Chapter 11
HEATHER
By the time Claire arrives in Edinburgh to do some emergency repairs in her rental flat, Heather has completed an audit for a haulage firm, gone on two light-hearted and non-committal dates with Gerry, and spent her evenings reviewing her manifestation diagram.
She has transcribed her musings from St Andrews onto a large white board she normally keeps in her office.
Today, she’s lugged it halfway across town to show it to Claire in the gaps between the flat upgrade.
‘So what do you think?’
She and Claire are sitting in the compact lounge of a tenement building where the ceiling is higher than the width of the room whilst the gas engineer works through the annual boiler check in the kitchen.
Claire puts down her coffee cup and pulls the whiteboard towards her. ‘So talk me through it,’ she says.
Heather leans over and points to the top left-hand corner.
‘So for my physical activity and improving my social life, I’ve started swimming.’
‘Swimming?’ Claire will be thinking of the effects of chlorine on menopausal hair.
‘I wear a cap.’
‘Geez. I bet that’s attractive,’ her friend joshes.
‘It’s like I’m wearing a black extra tight condom on my head, to be fair,’ Heather laughs, ‘anyway, I’m building up my stamina in the swimming pool because eventually I want to take up open water swimming.’
Claire taps Heather on the shoulder.
‘Good for you. Awesome.’
‘When I saw the swimmers in St Andrews on drop off day, I thought it looked like a cool thing to do. There’s a club that swims out of Portobello, just on the other side of town, so swimming with them, and perhaps even alone, is my eventual target if I’m ever brave enough.’
‘That’s it. That’s it,’ Claire says excitedly. ‘That’s the beauty of manifestation. You envisage your goal, and then allow your mind and the universe to construct small stepping-stones towards achieving that point.’
A knock on the door breaks up their conversation. Claire pays the heating engineer and files the gas safety certificate in her workbag.
‘Right, you,’ she says. ‘Painting.’
With the room vacated, Heather and Claire set to work brightening the small galley kitchen with fresh paint.
‘Uuug, it reminds me of home,’ Claire says as she daubs paint on the walls. ‘Every one of our walls is magnolia. I know Mark’s right. It is the most affordable. But it's just so booooring.’
‘Perfect for a rental property, though,’ Heather says from the step ladder, noting that her friend seems to be being increasingly down on her marriage these days.
They paint in companionable silence for a while, speaking only to negotiate the passing of a paint brush, the positioning of the ladders or the glossing of the skirting boards.
‘I hate my job,’ Heather says. It’s as though the meditative effects of the painting have loosened an awareness in her that was lying dormant.
‘I’ve put it in my plan. I only got into finance when Dougie left.
There’s no way a teacher’s salary would have allowed Georgia and I to stay in our house.
It was the only way I could gain financial independence.
It’s been a career. It’s paid the bills. It’s never enthralled me.’
‘Maybe there can be some flex now Georgia’s at university?’ Claire says, bending her neck at an awkward angle to reach the area of wall obscured by the wall cabinet. ‘Might now be the time to consider returning to an art-based career and the work you love?’
Heather plops her own paintbrush into the pot and stretches her back.
‘Exactly,’ she says. ‘But what?’
They return to Heather’s manifestation board when the first coat of paint is drying. Their conversations whilst painting covered almost every aspect of Heather’s plan. With one notable exception which Claire realises when she stares once more at the whiteboard.
‘There are two men on this board,’ she says, her eyebrows squashed together in a comic furrow.
‘Indeed,’ Heather replies. ‘I hide it any time Gerry visits, obviously.’
Claire smirks.
‘I can see why.’ Because both Gerry and Scott feature on the board (Gerry: get to know better. Nice man. Might find a spark if I look? Scott: avoid. Emotionally unavailable, unreliable.) ‘At least you’re resolving to keep your distance from Scott,’ her friend concedes.
‘You really don’t like him, do you?’ Heather asks in a teasing voice.
‘Not dislike, exactly. I mean, I’ve never met the man. But honestly, is he the kind of guy you want to get yourself involved with? After Dougie? After Paul? What was it you said to me after Paul left?’
Heather doesn’t even need to think. It’s been her mantra for nearly six years.
‘Men abandon you. They ditch you when you’re down and leave you in the lurch.’
‘And while that’s not always true, it’s definitely the pattern you’ve experienced.’
Heather does a quick internal audit of the men in her adult life since she completed her teacher training.
There was Gerry, of course. Safe, dependable, Gerry.
But since him. Well, Dougie left her with a tiny colicky baby when the going got tough; her father disowned her for insisting Georgia’s dietary needs were properly met.
(“If we’re not good enough for you, then don’t think about crossing our threshold again” had been his last words to her); and finally, there was Paul.
Paul chose the height of the Coronavirus pandemic to show Heather that she and Georgia were not his priority.
Heather’s analysis validates her one abiding, still to be disproven, conclusion.
For her, at least, men are great big, unreliable, abandoning losers.
So why should Scott-Bloody-Reynolds (who she doesn’t even like, incidentally) be any different?
By the second coat of paint their conversation has moved onto social lives: Claire’s – non-existent, Heather’s – pitiful, save for the invite to a Hallowe’en party with Gerry.
Claire is instantly invigorated by the idea of dressing up and playing the part of someone else for the night.
‘What are you wearing?’ she asks from her kneeling position applying gloss paint to the skirting board.
Heather, who is painting around the cornicing, grabs onto the ladder handrail, extracts her phone from the back pocket of her skinny jeans, finds the appropriate tab and squats on the step to pass the phone to Claire. Claire’s eyes bulge as she looks.
‘Wow. Gerry’s a lucky guy.’
‘What do you mean?’ Heather clambers down the steps and grabs the phone back from her friend, giving her a gentle swat on the arm as she goes. ‘You’re making me nervous. It’s not that revealing. Is it?’
She magnifies the image with a pincer movement.
‘If anyone can pull it off, Heather, you can,’ Claire replies.
They’re both exhausted by the end of the day. They order take-out and open a bottle of red wine as they wait for the pizza to arrive.
‘I just have one final thing to ask,’ Claire says, raising her glass towards the corniced ceiling. They’re both drinking on empty stomachs, so the wine has very much gone to their heads.
‘Anything. Ask anything,’ Heather says in the manner of someone so comfortable in a person’s company she feels no need to censor herself.
‘Well, this guy, Scott?’
‘Scott-Bloody-Reynolds?’
‘Yup. So. He’s single, right?’
Heather tilts her head. The wine in her glass sloshes in the same direction.
‘I think so….. I mean, I assume so,’ she says, knowing the moment she says the word aloud that assumptions are very risky indeed when it comes to men and matters of the heart.
‘So what’s his story, then?’
Heather ponders.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Probably textbook ditches his wife when another younger model comes along?’ Claire predicts. ‘You know the type, has an affair or leaves when the going gets tough.’
It would pretty much match with every relationship Heather has ever had and would further evidence why she’s better to stay away from the man.
‘Perhaps. But I’m really not sure,’ she says.
The doorbell chimes and Claire returns three minutes later with two steaming pizza boxes. It gives Heather just enough time to act.
‘I asked Brianna,’ Heather says on her return.
‘Asked Brianna what?’ Claire is already pulling the first piece of pizza from the box and working to contain the flow of cheese.
‘I asked her why her dad was single.’
Heather feels mildly victorious until she sees the look on Claire’s face. Has she been rash? She takes a bite of her own pizza and opens her messages to check how she worded her question. But Brianna is already typing.
‘Oh,’ says Heather when the message finally lands in her inbox.
‘What?’ says Claire.
‘Brianna’s answer,’
Brianna has replied with three words: My mum died.
SCOTT
Scott pulls into the car park, thankful to finally find a space to leave his car.
He has berated himself precisely six times today: three times on the drive from his Glasgow flat, (why the company couldn’t rent him something with a few bits of basic furnishing, he doesn’t know), and a further three times when driving in circles around the Ikea multi-story.
He’s survived the past few weeks in the apartment with the bare minimum in terms of furnishings, but there’s only so much longevity you can eke out of cardboard packing boxes.
One made a very passable bedside table for nearly a month and only let him down when a coffee spill soaked into the structure and reduced it to pulp.
But Ikea? On a Saturday? Honestly – what was he thinking?
He isn’t ready for the self-reflection needed to answer that last question.
He knows he’s likely to arrive at an unpalatable truth: he was thinking about Heather.
He was thinking about the feeling of her fingers on his sternum.
If he’s honest, it’s beginning to feel like an unhealthy obsession.
A woman, the absolute antithesis of what he wants for himself at this stage in his life, is flooding his thoughts.
So, rather than staying at home, staring at piles of unsorted clothing, overflowing suitcases, bundles of miscellaneous possessions and fixating on Heather, he decides he may as well switch one form of hell for the other.
At least this way he gets to achieve something.
What has he been instructing himself to do for the past seven years?
One tiny thing to move forwards every day.
He walks through the garish yellow and blue doors, grabs himself a supersized plastic shopping bag and immediately questions his judgement.
Ikea on a Saturday afternoon might be the worst place in the world for someone outside a relationship.
Everywhere he looks, people are paired up: young couples putting together their first joint homes smiling smugly and stopping for a quick grope by the tealights; families with pregnant bellies or kids in tow searching for the perfect crib or cot-bed; elderly couples looking for economy and practicality in light of their decision to downsize.
It’s not that Scott has never achieved a connection like theirs.
He knows what it’s like to love someone body and soul.
To feel as though your minds are intertwined and your dreams meshed.
It’s just that he now knows another unpalatable truth: love like that is transient.
And when it’s gone, it’s gone and the person left behind is cast completely adrift.
Love like that, when it leaves, destroys you.
Never again for him. Heather might well be kind and captivating, and, okay, she's rekindled happy memories of belonging to someone again, as he once did, but it can go no further. There’s the small matter of the pledge he made to Lucy, his wife, as she lay dying in his arms. “There’s never going to be another one for me.
Ever.” A vow like that cannot be shunned easily, if ever at all.
Scott follows the one-directional walkway through the shop trying to keep his focus.
He eventually finds himself standing miserably beside a display of KALLAX modular shelving and willing himself not to cry.
It’s only a set of shelves, for fuck's sake, but it represents the first set of shelves he’s ever bought on his own.
Perhaps it would be easier if today’s efforts resulted in a flat that reflects his personality, but in all honesty he imagines his Glasgow apartment will end up furnished in the exact same manner as hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of apartments the world over.
He stayed in a condo in Buenos Aires with a KALLAX and a BILLY bookcase, for crying out loud.
Scott’s mobile rings when he’s trying to use the itsy-bitsy pencil on the tiny scrap of paper whilst holding onto an oversized shopping bag in canary yellow.
‘Hello?’ Okay, he’s vexed and it’s coming out in the tone of his voice. But sometimes -
‘Mr Reynolds? Is that you? It’s Theresa Kelly. I wondered if we might talk?’
This woman again! She phoned when he was in Morocco. Hadn’t he blocked her number? Clearly it was time for him to make his situation as clear and transparent as the ice he feels around his heart.
‘Ms Kelly. I don’t know where you got this number?’
There’s a pause on the other end of the line. Ms Kelly wondering how much shit she’s getting herself into due to data protection protocols? Perhaps.
‘Mrs Ah, Mrs Lorraine Adams.’
He might have known it. Lucy’s twin sister.
His sister-in-law. Thinking she was doing the right thing.
Thinking she knew what was needed to help him.
Scott sidesteps a family of five arguing about the dimensions of their lounge.
Nobody had thought to measure it before they left home.
He drops the silly little pencil and the redundant scrap of paper into his bag.
There's no way he's completing the shop now.
‘Look. I know what you’re phoning to offer me. I understand that the boy–man– who killed my wife is due to be released soon. And I understand he wants an opportunity for mediation beforehand. The thing is, Ms Kelly. I. Do. Not.’