Everlasting Lane

by Andrew Lovett

  I didn’t know what he meant. He had me all confused. It was like he was one of those magicians on TV and his words were like card tricks, pretending to be magic. I didn’t hit that cricket ball, did I? It was Mr Gale, I thought, but I couldn’t remember for sure. And the Beast? Crunch! That was Crunch! That was Mr Merridew.

  ‘All these incidents,’ said Doctor Todd, ‘they’re not coincidence, are they?’

  No, I wanted to say, they weren’t. Even I knew that. They were consequences just like in the game. But I didn’t say anything. You see, I wasn’t sure what they were consequences of.

  ‘Let’s talk about Alice,’ said Doctor Todd. ‘The real Alice. Tell me what you know about her.’

  ‘She used to live here,’ I said. ‘She had a nursery.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right, she had a nursery but she never lived in it, did she? Do you remember why?’

  I shook my head. ‘She was my sister.’

  ‘That’s right, Peter.’ Doctor Todd nodded slowly. ‘That’s right but Alice was never born, was she? Your mother brought you here to help you remember why. Do you?’

  ‘Mummy had an accident. That’s why she has a sore knee.’

  ‘That’s right. Well done, Peter. Splendid. But do you remember the accident? Do you remember exactly what happened?’

  33

  I studied the door, peering at the hinge and then the lock. I reached out and touched it, placing first the pad of my finger and then the palm of my hand against it as if measuring the temperature.

  ‘Where are we now?’ asked Doctor Todd.

  ‘Outside the kitchen.’

  ‘Good. Now, in you go.’

  The only sound was my breathing. I put the key in the lock and turned it. I felt suddenly hot and cold. I pushed the door open and looked inside. I saw myself sat at the table cutting random shapes, like lop-sided stars, with round-bladed scissors, dollops of glue setting hard on the table-top.

  ‘Now, who’s with us?’

  ‘Daddy.’

  He was soaking paint brushes, white spirit tinged with pink from the nursery walls. Spicy ginger was rising in the oven; milk was bubbling in the pan. My lips could already taste the creamy ring of chocolate.

  ‘Where’s your mother?’

  ‘She’s upstairs.’

  She was cleaning up after Daddy and his painting, her belly all swollen with my little sister, her Hoover clickety-clack against the skirting board of the room above.

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Funny.’

  The skipping rope tied clumsily across the top of the stairs. It was only a joke. Would she see it? Would she not? She’d always wanted a little girl.

  ‘Oh, Peter,’ said my father, ‘you’ll be the death of me,’ as he picked at the blobs of hardened glue. ‘Anyway, do you want your cake now or will you save it for later?’

  I stared at Doctor Todd. My mouth was sticky and dry. My tongue rasped over my lips.

  ‘What happened next?’

  ‘She fell.’

  ‘That’s right. She fell, didn’t she, Peter?’

  Yes, she fell. I could see her limbs flying and tumbling like a woman at the circus which was kind of funny because, of course, I didn’t see it. I only heard it. Her body like a bag of bones, clumpety-clumpety-clump. And her cry: frightened, yes, but soft like a mouse because there was nothing she could do. And then the clumping came to a final thud, her leg broken, the white bone peeking through the red skin, blood in her lap, and then there was a pause—I giggled at my father’s face—and then the screaming started.

  ‘Peter!’ My father leaping to his feet. ‘What did you do?’

  I’d never heard him scared before. My father’s face: I’d never seen him scared. Pretend-scared, yes, if I was playing at ghosts or being a monster but not properly-scared. All the way through the war without a graze—Tobruk, Sicily, Rome—but he died right there. Just like Alice. The cancer killed him in the end but really he was already dead. I mean, not really but … Sometimes it’s hard to be sure.

  I stopped giggling.

  ‘Peter, what’s happening?’

  And yet he forgave me when my mother never could. Why couldn’t she forgive me? It was my fault but … I didn’t know anything about consequences, you see. I’d never even heard of them. ‘Peter?’ I didn’t know things happened in chains. ‘Peter!’ I thought they happened in bubbles.

  I felt Doctor Todd’s palm again, sharp on my face. I stared at him. His pen, the real one, tappety-tappety-tappety-tap on the corner of his notebook. The room was full of smoke. I could hear tears flowing but I couldn’t tell whose.

  ‘You’ve reached an age, Peter,’ said Doctor Todd, his voice sounding cross, ‘when—how can I say this?—you need to grow up. You can’t keep hiding from the truth. You can’t keep evading responsibility for the things you do. Karen—your mother—has, well …’ His glasses glinted at me and then flashed right through me to the hazy shapes on the sofa. ‘You have been terribly over-indulged. Terribly.’ It was a strange expression—on his face I mean: half anger and half that look Melanie got sometimes when she wanted her story marked now but Mr Gale would only point to the top of the pile. It was like facing an invisible wall you could never climb. ‘Isn’t it time to take your place in the real world, Peter? To be a real tiger, perhaps, eh? And then, I dare say, you will at once begin to recognise how,’ he jabbed his cigar at the air, ‘how frustrating your peccadilloes have been.’ With white knuckles he ground his cigar into the ashtray ’til the sparks nipped at his fingers.

  ‘But Kat—’

  ‘Kat? Oh yes, ha, the mystical aunt. What a creation! But you realise, don’t you, that Kat was … well, a game? A game,’ again he flicked through the scrapbook letting the pages uncurl until he came to the right place, ‘yes, a game of the imagination. Your mother, Karen, wanted to help you, both of you, create some distance … distance from events. Look at the sofa.’

  I did so.

  ‘Now,’ he said, ‘your mother or Kat: who is real?’

  But it was hard. Like I said before they looked just the same.

  ‘You remember, don’t you, Peter, that there never was a Kat? I mean, there was only your mother. I would be very worried …’

  I did remember. Of course I remembered. Why did everybody think I was such an idiot? But … But what I wanted to explain to Doctor Todd was that Kat was real and that she was different to my mother. I mean a different person. She was warm where my mother was cold, she was happy where my mother was sad. She was a mother where my mother—

  Doctor Todd’s problem was that he was talking like he thought things that weren’t real weren’t as important as things that were. I suppose a lot of people think that. People like teachers or people on the news maybe. But I think they’re wrong in a way because there was a lot of stuff in my head that wasn’t real but was really important: like the things I wanted to happen or the things I wished had happened instead of the things that had. They were just as important as the things that did actually happen.

  And it was like that when my mum was just my mum and she wasn’t very happy but when she pretended—and I pretended too—that she was Kat and then she was happy. I mean she was pretending to be Kat but she wasn’t pretending to be happy. That was real. And she was happier being Kat than when she was real because who she was when she was real wasn’t who she really was.

  Doctor Todd sighed. ‘People need to keep what’s real and what’s not real in separate boxes, clearly labelled. If you get them mixed up, well, that’s really not very healthy.’

  Now he was talking like it was easy to know what was real and what wasn’t but he was wrong about that too. It was like the difference between a trick and magic; like that Peter and Paul thing. Sometimes all you knew was that the lady was sawn in half or the man guessed what card it was or the sun rose in the sky. You didn’t know whether it was magic or a trick but maybe it didn’t matter. And maybe, even if it did matter, it was up to you to decide anyway.
>
  Because what I think is that some people might think that things that are real and things that are unreal are opposites, you know, like black and white or the different sides of a coin. But I don’t think that’s true. I think that things, whether they’re real or unreal are on the same side of the coin. What’s on the other side is nothing, no things, absolutely no things at all.

  ‘I couldn’t remember.’

  ‘Remember? Well, memory’s a fickle thing, Peter. It doesn’t always do the things we’d like it to. You know how hard it is to forget something bad. Well, sometimes it’s just as hard to remember and it doesn’t matter how hard we try. Sometimes we want to forget. I suppose it’s a bit like all those dreams locked away in Alice’s head. Your mind didn’t like what it saw so it locked it away: put it all in a secret room and hid the key so that you couldn’t find it. That’s why we—well, your mother—had the idea to bring you back here: so that you could find the key and open the door.

  ‘It was all too hard for your parents. Can you imagine what it was like, Peter, for them? To live each day with the knowledge of what you’d done but you didn’t even remember.’

  ‘What do I have to do?’ I said. Daddy would’ve known. That’s what daddies are for. I stepped towards my mother. ‘I’m … I’m …’ I held out my hand to her.

  Slowly, slowly she turned to face me and wrapped her arms around me. She placed her face against my tummy until her tears were soaking my T-shirt. I wanted to say sorry. I wanted to say I’m really, really sorry but I didn’t know how. The words in my head sounded so stupid. But then I put my hand into my pocket and there was the ring in that little bag. And I thought now is the best time because although it was only a little thing I knew—and I hoped my mummy knew—that it meant something much, much bigger than just a ring. But, just when I was about to take it out of my pocket, Mummy said: ‘Oh, Peter, you’ll be the death of me …’

  And I said, ‘Cake.’

  My mother looked up at me. ‘I … What?’

  ‘Do I want it now,’ I said, ‘or will I save it for later?’

  She was staring now. She was trying to smile but looked like she was a little bit scared of me. I felt Doctor Todd’s hand on my shoulder. ‘I’m sorry, Peter,’ he said, ‘I think you’ve rather lost us there.’

  But I wasn’t really listening any more. You see, once at school, at my old school, I’d seen this film about World War Two. I watched it really closely in case I saw my dad because it wasn’t a proper film like The Great Escape or something. It was all lots of little films, only a few seconds each. So there was Mr Churchill with his v-sign and his cigar, and men in black and white suits, and then there were all the planes firing their guns and then all those people that the Germans killed with gas and stuff and at the end was the big mushroom bomb. Your head was all dizzy from it and when my mother said that thing about me being the death of her it was the same kind of thing. I saw Anna-Marie on the red swing—‘It’s not like I’m going to kill myself’—and then at the ballet with all those marks around her neck and then the soldier, my father, in the woods with the girl in his arms—‘Will you save it for later?’—

  ‘Peter?’ It was like I’d just finished the puzzle, ‘Peter?’ sat back and seen the whole picture for the first time.

  ‘Anna-Marie,’ I said.

  My mother’s smile flickered. ‘No,’ she corrected, ‘it’s Mummy.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s Anna-Marie. She’s in … She’s in trouble.’

  The red swing—the broken seat.

  ‘Oh, Peter.’ Her hands released me. ‘After everything …’

  ‘Peter,’ said Doctor Todd. He sounded cross. ‘I really think you need to focus on what’s important here.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I mean it is important. She … Anna-Marie … She’s …’

  And the chain growing tighter and tighter.

  Doctor Todd grabbed my shoulders and spun me round to face him. I could smell his dead-cat breath all over me. ‘You need to pull yourself together.’ He was kind of shaking me as he said it. ‘What have I been saying?’ he said. ‘It’s time to leave all these little fantasies—’

  ‘But I’ve got to—’

  ‘I think your duty is to your mother, Peter, not to some schoolgirl.’

  Do you remember that time that Anna-Marie and I walked down Everlasting Lane and there was that fork in the road? Do you remember how hard it was to choose which way to go? Well, I didn’t really decide at all, did I? Well, it was just like that: there were two ways to go and I couldn’t go both ways. It was Mummy or Anna-Marie and I couldn’t really split myself in two. It was like Norman said, I had to choose.

  ‘And, besides,’ said Doctor Todd, ‘whatever it is that seems so urgent, well, I’m sure it can wait until—’

  But how could I wait?

  It’s like when there’s a fire. You don’t say: ‘There’s a fire. I’d better get out of the house later’. You say: ‘I have to get out of the house now’, just in case you burn to death. That could happen. I mean that’s what I’d say.

  And, I mean, well, what would you have done?

  34

  ‘If you had to choose,’ I demanded, crashing through the kitchen door, piggy-bank stuffed beneath my arm like a rugby ball. ‘I mean if you had to choose between the mother and the baby, who would you save?’

  Norman Kirrin, sat at his morning table nursing a cup of tea and a pen, looked up at me startled from his thoughts. ‘Well, Peter,’ he blinked, ‘ever the one for the dramatic entrance. I must say—’

  ‘But which is it?’ I cried. ‘Who would you …? Who would you save?’

  Norman stared at me as if I’d just offered him poison. ‘How …? Oh, Peter, what a cruel question. How could one even begin—?’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘But if you had to choose.’

  Norman looked away shaking his head. ‘I don’t even know,’ he said, ‘whether the child …’

  ‘But if you had to choose!’

  ‘Norman!’ It was Greg calling like thunder from the shop. ‘I’m warning you! I’m totting up for God’s sake! Enough with the bloody hysterics!’

  Norman nearly tripped as he clambered from his seat, his finger hushed against his lips. He seized my sleeve and dragged me across the floor, pushing me into a chair.

  Pulling the back door softly shut, his fingers rifled through his thin hair. ‘Peter,’ he muttered, retaking his place, ‘Peter, Peter, why do you ask that? What is it? No human being should have to make that choice.’

  I didn’t have time for this. I reached out and grabbed his arm. ‘Please,’ I said. ‘Tell me what to do.’

  He had tears in his eyes now, his head shaking slowly. ‘I’m sorry, Peter,’ he said. ‘Only you can decide that.’

  ‘But you know.’

  He shook his head again. ‘It doesn’t matter what I know. Only you can decide. But, Peter, when have you …? Have you ever had to make a choice like that?’

  ‘Yes.’ Because he was right: sometimes there wasn’t a choice. ‘It’s today.’ But sometimes there was.

  Norman’s eyes widened. ‘Oh, Peter,’ he said, ‘really?’

  I nodded. And I had to make that choice. Because that was it: did I want cake now or would I save it? I mean, save her. I wanted to save her, of course. Of course, I wanted to save her, but I wanted—I needed—to save her now.

  ‘And can I …? What can I do? Can I help?’

  And I knew how to do it. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s in the shop.’

  He looked unsure, glancing nervously at the door that separated us from his brother. ‘In the shop you say.’ He stroked his stubbly chin. ‘Well …’

  Norman winced as he opened the door with the slightest creak. We peered in. Greg Kirrin was weighing potatoes and tomatoes for a lady with one baby on her hip and another tucked sleeping in the bulge beneath her summer dress. He was tut-tut-tutting about the weather and she, soft with sweat, was nodding in return.

  Norman hushed me
again as we muffled our steps and entered the shop. I took him by the hand and led him close enough to see Anna-Marie’s fairy smiling at us and pointed her out. The fairy which had once seemed so tatty was now glittering in its taffeta frock and was suddenly beautiful, not for what it was but for what it could achieve. Norman didn’t hesitate. He seized it in his fist and squeezed it into mine. ‘Will this do it?’ he hissed.

  I nodded: Yes. And I really believed it would. ‘I’ve got money,’ I whispered, and offered him my piggybank. ‘I’ve—’

  He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘There’s no time. Go now. Don’t look—’

  ‘What the bloody hell’s going on?’

  Greg Kirrin loomed above us. The topping of white hair made him look like a snow-peaked mountain, a mountain in an open necked shirt and a ratty blue jumper like something Kitty had dragged in. The pregnant lady had left and Norman and I had never even heard that little bell ring. ‘I said,’ boomed the shopkeeper, ‘what the bloody hell is going on?’

  ‘I was just serving—’

  ‘Serving?’ Greg laughed but not in a funny way. ‘Serving is it? You know you’re not to serve unless—’

  ‘I know, Greg—I’m sorry—but on this occasion I—’

  ‘So, now you’re a shopkeeper, eh?’ His great tummy rumbled with silent laughter. ‘I’ll be looking forward to help with the accounts, then, will I? Stocktaking? It’s not all standing around in a coat being jolly, you know.’

  ‘I know, Greg. I’m sorry. I was just talking to Peter. He only wants the fairy and I thought—’

  ‘Peter?’ He sniffed the word suspiciously. ‘First name terms, is it? What’s been going on?’

  ‘Look, I’ve given him my word. I’ve—’

  That same wheezing, unfunny laugh. ‘Well, it’s always words with you, isn’t it, Norman? Bloody poetry. Well, when it comes to this shop, I’m in charge of everything including the words and the only word we have on offer today starts with “n”, ends with “o” and rhymes with “no”.’