TWNS-2-6-Kindle Master

by Alexander, Nick

  He feels, perhaps, closer to the Sean he was before he met Catherine and that, after all, isn’t so illogical. Those old, adolescent sensations of feeling scared and alone, of not being able to imagine the future, are returning.

  In an attempt at trying to work out who he is now that she’s gone, he’s lapsing into old ways, in some cases, very old ways. It’s as if he perhaps needs to remember that he changed when he met Catherine, that he did exist before he met her.

  So he’s buying oven chips and he’s drinking cans of beer. He’s smoking the occasional cigarette (after a twenty year break) and on weekends, he’s slobbing around in a track suit until lunchtime.

  On Friday evening, he leaves work early and swings by a hi-fi store on Hills Road.

  He has been thinking about what Catherine said, that he has stopped singing. He’s been trying to work out when and why that happened and has realised that he’s even stopped listening to music.

  As far as he can work out, this musical hiatus seems to have sneaked up on him in the mid-2000s, which would make sense because that is when he converted all of his CDs into MP3 files and stacked them in the loft with his records. It’s perhaps no surprise that the moment he stopped listening to albums is the moment they quite literally dematerialised.

  And now, it is Sunday morning and he has just finished wiring the new turntable into the TV’s surround sound speakers. He doesn’t even have a proper amplifier anymore.

  He opens the trap to the attic and lowers the step-ladder. He rummages around until he finds the box of vinyl.

  He looks through the records, one by one, each album cover provoking a flood of memories. He finally selects Pink Floyd’s Animals, and the record is so dirty that he has to wash it under the tap before he dares to play it.

  He lowers the needle onto the groove and settles on the sofa with envelope number four in one hand and a Marlboro Light in the other. He’ll listen to the first side and then he’ll play Catherine’s message.

  Snapshot #5

  Kodak disc format, colour. A faded, low quality, grainy image. A very young woman with a frizzy perm stands on Margate seafront. A man in Doc Martin’s, bleacher jeans and a green US military bomber jacket is standing beside her with his arm around her shoulders. He’s raising one finger at the person taking the photo, half smiling, half sneering. Behind the couple, in better focus than the couple themselves, are the rusted remains of Margate Pier.

  As he listens to Pink Floyd, Sean studies the photo, but his mind remains a blank. Catherine looks very young to him and he’s not sure he ever saw her with a perm. He has no recollection of the photo being taken and no idea who the skinhead is either. In the end, curiosity gets the better of him so he gets up, lifts the needle from the record and presses play on the dictaphone instead.

  Cassette #5

  Hi Sean.

  It’s me again. So, today you get to meet Phil.

  As I explained in my first tape, the aim of all of this is not in any way to sanctify your memories of me but to create a realistic record of who I really was, warts and all. Hopefully that will make it easier for you to let go, to move on, as they say. But that means that not all of this is going to be pleasant, so if you need a drink before listening to the rest of this one, be my guest.

  This is Phil. You actually met him once, though I doubt very much you’ll remember it. We were walking along the seafront on our way to pick April up from Mum’s – she was about three, I think. And a guy on a motorbike pulled up to say hello to me. I told him that you were my husband and without saying another word he roared off, so I don’t think you even saw his face. As I recall, you asked me who he was and I replied that he was “just a schoolfriend”. But that was a lie, so I’m sorry about that.

  The truth is that I was going out with Phil until I met you. I’d actually come from Phil’s flat, from Phil’s bed, that morning I met you in Dreamland.

  Now this may sound horrible and cruel, but from the second I met you, he was nothing to me.

  Phil was a drunk. He was a waster who lived on benefits he shouldn’t really have been getting and the sale of “knock-off” gear that an acquaintance of his somehow came by. Things fell off the backs of lorries a lot, back then, in Margate.

  I’d love to be able to list all the reasons I was going out with Phil but I don’t really have a clue. I’d love to be able to tell you he had his good points, but I don’t think he really did.

  He was, like I say, a heavy drinker, a heavy smoker and a petty thief. The sex was OK, I suppose, though only, really, because I didn’t have anything to compare it to. But it was very rough and ready and at the time I liked that, or at least I thought I did. Compared to Phil, you were so unbelievably wonderful in every way that it’s really difficult for me to justify, even to myself, that I was with him, except perhaps to say that he was like a younger version of every guy Mum ever dated. So in a way, it was all I knew.

  I only ever saw Phil once after you left that Monday. I spent one evening with him, just to be sure. We ate fish and chips together, then had “goodbye” sex, after which I provoked, as far as I can remember, an argument. And then I stormed out, feeling all smug and pleased with myself.

  I was only eighteen. Please forgive me.

  • • •

  Sean spends the week feeling jealous. He’s fully aware that it’s absurd to be feeling jealous of one’s late wife’s ex-boyfriend from thirty-five years ago, but he can’t help himself. It’s just as well that Catherine didn’t provide Phil’s surname, Sean reckons, because otherwise he might have been tempted to hunt him down.

  On Thursday lunchtime, Sean accepts an invitation to a pub lunch with three colleagues from Nicholson-Wallace and it’s the first social interaction he has had since Catherine died where the major subject of conversation isn’t how he’s coping. This is a sublime relief and for one precious hour, he’s almost able to forget that his life outside these walls has stopped.

  They are just finishing their drinks when Jenny, the company secretary, asks him what he has got planned for the weekend.

  “Um, nothing really,” Sean replies.

  Jenny stares at him, nods gently and smiles understandingly. A wave of sadness sweeps over Sean. Nothing planned, ever again, he thinks, dramatically.

  “Um, why don’t you come out with Mike and me, then?” Jenny asks. “We’re going to that place out in Bourn for a curry. It’s supposed to be amazing.”

  Sean starts to feel embarrassed. He can see what Jenny’s doing. He can picture how Jenny sees him. Because though Sean and Catherine have eaten with Jenny and Mike before, without Catherine it becomes a whole different thing – it becomes an act of kindness towards him, an act of sacrifice. Just imagining it makes him squirm.

  “Um, thanks,” Sean says. “But not this weekend. I’ve… some… um, things to do at the house. But thanks. Now, I really do need to get back and finish off these bloody balconies.”

  Jenny nods gently and flashes a knowing look at Steve and Jim.

  “You should go,” Jim says. “It’ll do you good to get out.”

  “Yes,” Steve says. “I think so too.”

  “Not this time,” Sean says, standing so fast he almost knocks his chair over. “See you back at the office, then.”

  “Stupid!” Sean admonishes himself as he crosses the car park. “What’s so difficult about a bloody curry with Jenny and Mike?”

  But despite his attempts at convincing himself, the vision of him sitting opposite concerned Jenny and matey Mike remains tooth-achingly uncomfortable.

  So, no, he won’t be going to dinner with Jenny and Mike, or with any of the other couples they know. He’ll be drinking his cans of beer alone. He’ll be listening to his old records, alone. And he’ll be waiting for Sunday to arrive so that he can open the next damned envelope.

  Snapshot #6

  Computer printout from Google Street View. The image, in the middle of a large empty sheet of A4 paper, shows a pub called the Dog and Doublet.
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  Cassette #6

  Hi Sean.

  I don’t think we ever took a photo of us in Kipps wine bar, so I asked Maggie to help me out. Unfortunately, this is all she could come up with.

  Don’t worry, by the way. Maggie doesn’t know anything about what’s in these tapes. What you tell and to whom and when you do it is entirely up to you. If you do have a need to share any of this, feel free. I won’t, being dead, object.

  So, The Dog and Doublet is what they’re calling Kipps wine bar these days, or so I’m told. I’m pretty sure they changed the façade too, because I don’t remember it looking like that at all. I hope it’s the right place. I secretly suspect that Maggie got this wrong.

  Anyway, it’s important because it’s supposed to be Kipps, and Kipps is where we spent some of the best nights I’ve ever had. And because Kipps is where I told you I was pregnant.

  I’d spent three weeks arguing with Mum – she wanted me to have an abortion and she had finally (almost) worn me down. She had very nearly convinced me that it was the only sensible option. I was only eighteen, after all. I was too young to have a baby. I had my whole life ahead of me and blah blah blah.

  But as far as I was concerned, the main reason was that I didn’t know who the father was.

  Even though I never told you that, I suspect it doesn’t come as a complete shock to you. I reckon you must have worked that out.

  So that night, we went to Kipps and we got our drinks. I needed some Dutch courage in order to say what I had to say. I was terrified that you would dump me on the spot. I was imagining sleeping on the bench in the bus shelter and going home the very next morning. I could hardly breathe, I was so scared.

  You could sense that something was up and you asked me what was wrong. By that point I had a couple of pints of Tennent’s inside me, so I blurted it out. “I’m pregnant,” I said.

  I was going to tell you that it might be Phil’s, I honestly was. It was the very next thing that I was going to say. But I didn’t get any further than, “but the thing is…”

  Your face slipped into this enormous grin. It wasn’t what I had been expecting at all.

  “What?” I asked. I thought you were maybe about to laugh in my face.

  “I don’t know,” you said. “That’s just amazing. That’s brilliant!”

  And so I couldn’t bring myself to tell you, there and then. I promised myself I’d tell you the next morning, or at the very least before I left.

  I asked you, instead, if you thought that I should keep it. I thought you might ask why not, in which case I could explain that things weren’t as simple as they seemed.

  But you said, “Of course! Of course you should keep it! We’re going to have a baby!” And then you leaned over the table to kiss me and knocked your pint over.

  I was soaked, but we stayed and I spent the evening putting up objections. Where would I live? What would I live on? And you just got drunker and drunker and happier and happier. “I don’t care,” you kept saying. “I don’t care about any of that. We’ll sort it.”

  I woke up late the next morning with a terrible hangover. I lay in bed for ages thinking about how I was going to announce my bad news.

  But when I came downstairs, you, Alistair and Theresa, who had just moved in, were having one of what you called your “house meetings”.

  It had all been decided, you announced. I could stay. We would live together. Alistair and Theresa agreed. “It’ll be like a commune,” Alistair commented. Theresa was looking forward to babysitting, she said.

  It was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me, so I didn’t say a word.

  I phoned Mum from that call box at the end of the road and told her the news. I told her that I wasn’t coming to my appointment at the abortion clinic and then I told her I wasn’t coming home at all.

  She went all weird and shrieky on me then, and in the end I had to hang up on her.

  I don’t think she ever forgave me for that, or not until she met April at any rate.

  I’m sure this was hard to hear, my darling. So I apologise again for that. But brace yourself, for there are, I’m afraid, a few more shockers to come.

  • • •

  The following Saturday, Sean decides to phone Maggie. She has left three messages on his voicemail in the last forty eight hours and he’s pretty certain that if he doesn’t speak to her soon she’ll appear on the doorstep.

  As the house is a mess and the freezer is empty again and because he finds himself unable to sum up the energy to fix either, he really doesn’t want her checking up on him right now.

  The truth of the matter is that he’s been feeling sadder than usual since last Sunday’s tape, perhaps even what people call depressed.

  He has only once or twice had doubts about April’s lineage in the past and nowadays, having parented her since she was born, all logic tells him that it’s immaterial. He loves her, that’s all. He has always loved her and nothing anyone could ever say is going to change that. And yet, and yet… was it not more comfortable feeling certain that he was her biological parent? Because even though he had doubts from time to time, in the end, this is what he had decided to believe, for the simple reason that believing anything else was unbearable.

  But now, unless he does a DNA test, he’ll never know. And what possible point could there be in taking a DNA test at this point? What possible advantage could there be in knowing, other than avoiding this, other than avoiding ever having to think about it again.

  So he’s angry at Catherine, too. Not for what she might or might not have done when she was eighteen but perhaps for not telling him at the time and definitely for deciding to tell him now. It strikes him as cowardly, actually. Yes, waiting until she’s not even there to hear how he feels about it is cowardly.

  “Ah,” Maggie says, when he finally makes the call. “He lives!”

  “Yep,” Sean says, pretending to be upbeat. “He lives! How are you?”

  “Oh, you know,” Maggie says.

  “Not really. That’s why I’m asking.”

  “Oh, we’ve been trying to choose where to go on holiday this summer,” Maggie says. “But it seems we can even argue about that.”

  Thinking that the more they talk about Maggie and Dave, the less he’ll have to talk about himself, Sean asks, “So what are the options?”

  “Well, I want to go to Portugal.”

  “Ooh, nice,” Sean says. “I can’t see why anyone would argue with that.”

  “Well, thank you! Maybe I should just go with you.”

  “So what’s Dave’s objection?” Sean asks, ignoring that comment.

  “Oh, Dave says the sea’s too cold. On account of it being the Atlantic or something. He says it’ll be boiling hot on the beach but we won’t be able to dip a toe in the sea without having a heart attack.”

  “Ah,” Sean says. “Well, there might be a little truth in that. This is for when?”

  “June or July.”

  “Then yeah… the sea could be pretty chilly.”

  “Damn you both,” Maggie says. “It’s cheap as chips. And the hotel’s gorgeous. And there’s a bloody pool anyway. And I don’t want to spend a thousand pounds going to Bali.”

  “Oh, that’s an altogether different proposition,” Sean comments.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Very nice! Bali’s stunning, so I hear.”

  “Yes. But it’s a day to get there and a day to get back and it’s way over my budget.”

  “Maybe you could settle for somewhere halfway?” Sean offers.

  “Maybe,” Maggie says, doubtfully. “Where would that be? I’m rubbish at geography.”

  “Um, Israel, I reckon,” Sean says. “Or Saudi Arabia. Dubai maybe?”

  “Oh, faaabulous,” Maggie says, sarcastically. “I’ll get my burka dry cleaned.”

  “Israel’s quite trendy at the moment,” Sean says, “surprising as that may seem. A couple of people from the office have been there rece
ntly. And no burka necessary.”

  “You know I spent all winter collecting for the poor Palestinians, right?” Maggie says.

  “Ah, of course. Sorry, forgot. Egypt then? That’s a bit closer than halfway. Or Greece. Or Turkey.”

  “Actually, Turkey might do it. That’s gotta be fairly cheap, right? I don’t think I’ll ever be going to Greece again. Not after last time.”

  “Ah, no. Sorry. I forgot about our Grecian extravaganza.”

  “I didn’t. Would Turkey have warmer water, then?”

  “Than Portugal? Oh, definitely. It’s the Med, isn’t it.”

  “Great, well, if Monsieur deigns to calm down, I’ll suggest it. Unless you want to go with me? To Portugal? What do you think?”

  “I… think that wouldn’t do your relationship with Dave much good,” Sean says.

  Maggie sighs. “No, you’re probably right. So how are you, honey?”

  “I’m OK.”

  “We don’t seem to be seeing much of you.”

  “No?”

  “No. Are you still not feeling… you know… up to being sociable?”

  “I guess I’m not really. No.”

  “Well, I’ll give you a few more weeks, but then we’ll come round and kidnap you for a night out if need be. We can’t have you sitting at home for the rest of your life.”

  Sean pulls a face at the phone. “I’m not sitting at home. I’m at work all day every day, Mags. But I’ll, um, let you know when I feel up to being kidnapped, OK?”

  “Have you finished that box, yet?”

  “Catherine’s recordings?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, they’re one a week. I told you,” Sean says.