I said she should never have given up on Alfie Harris, that gut instinct that something wasn’t quite right, she should have questioned where the cash came from. She said she was scared and had no one to confide in. I said she should have been stronger, she said when someone treats you worse than a dog, you are no stronger than your own weakness. I soon stopped giving her a hard time. I accepted her struggle and her situation. In Lowe’s world, he was the police. He was power, corrupted absolutely.
There will always be unanswered questions but, weirdly, the chaos had a positive force. I was now here to support Lou. How could I not? It was incomprehensible that Lowe could put a bullet in his own sister-in-law. He appeared to have a total disregard for human life and showed nothing but contempt for the woman he had married.
Louise had been sad all my life and now I understood – and it wasn’t because I was unloveable.
I, too, felt a loss but it was a different loss: the parents who had cost me a million tears weren’t real. What kind of mother and father puts their innocent baby bang in the middle of a drug deal time and time again? I was no more than a diversion, a prop, a ruse on a regular basis.
We didn’t speak much about Lowe when Lennox was in hospital. Looking back, I think we were both still in shock. We didn’t speak about him but I thought about him every second, every day.
I didn’t scream. I didn’t think he would do it. I didn’t hear an explosion when the gun went off. It should have boomed but it didn’t. I just watched terror-stricken, paralysed to the point of pure nothingness, almost blackness, as Lowe put some gentle pressure on the trigger, pulling it back, one smooth, continuous movement. I swear I didn’t hear anything, maybe the acoustics in the underpass snatched the sound and hurled it as far as it would go.
Lennox knows how to control a fall. We learn how to do it. He knows that we fold, we bend, we don’t ever let our head connect with the ground. Then there are falls that are the exception to the rules. Watching him, I could see there was a heaviness to him, like the entire universe was falling with him. He didn’t even have time to bring his arms up over his head. He had no protection.
I was pulled back from paralysis as the adrenaline kicked me into the air. I jumped as Lennox went down. I knew that Lowe was going to take another shot, which left me three choices: I could be a witness, another victim or I could be protection.
I made my choice. I looked straight at Lowe when I wrapped my board around him at full force. Seriously, you’d think an asteroid had hit him, the shock on his face ricocheted through his skeleton. Then I ran harder, faster, stronger than I ever thought humanely possible. I used to think we could escape our demons if we sprinted fast enough. Keep moving. Now I know it’s not possible, it’s just exhausting. Sometimes you have to stop moving. You have to stop, turn around and look straight at them, preferably with full force.
Sometimes I wish I’d killed Lowe, simple eradication, fair retaliation. I had his gun in my hand, I could have done it. What goes around, comes around and all that. Then I think, let him be alive, let him take the hit from the inside.
I’m not sure Louise believes jail time is enough time though. I guess she thinks that a bullet would have been better. I think she believes that as long as he’s alive, he can still hurt her. I don’t like to point out that if he was dead, he could still hurt her. That man got into her head and made her believe she was worthless, useless. She thought she was the unloveable one. She lied for him, cried over him, and bruised for him, but could never leave him. Louise Lowe was someone with a remarkable pain threshold. He shut down her questions about Alfie Harris, he left her for someone else and she still couldn’t move on, stuck in the emotional swamp he pushed her into.
As Ronnie’s mess was painstakingly unravelled, secrets of corruption, drugs, bribery and violence spewed out as people came forward with information and confessions.
First responder’s blue lights, white knights, people to the rescue, it means nothing under the cover of lies. Talking of lies, just when you think there are no more sirens or surprises, you are reminded that there are always more.
Like I said, just when you think there are no more surprises, there are always more. Louise knew how to keep her mouth shut. It was the default instruction throughout her entire marriage to Lowe. Her life depended on it.
Then she told me.
Finally sick of secrets I suppose, after all we’d been through.
“Jasmine was in and out of trouble all her life,” Louise explained, a paper tissue clenched in her fist. “I tried to save her so often. I could never quite save her enough.”
We were at home, we’d taken to sitting together in the living room instead of hiding out in our respective rooms. I sat in silence, transfixed.
“Then she got herself straight,” continued Louise, “or so I thought and she told me she’d adopted a baby and next thing I know, hello Angie Anderson.”
There it was. That’s how you find out the truth. One sentence is all it takes to turn the world as you know it upside down.
Jasmine and Davie Anderson weren’t my biological parents? I should point out that I’ve cut straight to the DNA when, actually, it took hours to get my head around this. I still can’t quite get my head around it. In terms of molecules and genetic markers, I was coded differently to the people I had called my parents.
“How old was I?” I asked baffled, once I’d got over the initial shock. Louise had rewritten the past and I was going in reverse.
Louise sighed. “Barely a week old.”
“My real parents?”
Louise shook her head. “I have no idea.”
“But somewhere?”
“Angie,” cautioned Louise. “Someone like Jasmine would never have been allowed to go through an official adoption process. Not with all the checks and visits that the adoption system would have required. It wouldn’t have been straightforward. I doubt The Registry of Births & Deaths holds the answers you’re looking for.”
“If it wasn’t official then what was it?” I was bewildered, fearful.
Louise brought the tissue to her eyes, paused, then continued. “I told her that she had to tell me if she had done something bad. I told her that she couldn’t just take a baby if she wanted one.”
“What did she say?”
“She said you were official enough.”
“What… what does that mean?”
“It means that Jasmine was involved in a world that is different from ours, in every way. She ran with the wrong crowd; runaways, thieves, addicts. It probably means that someone in her circle had a baby and simply couldn’t cope – couldn’t look after themselves, let alone you.”
I exhaled. Sometimes an outer shell did weaken against the blows.
Louise was quietly crying now. “Angie, Jasmine loved you. I’m absolutely certain of that. I also think that she was in way over her head. I know that all she wanted was to be with you. She was the one who made such a fuss about making a will, making sure you would be looked after if something happened to her. I also helped sort out her life insurance. I remember her saying, astonished, ‘Wow, Lou, imagine me being worth something if I died… and that much!’ Like she believed she was worth nothing, nothing at all.”
“She loved me?” I asked quietly. Real mother or not, I needed to hold onto that love right now and never let it go.
Louise nodded fiercely. “It scared me to see how much she loved you. I tried to explain to her that one day your real mother might want you back.”
I felt numb. Jasmine’s love, no matter how strong, wasn’t enough to last me a lifetime. She was gone and no one had wanted me back.
Louise sensed the loss I felt. “I should have loved you like you were mine,” she whispered, carefully reaching out to hold my hand. “Instead I loved you from a distance, like you were someone who could be taken away from me at any moment. I was protecting myself – I didn’t want to love you and lose you. I’m sorry, Angie. I’m so sorry.”
I had
parents. I lost them. I had other parents, biological ones? I lost them too, the moment I came into this world.
28
Lennox: memorial
Man, leaving hospital was such a buzz. It was an escape, almost like the adrenaline rush when you make it out the barrel of a wave. The bullet wound had pretty much healed. I had definitely healed. I was back, bouncing, dancing, breathing. It felt so good to inhale and to come out the other side.
I could tell Angie was nervous. Mrs Martel said that she wanted to talk to us. Angie deadpanned that she’d talked enough to last her a lifetime but I said it would be fine. We were still here, weren’t we?
She relaxed the minute she saw her old therapist.
“MacKenzie,” she squealed. “I’ve decided to go off the rails again so I can see you more often.”
“Aw, wheesht, Angie,” he replied, laughing. “Still got the skateboard?”
“How else would I keep ahead of trouble?” she answered.
“That’s why you don’t need to see me more often,” he retorted, laughing some more.
Reunions and introductions over, there were different theories, according to Mrs Martel and MacKenzie. Angie and I were prepared to listen to whatever they offered, whatever they’d got.
The flashbacks that I had been experiencing were related to a real crime scene, that much we knew. I possessed pin-sharp detail, even mundane details that were consistent with a past life. The information was both credible and accurate.
“That fact that you thought you were Alfie Harris is because…” Mrs Martel paused, choosing her words carefully, “you were Alfie Harris.”
As outlandish as it sounded, Angie and I didn’t react with howls of protest, only stunned silence. It’s one thing to think it, it’s entirely different to hear someone else speak the words out loud.
MacKenzie picked up some paperwork. “Here are case files with events similar to this situation,” he said. “These files are about people with past-life recollections who have helped solve cold cases.”
“Reincarnation?” Angie blurted out.
I didn’t have a word for it. I didn’t know what to think.
Mrs Martel pulled a face. “We wouldn’t use that word. We strive to find a more scientific explanation.”
“Born again?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.
“That’s more like a religious rebirth,” replied Mrs Martel, looking up to the right as though she was searching that part of her brain for answers. “Less ‘born again’, more like, well, the unofficial phrase we tend to use is, ‘you again’ – someone who has a consciousness from a life before. It is a reconnection.”
“It’s how we explain child prodigies, for example,” volunteered MacKenzie, attempting to make the information easier for us to process.
“Like a transfer of matter and energy?” I asked, attempting to get my head around what they were saying.
“Mrs Martel nodded. “Yes, the theory is more scientific than spiritual.”
Angie turned to me, staring at me, as though she was looking at me for the first time.
I pulled a face and shrugged. We were Generation Z after all, digital natives. Information was our highway. It was possible to believe more than we ever did before.
“According to research,” continued Mrs Martel, “it’s common for people to reconnect with a past life around the time of original death. Alfie Harris was 15 when he died, you are 15 now Lennox. This explains the intensity of the flashbacks.”
MacKenzie paused to let us digest this explanation before he picked up the conversation again. “Deaths, more often than not, tend to occur through natural circumstances, so we usually reconnect with our past lives when we’re older, say, when someone is in their seventies or eighties. People will experience similar style flashbacks, just like you did, Lennox, but they often find it confusing. Sometimes it occurs when their mind is in an altered state, usually incorrectly diagnosed as dementia or Alzheimer’s.”
“Your case is so interesting, Lennox,” enthused Mrs Martel, “because you are so young. You coped with the re-experience although it was tough. You learned from it and it saved your life. You are an incredibly strong, resilient and,” she paused to emphasis the next word, “brave young man.”
MacKenzie cleared his throat. We looked at him. He had another point to make: “We could be wrong. You could simply have been a child in the park who witnessed the shooting. It’s not unreasonable to suggest that sessions with Mrs Martel may have simply reawakened the trauma.”
“A baby, you mean,” I corrected. “I would have been a baby in a pram, like Angie was. She remembers nothing. Babies are not witnesses.”
“Perhaps your mother witnessed it?” suggested MacKenzie. “She could have retold the story to someone and it was retold and retold? You could have absorbed the details without even realising.”
“I grew up in San Francisco,” I explained, shaking my head, “not here. I was six years old when I visited London for the first time. What’s more, if my mother had witnessed a triple murder, I’m sure she’d still be in a state of shock. We would definitely have heard all about it.”
Mrs Martel intervened. “I agree. The witness explanation doesn’t point to how Lennox possessed such knowledge about Harris.”
“The internet?” answered MacKenzie. “Asking questions.”
I glared at him. He held up his hands. “Devil’s advocate.”
“I didn’t ask questions. I had the answers, I just don’t know how,” I insisted.
MacKenzie nodded. “Alternatively, some therapists argue that increased levels of medication such as antidepressant drugs in our drinking water are thought to create a powerful chemical reaction in the brain, an altered state. Flashbacks are a common side effect.”
There are theories, there will always be theories. We must accept our own truth and live with it. I believed I had been here before. Therapist MacKenzie said the memories, the death of Alfie Harris, would fade as I got older. We don’t hang on to our past, we let it go, apparently.
“Don’t look back,” MacKenzie told me. “You’re not going that way.”
Soon I’d be back in San Francisco for the summer. I’d return to London in the fall when school started again – September was the plan.
I asked Angie to come with me but we both knew it wasn’t going to happen, not this time. No passport, no chance she would make it over the Atlantic until the official paperwork came through.
She was still my bonfire-blazing Angie. Perhaps I felt that connection to her, the first time we met, for all the wrong reasons – me caught in a flashback, she seemed to be the source. Now it was different. She was different. More relaxed, possibly still too feisty.
She had a better relationship with Louise. She was working on her past, tentatively considering a search process that would lead her to her birth parents. She was taking her time and, in the meantime, she had the Rob Lee Memorial Skate Park to open. It hadn’t been officially finished but she didn’t want to wait.
“Do you think my head looks big in this?” asked Vivienne Lee. Rob’s sister was standing next to me while Angie was at the front gate to the park.
I looked at her. “Yes,” I said. She was wearing the equivalent of an inflated parachute.
“It’s retro,” she said, keeping her head still.
“It’s definitely something,” I said.
“Ssssh,” hissed Vivienne. “Look. Angie. She is going to speak.”
Angie took the microphone and looked around the park that was heaving with people. She had her baseball cap on back to front. She looked awesome, beautiful.
“The thing with memorials,” she said in a clear and confident voice, “is that the person honoured is not around to appreciate it, which is a bit shit really, isn’t it?”
There was a respectful pause. I couldn’t take my eyes off Angie.
“So it’s time we did something about that.”
There was a spontaneous ripple of applause.
; “That’s why…” Angie paused, “Rob Lee is here to appreciate his namesake. This park will live on because he does.” She turned and tossed the microphone to Rob to the sound of deafening cheers.
Rob Lee looked around. He was holding a roll of architectural plans in his hand. It was not much to look at now – just an incredible concrete space – but it would be something one day, something for everyone on a skateboard.
Rob stood there grinning, looking around at everyone, looking over at Angie. She grinned back. People continued cheering. Vivienne was screaming underneath her parachute.
Rob shook his head, overwhelmed no doubt. “Thanks, Anderson,” he said.
“Speech! Speech!” someone roared.
He swallowed hard, raised a hand to quieten down the masses.
“We fall down…” he said, and paused.
“We get back up again,” everyone roared back.
“Next stop the Olympics,” he shouted above the noise.
Speech over. Back on the board.
Imagine, all you want to do is catch a break but it never quite happens. Imagine, you never give up. You hustle, listen, learn, survive but this still isn’t enough. Alfie Harris ran out of time in the end.
I had all the time in the world. I’d led a charmed life to date. I was part of a family that bonded together, atoms sticking to atoms until the very end. Virtually indestructible, we lived a shatterproof existence and we’d never know any different. The Joneses, throw anything at us: misery, debt, pain, scandal and we’d throw money back at the problem. Yeah, even debt, because people like us always get credit, somehow.
Alfie wasn’t a junkie, he was a hustler and a vulnerable teenager from a broken home who was desperate enough to take criminal risks because he needed an escape route to a richer life, a better one. Lowe, a predator, would never have put hundreds of thousands of pounds in the hands of a drug-dependant teen. He would want someone who was fast, smart, reliable, but also, ultimately, someone who was disposable. Desperate helped too. Danger doesn’t exist when desperation is always near the surface.
You Again Page 19