The Road to Zoe

by Alexander, Nick

  ‘Sure,’ Jess is saying. ‘That would be great, wouldn’t it?’ She glances at me for confirmation.

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Yes, that sounds good.’

  ‘That’s settled then,’ Nick says, standing. ‘So, here? Tomorrow? About ten o’clock?’

  ‘Um, great,’ I say, making to stand myself.

  Jessica is looking between us questioningly. After a moment of confusion she grasps that we’re being kicked out. ‘Oh!’ she says, standing. ‘Oh, of course. Yes!’

  Seated in the icy car outside a couple of minutes later, she says, ‘You know, I kept waiting for them to say something about dinner. I thought they were going to invite us to stay for food, didn’t you? But not even a crisp. I feel quite light-headed.’

  ‘Well, food was always complicated for Zoe,’ I say. ‘Plus, they’re broke, apparently. So maybe they didn’t have anything in.’

  ‘Oh, I know that,’ Jess says. ‘But I thought they would suggest a restaurant or something. Then suddenly we were talking about tomorrow.’

  ‘It was a bit unexpected, wasn’t it?’ I say. ‘But in a way it suits me better.’

  ‘It does?’

  I nod. ‘It was quite . . . intense, I guess you’d say. I’m kind of ready for a break.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ Jess says. ‘I feel like that, too, but I was thinking that it was just me.’

  ‘No, it was hard work,’ I tell her.

  ‘Shall we just stop at the first place we come to?’ Jess asks. ‘I’m starving.’

  ‘They may not have anything vegan,’ I point out.

  ‘I don’t care,’ Jess says. ‘I’m dying here.’

  We start to head back towards Nice, but when we come to a pizzeria, Jessica pulls into the car park.

  ‘Pizza?’ I say. ‘Really?’ I have never seen Jess eat a pizza yet.

  ‘I’m that hungry . . .’ she says. ‘Anyway, I’m sure I can ask for it sans fromage.’

  The restaurant is a basic roadside place. The interior is tiny, but they’ve added a vast heated tent outside and it’s here that we take our seats. Around us the place buzzes with the hubbub of multiple slightly drunk conversations.

  ‘So have you worked out how you’re feeling?’ Jess asks, once we’ve ordered and our drinks have arrived.

  ‘I knew you were going to ask that,’ I say, smiling weakly.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Hmm,’ I say, sipping my beer. ‘It’s complicated. I mean, I’m happy, of course. Because she’s alive and well. And she really does seem well, doesn’t she? So yeah, that’s good news.’

  ‘I’m sensing there’s a “but”?’

  ‘Yeah . . . I don’t know. It’s also like she’s a stranger, really. She’s not the Zoe I know, or . . . thought I knew. I mean, I had no idea she was gay, for example. Her living in France seems . . . out of character, I suppose. Plus, I still don’t get why she left, you know? And that’s kind of the start of the whole story that brings her to where she is now. And none of it makes much sense to me.’

  Jess nods thoughtfully and sips her rosé.

  ‘This will sound weird, but I guess I’m struggling to feel like she’s my sister,’ I say, attempting to work it out in my mind. ‘It was all a bit superficial, yeah? So, it feels like I’ve been chatting to a stranger, almost. And that’s always kind of hard work, isn’t it?’

  ‘Maybe tomorrow will be different,’ Jess says. ‘If you see her without Nick being there, maybe you can talk with more intimacy. Actually, perhaps I should stay back in Nice. You might get more of a feel for each other that way.’

  I shake my head. ‘I don’t think so,’ I tell her. ‘I think I want you there.’ I think about how strange those words sound coming from my lips and ask myself if I really mean it. But it’s true. For some reason, I can’t even imagine doing tomorrow without Jess at my side.

  ‘OK. But if you do need some space . . .’

  ‘If I need you to take a walk around the block, then I’ll say, OK?’

  Our pizzas arrive at that moment, a Végane for Jess and a Quatre Saisons for me.

  ‘God, they’re humungous,’ Jess comments, and indeed our two pizzas are so large that they overlap at the middle of the table.

  ‘Good,’ I say, salivating as I reach for my cutlery. ‘I’m starving.’

  Due to the fact that both Jess and I wake up feeling particularly horny the next morning, we’re late getting back to the campsite.

  We find Nick waiting for us in the car park, sitting on a wall in the sunshine, smoking.

  Jess pulls up and parks so that I’m right next to where Nick is sitting. I wind down my window and say, ‘Hi.’

  ‘What time do you call this?’ Nick asks, tapping the glass of her watch with a fingernail. ‘We said ten!’ I’m unsure whether she’s joking or actually telling me off.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, earnestly. ‘We left a bit late and then the traffic was bad, too.’ This last bit about traffic is entirely untrue.

  ‘It’s fine,’ Nick says, stubbing her cigarette out and standing. ‘I wanted to take you for a walk somewhere pretty, that’s all. But I think it’s a bit late for that now.’

  Jess leans over me and peers up at her. ‘Hi, Nick,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry about that. I would have really liked a walk, too.’

  Nick twists her mouth. ‘Oh, fuck it,’ she says, moving towards the rear of the car and opening the door to climb in. ‘Let’s do it anyway.’

  Once Nick’s aboard, she directs us to drive inland.

  ‘So where d’you eat, last night?’ she asks, leaning forward so that her head appears between our shoulders. ‘Anywhere nice?’

  ‘A pizzeria just back the other way,’ I say, twisting in my seat to address her.

  ‘L’Authentique?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes!’ I say. ‘How’d you know?’

  Nick taps the side of her head. ‘Psychic,’ she says, and though this has to be a joke, again she sounds totally serious as she says it. ‘Good pizzas there, huh?’

  ‘Yeah, really good,’ Jessica says. ‘They even had a vegan one for me.’

  ‘I would have suggested we all go there together,’ Nick says, ‘but Zoe’s weird about eating with other people. I guess you already know that, Jude.’

  I tip my head from side to side. ‘More or less,’ I say. ‘Food was never a simple thing as far as Zoe was concerned.’

  ‘She ate with us in Snackway,’ Jess points out.

  ‘Yes, she’s OK as long as it’s something she’s happy to eat. And she’s fine with their veggie baguette thing. But she can’t stand restaurants where she has to choose something different. People always end up trying to get her to try new things because they just don’t get it, and that drives her crazy.’

  Nick directs us to a small village fifteen minutes away. It’s called Pont du Loup, which she explains means Wolf Bridge, the Loup – ‘Wolf’ – being the name of the river.

  The village itself isn’t that special, comprising just a few shops on either side of a fairly busy main road. But it’s set at the bottom of a gorge, and the grey cliffs rising either side are dramatic and beautiful. A series of stone pillars rises out of the valley, the remains of the famous bridge, now defunct.

  Leaving the Renault in a small car park, we follow Nick along a footpath down to the river and then on up into the gorge, where the path tapers to a simple hiking track.

  The river is the same crazy turquoise colour as the sea in Nice and when I comment on this, Nick explains that the sea is this colour precisely because these rivers release their waters into the bay. ‘It’s flecks of silica from these rocks,’ she tells us. ‘The rain washes tiny particles into the river, and they reflect the light, making the water look turquoise.’

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Jessica says. ‘It’s almost fluorescent.’

  As the path follows the river up into the hills it rises in places, leading us into woodlands, and then drops back down to meet the rapids again. It soon becomes so narrow that we have to wal
k in single file, Jessica out in front, then Nick, then me.

  ‘So, Nick,’ I ask, as we walk, almost shouting so that she can hear me. ‘How come Zoe moved around so much?’

  ‘Did she?’ she says. ‘I know she was in Bristol with some guy before Morecambe, but . . .’

  ‘Yeah, she used to send me postcards from all over the place,’ I tell her. ‘Knutsford and Canterbury . . . Brighton . . .’

  ‘Hailsham,’ Jess adds.

  ‘Yeah, Hailsham, too. Loads of little villages.’

  ‘Oh, she knew this van driver,’ Nick says. ‘I think she used to get him to send them.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ I say. ‘Any idea why?’

  ‘So you wouldn’t know where she was living, I imagine.’

  ‘Yeah, but why didn’t she want me to know?’

  ‘Ah, you’d have to ask Zoe about that,’ Nick says.

  ‘Right,’ I reply, pulling a face at her back. ‘I just thought you might know, that’s all.’

  ‘Are these hills part of the Alps?’ Jess asks, clearly trying to calm things down a little. I guess I am being a little over-eager in my information-gathering attempts.

  ‘Yep,’ Nick says.

  ‘Amazing.’

  ‘And have you noticed all the layers?’ Nick asks. ‘Look.’ She points to a rise of rock to our left, where layers of sediment, presumably once horizontal, have been pushed up until they’re almost vertical. The rain has then worn away the softer layers, leaving strata of rock sticking up. They look a bit like the fossilised ribs of some vast dinosaur.

  ‘It’s pretty,’ Jess says. ‘Do you walk here a lot?’

  ‘Not often,’ Nick says. ‘There are so many great walks around here. Zoe hates walking, of course. But I often go for a hike on Saturday morning, while she’s working.’

  ‘So, was Zoe dating guys before you met her?’ I ask.

  I regret my clumsy question even before Nick replies. She looks back at me and shoots me a lazy smile. ‘You can quiz Zoe all afternoon,’ she says. ‘For now, let’s just enjoy the nature, shall we?’

  I sigh silently and drop back a little, feeling half-embarrassed at my lack of tact, but also a bit peeved. Because, yes, the walk is pleasant and, yes, the surroundings are stunning. But that really isn’t why I’m here. The reason I’ve travelled hundreds of miles over the last ten days is to find out more about my sister, and I only have a few hours in which to do so.

  The path opens out a little, so Nick and Jess end up walking side by side while I’m forced to trail behind them. They chat easily about the weather and driving in France, and about whether Nick and Zoe think they’ll move back home one day. Slowly but surely, Jess manages to guide the conversation towards the things she knows I’m dying to find out more about. She’s clearly much better at this than I am.

  ‘So can I ask you a personal question?’ she asks Nick, about half an hour into the walk. ‘It’s just something I’ve always wondered about being gay.’

  ‘God, you’re not going to ask what we do in bed, are you?’ Nick asks.

  ‘No!’ Jess laughs. ‘Don’t be daft!’

  ‘People do,’ Nick says. ‘You’d be surprised.’

  ‘Oh, I can imagine,’ Jess tells her. ‘But no. No, the thing I always wonder is how you meet people, if you’re gay. I mean, there’s the internet and everything, isn’t there. But if you’re at work or whatever, well, it’s delicate, isn’t it? Because you can never really tell.’

  ‘Yeah, I know what you mean,’ Nick says. ‘Sometimes it’s complicated.’

  ‘So, say, for you and Zoe. How could you tell? Because I’d never guess that either of you were gay. Or is gaydar a real thing?’

  ‘I don’t think so, really,’ Nick says. ‘But the pub I met Zoe in was a gay one. So that was a bit of a giveaway.’

  ‘Ah, right,’ Jess says. ‘Thank God for gay pubs, then. Are there lots of them, even in little towns like Morecambe?’

  Nick laughs. ‘Not one!’ she says. ‘No, we met in Blackpool. And there’s only one shitty pub there.’

  ‘Blackpool scared me a bit,’ Jess confides. ‘We got hassled on the seafront. Some racist idiot started making monkey noises.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ Nick says. ‘It’s rough. Personally, I’d never live in Blackpool. Even Zoe couldn’t stomach it for long, and let’s face it, not much fazes Zoe.’

  ‘I think it’s funny that she ended up in catering,’ Jess says. ‘I mean, what with all her food issues. It seems a strange choice.’

  ‘Just the luck of the draw, I think,’ Nick tells her. ‘A guy she met fixed her up with the Snackway stint. She’d already worked in a chippy, too, I believe.’

  ‘Yes, in Bristol,’ Jess says. ‘We went there. Horrible, horrible chips. In the roughest part of Bristol. Zoe certainly chose some strange places to live. Before here, I mean. Because it’s gorgeous here, isn’t it? I’d love to live somewhere like this.’

  We’re reaching the narrowest part of the gorge now, and the noise of the river cascading against the rocks is deafening; so I’m unable, for about five minutes, to hear their conversation. Frustratingly, by the time the valley opens out again, Jess is telling Nick about our lives instead.

  It’s just after one when we get back to the car, so we offer to buy Nick lunch in a café somewhere. She declines, telling us that she’s ‘out of time’. She also informs us that Zoe is bringing sandwiches home for us all, so instead we return to the campsite, where Nick climbs into a beaten-up Renault van and, telling us that Zoe will be home ‘pretty soon’, she waves and starts the engine.

  As she pulls out on to the main road, leaving a cloud of diesel fumes lingering in the air, I realise that I’m not sure if we’re even going to see her again. Perhaps we should have said our goodbyes in a more definitive way.

  But Jess tells me that we’re eating with her this evening. ‘She said she’d be back around six.’

  We sit on the wall in the sunshine, and while we wait for Zoe to return, Jess fills me in on the other bits of conversation I missed out on: namely that Zoe’s moves to Bristol and Blackpool and Morecambe had all been related to different men she’d been dating.

  ‘So she’s flexi, then, is she?’ I ask, frowning in confusion. I’ve only just got my head around the fact that she’s gay.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Jess says. ‘But I’m guessing that she must be.’

  Zoe arrives just after two, a plastic Snackway carrier bag hanging from the handlebars of her little scooter. When we reach the cabin, she is in the process of moving three chairs to the middle of the access road that runs through the middle of the campsite. The cabins are so closely packed, I realise, that the winter sun can’t penetrate between them.

  ‘It’s a bit public,’ Zoe says, as she unfolds a small camp table, ‘but at least it’s in the sun. Plus, there’s hardly anyone here at the moment anyway.’

  She tips the contents of the Snackway bag on to the table, and it’s an exact repeat of what Jess and I ordered yesterday: a tuna wrap and a vegan baguette with a Coke and an orange juice. I’m quite touched that she has remembered. She was always so self-centred back in the day that this simple attention to our tastes is quite surprising. I suppose even the Zoes of this world get to grow up.

  ‘You’re not eating?’ Jess asks.

  ‘I ate at work,’ Zoe says. ‘I was hungry.’

  ‘You’re quite early,’ I point out. ‘Weren’t they busy?’

  ‘Oh, queuing out the door, like every day,’ Zoe says. ‘But Jacques, my boss, he’s quite cool. I told him it was exceptional circumstances. Circonstances exceptionnelles.’

  ‘And they’re nice?’ Jess asks. ‘You like working there?’

  ‘Snackway?’ Zoe says, laughing. ‘No, they’re slave-drivers. And everyone’s on minimum wage. But it’s, you know, a job. At least until we’ve got a flat sorted out, and until Nick gets more hours at Berlitz . . . well, we need the money. Actually, there’s a risk that Berlitz will lay her off completely, so
that’s a worry, too.’

  ‘I like Nick,’ Jessica tells her. ‘She’s really easy to get on with, isn’t she?’

  Zoe shrugs. ‘More famed for being direct than “easy”, but, yeah, she’s OK. She’s fine.’

  ‘Is she your first girlfriend?’ Jess asks. ‘Or . . .’

  Zoe blushes visibly at this, causing Jess to apologise before she’s even had a chance to answer.

  ‘No, it’s fine,’ Zoe says in the end. ‘I just . . . Um, yes. The answer is yes.’

  I open my mouth to ask Zoe when she first realised she was gay, but then hesitate between trying to demonstrate that I’m cool with it and avoiding making her uncomfortable.

  ‘I dated guys before, so . . .’ Zoe says, partly answering my unspoken question. ‘I’m not a militant lesbian or anything. Not like Nick.’

  ‘You’re not?’ Jess says. ‘Oh, right.’

  ‘It’s just the person, yeah? You fall in love with a person, not a gender. And I fell for Nick.’

  ‘Sure,’ Jess says, smiling reassuringly. ‘Of course.’

  ‘Anyway, it didn’t really work too well with guys,’ Zoe adds. ‘This seems to suit me better, for now.’

  ‘Was it a guy when you left?’ I ask her. ‘I mean, did you meet someone? Was that where you went?’

  It’s the subtlest way of edging the conversation in the direction I want it to go that I’ve been able to come up with. But my angst has leaked into my voice so that it hasn’t ended up sounding casual at all.

  Zoe shoots me an inquisitive glance. She looks scared, momentarily, like a tiny cornered rodent, but I shoot her my best smile and she relaxes a little. ‘It was the delivery guy,’ she says. ‘You know about that, right?’

  ‘The delivery guy?’

  Zoe nods. ‘The QuickParcel guy. The one who brought all the stuff Mum used to order online.’

  ‘Really?’ I say.

  ‘Don’t you remember him? Blond guy. Really cute. Massively gelled-up hair. I’m sure I told you I liked him . . . Anyway, I used to go round the corner and smoke joints with him in his van.’