Junction X (29 page)

He lost that smile straightaway, for he’d been worried about me—about me! He demanded to know what was wrong. Funny that when Val asked me that I couldn’t answer her, but I told him all of it—my doubts, my fear, the future. And all the while his eyes never left mine, and the colour drained from his face.

He told me I was stupid. He told me that he had no intention of finding anyone in College. He told me he wanted me to come up and visit as soon as I could—he had a list of excuses I could use.

And all the time, I kept saying no.
No. No, Alex.
We can’t
. The more excited and frustrated he got, the more I shrank away. Finally I had no fight left in me.

He threatened me with Val at one point. I looked at him and said, “You won’t do that, Alex, you know you won’t.” And then—unbearably—he cried. I wanted to hold him, but I’d gone too far by then.

I thought I was being kind. I didn’t watch him go. I couldn’t bear to see him go. He’d get over it. He was young. It would be better, I told myself. Next time I saw him.

Chapter 23

And then I was wrong, wasn’t I?

I never saw it coming. I thought that he was young enough to weather it. Resilient. Strong. Hadn’t he always been the strong one? I thought that he’d go back to university, complain of my cowardice, and heal. Young people heal.

It was only a love affair, Alex. Only a stupid love affair.

And thick, stupid, criminal Edward got it wrong. Again.

+ + +

The siren woke us, and we lay in bed waiting for it to go past. But it didn’t. The sirens stilled but the blue light flashed through the chink in the curtains. I got out of bed. Something seemed to be muffling my head, my ears. Val was talking but I couldn’t hear her, couldn’t work out what she was saying. I looked directly at her and I remember wondering why I was doing so.

Alex’s house was lit up top to bottom, the small attic light shining bright and clear. The children woke and Val went to them. When or how I dressed, I don’t know. How I put one foot in front of the other, I don’t know.

Then I was in the Charles’ kitchen and Sheila was standing by the cooker. Her eyes were nearly all red. At first she couldn’t speak. Her expression spoke of the primal fear I’d been hiding from. Then, “Alf’s up there with him,” she said, and I started up the stairs, sick with terror—knowing what she meant, and not realising that I shouldn’t have known, and shouldn’t be terrified.

Halfway up an ambulance man tried to hold me back. He called me sir. Sheila started to shriek, her cries echoing up the stairwell and the man dropped my arm and went to her. I ran—fled—up those stairs.
No.
I remember that’s all I could think—
NO
—but I was somewhere else. Somewhere detached. I never came back from there.

The layout was smashed. A cricket bat lay on the floor, the culprit of the destruction. I picked it up, felt the whip-cord against my palms. Another ambulance man was standing on the table, taking a rope from a beam. There was a policeman, too, his face ashen, all the colour in his eyes. He took the bat from me, gently. Then asked me for my name.

And Alex, barefoot in his favourite jeans and an old T-shirt, lay on the wreck of the layout, his eyes open, his face pale, looking grey in the light, his kiss unnatural. Purple. The policeman was trying to talk to Alf, crouched by the far wall but Alf was broken, a puppet with his strings cut. All I could do was watch as the ambulance man closed Alex’s eyes.

It wasn’t until the constable spoke to me again that I realised that I was superfluous. He led me away as the ambulance man shut the door behind us. I don’t know how I kept from being sick, but everything still seemed far away.

“Best thing you can do, sir,” he said as he led me back down, “is just to be there for the parents. The shock could affect them in funny ways. Terrible business, but it’s not uncommon for boys his age. Sad, it is.”

We walked through to their dining room and he motioned me to sit down. I held myself in check, letting the world happen around me.

“I’d be grateful if you could give me some details. Can’t expect his parents to be coherent right now.” I just stared at him. “A shock for you too, I imagine. Did you know the deceased?”

And there it was. Just a name in a report to be written up at the station. Just words. But he was asking the wrong questions. I wanted him to say: Did you know Alexander Charles? Did you ever see him smile with just the corner of his mouth? Did you ever feel his breath on your skin? What did his mouth taste like? Did you love him? Did you, sir?

I wanted to tell someone. I wanted to keep Alex in someone’s memory other than mine.

Instead it was clinical—talking of a life once known. Already a memory. Already history and nothing more.

I stammered through the details, somehow. Shock camouflaged the truth—that, and the fact I was a neighbour with children. “Won’t be easy for them, either, I’d imagine,” the policeman said. His name was Constable Johns. Funny how a stupid detail like that stays with you when so much else drifts away.

“I…no. Of course not. If you’ll excuse me?”

“Of course, sir. You’ve been helpful.”

Questions I could never ask flooded in my mind as I sat and stared at him.
Where? How? Why?

As if I’d spoken, the constable led me to the door. “Like I said, sir, it’s not too unusual. You told me he was a bright lad. Oxford, wasn’t it? Lots of pressure. It’s sometimes harder for a clever boy who’s not from the system, if you know what I mean. I’ve seen it before.” He shook his head and put his helmet on.

The door closed behind me, and I walked down the path and back to my house. I stood for a long minute in the driveway before I went in.

Mrs. Tudor was putting coats on the twins. Val was shutting a small case. “I phoned Mrs. Tudor. The twins will be better off there.” Her voice was acid-cold, like nothing I’d ever heard before. The last grains fell from under my feet and I was there with nothing to support me.

“Daddy?” Mary’s eyes were huge in the hall light. “Daddy?”

“It’s all right, sweetie.” My voice was husky. I couldn’t hide it any longer. Val knew. “It will only be for a little while. You’ll be back before you know it.”

“But the ambulance…?”

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

Valerie took over. “Just an accident, next door. Don’t worry. It’ll all be all right. Mummy will come and get you tomorrow.” The door closed on them and I watched them drive away, Mary’s face flashing blue from the ambulance’s strobe as she pressed her face against the side window of Mrs. Tudor’s Morris Minor.

Waves of nausea hit me—like seasickness, and I clung to the sideboard to prevent myself falling. Alf had been crouched like an animal in pain, and I was him, then. I don’t remember time passing, just the silent flick-flick-flick of the ambulance light, cutting the night into slices.

I lost track of everything, time and space. Where Val was I couldn’t tell. I wasn’t even aware of her until she spoke. Her voice was like a knife. Blood red, cold. But almost too soft to be heard, and sounding dusty with disuse. It was like she’d been trying to speak but had forgotten how.

“Now it all makes sense.”

I turned to her and saw the look on her face, the one she’d been hiding from the children. She’d taken her mask off, and I can’t erase that memory or forgive myself for yet another crime. Her lips were livid in a face with no colour. No life. Finally, no hope. She looked, for a moment, like
him
.

“You aren’t even going to deny it, are you?”

When I didn’t move, not even to shake my head, she came at me, the rage pouring from her fists and nails. Words I’d never heard from her in our entire married life flooded from her mouth, vile, terrible words. All I could do was to hold her wrists until, limp and sobbing, she stopped and leaned against the other wall.

“Something,” she said, her breath ragged, “I knew there was something. Phil’s hints, you working all hours…I asked you. I
asked
you! I
begged
you to tell me.”

There was no need to be kind anymore, so I was unnecessarily vicious. Someone else had to suffer. “What did you want me to tell you? The truth?”

She gasped at that. Her eyes were saucers as she took it in. I guessed what she was imagining—all the pictures that were passing before her eyes.

 
And what could I do? Tell her that the visions she was seeing were wrong? They weren’t. They were all true. There was nothing she could imagine that was false.

Her voice shook as badly as her hands. “You…he’s a
child
.” Phil had said the same. I had had no answer for him, either. “Of all the things I imagined—never,
never
this! Tell me, Ed—tell me!
Why?
”

It was if my mouth wasn’t working. My lips felt leaden, closed by virtue of their own weight, never to open again. What was there to say? Who was there to say it to? What difference would it make?

+ + +

I stood on the landing and watched the ambulance drive away, its siren silent. I was still there when Valerie came back up the stairs and touched my arm. I don’t know what I expected her to say or how I expected her to act, but it was as if someone had taken her from me, and the woman who handed me the suitcase was a stranger I’d once seen from a distance. Not an angry one, but just someone who couldn’t quite work out why I was in her house and was waiting for me to leave.

We’d said was all that needed to be said. There could be no retrenching, no hope of an armistice. I was just in the way.

The cold clutched my heart as she turned and the tiny tell-tale sign of her pregnancy showed, just for second, as the fabric flowed with her movement. A younger Edward would have caressed her stomach. But there was nothing of him left.

+ + +

And there we are. Left with a man on his own in a flat. A room that he can’t bear to look around to see the little remembrances here and there. A book, cast aside and never finished. Some pennies that had fallen out of his jeans and I found under the bed. Sweets and a jar of Vaseline. Three golden hairs which I’ve kept in my wallet. Not a lot to show for the whirlwind. No picture except the one I have when I close my eyes.

The phone rang when I first moved in here, but now it’s silent. I don’t even know whether it’s still connected. I walk in the twilight, out of the station and away from The Avenue. The pavements seem dangerous, like quicksand. And yet there’s nothing more to fear. Nothing more to hide. I walk for hours, no matter how wet or cold it is. The hail stings my face and leaves it numb. It’s a good feeling. It’s a feeling.

I leave the curtains open and watch the wind whip at the bare branches, stark against the sky. If it snowed, at least, I could see him in the shadows of the streetlamps. But it doesn’t snow.

I’m locked in, locked up. Paralysed from the heart outwards. I don’t know how to put it more clearly than that. If heat was the wrong emotion, maybe cold is too.

Phil came once. He rang the bell for ages but I didn’t answer it. He got in the main doors, eventually. Probably bribed the ticket collector or slipped in with one of my neighbours. Eventually I had to let him in the flat because he wouldn’t go away. But I couldn’t talk to him. Not even platitudes or reassurances.

“Come to me,” he kept saying. “It’s better than this place.” But I shook my head. I don’t think I said four words to him altogether, even when he told me that Valerie had moved back to her mother’s with the twins. “Until…” and then he stopped. Maybe he didn’t know that I knew she was pregnant. I don’t know what he really thought. I don’t care.

He didn’t come again, although he said he would. He said there was paperwork needed doing. I dare say there is, but I won’t be bothering with it now.

+ + +

One more trip to take, and here comes the melodrama. One more trip down to the platform, to stand in the rain and let the cold numb my skin once more. To watch the trains pass and not to take their numbers. To lose track of which train is when so that I won’t know which one it’ll be. No cry for help. No pills. No note—unless you count this diary. Rent is paid to the end of the week. All bills paid.

And without him—well, that’s really rather the whole point, isn’t it?

One question left. Do I take this book with me, let its leaves scatter like snow on the line, or do I leave it here? The question should be, I suppose, why did I take the time this last few weeks to write it all down if not to leave it? But as what? Is it an excuse? Another rationalisation?