ALSO BY NICK ALEXANDER
Things We Never Said
The Bottle of Tears
The Other Son
The Photographer’s Wife
The Hannah Novels
The Half-Life of Hannah
Other Halves
The CC Novels
The Case of the Missing Boyfriend
The French House
The Fifty Reasons Series
50 Reasons to Say Goodbye
Sottopassaggio
Good Thing, Bad Thing
Better Than Easy
Sleight of Hand
13:55 Eastern Standard Time
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2019 by Nick Alexander
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503958623
ISBN-10: 1503958620
Cover design by Debbie Clement
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PROLOGUE
She is staring at her toes. Her legs are outstretched above the shimmering blue of the swimming pool and she’s surprised at the lime-green gloss of her toenails – she doesn’t remember painting them this colour. But it’s pretty, she decides. And it contrasts particularly well with the sunlit mosaic of the pool. Perhaps, for summer at least, green is the new pink.
She closes her eyes and turns her face skywards. She can feel the hot sunlight on her eyelids. The world, momentarily, is red, and warm. She has never felt more relaxed.
A movement of air caresses her body, followed by a harsher, cooler gust of actual wind, so she opens her eyes and watches the leaves of the tree at the far end of the pool as they shimmer in the breeze, switching from light to dark and then back again, like pixels that can’t make up their minds on a faulty television screen.
The wind blows again and she can feel goose pimples rise on her arms so, in search of a T-shirt, she turns just in time to see three sheets of paper from the table behind her rise and flutter into the water.
Her initial reaction is to laugh. Sod’s law, she thinks. They could have landed anywhere, but they landed in the pool.
Leisurely, still amused, she stands and walks along the edge of the water until the sheets of now-soaked paperwork are within reach. She kneels – the hot concrete burns her knees – and by leaning out, manages to recover two of the pages. She lays them on the paving to dry, but the third, a flimsy slip of paper, is out of reach and sinking fast, rolling and twisting as it goes under, so she stands and dives in gracefully. It’s cooler than she expected and the shock of cold makes her gasp.
She swims to the centre of the pool, takes a breath, and plunges. She’s aware that the breath should have been deeper. It’s as if she has a sense of déjà vu warning her of what’s to come.
At first, the sunlight shimmers across her bare arms and she can still feel the warmth of it across her back. But as she swims ever deeper, chasing the elusive slip of paper, the light fades and the water changes from blue to green, and then, slowly, to inky black.
She starts to feel scared. The slip of paper is, she remembers, incredibly important (though she can’t, strangely, remember why). But the pool is so deep and dark and cold, and some inexplicable undercurrent is sucking the prize ever deeper.
There are things down here, too – living things. She can sense them all around her so, suddenly fearful, she glances upwards to see the distant ripple of daylight far, far above.
She releases a bubble of air from her mouth and watches it shape-shift and break into smaller bubbles as it rises. When she looks down again, she can barely see the rectangle of paper, so fast is it descending.
Panicky now, she dives jerkily, urgently, but her lungs are bursting and though, when she tries really hard, when she gives it everything she’s got, her fingers brush the edge of the paper, she fails every time to grasp it.
Something touches her leg and there’s a clicking sound that makes her think of an octopus. Did she see a documentary about them? And was that not the sound they made?
But something is definitely wrapping around her leg; something that scares her, something that makes her gasp again, releasing precious air from her lungs. She twists her head upwards but the light has vanished and she’s suddenly unsure of the right direction. What if up is down now? she wonders. Things can swap around in life, unpredictably, she knows this. Left can become right. Hope can become despair.
She kicks towards where the light should be but there’s nothing there, just more inky, oily blackness. Full-blown panic starts to set in, and she thrusts with all her might, trying to escape whatever has a hold of her right foot as she begins, she can sense it, to drown.
She knows now. She knows as if she has always known it – that this is how she dies. This is where and when and how it happens. She drowned in a pool, she hears them saying. It seems such a pathetic way to go; almost laughable really.
But then a voice reaches her, distorted and filtered by its passage through the water. ‘Mum,’ it’s calling. ‘Mum! I know you’re in there. MUM!’
She swims towards the noise, kicking hard to free her right leg and floundering with all her might so at least whoever is there will be aware of her presence, and just as she exhales the last snatch of stale air from her lungs, just as she knows that she has no choice but to let the liquid invade her body, she breaks the surface to find herself soaked in sweat, her leg wrapped in a sheet, and her spirit distraught, once again, at the loss of that damned slip of paper.
‘Mum!’ the voice calls out again. There’s a rap-tap-tap on the window and she recognises the tapping, just for a moment, as the clicking noise a dream octopus might make, and feels scared all over again.
Laura opens her mouth to reply but no sound comes out, so she runs her tongue across her teeth, swallows with difficulty, and tries again.
‘I’ll be right there, Becky,’ she croaks. Then again, louder, more successfully, ‘I’ll be right there! Just give me a minute.’
ONE
BECKY
I invented my father when I was five years old.
He was a fireman and wore a stiff uniform with big brass buttons. He drove around in a shiny red fire engine with an extensible ladder on the roof.
Dad had many different jobs over the years: he was, as I say, a fireman but also a policeman, and a brain surgeon. He was even, briefly, the president of Norway.
That should have been a bit of a giveaway to my school friends actually, because there is no president of Norway. Norway, it turns out, is a monarchy. But of course no one knew that at Salmestone Junior School. If we’re being completely honest here, I think half of the teachers w
ould have struggled to point to Norway on a map.
Though, at school, I’d declare with unshakeable and apparently convincing certainty that my father was now at the pinnacle of this or that profession, at home he was always the Great Unmentionable Mystery.
He had died before I was born – this much I knew. But I didn’t know who he had been or the details of how he had died, and I didn’t know why I wasn’t allowed to ask about him either.
For the most part, I didn’t think about it that much, not about the reality of him as a specific person who had existed and who no longer existed. Perhaps that’s just a concept that’s too hard for a child to wrap her brain around.
I was generally pretty happy though: with Mum, with my life, and with my astronaut father (yes, that was another one). In fact I was happier about my make-believe dad than a number of my school friends were with their very real fathers.
‘Does your dad smack you?’ I remember a friend asking.
‘Never!’ I replied. ‘But he always brings me chocolates when he comes back from the space station.’
My mother was undeniably real, so I couldn’t pretend she didn’t slap the backs of my legs when I came out of school with muddy knees, and I couldn’t pretend she was anything other than an estate agent’s secretary.
But I did have to invent what was going on in her head, because there was always something unknowable about Mum. She always looked as if she was keeping secrets from you, and as it turned out, of course, she was.
Mum was a nervous, skinny, rather pointy-faced woman with few real friends. She has rounded off with age, both physically and psychologically, but back then she wasn’t an easy woman to feel close to, not even as her daughter. On the material side of things, though, she was an absolute ace.
It must have been really hard being a single mother but I never wanted for anything, and that certainly wasn’t any thanks to Gran who, being a devout Catholic, was as furious with Mum for getting pregnant as she was with me for being an everlasting reminder of her daughter’s sins.
Mum cried a fair bit when I was little. Actually, my earliest memory is of her crying. We were still living in that tiny bedsit by the station, so I must have been under five, because once I started school Mum got a job and we moved to a council flat. Anyway, I woke up and realised Mum was sobbing, so I crawled to the end of the bed. In my memory, that was quite a long crawl, so maybe I was even younger. I put my arms around her, just like Mum did when I cried, and asked her what was wrong.
She gestured at the room around us and said, ‘Oh, it’s nothing. It’s just this place. It gets me down sometimes, that’s all. But don’t mind me, I’m just being a silly sausage.’
I remember picturing her as a sausage with a face, frying, crying. And then I looked around the room in puzzlement, trying to understand what was wrong. Because to me it looked perfect.
We had one of those mini-hob/oven combinations in the corner – a Baby Belling, I think it was called. There was a television that showed Budgie the Little Helicopter, and a wardrobe full of clothes and toys. We had a red velvet armchair from the previous tenants, with cigarette-burn holes I could stick my fingers through, and orange curtains with a swirly pattern that looked like lollipops. I honestly didn’t understand what more anyone could want.
Looking back it must have been horrible, I suppose. And it must have been depressing beyond belief to bring a child up alone in a single room in a town where she knew virtually no one.
But me? I loved it. I liked the doll’s-house nature of our accommodation and I liked the fact that we spent every possible moment alone together, invariably on the beach. I liked the flashing lights of the amusement arcades and the sound of the trains trundling past the end of the road. I liked being walked to town along the seafront and laughing at the wind, which was so strong sometimes that I had to hang on to Mum’s hand really hard to avoid being, quite literally, blown away. So I struggled to understand why Mum was so sad.
Once I started school, things got slowly better for her, thank God. Mum got jobs – a brief stint in a taxi office and then the secretarial job at the estate agent where she was to work for fifteen years. And when I was ten, she met Brian.
I latched on to Brian like a limpet. I think I was genuinely afraid he’d just walk back out the door, but I’m told I had always been obsessive about men. I was forever walking up to them in the supermarket and taking their hands, just to see what it felt like. By the time I was eight, I was quite consciously trying to fix Mum up with my school friends’ fathers or with the meter man, or even the guy who owned the sweet shop. ‘What do you think about the man with the Labrador?’ I would ask her, desperately looking for an opening while also trying to obtain more data so I could refine my search criteria. ‘Do you think he’s nice-looking?’ But my search seemed hopeless and I suspected, even at an early age, that my mum was in some way broken and quite simply incapable of relationships.
So Brian was unexpected, to say the least. Being generous and funny and bald (the bald was a plus – I liked rubbing his shiny head), and incredibly relaxed in the face of what wasn’t, looking back, a particularly relaxed relationship, he seemed heaven-sent.
He dumped Mum when I was eighteen, which was one of those surprises which turns out to be not so surprising after all. It always seemed to me, and no doubt to Brian, as if Mum was holding out on him, as if she was forever keeping something back – her joy, her sense of fun. Her love, ultimately.
I had known from the earliest age how it felt to be aware that you never quite knew someone, because that’s how things were for me, too. Because the one subject I wasn’t allowed to discuss was my father, I suspected Mum’s aloofness, her brokenness, was linked to that.
Mostly, when I tried to discuss in my clumsy, childlike way who my father was or, more precisely, why I didn’t have one, Mum would distract me by talking about something else. Other times she’d ward me off with a few sharp words or a sudden headache or simply silence, as if she hadn’t heard my question at all. Only once, when I was about seven, I think, did I manage to force her to engage.
I had a perfectly calculated meltdown about it all. I stamped my little feet and demanded to know why, unlike all my school friends, I didn’t have a father. Mum made a cup of tea – to give herself time to think, I reckon – and then she sat me down in the lounge. ‘This is incredibly difficult for me to talk about,’ she explained earnestly. ‘So I only want to go over this once. Do you understand?’
I nodded that I did. I was trembling with excitement, as I recall, because I had never before got this far with her on the subject.
‘Your father was a gorgeous, lovely man,’ she said. ‘He was very good-looking, just like you – in fact he looked a lot like you – and I loved him very much. But sadly, very sadly, he had an accident and died, just after I met him. I thought my heart was broken, but then you came along and mended it for me. OK? And now it’s just the two of us.’
I nodded thoughtfully. ‘But . . .’ I started.
‘How would you like to go and get a 99 ice cream on the seafront?’ Mum asked.
‘But . . .’ I said, struggling as I spoke to resist caving in to the unusual and tempting offer, even as I understood it was pure bribery.
‘You don’t want an ice cream?’ Mum asked. ‘Oh, well . . .’
I knew from experience that that, as they say, was the end of that. I also knew that unless I shut up about the subject of my father sharpish, the ice cream offer would be withdrawn. And so I smiled and nodded, and ran to get my coat. As I pulled it on, I remember looking at myself in the hall mirror and trying, and failing, to imagine a man who looked like me.
If someone were to make a sort of colour chart of emotions, Mum would rarely have moved out of the zone that lies between ‘normal’ and ‘sucking lemons’. That’ll sound a bit harsh, but she really did always have this strange expression on her face. She always seemed to be squinting a little bit, as if whatever she was looking at was hurting her eyes
, or as if, perhaps, she had the beginning of a toothache. I don’t really know how fun-loving Brian managed to put up with it for eight whole years.
I loved – I love – my mother, though. Don’t get me wrong. I love her like I love my right arm or my eyesight or my heart. She is and always has been the centre of my whole world. As humans, we’re designed to be able to love people despite their imperfections, and that’s just as well really, because as a race, we do seem to have so many of them. When you grow up with someone, those imperfections seem totally normal to you. I felt I knew Mum better than I knew myself, though of course, naming her quirks and understanding her in a conscious manner wouldn’t come until much later; not until I had the necessary vocabulary to construct those thoughts. But on an unconscious level, I got her. I understood her, limitations and all. And so was unsurprised, as I said before, when Brian left.
I hated him for it, all the same. More specifically, I hated him for leaving me. Jenny, his new girlfriend, had a whole ready-made family for him to slot into, and I’m sure that having gone overnight from one child to five, Brian must suddenly have found himself very busy. But he basically never phoned me again, and that still strikes me as unforgivable. I mean, I know at eighteen I was a bit of a sarky, moody so-and-so, but all the same . . . a gift at Christmas, a phone call on a birthday – just something to say, ‘You were not nothing to me.’ I truly struggle to see what the cost of maintaining basic civilities would have been. Then again, maybe my need for a father had simply blinded me to the truth. Perhaps he was just a bit of a nob all along.
Anyway, I was angry with Brian for dumping me (that’s how it felt to my eighteen-year-old self) but also angry at Mum for not loving him enough to make him want to stick around. And being off at college provided the perfect excuse to cut the umbilical cord linking me to the whole sorry mess.
I was living in a shared house in Bristol; I was going to parties and smoking joints; I was working my way through a whole string of unsuitable boyfriends. Visiting Mum felt like the most unappealing option out there. And so I shamefully abandoned her for a while.
You Then, Me Now Page 1