by S K Sharp
‘I want us to be together,’ I say. ‘That’s all.’
‘So do I.’ He squeezes me and holds me tight.
‘I can’t leave home. I can’t run away.’ I know this. There’s no point pretending it isn’t true. I know I’m sixteen and all grown-up, but I’m scared and I’m not ready. ‘I don’t know what to do.’
‘There’s the weekends,’ he says. ‘It’s still London. I can get on a train.’
We both know it’s not the same.
He squeezes me. ‘Thanks for staying.’
‘I’m going to tell the police,’ I say.
‘What?’
‘I’m going to tell the police. And so are you. Then he’ll be arrested and you won’t have to go. You can stay—’
‘No.’
‘Dec!’
But he shakes his head.
‘Dec, I don’t want you to go! I don’t want either of us to go anywhere! He’s the one who should go, not you. I want to be with you! All the time.’ And I do. I don’t want him to be in Clapham where we can only see each other at the weekends. I want him to be here, where I can walk from his house to mine, from his house to school, where I can see him every night from my bedroom window …
‘Nix—’
‘No! He can’t do this to us.’
I press into him. I feel his hand on my hair, stroking me, and then his other hand on my face, turning me towards him as he leans in to kiss me. I kiss him back and it’s odd at first, because I can feel his misshapen lip and the dry, hard tips of those two twists of toilet paper, and taste an iron tang of blood. I feel a surge inside me and take his head in my hands so he can’t get away. I feel his fingers on my cheek slip to my shoulder and then inch further, still thinking they’re some sort of ninja hand. I pull away and for an instant I catch in his face how desperate he is, how much he wants me. It’s hard not to dive on him.
‘There’s blood on your shirt,’ I say. ‘You should probably take it off.’
While he does that, I slide to the floor, down on my hands and knees, reach under the bed and pull out the Penthouse and drop it in front of him. It’s delicious how embarrassed he looks. It’s not like he can pretend it isn’t his.
Dec gives me a sheepish look. His mouth opens as if maybe he’s about to say something, but then it stops and hangs there, because I’m standing in front of him, undoing the buttons of my blouse and feeling really, really smug that I had the foresight to put on the sexy bra and knickers, the ones which would give Mum a heart attack if she knew they were what I’d bought with this year’s birthday money.
10
Thursday 6th February 2020
I don’t stay the night with Declan. He would have let it happen, I think, but I make my excuses, go home and spend the night staring at the ceiling instead. My heart is thumping. I keep telling myself how I only want things back the way they were a week ago but I know that’s not true. I want more, so much more. I want to go back to when we were young. Both ideas are stupid, I know, because no one can go back in time, but I can’t seem to let it go.
I try to imagine what it must be like for him, not being able to remember that night. He remembers his dad giving him a beating, and how it wasn’t the first, not by a long shot. He claims he remembers the Penthouse, too, but not the blood; and I don’t understand how he can remember the one and not the other. When I finished telling him what happened that night, he said the rest was sort of coming back to him – the stuff that happened in the Shelley before we left – but I’m not sure how much of that was wishful thinking. I wonder how it feels to be at sea like that. He’s got a story now, but I’m not sure how much of it is really his. And, of course, I can’t tell him what really happened after I left, only what he told me the next day.
As I lie in bed, unable to sleep, I think about Declan’s photograph – the lie of it, Declan saying how his Aunt Madge and Grandpa Vincent hated each other even as they lived under the same roof. I think of Kat’s mum taking pictures at the party. If I looked through them, would I find Declan looking back at me? Was she still taking pictures after midnight? Does she still have them?
I try to sleep but it doesn’t really work and so eventually I give up. I get dressed before it’s light outside and have an early breakfast. I fuss with Chairman for a while and think how there must be other witnesses, people who saw Declan at the Shelley when he returned. Even if the police know his mum lied about him being there for the whole night, there has to be someone else. I suppose Kat went straight home after she and Gary did whatever they did … But Gary would have stayed for as long as the drinks were free, and Kat’s mum was there right to the very end. One of them has to remember, don’t they? I go through the faces in my memories, one by one. I never had names for most of them – only the ones who were parents to people I knew.
I check the time. I’ve got plenty before I need to leave for work, so I go through the whole evening again, from the moment I got there, writing down the names I knew and what everyone was wearing. I know it was a long time ago but there must have been a hundred people at the party that night, and it only takes one of them to remember.
Dad’s jacket, streaked with mud …
If Dad was out in the park close to midnight then maybe Kat was right and it was him that she and Gary saw. But why was he out there? And how did he get mud all over his jacket?
Mum, livid with fury …
I saw her giving Arty Robbins a piece of her mind before we left. I assumed it was something to do with me and Declan. Later, I thought maybe she knew about what he was doing to Anne.
Good riddance to bad rubbish. Dad’s words. He never told me what happened that night or why there was a policeman in our house, but I remember the bruises on Mum’s neck the next morning.
Lingering behind all this is the thought that maybe I should have stayed with Declan last night, if only to treasure the memory of it.
I check the time again and suddenly I’m running late. I grab my jacket and my bag and rush for the door, and as I do, a memory swallows me like a shark from the deep, dragging down a seal. It’s early autumn. I can feel it in the air: the slight nip of a chill that says summer has finally gone. It’s 1990 and I’m about to get married and I’m with Kat, in a hotel room, staring at myself in the mirror, at a dress that doesn’t seem real – the dress I’m going to wear when I marry Dec in about forty minutes – and a part of me is wondering if I’m supposed to be scared or feel full of doubt, but I’m not and I don’t. I can remember our relationship from the start to the present and there’s not a single thing I’d change.
I tell this to Kat and she laughs. ‘Not even that time he abandoned you at that service station?’
‘That was an accident!’
‘That’s what he says.’
‘He’s your cousin. Aren’t you supposed to be telling me how great he is?’
‘I don’t think you need me for that.’ She smiles, that big honest smile that seems like it’s only for me. ‘You could do a lot worse, though. A lot worse.’ The smile turns into a grin. ‘And since we’re cousins, he has to treat you right or I’ll thump him, and he knows it.’
I relive it as though I’m right there, minute for minute, talking to Kat, feeling the butterflies in my stomach, almost tripping over on the stairs down to the lobby, fumbling my way into the Bentley that Dad insisted on hiring for us. I climb out when we reach the registry office and I’m so light-headed that Kat has to hold my hand, and at first I can’t see Dec, only Mum and Dad: Dad beaming like he’s won the lottery, Mum looking like she’s trying very hard but can’t quite hide how she doesn’t want to be there.
And then I see him. Dec in his top hat and tails, emerging from a cluster of friends. For the next ten minutes, even my memory fails me, breaking into fits and starts, flashes of this and that. Dad and Dec shaking hands. Standing with Dec as we made our vows, putting the ring on my finger. Kissing him. Signing the register. The banquet back at the hotel – Dad again. It was a wonderful day
and so I linger there. I don’t want to leave, even though I know I should. I want to stay here, before it all went wrong.
When I finally come back, it’s because my phone is ringing. I’m sitting on the sofa, eyes full of tears, and I should have been at work an hour ago but I can’t seem to move. I remember the wedding dinner. I put Mum next to Mrs R. It seemed the right thing to do, but I don’t think Mum said a single word to her all evening.
When I answer my phone, it’s Ed from work.
Shit!
‘Nicola! Where are you? The Orien Trust people are here and I can’t find you anywhere! Are you even in?’
Shit, shit, shit!
‘I … Sorry. I … I’m at the doctor’s.’ It’s the first thing that comes into my head.
‘What?’
‘I’m really sorry. It’s just that I was on my way in and I suddenly felt really sick. I had to get off the bus and then I started throwing up.’
‘What? Fuck! Are you OK?’ There must be something in my voice that rings true for Ed to actually show some concern.
‘Probably nothing serious. One of those twenty-four-hour things. I’ll probably be fine by tomorrow, but you know – better safe than sorry.’
‘I hope so. What am I supposed to do about the Orien Trust?’
‘You’ll have to ask them to come back. Tell them I’m so sorry.’
‘Right. Can you let me know a bit earlier tomorrow, if you’re not coming in?’
‘Yes, of course. Sorry.’
It’s not unusual, slipping into memories so deep that I lose all sense of time, but usually it’s for five or ten minutes, not two hours. And I don’t skip work for a day simply because I feel down, that’s not who I am. But I can’t go in now, not after what I just said to Ed.
An hour later, I step out of Wordsworth Park station. To the right are the shops and the High Street. To the left is the park with a couple of benches by the entrance. If I close my eyes, I can see it change as the years pass. I can see a path of muddy brown earth swallowed up by trees to either side. I can see a track covered in gravel, trees on one side, Parklands on the other: my daily walk to school. I see it as it is now, a tarmac cycle path warded on one side by the high wooden boards of the construction site, and on the other by the fence around the car park, the trees all gone.
I’m going home. I’m going to see Mum. I’m going to ask about that night.
I walk to the end of the High Street and onto the path into the park, and I’m twenty-six; and behind the boards that cage the building site beside me, another me is hugging her knees to her chest in the dark and the rain, and the despair is a black pit from which there seems no escape. Another dozen yards and I’m seventeen, and it’s a summer night and I’m too drunk to stand, and there’s a bench and I’m slumped on it, my head in Declan’s lap, and I feel so ill that I want to die. That was the night I discovered I could drown my memory in alcohol, if I wanted, because to this day I don’t remember much of what happened.
I walk on and I’m six years old, Mum on one side of me, Dad on the other. I’m holding their hands and everything is bright and brilliant and I feel safe and happy, and then – SNAP! – I’m twenty, and Mum and Dad have turned into Declan, but we’re still holding hands and the feeling is the same, and I don’t know whether that was how I felt when I was with him or whether it’s still the feeling of a small child, or whether it’s both …
On the other side of the building site, I cross Wordsworth Lane, the playing fields on one side and the woods on the other.
… and my sixteenth birthday is only weeks away and I’m sitting on a swing, watching the field where Declan is playing football in the snow with a dozen other boys whose names I can remember, every single one; and Andrew Fisher is coming towards me, and Declan is with him, so I wait and smile, not at Declan but at Andrew Fisher, and Andrew Fisher smiles back and notices me, and everything is perfect and I barely see the look on Declan’s face and …
I shake myself back to the present. A miserable February morning. I came this way to school every day for years, but everything is different. I remember an ice-cream van in the summer, where the coffee shop stands; I remember a slide, a see-saw, a roundabout and a climbing frame, all set into unforgiving tarmac, but now some adventure-play wooden fort-thing stands in their place and everywhere is covered in bark chippings. My memory is like the sea in a storm today, waves crashing over me one after the other, knocking me down with barely time to get back on my feet. Sometimes it feels like I’m going to drown.
I don’t know what to say to Mum. I haven’t known since Dad died and she married Dave Crane, throwing away her old life as though none of it mattered. I wonder, sometimes, if it was actually a relief for her when Dad was diagnosed. It’s a mean-spirited thought, probably unfair, but I think it anyway.
Kat and Gary saw someone in the park that night. I need to know if it was Dad. I think what happened that night is that Mum left the party with Dad’s best friend Dave, not with Dad. I think Dad couldn’t find her and so he went looking. I think he saw them together. I think he already knew something was going on because things weren’t right between them even before, but it all got worse after that night. I don’t think Mum will ever tell me if it’s true. But I have to try.
Do I? Why does it even matter? It won’t save Declan. Arty Robbins had nothing to do with the triangle of Mum and Dad and David Crane … And yet it does matter. To me.
The park gates open onto Shelley Street past what used to be the Mary Shelley. It’s got a new name now, part of some bland family-friendly chain. Vincent put it up for sale the year after his son disappeared. He was never the same after that night.
It’s closed – too early – which is just as well because I’d murder for a shot of something strong to steady my nerves, or to sit at one of the tables outside and smoke. But if I were to do either of those things then I’d turn around and go home, because I don’t want to be here. I don’t want any of this. It’s only been a few days since Declan called but it feels like a month. I wouldn’t say I was happy before, but at least I’d found a way to be at peace. Now? Now I need to know what really happened that night. All of it.
I walk past the Shelley and Tennyson Way and glance towards the house where Andrew Fisher used to live. We went out for exactly three weeks and one day before I dumped him and started seeing Declan. If I want to, I can picture everything as it was back then: the roads half empty, only a handful of cars parked on the street, green front gardens with their little patches of lawn, flower beds that turned into bursts of colour in the spring and summer. Now the road is rammed, cars and vans parked on both sides, the front gardens mostly paved over, the terracotta red roof tiles cratered by dormer windows and loft extensions. I turn the corner into Byron Road and it’s all more of the same. It’s been ages since I came back here.
Mum almost sold up three years ago. Fed up with the street being constantly a building site, she said.
I stop across the road from the house that used to be my home. The windows have changed, old wooden frames replaced by glaring white uPVC. The front door is new, too, and the drive has been re-laid and there’s a new garden wall. The old flower beds and rose bushes – Dad’s pride and joy – have all gone. Replaced, just like Dad himself.
Why do I need to do this? Am I still trying to get Declan back, after all this time?
Not that. I saw him with that other woman.
Then why?
In my head, I’m at my window, looking out into the dark, and Declan is looking back, and the yearning is inside me. I feel it now as I felt it then – a blooming, the most beautiful feeling I’ve ever known. I feel myself falling in love with him, over and over again. Young and strong, my heart already carrying its first few shallow scars, but really only scratches …
I want to make it right. I just don’t know how.
Across the street, the door opens and Dave comes out. He’s starting to show his age at last, hair mostly silver. He’s seventy-three y
ears old, a couple of years younger than Mum, but he wears it well, looks and moves more like a man in his fifties. He doesn’t notice me at first, not until he opens the car door and feels me staring. When he sees me, it takes him a full two seconds to recognise who I am.
‘Nicola?’
I take an instinctive step away. I used to like ‘Uncle’ Dave until that summer when Arty Robbins disappeared. Then I hated him, and I never stopped.
The feeling sparks a memory. I still see the streaks of mud on Dad’s jacket. Dark leather, the mud almost orange. Dad was in the park that night …
‘Are you here for Susan?’
Why else would I be here? I wish he’d just get into his car and go wherever he’s going. When he doesn’t, I force myself to cross the road. Dave leads me to the front door and opens it and calls, ‘Sue! You’ll never guess who’s here!’ When he turns to me, his smile is guarded. ‘She’ll be delighted to see you. It’s been ages.’
As if I can’t remember that for myself.
Mum emerges from the lounge and it nearly breaks my heart the way her face lights up. She almost runs at me to hug me. ‘Nicky! What a lovely surprise.’
‘I’ll make some tea.’ Dave slips diplomatically to the kitchen while Mum drags me to the lounge, sits me down and flutters around as though she doesn’t know what to do.
‘Dave was about to go to the shops. I hope you don’t mind.’
‘Of course not.’ The sooner he goes, the better.
She asks about work, which hasn’t really changed since I started at the library ten years ago, and about Joy and a few other friends I’ve mentioned over the years. It’s what she always does, skirting around the edges of my life, looking for meat where there isn’t any. My world is quiet and simple because that’s the way I like it. At least she’s given up on grandchildren.
Dave brings in a tray with a teapot and a pair of cups, a little jug of milk and a bowl of sugar. He leans over Mum and kisses the top of her head. I have to look away as my eyes fill with tears. It’s what Dad used to do.