I wasn’t expecting him to sound the way he does. His voice sounds warm and approachable, like a steady reassuring policeman, someone you’d be safe with. It matches the way his smile has always looked.
‘Are you on holiday?’ With your wife? And children?
‘No, I’m working, although I’ve got a nerve to call it work, really. I’m restoring an old carousel by the sea. I’m literally on the sand. The beach is my office. It’s amazing. It couldn’t get any better.’
I find myself smiling at how happy he sounds. ‘That explains all the pictures of wooden horses on your phone.’
‘So you’ve been going through my pictures then, have you?’ He still sounds jokey and not annoyed at all.
‘I wasn’t going through them, I was looking for a way of getting your phone back to you.’ I don’t mention quite how much time Daph, Zinnia, and I spent combing through his phone inch by inch this morning or that I’m already thinking about how smug I can sound tomorrow when I tell them the carousel horses aren’t just a weird fetish.
‘In my photos?’
‘Well, you could’ve taken a picture of your house, couldn’t you?’
‘Hah. It’s a crummy flat in an ugly block in London. The only people who’d take a photograph of it would be filmmakers for a documentary on Britain’s worst housing.’
‘Oh, I know that feeling.’ I glance over at the bucket in the corner, catching a leak of unknown origin. The landlord, on the rare occasion I can get hold of him, promised to get it sorted last year. He hasn’t answered his phone since. Perhaps I should stop the rent direct debit – that’d get him round here pretty fast.
‘And I bet you pay enough rent to purchase a small car every month too, right?’
‘Several small cars, actually.’
‘You should see the cottage I’m staying in here. It’s a holiday let that I’ve rented for six weeks, but I could live here for six months for the price of one month in London, and it’s gorgeous.’
‘Six weeks,’ I say, trying not to think about a beautiful cottage by the sea or that gorgeous man in it. It sounds like the most perfect place and I suddenly have an overwhelming pang of sadness because I’m here and not there. ‘You won’t be back for ages.’
‘No, the owner wants this thing restored by the summer holidays so I’m here until then. It’s an incredible old carousel. I reckon it was carved entirely by one person, and it was found in an old ruin. The owner won it in an auction, and put it on the beach for the public, and their busiest season is once the kids break up from school so that’s my deadline.’
So much for hoping to see him on the train again tomorrow morning to return the phone. ‘Do you do this a lot then? I mean, all those pictures …’
‘Yeah, mainly repairs rather than full restorations because there just aren’t that many carousels to restore in the country – this is a rare treat for me.’ He laughs. ‘And yeah, I really am that boring. That’s pretty much all I use my phone for, as I’m sure you discovered. Pictures of work.’
And keeping track of your shopping lists, of course. Which I know because you buy all of my favourite food.
‘I must be creating such a good picture of myself here. All I do is moan about my flat and talk about work. Sorry, I’m sure I’m not usually this boring.’
‘It’s not boring at all. Pretty much all I do is work and moan about my flat too. At least your job is a lot more interesting than mine.’
‘What do you do?’
‘I’m a fact-checker for a women’s magazine. I have to double-check everything that proper journalists write so we don’t publish anything that’s untrue. I want to be a journalist and I thought I’d get a chance to prove myself there, but it’s been years now and all I am is basically a proofreader who does a lot of googling and phoning around to confirm quotes. I work a lot of overtime because I have nothing better to do and I keep hoping my boss will notice how dedicated I am.’
‘I can’t complain about my job. I work a lot of overtime because I love old carousels and mainly because if I’m working then I’m not sitting in my crappy flat thinking about how many places I’d rather be.’
‘I know that feeling too,’ I say, looking at the window, which gives me a marvellous view of the building next door. I can imagine what his view in that gorgeous cottage is like. ‘Do you do anything other than carousels? There were some pictures that we— I— couldn’t work out, they looked like bits of rollercoaster?’
‘I’m glad you were so thorough in your search for my address.’ He still doesn’t sound annoyed by it. ‘And yes, I’m not strictly carousels, although they’re my speciality. I’m just a repairman in general, really. My firm restores all sorts of old things, from organs to engines to fairground rides, and yes, they were bits of rollercoaster but not rollercoasters as we know them now – the old wooden scenic railways that were popular in the early 1900s, the kind of thing anyone from a baby to a granny could enjoy a ride on, a real throwback to days gone by. I take a lot of pictures because you can rarely get parts in this day and age, and we usually have to find something similar and adjust it or make the parts ourselves.’
He suddenly stops himself. ‘I’m sorry, I must be boring you senseless. I’m not usually this boring, honestly. And the fact I’ve said that twice tonight probably doesn’t bode well. You’re not busy, are you? I’ve been rabbiting on for ages and never asked you if I was interrupting something. You’re probably sitting down for a nice dinner with your husband, and—’
I laugh at the mental image. ‘No husband. I was sitting down with a microwave meal and Netflix. How’s that for busy? Talking to you is much more interesting.’
He laughs too. ‘You obviously don’t know me well enough yet.’
I try to ignore another little flutter of butterflies at that ‘yet’.
‘And you’ve just described my average evening. Netflix and a sarnie. Sometimes I stretch to something really strenuous like cheese on toast.’ He says it with a French accent, like a posh chef describing a gourmet meal, and it makes me laugh again, and I realise that I’m gripping the phone tighter because I don’t want him to go yet. ‘My brother bought me a chef’s blowtorch once. God knows what he thought I was going to cook with it. Beans on toast on fire?’
‘You know what I don’t get?’ I say, trying to stop myself laughing again. ‘Instant mashed potatoes. You sprinkle a little bit out of the packet into the bottom of a mug, and it makes six bowlfuls.’
‘Oh, I love instant mashed potatoes,’ he says. ‘They’re like the ultimate comfort food, and I can pretend they’re healthy because they’re vegetables. Powdered, reconstituted vegetables, but still. I’m spoiled tonight because the landlady at the cottage made me a macaroni cheese and left it in the fridge. At least I now know why she asked if I had any allergies. I wondered if she was planning on filling the roof with asbestos and painting the walls with lead or something. I’m just waiting for that to come out of the oven and I’m going to eat it in the garden with a cup of tea.’ He pauses. ‘You probably thought I was thirty-six this morning, but now I reveal I’m really an eighty-year-old woman in disguise. No wonder I like it in Pearlholme so much. Everyone seems to be elderly around here. You should’ve seen my landlady, bless her. She looked like she could barely carry the key when I collected it. God knows how she’s still managing to cook huge casserole dishes of food.’
I laugh yet again. I’m not good at talking to strangers, which is probably quite weird for someone who spends a lot of time phoning strangers to confirm facts and double-check quotes in articles, but there’s something about him that