CAUGHT

“So embarrassing!” I chastise the steps. 

“The algae’s bad in this weather.” 

Excellent, platitudes from a passing botanist, extending a hand, assuming I’ll take it. Doesn’t she know? People don’t touch each other nowadays – not parents and children, not friends and certainly not strangers. The hand has pierced the invisible bubble of my personal space and is waiting to be clasped. An invasion that is neither asked for nor welcomed.

My umbrella is sticking out of the pebbles like Arthur’s sword – useless; water marks are forming on a perfectly good suit – irksome. It’s this Good Samaritan’s fault, who’s smiling down at me as if we’re on some jolly in the woods, some team building exercise and I have slipped in a puddle. 

Every day I compete with the commuter train and every day I win, often with thirty-seconds to spare. She ruined that by strolling up the steps as I was rushing down. A passing glance, a slip and now there’s a dent in the day that will have repercussions for many. Selfish. 

Look at her, all white teeth, throaty laugh and deep-voiced. 

“Come, let me help you.” 

“You’ve done enough. Really, I am fine!”

“You slipped down fifteen concrete steps.”

I bat her hand away. She chuckles, and continues to stand there – legs wide, tomboy tough. Ignore her. 

Too soon the notary will be waiting by the elevator, looking at his watch and tapping his pen against his teeth in a way that makes me want to snap it with my smile. Brittle Beatrice, he calls me behind my back, like I don’t know. I must make a few calls, admit shoddy time keeping. Reaching into my blazer pocket – a reflexive movement, done on the Tube, in a taxi, at a restaurant table – is impossible, as an unseen knife stabs me in the back. 

“It’s your coccyx, most likely. Throbbing?” 

Throbbing. Foolish word, slightly inappropriate.

“Your back, is it throbbing?” 

The drizzle on my skin has a grey hue, on hers it looks golden. 

“Someone should call Brighton council,” I tell my swelling ankle. 

“And get them to do what? Stop the rain?” 

“I don’t see what’s so entertaining.”

“Look at you, buttoned up tight as a soldier. Stop trying to move, woman. You don’t know what you’ve done.”

Who is this person, to be jumping over social boundaries with titles like ‘woman’ and orders to stay still? My husband wouldn’t like it and I wouldn’t blame him. There are codes of conduct between strangers – codes that need to be adhered to. 

“Come on, I got you.”

“You really don’t. I will be perfectly alright on my own.”

That outstretched hand remains – steady, unfazed. 

“Don’t be a pussy. Take it.”

Such delicate fingers, not a scar or sunspot in sight. Perfect, except for the tiny haphazard tattoos on her knuckles. Not words but symbols, cryptic clues for normal people to ponder – normal people in a hurry, who don’t have time to sit around wondering what squiggles will look poetic on which body part. 

“Don’t you have somewhere you need to be?” 

“You mean other than helping someone who thinks racing in heels in this weather is a good idea?” There is judgement in her voice, but it isn’t cruel. 

My right foot is shoeless; red toenails brazenly showing through skin-coloured tights. Indecent. Finding my shoe is imperative.

As if reading my mind, she glances at the black patent stiletto, standing upright in a discarded chip box that’s out of reach on the pebbles. It looks as though it has made a dive for it, attempting to get away from a servile existence of pavement pounding. Something about its haughty stance, balanced incongruously in the soaked potatoes of someone’s yesterday, makes me laugh. It’s a sound that I don’t recognise.

“I’m sorry,” I tell the shoe, the pebbles, the husband who will be waiting for my call to confirm arrival at Victoria. 

The rain comes down a little harder. My mascara begins to smudge, and I can feel something savage stir behind my sternum. It wants to tear at the buttons, the other shoe, the make-up and the restrictions I have concocted out of a thin-skinned adulthood. This woman is smiling at me like she is reading my private, dirty thoughts.  

“If I can’t help you get up, can I at least get your weapon of ankle destruction?”

“No! Really, I can do it.”

She allows me a moment or two to try to stand and then takes charge. There is such energy in her movements. Distracting. She dances back to towards me, swaying to a rhythm that I feel sure I could hear if only I listened hard enough, if only there was enough time in the day for such indulgences as listening and watching. My shoe held aloft, her eyes shine with triumph and vitality. My clothes are too conservative, altogether silly on this beach made for her khaki jumpsuit and trainers, her tattooed fingers and dark skin.

I don’t mean to snatch it out of her hand. I really do mean to say, “I’m dumb-struck.” 

I say – nothing.

“What’s so important that you have to kill yourself to get there?”

“Lawyers. Clients. Appointments. The grown-up world.” I try to bend over and put the shoe on, but it proves impossible. Her patience soon wears thin and she crouches, taking hold of my foot.

“Calm down, soldier girl. I’m only helping.”

“I don’t need –.”

“That’s a lie.” She glances at my wrist, at the three finger-shaped yellow bruises that could’ve been anything, had been nothing. I had asked for it. Not in the wife-beating sense; I had actually asked for it. It had been a long day of absorbing the confused grief that oozes from strangers. I had needed to calm down, to create balance. She wouldn’t understand. Things are complicated between couples. Anyway, it is nothing to get worked up about, just a reminder, certainly not something that deserves a raise eyebrow or that tutting sound she’s making. Some people have rubber bands, I have bruises. So what? I pull my sleeve down in a way that makes it quite clear the marks are part of my world, not hers. She nods, like she has had this unspoken conversation a thousand times before, diminishing the symbolism of it, stealing it away and making it mundane, something ugly, when it is, in fact – beautiful.

She massages my ankle in a way that makes my heart hurt. 

“It’s not broken,” she says, and for a moment I wonder if she is referring to the pain in my chest.  “Your ankle,” she clarifies and laughs. The invasion. “So, what d’you do?” she asks like we were in a spa, not sitting on a wet step, soaked to the bone. 

“Mediator.”

“What, like divorce?”

“Correct. I don’t know why you’re smirking.”

“Ending marriages happily ever after?”

“Quite.” There is no point explaining; she doesn’t seem the burdened-by-responsibilities type. 

“You successfully negotiated the way out of your own yet?” The question is hushed and yet it is as if she is holding my head in those tattooed hands and yelling in my face, “Well, have you?” 

“I am happily married.” 

She grips my ankle; I look up. 

“I…”

Unblinking, she gives me time to say one true thing. I don’t know her, this hippie with the big smile, the raucous laugh, the dance in her step. This ruiner of days. Silence. I never win staring competitions, but I will not lose this argument about my life choices. Until I do. The brown and grey ground fills my vision; defeat rounds my shoulders. 

“That’s a heavy cloak to wear all the time, man,” she says. 

Quite unexpectedly, she reaches up to my collar, fingers stroking my throat, and she pulls out a thick chain that sits just-so on my clavicle. In its centre is a hoop. She tugs on it, making me bow slightly, our noses almost touching. 

“And this?”

No air left in the world; I can’t breathe. The sea throws itself against the shore, sea gulls fight over scraps, her breath is sweet. Answer her! the sea shouts. Answer her now if you want to live.

“I am happily married,” I mouth, no sound.

How long do we hover here? Thirty seconds, maybe more. Her hand wrapped around my ankle, both breathing quietly as the world roars around us. It is somehow muted, that siren in the distance, heading to an emergency which can never be more urgent than this moment. Please, I beg you, leave me alone – I don’t say. Waiting is the answer. Don’t move, say nothing, they get bored these helpers, these do-gooders.

“Fuck’s sake,” she says eventually as she shoves the shoe-heel over my Achilles. “Ah, stop whining, you deserved that.”

There is so much I could say to this presumptuous individual, so much I will say when I find my voice again, but she renders me speechless by doing the oddest thing – she sits down next to me on the step, and with one of those tattooed hands she rests my head on her shoulder. I let her, or rather, I can’t stop her. Her skin is soft but her pulse, against my ear is determined, strong; her smell – all roses and marijuana resin – is distracting. Her house is probably overrun with dust-covered plants teetering on windowsills, coffee caramelising in the pot, sun hitting a table still covered in breakfast bowls. No order whatsoever. 

Drizzle darkens the stones at our feet, as we sit like this for what could be ten minutes or ten hours; there is no time on this step in the rain that is quite out of context, quite separate from reality. 

“You want me to leave?” There is no emotion in the question that isn’t really a question. 

I stare at her other hand, placed so assuredly on my thigh. She is probably an artist or a student, still finishing her anthropology PHD ten years after she should be putting earnings into a pension. Brighton is littered with them, like the discarded chip boxes.

“That would be judicious.”

She laughs at something I feel sure I haven’t said. 

“OK mediator,” she slaps my leg a little harder than is necessary. “Good luck getting up. I suspect you’ve found a way to do it plenty of times.”

Drizzle becomes hard rain. I watch her walk away, soaked through because of me. I smear my mascara down my face because the savage is out now, and I am not sure if there will ever be a good enough reason to wipe her inside again.

“I didn’t ask for your help!” I call out to her departing back.

I think she will say something, return, tell me to stop this nonsense, but she doesn’t, she keeps on walking as if we have never laid eyes on each other. Everything aches. I need her hands around my ankle, her shoulder to rest on. I have to know what the tattoos on her fingers are about. 

To apologise.

On second thoughts, she does turn around and stares back. Heat rushes to my cheeks in greeting – a giddy girl who has made a new best friend. In her expression I see pain, the kind I know; then anger, the kind I know; acceptance and finally, frustration – the kind that makes me look away.

“I run the shelter up the hill. Drop by for coffee sometime. You might learn something,” she yells, before turning and striding away – faster now, with purpose. Suddenly the pot plants in her house are shiny and cared for, her dishes are clean, the coffee pot non-existent and her back is sober and straight.

“Fucking hippie!” I shout, before covering my mouth to try to catch the hurt words that have already made their escape, but they bounce off her back like the rain, like me.