by Lesley Kara
I can just about get my head round the first one and admit that for most of the time I’m powerless over alcohol, that my life has become unmanageable. But the next two are pretty major stumbling blocks: believing that a power greater than myself can restore me to sanity and, here’s the killer: turning my will and my life over to the care of God. I mean, I know they say it doesn’t have to be the old-man-in-the-sky kind of God, it can be anything I feel comfortable with – the cosmos, the power of the group itself even – but it’s hard to get down on your knees and pray to the collective wisdom of a random bunch of drunks.
I close my eyes. The room has that old-church smell: stale and musty. It prompts a memory I thought I’d forgotten. A Sunday-school classroom. Being shown how to write a capital ‘G’ for ‘God’ and pressing down on the paper so hard my pencil broke. Even as a small child, something inside me resisted the notion of a higher power.
Someone to my right clears his throat. He looks like the sort of man who might play the church organ or organize the local Neighbourhood Watch. Dull and worthy. He looks like my old physics teacher, Mr Staines. Semen Staines, we used to call him, poor bugger.
‘Good evening, everyone,’ he says, his voice as watery and colourless as the rest of him. ‘My name is David and I’m an alcoholic.’
And so it begins.
David is in the middle of the usual preamble when the door bursts open and a latecomer hurtles through. A tall, middle-aged woman in a beige raincoat and red court shoes. Her messy hair is shoulder-length, mousy-coloured.
‘Sorry,’ she says, her face flushing as red as her shoes. Her flesh-coloured tights have gone all bobbly round the ankles.
I give her a small smile. She looks so vulnerable, standing there in front of us all, and I can’t help noticing that tremble in her hands. I bet she’s still drinking. Poor woman. She looks like she’d rather be anywhere but here. I know just how she feels.
After the meeting, people drink coffee and chat. Some of them hug each other. The peroxide woman with grey skin – Rosie, eight years sober, AA evangelist – tries to hug the woman with red shoes, who clearly doesn’t want to be hugged. I’ve met Rosie’s type before. Homing in on the newbies. Oh, God, now she’s heading straight for me. I hold out my hand instead and the woman with red shoes rolls her eyes at me over Rosie’s shoulder. I can’t reciprocate, not without Rosie cottoning on, but I think she can tell from the way I look back at her that we’re on the same wavelength about inappropriate hugging.
When Rosie finally slinks off to accost someone else, the man in the suit gestures at me with a cup. He’s standing next to the man with acne, who’s now openly staring at me. I shake my head. I have to get out of here. Now. But as I turn towards the door I bump straight into the woman with red shoes. We both say sorry at the same time.
‘My fault,’ she says, flustered. ‘I wasn’t looking where I was going.’
Her voice is soft, tremulous, and though I haven’t come here to make friends I feel as if I ought to encourage her. Reaching out more, helping others – that’s how this whole fellowship thing is meant to work. Be nice, Astrid. Be nice.
‘See you next week?’ I say.
‘Maybe.’ Her eyes glisten with tears. She rushes to the door and stumbles out into the corridor, her exit as sudden and clumsy as her entrance.
I imagine her running all the way home, then opening a bottle of red wine and drinking the lot. Opening another. I pack the thought away before it takes hold.
Outside, wind hurls itself from the sea end of Flinstead Road. I tug my coat across my chest and walk straight into it, chin pressed down, the musty smell in my nostrils blown clean away.
The street is deserted. Out of season, Flinstead is dead after nine o’clock. Actually, that’s a lie – it’s dead after eight. When I pass the alleyway that leads to the little cluster of overpriced boutiques, the ones only the tourists go in, I stop and stare into the shadows. This was the exact spot where I saw Simon last night. In the daylight, it looks enticing, with its coral-painted walls and that glimpse of courtyard at the end, the metal bistro tables and chairs, the hanging baskets. Now, it looks like the kind of place a girl might get strangled.
I walk straight down it and sit on one of the chairs, the cold of the metal burning into the backs of my thighs. It’s a matter of pride. To prove to myself that I’m not scared. That I don’t believe for one second that it was really him.
Once, I would have said he wasn’t spiteful enough to come back. But that was before.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve killed her. The number of ways.
Yesterday, it went like this: we were standing on the pier at Mistden Sands and I just pushed her in. She was wearing those stupid Doc Martens she clumps about in and, what with them and her big, heavy coat, she couldn’t keep afloat. I stood there, watching as she thrashed about, and waited for her to sink. Her braids spread out on the water like long fingers of seaweed.
The last thing I saw were those little blue beads at the ends, bobbing on the surface like fishing floats.
It was too easy, though. Too clean. I prefer it when there’s blood.
4
I’ve passed the Fisherman’s Shack almost every day since I arrived, but I’ve never been inside before this morning. I see at once what I’ve been missing. Creaky old floorboards and mismatched tables and chairs. Vintage, but only because they’ve been here for years. They haven’t been specially ‘sourced’ or painted in Farrow and Ball and roughed up with a sanding block. And, most impressively, they just serve coffee (instant or filter, not a macchiato or ristretto in sight), tea, Fanta or Coke. Egg-and-bacon butties. Toasted teacakes.
It’s an inspired choice. I love it.
The barista has arms like Bluto. The devil in me wants to ask for a skinny latte, just to see his face, but I order a filter coffee, black, and take it over to a table in the window. I’m ten minutes late and he’s not here, which either means he isn’t coming or he couldn’t be bothered to wait. I don’t even know his name. For all his chatter on the beach yesterday, he forgot to introduce himself.
I rub a circle in the steamed-up window and watch the good folk of Flinstead go about their usual business. Coming out of shops with papers tucked under their arms, waving to someone on the other side of the street or nodding their endless hellos. Sometimes I think it’s like The Truman Show and all I’ve got to do is find the perimeter of the set and break out through the papery screen to the real world on the other side. The messy, chaotic world of noise and pain and sharp-faced strangers who look straight through you.
Then I see her, the hugger from AA. Rosie, or whatever her name is. She’s wearing another of those long, trailing cardigans, only this one is black, and she’s dragging a rotating card stand out of the Oxfam shop. After she’s wrestled it over the step and wheeled it into position in front of the window she swivels her head round and looks straight at me, almost as if she’s sensed me watching her. For one awful second I think she’s going to wave, but then she turns away and goes back into the shop.
My shoulders soften. There’s no way she could have recognized me from this distance and, even if she did, there’s an unspoken rule at AA that we don’t acknowledge each other in public, especially in a town this size.
A girl in a puffa jacket emerges from the newsagent’s. She’s tucking into a huge block of chocolate, biting straight into it as if it’s nothing more than a snack-sized bar. My mouth waters. If Wetsuit Guy doesn’t turn up soon, I’m going to buy some chocolate too.
I watch as she positions herself in front of the card stand, spinning it listlessly. Something about her looks familiar, but before I can work out what it is, she disappears into the charity shop.
I turn away and stare into my coffee. Why am I still hanging around in here, waiting for some fitness fanatic to show up? I might just as well finish this and go.
A door at the back, which has the word ‘Toilet’ written on a piece of card strung round the ha
ndle, opens with a loud squeak, and there he is. For some stupid reason, I hadn’t imagined him in anything other than a wetsuit but, of course, he’s fully clothed. Faded jeans and a pale-green rugby shirt. Blond, tousled hair. He’s even more good-looking than I remember.
‘You’re here,’ he says, grinning.
For one awkward moment I think he’s going to kiss me, but at the last minute he offers me his hand.
‘I’m Josh, by the way.’
‘Astrid.’
‘Cool.’ He nods at my coffee. ‘Can I get you something to eat with that?’
I could murder an egg-and-bacon buttie but have visions of egg yolk sliding down my chin. It’s not a great look for a first date. If that’s what this is. Dating hasn’t been part of my repertoire for ages. In fact, I’m not sure it ever was. Falling into bed, rat-arsed, with complete strangers is my usual modus operandi.
‘A toasted teacake, maybe?’ Christ, did I really say that? It sounds like something my Great Aunt Dorothy would order.
‘Toasted teacake coming up,’ he says, and saunters over to the counter, reaching in his back pocket for some money.
‘One toasted teacake, one egg-and-bacon buttie and a cup of tea, please, Bob,’ he says.
Bob nods and sets to work. I’m studying the back of Josh’s head – the way his hair curls over his collar – when an involuntary shudder travels the length of my spine. I don’t have to look out the window to tell that I’m being watched, and I instinctively know that, this time, it’s not Rosie.
Josh pulls out the chair in front of me and it scrapes against the floor. ‘Are you okay?’
I swivel my eyes to the right. There’s no one there. Of course there isn’t. Get a grip, Astrid. It’s not him.
‘Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.’
Josh glances out of the window and frowns. Then he turns his attention back to me.
‘So how long will you be staying with your mum?’
‘Until she gets better, I suppose.’ There’s just the faintest sensation of warmth in my cheeks.
‘What do you do?’ he says. ‘For a living, I mean.’
My brain goes into overdrive. Breathe.
Josh screws up his face. ‘Sorry. That’s a really annoying question. I sound like some tosser at a dinner party.’
I smile. ‘I trained in scenic design. I work freelance.’
What I don’t tell him is that the last job I had that was anything remotely to do with design was over seven years ago. I had a reputation for turning up for work late, still pissed from the night before. A walking health-and-safety hazard. A useless drunk. Since then it’s been a series of low-paid, temporary or zero-hours contracts. Boring clerical positions, supermarket work, that kind of thing. For the last year it’s been nothing at all.
I take a mouthful of coffee and scald the roof of my mouth.
Josh blows across the top of his drink, like I should have done. ‘I work in a university,’ he says. ‘Student services. At least, I will do, from the end of August. I was made redundant from my last job.’
‘Oh, sorry to hear that.’
‘Don’t be. I hated it. Anyway, it’s worked out pretty well. My dad’s bought a big old place overlooking the backwaters. So I’m staying here for the rest of the summer to help him out with the refurbishment.’
He’s looking right at me now. ‘So what made you want to be a set designer?’
Now this I don’t even have to think about. ‘I love painting on a big scale,’ I tell him. ‘Climbing on scaffold towers and transforming a plain old backdrop into a forest, or an ocean, or a busy street. Mixing the colours and textures together, flicking paint on to the canvas and getting my hands and clothes covered in it too. Makes me feel like I’m part of the painting, actually inside it – do you know what I mean?’
I haven’t talked about any of this for ages, haven’t even thought about it, to be honest. But now that I am, it’s all coming back to me. The passion I felt before it all went wrong. Maybe if I hadn’t been hell-bent on self-sabotage, I could have been on my way to being a respected set designer by now, or at least in regular work with good production companies.
Josh is nodding at me and smiling.
‘It gets your adrenalin pumping too. Especially when you’re working so high up. You’ve got to know what you’re doing. And there’s something really special about working in a theatre late at night. The atmosphere, you know? Eerie and dark. Echoes bouncing off the empty auditorium. Always a broken light flickering somewhere in the darkness.’
I stop. He must think I’m mad, rattling on like this.
He leans back in his chair. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone so in love with what they do,’ he says. ‘Your face is completely transformed when you’re talking about it.’
I look down, embarrassed.
‘Actually,’ he says, ‘I might pick your painterly brain, if you don’t mind.’
I give him a quizzical look.
‘There’s this weird little room in the middle of my dad’s house that hardly gets any light. He’s thought about knocking it through into the two adjoining rooms but there’s something about it he likes, and I know what he means. It’s like a secret chamber.’
He pauses while Bob brings the buttie and teacake over and we move our cups aside to make more space.
‘He’s got this idea of getting someone to paint a window on one of the walls. You know, one of those realistic ones that looks like it’s opening on to a beautiful garden, or something.’
‘A trompe l’œil.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘A trompe l’œil. It’s French for “deceive the eye”. A painting that tricks you into seeing it as a three-dimensional solid form. It’s all about illusionism and forced perspective.’
‘You see?’ Josh says. ‘You know about these things. Why don’t you come and have a look, see what you think?’ He winks. One casual movement of an eye and there’s a strange fluttering sensation behind my breastbone. Between my thighs. I glance out of the window.
‘Seriously, you don’t have to if you’re too busy, but it’d be good to have your input, and Dad’s great. You’ll love him.’ He blushes then. This six-foot-something blond Adonis actually blushes. ‘And it’d be really nice to see you again.’
I wipe the palms of my hands on my jeans under the table. This is crazy. I’ve only known this guy five minutes and already he wants me to meet his dad. I was with Simon for almost three years and I never met a single one of his relatives. He’d lost touch with them all by then. It’s hardly surprising, in the circumstances. I doubt Mum and I would still be talking if I hadn’t agreed to rehab.
‘Okay, then.’ The words fly out before I can change my mind.
5
Josh’s text comes through later that week.
‘Hi Astrid. Meet you outside the Old Schooner in Mistden? 2pm Wednesday?’
Shit! What have I done? I suppose I could tell him Mum’s taken a turn for the worse and that I can’t leave her too long on her own. Or I could do the easiest thing of all and ignore it. Not turn up. Pretend none of this is happening.
And yet, if I close my eyes, I can already visualize the small, dark room at the centre of his dad’s house. Its secret chamber. Part of my brain is already imagining myself there, doing the job for them. I can picture the bare plaster wall, smell the primer I will prep it with.
I stick my head round the living-room door. Mum’s fallen asleep on the settee and her mouth’s hanging open. She looks like a corpse. I close the door softly, then go upstairs and pull down the extending ladder that’s attached to the loft hatch. My brushes must be up here somewhere, along with all my other stuff – the boxes and bags and bin liners that contain my worldly goods, or ‘a load of old rubbish’, as I heard Mum call it the other day. She was speaking to one of her Quaker friends on the phone. I’m not the only one who goes to meetings.
I flick the switch and a dingy yellow light creeps into the darkness. It takes me a whi
le to find them. They’re in an old suitcase under a pile of winter clothes. I draw out the stained canvas roll and bring it towards my face, breathing in the long-forgotten smell of turps and linseed. Just the possibility of painting again makes me want to weep, but I wall in the emotion, seal it up tight. I’m about to pull the lid down on the case when something shiny and gold catches my attention. I peel back the jumper that’s half covering it and gasp. It’s one of Simon’s old juggling balls. How the hell did that get here?
I pick it up and squeeze it into my palm, the beat of my heart loud, insistent. Simon was teaching himself to juggle when we first got together. He wanted to be an actor. He thought the more skills he could develop, the more roles he could play. The trouble was, he kept missing out. No matter how many auditions he went for, he never got the parts he wanted. Alcohol took the pain of rejection away.
I see him now, in my mind’s eye, dropping the juggling balls and swearing. I’d pluck them off the floor and throw them back to him, and they’d be all warm and sticky in my hands. I’d say, ‘Go on, then, show us what you can do with your golden balls,’ and he’d give me that crooked little smile and start undoing his flies as a joke.
Did he have them with him that last time? He must have done. How else to explain one of them being here?
I stuff the ball back in the case, then take it out again and edge backwards, my right foot dancing in the emptiness behind me, searching out the top step of the ladder. I turn the light off and climb down, watch the ladder retract into the dark black square in the ceiling.
Back in my bedroom, I put the ball on my bedside cabinet.
In the early days, before it all went wrong, just seeing something of his would make me glow inside. Now, my pulse races for entirely different reasons. Why on earth didn’t I leave it in the loft? The last thing I need is reminding.