“So I’ll toss it, then,” says Jess, and suddenly, strangely, it doesn’t seem ridiculous at all any more. She comes down the two steps and takes a coin from the bowl by the phone, throws it in the air, making a complete hash of it.
“No,” says Jack. “It has to be done properly. That doesn’t count. Anyway, you forgot to say whether heads or tails means you go in or not.”
“OK, well, you know the rules. So you do it.”
He puts the mugs down. Picks up the coin and cleans it on his trousers. Places it on his hand, with the thumb underneath it, looks at her. “Heads, you go in. Tails, you don’t. And you have to go with the answer.”
“Fine. Go on then.” It feels strangely easy, this letting go of choice. Handing over a decision to fate or chance or luck or whatever. The coin will decide and it won’t be her problem.
Heads it is. Jess opens the door and finds what she knows she will find. It is not her fault. The coin decided. It is better that way and she finds herself oddly happy about it. It is a relief.
CHAPTER 16
AN EARTHQUAKE CRACK IN THE ROAD
THE room is too hot – the fire is on. The TV is blaring. A black cat is curled up by the fire. And the woman who is presumably Jess’s mother is asleep on the sofa, snoring. Her mouth is slack and open, her face flopping sideways with gravity.
That’s what Jack sees. It’s quite amusing, at least at first sight. What Jess sees is only fractionally different, though she understands more. And to her it is not at all amusing. Her mother is drunk, unconscious, and saliva is hanging from the corner of her mouth. She doesn’t need to see the bottle of gin to know that her mother is drunk, not just sleeping.
Jess sees the bottle of gin just as Jack does. Or, to be more accurate, a gin bottle. For there’s no gin in it. Of course, there may only have been a tiny amount in it to start with, but this was not the case. The bottle is on its side and this position lends an extra seediness, as though even the bottle cannot remain upright.
Now Jack understands. Why Jess’s mother had not heard them come in and why Jess did not want to open the door. And it’s not amusing at all. He feels as though he has stumbled on something he was never meant to see.
“Listen, Jess, do you want me to cancel the taxi? I don’t want to leave you.”
“What about your dad? Won’t he be worried?” She is glad that he will stay, though what he can do, she does not know. She just feels that she would rather not spend the night with wolves, snakes and a drunkard mother.
“He’s not expecting me back yet anyway. He’ll be asleep but I’ll text him to say I’m staying here. He’ll be fine about it.”
Jess nods, empty of energy. She is looking down at her mum. She wants to do nothing, to walk away from there. To pretend it didn’t happen. To wipe clean the whole disastrous night and start over in the morning. She is so tired and she should not have to think about anything else but herself.
Jack looks around, trying to take control of the situation. “Turn the fire off. Maybe find a blanket or something?” They can pretend that this is just a sleeping beauty if they want. But they both know it isn’t. Jess nods again and moves towards the fire. Jack phones the taxi company and Jess goes upstairs to fetch the quilt from her mum’s bed. In her mum’s room, clothes are strewn everywhere. Make-up is open. A lipstick-edged wine glass sits on the dressing-table and there is a kind of shameful nakedness about it.
Jess’s lips tighten. Her head is pounding and snakes are not far away, still hissing in her memory. She knows the snakes and wolves and unicorns are not really there but they were, oh, they were. She saw them and that’s all that matters. More than a nightmare, more real than that, a kind of madness in her. Her mother should be there to help her, not dribbling on the sofa. Jess is frightened by what happened in the club. What are mothers for if not to comfort with soft warm arms and mother-smell when scary things have happened?
She goes downstairs with the quilt. “Mum?” Jess shakes her mum’s shoulder. Sylvia is lying on her side already, so Jess need not move her much. She mumbles and half opens her eyes. Says something that sounds vaguely like her daughter’s name. Groans, dribbles a little.
And in that raw moment Jess hates her mother. For doing this. For not being there. It is a moment that passes quickly. It passes from hate and anger to sadness and anger. And fear. But although the moment passes, it is important, because it has changed something between them. There is a seesaw tipping-point.
It is a faultline between them now. An earthquake crack in the road. Not a chasm, though. It is small, crossable; they could, either of them, leap over it fairly easily. Or even touch each other from opposite sides. But it is there.
It may widen or it may repair, depending on many things. If Jess or Jack or Sylvia knew what the future held, they might try to make different choices. Or that is what they think.
CHAPTER 17
SLEEPING TOGETHER
A little later. Spike has been let out – ears back against the rain. The sitting room is silent, apart from Sylvia’s snoring. A small lamp casts a soft glow, in case she wakes up and is confused. Confusion is highly likely in view of the state she’s in. Though waking up is not.
Sylvia has, a few moments ago, been roused to brief consciousness – for Jess and Jack need to know that consciousness is possible. She has wiped her mouth, mumbled Hello and Pleased to meet you, fallen quickly back to sleep again. Jack has smiled at Jess, to show that he does not think less of her for having such a mother. Jess has smiled back, though she does not feel like smiling and it is a smile that is fragile.
This is not how the night was supposed to end: staring down at a dribbling mother. Jess is struck by the difference between herself and this so-called mother. She is glad her father left before all this happened. Though if he was here then perhaps her mother would not be like this. But how impossibly untangleable is the tangle of what ifs. Once the coin falls and life tumbles one way, infinite possible worlds become impossible. If you try to think of them too much it will turn you mad.
But when her father left, her mother did not go to pieces. She was angry, certainly, but didn’t turn to the bottle. Unless she’s been hiding it, Jess wonders, which perhaps would be easier with a young child than the near-adult that Jess now is. She doesn’t seem to be hiding it now. Though perhaps it is actually even worse than it seems. Perhaps she takes empty bottles secretly out of the house and disposes of them. Jess has heard that alcoholics are devious like that. But deviousness has never been a Sylvia thing.
“You need to go to bed now,” says Jack. “Come on.”
And he follows Jess upstairs, after leaving the cold cups of tea on the kitchen table. Into her bedroom. She sits on the bed, shoulders slumped.
“Someone spiked my drink, didn’t they?”
“It’s hard to believe but I guess … I suppose. We should get you checked out, maybe?” Jack is struck by this thought as he says it. Should they? But Jess is better, she’s lucid, she just needs to sleep. Surely. And with Jess’s mother in that state, they can’t go now, can they? He stands for a moment, tired himself, struggling to think.
“No, Jack, no way. I have to go to bed. Please.”
She’s right. There’s not really any argument. Whatever was in her drink, she is clearly recovering from it. It hasn’t killed her. But he cannot think about that, cannot face that scary place.
“OK, go and finish in the bathroom. And have you got a big T-shirt or something I can use?”
She grunts, gets up, rummages in a drawer and finds something that will do. The smell of her invades him when he holds it.
A few minutes later, Jess is in bed, washed, make-up vaguely removed, or what was left of it. Jack comes back from the bathroom himself to find her with her eyes closed, lying on her side. The house watches quietly as he positions himself carefully beside her. He lies on top of the duvet, with the quilt wrapped around him.
“Goodnight, Jess,” he says softly.
She
smiles, though he cannot see this. “Thanks, Jack, for looking after me. And I’m sorry that … you know.” Her voice is somewhat mumbled, her lips almost unable to work through tiredness and the after-effects of whatever it was.
“Could have been a lot worse,” he says. And he knows it could. But just now, at this moment, in this place, Jack is only struggling to hold on to one idea: how lucky he is. Because if he does not focus on that one thing, he will be forced to face the other side of the same coin: that he was very nearly unlucky.
But being very nearly unlucky is the same as being lucky. And lucky he is. Everything has turned out right. Jess has come to no harm. He is lying in bed with her.
It is best not to think of alternatives.
CHAPTER 18
AWAKENING
THE house creaks awake when the boiler switches itself on at dawn. Outside, the birds are singing after the rain and, as the air warms, the doors and windows and walls and roof click and squeak as though spirits were walking through them. As perhaps they are, though it is also the physics of particle expansion which cause the noises that all houses make.
Jack wakes first. His bladder is full and he needs to go to the bathroom. But he does not, not immediately. First because he is a stranger in this house and second because Sylvia may happen to walk across the landing at the same time and then where would he be? And third because he is lying very close to Jess, one of his arms across her shoulder, his lips in her hair, and Jess is asleep. This is a situation to be savoured.
A sound on the landing. Jack holds his breath. A door squeaking and footsteps doing what footsteps do. A door – the bathroom probably – closing and soon the sound of a toilet flushing. Jack breathes again. Good thing I didn’t go out just then, he thinks.
Wouldn’t have made much difference, actually, Jack. Because Sylvia has just remembered that she has a daughter. She thinks, fuzzily and painfully, that this is an important fact for at least two reasons: because the daughter could get her a cup of tea and feed Spike, and because the daughter had been out late the night before and Sylvia probably should have checked that she’d got back OK. Sylvia knows that other mothers might do this. But Jess is more likely to check on Sylvia than the other way round. As indeed happened, though of course Sylvia does not know this.
So, Sylvia crosses the landing towards Jess’s room. For a moment she hesitates. Not because she thinks of any reason not to open the door but because a wave of headachy nausea has just washed through her, not helped by having just seen herself in the bathroom mirror. She takes a deep breath to quell it, squeezes her eyes and passes one hand over her forehead.
Earth to Sylvia: don’t buy cheap gin, she thinks. There’s another, more sensible, part of her brain that says, For Christ’s sake, just don’t do that again, you stupid woman. You’re an embarrassment and you’re turning ugly and wrecking your body, your liver, your brain and quite possibly your life, not to mention your relationship with your daughter. Everything, you bloody fool. Why would she love you looking like this? After all, he didn’t. Just stop it. Stop it. Just never, ever, ever do it again, OK? All of this is expressed in a silent internal groan.
It’s in theory possible that she won’t do it again. But it’s unlikely. One thing does tend to lead to another and stuff happens all too predictably. Usually. It’s the predictable things that should be so easy and yet are so difficult to control. The things that trip us up unpredictably can lurch us into a brighter future. Shock treatment. A defibrillator for life.
Mind you, a shock is what Sylvia is about to get.
She taps on the door and opens it. Someone gasps. It could be Sylvia, it could be Jack, it could be Jess. The moment freezes and Sylvia struggles to comprehend what she is seeing, while Jack struggles to comprehend what she might be thinking and Jess struggles to comprehend where she is.
Jack sees a dishevelled woman who looks little better than when she was sleeping off her gin. Jess sees this too, though she also sees that Jack is on her bed, and this causes her some confusion until she remembers why, and hopes she remembers all of it. Sylvia sees a tousle-haired boy apparently in bed with her only daughter. It will be several more moments before she sees that he is not in but on the bed and that he is fully dressed. Not that this says anything very important at all but she will do her best to hold on to the positive aspects of it.
Jack sits up. He wants to say, It’s not what you think, but this would be a cliché. There is too much they all need to say.
Jess presses her hands into her eyes as though she could push her headache away. “Someone spiked my drink, Mum.”
“Oh, right! So that’s all right, then.” Sylvia attempts to regain control. Regain is not the right word. Nor, really, is control.
“No, seriously.”
“Yes, seriously,” adds Jack. “I had to make sure she was OK, so I stayed.”
“You say spiked? As in a drug?”
“We think.”
“But, oh my God! Did you go to hospital? And what about the police? Did you do any of that? Are you OK, Jess, darling? How did it happen? God, I’ve always told you to be careful in bars. And I suppose you were drinking too? You should have woken me when you came in. Why didn’t you?” During this she has been picking up things and putting them down again.
“Actually…”
“Look, I really need to go to the bathroom? Can I…?” And Jack gets out from under the quilt he’s pulled over himself, at which moment Sylvia sees that he’s still wearing his jeans, and very rumpled they are too. Considering that they are also damp and extremely uncomfortable, Jack reckons he’s performed an act of supreme decency, keeping his jeans on in the circumstances. He disappears from the room and goes into the bathroom. He isn’t entirely sure at this point what he has let himself in for but he has done nothing wrong, so he isn’t worried. He just wants the bathroom.
“Mum!” hisses Jess. “You want to know why we didn’t wake you? We couldn’t! You were rat-arsed, if you must know. God, you could have died or burnt the house down or something. Not to mention that I was ashamed.”
Sylvia is momentarily stunned but her alcoholic’s deceit quickly kicks in. “I was waiting up for you, really. I can’t help it if I fell asleep. And don’t be stupid – of course I wasn’t drunk, or rat-arsed as you so charmingly put it. I was just asleep. You should have woken me. I’m your mother – I should know if you are ill.”
Sylvia is right about that at least.
“There was an empty bottle of gin, Mum. Lying on the floor?” Jess’s hands are still over her eyes. The world looks marginally better this way.
“So? I’d hardly had anything. You’re jumping to conclusions. And you’re a fine one to talk.”
“My drink was spiked! Don’t you believe me?” And now Jess does look, because eye contact when you tell the truth is important.
There is a tiny hesitation before Sylvia looks away and says, “Of course, but, Jess, the idea terrifies me. You could have died! Do you know what it was?”
“Of course I don’t. I just know that I suddenly felt really weird.”
“Weird how?”
But suddenly Jess can’t be bothered to say, Wolves and snakes and unicorns. What is the point? It would just sound stupid.
Jack is at the door. “Hi, sorry, but could I borrow an iron?”
“An iron?” Sylvia and Jess say together.
“Yeah, it’s just that my jeans never dried from the rain and my dad always…”
Sylvia takes Jack to the spare room, where the iron is. Ah, so they do have a spare room. Its emptiness glares accusingly at Jack, as though perhaps he should have slept here. But there are so many reasons why he didn’t and none of them actually needs to be stated.
If Jack were to look closely at Sylvia he would see a blowsy hung-over woman of soft fragility, like some huge ungainly rose with the petals about to drop, but he does not look at her because he senses that it would be better not to, kinder to her and kinder to Jess. In some ways h
e wants to, because this is a mother, an imperfect mother, such as either of his might have become, but he does not, just sensing her dressing-gown and her lack of make-up, and guessing her headache and perhaps her shame.
She puts the ironing-board up for him. “I’m sorry,” she says, “I can’t remember your name. I think Jess told me. You’re the boy with the band, I guess?”
“Yes. Jack. And I’m sorry you got a shock just now but we didn’t want to wake you last night. You were fast asleep.”
Sylvia looks away. “Long day. I didn’t know when Jess would be back, so…”
Silence. She unwinds the iron. “You can manage?”
“Yeah. Thanks.” Was she going to stand there while he took his jeans off or was he to iron them on his legs?
Sylvia duly disappears. Jack breathes deeply. Removes his jeans and begins to iron them. Steam rises with the faint metallic smell of wet pavements. Jess peers round the door a few moments later. She smiles and his guts shrink. He smiles back.
“Sorry,” they both say together. They know exactly what they mean. Everything. And yet of course there is so much they are not sorry about, which also they do not need to say.
Half an hour later three people are in the kitchen pretending that many things have not happened and that this is a normal morning. Spike twines between their legs and each leg-owner in turn bends down to stroke him. A cat is a good thing to have around in moments of tension.
The humans have showered, washed their hair, dried it, mostly, though Jack’s is still damp. Jess’s hair is full and burnt-chocolate thick, Sylvia’s is wound in a straw spiral, with stray bits. Sylvia is pretending not to have a headache. She darts from place to place in the kitchen, looking for things to make something that might amount to breakfast. She keeps offering coffee and tea and toast and cereal and juice and honey and yogurt to Jack, who is already eating toast that Jess has made. Jess’s eyes are the only bit of her that betray the night. If you could look inside her head you would sense remnants of fear, the smell of wolves, the shiny spiral spike of a unicorn, the hiss of a hidden snake, but they do not show on her face.
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