by Stephen May
We are back at The Limes, under the covers and back making good use of the facilities. We are showered, we are drinking tea and we are watching live poker on the TV. We are getting the maximum bang for our forty-five bucks. We are still full of the roast vegetable soup Max had made. We are quite drunk on very decent wine. If I am careful not to think about anything – anything at all – then I could be content, at least for this moment.
Lulu’s leg is under the bed. Taking her prosthesis off had been the first thing on her mind when we’d got in. She’d told me how she was only meant to wear it for six hours at a stretch and she’d gone more like twenty-eight hours and it was bloody agony now. But she’d bathed her leg, and rubbed some special ointment into the knee with its neatly stitched scar. I’d told her the thing Anne had told me about a scar being stronger than skin. Lulu had smiled.
‘That, Mr Chadwick, is a very true thing,’ she’d said.
So now we are watching TV. We are both in t-shirts and underwear, bodies not touching, though I’m very aware that Lulu is only centimetres away. The heat of her. The pulsing energy of her.
With her eyes still on the screen, she says, ‘I wonder what Jake is up to now?’
It’s not a real question, she doesn’t need me to answer. I don’t say anything, but if I had to guess I’d say he would be trying to fuck someone or fight someone.
She says, ‘When I was young I was so flattered when men approached me, when they desired me, but then…’ She drifts into silence. On the screen a young woman wins fifty grand and receives it with the merest ghost of a rueful smile.
‘But then?’
‘But then you find men are led by their cocks and that those cocks are blind with no morals or discernment whatsoever. So you have to be fastidious about the cocks you let into your life. You have to apply high standards, stringent checks. You have to make them work hard for everything.’
I think it’s interesting that the word ‘cocks’ doesn’t qualify as an unimaginative swear word. We let another hand go by.
‘It’s okay. I won’t make a pass at you, Lulu.’
‘You see that’s what I’ve come to know about you, Mark. You’re lazy. You rein yourself in. Hold yourself back. You don’t throw yourself into life. There’s not enough fire in your belly. Because, actually, old chum, you should make a pass at me. I’m a passionate woman. I’m a passionate, attractive, newly single woman. We’re on a bed in a cheap hotel. We’re drunk, we’re clean, we’re not wearing many clothes. You should be trying to snog me, you should be trying to get into my knickers.’
‘Oh, right.’
‘We’d kiss for a bit, touch each other up for a bit and after a while I’d decide if I wanted to take things further. I probably would, knowing me.’
‘I’m very tired, Lulu. I’d like to get going early tomorrow.’
‘And you’re very much in love with your wife.’
‘Yes, yes I think I am. Sorry.’
‘Don’t be sorry. It’s nice. I guess. Though I don’t think being with one person forever is going to be my thing.’
‘You think monogamy is a failed experiment?’
She turns towards me. Christ, she’s stunning. ‘I think that’s it exactly. A failed experiment.’
We watch another poker hand. The young woman is on fire, she scoops the pool. A million quid. Still she hardly reacts. A brief smile, a wink to someone in the crowd, handshakes for her opponents, all of them men in early middle age. They smile, but they want to murder her. They must do.
‘My name’s not Lulu by the way.’
‘No?’
‘No. It’s Lorraine.’ She takes a slow breath. ‘The leg wasn’t a shark: it was cancer. Just boring old cancer.’ Her voice is stretched, tight. ‘After the op I decided that cancer would be the last boring thing that I ever allowed to happen to me. Now tell me about the terrible thing you did.’
But I can’t. I’m still not ready for that story. But there’s another story I can tell. I take a long breath of the room’s antiseptic, lemony air. I wet my throat with tepid tea.
‘It was a stupid row,’ I say. ‘Eve was sick and we didn’t know.’
51
Eve in her room playing the same two chords over and over on her electric guitar. It’s a Gibson Les Paul Junior with a P-90 pickup. The same guitar the bloke from The Clash used, bought for her by her dad for twenty-five quid off a bloke that came in the pub. She is driving everyone mad as she tries to write a song about how the whole world is weighing her down. But it’s just a song, just teenage angst in minor chords – not worth taking seriously.
Her mum was shouting. Eve should be helping in the pub. She should be doing banter with the sad fat men. She didn’t want to, she thought her brother should take a turn.
‘He’s studying!’ hollered their Mum. ‘He’s got exams. He’s going to Cambridge.’
‘Yeah, right,’ said Eve.
Along the landing from all the yelling, her brother felt bad for a second. Because he was not studying. He was reading The Day of the Triffids – for maybe the fourth time – and it was on no exam syllabus, just a good, fun read, but he was into it and didn’t feel like moving and if his mum believed he was working, well why should he enlighten her? He felt lazy and for once he was going to give in to it.
Outside his room, the row between mother and daughter escalates until Eve is NOT going to that party she was so desperate to go to and her mother DOESN’T CARE if all her mates are going. It’s TOUGH. She should have THOUGHT OF THAT before she started getting so BLOODY LIPPY.
The shouting gets so annoying that the brother can’t stand it and puts the book away – he can’t concentrate on it any more anyway – and comes out onto the landing to shout that it’s okay, he’ll do Eve’s shift but his mum tells him it’s TOO LATE, Eve has MADE HER BED and NOW SHE CAN BLOODY LIE ON IT.
So the brother – Mark – went out instead, and by the Rec he met Ali Beswick, a pretty, tiny pixie of a girl, one of Eve’s best mates. He explained the situation to her.
‘That’s crap,’ said Ali.
‘Parents. What can you do?’ he said.
‘Yeah, they’re all mad. All beyond help,’ said Ali and they smiled at each other and now somehow the brother was going to the party and he spent a few hours there, drinking warm cider from big plastic bottles and going through the record collection of the people whose house it is. They had pretty good taste.
He was quite happy doing that. He didn’t need to talk to anyone. He pulled out a copy of the second Scott Walker album, the subject of a retrospective in The Sunday Times magazine only that week. They called it a seminal work, made him feel he should seek it out. He wondered if they’d miss it.
Ali introduced him to a skinny, beaky kid called Andy Shreeve and after he’d drifted away she told him that he was brilliant at chess, played in a league, and oh, also, his sister had a massive crush on him.
Really? Mark looked harder at this Andy Shreeve as he danced with rather too much concentration and vigour to some generic indie pop – Ride? Inspiral Carpets? – he seemed all elbows and knees to Mark. He looked like some kind of wading bird. A chess-playing flamingo maybe.
Time passed and when he decided to go, he looked for Ali Beswick to say goodbye. When he couldn’t find her he was told by one of the other kids that she was last seen disappearing together with Andy Shreeve into one of the bedrooms.
The kid leered, ‘Do you think he’s passing on some tips about the classic openings.’
This kid was a short-arse in an ugly grey jumper that made him look like he was wearing school uniform. He had a very punchable face. Mark thought about lumping him. Didn’t. Instead he walked out of the house without saying anything else.
He felt no surprise at Andy Shreeve’s behaviour and he knew it was dumb to feel pissed off at him. It was hardly the boy’s fault if Eve had a thing for him. But he was depressed by Ali, though he knew he shouldn’t be. These kids were only fifteen – babies really – and all
’s fair when it comes to making out. Why should you be all hands off just because you know your best mate fancies the same chess prodigy that you do?
When he got home the pub was quiet. The last of the regulars had rolled off home and his mum was wiping tables. She looked weary, defeated, bloody knackered. She was wearing the face that the punters never saw. He asked how the battle with Eve ended.
‘Oh she piped down in the end. I think she put her headphones on.’
‘Maybe you were a bit harsh Mum.’
‘I know. But she’s maddening, that girl.’
‘She’s at a difficult age.’
‘We’re all at difficult ages, son. That doesn’t ever stop.’
Mark popped his head into Eve’s room. She wasn’t there. He sniffed the air which was a pungent syrup of tobacco, joss sticks and booze. On the table next to the bed squatted a half-empty bottle of three-star Napoleon brandy. It made him smile. She’d gone for the good stuff, the stuff no customer in the Blue Pig ever asked for.
He could see the notebook on her desk, a couple of verses of her song. It wasn’t finished, being mostly crossings-out and scrawled second thoughts. He read a few lines. It was all blood and darkness. Rain on flayed skin. Hearts and bones and tombstones. He couldn’t decide whether it was any good or not. Anyway, lyrics without music are always half-formed things. Limbless creatures. Flightless birds.
He didn’t notice the letter under the notebook. That mad letter that talked about becoming a bird, a cat, a butterfly. Of watching over them all.
He walked the few steps to the bathroom. Knocked softly.
‘Hey, hey Sis.’
There was no answer. He knocked again and still there was no reply. Still sulking, or maybe she had her phones on even in the bathroom. It was possible. No one loved music as much as Eve.
I find I have to stop then. There’s a pain in my heart, another in my head and sudden liquid heat behind my eyelids.
‘You don’t have to tell me any more if you don’t want to,’ says Lulu.
But I do. I tell her about going back to my room, about listening to the stolen album of songs of Scott Walker.
I tell her about the panicked banging on my bedroom door just as side one comes to a finish. I tell her about joining forces with my red-faced and yelling father to knock the bathroom door in. I tell her about my sister’s pale body lying in cool pinkish water. I tell her about my mother’s unbearable screaming, a sound no one should ever have to hear.
I tell her about my own unnatural calm. The calm I still can’t forgive myself for.
I tell her how I made the redundant call for the ambulance, how I went back into Eve’s room, found the fucking stupid letter and also the little bottles of the pills that no one knew she was taking, the pills that were meant to keep her afloat through those teenage years when the news commits violence to your heart, when the small betrayals of friends cut deep, when everyday pressures can feel like they are crushing the very life out of you.
‘What the bloody hell are those?’ said my dad, his voice shaking.
I tell Lulu about the strange limbo afterwards, about life picking itself up after a fashion, dusting itself down in a dazed kind of way and dragging itself forward towards the old rhythm of opening times and closing times and barrels that need changing. Crisps. The Eazyzap.
I tell her how I somehow staggered on zombie-like, lurching towards exams and towards Cambridge. How, once I was there, I discovered love at the same time as I discovered someone to blame for my sister’s death. Actually met the guy who was responsible. Who might have been responsible anyway. Sort of. Maybe she could imagine how that did my brain in.
After a moment I tell her about how I see Eve now, see her all the time, every day in the faces of my children. Sometimes in the faces of other people’s children, and sometimes in the look of any bright-eyed girl on the streets. That I see her in the faces of schoolgirls and prostitutes and policewomen and in the defiant eyes of those rare office workers who will meet your eyes on the Tube. The ones you know are fighting hard not to be ground down by admin systems and senior management.
I tell her how, even when there’s no one around, I can still sometimes feel her presence in the air. The crushed petal smell of the hair gel she used, the sudden song of a laugh just like hers, that these things can have me staring round me, wondering where she might be hiding. That sometimes, I see her in the birds, in the cats, in the fucking squirrels. I’ll be the voice in the wind, the bird on your window sill that seems strangely tame.
I tell her all of that. Then I stop and listen to the dark.
‘Hey,’ she says. ‘Hey, you’re allowed to be heartbroken. Everyone’s allowed that.’
52
We don’t talk much on the way to Cambridge. At Lulu’s request, I’m doing the driving today, sticking to B-roads because we are fairly certain Jake will have given the car’s registration number to the police.
We have the radio on. Radio One. It’s comforting. The DJs are inane in a peculiarly English way. I don’t know any of their names – I haven’t listened to Radio One since the days of Simon Bates and DLT – but they are in the tradition I recognise from when I was a nipper. A bit flirty, a bit saucily hyperactive, a bit laddish – especially the women – but sweet really, somehow kid-next-doorish. Unthreatening is what they are, and the music is easy enough to daydream over.
Lulu is restless however. ‘How can you stand driving on these mickey mouse roads?’ she says. And later, ‘Flip, the places some people get to live.’
She means places like Boxford and Cavendish and Clare – places that radiate a sense of quiet superiority, with their ancient pink-washed houses, their farmers’ markets, their cheese shops. Their smug signs welcoming us to their village and asking us to drive carefully.
Stebbing Bardfield has a sign reading ‘500 years of creativity’ as you drive in.
‘I bet that is such a lie,’ says Lulu. ‘I bet it’s 480 years of growing turnips and twenty years of artisan bread and designing websites. And all that please drive carefully through our village stuff. What’s so special about their blinking village? What are we meant to say “Oh, gee, thanks for reminding me, I was about to put my foot down, but now I won’t”? Are we allowed to drive as fast as we like through shitty places? Makes me sick.’
‘There are some nice houses around here, huh?’
She laughs. ‘Yes there are. And yes, I’m quite jealous. I must be getting old. I didn’t used to care about houses.’
The miles crawl by. Hedges and fields and roadkill. We let the DJ burble to the nation about her hangover for a while, before Lulu reaches forward and snaps her off, replacing her with some hardcore hip-hop. At least I assume it’s hardcore. It feels like it to me. It’s like being assaulted. It’s like being in the centre of a riot in a Bronx nightclub. Like being beaten round the head by baseball bats made from the bones of dead jazz drummers. I quite like it. Or at least, I like the contrast between the sounds inside the car and the feudal agrarian world outside the windows.
Just audible under the music, the satnav’s chilly, vaguely S&M schoolmarm tone is directing me to bear left and then bear right on the B1179.
Lulu is asleep. She has the experienced traveller’s knack of falling asleep anywhere at any time and I think about maybe not going back to Selwyn Gardens. Maybe I don’t have to do that.
I think about a room in a shared house, a cash-in-hand job in a pub in a big city. Not London obviously but somewhere an ordinary person could afford to live. Birmingham maybe. It’s coming up in the world. Or Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds, Newcastle, Glasgow. Somewhere like that.
Or maybe I could get an old camper van and simply drift from lay-by to campsite to car park. I could make a living doing the gardens of old ladies in villages like the ones we’re driving through. Maybe I could keep up with the kids on the net, through emails, through digital files of all kinds. Some careful skyping. Surely it’s never been easier to be an absent father and still
be a presence in the lives of your children?
Or maybe it would actually be kinder to vanish altogether. Maybe, in time, I could have a new wife, new children even. It’s not an unattractive notion, is it? Just rip everything up and start again.
I think now about all the times I meant to sit down and work out a proper plan. To get myself a refuge, somewhere to run to should the need arise. To quietly rent a static caravan in a part of the world where I’m not known. Didn’t even have to be a caravan, could have been a garage even. An allotment with a shed on would have been something.
I could have got a false ID. I’d actually researched it once. Found out how you get the birth certificate of a baby that’s died, how you present it as your own, use it to open bank accounts, get passports, driving licences, mortgages. There was even an easy way to get a new national insurance number though I can’t remember the details.
Somehow I just didn’t get around to it and the years passed the way years do, as did the terrifying dreams. Italy helped with that of course. And Katy.
Italy and Katy worked on me together until I recovered enough to come back and finish my degree. Little things at first: cheap wine, slow sex. Days spent talking about nothing important. Lots of laughing at Italian soap operas. The days when Katy knew I couldn’t laugh, when the TV had to go off. The way she knew when a row about politics was exactly what we needed. The day she showed me you could cook omelettes without oil and still get them out of the pan intact if you were quick and skilful. The time she took off all her clothes at midnight on a Tuscan beach. The day I realised she only cried at the happy parts of movies: the lover returns, the family is mended, the abandoned boy/girl/alien doesn’t die, but gets to go home instead.
Later, back in England, there were the miracles of our children of course, but Katy’s qualities hit me at other, more unexpected times too. When Jack challenged her to bottle flip and she did it first time. The parents’ evening when, bored with waiting for Mrs Baptiste to finish with the family before us, she climbed the rope that hung in the primary school hall. So many moments like this. Katy, Jack, Ella, I owe them everything. Then I wonder if maybe I owe them leaving them alone