11. Jay
Chapter eleven
Jay
A few days after her return from Mexico, I meet up with a mildly jet-lagged Katy at Flights and Fancies again. She opens her mouth for a wide yawn as the waitress deposits our food and drink on the table, and with a light giggle, she presses a hand to her mouth.
“Sorry,” she apologises. “I don’t know how Amie does it, I’m absolutely wrecked. Still.”
“Don’t apologise, Katy, it’s fine. It’s tough when you’re not used to it.” She smiles gratefully at me before returning to her phone, lying on the table between us. She swipes a finger across the screen, scrolling through photo after photo from her trip.
The pictures show fun in the pool, at a market, out in the city, the view from rooftop bars. There are photos of Maisy, photos of Amie—both alone and with her family—photos of Maisy and Amie with Katy, and of Amie and Katy in the tiniest, most indecent bikinis… I shift in my seat. The closer we get to warmer weather, the fewer layers Katy’s bundled up in, and the more her curves taunt me, tantalisingly close but forever out of reach.
“Looks like you had a good time,” I comment. Duh . You couldn’t have come up with something more interesting or poignant to say, Bevan? Or are we playing a game of stating the blindingly fucking obvious now?
“Yeah,” she smiles softly, a dreamy look in her eyes. “I did. It was really good.”
“Gonna tell me more?” I tease with a smile. Who am I? Despite not having seen Katy for the last few days, it’s been an okay week. My cuts and bruises are healing well, and I spent yesterday with my parents—and a little white lie about how I managed to get the black eye. But the pain has been tolerable, and the emotions have been more stable than they’ve been for a while. It feels like I’m turning a corner. I’m sure, soon enough, there’ll be two steps backwards again, but for now, I’m going to take what I can get.
“Oh! Yeah! So, this one—” Katy swipes rapidly to a picture of a marketplace with colourful flags hanging from the ceiling. “We went to this market. It was huge, it was so cool. All these handmade crafts. I could’ve gone broke in there.”
She swipes the screen again.
“Then for Amie’s birthday, we spent the morning at the pool. The hotel gave us all cupcakes to celebrate. It was so nice just to spend time with her, you know? Now she has Cam, and Maisy, and we’re both always working… I know I see her all the time but sometimes it feels like I never really get to see her, you know?”
I know. I see people, but I don’t think I see people. Except Katy. And she’s the only one who seems to see me. Dad avoids the hard stuff. Mum frets over it. Ruth babies me. But Katy? She sees me as I am. It’s refreshing, and entirely terrifying at the same time. I swallow around the hardness growing in my throat, nodding in agreement. Here come those backward steps. The walls are slowly closing in around me, and I don’t think I can speak.
She must see it in my face, because her hands leave her phone and reach for mine, gripping them tightly. Her fingers lace through mine, and her thumb brushes back and forth against my inner wrist.
“Where are you going, love? Stay with me.”
Her voice is soft, gentle—she’s always quietly-spoken, at least when I’m around. But there’s a firmness to her tone as she pulls our joined hands to the middle of the table between us. I nudge her phone with my arm as I’m pulled towards her. Her voice softens again as she murmurs soothingly, never releasing my hands from her grasp. Eventually, the tightness in my throat releases and my racing heart slows, returning to normal. I suck in a big breath, twisting my hands in Katy’s to squeeze her fingers.
“You’re okay.” She offers a heart-stopping smile as her shoulders drop with relief. “Do you want to talk about anything?”
I swallow hard, shaking my head.
“Okay,” she whispers. “Now, tell me more about that beer festival you mentioned.”
I laugh lightly, a weight lifted off my chest. Maybe it was only one step back this time. Maybe being tethered to Katy anchored me here, in the present.
“It’s not far—only an hour away by train. But it’s pretty big, and there’s loads of craft beers and ciders. It’s a good day out. We used to go all the time before we deployed because we could walk from the barracks. Didn’t even need to pour ourselves into a cab to get home.”
“When is it, again?” She picks up her phone and swipes at the screen. “Let me see if I’m working.”
“Two weeks on Saturday,” I confirm. A slow smile spreads across her face.
“Let’s do it.”
I spend the next week applying and being rejected for new jobs. Katy’s putting in overtime to cover a colleague on holiday, so I don’t see her much, but she sends daily texts with dumb jokes she’s found on the internet, and silly stories from customers. When my phone rings one evening with her name on the screen, I almost don’t answer. But there’s a little tug in my chest—a little voice of disappointment—that forbids me from ignoring the call, and ignoring her .
“I just wanted to say hi.” Katy’s voice is high and sweet through the line, and I fling myself back against the sofa cushions.
“Well, hi,” I answer. I rub my eyes with the back of my hand. I like talking to Katy—I like it a lot, probably more than I should—but I don’t think I’m great company right now. I don’t have a lot to say.
“And… okay, fine. I wanted to make sure you’re okay. I just spoke to your sister.”
“And what did she have to say for herself?”
“She…” Katy trails off, pausing for a moment before continuing. I can hear the quiet rush of wind and buzz of road noise in the background, like she’s talking to me as she walks home from work. “She kind of implied that you had a fight.”
“She did, did she?” I exhale heavily through my nose, a silent almost-laugh at the audacity of Ruth.
“She did,” Katy confirms. I can almost see the way her lips twist as she chooses her words carefully.
“Did she tell you that she fought while I just sat here being yelled at?”
“That was about the gist of it, yeah.” Katy sighs heavily through the phone. There’s a jingle of keys and a few small thumps on the line like she’s juggling her phone, and then I hear her front door open and close before the background noise melts away. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, Princess, you don’t need to worry about me.”
“I do, though, you know? I do worry.”
“I’m good,” I say. “I might not be around much next week, though. I’m going camping.”
“Yeah, she said that, too.”
“Are you going to tell me it’s a bad idea too?”
“Nope.” I hear the way she pops the p and I can’t help but imagine a little smile on her face, twirling a lock of blonde hair around her finger. “Is it safe, wherever you’re going?”
“Doesn’t get much safer than a quiet, family campsite in the New Forest in February, Katy.”
“Then no, I’m not gonna talk you out of it. Go camping. Be safe. Don’t get eaten by a bear.”
“There are no bears in Hampshire, Princess.”
“Okay, then don’t sit in any poison ivy.”
“Probably won’t find any of that, either.”
“Okay, well… have fun, I guess? Stay warm. Text me so I know you’re safe.”
I chuckle. It’s amazing how two minutes of conversation with Katy can pull me out of a funk. I haven’t experienced that since—well, maybe ever. This woman has been such an overwhelming revelation, with her steadiness, her warmth, her tender empathy. The way she cares for those in her life so wholly and completely, so freely. It feels good to be one of those people, to be chosen by Katy. Because when Katy Keller chooses you, she chooses you, and she does so over and over again, day in and day out. It’s something my sister always told me about—one of the things she’s always loved and admired most about her best friend—but to experience it for myself is something else entirely.
Over the next day or two, I spend some time with my parents, and my sister, who has just returned from New York. Ruth tries once again to talk me out of my camping trip, and instead of cancelling it, I invite her to join me. Exactly as I expected, she declines the offer, reminding me of all the work she has to catch up on following a work trip—something I’ll never understand—but eventually, with a grumble or two about stubborn dickheads, she brings me a bag full of food the night before I leave. I’m packing clothes, toiletries, and essentials into my backpack when she hammers at my door.
“Brought you some bits so you don’t die out there.” She dumps the overflowing shopping bag on my breakfast bar and begins to unload it. A few packages of granola bars are piled up on the counter, followed quickly by a couple of Tupperware boxes.
“Made you some of those energy ball things,” she says. “You like coconut, right?”
I nod as she pulls out some bags of jerky. Ruth knows very well that I like coconut. I’m the one who always ate the coconut chocolates she left behind every Christmas. It’s always been one of my favourites.
“You know, I’m quite capable of fending for myself in a perfectly safe forest for four days,” I start. “It’s not like I haven’t camped in the middle of deserts in war zones before and survived.”
“Don’t say that,” Ruth snaps. “Don’t act like it was all fun and games, Jay.”
“It wasn’t fun or games, Ruth,” I answer quietly. “It had its moments, but it was neither.”
“Exactly.” She pulls out a stack of sealed freezer bags and changes the subject. “These are coconut and cinnamon balls. Granny Bevan’s recipe.”
My mouth waters at the memory of our grandmother’s cooking. “You didn’t have to do this, Rooey.”
“Yes, I did. Just say thank you.”
“Thank you.”
My sister pushes onto her tiptoes and flings her arms around my neck, squeezing me tightly.
“Promise me you’ll be safe,” she whispers against my shoulder, clinging to me. “Don’t do anything dumb, okay?”
“I’ll be fine, Roo, I promise. Thank you for all of this. And for caring.”
“Always. Text me when you get to your camp site?”
“I promise.”
Ruth leaves, and once I’m done packing, I go to bed early.
When I was first deployed to Afghanistan in my twenties, I found sleeping in a tent difficult. If you thought the walls of old London terraces were thin, they’ve got nothing on a tent in the middle of a desert. You can hear—and feel—everything. Sometimes, we got lucky, and we’d be in canvas huts with actual camp beds and real blankets. Other times, we had tents and sleeping bags strapped to our backs as we parachuted into the most remote places, and we had to figure it out for ourselves.
Over the years, I grew to love the isolation of camping. The space and time it affords me to just be . It’s something I’ve very intentionally and deliberately made time to do whenever I’ve been home between deployments, and I’m long past due a trip into the woods.
It turns out putting up a tent when your leg is aching from a long drive is a little more of a challenge than I anticipated. I’m glad I chose to drive down mid-morning, because with the amount of breaks I’ve had to take, I’d be doing this in the dark otherwise. At least it’s not raining. It’s actually quite warm for the middle of February—I guess we can chalk that one up to global warming—and I have to pause to drain a bottle of water and strip off my hoodie before I continue.
Once the tent is up and my sleeping bag and duffel are stowed inside, I start a fire in the designated pit and heat some water in a tin jug. I brought Ruth’s non-perishable care package, as well as a cooler full of items I can cook on a grill or over a fire. I use the hot water to make a cup of instant coffee and sit back in a camping chair, content to just listen to the trees for a while and let the tension leave my body.
Being close to the fire doesn’t scare me as much as I worried it might. I think that was playing on Ruth’s mind, too, when I told her how I plan to cook for myself out here. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t particularly love the proximity to open flames, and the crackle and pop of the kindling sends a cold chill down my spine, but I managed to start the fire without too much hesitation and sitting by it now, watching as the orange flames lick at the air, my pulse is surprisingly steady.
My phone doesn’t pick up much signal out here. I’ve enough to send a quick text to my mum, Ruth, and Katy, as promised to let them know I’ve arrived safely, but I can do little else. It means I can’t talk to Ruth or Katy, and it means I can’t get in touch with Amie to ask for help getting some car parts shipped over for a project, but it also means my sister can’t call and baby me. It means I can’t doom-scroll through news sites, watching more innocent people fall victim to the whims of the rich and dangerous.
Four days of peaceful solitude is exactly the balm my soul needs. It’s giving me plenty of time to think, which is both a blessing and a curse.
When I joined the army, I did so knowing I wanted to join the airborne infantry battalion as a parachutist. Soldiers in the parachute regiments are always touted as the best of the best, and I wanted to be part of that. The thirty-week training course was gruelling as hell, but I never once doubted that I could get through it. It was that bravado that saw me get up time after time, every time I was knocked down.
Resilience. Discipline. Self-reliance. Those are the buzzwords I came to live by. Whether it was a training mission with soldiers from other nations, or deployment into a disaster relief or war zone, I conducted myself with those three things, and more besides. Courage. Versatility. Knowing when to pivot, when to move on, when to keep pushing.
All of those things seem to evade me now. My courage is long gone, blown up with the jeep and my best friend. My resilience might as well have gone along with it. And as for discipline—well, I’m just about breaking all of my rules these days, letting myself get close to Katy Keller.
Letting her get close to me.
I’ll always be a paratrooper, but I’m walking—or, more accurately, limping—a different path now. A path where I don’t need to be quite so disciplined or self-reliant; a path where others can join me, where I can call on them for help. It’s a hard habit to break, and the lock on my heart has damn near rusted closed. But fuck if Katy’s musical laughter doesn’t make me want to try and crack it open again.