After You

These were the moments when I felt most left behind.

I tidied up a little, washed my uniform, and then, just as I was sinking into a kind of quiet melancholy, my buzzer went. I stood and picked up the entry-phone wearily, expecting a request for directions from a UPS driver, or some misdirected Hawaiian pizza, but instead I heard a man’s voice.

‘Louisa?’

‘Who is this?’ I said, though I knew immediately who it was.

‘Sam. Ambulance Sam. I was just passing on the way home from work, and I just … Well, you left in such a hurry the other night, I thought I’d make sure you were okay.’

‘A fortnight later? I could have been eaten by cats by now.’

‘I’m guessing you weren’t.’

‘I don’t have a cat.’ A short silence. ‘But I’m fine, Ambulance Sam. Thanks.’

‘Great … That’s good to hear.’

I shifted, so I could see him through the grainy black and white of the little entry video screen. He was wearing a biker jacket instead of his paramedic uniform, and had one hand resting against the wall, which he now removed, and turned to face the road. I saw him let out a breath, and that small motion prompted me to speak. ‘So … what are you up to?’

‘Not much. Trying and failing to chat someone up through an entry-phone, mostly.’

My laugh was too quick. Too loud. ‘I gave up on that ages ago,’ I said. ‘It makes buying them a drink really, really hard.’

I saw him laugh. I looked around at my silent flat. And I spoke before I could think: ‘Stay there. I’ll come down.’

I was going to bring my car, but when he held out a spare motorbike helmet, it seemed prissy to insist on my own transport. I stuffed my keys into my pocket and stood waiting for him to motion me aboard.

‘You’re a paramedic. And you ride a motorbike.’

‘I know. But, as vices go, she’s pretty much the only one I have left.’ He grinned wolfishly. Something inside me lurched unexpectedly. ‘You don’t feel safe with me?’

There was no appropriate answer to that question. I held his gaze and climbed onto the back. If he did anything dangerous he had the skills to patch me up again afterwards.

‘So what do I do?’ I said, as I pulled the helmet over my head. ‘I’ve never been on one of these before.’

‘Hold on to those handlebars on the seat, and just move with the bike. Don’t brace against me. If you’re not happy, tap me on the shoulder and I’ll stop.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘You any good at interior decorating?’

‘Hopeless. Why?’

He fired up the ignition. ‘I thought I’d show you my new house.’

And then we were in the traffic, weaving in and out of the cars and lorries, following signs to the motorway. I had to shut my eyes, press myself against his back and hope that he couldn’t hear me squeal.

We went out to the very edge of the city, a place where the gardens grew larger, then morphed into fields, and houses had names instead of numbers. We came through a village that wasn’t quite separate from the one before it, and Sam slowed the bike at a field gate and finally cut the engine, motioning for me to climb off. I removed the helmet, my heart still thumping in my ears, and tried to lift my sweaty hair from my head with fingers that were still stiff from gripping the pillion handlebars.

Sam opened the gate, and ushered me through. Half the field was grassland, the other an irregular mess of concrete and breeze blocks. In the corner beyond the building work, sheltered by a high hedge, stood a railway carriage and, beside it, a chicken run in which several birds stopped to look expectantly towards us.

‘My house.’

‘Nice!’ I glanced around. ‘Um … where is it?’

Sam began to walk down the field. ‘There. That’s the foundations. Took me the best part of three months to get those down.’

‘You live here?’

‘Yup.’

I stared at the concrete slabs. When I looked at him, something in his expression made me bite back what I was going to say. I rubbed at my head. ‘So… are you going to stand there all evening? Or are you going to give me a guided tour?’

Bathed in the evening sun, and surrounded by the scents of grass and lavender, and the lazy hum of the bees, we walked slowly from one slab to another, Sam pointing to where the windows and doors would be. ‘This is the bathroom.’

‘Bit draughty.’

‘Yeah. I need to do something about that. Watch out. That’s not actually a doorway. You just walked into the shower.’

He stepped over a pile of breeze blocks onto another large grey slab, holding out his hand so that I could step safely over them too. ‘And here’s the living room. So if you look through that window there,’ he held his fingers in a square, ‘you get the views of the open countryside.’

I looked out at the shimmering landscape below. I felt as if we were a million miles out of the city, not ten. I took a deep breath, enjoying the unexpectedness of it all. ‘It’s nice, but I think your sofa’s in the wrong place,’ I said. ‘You need two. One here, and maybe one there. And I’m guessing you have a window here?’

‘Oh, yes. Got to be dual aspect.’

‘Hmm. Plus you totally need to rethink your storage.’

The crazy thing was, within a few minutes of our walking and talking, I could actually see the house. I followed the line of Sam’s hands, as he gestured towards invisible fireplaces, summoned staircases out of his imagination, drew lines across invisible ceilings. I could see its over-height windows, the banisters that a friend of his would carve from aged oak.

‘It’s going to be lovely,’ I said, when we had conjured the last en-suite.

‘In about ten years. But, yup, I hope so.’

I gazed around the field, taking in the vegetable patch, the chicken run, the birdsong. ‘I have to tell you, this is not what I expected. You aren’t tempted to, you know, get builders in?’

‘I probably will eventually. But I like doing it. It’s good for the soul, building a house.’ He shrugged. ‘When you spend all day patching up stab wounds and over-confident cyclists and the wives whose husbands have used them as a punch-bag and the kids with chronic asthma from the damp …’