Crash, page 8
‘I’m bleeding after sex. I left it far too long to see the GP.’
* * *
‘After we’ve had sex?’
* * *
I pulled away so that I could see straight into his eyes. ‘I don’t have sex with anyone else.’
* * *
He dropped his gaze. We never discussed the fact that he still had sex with his wife.
Sometimes I felt as if I had sex with her too, that our bodies were linked by his hands. I knew what she liked because of the way he touched me.
The street drinker’s discussion was becoming an argument, but we stayed and listened. It was about something that had been said and who had said it. A small man with a huge hat jumped up and swung a wild punch. He staggered and fell, and the group laughed. It felt tense, possibly dangerous.
Dan spoke again, lifting his head to find my eyes. ‘What is it you’re most afraid of?’
* * *
‘Right now, it’s whether those men will turn violent.’
* * *
‘We’re quite safe. They’re not aware of us.’
* * *
I paused, reluctant to shape my thoughts into words. ‘I’m afraid of dying, not of death itself but of leaving Tom alone with Carl. When I’ve thought about the end of my marriage, I’ve imagined every other horrible scenario but not this one. I expected Carl to die first. In fact, I thought he would die quite soon.’
Dan stared at me, frowning. ‘Slow down, Alice, you haven’t even had your treatment yet. Try not to imagine the worst. Take it one step at a time. And why on earth would Carl die?’
I reached across for his hand. ‘It’s time I told you everything but not today. I must go home.’
ELEVEN
TUESDAY 16TH SEPTEMBER
I still have my first year Sociology notes in a ring binder, hidden amongst the books in the library. The cardboard cover is frayed, softening at the edges, releasing minute paper fragments like asbestos. The edges of the lined paper are yellowed, and rust has spread around paperclips which grip the blue smudged handouts. They still smell of ink. My name is written across the front in faded blue biro, Alice Catherine Bowles. Around my name, in hearts of various colours, I have scattered declarations of love for Carl. The library captures the best light in the house. It’s a room where I always feel warm and safe, the pleasure of warm sun on new carpet never fading. I carried the folder over to the window seat, crossing my legs and tucking my feet under my bottom, remembering the pen I’d used to write those words of love. There were at least twenty different colours, every one released from a carousel with a single click. After I used up the ones I liked, the pen seemed worthless. My sister Hazel bought it for me to take to university in 1978, just before she left for Australia and I had packed it amongst my jeans and T-shirts, my Rod Stewart albums, and my Rupert Bear with only one eye. My precious things.
I flick through the pages of notes and handouts, but the underlined titles and lines of neat handwritten notes mean nothing to me now, even though I work as David’s research assistant. Carl and I had both studied Sociology and he used to enjoy quoting theory, names and dates, especially if it meant undermining me. I wondered if talking about the past might help bring him back to his present. With the folder tucked under my arm, I climbed the two flights of stairs to his rooms. He was asleep on his day bed, his head thrown back on the cushion, his mouth open. I crouched beside his bed and watched his chest rise and fall. Occasionally he frowned and muttered. Who was he talking to?
I pushed myself up from the carpet and brushed threads from my jeans, pacing the room, then settled into the chair by the attic window. Below me, russet tree crowns bunched together in dense folds of sepia and taupe and my thoughts drifted to the autumn, almost thirty years ago, when I first met Carl.
The first year Sociology students had organised a wake for the death of Keith Moon, the drummer of The Who. Carl stares straight ahead, his old school scarf tight around his neck, like an old-fashioned binman and his hair, dyed black, stands erect in sticky peaks like a Goth version of the royal icing on my mother’s Christmas cake. He wears a collarless shirt, probably from a charity shop and an antique waistcoat I later learned had been handmade in France for his great grandfather. His trousers were intended for someone pounds heavier and years older and were tied around his waist by a dog lead. His boots, highly polished, would have done credit to an officer of the Coldstream Guards. He stands at the edge of the room, one hand deep in a pocket of his trousers, the other lifting cup after plastic cup of beer to his mouth before he drops them into an over-spilling bin. No one speaks to him.
His isolation makes him appear special and exotic and I am fascinated. We weren’t at an exciting university. It hadn’t been hard to get in although most of us had struggled to achieve the already low grades we were asked for. Carl’s absence from fresher’s week only made him seem even more mysterious. In the second week of term, he turned up at lectures, sitting apart from us, always at the front, the first to arrive and the first to leave.
I am dazzled by a strobe light as I push my way through the dancing students, their body shapes frozen in slow motion, and crunch towards Carl through the litter at his feet. I try to speak to him, but ‘Substitute’s’ pounding rhythm sweeps my voice aside. At first, Carl pretends that he hasn’t heard then he leans towards me, one arm folded across his chest, the other cupping his chin. He peers at me over glasses he might have borrowed from John Lennon and raises his eyebrows. It’s a gesture I have come to know well.
We’ve left the party and are sitting on a bench in Victoria Park. It’s early October and I shiver after the heat of the student’s union. Carl unwraps his scarf, links it around my neck and turns it twice. It’s too tight and I protest. He slowly unwraps it, a curious smile flickering across his features. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, but I know he didn’t mean it.
Carl tried to give the impression he missed fresher’s week because he disliked organised fun, but the truth is simpler. He arrived at our glass and concrete university through clearing. Beatrice put him on a train… this was to be her last parental act, although neither of us knew it at the time… paid his fare and waved him goodbye. Carl knew the name of our city, but he didn’t know where he was in relation to any other place. He was a stranger to the world. Later, I learned that Carl’s life had been bounded by his mother’s home in Oxford and his school, a school with a name. Everything else about the world he learned from textbooks or the television. Of course, he went outside but only the outside that was permitted to a boy who was at prep school from the age of six and whose mother left him in the charge of a housekeeper.
That night, I opened the door for Carl to take over my world. He loved me as if he had never loved before, which was probably true, but even at the start, he didn’t seem to like me. There was too much about me to dislike. I embodied everything his mother had taught him to despise. Carl said he hated ordinary things, like shops, the houses lived in by most people, families like mine, yet those were the things that had made me. He hated Sociology, but it was the only course that clearing could find for him. He mocked my notes, the underlining, the lists I made, but relied on copying them out for his tutorials.
I only found out his mother’s name was Beatrice when my father died. At the funeral, my sister and I linked arms and walked amongst the bouquets spread out on the grass and my mother asked who had sent the expensive white lilies. I crouched down and turned over the card. It said Deepest regrets, Beatrice Williams. I stood up and brushed my hands, although they were not dirty.
‘Carl’s mother,’ I said.
‘That was nice of her,’ my mother whispered, already moving on to the next bouquet but even then, I had winced at how much Beatrice would detest the word ‘nice’.
The knee curled under my weight became stiff and numb and I shifted my position. I looked at my watch; two hours before I needed to collect Tom from school. I remembered that Dan was picking up his younger daughter today too, as she had a music exam. Sarah worked, of course, as a primary school teacher. If she wasn’t his wife, I expect I might have liked her.
I walked alongside Carl’s bookcase and pushed my folder amongst his books, at the same time pulling out a photograph album. It was one I’d bought in Woolworths just after we graduated. Its plastic cover stuck to my fingers as I knelt down and turned the pages, my back resting against the bookcase. Carl snorted and I startled, as if I had been caught prying. I hadn’t seen these since Euan died, was not aware that Carl had even kept the album.
At first, there are only photos of Carl. I owned the camera and he never offered, or I didn’t ask him, to take any of me. I notice now, primly, that he always had a beer or a cigarette or both in his hands. He was always posed and never smiled.
A few more pages of photographs, hard to distinguish underneath the bubbled cellophane but I angle the album to avoid glare from the window and see Euan, and Carl, playful in Monty Python poses. There’s one of Euan at a protest march outside the library, demanding something, his fist tight by his cheek. Carl is tagging along as usual, but his hands are folded across his chest, as ever. I’m there to take the photographs, already cast as an observer of their remarkable lives. They wanted everything to be recorded, as if they knew.
Carl didn’t make friends, he only wanted to be with me and if I made a friend, he would belittle them, so they soon gave up. His chance meeting with Euan at the medical centre in the student’s union was a miracle. Carl always made a fuss about being ill and if he was neglectful of his lectures and tutorials, he was diligent about making and keeping appointments with the doctor. I remember my surprise, seeing Carl and Euan walking towards me, their heads already close together in the deep companionship that would become their signature.
We’re sitting at our kitchen table, candles burning low amidst the debris of my chicken casserole. The plates are cold, with skin and bones congealing in fat amongst the overcooked carrots. Our breath, as we talk and smoke, is caught in the guttering of the candles. Euan’s eyes shine, his pupils reflecting the flickering flames, and Carl is mesmerised by his talk of their potential future. I am equally bewitched, but by the beauty of my flatmates, the angles of their thin, earnest faces chiselled by the soft light. I watch them and listen to their talk through a haze of love and wine, oblivious to my exclusion, or pretending not to mind.
I rise to clear away, dipping my hands in warm, soapy water, absorbing the mothering scent of washing-up liquid. My reflection in the kitchen window is ripped apart as a train rattles past the end of the garden. I think about the passengers and whether they see me, a young woman at a window in love with two boys, Carl so vulnerable and Euan so fascinating and unreachable.
That was the first time that Carl didn’t come to bed. Through the night I heard the thump of music, and I woke ragged with exhaustion and loneliness. The sitting room floor was scattered with papers and empty wine bottles and the flat was cold and smelt stale. The bathroom door stood open, but Euan was in bed, his neck stretched and mouth wide open, just as Carl’s is now. His clothes were tangled on the floor. I found Carl lying on the sofa, fully dressed. I shook them both awake, fiercely slapping their tousled heads. They had lectures at nine and I couldn’t allow them to be late.
This became our pattern. Carl and Euan lived for each other’s minds and my role was to be an admiring audience and mother, someone they needed but didn’t respect. My failure to grasp their lifestyle and the choices they made was simply another reflection of my pedestrian, middle-class thinking. Carl reminded me of this whenever I tried to contribute and Euan would look at me, apologetic, wistful even, when he heard Carl’s harsh judgements, but he didn’t disagree, he only shrugged in sympathy. They missed lectures, more and more often, yet passed exams by begging notes from other students and working through the night. To compensate for the alcohol, they started using something to keep them awake. I hated feeling left out, but something important was happening. It should be enough, I was reminded, to watch and admire from the margins.
Euan thought he knew about everything and one night at the beginning of our final year, when Carl was asleep, we sat up late and talked about my assignment, due the next day. He snatched the course text from my hand and scanned the photocopied articles at my feet, his finger stroking his upper lip as he read, dropping each one back onto the stained, matted carpet. Then we talked or at least he talked, and I listened and gradually I was aware only of his lips. The top one was so much narrower than the lower and I noticed how his dark brown hair fell across one eyebrow and that he had down on his earlobes. Euan paused, his eyelids lowered, leaned towards me and we kissed. That was the first time we had sex, but there were many more, as Carl gradually turned his days into night. I can’t remember there ever being another girl for Euan, at least not one I met. I still miss him. We both do.
Euan graduated with a first in Maths. I scraped a lower second, any hope of doing better destroyed by constant morning sickness. Carl passed with a third but said he didn’t care. The business he and Euan had started would give us everything we wanted, especially me, who would struggle to find a career anyway. My mother came to my graduation, but no one was there for Carl or Euan. I turn another page in the album and here are the photographs. My mother took one of me in my gown and mortar board but I’m frowning and looking away from the camera, as if I’m thinking, Where are they?
On that day, I actually made a cake, and we ate tea together in the flat. My mother was puzzled by my living arrangements but still too bereaved to ask questions. Her face was alert and smiling whenever she spoke but fell away once she was silent. She knew I was marrying Carl, but I hadn’t told her I was pregnant.
Honey scratched at the door and whined. I wanted to stay here, in Carl’s study, with my past but she must have been desperate to climb three flights of stairs to find me. I glanced at my watch; there was just enough time to walk her before collecting Tom from school. Sliding down the bookcase, I rolled into a patch of sunshine, stretching my arms out above my head and pointing my toes, before calling out to the anxious dog, ‘I’m coming, Honey, I’m coming.’
Before I left, I gave Carl some water. He opened his eyes but without recognition. The care team were happy with his progress, had reassured me he was slowly surfacing and all he needed was time. There was nothing to stop me taking Tom out of school tomorrow. We would go in search of Beatrice. If we didn’t see her, we would only waste a few hours in the car, and what else did either of us have to do?
TWELVE
WEDNESDAY 17TH SEPTEMBER
‘How come I can suddenly miss school?’ Tom spoke at last, after we had been driving for an hour.
I hesitated, caught out again by guilt and uncertainty.
‘Some things are more important than a day in detention. I thought you should meet your grandmother. The hospital team will visit Dad while we’re gone, around lunchtime. He’ll be okay.’
‘This is the first time I’ve heard about a grandmother.’
‘You’ve always had a grandmother. She just divorced us, I suppose. She didn’t want your father and I suppose she didn’t want me either.’
‘Lucky her. Why are we going to see her? Remind me.’
I was unsure of my motives and felt needled by his questions. All that was actually required was to inform Beatrice that Carl was ill. I could have written a letter to her old address or telephoned the university to pass on a message.
I glanced at Tom, but he stared straight ahead. ‘Carl wants his mother to know how ill he is. She needs to be given a chance to see him again. Don’t you think that’s important?
‘I’m not sure if she still lives in Oxford,’ I continued. ‘I don’t have her telephone number anymore. She isn’t listed in any directory and she’s not the kind of person to own a mobile. I admit this visit could be a wild goose chase.’
Tom sneered. ‘We own a surveillance company. You could have asked Oliver to track her down.’
‘I don’t want to involve Oliver or encourage him to snoop on private individuals. When your dad and his friend Euan set up CU.com they hoped it would help the world be a safer place. I don’t trust Oliver and I want us to manage family things ourselves.’
Tom frowned. ‘You’re wrong about him, Mum. I really like Oliver, he’s cool.’
I plunged on, determined to put into words the thoughts that had kept me awake through the night.
‘Tom, I’m worried about you being at home this summer with Dad and me, both of us so ill. Even if The Mount take you back, it will be hard for you to see friends. Ella will be home for a few days when I have my surgery but that’s all. I was thinking you could go to Australia and stay with your aunt, my sister Hazel. I can email her, if you like. It would be such an adventure.’
‘It’s okay, I’ll stay at home,’ Tom said with forced politeness.
‘At least think about it. They live in Queensland and there’s beaches and surfing and they have two grandsons about your age.’
‘I said, I’ll be okay at home.’
‘Madeleine texted last night. If The Mount ask you to leave, you can help out in the surgery in the afternoons and meet Owen on the nights he doesn’t have rugby. It’s really generous of her, especially as Owen isn’t supposed to see you. I want to say yes.’
Tom turned to look at me. Even as I drove I felt his blue eyes staring, hard and icy in the way that only he and Carl could manage. ‘I want you to stop talking about me to other people. I don’t want help from anyone.’
Those were the only words we spoke and now Tom bounced on the balls of his feet, hands in pockets as I rang the doorbell. This was the same front door, with its cracked panes and peeling paint but I was twenty-four years older, heavier, my face more lined. Standing by my side, curious and impatient, was a boy that had not yet been created or even considered the last time I was here. The house continued unchanged but there was no longer any trace of me, that heavily pregnant young woman. A neighbour confirmed that Professor Williams still lived in the house, so I knew we would see her. We might have to entertain ourselves in Oxford for a few hours, but I would wait.
