The Race

by Nina Allan

  I thought that if Tim didn’t believe my story I might die. Or just stop, like the old Mickey Mouse alarm clock I’d had since I was six and that suddenly and inexplicably gave up working.

  Mickey now stood permanently lopsided at twenty past five.

  I knew I should throw the clock away but I couldn’t bear to.

  I put on my red sweatshirt and brushed down my hair and went to have supper with Tim and his parents to celebrate Tim getting into Oxford. Tim’s parents were both teachers. They spoke to Tim as if he were their equal, a person who lived in their house with them and who they liked very much. The place was full of books, books everywhere.

  “Will you be going to college next year too, Christy?” said Bella Leverson. She was a nice woman, with curling reddish hair and protuberant eyes.

  “Of course she will,” Tim said. “She’s going to read History.”

  Tim sounded different when he was with his parents, more confident and just a tiny bit full of himself. After supper we went up to his large room in the attic and Tim put on a new record he had, an album by The Smiths that he kept calling radical. We lay on his bed and kissed, then Tim slid his hand down the front of my jeans. I lay very still and held my breath. I suppose I was waiting for him to start turning into Derek. Luckily it didn’t happen. I let myself drift. There was a spider on the ceiling, just a small one, over in one corner. I fixed my eyes on it, its eight tiny limbs spread out like the points of a star, and tried to imagine the room from its perspective.

  A kingdom of wonders and monsters. A raucous unstoppable din of electric light.

  ~*~

  Tim wrote to me from Jesus just as he’d promised and then he stopped. I imagined he had met someone else, someone brilliant, or at least less of a psychological disaster area. I kept on writing to him for a while as if nothing had happened, then I stopped too. It was winter by then, early December. I kept remembering how much my mother had hated the long dark evenings, the curtains already drawn at four o’clock, the town’s steep pavements slippery with rain. She used to say that winter was like being in prison. For the first time in ages I found myself wondering where she was now and if she was happy. It felt like trying to push open the door to another country.

  You are too stupid, I thought. Too stupid to get into Oxford. That’s why he’s stopped writing. What else did you expect?

  I ached inside, but I couldn’t cry. It was as if my chest and throat were choked with stones.

  ~*~

  Then a couple of days before Christmas, Monica told me she was going to break up with Derek.

  “He’s so possessive, Chris,” she said. “He thinks he owns me. It’s not normal. I don’t know how to deal with it any more.”

  Her revelation made me unhappy. Having Monica around had brought a sense of rhythm and normality back into our lives – if she left us there was always the chance that Derek would go off the rails again. Plus I knew I would miss her. I didn’t want her to go.

  “Do you have to?” I said.

  “I’m sorry, Chris. It might make a difference if he really loved me but he doesn’t. I don’t think Derek could love anyone, not properly, he isn’t capable of it. It needn’t make any difference to us though, we can still keep in touch. I’ll want to know how those exams go, for a start.”

  “Aren’t you going to wait till after Christmas?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t do that, it wouldn’t be fair. Now that I’ve made my decision I have to tell him.”

  Dad was ill by then – he had cancer. Jake Hom the Saturday boy had agreed to go full time, but even so Derek was working flat out, doing twelve-hour shifts sometimes. He was pretty knackered. He needed more help really, but he was trying to keep going until the New Year before hiring someone. Taking on new staff over Christmas would cost a packet, he said. He had five days off over the holiday period and I knew he was looking forward to having a break.

  He’d booked a table, for the four of us including Monica, at the Royal Victoria. When Monica dropped her bombshell I remember thinking: that’s it now, we won’t be going, bang goes Christmas. I didn’t care about Christmas, not really, but it was one more thing. I stomped down hard on my toes to keep myself from crying. It felt like Cindy Rogers all over again.

  “When are you going to tell him?” I asked Monica.

  “Tonight,” she said. “As soon as he gets in.”

  We stopped talking about it after that. Monica fixed us some cheese and pickle sandwiches and we took them up to my room to watch TV. I tried to pretend everything was normal, even though I knew it wasn’t. I tried not to think this might be the last time, but I couldn’t help it. It was as if Monica had become less solid, less really there. In the end I was just wishing it would soon be over.

  Derek came in around seven. Monica glanced at me knowingly and then went downstairs. Nothing happened at first. I could hear her moving around the kitchen, making him supper, sausage and bacon probably, and the sound of them chatting. Every now and then one of them laughed.

  I turned up the volume on the TV and began to eat my way through the rest of the box of chocolates Monica had bought for us, Thornton’s Continental, which she knew were my favourite. There was a celebrity quiz show on the BBC, and after that an Agatha Christie film, set in a grand hotel somewhere in Devon. About half way through I realised I’d seen the film before with Derek, or some of it anyway. I couldn’t remember how the film ended though, and I supposed that Derek had done his usual and switched it off the moment he got bored.

  Derek thought Agatha Christie murder movies were pointless and tame.

  “All those posh gits walled up together,” he said. “The only mystery that wants solving is who I’d shoot first.”

  I didn’t say so but I thought he was wrong. There was always something comforting about Agatha Christie. Even though someone had to get murdered there was something Christmassy about it.

  When the film finished I turned off the television and went downstairs. Since his illness Dad lived down there, mainly – he’d taken over the side room, so he could be closer to the kitchen and have his own bathroom. There was a light showing under his door, and I could hear the faint murmuring of the chat show that had come on after the Agatha Christie. Aside from that the house was quiet. The kitchen lay in darkness. I was expecting to find the room in chaos but when I switched on the light I found the washing up had all been done and everything cleared away. There was a broken plate in the waste bin but that was all.

  There was no sign of Monica, or Derek. When I checked out the front for Derek’s van I found it was gone.

  Perhaps they made up, I thought. Or perhaps she never told him, after all.

  Derek came in around six the following morning then left again almost immediately to go to a job. He brought home Chinese takeaway that evening as he sometimes would. He didn’t mention Monica at all.

  On Christmas day Derek and our father and I all dressed up the best we could manage and drove over to have our lunch at the Royal Victoria. Derek was in a good mood. He drank a bottle and a half of Cava and for a while I was afraid he might turn nasty but apart from throwing up in Dad’s bathroom when we got back he was mostly okay.

  Dad didn’t eat much but he had a few drinks. None of us wanted to admit how ill he looked.

  ~*~

  I gave up my job at the flower shop straight after Christmas. I wrote a letter to Diane, telling her I needed to concentrate on my exams, but really it was because I didn’t want to risk running into Monica. I was embarrassed I suppose. I somehow knew she wouldn’t keep her promise to stay in touch with me and she didn’t. It was as if she’d vanished from the Earth altogether. I missed her a lot at first but in the end I got used to it. When I wasn’t in school I mostly stayed in my room, reading and doing my school work and writing my journal. The idea of going to college had started to scare me shitless but I clung to it anyway, I suppose because I knew there was no alternative.

  For my History exam I wrote an es
say about Lady Jane Grey. I wrote that Jane was disliked by the men at court because she was well educated and held strong opinions. They thought she was dangerous, so they had her beheaded. She was only sixteen when she died, younger than I was. I found the thought very upsetting. I put that down, too.

  I became so involved in writing the essay that by the time the three hours were up I’d almost forgotten I was sitting an exam. When I arrived home, Dad was asleep in his room and Derek was out on a job. Neither of them remembered it was an exam day. When my results came through in August I wrote Monica a note, sealed it inside an envelope and posted it through the letterbox of the house that Monica lived in on Braybrooke Road. I never received a reply though, and a week before I was due to enrol at college a For Sale sign went up outside.

  Monica was now as gone as my mother. I made myself forget her after that.

  Derek seemed to avoid me after Monica left, which was okay by me. A couple of days before I left for London, he asked me if I needed any help moving my stuff.

  “We can go in the van, if you want,” he said.

  I told him there was no need.

  “It’s only one suitcase,” I said. “I’ll be fine on the train.”

  He seemed relieved, and it was as if he wanted me to be gone every bit as much as I wanted to go. On the morning of my departure he presented me with a new laptop computer in an expensive carrying case.

  “You’re bound to need one,” he said. “I chose this model because it has an extra-long battery life.”

  I’d never owned a computer before and I was chuffed to have it. I embraced Derek awkwardly, the first time we’d physically touched in several months. I tried to remember how long it had been since we’d sat out on the shed roof together, watching the cats and smoking Dad’s Marlboros and talking nonsense in the purple twilight. I wondered if he was sorry for what he’d done to me, if he ever thought about it even. He was my brother and I felt I should have known these things, but they were questions I found impossible to answer, or to ask.

  I felt sick and sad and desperate to get away.

  ~*~

  Most of the rooms in halls were reserved for overseas students, so I had to find digs elsewhere. A woman I’d spoken to in the student accommodation office sent me a list of flats and bedsits within a reasonable distance of the college, and I chose the one that looked most affordable, a room in a family home between New Cross and Peckham. The room was in an extension that led off the kitchen, which made it separate from the family’s main living space and so a bit more private. There was a toilet and a tiny shower cubicle, also a two-ring hob for cooking on, although Lana Sobel said I was welcome to use the main kitchen whenever I wanted to. Lana Sobel was a physiotherapist at Guy’s Hospital. Conrad Sobel worked at Heathrow Airport, though I never discovered exactly what he did there. Their two sons, Abel and Curtis, were twenty and twenty-one years old. With their broad shoulders and big grins they seemed to immediately fill any room they entered. They came and went at random intervals, usually accompanied by one or other of a succession of girlfriends.

  All the Sobels laughed a lot. At the weekends Lana would cook up huge quantities of jambalaya and a Jamaican dish called jerk chicken and they would have friends over. Their parties often went on into the small hours. I envied the family’s easy habit of being together, and wished I could find a way of being more like them, but their noisy openness unnerved me and I felt unable to emulate it. I thought of the Queen’s Road house very much as their domain, and came and went from my tiny corner of it as quietly and unobtrusively as I could. None of them was ever unfriendly towards me, but I had the feeling they thought I was rather standoffish.

  I liked being in London almost immediately. I liked the tall terraces and odd little shops, the dusty plane trees that flanked both sides of Lewisham Way. Also I felt safe there because nobody noticed me or cared who I was. I felt nervous about starting the course though. Getting to and from the South Bank campus was no problem, as buses ran up from New Cross Road to London Bridge every ten minutes. My worry was that I wouldn’t be good enough, or that I would make a fool of myself in front of the other students, who like the Sobels seemed already noisily at ease with communal living. I was fascinated by their casual intimacy, their instant dismissal of any person or subject they considered as dull.

  Things became easier after I met Robyn Duschamps. Robyn was studying Economics, but she was taking some of the History modules, which was how I met her. Robyn’s parents were divorced, and she referred to them by their first names, Sara and Eugene. Eugene Duschamps was originally from Haiti. Sara, like Conrad Sobel, was from Jamaica. Robyn had dark brown skin and pitch black, kinky hair which she wore scraped back from her face in a red rubber band. The thing about Robyn was that she never seemed to give a damn what people thought of her. She was clever and never tried to hide it. When after a couple of weeks of knowing her I asked her if she’d read through an essay I was writing on Matilda of England she said it was excellent and that I should get serious about my writing.

  “What do you mean, get serious?” I said.

  “I mean you should stop being afraid of getting stuff wrong and put your arse on the line. Say it how it is, how you see it. You have an unusual way of looking at things, Christy. Hasn’t anyone ever told you that before?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, you have.”

  I wasn’t sure whether to believe her or not, but Robyn seemed to have an opinion on everything and she wasn’t shy of letting people know it. I remembered Miss Wisbech, the way she’d come up to me in the corridor that time and said she thought I might enjoy reading Doris Lessing. I could imagine Robyn and Miss Wisbech getting on like a house on fire.

  I wondered what Robyn would think of my Sapphire journals, if I were to let her see them, of the stories I told myself about an imaginary town. They were an unusual way of looking at things, definitely. I wondered if Robyn would think they qualified as telling it like it is.

  ~*~

  I would have preferred to stay on in London over Christmas, but Lana Sobel told me she had guests arriving for the holidays and that I had to be out of my room from December 19th until just after New Year.

  “You can leave your stuff, that’s fine,” she said. “It’s just my brother and his wife in your room, they won’t hurt a thing.”

  I dreaded returning to Hastings. I hadn’t been in contact with Derek all term, except to tell him I’d be home for Christmas. I had no idea how things would be there. The first surprise was Derek himself, who seemed so chatty and so cheerful I barely recognised him. The second was that he had a new girlfriend. You didn’t have to be a mastermind to see the two were connected.

  “Hey, Sis,” Derek said. “This is Linda. We just got engaged.”

  They were sitting side by side at the kitchen table. They both had mugs of coffee in front of them, and I noticed they were looking at property details, those print-offs of houses for sale you get given by estate agents. Derek never called me Sis, for a start, but I didn’t dwell on the weirdness of that just then, because most of my attention was focussed on Linda.

  Linda had the same very fine, pale hair as Monica, but instead of wearing it short and cut close to her head she had it long, almost down to her waist. She had that white, kind of blotting paper skin you can see all the veins through. Her forehead bulged outwards slightly, fixing her with a look of almost permanent anxiety. She was very skinny, and there was something otherworldly about her. She was one of those women you absolutely cannot help staring at.

  If Derek had told me she was a visiting member of an alien race I might even have believed him.

  Linda was a dancer. She taught modern dance and ballet at a private studio in St Leonards. I think she and Derek met in a bar, though I don’t know for sure. I could see at once that Derek was smitten, and I mean seriously. The way he looked at her, it was as if he had an engine running inside him and I knew it meant trouble. When I first saw Linda sitting there next
to Derek at our kitchen table the image that sprang to my mind was of the porcelain ballerina in the china cabinet at Charlotte House, the pretty glazed ornament that Derek had said was Capodimonte.

  I remembered the way Derek had cradled the figurine between his hands, the tense excitement in his eyes as he gazed at her.

  When Derek said they were engaged I thought he was joking. Then I saw the ring on Linda’s finger, a cluster of diamonds and pearls, intricate and delicate, like the sweet-scented alyssum flowers in our backyard that forced their way up through cracks in the concrete in early summer. It was a beautiful piece of jewellery, an antique – I knew Derek would never have bought anything from a high street jeweller.

  The ring suited Linda’s hand perfectly.

  “It’s lovely to meet you,” I said.

  Linda smiled, and I realised she was nervous. More nervous than I was, probably.

  “We’re selling the house,” Derek said. He drew the various sheets of property details towards him across the table and began sorting them into a pile. “We want to get somewhere together, somewhere decent. This place is fucked.”

  “What about Dad?” I said. It was the only question I could think of that felt safe to ask.

  “Dad? He’ll come with us, of course. There’ll be plenty of room for you too, obviously.”

  He spoke impatiently, as if my questions were irrelevant, a minor annoyance. I was in college now anyway, and both of us knew Dad wouldn’t live much longer. The news of the move should have pleased me but it didn’t. I felt there was too much riding on it. I also didn’t like the nervy, all-or-nothing way Derek was behaving.

  “When’s this supposed to be happening?” I looked directly at Linda as I spoke, hoping to get some kind of reaction out of her, but once again it was Derek who answered.

  “We’ll be putting the house on the market at the end of January. Dad’s agreed.”