Zach
13 February 2012
I’m off to Cornwall today. She thinks I’m seeing the new dealer in Exeter, spending the night there, but I’m going straight to Gulls. I’ll make it nice for us to move into. I need to calm down a bit, too, get some more medication from Kulon. I want her to miss me, to miss my hands on her body, between her legs, the touch of my lips. She’d bloody better miss it. She’d bloody better miss me.
Valentine’s day tomorrow and I’m not going to be here. Last year, it was roses and candlelight, cards and kisses. We spent the night entangled. This year, it hasn’t been mentioned.
She was in a weird mood last night. She cooked chicken with mushrooms, actually cooked with them, touching, snarled up with garlic in their snappy little limbs. A pre-emptive stab at romance? I don’t think so. It wasn’t that I didn’t speak to her. I couldn’t speak to her. How could she pay so little attention to my needs? She rendered me literally speechless. When I left my entire plate, she took it away silently, scraped the lot into the bin. Later, she said in a peculiar tone, as if commenting on a subject that barely glanced off her life, like the weather in a distant part of the country: ‘You could try mixing your food up a bit. You won’t know if you like it unless you try.’
‘I’m an adult,’ I said. ‘I don’t need coaxing to eat my greens, thank you.’
‘I’m just saying it might not kill you to try.’
I said: ‘People always want to tell other people what to do.’
‘People?’ she said. ‘You’re always talking about “people”, Zach. You make sweeping generalisations about “people”, lumping them all together, as if the rest of the world behaves identically and you, alone, are different.’
She apologised this morning for upsetting me. I’d been angry, I think. I can’t remember now. Did I push her? Bit of a blur. Still, it was too little, too late. We pretended to be normal. She’d hardly slept, I could tell – blue smudges under her eyes. The radio was on, broadcasting the results of another by-election in another town. She put her coat on and she was halfway out the door when I called her back.
‘I love you,’ I told her. ‘You do know, don’t you?’
‘I do,’ she said. She was lying through her teeth.
‘More than anything,’ I said. ‘More than life itself.’
I kissed her as hard as I could, but I could still feel her pull away.
Chapter Twenty-two
Lizzie
On Saturday I am awake before it’s properly light. Howard gets to his feet when I creep into the kitchen and eats the food I put down for him. His tail wags, knocking a spoon off the table. It clatters, and I freeze, waiting. No movement upstairs. I quickly write Onnie a note, thanking her for last night’s meal and for her tidying – I really appreciate it and the house definitely needed it. I explain that I have a friend coming to stay and wouldn’t mind having the sofa bed back if possible. I add a final line: On reflection, I don’t think us looking for Zach together is the best way to go about it! Sorry! If I don’t see you before you leave, best of luck with everything!
It’s a nasty little passive-aggressive letter, but I don’t care.
I hide Zach’s laptop under my mattress and leave the house as quietly as I can.
Ryde esplanade in March: faded and bedraggled like a row of Victorian dolls left out in the rain. High tide crunching against the sea wall. At the top of the town, a church tower punctures a pillow of low cloud.
I feel as if I’m trespassing, entering forbidden territory. It was an evil place, Zach said, the repository of all his unhappiness. He swore the day he left he would never return. That day, he had stood up to his father for the first time and been kicked out of the house. His mother was weak and took his father’s side. When he died a few months later, his mother told Zach he wasn’t welcome at the funeral. He didn’t even go back to sell the manor – most of the proceeds went to pay his father’s debts.
‘Did the neighbours not know what was going on?’ I asked him. ‘Did no one step in to intervene?’
‘They knew I was being beaten,’ he said. ‘Curtains twitched. They knew but they did nothing.’
I don’t blame him for deciding to hate where he grew up, to blame it for everything that had happened. But it wasn’t the island’s fault. It was only the scene of the crime. He couldn’t escape it just by moving somewhere else. He lived every day with the consequences of his father’s brutality and his mother’s collusion. It was behind all his problems. Maybe he has come to realise that. If he’s hiding here now, how desperate he must be. And if he isn’t, and he’s followed me down, has seen me defy his wishes, how angry. Either way, this should draw him out. I want him to see me do it. I want him to know.
I take a train and a bus and a hovercraft. On the train, I scanned the faces of the other passengers, changed carriages and seats several times. There were only four of us on the hovercraft – two girls in their twenties and an old man who sat at the front, reading his newspaper.
I’m surprised how gentle and normal the Isle of Wight looks, a chunk of mainland set afloat, with its own pedestrian bridges and mini-roundabouts and fish and chip shops. Ryde has the melancholy air of any seaside town out of season – shuttered-up hotels, cut-price wetsuits, aimless teenagers.
I set off along the front, Howard pulling ahead, past a skating rink, a penny arcade, a mini Peter Pan amusement park. One of the rides is upended, its workings revealed like oily intestines. None of these landmarks are as tacky and awful as Zach claimed. At an artificial lake, next to a chained-up link of pedaloes in the shape of swans, a young woman and a small child are feeding bread to a few ducks. I remember a holiday in Bognor Regis, my mother upright and plucky in her darned summer frock with her two neat girls. She dressed us in matching swimsuits, marine blue with white skirts, from a shop called Cuff’s. ‘Suits your sister better,’ I remember her telling me. ‘She’s got the figure for it. But there you are.’
I let Howard off the lead when I reach a wide arc of beach. To my relief, he seems much better today. I’ve picked up a map from a stand at the hoverport so I know roughly the direction I need to go in. I follow the sea path, past a shut-up café, a row of abandoned beach huts, and through a park to another main road. The path is quiet. No one follows me. Beyond a sweeping view of the grey Solent, the towers of Portsmouth are teeth marks on the horizon.
At the end of this raised walkway, where the huts dribble out, a path leads back down to the road. I put Howard back on the lead and have another look at the map. The next turning leaves the sea and climbs sharply up a hill. A few houses, mostly divided into flats, are set back from the road, interspersed with trees. It’s so very different from Cornwall. Zach was right about that. It feels tamer here, more suburban. Most of the buildings look like holiday lets and are shut up.
At the top, past the entrance to a noisy Wildlife Encounter where Howard struggles to break free, I reach the main road and it’s a fifteen-minute walk along this to the village where Zach grew up.
I’m not sure what I am expecting – a pretty green maybe, Miss Marple, some thatching. But this is more – well, it’s a brow of hill, a curve of road, a junction. The village has a primary school – though I know Zach went to Tennyson Prep, the ‘best education on the island’ – an off-licence (heavily barred) and a Londis. A pub advertises Sky TV and a Sunday carvery.
I sit on a bench on a scratch of grass next to a dog-poo bin. Howard lies down at my feet. I’m glad he’s with me. There’s no one in sight. I hadn’t imagined feeling so desolate. I thought the house Zach grew up in, Marchington Manor, would be obvious – a sweeping driveway, a walled garden, a tennis court. I haven’t seen anything resembling that.
In Londis, the young girl with the nose-ring doesn’t recognise Zach from the photograph I have brought – him on a deckchair in our garden, half asleep, his head tilted to the sun. It’s my favourite. I took it one day without him noticing. She hasn’t heard of anyone called Hopkins. The only big
house she can think of is the Priory, but that’s a luxury hotel. Zach once mentioned a nanny called Miss Caws. She wore a starched uniform and lived in one of the farm cottages. The girl with the nose-ring says there is a Caws Avenue, but she doesn’t know of any old ladies who used to be nannies. As for farms, ‘There’s a petting farm over at St Helen’s. The café’s under new management, not sure they’ve got cottages – maybe holiday lets?’
Zach’s father didn’t drink in the pub. He imported his own booze into the house, preferring to drink alone. I ask behind the bar anyway. The landlady, who’s from Thailand, knows nothing. She suggests I take the road back down to the coast, to the small seaside resort at the bottom of the hill. The man who owns the gift shop has been there for years – he might know something.
It is spitting with rain now. I zip up my fleece, pull the hood over my head, and set off in the direction the landlady sent me. As a teenager, he must have drunk in that pub, wheeled down this hill on his bike. He must be living a life, if he’s hiding out here. He will have to be walking these pavements, using these shops. Have I got this wrong? I hear his voice in my ears. ‘I thought you trusted me.’
The village is genteel in a higgledy-piggledy way, all blue and yellow curtains. It’s hard to feel scared. I find the gift shop at the top of the high street. The door dings as I enter. It smells sweet and stale inside, of pencil shavings and second-hand books. Did my husband spend his pocket money here, on paper planes, water pistols or art materials – wax crayons and pads of sketching paper? I try to imagine him as a little boy, choosing carefully. When I can’t, my heart lurches. I ask the owner, a fat man with rosy cheeks and new teeth, if he remembers him, or has seen him recently, but he doesn’t, and he hasn’t. He suggests I ask next door at the post office.
In here, three blond schoolchildren are choosing a crab net and a bald man in red trousers is extracting money from the cash machine. I’m beginning to feel frustrated. It’s much bigger, this island, than I anticipated. The map says twenty-five miles by thirteen. He might not be here. He could be anywhere. The young woman at the till doesn’t recognise the name Hopkins, either. Caws, though, oh yes, they’re an old family in these parts, but no nannies as far as she knows. As for big houses, not so many round here, most of them were converted into flats way back.
‘Sorry I can’t be of any more help,’ she says, reaching for a packet of Silk Cut to give the man in the red trousers. ‘I’m sorry he’s gone missing, love. It must be a heartache.’
I stand in the street outside the post office, where two dachshunds are tied up, yapping.
An elderly woman with swollen ankles is sitting in the pharmacy opposite, on a chair by the counter. The chemist is tall and thin with hollow cheeks and a prominent Adam’s apple. I give my spiel – I’m looking for a friend, Zach Hopkins, who has gone missing, and I’m on a hunt to find him. I describe what I know about his childhood home. The chemist shakes his head, with only a glance at the photo, but a younger woman with long dark hair comes out of the back room with the old lady’s medication and cranes her neck.
The old lady peers too. The younger woman says: ‘Do you think that’s Jilly Jones’s son? It could be, couldn’t it?’
The old lady takes it and holds it up to her nose. She nods and hands it back to me. ‘That’s Jilly Jones’s boy.’
‘Jones? No. I don’t think so. I think you must be—’
The younger woman has turned away. She doesn’t seem to want to talk any more. I feel awkward, as if I’ve said something wrong. When the old woman slowly gets to her feet, I hold out my arm to help her up, and she and I leave the shop together. She leans on me as we cross the road to the yapping dogs. As she unties them, she says: ‘Do all right, did he, in the end?’
I nod. ‘Yes. If we’re talking about the right person, he did OK. He became an artist. A good one.’
‘Mrs Bristock – you should talk to her. She was Jilly Jones’s next-door neighbour. Still lives in the same house. She’ll remember – she used to babysit for the lad. Go on. Take that picture and show her.’
She gives me the address, indicating the direction with her stick, and shuffles off with her dogs.
I cross the road again and take the turning she pointed at into a modern estate. The road bends and I follow it, take a left and a right, doubling back on myself at one point – it’s confusing, the houses all look the same – until, after ten minutes of spiralling up the hill, I reach the right address. The house is small and square, with a patch of grass at the front and a large satellite dish attached to a mansard roof. Scalloped net curtains at the single window.
I expect it to be embarrassing and a waste of time. I imagine Mrs Bristock taking one look at the photograph and shaking her head. Part of me is hoping for that.
To the door comes a small woman with tight white curls and milky blue eyes behind enormous glasses. She is wearing bulbous pearl earrings, a floral dressing gown and gold lamé slippers on heavily veined feet. When I explain what I have come for – I am still using the name Zach Hopkins – she puts a bony hand on my arm and tells me to come in. ‘Don’t worry about the dog,’ she says. ‘He can run around in the garden.’
She takes a while unlocking the back door to let Howard out. He sees a cat and tears past her. The two of us go into her sitting room.
It’s hot and crowded with knick-knacks. A gas fire is bubbling under a fake mantelpiece and the television is on, with the sound off. There’s a dizzying, synthetic smell of rose petals.
‘Right, dear,’ she says, lowering herself into an armchair. ‘Tell me again what you’ve come for.’
I perch on the edge of the sofa facing her; on the side table next to me is a bowl of potpourri and a tall black cat made of twisted glass. I take out the photograph and lay it carefully on the table.
‘That’s Jack Jones,’ she says immediately. ‘Poor Jilly’s son.’
Jack Jones. I feel myself slipping back into the sofa, the cushions giving way beneath my head. ‘Are you sure? When I met him he was called Zach Hopkins.’
‘No, Jack Jones. She called herself Mrs Jones, for appearances’ sake – but she was never married. It was her maiden name, though . . .’ She waves one hand in the air. ‘Now you mention it, I think the boy did take his father’s name, when he got old enough. Changed it by deed poll.’
‘His father’s name? What do you mean?’
‘It upset poor Jilly quite a bit. His father never had anything to do with him, you see – one of the fairground lads, or one of those boys over from the naval academy on a day trip. Came to visit once when the boy was about five. But I know he didn’t pay maintenance.’
‘I don’t understand. The Zach I knew had two parents. Are you sure . . . ?’
I pass the photograph to her again and she brings it close to her face. ‘Yup. That’s Jack from next door all right.’ She leans forward and pulls the lace curtain apart with her index finger. ‘That house to the right, over there. Exactly the same as mine, only their garden is on a slant and I’ve got a bigger airing cupboard.’
I look where she’s pointing. A house like this, with a satellite dish on the roof. A small blue trike lies on the front path. No manor. No tennis court. No staff. No abusive father. No father at all.
‘I think you’ve got the wrong person,’ I say.
Mrs Bristock heaves herself to her feet and opens the cupboard under the television. She brings out a photograph album and flicks through it. ‘There,’ she says, pointing. ‘There he is. With Jilly at the village fete.’ She brings it to her face again to read the writing under the photograph. ‘In 1985. He must have been thirteen or so.’
She holds the album out and I look at it closely. The woman is thin, with a pinched face. She is in high heels and wearing a pink coat, cinched at the waist with a black patent belt. Next to her, unwillingly, half moving out of the picture, is a tall boy with brown hair and blue eyes and a distinctive mouth.
‘Did she beat him?’ I manage to say eventually
.
‘She doted on him, did Jilly,’ Mrs Bristock says. ‘She worked up at Tesco. When they opened the twenty-four-hour superstore she took on double shifts. She never learned to drive, but she used to cycle up there. Nothing was too good for her boy. Spoilt, of course. Overindulged. That was his problem.’
After a long pause, my voice cracking, I say: ‘Where did he go to school?’
‘Local primary, then the comprehensive over at Newport. Jilly wanted him to go to the grammar school in Portsmouth, but he didn’t get in. He was mad keen for art college, I remember. He won the village art competition one Easter and he had a stall doing caricatures of people in the fair at Regatta Week. But it wasn’t to be. He didn’t get the grades.’
She stops talking and smiles at me. My expression must have stopped her. ‘Can I get you anything, dear? A drink?’
I tell her I wouldn’t mind a glass of water but I can fetch it myself. I ask her if she’d like anything and she quite fancies some tea – ‘bit early but what the heck’. I tell her I’ll bring it and I stand in the kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil, staring out of the window. Howard is lying in the middle of her lawn, next to a low bird bath.
No abusive father, no beatings, no cold corridors and freezing cellars. An ordinary childhood in an ordinary village. A mother who doted on him, who gave him everything he wanted. A single parent – but no one died of that. Nothing he told me is true. It’s all lies. How many times did I excuse his behaviour, his need for control because of what he went through? How much did I let him get away with?
He didn’t go to art college. He never lived in Clapham. I think about the bare white walls of his Wimbledon studio: did he paint at all? The gallery in Exeter, how hard I tried to track it down after his death, to reclaim his work – was that an invention? This man I loved. I lay next to every night. I touched each part of his body. I let him inhabit me, possess me. He slept with Onnie. He is a stranger. Even his name is a fabrication.
Remember Me This Way Page 26