by Emlyn Rees
‘Feels nice, doesn’t it?’ she’d commented, gazing down at the shimmering water, as a wave had pulled back across their feet, returning to the sea and sucking the sand out from beneath their wriggling toes. ‘It makes you feel like you’re really part of the planet.’
He’d planted his feet further apart and had crouched down low before unleashing a smooth round pebble across the flat sea surface.
‘Seven,’ his gran had then announced, counting the bounces. ‘Not bad.’
She’d crouched down, too, and had released a stone of her own.
Jimmy had taken his turn in performing the arithmetic. ‘Five,’ he’d said. It had been the first throw she’d lost.
‘Either I’m getting old,’ she’d said, ‘or you’re getting better …’
‘Probably both, Gran,’ he’d replied.
Something about his answer had amused her and she’d turned to him and smiled. ‘You could well be right.’
He’d watched her bright grey eyes moving quickly over his face, inspecting every millimetre of his skin. ‘Don’t, Gran,’ he’d said.
‘Don’t what?’
He’d shrugged at her awkwardly. ‘That. Looking … you know?’
She’d laughed. ‘And why ever not?’ she’d asked. ‘You’re a beautiful boy and you’re much too young to be self-conscious.’
‘What does that mean?’
Her eyes had narrowed in concentration. ‘It means worrying about old women looking at you.’
He’d scrutinised her in return. ‘You’re not old, Gran,’ he’d then decided. ‘I mean you are, but you’re not, if you know what I mean.’
She’d laughed, a light and airy sound, which had soon been lost in the breeze. ‘I’m not altogether sure I do,’ she’d said.
‘We-ell …’ – he’d searched for the words to explain – ‘you look older than my friends’ mums, but you don’t act it. Like, you’d never catch them down here skimming stones, because they’re all much too boring for that.’
‘Perhaps they just don’t like skimming stones,’ his gran had suggested, before loosing another stone on cue.
‘Nine,’ Jimmy had scored.
‘Or perhaps they’re just not as good as I am,’ she’d added.
He’d glanced at her and had seen that she was smiling again. ‘Why do you look at me that way sometimes, Gran?’ he’d asked.
Quickly, she’d pulled a face at him. ‘Like this?’
He’d pushed her playfully. ‘No, like you were a minute ago. Like you’re checking I’m all here …’
She’d nodded her head, as if to herself. ‘Because, Jimmy Jones, you’re changing faster than you could ever guess. And I sometimes worry that if I don’t watch you carefully, then one day I’ll turn round and you’ll have grown up and I won’t remember how it happened or how you once were.’
‘You’ll remember, Gran. The same way you remember stories.’
His gran had had a phenomenal memory. She’d known about fifty bedtime stories word perfect. Her and her friend Arnie had always won the pub general knowledge quiz at the Lewis Arms and all Arnie had ever had to do had been to buy the rounds while Jimmy’s gran had filled in the answers.
‘I know,’ she’d said. ‘But it’s just in case I don’t.’
He’d thought about this for a few seconds. ‘In that case it’s OK,’ he’d said.
‘What is?’ she’d asked.
‘You looking at me. If you want to, you can. I won’t mind.’
She’d bowed to him. ‘Thank you.’
‘You know all those other mums I was talking about …’ Jimmy had then said.
‘What about them?’
‘None of them are as good as you at anything, including throwing stones.’
His gran had slipped her arm round him then and had squeezed him in close. ‘Come on,’ she’d said, turning them about and staring across the beach where only a few holidaymakers had still remained. ‘Let’s make our way home, because I don’t think today can get any better.’
Jimmy watched her sleeping now, here in the hospice room, and hoped she could remember it all. He’d give anything to make her well again.
He started to tell her about his day, about getting an ‘A’ in his Macbeth essay, but only scraping a ‘C’ in his History spot test. He told her about Rachel getting drunk the night before and crying because she was missing Jimmy’s dad so much. But it wasn’t this he really wanted to tell his gran about at all.
‘There’s a girl,’ he finally admitted, watching the dark gather in around the window like a cloak. ‘She’s buff,’ he began. ‘Beautiful,’ he hurriedly corrected himself. ‘Her hair’s …’
But hair colour, and height, and all of Verity Driver’s other physical attributes … none of them came close to summarising how Jimmy actually felt about her. Because Verity, to Jimmy, was all about change. She was about dreams and endless possibilities. She was about a limitless future, as wide and as unpredictable as the sea. She was everything his land-locked here and now was not.
He started to tell his gran about his failed attempt to ask Verity out the day before yesterday on the way to school instead. ‘I made a right arse of myself,’ he confessed, not because he knew she wasn’t really listening, but because his gran had never been averse to a bit of swearing herself in her time.
Gran would like Verity, he went on. She’d like the way Verity woke stunned sometimes from her daydreams in class, and stared around like she couldn’t quite believe the classroom was real, or like she’d just woken up on an alien planet. ‘The same as you do here, Gran,’ he said. ‘There’s a hidden world behind those eyelids that you can’t help wanting to explore.’
And Gran would like the sound of Verity’s voice, the way people listened to her whenever she read in class or school assembly, and the way people fell silent whenever she sang. ‘Her voice is so sweet, Gran,’ he told her. ‘I could hear it all day long and never get bored.’ Jimmy squeezed his gran’s hand harder. ‘Then I messed it up,’ he concluded. ‘I chickened out when it counted the most.’
But he didn’t get a reply. All he heard was the laboured sound of his gran breathing.
Rage boiled up inside Jimmy as he walked back down to his bike. What was wrong with this world? he wanted to shout. So much shit happened to the wrong people. And now it had happened to his gran. Like it hadn’t been enough for her to have been losing her marbles, the way she had been these last two years before the hospice had taken her in. Like it hadn’t been sufficient for her to have forgotten who she was and to have been doomed into looping in and out of her past, losing whole days to strange delusions of dementia.
‘God bless you, Gran.’ That’s what he’d told her just now when he’d kissed her goodbye.
‘What God?’ he now imagined Ryan’s voice echoing on the wind as he stepped outside and watched the setting sun throwing the buildings of the town into silhouette. ‘The God that took your mum from you? The God that stole your gran’s spirit and now wants her body as well? Don’t be so daft, Jimmy. You don’t believe in God any more than I do. Just us, Jimmy. That’s all there is. That’s all we need. Just you and me, boy, living our lives the way we want to and living them for ever.’
Jimmy climbed on to his bike and rode through the hospice gates and onwards towards the town.
‘For ever!’
That’s what Ryan had shouted the night Jimmy’s whole world had exploded.
How could you have got it so wrong, Ryan? Jimmy thought now, as a tear stretched from his eye across his cheek, as if being drawn that way by the wind. How could you? You, who made more sense than anyone I ever knew?
‘For ever!’ Jimmy remembered Ryan’s face as he’d shouted the words, the way he’d thrown his head back as a challenge to the sky. It had been almost a year ago now and Ryan had been standing outside the George Inn, swaying on his feet like there’d been a breeze, even though the harbour waters had been as flat and motionless as the daguerreotypes of the town’s past hun
g up in the glass cases outside the Community Hall.
‘For ever!’ Ryan had bellowed up at the heavens. ‘I’m gonna live for ever!’
And three hours later, he’d been dead.
Stocktaking was a code word, only it wasn’t like a code word that anyone had ever sat down and worked out on a piece of paper. Rather, it was the phrase which Marianna Andrews, Video-2-Go’s owner, had always used as an excuse for shutting down the store for half an hour before the evening rush started on the nights Jimmy worked there, so that she and Jimmy could be alone.
Heavy with the smell of floor polish, Video-2-Go’s stockroom was separated from the front of the store by a security door for insurance purposes and was lit by a single strip light, which hummed like a fridge and flickered like a candle, throwing up shadows across the shelves of white-stickered videotapes, console games and DVDs.
Marianna Andrews was an obsessively skinny, diminutive thirty-eight-year-old bottle blonde with a thick black wedge of pubic hair and a jagged scar on her right buttock from when she’d slipped off a Spanish pub table during a wet T-shirt contest in 1985, the same year Jimmy had been born, and the same year in which she’d met and married her husband.
Lying here now, on the plain wooden table in the centre of the room, with Marianna perched on top of him, bucking and grunting like a rodeo queen, Jimmy remembered the first time they’d had sex. It had been early last year, a couple of weeks after Jimmy had started working for her.
One minute he’d been helping her to move some boxes from one set of stockroom shelves to another, the next he’d been caught checking out her legs as she’d bent over in front of him to pick up a dropped DVD case from the floor.
She’d stood and stared at him as he’d blushed. But she hadn’t been angry. Instead, she’d told him what lovely eyes he had and then she’d made her move. There’d been no romance to it. All it had involved had been a simple question and a statement on her behalf (‘Do you want to make love to me, Jimmy? Because I want to make love to you’), and a stunned failure to reply on his.
The rest was history: Jimmy had been working under her ever since. He’d been a virgin before Marianna had got her manicured mitts on him, and would probably be a virgin still if it wasn’t for her. But now? Well, now he wasn’t so sure that this was what he wanted. Of course, he still enjoyed the physical side of it, but that was just it: the physical side was the only side there was.
Jimmy looked away from her manic flashing eyes, unable to hold her stare, knowing that in ten minutes’ time they’d both be back behind the shop counter. By then, Marianna would have secreted her black lace French knickers back inside her workaday jeans, and smoothed down her hardened nipples beneath her demure lambswool sweater. And there’d be nothing so sexual as a sidelong glance between the two of them.
Marianna never spoke during the act itself and never referred to it once it had ended, kind of like it had never happened, kind of like she hadn’t been unfaithful to her husband, Bill, at all.
But where, Jimmy wondered, did all that leave him? Was he an exploited member of the working class? Or merely the hapless beneficiary of a not unattractive Mrs Robinson’s sexual frustration? I mean, he thought, as Marianna clawed her fingernails across his chest, there had to be more, right? There had to be more to a relationship than this?
And he knew that, of course, there did. Because nothing about Jimmy’s affair with Marianna involved equality, he was only too aware. What had started out as a teenager’s wet dream come true – and one that even Ryan had admitted to being jealous of at the time – had become repetitive and little more than an expected, however pleasurable, perk of work.
He felt nothing for Marianna any more, not now that he’d allowed himself to feel so much for Verity Driver. He recognised that what he’d felt for Marianna had been lust and nothing more, whereas what he felt for Verity Driver was something infinitely more complex than that. He knew that if he had asked Verity Driver out and she had said yes, he wouldn’t be here now. Then he’d have had something to shout to the world about, not conceal inside a windowless room.
Jimmy called time out on himself. All this thinking was getting him nowhere.
Because the point was, he hadn’t asked Verity out. Which is why all this obsessing about her, he knew, had to end. Whatever might have been between himself and Verity was now never going to happen. It was high time he accepted that and stopped kidding himself that it could ever be otherwise.
So that was what he did, right there and right then. Lying flat on his back as Marianna Andrews clasped tightly at her breasts and built herself up towards a shuddering climax, Jimmy Jones resolved to stop thinking about Verity Driver and move on.
Four hours later, towards the end of his shift, and Jimmy was boxing up and handing over a copy of Lord of the Rings to Michael Francis, the beaded, bearded owner of the terminally unfashionable New Age trinket shop on Southcliffe Street.
Slouching casually over the counter – as he liked to slouch, in case any of his friends should walk by or in – Jimmy watched Michael limp out of the store and on to the dark street outside. He glanced across at Marianna, who was perched on the stool next to him, nattering away to her best friend, Melissa, about the skiing holiday they had planned for the New Year. Even the pink in her cheeks had faded away.
Jimmy’s phone blipped. There was a text from Tara, reading: ‘Beer aw8s don’t B L8.’
She’d be down the Sapphire and, twenty minutes from now, he’d be with her. Wednesday night drinks were a tradition for them both, had been since Ryan had declared Wednesday to be the new Friday the year before, arguing that there was less chance of the police nicking them for under-age drinking, and that it was easier to get a seat and a game of pool.
Jimmy picked up a stack of empty display boxes and was about to return them to the racks, when the doorbell chimed and he looked up to see the film guy – Scott – he’d helped down at the cottage on Quayside Row earlier in the week.
Jimmy felt sick. He stared down at his hands. He didn’t know what to do with them. He felt like a thief who’d just been caught cold with his fingers in the cash register. One of the display boxes slipped from his grip and clattered to the floor.
Scott smiled at him, but Jimmy ignored the gesture. He stared instead at the wall-mounted widescreen, like he really cared about what the super-tanned MTV VJ was jabbering on about. In truth, though, Jimmy couldn’t even focus on the VJ. All he could picture in his mind’s eye was Scott and all he kept wishing was that he’d leave.
Go away, Jimmy repeated like a mantra inside his mind, wishing he could disappear. Then, Remember, he told himself. Remember how you’d planned to handle this.
Because he did have a plan for this eventuality. He’d thought about bumping into Scott and Ellen again. How could he not have, living in a town this size? It had been inevitable and he’d decided he’d ignore them and avoid them, not because he’d wanted to, but because it would be safer that way. There was stuff Jimmy knew about Lost Soul’s Point, secrets that he wanted to remain just that. He didn’t want to be talking to people who were intent on digging up the past.
‘Hi, Jimmy,’ Scott said, sliding a DVD case across the counter towards him.
Jimmy kept his eyes on the screen.
‘OK …’ Scott went on. ‘Well, maybe you’ve got a membership form I can fill in?’
‘We’re shut,’ Jimmy told him, his voice cracking as he did, uncomfortable with being aggressive like this.
There was a pause, then, ‘It says ten on the door.’
‘Whatever,’ Jimmy answered, opening a drawer below the counter without looking and slapping a membership form down on the counter. ‘You’ll need three proofs of ID and –’
‘All present and correct,’ Scott said, depositing a bundle of papers next to the DVD case.
Conscious of Marianna’s proximity, Jimmy finally deigned to look at Scott and, the moment he did, he felt his resolve weakening. It was Scott’s smile that did it:
open and easygoing. It was impossible to hate a man who seemed to have no malice in him himself. Reluctantly, Jimmy picked up the papers and flipped through them as Scott started filling out the form.
Jimmy watched him for a moment, before glancing at the DVD case Scott had selected. It was Charade, a Stanley Donen movie, starring Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn and Walter Matthau. Jimmy prided himself on the fact that he’d watched every film in Video-2-Go’s limited archive. Scott was the first person to take this one off the Classics stand in all the time Jimmy had worked here.
‘Fake Hitchcock.’ The words had left Jimmy’s mouth before he’d been able to stop them.
‘What?’
Jimmy was furious with himself. The last thing he’d wanted was a conversation, but he couldn’t bail out, not now that he’d started it himself. ‘Charade,’ he half said, half mumbled. ‘It’s a rip-off. It’s got all Hitchcock’s trademarks in it, but it’s not by the man himself.’
Scott handed over the completed form. ‘And what’s so wrong with that?’
Jimmy turned to the computer and began transcribing the information from the membership form into the system’s data fields. ‘Nothing. So long as you know. Otherwise when you do find out, you’ll end up feeling conned. You know, like when you find out a song you really love in the charts is just a load of samples from other, better tracks.’
Jimmy watched Scott’s reflection nodding in the screen as he weighed the Charade case thoughtfully in his hand. ‘Know a lot about films, do you?’ Scott asked.
‘Enough. It kind of comes with the turf, working in a place like this.’ Jimmy took out a membership card and handed it over for Scott to sign.
Suddenly Marianna was at Jimmy’s side. ‘He’s being modest,’ she told the Australian. ‘He’s going to film school next year, aren’t you, Jimmy?’