Something to Live For

by Richard Roper

  Well, not me this time, Andrew thought, feeling a prickle of defiance. When Peggy returned he looked at the man, feeling rather smug.

  There was a shriek of laughter from the other table. However insincere her friends were being, the bride-to-be was very obviously glowing with happiness.

  “Bloody hell,” Peggy said. “Last time I smiled like that it was after I’d found a twenty-pound note in my dressing gown. I screamed so loud the dog farted.”

  Andrew laughed. And perhaps it was just the beer on an empty stomach, or the fact he hadn’t had to go straight back to the office to face another afternoon of Keith and the others, but he was feeling really rather happy and relaxed all of a sudden. He made a mental note to try to remember how it felt not to have his shoulders tensed so much that they were practically touching his ears.

  “Sorry again for dragging you to the pub,” Peggy said.

  “No, no, it’s fine. I’m actually having a good time,” Andrew said, wishing he hadn’t sounded quite so surprised. If Peggy found this an odd thing to say, then thankfully her face didn’t show it.

  “By the way, how are you at pub quizzes?” she said, half distracted by a man on a mobility scooter edging his way through the door, shepherded by the barman.

  “Pub quizzes? I’m . . . I don’t really know,” Andrew said. “Normal, I suppose?”

  “A few of us get babysitters and do the one at the Rising Sun on the South Bank. We come last every time and Steve usually ends up getting into a fight with the quizmaster, but it’s always a laugh. You should come.”

  Before he could stop himself, Andrew said, “I’d love to.”

  “Champion,” Peggy yawned, rolling her head around her shoulders. “I hate to be the one to say this, but it’s nearly two—I suppose we better get back?”

  Andrew looked at his watch, hoping that there had been some sort of glitch in time so that they had another few hours. Sadly, it wasn’t to be.

  Even when they were approaching the office and climbing the rain-slick steps outside, which seemed especially keen to have him slip on them today, Andrew found he couldn’t stop grinning. What an unexpectedly pleasant end to the morning that had been.

  “Hang on a sec,” Peggy said as they came out of the lift. “Remind me: Keith, Cameron . . . Melinda?”

  “Meredith,” Andrew said. “The one I’ve decided has a thing for Keith.”

  “Oh yeah. How could I forget? A late summer wedding, maybe?”

  “Hmm, spring, I think,” Andrew said, and in the moment it felt somehow perfectly natural for him to perform a semitheatrical bow as he held the door, gesturing for Peggy to go through first.

  Cameron, Keith, and Meredith were sitting on one of the sofas in the break-out space and all got up straightaway when Andrew and Peggy walked in. Cameron’s face was ashen.

  Oh shit, Andrew thought. We’ve been rumbled. They know about the pub. Maybe Peggy was just a stooge, hired as a one-off to investigate improper practices. The pub trip was all just a fucking ruse and it served him right for daring to hope to pretend he could be happy. But a quick glance at Peggy and he saw she was as nonplussed as he was.

  “Andrew,” Cameron said, “we’ve been trying to get in touch. Has someone managed to call you?”

  Andrew pulled his phone out of his pocket. He’d forgotten to turn it off silent after leaving Eric White’s flat.

  “Is everything okay?” he said.

  Keith and Meredith shared an uneasy glance.

  “Someone called earlier, with some news,” Cameron said.

  “Right?”

  “It’s about your sister.”

  — CHAPTER 8 —

  Andrew had been three and Sally eight when their father had died of a heart attack. Rather than this bringing the two siblings together, Andrew’s early memories of his sister tended to feature her slamming doors in his face, screaming at him to leave her alone, and their occasionally vicious scraps when he was brave enough to stand up to her. He sometimes wondered if their dad had been around how their relationship might have differed. Would they have bonded more, or would their dad have had to be constantly intervening to stop them from fighting, getting angry himself at their relentless squabbling, or perhaps using a gentler approach—telling them in a soft voice how they were upsetting Mum. For her part, their mother was never on hand to stop their squabbling. “She’s taken to her bed,” was the confusing expression Andrew had once overheard a neighbor say, unaware that he was lying in the border by the garden fence, recovering from Sally’s latest pummeling. At the time he couldn’t comprehend that his mum was crippled with grief. Nobody explained this to him. All he knew was that if she’d opened her bedroom blinds it was going to be a good day—and on good days he got sausage and mash for dinner. Occasionally she’d let him climb into bed with her. She’d lie facing away from him, her knees pulled up to her chest. She would hum songs and Andrew would rest the tip of his nose on her back, feeling the vibration of her voice.

  By the time Sally was thirteen she was already a good six inches taller than the biggest boy at school. Her shoulders grew broad, her legs meaty. There was a large part of her that seemed to embrace being different, stalking the corridors, actively seeking out people to intimidate. Looking back, Andrew realized this was obviously a defense mechanism, a way for Sally to strike preemptively against any bullies, while also providing an outlet for her grief. He might have been more understanding if he hadn’t been her punching bag of choice on quite so many occasions.

  When some of the boys came back after summer holidays having had growth spurts, the bravest of them were confident enough to tease Sally, provoking her until she went for them, pursuing them across the playing fields, a manic glint in her eye, windmilling her arms at whoever she managed to corner.

  One day shortly after Andrew had turned eleven, he had waited until Sally had gone downstairs before creeping into her bedroom and just standing there, smelling his sister’s smell, wanting desperately to perform some sort of spell that would change her and make her care about him. He had his eyes closed, tears pooling behind his eyelids, when he heard Sally hurrying up the stairs. Maybe the spell had worked; maybe Sally had felt the urgent call to find him and tell him everything was going to be fine. It only took Andrew a split second to realize that Sally advancing toward him was going to end with a punch in the gut, not an arm around the shoulder. He received a gruff apology later that day, though he couldn’t be sure if it was guilt that made Sally do it, or a rare instance of their mother stepping in. In any case, Andrew was only afforded a few days’ respite before another scrap.

  But then out of nowhere came along Sam “Spike” Morris, and everything changed. Spike had only joined the school when he was sixteen, but he had a quiet confidence about him that meant he soon made friends. He was tall, with shoulder-length black hair, and, much to the jealousy of his bumfluff-sporting male peers, possessed a full-on folk singer’s beard. Almost immediately, the word went around that Spike had somehow incurred Sally’s wrath, and that he was in for a windmilling if he crossed her again.

  Andrew saw the telltale signs that a fight was happening somewhere as the other kids—as if by some innate instinct, like animals heading for higher ground before a tsunami—all began hurrying toward the portable buildings. He got there in time to see Spike and his sister squaring up, circling each other warily. Spike, Andrew noticed, was wearing a badge with the peace symbol on it.

  “Sally,” Spike said in an unexpectedly soft voice, “I don’t know why you’ve got this beef with me, but I’m not going to fight you, yeah? Like I said, I’m a pacifist.” Sally had tackled him to the ground before the “ist” was out of his mouth. It was at this point that Andrew got caught up in the melee of kids around him and was knocked to the ground, so for a few moments all he could hear was the approving roars as the fight continued out of sight. But then the roars suddenly gave way
to jeers and wolf whistles. When Andrew finally managed to get to his feet and see what was happening he was met by the sight of Sally and Spike locked in a passionate embrace, sharing an almost violent kiss. They broke apart briefly and Spike grinned. Sally returned the smile, then swiftly gave him a vicious knee to the balls. She marched away, hands raised in victory, but when she looked back at Spike writhing on the ground, Andrew was sure he saw concern tempering her triumph. As it turned out, Sally clearly felt something deeper than just concern for Spike Morris’s welfare, and against all odds, the two of them became an item. If Andrew was surprised at this, nothing could have prepared him for the effect it seemed to have on Sally. The change was instant. It was as if Spike had tinkered with a pressure valve somewhere and all her fury had been released. At school they were inseparable, loping around with hands clamped together, their long hair swaying softly in the breeze, handing out spliffs to the other kids they towered over, like benevolent giants who’d wandered down from the mountains. Sally’s voice began to change, eventually morphing into a slow, monotonous drawl. At home, she started not only talking to Andrew but inviting him to hang out with her and Spike in the evenings. She never acknowledged her previous reign of terror, but letting him spend time with them, watching films and listening to records, seemed to be her way of trying to make up for it.

  At first, Andrew—like most of the other kids at school—thought this was some sort of psychotic playing-the-long-game tactic; Sally was only sneaking him into pubs and inviting him to watch Hammer horrors on ropey VHS to make the inevitable beatings afterward unexpected and even more brutal. But no. Spike, it seemed, had softened her with love. That and the weed. There was the odd flash of anger, usually directed at their mother, whose torpor Sally took for laziness. But she would always apologize afterward, and of her own volition.

  Most surprisingly of all, shortly after Andrew turned thirteen, Sally went out of her way to source him a girlfriend. He’d been minding his own business, reading The Lord of the Rings in his usual spot by the fight-zone portable building, when Sally appeared at the other side of the playground along with two other girls Andrew had never seen before, one Sally’s age, one closer to his. Sally strode over to him, leaving the other girls behind.

  “Hey, Gandalf,” she said, pulling Andrew to his feet.

  “Hello . . . Sally.”

  “See that girl over there? Cathie Adams?”

  Ah yes, he did recognize her now. She was in the year below.

  “Yes.”

  “She fancies you.”

  “What?”

  “As in, she wants to go out with you. Do you want to go out with her?”

  “I don’t really know. Maybe?”

  Sally sighed. “Of course you do. So now you need to go and talk to her sister, Mary. She wants to see if she approves. Don’t worry, I’m doing the same with Cathie.” And with that she signaled to Mary with a thumbs-up and pushed Andrew roughly in the back. He stumbled forward, just as Mary shoved Cathie in his direction. They crossed in the middle of the playground and exchanged nervous smiles, like captured spies being exchanged across an exclusion zone.

  Mary swiftly interrogated him, at one point leaning close and taking a tentative sniff. Seemingly satisfied, she turned him by his shoulders and shoved him back the way he’d come. A similar process had occurred with Sally and Cathie, it would seem, and the end result was that the next few weeks seemed exclusively to involve his holding Cathie’s hand in mute acceptance as she paraded them around school at break times, her head held high in the face of jeers and wolf whistles. Andrew was beginning to wonder what the point of all this was when one evening, following a school play and two and a half bottles of Woodpecker cider, Cathie pinned him against a wall and kissed him, before he promptly vomited on the floor. It was the best evening of his entire life.

  But such are the cruel twists of fate that only two days later Sally sat him down to deliver him the terrible news, as passed on to her by Mary, that Cathie had decided to end things. Before Andrew had time to process this, Sally was hugging him ferociously, explaining that everything happened for a reason and that time was a great healer. Andrew had no idea how he felt about Cathie Adams’s decision, but as he rested his head on Sally’s shoulder, enjoying the pain that came from her fierce embrace, he thought whatever had happened was probably worth it.

  The following Saturday, when Andrew came back upstairs after having been dispatched to make popcorn, he looked through a gap in the door and saw Sally and Spike kneeling, foreheads resting together, whispering softly. Sally opened her eyes and kissed Spike delicately on his forehead. Andrew had no idea his sister was capable of anything so tender. He could have kissed Spike Morris himself for performing this miracle. After everything, he’d finally gotten a big sister. Unbeknownst to him, that evening would be the last time he’d see her for years.

  He had no idea how Sally and Spike had managed to sneak out of their separate homes and get to the airport, never mind how they’d afforded the flights to San Francisco (it later transpired that when Spike turned eighteen he was entitled to a large sum of money that had been left to him by his grandparents). Andrew found a note in his sock drawer from Sally explaining that they’d “gone to the States for a while. Don’t want to cause drama, little bro,” she added, “so please can you explain everything to dear old Mother, but not until tomorrow?”

  Andrew did as he was told. His mum reacted to the news from her bed with a sort of affected panic, saying, “Oh dear. Dearie, dearie me. Really, that’s unbelievable. I can’t believe it.”

  There followed a surreal meeting with Spike’s parents, who arrived outside the house in a VW camper van and a haze of marijuana. Andrew’s mum spent the morning fretting exclusively about which sort of snacks she should put out and Andrew, terrified that she’d now gone entirely mad, scratched so hard at the spots on his cheeks that he bled.

  He spied on the conversation by lying on the landing and peering down through the banister. Spike’s father, Rick, and mother, Shona, were a jumble of long brown hair and potbellies. Hippies, it turned out, didn’t age well.

  “The thing is, Cassandra,” Rick said, “we kind of feel that as they’re two consenting adults we can’t stop them from following their hearts. Besides, we went on our own trip at that age and it didn’t do us any harm.”

  The way Shona was clinging to Rick as if they were on a roller coaster made Andrew ever-so-slightly doubt this statement. Rick was American, and the way he pronounced the word “adults,” with the emphasis on the second syllable, seemed so impossibly exotic to Andrew he wondered whether he might just up sticks and get on a plane across the pond, too. But then he remembered their mother. Sally might not have had a conscience, apparently, but he still did.

  At first, there was no word from Sally. But after a month a postcard arrived, postmarked New Orleans, with a picture of a jazz trombonist in smoky sepia.

  “The Big Easy! Hope you’re cool, dude.”

  Andrew chucked it on his bedroom floor, furious. But the next day he couldn’t resist the temptation to study it again, and then he found himself sticking it to the wall by his pillow. It would be joined later by Oklahoma City, Santa Fe, the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, and Hollywood. Andrew used up what little pocket money he had on a US map, tracking his sister’s movements with a marker pen and trying to guess where she’d post from next.

  By now his mother would oscillate wildly from angry rants about why Sally thought she could just go swanning off like that, to tearful laments about Andrew’s now being her only child—cupping his face in her hands and making him promise several times that he’d never leave her.

  It was with grim irony, then, that five years later Andrew found himself sitting at what his mother now referred to, with no sense of how upsetting this was to him, as her deathbed. The cancer was aggressive, and the doctor gave her weeks. Andrew was supposed to be going to universi
ty—Bristol Polytechnic—to study philosophy that September, but he deferred to look after her. He hadn’t told her he’d gotten a place at university. It was just easier this way. The problem was that he’d not been able to get in touch with Sally to tell her their mother was dying. The postcards had dried up, the last one coming the previous year from Toronto with the message “Hey, bud, freezin’ here. Hugs from us both!” But more recently there had been a phone call. Andrew had answered with a mouthful of fish fingers and nearly choked when the echoey sound of Sally’s voice came through the receiver. The line was terrible, and they barely managed a conversation, but Andrew did manage to hear her telling him she’d call again on August 20, when they’d be in New York.

  When the day came he sat waiting by the phone, half willing the call to come, half hoping it never would. When it finally did he had to wait for it to ring several times before he could face picking up.

  “Heyyyy, man! It’s Sally. How’s the line? Hear me okay?”

  “Yeah. So listen, Mum’s ill. As in, really ill.”

  “What’s that? Ill? Like, how bad?”

  “As in, not-getting-better ill. You need to get on a plane now or it might be too late. The doctors think it might be less than a month.”

  “Holy shit. Fuck. Are you serious?”

  “Of course I’m serious. Please come home as soon as you can.”

  “Jesus, bro. That’s . . . that’s nuts.”

  Sally’s return was as clandestine as her exit. Andrew was coming down for breakfast as usual when he heard the kitchen tap running. His mum hadn’t been out of bed for weeks, let alone made it downstairs, but he felt a flash of hope: maybe the doctors had gotten it wrong. But it was Sally, standing at the sink, a ponytail seemingly featuring every color of the rainbow stretching all the way down to her lower back. She was wearing what looked like a dressing gown.