Eleven Lines to Somewhere

by Alyson Rudd

  She decided to take the plunge.

  ‘I could do with a break,’ she said. ‘We could go somewhere together if you could bear it, my sweetheart?’

  Hana turned to her slowly while pointing at Grandpa.

  ‘Ryan can stay and he can pay for some help,’ Grace said. ‘He has offered, you know.’

  Hana was not so angry that she wanted to hurt her mother but she had thought she and Ed would be spending the Easter break walking in Cornwall and then travelling abroad in the summer. She had daydreamed about their elegant, minimalist, grown-up wedding, about a surprise baby when she was forty-two that would give Grace a new burst of life and purpose. But now Hana was expected to climb down from the cloud of fertile happiness and engage in the life of a barren spinster supping tea on a terrace in Bournemouth or Torquay.

  ‘Where do you fancy going?’ she said gloomily.

  ‘Las Vegas,’ Grace said and Hana spluttered her coffee. ‘I’ve been saving up,’ her mother added. ‘I want to see the Grand Canyon as well.’

  Hana was so surprised that she stopped thinking about Ed for a full twenty seconds.

  ‘You’re on, Mam,’ she said, not believing for a moment they would do it but certainly intrigued enough to fall into line.

  Grace allowed herself a small smile. She had no idea at all if she would like Vegas and had never thought about going. It had been an inspired spur-of-the-moment suggestion in case her daughter had been dreading the prospect of a holiday that would include them strolling along Blackpool Pier towards a cabaret show or eating fish and chips in the blustery breeze of Lyme Regis.

  Still, she stole a guilty glance towards Grandpa, who had been silently weeping but had now stopped. The tear stains on his cheeks were such a regular occurrence, she thought, that there would come a day when she would not quite be able to erase them. Like a glacier taking centuries to leave a scar on the landscape, the tracks of Grandpa’s tears would become a permanent feature of his plump and jowly face. She had no real idea of why he wept but she could sympathize. If she was to sit in the same chair each day with the luxury of time in which to reminisce about her life before Tom was taken from her, she too would weep so hard her cheeks would become as chapped and sore as her soul.

  On the other side of London, Naomi turned towards Ed.

  ‘It’s still based on a lie,’ she said, but not crossly.

  ‘No, it isn’t. You were loyal and honourable and would not fondle me until I had made it clear to Hana it was over. We did not overlap. We did not deceive. We are in the clear, young lady.’

  ‘You know what I mean. I’m still sleeping on a mate’s sofa bed as far as Ryan is concerned.’

  ‘We are simply a few weeks out of sync with reality, that’s all. In a few months, no one will care, just like nobody cares what A level results you got a year later or whether you saw Radiohead live or not.’

  ‘I guess,’ she said and for the first time she wondered if it was such a good thing that Ed was so eloquent and persuasive in absolving them of any wrongdoing whatsoever. Oh, but Naomi so liked their dead-level kisses, the way strangers gawped at them as they strode along the pavements of Lilliput London. They had both worn black jeans the day before as they headed to the cinema and she had noted the envy in the eyes of a pretty woman of average height whose hot drink had dribbled on to her neatly wrapped pale coral scarf as she had stopped mid-sip to assess a relationship that she could only dream of having.

  The woman reminded Naomi of Hana and how smitten she had been with Ed. She knew that, she could understand that, and she conceded, with a spasm of guilt, that just one, rather ludicrous, lunch had ruined everything for a woman who deserved better.

  Chapter 18

  Paul dragged Ryan off for yet another Friday-night curry. He had missed the ability to easily find a decent Keema Masala while abroad and was still in his childlike, glad-to-be-back-in-London phase. He was a mixture of contentedness and excitability and very good company, aware that teasing Ryan too heavily about finally sleeping with Sylvie would ruin the evening, but unable, all the same, to stop congratulating him.

  ‘You know, you did say part of the reason for coming back was to find women who would get your jokes,’ Ryan said, keen for his sex life not to dominate the conversation.

  ‘Not true. No one is ever going to truly like my jokes but I want to be able to impersonate Lord Percy Percy and not be treated like an imbecile. Shared humour, it’s not much to ask for. OK, why are looking so pleased with yourself?’

  ‘Sylvie was happy to try an Appletini, so I get it. It’s vital for any healthy relationship to be able to order an homage cocktail.’

  ‘God, yes,’ Paul said. ‘And what’s the score with her? One minute she’s a bit, um, dubious, the next she’s back at work, then sat next to you at my lecture smiling at all the right moments, smiling at you, and you’re getting envious looks from the geeks using your labs. What did you do exactly to turn a mystery into a relationship?’

  Ryan tried to appear confident and nonchalant but Paul knew him too well.

  ‘Ah, what couldn’t you do?’

  ‘Don’t get me wrong, she’s great, I like her a lot, and she did get a job after we, you know, visited the scene of the crime, so to speak, but she’s jacked it in and she’s back on the Tube.’

  ‘As in, back on the booze? She’s addicted?’

  ‘No, no of course not. It’s like OCD or something. She calls it a commitment. It’s like she still blames herself and is doing it as a punishment.’

  Paul nodded and chewed and nodded again. He was fascinated by the woman he too had followed underground.

  ‘You thought – she thought, in fact – that going to the platform where it happened would give her closure, and it almost did by the sound of it. But there’s something else. It was a sound guess to think she needed to see the place but,’ and here Paul adopted a Northern Irish accent, ‘unfortunately not the right one.’

  Ryan laughed.

  ‘You see, shared humour. Roy Walker, Catchphrase, I salute you.’

  ‘So any idea what the real catchphrase for Sylvie is?’ Ryan asked once Paul had stopped repeating the phrase, ‘Good answer, but not the right one.’

  ‘She’ll know it,’ Paul said, suddenly serious. ‘Only she can know it, really.’

  Sylvie was about to board the mainline train to Reading, having not visited her parents since Christmas. She collected her ticket from the foyer at Paddington, bought herself a large coffee and some dark chocolate, settled into her seat and tried to think about nothing. All her life she had hoped her parents would express more interest in the minutiae of her life but currently their lack of curiosity was a blessing. She would be vague and they would not care for her to elaborate. She could have spent the entire journey daydreaming about Ryan but she knew he was disappointed in her. She was quite convinced he would vanish, spooked, from her life and she was angry she could not summon the courage to prevent it.

  She had stopped restyling her bedroom nine years ago and it was stuck in time now with its Paul Smith-style wallpaper and matt grey desk. ‘I was virtually a tomboy,’ she chuckled to herself but of course when compared to her brother’s room hers was mightily feminine. Franklyn had sports memorabilia galore and myriad posters and cards of famous sportsmen from football, rugby, cricket, baseball and American football over every square inch of the place. Not one woman, she thought, not even a cheerleader.

  Brooke could have been a cheerleader. She would have to ask her next time they met. Or maybe not. Franklyn had become someone who suited his name. Her family had not one single link to the United States before they named their firstborn after a famous president. It was as if every morning the toddler Franklyn and then the young Franklyn and then the teenage Franklyn – never Frank, never Frankie – had woken up and vowed to do more to ensure he could gain passage to America. His hair had been more of a strawberry colour at Christmas, kissed by the Florida sun. His kids would probably be called Todd and Madison
. He phoned home while Sylvie was there but not because he knew she was. He was calling to ask his mother to sort out the wedding for June.

  ‘June next year?’ Sylvie heard her mother say as if that would be pushing it if they wanted to luxuriate in the various choices of venue.

  ‘The wedding,’ she said as she ended the call, ‘will be in seven weeks. Brooke, apparently, is distraught. She is pregnant.’

  As the evening unfolded, Sylvie became aware that her mother too was distraught. She was being denied not only a year or more of planning and anticipation – of having the time to change her mind on whether the napkins should be a shade of apricot or peach – but also the speculation of when her Franklyn would become a father. It was all happening too quickly and, all at once, and she was quietly furious. So furious that she turned to her daughter, eyes glinting, later in the evening.

  ‘Don’t you dare pull a stunt like this,’ she said and Sylvie was annoyed that she felt an unfurling of pride that her mother wanted her to have the perfect, chaste wedding day, if only for herself.

  The upside was that questions about Sylvie’s career were at their absolute minimum as her mother ordered her to hurtle through various websites to help find the fairy-tale English venue Brooke was hoping for.

  ‘Oh, the invitations,’ she groaned, ‘that’s a month’s work we’ll have to pack into a few days.’

  Sylvie found herself offering to liaise with Brooke and Franklyn over the guest list and to be in charge of the printing.

  Her mother paused, weighing up the loss of power over the practicalities, and decided to graciously accept, even adding a ‘thank you, darling’ that her daughter lapped up thirstily. As Sylvie retired to bed her mother stood to give her a kiss on the cheek.

  ‘We make a good team in an emergency,’ she said and although they had never teamed up before Sylvie subconsciously created a personal history in which she and her mother had rescued soufflés from deflating, found petrol stations just as the dashboard warning sign flashed that they were out of fuel and had pulled a puppy from a sticky pond.

  She emailed Franklyn that night, adopting a deliberately officious tone so he would know she was in charge. Of all her relatives, it was, curiously, her brother who knew best that she was extremely adept at organization. He would calm Brooke and tell her they were in good hands. He would give her Sylvie’s contact details and before too long she would be a de facto wedding planner.

  On Sunday evening her father drove her to the station, his eyes cloudy from the boredom the wedding talk had induced. He would sorely have liked to discuss the weekend’s cricket and Sylvie, having managed to forge a connection with her mother, decided to do the same with her dad. Years of sports chat at the dining table had left her with a residual knowledge of the ebbs and flows of the season and so she asked him if he had enjoyed his recent trip to Lord’s. Her father was too grateful for the opportunity to expound to a captive audience to bother wondering why his daughter cared.

  As she climbed out of the car, her parting shot as she closed the door was, ‘I don’t think we were truly ready for draft system in cricket.’

  Her father drove home a little perplexed but also a little proud. He had a daughter but she liked her sport, of course she did, he was a great dad. Enlightened, probably. He had watched her play netball once.

  ‘We’re off to Vegas next month,’ Hana told Ryan that Sunday.

  For a moment he thought she meant her and Ed were going away together and he flushed as he remembered Ed had hooked up with Naomi and that was, in a roundabout way, his fault.

  ‘Yes,’ chimed in Grace, ‘we’re hitting the slot machines.’

  Ryan looked from one to the other, wondering if he was missing the joke, and then he looked from one to the other and across at his grandfather, wondering if it was he, Ryan, who was the joke.

  The women saw the panic in his eyes.

  ‘We’ve looked at home help and if you can get back here by 6.30 each night of the fortnight and be here at the weekend, it’s doable and not too expensive,’ Hana said firmly.

  Ryan opened his mouth and closed it again so Hana added that he could buy in evening cover but that was up to him and how much he could afford to pay for it.

  ‘Mam deserves a break, don’t you think?’ she said without smiling.

  ‘Have I said I won’t be here?’ he asked and to make a point to Hana he kissed Grace on the cheek.

  Grace was speechless, her heart a turbulent mix of gratitude, love, guilt and worry. Eventually she smiled.

  ‘My word, Las Vegas,’ she said.

  Hana was stirred by Ryan’s stoicism and understood at that moment that she had been blaming her little brother for the end of Ed.

  ‘Oh, Ryan,’ she said, embracing him awkwardly. ‘I should have discussed it with you, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Look!’ shouted Grandpa excitedly and they all looked, expecting to see some terrible atrocity in Berlin or Paris, but it was Tiffany, his new love, on the shopping channel with a new hairdo.

  At four, Ryan left to meet Sylvie. He had been full of ideas and energy about ways to end her commitment but was now deflated at having a grandparent to worry about as well. He almost welcomed being sat in Trish’s Sauvignon-scented maisonette with both women extending sympathy, but neither of them thought he should even want to end this particular commitment to his grandfather. It was almost scary to be in a predicament that no one in the world believed he should be able to avoid. He was at the mercy of some sort of universal moral code.

  ‘I’ll visit you,’ Sylvie said. ‘Help you get him to bed.’

  Ryan sighed. He had known it was coming. He had to try to be grateful it was just a fortnight. Sylvie, had, after all, been trapped for a year and without the weight of morality behind her. She was alone. He vowed to be less self-pitying and then, after a short, companionable silence, he blinked with an idea.

  ‘Sylvie, I’ll come with you one day next week and you can talk me through what happens so we can devise a way out of it,’ he said.

  ‘That’s thoughtful but I’d be too embarrassed, really,’ she said. ‘The whole thing is embarrassing.’

  ‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘It isn’t. It’s a problem that needs solving, that’s all. And we’ll solve it.’

  He met her outside Eastcote on a day of weak sunshine accompanied by a weak, lukewarm breeze.

  ‘This is silly,’ she said, ‘there’s no need for you to waste your day as well.’

  ‘It’s not a waste, it’s the opposite of waste,’ he said as he handed her a Cadbury’s Creme Egg. ‘We are being constructive.’

  ‘Is this my breakfast?’

  ‘No, but it’s comforting to have one handy, I always think,’ he said.

  They boarded a Metropolitan line train.

  ‘How do you decide which train to catch?’ he asked.

  ‘I take the first one, that’s all. I don’t set out with a plan other than to get into the heart of the Underground before changing.’

  ‘How do you know when it’s time to change?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘I don’t know that I know, it just happens, like when you realize you’re filling the kettle but you did it automatically.’

  They sat in silence until Liverpool Street.

  ‘Time to be on the move,’ she said.

  ‘Do you know where you are headed now?’

  ‘Not really. I just follow my nose.’

  ‘Are you looking for anything, or someone, a sign perhaps?’

  She did not answer. She was pondering the question. She led him towards the Central line. They could head out of town or towards its centre. What made her decide which direction? She chose west and looked around intently. There was a short woman with long brown hair in front of them. Was there always a woman ahead of her? Was she looking for the mother with brown eyes? Her eyes welled up and she felt in her pocket for a tissue. People did not cry on the Underground. Not even those desperate enough to step in front of a train.<
br />
  The woman in the long skirt had not cried and she had known what she was about to do or why else hand over her child? Sylvie could not comprehend the premeditation of it, the accompanying calmness. She could not comprehend how she had been a part of it. An accomplice. She wondered if she was punishing herself by turning herself into the ghost of the suicide victim, doomed to wander the Underground until— She rubbed her forehead. That was the question. What signal was she waiting for that would free her from this absurd ritual? There was something inside her, she could feel it, tightly wound, waiting for the key or a code to release the tension and the compulsion. She thought Ryan was the key and then she thought, if not Ryan, then he at least would find it and she knew he was trying and she was grateful but if this was to be her great love affair then it had better stop being so absurd pretty soon.

  They lunched at one of their Waterloo booths. It was chilly. The half-hearted sunshine could not permeate the glass roof and those around them scurried with more speed than usual. The departure board updated itself almost petulantly as if to say, ‘I am so busy today, too may trains, not enough platforms, keep up people, pay attention, blink and you’ll miss where you need to be.’ Commuters and holidaymakers strained their necks, parents chased runaway toddlers, a buggy tipped over under the weight of its bags, a large woman in a low-cut scarlet velvet dress belted out something operatic in front of a collection bucket, the queue at Starbucks spread out onto the station foyer. Their waiter winked. He had served them before.

  ‘Are you ever tempted to catch a mainline train?’ Ryan asked.