A Romance between two outsiders
It was another dull, rainy and drab Monday morning. I thought of pulling a sicky but then I thought of how dishonest that would be and how it may tempt fate and also of how unfair it would be on my colleagues so I showered, breakfasted, pulled on my clothes and unenthusiastically started for work. If there had been a seat for me to sit on during my commute then my daughter may never have been born.
I couldn’t believe it when I struggled into the train. The crowd almost pushed me out again because it was so dense. Most Mondays were like this but today was far worse than usual. As the train rocked and swayed, lurched and swayed even more I felt as if I were going to fall. Iron arms clamped themselves round my waist and held me up. I found myself clinging to the supportive person and surely we looked as if we were doing a stationary dance as we were involuntarily swaying to the music of the clicking clacking wheels. It was a long commute and I felt tired already. Then, from somewhere inside my head, I heard a disembodied voice which told me we had to get out at the next stop in order to avoid catastrophe.
“We must get out”!
I said to my supportive arms of the man who looked down into my frightened face and somehow got the message. Knowing neither of us would be at the stations we normally got out at, knowing also we would both be late for work, we got out. In my haste I fell and sprained my ankle so badly I could not stand on my foot.
“I’ll take you to hospital”,
As if i were a featherweight
My companion said. He lifted me as if I were a featherweight and, putting me down on a seat, called a taxi. My ankle was strapped up but I was told to walk on it with support. I wasn’t sure how I would do that since I lived alone, not to mention how would I carry things? The man with me told me he would take me back to his place and take me home again once I was better. The thought of staying with a stranger in a place I didn’t know and in such a vulnerable position didn’t fill me with confidence but rather with dread but what choice did I have! I am an only child of long-dead parents and a selection of crusty old aunts and dotty uncles who either smelled of camphorated oil or tobacco and engine oil. None of them could be described as fit enough to look after me and all were on the wrong side of seventy.
The taxi reached Parkside Close in around fifteen minutes. Then we went inside my rescuer’s flat. It dawned on me that I did not even know this man’s name yet so I asked.
“People call me Furry”,
He said and, by way of explanation, tickled my cheek with his beard. Next came tea and food in the form of bacon sandwiches and nothing but worry on one hand and relief on the other. Furry told me he only had one bedroom as this was not a well furnished place and once his parents died, he got rid of most of the furniture except for his own bed but when that conked out, he bought another double bed since the former had belonged to his parents and he liked having all the room it provided.
When being held up on the train I never thought of him as a sexual being but rather a visible means of support but now it was a whole different ball game. Where was I to sleep? I couldn’t possibly sleep with a stranger in one bed, especially a man and the look of horror and fear was not lost on him.
“I won’t hurt you”,
He said.
“You can’t stay down here as the lavvy is upstairs and none of the other bedrooms has a bed in it as I said so there’s no alternative but to share with me till you are fit enough to go home”.
“I’ve never heard of a man sharing a bed with a woman without the inevitable taking place and I don’t even know you”.
“There’s a time and a place for everything and raping a woman with a sprained ankle, never mind doing so to someone like you, is morally unthinkable”.
I was scared to take painkillers
I was scaredto taket painkillers in case he gave me something which would knock me out and even ore scared to sleep in case he forced himself upon me so I listened to the hours being recorded by the chimes of the grandfather clock in the hallway but despite that, was assured that I had not heard each hour strike but had fallen asleep if only fitfully.
I moved around on my ankle which was still painful and Furry, as I had come to know him, took time off to look after me. When he left me in order to go shopping, my mind wandered in the world of all the serial killers I’d read about and studied. I thought of how they appear nice and kind and even charming until the urge to kill came upon them again and how they watched and followed, chose and honed in on their intended targets and then struck. I felt ill by the time Furry’s key entered the lock on the front door and he returned, carrying bags of supplies. He asked me if I had heard a startling noise and then seemed to pick up on my thoughts.
“I’m not going to hurt you”,
He told me and the stammer I had noticed when we first met seemed to worsen.
“I ought to go home”,
I told him after another couple of days.
“Not for another week”,
He said.
“I took two weeks off and a week on Sunday, I will take you home”.
I was sleeping better
Strangely, I was sleeping better and he kept his back to me so I wouldn’t be scared I didn’t want to ask if he was batting for the other team in case he took it to mean that I now wanted him to have sex with me which I didn’t. Then, the day came when he promised to take me home. My ankle was still not right but better and since I didn’t live that far away I could walk. I asked him inside, more out of politeness than anything although I was very grateful to him for his help in a crisis. He came in and saw my books, picked them up and examined them, replacing them all in the wrong order on the shelves, refused tea and watered the plants which were dying for a drink. Then he lowered his six-feet-seven frame, kissed me on the forehead and left abruptly.
During my stay with him, I heard the news about the horrific rail crash that had happened just seconds after the train pulled out of the station we got out at. We both knew I had a premonition of the event, hence my insistence that we get out when we did. We also knew that acting upon it saved both our lives.
When we caught the train from then on, we were the only commuters who spoke to each other but never was there a seat so furry held me up until we got out at the proper station. Eventually he began calling and we went shopping together. I longed to be with him which I only really realised when I went home. One Friday evening I rang him in a panic since my washing machine flooded and luckily he was in, came round and fixed it but still I don’t know how.
“It’s old. You may need a new one”,
He said.
“Either that or marry me and then you could use mine”.
I’d never done such a thing before and would have asked if he had been joking but instead I just said:
“Yes”.
We were married
We were married and I sold my flat and went to live with him in his home. After a year, Sarah was born although he had misgivings about children but from the time he saw her he loved her. He looked for the tell-tale signs of the same thing which plagued him but there were none. She had no freckles under her arms or lumps coming up anywhere. In fact she was a pretty child who was inseparable from Furry when he was at home. When he was in hospital, which was often, she worried just as much as I did about whether he would return home and when he was at home she worried about how long it would be before he had to go in again but I didn’t know how much she worried until she told me when she was an adult. She never told him at all but she did ask him all sorts of questions when they were in the park if I couldn’t go with them which wasn’t often.
Furry was eccentric. He came home one evening and had told me an hour before not to cook because he intended to bring home fish and chips. My stomach rumbled at the thought of them until I opened the door and heard two budgies tweeting in their cages.
“Where’s fish and chips then”?
I asked.
“Here they are”.
“Surely you don’t mean those birds”!
“I do. They were going cheap down the market, literally and metaphorically so I got them for Sarah, one for lunch, the other for tea, then she’ll have to starve. Haven’t had a pay rise since my boss held up my wage packet and waved it at the ceiling”.
I’d long since given up trying to work out what parts of Furry’s stories were true and just sighed.
“I haven’t cooked anything”!
“Lazy woman! You don’t need to. Off out soon, be back when I’ve been out”.
Fish and Chips
Sarah loved the budgies and I loved the fish and chips. When Sarah was a baby, he got up in the night to feed her especially at weekends when he didn’t have to work. He had a friend who owned a garage so he worked for him after he gave up commuting and got a car. He called the car Vinegar because he said that the cost of running it gave him acid reflux. I told him vinegar is not the same kind of acid but that hydrochloric acid is what gives you acid reflux and is stronger than battery acid and ought to stay in the stomach. He told me that he’d call on me for a drop of it if the car battery ran down. We had silly conversations like that as well as sensible ones.
Among the serious conversations we had related to whether we ought to have more children.
“I’d like to but we spun the roulette wheel once and got the jackpot. Suppose we did so again and failed”?
He said. I didn’t really want Sarah to be an only child as I had been but neither did I want her to have a suffering sibling which perhaps she would have to care for once we had gone or to have to defend in the school playground when bullies struck.
Furry had been brought up in the south-east. He’d seemed okay till he was around eight. By this time he was doing well at school but then mysterious lumps came up on various parts of his body. The cause was neurofibromatosis which he described as:
“Coming in two or three flavours”
As if you order it in some restaurant or ice cream parlour instead of fate delivering it to you because your parents are carriers. He had the type which disfigured in a cruel way. In some cases coffee coloured spots or blemishes appear but in others, non-cancerous tumours grow on the nerve endings and have to be removed. Under Furry’s beard there were scars. Sometimes his cherished beard had to come off. I knew when he was in pain because then he was taciturn and Sarah couldn’t reach up to his beard to kiss him and if she sat on his lap he told her to not wriggle but to sit still. He took himself for long, solitary walks and went to bed early. I didn’t know what it was like to live in a violent home where a drunkard was expected after the pubs closed but I did know the tension of living with someone whose illness made him uncharacteristically and temporarily bad tempered but never, ever violent. Eventually I’d find out another lump had developed and he would have to go to have it removed. Youngsters of future generations would doubtless liken it to an app running in the background whereas others would describe it as the sword of Damocles hanging above their heads. I learned quickly that worrying was inevitable but also that life was for living, one day at a time.
I’m tiring quite a bit now, probably due to age and infirmities of my own so I will leave Sarah to tell you the rest of the story.
What’s normal to most if not everyone is whatever they were born to until they find out that their normal isn’t the same as that of other people. I thought it was normal to have an eccentric father and a mum like mine. One day he’d joined a darts team. On Friday nights we knew we were in for it. Mum always waited up for him so she could see if he wanted food but mostly to stop him coming up and lifting me out of bed, smothering me with kisses and telling me whether the team had lost or won. Then he’d carry me downstairs for: “A pie and a pint”. This was a pint glass of lemonade and a pie from the fish shop. Mum would go mad, telling him I’d wet the bed and be sick and that it was stupid to disrupt my sleep.
“It’s Saturday tomorrow. She’s got plenty of time to sleep”.
He’d then tell me stories about violins with spaghetti strings, played by Italian spiders who got tangled up in them and the silly mother who cooked the rice before putting it into babies rattles so of course they couldn’t hear them and other things he swore were true. If he were reading the newspaper I had to knock on the page before I spoke to him if I wanted him. Then he would call to Mum, telling her I was disturbing the pieces. I corrected him once by telling him I was disturbing the peace so he said:
“Well then! If you know that, why do you do it”?
If I could get to sit on his knee before he started to read he’d let me sit there but this meant guessing what time he would pick up the newspaper. I remember one Saturday night when he was sitting up watching the football. I crept down for a drink of water and he saw me.
“Come here, my little sweetheart”,
He said.
“Let’s have a midnight feast”.
He had rightly guessed that Mum had baked him a birthday cake so he sliced it and gave me some, eating most of the rest himself. Then he waited for the fall-out which would doubtless come when Mum found out. When she did, he said:
“A cake in the tummy is worth crumbs in the tin”.
When he saw her cry over it there were tears in his own eyes because he just didn’t see past the fun he and I would have while eating it when the house was quiet. As the years passed we went on fewer holidays because he looked so much worse by then. One of the bravest things I saw him do was to come into my school and talk to the children about himself so they wouldn’t bully me. Our neighbours’ children became accustomed to him and accepted and loved him far better than their adult parents. They all referred to him as “Uncle Furry” and it was they who had to educate their parents and stop them believing neurofibromatosis is catching. With one family he became really angry and made me put on my swimming costume and he shouted at this particular family:
“Well! Does she look disfigured or what”?
He then took us both swimming as Mum was scared of water and I needed to learn to swim. That was an ordeal for him but still he bore it for our sakes.
The adult cuddles
When we got home he told me about what he called: “The adult cuddles” and those that should be reserved for children. He said we carry all sorts of things round with us: weight, sorrows, joys, love, hatred, humour and eggs and seeds. He explained how mothers carried eggs in a special place and told me where it was and that fathers carry seeds and told me where they were. During an “adult cuddle” the seeds get mixed up with the eggs and eventually a new person is born. He explained it all in simple terms and said it was afterwards when we acquire the other things, like those he listed and that if people were ignorant it was only because of lack of proper information and education and that if we are given the right guidance we become both moral, compassionate and kind. He described the planet as one great flower bed and the children as some of its flowers and when I asked how the sea got salty, he said someone must have dropped the drum and it spilled into the water and then when I was older, helped me to find the answer. Then he said:
“Too much seriousness for one day but just remember, never let anyone touch you where your swimming costume touches until you are ready to do so and are a consenting adult”.
After that, I saw him putting those cushions into all the chairs and then he hid, squirting Mum with a water pistol which he said was full of milk. She believed him because she knew his antics. Mum wasn’t more serious than Furry. She was just less other-worldly. She was more practical in many ways because she thought ahead. One day when her back was killing her and she spent time in bed which advice is now not indicated by doctors, Furry got me ready for school. He thought not of an umbrella which he said I would break or a scarf or hat. It pelted with rain when he came to get me and when Mum told him I’d catch my death from the wet he said:
“The drops hit me before her and she’s small enough to dodge between them”.
He marvelled at people’s idiocy – Taking off their wet clothes immediately on entering the house and then sitting in wet bath robes after getting out of hot water.
I remember two awful times. One was when Furry went out in the evenings for a few weeks, wouldn’t tell us where he had been or why and on one or two occasions I caught Mum crying. She really lost her temper with him and their shouting woke me up:
“You’re having an affair. Why don’t you just admit it”!
He denied it, asking how the hell she thought someone would go out with him in his position. All was revealed in a few more weeks. Mum was still hardly speaking to him when it was her birthday.
“I know you are cross with me but here goes”!
Carrying her down the stairs
He hoisted Mum onto his shoulders, carrying her downstairs and showing her a new bookshelf he had made her. He’d gone into Rose Reynolds’s garage and made it in there. He said if he’d done it in our garage where there wasn’t sufficient room anyway, we’d hear the noise which we did anyway but assumed Rose had workmen in. Of course Mum cried again but at least she now knew he had been doing something wonderful for her and not deceiving her. Once she dried her eyes he said to her: “It’s a bit like Gaslight isn’t it? The bloke goes out, then into next door and then comes back later on”.
I felt really awful once when he scared me to death. I was six and as he came into the room, for once trying not to wake me, carrying something cumbersome which he wanted me to see when I woke up, the moon cast his shadow on the wall and I, half asleep, thought it was a monster. Soon he hissed into my ear:
“Don’t scream! It’s me! It’s your old Furry”.
I wouldn’t let him near me, woke Mum who came in and told him off for disturbing me. Years later, she told me he had cried because he had scared me. He had told her when a father scares his child it’s not normally because of how he looks. I finaly got back to sleep, hardly noticing what he had brought in. When I did, it was only to see the most beautiful dolls’ house. It had a little staircase and carved dolls inside and once more he had made all these things in Rose’s garage. It was a miracle I never found out and now it is the proud possession of my own children. He was full of surprises. The biggest of them all was a box of old tapes which I found when I was rummaging around in Mum’s old things where I found all my school reports as well. The tapes were labelled and all in carved wooden boxes. I was anxious to see if the cassette machine still worked. It did.
“Well, Ruthie, it’s only me. You’ll be back nosing around soon so not much time to record but I’ve got my eye on the clock. I couldn’t believe my luck that day in the crowded train when nobody offered you a seat. Neither could I believe people’s bad manners and lack of concern. I was in seventh heaven when you held onto me for support and I knew you saved my life as well as yours when somehow you tapped into the collective unconscious and knew the train would crash. I was even luckier when you fell and sprained your ankle, came to stay and married me and gave me our lovely daughter. As I saw my face changing, year after year, I hardly thought I would meet anyone who would marry me. That’s why I never went to discos as we called them in the 1970’s. I just made out I didn’t care and was indifferent to all that went on around me. I made out that cars were all that mattered and they did until I met you. I’d watch you in the train every day, marvelling at your courage and your strength. I was half joking when I suggested you marry me so you’d avoid buying a new washing machine and was amazed when you said you would. I was so, so worried when Sarah came along in case she had my problem. It was a long nine months. Actually, it was a long few years as I watched, hoping no sign of the disease would show itself. When I remember the tricks I played on you both, I can only smile. When she was born, as others have said, she brought her own love with her. All the same, I didn’t think it worth risking it again in case next time another child would suffer as I had done and still do. The pain I put you through when I had to hide the fact that I was making you a book case and the fright I gave to Sarah when I took her dolls’ house into her bedroom in the dark and she saw my shadow is still raw because I can still see your tortured, frightened faces. I guess you thought that if you could fall in love with me then so could someone else but oh no. That was not the case and anyway, if someone had made a play for me I would have told them I only had eyes for you. Where have the fifty years we have had together gone! I don’t know but if I could have my life over again then I would do it all over again”
So the tapes went on. They took hours to listen to and I knew Mum must have heard them all as well.
Furry died last year. The benign tumours which had caused such havoc had turned cancerous. He kept his secret as long as he could but once he started losing weight and being unable to keep his food down, we knew. He lived long enough to see both my children born and he knew I would look after Mum but as things have turned out I didn’t need to because within three months she died, too, probably of a broken heart. One of the last things he said to me was:
“Do you think that if your mother had been sighted she would still have married me”?
“Yes, probably, but perhaps the fact that she wasn’t enabled her to see the beauty you have inside you and the wonderful sense of fun that you also retain. You were meant to be together and I don’t even think that any of us will keep her here long after you go”.
Then I said to him:
“There should not be standing room only for the likes of you and Mum for the journey of life in the carriages of life’s train. Instead, the carriages of courage should be right behind the engine driver, call him God, Jehovah or whomever and although nobody gets a problem-free ride, your tickets which came at your birth ought to be first class”.
He was unconscious by then but the nurses told me to keep talking to him as hearing is the last sense to go. I knew he had heard me, for I saw him smile and then he slipped away.