Sweet Sorrow

by David Nicholls

  ‘You didn’t win!’

  ‘Well, no, I did – and partly because I was so pleased to see you. I was surprised by it, how pleased I was. It felt like – I don’t know – breathing out. Just …’ And here she stopped walking, closed her eyes and exhaled slowly and I recognised what I’d felt too. ‘And I loved walking home with you, and talking, I kept wishing it was further. I still do. The only thing you said that annoyed me …’ She hesitated.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘The thing that annoyed me was you presuming I was going out with Miles, thinking ’cause he was that kind of boy, I must be that kind of girl. I mean, I like Miles, he’s quite good-looking in a sort of action-figure kind of way. But you thinking I was that, I don’t know … shallow.’

  ‘I was just jealous. I thought, Romeo, Juliet, aren’t you meant to live the role?’

  ‘Yeah, but the method only goes so far. ’Specially if he’s a bit of a dick.’

  ‘Bit older, he’s got a car, money, posh education—’

  ‘Stop it. You’ve got to stop it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’ve got to stop, the whole education, confidence thing. These people, they don’t have special rights or powers.’

  ‘I think they do.’

  ‘They don’t! I mean, they have advantages and privilege, and money’s important, ’course it is. And even if the exams have gone wrong, I know you can still do something brilliant, something that will make you happy.’

  ‘Like what?’

  She laughed. ‘I don’t know! It’s not for me to tell you, is it? You’ve got to work it out. But there’s a … potential. Stupid word, school-report word, but it’s what I mean.’

  We were silent after that. Her intentions were sincere, I knew, but it was undignified to be the subject of a pep talk and I resented it. We found our spot in the meadow and settled in the long, dry grass, further apart than we might have. The silence continued.

  And then her hand reached out and took mine.

  ‘Sorry. I know you don’t like talking about the future, but it is going to happen. That’s what the future is, it’s the thing that’s going to happen. There. Isn’t that profound?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Literally.’

  ‘Literally.’

  ‘You can’t see it at the moment, ’cause all these things have just gone wrong, and you’re nervous and angry about things you can’t control and which aren’t your fault. But if you … hang on, Charlie. I don’t know. I just think there’s something inside you and I love it. And you. I love you, Charlie.’

  And there it was. She’d said it and now I could say it back, that most banal and brilliant exchange of dialogue, which we’d repeat, over and over, for just as long as we meant it.

  Back at the gatehouse, we tidied up and compiled a list of essential supplies for the rest of the weekend – vodka, ice and Coke, some Chinese takeaway. Though I’d made little headway with The Name of the Rose, I noted that we’d need more condoms too and I felt a puff of pride at this. Despite my negotiations, I was still obliged to work three hours at the petrol station, but this would allow Fran to read and sleep. If I closed up promptly I could be back by eight thirty, and we could start the party once again.

  But something of the ease had been lost in contemplation of the future, and our future, and we were silent as we walked back through the woodland to where we’d stashed our bicycles.

  ‘We could … go home,’ I said. ‘If you wanted? I mean, we don’t have to stay two nights …’

  ‘No! No, I want to. I’m just tired. Hurry back. Ride like the wind. We’ll start again.’ And she kissed me and I lugged my bike gracelessly over the stone wall. ‘Don’t forget the lilac wine,’ she said, and I set off towards town and the start of a series of catastrophes, each greater than the last, each following on immediately like the end of a Shakespeare play.

  Mr Howard

  A petrol station is a forlorn place at the best of times, but on a long, dull, overcast Saturday afternoon at the end of summer, it has its own special melancholy. A deep ache had set in, an exhaustion that seemed quite overwhelming, and it would require something special to recover the mood of the previous night.

  There were winning scratch cards in my wallet. Without an accomplice, the exchange was riskier but not impossible if I used sleight of hand, and as a man of means I could try to buy champagne – cava – in the offy. As I was no longer a virgin, perhaps they’d hand it over without question and perhaps I’d get something ritzy from the Golden Calf, the house special of fat pink king prawns, and three more condoms from the toilets. Cava, condoms, prawns, big bag of ice; it was the shopping list of a young lord, and contemplating these riches, I fell asleep, my head on the counter, trusting the beep of the pumps to wake me.

  A large, blond, crop-haired man was standing over me, neck bulging in a shirt and tie, his knuckles rapping on the counter near my head.

  ‘You all right there?’

  ‘Sorry – dropped off. So sorry. Pump number … number …’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘Two. That’s thirty pound.’

  ‘Big night?’ He grinned unpleasantly.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘You’re asleep on your watch. Big night last night?’

  It would not have been appropriate to tell him that I’d lost my virginity, and yet he seemed to want more, standing with his head cocked to one side, hands planted on the counter, meaty and pink like ham hocks.

  ‘Big night, yes,’ I said and handed him his receipt.

  Still he didn’t move.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘No. I’m good. You get some shut-eye.’ And with a roll of his shoulders, the big man turned and left.

  And that was my last customer. A little before eight, I turned off the forecourt lights and set the till to chatter out its shift summary, took the tray from the till and, standing in the doorframe between the counter and the office, swapped the scratch cards for one twenty-, one ten-pound note. Cava, ice, prawns, condoms. In the back office, I loaded my rucksack with all the champagne flutes that I’d have to get rid of – I’d keep two back for the wine – and returned to the shop floor to turn off the lights.

  The crop-haired man was there and, behind him—

  ‘Mike! Hey there!’

  Mike said nothing, just shook his head slowly and sorrowfully, and an awful, cold nausea rose up inside me.

  ‘Charlie, do you recognise this gentleman here?’

  ‘Yes! Hello, there! Pump two, thirty quid.’

  He smiled unpleasantly, arms crossed high on his thick chest, waiting for something. ‘Your scratch card! I accidentally forgot to give it to you! Is that why you’re here? Hold on, I’ll get one for you.’ As a performance, it was not my best but what could they do about an honest accident?

  ‘Charlie, Mr Howard here works for a private security firm.’

  ‘Okay. Is this about me falling asleep?’ Perhaps it was only that.

  ‘I hired him, Charlie, because there have been some inconsistencies in the accounting.’

  Anything else he might have said was drowned out by a great roar of panic at what lay ahead, a deranged montage of both near and distant futures as I wondered what they knew, what my alibi might be and how I could hope to sustain it in the face of what was surely video evidence. I foresaw hours spent on plastic chairs in police stations and magistrates’ courts, I imagined Mum’s rage, my father’s flailing shame and despair. I would be seventeen in three weeks’ time – did that mean borstal or prison? And Fran, what would Fran think? The something inside that she’d spoken of, the potential she’d claimed to see in me revealed as the deception of a shabby petty thief, a till-dipper, an incompetent scammer with a criminal record stapled to those terrible exam results.

  ‘… seems a large number of cards meant for customers have actually found their way into the pockets of staff …’

  And how would she find out where I was? How long did they mean to keep
me here? The light was fading now and I thought of her alone in the gatehouse, lighting candles, eating the last of the food, anticipation turning to anger, anxiety to fear, like Juliet in the Capulets’ tomb. Even before she found out, she’d hate me for abandoning her. I had to let her know and to tell her the story in my own words …

  ‘… so we need to talk it through.’

  I forced myself to focus on Mike’s words. At least he wasn’t angry, more resigned, a sheriff who has been obliged to hire this gunslinger, now identified as a representative of a company called Croydon Investigations Agency, the CIA – how could I not have known? The big shoulders and small, sharp, judging eyes; the man was obviously a professional enforcer, and I cursed myself for succumbing to the cheap allure of Spanish sparkling wine and the house special at the Golden Calf.

  ‘Perhaps if we could go through into the back office?’ said Mr Howard, now stepping towards the counter. I lifted my bag, and heard the chink of twelve champagne flutes, evidence, through the nylon of my rucksack. My God, they’d got me red-handed. A night in the cells, and Fran alone in the woods, the candles burning low, waiting for me …

  I raised the bag carefully, so that the glasses would not chink.

  ‘If you could lift this, please,’ said Mr Howard. The counter was separated from the office by a hinged panel, secured from below by a sliding bolt on the cashier’s side.

  ‘One moment, I just need to …’ I slipped sideways into the office, and locked that door too.

  ‘Come on, Mr Lewis, stop fucking us about,’ said Mr Howard.

  ‘Hold on! Just need to—’

  ‘Charlie, come on, mate,’ said Mike, siege negotiator. ‘It’s just a chat.’

  I pulled the rucksack carefully onto my back as if it contained explosives, which in effect it did, and pushed sharply on the bar of the emergency exit.

  And now I was out in the chill of the evening air. In this light, the bright shop interior looked like a cinema screen and I could see Mike’s legs sticking out horizontally into air as he struggled with the hatch in the counter. Hands shaking, I locked the shop door too, sealing them inside. Catching the movement, Mr Howard ran to the door, banging at the glass, but I was already on my bike and across the forecourt.

  I powered out onto the long straight road that led back towards town, empty at this time. If I could just get to Murder Woods, dump the glasses, wait in the undergrowth for Mike and Mr Howard to give up the search, then rush back to the gatehouse, kiss Fran and tell her everything, explain that I’d done something stupid but that I loved her … If Juliet could forgive Romeo for murdering her cousin, then surely, surely a scratch-card scam was redeemable too. There’d be tears but we’d make sad, poignant love, just as Romeo and Juliet do the night before his exile, and argue about larks and nightingales, and in the morning I’d find Mike and tell him I’m sorry, Mike, I panicked and yes, I took a couple of glasses but no money. Or if there was evidence against me, then I’d pay it back; I still had most of the cash hidden in my room, and I’d work off the rest or borrow it from … I don’t know, my sister’s bank account or Harper or someone but not my parents, my parents must not know. Mike would tell my mum, but my father couldn’t know. It would kill him.

  I pounded towards my hiding place, another future beckoning now, life in exile. If I could get my hands on my passport, there was nowhere I couldn’t go. I’d buy a donkey jacket and a kit bag, join the merchant navy, whatever that was, and write beautiful, yearning letters to Fran from Singapore and Vladivostok and Mantua and perhaps some day, on the jetty of some distant port beyond the reach of law—

  I heard a car behind me and waited for it to overtake but instead saw it pull alongside. I’d presumed that I’d been travelling at extraordinary speed but the big, black Range Rover was barely in second gear, Mike close enough to lean out of the window and rest his hand on my forearm.

  ‘Pull over, Charlie,’ he said.

  ‘I can’t talk to you now. I’ve got to be somewhere.’

  ‘Just stop pedalling, pal, we only want a chat.’ But beyond Mike, I could see Mr Howard hunched over the steering wheel, laughing, and so I stood and powered down into the pedals. I would run into the woods and lose them there, I’d set out cross-country and in darkness to the gatehouse. Hadn’t she said she loved me? I turned off the road but I’d misjudged the angle needed to mount the high kerb and the bike juddered for a moment and then stopped entirely, sending me over the handlebars and onto the footpath.

  And here it was again, the strange, elastic nature of time, allowing me to note the neatness and completeness of the somersault and how I’d stubbornly refused to let go of the bike, bringing it with me so that it might have made a fine circus trick. Most memorably – or did I imagine this? – time even allowed me to register the crunch of the champagne flutes that were, in their own way, breaking my fall, to feel them hold their shape for a split-second and then collapse like an egg squeezed in a fist, the chain reaction, pop, pop, pop, the glass returning for the most part to sand, but also to diamonds.

  Scars

  ‘Where did you get these from?’

  ‘Get what?’

  ‘On your back. These marks.’

  ‘Those? Shark attack.’

  ‘Oh, is that right?’

  ‘Garage glasses. I fell on a whole load of cheap champagne flutes when I was sixteen.’

  ‘Of course you did.’

  ‘The scars are where they picked out the little chunks of crystal.’

  We were on the beach when Niamh noticed them for the first time, the scattering of smooth, raised scars that were more likely to be felt than seen, except in the summer when they showed up white like invisible ink under a lamp.

  ‘Okay. I know it should be obvious, but …’

  ‘I’d stolen the glasses from the petrol station and they found out, and I did a runner and I came off my bike.’

  ‘Motorbike?’

  ‘Bike-bike. Pushbike.’

  ‘Christ. Your dark past. Garage glasses and a pushbike. You’re like Jason Bourne.’

  We were island-hopping in Greece, our first holiday together, at that stage in a relationship when an opportunity to show each scar is something to leap at. I’d seen the tear between her second and third finger from the edge of a catering-sized can of chickpeas, the neat grid of stitches on her shoulder from the removal of a mole, and now it was my turn. The broken glass had peppered my back like buckshot, and I lay on the hot sand and let Niamh’s fingertips trace the constellation.

  ‘It’s like Braille.’

  ‘What does it say, Niamh?’

  ‘It says … hold on … it says “what … kind of dick … steals garage glasses?” Aren’t they free anyway?’

  ‘That’s what made it the perfect crime.’

  ‘Stealing something no one wants?’

  ‘Well, there was a certain amount of cash involved too.’

  ‘Ah. From the till?’

  ‘Yes, though it was more complicated than that. I mean I was stealing scratch cards, not cash, so no one lost out. It was a victimless crime because the money didn’t exist until you scratched the card. It was like that cat in a box. Philosophically speaking.’

  ‘And is that what you told them?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘And how did that go down?’

  ‘Not well.’

  ‘My God. A master criminal. I’m appalled.’

  ‘Oh, and you’ve never stolen anything?’

  ‘Me? No!’

  ‘All that time, working in restaurants, not a bottle of wine? A steak from the freezer?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘A coffee you’ve not rung through the till?’

  ‘Well. Maybe. Once or twice, but my upbringing means I’ve always felt shit about it.’

  ‘Well, I felt shit about it too. Especially getting caught. It was a bad time. And the stupid thing is, if I hadn’t made a run for it, I’d have been fine.’

  ‘So why did you run?’
r />   ‘Well – you’ll like this.’

  ‘Go on …’

  ‘It was for love.’

  Niamh lay back on the sand. ‘Oh, bloody hell. Not her again.’

  I think I was in shock for a while. Certainly I couldn’t stand or stop my hands from shaking and so we just sat quietly on the kerb in the fading light.

  ‘We only wanted a word, silly boy,’ said Mike.

  ‘We were just putting the frighteners on, that’s all,’ said Mr Howard. Already I could feel the blood on my back chilling and stiffening so that when I rotated my shoulders, the skin seemed to stick unpleasantly to my T-shirt. Mr Howard, who had, I was fairly sure, killed people, reassured me that it was nothing to some of the things he’d seen, but the blood had turned my fingertips to a dark brown that flaked like rust, turning black as night came on.

  ‘We’ll take you to hospital. See if there’s any glass still in there.’

  I had already rehearsed the phrase ‘I want to speak to my solicitor!’, though where I might find such a thing remained a mystery to me. Did a solicitor handle Dad’s bankruptcy, or was that an accountant? ‘I want to speak to my accountant!’ didn’t sound right.

  ‘But why did you try to get away? Silly, silly boy.’

  I allowed myself a few words now. ‘I had to be somewhere. That’s all.’ And that was when the police turned up.

  It was not in Mike’s interests to involve the law, but a shaking, bloodied boy on a quiet road at night must have attracted the attention of a passer-by and now here was the patrol car, blue lights illuminating the plantation behind us. ‘Oh, fuck. We don’t need this.’ Mr Howard was already standing, hands outstretched, palms outward placatingly, and I felt an awful fear. Police stations. Magistrates’ courts. Criminal record.

  But before prison, the hospital. We drove for twenty minutes to the place where my mother had worked when we’d first moved to town and I sat on the edge of a plastic chair while a weary policewoman asked me questions – where had I been heading to? To see a friend. Had the driver run me off the road? No, it had been an accident. Had I been put in danger by the gentleman’s driving? No, we’d been talking. Through the window of a moving car? Only for a second, then I’d lost control. What was I doing with all those glasses in my bag? Here I stumbled. I could see Mike, ashen-faced and fearful at the other end of the corridor, pressing down on his moustache as if it might come unstuck.