ALSO BY NICK ALEXANDER
The Road to Zoe
You Then, Me Now
Things We Never Said
The Bottle of Tears
The Other Son
The Photographer’s Wife
The Hannah Novels
The Half-Life of Hannah
Other Halves
The CC Novels
The Case of the Missing Boyfriend
The French House
The Fifty Reasons Series
50 Reasons to Say Goodbye
Sottopassaggio
Good Thing, Bad Thing
Better Than Easy
Sleight of Hand
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2021 by Nick Alexander
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542026840
ISBN-10: 1542026849
Cover design by @blacksheep-uk.com
Cover illustration by Jelly London
CONTENTS
One Heather
Two Joe
Three Heather
Four Joe
Five Heather
Six Joe
Seven Heather
Eight Amy
Nine Heather
Ten Joe
Eleven Heather
Twelve Joe
Thirteen Heather
Fourteen Amy
Fifteen Heather
Epilogue Heather
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
One
Heather
Do you believe in ghosts? I don’t. Or at least, I don’t think I do.
Perhaps that means that I believe in premonitory dreams, or just freakily unlikely coincidences, because this, I swear, is true: a few days after her death, my mother spoke to me. Whether she appeared inside a dream or in what we like to call ‘real life’ remains unclear to me. I suppose we’ll never know which of those it was, so you’ll have to choose what you want to believe, or, like me, not choose and just wonder about it for ever more.
Whatever the explanation, the experience felt shockingly real. I saw her in front of me – she was semi-transparent as if made not of atoms but of light, and she was smiling. She walked towards me and paused before continuing until we were taking up the same physical space. I could sense her presence glowing and swelling within me as she expanded outwards into my fingers and toes.
I felt shocked, I remember, but the overriding feeling was one of being ecstatic to the point of tears to discover that she still existed, that despite the fact we had buried her in the cold hard earth a few days earlier, she could still visit me, be with me, be within me, even. It felt as if she was using my eyes to take one last look at the world she had recently left, and she was loving it.
As my body throbbed with the warm glow of her presence, I discovered that she could speak to me too, much as you might speak to yourself when debating what to do about some difficult situation. ‘Don’t worry,’ her voice said within the confines of my head. ‘Things will get worse, but then they’ll get better because you’ll go with the . . . and be happy.’
By the time I woke up the next morning, Mum was gone for good, and as I said before, I couldn’t tell if she’d really been there or if I’d dreamed her up. More importantly, nor could I remember that missing word, the one that would supposedly lead to my happiness.
It turned out, much later, that there was a perfectly good reason why I couldn’t remember that word: it was a term I never used. In fact, I don’t think I had ever come across it until that day, which is perhaps the strongest indication that this wasn’t a dream manufactured by my own mind but something that came from an external source. Another sign was that the thing she was referring to hadn’t happened yet, which would seem to reinforce the other-worldly origin of the message. But when I finally did understand what she’d said, it would make more sense to me than anything else in my life ever had.
I tried many times to plug that gap, made hundreds of attempts at understanding Mum’s message. But nothing that I could think of – go with the flow, for example, or go with your feelings – seemed to work. Go with the postman . . . go with grace, none of it made any sense. In fact, as time went by, Mum’s message became more and more incomprehensible, because the final part of her revelation, the be happy bit, seemed to be getting not closer, but further away.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, aren’t I? Because for me to explain how complicated being happy was, I need to tell you the whole story. And to do that, I need to dig deep and admit that I wasn’t always unhappy with my lot. In fact, for a while back there, I thought I’d struck lucky.
I’ll start my story, then, in 2009 – the year I met Anthony.
My mother was still in perfect health, or at any rate we thought she was. The beginnings of her illness must have been present, I suppose, already pushing out roots and dropping deadly seeds that would float around her body before settling and pushing out roots of their own, but we certainly didn’t know that back then.
My father had died three years earlier and Mum was enjoying a brief renaissance, having been liberated from his toxic presence by the very thing that had made him toxic in the first place: he’d died, you see, of alcohol poisoning. Is the fact that the thing which made him so hateful is also the thing that took him from us ironic, or simply logical? I’m still not sure.
Anyway, Mum – a gentle soul who had mistakenly devoted her life to a man who loved vodka more than he loved her – surprised my sister and me with an unexpected capacity to adapt to an alcoholic-husband-free life. Within a month of his death she had signed up for gym sessions and fine-art evening classes. And within six, she was taking her first ever overseas holidays with the new friends she had made.
Dad’s illness hadn’t only polluted Mum’s life, of course.
When I was five, he’d left my sister and me alone in the Dorchester Arms. He’d told us he was nipping to the cashpoint, but never returned. At closing time the barman had phoned Mum so that she could come and pick us up in a taxi. She’d been incandescently angry, and she and Dad had screamed at each other until the sun came up the next day.
When I was seven, Mrs Wilson had caused a scandal by refusing to hand us over at the school gates because Dad couldn’t walk without zigzagging, and by age eighteen, I was repeatedly picking him up from the police station after he’d spent a night in the cells, or settling his debts at various pubs to avoid them calling the police in the first place. And these, my friends, are just highlights – simply the first awful memories that come to mind, to give you a taste, so to speak. Because the drama, the trauma, was incessant. Dad’s alcoholism had been the dominant, most reliable constant of our day-to-day lives for as long as any of us could remember.
It will sound awful to anyone who hasn’t lived through that kind of chaos, but as frequently as I have thought of Dad and missed him, I’ve remembered the fact that he’s dead and sensed the fear I’d got used to slipping blissfully from my shoulders, like a well-worn cloak. Until he died, we’d lived in constant dread of answering the phone, you see. We never knew quite what form the ne
xt episode of drama would take, nor when it would occur. And to realise that was over was a source of sadness but also great relief.
By 2009 Dad had been gone for three years, so I too was in full flow, finally enjoying my all-new drama-free life. I was nursing at Canterbury Hospital, and had moved to a cute flat above a trendy record shop in Castle Street.
I believed, back then, that the bad times were over. I thought that all the anguish and misery in our lives had vanished the moment Dad downed his final half-bottle of vodka. But his shadow – or, more precisely, the shadow of our upbringing – was just snoozing, as it turned out. It was just having a kip beneath a tree while it dreamed up new ways to ruin my life.
I first laid eyes on Anthony in a DIY superstore, of all places. I’d been living in Castle Street for almost a year and had finally decided to install a toilet roll holder. Though leaving the roll on the floor hadn’t much bothered me, my sister had given me a kitten – Dandy – for Christmas. Because Dandy’s main joy in life seemed to be ripping the toilet paper to shreds, getting it out of his reach had become essential.
In B&Q’s bathroom aisle there were a surprising – some would say unreasonable – number of different options to choose from, running from a £1.49 pink plastic affair to a ‘deluxe’ chrome-plated model at £14.99. Disappointingly, none of them was reduced in the January sale.
The problem I faced was that they all required screwing to the wall, and as drilling into tiles, using Rawlplugs and all the other kerfuffle that went with it had been Dad’s exclusive domain, I was at a bit of a loss to know how to proceed. As I studied the instructions on the back of each blister pack, I began to think about how much I missed him. After what I said previously, that may sound contradictory, but my feelings about Dad would come and go in waves: relief that he was gone, then sadness at his absence, and occasionally a specific kind of overwhelming grief, not so much for who he had been, or for what our relationship had held, but for who he might have been, the kind of relationship we could have had, if only things had been different. By things being different, I suppose I mean if Dad had been an entirely different person.
Anyway, amid these conflicting thoughts and feelings actual tears were welling up, there in the bathroom fittings section of B&Q, prompting the man beside me to ask if I was all right.
‘I’m sorry?’ I asked, turning, only to realise that my vision was too blurry to actually see.
‘You just look a bit . . .’ he said, sounding hesitant, ‘. . . overwrought . . . maybe?’
I wiped away the tears with my sleeve and studied the man. He was tall, athletic, red-headed and elegantly dressed. He smiled at me kindly, confusedly, and the skin around his blue eyes wrinkled a little. He was five or six years older than me, I guessed, and he had a hint of what sounded like a Liverpudlian accent.
I forced a smile. ‘Oh! My eyes . . . ?’ I asked, embarrassedly faking a laugh. ‘It’s just an allergy. I’m fine. Really.’
‘What are you allergic to?’ he asked. ‘Toilet roll holders?’
‘Oh . . . no . . .’ I spluttered, before realising that this had been a joke. I’ve always been a bit slow on the uptake, joke-wise. ‘Allergic to the idea of fixing one to the wall, maybe?’ I offered, attempting a joke of my own.
The man smiled more broadly and held out a big hand with long fingers and manicured fingernails. I remember thinking that his nails were in a better state than my own. ‘Anthony,’ he said, ‘but everyone calls me Ant.’
‘Heather,’ I replied, shaking his hand loosely and blushing.
‘Some of them just stick on,’ he explained, nodding towards the wall of toilet roll dispensers. ‘They come with double-sided tape. So you could avoid the whole drilling thing that way if you want.’
‘Yeah?’ I said. ‘I haven’t found a stick-on one yet.’ And so Anthony helped me look until we had confirmed that there was in fact no such option, at least not today, not here, not in B&Q.
‘You no good with a drill, then?’ he asked finally. ‘Cos I think it’s going to be your only option.’
I shook my head. ‘I’m more likely to drill the cat than the wall.’
‘I could give you a hand, maybe,’ he offered. ‘I’m quite good at that stuff. If you live around here?’
‘Oh, um, thanks,’ I said. I could feel myself blushing again, and my awareness of it only made me blush even more. ‘That’s really nice of you, but . . . I’m sure I’ll be fine.’
Anthony shrugged and smiled again, but I was desperate to escape the moment, so I dropped the package I was currently holding into my basket – it was, unfortunately, the deluxe model – and ran for the tills. ‘You, um, have a good day!’ I offered over my shoulder as I escaped. I did not look back. I was hating myself for running away even before I had realised that was what I was doing.
I was still single, after all. Being normally constituted, I was also gagging for my romantic life to begin and, at thirty-three years old, this was indisputably overdue. But Dad’s illness had punched a hole in all our lives. For the longest time, everything had been put on hold and, in my case, this included being able to cope with the complication of a man in my life or indeed developing any sense of self-confidence that would enable me to chat one up. Sometimes I even feared that my childhood had somehow left me broken, and that I’d never be able to have a meaningful relationship. Anyway, the moment had begun to feel excruciating and I had run. It was pathetic, I knew it, but it hadn’t felt like a choice.
Once outside, I began to chide myself, muttering, ‘Stupid, stupid woman!’ as I marched through the drizzle towards the bus stop, yet by the time I got home with my pointless purchase – even if I’d known how to drill holes in the wall tiles, I didn’t have a drill – objectivity was setting in. Anthony had been out of my league anyway. There was no way that an athletic, red-headed alpha male in an expensive suit would be interested in little old me, so why worry about it? Oh, he’d flirted with me all right, but men like that will flirt with anything in a skirt, just to prove that they can. I knew from experience that the story would have ended at the precise moment Anthony felt he’d succeeded, at the exact moment I’d succumbed to his indisputable charm.
I don’t think I’m being falsely modest here, either. I’m just being honest and objective by stating that I’m a very ordinary woman. I know that’s an unfashionable thing to say these days; I know we’re supposed to big up just how unique and fabulous we all are, but I’m not ashamed or embarrassed to admit that I’m nothing special.
I’m a small woman, a smidgin under five feet tall, and of average intellect. I did neither well nor particularly badly at school and my parents were neither rich nor poor. My hair isn’t bombshell blonde nor sultry black but brown (‘mousy’ is the technical term, I believe), and it’s neither straight nor frizzy but a special kind of wavy that looks unkempt in virtually all circumstances. My eyes are a not unpleasant aqueous colour that can look blue, or green, or grey, depending on the weather and what I’m wearing. Anyway, you get the picture: I’m pretty unexceptional and I’ve known that for as long as I can remember.
Viking descendants like Anthony, on the other hand, are exceptional, so it didn’t seem to take a genius to work out that he was not destined for me.
The tall, square-shouldered, beautifully dressed men might eye up women like me occasionally – for kicks, or out of habit. But the women they date – even more so the women they marry – are, and always have been, those same girls we both envied and hated at school: the ones with the tiny waists and the perfectly aligned teeth; the ones whose fathers bought them cars for their eighteenth birthdays. In short, men like Anthony choose the same girls, the ones who always got picked first for netball practice back in the day. And there’s no point complaining about it because that’s just how life is.
The next time I saw Anthony was outside the cinema ten days later.
I was queuing with my friend Sheena, a cheeky nurse from work who I got on really well with. We were waiting to
see a film with Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman. It was an icy-cold January day, but for the time being the forecast rain remained thankfully absent.
‘How’s the bog roll holder?’ a voice asked, and I turned to see Anthony standing on the pavement beside me. He was wearing pointy, shiny shoes and a full-length woollen overcoat, the kind of thing American lawyers wear in films.
‘Oh, hello!’ I said, flushing with my habitual embarrassment.
‘Well?’ he prompted. ‘Did you get it done?’
‘It’s, um, still in the box,’ I admitted.
Sheena was looking at me questioningly, silently waiting to be introduced, so I sent her a complex stare that was supposed to communicate the fact that I’d explain everything later.
But Sheena had no intention of being left out. ‘Hello, I’m Sheena,’ she said, fluttering her lashes, despite the fact that she’d been in a relationship with her partner for almost a decade.
Anthony dragged his attention from me and shook her hand briefly, then glanced in my direction again. ‘You should have let me fix it for you,’ he said. ‘I did offer.’
‘Are you coming to see Australia with us?’ Sheena asked, pouting slightly and subtly pushing one hip out. Her flirting was starting to annoy me.
‘Um?’ Anthony said. ‘Oh, no! No, I was just walking past and I spotted Heather here.’ I was shocked that he’d remembered my name.
‘You could come anyway,’ Sheena said. ‘It’s supposed to be really good.’
Anthony glanced up at the poster above our heads, momentarily considering it, I think. But then he said, ‘Nah. Not really my sort of film.’
The queue suddenly shuffled forward and, as ever, desperate to end the embarrassment of talking to a man, I faked a laugh and said, ‘Well, it was good to see you,’ before staring at my feet, then at Sheena, and finally turning resolutely towards the front of the queue.
‘Call me sometime,’ Anthony said. He was holding out a business card. ‘Let me give you some DIY tips.’
‘You get my vote, honey,’ Sheena said, taking the card. I snatched it from her and slipped it into my coat pocket. ‘Thanks,’ I told Anthony, hoping it would get rid of him, ‘I will.’ At that moment the queue moved forward again, and as we’d reached the glass door into the lobby I gave him a fingertip wave and stepped inside.
From Something Old Page 1
