The Race

by Nina Allan

  He wondered what he was doing there really, why she had summoned him.

  “Are you from Hastings originally?” Christy said. Her question was innocent enough, Alex supposed, yet he knew how questions like this still made him bridle, his temper stretched thin and tight, like cling film over a jam jar. He had never become used to it, this insatiable curiosity people seemed to have about his origins. Even now, when he knew that the questions were not the same, perhaps, as they once had been, the tight-lipped, near-demands for proof of residency his parents used to have to endure on an almost-daily basis.

  Mostly, people were just interested. Where was the harm in it?

  The shame of it was, he would have liked to speak of Lagos more often. He would have liked to tell this woman about the life of the port, about the unmade, red-dust roads of the interior. He would have liked to describe Aunt Clo to her and Uncle Midas and his cousin, Bella, to share his memories of the carefully tended garden behind their house, to describe its sounds.

  He was able to talk about these things with his parents of course, but it was surprising, Alex reflected, how rarely he did so.

  “Yes I am, I was born here,” Alex said. “I’m based in London now though, I haven’t lived in Hastings since my early twenties.”

  Something passed across Christy’s face then, a faint shadow. His Aunt Clo would have said she has an inkling, but Alex had never believed in inklings, or astrology, or any of that stuff, even though Aunt Clo once told him he had a talent for it. When he told his mother what Clo had said, Marielle Adeyemi had scoffed.

  “She’s a little bit crazy, my sister,” she said. “Take no notice.”

  And it was true that Clo had always put her trust in the spirit world even more than she had lately come to rely on the internet. With the spirits you don’t get no power cut, she insisted. You ever heard of broken satellites in the after-world?

  Alex tried to ignore the feeling he had, that Christy Peller was about to reveal a secret to him, something important that would reshape the landscape of his life.

  “I’ve been reading your articles online,” Christy said. “I really liked the Dale Farm piece, and the piece about the football hooligans. You’re a very good writer.”

  “Thank you,” Alex said. “I’m glad you enjoyed them.” Christy Peller was holding her coffee cup in both hands, clasping it by the base as if she was using it for support. She looked pale and nervous, almost as if she were afraid of him, or of something he was about to say to her, but how could that be? It was she who had invited him here, not the other way around.

  He remembered what Linda had said about Christy, that she seemed scared of her own shadow.

  “She barely said a word to me for ages,” Linda said. “She’s a bit strange.”

  “That’s hardly surprising though, is it, when you think who her brother is,” Alex had retorted. “She’s scared stiff of him, I bet.”

  At the time he’d spoken out of pure contrariness – he wanted to see Derek Peller as the villain of the piece across all categories. Now he wondered if he’d been right after all. If he’d had an inkling. Linda in any case couldn’t have had much in common with Christy, they were such different people. Alex remembered a particular afternoon, when he clocked off early from the supermarket and walked across town to meet Linda at the dance studio. She was teaching a class of girls, visiting from Eastbourne or Bexhill or somewhere, not trained dancers, just ordinary schoolkids in their PE kits. He remembered Linda in her leotard and leggings, showing one of them how to position her foot beside the barre. The girl was overweight, and it was clear she felt exposed in her boxy green shorts and aertex shirt but Linda spoke to her gently and with a smile, placing her own foot beside the girl’s in its chubby-soled gym shoe. He remembered the way the fat girl smiled as she suddenly grasped the essence of what Linda was showing her, beautiful for a moment as she forgot how uncomfortable she was normally made to feel with the sight of her own body.

  He sensed that Christy felt the same discomfort, but for different reasons.

  “I wanted to ask you about Linda,” Christy said suddenly. Her voice was unsteady, and Alex realised that this was it, that the mystery surrounding his visit was about to be solved. “You went out with her, didn’t you? Linda told me about you.”

  “We were together for about six months, and then we split up,” Alex said. “You do know that Linda was seeing your brother Derek?”

  “Yes, of course.” Christy set her coffee mug back down on the tray, and Alex noticed with a shock that her hands were shaking. “I thought of Linda every day, for years,” she said. “I still think about her now. I wonder how her life would have been if she’d never met my brother, where she’d be living and what she’d be doing. Linda was so gifted. I liked her a lot.”

  Was? Alex thought. Liked? He felt an odd little shiver go through him, coursing up through his feet and into his fingertips like the shock waves from a minor earthquake. That’s what it’s like when the world rearranges itself, he thought. That’s what it’s like.

  “I’ve done something very wrong,” Christy said, and then stopped. She seemed to shrink inside her clothes, to diminish, and Alex knew she must be feeling what he was feeling, that sense of embarrassment that hits you when you’ve been assuming the person you’re talking to understands you perfectly and then you suddenly realise you’ve been in different conversations all along.

  “You think Linda’s dead, don’t you?” Alex said. Understanding flowered inside him, unfurling inside his head like the fragrant, curlicued petals of night scented stock. Who wrote that? Alex thought, then realised that Christy herself had written it, or something like it, when she was describing the blood seeping from under the dancer’s toenails in her story ‘Allegra’. “You think Derek killed her.”

  “I should have warned her,” Christy said. “She didn’t know what he was like, not really. Nobody did. I let her down. I should have called the police but I didn’t. It’s all my fault.” There were tears in her eyes now, diamond-bright, glistening globules. As Alex watched, one of them toppled over the rim of her lower eyelid and fell into her lap.

  “It’s not though,” Alex said. He realised with wonderment that his presence here was required after all, that there was a point to all this. That he had been called, as Aunt Clo might have said, for a reason. “It’s not right. Linda’s not dead. What on Earth made you think she was dead?”

  Christy looked up at him from where she sat on the corduroy sofa, her eyes still full of tears and a dawning bewilderment. “I saw Derek,” she said. “The night Linda disappeared. I couldn’t find Linda anywhere, and there was all this blood on Derek’s sleeve, dried blood. Then later on I found Linda’s engagement ring.”

  After they had eaten their lunch she showed it to him, a cluster of diamonds and pearls on a yellow gold band. Alex had never seen the ring before, and he realised that Linda had most likely taken it off before each of their meetings. She must have given it back to Derek in the end, a final way of telling him that things really were over between them.

  It would have hurt her to do that, Alex knew. Linda always loved pretty things, delighted in them like a magpie, like a child. It had been one of the most charming and innocent aspects of her character.

  “I found it in the garage of our old house on Laton Road,” Christy was saying. “It was in one of the drawers of the old tallboy Derek always used for storing his sales receipts. I came back to help Derek with the house, you see. To clear it out before he went to Australia. I suspected for years that Derek might have done something terrible to Linda but I kept telling myself I had to be wrong, that if anything had happened to her I would have heard something. Finding the ring brought everything back. But by then – I don’t know, it just seemed too late for me to say anything. It would have looked like I’d been covering up for him. I couldn’t bear the thought of it.”

  “Derek’s in Australia?” The news had caught Alex so off guard he had barely taken in the rest of
what she was telling him. There was something almost mythical about it, this conclusion to the Peller saga, the kind of thing that only normally happened in stories.

  “Yes. He went out there to be with our mother. I think he likes it there, better than he liked it here, anyway. I just hope he stays there.”

  ~*~

  “But Derek having the ring didn’t mean Linda was dead,” Alex said later. “You must have realised that, surely?”

  “I was frightened,” Christy said. “I didn’t want to know the truth, so I let things carry on the way they were.”

  ~*~

  Two days after Peller’s attack on him, Alex tried calling Linda’s flat again, but it was the same as before, the phone just ringing and ringing with no reply. By then he was feeling worried as well as angry. He had been over their final telephone conversation so many times he no longer knew how much of it was a genuine memory and how much was invention. Either way, there was nothing that offered a clue as to what had happened. She’d said she would be home late, that was all.

  She had not been joking.

  In the silence of the dingy flat on Devonshire Place the idea that Linda had gone back to Derek, after everything that had happened, began to seem less and less likely. That had been his own paranoia speaking. Linda was impulsive but she wasn’t crazy. Alex telephoned the flat again the next day and the next, and when after three more days there was still no reply he called the dance school and asked if he could speak to Linda Warren. There was a long pause while he was put on hold, then the switchboard operator, Susan her name was, came back on the line and told him that Linda wasn’t available.

  “She’s teaching at the moment,” Susan said, and the smug knowingness in her voice was all that Alex needed to know that she was lying. Linda was there all right, she just didn’t want to speak to him.

  He slammed the receiver back into its cradle. Tears dug into his cheeks, like shards of hot glass.

  In that moment Alex knew he’d had it with the town, and with Linda too. It was time to leave.

  Looking back on it now, Alex knew that if it hadn’t been for his fury at Linda he would probably not have had the courage to make a break for it.

  In a way, he owed Linda his future. He owed her everything.

  He saw her again, just the once, years later, coming out of a delicatessen on the Fulham Road. He recognised her immediately – her way of walking, that gossamer lightness, was unmistakable. She was wearing a pair of old tracksuit bottoms and plain black plimsolls. She was as lovely as she ever was, perhaps even lovelier.

  It did the world good, Alex thought, just to have her in it. He no longer thought about or cared why she left him, so suddenly and without explanation. She was sick of them both most likely, him and Derek Peller. Probably she wanted her freedom as much as he did.

  Whatever. It was a lifetime ago. So over.

  As she stepped down from the pavement their eyes met. For a second Alex felt sure that Linda recognised him, that she was about to say something. Then she looked past him over his shoulder and walked away.

  ~*~

  “Linda’s not dead,” Alex said to Christy. “She just moved on, that’s all, the way we all do.”

  ~*~

  They went outside. A fresh breeze was blowing. They walked down along the edge of the playing fields towards Castle Meadow.

  “What made you come back here?” Alex said. “To Hastings, I mean?”

  “It was the money really,” Christy said. “Half the money from Laton Road was mine. There was just enough for me to buy this house outright – I couldn’t have afforded to do that in London.” She pushed her small hands into the pockets of her jeans. “And after Peter died I felt I needed a change.”

  “Peter was your husband?”

  “We were never married, but we lived together for almost twenty years. Peter died of cancer. I still miss him.”

  Alex fell silent, not wanting to crowd her memories with unnecessary speech. “Do you think you’ll stay here?” he said at last.

  “I’m not sure what I’ll do in the long run. But it’s fine for now.” She shook her head, and Alex had the sense that she was still trying to get to grips with things, to sort out the facts as she now understood them from the fictions that had tormented her for so long. “Thank you for coming, Alex. I can’t tell you how much today means to me. It’s such a relief to finally know the truth.”

  “I’m glad I came.” And it was true, he was glad. He knew his time with her had changed things. In some unaccountable way it had straightened him out. A part of him wanted to confide this to her, to explain, but his greater self resisted.

  He knew it was not Christy Peller he should be talking to now. Their time together was done.

  They sat down to rest on a bench at the edge of the playing fields. Alex watched the monster gulls, banking and swooping and diving in the gusty cross drafts. They’re like spirits of themselves, he thought. The idea of gulls, become wild fantasies. Grey ghosts.

  “Do you think I was a coward?” Christy asked suddenly.

  “No more than anyone,” Alex said. “No more than me, anyway.” And then he was remembering what happened in Freetown, the euphoria of those first days, the sense that finally he was doing something, being someone, going where he ought to be going. Those first days it had not even felt particularly dangerous to be there. There was a lot of hanging out in cafes, a lot of talk of revolution and the establishment of a free state, a phrase that was used and reused until it finally disintegrated into a slogan. Then the woman journalist was shot in the face and everything changed. Alex had never spoken to her but he had seen her around. He knew her name was Stef and that she worked for Reuter’s.

  He started to shake all over when he heard. He was unable to fit his image of the young woman in khaki Bermudas to the words, coarsened as they were by fear and grief, of the older, more experienced newspaperman who told him what happened to her.

  “Her whole lower jaw’s gone. Frigging mess her face is now, worse than an animal. If you ask me she’d be better off dead.”

  Alex felt that the man had shown him a tiny, perfect glimpse into hell. He had tried to forget, not to know, but the thought of the woman’s shattered face would not leave him. He was too afraid to go and see her, but he wrote a report of the incident, including comment by witnesses, and then flew home to London. He sold the story almost the minute he stepped off the plane. The paper that bought it soon got back in touch and asked him if he was interested in doing a piece on factory closures in Sheffield.

  We like your style, they said. You have a freshness of approach that is most unusual.

  He accepted the commission at once. He knew that what had happened with the Reuter’s woman had forever put an end to his idea of himself as a war correspondent.

  This had been the shape of his cowardice.

  Whatever. It was an age ago. So over.

  ~*~

  He said goodbye to Christy Peller and made his way back to the B&B. He dozed on the bed for a while, then washed and changed and had supper at the Jenny Lind. He treated himself to a cognac, then decided he would return to his room at Church View and watch some mindless TV.

  When he was halfway up the Bourne he stopped. He took out his mobile phone and keyed Janet’s number.

  He was afraid that Leonie might answer, because it was Janet he wanted to speak to, and having Leonie there in the background would only distract him. He was in luck though, it was Jan who picked up. She sounded surprised to hear him, but in a good way, Alex thought, or at least he hoped so.

  “Hey you,” Alex said. He hadn’t said hey you to her in months. “How are things?”

  “Things are fine,” Janet said. “You sound odd though. Has something happened?”

  “I want to come home,” Alex said. “I made a mistake.”

  “Everyone makes mistakes,” Janet said. “The trouble is they can’t always be put right again.”

  “This one can,” Alex said. When he real
ised he believed his own words, his heart seemed to turn in his chest and perform a somersault.

  4: Maree

  Maud’s hair is long, to her waist. In the winter months it goes dark, like the rain-dampened roofs of Asterwych, dark as peat. In summer it reveals flecks of amber, the same colour as the soft down on her calves and forearms. The hair between her legs is mossy, like pond weed.

  Maud is hurting because she knows I am going away. She’s afraid I will forget her.

  “Don’t be silly,” I tell her. “We’ll have letters. Letters are better than anything in the world.”

  I say this because I want to comfort her, but also because I feel that it’s true. Words written down on paper are better than words spoken out loud, better even than mind-speech. Words written down on paper stay alive. They are the parts of ourselves we secretly bury and leave behind for those who come after us. Written words are like the ancient stone castles of Inverness-shire – they stand and stand and stand.

  I tell Maud I won’t have lovers in Kontessa, only friends. We are lying on a blanket on the rough grass that covers the hills that look down on the Croft. Our limbs are lengthening like the days, the air is filled with the scratch of ripe pollen and the rustle of grass seed, the mauve scent of heather. Maud and I paint each other’s shoulder blades and wrists with henna tattoos and pretend that these days, like the summer before them, are not hurtling towards their end.

  Their fleetness is terrible: blunt as a hammer blow, cunning as a rat. As the summer wears itself out I find that I am seeing things differently. It’s as if I’m watching myself from the outside, through a spyglass. Everything I do seems interesting suddenly, and also final. I choose to spend more time with Maud than I really want to, because I know that for her these last few weeks feel like the end of her world.