The Lives She Left Behind

by James Long

  ‘We’re like spies, you and me,’ said her mother. ‘We have to stay undercover for a bit. Don’t say where you lived before. Don’t answer any of those sort of questions.’

  More than that, there was the rich harvest of imagination that filled her head. She only had to close her eyes to see pictures of places and people, and around them she found she could spin stories that became more real for her than the alien seaside town they inhabited. At first the sea itself featured in none of them. Looking east across grey waves she had a sense of dangerous people far away, but these waves were as alien as the town itself. Just sometimes, when the wind was kind and the sun shone, she was reminded of a different sort of sea, a wide bay with headlands and a narrow strip of land separating the long beach from a lake at its back.

  The other compensation was that her mother had less power over her. For a quiet life, she did what Fleur asked her to do but she knew, because she had been told, that she did not really belong to Fleur and that made it possible to endure. The only time she really put her foot down was when her mother told her that they might go to live in Greece, where the sun shone and there were more of what she called ‘development opportunities’. The idea appalled Jo so much that she flatly refused to consider it and her mother was so unnerved by the icy obduracy she displayed that she let the subject drop.

  For all that, Jo was yearning for something and she thought at first that it might be the old house in York, though that didn’t quite seem to be it. There was another blessing. They were further away from the field at Stamford Bridge and that suited Jo, because on the occasional times when they had driven past it, she always had to force her mind closed against a wave of sadness.

  Her mother spent a lot of time talking to lawyers. After two months they moved into a rented bungalow full of the sort of furniture that wobbled and squeaked halfway to splitting when you sat down on it. One day her mother came back to the bungalow late in the evening and told her to stop reading. ‘You’ve always got your nose in some book,’ she said. ‘You should watch more TV. Anyway, I’ve got something to tell you.’

  She sat down dangerously, heavily. Jo thought her mother had put on a lot of weight since they left York. She brought cakes home every day and ate most of them herself.

  ‘We’re going to have a fresh start,’ said Fleur with a bright smile. ‘I need to go somewhere else – somewhere where I can do the sort of things I do best and not have to argue with small-minded people all the time. They’ve got it in for me round here.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Exeter.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  Fleur opened the book of road maps and pointed to it.

  ‘That’s a long way away,’ said Jo, though she didn’t mind that, not the way she had minded about Greece. She stared at the bottom corner of England pointing down to the left like a pig’s snout, and felt a stirring of excitement.

  ‘Yes, it is a long way,’ said Fleur as if that was the whole point. ‘I just hope it’s far enough.’

  So they packed up their stuff and on a fine Sunday they got in the car and drove away from the Yorkshire coast, along roads that got larger and busier until they were sucked into the bland and blinded motorway which hid England from Jo’s avid eyes behind crash barriers and signs and services. Even when it allowed her a glimpse of a church or a wood or a hill, it whisked them away again before she could find anything real.

  Four and a half dull hours brought them to signs saying ‘Bristol’ and a violent couple of minutes where protesting horns erupted round them as Fleur swerved from lane to lane, cursing, as she lurched from one motorway to another. Jo saw wide water to her right and learned from the map that she was looking across at another country on the far side, no longer England but Wales. She was disappointed that it looked so similar as if it should have been a different colour.

  A county border sign said ‘Somerset’ and the countryside seemed to grow kinder. For no reason she could understand, a fierce excitement began to bubble up inside her, then not so much inside her as from the outside, like a call or a promise. She tried to locate it by turning her head back and forth as if it were a homing beacon. Out across the fields and the trees, she saw a hill rearing out of the distant skyline, a sharp cone of green all by itself, and on top was the stone finger of a tower. She checked the number of the junction they passed, searched the map again and thought it might be Glastonbury Tor.

  The quiet voice in her head said ‘Home’ and she searched the map again hoping that might be the way to Exeter, off to their left, but Exeter was still a whole page of map straight ahead.

  ‘Can we go that way?’ she asked.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Over there, to the left.’

  ‘That’s not the way,’ Fleur said crossly.

  ‘Please? I’m sure we’ll find somewhere nice.’

  ‘Don’t be daft. We’re going to Exeter. It’s straight on. I just want to get there and put my feet up.’

  There was a junction ahead and Jo felt an urgent desire rising in her, suppressing all her common sense. It was as simple and basic as being deep under water and needing to swim upwards. ‘Just for a few miles,’ she said, then louder, ‘I want to go that way. I want to see what it’s like. It can’t do any harm. Turn left here – that’s all you have to do. Please, just do that.’ She didn’t know she was shouting, and for a moment she thought her mother was going to do what she wanted because Fleur pulled sharply across from the fast lane to the slip road, but all she did was bump up on to the kerb at the roundabout, switch off the engine and turn round to confront her daughter with fury on her face.

  ‘I thought you’d finished with all that nonsense,’ she said. ‘All right then, little miss. We’ll get you straight back on the pills, just you see. Now you shut up. I don’t want another word out of you.’

  ‘Don’t fight her,’ said the calm voice in Jo’s head. ‘You’re right. That’s home. You’ll be free to go there some day.’

  ‘When?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘When you’re old enough. Soon.’

  Sorrow crept through her as the land around chilled to evening and the turning wheels took them further away from wherever it was.

  CHAPTER 3

  Jo woke up sure she had heard the alarm, immediately afraid she was late for school. The bell ran away to the back of her head into the dream space and she knew it for the wrong bell, a church bell tolling wildly, not the clock’s calm electric buzz. Night filled the room but it was an unfamiliar shade crossed with yellow and the sounds were unfamiliar too – a quiet slapping of water and a car engine in the wrong place, with the wrong echo. Remembering she was now in this unknown Exeter, she got out of bed on to a bristly floor that released traces of a landlord’s cleaning chemicals as her toes disturbed the pile. She went to the open window, leaned out staring sideways, towards the dark water of the river with streetlight splashes bouncing on the ripples. The buildings beyond rose towards the centre of the city. It felt no worse than York, a little better even, just another place to be. Up the hill, a distant bell chimed twice and she switched on the light to check again that she had all her clothes ready. They were clothes from her old school and her mother had promised that the new school would not mind. There was the map her mother had printed off for her and two pound coins. Fleur had a meeting, she said. Otherwise she would have taken Jo there, as it was her first day, but she was sure it would all be all right. Jo looked at the map. It seemed a long way. She went quietly back to bed.

  In the morning, she took the map and the two pounds and a spare set of keys from a hook by the door and went out to find herself cut off from the city by the river. She turned right, looking for a way across, wasted five precious minutes, then turned back in mounting alarm and found a footbridge to the far side. There would be a bus, her mother had said, but when she found a bus stop, the names of the destinations bore no resemblance to anything on her map. She asked a young woman who looked like a student and
replied in what Jo thought might have been German, then a traffic warden who pointed vaguely ahead. At nine o’clock, when school started, her heart was pounding and she was finally in a road whose name appeared on her map, but it seemed to be a long road and the side turnings came crawling towards her, each one refusing to fit the deceptively ordered promises of her now-crumpled map.

  On the edge of tears, she sat on a bench and asked Gally to help her. To her surprise, she felt a small bubble of laughter start up inside her, a feeling of how ridiculous this was. I’ll get there when I get there, she thought. It has to be somewhere.

  It was half past nine when she finally reached St Matthew’s School. The grounds were empty so she followed the signs to the school office where they looked at her clothes in surprise, consulted the computer and led her to a classroom where every eye swivelled towards her as she walked in.

  ‘This is Jo,’ said the woman who had brought her. ‘She’s just arrived.’

  It was a science lesson and the class was split up mostly into groups of three, mixing liquids in tubes. The teacher looked around and settled on the only pair of girls. ‘You can work with them,’ he said. ‘Lizzy, look after Jo, will you?’

  The girl, who had long blonde hair, made a face and Jo’s heart sank but all she said was ‘My name’s not Lizzy.’

  The other girl, who was short, studious and quite wide, said, ‘Ignore her. He’s only gone and delivered you into the hands of the most dangerous girl in the whole school. I’ll look after you. I’m the sensible one. I’m Ali.’

  And that was how the three of them turned into a trio, how Jo’s life became more bearable and how she let more normal emotional comforts in. Lizzy – who turned out to be Lucy – and Ali had been inseparable for years. They had met on their first day at primary school when the teacher paired them up for a spelling exercise. Ali was immediately fascinated by Lucy’s insouciance, by her declared lack of interest in anything she termed boring and also by her clothes, which seemed to come from a richer and softer planet than the one Ali inhabited. Lucy was secretly impressed by the fact that Ali knew so much stuff.

  It took three weeks before Fleur found a private psychiatric clinic for Jo, in a large country house half an hour from Exeter, and that was a valuable three weeks because it cemented Jo’s friendship with Ali and Lucy before more tablets arrived to take the edge off her. The doctor had a name full of harsh sounds and a voice to match so that Jo could often not understand the questions he asked her. He listened to Fleur more than he did to Jo, nodding as Fleur described events that Jo had trouble recognising. He accepted Fleur’s account of Jo’s imaginary voices and suggested a new brand of antipsychotic. ‘It is mild,’ he said, ‘only mild. You will hardly notice but very good, I think.’

  Jo noticed and Ali noticed and Lucy noticed. After school, Jo would usually go back to one or the other of their houses. Lucy’s house was modern and airy and full of colour. Lucy’s parents, who were both something to do with media consultancy, treated their daughter as if she was an amusing acquaintance of their own age and gave her an allowance which meant Lucy’s room was always full of shopping bags and new clothes, a rainbow array of disposable self-indulgence. Ali’s home, indeed her whole life, was the antithesis of that. Her family lived in a Victorian villa with narrow windows – an old and serious place where the ceilings were high, the bulbs were dim and the walls were grey. There was nothing soft about it. The rooms were full of trays and boxes of bones and broken pottery and occasionally, when her mother came back from her latest excavation, Ali would find fresh boxes had overflowed into her bedroom. Her mother, who was the prototype of Ali’s short and powerful build, told her they were interesting and she believed her. While Christine Massey was away digging, Ali and her father would potter round the house in a companionable and undemanding alliance. He became much more fun. When Christine returned in a welter of rucksacks, the communication switched to Colchester colour-coated beakers, Samian bowls and the rim shapes of black burnished ware. Ali longed for the time when she would know enough to say something about them that her mother would want to listen to.

  The whole house smelt of old earth and slow decay and Jo woke from her first sleepover on a mattress on Ali’s floor to find herself staring into the eye sockets of a skull with a sword-cut across the top. She didn’t mind that at all. She stared quietly at the skull until Ali woke up, wondering what sort of soft, flexible flesh had once turned it into a face, what sort of brain had steered it along and who had mourned for it.

  That was before the new tablets came. Afterwards, few thoughts like that could penetrate the chemical barrier. ‘You’re a lot more normal these days,’ Fleur said. ‘That’s a relief, I can tell you. No more talking to the fairies.’

  ‘Why do you have to take them?’ Lucy asked indignantly, sprawled across her bed. ‘They’re bad for you. You’re much quieter. My mother says you should call ChildLine.’

  ‘It’s not her fault,’ said Ali, who was sorting her homework into folders. ‘You know what Fleur’s like. Would you want to argue with her?’

  Ali knew all about forceful mothers. When Christine Massey thought something was a good idea, other people tended to give in. Christine had never considered the possibility that her daughter’s preferences might not be exactly congruent with her own. When she was seven, Christine hoisted Ali into the saddle of a small pony because she had heard that riding was the healthiest interest to cultivate in a daughter. Ali found the height, smell and muscled determination of the pony quite terrifying but that had no impact on her mother. Unable to see any alternative to falling off this wobbly ridge of leather-topped horseflesh, Ali did so many times and was immediately hoisted back on by Christine, who saw this as only a minor interruption to the project. Ali rode for the next six years without enjoying a single second of it and was only released when the pony died of old age, or possibly pity for her. During that time, the idea of telling her mother she would rather not never even crossed Ali’s mind. She had developed a worried look by the time she was five and it rarely left her. In her own life, she tried to be as forceful as her mother and could never quite bring it off.

  The three of them only rarely went back to Jo’s house. Fleur was usually busy, poring over plans and estimates on the kitchen table, or deep in conversations with builders and architects as she rebuilt her business life. Mother and daughter shared the same roof but very little of anything else.

  The three girls grew up at different speeds and in different ways as the years passed. Lucy went on looking two years older than she really was and refusing to take any boy seriously who wasn’t another two years older than that. Jo had turned from child to girl and those boys who looked first at Lucy would often find something less obvious but more lasting when their gaze slipped to Jo, though they shied away from her detachment if they tried to take it further. Ali prayed secretly for some miracle of puberty that might stretch her upwards and inwards. One winter’s day at the end of 2009, just after lunch, Jo found her sitting on the frosty grass behind the science block, with her back to the wall and traces of tears on her cheeks.

  ‘I was looking for you,’ Jo said as she sat down beside her. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ said Ali. ‘Everything. You know.’

  ‘No I don’t. Tell me.’

  Ali sighed. ‘I heard Chris and Tim talking. They didn’t know I was there. Chris said I’d been mooning around and he thought I fancied him and Tim said “Bad luck.” He said I was a . . .’ She stopped.

  ‘You don’t have to tell me what he said. He’s an idiot.’

  ‘He said I was a fat dwarf with breath like a sewer.’

  ‘You haven’t got bad breath.’

  Ali gave her a dark look.

  ‘You’re not fat,’ said Jo, ‘and you’re five foot two.’

  ‘Five foot two and a half,’ said Ali and burst into sobs.

  ‘Chris Mellon is a halfwit and Tim Smith barely even counts as a life form.’ Jo put her arm
round her friend’s shoulders.

  ‘That’s not everything. There’s Facebook. I’ve been getting horrible messages.’

  ‘Who from?’

  ‘From the Six.’

  ‘The sleazy Six?’

  The Six were the girls who thought they ran the school – the sharpest, hardest, rudest sixteen-year-olds in the place.

  ‘Listen to me,’ said Jo. ‘None of that matters. When we’ve done our GCSEs we’ll be out of here and going to Exeter College and this will all be a bad dream. That’s only a few months.’

  ‘But right now, I’m here and they’re here and . . .’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘. . . and I’m nearly sixteen and I still don’t have a boyfriend and I wish I did,’ Ali wailed.

  ‘Ali, that’s like crying on Monday because it’s not Thursday.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Your life will come along at its own speed and when you’re not expecting it, and there’s nothing you can do to hurry it up.’

  ‘But it might not.’

  Jo moved a little away from her and stared out at the wider world as if she were listening to something, and when she turned back Ali thought some mystery had come into her eyes. ‘There used to be times when there weren’t enough men or women to go round,’ Jo said, ‘usually men because they caught the rough end of the world. Then if you were stuck, like most people were back then, and you couldn’t get away, you just had to put up with it, but even then the good ones found their match. I don’t mean people like the Six, I mean the really good ones – people like you, the sort of people someone would want to spend their life with. The right person comes along. And it’s so different now. You meet so many people these days, so very many people. Nobody stays in one place any more but that helps, you see? Just breathe deeply and be patient. Your time will come.’