Broken Chords

by Carrie Elks

  Still, at the end of it is a pot of gold. Or what I prefer to call, Sunday lunch.

  On the train, Alex holds Max in his lap, and starts talking to him in gibberish, making Max laugh. A couple of teenage girls sitting on the other side of the carriage eye him up, smiling when the baby giggles and batting their eyelashes whenever Alex kisses him. He doesn’t notice though—he’s too busy playing with his son—and his indifference makes me grin.

  Alex’s mum still lives in his childhood home, on one of the nicer council housing estates in Plaistow. The three-bedroom terrace is well-maintained, mostly thanks to Alex. He keeps a toolbox here now, sick of having to carry it from Shoreditch every time a job needs doing, and I’ve come to terms with the fact that whenever we come here he’ll disappear for a few hours with only a screwdriver and hammer for company. He’s still the man of the house, even though he hasn’t lived here for years.

  I sometimes wonder what it must have been like for Alex growing up here. The middle of three children, he was the only boy in a sea of girls. That’s probably why he finds it so easy to talk to women; it comes naturally. He’s a born flirt, of course. It was the first thing I noticed about him, after the tattoos and the sculpted cheekbones. He smiles and the women come flocking.

  It’s a blessing and a curse.

  The other side effect of growing up in a houseful of women is he’s spoiled rotten. Though he does all the jobs that need doing with a screwdriver, I don’t think his mum has ever let him load the dishwasher. It’s all “sit down, darling, you work hard enough” and “let us girls get you a drink, you deserve a break”. Every time she says it, I try to bite down a smile, knowing he’d never get away with that sort of thing at our flat.

  “You’re here!” Tina—his mum—opens the door, a huge smile spreading across her face. Before either of us can say a word she’s whipped Max out of my arms and is cradling him close. Max nuzzles into her chest, delighted at the soft landing, while I lower my arms, unsure whether to be peeved or delighted at her love for my son.

  “Come on in. Put the kettle on, will you, Lara? Alex, can you take a look at the upstairs toilet, I think there’s something wrong with the flush?” Though she has her back to us as she walks into the living room, we can still hear every word.

  Alex starts to laugh at my appalled expression. “Go and put the kettle on, there’s a good wife.”

  “Piss off, plumber boy.” My voice is low. His yelp when I pinch his arm isn’t.

  “Are you all right?” Tina seems naturally attuned to her son’s cries, even though he’s twenty-nine. I wonder if I’ll end up that way when Max is older.

  “Where’re the girls?” Alex asks, opening the cupboard under the stairs and pulling out his toolbox.

  “Andrea’s on her way. She needed to get some petrol. And Amy’s upstairs on the laptop.”

  Tina had the novel idea of naming all her kids with the letter ‘A’. That was fine for Andrea, and even for Alex. Poor Amy drew the short straw, having spent most of her life trying to escape from her colourful name, ‘Amethyst’. She hasn’t let Tina forget about it.

  “Is she doing coursework?” I ask. At twenty-two, Amy is the youngest of the three. The brightest, too, at least academically. Though she left school at sixteen and messed around for three years, she ended up going back to college, taking her ‘A’ levels a couple of years late. Now she’s at the local University in Stratford, studying Business. To say the whole family is proud of her is an understatement.

  “She’s always doing coursework,” Tina grumbles. Max makes a grab at her bleached-blonde hair, and she pulls away, tutting at him. “That kid never gets out. Her friends have given up asking.”

  “It isn’t easy studying for a degree,” I offer gently. I know how hard it is; having spent three years at York. Alex loves the fact I’m an English graduate, loves even more he’s my ‘bit of rough’, at least in his words.

  “Yes, but all work and no play makes Amy a dull girl.”

  “Oy, I heard that.” Amy walks into the room, glaring at her mum. She smiles when she sees me, though. We’ve always got on well, from the first time we met when she was only seventeen. That was in her wild days, when she was spending way too much time at bars and pubs, going out with different men every night. Strange to think how different she is now.

  “Good. You need to get out more.”

  “I’m too busy. And anyway, you used to nag me all the time for going out too much. Now I don’t go out enough. I can’t bloody win.”

  “Language.” That comes from Alex. It makes me laugh because he has the dirtiest mouth I know.

  “Fuck off,” Amy replies.

  When Alex’s older sister, Andrea, arrives, muttering about road works and traffic jams and the cost of petrol, Tina hands Max back to me and the two of them disappear into the kitchen to finish cooking the roast. Alex is upstairs, elbows deep in the toilet, leaving Amy and me in the living room.

  “Can I have a cuddle?” She reaches out for Max, and I place him in her arms. “God, he’s getting so big. Is he talking yet?”

  I laugh. Being the youngest, she has no idea about developmental milestones. Nor did I at her age. “Nah, not for a while yet.”

  “Or ever if you’re lucky. Alex talks enough for all of you.”

  “True that.” I smile when Max pulls at her ink-black hair, and it comes free from the perfect bun on the back of her head.

  “Did you know Einstein didn’t talk until he was five?” She nuzzles close to Max, making him giggle. “They say late talkers turn out to be geniuses.”

  “When did you start talking?”

  “Dunno. Whenever it was that Andie and Alex let me get a word in edgewise.”

  She has a point. The Cartwrights are a family of talkers. The first time I came to visit, I was shocked by how noisy they all were. Having grown up in a quiet home in Dorset, I wasn’t used to the cacophony.

  “How’s the course going, anyway?”

  “All right. I’m applying for placements for next year. Fingers crossed I get something good.”

  “Where have you applied?”

  “All the usual places. Banks, consultancies. I even applied for a couple of non-profits. Some of the other students are getting interviews already, but I’ve not heard anything yet.”

  “How long is it for?”

  “A year. Then it’s back to University for the final throes.” She smiles weakly. “And please don’t ask me what I’m going to do after that because I’ve no idea.”

  “Isn’t that what the placement’s for? To give you some ideas?”

  Her eyes light up when she smiles and nods. “You get it. If only Mum understood. She can’t understand why I’m spending four years studying and I don’t know what I want to do with it.”

  “She’s proud of you. They all are.”

  “They’ve got a funny way of showing it.”

  The door to the living room opens. “Funny way of showing what?” Alex sits on the chair next to me, slinging his arm around my shoulders.

  “Nothing.” Amy looks down, suddenly fascinated by Max. I try to hide my smile. Like the rest of them, she idolises Alex, can’t stand for him to think badly of her. Not that he ever would; I know for a fact he adores her right back.

  This is just how they are. They are loud, used to sharing their emotions, never whispering when they could shout. They’re a unit, they stick together, protect each other fiercely.

  Exactly how a family should be.

  * * *

  When people meet me now, they find it difficult to believe I used to be a hard-nosed career girl. For four years I worked in the City for GMSilver, a mid-sized investment bank dealing in securities and derivatives. It seemed the natural transition back then, for a girl with a first-class degree. When they offered me the job I didn’t hesitate to say yes, my eyes full of pound signs and thoughts of glamour.

  And it was glamorous, or at least some of it was, for a time. Along with the other interns they to
ok on each year, I worked my arse off, arriving in the office at around seven in the morning and often staying until ten at night. We used to have a game, the other interns and I, where we’d try to be the last one to send an email in the evening. Some of them even took to hiding in the toilets so we’d think they’d gone home, waiting until everyone else had left to hit the final ‘send’ button. Whoever won that week didn’t have to buy any drinks on Friday night.

  Of course, we drank a lot on Friday nights. Hedonistic evenings full of alcohol, white powder and casual sex. It was incestuous, too; we tended to keep to our small band of interns, maybe twenty or so, hooking up with different partners each week, never mistaking sex for anything more than the basest of releases.

  One Friday we were celebrating landing a major deal. One of the partners had given us his Black Amex card, and we were using it to the full. Bottles of champagne were succeeded by vintage Macallan, which I pretended to like because it was so expensive. When the bar closed for the night, we were all still too amped to go home, not ready to pair off. Instead, we headed for a seedy club west of Wapping, giggling at our bravery, smiling because we were ‘slumming it’.

  The club wasn’t seedy as much as it was industrial. In the basement of an old, Victorian building, it was all red brick and exposed pipework. Among the crowd inside—mostly young and hipsteresque—there wasn’t a business suit or a shift dress to be seen. We stood out like sore thumbs.

  Yet, there was something about it that called to me. By that point I was already feeling the strain of working seventy-plus hours a week. And though I didn’t realise it then, now I understand I was yearning for something deeper than ten more years of the same.

  After paying the cover charge and getting our hands stamped, we joined the people clustered around the stage, entranced by the performance going on in front of them. It wasn’t only that the band were good—although they were—but they had charisma leaking out of their pores, clinging onto the notes as they danced through the air.

  It was impossible to do anything but watch, listen, and dance.

  At some point I lost my jacket. Though it had cost me the best part of three hundred quid, I didn’t care; I was too excited, too alive, too blissed-out to bother. Instead, I let myself be dragged forward by the crowd, riding the wave of their surge, trying to avoid being pulled under. When the band finished their song, the movement stopped, and I found myself a few heads away from the front of the stage.

  That’s when I saw him.

  Jet black hair. A T-shirt that looked sprayed onto his muscled torso. Tattoos that seemed to cover every single part of his body. He was the complete opposite of every boyfriend I’d had. The clean-cut city types who hardly knew how to kiss.

  I was entranced. Maybe it was the buzz of the alcohol, or the lingering victory of our earlier deal, but when he finally raised his head, glancing up from his guitar, I didn’t look away.

  Neither did he.

  Though that moment only lasted for a few seconds, half a minute at the most, it was the most powerful thing that ever happened to me. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t move, I couldn’t feel my heart beat. All I could do was stare at this glorious, sweaty, messed-up guy, and pray he wouldn’t look away.

  People say that some moments are life-changing, but seeing Alex that night was more revolutionary than that. He transformed me completely, nucleus by nucleus, until my old life was little more than a discarded snakeskin left drying in the desert sun. When he mouthed two words to me, all I could do was nod, finally sucking in a breath, still failing to do anything but look at him.

  “Stay there.”

  That was all he said. That was all I wanted to do. So I stood, and I stayed, and I watched as Fear of Flying finished their set, all thoughts of multi-million pound deals wiped clean from my brain.

  3

  Two days after our trip to Plaistow, the sun is beating fiercely down as I emerge from the tube station and the sudden brightness is a shock after the dull gloom of the underground. I blink a couple of times to acclimatise, and the world appears before me in bleached-out colour. When I reach the street, I stand for a minute, watching the blur of people as they pass by, clasping bags, Styrofoam cups of coffee, all with a look of determination on their faces.

  They have somewhere to go. So do I, but first I need to catch my breath.

  I haven't been to work for nearly six months, and though I've brought Max into the clinic to show him off, this time it's different as I walk through the doors. My arms are empty, my heart is full, and my baby is being looked after by a stranger.

  It's harder than I thought it would be. Everything is the same here; the harassed receptionist, the aroma of antiseptic that clings to the dull, tiled floor, the posters whose corners are peeling off the wall. They contain warnings about substance abuse and drug addiction, adverts for group therapy and various medications.

  It's only been two hours and I already miss Max desperately. He cried when I left him at the nursery, his tiny fists rubbing at his red eyes, his bottom lip sticking out as he hiccoughed and sobbed. And even though the carer promised me he would stop as soon as I walked out, I could still hear his screams reverberating in my mind as I walked up the street.

  I'm a bad mother and a bad employee. I can't even imagine counselling anybody when I'm hardly able to think straight.

  “Hey, you’re early. Want a cuppa?” Elaine is my supervisor at the clinic. When I’m back here full-time, we’ll meet weekly to discuss my caseload, for me to share my worries, my fears. For now, though, our catch-up consists of a quick hello and occasional gossip, while I visit the clinic for half a day. I’ll only have a couple of clients assigned to me when I return and I suspect they’ve given me the simple cases to ease me back into the swing of things. One of them is an ex-cocaine user who has long been sober, and another is a parent of a seventeen-year-old boy who has been using crack. Though sad, their stories aren’t heart wrenching. Not yet.

  “I’d love a coffee, please.” With the sleepless nights I’ve had, tea is for wimps. “How’s everything?”

  “Same old stuff, really. Emergency calls, relapsing patients. Poppy is doing brilliantly at arranging the outreach classes.”

  Poppy is my friend Beth’s replacement, as Beth has moved to Brighton to start a new life. Though she seems a nice girl, somehow we don’t gel as Beth and I did. Which is a shame, because I could do with some new friends.

  Elaine finishes making the coffees, throwing the teaspoons in the dishwasher and wiping down the sides. I try not to laugh at her meticulousness; we both know the place is going to look like a stink hole by lunchtime. “There you go. One coffee, black, no sugar. Is that right?”

  “It’s what I need,” I say grimly, taking the cup and letting the bitter fluid burn my lips. “If I’m going to stay awake for the next eight hours.”

  My office is on the first floor, at the top of a long flight of stairs. Though it’s been used occasionally during my maternity leave, there’s still an aroma of staleness to it when I open the door. A light covering of dust lies on top of my textbooks—where I haven’t pulled them out at all in the past six months. It feels as if I’m walking into Miss Havisham's dining room.

  Even my chair seems odd. Harder than I remember, stiffer when I try to spin. I sit at my desk and drum my fingers on the table. I should check my emails, re-read some case notes, but all I really want is a hug from my best friend.

  But she isn't here.

  I met Beth nearly five years ago, when she started working at the clinic. I can still remember her first day, the way her eyes widened as I showed her around, the dip of her lip as I explained the range of abuse we dealt with. Back then she was still recovering from the drug-related death of her friend, a death she blamed herself for. It took her years to accept it was a tragic accident, to forgive herself for not being there when he died.

  I suppose I saw something of myself in her. Two years earlier, I'd suffered my own tragedy when my mum died, and like
Beth I'd found it difficult to pull myself out of my misery. If it hadn't been for Alex, I may never have succeeded. Maybe that's why we became friends. She liked my strength, and I knew she could find her own. We became so close, she even moved in with us for a while when she had nowhere else to go, and I loved the way we would all talk into the night. The way Alex liked her as much as I did.

  Likes her. She's not dead. Just moved away.

  I miss her so much. I know she's happy, living in Brighton with her lovely boyfriend and foster daughter, but I'm feeling nostalgic for the days when we used to escape from the clinic at lunch time, stuffing our faces with greasy chips and a cold glass of white wine. When responsibility was a four-letter word.

  That's why I decide to call her. I pull out my iPhone and select her number, and she answers after a couple of rings.

  “Hey, gorgeous.”

  “Hey, yourself.” For the first time since I left Max at the nursery, a smile threatens at my lips. “How's life in the sticks?”

  A mock sigh. “I told you, Brighton's where it's at. You need to move here immediately.” I can hear a voice in the background. Her boyfriend Niall, maybe? “So what's up, buttercup?”

  She's so much more playful since she started seeing Niall. I love the way he's helped her become the person she wants to be. The way she's turned into such a kind, wise mum to Allegra, her eight-year-old foster daughter.

  “I'm at the clinic. I miss you.” And Max, I add silently.

  “What are you doing there? I didn't think you were going back until next month.”

  “It’s my ‘Keeping in touch’ day. They're reacclimatising me, like a plant that needs to be moved. I'm hoping they might be able to give me a brain transplant, too.”

  “Still getting no sleep?” she asks, sympathetically.

  “Max woke up three times last night. I can't even imagine how I'm going to cope when I'm working full-time.”

  She clucks. “You'll cope. That's what you do. And anyway, isn't Alex helping?”