It was in Annie’s Kitchen that she and Catherine had both tasted their first cappuccino when they were twelve, and where Alison had made them come back every single day until they got a taste for its bittersweetness and could tell the other girls with all honesty that they were bunking off from PE to go for a coffee. Thanks to Alison, Annie’s Kitchen had become the hot spot for schoolchildren for several years.
Taking a step back, Alison looked at her wan and transparent reflection in the glass and wondered how long the café had lasted in Farmington after she left, how long it had taken for change to overcome it so that all that remained of that hot and crowded landscape of her childhood existed only in her memory. It was then, with her head pounding and her mouth parched, that she retraced her steps to her son’s school on the hill, the school that had once been hers and Cathy’s.
She felt the heels on her boots sink into the churned mud and grass as she crossed the playing field to find the copse at the back of the school, backing onto a paddock of horses. This had once been, and still was, judging by the butts that littered the muddy floor, the smokers’ den. It was here Cathy would sit, and smile and listen while Alison and the other girls smoked like troupers but did not inhale.
Once when they had been alone Alison tried to explain to Cathy that all you had to do to fit in and look cool was to hold the smoke in your mouth and then blow it out again, tapping the ash off the end of your cigarette as often as possible so that it would burn down quicker. Eventually she had managed to get Cathy to try it, but Cathy had accidentally inhaled and thrown up all over her feet just as the other girls arrived.
Now Alison sat down on the same low branch of a tree in the copse that she always used to—and that somewhere under all the moss and mold still bore both her and Cathy’s names, carved rather inexpertly with a knife nicked from the canteen—and looked out across the field that glittered fiercely as the sun strove to evaporate the morning dew.
Even on that night when she had left Farmington with Marc, she’d always told herself that she was Cathy’s savior, her crusader, and her hero. Was the true sum of their friendship that she was always getting Cathy in trouble for being late, encouraged her to skip school, even tried to get her hooked on smoking? Not to mention breaking her heart. Alison had always thought that she was the strong one, the one that Cathy needed, but now she realized that was no longer true; it had never been true.
The girl she had been fifteen years ago, Alison, the hip kid, the sexy girl, the one who was in with the in crowd and fighting off the boys, had always needed Catherine to keep her anchored to the ground. And it was the moment, the very second that she had chosen to let go of her friend that her life had begun, ever so slowly at first, to spin out of control. But with each revolution had come a fractional increase in speed, like the earth spinning on its axis at over a thousand miles per hour, so fast that you don’t even notice it. So fast that Alison didn’t notice it until finally her world had spun off of its axis and she was floating free, flaying around in free fall without a clue how to land safely.
Cathy had always been the strong one, she’d always been the brave one, and if Alison was honest, she’d always been the beautiful one too. All Alison had even managed to do was to burn a little brighter than Cathy for a short while, to burn so angrily that she put her friend in the shade. Now, though, Alison’s light was almost extinguished.
And here she was now, in this town that Marc had brought her back to. Here with her children and one hundred promises she could not keep.
As Alison sat there, the sun beginning to warm the sky, she understood that now she had to be strong, she had to stand on her two feet alone for the first time in her life. Because now there was only her, and no one else to blame if she got it all wrong.
At eight o’clock Alison headed back to the gym, where she showered and changed into the workout gear she kept in her locker there, and rang home to speak to her daughters from a pay phone. But the home phone was engaged, probably knocked off the hook at one of its many extensions, and it went straight to voice mail.
“Hi guys, I stayed at Cathy’s last night, sorry I didn’t call but it was late by the time I decided to stay over. I’ll be home in a little while. See you then!” Alison hung up the phone knowing that the message would languish undiscovered until someone picked up the phone to make a call, which on a Sunday might not be for hours.
Alison left the gym and was on her way home when she saw a train rumbling into the station. And the impulse to be anywhere except at home with Marc overtook her and she caught the next train to London, where she walked and shopped and ate a quiet lunch until she knew she could not put off returning home any longer.
It was just after four when she finally arrived home, hesitating with her key in the lock. But before Alison could turn the key, Marc opened the door, his clothes crumpled and his face heavy with dark stubble.
“Where have you been?” he demanded, his body barring her entrance to the house.
“Don’t start,” she said, ducking under his arm and heading for the stairs. “I’ve been out, Marc, I stayed out with Kirsty and Cathy last night and today I just needed some time to myself.” She leaned over and made a fuss of Rosie, who had come skidding round the corner to greet her. “And I’m sorry if you actually had to spend some time with your children instead of breezing in and out of their lives in five minutes flat, but frankly you are such a hypocrite. I left a message on the answering machine, at least. How many times have you never bothered coming home without ringing?”
Alison was racing up the stairs when Marc’s words stopped her in her tracks.
“Dominic went out last night and he hasn’t come home since,” Marc shouted. “I called you, I left you message after message. Where were you?”
Alison turned on her heel and looked at him.
“My phone went flat. What do you mean he hasn’t come home? Is he with friends?” she asked him urgently.
“You went out,” Marc began. “I was cooking the girls their tea when he came in, he’d obviously been drinking and he reeked of smoke. He said a few things, swore in front of the girls. So I said a few things and … it got out of hand.”
“Got out of hand?” Alison asked him, her voice tense. “Marc? Did you hit him?”
“Did I … ?” Marc looked stricken. “No, Alison, I did not hit our son. At least I didn’t mean to … he just makes me so furious, but I’d never hit him. I said a few things I shouldn’t have, but he … he makes me so mad. I don’t understand him, I don’t know him anymore.”
Alison stared at Marc for one fraught second as she attempted to decipher what he was saying to her.
“Marc,” she said, keeping her voice steady and calm. “Did you hit him?”
“I didn’t mean to.” Marc shook his head, as if the details were irrelevant. “He stormed off and I haven’t seen him since. I tried his mobile, it’s off. I’ve tried you a hundred times, where were you?”
“Oh my God, was he hurt, was he bleeding? … Marc?” Alison said, feeling the panic and fury surge in her chest. “Marc, what have you done?”
“No, no—I wouldn’t …” Marc trailed off. “He was angry, his pride was hurt more than anything. Like I said, he stormed off and I haven’t seen him since.”
She turned and walked slowly down the stairs, each descending step drawing her nearer to the fear she was beginning to feel for Dominic.
“I tried to find him,” Marc said, taking a step back as Alison approached him. “But I don’t know any of his friends. I don’t know where he goes, I don’t know anything about him. I put the girls in the car last night and again this morning and we drove around the school and a few other places but we couldn’t see him. I don’t know where he is, I didn’t know what to do without you. I didn’t know what to tell the girls. I told them you were at a sleep-over. Amy cried for you.”
“We need to find him,” Alison said, focusing on finding Dominic. “We’ll both go, I’ll take the girls with me an
d you go in your car. But if you see him … just phone me. Let me talk to him first. Don’t frighten him, Marc.”
“Frighten him? Alison it was nothing more than a slap, it wasn’t as hard as when you slapped me at the party,” Marc said, offering a smile.
Alison took a step closer to him, keeping her voice very low. “Our son, our child has been out alone all night because of you. You do understand that this is your fault, don’t you, Marc?”
Marc took a breath, unable to meet her eyes. “I know that,” he said. “I didn’t mean for it to happen.”
“But it did,” Alison said, biting back the obvious retort, determined to focus on her son. “And now we have to find him.”
“Mama!” Amy shrieked, crashing down the stairs, closely followed by her sister, hitting Alison’s legs with full force and buckling them so that she had to sit down on the bottom stair. “Where were you, Mama? Dom’s gone away and we don’t know where he is or where you were. Were you with him?”
“No.” Alison forced a smile for Amy as she put her arms around her daughter. “I was having a sleepover with a friend, with Leila and Eloise’s mum, remember? I didn’t know Dom was gone until just now.”
“Daddy didn’t know where to find him,” Gemma told her. “We thought of everywhere we could look but he isn’t anywhere.”
“Mama?” Amy’s voice was low, her eyes huge as she wound her arms around Alison’s neck. “Is Dominic dead, like the teenagers on the news? Is he shot?”
“Of course not, of course he isn’t. He’ll be fine, I promise you,” Alison said, hoping her daughter didn’t hear the hollow echo in her words. She had a feeling, a cold, hard feeling in the pit of her stomach that frightened her.
She felt the weight of Marc’s stare on her and looked up at him; his whole body was clenched with anxiety.
“I’ll head out now,” he said.
“Okay.” Alison remembered something. “Ciara told us her surname, I’ll look in the book. I’ll try all the numbers under that name. If I can find her, maybe she can tell me some people he might be with. But if he’s not with her …”
“What?” Marc asked her.
Carefully Alison kissed first Amy and then Gemma on the cheek.
“Why don’t you girls go and get some snacks to eat while we’re out looking for Dom, I’m ever so hungry,” she asked them brightly.
“I can do that easily,” Gemma said.
“I’ll help,” Amy said, and the two girls and one dog trotted off to the kitchen, reassured for the time being.
“What if he’s run away, Marc?” Alison asked. “Gone back up to London? We might never find him then, not if he’s gone back up there …”
Marc took her in his arms and held her for a moment.
“Come on, you were right the first time, he’ll be fine,” he said. “He’ll be holed up somewhere hoping like hell that he’s causing all of the fuss and grief that he is. He’ll turn up.”
“Okay,” Alison said, feeling suddenly imprisoned in his embrace.
“You know that you and I are a good team,” Marc said, holding her a little tighter for a second. Alison disengaged herself from his grasp.
“Just find him, Marc,” she said. “Once upon a time you and he used to be such good friends. Don’t throw that away too.”
Twenty-four
Jimmy was determined to be prepared for what he was planning to say to Catherine as he climbed back on board his boat. This time he was going to get it right.
The best things that had ever happened to him, apart from his daughters, had been the one thing he’d put all of his forethought and planning strategies into. And that was getting Catherine to marry him. It had taken him ten months to get her to agree, ten months to persuade her that one day she would love him as much as he loved her. Every single day he’d offer her another little bit of carefully gleaned proof that he was the man for her, until she dropped the last of her defenses and let him love her the way he knew he could—forever. For ten months she’d resisted him, and then one morning as he’d been proposing to her between kissing each one of her toes, she’d said yes.
Or more precisely, “Yes, yes okay! Yes! Just stop it, please!”
“Yes what?” Jimmy had said, sitting up at the end of the bed, his heart in his mouth.
“Yes, I will marry you, you idiot,” Catherine had said.
“Why?” Jimmy had asked, crawling along the bed and stretching out next to her.
“Because you won’t shut up about it,” Catherine had retorted, pulling the sheet over her breasts. “And I’m tired of lying to my mother about where I am.”
“Your mother doesn’t know you have a lover?” Jimmy had asked her playfully, enjoying the illicit implications of the word.
“No, she doesn’t,” Catherine had told him, her smile dimming. “I need to get out, I need to be myself, and when I’m with you that’s who I am. You let me be completely me and you still seem to like me, so yes, I will marry you, Jimmy. You’re the best thing in my life.”
“That’s the most romantic thing you’ve ever said to me,” Jimmy had said, grinning from ear to ear.
Laughing with pure happiness, Jimmy had pulled her into his arms and kissed as much of her as he could before she squirmed away, rolling herself up in the sheet.
“I love you so much too,” he’d told her, intent on revealing those lovely breasts again.
“I know.” She’d laughed as he pulled her close to him. “And knowing that makes me the happiest I’ve ever been.”
Ten years ago, months of careful planning and persistence had got him his wife in the end. And that was exactly what he needed to do now to get her back. Because when Jimmy thought of himself and Catherine back then, laughing and happy, entangled in that sheet, he knew he loved her just as much now as he ever did. No, he loved her more, because after everything they’d been through she still had the strength and generosity not to hate his guts for it. She was the most amazing person he was ever likely to know, and even if she was never able to love him back in the same way he loved her, he still had to try to make her see that he was still the man for her. He had to be able to know that at least he had tried.
So now he was going to think through how he was going to tell Catherine he still loved her and persuade her to give him a second chance from about a million different angles. He was going to be prepared for any eventuality. Every single one of them. He was going into this like a barrister: sharp-witted, determined to win, and impossible to distract…
“Afternoon, Jim,” one of his neighbors, Leo, called as he hopped off his boat with his Jack Russell terrier yapping at his heels. “Lovely day for a walk.”
Leo paused and watched as his dog terrorized the ducks, sending them splashing and quaking into the water, shaking their feathers in distress. And then the dog spotted a swan, hissing a warning with wings spread, advancing toward him. Sensibly the dog retreated, heading instead for the undergrowth on the other side of the towpath.
“Yep,” Jimmy called back, hoping Leo wouldn’t want to draw him into a conversation. He was a nice old man, but he liked to talk, mostly about his dog. Fergus.
“He’s all bark, no bite, that one.” Leo smiled indulgently as Fergus broke out into insistent barking in the hedgerow. “He’ll have found something down there. Water rat probably, but he wouldn’t hurt it,” Leo said. “He acts all high and mighty, but when push comes to shove he’s a big softy. Or should I say a little softy.”
Leo chuckled, but Jimmy frowned as he looked at the bush that Fergus had disappeared into; something was driving the small dog to bark frenetically, so much so that the leaves of the bush trembled. Something white caught his eye. Fergus was tugging on it, growling between barks. Was that a … ? It was the sole of a running shoe. And it was attached to a leg.
Jumping down from his boat, Jimmy crouched down and crawled into the bush.
Fergus had found a boy lying on his side, his hood pulled up over his face, arms crossed over his chest,
his legs drawn up against his body. Now that Jimmy had arrived, Fergus dropped the toe of the boy’s shoe and was barking in his face, but the boy didn’t move a muscle. There was a sharp acrid smell and Jimmy noticed that the boy had been sick, probably shortly before he passed out. In the grass next to him lay an empty bottle of whiskey.
“Christ,” Jimmy said, scooping the boy up in his arms and lifting him out of the undergrowth and onto the pathway.
“Fergus has found a kid!” he yelled to Leo. “He’s cold, looks like he’s been here all night.”
“Is he all right?” Leo asked him, bending to pick Fergus up. The dog continued his tirade, a high-pitched insistent yap that made Jimmy have to shout to be heard over him.
“I don’t know.” Jimmy pulled the hood back from the boy’s still-white face, devoid of color except for his bluish lips.
“Oh God, it’s Dominic,” he whispered to himself.
“What did you say?” Leo asked him, bundling Fergus back into his boat and shutting the door on him. “Drug addict, is it?”
“No, I know this boy,” Jimmy said as he watched Dominic’s chest. “He’s not breathing. Call an ambulance, Leo.” Jimmy rested his head on the boy’s chest and tried to block out everything around him as he listened; after an impossibly long moment he heard a heartbeat. “Tell them there’s a slow heartbeat—but he’s not breathing. Tell them to be quick.”
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