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But you have to understand what they were like as a family. Tight-knit, fiercely loyal to each other. Once you were ‘in’ you felt special too. It was a golden circle. I’d thought families like this only existed on television until I’d met the Rylands.
I looked at the note again.
The kiss – single – didn’t lessen the uncomfortable sensation that the note was a little cold, by her usual standards. There would usually be a little joke, or a ‘Love YOU’, which was a thing we did.
I thought about the events of the evening before. Her odd mood. The atmosphere when Zoe arrived. Me almost dropping her from my shoulders. Her wanting to go, then being sick. That weird vibe in the Uber …
The fact that some of these memories had hazy edges gave me a prickling feeling of shame. How many pints of cider had I drunk? Five? Six?
Had I ruined our day out? An unpleasant feeling began to creep over my skin. Sometimes, when I drank too much, it made me conscious that ‘Nice Respectable Teacher Elliott’ was a thin veneer over the treacly darkness I feared lay inside me.
I bashed out a text.
No worries. Hope you feel better. Love YOU xxxx
Outside, I turned left and began to run along the coast road. It was raining, that fine rain that deceived you into thinking it didn’t mean business, but which soon drenched you through to the bones. My hair clung to my head and I was breathing like an old man, filled with my usual conviction that everything about this activity was wrong and unnatural.
Drum and bass thumped through my earbuds, which usually spurred me on to run harder, but just felt annoying today. I switched the music off and all I could hear was the roaring of waves hitting the shore, my own rasping breath and the hiss of the odd car going through puddles as it passed me.
The sea was to my left; silvery grey in the rain, lace-edged waves licking at the slick, shining sand. There was a low wall and scrubby grass between the road and the beach down below, yellow signs dotted here and there that warned of unfenced cliff, with a dramatic stick man falling to his death.
This road seemed to go on for ever, past bungalows on the other side that already had a closed-up-for-winter, sad look about them, and the café that still gamely had bright beach towels and deckchairs with ‘witty’ slogans for sale on its covered porch.
After a while I turned right, heading up the hill that led to Petrel Point, where there was a World War Two lookout and a great view.
This was a savage bit of the run, and there was an easier route via a path leading from a car park on the other side, but the view at the top made it worthwhile.
As I made my way up the hill, the usual metamorphosis began to occur. I slowly began to transcend the feeling of hating running and everything connected with running, as my body warmed up and my stride became more fluid.
I’d never run in my life until we moved here. At first, I did it because it seemed like the sort of thing people in their thirties did when they left London and, frankly, I was a bit lost. The endless space around me felt as though it might suffocate me, in a weird way, and I couldn’t get used to everyone looking the same. Why are people so obsessed with having space? Buildings make me feel secure. I’ve never had much of a desire to be the tallest thing on the horizon.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of those people who thinks London is the be-all and end-all of civilization. I wouldn’t want to have stayed where I grew up, in a shitty council flat in one of the more depressing bits of north London. It was just a bit more of an adjustment than I’d expected it to be.
Anya grew up in the next town along.
Lathebridge is a genteel place, with its famous Grand Hotel on the front that hosts a small arts festival every year, and its white regency houses along the seafront.
Casterbourne is more crummy arcades and charity shops than cream teas and literary folk, but it was cheap enough for us to buy a small house, with help, and well, there was always the sea. Right now, a silvery band was spreading across the horizon and promising brightness to come. It was one of the things I’d come to love about living here, that the weather could change so quickly. I could see for miles as I reached the top.
I was starting to feel simultaneously better and absolutely knackered, so I looped round past the fort and made my way back down towards home.
I pictured what Anya was probably doing right now. She’d be on the long sofa in their living room – sitting room – probably curled up watching telly and maybe drinking her beloved green tea.
I had an idea; maybe I’d have a shower and just turn up. No one was going to object, were they?
Many, perhaps most, people felt quite differently about their parents-in-law.
When friends made disparaging jokes about their own, bemoaning Christmases and birthdays in their company, I smiled along as though I got it, but really, mine were two of my favourite people in the world.
When I first met Julia and Patrick, I was a little nervous of what they would make of me. I worried that a primary school teacher who came from my sort of background would be a terrible shock to their middle-class sensibilities. All manner of Tobys and Julians and whatever, with Oxbridge degrees and jobs in the City, must have been queuing up.
I had enough of a chip on my shoulder without them even knowing my full story. They still don’t know about my so-called father. Only Anya does.
But the minute I met them, I felt welcome. Sometimes I marvelled at how quickly they’d accepted me. Almost like they had been waiting … and there I was.
Anya told me about her sister, Isabella, who had died of an infection when she was a few days old and whose solo picture – a small, red face in a white blanket – sat among all the ones of the sister who lived. Anya confessed that she felt guilty for having no feelings about this stranger at all and I could understand it, a little. But I think it was one of the reasons they were all so close, as a family. They were grateful for what they had, and maybe conscious that it could be taken away in a few failed breaths.
I was a bit taken aback that Anya was really called Anastasia. Julia only brought that out to wind her up though, as she hated that name. As a tiny girl they had called her ‘Stasi’, but it was a little too East German Torture Squad when written down, so it morphed into Anya, which she used as her official name now.
Patrick was a barrel of man with a hearty laugh and a propensity to see the positive in everything. He came from working-class roots, growing up in Liverpool and going on to work in shipping. Sometimes he made a comment about me and him having things in common, but we didn’t, not really. Very occasionally, you would witness him on the phone dealing with someone difficult and there would be the smallest flash of something else – something sharp-edged that was swaddled by his comfortable home life. He liked to go hunting now and then in Scotland, and I was grateful he never felt the need to ask me along for a father-son-in-law bonding session over dead, furry animals. Not my thing, in any lifetime.
Julia worked in publishing as a literary agent and was lively, fun company. She tended to clasp me in perfumed hugs and say things like, ‘Darling, how is my most favourite son-in-law?’ as though there were competition for the title.
That’s not to say that I hadn’t found her intimidating when I’d first met her. She’d peered at me over her glasses with a slight frown and, for the first half hour in her company, I’d felt a little like I was under a microscope. Then she’d seemed to change, just like that, and was warm and welcoming. I never really knew what it was that turned her around. Maybe she just saw how I felt about her daughter and approved of the sea of love that was on offer.
Anya was their everything. That was clear to anyone who knew them. She was the golden child – the one who survived – and they would do anything to protect her.
Neither of them ever mentioned my own mum. I think they found it hard to know what to say.
I sometimes imagined how it would have gone if my mum had lived long enough to meet them. I pictured Julia, dressed with her usual style, smelling of some sort of subtle perfume, then Mum in those shapeless dresses that were the only things that fit her and leggings, feet overflowing from her shoes like uncooked dough. She would have smelled of smoke because she would have been so nervous about meeting them and she’d have said, ‘Come on, Elliott, don’t give me that look. It’s one of my few pleasures in life and I only have one or two a day.’
I hated myself for thinking like that and I’d put up with any number of worlds-colliding awkward meetings if she was still here. But she had been dead for ten years now, following a massive heart attack, and it was becoming harder and harder to picture her in the world at all, let alone in mine.
My so-called father, well …
I think about the issue of ‘bad blood’ a lot. You would too, in my shoes.
A few nights before we got married, I’d had a huge attack of nerves, entirely based on the idea that Anya wouldn’t want me if she knew everything about me. I’d got royally pissed and, because I am unable to stop myself from making sarcastic quips to big, angry men, ended up with a black eye and a wobbly tooth.
Anya was furious, and I blurted it out. I decided she needed to know that part at least. I told her about the man who was my father by pure biology alone: Mark Little. He got life for beating a man to death who’d been working in a post office Little was trying to rob at the time. I don’t remember any of this. Part of my mum’s disabilities came from him having thrown her down some stone stairs when I was a newborn baby.
He had hepatitis and died in Brixton Prison. And that was the end of him. At least, in the corporeal sense. I try not to think about it, but I find it very hard to forget that fifty per cent of my DNA comes from him.
Anya had held me tightly that night and told me she loved me and that it was going to take a lot more than a ‘gangster dad’ to change that.
She didn’t know everything about me.
I could only test her love so far.
IRENE (#u46b24a53-b552-5625-ba96-a036c6ddda74)
Irene placed her chunky Nokia next to the sink and stared out at the small rectangle of back garden.
Why wasn’t Michael picking up? It was the third time she had called him this week and it kept going to voicemail. Her son could be very elusive sometimes.
The grass was emerald bright after all the rain and badly in need of a cut. Michael had promised he would be round this week to do it.
When her husband Colin was alive, the garden was kept in an immaculate state. He spent hours out there, in all weathers, digging flowerbeds and tending their small vegetable patch.
Now and then she pulled up a weed or two, but she wasn’t able to do much these days and relied on Michael, for this and other little jobs about the place.
Sighing, she put the kettle on and then, from nowhere, she was sideswiped by a scene.
The two boys, aged maybe ten and five, playing football on that lawn. It wasn’t so tidy then; strewn with plastic toys, footballs, and cricket bats. This wasn’t one specific memory, just an ordinary afternoon that would have played itself out many times. It was so vivid on the canvas of her mind now, she felt as though she could step right back into it.
Liam, her little firecracker, was probably cheating again, running around his red-cheeked brother with a cheeky grin that meant he got away with an awful lot more than he should. Michael, always so concerned with fairness, would have been huffing and puffing with the injustice of it all. Liam wouldn’t have been able to resist stoking the flames, goading his big brother and maybe calling him a mean name. They would be fighting before she had the chance to rush out and prise them apart.
Michael was so much bigger and stronger than his brother, but would never really hurt him, even when he was pushed. But still they fought like cat and dog and at the time it drove her doolally.
She smiled now, remembering it. It felt as though those long days of the boys’ childhood would go on for ever. But no one told you that they would be gone one day.
She was always so tired then. Her supermarket job left her exhausted every day, with an aching back and sore feet. Little time for much beyond making tea and hanging out washing before sitting in front of the television.
Irene wished she could step back into that afternoon, just for one hour. She’d wrap herself in it, bathe in every single second. There would be no, ‘I’m too tired to play’ or, ‘Go and watch telly, boys, I’m busy.’ There would be cake and sweets and as much Coca-Cola as they wanted to drink. She wouldn’t even bother with the diet stuff. She’d play all day if that’s what they wanted.
She swiped at her eyes.
Silly old baggage.
Glancing now, despite herself, at the space next to the cupboard where the cat bowls had lived until recently. Stupid still to be upset about this, when there were so many awful things going on in the world. Michael had brushed it off a bit when she’d told him.
But she couldn’t help the sadness that surged now as she thought about the comfort that old moggy had been.
The kettle seemed to have boiled already. She wasn’t sure she even felt like a cup of tea now, or the sandwich she was planning to make.
Michael was always nagging her to look after herself properly, but it was difficult, when she was on her own.
She hoped he was alright, whatever he was doing.
What was he doing?
He pretended that he was happy, but she knew he wasn’t, not really. How could they be happy, after what had happened, any of them?
Abandoning all thoughts of tea now, Irene went into the sitting room and picked up the photograph that sat on the mantelpiece. Liam, aged eight, all gappy teeth and sparkling eyes. He was always such a beautiful child. When he was a toddler, people used to stop her to comment on his auburn hair and those big, light brown eyes. Once, when she was up in London for the day visiting her mother, a man in the street gave her a card and said he was from a modelling agency that represented children. Modelling!
Irene had been dying to tell Colin about it when she got home, but he hadn’t been excited at all. He said that Liam already ruled the roost and it wouldn’t do him any favours to make him a bighead. She never called the modelling man.
It was a shameful thing she kept locked away inside; the fact that Liam had always been that tiny bit easier to love than his older brother.
Michael was always sick; always complaining about something or another.
And as an adult, he had all his weird theories about things; that there was a secret group of powerful people who controlled everything we did, that the state was constantly monitoring us. Irene couldn’t really keep up and just humoured him when he went into one of his rants.
Liam, though, seemed to have sprung from her womb raring to go at life. He sparkled with some sort of vitality that pulled you in.
He could have been anything, really. She gazed at the picture in her hands. He was still so open then, at primary school. Later, his smile became uncertain and wary. That was when things started to go wrong for him, at secondary school. He was always drawn to the bad lads, the cheeky ones at first, then worse. Something about extreme behaviour in others seemed to draw him like an insect to a lit window, and just like that insect, he would destroy himself, bashing against the glass.
For a minute she allowed herself a fantasy.
Liam was working in some sort of well-paid job in an office. He had a nice car and liked to go on holidays to hot places, where he bought her daft souvenirs. He hadn’t settled down yet, but was getting serious about the latest girlfriend, a nice girl he’d met at work. Michael’s marriage was still going strong and he hadn’t lost his job. Maybe he’d had a promotion and they would celebrate with Prosecco. Everyone was always going on about Prosecco and Irene hadn’t ever tried it. For a moment the fantasy was so real and delicious she could almost hear the sounds of them all around her.
Irene leaned forwards and covered her face with her hands.
It killed Colin. That was for sure. Even though they had their differences – God knows they did – Colin still loved his son. For a time after they got that postcard, their last contact with him, Colin had raged about the ‘lack of consideration’ and the ‘utter thoughtlessness for anyone else’. But when it was evident that Liam really wasn’t coming back, even when Colin was sick … well, it did for him.
All the postcard said was, ‘I have to go away. I’m sorry. Don’t look for me. Lx’.
His passport was missing. He’d been talking for ages about how he wanted to ‘get away’. Ever since he was a little boy, really.
And now it was just her and Michael left.
She went back into the kitchen to check her mobile again.
Where are you, Michael?
ELLIOTT (#u46b24a53-b552-5625-ba96-a036c6ddda74)
Gloomy at the prospect of going back to work after the weekend, I’d stayed up too late the night before watching a trashy horror film and drinking a few beers.
In the morning, I was feeling scratchy and tired and not at all like a man who’d just had six weeks off.
I found myself thinking about Mum again, which immediately led me down an unwelcome rabbit hole.
Nowadays I would probably be called a child carer or something, but it didn’t really seem like that at the time. I just had to do a bit more on occasion than most kids my age.
Mum had rheumatoid arthritis that used to flare up quite often, leaving her skin grey and her eyes deadened as she crab-walked gingerly around our small flat. She had strong drugs that were supposed to help but she said they made her sick, so she had periods of not taking them. Her weight had always been a problem and I can’t exactly say we had the best diet, so she was what you’d call clinically obese.
We lived in a ground-floor flat that was a stone’s throw from Holloway Road.
‘Like the prison?’ Anya said once, eyes wide.
Like the prison. Our estate was one of those blocks of flats built in the 1930s.
Morningside House was a big rectangle of brown and white buildings with a scummy grass area in the middle. The ‘No ball games’ signs were ignored but so much of the grass was covered in dog shit that it wasn’t exactly a draw anyway. I mostly played football in the playground after school.
There were benefits to living on the ground floor here, in that you never had to use the pissy-smelling stairs. The lifts never worked. But there was much more chance of being broken into, not that we had anything worth stealing. Mum had her bag taken right off our kitchen table when we were in the other room, eating our favourite meal (Findus Crispy Pancakes and oven chips) and watching EastEnders. We never even heard the door being jemmied open.
But that was lucky, for where we lived. There weren’t quite as many stabbings as you hear about now, but there were still a number, plus the odd shooting. More than anything, though, people opted for the good old-fashioned methods; knuckle, boot, and skull. Maybe the odd car jack or iron bar.
On one side of us was a family with three sons who seemed to spend the better part of the day beating seven shades of shit out of each other. Every now and then you’d hear the mum, Marie, shouting that she would ‘burn down the fucking house one day, with youse-all in it’. It sometimes seemed quite a reasonable idea.
Brendan was the father, a hairy-faced bull of a man whose glower alone could send me scuttling into the house if I happened to come across him outside the flats. The three sons – Frank, Kieran, and Bobby – were all a little older than me but the youngest, Bobby, had enough of a sphere of influence at school for me to avoid ever passing on stuff I saw or heard from their household. Like the time I saw Marie kick him up the backside at the front door because he couldn’t open it fast enough. All it took was one look from him, anger and humiliation glittering hard in his eyes, for me to know to keep my mouth shut.
When Mum’s pain got too bad, she would sometimes go to bed and not get up for a day or two. She took Valium – had been on it for years – from the days when GPs thought nothing of prescribing it for every period of stress or mild sleeplessness. She wasn’t a huge drinker but she knew that if she combined it with alcohol then it would knock her out. That was all she wanted. I don’t think she even liked the taste of alcohol very much.
My neighbour on the other side was an elderly Scottish woman called Mrs McAllister, known as Mrs Mack. She had neat, grey curls and bright eyes behind thick glasses. Her mouth seemed to transmit disapproval without the need for words.
There had always been a polite distance between her and Mum. Mum said she thought Mrs Mack disapproved of us, once speculating it was because of Mum’s brown skin. Or maybe it was because she knew about my father. When she said that it gave me a weird feeling in my stomach. Like there was a thread that tied me to him, still. That I was somehow the same as him.
