Every Vow You Break

by Julia Crouch

  ‘Welcome all,’ he said, handing round beers. ‘Welcome to Trout Island Theatre Company. I thought we’d have chips and dips here before I took you to your digs. Tuck in, Waylands!’

  He was fiftyish, handsome in an overgroomed, pudgy way, and he dressed like someone you might come across on a beach in Goa – Thai fisherman’s trousers, open cotton shirt, Birkenstocks. It was an unsettling look, as if an overfed otter had paid a visit to a beauty parlour.

  ‘Jack needs a change,’ Lara said to Marcus.

  ‘Can’t it wait?’

  ‘No it can’t.’

  James pointed across the foyer. ‘Use the bathroom, if you will.’

  Lara lifted Jack on to the fold-down changing table inside the ladies’. As she rooted around in his bag for a clean pair of pull-ups and wipes, she heard Olly and Bella outside the toilet door. Like ducklings they had followed their mother across the foyer.

  ‘I’d forgotten what a tosser he was,’ Olly whispered to his sister.

  ‘Shhh!’ Bella said.

  ‘Fat old poof.’

  ‘Shut up, Olly.’

  ‘Look at him hanging on Dad’s every word. It’s pathetic.’

  Lara sighed. Olly was like that. Over the years he had fought so hard for his father’s attention that he found it galling when someone simply swept Marcus away. The last time James had visited them in Brighton, he and Marcus had sat up drinking whisky and chewing the cud after dinner while Olly hung around trying in vain to get a word in edgeways. Defeated, he had sloped off up to his bedroom and plugged in his bass guitar, thumping through the floorboards so fiercely that Marcus stormed up and yelled at him to turn the damn thing off. Once Olly had a grudge, it was hard to dislodge it.

  ‘You’ve got a rude, moody brother,’ she said to Jack, tickling his ribs so he giggled with pleasure.

  She had a pee herself and noticed that the gush of blood from a couple of hours ago seemed to have stilled. She hoped it was nearly all over. As if, now done, it could ever be fully over. Once again, she pushed the hollow feeling aside, stood up and steeled herself.

  ‘I heard that,’ she whispered to Olly as she came out, Jack beside her, holding on to her index finger.

  ‘He’s such a twat though, Mum,’ Olly said.

  ‘Give him a chance, love. He’s just excited to see your dad. We’ll get him back in a bit.’

  Olly made a face.

  They headed back across the wide, wooden expanse of the hall. James was laughing heartily at something Marcus had said, throwing back his tanned head, his eyes fixed sideways on his ageing protégé.

  ‘Ah. Refreshed,’ he said, turning to them. ‘You two look so gorgeous.’ He beamed at Lara and Bella. ‘So alike, like a couple of matrioshka dolls.’

  ‘That’s what you said last time,’ Olly said. Lara leaned on his foot.

  ‘And you’ve certainly grown up, young man.’ James turned his attention to Olly, raising his manicured eyebrows. ‘How old are you now? Fourteen?’

  Olly bristled.

  ‘Sixteen. We’re sixteen,’ Bella said.

  ‘It’s wonderful to see you again, James,’ Lara said quickly. ‘How’s Betty?’

  ‘Oh, she’s back up at the farm doing a couple of last-minute rewrites. She sends apols, but things are going a bit tits up with the musical at the moment. We’re having artistic differences with the leads, who have also decided to start fucking each other, excuse me children.’ He rolled his eyes. His years away from Britain had given his accent a slightly Australian twang. ‘Super poster though, look.’

  He gestured at the lime-green playbills dotted around the foyer. Standing between a bright red, italicised script proclaiming Trout Island Theatre Presents the World Premiere of a Major New Musical, stood a highly saturated photograph of a group of uniformed firemen bearing aloft a plumpish besequinned woman. Two of the men, positioned on the far edges, held hoses that gushed at an unfortunate angle. The words SET ME ON FIRE! blazed across the poster in flame-serifed capitals and James and Betty’s names featured prominently over the remaining space.

  ‘Lovely,’ chorused Marcus and Lara.

  ‘It’s by a very gifted kid at the local high school.’ James sighed. ‘There’s such a lot of talent in this community, just waiting to be unlocked,’ he added, popping a blue corn tortilla chip into his mouth. ‘It’s part of our mission here.’

  Bella pulled on Lara’s skirt. ‘Mum, I’m really tired.’

  ‘And our Scottish Play is gonna rock the world, now we’ve got our main man.’ James winked at Marcus. ‘I always said we’d do it again one day, didn’t I?’

  ‘James directed me in the Scottish Play back at drama school,’ Marcus turned to explain to his family, who knew this already.

  ‘And the beard’s coming on nicely,’ James said, running his hand along Marcus’s bristled cheek. ‘What does it feel like, having such a man for a father, kids?’

  Lara leaned her weight once more on to Olly’s foot as she heard him shudder.

  ‘Where’s Cyril Bear, Mummy?’ Jack said, tugging her finger.

  ‘He’s in the car.’

  ‘I want him …’ he whined.

  Lara was dizzy with fatigue. She wanted the day over and done with so she could get on with starting afresh in the morning.

  ‘So!’ James said, picking up on their mood, clapping his hands in the air. ‘Wayland family. You look pooped. Let me take you to your quarters.’

  Taking Marcus by the hand, he led them out of the building, towards his little sports car, dwarfed in front of their own monolithic vehicle.

  ‘I don’t think I’m going to be able to stick him for six weeks,’ Olly grumbled to Lara. She turned and saw that, from the look on his face, he was serious.

  And Olly, she knew, was not to be messed with.

  Three

  JACK’S DESPERATE FIGHT FOR BREATH PULLED LARA FROM THE SLEEP that had, until that point, totally claimed her. She found him struggling next to her on the double bed trying to get air into his lungs and coughing with a noise like an extended death rattle, louder even than Marcus’s snoring on the other side of her.

  Jumping out of bed, she scooped Jack up while at the same time struggling with the odd twisty knob on the bedside light. She rushed him over to where his bag was on the floor and rummaged in it for his inhaler.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ Marcus heaved himself to sitting on the creaky bed.

  ‘Must be the dust,’ Lara said as she gave Jack five blasts of Ventolin. While Marcus watched, she rubbed the little boy’s back until his breathing had calmed to normal, then she fed him an antihistamine pill and bundled him into the bed.

  ‘Are you all right now, Jacky?’ she asked, leaning over him.

  ‘He’s fine,’ Marcus said. ‘What he needs is sleep.’

  You mean what you need is sleep, Lara thought as she settled back down to the useless remainder of the night, where instead of sleeping she would be listening out for every change in Jack’s breathing.

  All too soon, a stifling morning light filled the room. Lara couldn’t lie there any longer. She checked Jack’s chest before extricating herself from the tangle of his sticky limbs and leaving him in a sweaty, sheety heap next to Marcus. She fumbled on the floor for her clothes from the day before, then tiptoed down the dusty wooden staircase, across a hallway with an unspeakably filthy carpet to the large living space below they had only glimpsed the night before.

  So, she thought, looking around her, this was to be their home for the summer. James had told them the night before that it was an unnoccupied house, newly donated by its well-wishing owner, for the theatre company to house actors in lieu of anything approaching pay. He had made it abundantly clear that the Waylands, being a whole family attached to just one actor, were getting special treatment in having the place to themselves.

  A far cry from the gleaming American domestic interiors she knew from TV, the sparsely furnished house was devoid of any of the overstuffed comfort she had been e
xpecting, and a layer of grime covered everything.

  Something British in her was pleased by this.

  Walking through a vast living room with the same footprint of her entire house back in Brighton, Lara realised what she had assumed to be a rug on the floor was in fact a painted, faux-Persian floorcloth. The antique bookcase leaning against the sloping wood-panelled wall was actually made from MDF, broken down to appear aged. Around the edges of the room stood an assortment of sofas and easy chairs running the historical style gamut from Shakespeare to Ibsen, with a Tennessee Williams side table thrown in for a twentieth-century touch. And wasn’t that sixties circular bamboo chair slightly Pinteresque? Lara smiled. James and Betty had furnished the house with spare set dressings.

  Three large windows looked out over a shabby but bucolic scene of green meadows, large, leafy trees and peeling Greek Revival houses. The house smelled of damp and something else, almost like nutmeg – sweet but faintly rotten. Lara tried to open one of the windows to let fresh air into the dusty fug, but, probably during the cold winter months, some idiot had applied thick paint around the sashes, gluing them tightly shut.

  She moved on straight through an arch to the large, linoleum-floored kitchen.

  What she noticed first was the blue vase holding the two dozen red roses. Their scent leached into the hot room. A nice touch, Lara thought.

  Tea was what she craved, but she couldn’t see a pot or kettle, nor anything in the cupboards beyond some evidence of insect activity. The giant, genuinely retro fridge that stood humming and whirring in the corner was empty too, except for a light furring of mould. She tried to get the six-ringed enamel stove to work, but there didn’t appear to be any gas connected to it.

  At the far end of the kitchen, at the very back of the house, a glassed-in porch baked in the morning sun. Again, there seemed no way of getting any air in. Dead flies littered the sealed window frames and the once-white woodwork was covered with a greasy layer of dust. As she gazed at the empty, potholed car park at the back of the building, Lara tried to breathe, but her lungs felt furred up.

  Despite the heat of the room, a coldness began to percolate into her bones. What had she done, insisting they all tagged along behind Marcus to come here? Dragging her three children halfway around the world to this? She tried to take herself back to the excitement they had all felt when Marcus had got James’s email begging him to do the job. It had been Lara, in fact, who had driven forward James’s suggestion that the whole family could accompany him. She had found the money, located and booked the cheapest flights, let out their own house for the summer, sorted out the car hire. She had also worked insane hours at her local government graphic design job, combining her inflated time-off-in-lieu allowance with her entire annual leave so she could come away for six weeks and still be paid. This had been a necessary step, since, aside from the accommodation, the theatre was only paying Marcus one hundred dollars and five diner lunches a week.

  She returned to the kitchen and opened the back door, letting in air washed by the mist hanging over the grass beyond the car park. Again she caught that musky rubber-glove scent from the night before, though the damp morning diluted it. Pushing her way through the fly-screen door, she crossed a small deck and sat down, her bare legs dangling over the edge, her ankles brushing the dewy grass beneath. A light breeze filtered over her face, and she breathed in. Her eye was drawn to a shed that stood less than twenty feet from where she sat. Dangling from the eaves on the corner closest to her was a long, transparent tube full of a clear liquid, and buzzing around it were what looked like a couple of large moths. Lara hated moths, but her curiosity got the better of her and, jumping down off the deck, she padded over the hot tarmac to take a closer look.

  ‘Little birds,’ she said with delight. ‘Little tiny birds.’

  Two hummingbirds fluttered around what she saw now was a feeder full of something delicious to them. Their wings an iridescent blur, their long beaks held still among all the motion, they sipped at the liquid. Lara stood and watched, enchanted by their exoticism.

  And that was why she had brought everyone here. To see the new and, furthermore, to entertain the opportunity for change. Marcus, she hoped, was going to have his long-awaited moment of success – the first time since drama school he had played an eponymous lead. In doing so, she hoped he would rediscover a part of himself that he seemed to have discarded too many years ago. The part, she feared, she had once loved.

  She hoped it would work out for him. At first sight, the theatre didn’t seem to be quite the cultural powerhouse James had painted in the long Skype calls he and Marcus had shared in the weeks leading up to their arrival. But then she had only just glimpsed it the night before. And perhaps they did things another way over here. Perhaps different things carried different weight in America.

  No, she thought, this was going to be a brilliant summer. People would come up from New York City to see Marcus and he would land a Manhattan agent – it was much easier, he said, for an English actor to make his mark in the States. And she would leave her soul-sucking job at the council to start her own business.

  And then they would be happier than they had been for a long, long time.

  Lara looked at the little birds, busy at their nectar, and allowed herself to enjoy the anticipation.

  The slam of the fly-screen door brought her back with a start. She turned to see Jack, in his long T-shirt nightie, his eyes puffed up and pink.

  ‘My chest is all stuffy, Mummy.’

  ‘I know. Poor baby.’ She went to him and held him close. He felt hot, but then again, he had just got out of bed.

  ‘Here, do this,’ she said, standing up, holding her arms out and letting the breeze stroke her limbs. Jack did as he was bid, and they both stood for a while, smiling, enjoying the brush of the air.

  ‘I’ll get you another pill, then let’s find something to eat,’ Lara said. She tiptoed upstairs and felt around their bedroom to pick up Jack’s clothes, pills and inhaler without waking Marcus. Then the two of them crept out of the slumbering house to look for a shop. Jack insisted on sitting in his buggy, flopping in the heat in a cheap baseball cap that had come free in a rucksack supplied ‘For Kidz’ by the airline.

  They turned right and trundled along the uneven pavement away from the house. The road they were on was long and straight – called, she remembered from the directions the night before, Main Street. To her left was a grid of side streets named Third Street, Fourth Street and so on. When they got to Sixth Street, just before a vast, lawned cemetery, she realised they had reached the end of Trout Island, so they took the turning on to Sixth until they came to a junction to their left with a smaller road called Back Street.

  ‘Inventive road naming,’ Lara said to Jack, who nodded though he didn’t have the slightest idea what she was going on about.

  The houses lining the roads were mostly large, detached wooden buildings, set back on open lawns. Hills thick with trees rose almost vertically from behind the gardens of Back and Main. So far, so small-town movie set. But there was an emptiness, an eerie unkemptness to all but a few of the houses. The lawns weren’t neatly mown, and the paint on the shingles was far from fresh. Old icicle fairy lights hung from porches, abandoned toys lay in the front yards, and faded flags drooped from chipped poles on every other lawn.

  Where was everyone?

  They reached the end of Back Street and pushed on along First, past the theatre, and found themselves back on Main. They passed a couple of chapels, a closed ‘free’ library, a deserted fire station, a locked-up diner and a row of silent antique shops. Lara’s hopes rose when they got to a wooden building with a lit neon window sign declaring it to be a deli, but she tried the door and it was locked tight shut. They were nearly back at the house, and they hadn’t found a single open shop.

  ‘What will we do for breakfast, Jacky?’ Lara said. Jack shrugged. Then, just as she was about to give in, she spotted a petrol station, almost diagonally across t
he road from the house.

  Behind the empty forecourt was a sort of shack. As Lara and Jack crossed the gasoline-scented tarmac, she realised what she thought was a jet-lag-induced hallucination was in fact canned music wafting out of speakers beside each petrol pump.

  ‘Whatever will they think of next?’ she said to Jack, as she pushed open the door to the shack. The minute she smelled the bad vanilla-scented coffee and saw the riot of goods inside, she knew she had found her shop.

  ‘How ya doin’?’ a voice drawled from somewhere behind the counter. Lara peered and finally made out, camouflaged among the visual riot of doughnuts, cigarettes, coffee machines and point-of-sale displays, an overweight, middle-aged woman with multiple ear piercings, blond hair and dark black roots. Squeezed into her red uniform, she chewed her gum with an open mouth and peered into a too-small hand mirror, attempting to clean a smear of mascara from under her eye.

  ‘Um, hello,’ Lara said. ‘Do you have stuff like milk and cereals for breakfast?’

  ‘Hey, cute accent,’ the woman said. ‘Where you from?’

  ‘England.’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘We’re here for the theatre.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The theatre. Trout Island Theatre?’

  ‘Oh. OK.’ Either she couldn’t fathom Lara’s accent, or she didn’t know what she was talking about. ‘Milk’s round the back. You got all you need for breakfast over there.’ She pointed a fat finger at the middle aisle.

  Lara also picked up some cleaning stuff to tackle the mouldy fridge, a carton of orange juice and a packet of cookies, which she opened immediately, handing one to Jack. Finding no tea on offer, she consoled herself with a cup of scalding hot coffee, which, despite its plastic lid, took some carrying back to the house while pushing the buggy.

  ‘Anyone awake?’ she called once they were back inside, but there was no response. Lara was jealous of Marcus and the teenagers’ sleeping abilities. She was still firmly on British time; her body was telling her it was the middle of the afternoon, even though the clock in the shop had said it wasn’t yet nine.