Keep Walking Rhona Beech

by Kate Tough

Genres: Marriage & Divorce; Friendship; Black Humor; Literary Fiction; Satire; Women's Fiction; Contemporary Romance; New Adult Romance

Synopsis

Incredibly insightful, funny and poignant' Helen Sedgwick 'A warm and ferociously witty story. Truth rings from every page of this assured, engrossing debut' Zoe Strachan When Rhona's story comes to an end you will miss her. Her candid, raw, messy journey will make you laugh, cry and remember. Not a typical break-up book, it's much more profound. Nothing has turned out quite how Rhona imagined: she's been casually swapping one job for another while getting comfy in a long relationship which ends abruptly, and her efforts to adjust to that change are thrown by some unwelcome news... Flawed, relatable Rhona Beech narrates this beautifully written, pacey satire about female friendship, heartbreak, career change, conceiving and illness, which will appeal to fans of Fleabag. Join her on a laugh (and cry) out loud search for meaning amongst the bars, offices and clinics of Glasgow. Will her friendships survive the changes and challenges? Will SHE survive? At once funny and tender, Keep Walking, Rhona Beech is a clear-sighted look at a generation of women that was told they could have it all.

Release date: April 4, 2019

Publisher: Abacus

Print pages: 238

Sample

I step off the bus and stand there, planted; no part of me ready to go home. I watch the bus continue into the distance, start to pick up speed, stop to let someone off, start, stop. All that curbed potential.

A woman in leggings walks by, supermarket bag on one arm and yoga mat rolled up under the other. That’s one way to spend your evening. But is it a life – a job, a hobby and dinner at nine o’clock at night?

My mind searches for things I could do at this time on a Tuesday. Realising this might take a while, I move inside the bus shelter to perch on the pole that passes for a bench. I scroll through my mobile looking for a companion, someone without children or an early start, who could meet me for coffee. Names flow up the screen and the thought of holding another conversation wears me out. That woman’s voice says things … I don’t know where she gets them from. Since the split, I’ve been out in public as her, yakking, or home alone as I don’t know who, silent. What I really miss is being quiet in the company of another. I need to be quiet. I don’t need to be alone. Nor do I need to foist this on anyone else.

I put my phone away and stare up the street.



I get up. I go to work.

I spend the whole day there.



Emerging from the underpass something cold and sudden hits my legs. I look down and my thighs are wet; soaked through. Brain whirring: Am I supposed to walk home like this? Is it water? Is it piss? Was it deliberate? Are they laughing? More to come?

On the ground: tattered balloon skin.

Look left, right. Up.

A collection of boys at the wall, a phone camera pointed at me. ‘Very funny you wee pricks! Is it not past your bedtime?’

I bring out my phone and raise it towards them. They scatter. One stays.

Look away. Look back.

He’s about thirteen, in his customised school uniform of shortened, fattened tie, un-tucked shirt and no blazer, no jumper.

‘C’mere and say that tae ma face,’ he goads. ‘C’mere and say it.’



I get up. I go to work. I spend the whole day waiting for the words on my screen to make sense.

In the commuter broth of the carriage home, tears run in hot lines to my jaw and for a minute or so, I let them.



I don’t even take off my coat. I beeline for the walk-in cupboard in the living room. Moving a portable heater to one side, I can access a large cardboard box to reach inside. Both blind hands are required to lift out a smaller box placed there in July, when I swore I’d never do this.

Cross-legged on the rug, my coat seams cut into my armpits as I hold him.

My lungs remember air.

I slip-stop through the glossy stack: him alone, me and him, headshots, full-length, family groupings. Set against: landmarks and landscapes and sun loungers and celebrations.

Today has been a subway train rumbling towards this – I have to hear his voice. Just for a moment. The sound of it. I need to. I must.

I can’t.

I don’t have his new number.

I know I don’t. But maybe I do. I reach for my bag and rummage to retrieve the phone. As soon as it’s in my hand I feel a little better. Like I’ve fulfilled at least part of the craving that clawed at me all afternoon, from below the place where I know who I am or what drives me. I click the contacts icon: M … Mark. There he is. With his old number. The one he no longer uses because it’s a UK mobile.

I hold the phone to my ear. I imagine it ringing and him answering. I feel sick and stupid for calling him. I haven’t actually called him. I imagine we are talking, telling each other what happened today. Laughing before punchlines are delivered because we can second-guess what they will be. The phone is him, in my hand.

I may never hear him again.

The phone drops on the rug and tears trail hot, again, to my jaw.

If I can’t hear his voice I will drink. I’ll sit here, forget dinner and drink until bedtime.

I can’t. I know what that would lead to.

Opening the wine would end in me phoning his mum to ask for his new number and she would a) not give it, and b) phone him and tell him I asked for it.

My number is the same as it always was. My number used to be his number. And he hasn’t phoned it since he left.



I wake up. I am wearing my coat. I’m surrounded by photographs – remnants of the geek who didn’t trust cloud storage and printed a copy of everything worth keeping.

As I gather and neaten them into a pile I notice it’s easier to look at them now. Why? Studying the uppermost image it’s apparent that I’m not the person I am looking at. Her static existence is not mine.

Mark, too, may not be the man I am holding onto. Putting the photographs back in their box, I’m untempted by the items littering the bottom – birthday cards, Valentine’s cards. Envelopes with my name, in his handwriting. Little packets of temporary truth.

I bury the box back inside the larger box in the cupboard, so there will be no evidence in the morning. The phone screen displays his name. I delete his redundant number and go to bed.



I get up. I go to work.

Passing an entire day there, I’m subjected to the ritual call-and-response of colleagues as they leave the office (‘Cheerio’ > ‘See you tomorrow’). When I notice I’m the only person left I look at the clock and it’s seven forty-three. I won’t cross the 8 p.m. boundary so I turn off the computer, gather my stuff and decide to walk it. Perhaps I’ll feel like being at home by the time I get there.

Not long into my stride, the phone rings. On the screen: Hilary. After a salutation she says, ‘It’s the annual alumni dinner on Saturday. They sent me an email.’

‘Thanks, but it’s a no.’

‘You don’t know where it is yet.’

‘Who cares?’ I am using the background traffic noise to my advantage.

‘What?’ she asks.

I raise my voice. ‘I have plans already,’ I tell her. ‘An alumnus dinner at home. If you want to go husband hunting, take Tania.’

‘You just managed to get Tania and husband in the same sentence. Prize for the grumpy lady. Tania can’t go, she’s not a graduate. Just come. It’ll be good for you, for us, to mingle.’

‘New rule,’ I say, loudly. ‘No parties till I stop yammering with the brittle zeal of the recently dumped. I see it in their eyes, “Who brought her?”’

Hilary peddles her usual angle. ‘You weren’t dumped.’

‘As good as.’

I wait for the red man to turn green beside the twin exhausts of a motorbike.

‘I can’t even hear what you’re saying,’ she yells. ‘Phone me later.’



I get up. I speak to my cereal.

‘Maybe it’s time. It must be. I have to get used to doing things on my own.’

I go to work and manage small talk at the kettle. At lunch time, I ping round the internet like a pinball: ‘What’s on in Glasgow?’



The ‘musician’ wears baggy garb, topped off with a hard hat. Not worn to deflect missiles sent towards the stage, it is an instrument. Tubing is glued to it which trails to her mouth (I conclude ‘she’ from something in the shape of her lips) and she blows through it to produce nothing like music.

Tightly surrounded by a set of objects found in any self-respecting back lane – bike wheels, bed frames, rusting white goods – she seems furious about this, hitting, scraping and banging them with the frenzy of someone on the wrong side of talented.

Metal strings connect some of the objects. She rubs the wires feverishly with flattened fingers and the audience is enthralled but I can’t hear it. I just can’t.

Easing myself to the end of the row and then out, I wait for a bus while rain rushes at the vandal-proof glass in violent, percussive waves.

A short, shabby man teeters towards the bus stop, hand resting on the open can nestled in his pocket. Not judging distance too well, he sits down next to me so our upper arms are touching through the bulk of our coats. I wait for his uninvited, incoherent ramble. The half-cut, half-arsed attempt at conversation he will make and I will be expected to invest myself in, in case he causes a scene or stabs me or something. Conversation that he will apologise for starting, ‘Sorry, hen, sorry to bother ye,’ but will proceed with regardless. Conversation that will quickly move into the realms of the personal, ‘Yur a lovely lassie. So y’ur. Where’s yur husband the night, hen?’ And I will have to shout my answers (because he’ll be drunk and deaf) so passers-by will hear me say, ‘I’M NOT MARRIED,’ and he will reply, ‘Lovely lassie lik you? Courtin then, aye? Boyfriend, then.’

‘I DON’T HAVE A BOYFRIEND.’

‘Och. That’s no right. Come oot wi me, hen.’ Does he honestly think? ‘See when ah wis younger? Quite a looker. So ah wis. Aye. Ah’ll take y’oot, hen. Up the dancin …’ at which point he will get up and step from side to side, turn in methodical circles with his arms out, all the while smiling and carrying a pretty decent melody of a sixties’ song. And I will sneak off, leaving him to it.

But this is not what happens. Our upper bodies rest beside each other and I can smell his sour skin and breath but because he doesn’t say a word, doesn’t even look at me, I don’t feel the need to shuffle along. We sit in our silences. I contemplate what he might be contemplating and realise I have no idea. I start to like him for this; his courage to reject the coherent world and inhabit his own.

He sees a bus approaching and reels to his feet. Assuming that he wants to get on it, I face the rain to stick out my arm on his behalf. As the bus slows I hand him my day pass to use for his fare, thinking, I’ll walk off some of the antsiness, then maybe I’ll be able to go through my front door.



Cradling a mug of tea, I scroll through a screen of 35- to 45-year-old males (who live within five miles of my postcode, have an ‘about average’ body type, work in an ‘executive/management’ occupation and ‘no way’ smoke). I pause at one. Continue scanning. Pause at another. My forefinger tendon twitches beneath the skin: if my laptop goes in for repair, will the shop staff know which sites I’ve been on? I remind myself it’s not porn – but being caught looking at porn would feel slightly less humiliating.

Clicking the profile of LionRampant, I struggle to compute this realm of online romance. The last time I was in the market, occasional success depended on a blend of kismet, alcohol and making the effort (to get out the door, to look half decent). Now there’s this strange internet shopping – with unwashed hair after a long day at work. No pheromones. No danger.

I read what he’s written. Normal enough. Yet he hasn’t met a woman at the pub, or a party. Do people not speak to each other any more? I look at his photos again. Would we hit it off if we met? I ask him. Would I know how to function again if I hooked up with you?

I can’t imagine knowing what to talk about with LionRampant. I can only remember knowing Mark so well that we didn’t have to talk.

My eye focus has drifted during the reverie and I’m aware of my face reflected on the darker areas of the screen. Drooping where it didn’t use to, it is not a face to offer on a dating site.

The ramifications of the choice I made in July pitch up and bed-in for the night: I let him go at an age when no one else will want me. I was reckless with my best years. I have nothing to show for them.



For several satisfying seconds, the blade hits a rhythm of back and forth.

The adenoidal breaths of its serrated edge come in quick succession.

Then (due to the angle of my arm, or the grain of the wood) it catches. The sides of the cut hold fast around the slim metal but I keep tugging at it, as though it’s the teeth which have become embedded, when I know it’s something else entirely: some law of physics I have no patience for.

As always, it comes free again and obliges me; rasping back-forth-back-forth-back-forth.

It’s only when the blade is almost through the far edge that I notice.

I am sawing the branch that I’m sitting on.



I get up, I go to work. I’m hit on the ear by scrunched-up paper.

The boss has left for her holiday, and the others appear to be doing as little as possible. A cheer goes up when I roll my seat over to join them.

One explains that I got in the way of the target. I look over to where I came in and there’s a printed photo of the boss tacked to the door. ‘Ten points for her nose,’ he says.

A joy on Monday, by Wednesday, the inanity has back-fired to the point where I want to top myself. At midday, I say that I’m taking a long lunch hour, ‘… because I can, ha ha ha …’ but actually because I need to do something, anything, with a point to it. What I have in mind is the shops: stocking up on toiletries and replacing the gloves I couldn’t find when I looked for them. What occurs is an impromptu decision to board a bus which comes to a halt as I’m passing its stop. As long as I stay on it for less than half an hour, I can be back from wherever I am by one thirty. My luck is in; the traffic is light and after twenty-five minutes I disembark in a village that would have been isolated before the suburbs came out to greet it. There are a few shops up ahead. I wander towards them.

The woman behind the bakery counter is from the generation which considers it a female’s duty to herself, and everyone else, to look as groomed as she is able before leaving the house (even if it’s to serve sausage rolls to pensioners and off-course office workers).

Observing her, I can only conclude that her generation is right. The care she has taken over setting her hair and tying her neckerchief extends to the way she has the Empire biscuits arranged – also the way my sandwich is placed into its paper bag and the corners twisted with a dainty turn of manicured fingertips. She can touch nothing without nurturing it.

Handing over my money, I wish I’d made more of an effort this morning. ‘Is there somewhere nearby I can eat this?’ I ask.

She thinks for a second. ‘There’s a viewpoint behind the park,’ she replies. ‘Don’t go into the park, mind. Go up the track at the back of the cottages. You’ll see the signpost. It’s a climb to the bench, but the views go all the way to the reservoir.’

For the length of time she smiles at me, I forget to speak.

‘Will you be warm enough?’ she asks.

‘Be fine,’ I say, making a ‘tipping my cap’, ‘good day to you’ gesture with my sandwich bag. This excruciating display of masculinity bewilders me. I make myself leave though what I want to do is wait there till her shift is over, go home with her and live in her house.

At the bench I imagine how the bakery lady might sit and I do my best to emulate it. Gulls and crows are fussing in the distance, each group determined to claim a field as its own.

Watching the black and white shapes rough and tumble, I stand to sweep crumbs from my coat then sit down again, wondering, Does the bus go as far as that loch? Could I get off there another time?

Edging in from around these musings comes the sense that something, somewhere, isn’t right. It accrues momentum. Things are not fine. But what isn’t fine? The feeling swells till it’s loosened my moorings. The sandwich is on the ground and I am bent forward in a gaping-mouthed, perfectly silent howl.

I can’t hold him. I don’t have him.

Spit trails from my lower lip.

All the things I’ve lost …

I don’t know how long I’m like that – seconds? minutes? – before I manage a drink of water. Thank God no one could see me. Thank God it happened here. It can happen anywhere; the acute, occasional human pain that stops your stride, robs your breath and sends you into the nearest alley, the nearest toilet, because you can’t cry in the street. Who in their right mind cries in the street?



At the base of the track sits the village war memorial, a chunky granite needle engraved with names. I quash the usual curiosity to see if my surname is among them, given the risk that I’d see his – the heavily carved permanence of it is not an image I need to carry back.

Disco music builds inside my bag, signalling the life I have away from this place. The screen says, Tania. She’s been in touch more regularly since I ceased to be a ‘smug married’ (her words).

When I locate the phone there’s scant chance to offer a greeting.

‘Thank God you answered. Where are you? Can you talk?’

Tania’s grasp on the timetables of regular people is slight, ever since she left the service sector courtesy of a crippling anxiety disorder (full range of symptoms researchable online). She sells her NHS pills to a local dope dealer, and boosts her benefits by listing her flat on Airbnb. We’re not sure where she sleeps.

I tell her I’m on my lunch break and ask if she’s okay.

‘I need surgery.’

‘When? What?’

‘It’s shooting out my nose, Rhona. Oh it’s nasty.’

‘Put your head back.’

‘Not blood. God. If only. A hair. A bionic one. It’s dangling right out my nose and I don—’

‘And you think you need surgery?’

‘To cut out the follicle, so it never grows back. And I’ll need some hormone pills. I’m turning into a man here.’

She’s turning into something … Let’s see if I can coax her back.

‘Tania, everyone gets a rebel hair now and again.’

‘I don’t. I think I should get it checked.’

‘I wouldn’t bother the doctor. Really wouldn’t do that.’

‘What am I supposed to do?’ she whines.

Get a job? Do a bit of voluntary work?

‘Set to it with nail scissors,’ I suggest. Adding, ‘And don’t look at your big toes.’ Cruel, maybe, while she’s still in shock about her nostril but she’d have found out sooner or later.



On the journey back (me, three OAPs and a chihuahua in a jacket) my conclusion is, I am not taken seriously enough at work, they have lost respect for me. Reflecting on when this might have happened, I can conjure no evidence that they ever had any. Not in two years of compiling their rotas, reconciling their wages, making good their customer service blips and not telling the boss when their call times were out. If I stay any longer I’ll be in danger of a personal best.

My desk isn’t overlooked by anyone so I spend the afternoon updating my CV and surfing job websites because things can’t go on like this (‘It’s not fair on either of us.’).



I get up. I get to work at five to ten – within the bounds of flexi-time (just) but I’ve to reach the sixth floor still, and put my computer on.

The lift doors close behind me and the guy who’s already inside raises his head. ‘A’right?’

It’s a rhetorical question. An awkwardness-easer. He doesn’t need an answer. Why do I feel compelled to answer?

If the lift hadn’t stopped on Level Three, if he hadn’t got out, I’d have told him.

‘Yeah, all right,’ I’d have said. ‘Though I woke up alone, again, to come to work, which has descended into a zoo this week, with me as a performing seal. I know what you’re going to say and, don’t worry, I’m already looking. Where d’you work? Do they need a Section Manager? If I could just shake this pervasive malaise … everywhere I go, there it is. Plus I’m going to be logging-in late ’cause I was in my pyjamas Googling a cervical procedure. My appointment card arrived. Colposcopy – heard of that? I’ll spare you the details but I don’t fancy it. At all. Didn’t have time for breakfast in the end. So yeah, all right. You?’



Hilary and I laugh behind our hands like Japanese women, shielding each other from the food that may be lodged in our teeth. I’m telling her about the Facebook account the guys at work set up in the boss’s name during her holiday – and the insulting (or plain insane) messages they sent to the old school buddies who ‘friended’ her.

‘You should’ve seen the replies these people were sending back,’ I continue. ‘Outraged and full of personal stuff – what she’s supposed to have done in the toilets in 1982.’

‘That’s awful,’ says Hilary, frowning. ‘I wish I hadn’t laughed. Is she married?’

‘To a German Shepherd, in a humanist ceremony.’

‘Not her “relationship status”, Rhona. Married in real life.’

‘… how can you marry a dog in a humanist ceremony?’

‘Because I wouldn’t like to be there when her bloke finds out.’

‘… unless they meant an actual German, who keeps sheep …’

Hilary claps her hands in front of my face.

‘They’ve taken it down,’ I tell her.

She studies me for a second before reaching into her bag.

Bringing out her diary, she clicks a pen into ‘ready’ mode and hovers it over an open page. ‘Note to self,’ she dictates. ‘Email Rhona’s boss with details of Facebook prank. Suggest Rhona is sacked.’

‘Me!’

‘I can’t believe you joined in with that,’ she says, laying the pen down (but not un-cocking it).

‘I didn’t know they’d done it! Until the replies started coming in and the hilarity went up a notch. You don’t understand what it was like in there. I was tuning it out most of the time, trying to concentrate.’

Hilary shakes her head in slow motion. ‘Never lose your authority,’ she says. ‘If I taught you anything I thought it was that.’

I raise my glass. ‘A toast to October half-term and Miss Marshall being out on a weeknight.’

‘And to you, Ms Beech, for being single and free to come out anytime.’

‘Every cloud …’



I get up.

At work, I remember to block off a morning on my calendar for the colposcopy clinic. Try saying that when you’re drunk. I’m whispering it to myself repeatedly. . .