Carry You - Beth Thomas

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Time for me to go, I think. Abby is a truly great friend, and a good person, with the soul of an angel and the heart of a giant. She is kind and thoughtful and considerate and gentle, and when she gets annoyed fire comes out of her nostrils and her voice can split atoms.

      ‘You haven’t been fucking walking at all this past week, have you?’ was her opening gambit on Sunday afternoon. I almost didn’t understand her because her jaw was clenched together and she barely moved her lips as she spoke.

      You know that feeling you get when you’ve been found out doing something? Or not doing something? Or something you’ve done, and shouldn’t have, has been discovered? Well that’s exactly the feeling I got at that moment. It was like something solid and heavy plunging down through my abdomen, making me curl inwards and grasp my tummy.

      I frowned. ‘Abs,’ I started to say, but I didn’t have anything else.

      She raised her eyebrows and put her hands on her hips. Then tilted her head a little and gave a teeny smile. ‘Ah Daze,’ she said, her voice much less like a nuclear missile than I had been expecting, ‘I understand that you’re down. I really do. I know that it’s making you not want to do anything. I even get why you lied to me. No, don’t deny it. It’s undeniable, isn’t it? I mean, if you really had been walking down to the park and back every day this week, I’m fairly sure you would have learned how to get there by now.’

      She’s incredible, isn’t she? I mean, stand aside, Columbo. Take your beige mac and your wonky eye and get out of here. Of course, I did make it easy for her with that idiotic blunder. Completely ridiculous when you consider the lengths I went to to cover my tracks – or lack of them. But then I never expected to be tested on my knowledge of ‘Parks Near Abby’s Flat and How to Get There’. Abs suggested that morning that the three of us go out after lunch for a nice long walk, starting off at the park and from there to the seafront. It sounded like an awfully long way to me but I couldn’t let Abby see me thinking that.

      ‘Sure,’ I’d said nonchalantly. ‘Should be a piece of cake.’ I hadn’t done the walking I’d said I’d been doing, but I figured it wouldn’t be too challenging. It was only walking after all. How hard could it be?

      As it turned out, of course, the distance wasn’t the relevant factor. It all ground to a halt long before the distance became an issue. There was a bit of preamble when Tom and Abby had some kind of disagreement about whether or not he was coming with us. I’m not sure who was arguing for which angle, but the whole thing ended with a lot of ‘Fine’, ‘Fine’, ‘Suit yourself’, ‘I will’, and he didn’t come. I was glad, actually. He’s about as easy to talk to as a marble statue. And I’m always just as surprised when he responds.

      ‘Everything all right?’ I said to Abs as we went out of the gate of her building. I didn’t want to pry but felt I had to say something. Bit weird if you witness a horrible row between two people and then calmly start a conversation about Hollyoaks.

      She was frowning and blinking a lot, which I guessed meant she was trying not to cry. I was a bit taken aback by that, as she’s not usually one to cry. It’s something we both feel the same about. Crying is a blatant demonstration – on your face, of all places, to make sure absolutely everyone sees it – of self-pity. It is self-indulgent, attention-seeking and achieves literally nothing. Normally I can’t bear it, particularly from women. All those weepy heroines in the forties have given us a lot of ground to make up in the crying stakes. Small wonder we are generally despised as a gender for our tap-like qualities. But lately, of course, I’ve been doing crying enough for me and Abby. And, let’s face it, all those weepy heroines from the forties. I can picture all their black and white expressions, smiling at me winsomely every morning as my face leaks sickeningly from every orifice. ‘Chin up, old gal,’ they’ll be saying, in soft oblique lighting, ‘you look tarribly queeah.’

      ‘Fine,’ Abby’d said, nodding vigorously. ‘It’s all fine.’

      We walked on to the end of her road in silence, turned left, and Abby stopped abruptly – violently, even, if it’s possible to do that – put her hands on her hips and spoke that memorable and immortal phrase, ‘Daisy Macintyre, you haven’t been fucking walking at all this past week, have you?’ Enter Columbo.

      That was the day before yesterday. Today is Tuesday, April 21st. My magic trainers are officially a week old today. Happy Birthday trainers. I roll back over onto my bottom and stand up, brushing grass and dirt off me. It should take me about half an hour to get back now, provided I don’t get lost, which is actually quite likely, even though this is my third visit here. I don’t have the best sense of direction in the world – got lost in a maze, remember?

      A movement at the periphery of my vision attracts my attention and I turn sharply to focus on it. It’s a woman jauntily walking away from me, crossing the arc of my vision from right to left. I stare at her, noting the thick brown ponytail, the boot-cut jeans with trainers, the navy blue fleece jacket. The way she’s walking, almost bouncing along, arms swinging, is achingly, heart-breakingly familiar. I hold my breath, gazing after her as she moves further and further away from me, receding from my sight. I blink and start moving. The logical part of my brain knows it isn’t her, knows it can’t be her, knows that – even if it is her – there are so many hurtful questions that would have more hurtful answers that I almost couldn’t bear for it actually to be her, but her gait and her hair and her clothes are so right, so distinctive, so exact that I set off after her across the park anyway.

      ‘Mum?’ The word comes out of me in a whisper but I hardly notice as I try to reach her. But she turns, she moves, she disappears, she reappears, all the time out of my grasp, each time getting further away, smaller and smaller until I’m breathless and panting with the effort of getting to her. ‘Mum, Mum, Mum,’ I puff rhythmically, not really noticing the harsh rasp of desperation creeping in as I turn the final corner, look up the street and see that she’s gone. I stop and stand for a few moments, eyes fixed on the empty horizon.

      ‘’Scuse me?’

      The voice behind me interrupts my thoughts and I snap back to where I am. Disconcertingly, I find I am outside the park boundary, on a pavement somewhere, with no recollection of how I got here. Oh shit. This is how it starts. I feel the first faint, familiar stirrings of panic as I accept that I am probably lost. Again. I scan my surroundings quickly to try and find something that looks familiar, but it’s just a load of nondescript semi-detached houses, with black or blue cars parked on the driveways. One of them has a tree in the front lawn. It’s lovely – covered in pink blossom, like candyfloss on a stick.

      ‘Er, excuse me? Again.’

      I turn round to look, partly to see who’s speaking but mostly to see if there is any way I can work out which direction the park is from here. Surely I’ve just come out of a gate or something and it will be directly behind me? I can’t have gone far. But there’s nothing there; just the same bland street stretching away into the distance. Well, as far as the T-junction at the end, anyway. A motorbike goes past, right to left, and disappears. Where in God’s name is the park?

      A man’s face inserts itself into the frame, blocking out the left-hand side of the picture. He’s smiling broadly, but his eyebrows are pulled together slightly, as if he’s looking at a ninety-year-old woman in a nightie trying to buy a ticket to Afghanistan.

      I meet his gaze and raise my eyebrows. ‘Yes?’ I say, in a tone that lets him know without a doubt that I don’t need help of any kind. ‘What is it?’

      He’s quite scruffy in a dirty grey tee shirt and denim cut-offs, with messy brown hair pushed away from his face and damp with sweat. His forehead and top lip are beaded with it, although rather annoyingly my attention is drawn to the cute dimples that are showing in his cheeks as he grins. Attractively boyish for someone who’s probably in his early thirties. I look away hurriedly and at this point I notice that he’s holding the handles of a huge wheelbarrow, which is full of masonry or bricks or something else that is firmly lodged in a world I don’t go into. Immediately to my left is a wide driveway that appears to be in the middle of having block paving laid down on it.

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