The Race (25 page)

The houses on Bembrook Road were a mixture of 1950s council semis and newer three-storey townhouses and blocks of low-rise flats. Rotherfield Avenue jutted out at right angles from the junction of Bembrook Road and Egremont Place, a single row of rather attractive 1920s terraces. The houses had small front gardens, variously decorated with terracotta planters and overgrown forsythia bushes. The pavement in front of the terrace was uneven and sloping, with miniature thickets of groundsel and dock leaves sprouting thickly between the cracks. There was also a back access, a strip of potholed tarmac where people could park their cars or stow their bicycles.

It was an odd little road, down at heel, Alex thought, yet saved from being depressing through the grand sweep of its vista over school playing fields and, beyond them, Castle Meadow. In spite of its proximity to Bembrook Road and its haul of bad memories, Alex found he could understand why Christy Peller had chosen to live there. He knew already which house was hers – the last in the terrace. He gazed down the hill towards it, wondering if she was in, wondering how she might react if he were to turn up unannounced. For the first time, he felt genuinely curious about her, Christy Peller as a person, and not just as a connection with her older brother.

He spent the rest of the afternoon walking the cliff path. As he made his way back to the B&B, he felt a momentary but genuine sadness that he had never brought Janet here. Janet, he felt certain, would have liked the town. Janet’s innate and generous capacity for liking things had always been one of the characteristics that had most attracted him. He went upstairs to his room and made himself a cup of instant coffee in the plain white mug provided for that purpose. The house felt silent around him, and Alex wondered if he might be the only guest staying there.

He ate dinner in the same pub in the Old Town where he’d had lunch then returned to his room at the B&B and read the remaining stories in Christy Peller’s collection. They were all similarly odd. ‘At the Cedars Hotel’ recounted the final days an old piano teacher dying in Aberystwyth in the off-season. ‘The Raincoat’ was about a child who became lost at a funfair and saved the life of a pederast. ‘Dogs’ told the story of a woman who was taking part in a scientific experiment. As with the electricity rationing in ‘Allegra’, there was something about each of the stories that seemed to place it beyond the reach of ordinary time. The old woman in ‘At the Cedars Hotel’ reminisced about Queen Victoria as if she were still on the throne, and yet the peculiar nephew who came to visit her used a laptop computer and a mobile phone. In ‘Dogs’, the viewpoint character had a computer chip implanted into her brain that helped her communicate with her deaf-blind daughter, yet the mayor of London was still Ken Livingstone, and the nurses at the hospital where the operation was performed talked about the 7/7 tube bombings as if they’d only just happened. Parts of the stories reminded Alex of the science fiction he had enjoyed as a teenager, novels by Samuel Delany and Philip K. Dick, but he’d more or less given up reading science fiction when he discovered George Orwell’s essays, and the writings of Nadine Gordimer and Chinua Achebe.

By the time he finished reading the book it was after midnight. He washed in the tiny bathroom then went to bed. He fell asleep almost at once, only to wake suddenly less than an hour later, filled with the unsettling conviction that there was someone in the room with him. He could not get rid of the idea that the person was Derek Peller. He got up to take a piss, mostly as an excuse to switch on the light. There was no one in the room, nor in the bathroom, nor was there anyone hiding in the wardrobe or in the cupboard-sized shower cubicle. He rinsed his hands under the cold tap and went back to bed.

He wondered if it was Christy Peller’s book that had made him jumpy, though it was more logical to suppose his anxiety over Peller was natural, that it would be foolish to revisit old haunts without being prepared to encounter a ghost or two.

He remembered how Peller had come up to him in the street, stepping quickly like he meant business, then his fists, two fierce blows, one uppercut to the chin and one to the stomach. The pain had been sickening but the shock was worse, the realisation that something like this could happen to anyone, on any street, at any time.

Alex knew how it felt to be thumped, to be knocked down in the school playground, to have the contents of his duffel bag redistributed over a wide area. He had learned these things a long time ago, from the likes of Tracy Chadwick and his friends. Derek Peller though, that was different. Alex understood at once that it was
him
Peller hated, not his blackness or even his nerdiness. Peller was hateful but he had never been stupid, and for someone like Peller, simple bigotry was too general, too unthinking, too much like someone else’s point of view. Peller would have despised slogans, Alex realised, almost as much as Alex despised them himself.

What Peller hated was the fact that Alex had
dared
. Dared to get in his way, to insist upon his desires, desires that ran counter to those of Derek Peller. That he had dared to think he mattered, to believe he had agency.

Freaks like Peller acted alone, they were loose cannons. Heroes, or mass murderers, sometimes both.

Alex remembered the taste of blood as his face slammed into the pavement, the terror that Peller was going to start kicking him, kicking him until he fell unconscious or his kidneys ruptured.

Linda screaming, then beginning to cry, to weep like a child. The pain and then – once Peller was gone – that odd leap of excitement, the knowledge that today was no longer a day like any other.

Time had leached these events of their substance, of their bright immediacy. What remained was more elusive, grey as ash.

Alex lay awake for some time with his eyes open, the darkness soft against his limbs, like a coating of dust. He felt removed from his own world, the way he always tended to do when he was obliged to sleep in a bed that was not his own. The bed, a queen-size divan, made him think of a bunk on board a ship. The sea was rocking him back and forth, and he was returning to the harbour of his home port, a narrow, mean-minded place, rife with old rivalries and uneasy memories.

He could not call such a place home. But then where else could home be?

~*~

The following day was overcast but dry. Alex ate breakfast at the hotel. He was half hoping Trudi might be on duty, just so he could experience the pleasure of seeing a familiar face, but there was no sign of her. Instead he was served by a middle aged man with a sizeable paunch who introduced himself as Rog. The breakfast – sausage, black pudding, fried egg – was surprisingly good, and Alex found himself curious as to whether Rog had cooked it himself.

He had expected to find the dining room empty, but five out of six of the tables were occupied, by mature couples for the most part, which Alex supposed explained the quietness of the hotel the previous day.

“You’re busy at the moment, I see,” Alex said to Rog.

“We’re chocker from Easter onwards, that’s always the way.”

“Is Trudi working this morning?” Alex said.

Rog regarded him sharply. “No, she’s not. She doesn’t really work here anyway, she’s just staying with us.”

“As a guest, you mean?”

“She’s the wife’s sister. She hasn’t been well.” He began collecting Alex’s breakfast plates together, clattering them noisily in a way that seemed to suggest that the subject was closed.

“I see,” Alex said. There had been nothing funny about the exchange, yet he could feel laughter bubbling up inside him and threatening to burst free. He waited until Rog had disappeared into the kitchen then made his escape.

He was supposed to be at Christy Peller’s at twelve, which gave him time to kill. He decided he would do what he’d resolved not to do – he would go and have a look at the house where he had grown up. He suspected this had been his intention all along. The house was at the top of West Hill on Emmanuel Road, a solid Victorian terrace with a weathered front door. His parents had first rented and later purchased their two-storey maisonette from the house’s owner, a Mr Emmanuel whose surname was a strange coincidence and whose first name they never discovered. The Adeyemis had the ground floor and the first floor and the use of the garden. Mr Emmanuel lived upstairs.

“The colour of a person’s skin makes no difference to me, that’s what I say.” And indeed he did say it, so often, Alex thought, that the sentence seemed to add up to more than the sum of its parts. As a young child, Mr Emmanuel had scared him. His clothes ponged, and he had a habit of coming to the door at odd times – when he knew Marielle would be there by herself, mainly, or there with just Alex, which amounted to the same thing. Once the property was properly theirs, things were better.

Alex remembered his mother and father on the afternoon the contracts were finally exchanged, the two of them standing outside on the back lawn, clinking glasses, both their faces shining with a fierce kind of pleasure Alex had never seen there before. His mother had jumped in the air, whooping like a schoolgirl, pouring the remains of her supermarket-bought, sparkling white wine over her head as if she wanted to bathe in it.

I name this ship HMS Great Britain
.

These strange sights and sounds made Alex’s heart race. He realised that what he was seeing was the birth of freedom, a version of it anyway. No need to be scared now – if you owned your own home no one could kick you out, no one could tell you to get back where you came from, because you came from here and you had papers to prove it.

For Alex the house meant freedom too, but it was also a prison. His room was at the back, overlooking the garden, and from its book-crowded, paper-strewn space it was possible to believe that the outside world of the town – of Tracy Chadwick and his friends, of the pasty-faced youths outside the Grafton pub who sniggered at him and made monkey noises when he walked by – no longer existed. He built a haven for himself in that room, a space that was so much a reflection of his own inner world that in the end the world of his room and the world of the town became so out of synch he was almost afraid to venture outside.

These memories were still painful. He hated to think that they would always be a part of him.

He stood in the road outside the house, looking up. The exterior of the terrace had been recently painted, and the whole building looked brighter, newer. He supposed Mr Emmanuel must be dead by now, the contents of his poky upstairs rooms cleared out and tipped into landfill. The thought made him shiver. He remembered the tawdry little bedsit in Devonshire Place he’d rented straight after finishing college and during the six months he’d spent working at the supermarket and going out with Linda and wondering what the hell he was supposed to be doing with his life. The flat was his own first attempt at freedom and it had failed. No matter how thoroughly he cleaned the bathroom and the greasy kitchen tiles, no matter how he arranged and rearranged his books and few possessions on the Fablon-covered shelves in the murky living room, the place steadfastly refused to become a home. It reeked, persistently and damply, of impermanence.

He thought things would improve for him in London and for a while they did. Now that home had also failed him, or rather he had failed it.

Maybe it wasn’t the place after all, so much as himself.

Alex turned his back on Emmanuel Road and began walking downhill towards Croft Road and Castle Meadow, alternately thinking about calling Janet and resolving not to. As he crossed the wide swathe of green grass on the other side of Bembrook Road he watched a man throwing a Frisbee for his dog, a brindled Staffie with a studded leather collar. The man, who was Alex’s age or thereabouts, seemed vaguely familiar and Alex supposed they had probably been at school together.

He had twin tattoos on both forearms, charging bulls.

I suppose he thinks the dog makes him look tough, Alex thought. The Frisbee swept low to the ground and the dog charged after it, clapping its jaws shut on the yellow plastic like a steel trap snapping the neck of a scurrying mouse.

“Go, Charlie!” yelled the bull-man. “Go get ‘em, Charlie-boy.” He spread his arms wide, and the dog raced back towards him, letting the Frisbee fall to the ground in its final approach. It bowled wobblingly across the grass as the dog leapt, weighty and compact as a bouncing bomb, vertically upwards into the bull-man’s outstretched arms.

The bull-man clasped the Staffie hard against his chest in a kind of rapture. The dog’s tongue flapped and lolled, caressing his cheek.

Alex felt a lump in his throat, and suddenly he was remembering Linda as he’d last seen her, begging him to go home, telling him she’d sort it out, that she’d sort it,
just go
.

“But the guy’s dangerous, Linda,” Alex had said. “He’s some kind of maniac. We should call the police.”

“Oh for God’s sake, don’t be stupid,” Linda said. “He’s different when he’s with me. Let me talk to him. I’ll call you later and we can –”

She broke off to blow her nose, never finishing the sentence, never telling him what it was they could do. The delicate skin beneath her eyes was swollen from crying.

Alex left in a huff, still seething. His jealousy of Peller, for the moment at least, still monumentally greater than his love for Linda.

Had he loved Linda really, anyway? It was all so long ago. It was hard to be sure now of anything he’d felt back then. He’d had a girlfriend at school, or rather a girl
friend
, a friend who was a girl. Her name was Marian. She had crooked teeth and was slightly gawky but she knew what a plebiscite was and she always came top in maths, beating even Kev Stringer, who ended up winning a scholarship to Cambridge. It was Marian who first told him that Chip Delaney, author of
Nova
, was a black man. Alex still had no idea why nothing had happened between him and Marian, except that neither of them had the guts to make the first move. He ended up losing his virginity not to Marian but to Chloe, a girl he met in his first week at uni and before Chloe’s snooty friends had taken their chance to put her off him. Their relationship had lasted only a month or so, but after those first few fumbling, magical encounters the business of sex was never again so embarrassing or so desperate.