by Maria Goodin
The four of us kept looking at each other, wide eyes darting in the flickering light, asking the same silent question: how the hell do we get out of here?
Suddenly an argument erupted between the Leader and his two henchmen, Snake Eyes and Muscles, as I’d come to think of him, due to the bulk of his biceps. Muscles, until this point, had been fairly quiet, but now angry words flew back and forth between the three of them in a language we didn’t understand. The Leader removed his arm from Tom’s shoulder and drunkenly squared up to Snake Eyes. He snatched the bottle out of his hand, threw it to the ground, where it smashed, and shouted furiously, waving the knife in Snake Eyes’ face.
The four of us eyed each other desperately, unsure what to do. Were things about to get really nasty? Was this a chance to make an escape?
As the arguing continued, their victim on the ground rolled over slowly. He raised his head off the dry earth, looked around him as if seeking someone out, and then settled his gaze upon me. One of his eyes had swollen shut. His lip was cut and bleeding, his nose bruised. But he was still recognisable to me. It was the black hair that gave him away. And the chequered shirt.
Hey, dude…
The fire cast flickering light and shadow across Rocket’s face. He mouthed something at me as best he could with his damaged mouth, but I couldn’t make it out.
And then I got it.
Run, he was saying. Run.
I glanced anxiously at Tom, who caught my eye.
It was now or possibly never.
I looked at Rocket lying on the ground. I’d get help, I’d get the police. But I couldn’t do anything for him unless I got out of here.
And so I jumped up from the crate, grabbing Max and pulling him after me. Immediately, Tom burst into action, running into Michael and pushing him forward. But Muscles spied us and shouted. Moving swiftly, the Leader stepped in front of me, holding out the knife. With a burst of adrenaline, I knocked his arm out of my way and pushed on through, all four of us making a desperate bid for freedom.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the two henchmen make a sudden move to come after us.
And then there was a cry of pain.
I stopped and turned, saw Rocket crawling on the ground, the broken bottle glistening in in his outstretched hand. And the Leader cursing, clutching at his calf.
The two henchmen wavered, unsure whether to pursue us or return to their leader’s side.
“Jay, come on!” I heard Tom yell.
I glanced at my hand. Blood was dripping from my palm where I’d knocked the knife out of the way, but I felt no pain.
I couldn’t go back. The only thing I could possibly do now was get help.
I took one last glance at Rocket and ran.
Chapter 13
Complicated
Josh and I step out onto the terrace at the Canal House, mugs of tea in our hands, courtesy of a blurry-eyed Stu, who’s busy tidying up inside following last night’s engagement celebrations. Irena’s still cocooned in bed, suffering from morning sickness. It’s half nine on Sunday morning, and apart from the chinking of bottles being tidied away, the place is quiet, the air bright and still.
“Thank you so much for coming,” beams Libby, squinting against the morning sunshine, a paintbrush dangling from her hand. She’s wearing loose cotton trousers and a khaki shirt that are both splattered with white paint. She looks tired. Without make-up and with her hair tied back, her scar stands out, pale pink and shiny. Guilt forces me to avert my eyes.
“I’m really grateful for the help,” Libby smiles. “I think once this base coat’s done, I’ll be fine, I just had no idea it would take so long. I thought one coat would be enough, but it’s not and…”
“It’s fine,” I reassure her, and then gesture behind me. “Libby, this is Josh. Josh, Libby.”
“Hi,” smiles Libby, giving him a little wave.
“All right?” he nods, awkwardly.
Libby continues to stare at him, searching his features.
Josh shuffles self-consciously and stares at his pristine trainers.
“I really do appreciate your help,” she tells him, shaking away whatever thoughts she’d been having. “This might not be much fun for you—”
“It’s not meant to be fun,” I interrupt, “it’s punishment.”
I grab his arm and hold it up for Libby to see. A red-raw strip of skin runs down the inside of his forearm. Hard, white specks of superglue are still stuck here and there.
“Ouch!” she recoils, as Josh snatches his arm back and glares at me.
“Punishment for being an idiot,” I clarify.
“Oh, well,” sighs Libby, “we all do silly things when we’re teenagers, don’t we?” She raises an eyebrow pointedly at me and smiles.
Josh smirks. She’s already won him over.
“Yeah, Dad,” he mumbles. “I mean, I got a bit of glue on my arm, you got thrown out of school and had a baby… We all do dumb stuff, don’t we?”
I shoot him a warning glance and he rolls his eyes defiantly before wandering over to inspect the paint pots and brushes that have been laid out on old sheets.
I shake my head despairingly at Libby and we both snigger a little as if to say Kids! Again, I wonder how we got to this point, to this age where we’re the grown-ups.
“So…” I open, taking a sip of hot tea and trying to hide the fact I’ve just scalded my lip.
Libby smiles at me, waiting. I nod towards the half-painted wall, unable to swallow.
“Oh! Right!” she exclaims, remembering why I’m here. “So, just grab a brush and get stuck in basically!”
I place my tea down on one of the tables. Breadcrumbs, bits of gherkin and smears of tomato sauce still litter the terrace from last night, the barbecue now cold in the corner.
“How much needs doing?” Josh asks, his eyes following the line of the wall as if this is a Herculean task.
“All of it,” I tell him, in a tone that implies this should be obvious.
He stretches his arms up high, revealing a pale, lean midriff that doesn’t match the rest of the tan he’s picked up over the summer. “Seriously?” he mutters through a yawn.
“He hasn’t seen half nine on a Sunday morning for a while,” I tell Libby in a low voice.
“Yeah, I think I could have done with more sleep myself,” she says, rubbing her temple. “And much less wine. I hope I didn’t say anything… I mean, you know, if I said anything weird, then just forget—”
“No,” I tell her, reassuringly, “you didn’t say anything—”
“Oh good, ’cause I have a tendency to talk rubbish after one glass of wine, let alone three. Well, I have a tendency to talk rubbish all the time, but… Oh! How was your dad?”
We crouch down next to each other and start painting, while Josh takes a paint pot and brush to the other end of the wall, as far away from us as possible.
“He was… umm…” Violent? Aggressive? Offensive? “… He was okay. It was just a bad evening.”
“Is he…?”
“He has Alzheimer’s.” I spit it out quickly, the words still carrying their sting even after all these years.
“Oh my God, I’m so sorry,” she says, stopping what she’s doing and looking at me.
I paint silently, staring straight ahead, my grip tightening on the brush, pushing down my own anger and sadness, willing her to stop looking at me. After a while, she resumes her own painting.
“He was diagnosed when Josh was four,” I tell her, wondering why I always measure my life by my son’s age, as if my own existence is merely a shadow of his. Do all parents do that? “It had been clear for a while things weren’t right, though. I think I was just in denial. But we’re sort of at the stage now… well, it’s getting harder.”
“Does he live by himself?”
“No. He’s still in the house. I mean, you know, our family house. But he has a partner. Brenda. They got together not long after my mum left. She moved in after he got his dia
gnosis. Josh and I had to move out at that point, so she kind of stepped in.”
“You moved out because he was ill?”
For a moment it sounds like an accusation, but when I glance at Libby’s face, I see nothing but concern and a desire to understand. No one’s accusing me of abandoning my dad but me.
“I couldn’t have Josh around him,” I rush to explain. “Having a young child around… All the noise and chaos, it wasn’t doing my dad any good. He’d get angry and flustered. Plus, he’d get confused. He’d think Josh was me when I was little, and then he’d get confused about who I was, and who everyone else was… In the end, he started doing dangerous things: leaving the gas on, leaving the front door open… He started a fire in the kitchen one day, that was pretty much the final straw…”
I trail off, guilty for revealing these details about my dad who’d always been such a calm, private, capable person. In his rare moments of lucidity, he’d always been mortified by his own behaviour, and so I kept his secrets for him, told no one who didn’t need to know. Or at least that was normally the case.
“I’m so sorry,” says Libby again, her voice full of sympathy, “it must so hard for you all. Your dad was always so competent, wasn’t he? I mean, with all the things he used to build, and his teaching… he was so clever. And so patient. I remember how he taught me all about a car engine, took it all apart, showed me how it all worked.”
“Yeah, we were meant to be going to the cinema to see X-Men and we missed the start,” I say, smiling at the memory.
“And you were annoyed.”
“I thought you were just trying to get out of seeing it.”
“No, I was genuinely fascinated by what he was teaching me!”
“I realised that later.”
“And we ended up running to the cinema with me covered in grease and oil!”
“And you spent the whole film asking what was happening because we’d missed the beginning.”
“I did that with every film—”
“Yes, you did! Every film we ever watched, you spent the whole time asking who everyone was and what was going on and I always wondered how someone so clever—”
“It used to really irritate you!”
“Because I couldn’t concentrate and then I didn’t know what was going on!”
We laugh at the memory of it.
“I’m still just as bad with films, you know. It drives Will crazy. I don’t know what it is. He says I just have appalling concentration.”
We fall silent for a moment, the mention of Will bringing us back to the present time.
“Nah, you were just bored by most of the mainstream crap that was out there,” I tell her. “You used to like all that arty stuff, independent films, things with subtitles.”
“I still do. Although Will won’t watch them with me, so I just don’t bother normally. It’s no fun watching films on your own, is it?”
I disagree with her, but I don’t say so. I’ve spent hours sitting in the dark watching films in blissful solitude, so long I can’t imagine it being any other way.
“Well,” I say, searching for something that will take us back to where we were a minute ago, pre-Will, pre-the-stress-of-adulthood, “I never did get to find out what happened at the start of X-Men, so if you ever find out—”
“You’ll be the first to know,” she laughs.
We paint quietly for a while. Josh has his headphones in, and he’s painting slowly, sloppily, with the same minimum effort he affords most tasks.
“So,” starts up Libby again, “when you moved out of your house, what did you do? Where did you and Josh go?”
“Well, at that point Brenda moved in. And she had a little flat on the outskirts of Woodside – right down the road from where Michael grew up actually – and the mortgage was paid off and everything, so she let me and Josh move in there. The primary school was one of the best in the county.”
“Yeah, that’s a nice part of town.”
“Really nice. The flat was tiny. Just one bedroom, so I spent the next four years sleeping in the lounge, but I don’t really know what we would have done otherwise. I mean, even once I started working, I wasn’t earning anything near enough to rent somewhere.”
“But how did you manage? I mean, with work and childcare…”
“Actually my sister was…” Argumentative? Erratic? A bitch? “…amazing, if you can believe that.”
Libby eyes me like I’ve lost my mind.
“Yeah, I know! But, seriously, she adjusted her working hours to do school drop-offs, she covered sports days if I couldn’t be there. I honestly don’t know what I would have done without her. Or Michael. I mean, without the two of them…”
I don’t mention the ups and downs, the fact that Michael was sometimes like a second dad to Josh – chipping in with school pick-ups, taking him to the park on the weekends when I had to work – and at other times incapable of getting out of bed or lifting his head off the floor. I know other people might question my judgement, but he was one of the few people I always trusted with my son. The only person Michael had ever been a risk to was himself.
“And your mum?”
I shake my head and no doubt make a poor job of hiding my bitterness.
“Nope. She made promises before Josh was born about how she’d help with everything, but once she’d moved out… I mean, she helped a bit at first, but then, after about a year, she followed Jack to Ireland, got a lecturing job. We barely spoke for years.”
“My God, it’s so weird how things turn out, isn’t it? How people surprise you – in good ways or bad.”
“Sure is,” I mutter, trying not to dwell on thoughts of my mum. Over the years, my anger’s dissipated, and I’ve started to see her side of things. She was right, I guess; I made my bed, it was my job to lie in it. But still, when I look at Josh now, not far off the age I was when Hellie got pregnant, I still wonder how she could have abandoned me to it.
“I mean, look at you,” piped up Libby, “who would have thought you’d cope with a child? You were just a boy who didn’t know how to boil an egg… I mean, literally!”
I nod and smile. “And you thought that was outrageous.”
“It was outrageous! Fifteen years old and no egg-boiling ability! You couldn’t work your washing machine, didn’t know how the iron worked, couldn’t read bus timetables because Mummy and Daddy used to drive you everywhere—”
“Yeah, okay, okay.”
“Couldn’t even work the oven! Do you remember when you tried to cook me a special meal for my birthday and it was still raw?”
“Yeah, all right,” I smile, “just because you were little Miss Independent. I was your average teenage boy—”
“But look at what you did!” She looks over at Josh, staring again like she’s never seen a human boy before. “You raised a son. On your own.”
“Oh no, not on my own,” I protest.
“Well, as a single parent, I mean. And he seems like a good boy. I mean, he’s here first thing on a Sunday morning—”
“Not through choice, I promise you.”
“Nevertheless. It’s impressive. I’m really proud of you.”
I turn to her, surprised, and she blushes, before quickly going back to her painting.
“I mean, you should be proud of yourself,” she says with an awkward laugh.
I watch Josh, lazily painting away, nodding his head to whichever black-eyed androgynous vocalist is attempting to burst his eardrums today. It’s never occurred to me that I should be proud of myself. Proud of him, yes, but not of myself. I’ve always seen myself as someone who screwed up, had a child too young with a girl I barely knew, wasted my education, wasted my opportunities. I dwell on the things I haven’t provided for my son – a nice home, a proper family unit, a range of horrendously expensive extracurricular activities that a lot of his friends seem to have access to. A mother. He should have had so much more.
“So, anyway,” I say, not used to talking so
much about myself, “what about you?”
“What about me?”
“Well, what did you do after…” After I broke your heart? After I screwed up that great thing we had? “…you know, after you left here?”
“Well, like I said, I went to uni, flunked out of that, did various jobs, rented various rooms, moved about a bit. Then I met Will.” She shrugs, as if the rest should be self-explanatory.
“So, what about all the stuff you wanted to do?”
“Trek the Andes, traverse the desert plains on camel back, do an archaeological dig in Egypt…?”
“For starters.”
She laughs. “Well, it turns out you need this little thing called money.”
“Ah yes, I know it well. Or not so well, in fact.”
“Likewise. And… I don’t know… I suppose if I’d really wanted those things that much I would have worked harder, made them happen. But perhaps I changed, too. Or perhaps I was never really that person in the first place. Perhaps that was just the hippy-chick I thought my mum wanted me to be.”
“Sounds like where you are now couldn’t be more different. About to marry a City boy, settle down in a nice part of town, have a couple of kids, start shopping at Waitrose…”
I’m just toying with her, but she playfully takes the bait.
“That’s right,” she quips, “I’ll be off in my Audi to stock up on quinoa…”
“… And organic baby food…”
“… Choosing a kitchen island…”
“… For your massive house in Woodside.”
She laughs. “Will’s not that rich. We can’t all have the privilege of living in such a posh area, sending our kids to the county’s best school.”
“Yeah, well, I admit I got lucky there for a while. Although I felt like a right fraud. The parents at that school used to look at me like I was scum.”
“Seriously?”
“God, yeah. I was just some scruffy young bloke always turning up late to everything, always rushing, never seemed to have the right bag or book or paperwork…”
“Well, I promise that when I’m dropping off little Tarquin and Geraldine, I won’t look down on any teenage, single parents that cross my path.”