The Shadow Between Us by Carol Mason

Author:Carol Mason [Mason, Carol]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

EIGHTEEN

My phone rings from under a pile of cushions.

‘Hi,’ he says.

I seem to momentarily lose my voice. ‘Hi.’

‘What are you up to?’ he asks when there’s a canyon of silence between us. He sounds casual, chilled, much like the old Mark – or he’s trying to. I’m guessing the necklace business is clearly forgotten about now. Except, perhaps, by me. I just keep thinking of his parting words as I got into my car. ‘Show me. Go on . . . If you found something, then I want to see it!’ and me cringing as I shut the door.

I pull my mind back to the present and his innocuous question. What the hell am I up to? ‘Oh? Right now?’ I say. ‘Not much. Just watching a spot of TV.’ I haven’t had the TV on in two nights but don’t want to tell him I’m just sitting here in space, in case he reads something negative into that. ‘What about you?’ I ask. It feels surprisingly nice to have an ordinary conversation. We could be coming together at the end of a normal long day. It makes me miss us.

‘Oh, not much. I was just out watering the plants. Got talking to our favourite neighbours. Tanya was saying she hasn’t seen you in a while.’

With the emergence of his sarcasm, a part of me smiles; he can’t stand Tanya Waxman and isn’t the biggest fan of Bill. All the more reason I would have expected him to rally to my defence the day I saturated the idiot in his garden, I suppose, but never mind. ‘What did you tell her?’ I ask.

‘Just that you’d gone to England to spend some time with your folks.’

As if. My parents were the last people I could have talked to. How do you inflict something as big as what I’ve gone through on the elderly? ‘Think she believed you?’

‘No.’ He sounds semi-amused.

I snicker.

‘Who gives a shit what she believes though?’ he says.

And right there is the old Mark: my number one ally and champion.

I hear him taking a drink of something, picture him sitting on the sofa with his Scotch glass containing one fashionably large and slow-melting ice cube. I am feeling almost drugged by tiredness and the comfy familiarity of us, and find no need to root around in my head to come up with anything deeper than, ‘How are you doing?’ I realise I haven’t asked him this in a very long time. Not properly – where I might be giving him the opportunity to actually tell me.

There’s a lengthy silence then he says, ‘OK. You know . . . What can I say?’

I wait to see if he will say anything else, but he doesn’t. So I ask, ‘How’s work these days?’

‘Working,’ he says, sounding a little flat. And then, ‘How’s your letter-writing club?’

‘Ah . . . the Correspondents’ Club.’ I always love saying its name. ‘Good. I like it a lot.’ My thoughts slide briefly to last night, to Ned and his hand reluctantly on my door handle.

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