CHAPTER 10
He looked good, in the way that some men manage to do even as age chews at their edges.

A tiny bit heavier, but still fit, still solid rather than fat. I couldn’t help it, and flung myself around him, and wept. I quickly felt Elaine at my shoulder, and before I could tell her it was OK, switch all weapons to safety, she said, as quietly as she could manage in the noise, “So he found you, then?”

A set-up. Arris, obviously, through her husband. I dropped Tony, handing him my purse and telling him what the drinks were, and marched over to a grinning Swansea girl.

“A word, Miss Parry, outside if you please”

I marched out, heels banging, and we found a spot away from the various face-feeding couples over by the cricket screens.

“What the hell do you think you are fucking doing? I get myself straight after one man and you start dragging others in! Leave my life alone, OK?”

I ranted on for a while in similar vein, until Elaine joined us. As I wound down, and into the tears that were still there, she held me close.

“If you call the slow death you are living through ‘getting straight’, there are pigs flying out of Gatwick. And she hasn’t dragged others in, she has asked one rather nice one to say hello again. What you do after that is your call, but just think on this: if you didn’t want to talk to Tony, why did you just hand him all your money and credit cards?”

Arris was crying too, and stepped up to hold the two of us. “I’m really sorry if I have upset you, Sar, I just love you so much it was killing me to watch what you were doing. If you want, I can ask him to leave”

Tony spoke up, just behind me. “She can do that herself, ladies. This is Sarah’s call. Perhaps we can talk together for a bit, see what she thinks?”

Elaine took Arris back inside, Tony handing them my purse with a wry grin and the suggestion that he had something to do just a bit more pressing than buying drinks. We sat down on a low wall, and he put a finger to my lips.

“Just listen for a while, OK? I know about you. I didn’t at the rally all those years ago, but it was a bit difficult to miss after that nastiness. I thought a lot about you then, and I really couldn’t see it. You were all woman to me before that, and after it as well. I’m a bit more open to things than I look, you know.

“When Steve told me about their little trip to the West, I begged him to let me come, but he said no. I could lose my job was the main reason, but he also said that he didn’t want the turd to die, and I might not have the detachment to stop when it was needed. He was right, I think I might actually have been willing to finish him properly, and that would have been the end of us all.

“I should have followed it up, Sarah, but I’d run off when you told me what you did, and I couldn’t risk it, and then it was too late and Annie was there.

“I got married, Sar, and it is not good form to chase up women from your past when you have a wife, and then we had Jim, and we didn’t have Annie any more. And it was all too late, I thought. You know, you sit there, and you think back through your life, all the ‘what-ifs’ and ‘maybes’, and there are regrets. No way do I regret Annie, nor Jim, but I regret you. If we could perhaps recover a bit of friendship, a middle-aged man would be a little happier”

Typically, I asked the least important question first. “What do you mean, what I did?”

He started to laugh. “You sad, when I asked you what you did, that you were a drug dealer, and, well, I am a Customs Officer and…”

We were both laughing now, and then he swept me into his arms and it was good, so good. We settled down into that snuggle where you sit between the legs of your man and lean back onto his chest, and he wraps his arms around you and whispers into your ear. Tony had married an old school girlfriend, and a little boy had followed in due course. Five years old, they took him on the big adventure over to Florida, and after meeting Goofy, and Donald and Mickey they had come back happy and so deeply in love, and the day after, at breakfast, as Jim had tickled his Mam Annie had said something odd about smelling the chipmunks, and a little trickle of blood came down from her nose, and another from her ear and that was it. Some congenital weakness of a blood vessel in the brain, they said, an increase of blood pressure just the wrong way and…pop.

I could feel the tears on my neck and, in yet another of those little moments of insight realised that others could hurt too, perhaps more than me.

Harwich had been too much of a constant reminder of the past and of Annie, and so Tony had asked for and been given a compassionate transfer to Dover, where he spent his time clambering around lorries and loving a seven year old fragment of his lost wife. I pulled him to me, and returned the compliment of his confidences with my own, the pain of what Joe had done to me and the pain of what I now realised I was doing to myself.

“Tony, you have to understand how I am. I can’t just pick up where we left off, I have too many issues in my life, and only the most obvious one is what I am. I have found a way to get along and I will be serious, and honest with you, I do not know if I can come out of there.

“You say you have no problems with who and what I am, but the world does, and most of it doesn’t know.”

“Yes, I know, and most people don’t and wouldn’t care”

“Oh, come on, Tony, look what happened when they found out, even those who were supposed to protect me treated me like shit!”

“Sar, what exactly did they know? Think about it, what did that bastard tell them at the time? And consider this: when was that, and where? We’re well into the next century now, and while East Kent isn’t exactly the centre of the liberal world, it still isn’t West bloody Wales!”

His voice had risen a little, and suddenly he chuckled and whispered “So tell me….is it just the pretty ones they shag out there, or will any sheep do?”

I twisted round to slap him at that, as one must, but I got tangled up, and we fell off the wall onto the grass with a thump, and of course there was nothing else to do but kiss, and cry at the same time, and my head was screaming arguments at itself, about safety, and hurt, and wasted years, and so I just told myself to shut up and for once just seize the moment and live.

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We eventually got to our feet, and rejoined the others, hand in hand, Arris made a little two-fisted gesture of victory, while Elaine mimed collecting winnings from her other half. The band were back on for their second set, and in a rush of wonderful, for once, memories I found myself once again standing in front of Tony, his hands on my hips as I gently bopped to the music, and after a while I let my backside gently brush against him and, yes, he was up for me, and for an instant, just an instant, I was about to rush from the hall and lock myself away at home, but then he kissed the back of my neck, just the once, and it was better.

When he dropped me to get another drink, I watched him at the bar, as a couple of other men spoke to him. He was grinning after they went, and as the band finally finished with a cover of “Sharp Dressed Man” and we could hear again, I asked him what had been said.

“It was a couple of lads from work. In short, they wanted to know why I was so lucky to be able to pick out the only one of the four new girls who was ‘up for it’, and pointed out that I already knew you, and Rob said I was just like a bloody German”

“Eh?”

“You know, I had my beach towel out on the sun lounger, booked in advance, sort of thing”

I thought for a while, but a short one, and as the girls rejoined us I uttered that old line, “Want to come back to mine for coffee?”

“I thought you’d never ask!”

Arris was grinning so much I thought the top of her head would fall off. She held up her mobile. “Steve says he bet me a fiver you would ask him back, and that he is texting Tony to tell him he wants pictures”

I was laughing by now. “How many of you are involved in this little scheme?”

Arris’ grin switched to the ‘innocent little girl’ look, and she sad “Well, we left the kids out of it…”

I don’t need to go into details of the way we piled into my living room, and chatted about nothing and everything, just getting back to where we could have been, might have been, and for an instant, one silly moment, I saw that Alison was the only one of us not in a cuddle, and I called her over to settle into my spare arm, and how much I truly loved her rose up and threatened to drown me.

Surely ,if this world could make people like Arris, it could accept people like me?