I wrapped a towel around my waist and transferred my stinking clothes to a bin bag. Amber had put a clean T-shirt, jumper and jeans on the floor outside. They were a size too big, but I’d never been more grateful for fresh clothes. It was only as I made my way downstairs that I realized they must belong to Joel.
When I came into the living room, I found Amber pacing around it, phone in her hand.
“I’ve called him twenty times but it keeps going to voice mail,” she told me. “I’ve tried all of his old haunts, too—all those Soho bars, and all his old writer pals—but no one’s seen him. He must have known I’d do that. He’ll have found somewhere new to go. I just don’t know if he’ll be on his own or what.”
“Shit,” I said. It hadn’t occurred to me that this was what Joel was doing, but Amber was clearly convinced. “I mean, if he’s off drinking, then . . . how’s his body going to handle that?”
Amber kept pacing. “I don’t know,” she said, her voice strained. “Christ, he’d been doing so well, too. It’s going to set him back god knows how far. I’m just praying we hear the keys in the door any minute. All I want is for him to know I’m not disappointed in him, you know? Because that’s exactly what he’ll be worried about. Every time he thinks of it, he’ll have another pint.” She stopped dead. “Hang on, wait—his office, the Peckham flat. We should—”
“First place I went,” I said. “Sorry. No joy.”
“Oh,” Amber said. She sat down on the very edge of the sofa, looking disproportionately small against it. I stood there rather awkwardly, not knowing what to do. Then Amber looked up at me. “I’ve just realized I haven’t actually asked you why you’ve been looking for him.”
I cleared my throat and sat down at the other end of the sofa. “We’ve been walking the Thames Path together.”
“The Thames Path. What, that’s where he’s been? With you?”
I nodded.
“But why on earth wouldn’t he have just told me that? Oh, wait, hang on. Is this . . .” Amber looked to the ground, chastened suddenly. “There was that thing you promised each other. Your trip. I remember him telling me about it years ago. I suppose . . . I never thought you’d actually do it.”
“Me neither,” I said. “He turned up on my doorstep out of the blue. I wasn’t going to go at first, but . . .” I trailed off. I realized that I was about to mention The Regulars. My brain jump-cut to Joel on the bridge in Oxford, disgust on his face.
“That was why he lied,” Amber said, more to herself than to me. When she spoke next, she avoided my eye. “So, did he . . . I’m assuming that he told you everything, then.”
“Yeah,” I replied, fiddling nervously with my hands now. “I honestly don’t know if he’d planned to. But we’d got as far as Oxford and that’s when it came out. We . . . we had a bit of a falling-out about it. No, that’s actually bullshit—I was a complete fucking idiot about it, and that’s when he left. I’ve been trying to find him to . . . to say sorry, to try and make amends.”
Amber was trying very hard not to cry now. I knew I should go over to comfort her, but I was way out of my depth—I didn’t want to make things worse. Even still, I shook my awkwardness off and moved closer to her.
“You mustn’t be angry at him,” she said. “He told me he wasn’t going to tell you, no matter how many times I asked him to. Said he didn’t want to get in touch with you after what happened in Edinburgh. He thought you’d be too angry to even hear him out.” She was crying in earnest now. “I’m so sorry, Theo.”
I didn’t quite know how to handle this. Why had Joel told Amber he wasn’t going to tell me he was sick? What difference did it make?
As I patted Amber awkwardly on the back, I was blinded by a sudden flash that came from the window, and I recoiled.
“What is it?” Amber asked, whipping around. “Oh, the fucking paps.” She jumped up and ran over to the window, throwing the curtains closed. When she came back to the sofa and sat next to me, we grew silent, lost in our own thoughts. We stayed like that for a long time. I suddenly felt overwhelmed by tiredness. I hadn’t realized just how drained I was. It had been the adrenaline keeping me going these last few hours. But now I was fighting a losing battle to stay awake, especially as every time I shifted, the sofa seemed to give a little, like I was falling into quicksand. I thought I’d just rest my eyes for a moment, give my brain a quick refresh.
But the next thing I knew, cold daylight was flooding the room.
“Bollocks,” I mumbled. I went to get to my feet, but then I realized that Amber had fallen asleep against me, her head resting on my shoulder. I suddenly felt a bit sick. This was horribly strange: wearing Joel’s clothes, in Joel’s house, with Joel’s girlfriend sleeping next to me. I stood up, taking a few steps away from the sofa. My movement woke Amber, and after a moment where she got her bearings, she reached behind for her phone.
“Anything?” I asked.
Amber shook her head. Even so, this felt like the most likely place he’d come back to, and if he did—in the grips of a drinking binge—I didn’t want this to be how he found me.
“I think I should probably go,” I said.
Amber got to her feet. “You sure you don’t want to stay a bit longer—have breakfast, maybe?” But I knew she was just being polite.
“No, but thank you.”
Amber smiled at me, but her eyes betrayed how worried she was. I felt an urge to reassure her, to make her feel better, even if I didn’t really believe what I was about to say myself.
“Look, I’m sure he’ll be back any minute,” I said.
“Yes, I’m sure you’re right.” And although Amber’s voice wavered a little as she said this, her smile as she crossed the room to hug me was now a genuine one.
“Will you phone me as soon as he does?” I asked.
“Of course,” Amber said.
Just after we’d exchanged numbers, there was a noise outside the window. Excitement mixed with trepidation flashed across Amber’s face as she crossed the room and opened the curtains just a chink.
“Still just the paps,” she muttered. “It’s almost like they can sense something’s wrong, the fucking ghouls.” She looked over at me and said, “Oh . . .” before stopping herself. It took me a moment to realize her concern—me leaving through her front door wearing Joel’s clothes . . . That wasn’t exactly ideal.
“Don’t worry,” I said quickly. “I’ll go out the back way. If there is one?”
“Well, there sort of is, but . . . well, follow me.” Amber took me through the hallway into the ground-floor bathroom. “It’ll mean climbing over that wall and sneaking through those gardens. I don’t know if you can actually get out that side.”
“I’ll take my chances,” I said, opening the window—an act which took more strength than I was anticipating.
Just as I was wondering if I’d always be cursed to immediately follow up even the most vaguely filmic lines with an act of physical ineptitude, Amber put her hand on my arm.
“I’m sorry again,” she said, “about Alice.”
I nodded.
It was only when I was at the other side of the garden that it struck me as odd that she’d said, “I’m sorry again,” despite the fact we hadn’t mentioned Alice at all since I’d shown up. I looked back, but Amber had gone, and so there was nothing for it but to carry on, pushing my way through wisteria, wet leaves showering me with autumn rain.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Joel
I was looking out to sea, counting down the seconds as I tried to predict when the sun would finally disappear behind the horizon. London felt a million miles away.
The flight out had been an unusual experience. I’d only flown first-class once before when I was taken out to LA for meetings, and I didn’t remember a huge amount about it, because—predictably—I’d used the opportunity to get blackout
drunk. But this certainly made a pleasant difference to the usual experience of hurtling through the air in a coffin full of farts, being press-ganged into buying duty-free vodka. The best thing about it was how excited Mum had been. She’s never been the most sociable person in the world, but she was so giddy she began chatting to everyone within reach—quickly winning over even the taciturn businessman who’d initially tried to ignore her.
When we landed, Mum said good-byes to everyone as if parting from long-lost friends. We took a taxi through the blistering heat into the winding cobbled streets. I’d booked the nicest Airbnb place I could find—a beautiful old apartment with a private terrace overlooking the old town. Our host, Ruben, was dressed in that effortlessly stylish way continental European men do, like an investigative journalist who played saxophone in a jazz band in his spare time. He showed us around the apartment and ran through the usual spiel of how everything worked. Every time I thought he was done, I started to thank him, but then he would remember he hadn’t explained the shower, or the air con, or the rubbish, or the TV, or the kettle. Mum watched him explain all this with such a look of bafflement on her face—Why, her look said, does this man think we need the toaster explained?—that I found it very hard to keep a straight face.
“What do you want to do first?” I asked Mum when Ruben finally left.
She wandered over to the window, where sunshine streamed through the shutter.
“How are you feeling?” she asked, opening the window. Fado music drifted in on a warm breeze.
“Fine—honestly,” I said. “I just need to make sure I drink lots of water.” I picked up a brochure from the table. “We could do the castle—or the ceramics museum’s supposed to be good. Whatever you want—let’s do it.”
Mum turned around, a twinkle in her eye. “In that case—what I really want . . . is to go and sit in the sun with a glass of something and read my book.”
“Now, that,” I said, “sounds like a plan.”
We found a bar with a sprawling patio that looked out over the port, cocktails (or mocktail in my case) in hand. They were hilariously over-the-top affairs with half the contents of a fruit bowl upended in them. Mum was asleep within approximately eight seconds, book resting on her chest. I got up and adjusted the umbrella so that she was in the shade.
Having forgotten, as I always did, to buy a book at the airport, I’d picked something donated from former guests at Ruben’s place. There were only three books: a John Grisham, collected poems of T. S. Eliot, and a book cheerily titled Serial Killers of the World. Naturally, I went with Eliot. (I’d read the Grisham. And the serial killer book was in German.) I leaned back in my chair and stretched out my legs. They had swollen up quite a bit on the plane but were better now the air could get to them. I opened Eliot and took a gulp of sugary something-or-other. I’d never much been one for poetry, but I was pleasantly surprised by how much Eliot spoke to me. I was so lost in it in fact that the next time I looked up, the evening was waning and the sun was melting into the sea.
I looked over to where Mum had been sitting, to see whether she was ready to find somewhere to eat, but she wasn’t on her lounger any more. I sat up and scanned the terrace. It took me a long while to spot her, as she’d wandered quite far away. My heart had started to beat that little bit faster. It was a strange moment—a role reversal of sorts, for a son to be scanning a crowded area, concern rising at the thought his parent had wandered off. It was only as I arrived at Mum’s side that I saw she was crying.
“Hey, what’s wrong?” I asked.
But she stood impassive, looking out at the sea as tears dripped off her chin. Eventually she turned to me. “I’ve been a terrible mother,” she said.
This hit me like a knee in the midriff.
“That’s nonsense,” I said. “What’s brought all this on?”
Mum waved a hand at the view in front of us. “Look how you’re spoiling me. When all I ever did was bring misery to your childhood.”
I put a hand on her arm. “I think maybe this is the cocktails talking. For one thing, I’ve been promising to take you here for years. Some son I’ve been.”
But she shrugged me off. “This isn’t a competition. I’m your mum. It’s my instinct to protect you, to give you the best life you could have. And then I go and do a thing like bring . . . that man . . . that violence, into the house.”
This was the first time Mum had even mentioned Mike since the day he’d gone. I wondered how often she’d torn herself to pieces with all these thoughts. If only I’d been around more to save her from them.
“Mum,” I said softly, “none of that was your fault. He was a vicious, controlling bully who took advantage of your good nature. You see the best in everyone, and that’s not something you should ever change.”
Mum was shaking slightly now, the emotion threatening to overwhelm her. I put my arm around her shoulder, steadying her.
“Y-you know all I wanted was for us to be a family again, after your dad left. I didn’t want you to grow up without someone to do the things I couldn’t. I never thought . . . I will never forgive myself for not being able to keep you safe.”
I could feel the lump growing in my throat. It made it almost impossible to speak without crying myself.
“Please, Mum,” I said, my voice thick, almost a croak. “You have to promise me that you’ll stop thinking like that. That’s not who you are. That’s not who you’ve been to me. You are the kindest, bravest, most selfless person I know. These last few years have been the happiest of my life, and there’s no way in hell I’d have been around to experience them if you hadn’t put your life on hold to help me get better. I was nothing but dismissive and distant to you for years, yet you never wavered in your love for me, not for a single second. I love you, okay? And who knows how much time I’ve got left, but after what we’ve been through, I reckon we deserve to squeeze as many drops of happiness out of it as we can, don’t you?”
At this, Mum turned to me, and we embraced. I was crying more than her now. The way she held me. The way she rubbed my back. It felt like I could have been a kid again—after a fall, just needing a hug to make everything okay.
We made our way back into the old town, Mum’s arm looped around mine.
“Are you hungry?” I asked.
“Not especially,” she said. “You? How are your energy levels?”
“Pretty good, actually.”
In truth, I was reaching my limit, but with every step we took, it was like we were growing closer, and I didn’t want that to stop. Even when Mum asked, for the hundredth time, if I’d been able to find anyone else to help me with “plan B,” I couldn’t get cross—I just told her I was working on it, even though I wasn’t.
The streets were quiet. It was a Sunday in the tail end of the tourist season, but it still felt a little eerie, like we were actors wandering through an empty set. Fado music was drifting over from somewhere. As we walked, Mum began to hum along.
“My favorite, this one,” she said, but almost instantly the music stopped—as if the musician were shy and had been interrupted mid-practice.
“Ah, shame,” Mum murmured.
We began to wind our way up the cobbled street to the top of the hill where we were staying. I needed every ounce of strength to keep my legs working, but I was determined not to let Mum catch on. We rounded a corner. A busker was counting the change in her straw hat, her acoustic guitar lying in its case.
Mum and I had walked on a little further when the idea occurred to me. I stopped and Mum looked at me, concern etched on her face.
“You okay, love?”
“Yeah, fine. Listen, what’s the name of that song you were humming just then?” I asked.
“It’s called ‘Gaivota,’ ” Mum said.
“ ‘Gaivota,’ ” I repeated. “Give me one sec.”
“Joel, where are you .
. .”
When I caught up with the busker, it took me a while with the language barrier for me to explain what I wanted her to do. But after a fair bit of pointing toward Mum, saying “Gaivota” a lot, holding out twenty euros and doing a gesture a European footballer might do when he’s imploring a referee not to send him off, the busker finally understood what I was saying.
I beckoned Mum over. By the time she’d reached us, the busker was all set up, and even with the first chord, Mum clapped her hands to her mouth as she recognized what she was hearing, tears—happy ones this time—glistening in her eyes. The busker felt her way tentatively into the song, which was slow, somewhere between sad and hopeful. After a moment, I turned to Mum and reached out my hand. She tilted her head to the side at first—Really?—but then she took my hand and rested her head gently against my shoulder. There, on the cobbles, under the stars, we moved slowly in time with the music. It was hard to tell who was leading who.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Theo
I was the only person to depart the train at Kemble. I was still in Joel’s clothes, though these too were now dirty from where I’d had to scramble over a fence at the end of the row of gardens outside Amber’s house.
I couldn’t face going home just yet, so I sat on a bench and watched two pigeons fighting over a crust of bread. I tried to picture Joel—where he might be now. Amber would know him better than me when it came to a drinking relapse, but for some reason I couldn’t imagine him at the bottom of a bottle somewhere.
When We Were Young Page 23
