Page 44 of The Price of Love
‘What are you on about?’
‘Look at his texts.’
‘Don’t be bloody daft! That’s spying! Why should I want to do that? I trust Luke, absolutely.’
‘If you trust him, then there won’t be anything strange, will there?’ Cal nodded at the phone. It had gone to screen, which was a picture of a sports car.
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s wrong.’
‘Okay, you trust him, that’s good.’ Cal half-turned away. ‘Just checking. I mean, he seems a bit . . . I dunno. Edgy? And I’m not talking about that bloody haircut either.’
The screen had gone black now. I found I was staring at its blankness, and my reflection made me look uncertain. ‘I . . .’ I began, and then there was a buzz, and the screen lit up with the first lines of an incoming message.
From: Dee-Dee.
Can’t wait to see you later! We could go for a walk on the beach! Sorry about last night, I was
And that was all that displayed. I felt the world stop spinning, judder to a halt beneath me and flex. ‘Can’t wait to see you later,’ I repeated, like an idiot. The earth under me was still holding its breath, unsure how to start moving again. I held on to the Micra for support, my heart booming in my ears, a sour taste beginning in my mouth. What could . . . I mean, who would . . . he . . .Luke . . .
‘Has something happened?’ His voice made me jump. Cal held out a hand for the phone. ‘Can I see?’
Part of me wanted to pretend it was nothing. To protect Luke, in some strange way, from Cal, from Cal’s opinion, but I needed another perspective on this and, as my mouth dried, I handed the phone over from nerveless fingers.
Cal looked at the screen. He might have checked the messages box too, I didn’t notice, I just watched the way his long fingers moved about on the phone, as though playing an instrument he was adept on. He looked up eventually and said, ‘Shit.’
The shock was beginning to fade, passing over me to be replaced by rationalism. ‘It’s nothing incriminating though, isit? I mean, there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation, obviously. Dee-Dee could be a business colleague, Luke might have had a meeting yesterday.’
‘The sort of business meeting where they plan going walking on the beach together?’
I snatched the phone away, shoving it into my pocket. ‘Yes, well, we don’t know anything. It could be, you know, like those breakfast meetings, only a walking meeting.’
‘On the beach.’
I shrugged. The cold grip of shock was beginning to let go of my insides, but there was a zombie-kiss of horror making my lips tingle. My brain refused to think.
Cal opened the Micra and pushed me into the passenger seat, where I sat and shivered. He didn’t say anything, for which I was grateful, but stood outside the car looking over its roof towards the house, a lost expression on his face. I tried not to think of the condom behind me. The sun was beginning to sink behind the hills, the sky turning a chalky red, the clouds as pink as conjunctivitis and away to the east I could see night boiling up, insinuating its way in under the daylight. Cal swung into the driving seat beside me and rested his arms on the wheel.
‘Right. Bedtime story, to take your mind off things,’ he said. ‘Once upon a time, there was a little boy — that’s me, by the way — whose parents had waited a long, long time to have him. And then, when he was born, he arrived much too early and had to spend a long time in hospital, in a special cot. His parents didn’t mind. Because they’d waited such a time for him to arrive, they were happy simply to have him. Then he grew up, and he wasn’t the lovely, perfect child that they’d thought. Instead he was weak and ungainly and clumsy and couldn’t walk properly or run at all. And these parents said “we don’t want a little boy who isn’t perfect”, so they gave him away. Gave him to an old lady, who loved him, and did her best for him, but who wasn’t his motheror father. That little boy grew up to be someone who didn’t trust the perfect people and kept out of their way, and only mixed with his own kind, the damaged and the weak. But then, do you know what? This boy grew into a man who realised that nobody was perfect. Oh, some of them pretended to be, and they were the worst ones. The ones that looked like they’d been sent from heaven, all shiny and bright and lovely, because underneath they were rotten and black, the sort of people who’d lie and cheat and steal and . . . anyway. My point, if I’ve got one, is that, well, nobody’s perfect. Not really. We’re the lucky ones, because our imperfections are there for everyone to see. I can’t walk straight and you can’t keep your lunch in place. Apart from that, we’re perfect.You’reperfect. And that Luke, he doesn’t deserve you.’
‘That’s . . . what happened to you, it was . . . wrong!’ Cal’s story had distracted me, but the feelings were a paper-thickness away.
‘I know. Took a lot of therapy for me to deal with it, to come to terms with the fact that my parents weren’t perfect. Hadn’t been perfect. That they’d had no right to demand perfection of me. I was achild, their child, and they should have faced their responsibilities, not given up on me as though I was an untrainable dog. But they didn’t. End of story. Sorry. I didn’t mean to encroach on your feelings there but I just thought you should know. Me. All of it. Well, most of it, anyway.’
‘Are you saying that Luke isn’t what he appears to be? That he’stooperfect?’
‘Hey, put your own interpretation on it, why don’t you?’ He faced me and gently flicked my nose with a fingertip. ‘You have to make up your own mind here, Willow. These messages, yeah, I agree they aren’t exactly hanging evidence, but there’s somebody out there. You might want to find out who that is, before you let this go any further.’
I picked up the phone from where it lay in my lap. ‘It could be his brother?’
‘Could be. If they take’ — Cal winked — ‘thatkind of beach walk together.’
‘Or a friend?’
‘Again, yes.’
I looked down at the phone. The chill of the plastic casing against my hand felt like death. ‘I don’t know what to do, Cal.’
I saw him sigh, saw his shoulders move, but he didn’t make a sound, then he rubbed my arm. ‘I’d say, at a guess, you need to talk to him about this. I can’t help, I can only make suppositions, and that’s really not what you need right now, is it? Are you feeling up to heading back down to the farm yet?’
