The Boy Next Door

by Emlyn Rees

  I continue to use alcohol as an anaesthetic the next day, as we head haphazardly down the Thames, stopping off at riverside pubs on the way, throwing each other overboard, sunbathing on the deck and generally forgetting about everything in the world apart from what is here and what is now. By nightfall, however, when we’re moored up outside our fourth pub of the day and we’ve just finished eating, the anaesthetic has worn off. It’s like I’ve drunk myself sober and, even among my friends, I feel terribly alone.

  Leaving the others below in the cabin, I make my way up on to the deck and forward to the prow of the boat. Once there, I sit down with my legs dangling over the side and light a cigarette that I surreptitiously lifted from Eddie’s pack earlier. In spite of the amount of alcohol I’ve consumed, I’m still aware of the nicotine kicking in. My lungs suck it up into my bloodstream like water into a desiccated sponge and, for the first time this week, the tension drops from my shoulders and in that moment – as soon as my guard is dropped – I pine, like a homesick child, knowing that I don’t belong here any more and that everything has changed.

  I stare down at the starry sky, reflected in the calm black water. The river looks bottomless from here, like if you fell in you’d just keep on falling, flailing through the darkness, spinning further and further away from the light and air above. I picture Miles. It’s impossible not to whenever the thought of death crosses my mind. Was that what it was like for him? I wonder. Did he know it was final, the moment it happened? Did he experience the same combination of powerlessness and hopelessness that filled my heart when he left me behind?

  What would he make of all this now? Of Mickey? And me? And the way I feel? ‘She’s a beautiful girl,’ he said. I can see him now, there in that pub, smiling before asking me, ‘Are you in love with her?’ I swallow, biting down on my lip, trying not to think about him. But it’s no good. I can’t help wishing now that I’d answered him, that I could have let him a little into my life before he left it for good. He would have been pleased, I think. In spite of the way things got between him and Mum, he still would have wanted me to be happy, wouldn’t he?

  ‘Why aren’t you here?’ I whisper, my voice rough and my throat dry. ‘Why couldn’t you be here to tell me yourself?’

  A solitary tear runs down my cheek. I lift my beer bottle and drink, before taking another drag on my cigarette. I won’t cry. I won’t cry for him after all this time. It doesn’t matter what he would have thought, I tell myself. He’s dead. That’s all that matters. Everything I think I know about him is meaningless. It’s make-believe. He doesn’t even exist.

  I hear the sound of footsteps on the deck behind me and turn to see Eddie swaying towards me, camera still in hand. ‘Naughty boy,’ he chastises, nodding at my cigarette, before sitting down next to me.

  ‘Turn it off.’

  He doesn’t. Instead, he asks, ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you can’t live life like that,’ I tell him, ‘in front of a camera … like an actor. Because it doesn’t work.’

  He relents and switches off the camera. ‘Are you all right?’ he asks.

  ‘Yes,’ I reply, but automatically I find I’m justifying myself, covering up what’s inside like I always do: ‘I’m just feeling a little maudlin, that’s all. It’s probably the booze.’

  ‘Nervous about next weekend?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Big change, huh?’

  I nod my head.

  ‘It’s what it’s all about,’ he says. ‘No point in standing still too long, you just get bored.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Beautiful here, isn’t it?’ Eddie comments, lying on his back and gazing up. ‘You don’t get skies like this in London. Too many lights. You need to get away from electricity altogether to appreciate this.’

  ‘Thanks’, I tell him, ‘for organising everything.’

  ‘Have you enjoyed yourself?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good, because …’

  ‘Because what?’ I ask when he fails to continue.

  ‘I don’t know.’ He trails off again, no doubt taking some time out to organise his stoned thoughts. ‘It’s hard,’ he eventually says. ‘Sometimes it’s hard being a friend to someone. Sometimes it’s hard to get it right.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I ask, flicking the cigarette into the river and watching the stars shimmer and blur.

  ‘So long as you had a good time, that’s all …’

  ‘I did. What about tomorrow?’ I enquire, turning to him. His face is dark with shadow. ‘What time do you think we’ll get back?’

  ‘Around lunchtime. Why?’

  ‘No reason,’ I say, standing up. ‘Come on. Let’s go and check in with the others.’

  As we walk back to the cockpit and cabin entrance, I think of my car, parked outside the Rose and Thorn back in Kingston, and about getting into it, and I think, too, about the many directions in which I can drive.

  Chapter VI

  Mickey

  Of course, I should’ve known that she was going to be beautiful. It was obvious that Fred was bound to marry someone as fashionable and obviously successful as himself, but somehow I’d managed to block it out. I’d taken the one bit of information I had about Rebecca and invented the least threatening vision of her I could. So when Susan said that Fred’s business events weren’t ‘Gucci enough’ for Rebecca, I took it to mean that she was some lifeless, limp-haired snob, only good for designer shoe shopping and rustling up the odd gourmet canapé. And when I found out that she never stayed at Fred’s flat she’d become even more disembodied. I’d assumed that she was tucked away in some Chelsea pad, slipping into the background, being submissive and dull, while Fred shone. I’d even gone as far as allowing myself to believe that she’d inveigled herself into Fred’s affections until he’d been bamboozled into proposing.

  What I hadn’t considered was that she’d be real. Not only real, but beautiful, street-wise, ultra-trendy, sexy, intelligent and, worst of all, that she and Fred would look so good together. And it’s their togetherness that sticks in my throat. I’ve spent all this time seeing the past existing in Fred, so that seeing him existing in the present feels like a slap round the face. Because Rebecca is nice; so nice, in fact, that she’s the kind of person that maybe, in a different lifetime, with a whole new wardrobe of clothes, a complete hair, make-up and CD collection make-over, I could be friends with. And I feel hopelessly foolish – foolish because I didn’t ask Fred enough questions about her, foolish because he should have told me he was engaged to an absolutely stunning woman and foolish because it matters.

  These thoughts have been consuming me ever since I saw her outside my shop a week ago, but this morning, for the sake of my own sanity and for the sake of Joe, who’s been bearing the brunt of my bad mood, I’m trying very hard to remove Rebecca, or more specifically Rebecca and Fred, from my head. As Joe and I drive over to my parents’ house in Rushton, I reason that the only sensible thing is to let Fred go. I need to sever the loose strands that tie us together, rather than weave more. Fred has his own life and I have mine. To think that the two overlap in any way is nonsense.

  I’ve been so busy setting up the shop that I haven’t been back to Rushton for almost six months. Each time I come back, I notice that still more of the rolling hills, streams and woods that the school bus used to rumble past have been chewed up. This time I spot a sprawling business estate, full of low-level breeze-block buildings that seem eerily deserted. As I take the old route, I find myself on a pristine new bypass, punctuated by so many roundabouts that I feel like I’m driving on a board game. I’m in for a bigger shock as I make my way into the village itself. The Gordon Arms has been taken over by a pub-restaurant chain and a plastic banner advertising Sunday Lunch for £4.99 flaps over the doorway, while the Memorial Hall car park has been turned into an adventure playground complete with a sagging bouncy castle.

  That’s not all. At the bottom of Hill Drive there’s a l
arge hoarding with a watercolour-effect artist’s impression of a cul-de-sac full of mock Tudor houses, complete with latticed windows, cobbled driveways and a frisky-looking terrier. The blurb advertises ‘desirable secluded family cottages in the heart of the countryside’. It appears that Jimmy Dughead has sold out to property developers and the ‘desirable cottages’ have swallowed the very fields that made up the countryside round here. Sure enough, up the road from our house in the entrance to the farm, there are huge tyre tracks imprinted in the spill of sand on the road and an abandoned JCB stands where the gate used to be.

  The spare keys to my parents’ house are under the back doormat, where they’ve been since I was a teenager. I’ve often told Mum to devise a more ingenious hiding place, but she’s always insisted that she knows everyone around here, so security isn’t an issue. Not for much longer, by the looks of things. I glance up from the back doorstep, across the small rectangle of lawn, past the whirligig with its limp plastic bag full of pegs, to the trees at the bottom of our garden. In the field beyond, the imposing timber frames of the new houses creep like skeletons over the skyline.

  Inside, the house smells of my parents: a curious, dusty mixture of pot pourri, brewing tea and hairspray. It’s strange being here without them, as if the house is infused with the low-frequency sound of them, like a familiar radio station turned down low. I push the switch by the kitchen door and the long fluorescent lighting strip hanging from the ceiling buzzes, then flickers several times before lighting up.

  There’s a note from Mum on the flowery plastic tablecloth, directing us to a pie that she’s left in the fridge for lunch. Joe and I glance at each other. My mother’s never been famous for her culinary skills and intrepidly Joe opens the fridge and pulls out a glass dish with a sunken slab of overcooked brown pastry on top. He looks under the dish to ascertain its contents. ‘Corned beef,’ he says and I turn up my nose in unison with him. ‘Yuk.’

  ‘There’s eggs. I’ll make an omelette or something,’ I suggest, gesturing to the basket-effect china dish on the side.

  Joe passes it over, a disdainful look on his face. ‘They look funny,’ he says, picking up one of the eggs. ‘This one’s got poo on it.’

  ‘That’s because they’re from the farm down the road,’ I tut. ‘They’re free-range.’

  ‘I don’t want any,’ he says. ‘There’s no sell-by date on them.’

  ‘Joe, they won’t kill you.’ I laugh. ‘Where do you think eggs come from?’

  ‘The supermarket,’ he replies, bending down to stroke Oscar, the cat, who mews around his legs.

  I decide to deal with the cat first, since that’s the reason we’re here. There’s a small utility room off the kitchen with a door into the garage. An ancient washing machine takes up most of the space, along with a concertina peg rack stuffed full of coats. On top of the slatted pine unit there’s a row of jars filled with murky pickled objects and plastic buckets full of muddy potatoes and marrows from Dad’s allotment. There’s also a pile of old Sunday papers and a few ancient gardening manuals. Oscar weaves in and out of the clutter, nudging my hand as I open a tin of cat food, hardly giving me time to get the globular brown chunks out into his bowl. I tickle him, trying to push him out of the way, but he still manages to knock the fork out of my hand and I curse, crouching down to pick up it up, which is when I see a mark with the word ‘Scott’ written next to it.

  Under the coats by the door leading to the garage, the wall is covered in a haphazard ruler with faded felt-tip marks, recording the various stages of our growth as children. Forgetting Oscar, who has tipped the can on to its side and is scooping out the food with his paw, I put my finger to the wall. Low down is a mark, with ‘Mickey, 6’, and an inch below it, ‘Fred, 53⁄4’, written in green ink. I trace our growth pattern up the wall, past the garage door handle, until Fred overtakes me at the age of twelve. Smiling, I rest my hand on the wall, feeling the space where he used to be. Since I found out that Fred changed his surname I’ve been feeling as if our childhood was like a pencil drawing defaced by a grubby eraser, but seeing these marks brings it all back into focus again and makes it real.

  I glance through the doorway at Joe who’s doing up his rollerblades and it hits me that my own mother once took the time to record our heights. It seems so strange to think about it, when she always appeared to dislike children. But then I only think that because I know I was never her favourite child. That privilege was reserved for Scott who, with his surly detachment from the family, always had my mother clamouring for his attention. It’s not really surprising that he ended up as an airline pilot and spends his life as far away as possible.

  When it came to me, though, I think Mum realised pretty early on that she’d been cruelly short-changed on her tutu-wearing, peaches-and-cream little girl fantasy and instead got a gobby, grubby tomboy, who always took her father’s side. And while I think she’s proud of me now, it still doesn’t change the fact that I’ve spent most of my adult years deliberately trying to be the opposite of her. Up until now I’ve always resented this house and everything it stands for, yet I suddenly feel happy that my parents still live here and that this wall still bears the scars of my passage through time.

  Joe seems to have a sixth sense and looks up to find me grinning. ‘What?’ he asks.

  ‘Nothing. I just found something, that’s all.’

  He does a wobbly comedy walk towards me, as he only has one of his rollerblades on, and I show him the marks on the wall. ‘Am I taller than Fred was?’ he asks, looking at Fred’s height when he was nine.

  ‘I don’t know. Let’s see.’

  I clear the coats out of the way and Joe stands with his back flat against the wall.

  ‘Uh-huh.’ I grin. ‘That’s cheating. You have to take your rollerblades off.’

  Joe obliges, kicking off his boot. I put the gardening manual on top of his head and hold it against the wall, and he ducks out from under it. ‘I’m shorter,’ he says, disappointed.

  ‘You should eat some eggs.’ I laugh. ‘Then you’ll grow.’

  Right through my childhood I assumed that the whole purpose of religious holidays was to make it OK to eat a lot. Oblivious to any significance, I happily tucked into pancakes, hot cross buns, turkey with all the trimmings and harvest bread with extra butter as appropriate. It wasn’t until it dawned on me, some time during a Religious Studies exam in 1984, that Easter had a religious purpose (and wasn’t just a race to see who could consume the most chocolate), that I decided to ask my parents about their own beliefs. They skilfully batted away my enquiries.

  The issue of religion was treated with equal measures of superstition and suspicion in our household. That was until I fell pregnant and then, all of a sudden all hell broke loose. But until that fateful day, when I was made to feel like the original sinner, both parents had maintained a pursed-lipped pact of silence on all moral issues. Instinctively, I knew that below it was a seething torrent of resentment on both sides.

  This was probably due to the fact that, previous to my existence, there’d been a humdinger of a barney between the Irish Catholic Maloney side of the family and the Richie grandparents, who’d laid out their stall with their daughter’s intended by declaring that the Pope was Satan, all priests were child molesters and the only thing fit for Ireland was a bomb. The Maloneys had retaliated by informing the Richies (in public) that they were common, a gasp-inducing accusation that, while probably true, set Mum on a firm course of compensatory snobbism for the rest of her married life.

  In order to spite Dad and his so-called highbrow roots, the new Mrs Maloney set about borrowing certain religious scare-mongering tactics from her mother, mad Grandma Richie who, since Grandpa Richie got squashed by a bus, resided with a vicious bull-terrier in a pebble-dashed bungalow in Dartford. Like Grandma Richie, Mum used to ban pocket money if we used the Lord’s name in vain: oh God, bloody, hell, damn or any combination of the above, were particular no-nos although, weirdly, Jesus Chris
t as an expletive somehow slipped through her censorious net. She also crossed herself any time she bumped into anyone Jewish, Muslim or Baptist, but claimed to admire the Mormons – not that there were any in Rushton. In addition, she tried and failed every year to give up cigarettes for Lent and became positively sniffy if anyone attempted to buy condoms from the chemist in Bowley, where she worked three days a week.

  This idiosyncratically Catholic attitude to birth control was probably responsible for her two self-confessed ‘mistakes’: Scott, me. It remains a constant source of amazement that my mum and dad actually had sex – twice. How ever Marie Richie, she of the brassy beehive with just-so rhinestone shoes and a handbag to match, hooked up with painfully shy Geoffrey Maloney, second-generation Irish boy, was a mystery. They were married in Hemel Hempstead and honeymooned near my paternal ancestral territory in Derry. The story goes that Dad fished every day in the tranquil waters of the nearby lake, while Mum sat hunched up in his old Ford car in a fake fur coat and cried her heart out for the glamorous life that would never be hers.

  Eighteen months later, when Scott was born, the young Mr and Mrs Maloney moved here, to Hill Drive, and set about decorating in various shades of purple and orange. Even as newly-weds they disagreed on more or less everything, but Mum, with her ability to turn on the tears like a skilled movie diva, mostly got her own way. For this she regarded Dad as something of a drip and said so, pretty constantly, until the rare occasions when he would snap and disappear to his allotment for hours. When that happened she patted her latest hairdo, squeezed her brightly coloured lips together and uttered, in her best hard-done-by tone, ‘Just look at that, children. Underneath it all, your father is a cruel, cruel man.’

  Yet this was another of her dramatic fantasies, fed by years of secret soap opera addiction. She would’ve liked nothing more than to have had grand, passionate fights, but Dad didn’t have a cruel bone in his body. Instead, he tortured her with his patience. To this day he remains as long-suffering and loyal as an abused dog, having nursed Mum through various bouts of aerobic-video fanaticism, tranquilliser addiction, Tupperware purchasing, pyramid selling (including saucy underwear franchising), depression, an ill-fated flirtation with a Peugeot car salesman and, most recently, several phantom cancer scares.