My Name Was Eden, page 15
“Mum?”
“Sorry, love?”
“I said ‘how was Granny’s funeral?’”
“Oh. It was okay. Well, not okay but . . . it was nice. The vicar said some lovely things. I think she would have liked it.”
“Oh.” Eden puts her headphones on and looks out at the darkening sky. The hedgerows have given way to a flat ribbon of tarmac which curves around in a concrete horseshoe, guiding us to the outskirts of town: past the petrol station, where James once left his wallet and had to drive all the way back for it, past the playground on the corner, where Bex and I used to take the girls when they were small. We’d watch them climb the steps to the slide, then pretend to accept ice creams through the circular hole from their small, sticky fingers. We’d push them on the swings: higher, higher, and croon about how cute they were, as they clutched hands and declared themselves best friends, forever and ever. I probably pushed the friendship harder than I would have done had Eden shown the slightest bit of interest in other girls her age, or not appeared to hate me quite so much when we were alone together. Perhaps hate is too strong a word. It was as though she sensed we had nothing in common, and rather than seek out things we could share, I kept trying to create my daughter in my image. Poor Eden. Is it any wonder she railed against me?
I slam on my brakes. The cyclist puts a gloved hand up to me, then carries on, a neon blur along the path.
Shit. Shit.
I wait for the jogger behind him to pass. As he draws closer, I notice that he’s wearing a skintight sweat top, and it isn’t a lean middle-aged man like I first assumed. There’s something familiar about sweep of dark hair, the set of his jaw.
Fuck—it’s him. Alex.
He jogs across my path without putting a hand up, without even looking. He takes off along the curved path, toward the bridge.
Eden removes her headphones and looks at me quizzically. “What are you doing?”
I pull quickly into a space on the street, between two parked cars. “I just . . . I just want to talk to him.”
“Who? Alex? Is that Alex?”
“Don’t worry, I won’t do anything to make it worse. I won’t embarrass you.”
“Mum . . .”
“Just wait there. I’ll be two minutes.”
I slam the door and lock it. In truth, I have no idea what I’m going to say. Alex is already at the top of the path. I break into a fast walk and call out to him.
He’s listening to music—I can hear it as I get closer. It sounds like hammering, a heavy baseline, drilling into his skull. He doesn’t turn around, but continues to jog; past the lamppost, a discarded can of 7UP, a dog waste bin. I’m almost close enough to touch him when he slows, turns his head and yanks one earphone from its socket. He’s waiting for me to pass.
“Alex?” His name is like a dirty lozenge in my mouth. “I’m Eden’s mum.”
His face crumples into a frown. “Right?”
“Why did you do that . . . disgusting picture? Why are you torturing her?”
“What the . . . fucking hell. You do know she stabbed me, right? Fucking psycho.” He laughs.
He laughs.
I try to keep up as he screws the earphone back in and begins to sprint away from me. My breath comes in sharp bursts, stretching my lungs into a burning mass of elastic. He shouts something else over his shoulder, but I don’t hear him. I’m made of something else now; my legs feel like they are not my own. I’m getting closer, closer still, and then Alex glances back at me again but this time he isn’t laughing. He looks scared. I can hear the cars roaring onto the bridge overhead, and as he rounds the path toward the road, I stop running.
Everything burns. I lean over, gasping for breath.
What the fuck am I doing, chasing a child?
I need to get back to the car. I need to get back to Eden. And it’s in that moment, as I start walking in the opposite direction on trembling legs, that I hear the screech of brakes. Glass shattering.
A car door slams. And still my legs do not belong to me.
I keep on walking.
28
Charlie
What the fuck.
It’s got to be a joke, right? I sit up in bed and read Olivia’s status again. RIP, my beautiful little brother, taken way too soon. I can’t believe I’m writing this. Fly high, big man xxx
No. No way. I turn on the light and type her a private message:
Please tell me this isn’t for real.
More replies appear beneath her post:
Omg, what happened? Ring me x
Auntie Claire just phoned with the news. I can’t believe it ☹ xxx
So sorry for your loss, so tragic . . . too young. Lots of love to all the family, thinking of you x
I think I’m going to be sick. I head into the bathroom and sit on the toilet, staring at Lucas’s Little Tikes watering can on the side of the bath and the squirty animals bulging from a net stuck onto the tiles. Alex isn’t dead. How the fuck can he be dead?
I want to wake Mum up and tell her, but she’s been such a bitch about me seeing Alex, I don’t want to speak to her right now. Same with Eden. It’s like no one wanted to actually see me being happy. I don’t know what happened to Alex, but maybe if I’d been allowed to see him, he wouldn’t have died.
I’m getting goose bumps and red lines on the back of my thighs from sitting on the toilet, so I go back into the bedroom, literally praying that it was all a bad dream and Olivia’s status isn’t there. It is, though. And I’ve got two DMs. I open Olivia’s first:
Alex got hit by a car on the Ashworth flyover tonight when he was out running. They tried to save him but he died in the ambulance on the way to hospital. I still can’t believe it, he loved you a lot I’m in shock tbh x
I feel like I’m falling through space. Where is he now, I start to type, because I need to see him, I need proof, because this can’t be possible, and then I delete it again—it sounds weird. He’ll be zipped up in a bag somewhere, shoved into a drawer like the ones we used to have at primary school, the thin ones that slide in and out, stacked in a row so that occasionally, by accident, you’d open someone else’s drawer and see that everything inside was unfamiliar. I wonder if that happens with dead bodies: oops, wrong drawer, sorry. Alex isn’t just a body though. He can’t just be gone.
He loved you a lot.
Something fat is growing in my throat, pushing out a noise I can’t stop, and then I curl up like a baby because it hurts, it literally hurts. I would have had babies with Alex. I would have married him and had his babies. He was the only person who got me, who made me not feel like a kid anymore. He took off more than my clothes; he took off something else, something that was strangling me and I didn’t even know it.
I forget about Eden’s message until my eyes are so puffed up with crying, I can hardly see out of them. There’s a missed call from her, too.
Have you heard about Alex? Did anyone see what happened? x
What the fuck does that mean, “Did anyone see what happened?” What does she want, a photo? I close her message and type out a reply to Olivia instead, even though I don’t know what to say and everything just sounds stupid. What are we supposed to do, just go into school tomorrow and carry on like nothing’s happened?
I go onto Alex’s page. In a relationship with Charlie Symonds. Oh my God. There are only two pictures of us together—one outside the school gates, where he’s kind of half-on, half-off his bike with his arm around my shoulder, looking fit as fuck. The other one is a group picture we’ve been tagged in, that time I met him and his mates at the green and we kissed for the first time. Then I read the last post he shared, yesterday: Yeah, boy. No pain, no gain. There’s a photo of his running route, with a screenshot of his PB.
Hadn’t I told Eden that he ran the same route at the same time every week?
Hadn’t she messaged to say she was on the way over last night? She didn’t turn up, something to do with her mum saying they were going to but she had a migraine and all that blah, but it’s a bit weird, her asking if anyone saw what happened. I remember her sliding her arm through mine after Science, telling me we wouldn’t let him get away with it.
I’m being a twat. Eden’s become totally weird, but she’s hardly a murderer. And she could hardly do anything with her mum there.
I tug my pillow up behind my back and catch sight of my face in the blank TV screen. God, I look like shit. It looks like there’s a hole where my face should be.
Someone’s snoring. I wonder what Mum would say now, if I woke her up and told her what happened. She’d probably be all like, “Go to sleep, we’ll sort it out in the morning.” Or Matt would wake up first and tell me to get out before I disturb the boys.
Fuck my life.
I can’t sleep. How am I supposed to sleep? It feels like I’m full of little broken rocks. I lie there for a while, thinking about what Eden said about death being amazing, hoping that it is, hoping that Alex thought of me toward the end.
29
It was a red Corsa that hit Alex. I see an image of it being recovered from the road on the local news the following day. The camera zooms in on the crumpled bonnet, the windscreen splintered into a mosaic of shattered glass. “A teenage boy has died after being hit by a car on the A591,” the grave-voiced reporter says, before a picture of Alex flashes up on the screen. He is wearing the school uniform that I recognize so well, a broad grin pegged across his face. “Police are appealing for witnesses to come forward,” the reporter asserts, and there’s a brief pause before the story switches to a segment about a new weight-loss drug.
I killed him. I killed a child.
I don’t remember driving home last night. I just remember telling Eden to text Charlie and say I had a migraine or that I’d fallen asleep, so we weren’t going to come round after all. Anything but the truth. “Eden, I’m sorry,” I kept telling her on the drive home. “I didn’t mean for this to happen. I’m sure he’ll be okay.”
“Eli,” he reminded me, sternly.
We’d gone home and then I tried to pretend Alex’s accident hadn’t happened at all. I made popcorn. We put on a supposedly uplifting film about a blind man who learned to paint and fell in love. When it finished, Eden collected the bowls of popcorn kernels and told me it wasn’t my fault. “It was an accident, wasn’t it, Mum?”
Did you push him? That was the subtext. Because there had been so many accidents lately, too many—Eden, Anna and now Alex—a lifetime’s worth of them, a dark triad of happenings so close that in my head they were plaited together as one. Was it chance? Was it really?
“Yes,” I told her. “Of course it was!”
I phoned Bex, then cut the call before it connected. When James came up to bed later that night, I curled up and pretended to sleep, even as he flung an arm around my waist and kissed me with sour, wine-spiced breath. So much deceit. And then, as daylight crept through the curtains and I checked my phone for news under the covers, I learned that Alex Bird was dead.
Over the next few days, the outpouring of grief is visceral. On Facebook and Instagram, as well as the hundreds of messages of condolence, there are comments about how the driver should burn in hell or have unspeakable acts inflicted upon her. She isn’t named, thankfully. In one online article, a policeman is quoted as saying inquiries are ongoing; the driver is cooperating fully with the investigation. There are arguments for the speed limit to be reduced to forty, a footbridge to be installed. I scroll through every comment. My baby brother, someone called Olivia Bird has written. My heart is broken. Sleep tight and party hard up there, big man xxx
The spot where I gave chase is abandoned. I pull into the shoulder and wait in my car like a coward, watching the procession of teenagers shuffle along the path, their faces bleak with disbelief. Some are hugging, others are sitting on the path beside the bright spread of flowers, unspeaking, staring out at the traffic on the road below. For many, this will be the first time they have felt the cold breath of loss.
I can’t watch anymore. I’m about to start the engine when a woman in a denim jacket catches my attention. She joins the group and, when she lowers her bouquet of flowers, her body starts flexing as though a series of electric shocks are coursing through it. Her handbag slips from one shoulder. She turns slightly, and I almost don’t recognize her as Alex’s mother, because pain has grooved a series of deep gullies into her face, making her appear inhuman.
It was me. I did this.
I don’t go home straightaway. Instead, I try to keep busy, meandering between aisles in the supermarket, throwing things into the trolley on autopilot. Chopped tomatoes. Halloumi fries. Salted caramel and ginger granola. Flowers for Alex’s family, which I lift and then deposit back into the bucket, disgusted with myself. And then, standing beneath the glaring strip lights in the middle of Sainsbury’s, I stop beside the profiteroles. These were Eden’s favorite.
Eli will not touch these.
I’m not going anywhere, Eli had said.
Eden, too, is gone.
Someone bumps into me with their trolley, then touches my arm with a brief apology. I’m reminded of Pippa, rubbing, rubbing, rubbing as I watched the paramedics pump at Eden’s chest. The barking dog. Eden, violently retching up a camouflage of fluids that didn’t belong in her body.
Eden has gone. Alex has gone. I remain there, hollow and trembling, until a shop assistant asks if I’m okay, whether he can do anything.
“No,” I tell him. “No thank you.”
When I get home, Bex calls back again and, in a voice laced with shock and guilt, tells me that Charlie is distraught, Alex’s family are distraught, how terrible it all is. “I feel so guilty,” she says. “I didn’t like him, but I never wanted this to happen. So young. It could have been one of ours.”
I stand by the window and watch a bird peck at a piece of something flat and gray at the edge of the track. A dead mouse, perhaps. Yes, I agree, yes, it could have been one of ours. But for the grace of God. We will cuddle our daughters that little bit tighter tonight. Daughters. Already, it feels wrong. Eli is happy being my daughter in the eyes of the world, but in my private thoughts, and when we are alone, he is just as I always imagined him.
My son.
I keep trying to convince myself that Eli was right: Alex’s death was an accident. It wasn’t my fault. But if that was the case, why would I urge him to stay silent? Why the need for lies? The truth is, there was a hot, black hole of fury inside me that I couldn’t control, and in that moment, I wanted Alex dead.
I’ve always been able to restrain my emotions. When Eden used to slam doors and throw her homework books on the floor and tell me she hated me, when James insisted he’d texted me about a late engagement I knew nothing of, when day after day my car keys would be moved from the places I’d left them and frozen food was left out on the side to defrost, I stayed calm. I stayed calm.
But perhaps that was always a front. Perhaps, underneath it all, this is who I’ve always been.
Later, when James gets back from the gym, he takes off his jacket and his white T-shirt is stark against his lightly tanned skin. He seems so energized, so boyish. Alive. I can’t bear to look at him.
“What’s the matter?” James is wearing that expression again; the same one he pulls when our bank account is low on funds.
“It’s not you. I just don’t feel myself at the moment.”
“Well, you are a bit mental,” he says, and there he is, the same old James, trying to lighten the mood with jokes. Except there’s nothing remotely funny about this.
I don’t return his smile. “So you keep telling me.”
He sets his gym bag onto the coffee table and pulls out a towel. When I don’t offer him a drink, or ask how his day was, he pauses. I can sense him picking over words, trying to select the right ones to say.
“Listen . . . Lu, you can always talk to me.”
They’re not the words I expected. I look up and then I can see it: pain sewn into the cracks around his eyes. He didn’t go to the gym because he was trying to avoid me, or because he doesn’t care about his mum’s death. He went there to try and run from it. There are dark moons around his armpits, a shadow of damp in the center of his chest. I imagine telling him what I did. Would it change anything? Would he support me, or insist I went to the police? Would he try and get Eli onside, convince him that it was no accident? “It’s okay. I’m fine.”
“Well, clearly you’re not.” James sighs. “I’m going to hit the shower.” He half turns to leave the room, then stops. “Hey, did you hear about that poor kid that got killed near the flyover?”
“Yeah. Awful. I read something about it.”
“Horrible,” he says. “Barney knows someone who knew the driver that hit him. She said he came flying out of nowhere. Didn’t even stop. Said it’s completely messed her up.”
“I bet. You’d never forgive yourself.”
James disappears upstairs, and a few minutes later I hear the hiss of running water. I go and tap on Eli’s door to check if he’s okay, but even as I push the door ajar, he doesn’t seem to notice me. His head is bowed over the desk, a study guide folded open in front of him, and he’s writing fervently on one of the lined A4 books I bought Eden for Christmas. Before, I’d spent so many hours nagging: Can’t you get your revision organized? The notes had languished by the bed, used as a prop on which to gather used cups and empty cans of fizzy drinks, until now.
Quiet. It’s so quiet, since Eden’s gone.
Later, in the bath, I submerge myself in the cluster of bubbles. It’s too hot but I can’t be bothered to turn on the cold tap and eddy the water; instead, I will wait for my body to adapt to the discomfort. As I feel the bubbles prickle my skin, a submerged memory bobs to the surface—Eden as a toddler, standing up naked in the bath, begging for a Santa beard. “Here,” I told her, scooping up the foam and depositing it on her chin. “Ho-ho-ho. Can I have some presents, please?”
