by John Marrs
Dougie’s parents treated me like a part-time son. My place was set at the dining room table regardless of my presence. My sleeping bag remained on a camp bed in Dougie’s bedroom and they’d even bought me my own toothbrush and facecloth. All the Reynolds children were encouraged to invite their friends over, and their house resembled a youth club with the number of children passing through its doors. But I believe Elaine took a special shine to me.
As an only child, I was fascinated by the unfamiliar world of sibling relationships – how they played, learned and fought with each other. They taught me the definition of family. But watching them also bred resentment in me towards my father. The head of Dougie’s house was not a ghost of a man too overtly consumed with his louche wife to notice his own neglected son.
I questioned what was missing in my father’s make-up that rendered him unable to keep hold of Doreen. Why didn’t she love him like Elaine loved her husband? What did he lack that drove my mother into the arms of other men? He lacked nothing, of course. My negativity merely masked what I felt were my own failings as her son. I knew the man who offered me as much as he could also had his limitations. So what I couldn’t get from him, I stole from the Reynoldses.
But the most important lesson I learned from spending time with them came years later. And it was that, if you scratch the surface of something perfect, you’ll always find something rotten hidden beneath.
1 September
While neither Bradley nor I trespassed too far into each other’s pasts, my gut instinct was that he was a reliable sort. My history was as irrelevant to me as it was to anyone else, so I would never have voluntarily revealed my true colours to him.
Such aloofness was a self-defence mechanism born out of bad experiences. Because the more you trust in someone, the more opportunities you give them to shatter your illusions about them. But as much as I cared to think of myself as a solitary unit – and as much as it was against my better judgement – I still needed a Dougie Reynolds in my life. Bradley came close to filling that vacancy.
It was during a lock-in at the village pub a decade earlier, and with several pints of Guinness loosening our lips, that Dougie had revealed the disease running through his family. Out of the blue, he confessed his father was a violent wife-beater who regularly knocked the living daylights out of Elaine.
Sometimes he’d hone his skills in front of his family, but for the most part, he kept his hobby behind the bedroom door. Dougie explained it was why she had encouraged his friends to spend time at their house. Because if left alone, some minor incident would likely occur and inspire Dougie Senior to hurt her again. Our friendship offered them a temporary stay of execution. He’d used me.
I masked my ever-increasing dismay while he tearfully recalled his family’s swift departure from Scotland. Elaine had been attacked so badly that she’d been hospitalised for a fortnight – her husband’s lightning-bolt blows broke her jaw and five ribs. Instead of offering their support to Elaine, Dougie Senior’s colleagues encouraged her not to press charges against one of their own, and offered them a fresh start elsewhere.
But my disappointment wasn’t directed at the culprit – it was towards his son. Dougie had urged me to buy into his idyllic home, knowing full well what it had meant to me. Any sympathy or understanding he should have expected as a result of his disclosure was greeted by stone-faced, silent selfishness instead. The snow globe in which I’d placed the Reynoldses had been shaken so vigorously, the contents would never settle again. He’d cheated me out of the only stability I had known. Ignorance was bliss, and I’d liked bliss.
I was also disappointed with Elaine’s failure to remove herself from the side of a sadist. At least my mother had had the strength to leave us for a reason, no matter how weak it was. Elaine had plenty of them but she’d stayed and she’d lied, like all women do.
Eventually, Dougie must have read my expressionless face and realised my lack of compassion meant he’d confided in the wrong friend. So the conversation petered out, was brushed under the carpet and never discussed again.
Years later, I learned Dougie wasn’t all he seemed, either. If I allowed myself the opportunity to know Bradley better, he’d probably disappoint me too, so I kept him at arm’s length. It was better to remain on my island than drown in somebody else’s sea.
7 October
‘He’s dead, man. Shit.’
Bradley gently rolled Darren’s rigid body onto his back. He lay there with his eyes clammed shut. His forehead was as pale as a frosty morning and just as cold.
‘He certainly is,’ I sighed, then pulled a patchwork blanket up over his bare chest and covered the face devoid of expression. ‘He looks quite peaceful. It doesn’t look like he suffered.’
‘My grandpa looked the same when he died of a heart attack in his sleep. Good way to go, right? Bet that’s what happened to our guy. Better call the doc, then.’ Bradley picked himself up and walked towards the reception’s payphone.
With my eyes fixed on my friend’s movements, my hands darted under the dead man’s bed to find his backpack. I relied on touch to open the metal fasteners and fumbled around until I found my prize. I crammed it into my pocket just as Bradley hung up the receiver and turned around.
‘Doc’s on his way,’ he shouted.
Darren Glasper had appeared on our doorstep a month or so before his sudden demise. Our hostel was cheerful and – most importantly for the traveller on a budget – inexpensive. And like myself, the intoxicating lure of the town’s unfettered, relaxed anonymity was all it took to persuade Darren to remain there longer than first planned.
He told me over supper one night that, as the youngest of a family of eight, his motivation was to discover his own identity away from those who’d shaped it. At first, he’d succumbed to family convention by leaving school and becoming immersed in an unrewarding career in Sheffield’s steel mills and foundries. But Darren craved more than a lifetime of manual labour in a job he despised. So, to his loved ones’ surprise, he announced he was leaving to travel the world and educate himself, before returning home to educate others as a trainee teacher.
Despite his family’s inevitable attempts to persuade him he was being foolish, he upped and left. Nevertheless, he beamed with pride when he spoke of them, and the wall behind his bunk bed was plastered with family photographs. He’d arranged them like a protective halo around his head and introduced me to them one by one. They all looked so much like one another – even, somehow, his parents.
Summer was a fertile period for the hostel and it had been filled to bursting with guests. However, the closing days of the season were quieter and allowed the building to loosen its belt and exhale. It gave me space to sink my teeth into my renovation work, and Darren and others were more than willing to act as my labourers.
He’d been afforded a four-bedroom dormitory to himself, but when neither Bradley nor I had seen him that day, his lack of presence concerned us.
At some point, Darren had checked out of the world he was so keen to be a part of.
The town’s doctor arrived within the hour to officially pronounce him dead from a suspected heart attack. I’d joined Darren’s smiling family in keeping his body company while we awaited the police and an ambulance to take him to the morgue for an autopsy.
I wondered how his family’s lives would be affected by his death. I pitied them when I realised they’d probably never come to terms with being robbed of the opportunity to say goodbye to a son and brother, or apologise to him for arguing against his wanderlust.
For a moment, I contemplated how Catherine had coped when I too had followed my heart. But my thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of two officers, so I left the room and wandered into the courtyard for a cigarette.
Alone, I put my hand into my pocket and removed Darren’s passport. His need to leave his old world behind would live on through me. I was enjoying my time at the hostel, using it as a place of redemption and healing. But I knew I’
d develop itchy feet when I eventually finished my project. And possessing no passport or international identification meant that leaving for fresh pastures would be problematic. But not now.
Darren and I shared similar almond-shaped eyes, hairstyle and facial bone structure. A cursory glance at his passport’s photograph confirmed that. As long as I avoided a razor for a couple of weeks, I’d match his light beard and gain the potential to explore wherever I liked.
The moral issues raised by assuming the identity of a man who’d yet to be laid out on a mortician’s slab were complex – so I put them aside. No other issues presented themselves, especially as I alone knew that Darren had lost his wallet in Algeria. Without his passport, there would be no speedy way of tracking down his relatives.
I told the police his Christian name and his nationality and left them to fill in the blanks. It would buy me time. I stubbed out my cigarette and returned to the building to watch in respectful silence as his body was stretchered away.
Darren and I were both freer from those who’d held us back than we’d ever been before.
Northampton, today
9.50 a.m.
‘When did I ever hold you back?’ Catherine roared. ‘How dare you! I did nothing but support you and encourage you. I believed in you!’
As each new revelation fell from his lips, her mood darkened, shade by shade, until all she saw was black. She questioned whether the man sitting before her was indeed the same one who’d promised to love her until death do they part so long ago. It looked like him; it sounded like him. Even his mannerisms remained, like the way he absent-mindedly scratched the print of his thumb with his middle finger. Or when he tapped his bottom lip to mask his anxiety.
But she heard no one she recognised in his recollections of his life after discarding his family. Had it really been in him all along to live without a conscience? How could she have failed to recognise such deplorable deceit and opportunism in him? Her love really had been blind.
‘And you stole a dead man’s passport?’ she continued, perplexed. ‘That’s deplorable.’
He shuffled uncomfortably in his seat, like the devil was poking him with a pitchfork. ‘It’s not something I’m proud of, but I did what I had to do. I had no choice.’
She drew deeply from a reservoir of anger. ‘Oh, here we go again with those bloody words. You had no choice. Please, spare me. It was the children and I who had no choice, no choice but to carry on trying to live without you. No choice but to do all we could to try and find you.’
‘In all honesty, I didn’t expect you to be so persistent. I hoped you’d give up after a few weeks.’
‘But that’s what love is, Simon. It’s never giving up on the person you’ve given your heart to. It’s having faith that no matter how tough things get, that person will always be looking for you.’
She shook her head at her own stupidity in dedicating so much time trying to find a man who’d long left the country. They stared at each other until she stopped waiting for him to defend himself. Her victory felt hollow.
He wasn’t ready to explain in full why he, her husband, the stranger, had suddenly elbowed his way back into her life. It wasn’t a revelation he could suddenly blurt out or casually slip into the conversation. He had to make clear to her why he had made his choices before he could reveal the role she’d played in pushing him away.
Only then, when she realised her culpability, could he drop the first of his bombshells. Otherwise all she would hear when it detonated was the deafening sound of the truth ricocheting around the room. She would not pause to reflect, and his appearance would be over as quickly as it began.
For her part, his refusal to answer even her most basic of questions frustrated her. She deserved to know the truth – all of the truth. But against her better judgement, she also had a growing curiosity as to just how he’d filled his ocean of time.
She hoped he’d lived a miserable, depressing existence filled with regret, longing and woe. But none of that was evident in the suntanned, healthy-looking man who’d invaded her home. And all she’d heard so far were his thinly disguised boasts of a much better life abroad – without her.
He rose to his feet and made his way over to the French doors in the dining room to look over the garden he’d once toiled to shape. The corners of his mouth rose when he spotted the patio where they’d spent many long evenings planning their future. He hadn’t thought about those nights in years, and for a moment, he acknowledged there had been good times after all.
She’d since had a brick barbecue built and a wooden pagoda erected, where bright green grapevines hung. He knew from experience they’d never make a decent wine. A child’s yellow plastic bike was propped up against a crab-apple tree he’d planted in the corner by the firs. He wondered where and who the bike’s owner was.
‘I am glad you kept our house,’ he said softly.
‘My house,’ she corrected quickly. ‘It’s my house. And I nearly lost it because of you.’
CHAPTER SIX
CATHERINE
Northampton, twenty-five years earlier
14 October
‘You bloody idiot,’ I muttered.
My heart had sunk when I’d read the letter. Eight weeks was all we had left in our home before the bank repossessed it. I’d been ignoring the stack of brown envelopes addressed to Simon and crammed them into the kitchen drawer, out of sight and out of mind. And I hadn’t given any thought to checking the balance in our account.
Money wasn’t something I’d ever needed to take responsibility for. I’d been more than happy to let him deal with our finances. I’d presumed he’d make sure we were okay, and as long as we kept a roof over our heads that was all that mattered. Silly old me.
So I’d only known there was a problem when the first cheque bounced. It rebounded off the doormat and back into my hand a few days after I gave it to a petrol station cashier. Two more soon tumbled through the letterbox from our gas and electricity suppliers.
But it wasn’t until my debit card was declined at the supermarket checkout that I knew I had to pull my red face out of the sand to see just how much trouble I was in. The fridge was almost bare, and the only food we had was waiting to be paid for in an abandoned trolley.
So I plucked up the courage to look at the bank statement and, through squinted eyes, regretted it straight away. I was up to my neck in an emergency overdraft I hadn’t known had been activated. Simon’s wages had always covered the utilities, but there was never much left to siphon off into a rainy-day account.
He and Steven had agreed that until the firm reached a certain profit, they’d only pay themselves a basic sum. But now, with only half the work being done, Steven had barely enough to cover his own expenses, let alone mine. There was little in the way of spare cash, and certainly not enough to survive a drought. And after three months of natural erosion, the reservoir was dry.
Despite the turmoil it had seen, our house was as much a part of the family as the people who lived under its roof. But unless my fairy godmother waved her magic wand, we were going to lose it.
I wasn’t stupid. I loved a little gossip as much as the next person. So I knew many people in the village were talking about me. I’d see them looking away when they spotted me in the street, unsure of what to say. I heard whispers at the school gates from the other mums. I had my suspicions they thought Simon had walked out on me, only because I’d have probably thought the same thing if I was them.
So I played my rumoured ‘abandoned wife’ status to my advantage and pleaded ignorance to my debts during an appointment with our bank manager. I even felt a twinge of guilt when I turned on the waterworks in his office with surprising ease to prove how hard I was finding it to cope. But it worked.
He offered me a further eight-week stay of execution, giving me a total of four months to climb out of arrears before his hands became tied and we lost our home. I could have kissed him, but instead I skulked back home, ashamed of how I’d let
things slide. Then I decamped into the dining room and faced the reality of my money woes on a table littered with old statements and red letters. A bottle of wine gave me support as I watched figures on reams of pages twirl around like whirling dervishes, daring me to take a closer look at the mischief they’d created while I was distracted. Eventually, I calculated my outgoings were triple my incomings. No matter where I thought I could make some savings, the debts were still going to mount up.
The fact that Simon had, as far as the authorities were aware, not actually died but gone AWOL made it much harder to claim welfare support. I’d slipped into a grey area that wasn’t recognised by black-and-white regulations. I wouldn’t receive a widow’s allowance, as there was no proof he was dead, and I’d not been ‘actively seeking work’, so I couldn’t claim unemployment benefits. I was allowed family support, but that fortnightly payment didn’t stretch far. I was caught between a rock and a hard place.
Frustrated, I poured myself another drink while my eyes filled up faster than the glass. I was both angry with him for leaving me like this and at myself for being in denial. Something had to change. It was time to remove myself from my pity party and start being the breadwinner.
I began by selling the family car I rarely used, then reluctantly pawning my jewellery, including my gorgeous wedding and engagement rings. Never in all our years together had I taken either of them off. Not even when we’d spent all our waking hours glossing doors and staining floorboards or lifting concrete slabs. If I scuffed my rings, it didn’t matter – they’d be reminders of what we’d built together. Even when four pregnancies made my fingers puffy, they remained where I could see them at all times. Now Simon’s disappearance had made them the saddest objects I owned. The only thing stopping another round of tears was the knowledge that when we found him, I’d be able to buy them back.