Another Life

by Jodie Chapman

  ‘So I’m a liar?’ Her face was outraged, as she twisted her arms into her jacket.

  ‘What am I supposed to do when she stops by the table? I haven’t seen her in, what, seven years. All I said was “hi” and “congrats”. And have you forgotten that the reason we broke up was so I could be with you? Christ, Tilly, she even found us in her own bed.’

  Laura gave a small gasp and I remembered leaving out this detail when I told her the story.

  Mathilde laughed and nodded as if what she was about to say was absolute truth. ‘And I bet you’re hugely regretting that decision. Now she’s bursting with babies.’

  ‘This is crazy,’ said Sal, shaking his head. ‘I don’t want Tess. You’re the only one that I want. You know that because I tell you every single fucking day.’

  Mathilde stood there for a minute, staring at the ground. The pavements were busy with bodies stumbling out through pub doors. They either passed by towards the club down the hill, or into the kebab shop on the other side of the road. A small crowd was now looking over, enjoying the entertainment between mouthfuls of burger loaded with special sauce.

  Finally, Mathilde looked up. She drew her jacket tight and tucked her bag into the crook of her arm. ‘You know,’ she said to Sal, ‘I think this has gone far enough. We had something exquisite, you and I, and we burned brighter than most. But the fire went out a long time ago, and we’re too dumb to know it.’

  Sal’s expression switched from disbelief to fear. ‘Tilly, don’t.’

  ‘Come on, Salvatore,’ she said. ‘Admit it. We had a good time.’

  ‘Why don’t we just go home?’ I said, stepping forward. The curious faces were multiplying. ‘Sleep off the wine, take stock and pick this up tomorrow.’

  Mathilde arched an eyebrow, but her voice was soft: ‘That’s your motto, isn’t it, Nicolas. Shut off the feeling? Avoid it? Never say what you really feel? Yes, Salvatore told me all about her. Your one that got away.’

  I clenched my fist in my jeans pocket.

  ‘I think we’re done here,’ she said, turning to go.

  ‘Tilly, please,’ said Sal. He was crying. ‘I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry I spoke to her. I don’t fucking want her. I never did. It was always you. You. Fucking you.’

  She began to walk off and he started to follow, calling her name. When it was clear that she wasn’t going to stop or turn, he drew his foot back and kicked hard at a lamp post, shouting her name for every drunk to hear.

  Laura covered her face with her hands.

  My feet pounded the pavement and then my arms were around him. ‘Don’t, Sal. She’s not worth it,’ I said as he sobbed against me, but it was no use. He heard nothing but the violence of his heart.

  The next day was Sunday and we let him sleep late. Shortly after ten, I carried a mug of tea upstairs and tapped my fingers lightly against the spare-room door.

  After we’d got him into bed the previous night, Laura and I had stood in the kitchen and talked through the evening, piecing together the clues.

  ‘How was she when you left the table together?’ I said. ‘What did you talk about?’

  Laura frowned as she thought back. ‘The usual. Me asking questions. The brand of her lipstick, her job, if she missed Paris. She didn’t even use the loo – just stood by the mirror and played with her hair.’

  I shook my head. ‘She’s something else.’

  Laura didn’t say anything, and I looked up at her leaning back against the counter. The only light in the room came from the alley streetlights at the end of the garden, their soft glow edging her profile with orange trim. The side of her nearest me was in deep shadow.

  ‘Yeah, she is …’ she started. ‘This will sound odd to you, but I’m kind of jealous.’

  ‘Of Mathilde?’

  She nodded. ‘Everything happens so easily for her.’

  ‘She’s spoilt.’

  ‘Perhaps. But she gets up in the morning and already looks great. You know she doesn’t take her eye make-up off before bed? See, you shrug, but that’s a cardinal sin. If I did that, I’d be a panda, but she gets up and looks like …’ she waved a hand in the air, ‘… that.’

  I pulled at the corner of a pile of utility bills on the counter, there to be filed away. ‘I like how you look,’ I said, ‘and there are more important things.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, drily. ‘She aces those too. Gets an unpaid job at MTV as an intern, is spotted by a producer who wants to make her a TV presenter, and just like that, with no qualifications, she’ll hit the big time. I, however, forego any fun to study and get good results, leave uni with a decent degree and will spend the rest of my life in a desk job that has zero impact on anyone else.’

  ‘I thought you liked working in education?’

  ‘It’s hardly that, is it? You say you work in education and people assume you’re Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society. I ensure stocks of whiteboard pens and paper never run low.’

  ‘You’re the one that keeps things steady. O captain, my captain?’ I smiled, but Laura just stared through the window at our untended garden. ‘I don’t get why you would want Mathilde’s life.’

  She sighed. ‘I’m not saying I do. I just know that even if I did, I’d never get it. She’s just one of those girls.’

  ‘What girls?’

  ‘The rule breakers. They do what they like and it still works out fine.’

  Sal mumbled and I nudged open the door. He was awake under the covers, staring out the window, I assume at the tree hanging over from next door. This was the room with the best view; the fields in the distance above the rest of the estate. Just enough room for a double bed and a few small items of furniture. Cosy. I’d suggested it as our room when we moved in, but Laura had preferred the spacious master bed in the loft with the triple wardrobe, en suite and no view.

  ‘Morning,’ I said, setting the tea on the mirrored bedside table. I saw my reflection and it shocked me for a moment, the sight of my chin and neck from an angle I’d never known. It was me, but not the me I knew.

  Sal looked like newly awoken shit.

  ‘What time is it?’ he said, rubbing his eyes.

  ‘Ten-ish,’ I said, leaning against the closed door.

  His eyes widened and he leapt up, scrambling about for his phone. ‘Fuck, why didn’t you wake me?’ He grabbed his jeans from the floor and rooted through his pockets. The screen lit up when he touched it, and his shoulders slumped at the sight of no messages. He immediately began drafting one as he sank back on the bed.

  I sat on the chair in the corner, the one Laura had chosen from IKEA as a place for guests to drape their clothes. It was hard and wooden and the spindles pressed against my spine.

  Sal threw the phone on the bed with the screen facing upwards. He adjusted the pillow to lean against the wall and picked up his tea, rubbing his face with his other hand.

  ‘Has she messaged?’ I asked, forgetting my plan to talk of anything but her.

  Sal didn’t reply. His face had a nervous energy, a raw mix of exhaustion and alertness that when he was younger would manifest as a craving for a spliff. He didn’t bother asking if I had anything he could smoke. He just tapped the mug with his fingernails in a frantic, repetitive beat.

  ‘Well, I guess that’s that,’ I said, with a sympathetic smile. ‘You know you can stay here as long as you like, right?’

  The tapping stopped and he looked at me. ‘What?’

  ‘While you get yourself sorted. We can take my car to get your things from the flat, maybe when Mathilde’s at work. When’s best?’

  He frowned, but his face looked amused, like he was trying not to smile. ‘You don’t mean … Oh, Nick. No.’

  ‘What?’ I felt a cold sweat prickle on the back of my neck.

  ‘We haven’t broken up. No, see, this happens all the time.’

  ‘Last night?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He sipped his tea.

  ‘Last night happens all the time? Rows in the street? She tell
s you it’s over and you break down in front of the whole of Ashford, hyperventilating and beating your chest. This is normal behaviour, is it?’

  ‘Last night was perhaps especially full-on, but we row, yes.’

  I shook my head. ‘Oh, Sal.’

  Sal cleared his throat, his smile swapped for pure irritation. ‘Save the big-brother routine for another day. I’m not in the mood.’

  I couldn’t decide whether to start laughing, or punch a fist into my palm. ‘I don’t get why you’re happy for her to treat you like this.’

  ‘You don’t know her.’

  ‘I know she hates her dad because he walked out on her when she was a kid. You told me that. Doesn’t that explain it? She’s making you suffer because you’re a man, and a woman’s view of men is often shaped by her relationship with her father.’

  Sal laughed. ‘What is this, Freud for Dummies? Seriously, Nick. Bloody hell. Stop trying to analyse everyone all the damn time.’

  I wanted to shake him. ‘Laugh if you like, but it’s true. A person’s ability to relate to the world is moulded by their interaction with their parents as a child.’

  ‘Well then, we’re fucked,’ said Sal, snorting. He took a long swig of tea and checked his phone.

  ‘I’m just trying to understand,’ I said, slowly realising that this was never going to end.

  ‘No, you’re not,’ he said. ‘You’re trying to take care of me because that’s what you’ve always done. And I get that, Nick. I do. Maybe if I was the older one, I’d do the same. But listen to me when I say you don’t know a damn thing about her.’

  ‘I tried, Sal. I arranged last night—’

  ‘Oh, come on. Like when she walked into the restaurant and said it was warm and you disagreed? Or when you kept throwing her looks every time she mentioned herself? You think people don’t notice but you’re clear as fucking day.’

  ‘She does talk about herself a lot.’

  ‘She likes herself!’ he almost shouted. ‘What’s wrong with that? You want us all to hate ourselves and be miserable and make sure everyone else knows it?’

  I ran through the night in my head; the hair flicking, the confident way she ordered wine – no asking the waiter for his recommendation or canvassing the table for their preferences – the cool and calm acceptance of every nice thing said about her. She liked who she was. She wasn’t afraid of herself. I knew I found that threatening.

  ‘I don’t know her like you do,’ I said. ‘But all I have to go on is how she acts in my presence around my little brother. And maybe it’s because of our own useless dad that I feel like I have to be one to you.’ My voice struggled on the final word.

  Sal didn’t reply for a minute. He ran a finger round the rim of the cup resting in his lap and the silence grew between us. This was not familiar territory.

  Finally, he spoke. ‘Tilly’s relationship with her dad is partly why I fell in love with her. She knows how it feels not to be wanted. To be abandoned by someone who should love you. Few people know that.’

  I couldn’t leave it. ‘He loves you,’ I said. ‘In his own way.’

  Sal gave a grim smile. ‘Still fighting Paul Mendoza’s corner then?’

  ‘Don’t you remember the times when we were kids when he tried, when he really tried. The Arsenal games—’

  ‘—that you went to and I never did.’

  ‘Or when he’d take us round town to see the Christmas lights, how he’d call out to you before we reached your favourite house—’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Sal, ‘I remember the lights. How one year in all the excitement I spilled my hot chocolate on the seat so he refused to take us again. Yeah, I remember.’

  I bit my lip. He was right. I remembered differently. The visits to Highbury, Dad reading the match programme aloud as we waited for the game to start, the soggy chips in newspaper on the walk home. Those days had meant so much to me. And yet Sal hadn’t been there once. But how could I help that? Should I throw out the good memories I have of our dad, the ones I can count on one hand, do I pretend they never happened? How do we think of another human being if not based on our own experience of them? We are not fixed or permanent statues, we are ever-changing mists, clouds that are seen as dogs or cats depending on the person looking up. The thought of this is hopeful and so lonely.

  ‘You were always the favoured one,’ said Sal. ‘The firstborn. But you also weren’t the one who destroyed his life, who fired the gun that shot the bullet. I blew pieces of her brain across his suntanned limbs. I took away the only person who adored him. Why would he still love me after that?’

  The words blistered my gut. They tripped off his tongue, happy-go-lucky, as if he had turned them over in his mind so often that they no longer held any power. They were as familiar as a finger or a toe.

  I had thought them too, but only within the beat of my own head.

  ‘You look at Tilly and you see drama,’ he said. ‘But that’s what I need. Like a drug. Every day is different, every day has something new to make me feel alive, to stop me dwelling on the pain that drips through me like a fucking tap.’

  I looked at the carpet and nodded.

  There was a light knock at the door, and Laura’s face appeared in the gap she opened up.

  ‘Hey,’ she said, giving Sal a shy smile. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘You know. Waiting for a word.’

  ‘I’m making a fry-up, if you want one. Soak up all that beer?’

  He gave a thumbs-up, and she glanced at me as she closed the door. Apart from our conversation in the kitchen, Laura had been oddly quiet since last night. I wondered if Mathilde’s words had come back with the sober face of morning. Yes, Salvatore told me all about her. Your one that got away.

  Sal was typing another message.

  ‘Has she texted?’

  No reply, and I knew the answer.

  When he put down his phone, I said: ‘So tell me this. Why did the sight of Tess set her off?’

  Sal sighed. He raked a hand through his hair and kept it there. ‘We were chatting a few weeks ago, and in an offhand, three-beer kind of way, I said I’d love us to have a kid. It was a casual comment. I don’t think I even meant it.’

  ‘It’s good to make sure you’re in agreement about these things.’

  ‘Yeah, well, Tilly and I don’t work like that. Spreadsheet-Nick might not get it, but we take each day as it comes, live in the moment, the future doesn’t exist.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘She said she’d make a terrible mother. She refuses to pass her shit on to someone else.’ He put down the mug. ‘I think seeing Tess made her worry that I’d regret not having kids. You think Tills is hard as nails, right? Yeah. That’s what she wants you to think.’

  Despite myself, I felt a twinge of admiration for Mathilde, or perhaps relief at discovering a common ground. We knew our weaknesses.

  Sal’s phone beeped and he grabbed it. He began typing furiously, his forehead creasing like the spine of a loved book. ‘Gotta go,’ he said, pulling on his jeans. ‘The fry-up,’ I said, but he was through the door and running down the stairs, the cracks appearing in his bravado. Clearly this row was anything but ordinary. ‘Tell Laura I’m sorry,’ and then the slam of the front door.

  I thought of Mathilde, her recognition of herself and the way she lived without seeking the approval of others. Like a magnet, I was attracted and repelled by her. Both charges are potent. And just as a magnet has the power to control or cause chaos, depending on how an object yields to its force, Mathilde had the potential to alter my world, for better or for worse. She was a fire that could not be contained, and I was the spectator. Fascinated. Terrified.

  Someone else once made me feel that way.

  From: ANNA

  To: NICK

  Subject:

  I have done everything I was meant to.

  I have sold off pieces of myself that I forgot existed. Not an arm or leg or something obvious, but little gouges from my wrist
or ankle, scratches that go deep, scoops of flesh from my inner thigh or the underside of my foot, small enough not to notice until one day I can no longer stand. The tiny chips over time are hard to spot, but they’re there. No one sees you giving away these cuts of yourself. Not until you no longer have anything left to give, and by then, your worth is gone.

  You sabotage yourself for everyone else, and for what?

  I have done everything I was told.

  And I am broken.

  Part Four

  * * *

  2018

  The funeral was held on a Thursday.

  Dad insisted on a burial. It was double the price of cremation and more paperwork, but he was adamant no son of his would be burned in an oven with nothing to show for it. I think this is a commonly held view among the older generation. An obsession with leaving a stake in the ground, like scratching I woz ere into a desk on the last day of school. This was also typical of Dad. Nothing for months and then a grand, sweeping gesture.

  I remember a conversation Sal and I once had about being buried alive. As boys, we had a constant fascination with the macabre. He read once in a Reader’s Digest how they dug up old graves to reuse the ground, and on opening coffins they sometimes found scratch marks under the lid. Buried alive. Imagine knowing you were going to die, he said. Like, a second time. All the bugs crawling over you and up your bum and knowing there’s nothing you can do about it. He shivered from a mix of fear and delight. I definitely want to be buried. All the savings I had left were spent on flying his body home.

  I try not to dwell on the idea of bugs crawling over my brother’s body. But on dark nights or when it’s raining, it is all I can think about.

  I paid for the local priest to speak at the graveside. Sal wasn’t religious, none of us were, but the event seemed to require someone to manage it, or at least string a few words together. The thought of it made my mouth dry. It seemed worth the expense.

  We made a lonely procession. A few handfuls of us in black coats and umbrellas, picking up mud on our best shoes. Dad and I stood at the front and carried Sal’s feet on our shoulders, but when we made the final turn to the open grave, I stumbled and someone else took over.