Andrew saw the telltale signs that a fight was happening somewhere as the other kids—as if by some innate instinct, like animals heading for higher ground before a tsunami—all began hurrying toward the portable buildings. He got there in time to see Spike and his sister squaring up, circling each other warily. Spike, Andrew noticed, was wearing a badge with the peace symbol on it.
“Sally,” Spike said in an unexpectedly soft voice, “I don’t know why you’ve got this beef with me, but I’m not going to fight you, yeah? Like I said, I’m a pacifist.” Sally had tackled him to the ground before the “ist” was out of his mouth. It was at this point that Andrew got caught up in the melee of kids around him and was knocked to the ground, so for a few moments all he could hear was the approving roars as the fight continued out of sight. But then the roars suddenly gave way to jeers and wolf whistles. When Andrew finally managed to get to his feet and see what was happening he was met by the sight of Sally and Spike locked in a passionate embrace, sharing an almost violent kiss. They broke apart briefly and Spike grinned. Sally returned the smile, then swiftly gave him a vicious knee to the balls. She marched away, hands raised in victory, but when she looked back at Spike writhing on the ground, Andrew was sure he saw concern tempering her triumph. As it turned out, Sally clearly felt something deeper than just concern for Spike Morris’s welfare, and against all odds, the two of them became an item. If Andrew was surprised at this, nothing could have prepared him for the effect it seemed to have on Sally. The change was instant. It was as if Spike had tinkered with a pressure valve somewhere and all her fury had been released. At school they were inseparable, loping around with hands clamped together, their long hair swaying softly in the breeze, handing out spliffs to the other kids they towered over, like benevolent giants who’d wandered down from the mountains. Sally’s voice began to change, eventually morphing into a slow, monotonous drawl. At home, she started not only talking to Andrew but inviting him to hang out with her and Spike in the evenings. She never acknowledged her previous reign of terror, but letting him spend time with them, watching films and listening to records, seemed to be her way of trying to make up for it.
At first, Andrew—like most of the other kids at school—thought this was some sort of psychotic playing-the-long-game tactic; Sally was only sneaking him into pubs and inviting him to watch Hammer horrors on ropey VHS to make the inevitable beatings afterward unexpected and even more brutal. But no. Spike, it seemed, had softened her with love. That and the weed. There was the odd flash of anger, usually directed at their mother, whose torpor Sally took for laziness. But she would always apologize afterward, and of her own volition.
Most surprisingly of all, shortly after Andrew turned thirteen, Sally went out of her way to source him a girlfriend. He’d been minding his own business, reading The Lord of the Rings in his usual spot by the fight-zone portable building, when Sally appeared at the other side of the playground along with two other girls Andrew had never seen before, one Sally’s age, one closer to his. Sally strode over to him, leaving the other girls behind.
“Hey, Gandalf,” she said, pulling Andrew to his feet.
“Hello . . . Sally.”
“See that girl over there? Cathie Adams?”
Ah yes, he did recognize her now. She was in the year below.
“Yes.”
“She fancies you.”
“What?”
“As in, she wants to go out with you. Do you want to go out with her?”
“I don’t really know. Maybe?”
Sally sighed. “Of course you do. So now you need to go and talk to her sister, Mary. She wants to see if she approves. Don’t worry, I’m doing the same with Cathie.” And with that she signaled to Mary with a thumbs-up and pushed Andrew roughly in the back. He stumbled forward, just as Mary shoved Cathie in his direction. They crossed in the middle of the playground and exchanged nervous smiles, like captured spies being exchanged across an exclusion zone.
Mary swiftly interrogated him, at one point leaning close and taking a tentative sniff. Seemingly satisfied, she turned him by his shoulders and shoved him back the way he’d come. A similar process had occurred with Sally and Cathie, it would seem, and the end result was that the next few weeks seemed exclusively to involve his holding Cathie’s hand in mute acceptance as she paraded them around school at break times, her head held high in the face of jeers and wolf whistles. Andrew was beginning to wonder what the point of all this was when one evening, following a school play and two and a half bottles of Woodpecker cider, Cathie pinned him against a wall and kissed him, before he promptly vomited on the floor. It was the best evening of his entire life.
But such are the cruel twists of fate that only two days later Sally sat him down to deliver him the terrible news, as passed on to her by Mary, that Cathie had decided to end things. Before Andrew had time to process this, Sally was hugging him ferociously, explaining that everything happened for a reason and that time was a great healer. Andrew had no idea how he felt about Cathie Adams’s decision, but as he rested his head on Sally’s shoulder, enjoying the pain that came from her fierce embrace, he thought whatever had happened was probably worth it.
The following Saturday, when Andrew came back upstairs after having been dispatched to make popcorn, he looked through a gap in the door and saw Sally and Spike kneeling, foreheads resting together, whispering softly. Sally opened her eyes and kissed Spike delicately on his forehead. Andrew had no idea his sister was capable of anything so tender. He could have kissed Spike Morris himself for performing this miracle. After everything, he’d finally gotten a big sister. Unbeknownst to him, that evening would be the last time he’d see her for years.
He had no idea how Sally and Spike had managed to sneak out of their separate homes and get to the airport, never mind how they’d afforded the flights to San Francisco (it later transpired that when Spike turned eighteen he was entitled to a large sum of money that had been left to him by his grandparents). Andrew found a note in his sock drawer from Sally explaining that they’d “gone to the States for a while. Don’t want to cause drama, little bro,” she added, “so please can you explain everything to dear old Mother, but not until tomorrow?”
Andrew did as he was told. His mum reacted to the news from her bed with a sort of affected panic, saying, “Oh dear. Dearie, dearie me. Really, that’s unbelievable. I can’t believe it.”
There followed a surreal meeting with Spike’s parents, who arrived outside the house in a VW camper van and a haze of marijuana. Andrew’s mum spent the morning fretting exclusively about which sort of snacks she should put out and Andrew, terrified that she’d now gone entirely mad, scratched so hard at the spots on his cheeks that he bled.
He spied on the conversation by lying on the landing and peering down through the banister. Spike’s father, Rick, and mother, Shona, were a jumble of long brown hair and potbellies. Hippies, it turned out, didn’t age well.
“The thing is, Cassandra,” Rick said, “we kind of feel that as they’re two consenting adults we can’t stop them from following their hearts. Besides, we went on our own trip at that age and it didn’t do us any harm.”
The way Shona was clinging to Rick as if they were on a roller coaster made Andrew ever-so-slightly doubt this statement. Rick was American, and the way he pronounced the word “adults,” with the emphasis on the second syllable, seemed so impossibly exotic to Andrew he wondered whether he might just up sticks and get on a plane across the pond, too. But then he remembered their mother. Sally might not have had a conscience, apparently, but he still did.
At first, there was no word from Sally. But after a month a postcard arrived, postmarked New Orleans, with a picture of a jazz trombonist in smoky sepia.
“The Big Easy! Hope you’re cool, dude.”
Andrew chucked it on his bedroom floor, furious. But the next day he couldn’t resist the temptation to study it
again, and then he found himself sticking it to the wall by his pillow. It would be joined later by Oklahoma City, Santa Fe, the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, and Hollywood. Andrew used up what little pocket money he had on a US map, tracking his sister’s movements with a marker pen and trying to guess where she’d post from next.
By now his mother would oscillate wildly from angry rants about why Sally thought she could just go swanning off like that, to tearful laments about Andrew’s now being her only child—cupping his face in her hands and making him promise several times that he’d never leave her.
It was with grim irony, then, that five years later Andrew found himself sitting at what his mother now referred to, with no sense of how upsetting this was to him, as her deathbed. The cancer was aggressive, and the doctor gave her weeks. Andrew was supposed to be going to university—Bristol Polytechnic—to study philosophy that September, but he deferred to look after her. He hadn’t told her he’d gotten a place at university. It was just easier this way. The problem was that he’d not been able to get in touch with Sally to tell her their mother was dying. The postcards had dried up, the last one coming the previous year from Toronto with the message “Hey, bud, freezin’ here. Hugs from us both!” But more recently there had been a phone call. Andrew had answered with a mouthful of fish fingers and nearly choked when the echoey sound of Sally’s voice came through the receiver. The line was terrible, and they barely managed a conversation, but Andrew did manage to hear her telling him she’d call again on August 20, when they’d be in New York.
When the day came he sat waiting by the phone, half willing the call to come, half hoping it never would. When it finally did he had to wait for it to ring several times before he could face picking up.
“Heyyyy, man! It’s Sally. How’s the line? Hear me okay?”
“Yeah. So listen, Mum’s ill. As in, really ill.”
“What’s that? Ill? Like, how bad?”
“As in, not-getting-better ill. You need to get on a plane now or it might be too late. The doctors think it might be less than a month.”
“Holy shit. Fuck. Are you serious?”
“Of course I’m serious. Please come home as soon as you can.”
“Jesus, bro. That’s . . . that’s nuts.”
Sally’s return was as clandestine as her exit. Andrew was coming down for breakfast as usual when he heard the kitchen tap running. His mum hadn’t been out of bed for weeks, let alone made it downstairs, but he felt a flash of hope: maybe the doctors had gotten it wrong. But it was Sally, standing at the sink, a ponytail seemingly featuring every color of the rainbow stretching all the way down to her lower back. She was wearing what looked like a dressing gown.
“Brother, fuck!” she said, pulling Andrew into a bear hug. She smelled of something musty and floral. “How the hell are you?”
“I’m okay,” Andrew said.
“Jesus, you’ve grown about twenty feet.”
“Yeah.”
“How’s school?”
“Yeah, fine.”
“You do good in your exams?”
“Yeah.”
“What about girls? You got a new chick yet? Nah, too busy playing the field I bet. Hey, you like my sweater? It’s a Baja. I could get you one if you want.”
No, what I want is for you to come and talk to our dying mother.
“Where’s Spike?” Andrew said.
“He’s stayed out in the States. Gonna go back to him when it’s all, you know . . . over.”
“Right,” Andrew said. So that answered that. “Do you want to go up and see Mum?”
“Um, yep, okay. As long as she’s up and everything. Don’t wanna disturb her.”
“She doesn’t really get up anymore,” Andrew said, heading toward the stairs. He thought for a moment that Sally wasn’t going to follow, but then he saw she was just kicking off her shoes.
“Force of habit,” she said with a sheepish smile.
Andrew knocked on the door once, twice. Nothing. He and Sally looked at each other.
It was almost as if she’d planned to die before the three of them were together, just to make things extra painful.
“Classic Mum,” Sally said later in the pub, though she pronounced it “Mom” and Andrew was very tempted to pour his pint over her head, suddenly no longer in awe of the accent.
Their mother’s funeral was attended by two great-aunts and a handful of reluctant ex-colleagues. It was impossible for Andrew to sleep that night. He was sitting on his bed, reading yet failing to follow Nietzsche on suffering, when he heard the front door click shut. He was suddenly aware of the squawking starlings in the nest on the porch who’d mistaken the security light for dawn. He peered through his curtains and saw his sister, laden down with a backpack, walking away, and wondered if this time she was going for good.
As it turned out, it was only three weeks later—Andrew having spent the majority of that time lying on the sofa wrapped in the duvet from his mum’s bed, watching daytime TV—when he came downstairs and found Sally once more standing by the sink. She’d come back for him. Finally, something had gotten through that thick skull. When Sally turned around Andrew saw her eyes were puffy and red, and this time it was he who crossed the room and hugged her. Sally said something, but her voice was muffled against his shoulder.
“What’s that?” Andrew said.
“He left me,” Sally said, sniffing violently.
“Who did?”
“Spike, of course! There was just a note in the apartment. He’s gone off with some fucking girl, I know it. Everything’s ruined.”
Andrew shook Sally off and took a step back.
“What?” Sally said, wiping her nose on her sleeve. Then a second time, louder, when Andrew said nothing. There it was again, that old anger flashing in her eyes. But this time Andrew wasn’t afraid. He was too furious.
“What do you think?” he spat. And then Sally was advancing on him and pushing him back against the fridge, an arm against his throat.
“What, are you fucking glad or something? Pleased that he’s left me?”
“I couldn’t care less about him,” Andrew gasped. “What about Mum?” He struggled to pull Sally’s arm away from his throat.
“What about her?” Sally said through gritted teeth. “She’s dead, isn’t she? Dead as a doornail. How can you be that upset? That woman didn’t have a maternal bone in her body. When Dad died it was all over for her. She just fell apart. Would she really have done that if we mattered to her?”
“She was ill! And given what a mess you are about getting dumped I don’t think you’re one to judge about someone falling apart.”
Sally’s face flashed with renewed anger, and she managed to free her arm to hit him. Andrew staggered backward, his hands over his eye. He braced himself for another impact, but when it came it was Sally taking him gently in her arms, saying “I’m sorry” over and over. Eventually they both slid down to the floor, where they sat, not speaking, but calm. After a while Sally opened the freezer and passed Andrew some frozen peas, and the simplicity of the act, the kindness of it in spite of her being the reason for his pain, was enough to cause tears to leak from his uninjured eye.
The next few weeks followed the same pattern. Andrew would return from his job working in the pharmacy on the high street and cook pasta with tomato sauce, or sausage and mash, and Sally would get high and watch cartoons. As Andrew watched her suck up spaghetti strands, sauce dribbling off her chin, he wondered just what sort of a person she would turn out to be. The fiery bully and the hippie were still living Jekyll and Hyde–like inside her. How long, too, before she left again? He didn’t have long to wait, it turned out, but this time he caught her sneaking out.
“Please just tell me you’re not going to try and find Spike?” he said, shivering in the doorway against the dawn chill. Sally smiled sadly and shoo
k her head.
“Nah. My pal Beansie got me a job. Or at least he thinks so. Up near Manchester.”
“Right.”
“I just need to get myself back on track. Time for me to grow up. I just can’t do that here. It’s too fucking grim. First Dad, now Mum. I was . . . I was going to come and see you. Say good-bye and everything. But I didn’t want to wake you up.”
“Uh-huh,” Andrew said. He looked away, scratching at the back of his neck. When he looked back he saw that Sally had just done the same. A mirror image of awkwardness. This, at least, made them both smile. “Well. Let me know where you end up,” Andrew said.
“Yeah,” Sally said. “Deffo.” She went to close the door but stopped and turned. “You know, I’m really proud of you, man.”
It sounded like something Sally had rehearsed. Maybe she’d hoped to wake him after all. He couldn’t work out how that made him feel.
“I’ll call as soon as I get settled, I promise,” she said.
She didn’t, of course. The call only came months later, by which time Andrew had gotten his place sorted at Bristol Poly, and already it felt like an unbridgeable gap had opened between them.
They did spend a Christmas together, though, where Andrew slept on the sofa in the little flat Sally shared with Beansie (real name Tristan), the three of them drinking Beansie’s home-brewed beer that was so strong, at one point Andrew was convinced he’d briefly gone blind. Sally was seeing someone called Carl, a lean, languid man who was obsessed with working out and the subsequent refueling. Every time Andrew turned around he was eating something: a whole bag of bananas or great slabs of chicken—sitting there in his workout clothes, licking grease from his fingers like an Adidas-clad Henry the Eighth before he’d let himself go. Eventually Sally moved in with Carl and that’s when Andrew stopped seeing her altogether. The system of regular phone calls came into play not through any spoken agreement; it was just how things began to work. Every three months, for the past twenty years. It was always Sally that called. Sometimes, back in the early days, they’d talk about their mother. Enough time had passed for them to see some of her eccentricities through rose-tinted glasses. But as the years went by, their reminiscing became forced, a desperate attempt to keep alive a connection that seemed to diminish every time they spoke. These days, the conversations had always felt like a real effort, and sometimes Andrew had wondered why Sally still bothered to call him. But then there were moments—often in the silences, when there was only the sound of their breathing—when Andrew had still felt an undeniable bond.
How Not to Die Alone Page 8
