I heard the bottom step creak under Mike’s weight.
“Don’t make me ask you again,” he said, voice quiet now. “What’s going on?”
I stood at the top of the stairs and made myself face him.
“Mum and I are moving to London,” I said. “I’ll pay you back the money in installments.”
Mike considered me without saying anything, scratching at his chin, the sound of nail on stubble like a match igniting. As he began to climb the stairs, I clenched my fists, willing myself to stand tall, but tears born of fear and hatred pooled in my eyes.
“Of course he’s crying,” Mike sneered. “No fucking bottle.”
I heard Mum opening the bedroom door, and it was like a starter pistol had been fired, because I wasn’t going to let her get hurt again,not today, not ever. I launched myself at Mike, who was nearly at the top of the stairs, throwing my skinny arms at him wildly as I tried to land a punch. But Mike simply sidestepped, and I barely connected a glancing shot as my momentum saw me flying down the stairs, my right side taking all of the impact as I slammed into the edges of the steps on the way down, my head taking the final blow.
When I came to, I tried to struggle up, but I felt Mum’s hands on my shoulders and her soothing voice telling me it was okay, and then she laid me gently back down.
“Where am I?” I croaked.
“In the hospital, darling,” Mum said, “but you’re okay, everything’s okay.”
“Where’s Mike?” I asked, agitated, but Mum shushed me softly and said, “He’s gone, love. Don’t worry. He’s left,” and my eyelids fluttered and closed.
After the doctors had finished checking me over and told me to rest, Mum sat by my side and explained what had happened. It would seem that Mike had been planning his exit for a long time. He was going in with his brother on a bar in Málaga. His tickets were already bought and he was just counting down the days. He hadn’t stuck around after I’d fallen, presumably because questions would be asked about how I’d come to hurt myself. I don’t think either Mum or I mentioned the police—we just wanted the whole thing over. It would only be later that the CT scans and X-rays determined that the fall had left me with abdominal bruising, a broken rib and a laceration on my liver. I may have thought the whole thing was done, but Mike’s last act—stepping aside to avoid my punches—was unwittingly his most violent.
I stayed in hospital to rest for a few days. Amber came to visit me, but I was so dosed up on painkillers, it all passed in a bit of a blur. I just remember her kissing me softly and me worrying—absurdly—at how unattractively cracked my lips were.
The following evening, when I was feeling a little more lucid, I came around from a nap to find Mum at my bedside, her arms wrapped around herself as she tried not to wake me with her crying.
“Hey, s’okay, Mum,” I mumbled. “No need for that.” I reached my hand out toward her and she took it, warming it in her own, pressing it against her cheeks. She was trying to speak, but sobs escaped every time she opened her mouth.
“I’m so sorry for the life I’ve given you,” she said. “I should have protected you.”
I tried to sit up. “Mum, please.”
She was trembling now, like she’d just been rescued from freezing water. I tried to find more words to reassure her, to make her realize I didn’t blame her, that I loved her—but every time I tried to speak, it just seemed to make her more upset. Eventually, I shifted over enough so there was room next to me and pulled her gently toward me. She lay at my side and I stroked her arm, trying to calm her. We stayed like that until it got dark outside and the room was bathed in a rich orange from the streetlamp outside the window. I was still at a loss to know what to say to Mum about everything. I just wanted to draw a line under it all—to think about a future where we could be a family again, just the two of us.
“Mum,” I said.
“Yes, love.”
“If you could go on holiday—absolutely anywhere—where would you go?”
Mum stirred and pushed herself up. Her face was smudged with tears.
“What?” she said when she saw me smiling. “Have I got great big panda eyes?”
“Afraid so. But they’re very fetching great big panda eyes.”
Mum laughed, then sniffed and wiped her eyes.
“So . . . ?”
“Well, I’ve always wanted to go to Portugal. Your granddad always talked so fondly about it. He was your age, you know, when he spent that summer in Lisbon.”
“Let’s do it, then,” I said. “You and me. We could go to all his old haunts if you know them.”
Mum looked over at the window, eyes closed against the orange light. It was like she was reaching her face to the sun. It was like we were already there.
They let me out of hospital the following day, and I spent two weeks recuperating at home with Mum. In Mike’s absence, the whole place seemed lighter somehow, as if the sunlight was finally allowed in. The first thing I did when I was strong enough was persuade Mum to drive us to the dump. There, we held hands, and together we pushed “Mike’s chair” over the side and watched it crash to the ground.
I wish I could have stayed longer at home with Mum, to bask in our newfound freedom, but soon Amber and I were packing up to head to London. As I gathered up my last few things, wincing every now and then with the pain in my ribs, Amber stood on the threshold. She seemed unsure whether to come in and help. Mainly, I suspect, because of the noticeably cold smile Mum had given her when she arrived. The accident with Alice loomed large over everything, and I knew, too, that Mum felt it was Amber who was pushing me to move away. I tried to explain to her how that wasn’t the case and how Amber had been there for me when Mike was at his worst, but it didn’t seem to help much.
“You should get to know her properly,” I said after Amber had given us a moment to say good-bye. “You can still come to London—the offer’s there.”
Mum hugged me as tight as she dared without hurting my bruised ribs. She flicked a bit of fluff off my shoulder and looked me in the eye. “I’m sure you and Amber like each other a great deal,” she said. “And London will be wonderfully exciting for you both. But don’t let yourself get too carried away. First love can be such a powerful thing, but try to remember how young you are.”
I held my tongue. I wasn’t going to part on an argument, and I knew that she was just trying to protect me. Instead I said, “Order some holiday brochures and get the Lisbon research going, okay? We can start saving up now, try and book it for next summer. How does that sound?”
“That would be lovely,” Mum said, hugging me again. She couldn’t help but squeeze me a little tighter this time, but I didn’t show her that it hurt.
I loaded up my last bag and joined Amber in the back of her cousin’s car. As we drove off, I looked back at Mum and called, “One last thing.”
“Yes, love?”
“Just so you know, your glasses are on top of your head!” We moved off, and I waved back at Mum until we were around a corner and out of sight. I tried not to think about the moment she closed the door behind her, alone now with unhappy memories of what had gone on in that house. But I’d be back to see her soon, I told myself. Just because she was out of sight, it didn’t mean she’d be out of mind.
Amber and I ended up taking a sofa bed in a house near Morden at the arse end of the Northern Line. Our flatmates—who we saw less often than the resident mice—were a bunch of other struggling arty types. We may have been broke, but I loved exploring the city with Amber—even if we were limited to wandering the streets until our tired feet brought us to a pub where we’d nurse a drink all evening. We settled into a routine where we’d meet up on the South Bank after our respective days writing and acting. There, we’d minesweep as many drinks as we could in the BFI bar and try to sneak into whatever was showing in the cinema screening rooms downstairs. Th
en, afterward, we’d stroll along by the river, acting out our favorite scene from whatever gloriously pretentious art-house thing we’d just watched, seeking out a Waterloo sunset before we caught the last tube home.
I was doing my best to forget about Mike, but I began to have nightmares about him. At least once a week I’d dream he was chasing Mum down a hallway which would get smaller and smaller—until it was like one of those false-perspective paintings, and then at the point where there was nowhere for them to go, Mike would reach out to grab her and I’d wake, sometimes crying out. Amber would soothe me by curling her body into mine, staying awake with me until I finally drifted off to sleep. Each time I woke like that and felt her arms around me, I dreaded the thought of her absence. The idea of coping with everything by myself seemed unthinkable.
Time had moved glacially in Kemble, but in London the days flashed by. Before I knew it, we had been there for two years. I’d impressed Jane Green enough during my competition placement for her to throw me into other writing rooms, and I was making just enough money from those gigs to get by. Being a decade younger than most of the other writers, I’d naturally been treated with a fair amount of suspicion, bordering on hostility at times. It made me even more determined to prove myself—more often in the pub than at the writing table itself, which was fine by me, because I’d survive the hangovers better than them and get a head start in the mornings. When I had a few nights off booze, I realized that the nightmares came more often. Luckily, those days became rarer—there was always some party or other, either with our flatmates or one of Amber’s drama school friends. Even on Sundays there’d be Bloody Marys in our local, cheap red wine and anarchic, rule-bending Scrabble to finish off the weekend. It was a constant cycle between drunk and hungover, but as long as Amber was there, it didn’t matter. She was like a hangover cure and the best cocktail I’d ever had all rolled into one.
“Charming,” she laughed when I told her this one morning. “You sound like some dreadful Bukowski character. You’ll be calling me ‘one hell of a dame’ next.”
The conversation moved on, but later, as we lay on the sofa, she turned to me and said, “What you said earlier. The cocktail thing. That’s not all you think of me as, right?”
“No, course not. I just meant you make me happy all the time, whatever we’re doing—that’s all. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
Amber seemed to stiffen. At the time, I couldn’t see why that might have given her pause. Wasn’t that what relationships were all about? Weren’t you supposed to be lost without the person you were with? As I unscrewed the top of another bottle of corner shop chianti, I had no idea that the exchange was the first hairline crack on an icy pond.
By the time Amber had graduated drama school, she was already getting cast in modest parts in plays and the odd advert on TV—which I recorded and played back on an endless loop, especially when she was out for the evening and I found myself at home alone. I’d sink a bottle of wine and marvel at how that was my girlfriend on the TV, looking bemused at an anthropomorphized indigestion tablet. On the first night I saw her onstage, at the Young Vic, playing Portia’s attendant in The Merchant of Venice, I was so stupidly proud of her as she spoke her lines that I very nearly lamped the man next to me who’d chosen that moment to unwrap a sweet so loudly, at least to me, that it was like he’d let off a firework. I came back for the next few nights—plus the Saturday matinee—but there were only so many times Amber could sneak me in.
I missed her horribly when she was working, so I filled the void in the pub. I had regular drinking pals from the comedy world—particularly now I’d shown my writing chops and a working knowledge of 1950s radio sitcoms. There’d always be someone I could persuade to get stuck in with me in one of the pubs around the corner from whichever office we were in. I’d time it so I’d return home when Amber arrived from the theater. It turned out she’d absolutely got my number with her Bukowski dig, because secretly I quite liked the romance of it all—the boozy writer coming home to his West End star. I loved this adventure we were on—except the times when Amber had to go away.
It was the August of our third year in the city when she agreed to head off on a summer jaunt with Charlotte, a friend from Mountview. I grumbled to her about how I’d miss her, diving onto the floor and wrapping my arms around her ankles.
“You’ll survive for five whole days without me, my love,” she laughed.
I clung on without showing any sign of releasing her, to the point where I wasn’t sure how much I was still joking.
“Why don’t you go back and see your mum?” she said as I walked her to the tube.
“Yeah, I’ll think about it,” I replied. I’d barely been back to Kemble since we’d come to London. I hated being back in the house. The brightness that had arrived in the wake of Mike’s absence seemed to have faded. Mum looked so much older with every visit. The guiltier I felt about not going back to see her, the harder it was to get on the train.
The moment Amber disappeared into the tube station, I sent out a generic text to my address book asking who was around for a drink. Someone called Danny, who I had a vague memory of being introduced to on a night out a few weeks before, replied, saying he was off up to the Edinburgh comedy festival for a few days—hoping to crash as many corporate events and neck as much free booze as he could—and his mate had dropped out if I wanted to come.
“I’m in,” I said, without thinking about it.
I met him that afternoon at King’s Cross, and we started drinking on the train up. The rest of that day was a blur as we bounced from pub to pub. I had a vague memory of laughing in the wrong place at a serious bit in a show we went to see, then getting into an argument with one of the performer’s friends as I left. Next thing I knew, I was being shaken awake by Danny, who was trying to tell me I’d been shouting in my sleep. I was so confused and scared at first that I nearly threw a punch at him.
The next morning, dazed, cold—in the strange twilight between drunk and hungover—I wandered out into the murky Edinburgh streets, sunglasses on because even the sun straining against the slate-gray clouds was too much. There were so many tourists and people handing out flyers, the streets felt cramped, and great waves of claustrophobia stole over me. Was it too early for a drink? I knew that would calm me down. But nowhere was open yet.
Every street I turned on to was rammed with tourists. I pushed my way past an Australian trying to explain haggis to his bored teenage sons, nearly tripping on the uneven cobbles as I did so. I ignored four bright-eyed students flyering for shows that night. One was so insistent that I listen to his jaunty patter that I shoved him away and told him to fuck off, then tried to apologize while his friends pushed me away. I felt the air being sucked from my lungs. Spots appeared in my vision. I just about made it around a corner to a quiet side street, taking in great gulps of air. I had my hands on my knees, concentrating on the flyer on the pavement beneath me to keep me present. I looked at the faces of three people dressed as mimes giving wacky looks to the camera, and that was when I realized that one of those mimes was, unmistakably, Theo.
I reached down and peeled the flyer off the ground. The text above the photo read: The nineteenth national student comedy grand final! Sheffield Revue vs Cambridge Footlights. I pulled my phone from my pocket, wincing at the newly acquired crack on the screen. I could just make out the date behind the smashed plastic. The final was tonight.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Theo
The B&B receptionist actually gasped when I opened the door. They were used to the little trill of the bell announcing a fresh-faced tourist, not the swamp monster that had just crossed the threshold.
I was dripping with oily river water, and my hair was coated in mud and gunk. When I tried to explain that there was no reason for alarm, my chattering teeth betrayed me, and I’m not sure adding a Hannibal Lecter impersonation into the mix helped my cause m
uch. After I regained the power of speech, I tried, with some difficulty, to convince the receptionist I was the man who’d just checked out.
“Yes, well, I’m very sorry, but I can’t help you,” the receptionist said. “Company policy,” she added, a thin smile on her face.
“You’ve got a company policy for this?”
The receptionist’s smile flickered and died. She glanced at the phone next to her, as if she were about to call some sort of emergency security.
“Please,” I said. “I just want a quick shower and somewhere to dry my clothes for a bit. I’ll pay . . .” I reached for my wallet, but it wasn’t there. “Oh god . . .” I scrabbled desperately in my trouser and coat pockets, my fingers tingling with cold. I pulled out a wodge of soggy notes and held it out to her, like a toddler on a beach scooping up wet sand and presenting it to their mother as a gift.
“I’m afraid I can’t help you,” she repeated, wrinkling her nose. “Now, if you wouldn’t mind . . .”
I left with as much dignity as I could, which was hard given that I squelched with every step I took. I walked aimlessly down past the cathedral, just trying to warm myself up. Eventually I arrived at the bridge where Joel and I had ended up. I braced my hands on the wall and wished more than anything that I could rewind twelve hours and play out the scene again—do everything differently this time.
As I watched a houseboat chugging past, I realized that this had been the second time Joel and I had found ourselves at each other’s throats on a bridge as darkness descended. I was the one to walk away that time.
* * *
“We are now approaching Edinburgh Waverley. All change, please. All change.”
I couldn’t quite believe it. I was actually here, at the Edinburgh Fringe, the daddy of all comedy competitions—not as a punter but as a performer, in the final of the student comedy awards no less. We had got to the quarterfinals in my first year at Sheffield, and then the semis in second year—and now, at last, third time lucky in my final year, we’d made it to the very end. If we beat Cambridge in the final, then we’d have a chance to develop a TV pilot with one of the biggest production companies in London. This. Was. It.
When We Were Young Page 18
