‘I can take that.’ He grasps the handles of my bike as I walk it with one hand and have the other threaded through Jimmy’s arm. So unused to help, and even less used to him being kind, I snatch it away almost instinctively.
‘What do you want? Why are you being so nice?’ The chain scrapes against the ball of my ankle but I try and mask my grimace. I’m not letting him see me struggle.
‘I’m just trying to make your life easier,’ is his reply after he smiles so wide the moonlight glows in his teeth.
‘Yes, but why?’ I insist, still juggling my bike as the pedal takes a nice chunk from my shin as it dips through an unseen pothole. Jimmy, who strides beside me, says nothing.
‘Can’t you just accept for one moment that I might actually be a nice person?’ He sighs and takes the bike from my hand without any fightback on my end. He apologised, I remind myself. But still, there’s a reluctance in me to believe it. What if this is all part of his plan? Let me lower my guard, only to embarrass me ten times more than he did yesterday in the snug.
‘I don’t know many blokes who would trade trousers with me without a second thought.’ Jimmy reminds us of his presence. ‘I’d say our Ed is a good ’un. But you knew that already.’ He turns towards me. The shadow of the night conceals his full expression but from the whites of his eyes I can tell he’s raising his eyebrows.
Arthur grasps my wrist lightly. He’s touching me … again. ‘Bea, I just want to make sure you both get back okay.’ He speaks softly, sincerely, and with an audible sigh I fight him no more.
I’m grateful that the walk to the home is short enough and one I’ve done plenty of times, so we reach it without a hitch. Like clockwork, a nurse comes out to meet us at the door with a shake of her head but Jimmy melts her with a grin before she can attempt to tell him off.
‘Thank you both,’ he says with a wave, then takes Arthur by the hand and shakes it earnestly.
‘You take care of yourself, eh?’ Arthur claps him on the shoulder and is met with a crooked salute in reply.
When I begin my wander home, Arthur still remains by my side. ‘What are you doing now?’ I almost laugh.
‘Well, I thought you’d probably need your bike.’ He smiles, and still wheels it beside us both.
‘Oh sorry, let me—’ I reach for the handles but he speeds up before I get to touch them.
‘Where do you live?’ he asks as I catch up to him.
‘Why would I want you to know?’
He shrugs in reply.
‘Won’t Ms Riches be waiting for you?’
‘Probably.’ We near the corner of my street. ‘What’s she going to do? Banish me to another remote village that my parents grew up in but didn’t tell me about?’
‘Touché.’ We walk for a moment, listening only to the click of my bike tyres and the low hum of a car in the distance. ‘Is that why you’re here then? Banished?’
‘Something like that.’ He pushes his hair back from his face again, and I can’t work out if it’s a habit, or if his hair touching his face bothers him. ‘I fucked up at the BAFTAs. Dad had enough of me just floating through life and never sticking to anything. Hoped this place would show me what hard work looked like.’
I wasn’t expecting him to be so candid. Everything else about him seems a little guarded, planned, meticulously thought out as if his image is everything. But this place has thrown him off; I can tell.
‘You were good, back there.’ I too decide to be frank,and pay him the compliment I suppose he deserves. ‘With Jimmy, I mean.’
A sad smile crosses his face. ‘Thank you.’
‘No, thank you.’ I stop dead just before the beginning of my driveway. ‘Not many people understand his condition. It’s hard to associate a man so young, and seemingly so fit and healthy, with an illness that most people think is reserved for the frail and elderly. I think sometimes, on his better days, he can’t understand it either.’
‘Cruel, isn’t it? To have a whole life ahead of you but being cursed to forget as your mind and body both betray you. And all we can do is watch as we lose more of the person we knew every day.’ Arthur looks past me. ‘Is this your place?’
‘My grandparents’,’ I reply, but, unlike before, I’m in no rush to depart. ‘You speak as though from experience.’ I shouldn’t pry, but without the oppression of light, or risk of being seen too clearly in his emotion, he seems more open, as though happy to talk if shrouded in darkness.
‘My sister …’ he begins, then pauses as though weighing up his words. ‘She would read, and read, and read, until her eyes would go square, or she’d fall asleep inside chapter sixteen. She was a fair bit older than me, and especially when Mum and Dad started working more and we’d be with nannies or assistants, she took it upon herself to raise me. That included coming into my room each night before bed, to recount all of the stories she’d filled her head with, and tell them in a way that would both excite ten-year-old me, and lull him to sleep.’ I watch his chest rise and thenfall with each of his deep breaths, too nervous to breathe myself in case my exhalation would interrupt him, only for him never to resume.
‘Well one day, when I was a teenager, too cool for bedtime stories, she came in just the same, though this time, she couldn’t remember.’ He laughs, though the way his glassy eyes reflect the moonlight, it’s clear that it’s an expression filled with melancholy. ‘She always used to come over and stay. I think she was lonely in her own place and she had spent half the evening in her happy place: reading by herself in her room only minutes before. But she couldn’t remember the names of the characters, or even what they’d got up to. She was so clever, the smartest person I ever knew, but she started to forget words halfway through sentences, lose her train of thought, or just never find the right way to express herself. We thought, at first, she was just tired. She worked a lot; she cared for me. She was youthful and fit; there was not a chance she could be sick.’
‘But it was …’ I murmur, knowing where this sad story is going to end up.
‘Young-onset dementia. She’d had an accident a few years before, on a ski trip with her friends in Austria. She was a natural, brilliant at any sport, but on the slopes she always looked weightless. I don’t know how it happened but Mum and Dad got a call that she’d been airlifted to hospital. We thought at first it was just a few broken bones, but she’d suffered a traumatic brain injury, and that just seemed to fast-track the dementia.’ He nods, and a tear slips over his waterline and drags the moonlight down his face. ‘She was only thirty-two.’
