There was, of course, one very simple way to fix everything. It was a thought that had occurred to him a long time ago, now. Not in some moment of crisis, but simply registering itself as a possibility, as he went about his business. He had been waiting in line somewhere. A supermarket checkout perhaps, or maybe the bank. As soon as he’d acknowledged the thought, it was with him permanently. It had been like a stone hitting a windscreen, leaving a tiny crack in the glass. A permanent reminder that, at any time, the whole sheet of glass could smash. And now, he realized, it made complete and utter sense. Not only did he have a way out, but, for once in his life, he would be in complete and total control.
He looked at himself in the mirror, his face partially obscured by a streak of dirt. He set the ticket down carefully on top of the book and got slowly to his feet, standing still for a moment, listening to the gentle hum of the estate—canned laughter from a television next door, gospel music coming from the flat below. He could feel his shoulders slacken. Decades of tension were beginning to lift. Everything was going to be fine. The opening bars of Ella’s “Isn’t This a Lovely Day?” came into his head. There was a renewed flash of pain in his foot. But this time he barely registered it. It didn’t really matter. Not now. Nothing did.
In the kitchen, the freezer buzzed into life for a few moments, shuddered, then clicked off.
* * *
—
He made one final pass of Trevor’s flat and e-mailed a report to the office. Hopefully he’d given enough information for someone to make the funeral arrangements.
He took the bus home, standing with one leg raised like a flamingo, feeling liberated at how little of a shit he gave about the way people were looking at him. As soon as he was home he went straight to the bathroom and ran a bath. As he waited for it to fill he limped to the kitchen and, almost as if trying to hoodwink himself, reached into a drawer without looking until his hand touched what he was after. He ran his fingers against the scarred plastic handle of the knife, feeling oddly comforted by its familiarity. He ran it under the tap, supposing it should be clean, though it didn’t really matter. He started toward the kitchen but stopped and turned back. This wasn’t going to change anything, he told himself, but it felt like he should check, just in case. He opened the drawer and pulled out his phone. It seemed to take an age to turn on. When it vibrated, Andrew nearly dropped it in surprise. But then he saw that the message was from Carl. Is the money with you yet? You better not be having second thoughts. He shook his head, slowly. Of course Peggy hadn’t messaged him. He was already dead to her. He threw his phone onto the countertop, where it skidded along.
He flicked through his Ella records and decided what he was going to play. Normally, it would be on instinct. But for this, he felt the need to find the album that encapsulated everything he loved about her. In the end he decided on Ella in Berlin—the reissued import version. He lowered the needle and listened to the volume fade up on the crowd, their excited applause sounding like rain on a windowpane. He undressed where he stood, halfheartedly folding his clothes and leaving them on the arm of a chair. He thought perhaps he should write a note, but only because that’s what people did. What was the point if you didn’t have anyone to say anything to? It would just be another piece of paper waiting for the litter picker’s pincers.
By the time he’d lowered himself into the bath, gasping with pain as the hot water stung his foot, applause was ringing out again at the end of “That Old Black Magic,” and the gentle double bass and piano of “Our Love Is Here to Stay” filled the air.
He’d intended to drink the rest of the wine but had forgotten to bring the bottle from the kitchen. It was better this way, he decided. To be completely lucid. In control.
The rumbling thud of the bass drum and the rushed coda from the piano signaled the end of the song, and Ella thanked the crowd. Andrew always thought she sounded so genuine when she did that; it was never forced, never false.
He was beginning to feel woozy. He hadn’t eaten for hours and steam was fogging the room and his senses. He tapped his fingers on his thighs under the water and felt the ripples go back and forth. He closed his eyes and imagined he was floating down a languid river somewhere on the other side of the world.
More applause, and now they were on to “Mack the Knife.” This was where Ella forgot the words. Maybe this time it would be different, Andrew thought, feeling along the side of the bath until he found the plastic handle, gripping it tightly. But no, there was the hesitation, then the breathless, audacious reference to wrecking her own song, and now the cheeky improvisation where her voice morphed into Louie Armstrong’s rasp, the roar of the crowd. They were with her, cheering her on.
He lowered his hand into the water. Tightened his grip. There was barely time to pause for breath before the urgent drums of “How High the Moon” and Ella launching into her scat-singing. The music chased after her words, but she was always too quick, always too quick. He twisted his arm and clenched his fist. He felt the sharpness of the metal, his skin straining against it, about to give way. But then there was another noise, cutting through the music, vying for his attention. It was his phone ringing, he realized, opening his eyes, his fingers unclenching from around the knife’s handle.
— CHAPTER 28 —
It was Peggy.
“You’re in the shit for not being here. Cameron’s properly fuming, and he’s taking it out on the rest of us. Where the hell are you?”
She sounded angry. Glad, perhaps, to have an excuse to call and vent at him without explicitly mentioning the other night.
He’d managed to crawl to the bedroom, where he was now sitting on the floor, naked, exhausted. It felt like he’d just woken from an intense dream. He had a sudden vision of blooms of scarlet muddying the clear bathwater and had to grip his knees to stop the sensation that he was falling. Was he still here? Was this still real?
“I’m at home,” he said, his voice thick and unfamiliar.
“You’ve thrown a sickie?”
“No,” he said. “It’s not that.”
“Right. Well, what’s going on then?”
“Um, well, I think I sort of nearly tried to kill myself.”
There was a pause.
“Say that again?”
* * *
—
They met at the pub, once Andrew had refused Peggy’s several demands to take him to the hospital. The post-work Friday evening drinkers would be descending soon, but for now the place was empty, save for a man sitting at the bar making conversation with the polite yet clearly bored bartender.
Andrew found a table and slowly lowered himself onto a chair, folding his arms around his chest. He felt incredibly fragile all of a sudden, like his bones were made of rotten wood. A few moments later Peggy shoulder-barged the door open, hurrying over to him and smothering him with a hug that he accepted but couldn’t reciprocate because he’d begun to shiver uncontrollably.
“Wait here, I know what’ll sort you out,” Peggy said.
She returned from the bar with what looked like a glass of milk. “They didn’t have honey so this’ll have to do. Not a proper hot toddy but ah well. My mam used to give them to me and Imogen when we had colds. At the time I thought it was a proper cure but looking back she clearly just wanted to knock us out so she could get some peace.”
“Thank you,” Andrew said, taking a warming sip and feeling the not unpleasant sting of the whisky. Peggy watched him drink. She looked anxious, fidgeting with her hands, twiddling her earrings—delicate blue studs that looked like teardrops. Andrew sat inert opposite her. He felt so detached.
“So,” Peggy said. “You, um, said on the phone about the whole, you know . . .”
“Killing myself?” Andrew said.
“That. Yes. Are you—I mean it’s a stupid question I suppose but—are you okay?”
Andrew thought about it.
“Yes,” he said. “Well, I suppose I feel a bit sort of . . . like I might actually be dead.”
Peggy looked down at Andrew’s drink. “Okay, I really do think we need to get you to a hospital,” she said, reaching over and taking his hand.
“No,” he said firmly, Peggy’s touch bringing him out of his daze. “There’s really no need. I didn’t hurt myself. I’m feeling better now. This is helping.” He took a sip of whisky and coughed, clasping his hands together until his knuckles were white in an attempt to stop them from trembling.
“Okay,” Peggy said, looking skeptical. “Well, let’s see how you feel after this.”
Just then the door of the pub opened and four extremely loud sets of suits and ties containing men came in and arranged themselves at the bar. The old regular finished his pint, tucked his newspaper under his arm and left.
Peggy waited until Andrew had nearly finished his whisky before seeming to remember she had a beer to drink and taking two hearty gulps. She sat forward and spoke softly. “So what happened?”
Andrew shivered in response and Peggy reached over and cupped her hands around his. “It’s okay, you don’t have to tell me details, I’m just trying to understand why you’d . . . want to do something like that. Where were Diane and the kids in all of this?”
Andrew’s synapses instantly fired as he searched for an explanation. But nothing came to him. Not this time. He smiled sadly as the realization hit him. This time, this time, he was going to tell the truth. He took a deep breath, trying to settle himself, to stamp down on the part of him desperately trying to stop him from going through with this.
“What? What’s happened?” Peggy said, looking even more worried. “Are they okay?”
Andrew started to speak, hesitantly, having to pause every few seconds: “Have . . . have you ever told a lie so big that you felt there was no way out of it . . . that you . . . that you had to just carry on pretending?”
Peggy looked at him evenly. “I once told my mother-in-law that I’d crisscrossed the bottoms of sprouts when I hadn’t. That made for a tense Christmas Day . . . but that’s not quite what you mean, is it?”
Andrew shook his head slowly, and this time the words came out before he could stop them.
“Diane, Steph and David don’t exist,” he said. “It came from a misunderstanding, but then I kept the lie going, and the longer I did the harder it was to tell the truth.”
Peggy looked like she was thinking and feeling a hundred different things at once.
“I don’t think I really understand,” she said.
Andrew chewed his lip. He had the strangest sensation that he was about to start laughing.
“I just wanted to feel normal,” he said. “It started off so small but then”—he let out a strangely high-pitched bark of a laugh—“it’s sort of got a bit out of hand.”
Peggy looked startled. She’d fiddled with one of her earrings so much that it came free in her hand and bounced onto the table like a little blue tear that had frozen as it fell.
Andrew stared at it, and then the tune came into his head. This time, though, he willed it on. Blue moon, you saw me standing alone. He started to hum the tune out loud. He could sense that Peggy was beginning to panic. Ask me. Please, he begged silently.
“So, just so I’m clear,” Peggy said. “Diane just . . . doesn’t exist? You invented her.”
Andrew grasped his glass and tipped the remaining liquid into his mouth.
“Well, not entirely,” he said.
Peggy rubbed her eyes with her palms, then reached into her bag for her phone.
“What are you—who are you calling?” Andrew said, starting to get to his feet, yelping at the pain, having forgotten about his bruised foot.
Peggy waved her hand at him, getting him to sit back down.
“Hi, Lucy,” she said into her phone. “I’m just calling to check you’re all right to look after the girls for another couple of hours. Thanks, pet.”
Andrew readied himself to speak but Peggy held up a hand. “I’m going to need an oil change before we go any further,” she said, downing the rest of her drink, snatching their empty glasses and marching to the bar. Andrew clasped his hands together tightly. They were still so cold he could barely feel them. When Peggy returned with their drinks she had a new resolve about her, a steely look in her eyes that said she was prepared to hear the worst and not appear shocked by it. It was, he realized, exactly the sort of look Diane used to give him.
— CHAPTER 29 —
Andrew had gone to Bristol Polytechnic the summer after his mother’s death. With Sally in Manchester with her new boyfriend, it had been less about a yearning for higher education and more about finding some people to talk to. Without any real research he settled on some digs in a part of the city called Easton. The house was just off a stretch of grass with the optimistically bucolic name of Fox Park, which in reality was a tiny patch of green separating the residential street from the M32 highway. As Andrew arrived outside the house, hauling his possessions in a bulky purple rucksack, he saw a man in the park dressed entirely in trash bags kicking a pigeon. A woman appeared from a bush and dragged the man away from the bird, but to Andrew’s horror this was only so she could continue the assault herself. He was still recovering from having witnessed this harrowing tag-team display as he was ushered into his lodgings by the landlady. Mrs. Briggs had a fierce blue rinse and a cough like distant thunder, and Andrew quickly realized she had a good heart underneath her stern exterior. She seemed to be constantly cooking, often by candlelight whenever the electricity meter ran out (which it regularly did). She also had an unnerving habit of slipping in criticism halfway through an unrelated sentence: “Don’t worry about that feller and the pigeon, my love, he’s bit of a funny one, that lad—gosh, you need a haircut, m’duck—I think he’s one sandwich short of a picnic, truth be told.” It was the conversational equivalent of burying bad news.
Andrew soon grew fond of Mrs. Briggs, which was just as well, because he hated everybody on his course. He was savvy enough to work out that philosophy was going to attract a certain type, but it was as if they’d all been grown in a lab somewhere purely to annoy him. The boys all had wispy beards, smoked shitty little roll-ups and spent most of their time trying to impress girls by quoting the most obscure passages they knew from Descartes and Kierkegaard. The girls were denim-clad and seemed to spend all the lectures stony-faced, anger broiling away underneath the surface. Andrew only worked out later that this was largely due to the male tutors, who engaged in lively debate with the boys but spoke to the girls the way you might to a rather intelligent pony.
After a few weeks he made a couple of friends, a pudding-faced, largely benign Welshman called Gavin who drank neat gin and claimed to have once seen a flying saucer going over Llandovery rugby ground, and Gavin’s girlfriend, Diane, a third-year who wore bright orange-rimmed glasses and didn’t suffer fools gladly. Andrew quickly realized that Gavin was obviously the biggest fool of all, constantly testing Diane’s patience in increasingly creative ways. They had been together since before uni (“Childhood sweethearts, you see,” Gavin told him for the seventh time one evening, after his sixth gin), and Gavin had followed her to Bristol to do the same course. (Later, Diane would confide that this had been less Gavin’s not bearing for them to be apart and more that the simplest of tasks were too hard for him. “I came home once to find him trying to cook chicken nuggets in the toaster.”)
For reasons that were unclear to Andrew, Diane was the only person he’d ever met in his brief adult life whom he found it completely unproblematic to talk to. He didn’t stutter or stumble over his words when he was with her, and they shared a very specific sense of humor—dark, but never cruel. In the few instances where they were alone—waiting for Gavin to meet them at the pub, or in snatched moments when he was in the toilet or at the bar—Andrew began to open up to her about his
mum and Sally. Diane had a natural gift for helping him to find the positives in what he was going through without trivializing anything, so when he spoke about his mum he found himself recalling the rare occasions when she seemed unburdened and happy, which usually occurred when she was gardening in the sunshine with Ella Fitzgerald playing in the background. When he spoke of Sally, he remembered a phase around the time they were watching Hammer horrors with Spike when she started to come back from the pub with presents she’d “acquired” (clearly from a dodgy regular who’d got them off the back of a lorry), including a Subbuteo set, a little wooden instrument apparently known as a “Jew’s harp,” and, most magnificently of all, an R176 Flying Scotsman with an apple-green engine and a teak carriage. He loved that engine, but it was Diane who made him realize that it was more than just an appreciation of the thing itself, that it was really emblematic of that brief period of time when Sally had been at her most affectionate.
Occasionally, through a haze of smoke in a rowdy pub, he would catch Diane looking at him. Unembarrassed at being caught in the act, she would hold his gaze for a second before rejoining the conversation. He lived for those moments. They started to be the only thing keeping him going. He was failing in his coursework to the point where he’d stopped bothering with it completely. He was resigned to dropping out at Christmas. He’d get a job somewhere and save some money. He told himself he’d go traveling, but in truth he’d found it hard enough moving to Bristol.
One night, he, Diane and Gavin were invited to an impromptu party in a fellow philosophy student’s halls of residence room, the caveat to the invite being they had to bring a crate of beer each. A large gang of them crammed into a bedroom and cracked open cans. Nobody wanted to talk about uni work, but Gavin found a copy of On Liberty and began drunkenly reading out passages as everyone tried to ignore him. As Gavin searched for a new book (perhaps Kierkegaard was what this party needed!), Andrew reached for what he was 50 percent sure was his Holsten Pils, but someone took his free hand from behind and pulled him outside. It was Diane. She led him through the corridor, down the three flights of stairs and out into the street, where snow was falling in thick clumps.
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