by Nina Allan
“Christy?” It was Linda. God knows how she knew I would be there. She sounded totally panic stricken. “Please come. I can’t talk for long, because I know he’s around here somewhere, hunting for me. He said he just wanted to talk, but he’s not making sense. I’m terrified, Chris. I think he wants to kill me.”
“Don’t be silly,” I said. I asked her where she was, and she said The Dolphin, one of the pubs on Rock-a-Nore Road. “Just wait there, will you? You’re in a crowded pub – nothing can happen. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Just hang on.”
I left the house at once, cutting up through Elphinstone Road and then across the railway bridge towards West Hill. About half way there I started wondering if I’d left the kitchen light on, or whether it had been on already when I arrived. I wasn’t sure either way. It was too late to worry about that now.
It was a warm night, and the restaurants and bars along the sea front all had their doors open. Music and drinkers were spilling out into the road. The Dolphin was packed. I pushed inside, working my way through the main bar then through the pool room and out into the small walled beer garden at the rear. No sign of Linda anywhere. I even went into the Ladies just to check but she wasn’t there either. I made my way back out on to the street. I was starving hungry – apart from a pasty at London Bridge station I’d had nothing since breakfast. I was beginning to feel deeply annoyed as well as frustrated. It was as if they were playing with me, sending me out on a wild goose chase then watching from somewhere nearby and laughing like drains.
Why would they do that, though? What would be the point? And there was no doubting that Linda really had sounded petrified. I walked to the next pub along, which I knew had a phone box outside, and dialled the number of Linda’s flat. No reply, not even an answer phone message – either Linda didn’t have one or it wasn’t switched on. I thought about calling Laton Road but didn’t. What was I going to say if Derek picked up?
I hung around a bit longer, walking up and down the stretch of road between the two pubs, but there was still no sign of Linda, no sign of Derek either and it was beginning to get dark. I decided I to Laton Road. If Derek was there I’d tell him some story then catch the train back to London first thing in the morning.
I was really pissed off by this time, and for no reason I could pin down I was also frightened. I had started to get the idea that I was not in Hastings at all but in some fake version of it, a decoy-town. Even though the streets and cafes and houses were all perfectly familiar to me, I kept thinking I was going to turn the next corner and find myself lost.
Eventually that’s what happened. The Old Town is a warren anyway, a labyrinth of criss-crossing twittens and narrow courtyards, and on the night I went looking for Linda it seemed to expand. Strange houses loomed up out of the twilight. Streets I was expecting to find were no longer there. I walked for what seemed like miles along one alleyway, and when I came out I found I was in the kitchen yard of what looked like The Swan, a pub I knew had been destroyed by a bomb during World War Two. I recognised it from the old photos.
I could see lights inside, hear voices. Uncanny. I felt all the tiny hairs along my forearms standing on end.
It was as if I were living inside a story, or inside the journal I’d written about Sapphire, about Jenna and Del.
A sense of wonder overcame me then, in spite of my fear. I wandered around for what seemed like hours, no longer trying to find the pathways I knew but concentrating instead on inventing new ones, streets that would eventually take me where I wanted to go.
The shop windows were all lit up. I saw ships in bottles and ceramic greyhounds, silver earrings shaped like fishes or magpies, everything glimmering softly under coloured lights. I saw a woman, leading a child by the hand. The woman seemed to be in a hurry, but the child kept dawdling. Her hair was a nest of yellow curls, just like Derek’s. She pointed at something in one of the windows. The woman spoke some words to her and they moved on.
In the end I stumbled upon a path that I knew would lead me out on to Castle Meadow. The Old Town lay beneath me, a twinkling of tiny lights caught between two hills. From this distance the place was unknowable, the real shifting into the imagined, like smoke into the base ground of the coal-coloured sky.
I gazed up at the moon, as if to check it was still there, that it was still our moon I was looking at and not some other alien satellite in a distant galaxy. I was still sweating from the exertion of my upward climb.
~*~
When I arrived back at the house Derek’s van was parked in the drive and I could see lights on upstairs and in the hall. I let myself in with my key. After a minute or so Derek appeared, looking down the stairs towards me from the upstairs landing.
I felt terror for an instant, realising we were alone in the house together, remembering. Then the feeling evaporated. I knew he’d never hurt me again, that he wouldn’t dare. Don’t ask me how I knew that, but I did.
“Chris?” he said. His face looked drained of all colour. He looks like his own ghost, I thought. Then I realised that’s what we all are, when it comes down to it. “What are you doing here?” he said. I didn’t answer. He came down the stairs towards me, one step at a time. When he reached the bottom step he stopped and then sat down.
“I’m fucked,” he said. He rested his forehead briefly against his hands and then looked up at me. “I mean, what a total balls-up this day has been. Christ.” He looked burned out, almost pitiable. He was wearing the cashmere sweater that Linda had bought him for Christmas, and when he moved his right arm I saw the delicately pattered cream wool was marked with a stain the colour of rust from wrist to elbow. The wool had puckered up slightly around its edges.
Otherwise, the jumper looked clean.
“Have you had anything to eat?” I said to him. He looked at me as if I’d gone mad.
“Why, are you hungry?” he said.
“Like the wolf.” It was an old joke, an ancient pop lyric. Both of us smiled.
“There’s some bacon in the fridge if you want it. There’s bread on the side. It might be a bit stale, though.”
“I don’t care.”
I went through to the kitchen, took the bacon out of the fridge and fried up six rashers. The white sliced bread in its plastic packet was a day past its best, as Derek had said, but still perfectly edible. I spread on some Flora and made up two sandwiches. I ate mine immediately, standing up, leaning against the kitchen counter, the bacon still so hot it burned the roof of my mouth. Derek stayed where he was at the foot of the stairs. When I took him his sandwich he ate it, though more slowly.
“Are you staying?” he asked me.
“Just for tonight. I need to get back.”
“Tomorrow’s Sunday.”
“I have things to do.”
“Do you want me to get you a duvet and stuff?”
“Don’t worry about that. It’s late. I’ll sleep in Dad’s room.”
I bedded down on the sofa in the side room, covering myself with one of Dad’s old car blankets. The room seemed unnaturally silent, empty finally, as if it had given up its ghost when my father died.
This house, I thought. It’s so over.
I fell asleep soon after that. I felt exhausted.
~*~
Peter was back in London a week later and so was Robyn. By the time we all graduated, I had entered and won the Cavendish Essay Competition, an annual contest run by the college. A short while afterwards I published my first short story in London magazine. When Robyn went off to do an MBA at Princeton, Peter and I moved in together, to a garden flat in a building towards the Peckham end of Queen’s Road. I carried on working in the cafe for a while, later I got a job at the library in Forest Hill. I wrote in the evenings and at the weekends. My first collection of stories appeared five years later.
I more or less fell out of contact with Derek. I thought of him sometimes though, thought of him the way he used to be, when we sat out on the shed roof through those endless August eve
nings, giving unsuitable nicknames to the neighbourhood cats and feeling like we were kings of the world, a race apart.
“I can do anything I want,” Derek said. “Anything I fucking well feel like.” He blew smoke from a Marlboro. I rolled over on to my back and gazed up at the sky. The sky was mauve, translucent amethyst. The tarred felt roof of the shed was still blissfully warm.
~*~
I went over and over the night of my fruitless search for Linda, trying to make sense of it, trying to work out what must have happened and trying to convince myself I was mistaken. I confided my fears to no one, not even Peter.
If you fear your brother might be a murderer, how do you come to terms with that?
I told myself that if Linda was really dead I would have heard something.
Nothing ever added up, not quite. I suppose I could have tried calling Linda’s number, but I never did.
3: Alex
Alex hadn’t been back to his home town in twenty years, not since his parents moved to Scotland and he split up with Linda. Not that these two events were connected but they had become linked in his mind, simply because they had happened so close together. Alex had wanted to move too, not as far as Inverness but definitely out of Hastings and preferably back to London. Linda had been happy where she was. She liked her job at the dance school and didn’t want to leave, even though she knew there were likely to be better opportunities for her in the capital.
It was the only thing they really rowed about, the biggest stumbling block to their relationship and the main reason they’d split up in the first place. Alex carried on where he was, working at the Gateway supermarket in Queen’s Road and trying to amass enough money to get away on. He found he couldn’t forget Linda though. He kept waiting for her to get back in touch but she didn’t. At the end of three months he finally caved in and phoned her.
He remembered how just hearing the sound of her voice had brought tears to his eyes. Linda sounded pleased to hear him, too. They were on the phone for two whole hours. She wouldn’t let him see her at first.
“I think it’s safer if we just talk for now, don’t you?” she said. Alex had gone along with it at the time because he would have done anything to get back with her and it was better than nothing. There was even something exciting about it, at first anyway, something romantic. It made him feel like a horny teenager again, complete with the endless jerking off and falling asleep in the afternoon from lack of sleep.
Later he found out that the whole not-seeing-each-other business was because of Derek Peller, was because Linda didn’t want Peller to find out about him. Next came the appalling scene outside The Tower and he had lost her again. Alex hated men like Peller, thugs who got their way through bullying and violence, and Derek Peller he hated especially because he’d shagged Linda. He remembered the feeling of rolling in the gutter outside the pub, the taste of blood on his lips from where he’d bitten his tongue, the ringing in his ears, the unspeakable urge to get up and hit Peller, to slam him in the face hard enough to break his nose, to send the blood flying, to render him silent.
At that moment, Alex had wanted to hit him hard enough to kill. If he could have killed him, in that instant and without thinking twice, he would have done so. At the time, Alex’s flight to Sierra Leone had seemed like the ultimate fuck-you gesture, but Alex realised in hindsight that it had more to do with not wanting to be in the same physical space as Derek Peller. Even a whole country was not big enough for the two of them. The knowledge that Linda had fucked Derek Peller, that she had enjoyed fucking him, sucked his dick too probably, had worked its way inside him like a thorn.
Looking back on things now, Alex saw that his buggering off to Freetown was all about his own bruised ego. After Freetown came the job on the Standard, and later, Janet. Linda, and Derek Peller, became his past.
But now Derek Peller had resurfaced in the guise of his sister, Christy. He had forgotten Peller even had a sister, although Linda had mentioned her once or twice towards the end. Christy Peller had seen his byline on the Dale Farm piece. She had sent him an email, inviting him to come for lunch at her home in Hastings.
I think you once knew Linda Warren, who was a friend of mine, she had written. I would like to talk to you about her, if that’s possible.
Alex wondered why she hadn’t asked her questions there and then. He was tempted to write back and say he was too busy to travel to Hastings at the moment, and that if there was anything he could help her with they might just as well talk about it by email. But the more he thought about it the more curious he became. It would be interesting to meet Christy Peller, who was a writer now apparently. There might even be a story in it.
Also he needed a break from London and all the Janet stuff. Hastings was less than two hours away by train.
He sat down at his computer and looked up Christy Peller online. She hadn’t published much – a collection of stories and two novels – but she definitely existed. He wondered what she wanted to know about Linda. While he was searching for more information about Christy’s writing career, he noticed that his daughter Leonie was online. They messaged back and forth a couple of times. Leonie had scored eighty percent for her school science project, which had involved identifying wildflowers on three different bits of waste ground in Dalston and Hackney. Leonie had found and correctly named thirty different flowering plants in all. Alex stared at the list she sent him, which he thought read like a poem. Unborn tears constricted his throat and for a moment or two he was unable to begin typing a reply. Leonie was saying she was glad the flower project was over now because she was bored with it.
I want to write about our trip to Granny Adeyemi’s. That was really real.
Alex sometimes wondered what the hell had got into him, dragging Leonie up to Inverness like that, letting his mother fill his daughter’s head with stories about her childhood in Lagos and how different everything was now from when she had lived there, especially for girls, how interesting and exciting life in Nigeria could be these days.
Alex wondered how long it would be before Leonie started clamouring to be taken to Lagos to see her relatives there. She was already making noises about it, asking questions. Alex didn’t know why the idea disturbed him so much.
I can help you with the essay, if you like, he typed.
That’s OK – I’m fine by myself. But you can be the first to read it when it’s finished.
She was growing up so quickly. Perhaps that was all he was worried about, after all – losing her, becoming less important to her with each day that went by.
Leonie Baxter Adeyemi was ten years old. Two weeks ago when it was Alex’s weekend to have her, she’d found a stash of his old photographs in the bedroom cupboard, the ones from his Freetown escapade. Now all she could talk about was how she wanted to be a war correspondent when she grew up.
Because war would be really real, Alex supposed. He could only hope she would grow out of it. He was beginning to learn that he would have little choice or influence either way.
He was scared, but he was proud, ecstatically proud. So proud of his ten-year-old daughter he could punch the air.
He messaged Leonie goodnight ( get to bed now, chicken, it’s late) and then emailed Christy Peller and told her he’d be happy to accept her invitation. He didn’t mention Linda, or anything else, just asked her which dates would be most convenient for him to come. He sent the email, then went on to Amazon and ordered copies of Christy’s story collection and one of her novels.
He received a reply to his email the following morning. Christy said that any day that suited him would be fine by her, so long as he let her know two days in advance. Her email included her address in Hastings, and a link to a map. Alex emailed her back immediately. I’ll come next Wednesday if that’s all right, he wrote. He signed himself Alex, then deleted it in case it came across as too familiar. A. Adeyemi made him sound like someone’s solicitor. He settled on Alex Adeyemi and then clicked Send.
~*~
He booked two nights in a B&B on Harold Road, which was on the edge of the Old Town and not too far from Christy Peller’s place on Rotherfield Avenue. He wasn’t entirely sure why he had done this. He could have been there and back in a day, easily. But the idea of seeing Hastings again appealed to him suddenly.
He wondered if this was still about Janet, and decided not. It was a year since they’d agreed to part. He didn’t miss her very often and suspected the feeling was mutual. He missed Leonie of course, but he had her staying with him every other weekend and Janet let him see her whenever he wanted in between. Janet was good like that, great in fact, but then she had never been a vindictive person. She was reasonable about most things, thank God.
Leonie seemed okay with the arrangement, which was all that mattered.
Alex knew he was a good dad, he’d been a good enough husband also, he reckoned. The trouble, as it turned out, was that he was no good at being both things at once. He and Janet had been better than fine until Leonie. Leonie had got down between them somehow, like a steel tent peg. There was no doubt in Alex’s mind that he would die for Leonie. He also loved being with her, had loved being with her from the first, when all she could do was eat and shit and cry. His feeling for her, perhaps because it had arrived in his life so unexpectedly, continued to overwhelm him on a daily basis.
The downside was the effect that this had inflicted on his feelings for Janet. It was not that he had stopped loving her, rather that there was no space left over inside him for that love to exist. The thought of intimacy with Janet tired him. The laughs and chats they used to have, the good sex – these things seemed as much a part of his past now as Derek Peller.
He could no longer see the point of his marriage or of the effort that would be required to sustain it. There was his work, and there was Leonie – that was enough.
