by Katy Regan
What this investigation needs, I could hear her saying, is a rocket up its bum! When I put my ear to it, you could even hear it roaring. People always say it’s the sound of the sea, but I think it’s more like a rocket taking off.
21
Mick
Not yet eleven and already the “your dad did a runner” story isn’t holding like it was. It’s like sinking sand beneath his feet, and it won’t be long before it gives way altogether, because with every question Zac asks about Liam—like he did on Easter Saturday while I sat, frozen to the spot, wondering if that was going to be the moment the lid finally came off—with every piece of information he gathers, he is one step closer to knowing the truth.
The truth is so close. I can see it in the distance, gathering force, like I used to be able to see a storm approaching at that point between the sea and the sky. You know you’re in for it then, but there’s nowhere to go and you just have to sit it out. But this is different. I’m not just at the mercy of the storm; I’m an orchestrator of it. I’m like God, but all I can create is destruction. I look at my grandson—my beautiful grandson, the most precious person in my life—and I wonder what this will do to him, what pain and havoc it will wreak on his life. I’m caught between a rock and a hard place: I don’t tell him the truth, and I can’t live with myself; I tell him the truth, and he’s devastated.
And this is the person who gave me a second chance at life; if it wasn’t for Zac, I’d probably have drunk myself to death by now. But he was there and he needed me, needed me to airlift him from the wreckage—the wreckage that I played a big part in—and keep him safe and loved. If he was to be denied his father, then I owed him that. So that is one—the only—good thing to come out of this: I got sober, because I owed it to Zac. I got sober and I made damn sure I was the best grandad I could possibly be.
22
Juliet
“So, how was that?” says Jason, sitting down and sliding a coffee across the table to me.
We’re in the canteen at Your Fitness. Jason has just tried to kill me with I don’t know how many laps of the playing fields. (He said not knowing how many would be good for me. It would teach me to accept it, to “be with” the discomfort. I didn’t accept anything. I just swore a lot.)
“Hard,” I say, mortified I’m still sweating like a pig and we’ve been finished almost an hour, showered and everything. I can feel my thighs sticking to the plastic seat.
“On a scale of one to ten? One being the easiest?”
“About a seven.”
Jason nods slowly.
“Oh God, a nine then. It was really bloody hard, Jase!”
He pulls a face, somewhere between apologetic and amused (although he’s trying to hide the amused bit, which touches me). “The thing is, I haven’t done much exercise this week. I just haven’t had any time, so my fitness level has probably gone down”—What, from your Olympic athlete level the week before? I imagine him thinking— “and I’ve been really stressed, so you know …” I fan my face with a leaflet. The steam from the coffee is doing nothing for my excessive sweating. “The eating’s gone a bit sideways too. I’ve been bad. Really bad. God, sorry.”
A bit sideways is an understatement. On Easter Saturday, after everything that happened at Mum and Dad’s, I scoffed two of the three Easter eggs I had on top of my crayfish and lamb—and that was already on top of, I realized, easily a day’s calories in baguettes and “testing” the roast potatoes before we even sat down. Then, after the stress of Zac running off to the docks, his confession about the Find Dad mission, and, most importantly, me announcing I was going to help him, I didn’t have a hope in hell of walking straight past the Chinese on the way home, did I? This was partly why I arranged the session with Jason on Easter Sunday—not that I told him that at the time—as an emergency attempt to work off some of those excesses. Except afterward I just carried on.
When I relay this to Jason—the reason I’ve fallen off the diet bandwagon—I leave out any “looking for Dad” bits, even though that’s the main reason my eating’s gone so pear-shaped. I don’t even know why I don’t tell him; I just feel he doesn’t need or, more likely, want to know. He’s given up so much of his time for us recently that telling him we’re looking for another man in our lives feels kind of disingenuous.
“Jules.” Jason smiles his cute smile and leans forward on his elbows. If ever you needed an arm model, I think, he would be your man. “You don’t need to justify or explain yourself to me, you know.”
“I don’t?” I’m a bit disappointed. Where’s the Fame speech, the this journey is gonna take blood, sweat, and tears? Isn’t he meant to be all pumped up, bossing me around?
“No, I’m not the food or the fitness police, am I? I just want to help Zac so he’s a bit happier in himself, more confident.” He lowers his voice. “And I want to show him some karate moves to floor those little runts at school, if I’m honest.”
I smile.
“That’s what you want, isn’t it? Plus”—he grins, leaning back, slapping the table with his hands—“he brings me amazing sarnies.”
“He loves making those for you, you know.”
“And I love eating them. They’re so much nicer and better for you than the crap they sell here—and they call themselves a health center!”
I’m looking at his hands. He has nice hands too—at the ends of those nice arms: slender fingered, big, tanned. I reach out and touch his right one.
“Thank you so much for helping Zac like this. I think it’s boosted his confidence loads.” I want to say it’s helped me too since Jason suggested I come (and it was him who suggested it, I keep reminding myself of that), but feel that might be a bit much.
“No worries. I enjoy it. He’s a lovely kid; more fun than a lot of people my own age in this place.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, there’s some massive egos; some top-notch knob-ends here, Jules, honestly. PTs who’ve lost sight of the fact that exercise is meant to make you feel good and be fun, who aren’t happy unless their client is barfing in the bin at the end of their session, who think it’s meant to be some sort of exercise in sadomasochism.”
I cough, for effect.
“Oh, mate.” Mate? Since when did he call me mate? “I’m sorry if I went too hard on you today. I didn’t realize—”
“How fat and unfit I was?”
He rolls his eyes.
“Sorry,” I say.
“Look, I’m having no part in the stories you tell yourself,” he says simply. “Except to challenge them.” He crushes his polystyrene cup. “Anyway, you know what I think.” He gets up to go put it in the bin.
What does that mean? I wonder. Jason used to say I was gorgeous, and I never believed him, but God, I miss hearing that. Did he still think it?
“Can I ask you something?” I say, as he sits down again. I’m aware the way I’m sitting means my cleavage is all out, and I make no attempt to change the situation.
“Ask away.”
“Well, what about me?”
He looks blank. “What about you?”
“Well, how come you asked me to come along to these sessions too? How come you’ve taken the time to give me an exercise plan and an eating plan and you’re giving me this private session today?” Zac’s at Mum and Dad’s, and for once I wasn’t working, so I took full advantage of the situation and booked a session. “You’ve gone to so much effort, just for me.” Eek, cringe. That’s too much. Not so much fishing for compliments as drawing them out of him like a leech and I don’t really know why I’m doing it.
He goes to answer, but then something or someone distracts him. I follow his gaze. Dom is standing at reception. There is no warning, no time to run or hide.
“Oh shit.” Jason stands up. “I forgot Dom was coming in to talk to me about something—just a client training thing. Do you mind? I won’t be a sec.”
“No.” My already-hot cheeks blaze and I’m fighting a scene inv
olving snow and handbags and some crazy woman screaming like a fishwife, but I know I just have to sit this out. “No, it’s fine, I’ll just sit here.”
Thankfully, the way they are standing means only Jason is facing my way. I watch how warm and open his body language is, compared to Dom’s, which, even from the back, is much stiffer and more aware of itself: hands on hips, chest puffed out. I’m a guy who works out. The other thing I’ve noticed since I’ve become a “gym-goer” (pigs will fly and all that, even this one) is how robotic these gym instructors both look and behave, like they’ve forgotten what it is to be human and are only interested in being superhuman. Jason isn’t like that. He enjoys the people more than the exercise. In fact, if he had his way, he’d do half an hour lifting weights, then have a good old natter with a cup of tea—preferably with the over-fifties aqua aerobics class. Or Zac. He loves his sessions with Zac. He’s so good with Zac. So good for him too.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Jason recently. Finding Zac’s Top Trumps for Dads folder with its descriptions of the ideal dad, and realizing just how much he needs one, I’m kind of struggling to see why Jason is not that person; why I passed him up when he told me I was beautiful, when he was amazing with my son and laid-back to a fault. Laid-backness (bordering on laziness when not at work, Jason likes a good Xbox-and-pizza session just as much as Zac) may not be a quality you’d normally associate with a fitness instructor. You’d think they’d be all about personal bests and protein powders; weighing up your body fat percentage when they looked at you. But Jason isn’t like that. He hates the “Egg White Brigade,” as he calls them. “I challenge you to find a more mind-numbingly dull person,” he says, “than one who utters the words ‘an egg-white omelet, please.’” There’s never been any denying that at a size eighteen (on an average day; I’ve been known to fit in a size sixteen after the norovirus, but also go up to a twenty and even higher if I don’t watch it) I am overweight, but Jason, for some reason that I was—and still am—extremely suspicious of, always paid me compliments, always said I was sexier than the girls he trained, who, he told me, wanted to look like plucked rotisserie chickens and talk about glycemic index. He did it for work, gave the clients what they wanted—but he liked to come over to mine afterward, help me polish off a pot of spaghetti big enough to feed half the estate, and watch The Apprentice on demand. I used to be so paranoid about why he was with me, about what his other PT colleagues thought: Why is he going out with a fat bird when he could have the pick of so many size-eight gym bunnies?
It’s begun to dawn on me, though, since doing exercise with him—joining him in his working environment—that exercise isn’t about the scales or the dress size for Jason; it’s about being healthy and, actually, happy. (I’m still struggling with that concept but making progress. Zac worked out that exercise made him happy back when we did the beach run. The question now is yes, but does pepperoni pizza do the same job? The jury’s still out on that one.)
When Jase was little, he had leukemia. As a result he has a higher chance of developing heart and lung problems and, weirdly, obesity. Exercise then is not a way of him becoming superhuman; it’s just a way for him to stay a healthy human—and, ultimately, alive.
*
• • •
IT’S OVER A week since I told Zac I was going to help him. I knew it was the right thing to do. I couldn’t see I had an option since he was going to do it anyway, and I wanted to be there, to catch him if he fell—like he’s always been there for me. I wanted to be there for the emotional fallout. Because the way I see it, there will be fallout, whatever happens. I’ve decided there are four main possible outcomes. I’ve written them down in the notebook I bought, all guns blazing at the beginning of my Get Zac Happy mission, when, unbeknownst to me, he was already on a whole other mission of his own.
Possible outcomes:
Find him but he rejects Zac.
Find him, the truth comes out, and he rejects Zac.
Find him, the truth comes out, and Zac rejects him.
Find him, the truth comes out, nobody rejects anyone, but I have to work out what to say to my parents.
Writing everything down made the whole thing appear scarier than ever, but Jason feels like a rock I can swim to in these treacherous waters. I can rely on him—and this seems all of a sudden of the utmost importance. It’s more than I can say for Liam, after all.
Jason comes back from talking to Dom and sits down. “All right?”
“Yep.”
There is a long pause, while I pray for my cheeks to calm down.
“It’s all right, you know, Dom didn’t mention—”
“I don’t want to talk about it—ever again.”
“He probably even liked it, you know, being hit over the head, a bit of slap and tickle. Some blokes find that a huge turn-on.”
I kick him under the table.
“Sorry,” he mouths, smiling (the cheek! I thought he was meant to be pissed off about me going on a date with Dom, not taking the piss), and opens up the newspaper on the table while I sip my coffee, both of us content to sit in silence.
Eventually, he can feel me looking at him. “What?” he says.
“Nothing—just the beard. It really suits you, you know.”
*
• • •
ONE THING I’VE discovered: joining a missing-person search costs money. After he’d learned that his dad wanted to be a chef, like him, Zac and Teagan took it upon themselves to go round cafés and restaurants looking for him. They did it once or twice in Grimsby; they would have done it more that day in Skeggy had Teagan been with us. I don’t mind in principle, but I don’t want Zac or Teagan loitering around cafés, staring at people to see if they have light blue eyes, or half a thumb missing—they’ll get themselves arrested. So now I either go with them, and that means buying everyone a drink, or I give Zac (and Teagan—because Nicky, Teagan’s mum, has even less money than us) a bit of money to get one. I’m also worried Zac is building his dad up in his head as this Jamie Oliver character, when the truth is, he could be an alcoholic, even in prison, by now, gone completely the same way as his dad. He could be anything and anywhere. I battle daily with my decision to help Zac find him and I can’t talk to my parents about it, so that leaves Laura.
“So let me get this straight.” It’s Tuesday—when I usually work a late shift, but she and I have got a booking for “a cold platter” for a local business’s client meeting, so we’re on our own at the shop early in the morning. “Zac’s decided to find his dad and you’re going to help him?”
“Um, yeah.” It sounds mad when she says it like that. Like the plot from a film, not something that happens in my boring life, that’s for sure. By the look on Laura’s face, she thinks so too.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought you never wanted to see him again, that you’d always told Zac he was better off without him, and, more importantly, that you felt you were all better off without him after what he did. I mean, what about your mum and dad? Do they know about these plans?”
“All right, Laurs …” I didn’t expect her to be quite so alarmed. “Don’t say that, I’m worried enough as it is, without bringing them into it.”
I carry on chopping the feta for the salad, trying to calm the anxiety with the rhythmic action. In the face of failing business, Gino’s taken the decision to go slightly more exotic with the cold platter—so it’s not just egg and cheese sandwiches and a bit of lousy ham, it’s Greek salad too. (But go easy on the olives, please, girls, and the feta and the tomato … we have to keep costs down …) How am I going to explain this monumental life decision to my best friend when I’ve never been truthful to her about my real feelings? Laura saw it all play out when my brother died. She was round at my parents’ house an awful lot that summer, and saw the Cult of Blame flourish. She heard the vitriol from my mother firsthand, because my mother tried to recruit Laura into her anti-Liam cult too. And all that time, Laura on
ly ever saw me nod along and agree. She wasn’t to know I was too numbskulled with grief and shock to formulate opinions of my own; too worried about upsetting my already fragile mother further.
Once out of the fog of those early weeks, however, I did formulate my own opinion. Liam let me down catastrophically; he was not the man I fell in love with—but he was no murderer, and he didn’t deserve to be shunned from his son’s life forever. (No, but he let himself be; he made that choice.)
I didn’t tell Laura about my changing feelings, though, and what I really thought—why not? Out of loyalty to Mum? Yes. But also pride. Because the man I’d gushed about to her for so long had just fucked off, basically, hadn’t he? He didn’t love me enough to fight—and I felt ashamed about admitting that, even to her.
I look up. Laura is standing over me looking as threatening as it’s possible to look in a plastic cap, waiting, I realize, for an explanation. “Look.” I sigh, putting the knife down. “I’ve kind of changed my thinking on that.” No, all wrong, too flippant. My true feelings have existed only in my head for so long that I’ve no idea how to voice them. The early-morning sun is flooding through the shop window, glinting off the knife and onto my face, so I feel even more in the spotlight.
“Go on,” says Laura emphatically.
“Well, I’m still furious with Liam. I’ll never forgive him. But it’s not for what happened to Jamie. I can see that that was an accident now, just a horrible, tragic accident.”
Laura still stares at me, listening intently.
“Well, he wouldn’t have bloody meant to get in a fight that killed Jamie, would he? He didn’t plan that, before he went out; he’d never done it before. It was completely out of character.”
She continues to nod, and I continue to fill the space, damn her.
“I’m so mad because he never tried to get in touch, or tried to see Zac—who he was smitten with. He loved him, from the minute he saw him.” And I thought he loved me.