The Man Who Didn't Call

by Rosie Walsh

  There was a pause, and then there was his voice, saying hello. Just like I had dreamed it would, only this time it was real. Familiar and strange, perfect and heartbreaking. His voice.

  My own held just long enough for me to say yes, I could meet him tomorrow morning, and yes, Santa Monica Beach was fine; I’d meet him by the bike-rental place just south of the pier at ten.

  ‘I was beginning to think it was a lie that LA’s on the ocean,’ he said. He sounded tired. ‘I’ve been driving around for days and haven’t seen it once.’

  And then the call was over and I curled myself into the corner of Jenni’s couch and cried like a child.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Dear You,

  Hello, Hedgehog.

  Nearly two weeks have passed since you should have celebrated your birthday, but I still think about you every day. Not just birthdays.

  Sometimes I like to imagine what you would be doing if you were still here. Today I imagined you living in Cornwall; a young, broke artist with paint in her hair. In this version, you study fine art at Falmouth and then take over a derelict building high on a hill with your arty friends. You like headscarves and you’re probably vegetarian, and you’re busy getting Arts Council grants, organizing exhibitions, teaching painting to kids. You’re electrifying.

  Then comes the pendulum swing of grief and I remember you’re not in that crazy house on a hill. You’re scattered in a peaceful corner of Gloucestershire, a quiet hum of memory where once was my sunbeam of a sister.

  I wonder if you know about what I’m doing tomorrow morning. I wonder if you know who I’m meeting on the beach. And if you do, I wonder if you will forgive me.

  Because I can’t not go, little Hedgehog. I have to know how you were on the day you died: what you were doing, what you were saying, what you were eating, even. When I had to identify your body, I was pooled in the corner like something melted. It took me hours to get up and drive home. But when I got there, I found half a piece of toast by the sink. Cold and rigid, with the indentations of your little teeth on a corner. Like you’d considered the idea of a final mouthful but then skipped off to do something else.

  What else did you eat that day? Did you sing a song? Did you change your clothes? Were you happy, Hedgehog?

  I have to ask these questions. And I have to figure out why, in spite of everything, I am still in love with the very person who took you away from us all.

  I feel like I’m letting you down so desperately by going tomorrow. I hope you can understand why I am.

  I love you.

  Me xxxx

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  I watched a group of kids playing volleyball while I waited for Eddie. I wondered if he would even turn up, and wondered if it would be easier, better, if he didn’t.

  The tide was far out, the beach quiet. A light carpet of cloud hovered between Santa Monica and the fierce sun. The air smelled of something fuggy and sweet – melting sugar, perhaps, or cooking doughnuts – a childhood smell; it lit up an old corner of memory. Long holidays in Devon. Scratchy sand, salty limbs, slippery rocks. The delicate patter of rain on our tent. Whispering late into the night with my little sister, whose presence in my life I had never then thought to question.

  I checked my watch.

  Over on the volleyball court, the kids finished their game and started packing up. The boardwalk rumbled as a lone rollerblader panted past. I ran damp fingers through my hair. Swallowed, yawned, clenched and unclenched my fists.

  Eddie’s voice, when it came, was from somewhere behind me. ‘Sarah?’

  I paused before turning to face him, this man who had lived in my head so many years.

  But when I did look at him, I saw only Eddie David. And I felt only the things I’d felt before I’d realized who he was: the love, the longing, the hunger. The whump! as my body ignited like a boiler.

  ‘Hello,’ I said.

  Eddie didn’t reply. He looked me straight in the eye, and I remembered the day I met him. How I’d thought to myself that his eyes were the colour of foreign oceans: full of warmth and good intentions. Today they were cold, almost blank.

  I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. ‘Thanks for coming.’

  A tiny twitch of his shoulders. ‘I’ve been trying to come and talk to you for the last two weeks. Been staying with my mate Nathan. But I . . .’ He trailed off, shrugged.

  ‘Of course. I understand.’

  A family on yellow rented bikes pedalled along the boardwalk between us and he stepped back, watching me.

  We walked down the beach and sat on the sand where it sloped to the water. For a long time we watched the Pacific crashing in on itself; sheets of silver foam on a relentless journey to nowhere. Eddie had his arms looped around his knees. He took off one of his flip-flops and splayed his toes in the sand.

  The shock of longing almost winded me.

  ‘I don’t know how to do this, Sarah,’ he said eventually. His eyes were glassy. ‘I don’t know what to say. You . . .’ He spread his hands wide, looked helpless.

  Once upon a time Eddie had a sister, a sweet girl called Alex. She had blonde, tangly hair. She sang a lot. She had large blue eyes, full of life and plans, and she loved fruity sweets. She had been my sister’s best friend.

  My stomach clenched as I held her in my mind’s eye, waiting for what I knew was coming .

  ‘You killed my sister,’ Eddie said. He took in a sharp breath and I closed my eyes.

  Last time I had heard those words, it had been through the big Panasonic answering machine next to Mum and Dad’s phone. It was one, maybe two, weeks after the accident and Hannah had finally been discharged from hospital. She had refused to get into the car with me; refused even to go home. There had been a scene, and eventually a patient transport bus had been found to take her and Mum home, while Dad and I drove.

  When we got in, there had been a red flashing light – a sight I’d grown to dread – and a message from Alex’s mother, who by then was in a psychiatric hospital. Her voice had been like smashed porcelain. Your daughter won’t get away with this. She can’t. Sarah killed my baby. She killed my Alex, and she’s going to prison, I’ll make sure of it. She doesn’t deserve to be free. She doesn’t get to be free when Alex is . . . is . . .

  She’s going to make sure you go to prison , Hannah had echoed, scowling tearfully at me. Cuts and bruises were flung like pebbledash across her body. You killed my best friend. You don’t deserve to be here if she isn’t. She started to cry. I hate you, Sarah. I hate you! And that had been the last thing she had ever said to me. Nineteen years had passed; nineteen years, six weeks, two days, and she hadn’t spoken a single word to me, no matter how hard I’d tried, no matter how many interventions our parents had staged.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Eddie,’ I whispered. I rubbed my ankles with shaking hands. ‘If it helps in any way, I have never forgiven myself. Hannah never forgave me either.’

  ‘Oh yes, Hannah.’ He looked at me, then immediately away, as if I disgusted him. ‘You told me you lost your sister.’

  ‘Well . . . I did.’ I traced a wobbly line through the sand. ‘ Hannah stopped speaking to me. She cut me out of her life, permanently. So I don’t feel like I have a sister. Not really.’

  He looked briefly at the line I’d drawn in the sand. ‘Hannah never spoke to you again?’

  ‘Never. And God knows, I’ve tried.’

  He went silent for a while. ‘I can’t say I’m as surprised as I should be. She’s stayed in regular touch with my mother. You can imagine the conversations.’ His voice was flinty. ‘But that’s by the by. The fact remains, you have a sister. Even if she wants nothing to do with you, you have a sister.’

  I paused. Wished I could bolt. I am the woman he can hardly look in the eye. I am the woman he probably wished dead all these years .

  ‘I am so sorry your sister was best friends with mine, Eddie. I’m so sorry I took them out of the house that day. I’m so sorry my react
ions weren’t the right ones when he . . . when that man . . .’ I took a swallow. ‘I can’t believe you’re Alex’s brother.’

  Eddie flinched. Then: ‘I want you to tell me everything,’ he said, and I heard the effort it was taking to keep his voice neutral.

  ‘I . . . Are you sure?’

  His body – his strong, warm, lovely body, of which I’d dreamed so many times, gave a sort of twist of assent.

  So I did.

  I tried so hard to keep my place in Mandy and Claire’s friendship group that summer – so miserably, exhaustingly hard. In the weeks following our GCSE exams they met up every day, but they invited me to join them only a handful of times. ‘God , Sarah, stop reading into it,’ Mandy said, when I found the courage to confront her.

  We were teenage girls. Of course I read into it .

  During their time in each other’s pockets they’d developed a new code of behaviour they were unwilling to share with me, so my first few weeks in year twelve were a minefield. I said the wrong things, talked about the wrong people and wore the wrong clothes, realizing only when I caught the edge of an eye roll that they’d moved on.

  On the day of my seventeenth birthday I came into school and found that they’d stopped sitting in our corner of the sixth-form common room and had moved somewhere else. I had no idea if I was invited.

  During the spring term Mandy started going out with someone from Stroud, the town where we went to school. Greggsy, his name was. He was twenty and therefore a catch: no matter that he had a nasty, weasel-like face, or a questionable relationship with the law. Claire was sick with envy and spent all her time trailing around after them. I began to lose hope, certain that this would be the final straw for me. Girls who went out with older men were of a higher calibre. They were sexual, successful, self-contained; untouched by the pimpled anxieties of the sixth form.

  Mandy might take Claire before she pulled up the ladder behind her, I thought, but she certainly wouldn’t take me.

  But one day in March Mandy said quite casually that Bradley Stewart had been asking about me. Bradley Stewart was Greggsy’s cousin. He drove an Astra. He was one of the best-looking boys in that nasty group, and I was pathetically pleased.

  ‘Oh?’ I said, not looking up from the Diet Coke label I was peeling. It was important I played this right: Mandy would use my words to shame me at a later date, if I seemed too keen. ‘I suppose he’s all right.’

  ‘I’ll hook you up,’ she announced breezily. Claire, with whom Mandy had fallen out earlier, was fuming, and I realized this opportunity would never have presented itself if they hadn’t fought.

  We didn’t go on a date, because nobody went on dates back then. We just met up on the pedestrian street outside the Pelican, with all the other teenage drinkers. We drank bottles of Hooch and Smirnoff Ice, and tried to be sharp and funny. Bradley, with his black hair and black trainers and his piercing eyes, somehow persuaded me off to the multistorey car park on the London Road ‘for a drink’. He steered me into a wall and started kissing me. He put his hands up my top, and I let him, even though he was rough and impatient. He put his hands down my jeans, and I let him. I didn’t want to, but I had had almost no experience with boys and a chance like this wasn’t going to come my way anytime soon. He tried to have sex with me; I said no. He asked for a blow-job, settling eventually for a nervous handjob. I didn’t enjoy it, but he did, and that was enough for me.

  Then he didn’t call, and I was crushed. I stared at Mum and Dad’s phone for days, eventually giving in and trying his number when I couldn’t bear it any longer. Nobody answered. I even got the bus to his house, near Stroud. I walked past his front door three times in thirty minutes, rain-soaked, hopeful and hopeless.

  ‘You should have slept with him,’ Mandy advised. ‘He thought you must be seeing someone else. That or you’re frigid.’

  Claire, back in favour, laughed.

  I could feel it slipping away already, that tiny flash of value I’d held since Bradley had taken me off to the Brunel multistorey. So I told Mandy to tell him I was ready to put out (her words) and he called me.

  We became a couple, of sorts. I convinced myself that it was love and never imagined that I might deserve better. Nor would I have wanted someone better: I was part of a gang now; I belonged everywhere. I existed on that higher platform with Mandy and there was no way I was going back down.

  Bradley often told me about other girls who fancied him and my teenage heart would freeze with terror. He went days without calling me, never walked me to the bus stop and often insisted on going without me to the Maltings, a nasty meat market of a club, so that he could ‘be himself’. More than once he decided this while we were in the queue, knowing I had nowhere to stay if I couldn’t stay at his. The day I passed my driving test, he failed even to congratulate me. He merely suggested I drive over to his house for sex.

  ‘Sounds like a top bloke,’ Eddie said.

  I shrugged.

  He looked at me briefly, and I was reminded of our first morning together, when we’d sat facing each other across his breakfast bar. Me, him; the smell of bread and hope. Then he looked away, as if he couldn’t bear to look at me. ‘Do you mind if we just get to the point?’ he asked quietly. ‘I understand why you’re telling me this stuff, but I – I just need to know.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Of course.’ I grappled with rising chords of panic. It was years since I’d talked out loud about what had happened that day. ‘I . . . Why don’t we go for a walk? It’s getting too hot to sit still.’

  After a moment Eddie got up.

  We walked up past a pastel-blue lifeguard’s hut and onto the boardwalk, which snaked south all the way to Venice. Bikes and rollerbladers whisked past us; gulls cartwheeled above. The morning’s brief cloud cover had been burned away and the air now shimmered with heat .

  It was summer, a Monday afternoon in June. Mum and Dad had gone to Cheltenham for something and had left me in charge of Hannah after school. Hannah had Alex over. After an hour pretending to do their homework, they’d told me they were so bored they might seriously die and instructed me to drive them to Stroud for a Burger Star. I’d said no. Eventually we’d compromised with a hanging-out-eating-sweets session on Broad Ride. They’d made a den up there a few years ago, when building and maintaining a den was still an acceptable way to spend a day. Now, long past that sort of thing, they liked to go up there to listen to music and read magazines.

  I was sitting on a rug a little distance from them, reading one of my A-level texts. I had no interest in their whispered conversation about some boy in their class, but they were twelve years old and I wasn’t letting them out of my sight. Hannah was too much of a show-off to be responsible for her own safety. She didn’t understand the slimness of life; the consequences of a twelve-year-old’s bravado.

  It was a warm day, the sky carrying thin twists of cloud, and I felt about as peaceful as I was capable of feeling back then. Until I heard the sound of a car, thumping and buzzing with overamplified music. I looked up and my heart lifted and sank. Bradley had called earlier, wanting me to drive over to pick him up. His car wouldn’t start, he’d said, could I come and get him? Maybe lend him some money to fix it?

  No, I’d said to both. I was looking after two twelve-year-old girls; plus he already owed me seventy pounds. ‘Borrowed Greggsy’s new car,’ he said now, ambling towards me with a rare smile. ‘Seeing as you were too lame to help me out.’ He looked at Hannah and Alex with interest. ‘All right, girls?’

  ‘Hi,’ they said, goggling at him.

  ‘Since when did Greggsy drive a car like that?’ I asked. It was a BMW. Souped up, just how Bradley and Greggsy liked their cars, but a Beamer all the same.

  ‘He came into a bit of money.’ Bradley tapped his nose.

  Hannah looked excited. ‘Did it fall off the back of a lorry?’

  Bradley laughed. ‘No, mate. It’s legit.’

  He couldn’t sit still for very long. After about ten
minutes on the blanket he suggested we go ‘for a race’ in our cars.

  ‘No way,’ I said. ‘Not with the girls.’ I’d been in a race with him once before: Bradley versus Greggsy back and forth on the Ebley bypass late at night. It had been the most frightening twenty minutes of my life. When it had come to an end, in the new Sainsbury’s car park, my head had flopped down onto my chest and I had cried. They’d laughed at me. Mandy, too, even though she’d been just as scared.

  Hannah and Alex, however, teetering on the wobbly diving board into adolescence, thought it was a great idea. ‘Yeah, let’s go for a race,’ they said, as if it were a little sports car Dad had lent me, not a banger with a one-litre engine and a head gasket whose days were numbered.

  They went on and on, Hannah and Alex, Bradley riding on their coattails. It’s not the M-fucking-five, Sare. It’s just a shit little road going nowhere. Alex kept flicking her blonde hair over her shoulder and Hannah copied her, only she was less convincing.

  My need to protect Hannah had not dwindled as the years had passed. If anything, it had strengthened as she’d transitioned from fearless child to swaggering girl. So I refused. Again and again. Bradley got more irritable; I got more stressed. Neither of us was used to me saying no.

  But then the matter was taken out of my hands. Hannah, giggling, ran over to Bradley’s passenger door and got inside. Bradley ran round to the driver’s seat, quick as a wink. I started shouting at them, but nobody heard me because the car Bradley had borrowed had a dual exhaust and he was roaring the engine. He shot off towards Frampton and my stomach spilled out through my legs.

  ‘Hannah!’ I shouted. I ran towards my own car, Alex behind me.

  ‘Shit!’ she breathed. She sounded impressed and frightened. ‘They’ve gone!’

  I made her do up her seatbelt. I told her she shouldn’t be swearing. I prayed.

  ‘And off we went,’ I said, coming to a halt on the boardwalk.

  Eddie turned away from me and stared out to sea, hands jammed in his pockets.

  ‘You were on the village green because you’d just been walking along Broad Ride,’ I said. ‘Weren’t you? The day we met. You were there for exactly the same reason as me.’