The Heights

by Louise Candlish

  Outside of the pages of her book, Ellen is reluctant to discuss the status of their relationship. ‘Vic and I will always be bonded,’ is all she will say.

  When I ask her if she can imagine him reading her finished memoir, she considers the question carefully before saying, ‘Yes, there are some details he won’t know. He might be curious.’

  Mr Gordon declined to be interviewed for this article.

  Sunday Times magazine,

  December 2021

  Vic

  Now

  It is a Saturday morning, the one weekend in an age that he isn’t on duty in the tap room or out at a market or festival, when her text comes:

  Need to see you URGENTLY.

  She knows, he thinks, straight away. It’s a guttural thing, just as he’s always guessed it will be. (Nothing to do with those crazy, shouty capitals – that’s normal communication for Ellen.)

  His reaction, though, is less predictable. He expected to be panic-stricken, to drop everything to ready himself for his Waterloo (the acquisition of a bullet-proof vest is not the stretch you might think). But, in the event, it is more like how he supposes it must feel when you’ve been on the run for years and finally feel the helicopter searchlight on you. Hear the megaphone-loud instruction to remain where you are, there is nowhere left to hide.

  Because the terrible truth is that there is no such thing as a relaxed fugitive. There is no such thing as the enjoyable deception of a loved one – and Ellen is and always will be a loved one. So he is, now they’re here, relieved. Released.

  By the time he’s thought all of this, she has sent a second message:

  Vic????

  Clearly, she is not going to be ignored. This will have to be done today. He responds:

  Meet me in Beckenham Place Park at 2

  She agrees at once and he knows she’ll be there before him. Even if he gets there early, she’ll be waiting.

  * * *

  He leaves it till the last minute to tell India.

  ‘I have to nip over to Beckenham and see Ellen. I’ll just be an hour or two.’

  Having been face down on her yoga mat in a pool of sunlight by the balcony doors, his girlfriend rolls onto her haunches to face him. Her skin has that attractive rosy glow of the olive-complexioned (he, on the other hand, looks in need of hospitalization when he exercises). ‘Right now? You said you’d be here for the John Lewis delivery. You know they won’t leave it in the lobby.’

  ‘You won’t be in either?’

  ‘I told you, I’m meeting Coco in town.’

  He’s forgotten. In the hours since receiving the text, he’s forgotten most things. ‘I’ll arrange for Li to take it in, then as soon as I get back from seeing Ellen, I’ll go and collect it.’ Never mind that Li, in the flat next door, is usually gaming with headphones on, oblivious to the sound of the buzzer.

  India points this out. ‘Can’t Ellen come here?’ ‘You know she can’t.’ Vic’s eyes stray past her to the view over the rooftops towards the hazy skyline of Central London. Was it conscious or subconscious, his decision to live somewhere so high? Knowing Ellen wouldn’t come marching up here whenever she liked? His flat is on the fifteenth floor, nothing to a high-rise city like New York or Hong Kong but Blade Runner living in East Croydon. And anyone imagining those sleek oatmeal interiors you always see in show flats would be way off because the place has got a whole lot more colourful since India moved in last month – a riot of exotic colour to befit her name if not the home counties reality of her upbringing. A lot more chaotic, as well, now they are setting about reorganizing the space and redecorating the second bedroom.

  ‘What does she want to talk to you about, anyway?’ she says, mildly, and he marvels for the hundredth time how nothing is unacceptable to her, because everything – every flare of anger, every error of judgement – has a psychological reason that merits compassion.

  They’re all like this, the younger millennials, a cohort obsessed with well-being (maybe it’s a disorder in its own right? Obsessive compulsive well-being?). Mild anxiety or full-blown psychosis, both are regarded with the same sincerity by his twenty-eight-year-old girlfriend. His thirty-one-year-old head brewer George is the same. They are what Vic’s gen used to call ‘precious’.

  Sure, there are days when he misses that cynicism, the sheer grit of his own age group’s commitment to mockery. But he has his friends, his cousin Danny and Danny’s partner Jo for that. Ellen, too, in her own way.

  ‘It will be to do with Lucas,’ he says. ‘Maybe because I missed his birthday on Thursday.’

  ‘You didn’t miss it, babe. You just didn’t spend it with her. You were away, growing the brand.’ India gets to her feet and comes to him. She is a woman who expresses her sadness – all emotions, really – through touch.

  He draws her to him and buries his nose in her hair, damp at the nape. ‘Sorry about the delivery. If Li takes it in, I’ll start putting it all together as soon as I get back.’

  ‘Are you going to tell Ellen our news?’

  ‘Yes, at some point. But not today.’

  ‘Okay, but don’t let her find out from someone else, Vic. That’s not right.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I know how to handle her.’ Well, he thought he did, but they’re in uncharted waters now, aren’t they?

  India pulls away and they both look down at her abdomen, the faint curve of which is clear through the second skin of her yoga gear. In normal clothes it’s not yet evident.

  The day she told him she was pregnant was the same day Ellen told him Kieran Watts had re-materialized. Seriously, what were the chances?

  He’d listened to their messages one after the other:

  ‘Vic, babe, I need to tell you something. Something crazy.’ (India, sounding giddy.)

  ‘Call me as soon as you get this. I mean it, Vic, it’s urgent!’ (Ellen, sounding tearful, paranoid.)

  He’d played them both a second time before deciding which call to return first.

  Ellen’s, of course.

  Like there’d ever been any real alternative.

  Vic

  Then

  It seemed to Vic that only someone who had looked mania directly in the eye could appreciate the full, unstoppable force of it.

  Okay, mania might not be the clinical word for Ellen’s case. She’d had counselling, that kind of thing, in her teenage years, but not been given any psychiatric diagnosis. Highly strung, that was the label society reached for back then, and he’d known she was this right from the time they met at Bristol University in the early Nineties (improbably, given their career paths later, they were both studying anthropology). In a world of long-haired, blissed-out girls emerging from the second summer of love, Ellen was punky with her sharp-boned face, cropped platinum hair and wine-red lipstick. Like a young Annie Lennox.

  Not so rock ’n’ roll in her habits, he discovered, when they’d been out a few times. She was a moderate drinker, never touched cigarettes or drugs, unlike Vic himself.

  ‘I have to be careful about mixing booze with my medication,’ she explained.

  ‘You’re on medication?’

  ‘On and off. On at the moment.’

  There was panic involved, he learned. Phobias, the kind of irrational stuff that was often passed off in that era as eccentricity. That high place phenomenon thing, for instance: she made it sound so artistic, so chic, especially when she used the French term, l’appel du vide. She’d been raised by the Dover cliffs – a childhood with a view of France, no less – and yet couldn’t walk the celebrated coastal path. When Vic first visited the family home, he’d explored the clifftops and experienced those immense, lung-filling vistas with her parents, while Ellen remained in the visitor’s centre with a pot of tea.

  ‘No one likes heights, El,’ he told her. ‘No one wants to fall. Just stay away from the edge and you should be fine.’ That was his position on the matter, presented with his trademark guffaw.

  Yes, it was all very charming at
first, but, once they’d left the security of the college pack and lived as a couple in the real world, it rapidly came to grate on his nerves. It wasn’t like he had the patience of a trained professional; he was just an ordinary guy!

  An ordinary guy who depended on his girlfriend to take the pill and know whether or not its efficacy would be affected by any other medication.

  Efficacy: he didn’t think he’d ever used that word in relation to his own circumstances before the day Ellen told him, at twenty-two and both of them recklessly in debt following a post-university trip to Bali, that she was pregnant.

  * * *

  Parenthood made him view her through a new lens (and she him, presumably, given that she was the one who would do the ditching, a few years in). It made him see that those kooky fears of hers might be transferable.

  For starters, it wasn’t just cliffs that stirred her peculiar thoughts of jumping, but also ledges and balconies and roof terraces. Even bridges, for Heaven’s sake. He remembered one time, when Lucas was about nine months old, and they’d taken him into Central London to show him the sights. Vic had unstrapped him from the buggy and was carrying him when they reached Westminster Bridge and Ellen drew to a halt.

  ‘Let’s put him back in the buggy,’ she said.

  ‘Why?’ He loved walking with the baby in his arms, their faces pressing together, cheek to cheek, as they looked at the world from the same height, the same angle.

  ‘Just while we cross the bridge,’ she said, with the earnest pleading that had come to irritate him.

  ‘Why?’ he repeated.

  ‘You know how I get that feeling?’

  ‘But this is a bridge.’

  ‘I know, but I’m worried I’ll get it with him.’

  He gave a disbelieving laugh. ‘No one in their right mind would want to jump off a bridge with their baby. Besides, I’m holding him, not you. Come on, let’s go. You push the buggy.’

  People were starting to eye them as they clogged the pavement. At last Ellen moved, marching ahead with the foot of the buggy angled upwards, her rigid arms an extension of the handles. Some distance behind her, Vic felt that phrase ring in his ears: No one in their right mind.

  They reached the other side. ‘See,’ he said, cheerfully. ‘He’s still here. He had a lovely time looking at Big Ben.’

  Ellen’s face was pale, her jaw tensed. There was a stripe of red on her lower lip where she’d chewed a fibre from it. ‘I saw you walking backwards at one point.’

  ‘Yeah, so we could look back at the clock face, like everyone else!’

  ‘Someone could have knocked into you, Vic. They could have sent Lucas flying!’

  Overhearing this last exclamation, a passer-by pulled a face at Vic that made it clear what he thought of this dynamic. That Ellen was deranged, basically, and Vic the unlucky bugger who had to deal with her.

  ‘Well, they didn’t,’ he said, more acidly than might have been advisable.

  * * *

  She was an overprotective mother, no doubt about it. That was unusual among the younger mums, according to Danny’s new girlfriend, Jo, who had a pre-schooler of her own from a previous relationship, so she knew what she was talking about. It was generally the older ones who were the control freaks, she said, used to the cause-and-effect certainties of a career-driven universe (not Jo’s exact words, but that was the gist). Young mums still thought they were immortal and that this gift extended automatically to their babies.

  Jo swore by childminders, but Ellen wouldn’t have anyone caring for Lucas but her, which meant that for the foreseeable future she wouldn’t be earning any money. She’d worked a little over a year in her entry-level role at a heart health foundation before making her exit.

  ‘What about doing something part-time?’ Vic suggested. Although he had by now secured a junior position in the leasings team of a big tool hire company, he considered it temporary, if not beneath him.

  ‘Maybe.’ Maybe meant no in Ellen-speak.

  Living on one junior salary meant they couldn’t upgrade their one-bed rental in Sydenham, where they’d settled to be close to Danny, and so they put Lucas in the bedroom and made do with a studio arrangement for themselves. While Vic worked, Ellen roamed South London’s better neighbourhoods, compiling a wish list of the streets she’d far rather live on than their own. They didn’t have a car and she’d travel by bus, complaining about the rude treatment she’d received by drivers and, sometimes, other passengers.

  Frighteningly quickly, Vic found himself in a three-person catch-22. He couldn’t go on in the relationship with someone so tense and inflexible and weird, but it was his duty to be available to offer Lucas an alternative model to tense, inflexible and weird. He made a deal with himself: get his son to senior school – he’d be eleven, strong and fearless and able to stand up for himself – and then ease out of the relationship with Ellen.

  ‘You could always have an affair,’ Danny suggested, one night in the pub. He had a talent for simplistic solutions.

  ‘No,’ Vic said. ‘If she ever found out, she’d want revenge.’

  ‘Looks like you’re fucked then,’ said Danny.

  * * *

  When Lucas was a year from starting school, Ellen at last loosened the reins a little and enrolled him in a local kindergarten. At about the same time, she announced that she wanted to work in interior design and signed up for an evening class in electrical installation at Beckenham Technical College.

  Not long after the course had finished, she came to Vic and said, ‘I’m sorry, but I’ve met someone.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he said, unsure why she should want to apologize for making a new friend.

  ‘I mean, I’ve fallen in love with someone else. We want to be together. He’s already met Lucas.’

  ‘He has?’ Vic was stunned. ‘Who is this guy?’

  His name was Justin Saint and they’d literally met in a corridor at the college. He wasn’t very senior at work then, still in his late twenties, but seemed to be able to fund the deposit needed for a large Edwardian villa on one of Ellen’s dream streets, Tanglewood Road in Beckenham. With Lucas, of course. Vic moved from the Sydenham flat to a scarcely less poky two-bedroomed place on an estate on Shannon Way by Beckenham Place Park. (It wasn’t all bad: the housing had been built in the Eighties on the site previously occupied by Haddon Hall, where his hero David Bowie had once resided.)

  He was invited to Tanglewood Road to admire the swing that had been strung from a creaky old oak in the garden and the huge climbing frame with monkey bars high off the ground. There was even a trampoline. When Lucas started at the primary school at the end of the road, Ellen sometimes let him walk to school with a group of other neighbourhood kids, led by an older girl she trusted.

  Within a year, the lovebirds had married and had a baby girl. Vic didn’t ever get to know Freya particularly well, but the mere fact that Lucas had a sister was a cause for jubilation – someone else in the mix to take the pressure off the boy. Because these outward signs that Ellen had relaxed her parenting style couldn’t possibly be the true picture. Vic knew she must watch Lucas on that swing and climbing frame and trampoline like a close protection bodyguard. She couldn’t possibly now be trusting a young schoolgirl where once she hadn’t felt able to trust a qualified childminder. Perhaps she tailed that gaggle of kids to the school gate in the new 4×4 Justin had bought her.

  No one just suddenly got better, did they? Even if rogue impulses were being better managed, they were still there. Starter flames waiting for their oxygen supply.

  * * *

  In the blink of an eye, Freya had started primary school, Lucas was about to move up to Foxwell Academy, and Ellen was telling Vic she had taken a part-time job working for a lighting shop in the West End. ‘I want to get a few years’ experience, make some contacts, then start up on my own as a lighting consultant.’

  She stuck at the low-paid retail job for three years and Vic had to admit he was impressed. He’d
assumed those dreams of hers were just that. Conversely, he considered himself rather more than a dreamer. While continuing to work full-time at the tool hire company (he’d been promoted to manager by now), he’d taken his own evening class in running a small business, done exhaustive research into microbreweries and put together a business plan for his own craft beer brand.

  He blagged presentation skills training at work, before honing his pitch to investors and mentors (‘I’ve always wanted to organize a piss-up in a brewery’). As time went on, the cold calls were replaced by an online submission process, but the outcome never varied: thanks, but no thanks. In the age of the hipster, microbreweries were two a penny and he had neither the image the trade – or consumer – expected nor a story that made him in any way PR-worthy. As for the name, Common or Gordon, would millennials get it? ‘Doesn’t it give the impression the product’s bog standard, not premium?’ one asked.

  Not if they don’t get it in the first place, Vic pointed out.

  He recalled one pitch with the special pain of the near hit. It was a collective of investors in an übercool Bermondsey factory conversion and though his contact was junior – gatekeeper to the real decision-makers – there was real enthusiasm in his eyes. ‘Common or Gordon: I like that. We could do something with that.’

  But when the knock-back came, it was a variation on the usual theme. ‘We’re finding the brands that break through are the ones that have more of a personal story behind them. A lifestyle to buy into.’

  ‘Can’t I get the product out there and then add the lifestyle?’

  ‘The lifestyle is the product. Look at the guy from Blur.’