Whatever You Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

She could still walk with a delta frame, just, and her physio was getting her to do four hundred yards twice a day. Her larynx was going, though, and I was trying to persuade her to use audio feedback. I went twice a week, three times when I could. The home was good. ‘Be nice to yourself,’ the receptionist always said to me, as I left, smiling brightly, my wave brisk and my eyes glittering.
    *
     
    It was at a house party – a twenty-fifth birthday for a friend of a friend. I only went because I was feeling miserable about Mum and forcing myself to do things I didn’t want to do: the TENS machine principal of pain relief. During childbirth, we give women a small machine with two adhesive pads and suggest they electrocute themselves at the base of the spine during each contraction, on the basis that it will take their minds off the excruciating pain in their abdomens. I tried it with Betty. It didn’t work for me. David said I might as well have got him to kick me on the shins. As my mother’s health had deteriorated, I made myself go out to the sort of merry social occasions I disliked more and more often.
    I arrived early. There were only half a dozen other people there, none of whom I knew. Half an hour, I thought, then I’m off. Then I saw him. Yes, it was definitely him.
    The sitting room was over-lit. There was nowhere to hide while I observed him. I busied myself with extracting a glass of wine from one of those boxes with a plastic spout and a button that invites you, prophetically, to Depress Here. I talked animatedly to the other people that I didn’t know in the hope that he would recognise me if I stood there long and conspicuously enough. Covertly, I managed to observe that he was with a short blonde woman. He had to stoop to hear her when she spoke.
    If there had been enough other people there, I might have spent the whole evening circling him but the party didn’t seem likely to fill up and I knew I couldn’t hang around for long with no one else to talk to, so, emboldened by awkwardness, I went over and stood in front of him. He looked at me expectantly, with no flicker of recognition. The short blonde woman stared at me. I leaned towards him and said, ‘Sorry, aren’t you a friend of Carole’s?’
    ‘Carole…’ he said, turning from his companion, who responded by turning away from him with a degree of ostentation and beginning an animated conversation with someone behind her.
    He pursed his lips and furrowed his brows. ‘Now… oh God…’ he groaned rolling his eyes. ‘Carole. That Carole.’
    I exhaled, laughingly, as if I knew the whole story.
    ‘Carole,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘she was mad, wasn’t she?’ His accent was slightly more pronounced than I remembered. Later, he confessed that he instinctively accentuated it when he met people for the first time. It was a useful conversation point when he was chatting up women and a way of testing men. There was nothing made his hackles rise more than an Englishman taking the mickey out of his accent.
    ‘Er, yes.’
    ‘And you were her friend?’
    ‘For a bit, yes.’ I took a gamble. ‘I used to hear all about you.’
    He groaned again. ‘Well, that’s blown my chances of ever shagging you.’
    At this point, Shorty chose to re-appear at his elbow. She placed her hand lightly on his forearm and smiled at me.
    I lifted my wine glass, ‘Well…’
    As I walked back to the drinks table, David followed. ‘I remember you…’ he said. ‘Abbie.’
    I shook my head and reached for a bottle on the table. ‘Keep trying.’
    He screwed up his face. ‘God, now I really have no chance.’
    I turned to survey the room and spoke to him out of the corner of my mouth. ‘Try a different tack.’
    He was surveying the room as well, as if we were spies trying not to acknowledge each other too obviously. Shorty had her back to us but the two women she was talking to in the corner were staring at me.
    ‘Will you marry me?’ he