The Chain

by Joy Richards

  It was much colder. It was the middle of autumn, and fog was rising from the ground like smoke. He had just got home from his wonderful and devastating time in Essex. Brown dead leaves were falling off the trees. The countryside smelled like home. His mother had demanded he shower, dress and get out of the house for at least an hour. She had meant for him to go for a walk, but he was taking a perverse pleasure in defying her wishes. He’d sat on the cold hard ground. It had been drizzling all day, and the grass was wet. His jacket was too big for him: in the last three weeks since he’d arrived home, in the middle of the night, he had barely eaten anything. He’d lost weight and his hair was flopping in front of his eyes like a mop. He didn’t shave either, and was growing a terrifying wispy thing on his upper lip. He took out his phone and started fidgeting with it. He went on Facebook, scrolling through aimlessly. Then, he got a terrible idea. He relished how bad this was going to be for him. He found Alice and hovered with his thumb over the “Unblock” button. It had been over three years now. God knows how much he had to catch up on. He would have a look at what she was up to, see how much fun she was having travelling, yet another woman – like Holly – who preferred taking selfies on the beach to sitting at home with him. What he saw felt like a punch in the gut.

  Alice was pregnant. Not just that, she was married. There were wedding photos, all her friends dressed up as bridesmaids, their peach-coloured dresses swirling as they danced. From what he could make out, the wedding was somewhere in Australia. Somewhere indoors, very traditional looking. She’d been wearing a big poofy tulle dress that was everything she’d said she didn’t want. It looked like they had gone to Sydney for a short honeymoon, which was a far cry from her notions of long travels in remote places. That was almost two years earlier. Now she was just a woman who lived with her husband in a lovely little town-home in suburban Melbourne.

  She posted photos of the two of them having brunch on the balcony, squeezed on a tiny round table amongst the red geraniums they kept in the window boxes. There were pictures of them repainting the kitchen, from an outdated yellow to a classy muted green. There were pictures of the two of them cooking together in their newly repainted kitchen. Pictures of her shopping with her friends for nursery decor. Pictures of her baby shower, where she sat, radiant, as she unboxed little shoes, toys and baby books. He could not begin to comprehend it.

  He scrolled back, looking for pictures of her travels. There were none. If her Facebook timeline was to be believed, she’d moved to Australia, got a job, had one short holiday back to England for Christmas and then just started her new life right there in Melbourne. She’d made new friends, went on nights out clubbing and to fancy bottomless brunches. She’d fallen in love with a new friend from the gym. She had never gone to the gym while they were together, but she had seemingly taken up some serious exercise since moving down under. There were pictures of her at Zumba class, sharing a green smoothie with friends after yoga and going for long runs on the harbour.

  Who was this woman, living in Alice’s skin? She looked the same. But couldn’t be the same. This woman liked to cook and took days off to have staycations with her husband where they watched old movies and ate ice cream. This woman was having a baby. What’s the difference, he wondered, between this and what we would have had? He felt betrayed, while at the same time feeling relieved. He really was over her. He wasn’t jealous, he didn’t want her for himself. But he was confused. She’d uprooted her life, just to go live the same life on the other side of the world with some guy she hadn’t yet met. Paul could see himself spiral towards a new fixation. Understanding Alice; something he thought he’d never care about again.

  After an indefinite period of time, his dad came out of the house. He was holding an umbrella and stood over him. Paul hadn’t realised it was raining.

  “Hey, son,” he said.

  “Can you sit down, Dad?”

  His father sat. He was wearing beautiful brown corduroys, and he was probably very upset about having to cover them with mud. But he sat down anyways. He was a good dad.

  Paul told him. He told him everything, even things he’d not told his mother in their long heart-to-heart the night he got home. He told his dad about Holly, about how betrayed he felt. About how he thought every woman in the world would prefer to go somewhere with palm trees rather than love him. He told him about Alice, and how she was now living their life with a better-looking guy somewhere warmer. His father listened, his eyes closed, under the big umbrella. The rain got to be pretty heavy, but neither of them moved. After Paul was finished talking, they sat there in silence, listening to the rain. It was oddly comforting, even though Paul’s legs were wet.

  Paul’s dad had shaken his head.

  “Paul,” he’d said, with a deep shrug, “I don’t know what to tell you. When I was young, before I met your mother, I had no interest in settling down and having children.” Paul frowned. Imagining his dad not being a dad had always seemed like a slightly impossible feat. He was, and had always been, a dad. He’d seen photos of him when he was younger, of course, but it all seemed slightly made-up.

  “I was living in London,” his dad continued, “and loving every minute of it. We’re talking about the eighties here, son. That was the time to be in London. The parties, the girls. It was crazy.”

  “Dad, please don’t talk about cocaine.”

  “Who said anything about cocaine? It was good clean family fun. I even had a girlfriend there, for a while. And she was always unhappy, because I didn’t want to propose, and I didn’t want to get married. We even lived together for a few months.”

  “You had a live-in girlfriend before Mum?” That was out of this world. “Does she know?”

  His father laughed. He didn’t often chuckle, but this time he was really amused. “Of course your mother knows! She was there!”

  “Hang on, what?”

  “For goodness’ sake, Paul, I thought you were a man of the world. Your mother and I met when I was going out with this other girl and, well, we fell in love. I moved out immediately.”

  Paul let out an audible gasp. He didn’t want to hear that. It was too personal, like seeing his dad naked. No reason he shouldn’t know but still, not what he wanted to hear. His father continued, getting to the point. “And suddenly I was the one trying to convince your mother to marry me. I proposed twice before she listened to me. She wanted to live in Kent, and after we spent an afternoon here I was on board. My old girlfriend must have mentioned moving out of London maybe a hundred times and I kept pretending I didn’t get the hint. I got it all right.”

  Paul looked at his dad with fresh eyes. He had never thought of him that way, like a man who had made a set of decisions that had led, eventually, to him being his dad.

  He carried on. “And I wanted to have her babies pretty quickly after that. I’m not kidding, your brother, Jim, was mostly my idea.”

  “Dad, please.” Paul wrinkled his nose.

  “Why does every generation always think they’ve invented sex?”

  “Dad, please.”

  “Right, whatever. We found the three of you on the roof, after the stork had been by. My point is, the life I was dreading with my old girlfriend was, well, paradise with your mother. For almost forty years.”

  “But why?”

  “You see, son.” His dad got up and shook off his sodden muddy trousers. “It’s not so much about what you do in life. It’s who you do it with.”

  Paul sat on the grass for a while longer. At lunchtime, his mum brought him a cheese toastie and a cup of tea. He got up, and actually went for a long walk, all the way to the other side of the village. Then he came home and sat up with his parents to watch Masterchef. The following morning, he shaved and showered properly for the first time in a while. He put a change of clothes in his old school backpack, which was still hanging in his bedroom, and left for the train station. He didn’t need much. He still had plenty of clothes at Holly’s, if she would take him back. The rai
n had stopped, and the sun was peeking through the dark clouds. There might as well be a rainbow, he thought.

  And there he was, seven months later. Waiting for his own farewell party to start. He held Holly’s hand as they both swung in unison, looking up at the light blue sky. For the first time in his life, he couldn’t picture a single stitch of his future. He smiled.

  19

  Florence

  Florence called out to Spencer. He came through, holding his leash in his mouth. A cute trick she’d taught him, to make sure she could always find the leash. His training had come such a long way since the move. Florence stepped out into the cold morning air. The spring sky was clear, the light cutting right through the bare branches of the trees, barely covered with new buds. While her family in London was sending her pictures of daffodils in flower, spring was lagging slightly behind in Scotland. She had been delighted to discover that her front garden was laden with snowdrops. But spring was certainly in the air this morning. The grass was green, and shining with morning dew. A single prune tree was covered in tiny white blossoms. She looked over, to the hills of Fife.

  She pushed off the jogging stroller. Inside, Tim was cradling Miriam. She was asleep, enjoying her morning nap with a slight smile on her face. Both children were wrapped up warm in giant hand-knitted hats. She started running, first gently and then at a faster pace up the lane, away from the village. Spencer kept up, with huge leaps and bounds. His tongue was lolling out of his mouth, his eyes lit with excitement. That was a happy dog, if ever there was one. They reached the main path, and ventured into the woods. The naked branches of the trees let in all the rays of the sun, but it was still chilly. Florence was thankful for her own bobble hat, and for her thermal leggings.

  Tim waved frantically at his furry best friend through the stroller window. He had come such a long way too since they’d moved. He was going to a lovely childminder’s three days a week, and he had learnt so many new things. He could count, point out colours and animals. He had made little friends, whose mums Florence was slowly but steadily befriending. They’d had coffees at the local pub, and even the occasional wine night in. She missed her friends in London, of course, but she already felt very much at home in Scotland. While she’d never lived anywhere but London, she used to spend long summer holidays at her grandparents’ house in Perthshire and she had always felt a true fondness for the place. She loved living in a small village, where everybody knew everybody and she could leave the back door unlocked (not that she ever did, she was still a city girl at heart). She also loved being so close to Edinburgh, less than an hour if the traffic was good. Every Tuesday morning she got in her tiny third-hand car and drove into town to go to the office. It had been so long since she last had an office to go to, she still felt as though every Tuesday was a little holiday.

  They reached the top of the hill, and Florence turned round to take in the view of the village, nestled amongst the muddy fields. Little clouds of smoke were rising from people’s chimneys. A few people were out and about with their dogs. She took in a big breath of chilly morning air, and started stretching.

  “This was a good idea,” she said quietly to herself. It was her morning ritual: the run, the stretches, the affirmation. “This was a good idea,” she’d said that first morning, when she’d felt so overwhelmed with the house full of boxes, Tim crying, Spencer barking and Miriam, only eight weeks old, staring at her from her Moses basket. It had quickly become apparent it had, in fact, been a great idea.

  20

  Florence

  It all started one calm afternoon, three days before her due date when she was very ready for her pregnancy to be over. They’d moved to her parents’ house almost immediately after she’d heard about John. In fact, they had gone over as soon as they’d heard the news, and they had never really moved back. The tiny pink house with its crown of wisteria was no longer the house of her dreams, Florence had quickly realised. It was beautiful, but it was too intrinsically linked to John in her mind for her to be able to ever enjoy living there again. It was where they’d been happy. It was where they’d first brought Tim home from the hospital. It was where she’d found out John had been cheating on her with the receptionist. It was where she’d told him to leave. It was where she was standing, frozen in horror, when the phone had rung and she’d found out John was dead.

  A drug overdose, which was ridiculous because John had never done drugs, not even at university. And yet, there it was. They had found him in his little bedsit, after he failed to show up for work for two days in a row. It had taken two days for them to think something was wrong. Apparently he had been in trouble with his boss, and they all thought he was hiding out for fear of getting fired. The whole story was impossible, unbelievable, like his affair, and yet, like his affair, it was definitely true.

  The words from the kind police detective over the telephone felt like a punch in the gut. She had hated John so much, but all she wanted was to get him back. Florence would never want to erase John from her life. He was Tim and Miriam’s father. She had very much loved him for a very long time. After she hung up the phone, all she wanted to do was run home. She knew she needed a fresh start. Also, she was about to have a baby. She’d packed up and moved in with her parents. Adapting to a dog and a toddler living in the house had been a challenge for them, but they had been wonderful and very supportive.

  That fateful afternoon, Florence was sat on the sofa enjoying a restful cup of tea. Her mum had taken Tim out for a walk to feed the ducks in the park. She was browsing wallpaper for the new baby’s room. Tim was still sleeping with her, but she would try to get Miriam to sleep in her own room as soon as she could. Things would be different this time around. Miriam could go in the study, it had been decided. It was barely even used anymore, and it was right next door to her own room. So Florence was browsing for children’s wallpaper. Little pink flowers. Little ducks. A whole zoo of animals wearing tiny hats, in a Mardi Gras procession. That one was cute, and Miriam would probably enjoy it even when she grew up. And then it hit her. She was planning to stay at her parents’ house forever. She was getting wallpaper that her child would enjoy six, seven years down the line. She would be that woman, whose life had failed so miserably she and her children had to live with her parents. That woman whose life had been cancelled. People would ask after her with a genuine note of concern in their voice. Her parents would never stop treating her like a child herself. They would share in the burdens and responsibilities of raising her children. Motherhood would be easy from now on, when she could split it three ways.

  For the first time in many years, Florence felt a motion of rebellion stir up inside her. This life did not belong to her. This was not what she was looking for. Living with her parents was the done thing, what was expected of a young widow of thirty-two with very little work experience and two small children. But she had done what was expected all her life, and it had not been going well for her. She should try something different.

  She scrolled back on her phone, to her Instagram account. It was not something she had ever thought of as an accomplishment, but it was, by most people’s standards, quite impressive. She had over thirty thousand followers, tuning in every day to her carefully manicured selections of photos of everyday life. Instagram had been, for a long time, her only artistic outlet. Even in her busiest and most desperate days of early motherhood, she found a few minutes to take a picture of something beautiful every few days, edit it to match her style and share it with the world. People seemed to respond. She had never thought of making money from it. Could she even do that? Maybe, but probably not to make a living. Be real, Florence, she told herself. Being an Instagram influencer is not a real job. Not for you, anyways.

  She clicked on the pulsating icon at the top of her screen. It was a new story, from a homewares and interior decor brand she loved. It was called Polka Dots, and she owned almost every single one of their bakeware items. She had been following them on Instagram for years, just t
o fill her feed with beautiful images of rustic decor. They had followed her back, and they enjoyed regular chit-chat on a variety of weighty subjects, such as which colour peonies would look best in her new cream vase. They were virtual friends, her and Polka Dots, in one of those bizarre interactions that made her feel like she was truly a participant in the modern day. The story that popped up on the screen was different from their everyday content. They posted mostly photos of their products, and other action shots of life in the Scottish countryside. This one was just plain text, on a pale green background. It made Florence sit up and read it over.

  They were looking for a new part-time social media manager. The person currently looking after the account was moving on, and they needed someone to replace her. Could this be a sign? It was absurd, Florence told herself. For one, she didn’t have any qualifications. New media was a subject you could get a degree in, and you presumably needed one to become the social media manager of a well-known brand. Secondly, she had no experience. And crucially, this job would be somewhere remote in the Scottish countryside, even though flexible working was encouraged.

  Turns out it was actually in Edinburgh. She found this out when, after sending her CV and a one-page letter she did not read back for spellcheck, she heard back from them wanting to arrange an interview. An interview in Edinburgh. While the vibe of the brand was very country-like, they explained, the actual office was in Edinburgh. This was crazy, she thought. Impossible. She was two days overdue at that point, there was no way she could get on a train to Edinburgh. And yet, bizarrely, she did. She got up before dawn, took a taxi to the station and was on the first fast train out. She made it in time for her interview, which went well. They knew her from her Instagram account of course.