by Luke Allnutt
“Rob, look at me. You’re not just having an extra whiskey at night. You think I don’t notice the vodka bottles? Sometimes you can hardly stand when I get home from work. And you wet yourself the other night on the sofa.”
I thought I had covered it up, invented some excuse that I had spilled a drink, but perhaps she had seen me, or noticed my wet boxers in the wash.
“What are you talking about? I told you, I spilled a drink.”
“Jesus, Rob, I saw you. I came down in the night to check you were okay, and you had wet yourself. I saw it with my own eyes.”
A blush of shame, and then anger. Wet yourself. It was how you would speak to a child. She was loving this, her chance to humiliate me, rubbing my nose in it.
She sighed and then chewed her lip a little, as if she was contemplating something.
“You probably don’t remember what you did the other day, do you?”
“I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”
“You came home drunk, and you were stumbling and then you went into the backyard and urinated all over my flowers.”
I felt a strange sense of relief, as I had expected worse. I smiled, more out of nerves than anything else.
“You think it’s funny, Rob?”
I shrugged and looked away from her.
“It was my sunflowers, Rob. My sunflowers.”
The significance, the cruel symbolism of what I had done began to sink in. But what of it? What did it matter now? The sunflowers would be dead soon enough. They would be gone, their remains ground into the unforgiving soil.
“And you’re so perfect, Anna.”
She shook her head and sighed. “Of course I’m not perfect, God, far from it.” Then she knelt next to me and put her hand on my chest. “Rob, I’m not telling you all this to shame you. I take no pleasure in this. I think you have a problem, and I just want to help you.” It reminded me of her mother, how she spoke to the strays she was trying to save.
“It’s a shame you didn’t want to help Jack.”
“What?”
“You heard.”
Outside I could hear the caw and scratch of a magpie walking across the patio.
She stood up so she was now standing over me. “How can you say that, how can you even think that?” She started to cry, and I reached for my vodka and poured myself a glass. Could I tell her? Could I tell her now? That I thought about it every day. What if, what if? What if Nev and Dr. Sladkovsky had been right about Jack? Because Nev knew better than anyone how to save a life—in Josh, he had living proof. But Anna refused to listen, thought she knew best.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I can’t just pretend it’s not there. I know you don’t want to hear it, but it’s the truth, whether you like it or not. Jack had a chance, yes, a small chance. But it was something. It was all he had.”
Anna took a deep, resigned breath and dabbed her eyes with a tissue. “Rob, I’m not going to argue about it again. But can I ask you something? Do you not think that I don’t think about it? That I don’t lie awake at night, thinking that perhaps it would have made a difference, that maybe I made the wrong decision?”
I shrugged, drank my vodka.
“Well, I do, every day if you must know,” Anna said, her voice cracking.
“You should,” I muttered under my breath.
“What did you say?” Anna said. I looked away from her, like a sulking child.
“No, go on, tell me what you said,” she said, jabbing at me with her fingers. “If you’re such a big man.”
“I said you should. You should feel guilty about it.”
Suddenly, Anna grabbed the bottle of vodka and quickly walked into the kitchen. I jumped up off the sofa, stubbing my toe on the coffee table, and ran after her, skidding on the kitchen tiles and crashing into the fridge. She opened the cap of the vodka and held it over the sink.
“Please, Anna, please give me the bottle back.”
Her chest and face were bright red, and she spoke through clenched teeth, her words a whispered hiss. “That was a disgusting thing to say. The most disgusting thing you have ever said to me. How dare you judge me. How dare you! Your father would be ashamed of you. Ashamed, Rob, because you’re half the man he was.”
I grabbed the vodka from Anna, but the bottle slipped out of my hand and smashed onto the kitchen floor. We watched as the vodka spread across the tiles, the splinters of glass sparkling in the afternoon sun.
Anna said her words with such poise, such clarity, I knew they must be true. “I hate you, Rob,” she said. “I fucking hate you.”
* * *
Maybe this was the booze talking, but you think you know a person, though you never really do. You bury the bad things, keep them out of sight. I remembered the first time I noticed Anna’s coldness. A group email she had sent after her family dog had died, just after we had moved to London. A eulogy that was so awkward, so unfeeling, it was as if she had only sent the email out of a sense of duty, because she thought, in those circumstances, that was what one did.
I saw that coldness again, a few times over the years. Her curt and final “we were never that close” after her grandmother died. Her insistence that she would never give money to beggars, because there were charities for that. While her lack of empathy sometimes bothered me, it was mitigated by the fact that it wasn’t ever directed at me.
Anna’s intransigence. The rules are there for a reason. That’s what she always said. The rules are there for a reason. Because in Anna’s world, there was a proper way of doing things. You didn’t cheat on your tax return, or even try to get out of a parking ticket, because what if everyone did that? You didn’t sneak in to watch a second movie in the theater, when you had only paid for one. You didn’t go to unregistered cancer clinics in the Czech Republic, even if it meant your dying son would be given a chance.
I cleaned up the broken glass in the kitchen and got another bottle of vodka from my backpack. Through the French windows, I could see Anna in the backyard. She was frantically digging in the flower beds with a spade. I watched her as she bent down, scooped out soil with a trowel and flung it over her shoulder.
* * *
“Can we talk?” Anna was dressed for work, in pinstripes, her hair tied back. It was two or three days since we had argued, and we had barely spoken. I nodded, confused, unable to remember what happened last night. There was a large purple bruise on my forearm.
“I made you a coffee,” she said, placing a mug on the table.
“Thanks.”
“I wanted to speak to you now, while you’re sober.” She took a deep breath. “I can’t do this anymore, and I’m leaving.”
I did not feel anger but a sense of relief. Relief that I wouldn’t have to hide my bottles anymore, that I could sit here in the living room and drink in peace.
“Okay,” I said.
“We should work out what we’re going to do with everything,” she said, “but let’s do it through lawyers. I can’t deal with that right now.”
“Okay,” I said, and Anna bit her lip as if she had something she wanted to say but couldn’t. I lay on the sofa and heard her carry a suitcase downstairs and then quietly close the front door.
* * *
Six weeks later, after I had drunk through our wine collection and our drinks’ cabinet, I left. I couldn’t be in that house anymore. There was nothing left; Anna had taken everything. No little shoes by the door, no dinosaurs or Lego for me to trip on in the hall. I could no longer hear the sound of Jack’s songs as he sat in the bath or hear his little feet padding up the stairs.
I put our furniture and the things Anna hadn’t taken into storage. The movers took my stuff to the rented house in Cornwall, a place I had chosen because it seemed suitably remote and I had been there on holiday as a child.
On the day that I left, when all the furn
iture was gone, I had one last drink, sitting on the floor in the empty kitchen. I finished my glass of vodka and then filled up my Diet Coke bottle for the train. Just before I left, I went into the sunroom to check that the French windows were locked. As I was looking out over the backyard for the last time, I noticed it. A third sunflower swaying in the wind.
Part Three
1
The rain soaks through my trouser legs as I make my way through the long grass toward the back of Hampstead Cemetery. To get to Jack’s plot, from the entrance by the church, there is a shortcut through the oldest part of the site. The gravestones here are ramshackle, resting at oblique angles, battered by the wind; the grass is overgrown.
My shoes are caked with mud but I trudge on, leaning a little into the wind. There is always one grave that catches my eye, where I have to stop and stand still for a moment. A little girl carved into stone, tortuously thin and covering her face, as if she is hiding from death itself.
As I approach Jack’s grave, I stand behind an ash tree, which always seems incongruous in company, as if it should be standing alone on a Winnie the Pooh hill, waiting for lightning to strike. I peek out from behind the tree to see if Anna is here, but the graveyard is empty. I know she comes here, because sometimes there are flowers.
Jack’s is a small headstone, not upright, but horizontal.
Jack Coates
10th August 2008 ‒ 20th January 2015
Sunshine passes, shadows fall
Love and memory outlast them all
I did not like the inscription. I thought it was trite, but Anna said we had to have something. It reminded me of the condolence cards we had received, with their platitudes, their empty sentiments. Besides, I had not wanted a grave. A grave was to accept that he was gone.
It has become a monthly ritual to come here, to get the early train before dawn and to return to Cornwall around dusk. I crouch down and scrape away some leaves from the gravestone, but the wind instantly blows them back. I sit on the ground for a while, shivering in the rain, drinking from my hip flask.
I check my watch. Even though it is early, I do not want to risk meeting Anna. I kiss my hand and touch the stone lightly with my fingers and then head back to the entrance on the pebble paths, this time avoiding the long grass. There is a greater chance of meeting Anna like this, but it is wet, I am cold and I want to find a café to have some breakfast, where I can sit and wait for the pub to open.
* * *
After a sandwich in a coffee shop, I go to The Ship, the pub I used to come to with Scott. I plug my laptop into the wall and log on to the Wi-Fi, and start working on some code. I have been working for Marc, the programmer in Brussels who Scott hired. The work is boring, but it pays the bills. I work for a couple of hours, drinking pint after pint, and by the time I leave, I am drunk, unsteady on my feet. I do not want to go up our old street, so I go the long way around, trudging up past the ponds on the other side of the heath. The words “we own the sky” come into my head, as they always do when I’m alone, and I whisper them to myself with each step as I walk up the hill. “We own the sky, we own the sky.”
At the top of Parliament Hill, I put my backpack on the ground, take a long drink from my hip flask and look out across London. The sky threatens in the distance, a callous, unfeeling wall of cloud. The heath is desolate. Just the occasional caw of a crow, hustling like grave diggers, flying from tree to garbage can to tree.
When the tripod and camera are calibrated, I take the first shot, down toward the Highgate ponds. The view is pastoral, a little England, houses nestled on the hill, the village spire of St. Anne’s peeping above the trees. Even though I used to come up here with Jack, I have never taken a panorama from Parliament Hill.
I have been busy recently. We Own the Sky has been nominated for a photography award, so I have been taking more and more panoramas, traveling around the country, going farther afield. The Seven Sisters, Three Cliffs Bay, the Cheddar Gorge. Sometimes I drive, but mostly I take the train, traveling in first class, drinking Kronenbourg and vodka in the dining car. There is something cathartic about it, something that keeps me going. Visiting the places we went together; writing my messages to Jack in the sky.
I slowly move the camera around, as the hills give way to the city, and suddenly there is Canary Wharf, like a fortress, surrounded by its chunky minions. I rotate the camera for another shot, capturing the Gherkin and then the Shard, rising above the skyline like a stalagmite.
* * *
I am standing under the departure board at Paddington Station, when I see someone who looks familiar. It takes me a while, a flash of recognition, a feeling that we have met somewhere before, perhaps one of the women I have chatted with online.
I am just trying to place her, thinking that she looks rather Bohemian, a refined artiness, like a rich gallery owner, when she catches my eye. It is then that I realize it is Lola.
There is a second moment when we consider pretending that we haven’t seen each other, that it was nothing more than the curious meeting of two strangers’ eyes. But there is something that propels me toward her.
“Hello, Lola,” I say and as I speak I realize I am slurring my words.
“Oh, hey, Rob. Wow, what a surprise,” she says.
“How are you?” I say. “It’s been a while.”
“Yes, wow, it really has,” she says, flustered. “I was at some opening last night. Bit of a late one.”
She is exactly as I remember, the impression of creative chaos she so carefully nurtured, the tone and lilt of her voice, which always sounded like an air-kiss.
“And how are you, Rob?” she said, emphasizing the word you.
“Fine,” I say.
“What are you up to then?”
“Just getting a train.”
“No, silly-billy. I mean generally.”
“Oh, nothing much. I’m living down in Cornwall now.”
“Yes, Anna said.”
“So you’re still friends?”
“Yes, of course. Why wouldn’t we be?”
I know I am not making much sense and I suddenly feel very drunk, like a teenager coming home and having to pretend they are sober.
“We live close by now, in Gerrards Cross,” Lola says.
Gerrards Cross? I know it can only mean one thing: that Anna has remarried. I can imagine her living with an older man, divorced, teenage kids from a previous marriage.
“That’s nice,” I say, and I want to ask about Anna but I don’t know how.
“Are you okay, Rob?”
“Yes, I’m fine,” I say, speaking slowly and trying to enunciate each syllable.
“Have you been sick?”
“What?” I look down at my jacket, and there are little flecks of what looks like vomit. I try to think back and realize I can’t remember leaving Parliament Hill, or even how I got to Paddington.
Lola smiles at me, as if I am a rescue puppy she is rejecting. “Anna said you were struggling a little with the...”
She doesn’t finish her sentence, but she doesn’t have to. I know Anna will have told her everything, given her side: how I kidnapped Jack, put him at risk. How I’m a drunk. I’m sure she hasn’t told Lola about what happened in Prague, how she refused to allow our son the treatment that could have saved his life. How instead of giving him a chance, she did word searches and read crime novels.
I am just about to say something, to tell her to go and fuck herself, when I drop my wallet and loose change spills on to the ground. I bend down to try to pick it up, but I stumble and my knees buckle and then I am lying on my back, looking up at the station roof.
I can feel Lola next to me, her arms around my shoulders, trying to help me stand up, but I can’t see straight, can’t seem to coordinate my arms and legs. So I stop and sit for a while, my head bowed, until finally I manage t
o stagger up and weave my way across the platform to the train.
* * *
My jacket is wet, I think from where I have tried to clean off the vomit in the bathroom, and I am carrying a bottle of wine and a grocery bag full of beers. I find a seat and sit back and stretch out my legs, watching the blurry skyline rush by.
I have Googled Anna from time to time, but there has never been any indication that she has remarried. She had taken up marathon running. I couldn’t believe it at first. After our aborted game of squash, it was a standing joke between us that Anna had no interest in sports. But when I clicked on the link, it was Anna, all right. Anna in a running singlet pictured in a local Buckinghamshire newspaper, getting third place in a charity fun-run. I remember the headline: ‘Brave Mum Runs for Her Son.’”
Once, when I was drunk, I unsuccessfully tried to hack into her email and Facebook accounts, using every password combination I could imagine. I should have known better. Anna was always so careful about such things.
I wake. We are now a few miles past Exeter, following the path of the estuary, and I have spilled wine on the table and a couple near me have moved seats, glaring, tut-tutting as they go. The train emerges from a tunnel, and suddenly we lose sight of land and we are thrown out to sea, the train traveling so close to the shore it feels like we are tilting, then falling, into a giant pool of sea and sky.
I take out Jack’s camera from my bag and look through his photos. The brilliant white lighthouse on the walk to Durdle Door; a blurry shot of his favorite robin; his makeshift panorama from the terrace in Greece. Anna might have cleared out his room, taken his things to the dump, but she wasn’t having the camera. I made sure of that. I snuck it away from his bedside the day that he died, and I have never let it out of my sight.
I pass out, I think, with Jack’s camera in my hand. When I wake, I see that I have missed my station and there is a damp stain spreading across my crotch. The alcohol is making me horny, and I think about getting out at the next station and trying to get to Tintagel to find the girl from the pub, but it is too late now, so I search on Facebook for Lola, squinting so I can see straight, and I find a picture of her wearing a wrap on a beach, coral in her hair. I try to click through her photos, hoping to find a shot of her in a bikini or a slinky cocktail dress, something I will dwell on when I get home, but all her privacy settings are closed.