Remember Me This Way (32 page)

He offers us chocolate muffins from a swan-shaped wicker basket and tells us what happened, or as much of it as he has pieced together. He left me at the edge of the common and walked along the diagonal path towards the railway bridge. That’s all he remembers. He assumes he must have crossed over, because an hour later he was found on the other side of the tracks, in the bushes, with a head injury and two broken ribs. ‘Random attack,’ the police think. ‘Mistaken identity perhaps, or robbery gone wrong.’ He is due to be released today when the relevant nurse brings the relevant paperwork for him to sign in the relevant places. Paula, his ex-wife, is driving down from Hackney to take him home. Jane asks if he will be all right, looking after himself, and he says Paula is going to stay the first night just to check he doesn’t wake up foaming at the mouth.

‘Oh?’ she says knowingly.

‘It’s not like that,’ he says and gives me a quick look.

I hardly speak. I’m no company for anyone. But as we are getting up to leave, he says, ‘I’m sorry about this’ sweetly, as if it is his fault. Our eyes meet. There is a dark fleck, like a comma, beneath one of his pupils, and deep smile lines around his mouth. He is wearing a checked Viyella shirt, open at the neck. His collarbone is pale, with a thumbprint of a bruise.

Jane persuades me back to her flat in Tooting after the hospital. Sanjay is working late and she could do with the company. I expect she’s checking up on my state of mind, but I go anyway. I want to stay out of my house, and away from Onnie, for as long as I can. I don’t mind her being there, I feel responsible for her, but I’m reluctant to spend too much time with her. She will ring, she promised, if she gets anywhere. In the meantime, I need to get a grip on something firm, calm my mind.

Jane and Sanjay live in a flat that takes up the top two floors of a large house behind the Broadway, decorated like a Victorian bordello, full of rich drapes and chaises longues and red velvet screens. We have a cup of tea in their little kitchen and then a glass of wine. Jane rustles up some microwaved baked potatoes and cheese. We talk about work – whether Michele’s boyfriend will propose and whether Pat needs Prozac and whether Ofsted will come next week now instead. My mind has split into parallel lines. I’m disconnected from my friends. This is what happens when you keep things back. It becomes impossible to bridge the gap. I’m not going to mention Zach, but I do tell her a bit about Onnie – to try and explain how distant I have been. I don’t go into details – just say the daughter of an old friend of Zach’s has turned up and is behaving erratically. Jane says she sounds like she needs professional help. ‘She’s not really my problem,’ I say casually and I wish I meant it.

Before I know it, it’s past nine. I could get a bus, but I decide to walk – along Garratt Lane and up Magdalen Road. It’s stopped raining for the first time in months. The wine has gone to my head. It’s a forty-minute stomp and I stride past the shops, out in the open, under the street lights. I turn round and stop a lot. I wonder who he is watching: Onnie or me? Is he confused? Erotically stirred? I say, under my breath: ‘I’m ready. Where are you?’

He’s too clever for that.

Standing outside the house, I hear the strains of familiar music. A voice, half-sway, half-boom, over drums and an electric guitar. It’s Elvis Costello: not
Goodbye Cruel World
, but a song from an earlier album,
My Aim is True
. ‘Alison’, a song about betrayal that’s pretending to be about love. I fumble for my key and jump when I realise Onnie is next to me, in the bay window, the other side of the glass, staring at me. Her face is a pale moon, her hair drawn across her shoulders like curtains.

She comes out of the sitting room into the hall when I open the door. ‘You’re so late,’ she says, her head on one side. ‘Where have you been? I’ve been so worried.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry. I texted you. I went to visit a friend in hospital.’

‘You didn’t answer your phone.’

My mobile is in my pocket and I take it out. ‘Damn. Sorry. I switched it off to go into the ward. I must have forgotten to switch it back on.’ I press the top button and the screen illuminates. Five missed calls. Four texts. ‘Sorry,’ I say again.

She looks at me and slightly shakes her head. ‘It’s OK. It’s not spoiled.’

The dog has pushed his way out of the kitchen and has come to greet me. The music is louder with the door open. Spoiled? I can smell cooking. I stroke Howard and say: ‘I would have thought you were a bit young for Elvis Costello.’

‘Just like it, that’s all.’

‘It was Zach’s favourite.’

‘I know.’

I push down the small wave of jealousy and follow her into the kitchen, where Elvis Costello is playing from an iPod dock. The table is laid. Onnie is opening the oven and pulling out a tray containing two chicken breasts. She lays them on separate plates and adds mashed potatoes and peas from saucepans on the hob. ‘Tra-la,’ she says. ‘I bet you didn’t know I could cook, did you?’

‘How lovely,’ I say. I should be able to tell her that I’ve eaten. It shouldn’t feel so insurmountable. But I can’t. It’s how I used to feel with Zach, trapped in his expectations, controlled. I have the same loss of perspective, too. I don’t know what I’m
allowed
to feel, whether I am in the right or in the wrong. I fetch a glass of water and drink it, leaning against the sink. I can sense Onnie watching my every move.

‘Nice, isn’t it?’ she says, when I have put the glass down. ‘To come home to a cooked meal?’

‘Lovely.’

‘Have you been drinking?’

‘Hardly at all.’

She laughs and wags her finger at me.

‘No, really, I haven’t. One or two glasses.’

She passes my plate to me and we both sit down.

‘So who were you visiting?’ she asks as we start to eat.

‘Just a colleague from school.’ I swallow down some chicken. It feels like punishment.

‘Sam Welham?’

‘Yes! How do you know that?’

‘I remembered, that’s all. You told me about him, the other day.’

‘Did I?’ I put my fork down and stare at her. How odd that she would pick up on that.

She carries on eating, but, feeling my eyes, looks up and smiles at me. ‘So you haven’t asked how I got on today?’

‘How did you get on?’ I realise as I’m asking that this is a mistake. I don’t want Onnie looking inside Zach’s laptop without me being there. I don’t actually want her looking inside his laptop at all. I hope she
hasn’t
found anything.

‘I didn’t work it out, she answers quickly. ‘But I have been thinking hard. One in five people apparently use their pet’s name. I tried “Howard” but it didn’t work. Did Zach have any pets when he was growing up that you know about?’

An image of Zach’s cold childhood home comes into my head. A large house, with empty rooms, and a small unloved boy in a corner, ducking the blows. He longed for a dog – Zach told me that early on – but he would never have had the courage even to ask. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘First girlfriend? The love of his life? He would have chosen something that meant the world to him. He was such a romantic man.’

‘Was he?’ I stand up and surreptitiously scrape the rest of my potato into the bin and wash my plate under the tap. Now she thinks I’ve accepted their affair, she’s talking as if we’re equals. ‘Well, I suppose his first girlfriend would have been on the Isle of Wight, when he was growing up.’

‘The Isle of Wight! We should go.’

I turn round and laugh in mock horror. ‘We can’t. I promised Zach I’d never set foot in the place. He didn’t want me corrupted by it. He had sworn never to go back.’

‘He made you promise never to go to the Isle of Wight?’ Her expression, pinched around the cheeks, is baffled, and a bit pitying.

‘It was no great hardship,’ I said. ‘Until I met Zach, I don’t think I properly even thought about where it was. And, to be honest, it wasn’t on my itinerary.’ An idea is taking root, even as I’m talking. The Isle of Wight.
Of course
. I’ve been fixated on the thought of him nearby. He could be waiting at a distance. The Isle of Wight: yes. It’s the last place he’d expect me to look. It would be the perfect place to hide.

‘You’re funny,’ Onnie says. She’s looking at me quite fondly. ‘It wasn’t on your itinerary!’

‘It wasn’t that funny.’

‘Thanks for letting me stay. It’s OK now, isn’t it? I think when Zach finds out, he’ll be so glad that we’re friends.’

Zach

13 February 2012

I’m off to Cornwall today. She thinks I’m seeing the new dealer in Exeter, spending the night there, but I’m going straight to Gulls. I’ll make it nice for us to move into. I need to calm down a bit, too, get some more medication from Kulon. I want her to miss me, to miss my hands on her body, between her legs, the touch of my lips. She’d bloody better miss it. She’d bloody better miss me.

Valentine’s day tomorrow and I’m not going to be here. Last year, it was roses and candlelight, cards and kisses. We spent the night entangled. This year, it hasn’t been mentioned.

She was in a weird mood last night. She cooked chicken with mushrooms, actually
cooked
with them, touching, snarled up with garlic in their snappy little limbs. A pre-emptive stab at romance? I don’t think so. It wasn’t that I didn’t speak to her. I
couldn’t
speak to her. How could she pay so little attention to my needs? She rendered me literally speechless. When I left my entire plate, she took it away silently, scraped the lot into the bin. Later, she said in a peculiar tone, as if commenting on a subject that barely glanced off her life, like the weather in a distant part of the country: ‘You could try mixing your food up a bit. You won’t know if you like it unless you try.’

‘I’m an adult,’ I said. ‘I don’t need coaxing to eat my greens, thank you.’

‘I’m just saying it might not kill you to try.’

I said: ‘People always want to tell other people what to do.’

‘People?’ she said. ‘You’re always talking about “people”, Zach. You make sweeping generalisations about “people”, lumping them all together, as if the rest of the world behaves identically and you, alone, are different.’

She apologised this morning for upsetting me. I’d been angry, I think. I can’t remember now. Did I push her? Bit of a blur. Still, it was too little, too late. We pretended to be normal. She’d hardly slept, I could tell – blue smudges under her eyes. The radio was on, broadcasting the results of another by-election in another town. She put her coat on and she was halfway out the door when I called her back.

‘I love you,’ I told her. ‘You do know, don’t you?’

‘I do,’ she said. She was lying through her teeth.

‘More than anything,’ I said. ‘More than life itself.’

I kissed her as hard as I could, but I could still feel her pull away.

Chapter Twenty-two

Lizzie

On Saturday I am awake before it’s properly light. Howard gets to his feet when I creep into the kitchen and eats the food I put down for him. His tail wags, knocking a spoon off the table. It clatters, and I freeze, waiting. No movement upstairs. I quickly write Onnie a note, thanking her for last night’s meal and for her tidying –
I really appreciate it and the house definitely needed it
. I explain that I have a friend coming to stay and wouldn’t mind having the sofa bed back if possible. I add a final line:
On reflection, I don’t think us looking for Zach together is the best way to go about it! Sorry! If I don’t see you before you leave, best of luck with everything!

It’s a nasty little passive-aggressive letter, but I don’t care.

I hide Zach’s laptop under my mattress and leave the house as quietly as I can.

Ryde esplanade in March: faded and bedraggled like a row of Victorian dolls left out in the rain. High tide crunching against the sea wall. At the top of the town, a church tower punctures a pillow of low cloud.

I feel as if I’m trespassing, entering forbidden territory. It was an evil place, Zach said, the repository of all his unhappiness. He swore the day he left he would never return. That day, he had stood up to his father for the first time and been kicked out of the house. His mother was weak and took his father’s side. When he died a few months later, his mother told Zach he wasn’t welcome at the funeral. He didn’t even go back to sell the manor – most of the proceeds went to pay his father’s debts.

‘Did the neighbours not know what was going on?’ I asked him. ‘Did no one step in to intervene?’

‘They knew I was being beaten,’ he said. ‘Curtains twitched. They knew but they did nothing.’

I don’t blame him for deciding to hate where he grew up, to blame it for everything that had happened. But it wasn’t the island’s fault. It was only the scene of the crime. He couldn’t escape it just by moving somewhere else. He lived every day with the consequences of his father’s brutality and his mother’s collusion. It was behind all his problems. Maybe he has come to realise that. If he’s hiding here now, how desperate he must be. And if he isn’t, and he’s followed me down, has seen me defy his wishes, how angry. Either way, this should draw him out. I want him to see me do it. I want him to
know
.

I take a train and a bus and a hovercraft. On the train, I scanned the faces of the other passengers, changed carriages and seats several times. There were only four of us on the hovercraft – two girls in their twenties and an old man who sat at the front, reading his newspaper.

I’m surprised how gentle and normal the Isle of Wight looks, a chunk of mainland set afloat, with its own pedestrian bridges and mini-roundabouts and fish and chip shops. Ryde has the melancholy air of any seaside town out of season – shuttered-up hotels, cut-price wetsuits, aimless teenagers.

I set off along the front, Howard pulling ahead, past a skating rink, a penny arcade, a mini Peter Pan amusement park. One of the rides is upended, its workings revealed like oily intestines. None of these landmarks are as tacky and awful as Zach claimed. At an artificial lake, next to a chained-up link of pedaloes in the shape of swans, a young woman and a small child are feeding bread to a few ducks. I remember a holiday in Bognor Regis, my mother upright and plucky in her darned summer frock with her two neat girls. She dressed us in matching swimsuits, marine blue with white skirts, from a shop called Cuff’s. ‘Suits your sister better,’ I remember her telling me. ‘She’s got the figure for it. But there you are.’