Every Vow You Break

by Julia Crouch

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ Bella said.

  ‘Christ sake,’ Jack echoed, shaking his head in imitation of his big sister.

  ‘Well, that’s the last bit of help I’m going to be getting from Olly this afternoon,’ she said. ‘Do you want a lolly?’

  ‘Lolly!’ Jack replied, nodding vigorously.

  Bella slipped off her swing and lifted Jack from his.

  ‘Hey sis, you off?’ Olly yelled across the playground.

  ‘What does it look like?’ she called back. She heard the other boys snigger. ‘Don’t forget Dad wants you home by four,’ she added, hoping to bring him down a peg or two.

  ‘Whatever,’ Olly said. The sniggering grew into laughter and they all high-fived him.

  How on earth does he do it? Bella thought, bending to retrieve Jack’s buggy.

  They crossed the road and went past the theatre building. The doors were closed, but Bella could hear show music from within. Someone – it had to be James – shouted ‘AND one and two and three AND one.’ Then he clapped his hands and yelled, ‘No, no, NO!’

  A large version of the awful poster for the musical had been pasted on a board outside. Bella looked at her watch. She had kept it on British time, so she had to do a couple of calculations before she worked out they had exactly two hours before the show began.

  ‘Sounds like a bag of shite,’ she said to Jack.

  ‘Bag of shite,’ he giggled.

  ‘Wash your mouth out young man. Do you want to get into the buggy?’

  ‘No,’ Jack said. ‘I want my lolly.’

  So, very slowly, stopping to inspect every ant and cricket that crossed their path, they headed off in search of a lolly. They reached Main Street, which was, as ever, deserted. To their left stood a small fire station. Bella wondered if its proximity to the theatre had anything to do with the choice of subject matter for the musical. It was staffed, a sign proclaimed, by volunteers drawn from the Trout Island Community, although there didn’t appear to be anyone around at the moment. So when the siren went off for real, Bella imagined, people would pour out of all the houses, pulling on yellow coats and hats, slinging their axes and life-saving equipment over their shoulders, like in a movie.

  Despite the lack of cars on the road, Bella decided to cross at what looked like a zebra crossing in front of a clapboard church whose noticeboard proclaimed in stuck-on plastic letters: For the road to heaven, turn right and go straight.

  Yeah, right, Bella thought, taking Jack’s hand and stepping off the kerb. Out of the blue, a dun-coloured car appeared on the road. Perhaps it was because it was a similar colour to the tarmac or perhaps it was because she hadn’t heard the engine over the ever-present electric hum of the cicadas, but Bella just didn’t see it until she and Jack were on the road. Confident it would stop – she was on a zebra crossing – she carried on leading Jack across, but the driver blasted the horn and sped straight at them, showing no sign of slowing down. Bella only just managed to snatch Jack out of its path.

  The driver – invisible behind tinted glass – let the car window down just enough to stick an arm out, extend a middle finger and yell ‘Asshole!’ before roaring away. It was a gravelly voice, one that had no doubt seen too many cigarettes, but it was unmistakably the voice of a woman.

  ‘Blimey,’ Bella said. ‘You OK, Jack?’

  Jack nodded, speechless.

  ‘Perhaps the zebra crossings aren’t the same here as back home.’

  Looking both ways this time, she led him across the road and they mounted the steps to the steep pavement some five feet higher than the other side.

  The path was uneven and cracked, pushed up by roots from giant trees in the front gardens lining the road. Bella was glad Jack had decided to walk and she didn’t have to negotiate this surface with the buggy. She held tightly on to him in case he toppled over.

  They went on, past the library and a couple of junk shops, including one that seemed to have some interesting old clothes in it. Bella noted it for a future visit, perhaps with her mother. Another, shoddier shop had a badly painted sign declaring it to be a ‘Consignment Store’, whatever that was. On its veranda was a selection of sit-in toddler toys, a grubby playpen and a forlorn Wendy house, so old and scruffy they didn’t divert Jack for one second from his lolly quest.

  Bella made a mental note of all of this for the photo essay she was going to make about Trout Island. She wished she had remembered to bring out her camera. The house was close enough for her to run back and get it, but it was so hot, and she had Jack, and it all seemed too complicated. She was actually completely exhausted. If it weren’t for her watch calculations she’d have no idea of the time of day, whether it was morning or evening. This feeling, of being on the very edge of being stoned, was jet lag, she supposed. She didn’t much like it.

  ‘Look, Bella. Lollies!’ Jack had spotted an ice-cream poster stuck to the inside of the next shop window. A mangled dump of a place, its woodwork was dirty and unpainted, but it had a sign that read ‘deli’ in an incongruous red neon scrawl above its door. The word brought to Bella’s mind some little boutique in the North Laine of Brighton selling eye-wateringly expensive Parma ham and buffalo mozzarella. When she went in, she found that, inside as well as out, this deli was a rather different proposition. Down one side of the long, dark and dusty shop was a vast chill cabinet sparsely populated with plasticky hams and great, rectangular blocks of cheese. The floor was taken up by five long shelves with packets of non-perishable foodstuffs dotted around them.

  ‘How you doing?’ A voice came from the gloom behind the counter.

  Bella couldn’t make out if it was male or female. As her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness after the scorching sunlight outside, sight of the person who had spoken made her none the wiser.

  ‘Fine thank you,’ Bella said. ‘How are you?’

  ‘I’m good,’ the person said, inclining his or her head and smiling on one side of his or her mouth. Bella decided it must be a girl, probably about her own age.

  ‘Do you have ice lollies?’ she asked.

  The girl guffawed like a leaky tap with an airlock. ‘Do I have what now?’ she said, once she had recovered her breath.

  ‘Ice lollies. You know.’ Bella mimed licking something.

  ‘Popsicles, you mean.’ The girl spoke to her as if she were backward. ‘Where you from with that accent?’

  ‘England.’

  ‘You that English family with the theatre? Staying in the Larssen place?’ The girl made a face on the word Larssen.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Word gets around.’

  ‘I told her,’ a voice came from somewhere even further inside the store. Then the speaker emerged from behind one of the dusty shelves, his arms full of Diet Coke bottles.

  He was the most beautiful boy Bella had ever seen.

  ‘You must be Bella, right?’ he said, leaning against the end of the shelf, his blue, blue eyes on her.

  ‘Yes,’ Bella said, hoping the blush she could feel wouldn’t show on her heat-reddened face, while at the same time wishing her face wasn’t quite so heat-reddened.

  ‘I’m Sean,’ he said, putting his load down on to the counter and extending his hand. ‘I’m an intern at the theatre, helping James. Sent out to get supplies.’ He nodded at the bottles.

  ‘Hi,’ Bella said, almost jumping at the shock of static that passed between them as they shook hands. For a moment, she hung suspended by his gaze.

  ‘Lolly!’ Jack said, pulling at Bella’s skirt.

  ‘Hey little guy, let me help you out there.’ Sean led them over to an ancient freezer with sliding doors in the top. Then he lifted Jack up so he could choose his treat. ‘You just got here, right?’ he turned and said to Bella. She wasn’t sure, but was he blushing too?

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Here. Trout Island.’

  ‘It seems nice. A bit quiet …’


  ‘Things usually hot up once the show’s on.’

  ‘I want that one!’ Jack said, pointing to a box out of his reach, deep within the bowels of the freezer.

  ‘Right you are,’ Sean said. He put him down and reached for the chosen treat. As he bent forward, Bella noticed the clean waistband of his underwear just showing above his belt, and a sweep of smooth, brown skin beneath the hem of his T-shirt.

  ‘Have you come up from New York City?’ Bella said, twirling a strand of hair around her forefinger.

  The girl leaned over her counter at the other side of the shop and snorted. ‘He wishes! He’s lived here all his life! Ain’t ya, Sean?’

  ‘I’m afraid I have,’ he said, handing Jack a lolly almost as big as his head. ‘But I’ve been to other places. Unlike some people I could mention around here, Charlotte,’ he said, leading them back to the counter to pay. Jack held his prize aloft like a light sabre.

  ‘That’s Charley to you, faggot,’ the girl said, not unpleasantly.

  ‘You’ll have to forgive my friend,’ Sean said. ‘She’s a little overfamiliar, what with us going to school together for twelve years.’

  ‘The two class weirdos. That’ll be one fifty to you, sir. You got five dollars,’ Charley said, taking the bill Bella had handed to Jack, who always insisted on paying.

  ‘You coming to the party tonight?’ Sean asked.

  Bella nodded. Her stomach flipped over.

  ‘There’s your change,’ Charley said, handing it over with her eyebrows raised so high they almost disappeared into her short, spiky fringe.

  ‘See you tonight,’ Sean said, touching Bella lightly on the shoulder as she left.

  ‘Sure,’ she said.

  And all of a sudden, Trout Island looked a little more interesting.

  Ten

  LARA TRIED TO WORK ON HER BUSINESS PLAN BUT SHE COULDN’T find any conviction; it all felt to her like so many words she was making up and pulling out of thin air. Was there a point in your life, she wondered, when you were grown-up enough to have a game plan? Or did everyone blindly muddle from one thing to another like she seemed to?

  She ended up spending her precious free hour lying on the dusty sofa in the sweltering living room, one arm thrown across her eyes. She wondered if she had the energy for the evening ahead, with the show and the party afterwards. Perhaps an ibuprofen would do the trick. Or a glass of wine or two? Just to give her a bit of a perk-up? Normally she wouldn’t contemplate daytime drinking, but her body was telling her the sun was way past the yardarm in England. So perhaps, just this once, she could bend the rules.

  As she lay on the sofa, fighting the urge to get up and pour herself a drink, she also did battle with her irritation with Marcus. Apart from the bulgy dress incident, the fact he was just lying around on this, his last day off, was exasperating. She breathed in slowly, reminding herself that as well as being eleven years older than her, he was also naturally less energetic, so she should make allowances. But it was hard to imagine how it was possible to be less energetic than she felt at that particular moment and still have a pulse.

  She jumped up, steadying herself against the dizziness caused by such a quick change in position, and went through to the kitchen to pour out a tumblerful of Yellowtail Merlot from the large bottle they had failed to finish the night before. Then she returned to the dusty sofa and stretched out, enjoying the instant relief the alcohol gave to the knot of tension in her neck.

  The dashing Marcus she met seventeen years ago had been the soul of vim. He had been charming, funny, considerate, and, above all, hell-bent on having her. Seeing her beautiful daughter now, she realised what she unknowingly possessed when she was younger, and the power it must have wielded over him. Youth was surely wasted on the young, she thought.

  She had been popular among the actor drinkers at the Dirty Duck, and would often join them on the other side of the bar, after her shift had ended, for regular lock-ins. There was a lot of drinking back then. One morning, after a strenuous all-night session, one of the actors heard the Grandstand theme tune on the pub TV and came to the dreadful realisation that it was Saturday lunchtime, there was a matinée, and he, a lead, was due on stage in half an hour.

  It was a wild time.

  But Lara wasn’t like the other girls working in the town, happy to jump into bed with any of the bright young stars of the stage. Something of an arty outsider at school, she had been disdainful of the boys around her, who seemed too dull, too crashingly normal to pique her interest. As a result she came to Stratford a virgin, took her time settling into the rhythm of the place, and it wasn’t until she met Marcus that she got around to sleeping with anyone.

  Not that he was exactly a star. He was ‘playing as cast’, which meant, he said in the Indian restaurant in Stratford that was the setting for their first date, he was under contract to stay with the company for two years to do whatever roles they chose for him. So far, he had been the First Gravedigger in Hamlet and a Forester in Love’s Labours Lost.

  It was a step down in terms of parts, he said, cracking a poppadum and dipping it into some fearfully hot lime pickle. He had done a couple of leads at the Bristol Old Vic Studio, a smallish ‘but plot essential’ part in a Chekhov on the West End and an on-off stretch as a character’s wayward brother in EastEnders. But a stint at the RSC, he said, after he had recovered from the pickle with a swig of Kingfisher, would get him in there in the theatre world. He was, he was certain, beginning to make his name.

  Lara had found it all terribly exciting. His stories made her ache to be part of that world, part of his world. And, naturally and inexorably, she had fallen for him.

  If only, she thought, draining her glass and thinking about getting off the sofa to fetch another, she could get that feeling back again.

  She was just mobilising herself when the door burst open and Bella and Jack appeared. Bella looked wrecked by the heat, as melted as the ice cream slicked down Jack’s front and all around his face.

  ‘Wow, you two look like you’ve been having a bit of a time,’ Lara said, slipping her glass unseen down the side of the sofa and making a mental note to retrieve it later. ‘You’d better get cleaned up before we go.’

  ‘What time is it?’ Bella said, a hint of panic discernible in her voice.

  ‘Half three.’

  ‘Shit. Can I have a shower?’

  ‘If there’s hot water. I’m not sure how it works.’ Another question for James. ‘What about the mess you’ve got your little brother into?’

  ‘Can’t you clean him up, Mum? Please? I’ve got to get ready.’

  ‘It’s a whole hour you’ve got. What’s the rush?’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘Oh God, Mum.’ Bella turned and flounced out of the room, slamming the door behind her. Her every gesture, every drop of her exasperation, Lara recognised. At once depressing and enthralling, it was as if she were her own mother, confronting her teenage self.

  ‘What’s got into your sister, then, Jacko?’ Lara said, taking him by his sticky hand and leading him through to the kitchen sink to sluice the ice cream from him.

  Jack shrugged. ‘She’s wacko, Jacko.’

  ‘Certainly is. Did you have a nice time at the playground, then?’ she asked, peeling off his sodden filthy clothes.

  ‘Yes. I like that big boy, too,’ Jack said, shivering with pleasure as his mother rubbed a soaking wet dishcloth over his sweaty little body.

  ‘What big boy?’

  ‘He helped Bella with my lolly.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Lara. A big boy. Bella was so like herself she should have guessed without Jack having to grass her up. She lifted him out of the sink and rubbed him down with a tea towel.

  Half an hour later, after Bella had vacated the shower, Marcus disappeared into the bathroom to have, as he put it – and despite the fact that he was growing a beard – ‘a shit, shave and shampoo’.

  Lara made their b
ed, then sat on the edge of it. With Jack leaning on her leg, watching her closely, she tried to draw a straight line of kohl on her upper eyelids. Just as she thought she had succeeded, Olly burst in and made her jump, jerking her hand up into her eyebrow.

  ‘Sorry, Mum,’ Olly said. He was noisily chewing a wad of gum, his mouth open.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Lara got up to fetch a cotton wool ball from her cosmetics shelf in the side room.

  ‘I met some guys. Hey, cool wardrobe room thing.’ Olly had followed her and stood looking around. He looked far more impressed than the large cupboard warranted, and this made Lara suspicious. She turned to inspect her son.

  ‘What guys?’ she asked, peering at his bloodshot eyes. ‘And what did you do with these guys?’

  ‘Oh, you know, just hung out.’

  ‘Breathe,’ Lara said, standing on tiptoe and pulling his face down towards hers. But all she could smell was the strong mint of the gum. ‘Have you been smoking?’

  ‘Mother,’ Olly blustered. ‘However could you cast such aspersions?’

  The turn of phrase, the avoidance of an answer, Lara had seen it all before and she knew what it meant. He was stoned. She sighed and went back to the bed to fix her eye. There was no point in arguing with him about it now, but she was disappointed. That was one of her expectations of the summer dashed before it had even begun – the hope that getting Olly out of Brighton would also get him out of his daily weed habit. He didn’t know how completely she had rumbled him, but as the person who emptied his pockets of torn Rizla packets and dusty empty baggies she had a pretty clear idea what he was up to, and she had observed him closely, learning the signs.

  She had tried to talk him out of it, giving him the lectures about dope sapping his ambition and how the new forms of product were unknowable in their strength and potential to induce psychosis. All she got back from Olly though was a patronising ‘Relax Mum, I’ll grow out of it,’ and, ‘What do you expect? I’m a sixteen-year-old Brighton boy.’