Wildest of All

by P. K . Lynch

  He loitered by the kitchen door, unsure of his next move. Behind him Sissy saw his mates regroup, like a flock of birds resettling after a scare. She knew he wanted to be with them. She enjoyed that she had pulled him away, but what was growing inside her was a feeling to dwarf all others; a sense of being too big for this shit life. Too powerful. Too wild. Too good. If she were to tip her head back and roar, a thousand lions wouldn’t be louder.

  She found what she was looking for glinting in the bowl on the bedside table. Her hand swooped in and picked them up. Somehow they arranged themselves to dangle provocatively on her middle finger, which she held up before her.

  ‘What you doing, you stupid cow? You ain’t fit to drive.’

  ‘Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do.’

  All her life people had told her what to do. Why had she let them? Why had it taken all this time to realise she was her own boss? That she owed no one anything? That she knew more about everything than the rest of them put together? It didn’t matter. She knew it now. She was ascending, emerging fantastically into the world, like a phoenix. Her history was falling away and everything new awaited her.

  Fame stepped forward and swiped for the keys, but she sidestepped him and he tumbled onto the bed with its wrinkled duvet and cum-stained sheets. Just looking at them made her want to peel her skin off. Instead, she made a dash for the front door and ran down the stairs, laughing, or screaming, at the words he hurled after her.

  ‘Sissy! That’s my motor! Sissy! Don’t you dare! Sissy! Leave my motor alone!’

  It wasn’t until she put the key in the ignition that she realised where she was going. A voice so small it was almost a memory warned her against it, but she didn’t want to listen. The night’s beauty rushed upon her. Even the moon seemed aware. It hung back, distant and humble; it paled into nothing compared with the artificial blaze of a sleeping city. The roads lay open and empty. The whole of London had been gifted to her. She drove with a razor-sharp focus, obeying the speed limit and guiding the car over speed bumps the way a mother’s hand might caress a baby’s head. Ha. Her inner poetry was potent. She’d conquered London. Nothing of interest here any more. Soon she picked up signs for the M1, and as she pointed the car north, at last the monster inside burst forward and took full control. Jealousy was in charge now. Jealousy and anger and hurt. At last she was brave enough to destroy everything. She imagined she even looked different. How could she not? But she didn’t doubt that Pascal would still recognise her.

  The motorway was a silken tunnel lined with cones of luminosity, crowned with such amber gems she might have been in Aladdin’s cave. A necklace of white lights guided her. Two roads: one sweeping forward, one trailing back.

  Her foot pressed the floor and she and the car shot through darkness like a comet, music their companion, transporting them into space, or sea, or just there, on that road with a sprinkling of other vehicles, all of them lonely crusaders riding the witching hour.

  Far-off lights made her think of local civilisations, the sheer optimism of human settlements, the fragility of lives in flux. Nothing was permanent, everything that existed was fleeting; the whole world was beauty in transit. Blue and white road signs emerged from the blackness like angels. Her jaw fell open as she approached an orange box by the side of the road. It had a black telephone sticker on it. The idea that out there in all that dark, she could pick up a phone and hear a helpful human voice at the other end – well, it was so magnificent it almost made her want to die with happiness.

  For some unknown reason, the music appeared to have stopped. Suddenly a car rose up in front of her and she slammed on the brake.

  I’m not going to make it, I’m not going to make it.

  Her arms went rigid between her shoulder and the wheel. As she bore down hard, she could see the vehicle in front had two passengers.

  At last, she stopped with centimetres to spare.

  Heart thudding, she expected the driver of the car in front to get out and scream at her. She’d almost killed them. She stared into their rear-view mirror. It was impossible they were unaware of her existence.

  After what felt like an eternity, they moved off.

  She sat at the roundabout for many minutes, shaking and trying to steady her breath. Paranoia scrambled to warn her she’d been sitting too long, probably attracting attention in hidden traffic cameras.

  She let the window down and cold air rushed in. In the distance, the sun sent its first yellow tendrils to yawn delicately over the land.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Old New Beginnings

  Pascal had been okay in the end. He’d taken one look at the car, its interior covered in vomit, and brought her into his office, no questions asked. She slept on the floor beneath his window and he covered her with his leather coat. She found the smell of it comforting, but when she woke up she knew she was done with him.

  She gave him the keys to the car and he promised to return it to Fame within the week. He said he would take care of the valet and send her belongings when she sent him an address.

  From there she took a train to Glasgow and found a room in a flat on the south side. She shared with two others. Professionals. Quiet. Ideal. The last thing she needed was more party people in her life.

  She’d never noticed before how the air can be different from city to city. Glasgow was colder, fresher. There was something to it, a familiarity that came from being born and raised in a place. The sun set where it should, cast off the colours it always had. Why they should look so different in Glasgow she didn’t know, but she accepted it and knew it was right, just as she knew the clouds hanging low overhead were right, and the sound of the rain was right, whether it came as a drizzle or flood. In London, she hadn’t been aware of anything amiss in the shape of the world, but Glasgow had a tinge of something that was so uniquely to do with home, and childhood; a sense of belonging, even though there had been no fanfare to welcome her home because as yet no one knew she was back.

  She took the red tourist bus from George Square and wondered how she could have grown up to know so little about her own city.

  Alighting near the university, she couldn’t fail to think of Grammy and another of her well-worn tales:

  ‘The Headmaster came to our door and told Aunt Margaret I should be going to university. “No, no,” says Margaret. “That’s not for the likes of us. We can’t afford that.” The Headmaster’s eyes looked like they would pop out of his head. “You won’t need money,” he told her. “That one will get scholarships!” But Margaret was firm. “No, no,” she says. “I need her working and that’s that.” All I could think was how she’s ruined my life. Ruined my life then caught the boat to Australia. In some ways it was thank God for your grandfather.’

  She always blew a little puff of air from her lips at this point, which gave the impression she found it funny but not enough to laugh fully. She always shook her head too, as if she couldn’t believe what she was hearing, even though they were her own words from her own mouth.

  Sissy had only the vaguest memory of her grandfather. She had gathered the impression over the years of a quiet man living in the shadow of a Goliath woman. Even her father hadn’t spoken very much about him. Was that odd, she wondered, and would her own father disappear from conversations now he wasn’t here? In fact, she realised with a jolt, it had already happened. Whether she’d intended to or not, Sissy had arranged matters so there was no one to talk to. In the middle of Kelvingrove Park, she felt a surge of nausea as she contemplated the fact she’d become complicit in his eradication.

  Finding a bench, she sat and waited for the sickness to pass. A crocodile of children clattered noisily past her, accompanied by two carers. Sissy looked past them up to the Gothic spires of the university building. So high, so imposing. Despite her grandmother’s stories, Sissy had never been attracted to it. ‘Not for everyone,’ her father said. It had always been a source of tension, so she’d filed it away as something not worth thin
king about. Now, sitting on that bench, her head full of ghosts, she felt the stirrings of something else deep inside her.

  She took a job answering calls and emails from disgruntled rail passengers, of which it transpired there were many. For Sissy, the new routine was a breeze after the hostility she’d endured on calls in her previous job. She handed out apologies with cash and vouchers and enjoyed hearing the change in the customer’s voice before they hung up. Her supervisor told her she was too generous, but as grateful emails poured in congratulating her on excellent customer service it became easy to disregard the warnings, especially as prospectuses for various universities arrived through the post. Hungry for change, Sissy spent evenings poring over them, dreaming of a day in the future when she could go to see her mother with apologies bolstered by tales of achievement.

  One day she took a train and a bus to the north-west part of Glasgow she’d grown up in. She walked past her old school, went to the places she, Cam, and Rik had hung out in. She had lunch in their favourite cafe and from there walked to the park. Her breath ran ahead of her in billowy clouds. The trees were mostly bare and the paths strangely quiet.

  She took the curved path behind the rhododendron bushes, and as the pond came into view she scanned for the boathouse in which they’d spent many a truanting afternoon. At first she thought it had been removed, but then she saw it lying on its side, head first in the pond, no doubt pushed over by cider fuelled teenagers. Walking over, her suspicions were confirmed by the presence of empty bottles lying in the long grass.

  She sighed and took a seat on the bench, which at least remained intact, albeit with a few new layers of graffiti. There was no sign of her name, or anyone she knew in amongst it. The cold seeped through her jeans and numbed her backside, so she got up again and began to walk.

  The park had the odd quality of being altogether familiar, yet entirely new to her. She realised she’d never really looked at it before. The intricacy of the chipped gold angels encircling the water fountain struck her as a kind of miracle in their down-at-heel setting. Swings wrapped two and three times around their metal frame carried a double sadness; not only were they unusable and, no doubt, the source of disappointment to small children and tired parents, but they whispered of underwhelming weekends, days and nights of teenage wanderings, wild souls with nowhere to go, nowhere to be.

  A few drops of rain blew in and Sissy turned towards the exit, keen to be on a bus before the weather changed. Behind her she heard a scurry of footprints and a voice called, ‘Here, boy!’

  Suddenly a dog wound itself around her legs, causing her to almost topple over.

  ‘Sorry!’ the owner called.

  Sissy bent to scruff the dog behind its ear and it jumped up at her, its pink tongue lolling out the side of its mouth. She looked into the dog’s eyes, one green, one blue, and her heart lurched.

  ‘Come on, boy,’ the voice said from behind her. ‘Sorry about this.’

  She remained kneeling as Cam grabbed Bolt by the collar and clipped his lead. For a moment she thought he would walk away, but then he did a double take and stared, and she realised her long hair had momentarily disguised her.

  Slowly, she pushed herself to standing, caught red-handed, though up until that moment she hadn’t realised she’d been hiding. Bolt jumped on his lead and Cam pulled him into line. He looked back at Sissy, mouth agape. In the absence of any other plan, she accepted his scrutiny while doing some of her own.

  Was it possible he’d grown taller? It certainly seemed so, though his style hadn’t changed. His track suit and trainers were as grubby now as they had been when he was twelve. A rush of affection mingled with guilt for being so shallow.

  ‘How are you, Cam?’

  It sounded so trite and formal.

  He continued to stare at her, and began to slowly shake his head. Then, just as she was wondering how to extricate herself from the situation, he dived forward and picked her up in a fantastic bear hug. Sissy, he was saying, Sissy, Sissy, Sissy, and then her face was wet, whether from the rain which was coming down heavily now, or from something else, she couldn’t say, but she hugged him back, and then somehow they were jumping up and down, even though they were still hugging, and what made them laugh more than anything was the fact of the dog barking and jumping until they all fell to the ground, tangled up together in a jubilant mess.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  After Midnight

  Cam arrived late for his shift at the hotel breathless from running, and distracted with knowledge, or more specifically, the worry of what to do with his knowledge.

  He and Sissy had walked round the park, playing with Bolt, avoiding serious conversation, but when the rain had soaked them they had gone to their old cafe to warm up. They ordered hot chocolate and chips, which they fed to Bolt in a bid to keep him quiet beneath their table, and tried to unravel what had gone wrong in London.

  ‘I was a dick,’ he said.

  ‘I was a bitch,’ she said.

  ‘Rik was a twat,’ Cam said, ‘Let’s blame him.’

  They laughed at the nonsense of the statement. Sissy explained about the new boyfriend and how she’d had to move out when he came along. When Cam asked why, she only sighed and shook her head.

  ‘I was a dick,’ she said. Cam snorted into his hot chocolate. She smiled.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I felt a bit… pushed out. It felt a bit like when Grammy moved in with me and mum.’ She shrugged. ‘It just pushed my buttons, I guess.’

  Her eyes had watered and she’d stared down into her cup until he lunged for another topic.

  ‘I can’t get over the hair!’ he cried, sounding false even to himself. ‘It looks awesome. What made you do that?’

  She’d blushed and lifted the ends. ‘It’s all fake. I don’t like it. I’m going to have it taken out soon.’

  ‘Well, I think it looks nice either way,’ he’d said, and lifted his cup and clinked it against hers.

  She’d told him all about her plans, which universities she was looking at, and he’d told her he had a job in catering, which wasn’t the whole truth, and enough of a lie to be ashamed of. He didn’t even know why he’d lied, only that it wasn’t the time to be truthful. They’d talked for hours until Cam had realised the time and dashed to work.

  ‘Of all the nights to be late, Cam!’ Jude said, as she emerged from the function suite laden with plates.

  ‘I know, I know, I’m sorry,’ he replied, skipping past her with his hands up, guilty as charged. ‘I’ll hang my coat up and be straight there.’ But she’d already disappeared into the kitchen, allowing a cacophony of banging pans and beeping machines to escape through the swing doors.

  When he’d returned from London, he’d been given short shrift by his mum and stepdad.

  ‘It’s not you. It’s the dog,’ his mum said.

  Cam knew it was neither he nor the dog that was the issue, but rather his stepfather.

  ‘Put him in a shelter,’ his mum had said. ‘Someone’ll take him.’

  The suggestion boiled his blood. He could just as easily imagine her saying the same thing about him.

  He’d spent weeks sleeping rough, mostly in the boathouse until a bunch of little shits kicked it over one night. Then he’d taken to the street and that was where Jude had found him. She’d taken him back with her and fed him and let him wash and then he’d slept for a week. She didn’t complain once about Bolt, who was smelly and had forgotten the basics of being a house dog.

  Jude had always been decent to him. He owed her a great deal, though he knew she would deny it. She never lorded anything over him. Which was why he wasn’t comfortable not telling her about Sissy.

  All evening he mulled it over, spilling drinks, dropping glasses.

  ‘Pull it together, will you,’ Jude hissed, uncharacteristically harsh. She immediately apologised. ‘It’s just this party. I want it to go well. I know the family…’

  Her whole demeanour changed as a man
in a grey suit carrying a small baby approached them.

  ‘Aleks! I was hoping you’d say hello! I hope everything is as you’d expect? Oh, is this your daughter? How lovely.’

  Cam made to return to the suite but Jude called him back.

  ‘No, no, come over here, Cam! I want you to meet Aleks.’

  Unused to such formalities, Cam shook the man’s hand, which wasn’t easy to do because of the baby.

  ‘Aleks used to run this place,’ Jude said, lightly, peering down at the baby. ‘I think he’s back to make sure I haven’t run it into the ground.’

  The man smiled stiffly, his focus towards Cam because Jude would not look up. ‘I know that would never happen,’ he said.

  ‘Aleks, this is Cam,’ Jude said. ‘He’s my best worker. Soon, I think he’ll be my second-in-command.’ She looked up briefly and gave a glassy smile. ‘Just like I was to you. Oh, she really is lovely,’ she said, looking swiftly down again. ‘You must be so proud.’

  Cam was stunned by the casual way Jude had seemed to promote him. He hadn’t expected it and his mind was instantly alive with possibility. Certainly the place was populated with half-wits who needed telling what to do all the time, but he’d never imagined being their boss. The idea was a tempting one.

  ‘Shall I get back to our guests?’ he asked Jude, with what he hoped was an air of polite maturity. Now he saw the prize, he was ready to play the game.

  She nodded and he bowed slightly and retreated.

  ‘Well, it was lovely seeing you,’ he heard her tell the man. ‘I’m so glad you decided to have the christening party here, but I’m afraid I have some paperwork to settle so…’

  ‘Jude,’ the man said, in a low voice. Cam’s ears pricked up, always alert for trouble. He busied himself behind the reception desk, ready to step in, but Jude seemed to have it under control.