15. Colin, the man with a plan
15
COLIN, THE MAN WITH A PLAN
For fuck’s sake. Colin was at the limit of his endurance here. The limit! And now this. Doogie Chambers! Doogie fucking Chambers. She was rubbing his nose in it, the bitch. The absolute, out-and-out bitch. His arms pumped. His heart pumped. Everything about him was pumped. Colin was one pumping, throbbing mass of indignation, stomping down the street at near Olympian speed. He had nowhere to go but he couldn’t have stayed there watching them having fun at his expense. If he had a car, he’d just get in it and drive, but there was no car, because Arianne had stolen that too. So there was nothing else to do but walk. He could have taken a bus, but Colin didn’t do buses. He had his limits.
Before long he found he’d arrived at the allotments. He didn’t know why he’d ended up here. It wasn’t exactly a place of comfort, more one of daily endurance. And for what? In the vain hope his daughter might acknowledge his effort? She had not. In the even vainer hope that his son might recognise how much he’d been humbled? He had not. No one had made the slightest effort to say anything positive, except for Clyde, and that was only that his digging had improved. Still, he was here now, and someone had left the gate unlocked.
The place was nearly empty. Just a few diehards left. Everyone else had gone home for their dinner. Colin kept his head down and followed the path towards the thicket hedge. He shouldn’t be here really. Not without Arthur, his geriatric minder.
‘Back so soon?’
Colin looked up and saw the woman who’d come to get Arthur on that first day. What was her name now? Ursula, that was it. ‘Can’t keep away.’ He said it with a little laugh, keeping it light-hearted so she didn’t guess he was here without permission, and kept walking before she asked where Arthur was.
Once he got through the hedge, he relaxed a little. They hadn’t cut it back yet so he was invisible on this side. They’d left the chairs outside the shed earlier. He took one of them, his body still jittery with the shock of seeing Doogie Chambers, the man who’d ruined his life.
The first ever time Netta had spoken to Colin, he couldn’t believe his luck. He’d been a nerdy accountancy student then and she’d been the girl all the guys wanted, the kind that floated around campus unaware that half the male population of Manchester University were having fantasies about her. When he saw her at a party, he already knew more than he should about her but he hadn’t even registered on her scale. She was too much in love, really madly in love, with the one and only Doogie Chambers. As luck would have it, she’d had a big bust up with him that night and, even though he knew she looked down on him, Colin grabbed his chance and clung to it by his fingernails. Her friends hated him, her parents hated him, but he didn’t care, because he loved Netta Wilde so much, nothing else mattered.
She didn’t go back to Chambers, and Colin thought he’d won the biggest prize ever, the gold medal of gold medals. Because he’d won Netta Wilde, the most perfect woman he’d ever known. If she’d thought the same of him, or even if she’d liked him just a tiny bit, they’d probably still be married today. But she didn’t. He wasn’t funny, or smart, or cool enough. He liked the wrong music, wore the wrong clothes, said the wrong things. In other words, he wasn’t Doogie Chambers.
When the children came along, it looked like their marriage might just make it. He was a good father and for a while, he thought she’d actually found some respect for him. But he’d reckoned without human nature. A work project had taken her back to Manchester, and back to him. Six months of working half the week there and half the week in Birmingham. Six months with Doogie Chambers. That’s all it took to ruin everything. The thing was, he may never have found out if she hadn’t got pregnant and lost the baby. Not Colin’s baby. She’d hardly looked at him, never mind touched him, since she’d been pregnant with Liza. Two years of being shunned like a leper. Then, he gets called to the hospital and told his wife’s had a fall and she’s lost the baby. If he hadn’t had the kids, he’d have probably done something to hurt himself. When she said who the father was, there were only two people he wanted to hurt. But he wasn’t a violent man, and Chambers wasn’t around anymore.
A flash of blue caught his eye. Ursula was making her way towards him, her path a bit easier than the last time she’d taken it. She was wearing the same dress she’d worn on that day and was carrying something. As she neared him, he could see it was a wine carrier and two glasses.
‘I was about to open a bottle of wine, and I thought it would be very selfish of me to drink it alone when you’re sitting here pondering on life. Unless you prefer to be alone, that is.’
Actually no, Colin didn’t want to be alone. He’d had more than enough of that. ‘I couldn’t think of anything better than watching the sun go down with a nice glass of wine.’
She gave him a smile that showed a set of perfectly even, white teeth. ‘I can’t promise it’ll be nice. It’s pot luck at the corner shop, whatever’s chilled in the fridge. But it will be wine and there will be a sunset.’
She sat in the next seat and gave him the bottle to pour while she held the glasses. They each took a sip and only winced slightly. ‘I’ve had worse,’ she said.
Colin thought about a revolting elderberry wine Arianne once brought back from one of her retreats. He’d been forced to drink it to keep her happy and spent almost a week on, or with his head down, the toilet. ‘So have I.’
Ursula looked out beyond the furthest thicket hedge. ‘It’s lovely here. Samuel and I often used to sit here at this time, admiring the sky and talking through our day.’
‘The guy who had this allotment? You were?—?’
‘Friends, yes. Great friends. I still miss him. He’d be happy to see his patch being reworked. Are you a keen gardener, Colin?’
So she knew his name then. Colin wondered what else she knew about him. ‘Not really. I just come because…’ He stopped, not sure what to say.
‘Because you’re in between things,’ she said with no trace of irony on her face.
‘Yes, that’s a good way of putting it.’
‘Many of us come for the same reason.’
‘Is that why you come?’
‘Not when I first started coming, but I think it is now.’ She ran her fingers through her long, grey hair. She was a beautiful woman, but it didn’t seem to matter to her. She reminded him of Netta in that way. She turned to him and smiled, the skin around her pale blue eyes wrinkling a little. ‘Can you face some more?’
‘Sorry? Oh yes, why not.’ He’d been too busy trying to work out her age. He topped up their glasses and took a guess at early sixties.
‘It doesn’t taste so bad after the first half glass. Look, the sun’s almost gone,’ she said.
Colin turned back to the dying sun, a fireball descending into the Earth’s core. It would be good to paint such a scene. Except he wasn’t painting anymore, and even when he did, he didn’t paint that sort of thing.
‘I’m afraid I’ll have to throw you out soon,’ she said. ‘Do you have somewhere to go?’
‘Yes. Do you?’
‘Yes, thank you.’ She said it with a little laugh, and he thought of Netta again.
‘Don’t take this the wrong way but I could be anyone. I could be someone, you know, very bad. You should be careful.’ His head felt woozy. He’d drunk the wine too quickly on an empty stomach. He assumed that was why he was jabbering on and patronising a woman who was probably older and wiser than him.
‘Yes, you could be, which is why I called Arthur to check if you were harmless before I approached you.’
He sighed. ‘What did Arthur the Great say?’
‘As long as you don’t open your mouth.’
‘Hah.’ That was quite funny. In fact, it was the funniest thing he’d heard in ages. Colin laughed, and suddenly he couldn’t stop.
He was on a bus. Colin, the man who didn’t do buses, was actually on a bus. He’d walked Ursula to the corner of her road and hopped on one before he changed his mind. Because Colin was also a man with a plan. He was going home. Proper home. Not Netta’s. Not Frank’s. His own home. Fuck the lot of them, he’d had enough.
It was only when he got to his drive that he realised he was another kind of man. One who’d recently downed two thirds of a bottle of wine and several cans of gin and tonic, purchased from the supermarket in the village. He wasn’t drunk. Well, he was possibly a teeny bit drunk. But sometimes, a person needed a bit of help.
Having reached the door without too much issue, Colin rang the bell. It was opened by a great tank of a man, not muscular as such, but big and wide. It was unmistakably the man Colin had seen in the window on the day Arianne had thrown him out. ‘Yeah?’
‘I want to come in. This is my house. I want to come in.’
‘Fuck off.’
The door slammed shut. But Colin hadn’t splashed out on all that Dutch courage just to stand here and get a door in his face. No. Absolutely not. He rang the bell again, and when no one came, he hammered his fist on it and demanded to be let in.
The door was flung open so fast it bashed against the wall. Despite his insobriety, Colin thought of his plasterwork. But not for long, because there, in all her tracksuit bottomed glory, was Arianne, her eyes flashing wildly, her face purple. Behind her stood the big man. She jabbed Colin in the shoulder. ‘I told you to keep away.’
He was suddenly reminded of their last argument and all the arguments before that, and he wobbled, both inside and out. But then he thought of Liza. If she were here, she wouldn’t put up with this. He steadied himself and looked Arianne in the eye. ‘This is my house. I want you out.’
‘And I want you out.’
‘I am out, but I shouldn’t be. You should be out.’
‘Well I’m not getting out, so piss off.’
‘No, you piss o—’ Before Colin could finish, a fist came for him, caught his left eye and finished it for him. His feet got in the way of each other, and he tumbled over, smashing the side of his face against the ground as he hit it.
Arianne stood over him, flexing her hand. ‘I warned you, Colin. Next time, I’ll set Byron on yer.’
‘Anytime, babe. Anytime,’ said big, bad Byron, as the door closed once again.
Colin scrambled up and stumbled away. He was no longer a man with a plan. He was just a man with a very sore face.