He still couldn’t quite believe what had happened earlier that day. The moment he’d taken Peggy’s hand and set off without knowing where he was going, it had felt like an out-of-body experience. The memory was somehow sharp and blurry all at once. They’d sat for a long time on the bench, their foreheads touching gently, their eyes closed, until Peggy broke the silence. “Well now. I’m not entirely sure I saw this coming.”
As they made their way back to the car Andrew felt like he’d been drugged. He spent the entire journey home trying to stop grinning. He watched the fields flash by, getting the occasional glimpse of the sea, sunlight shimmering on its surface. A sunny August day in England. Perfection.
“That was an eventful day, then,” Peggy said when they were back at Imogen’s, as if they’d just been for a ramble and come across an unusual bird’s nest on the ground.
“Oh, I dunno. Pretty run-of-the-mill stuff for me all told,” Andrew said. He leaned across to kiss her but she laughed and gently nudged him away. “Give over, what if someone sees? And before you say anything, earlier it would just’ve been a pensioner on a bench, not . . .” Imogen or the kids, was the unspoken thought. The spell might not have been completely broken, but it was certainly damaged. Andrew was about to get out of the car but Peggy made an exaggerated show of looking around before leaning over and giving him a peck on the cheek, before quickly fixing her makeup in the mirror. It was all Andrew could do not to skip up the drive, Morecambe and Wise–style.
Dancing around the living room to Ella would have to do instead. Maisie, who up until now had been summarily ignoring them in favor of her novel, waited until the song was over before asking who the singer was. Andrew put his hands together as if in solemn prayer. “That, my friend, was Ella Fitzgerald. The greatest singer there’s ever been.”
Maisie gave the subtlest nod of approval. “I like her,” she said, with the tone of someone weighing in calmly to settle a fierce debate, before going back to her book.
Andrew was about to find a new tune (he was in the mood for “Too Darn Hot,” next) and, more importantly, get another lager from Imogen’s booze fridge in the garage, when Peggy appeared at the living room door and asked the girls to come and help her lay the table.
Andrew retrieved a fresh beer and flopped down onto the sofa, allowing himself a moment to take everything in. He let the music wash over him, listened to the animated voices coming down the hallway, and breathed in the delicious cooking smells drifting in from the kitchen. All of it was intoxicating. He decided this should be part of some governmental scheme: that everyone should be legally entitled to have at least one evening a year where they could sink down into soft cushions, their stomachs rumbling in anticipation of ravioli and red wine, listening to chatter from another room, and feel for the briefest flicker of time that they mattered to someone. It was only now he could truly see how deluded he’d been to think the fantasy he’d created could be anything more than the weakest facsimile of the real thing.
After he’d listened to “Too Darn Hot,” Andrew headed to the kitchen and asked whether there was anything he could do.
“You could give the girls a hand,” Peggy said. Andrew saluted back, but Peggy had turned away and missed it. She and Imogen were having to chop, peel and stir in close proximity, but, as if carefully choreographed, they managed to avoid getting in each other’s way. Andrew, on the other hand, now fully buzzed by the beer, quickly became an increasingly frustrating presence as he tried to help. There was something about being in another person’s kitchen that meant everything he was looking for seemed to be in a totally illogical place. So when he confidently opened the cutlery drawer all that was inside was a warranty for a sandwich toaster, and the cupboard that should have housed glasses contained just a novelty eggcup in the shape of a hollow-backed pig, and some birthday cake candles. “Andrew, Andrew,” Imogen said with an air of frustration as he tried to pull open a false drawer next to her, “glasses top left, knives and forks here, water jug over there, salt and pepper here.” She pointed out each item like a football manager on the touchline indicating who the defenders should be marking.
Table now laid, Andrew sat down at it with a fresh beer and some Pringles Suze had brought him (two in her own mouth poking out to make it look like she had a duck’s beak) and drank in the atmosphere. The kitchen, like the rest of the house, was well kept but with lots of character—a bunch of flowers in a quirky vase on the windowsill, a print on the wall with a picture of a woman cooking and sipping from a glass with the caption “I love cooking with wine—sometimes I even put it in the food.” The windows had steamed up to reveal handprints and a wonkily drawn heart.
“I never know whether you’re supposed to eat the top bits of peppers,” Peggy said to no one in particular. “Don’t want to make people ill but don’t want to be wasteful either. I end up walking to the bin, nibbling on it till I get there, then chucking what’s left away.”
Jesus Christ, Andrew thought, unable to stifle a hiccup. I think I’m in love.
* * *
—
As the old drinking adage goes: beer before wine, then you’ll be fine; six beers before half a bottle of wine, then you’ll be dizzy and believe the story you want to tell to be much more important than anyone else’s.
“Yeah, so, yeah,” Andrew slurred, “. . . yeah.”
“You were in the kitchen?” Imogen prompted.
“Yes, Imogen, we were! But then we thought we’d check the bedroom because that’s where they usually leave their money if they have any—cash, you know, rolled up in socks or in a Tesco’s bag shoved under the mattress. So anyway, anyway, we went in there—didn’t we, Peggy?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“And the impression we’d had up till then was that the man had been fairly quiet, fairly normal . . .”
“Andrew, I’m not sure this is okay . . . the kids . . . ?”
“Ohhh it’ll be fine!”
Peggy took his hand under the table and squeezed it firmly. It would only be much later that he’d realize this wasn’t an affectionate gesture but an attempt to get him to stop talking.
“So, the bedroom’s bare apart from a telly, and I accidentally turn it on and lo and behold—”
“Andrew, let’s talk about something else, eh?”
“—he’d been watching a dirty film called Quim Up North!”
Peggy had spoken over him, so the impact of the punch line was deadened.
“Come on, girls, shall we play cards or something?” Imogen said. “Maisie, you can help teach Suze.”
While Maisie went to get the cards, Andrew—as is the preserve of the drunken—suddenly decided it was imperative he be as helpful as possible while doing so ostentatiously enough to be praised for it.
“I’ll do the washing up,” he announced determinedly, as if volunteering to go back into a burning building to rescue some children. After a while Peggy came up to him at the sink as he struggled to pull on washing-up gloves.
“Oi, you, you lightweight,” she said in a low voice. She was smiling, but there was a firmness to her voice that went some way to sobering Andrew up.
“Sorry,” he said. “Got a bit carried away. It’s just . . . you know. I’m feeling quite . . . happy.”
Peggy went to say something but stopped herself. She squeezed his shoulder instead. “Why don’t you go and relax in the living room for a bit? You’re the guest, you shouldn’t be doing the washing up.”
Andrew would have protested, but Peggy was standing closer to him now, her hand on his arm with her thumb gently caressing it, and he very much wanted to do exactly as she asked.
The girls and Imogen had briefly abandoned cards to see how fast they could play pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man, their hands a blur, collapsing into giggles as they finally lost coordination. Andrew heard the tail end of their conversation as he left.
&
nbsp; “That pasta we just ate now,” Maisie said.
“Yes, pet,” Imogen said.
“Was it al dente?”
“I think it was Jamie Oliver, love,” Imogen said, cackling at her own joke. At least I’m not the only one who’s pissed, then, Andrew thought. He slumped onto the sofa, feeling exhausted all of a sudden. All of this euphoria was very tiring, but it didn’t stop him from wanting the day to go on forever. He just needed to rest his eyes for a minute.
* * *
—
In the dream, he was in an unfamiliar house, dressed for a property search in his regular protective suit, except it was beginning to feel suffocatingly tight against his body. He couldn’t remember what he was supposed to be searching for; he had a feeling it was to do with some documents. “Peggy, what are we looking for again?” he shouted. But her reply was muffled, and though he looked in every room he couldn’t seem to find her. And then he was lost—and more and more rooms kept appearing, so that every time he crossed a threshold he was in a space he didn’t recognize, and he was calling Peggy’s name and asking for help and his protective suit was starting to constrict him to the point where he thought he might pass out. And there was music—jarringly out of tune, so deep it was vibrating through his body. The song was Ella’s, but her voice sounded like it was playing at half speed. Bluuuue moooooon, you saw me standing aloooonnnne. Andrew tried to shout for someone to turn it off, to play anything—anything—but that, but no sound came out of his mouth. And then suddenly he was in his own flat and Peggy was in the corner, her back to him, but as he approached and screamed her name, the music getting louder all the time, he saw it wasn’t Peggy at all, but someone with brown, wavy hair, a pair of orange-rimmed glasses in her hand at her side, and then the glasses had slipped through her fingers and were falling in slow motion toward the floor—
“Andrew, are you okay?”
Andrew opened his eyes. He was on the sofa and Peggy was leaning over him, her hand cupping one side of his face.
Is this real?
“Sorry—I didn’t know whether to wake you, but you looked like you were having a nightmare,” Peggy said.
Andrew’s eyelids flickered and closed.
“You don’t have to say sorry,” he mumbled. “. . . Never . . . ever have to say sorry. You’re the one who’s saved me.”
— CHAPTER 21 —
Trust me, it’ll help.”
Andrew took the can of Irn-Bru from Peggy with a trembling hand and took a tentative sip, tasting what seemed like fizzy metal.
“Thanks,” he croaked.
“Nothing like a four-and-a-half-hour trip on a train that smells of wee to cure a hangover,” Peggy said.
Suze nudged Maisie and gestured for her to take her earphones out. “Mum said ‘wee,’” she said. Maisie rolled her eyes and went back to her book.
Andrew was never drinking again, that much he knew. His head was throbbing, and every time the train took a bend he felt a horrible pang of nausea. But far worse were the incomplete flashbacks from the previous night. What had he said? What had he done? He remembered Peggy and Imogen looking annoyed. Was that the point when he’d started a sentence three times with increasing volume and urgency (“I was . . . So, anyway, I was . . . I WAS”) because people didn’t seem to be concentrating? He’d at least managed to get to bed rather than sleeping on the sofa, but—shit—he remembered now that Peggy had practically had to drag him there. Luckily, she hadn’t lingered there long enough for him to embarrass himself further. Ideally now they’d be re-creating the spirit of excitement and adventure of the journey up there, but Andrew was having to focus all his attention on not puking himself entirely inside out. To make matters worse, there was a small child sitting directly behind him whose favorite pastime appeared to be kicking Andrew’s chair while asking his father a series of increasingly complex questions:
“Dad, Dad?”
“Yes?”
“Why is the sky blue?”
“Well . . . it’s because of the atmosphere.”
“What’s a atmosphere?”
“It’s the bit of air and gas that sort of stops us from getting burned by the sun.”
“So what’s the sun made of?”
“I . . . Um . . . why don’t we find you your bear, Charlie? Where’s Billy the Bear gone, eh?”
I hope Billy the Bear is a nickname for a strong sedative, Andrew thought. He tried to will himself into unconsciousness, but it was useless. He noticed Peggy was looking at him, arms folded, her expression unreadable. He scrunched his eyes shut, Peggy’s face slowly fading away into nothing. He fell into a horribly uncomfortable pattern of falling asleep but almost immediately jolting awake. Eventually he managed to doze, but when he woke, expecting to be south of Birmingham at least, it turned out they were stationary, having broken down before they’d even gotten to York.
“We apologize for the delay,” the driver said. “We appear to be experiencing some sort of technical delay.” Apparently unaware that he hadn’t turned off the loudspeaker, the driver then treated them all to a peek behind the magician’s curtain: “John? Yeah, we’re fucked. Have to chuck everyone off at York if we can even get a shunt there.”
After said shunt finally materialized, Andrew and Peggy hauled their bags off the train along with a few hundred other passengers traveling back that Saturday whose phasers were all set to “grumble,” only to be elevated to “strongly worded letter” when they were told it would be forty minutes before a replacement train could get there.
The brief sleep had revived Andrew enough that he could now, with horrible clarity, consciously consider how much he’d ruined things. He was just deciding how to carefully broach the possibility that maybe he and Peggy could possibly have a little chat, about, you know, everything, when Peggy returned from the café with crisps and apples for the girls and coffees for her and Andrew and said, “Right, we need to have a word.”
She bent down and kissed the top of Suze’s head.
“Won’t be a minute, pet. We’re just going to stretch our legs, but we’ll not go far.”
She and Andrew walked a little way along the platform.
“So,” Peggy said.
“Look,” Andrew said quickly, cursing himself for butting in but desperate to get his apology in as soon as he could. “I’m so sorry for last night—like you said I’m clearly a lightweight. And I know, especially, that to do that when that’s what Steve’s been doing is so stupid of me, and I just promise to you now—on my life—that it won’t happen again.”
Peggy swapped her coffee from one hand to the other.
“Firstly,” she said, “getting tipsy on a few beers and being a bit of a tit doesn’t make you Steve. It makes you a bit of a tit. Steve’s got an actual problem.” She blew on her coffee. “I haven’t told you this, but it turns out he’s been sacked for drinking at work. He had a bottle of vodka in a drawer, the moron.”
“Jesus, that’s awful,” Andrew said.
“He’s getting help, so he claims.”
Andrew chewed his lip. “Do you believe him?”
“I don’t really know. In fact, to be truthful, the only thing I can be sure about, with all that’s happening at the moment, is that everything’s a huge mess and there’s no way someone’s not going to get hurt.” The jaunty musical jingle that precedes an announcement sounded and everyone on the platform pricked up their ears, but it was just warning them of a train that was not stopping there.
“I know that things are complicated,” Andrew said, because that seemed like something people said in these sorts of conversations.
“They are,” Peggy said. “And you can see that maybe my head’s been a bit all over the place recently. That maybe I haven’t been thinking straight, and that I’ve been a bit, well . . . reckless.”
Andrew swallowed, hard.
�
��You mean with you and me?”
Peggy scrunched her hair tight at the back of her head, then let it go.
“Listen, I’m not saying I regret what happened yesterday, not for one second, and I honestly mean that.”
There was a “but” coming. Andrew could sense it hurtling toward him quicker than the approaching train.
“But . . . the thing is . . .” As Peggy grasped for what to say next there came the familiar two-tone blast from the onrushing train, warning people to stand back. “I just think,” Peggy said, stepping closer to Andrew, her mouth close to his ear to make herself heard over the noise of the train that was now tearing toward them, “that I don’t want you to get carried away, and that this should just be something lovely that happened. A one-off. Because meeting you and becoming friends has been such a wonderful, unexpected thing . . . but friends is all we can be.”
The train thundered past and disappeared into the tunnel. Andrew wished, very much, that he were on it.
“Does that make sense?” Peggy said, taking a step back.
“Yeah, sure,” Andrew said, waving his hand in what he hoped was a casually dismissive way. Peggy took him by the hand.
“Andrew, please don’t be upset.”
“I’m not upset. Honestly. Not in the slightest.”
He could tell from the way Peggy was looking at him that this pretense was pointless. His shoulders slumped.
“It’s just . . . I really feel like we’ve got something, here. Can’t we at least give it a chance?”
“But it’s not as easy as that, is it?” Peggy said. Andrew had never felt so pathetically desperate. But he had to keep going, had to keep trying.
“No, you’re right. But it’s not impossible. We could get divorced, couldn’t we? That’s an option. It’ll be hard—obviously—with the kids and everything, but we would work it out. Find a way to be a family.”
Something to Live For Page 19
