Jimmy drummed the heels of his cowboy boots against the kitchen cupboards.
“I don’t want to do that,” he said.
Catherine turned around to look at him, onion tears standing in her eyes. “But why not, it’s the truth.”
Jimmy paused for a moment. “I know it’s the truth, but I don’t want to take away hope from an eight-year-old girl, let alone her kid sister. When you’re a kid is practically the only time when hope seems like a real possibility. We might as well tell them Father Christmas isn’t real and that it’s been us they’ve been bankrupting and not the tooth fairy all this time. Next you’ll be wanting to tell Leila that Jesus is no more than a historical figure and not the son of God.”
“This is different, Jimmy, and you know it,” Catherine said in a low voice. “We can’t lie to them about this. It’s their lives we’re talking about.”
“We’re not lying, we’re not doing anything,” Jimmy corrected her. He hopped off the counter, put his hands on Catherine’s shoulders, and looked into her eyes.
“Look, we hurt each other pretty badly. We tore each other up and those two were in the middle of it. And now you don’t hate me anymore, and that’s all right by me, and I’m not messed up by you anymore, and that’s all right by you. Those two girls in there have had enough pain in their lives already. It just can’t be wrong to let an eight-year-old have hope, it just can’t.”
“But it’s false hope,” Catherine persisted, wiping the back of her hand under her eyes and feeling an instant sting.
“All hope is false hope, that doesn’t make it a bad thing,” Jimmy said. “Look, if they ask me anything like ‘When are you moving back in, Dad?’ then I’ll tell them I’m not and you’ll do the same and in a few months they’ll stop asking. In a year or two they won’t even think about it anymore and the way we live will seem normal to them. The hope will fade all by itself, don’t you worry.”
“That sounds wrong coming from you, the eternal optimist,” she said.
“Oh, don’t get me wrong,” Jimmy said, mustering a grin. “I’m still an optimist, it’s just that I’m starting to realize eternity is a very long time. So what do you say—is that a plan?”
Catherine looked into the living room, where Eloise was picking out the riff from “Hotel California” on Jimmy’s acoustic guitar, her head bent over the strings while Leila watched her fingers, trying to pick up the notes herself. At that moment her children seemed safe and happy, and it was a feeling that Catherine was as desperate to preserve as her husband was.
“Okay, we’ll do that, then,” she said. “We won’t lie but we won’t say anything either.”
The two of them stood in silence for a moment in the small galley kitchen, sensing the unraveling of another thread of the lives they had once woven together so hopefully. Catherine still mourned the loss. Not because this relationship had once been right, but because she had wanted so much for it to be.
“So are you staying for dinner, then?” she asked him finally, breaking the thread.
Jimmy’s smile was weary. “I thought you were never going to ask.”
It was past eight when Catherine finally got the girls into bed. It was Jimmy’s fault. After his quiet resolve in the kitchen, he’d returned to his tall-tale self by the time Catherine served dessert, regaling the girls with stories of what a wonderful life they were going to lead as soon as the band was discovered and he hit the big time—which would be sometime soon, now that they had the funds to make a new demo. Eloise asked for a pony and Jimmy told her she could have a fieldful if she wanted, and there was to be an unending supply of sweets for Leila, who planned to distribute them to the world’s less privileged children.
Jimmy and the girls were still singing by the time Catherine finally managed to shepherd them up the stairs, and she did have to admit, as they hummed while brushing their teeth, that Jimmy’s new song had a catchy tune. Jimmy was good at catchy tunes, but somehow they never seemed to fit into his rock-and-roll image. When you looked at Jimmy you saw a tall, long-haired, strong, purposeful-looking man. The sort of man who, if you didn’t live in Farmington and didn’t know Jimmy Ashley, you might be slightly threatened by. After all, Jimmy stood out in a crowd in his full-length leather coat. He should be writing songs about mayhem and seducing countless women, but it was always these softy lyrical love songs that he kept on producing. Jimmy might have a skull and crossbones tattooed on his right shoulder, but it was wreathed in roses, and once many years ago when Catherine had teased him about his rock credentials, he’d replied, “I’m a lover, not a fighter, babe.”
He’d more than proved himself right since then.
When she came downstairs Jimmy was still there strumming on his guitar and humming the now familiar tune. He’d opened a bottle of wine and poured two glasses, which meant he wasn’t planning on going back to the boat anytime soon, and Catherine realized that she was glad. They’d sit and talk about the girls, and her job and the PTA, and he’d entertain her with stories of the band’s latest exploits or whichever kid he was teaching in Rock Club who had the most promise. What Catherine missed most about living with him was simply having him around on a week-night, sipping a glass of wine and talking. Loving each other had been a trick they had never quite pulled off, but even after everything that had happened, they still had a knack for liking each other.
“Do you mind?” Jimmy asked, nodding at the wine. “I’ll go back to the boat in a mo, but the forecast said frost overnight. I could do with a drink to help keep the cold out.”
“You need a proper home, really,” Catherine said as she sat down, picking up her glass.
“I’ve got one,” Jimmy said with a shrug. “It’s just that I don’t live in it anymore.”
Catherine took a sip of wine. “I mean you need a proper home for yourself. You can’t go on living in that boat. It’s not even a proper boat, just some floating rust bucket that Billy cobbled together when he was half cut and off his face.”
“Don’t talk that way about Billy,” Jimmy said mildly, referring to his oldest friend and one-time bandmate who had died from an alcohol and prescription drug overdose almost three years ago. “If anybody had a good reason to drink, it was him. He went from the brightest, best-looking, most talented bloke I’ve ever known to a shell of himself in less than five years. He could never let go of what he had once been, that’s the worst tragedy of schizophrenia. Everyone stopped seeing him and only saw his illness, and yeah, it did make him pretty weird and hard to be around, what with him thinking he was being hunted by the FBI, but to me he was still Billy. He was still my best mate. But he knew he’d never have the life that everyone else would, never get married and have kids. So he loved that boat instead.” Jimmy paused. “I miss him.”
“I’m sorry,” Catherine said. “I know you do. And it’s a great boat, but it’s not a home, not for you. If paying the mortgage on this place is stopping you from getting a flat or something, then we need to think again. I might be able to manage if we cut down a bit.”
“Cut down on what?” Jimmy asked. “You haven’t got anything to cut down on, Catherine. And it’s not a rust bucket. Billy might have been a drunk, but he was a master craftsman.”
“I just don’t think it’s fair that you should be freezing to death on a canal boat,” Catherine said.
“It is fair,” Jimmy said. “The girls need something constant in their lives. They’ve grown up here, Leila was born here while I played Clapton to her so it would be the first thing she ever heard. I want to keep this place for them. And besides, I’m moaning now but you wait, in the summer that boat’s a little bit of paradise. The chicks really dig it.”
Catherine found herself laughing.
“It’s just that you’re getting on now,” she reminded Jimmy playfully. “You don’t want to be getting arthritis in this weather.”
“Hey, lady,” Jimmy warned her with a grin. “I’m still young. I’ve still got it all ahead of me.”
/> “Have you?” Catherine asked, skeptically.
“ ’Course I have, and so have you.”
“Have I?” Catherine said. “Sometimes I think I don’t want anything new in my life. I think that just the way it is now is enough for me. I love the girls, and you and I are friends now, more or less. Everything’s ordered and calm. If all I had in front of me was fifty more years of the same I’d be happy enough.”
“Happy enough? Happy enough isn’t enough. If it was, then Billy would have kept taking his medication and living half a life and I’d have given up my music years ago and become a postman. I’ve thought I’d quite like the early mornings and the uniform,” Jimmy said, making Catherine smile just as he intended. “Everybody needs to be loved, everybody needs to love someone.”
“And some people need to love everyone,” Catherine added wryly.
“I don’t, though,” Jimmy said, tipping his head back on the sofa and looking at the ceiling. “I don’t love anyone. Not since us. But I know I will love someone again and that someone will love me, because I need that to happen and so do you, it’s what makes us human.”
Catherine wanted to disagree with him but she couldn’t quite bring herself to do it.
“I’d better get going,” Jimmy said after a while, finishing his glass of wine. “If I don’t get the stove lit now I’ll be a block of ice in the morning and frozen corpses hardly ever have number one hits on iTunes. I’ll leave the electric here if you don’t mind. If the damp gets into her she’ll be knackered.”
He kissed Catherine briefly on the lips as she stood up to let him out, and then with his hand on the latch of the door he turned around and looked at her.
“Look, I don’t know why I’m saying this—but try to remember the last time you were really in love, Catherine, the last time your heart burst out of your chest every time you thought about that person. The nights you spent awake just dreaming about what it would feel like to touch them, longing for their arms around you. He hurt you, I know he did, and she let you down and left you alone to cope with everything. But sometimes I think when you buried the hurt and the pain they left you with, you buried a bit of yourself as well. I know it’s none of my business anymore, but I’m only saying you deserve to be loved, so try to remember what it felt like and then maybe, when the time comes, you’ll be able to let it happen again. I want to see you happy.”
Jimmy nodded once and then closed the door carefully behind him so as not to wake the girls.
Catherine tweaked back her curtains and watched him hunched up against the cold as he marched stalwartly toward the canal, his hair whipped by the wind, clutching his guitar by its neck.
Despite everything, he was still the only person on the planet who really knew her, who understood her better than she understood herself.
Five
It had been almost unbearably hot on the day she had met Marc James.
For most of the summer holiday Catherine had been required either to help her mother in the church bookshop she ran or to do a long list of chores at home that Catherine felt sure had been invented to stop her from leaving the house. But occasionally over the six-week break, there would come a day when Catherine could find a few hours for herself and Alison, whose weekend job at the supermarket gave her plenty of free time.
If it rained they’d sit in Alison’s bedroom listening to her Take That CD over and over again, while Alison told elaborate stories of how one day the two of them would meet the band and be whisked off on a romantic world tour with them. Alison always got Robbie, Catherine could have her pick of the rest. But on a sunny day, like the day Catherine had met Marc James, they would go to the park so that Alison could work on her tan while she peered over the top of her sunglasses at any passing boys. Sometimes they’d see other girls from school who’d sit with them a while and gossip about who fancied whom, but that was only if Alison was there. If Catherine was alone the other girls would wave at her and shout hi, but they would never sit down. Catherine just didn’t have that knack for friendship that Alison had, the easy ability to make people want to spend time with her. The older they got the more it puzzled Catherine that Alison wanted to invest so much time in her, maintaining their friendship when it would have been so much easier for her not to. But now that they had known each other so long it seemed foolish to ask. The two of them together, that was just the way it was. Catherine trusted in that.
One day Catherine had been waiting in the park for Alison to make an entrance into her life. When the two girls had reached the age of seventeen, it seemed Alison no longer arrived anywhere on time because she had learned that most people, especially boys, would wait for her almost indefinitely. And that summer, even though Alison had been nursing her own secret crush, she’d started to accumulate boyfriends. Not the kind she used to have—some fleeting romance that would begin at registration and be over by the afternoon break—but dates with real boys to the cinema, McDonald’s, and sometimes even the pub, where Alison would sip a Cinzano Bianco and lemonade.
Catherine had laughed and listened, wide-eyed, to her friend’s detailed descriptions of her first kiss, the first time a boy had put his hand up her top, and how it had taken David Jenkins ages to undo the hook of her bra because his hands had been shaking so much in excitement. It was a change in her friend’s life that was as alien as it was fascinating to Catherine. Her imagination simply could not conceive what it would be like to touch a boy, kiss one, or even hold his hand, so limited was her experience of the opposite sex. All she knew was that ever since Alison had started going out with boys, her lateness increased and once or twice she hadn’t shown at all.
The trouble was, Catherine remembered thinking on that day as she sat, her back against a tree, feeling its rough bark imprinting into her skin through the thin cotton of her dress, she often felt a little bit as if her life wasn’t actually real when Alison wasn’t in it. It was like that riddle about the falling tree in an empty forest and whether it made any sound as it crashed to the ground if no one was there to hear it. When Alison wasn’t there to see her, Catherine felt entirely invisible.
She had closed her eyes briefly and pushed her sunglasses up her nose, tapping her feet as she hummed quietly to herself. And then the sunlight had dimmed behind her eyelids and the skin on her legs cooled as a shadow fell over them.
“Well, it’s about time,” she said easily, pushing her sunglasses into her hair, opening her eyes and expecting to find Alison, her vision momentarily dazzled by the bright light. The shape that loomed over her in the instant it took her to focus was male, it was a boy—no, not a boy. It was a young man.
Catherine judged that he was shorter than her, stocky with muscular arms and a bare chest, dark-haired, and olive-skinned. He was barefoot, holding his T-shirt in one hand and a can of beer in the other. And yet Catherine remembered quite clearly she hadn’t felt intimidated by him. Not even then.
She sat up, pushing her hair off her shoulders, straightening her back a little. She waited.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you jump,” he said as he sat down on the grass, even though Catherine hadn’t jumped. “I’m just so tired. I work nights on the railway line, repairs and maintenance. I should be sleeping right now, but I can’t. It’s too nice outside. I wanted to come out and sit in the sun for a bit, but every time I relax I fall asleep and I can’t do that. I’ll turn the color of your hair and if I miss the start of my shift I’ll get laid off. So I thought I’d talk to you for a bit, if that’s all right. At least while you’re waiting for your friend … boyfriend?” His dark eyes creased as he smiled at her.
“Friend,” Catherine corrected him hastily. For once she was glad Alison was late, because she knew that if her golden friend had been here, this incredible-looking being would not be talking to her. He would not have even seen her.
He sat down on a patch of grass just beyond where the shade of the tree’s canopy ended, the sunlight reflecting off his amber skin.
; Catherine had never seen anything or anyone so beautiful in her whole life. The sight of him made her heart stop in anticipation. His dark hair was cut very short into the nape of his neck, his dark eyes set beneath strong, straight brows, and he had the kind of square jaw that Catherine thought only film stars and male models in razor advertisements had.
“My name’s Marc,” he said, leaning back on his arms so the muscles in his shoulders and biceps stood out in sharp relief. “I’m from Birmingham, I go where the work is and this month the work’s here. That’s pretty much my story. I don’t have any hobbies or many friends. I don’t read books or go to movies. I get up, I go to work, I go home—wherever home is that week. This week it’s here.” He smiled at her again and there was something in his smile Catherine recognized. As impossible as it seemed, he reminded her of herself, the outsider. “There’s this postcard stuck to the bathroom wall in the rooming house I’m staying in of a girl floating in a river. I think she’s supposed to be drowned actually.”
“Ophelia,” Catherine said. “It could be Ophelia, a character from Hamlet. She kills herself because loving Hamlet drives her mad. There’s a famous painting of her by an artist called Millais, he made his model, Elizabeth Siddall, lie in the bath for hours at a time until she became so ill she almost died for real. She was only nineteen, not that much older than me.”
“You know a lot, don’t you?” Marc said, smiling. “You know all of that from me describing one postcard, and pretty badly at that. That’s cool.”
Catherine felt her cheeks color. “It’s just something I’m interested in. I like art history. If I get to go to university, that’s what I’m going to study.”
Marc nodded. “You should. What I was trying to say was that you remind me of the girl in the painting. You’ve got the same incredible red hair and pale skin. She’s a beautiful girl, especially considering she is meant to be dead!”
Another Mother's Life Page 5
