A Walk in Roundhay Park
A series of interconnected short stories from my 2018 collection "Degrees of Separation"
A Walk in Roundhay Park
(December 2011)
As the blue Audi cabriolet pulled to a halt in the car park, Pat, sitting on a bench near the entrance to the cafe, didn’t need to look at his watch to verify how late Andy was; he’d been checking it on-and-off for the last forty minutes.
The man who emerged from the car, mobile phone pressed to his left ear, gave a wave and a slight shrug of the shoulders. It was a gesture that simultaneously said “Sorry, pal”, “Not my fault!”, “You know how it is…”. Pat wasn’t surprised his old friend was as late as this. Driving towards the park from Roundhay Road he’d had a bet with himself as to how late Andy would be. He’d gone for fifteen-to-thirty minutes. Obviously that was a tad optimistic these days. As Pat stood and walked back to the car park, he couldn’t fail to recall when it would have been a shock for Andy to have been fifteen- or thirty-seconds late! The last four years had taken their toll - and in more ways than just time-keeping.
Pat was no more than four steps away from Andy when he finally lowered the phone.
“Busy?” Pat suggested unnecessarily, offering his hand.
Andy shook it warmly as he simultaneously dropped the phone into the inside pocket of his jacket.
“You know what these Scandinavians are like,” he said rhetorically, “always another question that needs answering, something else needing to be clarified.”
Pat laughed.
“Not all Scandinavians, surely?”
“You’re right. Probably only the ones I have to work with.”
They fell into step without thinking about it, heading past the bench on which Pat had recently been sitting and towards the lake.
“Coffee first or second?” Andy asked.
“Second, I think. I’d like to kid myself I’ve earned it for a change.”
Andy took in the full length of his friend.
“Not running so much these days?”
“Not so much. That obvious is it?”
“Life can be a little cruel when you get to our age. There always seem to be more and more reasons why we can’t find the time to do the things we used to.”
“Including Scandinavians,” Pat suggested.
If you had looked of them perhaps fifteen years earlier, you would have seen slightly slimmer versions of their present day selves. Little else would have been materially different, at least from a distance. From that perspective, time had been relatively kind.
They would probably have been running too. Young men out for their weekend exercise, atoning for a late night or recharging the batteries in preparation for another week at work. Although Andy had been moving ahead professionally, when they were in their running gear it was Pat who always had the edge. If you were to ask, neither would admit to ever having raced the other, though the truth was that Andy always tried to finish in front at the end of their run - and that Pat was never going to let him. Each being slightly ahead of the other in different spheres - work and play, if you like - gave their relationship an equilibrium. It was a balance they maintained all through their university days and on into the world of work where - as coincidence would have it - they ended up working for the same company for a while.
“How long has it been?” Pat asked.
“Since what?”
“Since we went round the lake together? Six years?”
“Longer,” Andy replied. “I left Leeds ten years ago when I got that promotion to London.”
“Ten years? That’s something. And look at you now…”
“Fat and flabby?” Andy laughed. “But if you want to run round Pat, you just let me know!”
Pat treated it as the bluff and bluster it was, but he also knew that if he’d taken up Andy’s offer, they would have been off and away even in their heavy shoes and winter coats.
As they turned left past the cafe entrance and began to walk towards the far end of the lake they did so in silence. The path was well trodden here and recent rain had resulted in the presence of a number of puddles and patches of mud. Navigation seemed to require silence.
“It amazes me that they’ve never sorted this path out,” Andy said as soon as they had been able to walk side-by-side again. “The smallest drop of rain and it gets like this.”
“It’ll be worse at the far end - as always.”
For a split second there was the hint that they might not try and walk round the lake after all but rather retrace their steps immediately and give in to the lure of coffee and cake. But then the moment was gone, displaced by the sight of a mum ahead of them who had paused to retrieve the small teddy which had fallen from her child’s buggy and was now in serious need of a wash. Pat went ahead as they reverted to single file for a moment.
“How is Leeds? Same as ever?”
Andy’s question, carried through the air, caught Pat up before the speaker did.
“Same as,” he replied, once they were in stride again. “The odd new building in the centre of town - mainly flats - and the odd old business relocating here.”
“They tell me at the office that the city’s booming, northern financial hub and all that.”
“So they say.”
“It’s a shame I haven’t been able to get up here much; not as much as I used to anyway. And that’s not just the fault of the Scandinavians, before you say anything!”
“I think the fact that the last three times we met were all in London speaks volumes.”
“Meaning?”
“You. Your work. Big important man now. Globe trotting executive. Keeping the wheels of commerce moving. Needing to be at the centre of things. Which - let’s face it - isn’t Leeds.”
“Not in the context of my business, no; but other companies, surely? Your outfit’s doing okay, isn’t it?”
They were walking alongside some threadbare bushes to their right, a short stretch where the path did not directly butt up against the lake. Pat waited until they were in plain sight of the water again before replying, almost as if there might be someone hiding in the bushes trying to listen in on their conversation.
“Growing slowly. Nothing spectacular.”
“The share price seems pretty solid.”
“You checked our share price?!” Pat’s voice carried a note of surprise blended in with a tone which betrayed he knew Andy would do that.
“Force of habit, I guess.”
“I saw you’ve just bought out one of your competitors.”
“The gig in Manchester?”
Pat nodded.
“No brainer, really. And we got a good deal, too. Fits perfectly with our strategy and where we’re trying to get to. ‘Another brick in the wall’ as one of the team said to me the other day.”
“Or a brick in the Yellow Brick Road.”
Andy laughed.
In their university days they’d had a soft spot for ‘The Wizard of Oz’, and when drunk used to argue over the merits and demerits of the film and which character each of them could play. In the main it had been light-hearted, alcohol-induced stuff. Andy had Pat pegged as the Cowardly Lion, and had once used his refusal to move away from the city to try something more adventurous as proof of this theory. Indeed, it was a parallel that had resurfaced when they had briefly met in London a few months earlier. Pat had always seen Andy as some kind of Tin Man - though for no blatantly obvious reason. More recently however it felt to Pat as if his profile had shifted more toward the Wicked Witch of the West. He had said nothing of course.
“Let’s kidnap Toto!”
It had been a standing joke. They had argued that if the dog went missing, the film simply couldn’t exist. The tomfoolery of youth, Pat knew, but he had begun to wonder if - given half the chance - the present day Andy might just have carried out the threat.
A false step on a patch of mud threw Pat, leaving him momentarily off balance.
“Watch yourself there,” he warned over his shoulder, Andy having dropped into single file behind him again as the state of the path worsened. When there was no response, he glanced behind him. Andy was stationery, mobile phone in his hand once more, his eyes fixed on its screen.
It was a pose which jarred with their surroundings; not with the park so much - after all, these days you couldn’t go anywhere without seeing people buried in their private yet paradoxically connected worlds - but for Pat walking around Roundhay Park with Andy still represented a symbol of their youth, a shared past. It was, even if only in some tangental way, a statement about who they had been, both individually and together. Andy, in instantly absenting himself like this, lured away by a ‘ping’ from his jacket pocket, seemed to be making a statement about values with which Pat struggled. He knew how significant Andy’s job was, and could only guess at the pressures and demands of being the CEO of a global business. You were, he assumed, at everyone’s beck and call - which was ironic, because most people would automatically believe it was the other way round. But the fact that Andy could make that switch - and so readily, too - when they were having some private time on a Sunday morning, made Pat feel as if their friendship had been demoted, that he had been devalued. His shares - in Andy’s terminology - had fallen.
His invitation for Andy to join him on a walk round the lake - “for old time’s sake” - had been made as soon as he had discovered he was going to be in Leeds for a couple of days, attending some industry ‘bash’ on the Saturday night. To promote his case he had pulled all the emotional strings he had at his disposal. Over the previous three years - ever since that stratospheric promotion - Pat had watch his friend gradually change. Not that he was surprised by this, not really; after all, how can you be elevated to such a level and take on so much responsibility without needing to adjust? Pat had assumed that much of the change would be seen in disciplines, working practices, an alteration in focus or prioritisation; things like that. He had taken for granted that the core of who you were would remain intact, unsullied by such new pressures. Perhaps that was because he hoped that's how he’d behave under similar circumstances. But he had sensed - and then seen - Andy’s new reality beginning to impinge. Even during those short coffee-bar get-togethers in London it had begun to feel as if his friend was re-evaluating his own past given he had a new set of imperatives within which to operate. This vague sense had prompted him to see if he could find a way to validate his assessment. Was he imagining things or was Andy really a changed person? Roundhay Park represented something of a datum point for Pat. It was base camp; something almost elemental in their relationship. The walk was his way of stress-testing who they still were.
“Italians this time?” Pat suggested as Andy, freed from his phone rejoined him.
“On a Sunday?!”
“OK, maybe not.”
They continued walking for a few steps in silence.
“So how is it? Really. The new job I mean?”
“Great. Just great.” Andy looked across. “But you asked me that before, in London. At least twice.”
“Did I? Well then.” Pat paused, then picked up the thread again. “But that would have been when you didn’t really know, wouldn’t it? I mean, in the early days - with all the euphoria and newness of it - how could it be anything other? But now? Now that the excitement has worn off… I just wondered if it was still ‘great’.”
On the lake a number of round wooden poles poked through the surface of the water and rose some three feet above it. Seagulls used these remnants from an earlier jetty - now long since disappeared - as outposts where they would sit and watch. Andy allowed his gaze to wander to a solitary bird on the penultimate post, and let it rest there another second or two before responding.
“I’d say so, yes. But it’s a different kind of great now, of course. But isn’t that like any job? At the interview it’s one thing; on day one it’s something else; on day four hundred… It has to change.”
“And change us too?”
“I’m not making as many mistakes now, that’s for sure.”
“Mistakes?”
“Brian - the guy before me - he said I’d make mistakes and he was right. I probably even made exactly the same mistakes he did! But no harm done, eh?”
“That’s good.”
“Nothing major anyway,” Andy offered a smile that verged on the conspiratorial. Pat knew he was joking.
“A few pence on the share price? Perhaps some unhappy Scandinavians?”
“Something like that.” Andy’s attention was caught by the seagull which had decided to take to the wing.
“But I’m interested: do you change the job, or does the job change you? If you assume it’s not a perfect fit from day one, that is. And making mistakes surely suggests it can’t have been.”
They were turning at the top end of the lake. The concrete path had given way to a rough and muddy track that ran through some trees for a few yards. Once again they were in single file, concentrating on avoiding the grey-brown puddles, uncertain how deep some of them might have been; traps for the unwary.
“What do you think?” Andy eventually replied, countering Pat’s question with one of his own.
“Me? I don’t know. I guess in my limited experience - and considering the level at which I work - the job is the job. You get very little chance to change it, not really; so you have to mould yourself around it.”
“At your level? You do yourself down!”
“You know what I mean. But for you; well, you can change all the jobs if you want to, can’t you? You’re in charge, after all.”
“Always looking down.”
“What?”
“Sorry. Something else Brian said.” Andy paused. “I suppose it is different. And you’re right, after a couple of years you do get a better handle on things; you get to know really what’s going on and what you need to do to be successful.”
“At any cost?”
They were side-by-side again, having just moved to the side to allow two joggers to run by them.
“That’s an interesting choice of phrase, Pat. And loaded too. What’s on your mind?”
Pat had rehearsed their conversation, estimated when they would need to have finished with the pleasantries and got onto the meat of the subject - at least from his perspective. The round poles were immediately to their right now and the seagull had returned to its station.
“Just an observation, that’s all.”
“About me?”
“Or about the job, I suppose. I was trying to gauge.”
Andy paused for a split second.
“But it can’t be about the job. You don’t know the job. You can’t interrogate the job. Therefore it must be about me.”
There was a tone in Andy’s voice Pat was keen to dispel.
“I just wondered if you felt the job had changed you in any way. Whether there was any kind of knock-on from suddenly having all that responsibility…”
“All that pressure?” Andy suggested.
“Something like that.”
Pat sensed his approach had been a little clumsy, but the genii was out of the bottle now.
“Do you think it’s changed me?”
“I don’t know.”
Andy’s laugh was short but not unfriendly.
“Come on, Pat; you know me better than almost anyone else. Certainly outside of the business. You’re not tainted by the enforced loyalty working together brings. I’ve known you almost longer than my little brother, for Christ’s sake! We’ve thrown up together in the same bushes!”
It was Pat’s turn to laugh.
“Once not a million miles from here, if my memory serves…”
There was a short hiatus. A second seagull swooped across the water and joined the first, alighting on the furthest post. For a moment the two birds eyed each other and then turned their collective gaze back down the lake. A brief gust rippled the surface of the water a little more.
“Well?”
Pat could tell Andy wasn’t going to give this up.
“Honest answer?”
“Nothing less.”
From Pat’s perspective, there was proof right here.
“Why are you smiling? What’s funny?”
“Nothing, Andy; nothing at all. Once upon a time you used to let things go; let them slide if they didn’t immediately get resolved. I used to think it was quaint in a way, the shortness of your attention span. If you weren’t immediately satisfied, you’d move on to the next thing.”
“That doesn’t sound like me,” Andy objected.
“No it doesn’t. Not the you of today. But all those years ago?” Pat laughed just a little. “Diana saw it.”
“Diana?”
“She said you had no staying power, no focus. That’s why she finished with you; because she needed more attention. She required more work than you were prepared to put in.”
“She said that?”
Pat nodded.
“You’d know, of course.”
“But today’s Andy’s not like that at all.” Pat moved on, refusing to be deflected. “I agree completely. Your focus is totally different. I assume it has to be - because of the job. So you can’t abide loose ends like you used to; can’t leave things unresolved.”
It was Andy’s turn to laugh.
“Guilty as charged! But that’s how it has to be now.”
“Undoubtedly. And my point exactly. That’s why I asked the question about the job; how it might have changed you.”
They walked on in silence for a few yards.
“But your point is also something else, isn’t it? It’s not just that I’m a more focussed individual now because I have to be. I can sense you think it’s not just that. I think that’s another way the job’s changed me, if you like; I need to be able to read people better, to get through all the crap on the surface and down to what’s really bothering them, to what’s important. And I need to do it quickly.”
“No dancing round handbags?”
“I gave up handbag-dancing ages ago!”
“And that’s a good thing?”
“I think so. In the main, anyway.”
“Do you also think then - ignoring all the handbags - that what’s important to you has changed? I’m not talking about work. I’m guessing that it’s inevitable that the things you have to focus on at work are different today than, say, four or five years ago. Is that fair?”
“That’s fair.”
“So let’s take that as a given. What about outside of work? Or work versus non-work, if you’d prefer?”
“Versus?”
“The choices you make.”
“Help me out. Give me a for instance.”
Although Pat didn’t use it as an example, even this conversation demonstrated how Andy was different. A few years previously he would never had been able to talk about himself for so long. Pat hadn’t thought of this until now, just as he dropped behind his friend to let another pair of joggers go by them.
“Okay, an example. How about running?”
“Running?”
“You still run, right?”
“Sure; not as much as I used to. Probably a bit like you, eh?”
Pat inclined his head slightly in acknowledgement.
“It used to take something truly significant to deflect you from your run, if you’d had one planned. What about now?”
Andy laughed.
“That’s crazy!”
“Crazy?”
“Crazy. Because, one, we get older. Two, other things intrude on our time. Three, priorities change. That’s just growing up, Pat! You’ll have to do better than that! If that’s my crime, then guilty again.”
“All right. How about the Church? You used to disappear every Sunday morning for the early service come rain or shine. What about now?”
Andy remained silent.
“The growing up card?” Pat suggested, keeping a smile close to his lips to try and ensure Andy realised at least part of the interrogation was playful.
“Probably. Thought that’s more complex isn’t it? Obviously.”
“Okay, let’s not go there. Sorry.”
He paused. At the heart of Pat’s concern was the people question, and his belief that Andy wasn’t the same friend he had once been. Some of their mutual acquaintances had remarked that Andy had ‘dropped off the radar’, or had been a little short with them the last time they had spoken. He knew circumstance played a part in all interchanges, but the mounting evidence - even if it was hearsay - was undeniable.
Having mentally envisaged a red line, Pat knew that any further pursuit of his theme could only be another step towards it. Or even beyond. In a way, he had found out what he wanted to know, affirmed his suspicions. Having done so, it was now his issue to deal with, not Andy’s. If he had harboured any ambition to prompt change, to turn the tide or have his friend ‘see the light’, he realised now how naïve a notion that had been. Naïvety was a trait of his own that he hadn’t managed to shed.
“So? What else?”
They had turned the corner and were walking along the top of the dam-like wall at the western end of the lake. In a few yards there would be another right turn and then the final short stretch back towards the car park and the cafe.
“You know, it doesn’t matter. Let’s leave it.”
“Leave it? Come on, Pat. How long have we known each other? There’s something else. I know there is.”
“Well if there is, then maybe it’s me,” Pat offered. “We’ve demonstrated you’ve changed - ‘grown up’, if you like - and that some of it is down to the job. Fair enough. But maybe there’s a part of what I think that’s actually down to me not changing; to me being pretty much the same as I always have been.”
The lack of immediate response was proof enough that Andy was considering this thread seriously. Pat hadn’t had any intention of opening himself up to scrutiny. He knew that would not go well. When they were both young, naive, idealistic, innocent, daft - that was a different matter. But now they weren’t. Or Andy certainly wasn’t. He had thought the issue was solely with his high-flying friend, but maybe not.
He didn’t want to find out.
“‘What I think’; that’s what you said,” Andy eventually came back. “Well, what do you think, Pat? We’ve established that there’s part of me that’s changed, and that inevitably it’s down to the job. I’ve agreed that there are different pressures and priorities, that choices have to be made, that outcomes are different now. All agreed. Guilty, like I said. But it occurs to me that I still don’t know what you really think.”
“Does it matter?”
“It clearly matters to you or you wouldn’t have raised it. I’m not the one dancing around the handbags here…”
The buzzing from Andy’s jacket pocket broke into his sentence and he paused to retrieve his phone. Pat carried on walking as soon as he heard Andy’s voice, his professional voice.
As they neared the cafe the path became a little busier. Young couples with children in and out of buggies; boys poking at the earth with sticks they had found or swishing them through the rough grass at the path’s edge. Dogs on leads of various lengths, sniffing and padding, weaving across the tarmac. And again joggers - this time a singleton nipping past them - running around the lake. He used to know the precise distance of the perimeter, but now couldn’t remember it. He glanced over his shoulder; Andy was still talking.
“That went well” he told himself as he reached the car park, a car park that was probably twice as full as when they’d left it. He could see through its windows that the cafe was busier now. There were one or two tables that were free, but it wouldn’t be quiet.
He stopped, finding himself mid-way between Andy’s car and the entrance to the cafe. Turning, he saw Andy making a hurried remark and then sliding the phone away again. There was a frown on his face.
“How far is it,” Pat asked, “around the lake, I mean? Can you remember? I used to know.”
“About a mile and a half, I think. Maybe just over. Used to take us eleven or twelve minutes or so. I’m surprised you don’t remember. You used to keep some kind of log didn’t you?”
Pat remembered the little notebook. Who knows, he probably still had it, lost in the bottom of a box somewhere.
“Before I grew up,” he suggested. Then after a pause, “Coffee?”
Andy shook his head, glancing down to where his phone now lay out of sight.
“Sorry, pal. The Scandinavians again. I have to go back to the hotel and get something sorted out.”
Pat nodded.
“I understand,” he said, even though he still didn’t.
Andy was already heading towards his car.
“Bet you couldn’t do it in twelve minutes now!”
Pat knew that was true.
He watched the Audi’s lights flash and Andy open the door. There was a pause before the engine started, then another delay as the roof began to retract. Pat looked up. The sun was out, but the sky was far from cloudless; there was a chill in the air that he’d forgotten, the mild exertion of their walk insulating him from it. Hardly top-down weather, at least from his perspective.
Andy raised his arm as he wheeled away, shouting something that was drowned out by tyres on gravel, the shouts of children, and the barking of dogs.
They hadn’t shaken hands goodbye.
For links on where to buy Degrees of Separation, click here.