Hubble Bubble

by Jane Lovering

  Was the man I wanted.

  I opened all the windows, despite the chilly air, trying to get the breeze to drive all traces of Aiden out of the house. The living room still smelled of Chinese takeaway and burned-down candles, there was a foil dish smooshed into a flying-saucer shape and dumped on top of the TV and a forgotten single sock behind the sofa. I dropped it all into the kitchen bin, fetched clean laundry from the cupboard in the hall – Aiden had put all the bedding on a hot wash cycle – and remade the bed. The place felt like mine again. Quiet, yes, after the frantic activities of today, no tiny babies crying, no heavy footsteps thumping up and down the stairs, no shouts for tea from the kitchen. But mine. The way I liked it. Silent. Empty.

  Lonely.

  I did some work on my laptop for a while. The local weather had put anyone off wanting any location work from me lately, so I just had paperwork to catch up on and a company in Bath wanting a large ‘typically Northern’ house for some grim drama they were casting. I found myself staring at the screen without registering the words I’d typed on it. Seeing, behind the Word document, a kind of glowing after-image of Kai’s face, that yellow-eyed focussed intensity that he’d had when he’d asked me to stay. The serious, slow way he looked at me, as though he was waiting for me to come to some realisation, his questions and observations about my life and friendships … About Nick.

  What did he see when he looked at Nick and I? Devoted sister, caring for her brother? Or something else, something darker – something I wouldn’t even let myself think, except sometimes, when it snuck through and had to be excised from my brain like a bad idea?

  I could see my own face now, words shining through my cheeks and eyes and highlighting my skin. Was he right? Did he know how I really felt, underneath it all? Why I kept everyone at arms’ length? Not because I couldn’t make room for them in my heart, but because I was afraid that they would see through my caring and into the guilt that lay inside, that they might ask the question I was terrified even to think to myself – why, exactly, did I do it?

  I stared out of the window as my mind cantered round and round the realisations. Outside, in the late dark, the snow had turned to rain and the thaw was in progress, accompanied by the meltwater drip from gutters and the slushy swish of tyres on the road.

  There was a tap on my front door. ‘Holly?’

  I hesitated for a second as my thoughts overlapped with reality, but then realised that I couldn’t make my brother suffer for my introspection. ‘Hi Nicky.’ I let him in. ‘You don’t often get all the way down here.’ Nicholas’s flat was at the top of town in a dingy area where they didn’t mind his rent money being provided by the Benefits agency.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you.’ He looked around. ‘And have you got any food?’

  ‘Dual-purpose visit then.’ I ransacked the freezer and put two pizzas in the oven. ‘What did you want to talk about?’

  ‘They were right, you know.’

  ‘Who were? Not the voices again, I’ve told you, voices in your head very rarely have good ideas.’

  ‘Cerys and Kai. They were right about me getting dependent on you, not looking after myself because I knew you’d sort me out.’

  ‘Okay.’ I said slowly. To give my hands something to do, I laid the table.

  ‘So I’ve decided to leave.’

  I stopped, one hand still holding forks. ‘You’ve what? Where would you go?’ And then the horrible, sick-making spurt of relief, quickly covered by the plaster of despair, and if you go, what do I have left?

  ‘Look, Holl. I hate my life.’ Nick leaned over the back of the sofa, it made him look like a fey male model. ‘I’ve pretty well resigned myself to never being able to get a proper job round here. I can’t get away from myself, I’ll always be Mrs Grey’s difficult son, the one with the problems. If I go somewhere else I can start again.’

  ‘But, I repeat, where would you go?’

  ‘Peterborough.’

  ‘Peter …’ My voice was all squeaky. ‘What, you mean with Cerys?’

  ‘Yeah. We’ve been talking. On Facebook. She’s got a three-bedroomed flat, she needs a bit of help with the twins, she said I could stay with her in exchange for a bit of mother’s helping and doing housework and stuff like that. Maybe get a proper job eventually.’

  ‘But …’ I waved a fork weakly, ‘your meds?’

  ‘They have pharmacies in Peterborough. Doctors too. But, like you said, these new meds seem to be working out for me. I know I … up in Scotland things got a bit strange, but I didn’t take my stuff then.’

  ‘I’m just amazed that, as the new mother of twins, Cerys has had the time for all this chatting and hanging around on social media,’ I said, to distract him from another monologue on how, sometimes, he got the feeling that his drugs did nothing more than paralyse him and blunt his feelings. I’d sat through that explanation more times than I cared to remember.

  ‘Think Kai had the babies. He’s been staring at them a lot, she says. But, listen Holl. Things Cerys said make sense. About sometimes everyone needing a bit of help and nothing to be ashamed about and all that. And that all made me realise … I used to think that the meds evened me out too much, took off my edge, but now I know they make life easier for me. I like myself more when I’m on them. I won’t not take them again, Holl, I promise.’

  ‘Oh.’ It was all I could say. I could smell burning cheese.

  ‘So, Kai’s driving us down in a few days, when Cerys has got used to the twins. Thought I’d better tell you.’

  ‘Are you and Cerys …?’

  Nick grinned a wicked grin. It was such a ‘guy’ grin I had to smile back. I didn’t think I’d ever seen him do that before. ‘You’ve got a mucky mind, Holly Grey. Cerys and I are just mates. Friends.’ He shot me a furtive look. ‘Like you and Kai. No sex please, we’re too busy being busy.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Aw, come on. You stand a much better chance with Kai if I’m not around. I know he’s not a wanker, he’s a nice bloke, and … you can give him your full attention when you’re not worrying about me.’

  ‘And you think I won’t worry about you in Peterborough? It’s not the Other Side, Nicky, it’s only a hundred miles or so away.’

  ‘Yeah. Are we eating now? Those pizzas smell funny.’

  I’d bent down to the oven when a thought struck me. ‘Oh my God. Nick.’

  ‘I told you they smelled funny.’

  ‘No. I … you and Cerys. Remember your wish? The one that I had to make for you when we did the spell?’

  ‘Think so, yes.’

  ‘You wanted a girlfriend. With enormous tits.’ We stared at one another, then started to laugh. ‘Well feeding twins is better than implants. And she’s a friend who happens to be a girl.’

  ‘I got my wish. And what about you, what did you wish for?’

  ‘I don’t even want to think about it right now.’ I plonked the pizzas onto the table.

  ‘Kai really likes you.’ Ignoring the cutlery, Nick picked up his slice of pizza in his fingers. ‘I’ve heard him talking to Cerys about you. Like he was really fond of you. And you like him, don’t you? Your eyes go all big when you look at him. And you stare at his groin a lot.’

  ‘He’s about nine foot tall, his groin is the only bit I can see without binoculars.’ I tore a massive bit of pizza off to cover my embarrassed confusion.

  ‘I’m going to miss you.’

  And I’m looking into a big blank space where you’ve been for all those years. ‘Yeah, well I’ll miss you too.’

  ‘No you won’t. You’ll be able to have a proper life, not always have to be looking after me. Like Cerys said, I’m thirty-two, you shouldn’t have to be looking after me, I can look after myself.’

  ‘No you can’t. Look at that time with the pigeons.’

  ‘No, I can. I should. I’ve done too much leaning, too much letting you cope when I should have been trying to manage everything myself. I know I’m n
ot normal, that my mind doesn’t work the same way as other people and that I have to be careful and take the meds and not get overtired … but I still screw up, Holl, because I know you’ll pick up the pieces. If I go to Peterborough – well, I can’t lean on Cerys, she’s got her hands full, she will need me. I think that’s what I need most, Holl, to be useful rather than just the weird tit who talks to walls.’

  He was right. Of course he was. It was just that … I’d spent the last twenty years looking after Nick. I wasn’t sure I knew how to stop.

  We finished the pizza and he went back to his flat to start packing up his things. Since his things consisted of a duvet and pillow, two cardboard boxes of clothes and a stuffed badger that he’d found on a skip and refused to be apart from, I hardly thought it would take the next few days but, hey. I’d stopped interfering. And I couldn’t believe, really and truly that it could be that simple. That he could just decide to go, pack up, and leave, this man who’d needed me to remind him to change his underwear and brush his teeth until he was twenty-five.

  I slept long and deeply, uninterrupted by a self-absorbed film director with a permanent erection. So many women, I mused, waking up next morning refreshed and unsticky, would have killed for a man like Aiden. I would have ended up killing Aiden.

  I got dressed and got in the hire car that I was going to use while my car sat in the garage and got poked. A lot of men in boiler suits had sucked their teeth at it already, and come to what I was going to call an overall consensus that the axle was snapped. The hire car was smaller than my Renault but newer and didn’t have crisp packets all over the floor. I drove it across to Barndale on the squishily slushed-over roads, while the rain continued to wash at the edges of the snow, eroding it back gradually into lumps that looked like half-sucked sweets, discarded along the margins, and the banks of ploughed snow wore down to weirdly topiarised shapes, sculpted by the running water.

  I struggled and waded up the hill like a simple, if somewhat masochistic, early morning sightseer. It was, after all, a lovely day. The dawn sky was Renaissance blue in the gaps between the rain clouds and apart from the fact that the ground was covered in a layer of rapidly liquidising snow, it could have been summer. Only cold, of course. Leaves, curled like ammonites, blew across the hilltop, somewhere a dog barked and a sheep coughed. Rooks cleared their throats overhead, their finger-wings combing the sky and the air was as clear as a mirror.

  Hands in pockets, I sauntered to the bare hilltop. The snow still lay thickly up here, and footprints and tyreprints were translucent trails nibbled into it, showing where someone had been creeping around since we’d been up here performing psychological warfare on our sanity. The site of our ritual was bare, though, just a blank, white sheet of virgin snow which had blown around, so the surface was only inches deep, but drifts sulked around the trees like onlookers driven back from a juicy accident. Trying to look innocent and just-out-for-a-walk, I began to stomp and rake through the snow with my boots, stirring the smooth surface into a battlefield of treadmarks and kicked-up piles.

  The first candle turned up surprisingly easily. With an almost invisibly fast glance around to make sure no one was spying, I bent down and dug it out of its snow hole. It froze onto my skin, hard and oily like a dead man’s finger and I shoved it quickly into my pocket with a shiver. One down, three to go.

  I kicked snow innocently for a bit, getting more vicious as I became more frustrated. Eventually I was sending torrents of snow from each boot cascading up over my head and I nearly sprained my ankle twice from kicking unexpected small rocks. I must have looked like the video-nasty version of Walking in a Winter Wonderland as I brutally belted another footfull of snow which fell in a frozen shower onto my head and shoulders. ‘Bloody bloody things, where are you?’ I muttered.

  ‘They’re here.’ A voice from near the treeline made me jump. ‘If it’s these that you’re looking for.’

  Leaning against a tree and swinging the three remaining candles from one hand, stood a man. Something about his voice and arrogant stance were familiar.

  ‘Can I have them, please?’ I moved towards him, down off the shoulder of the hill and towards the wood, holding out my hand. ‘They belong to a friend.’

  ‘I know.’ The man came properly into view. He was quite attractive, trendily long-haired and nicely shaped under an unimpressive grey duffel coat. ‘The witch.’

  Then I recognised him, but of course by then it was too late to back up. Of course, he would have known we’d come back for the evidence … He must have taken the candles almost as soon as we’d gone off the hill, and the snow had covered his tracks. ‘You’re the guy with the gun from the other day.’

  An acquiescent tip of the head. ‘Which, I think you’ll notice, I never fired.’ His accent wasn’t local, more southern. Well spoken but without the braying edge of the Ginge.

  ‘Bully for you.’ My teeth were clenched so I’m not sure he heard me, which was probably just as well. ‘Can I have my candles now, please?’

  ‘No.’ Now the voice did have an edge. I think it might have been menace, but I’d never really been menaced before, so I wasn’t sure. It could, of course, have been outright rudeness.

  ‘But they’re mine.’

  ‘Now, let me see. If I give you the candles, you’ll … hmm … what would I do? Well, I’d probably go round and blow the living hell out of anyone who’d got in my way, but then you’re not me, are you? No, I think, if I held these’—he swung the candles again—‘and if I were a woman, convinced of my utter rightness and permission to behave as I wanted, I would go to the police. Tell them that some nasty men scared me.’ He put on a stupid, simpering voice for the last bit. ‘And there was me and my black girlfriend, out for an innocent stroll. Am I getting warm?’ He raised his eyebrows and I fought my face not to let it react. ‘And then the plods would be stomping around, asking stupid questions, getting no closer to the real truth of the matter which is,’ he lowered his voice and now the menace was unmistakable, even to me, ‘that some bitches were playing with Satan on the hill. Dancing with the Devil. Conjuring evil spirits with the use of blood and offerings.’

  ‘That’s bollocks!’

  ‘No. That’s women for you. All tits and lies.’ He moved away from the tree, towards me. I didn’t know what to do, I was on the rising ground of the slope so he had to move uphill to get to me, but I didn’t think I could move fast enough to get away on the snow-packed ground. He was wearing big tyre-treaded boots and I’d only got wellies on. Leopard print ones. ‘And you did do witchcraft.’

  ‘It’s not witchcraft. It’s a bunch of women playing. Pretending.’ Despite myself I took half a step back.

  ‘So you didn’t do spells then?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Drinking the liquid from the cauldron? What was that, just having a nice brew up were you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I seized on this. ‘It was tea. We came out for a picnic.’

  ‘In November? In the dark?’ He pretended to shake a leg. ‘Jingle jingle, my darling. Try again. Because I’ve got pictures, love, photos of the candles with the blood and everything, and pictures of you sweet little girlies sitting there doing your thing with them.’

  Now my palms had started to sweat and I could feel my heart rising up in my throat. ‘It’s a free country,’ I started again, but he made a quick jump across the snow and grabbed my arm so suddenly that I couldn’t speak any more.

  ‘No, it’s not a free country. At least, this part here is our country, and it most certainly is not free for lesbian sluts to writhe around in, copulating with the forces of Hell.’

  I almost laughed then, at the overblown ridiculousness of his hatred. Vivienne and copulating with the forces of Hell were not compatible images. But his hand was hard on my arm, I could feel each individual finger even through my multitude of sweaters and my good coat. ‘What if we promise not to do it again?’ I asked, my voice smaller than I liked.

  ‘Yeah, ’cause you can al
ways take the word of Satan’s whores.’ He began to walk now, dragging me backwards across the hard packed snow.

  ‘What are you doing? I’m not going anywhere with you!’ I skittered and wheeled alongside him, struggling for purchase but my boots had only nylon soles and slid unprotestingly across the wet surface. ‘You can’t do this.’

  He inclined his head downwards. ‘Think I can, darling.’ He nodded again. ‘This gives me permission to do pretty much whatever I want right now,’ and I saw the metal sheen and grip of a hand gun, jutting from his pocket like a lethal erection.

  ‘What … where are you taking me?’ I tried to dig my heels in but my feet just slipped out from underneath me and his crocodile-jawed grip got tighter on my arm as he used it to hold me up.

  ‘Putting you somewhere. Somewhere you’ll be safe until I come back for you.’ Now he stopped walking but kept pulling until I was dragged right up against him. ‘I’ve got uses for you yet.’ His spare hand came into view, gun casually between his fingers as though it was nothing more than an accessory. He ran his thumb over the barrel like you might stroke the palm of a sinisterly familiar hand.

  I started to struggle, yanking back against his hold on my arm. I could smell his body, his hair, an age-old cigarette on his breath. I tried not to notice, not to feel the threat of the swelling in his groin or the insolently possessive way he put the gun barrel under my jaw and tipped my face up to force me to look him in the eye. I couldn’t breathe now past the terror tightening my airways as he forced my body to turn slowly in front of him and squealed as I felt the gun drop, his hand move across my body, dipping and diving, until he increased his grip with a jerk that almost broke my arm. ‘Shut up. I’m just looking for … ah, there we are.’ My mobile appeared from my pocket for a second and then vanished into the depths of his clothing.