‘No, I’m not hung over. I’m on the wagon.’
I stared at him without comprehension.
‘Yeah, it’s been about five months now.’ So very proud of himself. He ran a hand through his short scruffy hair.
‘Five months?’ I intoned dully. Five months ago I had nearly died. Five months ago we separated forever. Abstinence that he’d refused for me, he’d managed in his new-won freedom. For a moment I didn’t trust myself to speak.
‘Yep.’ He leaned against the kitchen counter, crossing his trainered feet smugly. His sweatshirt was paint-spattered as ever and there was a big rip in the knee of his jeans. Alex’s clothes were always dilapidated. ‘Thought it was about time I got into this clean-living lark. Everyone else is.’ He eyed the empty wine bottles left over from lunch. ‘Well – nearly everyone. You’re not embracing it yourself, then, Mag?’
Since when had Alex become all smug? I caught sight of my sleep-creased face in the mirror behind him; it just made me more cross. Half-cut and crumpled, I felt at a disadvantage.
‘No, that’s right, Alex. Can’t live without a drop, me.’ I tried to keep my hand steady as I tipped instant coffee into a cup, absolutely awake and completely sober now.
‘Don’t you run to the real stuff? I’m sure I left some in the cupboard.’
‘How kind.’ Very deliberately I added water to the Nescafé and slopped it towards him along the counter, past the half-full coffeepot. ‘What do you want, Alex? My dad’ll be back soon.’
‘Great. It’d be nice to see Bill.’
‘I’m not sure Bill would agree.’ With a shudder I recalled the soggy heap I’d been upon leaving the hospital after my final operation, crying intermittently for a solid week, refusing to leave my old room, forcing the occasional slice of toast down to appease my anxious father. He’d held my hand, folding his awkward height to perch on the edge of the bed like he had when I was thirteen. He’d listened while I’d rambled on; when I’d sworn I’d never love another man again he’d promised that I would. He’d driven me back and forth to the flat to collect my things when I knew Alex wouldn’t be there. Patiently he’d accompanied me to the physio, taking time off to drop me there every other day for a month. My father had let me rant and rail when I thought I’d never walk properly again, never walk without a limp.
‘No, well, perhaps not. Look, Maggie –’ Alex stopped. He was struggling with something now, the smug façade slipping until it eventually crumpled. He jangled his car keys from one finger, his nails chewed down to the quick as usual. ‘Maggie.’ His voice was very quiet now as he stared at his dirty old trainers.
My heart was thumping painfully in my chest.
‘This is really difficult.’
‘What is?’ I was impatient now. Just get it over with. ‘Don’t tell me. You’re marrying that girl.’
‘What girl?’ Alex frowned.
‘The anorexic blonde from Bel’s wedding.’
‘Serena?’ He grinned. ‘Are you mad? Why, would you come?’
His lack of sensitivity was no surprise. I ignored him.
‘No, Maggie, it’s just – I thought we should –’
He was interrupted by Digby, who flung himself at Alex like an animal possessed.
‘All right, Diggers!’
The show of mutual appreciation was so lavish I had to turn away. ‘Traitor,’ I muttered at the slavering dog, and began to scrub an already clean roasting-tin as if it were Alex’s head.
My father appeared in the doorway, lead in hand.
‘Ah,’ he said, rather pointlessly. ‘Alexander.’
‘Good to see you, sir.’ Alex sprang forward, hand extended.
Sir? The creep.
‘I think – shall we leave you to it, Mag? Jenny was going to come up to say bye but I’ll intercept her – unless –’ My father looked at me closely. ‘Is that all right?’
I tried to smile. ‘It’s fine, Dad, really. Thanks so much for coming.’
My father kissed me, hugged me tight for a moment. If there was anything good to have come out of the past few months, it was this new intimacy with him. It was an intimacy born late, but one that I’d waited a lifetime for, which I appreciated deeply now.
‘Ring me later?’
‘I will.’
‘Bye, Bill. Good to see you.’ Alex looked up from tickling Digby’s tummy.
‘Yes, well –’ My dad was so very British sometimes. ‘Likewise.’
As the front door closed, I turned back to Alex. ‘Leave that bloody dog alone, will you? You haven’t been the slightest bit interested in seeing him in the past five months so don’t bother now. Poor little thing. He’s forgotten what you look like.’
‘Obviously,’ said Alex dryly as Digby slobbered all over his face with great enthusiasm.
‘Yes, well. He’s not very bright.’ I slammed the tin into the drying-rack where it wobbled for a minute before falling onto my bare foot. ‘Ow!’ I bit back tears of pain and anger. ‘For God’s sake! Look, Alex, what exactly do you want?’ I kept my back to the room, desperately trying to collect myself.
Alex picked up the tin. ‘It’s just – well, we haven’t really spoken properly since your –’ His voice faltered.
‘Accident, Alex, is the word you’re looking for, I think.’
‘Yes, sorry. I know I’ve been a bit crap.’
‘A bit?’
‘Okay.’ He held his arms up in submission. ‘Very crap. But when you said you didn’t want to see me, I –’
‘You know why I said that.’ I frowned. ‘But you still could have come.’
‘I didn’t think –’ he faltered, ‘not after – I mean, when Bill –’
‘Whatever.’ I hated Alex’s half-truths with a vengeance. ‘It’s a bit late now.’
‘I’m so sorry. I just couldn’t face seeing you in the hospital.’ He took a look at my face. ‘Right. Well, also, I wanted you to know I’ve been trying to – you know – clean my act up.’
‘Great,’ I muttered ungraciously.
He gave up. ‘Okay. Right, well, let’s just sort the practical stuff out, shall we? Splitting bills and things.’
I stared out of the window into the dark, at the glimmer of the train-tracks disappearing into the gloom above us like snail trails.
‘And also, Maggie, I just wanted to know how much you –’ He ground to a halt again. It was most unlike him to be lost for words.
I looked around for my cigarettes. ‘What?’
‘How much you remember.’
‘How much I remember about what?’ I looked at Alex now, and he held my gaze for a moment before dropping his. His yellow eyes were tired and ringed with black; he’d always struggled with insomnia.
‘Of the accident, you mean?’ It made my heart beat faster just to think of it. ‘It’s all a bit fuzzy.’
I finally unearthed my fags from a pile of paperwork. My hand was trembling as I tried to light one.
‘Right. I’m sorry. I really meant, though, of what happened – before.’
I chewed my lip. One of these days I’d chew right through. It was all a blur, that day, the few weeks before, a muddy midnight-blue tangle of tears and recriminations and shouting at each other in desperation and fury and absolute sorrow. We’d been in Cornwall together, I knew that, trying to sort things out, trying to find a solution once and for all, and then – then I couldn’t remember much at all about before or after. Then I was on the coach to London. Alone. So much of that period was still shadowed that the doctors talked grandly of ‘traumatic amnesia’ – but I was sure, oh I knew I must have blocked it.
‘What happened with us, you mean?’ Perhaps the memories were necessarily vague – but I knew it was only a matter of time before they surfaced. ‘I’m still struggling to remember.’
‘I just wondered, you know, that night when – my mum’s birthday –’ He looked a bit sick.
‘Oh God, I still can’t see it clearly.’ I finally lit the cigarette. ‘I try an
d piece it together, but it’s all so bloody vague.’
Immediately before the accident was clear: a lot of swearing in a service-station car park just outside Bristol. Alex, covered in engine oil, kicking the driver’s door in fury. Yet another heated argument. Silent tears sliding unchecked in the darkness. A cab. Sitting alone in a fluorescent-lit coach station with orange plastic chairs. ‘I know we had a row and that’s why I got on the coach.’ I considered him for a moment, took a lungful of smoke. ‘I just can’t remember why we were there in the first place.’ I exhaled slowly.
Alex looked almost relieved for a second as he turned to put his coffee cup down. ‘Why are you smoking again, Maggie? I thought you’d given up.’
I shook my head impatiently. ‘Why do you want to know all this now, Alex? About the accident. Did you do something terrible before it?’
‘Don’t be stupid. I just wondered.’ He busied himself with Digby, clapping for the little dog to jump to his clicking fingers. He didn’t look at me. ‘I need to get on, actually. Can we talk about the flat now?’
‘What about it?’ I ground the fag out hard.
‘Well, Serena and I –’
‘Oh.’ The penny dropped with a great big clank, rolled around the floor between us. ‘Oh, of course.’ I clapped a hand to my head. ‘You want to move her in.’
‘Look, just forget about bloody Serena, will you? Living with her isn’t really working out.’
Did he read the relief in my eyes? I cast them down as he went on. ‘So I need to – I’m just thinking about the future. After Glasgow.’
The future. I’d never known Alex plan for anything other than where he was drinking that evening. I thought of Serena; of Alex in his beautiful suit at Bel’s wedding – her glossy perfection set off by his rangy height. ‘You looked pretty loved-up to me the other week.’
‘Hardly. I mean, she’s beautiful, but – well, you know.’
‘What?’
‘Maggie –’ His voice was so quiet as he stared at me, and he almost said it and I could practically hear the ice cracking in my chest; feel my heart starting to thaw as Alex took a step towards me, his scarred hand extended. I froze for a second and then I forced myself to take a step back. I picked up a dishcloth and began to wipe the counter energetically. My mind was racing, rushing down alleyways that turned out to be dead-ends. He always did this to me. Could charm the birds out of the trees, Alex, on a good day.
‘I mean, Serena’s all right when I’ve had a drink or –’
It was a bad day, though. I stopped wiping. ‘I thought you weren’t drinking?’
‘I’m not.’ Too late. He wouldn’t look at me, searched desperately for any fragment of nail left to bite. ‘Well, hardly at all.’
‘Oh God, Alex. Why do you always have to lie?’
‘What – and you never do?’
My foot was hurting from standing too long; I sat heavily on one of the chrome kitchen chairs that he’d insisted we buy one drunken Sunday afternoon on Upper Street; chairs I’d always hated in the cold light of day. He always knew best, though. The silence spread between us like ripples in a pond. I felt so tired, so sad, so tired of being sad.
‘I’d rather – I think it’s better if we don’t see each other right now, Alex,’ I whispered eventually, staring at a hole in his trainers. ‘I don’t want to know about your new girlfriends, really.’ I felt a great depression soaking me, a depression so greedy and black it engulfed me entirely. Nothing, it whispered, its tentacles crawling, there is nothing for you here. Nothing loomed in my future apart from loneliness and my best mate leaving the country and working for bloody Charlie against my better judgement. I was trapped. ‘Could you really not just have been on your own for a bit?’
‘You’re hardly the Virgin Mary yourself, now, are you, sweetheart?’ Alex snapped, pushing a hand through his hair.
I narrowed my eyes at him. ‘What the hell does that mean?’
‘Nothing.’ He turned away to pick up his keys. ‘Look, this is all bollocks. I only came to say let’s put the flat on the market.’
‘Oh, right.’ I stared at him. ‘Bloody great. So you want me homeless as well.’
‘We’re gonna have to do it sometime, so why not now?’
‘And that’s what you came all the way round here to say?’
‘Yep.’ Digby was worrying at the scarf that Alex had stuffed in his back pocket. ‘Leave it, Dig.’
‘Why didn’t you just phone?’
‘I did.’
‘Did you?’ I was sure he hadn’t. Had he?
‘I came –’ The dog still wouldn’t let go. ‘I came because’, Alex swiped at him half-heartedly, ‘I thought it was the decent thing to do.’
‘You never do the decent thing.’
‘I do.’ He looked like a belligerent teenager. ‘Sometimes.’
I looked back in disbelief, and felt the sudden urge to laugh. It was the moment the tension that twanged so tight between us could have been dispersed. He sensed it too, grinning sheepishly at me, and my heart did a tiny forward-roll.
But I didn’t laugh, because Digby finally freed the stripy scarf from his master’s holey jeans, trailing it victoriously round the kitchen in his mouth like a trophy. Something followed the scarf, tumbling out of Alex’s back pocket, floating to the ground between us. We both watched it as it hit the floor: a packet of gold and silver confetti stamped with the immortal words ‘Bel and Johnno Forever – You Betcha!’ Confetti they’d been giving away at their party the other night. I picked the tiny packet up and turned it over, frowning again.
‘Where did you get this?’
‘I don’t know,’ Alex shrugged, biting the skin round his thumb now. ‘It must be yours. Look, I’ve got to go.’
‘It’s not mine. You weren’t at Bel’s, were you?’
He kept on at that thumb.
‘Alex! Were you at the party?’
‘No.’ He rubbed a hand through his short hair so it stuck up on end. I shook my head in confusion. ‘Hardly the Virgin Mary,’ he’d said. I didn’t understand. I remembered Sebastian – definitely the first man I’d so much as flirted with since I’d split with Alex.
He jangled his keys. ‘I need to get going. Serena’s expecting me.’
‘Alex, tell me the truth.’ I stepped towards him. ‘Were you there?’
‘Well, I was going to drop in, but then –’
‘What?’
‘I couldn’t face it, so I – I just sat outside in the car for a bit.’
With a shiver, I remembered the car that had nearly run me down.
‘Did you see me come out? Did you – you didn’t try to run me over, did you?’
Alex looked at me like I was mad. ‘Christ, Maggie! Are you insane?’ He retrieved the scarf from Digby’s slobbery mouth. ‘I’ll have that, buddy, okay?’ His voice softened talking to the dog, and I winced as I thought of all the times he’d talked that way to me. With a great ache in my chest, I considered the violence of change. I remembered the row that had propelled me onto the coach – and then, suddenly, something else. Slivers of that humid night in town, piercing the fog in my brain, slivers of a broken mirror unable to reflect an image accurately any more. I clutched my head – but they’d gone again.
‘I’ll be in touch about the flat.’ He broke through my thoughts. ‘Is it okay for the agent to come round to value it tomorrow?’
‘I suppose so.’ My turn to shrug. ‘But I might want to stay.’
‘Fine – if you want to take over the whole mortgage.’
‘Fine. I might do that. I’ll put the rest of your stuff in boxes, shall I, and you can collect it sometime.’
‘Fine.’
‘Fine. Sometime when I’m not here, obviously.’
‘Obviously. No problem. See you around.’ And he was gone, loping down the stairs with not so much as a backwards glance. Digby watched his departure mournfully.
‘I know, silly thing.’ I scooped up the trembling dog. ‘
Too much excitement for one day, eh?’
On the kitchen counter, the little packet of confetti glistened in the artificial light. The phone began to ring again. When I picked it up, no one spoke.
The first time I met Alex he was in the middle of a huge row with his father. Back in the day when I still had zest and ambition, I’d finally convinced Charlie to give me my first show to produce alone. I was still a novice really, and impressing my boss mattered massively to me.
Those were the halcyon days of believing I could make some kind of difference in my work; striving to bring great entertainment and vital information to the masses. My future soared out before me, rainbow-like: my future, chasing fool’s gold. It wasn’t so long ago but it felt like an eternity. With the bit truly clamped between my teeth, I’d spent days agonising over a subject I thought was imperative and timely for debate, and then I went with all guns blazing to persuade Malcolm Bailey to appear.
Malcolm Bailey was a thug-made-good – though it took me a while to fully realise it. Infamous for championing unfashionable causes, he’d originally made his money with a raft of innovative computer equipment in the eighties; then he’d used his business clout to buy airtime for his controversial opinions. He was truly Left, left of left, old Left: his political heart belonged in Russia circa the Revolution, though he certainly wasn’t averse to a bit of what money could buy, principles or none. And he was full of the things – principles, that is. Chock-full.
I needed Malcolm desperately for the show I was producing on domestic violence: I had to prove to Charlie that I could come up with the goods, and Malcolm would be a truly contentious booking. Unfortunately he’d already sensed my desperation and, calling the shots, arranged an early breakfast meeting on a Monday morning at his new offices in Clerkenwell. I’d spent a hideous weekend working all hours, and then had finally slid into bed on the Sunday night only to be woken by the phone. In the first stages of Alzheimer’s, Gar was not well at all, and in the end I’d slept in the chair by her bed in the nursing-home, waking stiff, sore and late, not to mention terrified by my grandmother’s fragile state.
By the time I’d screeched into the foyer of Bailey’s building a minute before eight, I was beside myself with exhaustion and ill humour. The offices were part of a new block that was causing a huge row – ecological triumph or eyesore, the jury was still out. Frankly, this morning I was past caring. I was more interested in the offer of coffee that Bailey’s ferocious PA Charlene made as she escorted me humourlessly to the tenth floor.
Bad Friends Page 10