The Rumour

by Lesley Kara

  ‘It’s only ten o’clock, Mum. You can’t keep doing this. You’ve got to trust me.’

  The snort is out before she has a chance to think better of it. ‘Trust? You’re talking to me about trust?’

  She crumples on to the bottom stair with her head in her hands, and something inside me crumples too. I kneel down beside her and bury my head in her lap.

  ‘Sorry.’ My voice is muffled in the folds of her dressing gown and the years roll away. I’m in my first year of secondary school and a gang of girls has been bullying me. Mum is telling me to rise above it.

  Now, as then, she rubs her hand in a circle between my shoulders.

  ‘I just don’t understand why you have to walk so late,’ she says, and I want to explain that if I have to come home and sit in this dreary little cottage night after night without drinking, my head will explode. I want to tell her that I walk to stay alive, that I have to keep on the move, doing things, going places, even when I’ve nothing to do and nowhere to go. Especially then. But all I can do is shed hot, silent tears into her lap.

  It’s been five months since I woke up in hospital, Mum standing at the foot of my bed with That Look on her face. A fortnight since my spell in rehab came to an end. It was she who suggested this arrangement. If she hadn’t, I might have been forced to ask, wouldn’t have had the luxury of indignation.

  ‘Move in with you? In Flinstead? You’ve got to be joking.’

  Simon and I had laughed about the place on the few occasions it cropped up in conversation. Said the day we ended up somewhere like Flinstead was the day we gave up on life. It’s got this reputation as being somewhere you go to die. Like Eastbourne, only smaller and with nothing to do of an evening.

  ‘What are your other options?’ Mum said. That must have been the moment she decided to adopt the dispassionate tone of a counsellor. She’s been using it ever since, when she can remember. Open questions. No hint of disapproval. I’m not fooled for a second. It’s just another of her strategies. All that anger and frustration, all that disappointment – it’s still seething beneath the surface, ready to boil up and spit in my face like hot fat.

  It’s gone midnight now. I’m lying in bed, curled on my side, facing the window. A sliver of moonlight seeps in through the gap in the curtains. I roll on to my other side and hug my knees against my chest, finally allowing myself to think of Simon. Maybe that’s what seeing his ghost was all about – my mind’s clumsy way of telling me to face up to the past. Face up to what I’ve done.

  ***

  We met in a bar. Where else? One of those cavernous London pubs with panelled wood walls and massive mirrors etched with the names of beers. Packed to the rafters on a Friday night, but depressing and sepulchral at four-fifteen on a Tuesday afternoon. Was it a Tuesday? I don’t really remember. Back then the days were all pretty much the same. They are now, of course, only in a different way.

  I just walked right up to where he was sitting and told him he had an interestingly shaped head. That’s what drink does. Did. Gave me the gall to approach complete strangers, to bypass all the meaningless chit-chat and get straight to the point. Whatever point my fucked-up head was currently obsessing over. I thought I was being witty and flirtatious.

  No, Astrid. You’re being foul and warped and ugly. Drink isn’t your friend. It’s your enemy. Your poison. Can’t you see what it’s doing to you? Jane’s words ring in my head. Jane, who was supposed to be my friend. My ally. I’d lost her by then, the latest in a long line of friends and acquaintances who couldn’t hack it any more.

  Then I met Simon and none of it mattered. We drank cider till the men-in-suits brigade swaggered in and we slunk off back to his place. A dingy bedsit on Anglesey Road in Woolwich. His sheets were rank but I didn’t care. We weren’t just a couple of drunks hitting it off; we were kindred spirits. Soul mates. Two sides of the same coin.

  Must have been a bad penny then, says that little voice in my head. The one that sounds just like Mum.

  He can’t have come back. He just can’t.

  Chapter Two

  The next morning, I get dressed quickly, determined to put last night’s apparition out of my mind. I know what it is. It’s guilt, pure and simple. Emotional self-punishment. It’s time I moved on. It’s not as if there’s anything I can do to change things. What’s done is done.

  I loop my key chain round my neck and go downstairs.

  ‘There’s a banana needs eating,’ Mum says. ‘If you want that with some toast.’

  ‘Not that black spotty thing that’s been mouldering in the fruit bowl all week?’

  She picks it up and gives it a squeeze. ‘Nothing wrong with it.’

  ‘You eat it then. Toast will be fine.’

  ‘There’s always porridge,’ she says. ‘I could make you some if you like.’

  ‘I don’t like porridge, I’ve told you.’

  I take the last sachet from the box of green-teabags and pluck my favourite mug from the mug-tree. The one that says: I don’t like morning people. Or mornings. Or people. It’s one of the few things I haven’t lost or broken over the years.

  Mum sighs. ‘Oh Hilly, it doesn’t have to be like this.’

  I rip the sachet too fast and tea-leaf dust spills all over the counter. ‘Mum, I haven’t been called Hilary in over seventeen years.’

  She touches my arm. ‘Sorry, darling. Sometimes it just slips out.’ She opens the cupboard above my head and draws out another box of green-teabags. ‘Here, I noticed you were running low so I picked some up.’

  With the flat of one hand, I sweep the spilt tea into the cupped palm of the other. It’s gone everywhere, but I’m glad of the distraction. It’s something to focus on, something other than the horrible clogged sensation at the back of my throat. The one I always get when she does something kind.

  ‘Thanks, Mum.’

  Hilary. It comes from the Latin hilarus, which means cheerful. Mum said she and Dad chose it from The Pan Book of Girls’ Names. They opened that treasure trove of possibilities and stuck a pin on a page to give them the title of my life. I’m assuming, of course, that if the pin had impaled itself on Beryl or Mildred, they might have tried again. But Mum liked the name Hilary. ‘As a baby, you had a very sunny disposition,’ she once told me, a wistful look in her eyes.

  I’ve since worked out that I was born on a Wednesday, so what chance did I have? Woe is my default. Anyway, Hilary sounds like something out of the 1950s. Head Girl at a posh boarding school in Surrey. Captain of the hockey team. All-round jolly good sport. By George, Hillers, you are a good egg!

  ‘Astrid’ was the perfect antidote to all that, the antithesis of everything I was running away from. It’s a rebellious, rock ’n’ roll kind of name that carries a hint of the stars, a wildness. There was Astrid Kirchherr, the woman who photographed The Beatles in Hamburg, and Astrid Proll, an early member of the Baader-Meinhof gang. Then there’s Astrid Lindgren, author of the super-strong and thrillingly outrageous Pippi Longstocking stories. The list goes on. Queens and princesses. Sculptors and shot-putters. Skiers and porn stars. Troubled fictional protagonists. The name means ‘divine strength’.

  Changing my name changed me. It made me visible. Gave me the balls to get wrecked with the bad girls on Peckham Common. To suck Danny Harrison’s cock in a mausoleum in Nunhead Cemetery. To get my nose pierced and the tattoo of a flame snaking up my inner thigh. Sunny disposition, my arse.

  ***

  The tide is way out this morning, beyond the metal markers, and it’s warm enough to believe that summer’s on its way. I take my trainers off and walk barefoot on the flat, wet sand, dangling them by the laces. I’ve counted five small jellyfish like transparent fried eggs before I see the guy in the wetsuit clambering over the slimy spit of algae-covered rock. The same guy I’ve seen swimming from here for the last two weeks. The one who’s nodded at me and said hello a couple of times. It’s what people do in Flinstead. For someone who’s spent most of my adult life in Londo
n, it takes a bit of getting used to.

  ‘There’s a whole ecosystem right here,’ he says, as if we’re in the middle of a conversation. ‘Sea squirts, limpets, barnacles. An-en-om-es, too.’ His teeth flash white against his tanned face. ‘I have to really concentrate to say that,’ he says.

  My laugh peals out before I can rein it in. Too loud. Too eager. Shut up, Astrid.

  He jumps on to the sand and runs his hand through his hair. Pale, blond hairs curl at his ankles where the legs of his wetsuit end, but they don’t extend to the tops of his feet which are smooth and golden brown, with evenly spaced toes that curl into the wet sand.

  ‘Are you local?’ he says.

  I hesitate. ‘Not really. Well, kind of. For now, anyway.’

  He laughs. We’re walking towards the sea now, squelching through shallow pools left by the retreating tide. ‘I’m between jobs at the moment,’ he says.

  ‘Me too. I’m keeping an eye on my mum.’ A gull screeches overhead – a harsh, mocking sound. ‘She’s … a bit depressed.’

  Guilt snakes through me. I can hardly tell him the truth. Someone like him – so healthy, so wholesome – he’d run a mile.

  We’ve reached the sea now.

  ‘Listen,’ he says. ‘If you fancy a coffee sometime …’

  ‘That’d be nice, yes.’ It’s just his way of ending the conversation. If he meant it, he’d suggest a time. A place.

  He turns away and strides into the water. I don’t know whether I’m disappointed or relieved. Relieved, I think. The last thing I need is the complication of a new relationship.

  ‘Eleven o’clock tomorrow all right for you?’ he calls over his shoulder. ‘In the Fisherman’s Shack on Flinstead Road?’

  Nervous laughter bubbles up at the back of my throat. I feel sick. ‘OK. See you then.’

  I watch as he commits his body to the cold and pushes off into a front crawl. It’s remarkable the distance he’s already covered, the relentless rhythm of his strokes. It takes courage to head straight for the horizon. I nearly drowned once, doing that. Got caught in a rip current. I screw my eyes shut and clench my knuckles, trying to block out the memory of my panic, the sour burn of seawater at the back of my nose and throat.

  And that’s when it happens. The unmistakable scent of Simon’s aftershave in my nostrils. My eyes snap open, but by the time I’ve registered it, it’s gone, carried away by the breeze. I twist my head over my shoulder, bracing myself for what I might see, but apart from a smattering of early-morning dog-walkers and a jogger with earplugs, there’s no one else about. No one who looks remotely like the kind of person who’d be wearing Joint at half past eight in the morning. Or smoking one.

  It’s called phantosmia. I looked it up last night. Smelling things that aren’t there. Although usually they’re unpleasant things, like sour milk or shit. Apparently it can be caused by a head injury or an upper respiratory infection.

  I haven’t hurt my head or had any colds recently. So either my debauched past has finally caught up with me, or Simon’s messing with my mind from beyond the grave. Either way, I need a drink.

  Chapter Three

  By the time I arrive at AA I’m wired. All I’ve done since this morning is drink endless cups of coffee and smoke myself stupid. I’ve also been researching barnacles. Apparently they exude an adhesive-type substance that binds them to hard surfaces and cements them in place. It’s similar to the clotting mechanism in blood. I need facts like this to occupy my mind. To fill up the spaces where the bad stuff clings on. Anything to quell the compulsion to drink.

  And now I’m here, hugging my chest to keep my heart from exploding. It’s the first meeting I’ve been to since coming out of rehab. Mum’s been on at me to come for days.

  I take the chair nearest the door and do that thing I used to do on the Underground. Quick, furtive glances at the other passengers. Just to get a sense of them. The cross-section of people in the vestry of Flinstead Parish Church on this chilly May evening is, in fact, remarkably similar to that of a London Underground carriage. Apart from one striking factor: we are all white.

  A woman with peroxide hair and a ravaged face gives me a knowing smile. The crowns on her front teeth are so old they’re black at the gum line. She looks like she’s in her sixties, but dresses younger – probably is. Tight black jeans. Grey vest over a black T-shirt and one of those long, shapeless cardigans that trails over the tops of her ankle boots. Every time she shifts position, I catch a whiff of stale cigarettes. Do I smell like that too?

  ‘First time?’ says a cultured voice to my left. Its owner wears an expensive-looking charcoal-grey suit and polished brogues. He has a distinguished air. A lawyer or consultant, perhaps? It’s a great leveller, this addiction of ours.

  ‘First time here, yes.’ My voice is hoarse from too much smoking and there’s an annoying twitch in my left eyelid.

  More people drift in and take their seats. A gaunt-looking woman with bulging eyes and long, fidgety fingers sits opposite me. Her eyes veer in their sockets like pale blue marbles. Every so often they settle on me, before spinning off in another direction. I stare at my knees. When I look up, I find her watching me.

  This is unbearable. I could be out of that door and back at the house in less than ten minutes. Except then Mum will know I didn’t come, and I have to prove to her that this time I’ll do it. This time I’ll quit for good. It’s my last chance – she’s left me in no doubt about that.

  A noticeboard with AA literature pinned all over it has been propped on a table against the wall, no doubt so it can be whisked away when the mother-and-toddler group takes over. My gaze drifts over the Twelve Steps, not that I need to read them again. After three months of rehab, I could probably recite them by heart. Actually working them, step by step, is a different matter.

  I can just about get my head round the first one and admit that for most of the time I’m powerless over alcohol, that my life has become unmanageable. But the next two are pretty major stumbling blocks: believing that a power greater than myself can restore me to sanity and, here’s the killer: turning my will and my life over to the care of God. I mean, I know they say it doesn’t have to be the old-man-in-the-sky kind of God, it can be anything I feel comfortable with – the cosmos, the power of the group itself even – but it’s hard to get down on your knees and pray to the collective wisdom of a random bunch of drunks.

  I close my eyes. The room has that old-church smell: stale and musty. It prompts a memory I thought I’d forgotten. A Sunday-School classroom. Being shown how to write a capital G for God and pressing down on the paper so hard my pencil broke. Even as a small child something inside me resisted the notion of a higher power.

  Someone to my right clears his throat. He looks like the sort of man who might play the church organ or organize the local Neighbourhood Watch. Dull and worthy. He looks like my old Physics teacher, Mr Staines. Semen Staines, we used to call him, poor bugger.

  ‘Good evening, everyone,’ he says, his voice as watery and colourless as the rest of him. ‘My name is David and I’m an alcoholic.’

  And so it begins.

  David is in the middle of the usual preamble when the door bursts open and a latecomer hurtles through. A tall, middle-aged woman in a beige raincoat and red court shoes. Her messy hair is shoulder-length, mousy-coloured.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says, her face flushing as red as her shoes. Her flesh-coloured tights have gone all bobbly round the ankles.

  I give her a small smile. She looks so vulnerable, standing there in front of us all, and I can’t help noticing that tremble in her hands. I bet she’s still drinking. Poor woman. She looks like she’d rather be anywhere than here. I know just how she feels.

  After the meeting, people drink coffee and chat. Some of them hug each other. The peroxide woman with grey skin – Rosie, eight years sober, AA evangelist – tries to hug the woman with red shoes, who clearly doesn’t want to be hugged. I’ve met Rosie’s type before. Homing in on th
e newbies. Oh God, now she’s heading straight for me. I hold out my hand instead and the woman with red shoes rolls her eyes at me over Rosie’s shoulder. I can’t reciprocate, not without Rosie cottoning on, but I think she can tell from the way I look back at her that we’re on the same wavelength about inappropriate hugging.

  When Rosie finally slinks off to accost someone else, the man in the suit gestures at me with a cup. I shake my head. I have to get out of here. Now. But as I turn towards the door, I bump straight into the woman with red shoes. We both say sorry at the same time.

  ‘My fault,’ she says, flustered. ‘I wasn’t looking where I was going.’

  Her voice is soft, tremulous. It’s the first time I’ve heard her speak. I haven’t come here to make friends, although, of course, that’s exactly what I should be doing. Reaching out more, helping others. That’s how this whole fellowship thing is meant to work. Be nice, Astrid. Be nice.

  ‘See you next week?’ I say.

  ‘Maybe.’ Her eyes glisten with tears. She rushes to the door and stumbles out into the corridor, her exit as sudden and clumsy as her entrance.

  I imagine her running all the way home, then opening a bottle of red wine and drinking the lot. Opening another. I pack the thought away before it takes hold.

  Outside, wind hurls itself from the sea end of Flinstead Road. I tug my jacket across my chest and walk straight into it, chin pressed down, the musty smell in my nostrils blown clean away.

  The street is deserted. Out of season, Flinstead is dead after nine o’clock. When I pass the alleyway that leads to the little cluster of overpriced boutiques, the ones only the tourists go in, I stop and stare into the shadows. This was the exact spot where Simon’s ghost vanished last night. In the daylight it looks enticing with its coral-painted walls and that glimpse of courtyard at the end, the metal bistro tables and chairs, the hanging baskets. Now it looks like the kind of place where a girl might get strangled.

  I walk straight down the alleyway and sit on one of the chairs, the cold of the metal burning into the backs of my thighs. It’s a matter of pride. To prove to myself that I’m not scared. That I don’t believe for one second that Simon’s vengeful spirit is out to get me.