The Road to Zoe

by Alexander, Nick

  ‘Just, give him a chance,’ I said. ‘Try to get on with him.’

  Zoe laughed at this. She actually laughed. ‘Yeah, right,’ she said, sarcastically.

  At that, my patience ran out all over again. ‘I give up, Zoe,’ I said, standing. ‘You’ve worn me down, and I’m tired. So, I give up.’

  ‘So, Scott goes?’ Zoe asked, looking up at me with genuine optimism in her eyes. My heart fluttered a little then, because I remembered that she was a child – a child who could imagine that such an outcome was possible. And I actually considered it, for a moment. The thought lasted less than a second, but I imagined dumping Scott so that Zoe would be happy again. And if Scott had been anyone else, I seriously might have done so. But Scott was Scott. I was in love with him.

  It was my turn to laugh then, but with sadness. ‘No, Zoe,’ I said, reaching out to ruffle her hair, but failing when she ducked away from my touch. ‘No, Scott isn’t going anywhere. But I give in trying to fix it. Get on with him or don’t. I don’t care any more.’

  She was awkward all weekend. She was silent and on hunger strike when we ate in a fish-and-chip restaurant on the seafront. She was solitary and miserable on the beach. She even ignored Scott’s offer of money to play the slot machines. This was all pretty par for the course, and yet something was different. Something had changed, and it took me a surprisingly long time to work out exactly what that was.

  It wasn’t until we were almost home that I figured it out.

  We were driving over the hilltop road everyone refers to as the Cat and Fiddle and Jude had been blathering on for what felt like hours about seawater aquariums and how cool it would be to have one, and how he could keep those crabs as pets if that were the case, and what he would feed them, and on and on and on.

  Scott interrupted to ask if we wanted to stop off and get a takeaway on the way through town. It was my opinion that we’d spent quite enough money over the course of the weekend, and there was plenty of food at home I could cook.

  But Jude wanted pizza, and Scott felt it would finish the weekend off nicely, so I caved in.

  ‘What about you, Zoe?’ Scott asked her. ‘Will pizza work for you or do you want something else?’

  Zoe didn’t reply, and as it was rare for her to not have a negative opinion about a food option, I turned in my seat to look back at her. I was thinking that she might have fallen asleep.

  But Zoe was awake, her features neutral. It was as if she hadn’t heard Scott’s question at all.

  ‘Scott just asked if pizza works for you,’ I said. ‘Or would you rather we stopped somewhere else?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t mind, Mum,’ Zoe said, sounding polite, sounding quite reasonable, in fact. ‘I’ll just make one of my sandwiches when we get home anyway, so get what you want.’

  ‘Do we have enough sausages?’ Scott asked her then. ‘And what about bread? Do we need bread? I can always stop at the Sainsbury’s Local if you want.’

  Again, Zoe didn’t reply. Again, she looked like she genuinely hadn’t heard him. It was just that, within the confines of the car, not having heard was impossible.

  ‘Zoe!’ I said, trying to keep the exasperation from my voice. ‘Do we need sausages or bread?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ she replied. ‘There’s two whole packs in the freezer. There’s loads of bread left, too.’

  It was then that I understood she was blanking Scott. I scanned through the last forty-eight hours in my mind and realised that she hadn’t, as far as I could remember, spoken to him, or even acknowledged his presence in any way since Blackpool.

  I didn’t challenge her about it immediately. Instead, I waited to see if I was right, and once I’d confirmed that I was, I waited a little longer to see if it would pass.

  I hadn’t been joking earlier when I’d told her she’d exhausted me. The weekend had left me feeling reluctant to engage with her in any way. It’s a terrible thing to say, but I felt bored with the subject of my daughter, the special kind of ‘bored’ that really means ‘resentful as hell’. I did, however, ask Scott about it in bed that night.

  He was dismissive. He said something like, ‘Oh, you know what she’s like.’ He said she’d get over it, that it was just another phase.

  ‘Get over what, though, Scott?’ I asked. ‘Did something happen when you were on that mouse ride? Did you argue?’ It had been after the mouse ride that she’d run off, after all.

  Scott just shook his head. ‘Nope,’ he said, visibly trawling through his memories. ‘She was fine, actually. She was in quite a good mood. And then when we got off, she ran away.’

  I wondered if it was maybe my fault. Perhaps saying that I didn’t care if they got on had been a major strategic mistake.

  But then Scott rolled on top of me, and for twenty glorious minutes, I didn’t think about Zoe at all.

  The months that followed were excruciating.

  If you’d asked me what Zoe could do to make my home life worse, I would have said that there was nothing. I would have told you that we’d already reached peak-Zoe-angst. But I would have been wrong, because Zoe’s blanking of Scott would turn out to be exceptionally destructive of what remained of our home life.

  She never stayed in a room where Scott was present, and when, just occasionally, circumstances forced them together – in the car, for instance – she quite literally never spoke to him, or reacted to anything he said, ever again.

  If I sat her down to ask her what was wrong, and I did do that quite regularly, she’d say, ‘I hate him,’ or, ‘I don’t want to see him.’ But that was all the information I could get.

  Only once did I get anything more from her. In response to my quite specific question, ‘Did something happen in Blackpool? Did something happen on that mouse ride?’ she replied with something other than dumb silence. ‘What do you think, Mother?’ she asked me.

  ‘I don’t know, daughter,’ I replied. ‘That’s why I’m asking you.’

  ‘Well, of course it did,’ she said. ‘Of course something happened! Jesus!’

  And then she ran through the house and vanished for the rest of the weekend.

  I played the scenes of that day over and over in my mind. Here was Zoe agreeing, quite enthusiastically, to go on the ride with Scott. And here she was afterwards, sullen and silent and brooding.

  I thought about it obsessively. And when we were all together I listened to the oppressive silence between them. Often the air in the house would feel so unbreathable that I’d have to go for a walk around the block just to find some oxygen to stop my head spinning.

  I asked Scott endlessly what had happened that day. Because try as I might, I just couldn’t convince myself that he had no idea whatsoever. In the end, the fact of my asking – my inability to believe his answer, as he saw it – became a problem for our relationship as well. Things became tense between us and I was at a loss to know why or how to fix it.

  Scott didn’t seem to care as much as I felt he should that Zoe no longer wanted to speak to him. Within a few weeks he had given up addressing her as well.

  Questions of the ‘will you ask your sister?’ kind directed at Jude had stopped working by then, so Scott began to act like he couldn’t tell if Zoe was in the room either. It was as if they were in parallel universes, gliding through the same space but never quite aware of the other’s presence.

  Only once did Scott lose his temper with her, grabbing her arm as she walked out of the room and saying, ‘What is wrong with you?’

  Zoe screamed, and I mean she really screamed, until Scott let go of her, before running upstairs and locking herself in her room. Scott stormed out, leaving Jude and I sitting in silence. I caught my son’s eye, then, and he simply raised an eyebrow, in what struck me as a terrifyingly adult gesture.

  Later in the evening, I asked him if he could try to find out what was wrong, but he told me he’d already tried. ‘She doesn’t like Scott,’ he informed me, as if that explained what was happening. Perhaps to a fourteen-year-old i
t was reason enough. Maybe to Zoe it seemed that way, too.

  But I felt there had to be more to it. Everything had a cause and everything had a solution. And so I started to drag her, sometimes quite literally kicking and screaming, back to see the school psychologist.

  Eight

  Jude

  I sleep badly that night, and I wake up extra early, too. Unable to get back to sleep, I slip from the bed, leaving Jess snoring gently, dress and head to the village for breakfast supplies.

  When I get back forty minutes later, she’s in the shower, and by the time she’s finished messing with her hair I’ve given up waiting and eaten.

  Later, I toast a couple of crumpets for her and make a fresh pot of tea. In keeping with the granny theme, there’s a teapot with a knitted tea cosy, which, when I put it on like a hat, makes Jess giggle gorgeously. Still wearing my comedy hat, I sip my tea and watch her bite into the crumpet with gusto.

  ‘Did you ever want to work in fashion?’ I ask. She’s wearing a tartan skirt and a grey jumper with mad zigzag stripes this morning.

  ‘Do you want us to go into business together selling tea-cosy hats?’ she asks. She looks down at her chest and adds, ‘Or is that your way of telling me this is too much?’

  ‘No! You look great,’ I say. ‘I was just wondering. I mean, you like clothes and you’re really good at putting them together. Did you never want to be a designer or a model or anything?’

  ‘Um, modelling was hardly an option,’ Jess says, laughing.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, my boobs are too big and my hands are too ugly, to start with. Add to that my huge forehead and uncontrollable hair, and . . .’

  ‘Wow! All that, huh?’ I say. ‘God, you girls are so hard on yourselves! I think you’d make a perfect model. And there’s nothing wrong with your boobs, your hands or . . . what was the other one? See, I can’t even remember.’

  ‘My huge forehead.’

  ‘Yeah, there’s nothing wrong with that either.’

  ‘Which shows just how much you know,’ Jess says. ‘You guys have no idea.’

  ‘And designing stuff?’ I ask. ‘I mean, you’re always changing everything, sewing bits on and pulling bits off.’

  ‘I suppose I thought about it,’ Jess says. ‘When I was a kid, I did consider it. But the fashion world’s just so vacuous, isn’t it? I’d rather be actually helping people, I think.’

  ‘That sounds fair,’ I say.

  ‘By the way,’ Jess says, ‘while we’re on clothing, I hope I didn’t upset you about your suits?’ She nods at my clothes, jumper and jeans again, as if that is somehow proof of what she’s saying.

  ‘No,’ I tell her. ‘Not at all. I just thought because we’re going Zoe-hunting, this is better. Don’t want them thinking we’re Jehovah’s Witnesses again, do we?’

  Jess chews and swallows before replying, ‘I do think you look better in a suit. Just so you know. It’s weird for a young guy – I mean, unusual, not weird. But it suits you. Especially that blue check one.’

  ‘Well, thank you, ma’am,’ I say.

  ‘I kind of think we look cool together, too, don’t we? I saw our reflection the other day in a shop, and your serious thing kind of offsets my mad thing, if you know what I mean.’

  I laugh at this. ‘If you say so,’ I say. ‘You’re the expert.’

  ‘Plus, it’s sexy,’ Jess says. ‘Much sexier than the jeans and T-shirts the rest of the world is wearing.’

  ‘You can stop now,’ I tell her. ‘But thank you.’

  ‘Right,’ Jess says. ‘Well, at least I’ve said it. I was worried you were going to burn all your clothes and buy activewear.’

  ‘No chance,’ I say.

  Jess pulls out her phone now, and starts to read the Guardian, her daily morning ritual, so I leave her to it and move to the lounge, where I can look out at the seascape.

  I daydream about Zoe, then remember my childhood visit to Morecambe and kite-flying with Scott. I feel a sense of nostalgia, of loss, really; for even though, thanks to Zoe, the weekend had been pretty awful, it had been the last time I’d ever really had fun with Scott.

  I think about the fact of Zoe coming back here and wonder why that might be, and then if maybe it somehow holds the key to understanding what went wrong.

  Perhaps, I figure, she met someone that day at the funfair. Maybe she ran away later to join him.

  I must be staring out to sea for some time, because the next thing I know it’s ten o’clock and Jess is placing one hand on my shoulder. ‘Are you OK?’ she asks. ‘You’ve been there for ages.’

  ‘Sure,’ I say. ‘Just, you know, daydreaming.’

  ‘About Zoe?’ she asks.

  ‘Yeah, mainly,’ I admit.

  ‘Do you think we’ll find her?’ Jess asks, and then when I shrug, she adds, ‘In your guts, I mean. What’s your gut feeling?’

  I tell her honestly that I don’t have a gut feeling, and that I’m wondering if that might mean she’s dead. ‘I used to think she had a death wish,’ I tell her.

  ‘A death wish?’

  ‘Yeah, the not-eating thing. She scared me sometimes.’

  ‘No,’ Jess says, with surprising certainty. ‘She’s not dead.’

  I sigh, unconvinced.

  ‘Have you been here before?’ Jess asks. ‘I mean, you’ve been to Blackpool, haven’t you? Have you been here as well?’

  I smile and turn to face her. ‘Now, why would you ask me that?’ I say.

  ‘Just a feeling,’ she says. ‘A woman’s intuition, maybe?’

  I decide to tell her the truth. I’ve been feeling uncomfortable about avoiding the subject anyway. Uncomfortable, too, about the fact that I’m not sure why I’m avoiding it. So I tell her the whole story: our trip to Blackpool, my obsession with the Big One, Zoe going on the mouse ride with Scott and then vanishing. And how she never spoke to him again.

  ‘Is that why they split up?’ Jess asks, when I’ve finished. ‘Did your mum and Scott split up just because Zoe hated him so much?’

  ‘Sort of,’ I say. ‘I think it was less direct than that. It was, you know, more the stress of the whole situation. But yeah, it kind of made everything go sour. It made me so angry, losing Dad and then Scott as well, just because Mum and Zoe were so useless all the time.’

  ‘How were they useless?’ Jess asks.

  But when I try to think about that feeling it doesn’t make any sense, so all I can do is shrug. ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I just feel like they could have convinced Dad to stay if they’d wanted to. Or Scott, for that matter. But Zoe really hated Scott. Especially after Blackpool.’

  ‘You don’t think that—?’ Jess starts, before interrupting herself. ‘Actually, forget that,’ she says.

  I don’t prompt her to continue, because I’m actually pretty relieved that she decided to stop where she did. I’m fairly certain I know what she was going to say, and I’m only realising, at this precise instant, that the potential for her to say it was the exact reason I’ve been avoiding telling her about that day.

  ‘Given the circumstances, it must be weird for you being here again, isn’t it?’ Jess asks.

  ‘A bit,’ I say. ‘It’s where my sister went loopy, so . . .’

  ‘And it’s strange that she came back here, isn’t it?’ Jess says. ‘Why do you think she chose here?’

  I shrug.

  ‘Maybe it’s some kind of healing process,’ Jess suggests. ‘Maybe she’s retracing her steps. Perhaps she’s on her way back to you all.’

  ‘Now that I very much doubt,’ I say.

  We type Zoe’s address into Google Maps and then decide to walk back into town. It’s another sunny day with blue skies and a breeze. It’s considerably warmer than yesterday, too.

  ‘We should have driven,’ Jess comments, as we reach the wide promenade. ‘We could have finally taken the top down.’

  ‘We can always go for a drive later,’ I offer, ‘once we’ve got the Zoe thing out
of the way.’

  After the fifty-minute walk to Morecambe seafront, it takes another ten to find Poulton Road. The address we’ve been given is a two-up, two-down house in a side street. It’s bang opposite a pub called Smugglers Den.

  ‘The smugglers are missing an apostrophe,’ Jess points out.

  ‘Maybe someone smuggled it away,’ I joke, turning to face the front door of number fifty-seven and taking a deep breath. ‘Here goes,’ I say, knocking on the door.

  There’s no answer, and even when Jess knocks more loudly and shouts through the letterbox there’s no sign of movement from the interior. I’m pretty sure the place is empty.

  Feeling dejected, we turn to face the pub again. A rough-looking guy with a ratty goatee and tattooed arms is standing in the doorway smoking, staring at us inquiringly.

  ‘Who you after?’ he asks, tipping his head slightly backwards as he asks the question. He has a strong local accent.

  ‘Um, Zoe Fuller,’ I say, as we cross the road to join him. ‘She’s my sister. She lives at number fifty-seven. Or at least, she used to.’

  ‘Zoe?’ he says. ‘Well, now, there’s a blast from the past!’

  ‘You know her?’ Jess asks.

  ‘’Course I do,’ he says, dragging deeply on his cigarette and then blowing the smoke off to the left. ‘I know all the birds ’round here,’ he adds with a salacious wink, and I’m suddenly afraid he’s going to tell me how he came to sleep with my sister. He is not a good-looking man, and I’m doing my best to avoid imagining such a scene. ‘Moved away ages ago, though, Zoe did,’ he adds.

  ‘Right,’ I say. ‘Any idea where she went?’

  ‘Joined some hippies up in Scotland,’ he says.

  ‘Scotland?!’ I exclaim.

  ‘Aye. Some commune or sommat,’ he says, nodding and blowing smoke out of his nostrils like a dragon. ‘Used to bang on about it all the time.’ He stubs his cigarette out on the wall of the pub and then drops the butt into a bin. ‘Come inside for a bit,’ he says, gesturing towards the pub. ‘I don’t mind a blather but I really need to get back to my mopping.’

  We sit on bar stools and watch as he mops the sticky floors of the empty pub. Dim sunlight is filtering through the windowpanes, and there’s a strong smell of beer in the air. There’s actually something spooky about being in an empty, dingy, unheated pub. Whether it’s down to the spookiness or the temperature I’m not sure, but as I sit there I shiver repeatedly.