…Sara left the house while I was still in bed, not sleeping, but just keeping my head down, because I knew from the way she was preparing for the day that she didn’t want to speak to me.  There had been a few days like that lately.  And mystery phone calls.  If I asked who they were from she would say “No-one” and if I asked what they were about, she would say “Oh, nothing.”  I was closing in on fifty years of age and though, I must admit, never the most intuitive of souls, even I could see the signs.  Problem is, I had no idea what they were the signs of…

I climbed out of bed as the car pulled away and went downstairs to make coffee.  Sara’s phone was on the table.  I stared at it for a while and thought about opening it to examine her call record, but not for long: whatever the circumstances, that felt like a betrayal.  Besides, if her phone was in the house, she couldn’t take any more calls, could she?  Leaving the phone where it was, I went back up the stairs.  “Only me,” she shouted on her return, just seconds later.  “I left my phone.  I’m expecting some important calls today,” and with that she was gone.

Sara had moved in with me six months before and we seemed to be getting along just fine.  Cross words were few and we laughed a lot, but her behaviour had changed lately.  She seemed distracted, she sighed resignedly whenever I did anything stupid, but did not comment even when I dressed especially to provoke a reaction.  She passed over the hated corduroy waistcoat with nothing more than a raised eyebrow and even the pale green chinos prompted nothing more than a silent ‘tut’.

…Knowing that I would otherwise spend an unproductive day feeling sorry for myself, I pulled on my running gear and headed out for what I fancifully called ‘a jog’ around the park – the very place where I first met Sara, probably a year or so ago now.  The fresh air would clear my head and the steady thump of my feet on the tarmac would soothe my soul, but there was a slight drizzle in the air and I almost turned back before taking my first stride, when I saw the supermarket delivery man next door and his cheery wave ensured that I had to keep going: lack of moral fibre seriously affects delivery times around these parts.

By the time I reached the park gates, a hundred yards or so along the road, I was already approaching death: my chest burned with every rasping breath, my eyes misted over, my heart had moved up into both ears and was banging, arhythmically on my eardrums, the muscles in my legs were trying to tear their way out.  I headed towards the top of the hill and a shaded, hidden corner that housed a small memorial bench tucked, discreetly, behind a bush of unknown genus: its very isolation one of the reasons why the park had to close at night.  It was the perfect place for me to gather my what-passed-for thoughts whilst I sucked some air back into my lungs; to rest my weary bones and count down the twenty minutes that I would allow before reappearing, looking for the world like a man who had just jogged all the way around the bottom of the park on the other side of the hill.  As it was, I had to walk a little before I got there, but I managed to effect a quite passable limp, so no-one was any the wiser.

“I didn’t know you ran,” said the voice behind me.
“You!” I said.  I didn’t need to turn around.  I somehow sensed that this was the moment for Lorelei’s reappearance.  I acknowledged – if only to myself – that actually, I might have been looking for him.  “What are you doing here?”
“I was just passing through the park,” he said, “on the way to do a little errand, when I saw you limping and thought that you might need a little help.”
“I wasn’t actually limping,” I said.
“I know,” he replied.  “You weren’t exactly jogging either.”  Infuriating.  “I understand that you and Sara are together now.”
“How do you know that?”
“Is it a secret?”
“No.”
“Then that’s how I know.  How is she?”
“Sara?”
“Is there somebody else?”  As usual during these conversations, I began to understand the sensation of being a rabbit staring into the headlights of an oncoming lorry.
“No,” I said.  “…At least not for me.”
“Ah,” he said.
“What do you mean ‘Ah’?” I snapped, not unreasonably I thought at the time.
“Just ‘Ah’… Would you like a mint?”  He held out the pack and I took one, mainly to make certain that it was real.
“Are you a figment of my imagination?” I asked.
“I don’t believe so,” he said.  “What makes you ask?”
“You only ever seem to appear when I’m troubled.”
“Perhaps you only notice me when you’re troubled.  Perhaps for the rest of the time, you just don’t see me.  Maybe you’re a figment of mine.”  I looked at him, the long white hair, the neatly trimmed white beard, the long black coat and the snakeskin ‘cowboy’ boots he always seemed to wear.  Was it even possible to not see him?  “So why are you troubled?” he asked.
“Did I say I was troubled?”
“Well yes, I believe you did.”
“Ah,” I sucked my mint.  “It’s just that…” I bit my tongue.  “There’s something she isn’t telling me.”
“About what?”
“I don’t know, do I?  That’s the whole problem.”
“Well, do you know why?”
“Why what?”
“Why you think that there’s something she’s not telling you?”
“She’s just acting strange…”  I looked into slightly disapproving eyes.  “…Strangely… distracted.  And she keeps getting phone calls: won’t tell me who they’re from or what they’re about.”
“Oh, I see…  Can we walk, I’m getting cold?”  We strolled back down the hill towards the park gates in silence, mine brooding, his contemplative.  “Does she often keep secrets?” he asked as we walked out onto the street.
“Well, I wouldn’t know, would I?”
“I suppose not, no…  Why do you think that’s what she’s doing?”
“Have you another suggestion?”
“Perhaps it’s just something she wants to keep to herself for now.  Perhaps just be patient for now.  Just be there.”
“That’s all very well, but…”
We had reached the steps that led to the house.  It used to be my house, but it became our house within seconds of Sara moving in and now I couldn’t picture an inch of it without her in it.  He laid his hand lightly on my arm.  His touch felt like an electric shock: an intravenous Espresso.  “Just be there,” he said.  He held out a small envelope.  “This is for Sara.  …My little errand,” he said by way of explanation.  I took the envelope, knowing that no amount of explanation was going to make any sense to me now, and he turned to leave with a smile and just the slightest of nods.  Of course he knew where Sara lived – of course he did – but how could he have an envelope for her?  What kind of message was in it?  “But…” I started.
“Just be there.” he said and he was gone.

I weighed the note in my hand.  Was it possible that he was on his way to deliver it when he accidentally encountered me in the park?  That wasn’t the way he usually worked.  Why was he sending her messages anyway?  The envelope was not sealed and I knew that I could just open it and read whatever was inside, but I also knew that he would know and that was all I needed to resist the temptation.  I placed it on the mantle and when Sara returned from work I told her that I had found it on the doorstep when I got back from jogging.  She read it quickly, slid the paper back into its envelope and pushed it down into her pocket.
“Who’s it from?” I asked.
“No-one,” she said.
“Well what’s it about?”
“Oh, nothing…”

First published 03.11.23 under the title “Being There (part one) – Conversations with the Bearded Man (9)

…The cinema is ok when you are on your own: it’s dry and warm; you can turn up late, book a seat that has no-one sitting around you, wherever that might be in the auditorium, and enter while the Coming Soon adverts are assaulting the pre-assembled eardrums like artillery shells.  Nobody really notices you.  It’s not like going into a strange pub: no sudden, uneasy silence, no stares from men holding pool cues, no landlord asking what you want to drink when all you really want to do is get out of there, no lukewarm, cloudy beer in a pre-lipsticked glass, no standing in the middle of nowhere because it’s less risky than accidentally taking somebody else’s seat, no apologising profusely to the walking threat who has just knocked a full pint down your trousers…

But you know how it is, nothing ever goes quite to plan.  I saw them walk in, this Amazonian couple and I knew instinctively that they were destined to sit directly in front of me, with their giant tray of nachos, a sack-sized bag of crisps that crackled like a Taiwanese Hi-Fi, a Bucket-A-Coke and an unfinished conversation that was much too good to mute during the film.  I craned my neck left and then right before realising that I was not going to see anything in the centre of the screen that had not been filtered through hair-gel unless one or the other of them suffered a major infarction, so I settled down as far as ancient knees in a confined space would allow and attempted to snooze the next hour and a half away in a shape unknown to Tetris when a voice beside me said, “It’s so annoying isn’t it?” and despite a period sufficient for the average couple to have met, fallen in love, rented a flat, fallen out of love and soundly trashed one another on social media having elapsed since the last time I saw him, I knew at once to whom the voice belonged.  “There’s nobody sitting on this side of me if you want to sit there,” he said.  It seemed impossibly churlish not to do as he suggested and so I bottled all my churl and moved into the vacant seat on the other side of him.  I knew that there was no point in asking him how we could find ourselves sitting side by side in a cinema I had only entered to get out of the rain.  I knew his answer would only confuse me further.
“I’ll move if anybody has booked the seat,” I said and he nodded quietly, obviously content that it would not happen.  His long white hair was, as ever, immaculate and dry, yet he had no coat that I could see; no umbrella or hat.  He looked like a man who had just emerged from a hairdryer, whilst I looked like a man who had just emerged from the Thames, cold and not entirely free of effluent.
“It’s quite a comforting place, the cinema, when you’re on your own, don’t you think?”
“It allows me to be anonymous,” I said as the sound and fury of some intergalactic war or another warped speakers all around us.
“Salty or sweet?” he asked, holding out popcorn.
“You have to ask?”
“No, not really.  I bought both.  Why would you want to be anonymous?”
“Do I mean anonymous?  I might not mean anonymous,” I said.  “I might mean unnoticed.  Most places I go to, people notice a single man.”
“You don’t want to be noticed?”
“I don’t want to be stared at.”
“And you don’t want to be single?”
“Of course I don’t!” I snapped, momentarily flushed with anger.  “I hate being alone.  I don’t know how you do it.”
“Me?”
“You’re always alone.”
“Only when I choose to be.”
“You came here alone.”
“I was meeting you.”
“But how did you even know I’d be here?”
“I didn’t need to.  You didn’t know that I’d be here either, yet you still managed to meet me.”
I stared for a moment before, resigned, I grabbed a handful of popcorn.  It is so hard to argue with a man whose version of logic is at once bizarre and irrefutable.  “I presume it didn’t work out with Sara,” he said.
“And I presume you already know the answer to that!” I snapped again, feeling both ashamed and frustrated by my inability to control my anger.
“Well, I do now,” he said, sipping Coke through a straw, looking for all the world as if it was the first time he had ever done so.  “It’s a shame.”
“Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but what does it matter to you whether I am alone or not?  Whether I am happy or not?  Whether I am anything at all?  I don’t really know you at all.  You don’t know me.  I don’t really know how, or why, we keep doing… this.”  I turned towards him, but found his eyes firmly fixed on the screen.  He was distractedly eating popcorn one exploded kernel at a time.  Nobody eats popcorn like that!  The Sara question hurt because I really liked her, but as I always do, I had let things slide.  We hadn’t been in contact for some time and now I didn’t know how to try again without… well, you know.  I hadn’t actually done anything wrong had I?  I didn’t feel like I needed to lose face, even if Lorelei had made me realise how much I missed her company.
“You know,” he said, not removing his gaze from the screen, “I think I prefer the salty, until I try the sweet and then I’m not so sure.”  I knew that there was a point to this, but I had no idea what it might be.  He held out the two card containers.  “Here,” he said, “see what you think.”
Despite the conviction that I was nothing more than a lab rat in a maze, I took a single piece from each box and chewed meditatively.  It was impossible not to agree with him.  I took another two pieces before settling slightly in my seat and turning my own attention to the film.
“You know,” he said, “I think I might have seen this all before.”
“I think it’s new isn’t it?”
“Is it?  I must be mistaken then.  I can’t have seen it before can I?  I just feel as though I know exactly what is about to happen.”  I struggled to form a clear image of his face in the flickering gloom, but as far as I could see there was no suggestion of irony there.
“In my experience,” I said, “you always seem to be at least one step ahead.  It’s like you always seem to know exactly what’s going to happen next.”
“I’m like everybody else,” he said.  “I know what I’d like to happen, but I’ve no way of knowing that it actually will…  unless, of course, I really have seen the film before.  Do you know I think I might have to… I’m sorry.  I won’t be a minute.”  I smiled smugly, bathing in the knowledge that at least in one way he was no different to me.  Drink a large tumbler of Coke and you’re never going to make it all the way through a film.  “I’ll leave these here,” he said, placing the two boxes of popcorn carefully under his seat.  I watched him wander down the stairs and into the dimly lit entrance, turning back to the film at the exact moment that a silhouetted figure passed between me and the screen catching her foot on the unprotected popcorn containers and scattering the contents for some distance in all directions.
“Sorry I,” she said…  “Shit!”  The popcorn cascaded out of the boxes and down under the seats ahead.  “I… oh bugger,” she kicked away as much of the spilled popcorn as she could and picked up the now empty containers.  “I don’t know how I do it.  I always manage to turn up just a little bit too late, after everybody else has settled down” she tried to explain “and instead of disappearing into the crowd, I usually find myself treading on toes, making a grand and unwelcome entrance.  I’m sorry, I’ll…  Jim?”
“Sara?”  Of course, it had to be
“Well, I was going to offer to buy you some more popcorn, but you can buy your bloody own,” she said.  She was torn, I could tell, between anger and laughter.  She looked closely at her ticket and began to sit in the seat beside me.
“I think that seat’s taken,” I said.
She compared her ticket with the number on the seat again.  “No, this is mine,” she said.
I wondered what might be said when Lorelei came back before I realised that, of course, he would not be returning to his seat at all.
“Of all the cinema seats in all the cinemas…” I said.
“Here,” said Sara holding out a paper bag.
I took a small handful of popcorn.  “It’s salty,” I said.
“I know,” she said.  “Do you prefer sweet?”
“No,” I said.  “It’s fine.”
We both settled into our seats to watch the film and enjoy the prospect of not actually being alone for a couple of hours.  I struggled to find something to say, but decided that silence was the best policy until, hearing a quiet sigh beside me, I risked a quick glance to my side and was shocked to see Sara’s face close to my own.  “Do you know,” she whispered, “I think I might have seen this before…”

First published 17.03.23 under the title “An Afternoon at the Cinema – Conversations with the Bearded Man (8)

“…I knew it would be you as soon as I dialled.  How do you do it?”
The voice at the other end of the phone was exactly as I had grown to know, except for an air of confusion with which I was not familiar but, not being one to let doubt get in the way of indignation, I pressed on none-the-less.  “Your card in the newsagent’s: how did you know that I would see it?  How did you know that I would call?”
“Call?”
I quoted directly from the card that I had removed from the shop window.  “‘Tired?  Lonely?  Need to hear a friendly voice?  Just ring,’ and then it’s got your phone number.”
“My number?  Are you sure?”
“It’s the number I just dialled.”
“But I don’t have a card in the newsagent’s.”
“Yeh, right.”  I said, regretting my tone instantly.  “So how come I just got you?”
“You must have mis-dialled.”
“That really is…”  I wanted to say preposterous, but the notion was simply so far-fetched that I was already checking the number on the card against the number I had dialled.  It was, of course, one digit different.  That single digit had connected me with the man I know as Lorelei.  But how?  How is it even possible to dial what now amounts to a virtually random phone number, and get him.  It must be some kind of trick – a mind-game or something.  Maybe I was having some kind of psychotic episode.  Perhaps I’d been brainwashed, or hypnotised, or… I have no idea what… I would wake up soon and find that this was all a dream.
“So, are you?”  His voice pricked into my brain like defeat into an ego.
“Am I what?”
“Tired?  Lonely?”
I wanted to say ‘no’, but I knew that he would see right through that.  Why had I rung the number in that case?  I really didn’t want this man to think that I might have been trying to contact the kind of person who routinely displays their phone number in the newsagent’s window.  “Well, I’m tired of how things are.  Does that make sense?”
“I don’t know.  What sort of things?”
“I thought I was making progress.  I thought that she might have been ready to change her mind, but instead she just told me that she was getting married again and…”
“Ah, this will be your ex-wife.”
“The new man is called Duncan.  Bloody Duncan!  He sounds like a Blue Peter presenter.”
“I thought you had put that particular situation behind you.  I thought you said you were moving on.”
“Duncan has a sports car.  Duncan has his own house.  Duncan, apparently, wears clean socks every day and doesn’t behave like a three year old when things don’t go his way.”
“Ah, so you’ve not moved on quite so far as you might have hoped then?”
“The thing is, I’ve done everything she asked.”
“Have you?”
“Well, I listened.”  Even through the mobile phone I could sense his eyebrows arching.  “There was a lot to take in,” I explained.  “She had a lot to say.  It appears that I have quite a lot of faults.”
“I don’t suppose you can remember what any of them are?”
“Not really – she might have a point with the not listening thing I suppose – but the other stuff… I’m willing to try.”
“She doesn’t want you to though, does she?”
“Not now she’s got Duncan.  Good old Dunc’…”
“She was alone too, just like you, although without the six foot pile of takeaway containers in the kitchen and a mound of dirty socks in the bidet, obviously.”
“She left me.  She started the divorce.  She said we were both unhappy.”
“And?”
“…It’s bloody infuriating.”
“She doesn’t want you to be lonely.”
“She wants me to meet somebody.  To ease her conscience.”
He sighed the kind of sigh that, even over the phone, comes accompanied with a world-weary roll of the eyes.  “Where are you?” he asked.
“I’m in the park,” I answered.  “It’s the nearest thing I get to excitement these days.  Can I get home without treading in dog shit?  Can I sit on a bench without having my hat stolen by a gang of feral kids?”
“You’re not even wearing a hat.”
“How can you possibly know that?  I…”  I looked at my phone only briefly before ending the call.  “Don’t tell me,” I said, turning to face the man who I knew I would find standing beside me, “you just happened to be in the park as well.”
“I like to walk,” he said.  “I like to meet people.  It’s a good way to meet people, don’t you think?”
“I’m not really lonely you know,” I said.
“I know,” he said.  “Let’s have an ice cream.”  We joined the short queue to the kiosk.  “And we’ll see where life takes us.”
“Beautiful day,” said the woman in front of us, trying to defy gravity by remaining upright with a bouncing toddler dangling erratically from her arm.  She smiled apologetically as a whirling hand caught me a glancing blow a-midriff and gently eased the child out of range.  “I brought my nephew to play.  An ice cream is a small price to pay, don’t you think?  It’s so nice not to be staring at the walls.”
I waited for Lorelei to fill the void, but he was silent; smiling benignly at me, the woman and the world in general.  He had a look of contentment that, as ever, I found impossible to understand.  I tried to grin my way out of the situation, but the silence was becoming increasingly awkward.
“Do they still do 99’s?” I asked nobody in particular.
“I hope so,” said the woman.  “Otherwise I’ll have to get a Flake from the newsagents on the way home.  I’ll be particularly unhappy if they don’t do sprinkles.”  She smiled.  Quite a nice smile, in its own way.  “Sara,” she said.  “My name is Sara.”
“Jim,” I said.  “It’s nice to meet you.  And this is?…”  I looked down at the child clinging to Sara’s hand.
“Oh this,” she said.  “I’ve really no idea.  He’s not my nephew really, I just picked him up at the playground.  It’s so much easier to talk to people if you’ve got a child with you, don’t you think?”  I could feel my mouth dropping open.  “It’s a joke,” she grinned.  “Of course I know his name…  It’s written in the back of his coat.”  The smile again.  “This is Tom.  Say hello Tom.”
“Aunty Sara’s going to buy me an ice cream,” said Tom clinging tightly to her hand.  “We’re both having sprinkles.”
Lorelei coughed quietly.  “I’m sorry,” he said.  “I’ve just…”  He turned to the woman in the queue.  “I’m sorry Sara – I hope it’s ok for me to call you Sara – I hope you don’t think me terribly rude, but I have to go.  It’s been good to meet you.  I hope you enjoy your ice cream.”
“We will,” I replied in perfect harmony with Sara and Tom as Lorelei turned and wandered quietly away.
“And don’t be lonely,” he said.  “I’m just a call away…”
“I know,” said Sara…

First published 10.06.22 under the title “A Little Fiction – Conversations with a Bearded Man (part 7) – Helpline“