Emma And The Rosebud

Mark held Emma to him gently and unconsciously began to move in a
soothing, swaying motion. Emma's eyes began to close, her head lolling
against Mark's shoulder; a thin trickle of dribble began to form a damp
stain on his shirt.

"Who loves her Uncle Mark, then?" exclaimed Ian. At least someone does,
thought Mark. He and Ian had been best friends since primary school,
despite their strongly contrasting characters. Ian had always been
handsome, clever and self-assured, an achiever both at school and,
later on, with women whereas Mark had been, and still was, a plodder of
limited ability and distinctly average looks not helped by a chronic
lack of self-esteem. No-one had expected their friendship to last
beyond school and Ian's inevitable progress to university - Mark had
had to go out and get a job as best as he could at sixteen.

However, Ian had returned to their provincial town after graduation and
both men shared a deep loyalty and an unswerving determination to see
the other prosper which, had they not both been as straight as a rod
and hopelessly British, could also have been called love. This was duly
extended to Ian's wife Olivia; Ian was obviously infatuated with her
whilst Mark did not exactly fancy her - she was somewhat beyond
fancying - but acknowledged her as one of his closest friends and would
often share confidences with either or both of them. Each of the three
would simply say they "looked out for" the other two, though in truth
Mark took most of the looking out for.

Olivia came over to relieve Mark of his young burden. She was
golden-haired, fine-featured and had not lost her model figure during
pregnancy; the couple looked like they had just stepped down from Mount
Olympus and, needless to say, had produced a beautiful baby. Mark took
another look at the sleeping Emma and wondered what kind of weird
offspring his own genes would come up with; his long, thin face, lank
dark hair and bulbous nose would hardly be an asset if they were passed
down to any child of his. Not that this was a likely scenario; he still
remembered with embarrassment their teenage days when Mark and Ian
would hunt the discos as a pair; Ian would approach a couple of
unattached girls, dragging Mark in his wake, and as often as not Ian
would be set for the evening with the prettiest whilst the less
favoured girl would spend five minutes listening to Mark's stuttering
conversation before suddenly deciding that she had to be home early and
making a rapid beeline for the exit, leaving a forlorn Mark to travel
home alone.

Ian had breezed through university, bagged a well-paid professional
job, a large detached house and a glamorous wife; Mark worked at a
garden centre and lived in a bedsit in a less salubrious street, though
theirs was a small town and in fact they only lived a few hundred yards
apart. Ian and Olivia would often invite Mark to a dinner party where
there would be one or more of Olivia's unattached female friends, but
Mark was intimidated by these fearsomely bright young women who all
seemed to be "in the media" or acted as P.A.s to captains of industry
or showbiz personalities.

"I don't know why you keep inviting me to these parties," confided Mark
to Olivia one evening after all the other guests had departed and the
two of them were left to clear up and load the dishwasher, Ian having
volunteered to be taximan for the guests who had sampled freely of the
wine."Don't get me wrong, the food's great and I love being round at
your place but your mates are all way out of my league!"

"That's not true," chided Olivia, "most of them think it's cool that
you work with plants and look forward to meeting you. But you still
have to make an effort to talk to them even if you're not very
confident, otherwise they think you're just not interested."

"And you've got to admit I haven't got the looks", replied Mark, his
head drooping. Olivia put an elegantly manicured fingertip under his
chin and tilted it upwards until his eyes met hers again. She had
developed a habit of doing this with Mark.

"Looks aren't everything, except to silly bimbos and brain-dead
footballers," she reassured him, "and you've got a lot going for you."
Mark still looked doubtful, so she elaborated, ticking off his assets
on her long fingers: "You can hold down a job and look after yourself,
you don't get drunk or do drugs, you've got healthy outdoor interests
and you're not thick even though you didn't pass many exams. You're
good with animals and children, in fact you're a pretty good catch in
all sorts of little ways - but you have to talk to people to let them
discover that. And I know, 'cos Ian tells me everything!"

Mark knew that Olivia was uniquely special and however much he admired
her, not least for her thoughtfulness and kindness, reality dictated
that he would have to settle for someone more commonplace than the
female members of Ian and Olivia's circle - the trouble was that he so
rarely met ordinary young women; most of his customers at the garden
centre were elderly and knew him as "that nice young man with the big
nose". His leisure pursuits were largely solitary; he enjoyed hill
walking and visiting National Trust properties, especially those with
exceptional flora. He hated disco dancing, with its unfortunate teenage
associations, and whilst he wasn't averse to the odd pint of "real ale"
in a quiet local pub, he avoided the smoky places which pounded out
loud music and sold weak overpriced lager; just the kind of places
which females seemed to prefer, in fact.

"Go to night school," advised Ian, "learn Spanish or something. Or
yoga, or woodwork - anything! You'd be surprised at the amount of
talent who go to these classes, they don't all hang out in night clubs,
you know." But Mark was afraid he would be slow to learn and would drop
behind or get embarrassed when he couldn't do the work, and wasn't
convinced that he ought to embark upon courses of study with ulterior
motives in mind.

Mark's job entailed working weekends, so he had a regular free weekday,
and it was on those days he noticed the numbers of young women on the
streets who would normally be invisible to a nine-to-five working man;
women shopping, doing the school run, going down to the health centre;
most of these women had one or more children in tow. On fine days many
of them headed down to the park with their offspring, but Mark was
reluctant to spend much time there as single men were, it seemed,
perceived as shady and sinister characters if they hung about the park
too much. This was a shame as Mark appreciated both the floral displays
and watching the children enjoy themselves in the playground.

One Tuesday afternoon a harassed-looking Olivia turned up at Mark's
flat with Emma in her buggy.

"Just heard my Mum's had a fall and I need to go round," she explained.
"Could you possibly look after Emma for a couple of hours until Ian
gets home?" Ian was a civil engineer and worked thirty miles away, and
Olivia's mum lived at the opposite side of town. Mark was genuinely
delighted; although he had baby-sat a sleeping Emma in the evenings, he
wondered why he had never thought of offering to take her out during
the day. Mark took charge of the buggy and he and Emma set off for the
park.

Visiting the park with a baby was a much more pleasant experience for
Mark than going there by himself; no-one stared or frowned at him
whilst the occupied buggy proved to be an open sesame to all areas, and
Emma was fascinated by the inquisitive Canada geese waddling round the
duck pond. She squealed with delight when a gentle Labrador loped up to
the buggy and gave her a sniff. Emma then had to endure a few dull
minutes whilst Mark pushed her around the greenhouse, silently admiring
(or, more often, criticising) the efforts of the council's leisure
services division to grow plants with which to stock the civic flower
beds and hanging baskets in the High Street. Mark saw that she was
becoming restless so he soon headed for the playground. Emma was, Mark
thought, too young for the swings and slides, but he sat down on a
bench with Emma on his knee and let her watch the other children play.
Nearby was a pretty young woman with two children, a boy around Emma's
age and a girl who was a slightly older toddler; Mark had often seen
them in the street on previous days off and had smiled shyly without
getting much response. Today, however, the young woman lifted the
toddler out of a swing and secured her alongside her little brother in
the double buggy, which she then pushed towards the bench and sat down
beside them, her eyes fixed upon Emma.

"Oh, LOOK, Mattie, isn't she gorgeous!" she exclaimed to the small boy.
"What's her name?" she asked Mark. He answered her question and,
encouraged by the fact that she had initiated the conversation,
searched desperately for a way to develop this. He thought how Ian
often took Emma to the park at the weekend and asked the woman whether
her husband also took the children for a walk. A scowl appeared on her
face and her small red mouth puckered like a rosebud.

"Not bloody likely," she heatedly replied, "selfish sod upped and left
when I was pregnant with Matthew." Shit, he had put his foot in it
again! Fancy assuming that she was married just because she had young
kids! Crimson with embarrassment, he held Emma up high so that the
young woman couldn't see his face. Emma squealed again, thinking this
was a game.

"Sorry," the woman said apologetically, "I shouldn't be so touchy.
Anyway, this is Sophie, she's nearly three and Mattie's fourteen
months. I see you've got a lovely little girl there. Have you any other
children?"

Mark peered cautiously around Emma to look at the woman. Surely she
didn't think that he could be the father of this flaxen-haired little
beauty? He wasn't the only one who could make unwarranted
assumptions!

"She's not mine," he explained. "It's my day off from work and I'm
looking after her for some friends."

He ducked his head again, fearful that this confession would somehow
belittle him and mark him out as inadequate, a social misfit.

"Oh." The woman's rosebud mouth remained slightly open as the
monosyllable hung in the air. Mark turned back to face her, still
unsure. He had hitherto never been able to understand women but he
could gauge the potential of flowers pretty well and found to his
surprise that he could read the rosebud mouth and the steady
questioning eyes. He saw things he had hitherto never seen in the face
of an available woman; acceptance, maybe even respect and definitely a
slight speculation. He put Emma back down on his knee, straightened his
shoulders and looked full into those eyes with a new-found confidence
that would have had Ian and Olivia on their feet and cheering madly:
"I'll have to get Emma back to her dad soon. Do you fancy coming round
for a coffee?" The five of them left the park together, Mattie and Emma
gurgling to each other and the two adults chatting animatedly, as
though their encounter had opened floodgates, releasing unspoken words
and nourishing buried hopes and dreams. They were all going to get
along just fine.