The Day Tripper, page 15
ORDINARY PEOPLE
“Thank the bridesmaids,” Mum whispers to me. The room is so silent I’m sure everyone can hear her.
My standing here, mute, got some sniggers to begin with. But as a painful minute has ticked by, faces have fallen blank.
“Thank them all for coming,” my father-in-law says. “That’s all you need to do.” I give him half a nod, and he slumps back in his seat. “How many has he had this time?” he mumbles.
I knock back the champagne that’s been poured for the toast. Whether through nerves or the cocaine, my mouth is far too dry to speak.
There’s a faint cheer and some giggling from Dommy’s table. “Speak up, old chap!” Uncle Mike heckles.
A rustle of restlessness replaces the silence. A few hushed conversations begin. The toastmaster begins his walk from the doorway where he and the serving staff stand. I raise a shaky palm.
“This is... This is nonsense.” My voice, through the radio-mike, sounds alien and awful, its tremor amplified disproportionately. “All of this.”
The quiet is back in abundance: syrupy, noisy silence. The man in red is a statue.
“This is all just for show.” My eyes find Holly’s near the back. She gives me a sad smile. I make a point of casting my gaze around the room, but always I return to her.
“This isn’t love. This is a party.”
“Nowt wrong with a party!” Dommy calls out. No one laughs.
“You’re right,” I say. “Nothing wrong with a party at all. But love—love isn’t a party.” I glance at Elouise. My wife. She listens intently, chin propped on fist, intrigue and wariness in equal measure.
“Love doesn’t lessen with each guest that leaves. It doesn’t end with the last one out the door. Love is what’s left when everything and everyone—all of this—is stripped away.”
At the fringes of my vision, I see a smile bloom on Elouise. But my gaze, like a compass to magnetic north, swings to the back of the room. “Here’s something I’ve learned. Your world can be torn to pieces, everything back to front, inside out. Wrecked. You can be living day to day, hour to hour. Everything you thought you could rely on, everything you thought was real—gone. Everything gone, except love. Because, believe me, love is indestructible. It’s like the framework of a building that stands after a fire. Not only is it still there, but it’s clearer than ever for having everything else, all that is comfortable and reliable, burned away.”
My heart thumps. The nerves have faded, but my anger hasn’t.
“Love isn’t something that you put on an agenda. How could you? It turns up when it feels like it, and immediately it eclipses all other plans. There’s no right time. No wrong time. When love shows up, it is time. Whoever coined the phrase right person, wrong time can go to hell. Alone.
“Love isn’t about shared interests, is it?” I’m ranting now. Face burning. Flecks of spittle. “Why would you want someone with the same interests? Isn’t love about showing someone your world, and they theirs?”
I take a deep breath. Mouth arid. “Love isn’t something on a list of things to be done. Not a box to tick. It isn’t a crown, a cherry on the top, a penthouse, a finishing touch.”
Elouise’s nodding serves only to spur me on. “Love isn’t the ability to wake up next to someone every day. It is the unbearableness of not waking up next to that person, every single day.”
Holly plays it cool, acts like she’s not aware of my stare that’s unwavering now.
“Love is not about saying this is where I belong.” My voice is quieter now. “It’s about being completely, hopelessly, profoundly unable to belong anywhere else.”
The room is silent as they, and I, realize that my speech has run its course. I raise my empty champagne flute. “Anyway... To the bridesmaids!”
A lukewarm toast is made. The room floats somewhere between confusion and relief.
Except Maxim, who claps hard. “Well said, sir!” he shouts—thoroughly decent bastard that he is.
JANUARY 22, 1998 | AGE 22
Lucky Man
A gift. A day to take for ourselves, before everything is laid to ruin.
“I’m not exactly an old romantic, I’m afraid,” I say. “Could’ve come up with something better.”
“Nonsense,” Holly says, snuggling tight against me. “I’ve almost managed to forget how badly I’ve cocked everything up.”
We sit on the coarse carpet in close to darkness, gazing up at the model of Earth and the twinkling universe surrounding it. A PA announcement tells us that the Science Museum will be closing in ten minutes.
“Stop your worrying,” I tell her.
“Six months off qualifying and I drop the ball. Way to go, Holly.”
“I promise you you’ve passed.”
“I’m touched by your faith, baby. However misplaced...”
I picture the eclipse day in ’99, the swanky hospital, my insecurities over her success. Eighteen months from here. “Mark my words, darling.”
She was awake before me this morning. Tearful and agitated, she’d slept little, fretting over a disastrous exam yesterday. Cheering her up was the only possible thing on my agenda. Bank account and car running on empty, a trip on foot to my favorite museum was all I could offer. I’d imagined we’d hang about for a couple of hours, but all day has slipped past us, and we’ve barely looked at a third of the exhibits.
“Do you find it makes you feel pathetically insignificant?” Holly asks, staring at the constellations. “So...vast.”
“Sure. And yet, would you believe there are more possible moves in a game of chess than there are atoms in the known universe?”
“That’s not true.”
“I swear it is.”
“Sounds bonkers.”
“Numbers are bonkers things.” A twinge of sorrow as I say it, that I left my studies behind.
“Gimme another one,” Holly says. “I love your facts.”
“Six billion people in the world, give or take, right?”
“Yup.”
“Now, if you were to count to six billion, counting one number every second, and never stopping to sleep or take a dump, how long would it take you?”
“No idea. A month? Twelve millennia?”
“About one hundred and eighty years, actually.”
“I was close.”
“Now, imagine there’s a global rock-paper-scissors competition,” I say. “Everyone in the world plays the person nearest them. Winners stay in—they play the nearest winner. So on and so forth till the last two people on Earth are left. They play off to be champion.”
“Got it.”
“Tell me, Dr. Chan, given a six billion population, how many games has the global rock-paper-scissors champion had to play?”
“Just tell me. Don’t want to look a dick.”
“Thirty-two.”
“You’re full of crap.”
“I’m telling you, man, numbers are bonkers!”
A security guard ushers us along to the exits. Holly and I walk arm in arm through the deserted Space Hall that had been full of school groups when we arrived.
“Thank you,” she says. “I’ve almost managed to forget.”
“Cool.” I too have been saved from dwelling on my yesterday—an evening that ended with me matching Uncle Mike shot for shot at the bar.
“Everything’s all kinda here and now when I’m with you,” Holly says.
“Same.” We peck each other on the lips. “Although here and now is something of a debatable concept.”
“Here we go.”
“Well, in Einstein’s model of the universe, all of space exists, as does all of time. So much as here means different things to different people, so indeed does now.”
“It’s possible that I might be scienced out,” she says.
I stop at the exit and look guiltily at the box that invites donations. “Get you next time,” I mumble.
“You really dig this place, don’t you?” Holly says.
“Silly, innit? Used to come here a lot as a kid.”
“With school?”
I flush with embarrassment. “By myself, mostly. Hour or two, here and there.”
She squeezes my hand. “That’s kinda...sad.”
“What a weirdo!”
“Stop it. I think there’s a lot about your childhood I’d be fascinated to know.”
“Not at all.”
“You’re never keen to chat about it.”
“Nonsense. Nowt to tell.”
“Hmm.”
“All very gray and unexciting.”
“Whatever.”
Stepping out onto Exhibition Road, we are assaulted by sharpened road salt on a frozen gale. “Shitting hell!” Holly shouts.
I hold her face to my coat and clench my jaw, grateful for the change of subject.
AUGUST 8, 2011 | AGE 35
Read All About It
London burns. Jazz and I sit on a rooftop, eight stories up. It’s the late morning after the night before, and it’s peaceful here in the warm wind which carries a tang of toxic plastics. This is the uneasy calm of a ceasefire, though; not the end of hostilities. I can feel it. Last night was the third of the riots, Jazz has explained. The roughest yet. Black smoke billows diagonally into the blue sky: dead ahead, left and behind us.
I like it. This solid home of mine has turned on itself, fucked itself up. It’s shown itself to be vulnerable. I feel somehow less out of place today.
“Another?” Jazz says, relieving me of my plastic cup. I give him a thumbs-up, and he pours me more supersweet coffee from the thermos he brought along. We’re close enough mates, it seems, for him to spot my hangovers on first sight and, without judging, to know what’s good for me. Who cares that my only friend is a fifteen-year-old schoolboy?
This morning found me on the floor of the shitty bedsit in East London. Bedroom door wide open to the hallway. Jeans wringing wet from the crotch outward. No possessions to speak of bar a mobile phone with a chipped screen. Zero cash. Empty bottles. I awoke to the laughter from another tenant: “At least you haven’t shat yourself this time—that’s something,” he observed from outside my room.
This is a day I can’t afford to waste. I forced myself into the shower, let the hot water sear my skin as my stomach pumped out the last of the poison. Shaking too much to play guitar, and bemused by the trilling alarms and crystalized glass everywhere, I came here to the Sefton Hills estate. As if still a teenager myself, I knocked for Jazz.
He told me how the police shot a man last week, and everything kicked off after that. But he reckons it’s been brewing awhile. “Happy people don’t riot,” his granddad told him. I agree.
“Man, I need to get my shit in order,” I tell him as he mills about on the rooftop behind me.
“Right now, old cuz, we need to stay well away from everything.” He scatters some scraps of food from a carrier bag. Pigeons circle and flap like newspapers in the wind.
“I don’t have the luxury of waiting this out.”
Jazz makes cooing noises in reply to the assembled flock. Some he greets like old friends. “You’re too hard on yourself, man.” He says it like I imagine a counselor might—supportive yet tired of my whining. God knows what crap he normally has to put up with from me when he seeks me out down at the river.
I glance at my naked ring finger. It’s six years since I walked down the aisle. “How long did that last, I wonder?” I mumble. “Be surprised if we made it to the end of the honeymoon. What happened to that bright new career with her old man? I excelled at that, clearly.”
Jazz perches against the railings next to me. I take my eyes from the smoke belching silently from London, look into his worried eyes. “Sorry, man. You keep feeding your birds. I’m moaning.”
“You never said you’d been married,” he says. “What went wrong?”
I’m about to tell him I don’t know, but that’s not true. “Wrong person.”
He nods, hand-feeding toast crusts to a brace of tame birds. Before we came up here, I watched him gather food waste from a communal bin store. He freezes, raising a hand to silence me, listening for anyone coming up the stairs. “False alarm,” he says. “Some lads come up here in the evenings. Usually have the place to myself at this time.” This is the only high-rise on the estate, and it’s derelict. Supposed to have been demolished years ago, Jazz explained earlier, as he led us up a metal fire escape with the casual confidence of someone who comes here daily. The security door between the stairs and the roof hangs open, long since wrenched from its frame. There are rusted tinnies and shredded train tickets about the place. No square foot of wall has escaped the wet end of an aerosol can.
“I went to prison,” I tell him. “For a while.”
“No biggie,” Jazz says.
“Have I not told you that before?”
He shakes his head. “I kinda know you got...secrets, man. Shit you don’t wanna chat about.”
“What do we talk about, usually?”
“Music. You teach me guitar, innit. You help with school stuff. Politics and... I don’t know, everything.”
“You’re not surprised, that I was inside?”
“What d’you do?” he asks.
“I was stitched up, mate. Banged up for a crime that I am utterly incapable of. That’s the truth, I swear it. No way on God’s earth I did what they say I did.”
“Don’t have to convince me,” Jazz says.
“They say I...say I killed this woman. She’s called Holly. I was...am...in love with her.”
“Shit, man.”
“There’s no way, Jazz. Zero chance.”
“Of course.”
“I need to know what happened to her.” Despite the agony and the poison coursing through me this morning, I knew I had to make this day work for me. Any date after Holly’s death is a chance to find out what happened to her. An opportunity to discover why I got the blame. Who knows how many chances I’ll get to find out? Once I know, I can stop it happening. Force myself into the headwind, make the difference. Let our lives update. Save her. Save myself. Change the cause of these effects.
“You’ve checked online?” Jazz asks.
“Not really sure what—”
Jazz smirks, retrieving a small mobile phone from his pocket. “What’s her name?”
“Holly.”
“Surname?”
“Chan. Holly Chan.”
“And she...died when?”
“I don’t know exactly,” I tell him. “2007, I think.”
“Four years ago,” Jazz mumbles as he taps keys. “Shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Who you calling?”
“Cuz, you crack me up sometimes. Worse than my grandfather. This her?” He passes me the phone. A color headshot of Holly fills the screen.
“Fuck. Where did you get that?”
“Facebook. Memorial group. Got like a thousand members.”
“Right. Everyone loves her. Loved her, I guess.”
“You’re right,” Jazz says. “Was 2007. Thirty-three years old. Sad, man.”
My heart pounds. “How did she die? I need to know.”
Jazz scans the screen whilst I take deep, slow breaths, fight the urge to throw up.
“No sign of a how,” he tells me. “Lots of taken from us too soon and that.”
“Jesus.”
“And you’re saying people think it was your fault?” Jazz asks.
“I know they do. I went to prison for it.”
He navigates his phone once more. “Old cuz, nothing on Google.”
“What does that mean?”
“Look, there’s stuff about Holly—memorial groups, official notice about her funeral.”
“Funeral.”
“But that’s it,” Jazz says. “If she’d been killed, it would be all over everywhere. That would be news, wouldn’t it?”
“Definitely.”
“I can’t find nothing. She was probably like ill or something.”
I shake my head. “That’s crazy. If it was my fault, we’d know, right?”
“Hundred percent.”
“So how do I find out what happened to her?” I ask. “Library, or something? Hospital?”
“Reckon I’d just ask someone who knew her.”
I think about her dad, him ejecting me into the winter night in 2010. “Don’t really know anyone.”
Jazz passes me the phone. “Here’s a list of a thousand people who might help.”
“What is this?”
“People who’ve joined the memorial group. Maybe one or two might know how she died, don’t you think? Shall we message someone?”
“Jazz, you absolute...” I scroll through scores of unfamiliar names. Choosing someone is like sticking a pin in a map. What do I say to them, anyway?
“Anyone you know?” Jazz says. “Someone who’d help you out?”
I’m about to tell him no when, among the list of randoms, a name jumps out. Maxim Masondo. “I met this guy. He was...cool.”
“Let’s send him a message.”
“Say what?”
“That you knew this Holly. Ask how she died.”
I stare into the distance at smoke that is no more than wisps now, like a bonfire ready for more fuel.
“Come on,” Jazz says, “I’m writing it right now. Hi, Maxim...”
“Let me, yeah? My problem, man, not yours.” I take the phone from him. This guy was Holly’s fiancé. Were they still together at the end, two years after my wedding to Elouise? It’s likely. Twice I try asking the question, only to delete what I’ve typed. I need to tread carefully; if he’s good enough to give me one chance, that’s all I’ll need.
“Could you ask him if we might be able to meet up?” I say, passing the phone back to Jazz. “Please, mate. Tell him it’s Alex Dean. He’ll know who I am.” He’ll know all right, but I have to find out what happened to her.
