by Stephen May
Stephen May’s first novel TAG was longlisted for Wales Book of The Year and won the Media Wales Reader’s Prize. His second Life! Death! Prizes! was shortlisted for the 2012 Costa Novel Award and The Guardian Not The Booker Prize. He also collaborates on performance pieces with theatre-makers, artists, film-makers, musicians and dancers. He lives and works in West Yorkshire. You can find him on twitter @Stephen_May1 or visit http://www.sdmay.com/
By the same author
TAG
Life! Death! Prizes!
Wake Up Happy Every Day
First published in Great Britain
Sandstone Press Ltd
Dochcarty Road
Dingwall
Ross-shire
IV15 9UG
Scotland.
www.sandstonepress.com
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored or transmitted in any form without the express
written permission of the publisher.
Copyright © Stephen May 2017
Editor: K.A. Farrell
The moral right of Stephen May to be recognised as the
author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the
Copyright, Design and Patent Act, 1988.
The publisher acknowledges subsidy from
Creative Scotland towards publication of this volume.
ISBN: 978-1-910985-40-3
ISBNe: 978-1-910985-41-0
Cover design by Brill Design
Ebook compilation by Iolaire Typography Ltd, Newtonmore
For Caron, with love
Contents
Title Page
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
Acknowledgements
1
This is the hardest part of the journey home: a long, slow climb up Pentonville Road. Sharp pain along the backs of my calves and thighs. Sweat on my back beneath my rucksack. My breath coming in ugly rasps, but I can’t hear it. I have Rachmaninov loud in my headphones. Sonata for cello and piano, Ashkenazy and Farrell.
I always listen to classical music when cycling these days. It makes the most mundane trip filmic somehow. A little melodrama injected even when, like now, I am just making the trip from work to home.
This bike is a new one, only the second time I’ve been out on it. An anniversary present to make up for the fact that Katy will have first claim on the car for the next however long. Also because she knows I want to lose a few pounds, drop a jeans size, get the BMI sorted. Be fit for the baby.
It’s a serious machine. A Bianchi XR1 road-racer in a severely adult matt black: it is the sleekest thing I’ve ever owned. £2,200 worth of hand-tooled precision engineering. Beautiful.
When I was a kid I would have flown up this hill, hardly noticed it was there. It’s harder now but, despite the pain in my legs, despite the effort to get proper breaths, despite the uncomfortable stickiness under my arms, I am still glad to be out in the sun and the breeze, looking forward to seeing my family. It’s been quite a day. The lessons have been all right - but there’s been coursework marks to enter into the system, plus a moany faculty meeting, plus an appointment with parents disappointed with the progress their kid is making. I didn’t know what to say. Charlotte Phillips is a grade B student making grade B progress. She’s doing all right. But all right is just another word for failing as far as Mr and Mrs Phillips are concerned. They want an A star child and it’s just never going to happen. Difficult.
But that’s over for now. Let’s worry about poor Charlotte Phillips and her ferocious tiger parents on Monday. It’s the weekend. It’s all about Katy, the kids, the Bump. Katy’s given up work today, started her maternity leave, left the solicitor’s practice behind for a while, so she’ll be in a good mood. She might have made a cake.
I am just minutes away from getting sticky, giddy hugs from Ella and Jack. My favourite part of the day. Our kids are at the stage when they’re always thrilled to see me. Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy’s back! Yay! Look! Daddy! Look! I get a version of this every day and it never gets old.
I wonder about the random facts I’ll get from Jack. Because there will be some. He’ll tell me there are only two sets of escalators in Wyoming or that a slug’s bum is on its head, while Ella tells me who her new best friend is and all the hundreds of things that are absolutely mega awesome about her.
As I get closer to home I’m thinking about what I’ll cook tomorrow. Saturdays I like to do something adventurous, something a bit complicated. This weekend I think it might be lamb shawarma with saffron rice. Something Middle Eastern anyway. That’s the cuisine I like playing with at the moment. It’s good that Ella and Jack are prepared to experiment with food too. In this – as in so many things – we are lucky with our children.
Maybe we’ll have some people over – maybe Katy’s best mate from the solicitor’s, Amanda and Nick Campbell and their twins. We haven’t seen them since the summer. About time we all got together again. Short notice though, should have sorted it out before this.
Finally, I am past the Tube station, heading into City Road, easier going now, getting ready for the to turn into Haverstock Street. Only a couple of hundred metres to go. A handful of happy, more or less freewheeling seconds before I am back in the bosom of and all that. Now that I have conquered the hill I feel strong. The good old endorphins of exercise chasing away the bad old cortisol of stress.
Here’s where I see something that should alarm me, but it doesn’t. Not at first. I have maybe lost the habit of wariness. Lost the ability to hear the universe speaking, to recognise its way with signs. The universe will always punish that.
Two people, a man in police uniform and a woman in smart casual but with an obvious law enforcement walk, are emerging from either side of their Vauxhall Astra, and all I feel at first is a kind of curiosity. Oh my goodness, police in our road. One of them plainly a detective. Not something you see every day.
I am just seconds from home, the wild sparring of Ashkenazy’s piano and Farrell’s cello at its most passionate, the police already making their ponderous, almost reluctant way down the driveway, when an instinct for self-preservation kicks in. When I realise what it means. What it might mean.
I am almost level with my own front door. A reclaimed door painted the brightest holiday yellow. The male officer has his hand on the doorbell. He straightens his shoulders. He has the look of a man with a difficult job to do. I take that in.
Instead of turning in to my drive, I put my head down and, with my face covered by helmet, goggles and scarf, coast past without glancing to my left, though in my peripheral vision I see the door open. It will be
Ella doing that. Opening the door to callers is a job she insists is hers. I can’t see her worried frown beneath her dark fringe, but I know it must be there. No one opens the door to the police without anxiety, do they? Not even a child.
Less than two minutes later I stop and dismount. I am in a cul-de-sac I’ve never been in before, a brownfield development, built where workshops or a factory or stables once stood. Tall skinny houses in some kind of fake cotswoldy stone. Walls the colour of low-fat spread, five-year-old hatchbacks on the driveways. Basketball hoops on the side of the garages. Trampolines filling the back gardens.
I take off my headphones and discover my mobile is going. Katy. This phone is still quite new and still on factory settings which means the tune is absurdly jaunty, like the fanfare for a news programme that only reports the happy stories. The dogs rescued from a fire, the EuroMillions winner with his beaming fat face and his over-sized cheque, the baby prince being shown off in some distant part of the commonwealth.
‘Mark, can you get here now?’
Katy’s voice is on courtroom mode. Even, well-modulated. Every word bitten out clear and distinct. Which pretty much tells me all I need to know. Tells me that it is what it looks like. It’s not just routine and neither is it a cock-up. I turn the phone to vibrate.
I guess that the police must have been there while she made the call. I can picture them – the male cop’s bulk, settling himself comfortably into our old sofa. The female, plain clothes cop less at home, perched on the edge of her seat, not wanting to stray into the personal space of her colleague. Nor does she want to look too relaxed. She’d be working hard on showing empathy. The modern copper’s best weapon. I see her smiling shyly at my wife. The woman she hasn’t expected to be quite so good-looking, quite so obviously clever, or quite so pregnant.
But maybe it wasn’t like that at all. Maybe they were both simply watchful, careful, professional, refusing tea, neither of them smiling. Not even at the kids.
The kids. Ella will want to ask questions and Jack will be hanging back fearful, timid – afraid to go, afraid to stay – wondering if something terrible has happened. Being sure it has. Being right.
No sense in postponing the call any longer. But I do anyway. There’s a small patch of green between the houses and the road and a wooden sign in the middle of the grass that reads ‘No Ball Games on the Greensward’. I wonder at the curiously archaic language. Greensward. Like something from Thomas Hardy. A big word for a glorified verge.
I wish I still smoked, that I could spend a few minutes rolling a fag, that I could lose myself in a simple task that nevertheless still requires concentration and dexterity, something that leaves no room for other thoughts. I was an expert at rollies once. My tattoo itches, which it does at moments of stress. I take my gloves off, roll up my sleeve, scratch at it, those letters that have faded to a dull grey inside the love heart which itself is the brownish colour of long-dried blood rather than the vivid scarlet it was when I first had it done. The cheap inks of that Colchester tattoo parlour a lifetime ago.
I put the headphones back on and listen to another few minutes of the music, let it roil around my head. Let it surge and crash and storm around me.
I prod at the numbers. She answers before the end of the second ring.
‘Mark?’
‘Katy. I’m sorry.’
There is a long pause. Then, ‘Is that it? You’re sorry?’
I wait. Nothing I can say just now will help. Katy sighs noisily, but when she speaks again her voice is soft, almost a whisper.
‘Did you do it?’
I hardly pause at all. ‘No.’
I haven’t judged it quite right. There’s a brittle quality in my voice, a thinness, a lack of authority. A fragility, which, astute lawyer that she is, Katy is bound to have picked up on. I close my eyes, take a long, slow breath. I need to be calm.
‘Katy,’ I say. ‘Really, I didn’t.’ Now I think I sound too deliberate, too self-consciously firm. I think it sounds like acting. ‘What did they say? The police I mean.’
‘They said… They said that they just want you to help them with their enquiries into a very serious historical offence. Then I waited. When they told me what it was. I think I was meant to go to pieces.’
Seeing her go to pieces is a pleasure Katy will never give anyone, least of all a couple of low ranking plods.
‘But they’ve gone now?’
‘Yes, they’ve gone now.’
‘I’ll come back then. I’ll explain everything. Don’t worry. It’ll be fine.’
‘Will it?’ There’s a pause. ‘I made a sodding cake too. My last day at work. We were going to celebrate.’
2
In Ella’s bedroom the children are dividing up the last of the bags of sweets their granny brought them when she was over. Liquorice Allsorts and they left them till last because sorting out who gets what is hard. Jack only really likes the white and black ones. He’ll tolerate yellow and black and pink and black but he really hates the ones with brown on them and the ones with the crunchy coating. Ella prefers the same ones her brother does and doesn’t see why she should miss out just because Jack acts like he has a disorder all the time. But they manage it in the end.
‘Do you think Mummy and Daddy will get divorced?’ Jack says, his mouth full of Allsorts. He likes to shove them in a handful at a time.
Ella makes a face. The way Jack eats revolts her sometimes. It also annoys her that he still calls their parents mummy and daddy even though he’s eight years old. It also irritates her that he sounds kind of hopeful and she knows why. He thinks that if they get divorced he’ll get more presents, that’ll he’ll get two of everything. He’ll have two birthdays, two Christmases, that his guilty parents will buy bigger presents apart than they do together. He doesn’t understand anything.
She makes him wait.
‘No,’ she says finally. ‘But I think Daddy – Dad – will go to prison.’
Jack looks gutted. Which is what she wants. But as soon as she sees his face crumple, she feels bad. She pushes her remaining sweets towards him, all except the brown ones. He is surprised out of his gathering grief. ‘Go on, you have them,’ she says. ‘I’m trying to cut down on sugar anyway.’
Jack grabs the sweets and puts three in his mouth before she can change her mind. ‘Why will he go to prison, what’s he done?’
‘He hasn’t done anything.’ Her voice is harsher and louder than she means it to be. She sighs, stands up and goes over to the window. A group of boys have just met in the street, greeting each other with hugs and high fives. She wonders if they’ll have to move and if so, where to? Surely they’d get to stay in London? Or maybe they’d live by the sea? That wouldn’t be so bad. If you have to move from London, then the seaside is the best place to go.
She turns back to Jack and notices that he has eaten some of the brown sweets too now, the ones he says he doesn’t like. She doesn’t call him on it.
‘Daddy – Dad – hasn’t done anything, but the police obviously think he has. Someone has been telling lies about him.’
She thinks now about The Railway Children which dad read to her last year, where the father is put in prison because everyone thinks he’s a spy, and how the family learns to get along without him, and where the mother becomes strong and capable and how her mother is already strong and capable, so they are one up on the railway children, and she wishes she could remember their surname. It’s something quite ordinary. That book ended happily and this will probably end happily too. Dad will come back and the police will write an apology. Mum will make them, and she’ll make them pay for believing the stupid lies that someone has told. Then maybe they’ll be proper rich and get to go to America and stuff.
She wishes she had a phone, so she could tell Emylia Nicholls about the police coming round. Of all her friends Emylia will react the best. She’ll shriek and she’ll scream then she’ll tell everyone else. Every day Ella wishes she had a phone. She’s the only
girl in the class without one. She’s probably the only girl in the whole school who doesn’t have a phone. Even the kids in Year One have phones. Even the babies in reception have phones. If Dad does go to prison – or if her parents do split up – then she’d probably get a phone, a really good one.
She feels guilty for thinking like this. She’s as bad as her brother.
‘You can’t tell anyone.’ Jack is looking at her closely. It freaks her out that he seems to be able to read her mind. He’s always doing it. It’s weird.
‘I’m not going to tell anyone dumb-ass. You’re the blabbermouth round here.’
‘I’m not!’ Jack’s face is outraged. Good.
‘You are so. You can’t keep a secret for toffee.’
‘I can.’ His voice sounds unhappy now. He can be so whingey.
‘Shush for a minute will you.’ Ella has heard a change in the texture of the murmurs that have been filtering up from downstairs. The steady drone of adult talk has changed in volume and pitch. She knows that the police are standing now, that they are moving towards the living room door. Then they’re in the hall. The front door opens.
Jack joins her at the window, bony elbows digging into her as he wriggles in close beside her. Outside, the laughing boys grow sombre and disperse as they see the police emerge onto the driveway. Jack and Ella watch as the police walk to their car. They don’t speak to each other. In fact, they seem lost in their own worlds. The man goes first, eyes straight ahead. The woman behind him. She pauses at the gate and looks back, her eyes flicker up to the window. Without thinking about it both Ella and Jack duck down so they can’t be seen. Crouched beneath the window, Jack giggles. ‘What did we do that for?’
Ella frowns. ‘Don’t know. Messed up.’
‘Instinct.’ Jack says.
Ella stands up. ‘I’m going downstairs now,’ she says.
‘Listen,’ says Jack. ‘Mummy’s on the phone.’
‘Don’t call her Mummy,’ says Ella. ‘It’s babyish.’ But Jack isn’t listening, he’s already on his way out of her bedroom heading down the landing. She follows. They’ll sit at the top of the stairs and listen. Normally they like doing that, listening to their mum on the phone is fun usually, though she knows it might not be this time. Usually their mum is laughing or telling stories or working herself up about something. Sometimes she is serious and quiet and comes off the phone shaking her head. When that happens, they know to leave her alone for a bit.
