True Love, page 8
All right, she says.
She smiles at him.
Give me the address first.
The man flashes a set of teeth browned by tobacco.
Have it your way, he says. For now.
He turns, finds his coat on the back of a chair and plunges his fat, babyish hand into one of the inner pockets. He retrieves a small black notebook. Keely watches as he feverishly flicks through the pages, and when he finds what he’s looking for, he holds it out to her.
Only an hour from here, she hears the man say.
She looks down and reads the few lines under the name Eric. She recognizes the name of the village. She’s heard it before, she thinks. There was a boy who Sarah used to see there. How strange, Keely thinks, remembering Sarah’s voice complain about the journey. She reads the lines three more times until she knows she has it in her head.
She looks up, still smiling.
Well? he says.
He looks back up at the mistletoe, at the finger-shaped leaves and the small white orbs. He starts to lean in toward her, his fleshy lips slick with beer. But she has her drink still in her hand, and she lifts it up and throws the rest of it in his face. It makes a sound like a single handclap as it’s dashed against the flushed skin of his cheeks. The man’s hands go up to his face and he staggers back, rubbing at his eyes and crying out a litany of obscenities.
Keely senses that people have turned to look, but she doesn’t care. She’s already moving through the crowd, repeating over and over and over again the lines of her da’s address in her head.
SHE’S ON THE BUS. Strangely, she’s never been on one before. They drove in the truck at the camp, and since they moved to town she’s had no need to travel anywhere else. She doesn’t like the gaudy colours of the seats, and she doesn’t like how brightly lit it is. One light flickers on and off, humming like the fridge back in the flat.
She doesn’t know what she’ll say or what she’ll do when she arrives, but she’s on her way. She’s written the address down on a slip of paper and tucked it away in her pocket. She’s brought some of the cans with her. She has one in her hand now, which she periodically lifts to her mouth, sipping away until it starts to lighten in her grip.
It’s nearly four o’clock. She’ll be back by seven to meet Sarah – she’s sure. The sky is already nearly dark. Just a sliver of colour left in it, a shade close to lavender. Cars and their headlights rush by and sweep across her face. She stares out the window: at the houses with their twinkling lights, at the glow of Christmas trees in the windows, at the people together inside.
She’s sitting near the front. The bus is almost empty but for three young boys on the back row, the middle one with a football in his lap. They chatter excitedly between themselves. She remembers when she’d been that age, the Christmases they’d had in the caravan. She and Welty up late on Christmas Eve talking about what might be waiting for them under the little fake tree that their da put up each year. And then waking up early on the day and discussing it some more before they were allowed to get their da up.
When the clock hand finally reached seven, their da would groan and turn over as they leapt on to his bed; and he’d pretend that he wasn’t going to get up, that he was going to go back to sleep for another few hours. But they’d keep shaking him and shaking him until finally he’d rise and he’d flick the lights of the tree on and boil the kettle while they tore through their little pile of gifts.
She opens another can. It foams and she lifts it quickly to her mouth. It’s cold and slides harshly down her throat. She can feel her mind and her body loosening. Her heart was pounding when she’d walked out of the pub, half expecting to be followed. But no one had come after her.
She hasn’t changed – she’s still in her dress, though she’s put on a warmer coat, an old duffel that she’s had for years with horned toggles and a heavy hood, which she decides to pull up now as the bus stops and an old couple walk on together, all grey hair and shrivelled faces, walking sticks and beige cardigans. The driver waits as they shuffle down the aisle and sit down on the two seats directly adjacent to her.
Keely pulls back her hood a little and watches them as they try to make themselves comfortable. The rustle of their coats and bags. The old man’s nose is long and red, the wings of his nostrils empurpled by broken capillaries. He sniffs and runs a gloved hand under it. The old woman has her bag in her lap. She’s wearing a dark green hat with a loop of little Rudolphs prancing around the trim. She places her hand in his lap and he places his own on top of it. Neither says anything, both just stare ahead at the road and the lights of the cars, heading toward their home.
She’s not expecting it, but the sight blurs her vision with tears. It sometimes happens: the shock of stumbling upon an intimacy shared between two strangers. For a second, no more, there forms between them a connective tissue along which entire lifetimes flare and fade before her eyes, so vividly that she believes she’s witnessed all that they’ve been through together, and all that they might yet endure.
And then, as quickly as it arrived, the feeling vanishes and she’s back on the bus, passing between villages and stretches of road that aren’t lit, so that when she stares out the window she can see only her own face, her skin tinged yellow, her eyes cavernous and black.
This is the furthest she’s ever been from the camp and the town. She knows it’s sad and ludicrous, but it’s the truth. She opens another beer. The old couple glance over at her, look down at the bag by her feet with one of the empty cans sticking out. She shuffles it closer to her with her foot and slouches lower in her seat. She adjusts the hood of her duffel so that she can no longer see either side of her. She has to keep swapping hands to hold the can because it’s cold. She plunges the one that’s not being used into her pocket and bunches it up until it warms a little, then swaps it again.
The bus pulls over and the three boys at the back get off, still jabbering away between themselves. The ball rolls down the aisle, is trapped under a heel and then picked up. They’re a few years older than Welty was. Or still is. Strange to think that time has moved on, the years have passed, but he’s no older. She doesn’t believe in heaven or hell and never has; but she knows with little doubt that the dead exist in a realm of their own, one that’s governed by different rules, rules that’ll never be clear to the living.
At the next stop, the old couple get off. It is the man who turns to her and offers her a small smile. She’d like to return it, but she can only look back to the window and stare beyond her reflection where a graffitied bench glows beneath a streetlight, looking for all the world as if it’s been jilted, waiting for someone who will never show.
She knows that she is close and she feels a flutter of nerves. They pass through another village. More houses with lights glowing out, more cars parked on kerbs. A pub, brightly lit, with a painted sign. A crowd of men are singing something out the front. She catches a tiny bit of it over the engine of the bus as it drives past, a Christmas song that she’s heard on the radio in the shop.
The bus leaves the village and pushes back into the darkness again. She’s the only passenger left. She can’t see the driver, can’t even remember what they look like. The engine shifts, clunks loudly, roars on. The lights fizz above her and when the tyres hit a divot or some other inconsistency in the road, they flicker off until the wheels strike something else and then they flicker back on.
She begins to imagine that no one is driving, that the bus is moving independently of human agency and has no destination. It will simply continue, powered by a force that will remain a mystery to her. It could be that she’s dead, she thinks, and that this is her conveyance from the land of the living to where Welty could be waiting for her, standing pale and silent at an unnamed stop. He’ll climb on board and sit next to her, and the pair of them will ride around for eternity, letting some passengers on, letting other passengers off.
The bus has stopped and she hasn’t even realized it. It’s only when she hears two girls climb on and pay the driver that she sees the sign of the village out the window, the same one that’s written on the slip of paper in her pocket. She rises quickly, picks up the bag, and hurries down the aisle and off the bus.
She doesn’t know which direction to walk in, so she just stands and watches as the doors hiss closed and the bus moves away on to the road, watches the glow of its red taillights until they disappear over the brow of a hill.
She’s on a slope, so that she has to stand with one leg jammed straight and the other cocked to keep from teetering over. There’s a cluster of houses on the other side of the road slightly further up, lamps nestled in a row of prettily framed windows. Fields stretch out behind her into a darkness punctuated by little trinkets of light stitched across a rise of distant blue hills. The smell of manure rushes her nose, almost sweet in the chill air, the white shadows of her breath lifting and then vanishing, lifting and then vanishing.
A shiver darts up her spine and the bag rustles in her hand. She picks out the empties and drops them into a bin with a hollow, tinny cackle. She lifts out the last full one, opens it, and feels her upper lip sting with the punch of the cold as she drinks.
She holds herself very still.
Her da is somewhere near. The thought, if she lets it, will be enough to paralyse her. She hasn’t seen him in so long. He’s lived only in her mind, in imagined meetings and imagined conversations. There’s no scenario she hasn’t considered, no bitter argument or tender embrace she hasn’t screened and dissected a thousand times.
But now that she can just go and see him in the flesh, she feels afraid. The fact of his existence, of his face and body appearing before her eyes, brings the hairs up on the nape of her neck.
She thinks of crossing the road and getting the next bus back.
She can meet Sarah in the pub and never mention this little episode again. She doesn’t have to see her da. She’s been doing fine without him. Surely it’s him that should be coming to her, not the other way around. Why, in fact, is she even here? Why has she decided to track him down when she was the one left to fend for herself?
Her breath is a silvery, smoky trickle from her nostrils. Perhaps she doesn’t need to see him to say what she wants to say; maybe what she wants to say can be done much more effectively without words.
She steps off the kerb and makes her way across the road toward the houses. She brings the sleeve of her coat across her nose. Not a single car has passed by since she was dropped off. No pubs, no parties, no singing or carrying on like in town. A silence flavoured by the cold, as hard and brittle as ice, waiting to be cracked.
On the bus, she hadn’t been able to feel the effects of the cans she’s had; but now her head is light and her thoughts fizz behind the jittery scan of her eyes. She sees a stone and then another two, all of them a good size. She stoops down, picks them up, and drops them into the pockets of her coat.
They click in her pocket like dice as she walks up the slope, the tops of her thighs burning with the effort. She stops, takes out the slip of paper. She reads the street name, the number of the house, and then carries on.
There’s no real sprawl of streets here but a close weave of homes, all dotted near one another. She nears the first street. It has a curve to it, so that she can’t see all the way along it. Just the closest three or four of these queerly low houses, lights blazing, Christmas trees twinkling.
She wasn’t expecting this first road to be the one he lives on, but it is. She moves along it. She finishes the can, her last, and places it on the wall that edges the front garden she’s passing.
She reaches into her pocket and takes out one of the stones. The chill of it stings the mottled pink of her palm. She runs the length of her thumb across its chapped surface and is reminded of those very rare days when the sea had been flat at the camp, and her da would always take a moment to show her and Welty the particular flick of the wrist needed to skim a stone, hopping and jumping across the surface.
This is what she’ll do now.
She’ll throw this one, the one she feels will do the most damage, just as her da taught her to. A kaleidoscopic reel of violence brightens behind her eyes: a cracked window, a mouth twisted in pain, the spray and mist of blood.
She doesn’t hear the car coming, it’s just suddenly on her, rounding the bend with its headlights sweeping over her. She has to stop herself from running. Her hood is still up, shadowing her features. She keeps walking, but she turns her face away and puts her hand with the stone back in her pocket.
It could be her da.
The car slows behind her. She hears the register of the engine change, then feels it draw up alongside her. The window rolls down with a shuddery whine. Her heart is going. She has to get away; she has to turn and run and not stop until she’s out of sight.
Then again, if this is the moment she has to face her da, then this is the moment. She’ll do or say whatever must be done right here on the street. But the voice that speaks to her from the darkness of the car is not her da’s. It’s a woman talking to her: a pale, owlish face with red lipstick peering out. She’s on her way to a Christmas party and she’s got herself lost. Could she have some help at all with directions?
Keely says nothing. She only shakes her head and stares at the woman, who stares back at her with a smile that slowly straightens into a look of worry until it vanishes, and her eyes start to shift back to the road. The car idles for a moment longer, and then the woman starts to wind up her window and the car moves on, turns hastily in a driveway, and then speeds back past her again.
The number of the house – 80 – is in her head. It is all she can see when she blinks, pinned to the backs of her eyelids.
On one of the doors – 76. The lights from a wreath catch it and it shines out at her.
Only two away.
She keeps walking.
She takes the stone back out from her pocket.
The closer she gets to the number that’s flashing in her mind – 80, 80, 80 – the more she feels that she has nothing to say, that she’s had every conversation with her da before now in her head. She knows every way it might turn out, and she wants none of them.
What she wants is to see him hurt. She wants to leave him with the feeling that he left her with, with emptiness and worthlessness. She wants him to feel loveless. That’s what she wants him to be: loveless. To be alone like her. To have nothing. To have no one but himself.
She arrives at the right number.
The lights are on in the house. She moves on to the soft, dark lawn. The stone throbs in her grip. She edges closer toward the window, through which she can now see a sofa and two people sitting on it. One is a woman, still young and slight with dark hair and a pretty face. And the other is her da. He’s sitting next to the woman and his arm is around her shoulder. Their faces are lit by the TV. They’re smiling. She watches the woman’s hand as it strokes her da’s knee. And beyond them, or before them, she can see herself, can see her arm raised and the stone locked in her fist, poised to throw.
Part Two
* * *
SPURDOG
1
A DARK RUN OF WATER BETWEEN THE COBBLES. IT leaks from his boots as he stands looking down into his palm at what he’s gathered. Amongst the silt and grit, the green fray of weed and algae, there sits a pale, horned object.
He steps out from beneath the strutted shadows of the bridge. The noise of the traffic shifts from a dull, thunderous roar to a sharper, leaner clamour. It almost hisses now, tyres running slickly on the rain-dark road, carrying people away from their homes or back to them, where they’ll sit and sleep and think and dream, lives passing just as his does.
The water laps at his feet. He turns the object in his fingers, then holds it up to the pearlescent light of the sky. One end is flat and smooth, but from the other prongs a single horn, its edge now rounded but must once, he thinks, have been sharp. Strangely, it appears darker to his eye here, seamed with hues of brown and yellow that remind him of the pages of old books. He brings it up to his nose, inhales sharply but smells nothing other than the water, deep notes of rust and earth, but also something sweet, as if the river were just on the turn, on the cusp of going to rot.
He looks up and out across the dark span of the water, fascinated as he always is by it and what it coughs up for him. At a glance, it looks the same, as if a pattern is repeating itself, over and over again. But look more closely and he knows that it’s always different. Each second it forms something it hasn’t before, twisting and braiding itself into a state of constant newness. And the thought of it – even if he’s at home in bed and can only see it in his mind – makes the skin on his arms pimple, and the knot that has lived in his stomach for as long as he can remember slacken, allowing him to breathe a little easier.
He likes to think that he’s the same as the river. He might look to other people as he always has done, but really he’s changing all the time, and there’s a new version of himself with each passing second. Depending on how crowded his thoughts are, this feeling might unsettle him, might make him long to be still, so that he climbs into his bed and lies in the darkness beneath his blankets for hours on end. Or it will fill him with a kind of joyous emptiness, and his vision will glitter at the edges, the world somehow ceasing to terrify him.
He comes here, down to the bank, as often as he can. His nan and grandad don’t know that this is where he goes. The sodden boots he’s wearing are not his, otherwise he would have been found out long ago. His own trainers are further up the bank, hidden beneath a covering of grass and several large stones. He’d found the boots strewn on the pavement on his way to school. He’d looked up at the windows of the nearest house and, seeing that the curtains were still drawn, he’d picked them up and carried them straight back home, where he’d pretended to his nan that he’d forgotten something and slipped upstairs to place the boots beneath his bed.
