Chapter 23 #2
There are mute headshakes all round. I love Friday afternoon meetings; people want to go home more than they want to argue.
“Anything anyone wants to raise before we go?”
“I have something,” Nur says. “A bit of good news to tide us over the weekend. We heard this afternoon from the mayor's office. We have been awarded a grant.” She turns and smiles at Piotr. “I think this means you have an advertising budget again.”
I smile, thinking how great it will be to tell Anders. He’ll be pleased. He'd raided the advertising budget spinning up Cerium Malaysia. I expect Piotr to be ecstatic, but he just harrumphs.
I’m not letting him get away with that. Dropping my smile, I stare at him flint-eyed. “If you don't want the money, I can allocate it elsewhere.” I always prefer to work cooperatively but I can play hardball if I’m forced to it.
Piotr frowns. “No, I want it.”
That seems like a cheery place in which to end the meeting, so I let them all go home. Nur comes over before she leaves. She gives me a quick pat and says, “Well done.”
She means well, but I feel like a performing dog.
If Anders wants me to do this for long, he is absolutely going to have to pay me better. Every single one of the people in that room was making twice what I do.
I slide my laptop into my bag and head for the door. Here’s hoping I can get through the weekend without any more drama.
As soon as I’ve eaten, I fall into bed, exhausted by my rollercoaster of a day. Just before midnight, my phone goes off. I answer groggily. It’s Anders. He’s just picked up the hire car I arranged for him and is about to drive north.
Despite regular updates from his sister, his father’s condition is unchanged. I don’t tell him about my concerns with Piotr because he doesn’t need any more stress. Instead, I share the good news about the grant. I can tell it gives him a lift.
Neither of us speaks about the three little words at the end of his email. It’s an elephant squatting on the phone line. But honestly, all I want to do is go back to sleep, and all he wants to do is get home.
Anders calls again just as I’m falling asleep on Saturday night.
Truth to tell, I’m late to bed because I was holding on, waiting for him.
It’s a video call, so I prop myself up with pillows and pull up my knees to hold my phone in my lap.
From this angle, my double chin and acres of nostrils feature prominently.
My hair is a tangled mess, and I run my fingers through it, trying to pull it into order.
Anders seems to be sitting on his old childhood bed.
I thought American boys’ bedrooms were supposed to be full of team memorabilia, US flags, and posters of porn stars.
But I guess Hollywood is no more accurate on that than it is on all Brits speaking like Hugh Grant.
The wall behind his head is bare, painted a pale cream.
The linen on the bed is a muted green. He is wearing one of the T-shirts I packed for him, and he doesn’t appear to have trimmed his scruff.
It’s attempting to break out into a full-blown beard.
“How’s it going?” I ask him softly, pleased to hear from him.
“Shit.” He rubs his hands down his face. I can see he’s tired in the creases around his eyes, in the way his hand drops. The irrepressible Anders has momentarily checked out. Okay, I understand that.
“Have you seen your father?”
“I got here too late yesterday, but I saw him this morning. They’ve moved him out of intensive care, but he’s not good. It’s worse than I thought.”
“In what way?” I ask the question just to get him to talk. I feel like it might help him.
“He’s nuts. I mean, like batshit crazy.” His head drops into his hands.
“He thinks he’s at baseball camp. He’s yelling at the nurses because he believes they’ve hidden his bat.
I mean, he recognises me and Mom, and I explain it’s a hospital and they’re nurses, but he just goes quiet and then, thirty seconds later, he’s off again.
And he’s angry. I’ve never in my life seen him so angry.
Not even when I rolled his truck as a teenager.
I thought he was going to punch one of the nurses.
He can’t even get out of bed, but he tried to swing for her. ”
“What do the doctors say?”
“Nothing. At least nothing useful. I mean, I get that they don’t want to be drawn. If they tell me he’ll be fine and he isn’t, they get in trouble. All they say is confusion is not abnormal. Sometimes patients recover, sometimes they don’t.”
“That must be really hard.”
“Yeah. It’s not just the uncertainty of whether he lives or dies – it’s whether he’s full-blown Looney Tunes.”
“What about your mom?”
“Oh, she’s optimistic. She can’t contemplate a world without him, so she’s just trusting in the Lord and my father’s natural horniness to bring him back to her.”
I almost choke on my own saliva. What did he just say?
Just one day back on the wrong side of the pond, and Anders’s accent is more pronounced.
It takes me a moment to work out he isn’t saying ‘horniness’, which would be downright weird for any son to say about his dad, but ‘orneriness’.
At least, I hope that’s what he said. I can do without the mental image of Anders Anderson II trying to get it on with Sonia on a hospital bed.
Anders yawns, then apologises. “Sorry. It’s not you. I’ve been up since dawn.”
“Milking?” I’m not entirely sure what happens on a dairy farm. I’ve a confusion of images in my head, mostly from TV series about cowboys, but they’re probably not accurate.
“Among other things.”
“How did they manage yesterday?”
“One of the neighbours pitched in. And my sister helped. But she’s gone home now – she’s got kids. And let’s face it, she lives closer to them than I do. She’s going to be trekking over here to look after them when I leave. If I can leave.”
His words inspire panic. If he stays there, what happens to us? What happens to Cerium? What happens to me? Long term, an assistant with a five-hour time difference isn’t going to work. But Anders has enough on his plate. He shouldn’t have to carry my worries too.
I smile at him. “Maybe you should take a nap. Between the jet lag and the early starts, you must be exhausted.”
“No time. We’re going to grab a bite on our way over to the hospital.”
I assume ‘we’ is him and his mum but then I hear two female voices in the background. I thought he said his sister had gone? But then, one of them must step into the room with him because I hear her clearly as she says, “We need to leave now if we want to get to the Piggly Wiggly before it shuts.”
Anders glances up and then back down at me. “Got to go,” he says, and the call ends.
And I’m left sitting up in my bed wondering what just happened. Because I recognise the voice. The woman who felt free enough to walk into Anders’s room without knocking was his ex-girlfriend, Imogen.