In through the nose, Al … Better. Much better.
She’d get there. Back to that point she was at once upon a time, before she started letting the anxiety win. When she could still enjoy a nice, invigorating dip.
Her breathing was steady. There was definitely something in her mum’s advice. It was far easier controlling her breathing with a rambling inner monologue. Blythe’s mantra wasn’t as jazzy as the Ain’t no thing! version Alex had heard on Oprah’s self-help special, but it was still coming in handy in the wake of Alex’s new found bravery with the wet stuff.
Alex heard a splash too close on her right and tried not to falter again. Her concentration was rubbish tonight. Jem and her mum had taken something from her without realising it earlier this evening. The tension was supposed to ease after calling home, that’s how Dill’s birthday always worked. Only now she felt weighted down by something new, something she hadn’t anticipated. It had been niggling at her since she’d put down the phone to them. Finn setting up shop, right across the street from Foster’s Auto’s.
Why can’t you ever just take the easier route, Finn? It was a thought that had whispered through her head so many times before. And as ever, it came shadowed by another. Why did you always expect him to, Alex?
Yes. Why did she? She was selling him short, again and again and again, slipping straight back into the same old habit as if it were a favourite sweater. Had she forgotten? All sweaters had been returned. Lines had been drawn, ties cut, mix-tapes given back.
Another splash to the right and Alex’s coordination left her.
Don’t panic … don’t panic … but somebody else’s leg brushed against hers under the water then and it was all over. It was too late, she was already rearing up like a woman demented. One of the senior swimmers was blinking curiously at Alex through her goggles.
Brilliant, Alex! That had nearly been two widths in a row. You wimp. You big fat bloody wimp.
Alex made it to the edge of the pool and heard a giggle as she clambered out beside the Monday night couple. They came every week and spent most of the session huddled cosily in the Jacuzzi, although the guy had ventured into the main pool a few times. He’d done his Daniel Craig in Speedos impression past Alex last week. She’d stopped and pretended to fix the locker key strapped to her wrist while he’d thrashed past and Alex had discreetly hyperventilated.
Alex squelched her way beneath the poolside clock and through to the changing rooms. Nearly eight-thirty. Good. Enough was enough for one day. Just a couple more hours and Dill’s birthday could be put to rest for another year and she wouldn’t have to think about awkward exchanges with her dad for a while.
Alex opened her locker and made a grab for her shampoo and towel. She nudged her jeans accidentally and her phone slipped from her pocket. She whipped her hand out, somehow catching it before it hit the floor.
‘Whoops. Butter-fingers. Nearly lost it that time.’ Alex looked along the lockers to one of the old chaps who came swimming every week too. White-haired and friendly-faced, Alex always felt a bit guilty for curtailing their conversations, but the old lad didn’t seem to realise the perils of wearing white swimming trunks and Alex always found herself glancing down like a wide-eyed child to check if they were any less see-through.
‘Oh, yes,’ she agreed. ‘Nearly, that time.’
Alex’s eyes dipped without warning. It was like being told not to look at the sun as a kid. Don’t look, don’t look!
‘You should try dropping a cigar in your lap, young lady. I was driving my golf cart last weekend, burned straight through my trousers it did. Just look at the blister it’s left me with,’ he said, pointing to his hairy upper thighs.
Alex glanced sheepishly towards him. ‘Oh yes, would you look at that.’ Penis. That’s all Alex had just seen. Old man penis. Actually it was worse than looking at the sun. Far, far worse. She wanted to take her eyeballs out and wash them in the pool.
Alex’s phone bleeped. She seized her chance at a diversion. ‘Sorry, I really have to take this,’ she fibbed. ‘Would you excuse me?’ Alex flashed him a smile and slipped into one of the changing stalls. Jem’s name blinked demandingly on the caller display, puncturing the stillness of the cubicle. Thank you, sis. She couldn’t chance another look at those trunks, she wouldn’t sleep tonight.
Alex unlocked her phone. She just needed to kill enough time for the old lad to finish in his locker. Twenty-three missed calls, Jem? Tickly tracks of water were streaking down Alex’s back and shoulders where her wet hair clung. She rubbed them away and frowned at the urgency on her phone. That was a lot of calls from Jem. Carrie Logan must have death-stared her or something.
Alex hit the button on her phone and listened to the most recent of Jem’s voicemails. Jem’s words reached up over Alex’s collarbone, conquering the silence of the cubicle, pressing in on her with the same cold claustrophobia as the swimming pool.
Mum’s sick … suspected stroke … need to come home.
Squeeze. Squeeze. Squeeze.
Alex held her breath as if she were still in the pool and hit redial. She waited – Mum’s sick … Mum’s sick … with each impatient second.
‘Alex?’
‘Jem! What happened? Is she OK?’
Everything around Alex had faded into oblivion. Jem was talking in whispers. ‘I’m not supposed to have my phone on. We don’t really know yet for sure. Malcolm Sinclair found her. At St Cuthbert’s. In the churchyard. Alex, I … I can’t …’
‘Slow down, Jem! Where is she now? Where’s Dad?’
‘Kerring General. We’re here now.’
Jem wasn’t a crier, even when she was a kid. When Robbie Rushton stuck a drumstick through her spokes and Jem had flown straight over her handlebars she hadn’t cried, she’d pinned Robbie to the ground instead and given him a dead arm. A whole week had gone by before anyone had realised Jem had fractured that wrist, the same one she’d used to punch Robbie with. But Jem’s voice was wavering now. This alone made Alex want to cry immediately. She clamped a hand over her mouth in case.
‘They’re all over her, Alex. They said time was the most critical thing but Malcolm got her here really quickly. We’re so lucky he was in the churchyard, Al.’
Suspected stroke. The words swirled in Alex’s ears like trapped water. Blythe didn’t like a fuss. To be bundled into Malcolm Sinclair’s police car and rushed anywhere would have been beyond mortifying for her. ‘She’s going to be OK, isn’t she, Jem?’
There was a flurry of activity in Jem’s background, Alex strained to make any of it out.
‘You know Mum … tough as Dad’s old boots.’ But Jem had hesitated.
Alex looked at the scant belongings she had with her. The urge was there – keys, coat, get home to Mum – and then the inevitable thought.
Dad.
Alex forced herself not to think about what she would say if she went back up there. She could already hear the first whispers in her head … This was always going to happen, Alex, eventually. You knew that. Because every one of Dill’s birthdays without him had been one too many, and there was only so much quiet heartbreak the human body could take, even her mum’s.
No. She couldn’t go up there. It would be better for everyone if she didn’t. One less thing for them all.
‘Alex, are you still there?’
Alex took in a deep breath, just to remind her lungs that they still could. ‘I’m here.’
Jem sniffed. ‘Alex?’
‘Yeah?’
‘You need to come home.’
2nd November 2006
‘You need to come home.’
Alex inhaled, deep and steady, filling her lungs with as much of his delicious scent as possible.
‘I don’t want to hide behind a phone, Foster. I want to do this properly. Show him how serious we are, about doing things right.’
Anyone would think Finn was going to ask for her hand in marriage. They were a cool billion light years from that. Well, maybe they cou
ld just make it out of their teens first, at least.
Alex watched the candlelight dancing over the far wall, laying soft shadows over the edge of Finn’s face. They’d synchronised, his naked torso rising with breath as hers gave its own away. Rise and fall, the movement subtle like a gentle tide, so slight and easy it felt as if she might not need oxygen at all any more. He was enough.
Finn had a look of curious wonder in his eyes, a need finally met. Perhaps it was just the play of the light over his face, but Alex felt that way too, as if she’d made it to where she was always supposed to have been. She thought she’d be embarrassed, but it felt like the most natural thing in the world, to lie here beside him now, skin cool and sticky from their first adventure of each other. She never wanted to move again, her body wasn’t finished nuzzling in the glorious afterglow of what they’d finally just done. What she already needed to do again.
‘I missed you, Foster.’
Alex held back the goofy grin trying to make its way over her face, as if too sudden a moment might make it all disappear again like an illusion. ‘I missed you too, Finn.’
His face was close enough to her that she could see tiny flecks of hazel in the green of his irises, the contours where laughter had left its footprint in the lines beside his eyes. Finn ran his fingertips from Alex’s hip along her naked spine and began trailing delicate circular shapes over her shoulders. Alex felt her goose-pimples rise to greet him. Finn had found her again. He’d come all this way and he’d found her.
Alex reached her fingers to tease a lock of hair behind his ear. She’d been so buried in her coursework she hadn’t noticed the sudden arrival of winter in the city, not until she’d watched it walk in on the ends of his hair. She’d opened the secured door of her student halls and there he was, waiting under a tree, pearls of new snow clinging to the same long layers he’d worn through college. Nearly two hundred miles and he’d been standing there as if the end of the earth wouldn’t be too far.
‘Your mum told me how to find you,’ he’d said. And that was it, the snowflake that tipped the avalanche.
It was a perfect crisp November night and they’d spent it, some of it, talking through the year they’d spent adrift while the Old Girl had carried on flowing and the world had carried on turning. And now here they were, naked and blissfully fatigued in a single bed in a pokey little bedroom in a student house a million miles away from Eilidh Falls. And it was perfect.
Blythe had given Finn the address. Alex sent a quiet thank you out into the snowy darkness and hoped her mum would somehow feel it and think of Alex and Finn right then. Blythe was a sucker for a good love story; she’d probably compared theirs to the kind of love all of Blythe’s favourite operas were made from. Of adversity and triumph and explosions of something precious happening between two people. Luminous and powerful, darling! She would say. Love as beautiful and terrifying as a bolt of lightning!
Finn propped himself up on an elbow. ‘What are you thinking about?’
Alex’s hand naturally migrated to the hardness of his stomach. The grin got the better of her as soon as she opened her mouth. ‘Lightning.’
Finn’s mouth gave in to a smile too. He was still beautiful; the tiny scar Ted’s wedding band had left over the bridge of his nose hadn’t changed him. A monster had risen in Alex’s dad that night. Thankfully, none of them had ever seen it since.
Alex didn’t see Finn’s head furrow. ‘OK, so what are you thinking about now?’
She didn’t want to let any more thoughts of her dad in. ‘Nothing,’ Alex replied but she already knew it was too late. She stroked Finn’s side. A futile gesture, as if she was trying to tame a piece of her coursework before the clay hardened and left her with something incomplete, misshapen.
‘Let me tell him, Alex.’
‘No. Not yet.’
‘Alex, he can punch me all he likes if it makes him feel better. It won’t change anything.’
‘I know. I just … don’t want you to say anything that …’
‘But I want to. I want to say it to him. I love you, Foster.’
‘I love you too.’ She really did. It was the only certainty. But Finn’s expression had already changed.
He cut her a smile and nodded softly to himself. ‘I know you do, Foster. You just don’t want anyone to know it.’
CHAPTER 4
The sky was like a lingering bruise on the outskirts of town. Alex pulled off the main road and cruised alongside the Old Girl into Eilidh Falls, the light still steeped in the eeriness of a new day. Just over two hours without a dip into a service station was a new personal best, made possible only by non-existent traffic and two eyelid-expanding double espressos before leaving the flat.
Alex pinched between her eyes, trying to stave off her tiredness. Her dad would go mad if he knew how little sleep she’d had. She shifted in the driver’s seat, ignoring the growing ache in her back. This close to home it was pointless trying to push Dill away. He was all around her here; Dill belonged to Eilidh Falls. The tiny pocket of the world that had claimed him forever. Was it the same for Jem, she wondered, when she came home too? Jem played her cards so close to her chest you never could tell.
Another sign counting down the miles back to the Falls whizzed by the truck window. Time and distance, that’s all her dad had wanted, and she’d delivered. Now she could feel it all being undone, one mile at a time. It was always this way on the drive back to the Falls. Dill always found his way into her thoughts, transporting her back there again, setting her down perpetually on the banks of the Old Girl with him, their weeping father, and Finn in his mournful silence, as if those few cataclysmic moments had soldered them all together forevermore.
Finn had tried so hard, but Ted was never going to see it.
Alex shuddered at the recollection of that Christmas. That first Christmas after. He didn’t know what he was doing, it was the drink, not your father, Blythe had tried to say evenly as she’d gathered up sticky shards of Granny Ros’s Tutbury crystal bowl from the garden path. That was the last time Alex had seen Finn or Susannah anywhere near the house. It was also the last Christmas Alex had seen her dad anywhere near a drink, and the start of all that prickly quiet between them. Thick grey silences wedged between all the safe things they still managed to talk about, like ice forming between rocks, threatening to shatter them both.
A heavy grogginess was starting to filter in behind Alex’s eyes. She tried to keep them focused on the road ahead. Dad would never say it, that this new catastrophe was most likely a consequence of Blythe having to wish Dill a happy birthday down at St Cuthbert’s, but it would be there, in one of those silences where the rest of Alex’s failings resided.
A flash of black came up on Alex’s right side. Some sleek four-by-four sped aggressively around her. She let them pass like one of the more able swimmers back at the leisure centre, as if she had any choice. Alex checked her rear view for any more surprises. She was nearly home. Get it together, Alex. Mum needs you on the ball.
Nope, she would not think about Finn’s return any more. It wasn’t even her place. Mum was all that mattered. She would get there and find out her part to play. She would get her mum’s things together, help her wash and dress if needs be, grocery shop, cook for them, tidy the house. She’d only be back, what, a day or two? There were a hundred ways to pass a couple of days. All she had to do was help Blythe get back on her feet, and keep as best she could out from under her father’s. Simple. Everything was going to be fine, Alex smiled. It wasn’t like her Mum ever even got ill. Give it a week max and Blythe would show them all, this was just a blip in an otherwise blemish-free record of health. A momentary stumble. Wasn’t she due one after all these years? All these birthdays? Alex gripped the steering wheel a little more assuredly. Her mum would soon be back on her feet, and then Jem could get back to London and Dad would be back busting a gut keeping the garage going and Alex could just get back out of everyone’s way and they could all breathe again.
Welcome to Eilidh Falls!
The sign had changed; for the benefit of the tourists, no doubt. Beneath the salutation, an image carved into the wood of a Viking longship under a hail of arrows fired from the banks of the Old Girl. As soon as Alex rolled past that image, the illusion that any amount of time or distance could ever really make a difference to her dad quickly evaporated.
CHAPTER 5
It hadn’t been a nightmare exactly, Jem decided. More of a troubled sleep kind of thing, like in her teens. A sort of half-hearted insomnia. But definitely not a nightmare. Nightmares featured monsters and fear and peril, not the constant dull weight of words left unsaid.
Jem fidgeted in her old bed trying to get comfortable. She never slept well in her parents’ house any more, she realised. Not since those hideous years in high school when the late-night anxieties had first kicked in. It wasn’t easy sleeping on a lie every night, notching up the days she was keeping them all in the dark. Maybe her mum was right, the therapy might’ve helped Jem if she’d stuck with it, but it had seemed so OTT at the time.
‘Jem! It’s 3am!’ she remembered her mum rasping from the kitchen doorway, eyes blinking and vacant after catching Jem fixing a peanut butter sandwich for the third night in a row. ‘Is it nightmares, sweetheart? Or is there something else that’s bothering you? You haven’t been yourself lately, Jem. If you’re having nightmares it might help if you talk about them.’
‘I’m OK, Mum.’ Jem had reassured. ‘I only have nightmares in the run up to maths tests, honest.’ She hadn’t mentioned those long school trips stuck with Carrie Logan and the other bimbos. Or the eve of Eilidh High’s end of year discos when Jackson Cox was always expecting a slow dance with Jem and, rumour had it, a proper good snog.
Letting You Go Page 3