While Maisie went to get the cards, Andrew—as is the preserve of the drunken—suddenly decided it was imperative he be as helpful as possible while doing so ostentatiously enough to be praised for it.
“I’ll do the washing up,” he announced determinedly, as if volunteering to go back into a burning building to rescue some children. After a while Peggy came up to him at the sink as he struggled to pull on washing-up gloves.
“Oi, you, you lightweight,” she said in a low voice. She was smiling, but there was a firmness to her voice that went some way to sobering Andrew up.
“Sorry,” he said. “Got a bit carried away. It’s just . . . you know. I’m feeling quite . . . happy.”
Peggy went to say something but stopped herself. She squeezed his shoulder instead. “Why don’t you go and relax in the living room for a bit? You’re the guest, you shouldn’t be doing the washing up.”
Andrew would have protested, but Peggy was standing closer to him now, her hand on his arm with her thumb gently caressing it, and he very much wanted to do exactly as she asked.
The girls and Imogen had briefly abandoned cards to see how fast they could play pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man, their hands a blur, collapsing into giggles as they finally lost coordination. Andrew heard the tail end of their conversation as he left.
“That pasta we just ate now,” Maisie said.
“Yes, pet,” Imogen said.
“Was it al dente?”
“I think it was Jamie Oliver, love,” Imogen said, cackling at her own joke. At least I’m not the only one who’s pissed, then, Andrew thought. He slumped onto the sofa, feeling exhausted all of a sudden. All of this euphoria was very tiring, but it didn’t stop him from wanting the day to go on forever. He just needed to rest his eyes for a minute.
* * *
—
In the dream, he was in an unfamiliar house, dressed for a property search in his regular protective suit, except it was beginning to feel suffocatingly tight against his body. He couldn’t remember what he was supposed to be searching for; he had a feeling it was to do with some documents. “Peggy, what are we looking for again?” he shouted. But her reply was muffled, and though he looked in every room he couldn’t seem to find her. And then he was lost—and more and more rooms kept appearing, so that every time he crossed a threshold he was in a space he didn’t recognize, and he was calling Peggy’s name and asking for help and his protective suit was starting to constrict him to the point where he thought he might pass out. And there was music—jarringly out of tune, so deep it was vibrating through his body. The song was Ella’s, but her voice sounded like it was playing at half speed. Bluuuue moooooon, you saw me standing aloooonnnne. Andrew tried to shout for someone to turn it off, to play anything—anything—but that, but no sound came out of his mouth. And then suddenly he was in his own flat and Peggy was in the corner, her back to him, but as he approached and screamed her name, the music getting louder all the time, he saw it wasn’t Peggy at all, but someone with brown, wavy hair, a pair of orange-rimmed glasses in her hand at her side, and then the glasses had slipped through her fingers and were falling in slow motion toward the floor—
“Andrew, are you okay?”
Andrew opened his eyes. He was on the sofa and Peggy was leaning over him, her hand cupping one side of his face.
Is this real?
“Sorry—I didn’t know whether to wake you, but you looked like you were having a nightmare,” Peggy said.
Andrew’s eyelids flickered and closed.
“You don’t have to say sorry,” he mumbled. “. . . Never . . . ever have to say sorry. You’re the one who’s saved me.”
— CHAPTER 21 —
Trust me, it’ll help.”
Andrew took the can of Irn-Bru from Peggy with a trembling hand and took a tentative sip, tasting what seemed like fizzy metal.
“Thanks,” he croaked.
“Nothing like a four-and-a-half-hour trip on a train that smells of wee to cure a hangover,” Peggy said.
Suze nudged Maisie and gestured for her to take her earphones out. “Mum said ‘wee,’” she said. Maisie rolled her eyes and went back to her book.
Andrew was never drinking again, that much he knew. His head was throbbing, and every time the train took a bend he felt a horrible pang of nausea. But far worse were the incomplete flashbacks from the previous night. What had he said? What had he done? He remembered Peggy and Imogen looking annoyed. Was that the point when he’d started a sentence three times with increasing volume and urgency (“I was . . . So, anyway, I was . . . I WAS”) because people didn’t seem to be concentrating? He’d at least managed to get to bed rather than sleeping on the sofa, but—shit—he remembered now that Peggy had practically had to drag him there. Luckily, she hadn’t lingered there long enough for him to embarrass himself further. Ideally now they’d be re-creating the spirit of excitement and adventure of the journey up there, but Andrew was having to focus all his attention on not puking himself entirely inside out. To make matters worse, there was a small child sitting directly behind him whose favorite pastime appeared to be kicking Andrew’s chair while asking his father a series of increasingly complex questions:
“Dad, Dad?”
“Yes?”
“Why is the sky blue?”
“Well . . . it’s because of the atmosphere.”
“What’s a atmosphere?”
“It’s the bit of air and gas that sort of stops us from getting burned by the sun.”
“So what’s the sun made of?”
“I . . . Um . . . why don’t we find you your bear, Charlie? Where’s Billy the Bear gone, eh?”
I hope Billy the Bear is a nickname for a strong sedative, Andrew thought. He tried to will himself into unconsciousness, but it was useless. He noticed Peggy was looking at him, arms folded, her expression unreadable. He scrunched his eyes shut, Peggy’s face slowly fading away into nothing. He fell into a horribly uncomfortable pattern of falling asleep but almost immediately jolting awake. Eventually he managed to doze, but when he woke, expecting to be south of Birmingham at least, it turned out they were stationary, having broken down before they’d even gotten to York.
“We apologize for the delay,” the driver said. “We appear to be experiencing some sort of technical delay.” Apparently unaware that he hadn’t turned off the loudspeaker, the driver then treated them all to a peek behind the magician’s curtain: “John? Yeah, we’re fucked. Have to chuck everyone off at York if we can even get a shunt there.”
After said shunt finally materialized, Andrew and Peggy hauled their bags off the train along with a few hundred other passengers traveling back that Saturday whose phasers were all set to “grumble,” only to be elevated to “strongly worded letter” when they were told it would be forty minutes before a replacement train could get there.
The brief sleep had revived Andrew enough that he could now, with horrible clarity, consciously consider how much he’d ruined things. He was just deciding how to carefully broach the possibility that maybe he and Peggy could possibly have a little chat, about, you know, everything, when Peggy returned from the café with crisps and apples for the girls and coffees for her and Andrew and said, “Right, we need to have a word.”
She bent down and kissed the top of Suze’s head.
“Won’t be a minute, pet. We’re just going to stretch our legs, but we’ll not go far.”
She and Andrew walked a little way along the platform.
“So,” Peggy said.
“Look,” Andrew said quickly, cursing himself for butting in but desperate to get his apology in as soon as he could. “I’m so sorry for last night—like you said I’m clearly a lightweight. And I know, especially, that to do that when that’s what Steve’s been doing is so stupid of me, and I just promise to you now—on my life—that it won’t happen again.”
Peggy swapped her coffee from one hand to the other.
“Firstly,” she said, “getting tipsy on a few beers and being a bit of a tit doesn’t make you Steve. It makes you a bit of a tit. Steve’s got an actual problem.” She blew on her coffee. “I haven’t told you this, but it turns out he’s been sacked for drinking at work. He had a bottle of vodka in a drawer, the moron.”
“Jesus, that’s awful,” Andrew said.
“He’s getting help, so he claims.”
Andrew chewed his lip. “Do you believe him?”
“I don’t really know. In fact, to be truthful, the only thing I can be sure about, with all that’s happening at the moment, is that everything’s a huge mess and there’s no way someone’s not going to get hurt.” The jaunty musical jingle that precedes an announcement sounded and everyone on the platform pricked up their ears, but it was just warning them of a train that was not stopping there.
“I know that things are complicated,” Andrew said, because that seemed like something people said in these sorts of conversations.
“They are,” Peggy said. “And you can see that maybe my head’s been a bit all over the place recently. That maybe I haven’t been thinking straight, and that I’ve been a bit, well . . . reckless.”
Andrew swallowed, hard.
“You mean with you and me?”
Peggy scrunched her hair tight at the back of her head, then let it go.
“Listen, I’m not saying I regret what happened yesterday, not for one second, and I honestly mean that.”
There was a “but” coming. Andrew could sense it hurtling toward him quicker than the approaching train.
“But . . . the thing is . . .” As Peggy grasped for what to say next there came the familiar two-tone blast from the onrushing train, warning people to stand back. “I just think,” Peggy said, stepping closer to Andrew, her mouth close to his ear to make herself heard over the noise of the train that was now tearing toward them, “that I don’t want you to get carried away, and that this should just be something lovely that happened. A one-off. Because meeting you and becoming friends has been such a wonderful, unexpected thing . . . but friends is all we can be.”
The train thundered past and disappeared into the tunnel. Andrew wished, very much, that he were on it.
“Does that make sense?” Peggy said, taking a step back.
“Yeah, sure,” Andrew said, waving his hand in what he hoped was a casually dismissive way. Peggy took him by the hand.
“Andrew, please don’t be upset.”
“I’m not upset. Honestly. Not in the slightest.”
He could tell from the way Peggy was looking at him that this pretense was pointless. His shoulders slumped.
“It’s just . . . I really feel like we’ve got something, here. Can’t we at least give it a chance?”
“But it’s not as easy as that, is it?” Peggy said. Andrew had never felt so pathetically desperate. But he had to keep going, had to keep trying.
“No, you’re right. But it’s not impossible. We could get divorced, couldn’t we? That’s an option. It’ll be hard—obviously—with the kids and everything, but we would work it out. Find a way to be a family.”
Peggy put a hand up to her mouth, fingers splayed across her lips. “How can you be so naive?” she said. “In what universe does that happen so smoothly, so quickly, with all the logistics sorted and none of the fucking pain of it all? We’re not teenagers, Andrew. There are consequences.”
“I’m getting ahead of myself, I know. But yesterday has to count for something, right?”
“Of course it does, but . . .” Peggy bit her lip and took a moment to compose herself. “I have to think of the girls, and that means making sure I am in the best possible state of mind so that I’m there for them whatever.”
Andrew went to speak but Peggy cut across him.
“And, at the moment, given what I’ve been going through with Steve, what I really need—even if this is hard to hear—is an understanding friend with a good heart, who’s there to support me. Someone honest, that I can trust.”
* * *
—
They had been promised a replacement train, but in reality this just meant they were forced to cram onto the next service, which was already full. It was an every-man-for-himself affair, but Andrew managed to get into position by a door to let Peggy and the girls onto the train first, before some opportunists snuck on before he could. In the end, with no hope of reaching the others, he was forced to perch uncomfortably on his stupid purple rucksack in the vestibule. The toilet door opposite was malfunctioning, perpetually sliding open and shut and letting out a cocktail of piss and chemical smells. Next to him, two teenagers with an iPad were watching a film where old ladies played by grotesquely made-up men farted and fell into cakes, all of which the teenagers observed without a flicker of emotion.
When they finally reached King’s Cross and traipsed off the train, Andrew realized he’d lost his ticket. He didn’t even bother to fight his case, instead shelling out more money on the new fare so they’d let him through. At the other side of the barrier, Suze wore the telltale creased face of a grumpy child after a long journey, but to Andrew’s surprise, when she saw him she ran over and reached her arms up to hug him good-bye. Maisie opted for a formal but still affectionate handshake. As the girls bickered about who deserved the remaining strawberry bonbon, Peggy approached Andrew warily, as if he might try to carry on their earlier conversation. Sensing this, Andrew managed a reassuring smile and Peggy relaxed and leaned in to hug him. Andrew went to let go but Peggy took him by the hands. “We shouldn’t forget, in all of this, that we actually found Beryl!” she said. “That was the reason for the trip after all.”
“Absolutely,” Andrew said. It was too painful, this intimacy. He decided to pretend his phone was vibrating, apologizing and backing away with one finger pressed to his free ear as if to block out the noise of the station. He made for a pillar, still holding the phone up to his ear and mouthing silently to nobody, as he watched Peggy and the girls walk away until they were lost in the crowd.
* * *
—
Later, he stood outside his shabby building, which had seemingly aged ten years in the last week, and considered finding a pub or somewhere else where he could sit and pretend for another few hours at least that he wasn’t back home. He thought back to how uncharacteristically rushed he’d been when he’d left the house, feeling jarred by the change in routine but dizzy with excitement at spending so much time with Peggy. He’d barely had time to turn off his PC before—weighed down by his backpack—he’d hurled himself down the stairs and out of the building.
Eventually he resigned himself to going indoors, into the shared hallway with its familiar scent of his neighbor’s perfume, the scuff marks on the wall, and the flickering light.
He was about to unlock his front door when he became aware of a noise apparently coming from the other side. God, surely it wasn’t a burglar? Gritting his teeth, he swung his bag up in front of him to make an improvised shield, unlocked the door, and threw it open.
Standing there in the semidarkness, his heart pounding, he realized that the sound was coming from the record player in the far corner. In his haste to leave he must not have turned it off properly, so the needle was skipping, and the same note was stuttering away on a loop, over and over and over again.
— CHAPTER 22 —
His name was Warren, he was fifty-seven years old, and it had taken eleven months and twenty-three days for anyone to realize he was dead. The last record of his being alive was when he’d been to the bank to deposit a check, whereafter he’d returned home, died, and rotted away apologetically on a sofa under a throw patterned with hummingbirds.
The only other flat in the building was unoccupied, which explained the fact that the smell, which was currently causing Andrew to gag ev
en before he’d set foot in the flat itself, hadn’t been the thing to alert someone to Warren’s death. In fact, the only reason it hadn’t been longer before his body had been discovered was that direct debits for his rent and energy bills had bounced back at the same time. An unfortunate debt collector—who’d apparently been scrambled to the property with the urgency of a counterterrorist operative—had peered through the building’s letterbox only to be met by a volley of flies.
Peggy had messaged him on Sunday evening, the day after they’d returned from Northumberland, to say she’d developed “a stinking cold” and wouldn’t be coming into work the next day. In truth, Andrew was quite relieved she wasn’t with him. He wasn’t sure how he’d be able to act normally around her after all that had happened. And so it was that he found himself at his first solo property inspection in weeks, a heavily aftershave-soaked mask pressed to his face, bracing himself to enter. Though he’d tried to prepare himself as best he could, he was still unable to stop himself from dry-heaving. He dropped his bag to the floor and batted away the flies excited from the disturbance. He worked as quickly as he could, separating trash bags of indiscriminate rotting food and soiled clothes as he looked for any sign of a next of kin. He searched for nearly two hours without finding anything. With all the usual places covered, he even forced himself to look inside the oven, which was caked in congealed fat, and the fridge, which was empty save for a single summer fruits Petits Filous yogurt. When he finally left, not having found a single trace of evidence that Warren had family, or any concealed cash, he headed to his flat rather than the office. As soon as he was inside he tore off his clothes and showered, turning the water as hot as he could bear and scrubbing feverishly at his skin, using a whole bottle of shower gel. All the while he struggled to think of anything other than Warren. What must his last few weeks before he’d died have been like, living in all that filth? He’d always thought he preferred the chaos to the sterile, but on a purely sensory level it was hard to reconcile how someone could have lived like that. Surely he must have been of unsound mind not to know how bad it was. It made Andrew think of the frog boiling to death, unaware that the water’s getting hotter.
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