After Everything

by Suellen Dainty

  ‘You know,’ said Sandy. ‘About the thing, the accident. She keeps nagging me about it.’

  Jeremy appeared at the door. Although his sleeves were rolled up and his collar was unbuttoned, he looked alert and formal as if about to address a board meeting.

  ‘Do you think that would help you?’ he asked, handing Sandy a small porcelain cup. ‘See what you think of this blend. Could be my best yet.’ Jeremy sniffed his own cup and swallowed the coffee in one gulp. ‘Did you know coffee starts to lose flavour fifteen seconds after extraction?

  ‘I know Tim can’t wait for you to be in therapy,’ Jeremy continued, ‘or rooms or whatever they call it. I think he’s spoken to Peter about it. But is it for you?’

  Sandy tried to ignore the lick of paranoia, then succumbed to it. Clearly the three of them had been discussing the mess of his life and what should be done. They’d probably consulted Penny as well, Skyping each other in four-way conversations about his drinking, debts and general incompetence.

  He didn’t want to think about any of that. His actions that afternoon had taken on the quality of a dream. Sitting in Jeremy’s capacious armchair, watching the sun on the water, it seemed that someone else had walked into the path of an oncoming car and that nothing had actually happened to him, Sandy Ellison. He had his life back. Granted, it was not a life many others would covet. But it was all he knew.

  Jeremy had disappeared into the bedroom. There was a clatter of coathangers and a whooshing noise of a jacket being shaken.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Sandy called out. ‘Emily is very insistent though, and thorough. I told her I’ve stopped drinking, that I’m feeling good, but she won’t give up. She’s told me where to go and when, although how she worked all that out from a small town in northern India is a mystery.’

  ‘Why don’t you think on it for a while,’ said Jeremy emerging from the bedroom, jacket buttoned, ready for another busy and productive day. ‘Got to go, late already.’ They left the boat together. Jeremy had a car waiting for him. The driver scurried around to open the door, and gestured to the bottle of water and the stack of newspapers on the seat beside him. Sandy waved him away and turned for home.

  Later that day, mostly out of boredom, he rang the number Emily had given him and found himself agreeing to join a self-help group of people who had attempted suicide. The meetings were held on Wednesday evenings, in a church hall near Clapham Junction. On the way to his first meeting, sitting on the bus, Sandy imagined an ominous half-moon of plastic chairs and a therapist ringleader urging everyone on to messy public confessions. He was dreading it, but part of him wanted to please his daughter. He thought of the men on the common, with their buggies and their babies tucked up inside. They would know their children so much better than he knew Emily and Matthew.

  The hall was hard to find as it was badly lit and surrounded by a tall beech hedge. Sandy pushed through the squeaky gate. In front of him was an unkempt garden with the last snowdrops drooping from the day’s rain. He lit a cigarette and smoked it in the shadow of the hedge. When he could delay no longer, he walked into the hall. A man about his own age, with a full grizzled beard, was ambling up and down, elbows crossed. Three teenage girls and one boy, about Matthew’s age, were stacking yoga mats to one side. They looked so young, like children.

  ‘Hey, I’m Imogen,’ said a girl with spiky hair. ‘You timed your entry well. We’ve just finished setting up. Although I don’t get why those yoga women can’t stack their own mats.’ She sprawled on a couple of long sofas surrounded by a group of armchairs, and began scratching horizontal red weals on the inside of her wrist. Sandy winced and looked away. The boy and the other two girls flung the last of the mats to one side and flopped down. The man with the beard took up a position near the window, with his back to the group. Sandy smiled in what he hoped was a friendly way and approached the sofa. They were talking about music.

  ‘Have you listened to After the Gold Rush?’ asked the boy. ‘It’s just ridiculous it’s so good. The first time I heard it, I realised how many people had straight out copied him.’

  ‘I feel that way about Janis Joplin,’ said Imogen. ‘Same same but different.’

  Sandy couldn’t help himself. ‘Hey guys,’ he laughed. ‘That’s my music, old people’s tunes. Neil Young is even more ancient than me. Don’t you want your own music?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ said the boy. ‘But sometimes your music is better. Oh, I’m Duncan.’

  Sandy nodded. ‘I’m Sandy.’

  The two girls mumbled something. A man of about forty rushed through a side entrance and joined them. With a cheery Australian accent, redolent of sun and a commendable self-esteem, he introduced himself as Justin.

  ‘It’s Sandy, isn’t it? We spoke on the phone,’ he said, shaking hands with a firm, almost painful grip. ‘We only need first names here.’

  The week before, Emily had emailed him that travelling through India was like watching a Michael Palin documentary, except that she could smell toilets and dirt and spices all at once. He now knew what she meant. Group therapy was like everything he’d ever read about or seen on television. It was both familiar and unreal. He wouldn’t have been surprised if there were tripod marks on the floor and some over-educated git with his underpants hanging out of his trousers waltzed in and shouted, ‘Cut!’ or ‘Action’.

  There was an element of performance in the room. He imagined Imogen and the others preparing their lines before they spoke, the stage fright before the public confession. What would he say when it was his turn? That he drank too much but didn’t consider himself an alcoholic, although his friends and family probably did. That he had no memory of what happened that afternoon other than a desire for oblivion. That his life was a fog of unpaid bills and occasional bailiffs and that he subsisted on meagre royalties from a string of largely forgotten pop songs. That he didn’t bother listening to music anymore or trying to compose it, that he missed Penny and his children more than he thought was possible, and that more than a year after the divorce he could not bring himself to refer to Penny as his ex-wife.

  ‘Sandy?’ Justin called him to attention. ‘I’d like to start this evening with an exercise that I hope will allow everyone to trust each other. It’s very simple. Just stand up, in a circle and hold hands. Lean into each other, feel the support you can give each other. Let yourself go.’

  What a load of horseshit, thought Sandy as he got to his feet. What was the point? If you let yourself go, you might never find yourself again; the part of yourself that you chose to recognise anyway. The rest of you, whatever and wherever that was, might pack its bags and leave home for good. He had a bizarre image of bits of himself fleeing down an unnamed road, desperate to escape the flawed housing of his psyche for a cheery refurbished des res.

  No one else seemed to think it odd for a group of people not known to each other to stand inside a church hall on a chilly late spring evening and hold hands. ‘What the hell,’ Sandy muttered to himself. He shut his eyes and leaned forward. There was an alarming sense of vertigo in the split second between leaning and someone supporting him. But Duncan beside him was surprisingly strong and held him steady. It was all about trust, Justin told them; trust in yourself and others.

  ‘I’m not here to tell you everything is going to be fine,’ said Justin. ‘I’m not that big on the word fine. A lot of people say they’re fine and it means something very different.’

  Sandy wanted to hold up his hand as if he were back in the classroom. Yes sir, he knew the meaning of fine. Only recently one of his oldest friends had told him. Fine means Fucked-up! Insecure! Neurotic! And Emotional! Somehow this new interpretation of a previously anodyne word had entered the universal vocabulary, like twittersphere, mani-pedi or bestie. As usual, he hadn’t noticed. But now he was in the loop at last.

  After coffee, Imogen sat next to Sandy and began talking about cutting herself. Sometimes, she said, she sliced her skin just above a vein and played with it. She’d imagine
the blood oozing from the safety of its blue casing. It made her feel powerful and alive. It felt so good she wasn’t able to stop.

  ‘Why did you start?’ he asked, repelled and intrigued all at once. ‘What made you think of such a thing?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ she replied, with a funny small shrug. ‘Lots of my friends do it. Not together, though. I always do it on my own. Sometimes I feel like I’m floating through the sky, looking down. It feels good to be so high above myself and everything. Get away from all the shit. And then I couldn’t stop.’

  He thought of Emily. How brave and confident his daughter always appeared, how sensible and sober. Emily might have been beset by grim fears too. But he wouldn’t have known, because he never asked.

  Parenthood was another thing that had changed without him being aware of it. He had no recollection of ever spending any time alone with Matthew or Emily, of going to their schools or reading them stories. If he’d thought about it at all, which he rarely did, he would have told himself that his job was to provide money and Penny’s job was to look after the children. Most men would have said the same. Work sucked up time and energy. Families mattered when you were older, when you had time to think properly, when it was too late.

  Smoking was banned inside the hall, so he and Imogen went outside for a cigarette. Yellow light played on the lawn between the hall and the church. Through the light mist he saw the faint indentations of animal tracks in the grass. Cats or foxes following a familiar route to food or shelter in the hedge. The nights were still cold and he shivered in his coat, wondering why Imogen was wearing a T-shirt.

  He finished the cigarette quickly and lit another. Imogen’s confidences, given so freely, made him anxious. Every social group had its unwritten commandments. Disclosure was high on the list here. Sandy dreaded the evening that he couldn’t put off, the one when he would have to talk about himself.

  He leaned forward to light Imogen’s cigarette. She smelled of musk and cloves. In the sulphur flare, he saw her little pointed breasts, bare under her T-shirt, and knew immediately she’d seen him looking at her. She smiled, this child coquette with a taste for razors, and cocked her head to one side. He stepped back, embarrassed. He hadn’t meant to look at her breasts. He wasn’t like Jeremy, always up for the press of young flesh.

  ‘What do you do?’ Imogen drew on her cigarette and exhaled in a rush.

  ‘Not a lot,’ said Sandy, nonplussed.

  ‘No, not now. I mean what did you do when you did something. You know, your job.’ There was that upward inflection at the end of her sentences. Why did every sentence uttered by anyone under twenty-nine have to end up being a question?

  ‘I used to write songs,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t John Lennon, but sometimes I did okay.’ He shrugged. ‘I had an ear for music and I was good at the piano at school. I didn’t set out to work in music, but I went to work in a recording studio as a summer job and it started from there. I was all set to become a lawyer.’

  Imogen studied him. ‘You talk like a lawyer. Kind of posh.’

  Sandy smiled. ‘Far from it.’ He recalled the three-piece mock brocade suite in Newlands Road, the anxious vowels of his mother and the gruff façade of his father as they tried to mix with more assured parents on sports days.

  ‘I’m a long way from being posh and my parents were incredibly ambitious for me. So I can understand my father being livid when I went off the track he’d set up. But I couldn’t be a lawyer, I loved music too much.’

  He didn’t tell Imogen how much he was mocked in his early days as a studio runner for his Received Pronunciation and his habit of carrying handkerchiefs. Not that it mattered that much. Apart from his friendship with Jeremy, he’d never fitted in at school either, and home was always a place best viewed from the rear-vision mirror.

  Music was the only place where he felt entirely at ease. No class, no cliques; just pure notes hanging in the air. Although he did like the irony that eventually his old-fashioned musical education gave him a jumpstart ahead of his more fashionably spoken peers.

  ‘I suppose I knew when I heard a sound if it would work as a song or not … if it would be a hit. But it didn’t last, so I guess it was luck more than anything else.’

  He stubbed out his cigarette against the brick wall and threw the butt into the garden. Imogen made him pick it up. ‘It takes ten years for a butt to decompose and birds can mistake them for food,’ she scolded.

  ‘I’ve never met an ecological smoker before,’ Sandy said.

  ‘I’m stopping soon.’ They walked back inside. In the hall, she turned to him. ‘You’re okay,’ she said. ‘Not as bad as you looked when you first walked in. I thought you’d be a complete tosser.’

  ‘I don’t know how to take that,’ he said. Imogen smiled. She handed him her butt and walked towards the sofa. Sandy went to the kitchen and found a bin for the ecologically unsound cigarettes. His hands had soil on them and smelled of smoke. He washed them at the sink and gazed at his reflection in the window. The harsh fluorescent light accentuated his jowls and the pouches under his eyes. He needed a haircut. Apart from that, he looked the same as he did before.

  But he didn’t feel the same. He’d lost purchase with the path of his familiar cynical self. He didn’t know how others saw him anymore, so he had no idea how to see himself. He’d always imagined Jeremy, Tim and Peter considered him a good friend, affable and sometimes witty. Now they undoubtedly thought of him as a psychological weakling, an opinion probably shared by Matthew and Emily, and definitely by Penny.

  He dried his hands and went into the hall to collect his coat. It was later than he thought and everything was empty and silent. Imogen was sitting on the sofa, her knees tucked under her chin.

  ‘I thought everyone had gone,’ he said, wanting her not to be there.

  She smiled. ‘Well, not me,’ she said.

  Surely she wouldn’t want to flirt with him. He was an impotent grey-haired old man and she was only a few years older than Emily.

  She patted the sofa and he sat down, making sure there was significant airspace between them.

  ‘So who did you write songs for?’ she asked.

  ‘You’re far too young, you wouldn’t have heard of any of them.’

  ‘Don’t know about that.’ Imogen smiled. She had little pointed teeth, shiny pink gums. ‘I’m pretty good at my music. Try me.’

  He was almost too tired to talk. ‘They were just people.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself,’ she said. ‘That’s what my shrink says anyway.’ The radiators along the walls hissed, then sighed. ‘Where do you live?’ she asked.

  ‘In Battersea. The cheapest bit.’ Sandy picked up his coat. ‘I’d better get going. I’ll miss the bus otherwise.’

  Imogen raked her hair with her hand. ‘I live just up the road. You should come by sometime.’

  She tapped the coffee table, as if it were a drum, and stood up. ‘I’m off then. See you later.’

  Sandy sat for a while listening to the radiators hiccup and fall silent. He heard the distant rush of water through pipes, then nothing at all. His neck was stiff and his buttocks ached. He stood up and began walking towards the bus stop.

  emily.ellison@gmail.com

  To: mattman5@hotmail.com

  Sometimes you’re such a fuckwit it makes me furious. You told me, you swore to me you were not going to do drugs again. Why do you have to keep flirting with this? You will end up like Dad if you don’t watch out. Is that what you want?

  I’m so tired of all this family fuckwittery and how I’ve somehow been promoted to counsellor and fixer. Dad just mopes around that fetid little shithole in Battersea. And all Mum seems to do is glue bits of wood together and make toy houses out there in France on her own. They’re hardly embracing reality. You email me about GBH, ecstasy or whatever you call it. You know what I think? I think you should stop that, get a job, get an existence of your own.

  We had it okay. Not as good as some, bu
t way better than so many others. Were we beaten, sold off as child slaves or something like that? It’s just a divorce, it’s just what happened. Yes, Mum drank too much and there were those times when she threw up and pretended she had a virus. And yes, we knew that girl who kept ringing all night asking to speak to Dad wasn’t his secretary. I’m not saying it didn’t hurt or leave a mark, I’m saying stop using it. Move along.

  Okay, end of lecture. Everything is wonderful here. It’s not the same old thing of dancing at Gaz’s on Thursday nights and getting hammered afterwards with the usual bunch of people you’ve known since you were a kid. I just feel anything is possible now. Does that sound stupid? I’m so happy here. Everyone I meet is happy. Even the babies don’t cry and, God knows if you look at what is probably their future, there isn’t a lot to laugh about. But they don’t seem to care about money and stuff the way we do. Even all the palefaces, people like me, we’re learning stuff, we’re thinking and growing. Sometimes when I read texts and stuff from the lamas at the ashram, and listen to talks there, I get so excited I can’t sleep at night.

  I’m living in this tiny little flat about a quarter of a mile away, just off the main square. There’s a woman, Annie, living above me who works for an NGO helping to build schools. She’s been here for thirty years and says she’s never going back to England. Apparently she was at Oxford about the same time as Dad. She knew who he was, and used to see him and Jeremy around, but she didn’t really know them. She left without finishing her degree after something happened in her family, said she couldn’t see any point in going on. I like her a lot.

  There’s a big prayer festival soon, a puja. Loads of people come into town for it. Then there’s a big celebration when it ends. Can’t wait. You should come. I looked up the flights yesterday and they’re cheap. You fly into Delhi and get a bus up here.

  Think about it. Dear Matt, crazy poodle, I’m not pissed off with you anymore. Just take it easy.

  Chapter 12

  It had been a delicious silent morning digging between the crevices in the stone courtyard, teasing out the bindweed that threatened to smother the more fragile erigeron and nigella. Bullies, Penny thought, as she left the weeds in the sun to wilt and die. You won’t have everything your own way. Other plants have a right to space too. The work had given her a stillness of mind in which calm had begun to grow again. There was no sound except for birdsong and the occasional whisper from the pine trees as the breeze played along their branches. She lay on the uneven lawn in the last of the morning sun. The grass tickled her neck and bare arms. She imagined millions of root fibres slowly unfurling underneath her, tiny shoots forming, waiting for the earth to warm so it would be safe to push up to the light and air. She hoped it would be a kind summer.