Over the next twenty minutes, I sat next to his mum, chatting to both of them as I glanced at the readings on the equipment next to me, entirely underwhelmed by Rowan’s rate of improvement, considering he’s been on this trial drug for the past five months. Afterwards, as we sent him on his way, clutching his stickers, I remember being swept up in a tide of determination. This treatment might not be able to help him. But, one day, mine will.
*
I wake with my cheek stuck to the pages of my book, having not registered that I’d drifted off to sleep. I have no idea how long I was out cold, but when I sit up, Ed is no longer beside me. I take a sip of mineral water and find it unpalatably warm, before scanning the jetty. There’s no sign of him either in the water, or along the promenade or beach. His belongings are still on the lounger next to me. And although I’m keen to go back to the room to freshen up, something makes me want to wait for him first.
I start reading again, but I’m woozy from sunshine and can’t really concentrate. I try ringing him and only then realise that he’s left his phone under his towel. I open my book again and try to settle down, but after twenty minutes he’s still not back. Instead, I get up and walk to the couple a few metres away, before employing my best in pigeon Italian to work out if they saw Ed leave.
‘Escusi . . . mio amico . . . he went where?’
I accompany this with an emphatic shrug of the shoulders and bemused look, feeling as if I’m taking part in some sort of pantomime. They point across the line of the beach, to the foot of a craggy rock that rises up on a jagged slope.
‘È andato lassù,’ the man says. ‘A . . . path. Un vecchio sentiero dietro a quegli alberi. Non so se sia che sicuro però.’
‘Grazie,’ I reply, grabbing my bag and stuffing Ed’s phone and other belongings into it.
I crunch towards the cliff as children splash in the shallows of the lake and ribbons of light rain across the sky. The outline of an old footpath winds upwards from the side of the rocks, lined with wild flowers and fragrant herbs. It’s precariously steep and my footwear is far from ideal, but when I reach the top the view is heart-stopping, a verdant landscape dotted with elegant stone buildings in ice cream shades and cypress trees that rise like feathers sprouting from the ground.
Then I see him. Standing at the edge of the cliff, his silhouette opaque against the sunlight, his broad shoulders pulled back. It occurs to me that Ed hasn’t only got a head full of troubles. It’s full of something else too. Secrets.
Chapter 23
Ed
Ed lowers his eyes to the water as the faint ring of giggling children drifts up from the bay. The sound reminds him of Allie, the way he used to feel when they’d laugh together as kids. Warm and happy and high. Yet, it’s not even a high that he’s looking for. Right now, he just wants to bear to think about his future without nausea taking hold around his throat.
He still can’t precisely work out when his feelings started to change. The question he’s asked endlessly – why? – is never going to be answered. But something shifted in him on the night of that first big row with Julia. There had been others before but nothing like that. It could have been just another spat at first, but what it turned into that night shocked them both. He became a man he no longer recognised.
He walked around for days afterwards, with a knot in his stomach, asking himself: is this who I am now? A man who went from hearts and flowers to this so soon after the wedding? Ed is not self-absorbed enough to look in the mirror and try to claim it was all her fault.
Yet now, he is struggling to be around Julia, a woman he thought he loved enough to bind himself to forever. He didn’t take that decision lightly, on the contrary. It was no shotgun wedding, rushed into for the wrong reasons. To him, she was the phantom of delight of Wordsworth’s poem – a perfect woman, nobly plann’d. There had been no room for doubt.
That thought fills him with a numbness, a blur of misery that’s starting to take on a life of its own. There are times recently when he’s been unable to gain pleasure from the things he usually loves. Running and books and wine and friends. At night he gazes at the ceiling listening to the thrum of his heart and asking himself the question: what would those loyal friends of his make of him if they knew the truth? When he thinks about Allie trying to do her bit to cheer him up he doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Julia, unbelievably, maintains that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with their relationship. She seemed genuinely surprised when he said he thought there was. How? How can she still think that? He’s beyond looking for answers because he can’t think straight about it any longer.
‘Is everything okay, Ed? Do you want to talk?’
Ed turns around and is surprised. Both at the sight of Allie, standing with shards of sunlight in her hair and the faintest wrinkle between her eyebrows, and by the question itself. It takes a lot for Allie to offer to have a talk.
‘Sure,’ he shrugs and the wrinkle deepens.
This is not because she lacks empathy, on the contrary. But for all his friend’s warmth and goodness, stoicism runs through her core. She has a stiff upper lip. She pulls herself together. None of these things are considered positive attributes these days, in an age when feelings are to be dissected and analysed like complex organisms under a microscope.
They sit side by side on the dusty ground and Ed’s eyes blur onto the horizon, the outline of the pine trees and the ridge of the mountains on the other side of the lake.
‘I wondered where you’d gone,’ she says, sounding unsure of herself. Her skin smells of sun cream and tiny beads of sweat glisten on the bridge of her nose.
‘Just for a walk. I needed to do some thinking.’
‘Did you . . . work anything out?’
‘Not really.’ He feels himself smile at her, but she doesn’t return it.
‘I’m worried about you, Ed.’ As the words emerge from her mouth, emotion shines in her eyes and he almost can’t bear it. Not from her, of all people. He edges towards her and wraps an arm around her shoulder, squeezing her into his side. She tenses at first, but as she relaxes into him, warmth spreads through his body. Reflexively, he bends his head towards her, breathing in the clean, herby scent of her shampoo as he briefly presses his lips against her hair.
‘Sorry. I don’t like to worry anyone,’ he says.
She turns and looks at him and for a spark of a moment he feels as though he has no idea what’s going to happen next. She brushes dust off her feet and sniffs. ‘Why don’t we go and get ready for dinner?’
*
They sit on the veranda in Ed’s room after they’ve eaten, breathing in the night while they chat, as piano chords drift from the other side of the building. Ed asks a lot about Allie’s work; partly because he’s interested, but mainly because he likes the way her eyes light up when she tells him about it. And of course it’s easier than other topics.
It’s late when Allie looks at the time on her phone and stiffens, as if she’s been reminded of something important that she was supposed to do.
‘We still haven’t really discussed what’s happening with you, Ed,’ she says, twisting her bracelet around her wrist.
‘No,’ he says.
‘Well, I think you should talk about it, with someone. I mean, I don’t want to pry, I hope you know that that’s the last thing I’d want. But it’s not normal to keep things bottled up.’
He can’t help but smile.
‘What?’
‘Nothing. It’s just that you’re not really one to open up and talk about your feelings, are you?’
Her spine lengthens as she sits up, defiant. ‘This isn’t about me.’
‘I know, but you’re speaking sense,’ he says gently. ‘Yet, I don’t think in all the years I’ve known you I’ve heard you talk about your mum, for example.’
‘I have!’
‘No, I mean really talk about her, the impact of her death when you were so young. And now all this stuff with your
dad and this Stefano guy . . .’
‘I’m sure we were discussing your issues, not mine.’
‘Oh, I’m not saying you’ve got issues . . .’
‘Good.’
‘Not many, anyway.’
‘Very funny. Well, it’s up to you. But maybe I’ll surprise us both and turn out to be a great shoulder to cry on.’
‘Maybe.’ She picks up her clutch bag, ready to leave. ‘So whose shoulder are you going to cry on, Allie?’ he can’t help but ask.
She holds his gaze defiantly. ‘I never—’
‘You never cry. Yes, I forgot.’
‘Truth be told, I have been thinking about my mum a lot lately.’
He leans forward, interested, but she just shrugs.
‘I don’t mean just the woman she became after I’d been born, but the girl she was before. I mean . . . she was only a teenager, yet found herself in what must have felt like an impossible situation. What does a seventeen-year-old do when she has to announce to her devoutly religious mother that she’s unexpectedly pregnant? Let alone when the father might be a man who isn’t her boyfriend?’
Chapter 24
As her father fixed his eyes on her swollen, naked belly, she felt as though all the air had been sucked out of the room. She pulled her blouse down sharply, clasping her hands around her bump, as if her stupid, pale forearms could conceal what he’d already seen. He hadn’t even moved, or said anything, when she heard the slam of the front door downstairs.
‘Only me!’ her mum called. The cheerful, sing-song of her voice sliced through the air.
Their eyes locked. Father and daughter. And she’ll never forget the look on his face, one that said everything without saying a thing: you aren’t the person I thought you were.
‘Dad . . . I need to explain,’ she mumbled, but of course she couldn’t explain. There wasn’t an explanation, at least not one that would make any sense. So she started talking, filling the air with words in the hope that they were at least better than the acrid stench of shock that hovered between them.
‘It’s not what you think. I mean, it IS, obviously but . . . the thing is, it was all a mistake. An accident. It’s . . . such a mess.’ A statement of the obvious if ever there was one.
The ensuing silence nearly cracked her eardrums. Even from the other side of the room, she could see petals of fierce heat blooming around his temples.
‘Does he know?’ he managed.
She opened her mouth to respond, but something stopped her.
There was only one person her parents could think was the father.
But they were wrong. The real father was by now miles away, in a different country, his identity unknown by anyone. It wasn’t as if she’d been sneaking off for dozens of illicit trysts for months on end. It had been once. Just once. That was all it took.
These thoughts and a dozen others were thudding in her head, when she became aware that her father had given up on her responding and had left the room. She scurried to the door to see him walking down the stairs in shock, to intercept her mother as she was still taking off her coat in the hall.
She hung it up on the bannister, her movements slowing as she looked at her husband then followed his gaze up the stairs. ‘What’s the matter?’
She felt as though the breath had been ripped out of her throat. Hot tears rose from somewhere inside her and teetered precariously on the rims of her eyes. And a dozen possible sentences brushed her lips, until she realised that all she was capable of now saying was: ‘I’m sorry. I’m so very sorry.’
Chapter 25
Allie
A few months before Ed and I took our mock GCSE exams, I’d rushed out in the morning to catch the bus and left my key on the cupboard next to the stairs. I only discovered this when Ed and I, intending to revise for Sociology – a subject neither of us loved – battled torrential rain on my doorstep as I frantically emptied my bag.
‘Where are we going to go now?’ Water snaked down the skin on his face and droplets of rain hung like tiny crystals on the tips of his eyelashes.
‘We need a coffee shop,’ I replied. ‘Somewhere quiet and atmospheric.’
So we went to McDonalds, where we spent an hour and a half pontificating over a Haralambos & Holborn textbook and small fries, before eventually we were asked to make another purchase or move on.
‘It’s going to have to be your place,’ I said, heading outside.
‘Fine. But there’ll be no peanut butter. Mum’s joined Weight Watchers again.’
Fifteen minutes later, I stood behind him as he let us into a small terraced house with a blue door and a single bay window. As we stepped in, someone shouted from the front room: ‘Is that you, Brian?’
‘No, it’s me, Mum.’ Ed hesitated before pushing the door, releasing a lush cloud of boudoir scents, of heavily fragranced creams and potions and soaps.
‘Mum, this is Allie.’ I smoothed down the rat ends of my hair and followed him in.
We found Ed’s mum on the floor, surrounded by invoices, cosmetics and a stack of Avon magazines, as a game show flickered on the television behind her. She leapt up and welcomed me with a whoop of, ‘At last!’
‘Hello, Mrs Holt. Pleased to meet you.’
Mrs Holt, or Jackie as she invited me to call her, was in her dressing gown, a short, pale blue terry towelling item with a diamante teddy on the pocket. She had long, slim legs and slipper-socks topped with pom poms. She was fully made up, her features painstakingly enhanced with a tawny palette of eye shadow and peachy blush on the apples of her cheeks.
‘I wish he’d told me you were coming,’ she told me, starting to tidy up the room, as Ed went into the kitchen to get some drinks. ‘What must you think of me?’ She paused and lit a Silk Cut, blowing a ribbon of smoke into the air before she turned back and caught me looking. ‘Disgusting habit, I know.’
‘Oh no, I—’
‘So, what are you studying tonight, love?’
‘Sociology.’
‘Ooh,’ she said approvingly, before falling silent. This felt dangerously close to being the end of the conversation. ‘Is that like politics?’
‘It’s connected,’ I explained shyly. ‘But it’s more about how society is organised. We look at issues like crime and poverty.’
‘I can’t stand politics myself,’ she told me, conspiratorially. ‘I never vote. Doesn’t seem to matter who gets in, they’re all the same.’
I disagreed with this, but wasn’t going to be impolite.
‘That’s a very good argument for proportional representation,’ I said instead. ‘Lots of people think that would be a fairer way of producing a more representative legislature and faithfully translating votes into seats won.’ I realised how pompous this sounded and I added, self-consciously: ‘I like your pom poms.’
She laughed. ‘Aw, thanks.’
‘And also your make-up. It must be lovely to know how to do it like that.’
She lowered her cigarette and softened her gaze on me. ‘You know . . . you’re a very pretty girl, Allie.’ I must have turned the colour of a beetroot. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to embarrass you. Here – why don’t you take some samples, for you and your mum. I’ve got a lovely new Colour Rich lipstick for you. And your mum . . . perhaps she’d like a little bottle of Imari? “A fragrance to fire the imagination” apparently.’
She stubbed out her cigarette and opened a little bag, into which she started to put bottles, before handing it over. ‘There you go.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, breathlessly, peering into it. ‘Um . . . perhaps I should leave the perfume though. My mum’s no longer with us.’
She blinked. ‘Sorry?’
‘She died,’ I said.
I’d tried to come up with a low-key way of telling people that over the years – something that didn’t unleash a torrent of fuss – but judging by Jackie Holt’s reaction I’d failed.
‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t . . . Ed didn’t—’
‘It
’s fine. I just don’t want to waste your perfume.’
She glanced at the bag, then up at me again. ‘It’s not a waste. You can have it, Allie.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Absolutely. Abs-ol-utely,’ she repeated. Then she grabbed an eye shadow, a mascara, a blusher and some peach-coloured lipstick, all of which she added to my little bag of treasure.
‘Let me know if you need me to show you how to use any of them,’ she added gently. I could tell that she meant it, that Jackie Holt was the type of woman to help a girl with no mother on this small but important matter.
In fact, I’d have asked her for a full makeover there and then if Ed hadn’t appeared and suggested we adjourn to his room.
‘If it smells like beef and tomato Pot Noodle in here, blame Mike,’ he said as we traipsed up a narrow staircase with a threadbare carpet.
‘Oh, it doesn’t smell,’ I said as we entered, but he marched to the window and shoved it open anyway, unleashing a loud hiss of rain.
It struck me as a tiny room for two big teenagers, particularly as they didn’t get on. On Ed’s side of the room there was a Salvador Dali print, a framed Private Eye cartoon, a black and white picture of Bob Marley and another of Juliette Lewis. On Mike’s side there were fourteen posters of Melinda Messenger and Kathy Lloyd, all in various states of undress.
‘Sorry about the . . . you know,’ he said, gesturing to the wall full of nipples.
We sat at the end of the bed and I opened my folder, then looked up.
‘Your mum’s really lovely,’ I said. ‘Is your dad still at work?’
He nodded. ‘You can’t take a day off when you’re self-employed.’
‘What’s his firm called?’
‘B. R. Holt & Sons,’ he said. ‘Not very original, I’ll admit.’
I laughed momentarily then felt it trail off as something occurred to me. ‘So, is he hoping Mike will take over the business when he retires?’
Ed snorted. ‘I seriously doubt it.’
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