by Gayle, Mike
‘So you’re trying to say that none of this is real? That everything that has happened since that night has all been, what . . . some kind of dream?’
‘If that’s what your tiny brain can cope with at the moment then go with that.’
‘That’s ridiculous. This isn’t Narnia, it’s Lewisham! It’s been months since then. So much has happened in that time, how can you possibly expect me to believe that it’s still that same night?’
‘I don’t need you to believe anything. I’ve got a job to do and this is me doing it.’
‘What job? What are you talking about?’
‘The details aren’t important right now. Just the facts. That night you stood at a crossroads: one path leading home to your wife and kids and the other leading to Slag Face. The thing about crossroads, Joe, is that no matter which path you take there’s always part of you wondering about the road not taken. Thanks to me you’re going to find out exactly what lies at the end of that road and the journey has already begun. You think you only get to live one life? Well, from now on this is yours. Enjoy.’
This was all too much. I shut my eyes, willing this whole thing to be over, and when I opened them again Fiona was gone.
10
I didn’t move for an hour after the hallucination ended. I couldn’t. It was like I was rooted to the spot. I’d obviously suffered some kind of post-traumatic stress episode brought on by Penny’s leaving. What other explanation could there possibly be for my dead ex-girlfriend popping back for a visit? It had seemed so real and the idea that my brain was capable of doing something like this while I was fully conscious terrified me because while it wasn’t exactly great that I’d blocked out the night that I’d slept with Bella, it was altogether a different kind of ‘not great’ to be conjuring up Fiona. And though my every instinct was to put the hallucination and everything that came with it into a file at the back of my mind to be worked on another day (along with my missing night with Bella), each time I tried to do so the same question would present itself: was that really a ghost or have I officially lost my mind?
Like any decent twenty-first-century man my first step once I’d gathered my wits about me was to sit down at the kitchen table with my laptop and Google ‘Suffering from hallucinations why?’ Within 0.2 seconds I was faced with 3.3 million potential diagnoses. I took a look at the first five to get a brief overview of my condition. According to everything that I read hallucinations took several different forms but usually only ever affected one of the senses. For example someone might hallucinate a smell, or a sensation, even a sound, but rarely, if ever, all three. Yet my hallucination had been so real, so complete. I’d heard Fiona talking, I’d smelled her perfume and I’d seen her sitting on my own stairs looking as real as anyone I’d ever seen. Potential causes of hallucinations ranged from schizophrenia through to substance abuse but given that until this morning I’d never seen anything that wasn’t actually there combined with the fact that I hadn’t so much as touched a glass of wine since the weekend I doubted either of these could be the cause. One thing that did strike a chord with me was the mention of anxiety being a key factor. This made absolute and total sense. After all, what could be more anxiety-inducing than watching my wife leaving me? No, there wasn’t anything seriously wrong with my mental health. I just needed to calm down and relax a little then talk to Penny and try to sort things out.
I reasoned that the best way to re-establish normality was to busy myself with mundane household chores. I stacked the breakfast things into the dishwasher, put a load of washing on, tidied the kids’ bedrooms, cleaned the bathroom and then after lunch vacuumed the hallway and made a sizeable dent in the ironing pile. Although I was still unsettled, the performance of these tasks did soothe me somehow and had the bonus of showing Penny, when she did return, that I’d made an effort and kept the wheels turning. As feeble attempts to get on the right side of a woman wronged went it was pretty pathetic, but at that moment it was all I had.
I was already filled with dread as I stood in the school playground waiting for the kids to come out but when the bell went signalling their impending arrival I was nearly sick. They were going to want to know where Penny was and I didn’t have the faintest clue what to say or how to say it.
Jack came through the doors first and on spotting me he bounded across the yard and into my arms. I scooped him, his parka, book bag, water bottle and sandwich box up into my arms and landed a big kiss on his cheek.
‘Where’s Mummy? Couldn’t she come too?’
‘She’s had to go and visit Grandma and Grandpa because Grandpa’s not very well,’ I explained.
Jack looked up at me quizzically. ‘What’s wrong with him?’
‘Nothing too bad but I think Mummy’s a bit worried and wants to see for herself that he’s OK.’
Jack thought about it for a moment. ‘Mummy does worry a lot, doesn’t she?’
‘Yes, but only because she loves us all so much.’
I set Jack on the ground and we began walking over to the junior playground to pick up Rosie. ‘Will we get to speak to her tonight?’
‘Of course, and she’ll want to know exactly how your day’s been. So come on, how was it?’
Jack face fell and he pushed out his bottom lip. ‘Rubbish.’
‘How come? That Lucas kid and his mates haven’t been bothering you again, have they?’
Jack shook his head.
‘I’m not scared of him anyway.’
‘Never said you were. So what’s happened to make your day rubbish? You were really looking forward to it this morning.’
‘Mrs Millard told me off and sent me down the zone board because I told Kayleigh Sanderson that she was going to die.’
I stopped in my tracks.
‘You said what?’
‘I told her she was going to die and she started crying and told the teacher. But I was right, wasn’t I? You said every living thing dies eventually.’
I cast my mind back to the previous weekend when the conversation in question had occurred. We had all just finished watching The Lion King and Jack – who for as long as I could remember had had a bit of a dark side – asked when he would die. Cursing Elton John and his ‘Circle of Life’ I’d reassured him that he wouldn’t die for a long time. Then Jack asked when Rosie would die, to which I responded not for a very long time. Then Jack asked when Penny and I would die and so very much aware of my son’s ability to continue this line of questioning long after bedtime I replied that while we wouldn’t be going anywhere any time soon every living thing dies eventually.
To be fair to me it had seemed like the right thing to say at the time, and appeared to satisfy Jack’s morbid curiosity but it had obviously been percolating away in that brain of his ever since. I rubbed Jack’s head affectionately, hoping that in the future he might focus his energies on Pokémon cards rather than existential philosophy.
‘The thing is, son, the important part of what I told you was the word: “eventually”. Do you know what eventually means? It means one day way, way in the future but not right now. So while you were right in the sense that one day Kayleigh Sanderson will die, chances are it won’t be for a very, very long time, so long in fact that it’s probably not even worth mentioning it, all right?’
Nodding half-heartedly, Jack looked at me as if about to make a point of clarification but thankfully before he could the bell for the end of the junior school day rang releasing a deluge of rough and tumble pre-teens out of the main school entrance.
In contrast to Jack, Rosie’s response to my presence at pick-up time was typically muted: meandering through the playground chatting animatedly to her best friend Carly she had scanned the adult faces for her mum, spotted me and without a hint of surprise casually strolled over.
The first sentence out of her mouth was: ‘Where’s Mum?’ And the second, ‘I’m starving. Have you got any food?’
‘Well hello to you too.’
Rosie sniffed haughtily an
d made a big show of waving goodbye to Carly. ‘Dad’s being a pain,’ she called and then pulled a face – eyes crossed and tongue out – to illustrate exactly how much of a pain I was being. ‘I’ll text you later, OK?’
Carly giggled and waved goodbye. Given that from my experience there were very few moments in the day when they weren’t communicating with each other in some fashion I wondered what they could possibly have left to say.
‘So where is Mum then?’
‘Granddad’s not well,’ interjected Jack, thoroughly pleased to know something that his sister didn’t. ‘Mum’s gone to look after him.’
‘How long will she be gone for?’
‘I don’t know. A day or two maybe.’
Rosie wrinkled her nose. ‘I’ll text her and find out.’
‘No you won’t. She’s got a lot on her plate right now. She said she’ll call this evening and you can ask her whatever you want then. But in the meantime no texts, understand?’
Rosie nodded reluctantly, signalling thankfully that she knew the difference between the kind of no that could be ignored and the one that would result in her phone being taken away if she even thought about disregarding it.
‘Right.’ I sighed – this day had gone on for far too long and I couldn’t believe how much of it was left before it would officially be over. ‘Let’s go home.’
I made the kids a tea of pasta with a green salad, which Jack point blank refused to touch. I didn’t have it in me to make him eat it but neither did I have it in me to contravene Penny’s wishes (‘The kids eat what we put on their plates and that’s that,’) and so I compromised by allowing Jack to make such a mess of his plate that the majority of the salad ended up on the floor, thereby saving us both from doing the wrong thing where Penny was concerned.
Penny phoned after tea but didn’t say more than a handful of words to me. All she wanted was to speak to the kids and so while she did that I busied myself in the kitchen. Afterwards as I took Jack upstairs for his usual bedtime routine I asked how he thought Mummy sounded but he just looked at me, puzzled. ‘She sounded like Mummy. How else would she sound?’
Downstairs in the living room Rosie was doing her own thing, which seemed to consist of watching TV with the sound off, texting her friends and listening to music all at the same time, and once Jack was in bed I sat her down and attempted to help her with her homework. It was multiplying decimal fractions, something I hadn’t encountered for the best part of twenty-two years. Between us both it took half an hour and a search on Google to answer the first question, and a further forty minutes for the next three by which time we both decided to call it a day.
After making the kids’ sandwiches, and ironing their uniforms I settled down in front of the TV but couldn’t concentrate on anything and so ended up going to bed. The next morning I called in sick again, partly because I needed to be around for the kids but mostly because I couldn’t escape the fear that were Penny to arrive home unexpectedly she would interpret my absence as a sign that I didn’t care. Anyway, I decided, if my hallucination had been a sign of anything it was that I needed to keep calm and I wasn’t going to get much of that at work.
Three days into my sick leave and desperate to offer the kids something other than pasta for tea I’d ventured out to the supermarket to stock up with supplies and when I returned the first thing I saw in the hallway were Penny’s silver glittery Converses at the bottom of the stairs. I called out to her but there was no response so I searched the house until I found her loading clothes straight from her suitcase into the washing machine.
‘When did you get back?’
‘About twenty minutes ago. Did you go shopping?’
‘I thought it best to get a few things in. Is that OK?’
She said nothing.
‘How are your folks?’
‘Fine, though I really wish you hadn’t told the kids Grandpa was ill. Poor Tony didn’t know what they were on about.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I replied, ‘I just thought—’
‘I know,’ said Penny. ‘It’s fine.’
I poured myself a glass of water from the bottle in the fridge door and stood closer to her. ‘The kids have really missed you. This morning they could barely bring themselves to talk about anything other than when you’d be back. You are back, aren’t you?’
Penny closed the door of the washing machine and turned the dial to start the programme. The kitchen filled with the sound of water flooding into the machine’s stainless steel drum.
‘I’ve been doing a lot of thinking,’ she said, looking up at me.
I took her hand. ‘Pen, I want you to know that I’ll do whatever it takes to make this right. You name it and I’ll do it, no questions asked. I love you. You and the kids are my world and I don’t ever want to be without you.’
‘Do you really mean what you’ve just said?’
‘Of course I do,’ I said quickly, fearing that the opportunity to make amends might pass before I’d had time to respond. ‘I absolutely meant every word. Whatever it is you want, it’s yours.’
Penny took her hand from mine. ‘Then I want you to move out. You’ve screwed everything up, Joe, you really have, and right now what I need, what this family needs, is for you to go.’
This wasn’t exactly what I’d been hoping for. My every instinct told me that if I left it might prove impossible to return. Perhaps I could talk her round and make her see the impracticality of her request. ‘I get that you’re upset, Pen, I really do, but you’re not really thinking this through are you? I mean how long are we talking about here? What would we tell the kids?’
‘I’ll deal with them,’ said Penny. ‘They’ll be fine.’
‘But if I went that wouldn’t be us saying it’s over would it? Penny, I—’
The hardness of the look she cast in my direction cut me off completely. Wordless though it was, it spoke volumes about my inability to keep promises made even a few breaths ago.
‘Tell the kids I love them,’ I replied, ‘and tell them that I’ll speak to them soon.’
11
It was hard to describe with any degree of accuracy the multitude of feelings that manifested themselves as I stood looking up at the faded, peeling façade of the St Joseph’s Guest House. Suffice it to say that none of them were good. From the outside alone it was clear that this was the kind of place where hope came to die and the interior with its sticky lino, yellowing paintwork, and strange aroma, only confirmed what I already suspected. I booked in for a night (my mind balked at the idea that I might be there any longer) and was shown to a dingy single room with access to a shared bathroom with the added benefit of breathtaking views of the Old Kent Road.
I packed with a surprising efficiency for someone who didn’t know where he was going or how long he was going to be away. In fact I was almost proud of how well I’d done the job until, of course, I remembered that I wasn’t going on a last-minute trip halfway around the world for a celebrity interview but rather was leaving the home I’d lived in with my wife for the past ten years all because I screwed up in the biggest way possible.
Hideous though the B&B was, the truth of the matter was that my sleeping options were limited. My parents divorced when I was nineteen and my dad died five years later. Mum was still in Swindon but I couldn’t stay there for any significant period of time without driving us both up the wall, and although my brother Jim and I got on well, he was in Bristol which wasn’t exactly within commuting distance. As for friends, most had long since moved out of London to the commuter belt with their families and even if any had been up for having a thirty-eight-year old man sleeping on their sofa for an indeterminate amount of time, I wasn’t sure I could stand the pitying looks that would almost certainly follow. I would never have had this problem twenty years ago and even five years ago it might have been OK to knock on a mate’s door and say that you’d been kicked out by your girlfriend. But now all the girlfriends were wives, and all the wives mothers, and no o
ne really wants a reminder of how wrong life can get turning up in a sleeping bag on their living-room floor.
That evening as I heard the sound of the occupant of the room next to mine coughing loudly through the paper-thin walls I called Penny’s phone, hoping to find out from her when I’d be able to speak to the kids. The only thing was, Penny didn’t answer her phone, Rosie did. ‘Dad! It’s you! I can’t believe you’re in China! You sound like you’re just down the road! Why have they sent you there?’
China? For a moment I thought it was just Rosie having a laugh but then I remembered the situation at hand. Penny had clearly had to do some quick thinking to explain my absence and in her anger she had sent me as far away as she could. Working quickly, I raked through the far reaches of my memory for an excuse that sounded sufficiently plausible. Film premieres sounded too exciting. A political investigation too dull. Finally I found it. A small article I’d done on the British Council a few years ago.
‘I’m covering an arts festival. They’ve gathered together groups of British writers, actors and artists and they’re working with their Chinese counterparts to make something new.’
‘A bit like an exchange trip?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘Cool.’
‘So when are you back?’
‘I’m not sure. The festival goes on for a month but I’m hoping to be back before the week’s out.’
We talked some more about my trip and Rosie asked a thousand and one questions about China, the answers to which I could only hope she didn’t choose to verify via the internet. It was so good to hear her voice. I know it hadn’t even been a day but I already missed her.
She asked if she should put Jack on the line but as much as I wanted to speak to him I needed to talk to Penny more.
‘Can you put Mum on?’
‘OK. Love you, Dad.’
‘Love you too, sweetie.’
A short pause, then Penny’s voice.