Every night when Dad kissed me goodnight and switched my light off, I’d say, ‘If she comes back in the night, can you come in and wake me up?’ He’d just nod. He looked so sad and so tired. I was terrified that I’d be having breakfast one day and look up and there she would be, a bit scruffy perhaps, like on that morning when she came home and Dad told me she’d been in the hospital looking after Sara.
Then, one Saturday, Dad was making scrambled eggs while I was messing about on the kitchen floor tiles. I had my earphones in and I was twirling, trying to turn in a complete circle and land facing where I’d started from. I didn’t manage it, but I kept trying, thumping down on the floor and getting back up again. After I’d done my last twirl before sitting down for breakfast I asked him again if Mum would be coming back today. I didn’t want our nice morning to be ruined. But Dad had left the bread too long in the toaster and a thin swirl of black smoke curled up to the ceiling and set the smoke alarm off. It was a linked alarm system, so once one went off, they all did, all over the house. Suddenly there was horrible shrill beeping in every room.
Dad turned to me and lifted the spatula in his hand, using it like a baton to emphasise his point. He ignored the smoke, the burning toast, the eggs that had caught the bottom of the pan, the screeching alarm and the rhythmic thump of my landings, and he said, out of the blue, ‘She’s not coming home today and she won’t be home tomorrow. She might not be home for months, maybe years. But if she is coming home, I promise I will tell you.’ His hand shook and his eyes looked teary. ‘But please, please, Celeste, stop asking me.’
So I learnt not to ask and when I stopped asking, she faded a little. Not completely, but enough that it all became a lot easier to bear. I was still anxious, though, and I used to wake in the middle of the night with my heart thumping fit to jump out of my chest. One of those sleepless nights, I even wished that she would die, and that my Dad would come and sit me down, and gently tell me that she was never coming home, not ever again. I still feel really bad about that. All these years later, it’s still a memory that plays over and over in my mind.
Seventeen
Romilly had always had a job and she and David had worked out a system when they were fresh out of university whereby a portion of each salary went into a joint account to cover the mortgage, bills and household expenses and the rest was theirs to do what they liked with. Not that there was any financial secrecy. Their private accounts were transparent and holidays and other joint purchases would be paid for by whoever had their bankcard to hand. It was their way.
Romilly had fourteen hundred pounds in her bank account when she left the refuge of Sara’s house. With the lack of any other immediate options and not sure what to do for the best, she checked into a modern high-rise hotel in Broadmead, central Bristol. This was to be her home for a few weeks while she made a plan. Everything in the place smelt of plastic, as though the bed, curtains, walls and all the other contents of the room were disposable, temporary. And in a sense they were.
She stayed in her room for the first thirty-six hours, doubling over and fighting for breath every time she pictured David crying or the way Sara had shouted at him. It felt easier not to think about it, so instead she tried to take stock of her dire situation, with the bottle of vodka as her companion. She lay staring at the ceiling, replaying the many times she had driven round the roundabout outside the window, never properly looking up, never considering for a single second that this was where she might one day lay her head, alone.
She called her mum and gave her an edited version of what had happened. Pat sighed a lot, tutted and eventually offered, ‘Well, you can of course come here. Just give me a day or so to get your old room straight. I’ve been using it as a sewing and storage room and it’s a bit cluttered.’
Her mum’s tone was resigned and angry and Romilly decided that back under her parents’ roof was the last place on earth she wanted to be. The details of her situation had obviously been passed on to Carrie and Holly, who both texted her almost immediately. Carrie offered to swoop by with Dr Miguel and pick her up, and Holly suggested that coming to Ibiza might be just the ticket. Romilly had smiled, touched by their sweet concern, and wished beyond wish that she could be fixed and normality restored by a quick trip to the Balearics or one of Dr Miguel’s legendary paellas. She was particularly pleased that Holly had seemingly forgiven her; the realisation brought a lump to her throat.
After politely declining both offers, she considered what might make her feel better, what it was she needed most. Then she called the one person she felt might just understand what she was going through. She held her phone to her ear, hoping to hear a friendly voice.
‘Red? Jesus Christ, don’t tell me you and your old man have tracked me down and he’s coming to throw me a left hook to match the right?’
She bowed her head, letting her hair fall in a curtain over her face as she recalled that terrible moment when she’d realised she was lying on the grass and Jasper was by her side with blood on his face.
‘I’m in a hotel in the town centre. He’s kind of kicked me out,’ she managed.
‘Hey, well, we’re in Stokes Croft, just up the road. Come join us! I’ll text you the address.’ His posh drawl was as friendly as ever. He clearly harboured no grudges, despite having been punched by David.
She didn’t ask who the ‘us’ was but instead rummaged through the pile of clothes on the floor for her trainers and jeans. Forgoing a shower, she pulled her hair into a ponytail and, using the map on her phone, set off with only three things on her mind: to carrying on drinking, to get drunk and to remain so…
*
Romilly achieved her goal. She neglected to go back to the hotel for three weeks and so the hotel, having debited the money for her extended stay from her credit card, disposed of her meagre possessions – her clothes, underwear and toiletries and a book on the evolution of the mayfly. Not that she noticed. She didn’t notice much.
She had stepped into an underworld that a rational Romilly would have run a mile from. In this dark underbelly of the city, drugs and booze were the only currency of interest and the aim was to block out as many of the daylight hours as possible. She had unsatisfactory, fumbled sex with young Jasper; she had sex with young Jasper’s friends and their friends too. It was as much about comfort and wanting to be wanted as it was about being unable to say no when inebriated – not exactly incapable of saying no, but certainly incapable of asking the question, do I want to say yes? Each encounter took her deeper into a dark, dark place of self-loathing, which only made the escape more vital.
Her home was a sofa in a very large top-floor flat occupied by several seemingly unconnected people who came and went. A new face took up residence on every stained mattress, sagging chair and half-sprung sofa as soon as it became vacant. The vast space had no carpets, no electricity other than what the temperamental generator sporadically pumped out and no hot water. A man named Frog, who seemed to have authority over the disparate group, oversaw the place.
Frog was extremely kind, a generous white Rasta who believed that possessions should be shared. He preached about the totalitarian utopia that he saw rising from the ashes of capitalism once the lifestyles of the bankers and the rich had finally imploded. It amused Romilly to see the uber-posh Jasper, beneficiary of a thirty-thousand-a-year education, nodding sagely through a haze of hash at Frog’s ramblings. She decided not to mention that she had until recently been residing with her partner accountant husband in the rather smart suburb of Stoke Bishop, where their beautiful home sat in a well-tended quarter acre and screamed middle-class aspiration from its very appealing kerb. Not that she could bear to dwell on that anyway.
Frog was as good as his word when it came to sharing; he shared his opinions, his loud music and his time. Romilly shared her phone, her liquor and the remaining balance in her bank account. That was until the cashpoint flashed up an unsatisfactory message about insufficient funds and advised her to contact her bra
nch at her earliest convenience. She had, in a rather confused state, hurled the useless piece of plastic down a drain and then spent the next sober hour searching for it in the street. Later that evening, without sobriety to fuel restraint, she’d called the house in Stoke Bishop. Unsure who had answered, she rambled incoherently. ‘Forthemoney! It was Frog… droppeditdownthedrain… speshllyformenow, s’money! Areyoufuckinglissssning?’
The numerous visitors that hung around the flat were an eclectic bunch. Transient drifters with matted hair and stories of hard luck, free-thinking eco warriors with a passion for anything other than conformity, migrants with limited English who were just passing through, and a whole host of Jasper sound-alikes, lost rich boys enjoying a petty act of rebellion before they returned to privilege.
Romilly came to feel quite safe in her space on the sofa, welcoming the oblivion that she fell into each and every day. She would lie there untroubled as debate raged over her head on any number of topics, from global warming to who’d eaten the last tub of hummus, with the fug of sweet-smelling hash filling her nostrils and furring the back of her throat. She wasn’t even that bothered about feeling itchy, whether from lack of personal hygiene or from sharing the couch with Frog’s flea-infested mongrel. Catching sight of herself in a shop window one day, she noted distractedly how pale and gaunt she’d become and saw that her hair had dulled to a reddish brown, the burnished auburn now hidden under grease and grime. She often simply forgot to eat; her appetite was non-existent and her calories came mostly from alcohol.
Romilly submitted to this existence. She closed down, folded in on herself and just functioned. She couldn’t let herself think about Celeste, couldn’t think about David, her home, any of it, because if she did, she knew she might quite literally go insane. Her mind teetered on the edge of the darkest place imaginable, a place from which there would be no return. In her brief sober interludes, she would sob, a wretched, open-mouthed wail that invited hugs and strokes from whoever was in close proximity. She welcomed the physical interaction; it reminded her that she was human and helped her forget things for a little while.
Frog got into a fight; not a fisticuffs-in-the-street scuffle but a feud. It transpired that he was a small-time drug dealer, selling tiny wraps of ganja and the odd pill around the neighbourhood. This hadn’t gone down well with the family who considered the streets to be their domain. Romilly woke in the early hours of a damp autumn night to a loud bang and lots of shouting. She was petrified. Her heart leapt in her chest and her breath came in short bursts as though she couldn’t fill her lungs. As always, there was a second or two when she didn’t know where she was or what was going on. A friend of Jasper’s whose name escaped her ran into the room where she was sleeping on the sofa.
‘Red! Get your stuff together. We’ve got to get out. Now!’
Unsure whether she was fleeing from fire or gunshots, Romilly grabbed her bag, which contained nothing of any great use, threw her jacket over her sweatshirt and luckily was already in her jeans. With her trainers in her hand, she followed him blindly down the stairs, not stopping to question the instruction but trusting him to lead her to safety.
As she turned onto the landing, she looked into the dilapidated kitchen, where mould grew halfway up the walls and a gas pipe stuck uselessly out of the wall. Two burly men were holding Frog with his arms pinned behind his back. His head hung down near the floor and a third man was punching him hard in the stomach. She winced, wondered how she might be able to help, decided she couldn’t and ran down the stairs and out into Moon Street.
The ill-fitting front door was now completely off its hinges. But apart from the late-night stragglers vacating the Lakota nightclub and bouncing arm in arm on and off the kerb, the place was quiet.
‘You okay?’
She looked up at the boy she had forgotten was standing by her side. She nodded.
‘There’s some serious shit going on back there.’ He jerked his thumb in the direction of the flat.
Romilly started to cry. Her mind did this sometimes, opened up a little crack and let her look at herself in the past. In that particular second she saw herself in the middle of the night, tiptoeing downstairs to the kitchen to get a glass of water and stopping at the sitting-room door, surveying the large room and feeling so very lucky. She had a job she loved, a house beyond her dreams and a man she adored; and their beautiful girl was the icing on the cake! She remembered the feeling of pure joy as she padded back up the stairs to climb in next to David. And now here she was, running from a squat in the middle of the night, with all she owned slung over her shoulder in a grubby bag.
‘You okay?’ he asked again, wide eyed and edgy.
‘Yes.’ She looked at the garage door they were standing in front of and noted a large new daubing of paint. It was an unfinished work, a female face, half formed. She was devoid of a mouth and her hair and eyes had run in long drips along the metal. It made it look as though she was crying.
‘Come on!’ He took her by the hand as they loped along Fremantle Road and then Redland Grove, walking with no particular destination in mind. She found out that his name was Levi and he was on his gap year.
Romilly stared at him. ‘Of all the things you could have done, all the places you could have gone, why are you at Frog’s?’ She shook her head.
‘He’s cool and it’s buzzing!’ He laughed, pulling from his inside pocket a half bottle of vodka and, just like that, she didn’t care who he was or why he was hanging out with Frog; she just wanted to share his bottle.
The two meandered on and eventually found themselves at Westbury Park. Romilly stared up at the grand houses with their distinctive facades of limestone blocks and sandstone quoins, their blinds and curtains keeping the messy world of the street at bay. ‘It’s not fucking fair!’ she shouted, a little more loudly than Levi was comfortable with.
‘Keep it down, Red!’ He raised his palm and looked across the road.
‘WhyshouldI?’ She stumbled, managing to right herself before she fell over.
He pointed at a vast house on a corner plot, which, unlike most of the others on the road, had not been divided into flats. ‘This is where my parents live.’ He pressed the rest of the bottle into her palm and sloped off into the breaking dawn.
‘You’reafuckingjoke gapyearboy!’ she shouted after him.
He turned and flicked the Vs at her before disappearing inside the gate and out of sight.
Romilly looked around her. She knew she was at the top of the Downs, and what she wanted more than anything was to sleep. Plodding on as the indigo dawn began to burst through the darkness, she made her way across the road and before long was treading on the springy wet grass of Durdham Down.
Spying a bin set in concrete and with a shrub to its side, she decided that this was as good a place as any to catch some sleep. She fell inelegantly to the ground, threw her bag down and placed her head on it. Closing her eyes, she lay in a foetal position, too drunk to fully register what she was doing.
It was an hour later, her eyes still tightly shut and her limbs shaking, that she felt a body curl up against her back, spooning her in the early-morning gloom. Her stomach shrank and her bowels spasmed. Finding herself pinned between the bin, the large shrub and the heavy body behind her, she tried to think straight, tried to decide whether it was best to lie still or make a run for it, uncertain whether her legs would hold her upright.
A familiar, welcome sound caused her to open her eyes. A dirty woollen glove with a filthy long fingernail poking out of it was shaking the remnants of a bottle of whisky over her shoulder. The lid was already missing and the fumes danced up into her nose; this aroma was almost as good as the first taste and every fibre of her being sang with anticipation.
With her hip pressed into the wet grass, her head not five inches from a knotted black plastic bag that bulged with dog shit, she raised her mouth towards the cold neck of the bottle, wanting to feel the glass against her soft lip.
As
the liquid touched her tongue, bringing the relief she craved, she heard the body behind her unzip his fly. He pushed up against her. Her jeans had ridden down, exposing part of her flank, now peppered with goosebumps, and his skin made contact. She tipped the bottle higher, hoping for oblivion while he grunted and sighed behind her. She leant forward, bracing herself against the edge of the bin, and as she did so, a tiny spider came into focus. She stared at the little creature, working diligently to repair a gap in its gossamer web. It was beautiful. Romilly stared, concentrating on the pale brown stripe across its back and its stripy legs. Araneus diadematus. Beautiful little thing.
She must have passed out because when she came to, the sun was up and there was noise on the road. Cars were ferrying people to work and school, and bus engines were letting out great mechanical wheezes in the heavy traffic. Romilly sat up and gripped her head. Instantly remembering, she reached down to restore her jeans, wiping at the patch of skin where a dirty stranger had taken his pleasure in exchange for whisky. She felt otherworldly, wondering how life could go on all around her while she lay there, in the middle of it but invisible.
She knew she was awake, but surely she was dreaming, as she could hear the sweet, unmistakeable sound of Celeste’s voice. Celeste – the name I gave her because to hold her was heaven and I wanted her to dance among the stars, shining… It couldn’t be real! It must be her mind playing a trick. But the voice sounded so like her daughter’s that, trick or not, her gut twisted with longing. Peering through the sparse lower branches of the shrub, Romilly placed her hand over her mouth and let out a silent cry. A thick stream of tears coursed down her face, clogging her eyes and fogging her view, because it wasn’t a dream. There, just a matter of feet away from her, was Celeste, walking along the path with a girl of similar age, wearing the same school uniform. A woman, probably the girl’s mother, trotted behind them, her ponytail swinging as her right hand tugged at the leash of an inquisitive spaniel.
Another Love Page 21