Chapter 3
‘Morning,
David.’
David
Lutman wearily plodded down the stairs the following morning, fully dressed for
work in his obligatory office attire. His black briefcase was hanging loosely in
his right hand, with the green baseball cap gripped tightly in his left. He had
tried to grab whatever sleep he could with the time left over from last night after
his lengthy stint on his laptop, but trying to find the relevant information proved
nigh on impossible.
He
traipsed into the kitchen, placing together the case and cap on the working
surface that lay underneath the wall-mounted TV, which he automatically
switched on. He then opened the nearest of the several cupboards that lined the
walls just below his eye-level. A huge yawn rendered mobility momentarily
impossible, after which he took out a box of breakfast cereal. The kettle had
already boiled, so he removed a tea-bag from a small brown pot that was placed in
a corner of the working surface. From another nearby cupboard, he removed a mug
that was big enough to fill two average tea cups, filled it with boiling water,
and plopped the teabag inside. He then helped himself to milk and sugar for
both his cereal and tea, and then quietly sat down on one of the dining chairs
that surrounded the small corner table. He stared wearily at his dish, his
cereal not looking particularly appealing this morning.
‘Er, morning, David! Hello?’
David Lutman suddenly
looked up. ‘Oh, sorry, dad.’ It was not that often that he
appeared in the kitchen after his father did so.
Dennis Lutman looked at his son’s face. He could not help noticing there
were bags under the eyes, and his hair had clearly not been brushed properly. ‘You
look like you had an interesting night last night. Not
hungry this morning?’
His retired father was a sprightly and youthful-looking sixty-year old
who, despite a few grey streaks, was proud of having kept a full head of black
hair. He also kept himself in trim by regularly working in his garden and doing
plenty of walking. And he rigidly stuck to a ritual that, on weekdays, at 7.30am
every morning, and always dressed in his navy night-gown and slippers, he would
appear in the kitchen in order to make tea for himself and his wife, Janice.
Lutman looked up wearily
from his still-full breakfast bowl. ‘I was just thinking,’ he murmured quietly.
‘Just thinking?’ asked Lutman senior, making a half-hearted attempt to
sound interested. ‘About what?’
‘Erm… yeah, well…’ Lutman suddenly decided he needed to end the
gestation of a potentially difficult conversation quickly. ‘Well, dad, I’ve
decided I’m going back to the States for another holiday.’
His father tried to look surprised. ‘Oh yes? So whereabouts are you off
to now, then?’
Lutman smiled. ‘Well, I decided on California
Lutman
senior was genuinely surprised. ‘Haven’t you already been to California
It
then occurred to David Lutman that he usually had this kind of holiday already meticulously
planned out and arranged within minutes of making such a decision. He would
have had all the permutations of getting there examined and costed, the dates
sorted, the e-mails written to confirm time off work, the practicalities of
transportation to the airport arranged, and collected the various books and
maps before announcing such a trip. So there was no ready answer to the
question.
So
his father changed his question. ‘So… when’re you flying then?’
After a short pause, his son replied quietly, ‘I don’t know yet.’ He
tried to sound cheerful. ‘But I’m popping down to the travel agent during my
lunch break to see when the next trip is.’
‘Next trip? So when d’you hope?’
‘As soon as possible.’
‘Must be quite a trip.’
‘If all goes to plan, it may well be.’
His father smiled. ‘David, you look shattered. What time did you get to
bed last night, then?’
‘Oh, well, too late, I suppose.’
‘What exactly were you doing all night?’
‘Just erm… getting and reading info on the trip.’
Lutman senior was not too sure whether to believe this, and was about to
let it drop when he noticed the baseball cap placed on top of the briefcase. ‘Hey,
see bought yourself a new hat! That for the trip too?’
Suddenly aware that he had not discreetly kept the cap out of sight, David
Lutman grabbed it. ‘Jesus, is that the time? Better shift. See you, Dad!’
*
That morning had a distinctively autumn feel about it as Lutman
witnessed many of his neighbours scraping the first frost off the windows of
their cars after summer.
David Lutman and his parents lived in a leafy suburb of Hensfield, a
large town in the English East Midlands . The house was set
back in a cul-de-sac where just about everyone kept themselves to themselves,
blissfully unaware of each others' existence. Indeed, the family knew very
little, if anything at all, about anyone in their particular road, save for
those immediately next door. They would, out of courtesy, politely talk over
the fence if their immediate neighbours happened to be present, but in all that
time they had never stepped into each others’ gardens, let alone inside their
houses. Lutman murmured a quiet ‘hello’ to Miss Forsyth, a business lady in her
mid-thirties who lived roughly opposite. She was wrapped up in a thick mock-fur
coat that covered everything above the knee to only reveal a pair of black
tights and some awkward looking black high-heels. She smiled back, continuing to
scrape the ice from the windscreen of her MG. That was the limit of their
neighbourly relationship, along with just about everyone else in the street.
*
For
those that did know something about David Lutman, he was a clean-shaven, black-haired,
reasonably handsome young man, some 170 centimeters tall. But he was slightly
plumpish, a consequence of being in a largely sedentary profession. He worked
as a press officer for the Hensfield council, a job that he did not
particularly enjoy. His position there had been gained through being an
extremely diligent member of staff who had worked his way up in the various
positions and departments to eventually reach his current standing. This was
helped by the fact that he was a very articulate and well spoken individual, making
him particularly suited to media contact. But the position demanded that he
always wore a jacket, shirt and tie, things that he had always been very uncomfortable
with. Every day, as soon he got home, he would always change into something as
casual as possible.
The
Hensfield council job was his nine-to-five Monday to Friday routine, a position
he had now held for almost four years, and a role that he now found suitably depressing.
But thanks to his length of service with the council, Lutman had accumulated a
considerable amount of annual free time. Such blocks were always taken full
advantage of, and he would often take regular breaks away from the job and the
town and helping him, he felt, to retain his sanity. He would block off these
days into two week breaks and pursue an activity holiday. Two of these would be
taken every year.
Recently,
many of these breaks had taken him out of the country altogether. He loved
visiting the United States, in particular those trips that included touring,
pitching tents, washing up and hiking, along with the contrasting, fascinating,
and always breathtaking scenery that always accompanied such adventures. All
these visits had long made up his mind that the English East Midlands , a predominantly flat
region, just did not compare with the natural wonders across the Atlantic . For Lutman, those
excursions were a complete and utter contrast to UK
A
new David Lutman.
*
Half
an hour after leaving home in his white Corsa, Lutman soon found himself
crawling along the main road into the town, along with the rest of the Hensfield
rush-hour traffic. He knew that it would be another twenty minutes before he
would arrive at work, but today he did not feel particularly concerned at this.
Important though his position was, his bosses felt it did not merit an office within
the two large and very familiar high-rise blocks in the town that made up the
main council offices. In fact, his workplace was in a leased set of small rooms
located on the fourth floor in a side street, five minutes walk away from both the
blocks and the small multi-storey where he regularly left his car.
He
entered his offices at ten minutes to nine, greeted the reception staff of two
unsmiling middle-aged women, and then went through a small wooden door into a
large open-plan area. Here housed several workspaces that were surrounded by
old-fashioned, faded orange padded-cloth partitions. Lutman made straight for
his space and plopped himself into his office chair, flinging his case onto the
desk and staring at the mess next to it that, as far as he was concerned, was half
the Amazon rainforest. As he sat still, in silence, glaring at the mass of
paper, he let his mind wander elsewhere. Why
would my future self tell me that I was going to meet my wife? Am I really that sad that it had to take myself,
travelling from a few months or so in the future, to tell me all this?
*
It
would be another fifteen minutes before he finally turned his attention to the
job at hand.
First,
he switched on his mobile and quickly flitted through the missed calls and text
messages. Next, he spent two minutes wearily scouring around last week’s
accumulated clutter of paper, post-it notes, letters, printed e-mails and
various other bits of paper scattered across his desk, before he eventually
found the piece of paper he was looking for. He then went into his case to
retrieve a pendrive which was promptly slammed into the side of his computer.
He turned
to his monitor and started typing out another response to an ongoing and
seemingly endless public enquiry on the state of the roads within a local
council estate. Sending out these replies both by e-mail and normal post had been
occupying him over the last two working days, and he was now wearily trying to
search in his mind for the vocabulary for an appropriate formal response. This
was now especially difficult as the toll of last night was now catching up with
him. The telephone, however, ensured that any accidental dropping off to sleep would
be impossible, its guitar-riff ringtone regularly shaking him back to the
present. He had to deal with several enquiries on both his mobile and normal
phone; the first call of the day being a misdirected call in which his valuable
time was spent putting it through to the right connection. The next was a tirade
from someone blaming him - and solely him because he worked for the council, even
though he had absolutely nothing to do with the problem itself - for planting a
bus stop outside her leafy suburban residence. This latter call took up fifteen
minutes of his time. Lutman had learned to be patient with difficult calls, but
this morning was getting increasingly wearing.
He persevered
until it was almost one
o’clock when finally, he could wrap his mind around more
important matters - the visit to the travel agent.
Chapter 4 >
Chapter 4 >
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