A car honks behind them, and Gina feels sick at the speed at which this moment is hurrying her towards a decision, but at the same time giddy with a thrill she doesn’t recognise.
‘Gina, I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Will you do me the great honour of marrying me?’ he says in a rush, and offers her a box.
It’s spontaneous and romantic and everything Gina’s always wanted in a proposal (apart from the lycra shorts, but she can forgive that).
‘Yes.’ She hears a voice, but doesn’t recognise it as her own. She’s floating somewhere above this scene, seeing the sweet film romance of a proposal on a hill in the English countryside. A car will stop soon to offer to take a photo of the happy couple, so they can keep it on their mantelpiece. Tonight someone will be telling their wife about the adorable proposal they witnessed on the way home.
‘Yes?’ he repeats, unsure, and her heart melts at the touching shadow of doubt in his voice.
Gina smiles. ‘Yes.’
Stuart’s face brightens with relief, and he’s kissing her, his arms around her, strong and warm.
Gina tastes Boots’ Soltan, and hears a car honk behind them, and she wonders if this is it, the moment the starting gun goes on her adulthood.
Yes, she thinks. It probably is.
For sale: Scott Sportster Women’s hybrid bike £700 Lots of gears, knobs, what-have-you, barely used. Was a present, cost £1500
‘Obviously I’d need to take it for a test run before I make you an offer.’
Gina folded her arms, and steeled herself for the argument, the same way she steeled herself against builders who wanted to remove ‘just this one beam’.
This man – he’d called himself Dave on the phone – had been examining her pristine, top-of-the-range, ten-miles-on-the-clock mountain bike for half an hour now, making occasional hmm noises as if it were a clapped-out Fiesta in a back-street garage. She’d have booted him out as a timewaster twenty minutes ago, if he hadn’t kept asking her very specific questions to which she didn’t know the answers.
Gina hated not knowing the answers to questions, but she also hated seeing the bubble-wrapped bike in the hall every time she went out, reminding her of the chain (ha!) of events that had led her to this cramped upstairs flat-for-one. Stuart had bought it for her the day after they’d got back from the cycling holiday; they’d spent the whole afternoon in the cycle shop, which Gina hadn’t minded at the time because she’d convinced herself that she needed to get fit for the wedding and cycling was as good a way as any.
Apart from one arse-aching trip round the Forest of Dean, it had never left their garage.
Just seeing that saddle stirred up a giddy mixture of regret and relief in Gina, and she had to fight an impulse to tell Dave to take it and go. But then reason kicked in: the bike was worth at least seven hundred quid, and seven hundred quid in her Something Beautiful Fund went a long way, especially since Naomi still hadn’t got round to helping her with the growing pile of SELL items.
‘I’m not accepting offers,’ she said firmly. ‘I know what it’s worth.’
‘Do you?’ Dave looked at her, and so did the scrawny greyhound sitting between him and the door. It hadn’t made a sound since arriving, and Gina was starting to be unsettled by its unblinking gaze. It had eyes like black marbles and a white throat like a bib over its brindled grey coat. She kept forgetting it was there; it seemed to have a knack of making itself seem very small.
Another reason to get this over and done with. She hadn’t wanted a dog in her new flat either, but Dave had been going to tie it to the door and Gina couldn’t let him do that. The high street was really busy.
‘Yes,’ she said, raising her chin. ‘It’s got thirty gears and Shimano hydraulic disc brakes. Barely been ridden. Kept in a garage.’
He rubbed his face. ‘But I’d still need to ride it.’
‘It’s a woman’s bike!’
‘It’s a present. For my girlfriend.’
‘Good luck with that,’ said Gina, before she could stop herself. ‘You sure she wouldn’t rather have a nice diamond necklace?’
Dave grinned and revealed a surprisingly nice set of teeth for a man who’d arrived with a skinny dog wearing a cheap-looking collar. Even so, she decided, this would be the last sale she conducted from her hallway. Something about the exchange was making her feel uncomfortable – something about putting a price on her own past, and being alone with a stranger.
She kicked herself inside. Stuart would be going ballistic if he knew she was doing this. So would Naomi. Not just selling the bike but letting people into her flat. It had been really stupid to give him her home address, especially now the people in the shop had gone home. From now on, buyers could meet her in the café over the road.
The annoying thing was that it was something her mother had been right about: when Gina had arranged to meet ‘Dave’ she’d sort of forgotten she’d be alone. Subconsciously she’d assumed Stuart would be there, like he always was when the electricity-meter reader came round, looming capably in the background, awkward questions at the ready. She’d only gone ahead with it to prove something to herself and now she rather wished she hadn’t.
She glanced at the greyhound, and it turned its head away.
‘I need to take it round the block and back,’ Dave went on, ‘check the suspension hasn’t rotted.’
Gina put her hands on her hips. ‘How will I know you won’t nick it?’
‘I’ll leave Buzz.’ He nodded at the dog.
She tried to think what Stuart would do now. Or Naomi. Neither of them was a pushover. Neither of them would accept a dog as collateral for an expensive bike. ‘Haven’t you got a wallet? Or car keys?’
‘Ah, no, I never let my wallet out of my sight. Very dodgy people out there now, copying cards and that.’ He looked boldly at her. ‘Anyway, I can’t cycle and keep hold of him.’
‘That doesn’t work for me,’ said Gina. It was something she’d heard Naomi say. A lot.
There was a long pause. Then Dave sighed.
‘Fine,’ he said, reaching into the pocket of his cargo trousers and withdrawing a roll of notes. ‘Here’s a hundred-quid deposit. And my dog. Who is worth a damn sight more than that to me.’ He slapped two fifty-pound notes on the post table, but the sight of the roll of cash reassured Gina: at least he’d come prepared to pay. ‘I’ll be five minutes. We can negotiate about the rest when I get back. OK?’
‘OK,’ said Gina, feeling pleased that for once she’d done what Stuart would have done.
Dave wheeled the bike down the narrow passage and Gina held the front door for him. The dog made a move to follow but Dave swept the bike out and blocked the doorway with his leg. ‘Oi! Buzz, stay!’ He raised a finger, and the dog flinched. ‘Back in five,’ he said to Gina, and shut the door behind him.
The greyhound made a faint, sad whining sound and hurried to the door but Dave and the bike had gone.
‘You stay there.’ Gina made a ‘stay’ gesture and turned back to the stairs, trying to remember where she’d put the print-out of the bike from the Internet. She wanted to refresh her memory about some of the details before Dave got back and the haggling proper commenced.
To her surprise, the dog lay down by the door, and put his long nose on his paws, the picture of cowed resignation.
Gina wasn’t keen on dogs. She wondered if she ought to drag the table across the bottom of the stairs to stop him following her up, but he showed no sign of moving. With a backwards glance, she dashed up to her flat.
When Gina galloped downstairs again, clutching the bike’s guarantee and some paperwork, Buzz was lying exactly where she’d left him, his sleek head pointed towards the door. He was so still that for a second Gina wondered if he’d died, but then the narrow stomach rose and fell a fraction, and the whiskers on his long nose trembled with the out breath.
Gina felt a ridiculous awkwardness, as if she and the dog were two unintroduced strangers waiting for the host to return to a party. Was
she supposed to interact with it? Or just ignore it? She didn’t feel anxious about being attacked: Buzz didn’t seem to have the energy to get aggressive with anyone.
She checked her watch: Dave had been gone seven minutes. That was long enough to get off the high street and maybe up and down one of the terraces running alongside. How far did people need to test ride a bike?
Don’t answer that, she told herself, remembering the hours and hours Stuart had spent measuring her legs and making her stand on various bikes and talking to the sales assistant. At the time she’d joked that they were fitting her to the right bike, rather than the other way around, but neither Stuart nor the assistant had laughed. She’d given up, and tried to tell herself how lovely it was that Stuart was prepared to spend so much on a present for her.
Gina picked up the hundred quid and pocketed it, then put it back on the table. Then pocketed it again.
Something about selling the bike made her feel strange. It wasn’t like selling Auntie Jan’s unused coffee-maker from the wedding list. The bike wasn’t just a bike: it was a possible version of her that she’d rejected. There had been a time when it was going to be at the centre of her life with Stuart. They were going to be that fit outdoorsy couple who went off with their matching bikes strapped to the roof of their VW Golf, and returned, pink-cheeked and happy, on Sunday night, to a lovely meal and a bottle of red wine.
Even as she thought how nice that sounded, Gina boggled at her own powers of self-delusion. And yet, at the time, she’d truly thought that if she could just throw herself into the cycling Stuart would throw himself into something for her sake, like ghost-hunting or something, and they’d be fine.
He hadn’t. And to be fair, she thought, she hadn’t exactly thrown herself very hard into cycling. The short trip to the Forest of Dean, at the end of which she’d skidded on some leaves, crashed into a bush and sprained her wrist. And then, of course, she’d had the diagnosis and everything had gone out of the window. Then they’d had the wedding to talk about, then her illness and its gruelling treatment, then the recovery that had, at the time, seemed to be the making of them as a couple. The thing that bound them together. It was ironic, then, that as soon as that was all over and done with, so were they.
Guilt crept into the pit of Gina’s stomach, followed by the usual rat-like scuttle of unwanted thoughts. Maybe if she’d pedalled harder, got fitter she wouldn’t have been ill in the first place. Maybe if she’d been honest with Stuart instead of pushing those doubts down she wouldn’t have . . .
That was stupid. A stupid, unhelpful way to think. But—
The letterbox rattled and Gina jumped, trying to get her haggling face together, but it was only a pizza leaflet being shoved through. The greyhound was up on its white-tipped paws in the blink of an eye. It was quivering, whether from nerves or excitement Gina didn’t know.
‘Sorry,’ she said, trying to sound reassuring. Her voice sounded wobbly, even to her. ‘That wasn’t him.’
The dog turned and regarded her with his dark, anxious eyes, then slowly sank down onto his paws, despondent.
Gina sank down too, onto the stairs, and waited.
Now it was there she couldn’t get the image of herself on a bike out of her head, following Stuart up the hill in Derbyshire. She hadn’t known then half the things she knew now. Or maybe she had. Maybe she just hadn’t wanted to look too closely at them. Maybe she’d thought if she pedalled hard enough they wouldn’t catch up with her.
When Dave had been gone half an hour, Gina called his mobile and went straight through to a generic voicemail. She rang again after another ten minutes had elapsed, left another, terser, message, and when an hour had gone by and there was no sign of him or her bike, even she had to concede that maybe there was a problem.
Had he had an accident? Had he got lost?
She didn’t want to face the alternative, which was that he wasn’t coming back, and neither was her box-fresh Scott sportster hybrid bike.
Gina fiddled with her silent mobile and wondered what to do. Stuart would be springing into action properly now. He liked it when things went wrong. It meant that all of his worst suspicions had been proved valid, giving him permission to start planning their way out of it.
A gloomy voice in her head told her she’d just sold her bike for a hundred quid and a scrawny dog. But that couldn’t be right: he wouldn’t leave his dog, surely. Men didn’t leave their pets. Until recently, the only things that Stuart had made any sort of fuss about keeping had been Thor and Loki: he’d instructed his solicitor about it.
Now the greyhound was starting to look agitated, glancing between her and the door, as if trying to communicate something.
‘Do you need to go out?’ Gina wasn’t sure about dogs and their toilet requirements. Thor and Loki had shunned the litter tray in favour of the next-door neighbour’s garden, something that had caused untold aggravation with Mrs Pardew. The last thing she wanted in her clean new flat was a dog puddle.
Faintly annoyed, Gina looked round for something to tie to the dog’s collar, so it wouldn’t run off. The only suitable object to hand was her long leopard-print scarf, which she looped around it. She steered Buzz towards the back door, which led into the small yard behind the optician’s.
‘There you go,’ she said, dropping the scarf. ‘Knock yourself out.’
With a quick backward glance at her, as if he was afraid of doing the wrong thing, Buzz scuttled into a corner and relieved himself against an empty flowerpot. The long, dark stream of urine that trickled down the concrete suggested he had been holding it in as long as possible. It went on for ages, and all the while he looked away, then back at her, apprehensively.
Gina’s impatience evaporated. She felt sorry for the skinny creature, all angles and twitchy energy. The previous tenant had left a hose in the corner of the yard, so she used it to rinse away the pee. As she turned the water on, the dog cowered and immediately ran towards the gate that led on to the road behind the main street.
For a second, Gina wondered if he would find its owner if she let it go: she could follow it back to his house – and get her bike.
Or just let the dog go, and write the bike off to bad luck. Easy come, easy go.
But then she had a horrible vision of the dog wandering lost along the streets, searching for a master who hadn’t given two thoughts to leaving it with a stranger, and her heart flexed in her chest. She’d never been able to stand the idea of anything being lost, or wandering; there were stories her parents had never read twice, after she’d spent four nights in a row crying herself to sleep over what might have happened to Paddington Bear if the Browns hadn’t found him.
And it looked so skinny. Gina knew greyhounds weren’t exactly tubby, but the rows of ribs were painfully apparent beneath the dull grey coat.
‘Come on in,’ she said, more to herself than to the dog. ‘Let’s have some supper.’
The greyhound watched Gina while she heated up a carton of soup from the deli, and didn’t even try to steal any of the roll she warmed in the toaster, although she could see the leathery nose twitch with interest. Instead it lay flat against the door, not looking her way but flinching each time she moved.
It felt disconcerting, having a living creature in her space again. The cats had been an imperious presence in her house, invisible until Stuart came home, then materialising on his lap, cooing with adoration in a rather overdone manner, Gina had always thought. This dog seemed determined not to interact, yet she could almost feel his anxiety humming in the air.
Had he been left with strangers before? she wondered. Was he used to this routine? Something about the dog’s meekness made her feel increasingly sorry for him, as if he had more reason to be scared of her than the other way around.
Gina poured her soup into a bowl, then opened and shut her cupboards trying to find something to give him to eat. Thor and Loki had their own shelf in her repainted and perfectly organised walk-in pantry. Thor ate only brand-name c
at food; Loki was lactose-intolerant with a kidney condition. Not having to feed the cats was about the only thing that seemed to be saving Gina money in her new single life. It also saved her a fair amount of time and, she had to admit it, stress. It hadn’t done her self-esteem any good to be rejected on a daily basis by two cats.
In the end she made the dog a bowl of Weetabix, which he gobbled down almost as soon as the bowl touched the floor, gulping and then licking the china clean.
Gina ate her supper and took a mug of tea through to the sitting room, where she turned the radio on (a play on Radio 4: plays were good for filling chunks of the silent evenings) and opened a box of clothes to sort through. To be on the safe side, she retied the scarf to the dog’s collar, the other end to the leg of the sofa, but he curled up in a tight grey ball, his nose hidden in his speckled haunches.
Gina set out her sorting baskets in the space and started separating the contents into charity donations and eBay sales. When the play finished, she made herself a fresh cup of tea, and gave the roll she’d been saving for breakfast to the dog. The hot tea warmed her, but the eager, desperate way the dog gobbled the remaining roll made her feel warmer still, and then much sadder.
When she went to bed at ten to eleven, Buzz didn’t move. He was pretending to be asleep so he didn’t have to interact with her.
Not so different from being married then, thought Gina, and closed the door behind her.
Chapter Ten
ITEM: a Tiffany charm bracelet with the letter G, a tiny enamel wedding cake, and a silver angel on it. Inside the blue box, a few confetti petals and a placecard holder, dated and signed by Naomi and Jason Hewson
Longhampton, 2008
Gina isn’t keen on the peachy, frothy strapless dress Naomi has selected for her role as chief bridesmaid but she doesn’t want to say anything because Naomi is already in a heightened state of Bridezilla anxiety. The dress she was supposed to wear, selected and fitted months ago, has fallen victim to a dressmaker breakdown. With only four months left, they’ve got to find another one, in the sales. One more false move (viz., laughing when Naomi made her promise not to cut or dye her hair between now and the wedding; Naomi, it turns out, wasn’t joking) might result in demotion, not just from chief bridesmaid but also from best friend.