Please help me

I saw her come into The Oasis Café and look around. I like to sit at the four seater table at the far end of the counter with my back to the kitchen wall. To my left is the door to and from the kitchen. I am surrounded by the smell of food, especially the bacon cooking on the griddle. 

If I’m lucky, Shirley is wearing a skirt and I can see her calves. I know she lives alone in the flat above the café, because she has told me more than once. The first time I recommended a decorator and the second was to ask me if a home office was tax deductible,  as she had no need of a second bedroom, volunteering that ‘No one visits because I have no family, now my father’s dead’. I told her it didn’t seem right that such a lovely person should have to live alone to which she replied ‘I manage’. It was probably then that she hooked me, but I’ve spent the past three months since trying to do a final edit on my latest book, with Sebastian, my publisher, breathing down my neck, so I’ve done no more than look at Shirley’s legs and her pale, sad, face.

The problem is I’ve started on another story and that keeps interrupting. It didn’t help when the woman I started telling you about came into the café and saw me. She then walked the length of The Oasis, past four empty tables and rested her hands on the top of the chair across from where I was sitting. She could see I was holding a pen, poised to write in the notebook on a page I had already half filled. I was on a good run. ‘Can I sit here?’ she asked. ‘If you have to’ I replied, hoping the sharpness in my voice might be enough to change her mind and she’d go and sit at one the empty tables but she didn’t.

What struck me, when I saw her just after she entered The Oasis, was that what shape she had was masked by the voluminous fawn raincoat she was wearing and her face similarly lost under a matching rain hat made from the same fabric. My first thought was ‘Mrs Paddington Bear’, which brought a smile to my face, and now she had spoken I knew she was from the Scottish Highlands, a soft accent without the roughness of the Central Lowlands, an accent I find equally attractive because of what I can only describe as its ‘raw energy’. She was now sitting down and taking her gloves off. I put my pen down and looked at her again. ‘You’re from somewhere between Inverness and Aberdeen’. ‘Elgin’ she volunteered, ‘I’m impressed’. Her compliment appealed to my vanity and aroused my interest.

 ‘I spent my summer holidays in Grantown-on-Spey until I started work’ I replied, continuing ‘Why have you come to my table, when there are four, no five, empty?’ She gave me a penetrating look and said ‘I’m being followed, can we swop coats?’ I didn’t argue. I took my Barbour from the chair beside me and handed it across to her, dodging my coffee and the remains of my custard tart as I did. In its place I put her Burberry and thought these are the best two coats The Oasis will see this week, with a guilty smile of smug self-satisfaction, which I hoped the young woman opposite wouldn’t recognise for what it was. I then watched as she removed her woollen jumper and how her breasts moved freely as she did, comparing them with Shirley’s. I wanted to apologise to both of them but I was too ashamed of my thoughts to admit them to anyone.

‘By the way, what’s your name?’ I asked. ‘I’m Carson Willard, short story writer, The Observer Sunday magazine, just after the crosswords’. She put out a hand, ‘Mairi McEwan, what are you going to do with me?’ I looked at her and pondered her question before giving her an honest answer. I haven’t made up my mind’. I could now see fear in her pale blue eyes, ‘Christ, does this mean they’re going to get me?’ It was my turn to reach across the table and take a hand. I looked into her eyes, so wanting to feel the thick red red hair on her head, and said ‘I promise that won’t happen’ and closed my notebook. I would give Mairi a safe, good life. I owed that much, not that I told her.

I stood up and stretched my back. Shirley saw me. ‘Another coffee?’ ‘Yes please’ I said and walked the three steps to the counter and, looking over, watched her put the froth onto Mrs Green’s cappuccino, who saw me and smiled. I then carried the coffee across for Shirley and returning to the counter I said what I should have said three months ago. ‘I’d like to cook you lunch on Sunday. Nothing fancy, plaice with butter, oven steamed in foil, plus roasted aubergines and peppers, followed by rhubarb crumble. One o’clock’. My stomach was knotted as I spoke the words.

‘Sounds lovely’ Shirley came back, her face looking more beautiful than I had ever noticed before, ‘but, be warned, if you treat me too well I might not want to come home’. I smiled back and kept the words ‘That’s what I’m hoping’ to myself.