…Strange how different a house looks when it is full.  Well, I say ‘full’, but that’s a bit of an exaggeration really.  Even in a house as tiny as this, it would need a lot more people to actually fill it.  Certainly a lot more people than I knew.  As it was, most of the guests today were officially ‘Sara’s friends’.  Until Sara came along, the most people I had ever had around here was one – and then only if you count the postman.  Only once in my life had I been hugged by more people: when I scored in the Over-35’s indoor football final and, strange as it was, I preferred the hugs I was getting today.  They were far more fragrant, softer and, if I’m honest, less masculine.  Hearty back-slapping was noticeably absent.  Even at fifty, there is so much to be said for an unsolicited hug from a member of the opposite sex.

I had never before been the recipient of such a gift: a surprise ‘combined fiftieth birthday and one year since you met me’ party hosted by Sara.  I had never before been so completely taken in.  (Well, as long as you don’t count the bloke with the ‘lottery tickets’ on the Costa del Sol.)  Even after I had walked into the darkened room to find, when the lights snapped on, it filled with people all ‘raising a glass’ to me, it took quite some time for me to process what was actually happening.  It took me even longer to equate the party with Sara’s recent ‘suspicious behaviour’, followed by, perhaps, a twenty nano-second gap before the searing embarrassment of knowing that I had ever allowed myself to suspect her hit me with a 300 degree roasting down the back of the neck. I was hell bent on apology, but she had other plans.  “Come on Jim,” she said.  “Close your mouth: you look like somebody’s stolen your cigar.  You’ve got a lot of people to meet.  You need to tell them how grateful you are to have met me.”  And off we went on a round of all the people who were now our friends.  They all congratulated me on my good fortune in meeting Sara (with which I had to concur) and reaching fifty years of age (which, given the lifestyle I had led for many years was probably an achievement worthy of comment) and, eventually, I found myself back where I had begun, a glass in each hand, staring into the eyes of Lorelei.  “And of course, you know Christian,” said Sara, kissing my forehead and wandering away to be elsewhere.
“Christian?”
“Don’t you like it?”
“I thought it was Lorelei.  That is you, I thought you were Lorelei.”
He smiled, moving slightly to allow me to stand beside him.  “I’m sure I am,” he said.
“And Christian?”
“Almost certainly.”
“I don’t suppose you ever actually told me your name, did you?”
“Did you ever ask me?” he asked, and for the life of me, I couldn’t remember.  “She’s quite a woman, isn’t she?”
“Sara?”
He frowned until, quite suddenly, he realised that I was joking.
“How do you know her?”
“Oh, you know, we just bump into one another from time to time.”
“Like you bump into me?”
“You make me sound dreadfully clumsy,” he said.
“You were with me when I first ‘bumped into’ Sara in the park and when I re-bumped into her in the cinema.”
“We’re quite accident prone aren’t we, the three of us.”  He was cradling a small crystal glass tumbler – the best one we had, I noted – of Scotch in his hands and I hoped it wasn’t the rubbish that I normally drink.  His collarless white shirt was spotless and he was the only person in the world that I could think of who was capable of wearing a waistcoat with style.  I remember feeling shocked that, like everyone else, he had left his boots at the door.  Unsurprisingly his socks were immaculate.  It was no surprise when Sara appeared, carrying a bottle of the kind of Malt Whisky that most of us only ever see on our fiftieth birthday, to top up his glass.  He smiled benignly, and Sara glowed perceptibly.  I wondered how many other people he regularly ‘bumped into’.  How many other lives he had saved… Now, there was a strange thought.  Had he saved my life?  I don’t think he had done anything so dramatic, but he had helped me piece it back together.  And Sara?  Why had she needed him?  Oddly we had never spoken about him, despite the fact that we were both conscious that it was he who had brought us together.  Had he saved Sara?
“She is a remarkable woman,” he said, inside my head as always.  “I was at such a… loose end when I met her.  She gave me a purpose.  She brought me peace whenever we spoke whilst you, you brought me… variety.  You asked me questions that had to be answered.  You made me think about what my answers should be…”
“You always seemed to have all the answers,” I said.
“Perhaps you just asked the right questions.”
“Ok, then here’s my question for today; do you believe in guardian angels?”
He looked down into his whisky, swirling it slowly in the glass.  “Yes,” he said finally.  “I believe that I have two…”

First published 04.11.23 under the title “Being There (part two) – Conversations with the Bearded Man (9)

…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)