally polish the apple, when his nose had filled up and he’d found himself with tears on his hands. It was dramatic. He hadn’t done that since his best friend Steve Barratt had got himself killed on the back of a motorbike just before their joint twenty-first. Seventeen, eighteen years ago? Christ. Steve Barratt and the little sprog were the same thing.

  He could still hear the Great White Chief groaning on through the closed door. He couldn’t go back into the meeting in this state. He’d have to find out about trains. He wanted to see his brand-new daughter, born at 5.50 a.m.

  He couldn’t face phoning his mum. His fancy mobile was wet from his salty tears, it would probably rust, he had to wipe the keyboard on his tie. The little critter was the envy of the whole department, a Handspring Treo 180 that wickedly combined a PDA with a phone and web access. You can practically wash your smalls in it, he’d joked. Now the company was to install Blackberry software and they’d all have to have a bloody Blackberry in their shirt pockets, by order of the Yanks.

  He tried to access the train timetable for Stirling, having not the faintest what rail company it was, but all he got was window-spam and something that looked like a gherkin from Stirling Sex Products Inc. He kept at it, though, walking up and down the corridor with both thumbs pecking away until a timetable came up for Stirling with a cartoon picture of a bear. Change at Lethbridge for Medicine Hat, Swift Current and Moose Jaw. He stared for a moment, perplexed. Where the hell in Scotland was Moose Jaw?

  OK, there was a Stirling in Alberta, Canada. With this train you could head off up into the Northwest Territories, alight on Great Slave Lake at Hay River or cross up into the Yukon. He’d love to cross up into the Yukon and paddle through the ice floes, he could think of nothing nicer. There was also a Stirling in Australia, in New Zealand and in California, where of course it was Stirling City. The Scottish Stirling sites he finally scrolled down to had nothing as straightforward and simple as a railway timetable. He could hire a car. He should never have agreed to the share drive thing with Brian Wallis and co. This is what happened when you thought about the environment.

  He snapped the Treo shut and shoved it into his jacket and took a deep breath, wiping his eyes and nose on his cuff. Because his suit had been to the dry-cleaner’s, he’d got no tissues on him. Sod’s law. His bottom shirt buttons were undone over his stomach: he did them up again with difficulty, feeling fat and sorrowful. What the hell was he crying like this for? Because Steve Barratt and his daughter were the same thing. Life could be so simple.

  It was at this point, then, that Phil McAllister emerged, looking for him. Alan pretended to have an allergy to the carpets, at first. Phil told him that Roger was keen he be there for the end of the discussion, to give the personnel angle, before breaking for breakfast.

  That’s when, instead of saying, ‘Roger can go hang on his tits,’ he said: ‘I’m a father. She’s in an incubator. She’s OK.’

  After Phil had said, ‘You don’t need a womb,’ Alan had tried to take control of himself.

  ‘Kristen.’

  ‘Kristen?’

  ‘That’s my baby’s name.’

  And he started cracking up again.

  ‘I’m sorry, Phil,’ he said, in a high, pansy voice, wiping stuff off his upper lip. ‘Don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Everything was going A-plus, too. A bloody wonderful pregnancy. We’d just bought a nice blue pram with a wotsit – a carry cot.’

  Phil, a very steady teetotal Scotsman with a deep and tedious voice, gave him a clean man-size tissue and offered to let Roger Unwin know. This was exactly the kind of help Alan needed. For the first time in ten years at Northcott Jackson he felt an urge to hug one of his colleagues. He was glad Phil hadn’t asked how mother and child were, but come straight to the point.

  Phil went back inside the room, closing the door behind him. Alan heard a muffled interchange of voices, including R
oger Unwin’s.

  Phil’s tissue smelt of mints. It made Alan feel sick.

  He could picture Roger’s face, receiving the news. Slow handclap for Roger Unwin, Man with a Heart of Tungsten. This was the bloke who’d sent round a self-assessment form in the name of career development, then placed those who assessed their performance as ‘poor’ at the top of the redundancy list. This was not someone who would understand about an incubator. The bastard may well refuse him permission to leave.

  They’d be going back day after tomorrow, anyway, after the morning wrap-up. If the baby was OK in the incubator then one or two days was not going to make a lot of difference. He’d have his daughter for the rest of his life, barring catastrophe. Jill didn’t even feel like talking to him. Forty-eight hours or so was not going to make a lot of difference, not with a modern incubator in the frame.

  His shoes trod the soft plush of the corridor.

  If they’d phoned him last night, then things might have been easier. He might even have been there for the birth. But now it was born, he might as well act steady.

  If you hadn’t gone out and purchased the Treo 180 last week, wise-arse, they’d have had your number and you might have been there for the birth.

  He couldn’t help it if they’d got in touch only when the ball was rolling. Unless it was the girls deliberately freezing him out.

  He was a dad. A real live one. They’d got a sprog at last. Kristen. A name with class. Sounds like an Anglepoise lamp from IKEA, he’d joked, at first. But he’d come round to it.

  He cleared his throat as if to speak. He fished out his mobile again and tried Jill’s, just in case Sophie had got it wrong. Jill’s mobile was switched off. He scrolled through his address book: he should be phoning all his mates, Jill’s mother, his own mum, but he couldn’t face it. He couldn’t even face texting, not until he knew how things were going to pan out.

  He had to get down to Kingston General. Right away.

  He could almost hear the ripping sound of his own legs. Nobody, but nobody in the whole history of western civilisation had ever contemplated bunking the Northcott Jackson Three-Day Away Fixture. You weren’t even supposed to phone home. Brian Wallis called it the Convocation of Cardinals. He was a lapsed Catholic, of course.