by Nina Allan
What Peller hated was the fact that Alex had dared. Dared to get in his way, to insist upon his desires, desires that ran counter to those of Derek Peller. That he had dared to think he mattered, to believe he had agency.
Freaks like Peller acted alone, they were loose cannons. Heroes, or mass murderers, sometimes both.
Alex remembered the taste of blood as his face slammed into the pavement, the terror that Peller was going to start kicking him, kicking him until he fell unconscious or his kidneys ruptured.
Linda screaming, then beginning to cry, to weep like a child. The pain and then – once Peller was gone – that odd leap of excitement, the knowledge that today was no longer a day like any other.
Time had leached these events of their substance, of their bright immediacy. What remained was more elusive, grey as ash.
Alex lay awake for some time with his eyes open, the darkness soft against his limbs, like a coating of dust. He felt removed from his own world, the way he always tended to do when he was obliged to sleep in a bed that was not his own. The bed, a queen-size divan, made him think of a bunk on board a ship. The sea was rocking him back and forth, and he was returning to the harbour of his home port, a narrow, mean-minded place, rife with old rivalries and uneasy memories.
He could not call such a place home. But then where else could home be?
~*~
The following day was overcast but dry. Alex ate breakfast at the hotel. He was half hoping Trudi might be on duty, just so he could experience the pleasure of seeing a familiar face, but there was no sign of her. Instead he was served by a middle aged man with a sizeable paunch who introduced himself as Rog. The breakfast – sausage, black pudding, fried egg – was surprisingly good, and Alex found himself curious as to whether Rog had cooked it himself.
He had expected to find the dining room empty, but five out of six of the tables were occupied, by mature couples for the most part, which Alex supposed explained the quietness of the hotel the previous day.
“You’re busy at the moment, I see,” Alex said to Rog.
“We’re chocker from Easter onwards, that’s always the way.”
“Is Trudi working this morning?” Alex said.
Rog regarded him sharply. “No, she’s not. She doesn’t really work here anyway, she’s just staying with us.”
“As a guest, you mean?”
“She’s the wife’s sister. She hasn’t been well.” He began collecting Alex’s breakfast plates together, clattering them noisily in a way that seemed to suggest that the subject was closed.
“I see,” Alex said. There had been nothing funny about the exchange, yet he could feel laughter bubbling up inside him and threatening to burst free. He waited until Rog had disappeared into the kitchen then made his escape.
He was supposed to be at Christy Peller’s at twelve, which gave him time to kill. He decided he would do what he’d resolved not to do – he would go and have a look at the house where he had grown up. He suspected this had been his intention all along. The house was at the top of West Hill on Emmanuel Road, a solid Victorian terrace with a weathered front door. His parents had first rented and later purchased their two-storey maisonette from the house’s owner, a Mr Emmanuel whose surname was a strange coincidence and whose first name they never discovered. The Adeyemis had the ground floor and the first floor and the use of the garden. Mr Emmanuel lived upstairs.
“The colour of a person’s skin makes no difference to me, that’s what I say.” And indeed he did say it, so often, Alex thought, that the sentence seemed to add up to more than the sum of its parts. As a young child, Mr Emmanuel had scared him. His clothes ponged, and he had a habit of coming to the door at odd times – when he knew Marielle would be there by herself, mainly, or there with just Alex, which amounted to the same thing. Once the property was properly theirs, things were better.
Alex remembered his mother and father on the afternoon the contracts were finally exchanged, the two of them standing outside on the back lawn, clinking glasses, both their faces shining with a fierce kind of pleasure Alex had never seen there before. His mother had jumped in the air, whooping like a schoolgirl, pouring the remains of her supermarket-bought, sparkling white wine over her head as if she wanted to bathe in it.
I name this ship HMS Great Britain.
These strange sights and sounds made Alex’s heart race. He realised that what he was seeing was the birth of freedom, a version of it anyway. No need to be scared now – if you owned your own home no one could kick you out, no one could tell you to get back where you came from, because you came from here and you had papers to prove it.
For Alex the house meant freedom too, but it was also a prison. His room was at the back, overlooking the garden, and from its book-crowded, paper-strewn space it was possible to believe that the outside world of the town – of Tracy Chadwick and his friends, of the pasty-faced youths outside the Grafton pub who sniggered at him and made monkey noises when he walked by – no longer existed. He built a haven for himself in that room, a space that was so much a reflection of his own inner world that in the end the world of his room and the world of the town became so out of synch he was almost afraid to venture outside.
These memories were still painful. He hated to think that they would always be a part of him.
He stood in the road outside the house, looking up. The exterior of the terrace had been recently painted, and the whole building looked brighter, newer. He supposed Mr Emmanuel must be dead by now, the contents of his poky upstairs rooms cleared out and tipped into landfill. The thought made him shiver. He remembered the tawdry little bedsit in Devonshire Place he’d rented straight after finishing college and during the six months he’d spent working at the supermarket and going out with Linda and wondering what the hell he was supposed to be doing with his life. The flat was his own first attempt at freedom and it had failed. No matter how thoroughly he cleaned the bathroom and the greasy kitchen tiles, no matter how he arranged and rearranged his books and few possessions on the Fablon-covered shelves in the murky living room, the place steadfastly refused to become a home. It reeked, persistently and damply, of impermanence.
He thought things would improve for him in London and for a while they did. Now that home had also failed him, or rather he had failed it.
Maybe it wasn’t the place after all, so much as himself.
Alex turned his back on Emmanuel Road and began walking downhill towards Croft Road and Castle Meadow, alternately thinking about calling Janet and resolving not to. As he crossed the wide swathe of green grass on the other side of Bembrook Road he watched a man throwing a Frisbee for his dog, a brindled Staffie with a studded leather collar. The man, who was Alex’s age or thereabouts, seemed vaguely familiar and Alex supposed they had probably been at school together.
He had twin tattoos on both forearms, charging bulls.
I suppose he thinks the dog makes him look tough, Alex thought. The Frisbee swept low to the ground and the dog charged after it, clapping its jaws shut on the yellow plastic like a steel trap snapping the neck of a scurrying mouse.
“Go, Charlie!” yelled the bull-man. “Go get ‘em, Charlie-boy.” He spread his arms wide, and the dog raced back towards him, letting the Frisbee fall to the ground in its final approach. It bowled wobblingly across the grass as the dog leapt, weighty and compact as a bouncing bomb, vertically upwards into the bull-man’s outstretched arms.
The bull-man clasped the Staffie hard against his chest in a kind of rapture. The dog’s tongue flapped and lolled, caressing his cheek.
Alex felt a lump in his throat, and suddenly he was remembering Linda as he’d last seen her, begging him to go home, telling him she’d sort it out, that she’d sort it, just go.
“But the guy’s dangerous, Linda,” Alex had said. “He’s some kind of maniac. We should call the police.”
“Oh for God’s sake, don’t be stupid,” Linda said. “He’s different when he’s with me. Let me talk to him.
I’ll call you later and we can –”
She broke off to blow her nose, never finishing the sentence, never telling him what it was they could do. The delicate skin beneath her eyes was swollen from crying.
Alex left in a huff, still seething. His jealousy of Peller, for the moment at least, still monumentally greater than his love for Linda.
Had he loved Linda really, anyway? It was all so long ago. It was hard to be sure now of anything he’d felt back then. He’d had a girlfriend at school, or rather a girl friend, a friend who was a girl. Her name was Marian. She had crooked teeth and was slightly gawky but she knew what a plebiscite was and she always came top in maths, beating even Kev Stringer, who ended up winning a scholarship to Cambridge. It was Marian who first told him that Chip Delaney, author of Nova, was a black man. Alex still had no idea why nothing had happened between him and Marian, except that neither of them had the guts to make the first move. He ended up losing his virginity not to Marian but to Chloe, a girl he met in his first week at uni and before Chloe’s snooty friends had taken their chance to put her off him. Their relationship had lasted only a month or so, but after those first few fumbling, magical encounters the business of sex was never again so embarrassing or so desperate.
In his final year he met Janet Baxter. They almost got engaged then. Instead they had a massive row about one of Janet’s ex-boyfriends and split up three weeks before finals. Alex felt crushed by the break-up, which as it turned out wasn’t the end. He and Janet met again, at someone’s wedding, three years later. Six months after that they were married themselves.
He had met Linda on the rebound from that first cataclysmic break-up with Janet. Linda was beautiful and talented. Unlike many beautiful and talented people she was also kind. Alex had no idea what she saw in him. For a while he was as happy as a pig in shit, but then the trouble started. He wanted to leave town and she didn’t, they split. Three months later they were back together again but if Alex were honest with himself he knew it was doomed, even then, because their problems hadn’t changed or gone away. Also, he had no idea Linda had been involved with someone else in the interim, mainly because she never said a word to him about Derek Peller until it became impossible not to.
When Alex finally found out he was mad as fuck. Mainly because he hadn’t suspected, not for a moment. It took him a couple of weeks to work out that Linda was scared of Derek Peller and even when he did realise he felt pretty smug about it. He hoped the fear might go some way towards making Linda realise what a gigantic wanker Peller was. He didn’t take it that seriously though, not until Peller knocked him down in the street outside The Tower.
He remembered coming out of the pub with Linda. They’d been arguing a bit – about Peller, what else – then Linda started crying and Alex suddenly saw himself for the moron he was.
He was a coward and a bully. He was as bad as Derek Peller, if not worse.
“I don’t give a shit about that arsehole,” he said suddenly. “All I care about is you and me.”
He put his arm around Linda’s shoulders and she leaned in close. They started walking back down the road towards Linda’s flat. Alex felt a peculiar lightness overtaking him, the sense that so long as he and Linda stuck together everything would come out all right. Derek Peller seemed to hit him out of nowhere. Alex realised he still hadn’t worked it out even to this day, the exact direction Peller had come from. He remembered thinking: he’s going to kill me. He could hear Linda screaming – Derek, Derek – as if it were just the two of them in the street and he, Alexander Adeyemi, was nowhere at all.
The night smelled fresh and dark, like soil after rain.
He spent that night at Linda’s place. He didn’t remember much about it, just Linda cleaning the cuts on his face with Dettol and dosing him with paracetamol.
The following day he called in sick at Gateways. His whole body felt sore and aching, but it wasn’t just that. He felt nervous of going outside, though he would never have admitted that to anybody and least of all to Linda.
Linda went to work as usual. She called him at lunchtime to check he was okay and then again at four o’clock to tell him her classes had overrun and she would be late. When she still wasn’t home by six Alex tried calling the dance school but the switchboard was closed. As he listened to the voice of the answer phone inviting him to leave a message, the thought started circling in his head that Linda was with Peller, that she’d decided to get back with him after all, that the two of them were holed up together in The Tower having a good old laugh about him.
He felt sick of her, sick of them both. He gathered his things and left, slamming the door behind him on his way out. He headed for the Railway Arms, a dive of a place just up from Warrior Square. He normally avoided that kind of pub like the plague, but he told himself it was a free country, he would drink where he damn well chose. Two guys with tattoos glared at him ominously as he went in but the cuts on his face and the look in his eyes must have made them reconsider their options.
He sat in the darkest corner of the pub, angrily downing his beer and turning the pages of a Daily Express someone had left behind and wondering how the hell he had ended up there.
What are you doing with your life, Alex? His mother’s voice.
He was damned if he was going to call Linda, but of course it was the first thing he did when he got in.
The phone in her flat just rang and rang. There was no reply.
~*~
He resigned the tenancy on the Devonshire Place bedsit then took all the remaining money out of his bank account and booked himself on a flight to Freetown, Sierra Leone, convinced he was going to be the next John Reed. Alex had recently seen Warren Beatty’s film Reds, and Reed was his hero.
He didn’t see Linda again for many years.
~*~
“You’re Alex,” Christy said.
She was small and dark, with the narrow wrists and skinny arms that reminded him, out of the blue, of a woman he had spoken to in Freetown whose husband had been mortally injured by the rebel forces. The woman had seemed both frightened and defiant, and Christy Peller seemed a little bit the same, Alex thought, her face familiar to him through its wary expression. It was the face of someone living under siege from their private fears.
Her hair hung loose to her shoulders. The ends curled up slightly and she was beginning to go grey. She was wearing blue jeans with a blue-and-grey plaid shirt tucked into the waistband.
“Come through and I’ll make some coffee,” she said. “Lunch will be ready in about an hour.”
The house on the inside was box-shaped, the hallway surfaced with red-and-black quarry tiles. A panelled-in staircase led off it immediately to the right of the front door. There was a row of brass coat hooks, faded sage-coloured wallpaper stencilled with a William Morris pattern. The effect was subdued but calming. Christy showed him through to the room at the back, a cramped-looking sitting room dominated by a large green-tiled open fireplace. There were postcards on the mantelpiece, and a few framed photographs. To the right of the fireplace and immediately behind the door there stood a low, fat sofa upholstered in cocoa-coloured corduroy. Opposite the sofa was an armchair in the same fabric. Between the armchair and the sofa stood a wooden coffee table. Alex noted a large, gilt-framed mirror above the fireplace and a glass-fronted bookcase with one of its panes cracked. The walls of the room were painted cream, and a tall sash window looked out on to the garden. It was a pleasant room, Alex thought. There were just the books, the fire, the sofa, the things you need. There was no sign of a desk, or a computer, and Alex supposed that Christy Peller did her actual writing in another room.
“Please, sit down,” Christy said. “Coffee won’t be a moment. Do you take milk or sugar?”
“Neither, thank you,” Alex said. He sat down in the armchair, but once Christy was out of the room he stood up again and crossed the floor to examine the bookcase. He was expecting it to contain copies of Christy’s own books, for some reason. In fact
it was filled with volumes by writers he’d heard of but never got around to reading: Alice Munro, Ingeborg Bachmann, Flannery O’Connor. John Cheever and Raymond Carver he had read, because he did them at school. He remembered reading Cheever’s story ‘The Swimmer’, thinking he was going to hate it because the book’s green-and-grey covers made Cheever seem dull. The story turned out to be riveting, magical almost, and Alex ended up reading every story in the volume. They were weird but he loved them.
“Do you like Cheever?” Christy said. She had returned to the room without him noticing. Alex turned round hurriedly, the Cheever volume still in his hands. Christy was carrying a tray with two mugs on it, faintly steaming, and a plate of custard creams.
“I haven’t read him in ages,” Alex said. “Not since school really. But I liked him then.” He replaced the book carefully on its shelf. Christy set the tray down on the coffee table.
“I think Cheever’s very special,” she said. “It’s strange to think that most of his stories are more than fifty years old now. I don’t think they’ve dated at all.”
“A teacher of mine said she thought that what Cheever’s stories most represented was the gradual decline and fall of the bourgeoisie,” Alex said. The memory came back to him clearly, Miss Foregate, in her ancient Harris Tweed skirt and horn-rimmed glasses. She had seemed ancient to them, though Alex supposed she’d probably been in her early thirties. He hadn’t thought of her in years.
“I suppose that’s true,” Christy said. “But I don’t like to think of his stories that way, it makes them sound pompous. Cheever wrote about people, not politics. He was interested in how the lives of ordinary people can become unfastened from reality. That’s how I read him, anyway.”
“I think that’s right,” Alex said, remembering how he’d felt when he first read ‘The Swimmer’. It was a terrifying story, even though nothing much happened in it apart from some guy deciding to set himself a bizarre swimming challenge. It felt odd, talking to Christy Peller about John Cheever. He didn’t know Christy at all, she was a stranger to him, and yet because of the people they had in common – Linda, and Derek, and Cheever – his intimacy with her had become curiously accelerated.