by Maria Goodin
Legend Press Ltd, 51 Gower Street, London, WC1E 6HJ
[email protected] | www.legendpress.co.uk
Contents © Maria Goodin 2020
The right of the above author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.
Print ISBN 978-1-78955-9-453
Ebook ISBN 978-1-78955-9-446
Set in Times. Printing Managed by Jellyfish Solutions Ltd
Cover design by Kari Brownlie | www.karibrownlie.co.uk
All characters, other than those clearly in the public domain, and place names, other than those well-established such as towns and cities, are fictitious and any resemblance is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Maria Goodin studied English Literature and French at university before going to train as an English teacher, massage therapist and counsellor. Her writing is influenced by her experience working in the field of mental health, and by an interest in how people process traumatic events.
Her debut novel Nutmeg was published by Legend Press in 2012 and The End is Where We Begin is her second novel.
Maria lives in Hertfordshire with her husband and sons.
Follow Maria on Instagram
@mariagoodin_author
For my boys.
“Whether it’s them, me, whoever… just make sure you don’t hold everything in.”
Chapter 1
Memories
“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear J-o-sh…”
In the semi-darkness, the room around me seems to fade away as I watch the candles, mesmerised. Fifteen individual orange flames seem to blur into one, melding into the memory of a burning bonfire licking the night sky, bright sparks ascending. The sickly scent of icing gives way to the smell of smouldering wood, and the kids’ singing is drowned out by distant voices in my mind; the voices of other kids from long ago…
… What was that noise…?
… Are you scared…?
… Shit! He’s bleeding…
I close my eyes, feeling my chest tightening, my throat constricting. Not again, please. Not after all this time.
Run!
We need to get help…
Slow down there, son…
“Dad!” snaps Josh.
My eyes flit open.
“The knife?”
I stare at him. The knife? I glance down at the silvery scar that runs across my right palm.
“For the cake?” he elaborates, eyeing me quizzically.
“Oh, right.” I quickly fumble in the drawer behind me. One of the kids pulls the blind back up, allowing early-evening light to flood the kitchen once more.
I hand the knife to Josh and head out of the room.
“Don’t you want any?” he calls, but I’m already in the lounge next door, pacing, trying to catch my breath, trying to recall the tricks that used to help.
“… so weird…” I hear Josh mumble.
One of the girls says something back that I only half catch. “… not weird… he’s totally…”
“Ugh, shut up, that’s my dad!” I hear Josh retort, and the girls burst into giggles.
I try to take a deep lungful of air, but it won’t come. My throat emits a faint rasping sound. I want them all out of here, urgently.
All of them apart from my son, that is. I want him to stay and never leave the confines of this flat. Here I can keep watch over him. Here he’ll be safe.
I hear them talking with their mouths full, laughing at Alex’s ability to polish off an entire slice of cake in three mouthfuls. At first they all sound disgusted, but then the boys seem to take it as a challenge to see who can manage it in two. The girls call them gross while egging them on. One of the girls – the skinny one probably, Jasinda, is it? – claims she’s on a diet and everyone groans. The girls then start lamenting their ugliest body parts while the boys turn their talk to trainers.
I want to go to my room and shut my door, but I know I can’t. It will look too strange and Josh will be concerned. I just pray they eat quickly and go.
Over the din of them talking and laughing, I hear Josh’s ringtone.
“Hi,” he answers. “Yeah… yeah… yep. Thank you very much for the money. Yeah. No, that’s great, I really appreciate it. I don’t know yet, I might just put it in my account. I wanna get a new guitar so… yeah. We’re heading out soon. Just bowling, then some food. Uhh, yeah, he’s here somewhere, hold on.”
No, no, no, I inwardly groan. Not now, please.
I quickly turn my back to the doorway, knowing Josh is about to appear, and busy myself with examining the remote control. I know I don’t look right. I feel clammy and my chest is starting to heave. Josh has never seen me have an attack, doesn’t even know I have them. It certainly isn’t something he needs to find out about, especially not tonight. I always need to seem strong for him, even when I’m not, because when you only have one parent, they need to be your rock.
“Dad, she wants a quick word,” Josh says, swinging round the doorway. I try to take his phone without looking at him, but he grabs my forearm and gestures for me to hurry up because he wants to go out. I take the phone quickly and turn away, trying to conceal my increasingly laboured breathing. Fortunately, teenage boys can be remarkably unobservant when it comes to other people’s suffering, and Josh swings back out the door without another word.
“Is that your mum?” I hear one of the girls ask.
“My mum? Fuck no,” Josh mumbles, clearly assuming I’m already in another conversation, “like she’d even remember my birthday.”
A jolt of pain and surprise pierces through me. It’s not like him, that kind of bitterness. Or is it, deep down? From the outside, my boy seems perfectly well adjusted, but sometimes I feel like I’m just waiting for the emergence of all the ways in which we screwed him up. Every time he’s angry, sad, anxious, disengaged, I’m always searching for a deeper meaning behind it. Is that our fault? Did we damage him? Surely, it’s got to come out at some point.
I close my eyes and try to drag some more air into my lungs, but it’s like my ribs are contracting, squeezing the breath out of me. Luckily, I know that my sister only requires minimal input from me at the best of times.
“Hi,” I say into the phone.
“Hi, listen I saw Dad today and he was in a pretty bad way, I just thought you should know. He kept going on about how he hasn’t seen you in years, and he was getting quite upset and angry about it. And he was saying all this weird stuff about how he should never have lied to you—”
“What am I meant to do about it, Laura?” My tone is blunter than intended, but I can’t be dealing with this right now. I need space. I need air. And I need to get the kids out the door before this damn thing overwhelms me and I end up ruining Josh’s evening.
“I don’t expect you to do anything about it, Jay, I’m just letting you know. It was pretty difficult to deal with, okay? So I’m just telling you because I thought that was the idea, that we keep each other up to date with what’s happening, or is that not what we’re meant to be doing, because—”
“Okay, okay, sorry,” I lie. I just need her gone. On another evening I might be tempted to ask her why the hell she feels the need to tell me all the stuff my dad
says. It just makes me feel miserable and it’s not like anything’s ever going to change. But then that’s always been the difference between me and Laura; I keep my pain to myself, she tends to expel it onto other people.
“Anyway, that’s not even really what I wanted to talk to you about. My car’s still doing that thing, so can I bring it over on Monday after work for you to have a look…”
I move towards the doorway, Laura a grating noise in my ear, and discreetly watch the kids, who have finished their cake and moved into the hallway. They’re next to the front door, pulling on shoes. Seven pairs of legs all in skinny jeans. Jasinda and Amelia put their arms around Josh and all three of them hold their phones in the air and snap a selfie as they pull funny faces.
My son’s a nice-looking boy, perhaps a little too slender, but broadening slightly at the shoulders now, a side-parting that makes me worry about the way he holds his neck at an angle in an attempt to keep his hair out of one eye. I don’t think it can be good for posture. His skin is fairer than mine, his hair a lighter shade of brown; his mother’s genes fighting for their half of him. At least she staked her claim to him on some level.
I hear the toilet flush and Chloe comes out of the bathroom. Josh picks her pink hoodie off the peg by the door, shoves it clumsily at her. They exchange a few words, laugh. They’ve known each other since they were small, and although Josh denies there’s anything between them, I’m certain he’s either lying or in denial. I see it in their body language, the way they interact. It might have been some time ago, but I remember teenage love all too well.
Chloe takes a strand of her blonde hair, sniffs it, then holds it out for Josh. He sniffs it, too. He tugs at his own fringe before figuring out that it’s just too short to reach his nose, so instead Chloe sniffs it for him. I have no idea what they’re doing, but Chloe looks impressed and wraps her arms around his neck. Without missing a beat, he puts his arms around her waist and they stand there hugging, while their friends laugh and jostle around them. I remember the feeling so clearly it scares me; the newness of it all, despite having known each other for years, the uncertainty, the first tentative kisses, the early thrill of skin on skin. And later, those all-important words – I love you. The promises – we’ll always be together. My breath catches in my throat, ever tighter, and I close my eyes, wishing away the memories that have been plaguing me recently.
“We’re just friends,” he tells me time and time again. He even gets quite irate about it. And so I let it drop, and I stop the teasing and the jibes because I can see I’m pushing my luck. But that’s how it started for me, too. We were just friends. And then one day, we weren’t.
I watch them sometimes, snuggled close on our sofa, whispering and teasing each other, or having conversations that look deeper and more meaningful than anything Josh and I ever seem to manage, and I wonder if he’s ever going to be brave enough to make a move. I keep my mouth shut, but what I really want to say to him is, “I had that once. That total comfort and ease, the way you look at each other, how happy you are when you’re together, the way she makes you laugh. It’s rarer than you would imagine. Tell her how you feel, and when you’ve done that, learn from my mistakes – don’t be stupid enough to let her go. Because even at fifteen you can have the greatest love of your life.” My mind floods with all the things Josh would say to me if I gave him that speech. All of them are pretty offensive.
“…I don’t even know why I took the car there in the first place,” Laura is saying, “they’re con merchants and the guy who runs the place is such a total dick…”
Chloe releases Josh just as abruptly as she embraced him, distracted by the urgent need to check her phone. At least when I was their age I didn’t have to compete for a girl’s attention with five hundred other friends.
Alex, for no apparent reason, suddenly pulls Josh into a headlock and rubs at his hair, making Josh whine. The threat of having his hair messed up infuses Josh with enough strength to push the heftier boy off, and after running his fingers through his fringe a couple of times, Josh raises his fists, pretending to square up to his aggressor. In a flash, Alex’s fists are up as well, and they start to circle each other as best they can in the narrow hallway, Sam and Joel now cheering on their chosen contestant. Josh and Alex pretend to throw punches at each other, until Alex pulls his fist back too fast and knocks his elbow hard on the wall behind him, drawing a silently mouthed expletive and hoots of laughter from the other three boys.
The camaraderie, the rough-and-tumble closeness of these boys, is in some ways even more painful to watch than the slow-burning relationship between Josh and Chloe. Because despite the passage of time, whenever I see Josh and his three mates, it’s like I’m seeing us all over again – me, Max, Tom and Michael. The shoving and piss-taking, the mocking and name-calling, it’s the stuff of male bonding that endures throughout the ages. And whereas the rituals between teenagers of the opposite sex seem to mutate from one generation to the next, the glue that bonds boys together is always made of the same ingredients: solidarity, team spirit, a sense of brotherhood, loyalty and even love, all carefully concealed beneath a veneer of ridicule, mockery and tomfoolery.
But then maybe I’m not giving these boys enough credit, maybe things have shifted with time. Josh and his mates are capable of serious conversations in a way we never were – exams, potential careers, terrorism, politics… Perhaps kids have more to worry about now, constantly being exposed to social media and all its accompanying misery. So much has changed in such a short space of time. Or perhaps it says more about the four of us that at fifteen we never discussed anything much more serious than football and breasts. If we’d been capable of discussing even ten per cent of our true feelings then surely it would have helped us cope with what happened back then. As it was, we kept it all inside and tried to act like everything was fine, even though it was anything but.
“Are you even listening to me?” asks Laura.
I try to speak, but no sound comes out. How can you talk without breath?
“Jay? Are you okay, because you’ve been acting really weird lately. You just seem really distracted. I mean, not that you ever don’t seem distracted, but even for you… Michael said the other day that you seem like you’re not with it. He asked if I thought you were okay, but I said he was way more likely to know the answer to that than me, because God knows you never tell me anything.”
The thing about memories is they come whether you want them to or not. When they were little, I used to watch Josh and Alex kicking a football around the park and suddenly I’d be seeing Tom and myself, whooping and yelling and punching the air when we scored a goal. Years later, I’d see them lounging on Josh’s bed playing video games and suddenly I’d be transported back in time to those lazy Sunday afternoons we spent at Max’s house. And as Josh has grown older the memories have just kept on coming, more vividly, more painfully. In the last couple of years, his male friendship group has settled into a nice little crowd of four – him, Alex, Joel and, most recently, Sam, and the similarity is at times almost too much to bare. I hope he’ll be friends with these boys for ever, that nothing ever drives them apart. For me, there were things that even the closest of friendships couldn’t withstand.
“I’ve gotta go, Laur,” I say, my voice barely more than a whisper.
“Okay, so I’ll see you Monday, yeah? Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Monday,” I manage, and hang up.
Josh is the youngest of his friends, born at thirteen minutes to midnight on a sticky July night. So he’s not fifteen yet, I remind myself, as if it really makes any difference. I even glance at the time on his phone. Almost five hours still to go. I want the seconds to stop ticking by, I want him to stay fourteen. Because at fourteen everything was good. I was fifteen when it all went to shit, and even though I tell myself that was me, not him, I can’t seem to shift the dread of him turning a year older.
“Dad. Phone,” Josh orders, suddenly spying me in the do
orway. He holds his hands up to catch his mobile, too pressed for time to take the five steps towards me. I throw it to him and he catches it, stuffs it in the back pocket of his jeans.
“Let’s go!” he calls, and Joel opens the front door.
I want to step towards him, envelop him in my arms, ask him for the tenth time exactly where he’s going tonight and at what times, and to please text me when he gets there and when he’s leaving, and who will he be walking home with, and does he have enough money. But I can’t even move. I can’t even speak anymore. The oxygen won’t come.
“See you later, Dad!” Josh calls, followed by a cacophony of goodbyes and thank-yous from his friends.
I step towards the front door, my body making the automatic movement to go after him, to hold him back, but instead, as I feel the tightness in my chest, I find that I’m practically shoving the last of them out the doorway.
“Text you later!” Josh calls, already at the bottom of the stairs, swinging round the bannister into the communal hallway.
And it takes everything I can muster and one great drag of air to call, “Be careful!”
I shut the front door, a wave of relief washing over me, and slump down on the mat, burying my head in my hands. Even after all these years, the feeling is terrifyingly familiar.
“Breathe,” I whisper to myself, trying to drag in air, “breathe.”
And when I can’t even make the word sound out anymore, I continue to mouth it silently.
“Breathe.”
“Breathe.”
Chapter 2
Breathe
I remember it was my fault we were running late. Mine and that damn polar bear.
“Are you sure this is the right way?” asked Michael, stumbling over some brambles. He was trying to sound casual, but I knew him well enough to catch the anxiety in his voice. We all should have been home by now, and while fifteen minutes wasn’t going to mean the end of the world for the rest of us, Michael’s dad approached life with military precision. The consequence for him being back late would be well beyond the raised eyebrow and disapproving glance at the clock that the rest of us would get. I was the only one who knew what his dad could be like, but I hadn’t been thinking about Michael when I held everyone up that evening. All I’d been thinking about was that stupid polar bear.