Chapter Text
Are You Sure You Just Haven't Run out of Men?
It’s mid-morning, mid-March, the lilac is just beginning to bud outside her office window, and somewhere between this Friday and last Friday, the world has caved in on itself.
School is closing. Coronavirus is spreading. But the mounting list of things marked URGENT! that just can’t wait to be done, do nothing but form a vague grey mist around what plays brightly and repetitively at the forefront of her mind: Last Friday night. Hebdon women’s disco. And Gillian. Gillian who tipsily swayed closer and closer to her as the evening progressed. Who laughed at her awful, awful jokes, and sat, chin on hand, listening so intently, watching so intensely. Gillian who leaned in to kiss her without even thinking...
Which is how she found herself leaving school at lunchtime, despite the record number of emails in her inbox, and the phone that won’t stop ringing, and arriving at Gillian’s farm, all coat and scarf, adjusting her bag on her shoulder, keys jangling in her free hand as she slams the car door and negotiates sparse gravel and grit in three-inch heels.
The front door is open to let the sunshine in, despite the cold, and Caroline sidesteps Gillian’s mud-caked Wellington boots as enters, tapping gently on the open door, peering in, only to find her mother sitting by the fire, radiant and warm, firelit and dozy. She looks up and smiles.
“Oh hello, love.” She adjusts herself in her chair and shakes open the newspaper on her lap to rouse herself.
“Where’s Gillian?” Caroline asks, edging between the sofa and Calamity’s lego box to lean down and kiss her mother on the cheek by way of greeting.
“On the floor in the kitchen,” Celia answers from behind The Daily Mail , peering at Caroline as she straightens herself up.
“On the –” Caroline stops. Pauses. Slowly unwinds her scarf. “What’s she doing on the floor?!”
“Looking for slugs. Apparently. They keep getting in under the sink now the weathers turned.” She sets the paper down on her lap again and looks at Caroline from over the top of her varifocals. “What do you want her for anyway, thought you were in school today?”
Caroline folds the scarf over her arm, draws in a breath and wonders briefly if she could leave without explaining why she was ever here at all.
“I am. I was. I’m going back there in a minute, I just thought I’d pop in to see–”
The stairs creak and Alan appears holding her mother’s travel slippers.
“Hello, Alan.”
“Alright love?” He smiles warmly, gestures with the slippers and shuffles over to Celia.
“She’s just popped in,” Celia tells Alan with a raise of her eyebrows and a lowering of her tone. “To see Gillian .”
“What’re you saying it like that for?!” Caroline watches as Alan bends slowly and places the slippers neatly by the foot of the chair and holds them still whilst she slips her feet in.
“I’m not saying it like anything.” She’s indignant, and even Alan glances up at her with a subtle frown, a shake of his head and a silent don’t say anymore... but she is her mothers' daughter after all, so she continues nevertheless.
“Yes you are, I could all but see the air quotations around her name!”
“She’s in kitchen,” Alan says, attempting a conversational diversion, but Celia, like her daughter, can’t let it go.
“It just strikes me as odd that you can’t take time off for my birthday, but you can swan off in the middle of the day to pop round to see Gillian.” She casts a perfectly executed bewildered look towards the window. “Of all people.”
“Oh! Mum, let it go, that was months ago!” She hesitates, a beat in the air before a sentence follows that she casts off as casually as she would her coat if someone could be bothered to take it from her. “Anyway, I had OFSTED in.”
“Yes, well…” Celia purses her lips looks down her nose and gives a little shrug of her shoulders to further her point.
Caroline rolls her eyes, expels a breath and steps back over what looks worryingly like a lego BDSM chamber, towards the kitchen.
“Uh, be careful when you open door, she were on floor.” Alan cuts in again as Caroline edges closer to the door. “Looking for slugs.” He adds, and she smiles.
“So I heard...” She says gently.
She opens the door into the kitchen to find Gillian not looking for slugs at all, but sitting at the table, in profile, a cup of tea in front of her, sunlight coming in, low and pale, catching the steam from her tea and the paleness of her skin.
“You’re supposed to be on the floor.” She says as she closes the door behind her.
Gillian smiles a smile that doesn’t make it to her eyes but doesn’t turn. She’s sat upright, hair caught up in a ponytail, the sleeves of her red plaid shirt rolled up over tense forearms and the arms of her blue overalls hang limply from either side of her waist.
The kitchen is much colder than the sitting room, though the Aga is lit, and the light that shines through the thin glass panes has lost the yellow warmth it had only moments before.
“Everything...alright?” Caroline asks, her voice higher than she intended it to be.
Gillian inhales, tugs her shoulder with one hand, rolls her neck and finally turns to look at her.
“Just been in here listening to you lot jabbering on about how I’m in here on the floor, looking for slugs.”
“And were you?” She can’t think of anything else to say...
“I was. Earlier. Now I’m drinking tea…” She casts Caroline a sideways look before continuing, “enjoying a bit of peace and quiet.” She says pointedly.
“Ah.” Caroline shifts the strap of her bag into the crook of her elbow and glances at the clock. “I wanted to talk to you.” She looks back to Gillian whose attention is once again bound by the mug of tea in front of her. “About last Friday?” She adds as if Gillian couldn’t guess .
Gillian looks at her again, dead and sullen behind the eyes.
“I wanted to talk about it because it’s been worrying me…upsetting me, and I just...I mean, what I want to say is- I suppose I just wanted… needed ...to know why you did it?” She comes to a faltering stop, and the moment she does she realizes she’s made a mistake in coming here at all, because Gillian visibly bristles, her mouth twists and her eyes widen.
“I didn’t do anything!” She gestures with a hand and nearly knocks her mug.
Something is offset. Caroline can feel it, as she always has, ever since they first met, as if whatever it is that fuels Gillian in these moods is alive, breathing - a beast of its own.
“You kissed me!” She braves it anyway, beast or no beast, she’s here now and she needs an answer that will satisfy the thoughts that have kept her from sleeping for six nights straight.
“I bloody did not!” Gillian’s indignant.
“Well, you tried to...”
“Those are two v- very different things.” She’s stuttering and jittery, full of that trademark nervous energy and there’s steam in her eyes, in her hair, from the pot on the Aga that she sits too close too, and she’s smoldering and tense. Her leg starts it’s rhythmic anxious jiggle, and it’s in her, this thing . This beast of rage and sadness. It’s inside her, she can feel it, and it’s too much -almost too much to bear. But she can handle it, just like always does. She can handle it.
“But, why?” Caroline watches her, sees the flickering beat of her pulse in the side of her neck, and wonders, fleetingly, how warm that hollow between her shoulder and neck would be against her lips.
“Can we not just ignore this like... normal people? Move on! It was a f-f…. stupid mistake. I was pissed. You were pissed n’all! I was drunk, and I was sad. I was really f...ing….sad.” She lets her arms slide from the table and her hands fall to her sides. She slouches back against the chair, shakes her head, and looks out of the window to a cloudless spring sky.
Caroline notes the grey hairs caught up in Gillian’s ponytail and the sunlight on her face that makes the lines of her face even more stark than usual. “What about?” She asks softly.
Gillian shakes her head, keeps looking at the sky, and for a moment Caroline thinks she won’t answer at all.
“Just. Just stuff. Just, lot going on, with farm, with this f-ing woodworm…Raff, Ellie…” She looks down into her mug. That wasn’t it at all. “Think I’ve reached that age.” She speaks more quietly and her mood shifts. The anger dissipates. Now, Gillian is left, smaller than she seemed before and Caroline realizes just how exhausted she looks. She braves moving closer. Adjusts the angle of the chair closest to Gillian, and lowers herself down slowly to avoid the chair legs grating against the flagstone floor.
“What age? What are we talking about? And be careful what you say here because we are the same age.” She leans closer, tries to make eye contact, but Gillian doesn’t smile, and instead looks away from the sky and rubs at the chip in the rim of her mug with the top of her thumb.
“That age where no one wants you anymore. No one’s interested…in me, anymore.” She glances up. “Men. I mean.”
“Are you sure you just haven’t run out of men?” Caroline asks without thinking, and Gillian half-coughs, half-laughs.
“Fuck off!”
“Sorry.” She apologizes, but she’s relieved to see Gillian smiling, albeit briefly.
“It’d worry me more, only I don’t really care. That’s what worries me. I’m stewing out here on’t farm, a lonely old…” She leaves the sentence unfinished and turns the mug a fraction of an inch.
Caroline resists the urge to reach out and move the mug away entirely, as she would a student fidgeting in front of her. Instead, she attempts humor, “are you having a nervous breakdown? Is that what this is? Or the menopause, have you thought about…?”
Gillian raises a threatening eyebrow.
“Listen, Caroline. I wasn’t thinking, when I…. I was really, really f-f-….ing pissed….I’m sorry I behaved like a...twat.”
Caroline nodded. Apology wordlessly accepted. “I’m sorry I mentioned the menopause...”
For a moment there was silence. From the sitting room, there is the murmur of the television and the clucking of hens outside the front door.
“Do you want a cuppa?” Gillian asks suddenly. “There’s more in pot.”
Caroline shakes her head. Wishes she could, and pushes the memory of her email inbox into the farthest recess of her mind.
“No, I’d…I’ve got to get back. To school.” She catches the momentary flicker of something (disappointment?) in Gillian’s expression. “It’s…actually, I will have one.”
Gillian nods slowly, looks down at her hands, then pushes back her chair with no regard to the squeal of wood against stone.
“You’ll have to make it yourself though.” She’s standing up and pulling the rest of her overalls up over her shirt. “I’ve got a hundred and one other bloody things I’ve got to do before I move sheep. There’s a wall down by main road.” She looks up from buttoning herself up, to add, “Some pillock in a range rover ran into it.”
Caroline opens her mouth, closes it again, then, for want of something better to say, says, “Can’t trust those range rover drivers.” as she watches Gillian take her own mug to the sink before reaching up for a clean one out of the cupboard.
“Just leave it by the sink when you’re done.” She says, setting it by the Aga.
And she’s gone. Just like that. Leaving everything and nothing behind her.
“Right.”
Caroline answers to the house.
“Right…”