Chapter 3

I was up the following morning, dressed in the previous day’s clothes when there was a knock on the back door.

Mrs K. went to answer it and when she opened it, I heard Cal’s voice.

“Hi, Mrs. Kearford, is Mike in?”

“Yes, dear,” Mike’s Mum replied, “he’s just having his breakfast, won’t you come in?”

“Thank you,” she replied, “I was hoping he knew where David was?”

I stood to leave the room, but I felt Mike’s hand on my arm stopping me. I looked at him and he shook his head and then he motioned me to sit.

I sat and, a few seconds later Cal walked into the kitchen and stopped.

“David,” she said, almost a moan, “I was so worried.”

“There’s no need for you to worry,” I replied, “for the last six months I’ve run my own life reasonably well with a minimum of outside help and certainly no interference from my mother.”

“I’m sorry she did that yesterday,” she said, “it wasn’t her problem and she interfered.”

“She’s done that all along,” I said, “even that day in Bernie’s office was a result of her interfering and that didn’t come out too well in the end did it. Perhaps if she’d just stood back and let us work it out on our own.”

“It would have taken a long time,” she said.

“But we’d have got there,” I said, “and maybe we wouldn’t be where we are now.”

“Where are we now?” she asked.

“Well, you have a boyfriend and I have no girlfriend, but that’s not your problem,” I said, “but maybe you’d better get back to him before he gets suspicious. This isn’t the place for us to be discussing this subject.”

“Then can we go and find that place?” she asked, “let’s work out just what kind of a relationship we can have in the future.”

I stood up.

“Come on,” I said, a sharp tone in my voice, “let’s go and find somewhere to talk then. Let’s at least get it out of the way. Where are you parked?”

“At the front of the house,” she said.

“I’ll see you out there in a couple of minutes.”

When she left.

“Thanks Mrs K.” I said, “I really appreciate you letting me stay last night.”

“That’s absolutely no problem, David, if you need to, you come back here later.”

“Thank you,” I said, “if I need to I will. I hope I don’t need to, but I will.”

I picked my jacket off the rack near the door and left, walked round to the front of the house and opened the passenger door to Cal’s Citroen.

“All right, where to?” she asked.

“I have no idea,” I said, probably more grumpily than I meant to, “I’ve been in Canada for six months.”

“We could go to my house?” she suggested.

“No, on two grounds, firstly your boyfriend’s there, whatever you say, he’s going to be listening outside the door of whatever room we’re in and two, it needs to be a neutral venue.”

“So not your house either then,” she said.

“If you mean my parents’ house then no,” I said, “I’ll only be going there to collect my things.”

“Isn’t that an overreaction?” she asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said, “I’m absolutely fed up with my mother thinking she can run my life for me. I’m getting out come what may.”

“I’m sorry I caused that,” she said, favouring me with a wan smile, “is there anything I can do to make it right?”

“You didn’t do it; it was my mother’s insistence on always being right.”

“Where shall we go then?” she asked.

“How about we go and walk round Fairburn Ings, it’s a nice day and I haven’t been for ages, we can talk as we walk.”

“All right,” I said, “that should be nice.”

We drove out of town across the river and followed the Roman road down to the Allerton Bywater turnoff, turned right and two miles later parked at the side of the lake that had formed when the old mine workings underneath had subsided. Now it was a bird and nature reserve.

We walked into the RSPB centre and I paid the parking fee, then decided, before we set off round the water to have a coffee in the coffee shop.

She insisted that since I’d paid for the parking, she would buy the coffees, so I let her, at worst it was better than fighting over who did pay.

Since we were the only two customers, we took a table as far away from the counter as we could and sat opposite each other across a table for two.

“David,” she began, hesitantly, “I want to apologise, I didn’t forget that you were home this weekend, Peter asked to come with me, he wanted to meet you.”

“Why?” I asked.

“He said he wanted to see what the great David Barker was like.”

“Why would he want to know that?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “he never said. David let me take you back to Christmas. Or rather when I left Canada and got back home. I’d spent nearly two weeks with you and Sandy and I knew that you were right. For each other and with each other. She completely filled that part in your life, in your heart that I was too involved with wanting to sing to ever be able to take. So, I decided that I should look for somebody else. Somebody, perhaps with ambitions similar to mine. I started dating. Most of them lasted just one date. Although I was accepting of me needing to get back into sexual relations, but I wasn’t having anyone who decided that it had to happen on the first date. Or indeed the second.”

She paused and took a sip of her coffee.

“Peter is the first one to last beyond date number two,” she continued, “but I have so far turned down every suggestion that he’s made to ‘take it to the next level.’ I told him, honestly, that I didn’t feel comfortable with that until I got closure on a previous relationship. Me and you. When he discovered that I was coming home this weekend to see you and discuss what if any future we had, he decided that he was coming too. I tried to dissuade him, but he just wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

“So why didn’t you just tell me that and introduce us?” I asked, “you know I don’t bite.”

“I don’t know,” she said, “I think I thought that it may in some way prejudice our talk.”

“So, what do you want from our talk?” I asked.

“What do you want from it?” she asked, her voice soft and low.

“Me?” I said, “I want to know where we stand in relationship to one another. Are we going to be friends, best friends, lovers, or do we just say it was great but it’s never going to work out so let’s just wish each other every happiness and say goodbye?”

“Which is your preferred option?” she asked.

“I think that’s a question for later, for now we need to explore what we have, get what tore us apart out in the open and see what the options are.”

“What’s your take on it all?” she asked.

“Well,” I said, “purely from my point of view, the biggest problem between us comes from your impulsiveness. You do things without thinking them through, you’re so concentrated on your musical ambitions that everything else just gets thrust aside.

“I don’t think I could argue with that,” she said.

“But have you done anything about it?”

“Yes,” she replied, “I’ve been seeing a therapist since last September. We’re not there yet, but we’re making progress.”

“Good, I’m glad you’re getting help.”

“Are there any other issues from your point of view?”

“The whole thing in Manchester last September.”

“I think that again was my single mindedness. I’d decided that I wanted to be one of the ‘in-crowd’ and nothing was going to interfere with that.”

She paused for another sip of coffee and she made a face at it.

“It’s gone cold.”

“I’ll get us another,” I said and took the two mugs back to the counter.

As well as the coffees I got us two giant choc chip cookies, paid and took them back to the table on a tray.

“Thanks,” she said as I sat down again.

“So, in Manchester, you decided that I could be sacrificed to that ambition,” I said.

“I suppose that’s one way to look at it,” she said.

“If you know another, I’d be interested to know what it is?”

She was silent for a full minute before she looked at me with tear laden eyes.

“I’m sorry, David,” she said, her voice almost a whisper, “I didn’t think of it like that at the time, but yes, you’re right that was effectively exactly what I did.”

I reached over and used my thumb to wipe away the large tears that were running down her cheeks.

“It’s gone Cal, “I said softly, “it’s in the past, leave it there.”

“Is that where we are, David?” she asked, “In the past?”

“Where do you want us to be?” I asked.

“You want me to be honest?” she replied.

“Anything else would be unacceptable.”

“I have just gone through the worst nine months of my life,” she said, “separated from the boy I loved, but with him hating me.”

I reached over and placed a finger on her lips, which she promptly kissed.

“I never hated you, Cal,” I assured her, “I may not have liked you, but I never hated you.”

“And then I came to Canada for Christmas,” she said, “thank you for allowing that, by the way.”

“Nothing to thank me for,” I answered, “that was all Sandy.”

“Well, whoever, thank you, I saw how happy that the two of you were and I think I was a little jealous. You know? Thinking that it should have been me that was so happy, but that I’d messed it up.”

“Since we’re being honest, it was you that messed it up.”

“Yes, I know that,” she said, sounding a little tetchy.

“So where does it leave us, Cal?” I asked, “What is it that you want?”

“I don’t really know, where it leaves us,” she said, “the best analogy I can come up with is this. We’re sat here, in this café with this table dividing us. What I’ve done in the past is the table. What do I want? I want my David back. But I threw him away. And I don’t know how to make that right.”

“The short answer to that is, you can’t,” I said, “there’s no way that you could make what you did right. You could only ever make amends.”

“Then how do I make amends?” she asked.

“I think that that is something that you need to work out for yourself,” I answered, “and I don’t think there’s an easy answer. But, for now, tell me about Peter.”

“What do you want to know about him?” she asked.

“Everything you want to tell me,” I replied.

She paused for a moment to take a drink.