Love After Love

by Alex Hourston

  When we left, I asked about the drawings at reception and she said it was the work of the owners’ daughter.

  ‘Did you get a dirty one?’ she asked with a snigger. I told her no. ‘Oh right,’ she said. ‘They can sometimes be a bit rude.’

  I wondered, did the artist sell them? ‘It’s just a hobby,’ the woman replied. ‘She’s only something like twelve.’ I thought then, that I had seen the child, if it was she who whipped a croissant at breakfast without pausing to sit down.

  When I unpacked, at home, melancholy but focused, I found that Adam had folded one of the pages in the bottom of my bag. I used it to line my own drawer; Louisa sniffed it out within the week. And so began what passes for tradition in a love like ours. The exchange of unlikely gifts, innocuous-seeming tokens we can keep close, carry in plain sight. The blouse. A poem that he found after I told him I’d never read one that felt real. Dishonest little items that I let my children exclaim upon, turn over in their hot greedy hands. I take a pleasure in their enjoyment. I deny the risk and bask in the lie that these trinkets tell, that I – we – are still whole.

  12

  I got home to the dog waiting anxiously at the door and a woman’s voice in the kitchen. Skyler, out of control, was disconcerting. She hadn’t lined her eyes with their usual charcoal sweep and through an unplanned parting at the back of her head I saw tight twists of hair in odd, neat rows. She sat with Stef at the long table.

  ‘Where’s David?’ I said, a little parcel of anxiety unwrapping in my mind.

  ‘He’s gone,’ she replied.

  ‘Gone where?’

  ‘Fucked off.’

  ‘Ah.’ I bent down to hug her, though she didn’t respond. She smelled of stress sweat and old booze.

  ‘Have you got a tea?’ I asked, though they both had full cups. ‘I’ll get myself a tea,’ I said.

  Across the kitchen, I heard her voice start up but it was obscured by the blast of the hot water tap. When I came back, she looked down into her mug and swam the bag around by its string.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ she replied, like the kids, after a breakage. There was a hole in the thigh of her leggings.

  ‘When did he leave?’ I said.

  ‘Sometime while I was asleep. I got up and he was gone.’

  She dug a nail into a groove in the table.

  ‘So yesterday?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, yesterday. I woke about eleven and he wasn’t there. I called him but it went to voicemail.’

  ‘Shit,’ I said and felt for my phone. She muttered something but her head was low and I couldn’t make it out. Stef put a hand on her arm and gave me his signature look, counselling caution, time and tact.

  ‘Did you speak to him, Nancy?’ she asked.

  ‘No. I missed the calls.’

  Skyler looked up. She had tiny features, the sharp appeal of a fox. I had felt her dislike and the edge of competition in the way she puffed out her lip if I touched him, the sentences she began with: ‘You know, the thing is about David—’ I allowed it. Still, I felt she could be cruel.

  ‘I’m sorry, Skyler, I really am, but you should know, this is not the first time.’

  David is a master of retreat. You can see on his face when he has had enough; of the game, the conversation, the night. His eyes slide, his knee begins to jangle.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, he leaves. It’s what does. He goes for weeks, or sometimes months, and when he’s had enough of wherever he’s been, he comes back.’

  He fixed a lock on his bedroom when he was twelve. ‘Talk to me, David, please,’ I’d shout, through the door. ‘Just tell me what I’ve done,’ but he was immune to my need. ‘Leave him alone, Nancy,’ Mum said. ‘Give him his privacy, for heaven’s sake. We’re not all like you.’

  I watched Skyler processing this news; the scud of various emotions pass over her face.

  ‘Why didn’t anyone tell me?’ she said in the end.

  ‘Well, it’s not as if we are all exactly—’ but Stef touched my arm and I stopped.

  ‘He hasn’t done it for years, Skyler,’ he said. ‘Not since I’ve known him, at least. I guess everybody hoped that the last time was—That, really. The last time.’

  She nodded, her chin on her fists, her elbows splayed.

  ‘Look, he may very well be back,’ Stef said. ‘It’s only been a day. Do you think—? Was there anything at the party?’

  ‘He was pretty out of it,’ I said. ‘If that’s what you’re asking.’

  ‘Oh hardly,’ Skyler said, with a short, dry laugh. ‘That was not a big night, believe me.’ She tipped her head and looked at me curiously. ‘He’s not the boy you see, you know, Nancy.’

  On her thumb I saw a ring that I had given him. He didn’t like to travel and for years I bought him something from each trip. This was Rhodes, early nineties. On Skyler’s tiny finger, the dolphin’s nose and tail were hopelessly overlapped. She saw me looking and tucked her hand into the other palm with a locked smile.

  ‘What, the one who got his stomach pumped at age fourteen? He did rehab a long time before it was considered an interesting choice, Skyler.’

  I saw a brief shading of doubt and tried not to take gladness from it.

  ‘Look. This isn’t helping,’ said Stef. ‘I guess—You know, forty can be a big thing. The party, perhaps—’

  ‘The party?’ I said. ‘You can’t seriously be suggesting—’

  ‘I’m not suggesting anything, Nancy. I’m simply trying to understand.’

  ‘The party,’ Skyler scoffed, ‘Oh yes. Your stupid party.’

  ‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘He took a bag.’

  ‘What?’ said Skyler.

  ‘When he came here last week. From the cellar. He took an old bag.’

  ‘I wouldn’t read too much into that …’ Stef said, but Skyler dropped a shoulder and began to weep and I, too, felt the beginnings of a familiar hurt. She pressed her forehead gently to the table and Stefan left his chair to crouch down by her.

  *

  ‘Do you think there’s someone else?’ he asked me, later, in bed. I was reading a textbook for next day in a ghastly Americanised prose.

  ‘No. Why would there be? He would just dump her if there was. It’s not as if they’ve got all this.’ I drew a few loose circles in the air to indicate our connectedness. Implicated and dependent.

  ‘Could he be depressed?’ Stef said.

  ‘It was discounted years ago.’

  He turned onto his side and pushed up on an elbow, his cheek resting in the palm of his hand.

  ‘Don’t worry, Nance,’ he said.

  ‘Look, I’m fine,’ I replied. ‘If you need to sleep.’

  He ran his hand up my arm, his nails flat like tiny spades.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘I have to read.’

  Stef pulled on his eye mask and was instantly quiet, but for the odd little trill and shudder. I looked over the top of my book and thought of David. That time, when we were teenagers, that he almost got us killed.

  *

  He had come to Nottingham at the end of my first year, arriving in someone’s mum’s old Volvo and re-contextualising me instantly with his subtle London edge and the assurance of a wage, a fold of notes he’d earned on a building site packing out a back pocket of his jeans. The sight of him, an anomaly in the student bar, made me laugh out loud and I wondered why I’d kept him away for so long.

  We were up late in the kitchen of my halls, my flatmates talking while he watched and smiled, when a boy I’d never seen before came to the door and said someone across town had mushrooms, did anybody have a car?

  David grinned like the Joker and waited, testing me out; daring me to forbid him, to expose myself as lame. The other girls were silent, shoulders up, hands clamped between their knees.

  ‘Well?’ the boy said. ‘Anyone?’

  ‘I don’t,’ Vicky replied, at last.

  ‘All rig
ht. Just asking,’ he said, confused by the atmosphere, and had turned to go when David called:

  ‘I can drive, mate.’

  That the boy was midway through a long night was clear. He looked fluey; his hair clumped and crunchy where he had sweated and then let it dry.

  ‘Look, I don’t know how much he’s got,’ he said, earnestly, ‘but we can split it, if you like?’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll take you,’ David said. ‘Anyone else?’

  Vicky, who I still talk to, said no, which left Anna and Kate. Anna was tough and cool, with a stud in her nose and ugly clothes; Kate, all gloss and a crazy streak. He had the pick of them – the tone of the evening had made that clear – but preferred to leave it to chance. He is a believer, David, in all sorts of things. Mulder to my Scully.

  ‘I’ll come,’ I said.

  David smiled up at the ceiling.

  ‘Come on then, sis.’

  He swung the keys around his finger.

  ‘Should we wait up?’ Kate asked.

  ‘Why not?’ he said.

  The car was huge and smelt of dog and David’s homemade bong. In the footwell I found a swimming bag with a name embroidered on it. Charlie Holmes.

  ‘Travel sweet?’ he said.

  ‘I’m Daz, by the way,’ called the boy from the back.

  ‘Where to, Daz?’ he said.

  ‘Right at the main road. Five minutes, mate. Tops.’

  I usually took the bus to college, travelling slow along the ordained lane. That night, waiting to pull across the road, in a car, more stoned than pissed, I saw that the traffic was fast. I tried to process the scene; get a feel for speed and distance, but the lights had tails like comets and space had become elastic. Our own car gave a tinny little shiver every time something big passed by.

  ‘You hear that? The way the noise of each car gets higher as it comes close? That’s the Doppler Effect,’ Daz said. ‘By day I’m a physics—’

  ‘Shh,’ said David. He turned the music down.

  ‘We could just turn left, you know, and go round the roundabout,’ I said.

  ‘It’s fine,’ he replied. ‘Hold on.’

  David pressed his foot down on the pedal, I saw his leg brace. The engine rose, but time seemed to lag. When we moved, though, we moved fast, with a shriek and a kick out at the back.

  ‘Whoa,’ said Daz, catching a handful of my hair as he grabbed for the headrest.

  There was no chance of stopping in the space between the lanes, though when David turned right, hard, there was a second inside all the movement that felt like stasis. Then we were off up the road, the two boys whooping.

  ‘Christ,’ said Daz, ‘I’m flying!’

  David laughed and laughed until Daz was impelled to say: ‘Share the joke, mate.’

  I held the sides of my seat. My heart banged and clamoured.

  ‘David,’ I said. ‘I think the man in the car next door is trying to tell us something. He’s wound his window down.’

  ‘I need to drive,’ he said.

  ‘Pull forward, I’ll see what he wants,’ said Daz. He gave a thumbs up to the driver, still buzzing. ‘Open the window, will you? It’s child-locked.’

  Air boomed around the car. My ears popped.

  ‘It was an accident, mate,’ I heard Daz shout. ‘No harm done.’

  I looked across. The man, with his arm stretched out in the space between us, wanked the air slowly and pulled a little nearer.

  He followed us for twenty minutes or so, sometimes behind but when space allowed, alongside; close. He caught the wing mirror at one point and all three of us screamed. I saw the driver laugh then, mouth wide, before he finally took his turning home.

  When we arrived at the address of the guy with the mushrooms, we were too late. Back at mine, David and Anna shagged noisily in the bedroom next door. He had gone when I got up; left a note, this time. Thanks for an ace weekend, sis. Need to get the car home. Love you. xxx. He never visited again.

  I have shared this tale many times across the years.

  ‘You should not have been driving in that state,’ Mads said, when I first told her.

  ‘Oh well. We lived,’ I replied.

  David raised an eyebrow at one of us.

  I’ve held it up time and again, in demonstration of us, a snapshot of personality, a shorthand for our relationship, of the way we two intersect. It always gets a laugh, though I think sometimes I hear a high note of shock as well. I imagine people taking it home, chewing it over in dark bedrooms before they sleep and thinking they find things in it that I didn’t intend. It is exposing, yes, and not without kink. Neither one of us comes out particularly well. Yet I approve this version, in all its love and spite. Is it honest? Events unfurled exactly as I describe.

  13

  I took to watching Frieda. I trailed her, like a lovelorn boy or the world’s worst spy. She noted it; she would raise those thatches of clotted lash and pitch them in my direction but when they reached me, I didn’t know what to say, and she saw this, and swivelled them back.

  I formed the impression that she was sad; something in the bow of her shoulder, the dip of her head – she looked like a girl who bore a weight – and then I lifted her bag and found she did. The laptop and a tablet and any number of borrowed books. Delighted by a problem I could solve (a second bag, on the other arm, to even the load), I went to her.

  She stood against her bedroom window in a reflective skater skirt and a tight sheen top, an outfit whose proportions made no sense to me. The skirt sat way above her waist and the vest – or perhaps it was a leotard, it ran so smoothly under her waistband – had a high neck that met her chin, and deep-cut armholes exposing an odd view of side-rib. She wore jelly shoes of the sort we would have used on pebbly beaches, updated with a chunk of neon heel. Her legs looked cast from a mould; smooth, blemish-free and hairless since the day she turned eleven and begged me to show her how to shave. Next, the tang of Immac in her room and the tangle of furred wax strips stuck to the bottom of her bin. Now, she runs her hands up and down her calves in absent moments, feeling out any prickle of missed hair. ‘Oh hi,’ she said and raised her phone at arm’s length with a face we’ve all seen before in a thousand magazines.

  She clicked, and checked her screen, pressed a sequence of keys and said: ‘What?’ No grudge in it.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Oh yes, your bag’s too heavy. Come sit with me. We’ll buy you another off the internet.’

  She took off her clothes. Her skin glittered and smelled of bubblegum from the body cream she liked, but I could still see traces of her baby self. The abrupt cut of her forehead into her hairline. Something in the angles of her when she bent forward to step out of her skirt. I wondered if these were essentials or whether I’d look across one time and they’d be gone. Her pants sagged and said the wrong day of the week; they were old childhood to the pristine white of her bra which she briefly admired, looking down at herself. She slipped a thumb under one strap and adjusted it needlessly.

  ‘Or some underwear?’ I said. ‘You could do with an update.’

  She laughed at me, quite fondly, and pulled her onesie up and over each shoulder; her favourite one, the one with the ears. Her phone pinged on the bed and what she read there made her shout out a laugh and I saw that whatever was happening in the space beyond her handset was real to Free, not this thing that I tried to bring back to life each night after a long day’s work, this notion of family with its meals around the table, gobbled up before I’d had the chance to sit, and the chalk-board cupboard-fronts, one for each child, lagging with out-of-date appointments. Christmas cards signed Love the Jansens XXX as if we were a collective noun.

  ‘I’m busy, Mum,’ she said. ‘And I don’t need another bag. Thanks.’

  Her plume of fringe had been knocked askew when she pulled off her top. She saw me notice and raised her hands to it and adjusted the clips behind the swell of hair. When she dropped her arms, it stayed put, meshed and lacquered, looking f
or the life of her like some Southern debutante’s drunk mother. Then she watched me patiently until her look drove me out of her room. ‘Shut the door, Mum,’ she called, and when I went back to do it, she had turned away too, to get on with – what?

  ‘Don’t you think that she seems secretive?’ I asked Stefan, later. We had eaten moussaka which she asked for, now, instead of spaghetti bolognese, which I saw was to do with carbs but indulged, nonetheless. She ate with too much care. I saw her ease her aubergine out of its custardy cast with the tip of her knife and the way she moved the mince up the rim of the plate to drain the meat’s fat. I had cooked Jake penne so he could, to some degree, recreate the old dish. Lou ate what she was given and barely seemed to notice.

  ‘It’s not that, Nance,’ he said. ‘She just lives in her phone. That’s how they are,’ which was true; it was always there, before her on the table, or if she sensed my mood, on her lap, heating up a little strip on her thigh. It rarely made it to her pocket; when she walked, it rested in the claw of her grip.

  *

  On Wednesday, when David still wasn’t back, I called the family.

  ‘You what, love?’ Dad said, as though he hadn’t heard; a new habit. The world was becoming confusing to him, speeding up, spinning off, while he slowed and narrowed. He was coping, for now. He had his strategies. We gave him space.

  I said it again.

  ‘Can’t the girlfriend help? Whatshername. Have you asked? There must have been a row,’ he said, cleaving to his view of things.

  ‘Well.’ He blew out hard when he understood.

  ‘I’m putting the phone down now, Dad,’ I said.

  ‘Will I be seeing you next week, love?’ he asked.

  I texted Justine later to get him to tell Aunty April.

  *

  Madeline cried, straight away. Kitten, we used to call her when she was born. Her sounds were weak and tiny and made us cruel.

  ‘Mads,’ I said, her sobbing low but persistent. ‘Come on. I need to get off the phone and call Mum.’