‘You did?’
Zoe rolls her eyes and glances at Jessica. ‘Boys,’ she says. ‘They notice nothing.’
‘Um, Mum didn’t spot that one either,’ I point out.
‘No, well, I made sure of that,’ Zoe says.
‘And that’s where you went when you left home?’
Zoe nods. ‘Well, to his dad’s place in Macclesfield. But he creeped me out – his dad, that is. I think he wanted a bit of . . . you know . . . the action. So we went to Dwayne’s mum’s place instead. That was all the way down in Bristol.’
‘Ah, so that’s how you ended up going to Bristol,’ Jess says. ‘We did wonder.’
‘It was rubbish,’ Zoe tells us. ‘His mum lives in the middle of this housing estate. There’s nothing to do there at all. I was bored stiff. And it didn’t work out with Dwayne either. He was pretty pissed off with me about his dad, as if that was my fault . . . He hated his new job as well. He ended up working for some local courier company and they were pretty horrible to him, so he was angry about that, too. So in the end, I left.’
‘We went there,’ I tell Zoe. ‘We met Dwayne’s mum. She said she liked you.’
‘Yeah, she was OK,’ Zoe says.
‘And then we went to a horrible place in Princess Anne Road or something.’
‘Queen Ann Road? You went there?’ Zoe says. ‘Oh, God . . .’
‘Pre-tt-y horrible,’ I tell her.
Zoe nods. ‘I know,’ she says. ‘But I was going through a bad patch. I got into smack, actually, if you must know. But I didn’t stay there long, and I’m off it all now, thanks to Nick. So . . .’
We sit in silence for a moment as we continue to eat our sandwiches. Zoe looks lost in her memories, while I’m trying to slot this new data into my previously sketchy understanding of events. But though this explains where she went, it of course doesn’t explain why she left. And it certainly doesn’t explain her absolute avoidance of any contact with any of us ever since. I try to find a clever way to ask the question indirectly, and eventually decide to pursue the Morecambe connection.
‘So, why Blackpool, Zoe?’ I ask. ‘Why Morecambe?’
‘They were just, you know, things that happened,’ Zoe says.
‘Things that happened?’
‘Yeah, you know . . . This guy I met in Bristol was driving to Blackpool,’ she tells me. ‘I wanted to get away, so I got a lift. He was kinda cute, so . . . I mean, I thought I liked him at first. But then he tried to jump me at the motorway services and that was the end of that. But anyway . . .’
‘And Morecambe?’
‘Oh, some bloke offered me a cleaning job up there,’ Zoe says. ‘I needed the money and it came with accommodation. They never paid me what they owed me in the end. But it was OK. It was a friendly house. I was sharing with this gay guy called Paul. He actually took me out in Blackpool, which is where I met Nick. And the rest, as they say, is history.’
‘And that’s the only reason you went to Morecambe?’ I ask.
Zoe shrugs. ‘Well, yeah,’ she says. ‘I needed the job.’
I sigh at the dead end we have reached, and glance at Jess, who I know can see what I’m trying to do. She raises one eyebrow at me almost imperceptibly.
‘Mum’s fine, by the way,’ I say, attempting a different tack. I’m tempted to add a sarcastic, ‘Not that you’ve asked,’ to my phrase, but I just about manage to restrain myself.
‘I know,’ Zoe says, shocking me once again. ‘She’s moving to Nottingham, right? Selling the house and everything.’
My mouth, still full of tuna wrap, falls open at this. I cover it quickly with my hand. ‘How can you possibly know that?’ I ask, once I’ve swallowed.
‘Sinead told me,’ Zoe says. ‘She gives me occasional updates on you all.’
‘Sinead?’
‘Yeah, my friend from school. Don’t you remember her? Redhead, curls . . . You fancied her when you were about eight.’
‘Did I?’ I ask, frowning. I honestly have no recollection of Sinead.
‘Anyway, her mum ended up working with our mum. So she finds out stuff and tells me.’
‘And Sinead’s mum is . . .?’
‘Cynthia,’ Zoe says. ‘Cynthia Hubert. I’m not sure if you know her. We never saw her much, back then. But Mum got to know her when she was at Publicis. And then they sort of kept in touch.’
I bite my bottom lip and exhale sharply. Because for all these years, I’ve been telling myself that my sister didn’t give a damn about any of us. And that belief, I’m only now realising, really hurt me. ‘And me?’ I ask her. ‘Did she tell you stuff about me as well?’
Zoe laughs. ‘Of course,’ she says. ‘You’re living in London. You did a degree in electronics and got some top-notch result in your exams.’
‘Computer science,’ I correct her.
‘Same thing,’ Zoe says, dismissively. ‘I know about Dad marrying that yoga bimbo, too. And having a kid and calling the poor fucker Terra.’
‘Linda’s hardly a bimbo,’ I say. ‘And that poor fucker Terra is our half-brother.’
‘If you say so,’ Zoe says. ‘She used to drive me crazy with all her crystals and meditation and shit, though.’
I catch Jessica’s eye again and I can see that she’s willing me on. She wants me to be brave and ask the question: Why, Zoe? But I can’t seem to find a way to get there. Or perhaps I’m too scared of what her answer will be.
‘Shall I go for a walk?’ Jess asks. ‘Maybe I should give you two some space?’
I wonder if it would be easier if she did, or whether that would actually make things even harder. She’s so good at getting people to talk, after all. She’s so much better at all this than I am.
But before I can decide, let alone answer, Zoe has replied for me. ‘No! You’re fine,’ she says, definitively. ‘She should stay, shouldn’t she?’
I guess from the panic in her voice that Zoe’s afraid to be alone with me; she’s afraid of where the conversation might go. She’s perhaps afraid of how angry I might get as well.
It dawns on me that this is what I’m afraid of, too. I understand only now why the question is so hard. I’m afraid of my own anger. Of course I am.
‘Yes, stay, Jess,’ I tell her. ‘You should definitely stay.’
‘It’s just, I don’t really see why,’ Jess says. ‘I’m sure you two have private things you need to talk about, don’t you?’
‘I’d far rather talk about you than me,’ Zoe says, and I think, Yeah, I bet you would. ‘You’re a social worker, you said, right?’ she prompts.
So Jess ends up telling Zoe all about her job, a tale which includes a lengthy description of the famous Baby P case of 2007. I feel frustrated by the length of the detour, but also strangely relieved that we’ve managed to avoid talking about our family for a little longer.
Eventually, having explained that though she obviously wasn’t working in Haringey in 2007, the ricochets of the Baby P case have changed just about everything in child protection, Jess winds up her strange monologue.
‘Shall we go for a walk or something?’ Zoe says, and from the fact that she asks it in the split second following the end of Jessica’s story, I can tell that she’s been thinking about her next move even while Jess was still talking. She’s been deciding how to continue to fill that oh-so-dangerous void without getting personal. ‘Because if we are, we should probably make a move before the weather turns.’
‘The weather?’ Jess says.
‘Yeah, it’s going to rain, apparently.’
‘The weather forecast said sunshine all week,’ Jess says. ‘In Nice, at any rate.’
‘Oh, Nice has, like, its own special climate. Sometimes we have storms here and in Nice it’s boiling.’
‘Oh,’ Jess says. ‘Right.’
Even though clouds do seem to be building further inland, the temperature on the coast is a full eight degrees warmer than on the campsite. The sun is shining and it’s positively balmy, making
it hard to imagine that it might rain.
Directed by Zoe, we have driven to a long strip of pebble beach, sandwiched between the road and railway tracks on one side and the turquoise waters of the Med on the other. Because of the train tracks it’s one of the few areas on the coast that hasn’t been built up, and this gives it an entirely different feel to the rest of the Côte d’Azur.
‘This is the barbecue beach,’ Zoe tells us as we lock the car up and head to the water’s edge. ‘In summer this is wall-to-wall people cooking food and picnicking. It’s really good fun. People play music and dance and all sorts.’
‘That does sound cool,’ I say.
‘Nick’s not so keen,’ Zoe says. ‘She says it’s the ugliest beach in the area. But I kind of like it because it’s a bit shabby.’
‘I like it, too,’ Jess says, picking up a smooth pebble and chucking it across the beach to the sea. ‘It’s cinematographic, somehow. I think it’s the light. It’s like a scene from an American road movie or something.’
‘Like a scene from our road trip movie,’ I say.
‘Yeah,’ Jess says, shooting me a smile. ‘Yeah, I guess it is.’
We walk the length of the beach, past fishermen and dog-walkers, pausing to take photos of the snow-capped Alps in the distance and to skim stones across the waves.
Behind us, back towards Zoe’s place, dark clouds are swelling; but for now at least, we’re still blessed with blue sky and sunshine here on the coast. Eventually we reach the outskirts of Marina Baie des Anges, a development of high-rise ultra-modern apartments that ripples along the coast like some massive wave-shaped sculpture. At the edge of the development is an incongruous café comprising a small wooden hut and few red plastic tables scattered among the pebbles. Here, we buy cans of Coke and turn our chairs to face out to sea, side by side. It’s kind of strange having the turquoise sea and sky above and in front of us, even as the sky behind our backs shifts to deepest grey. I keep glancing over my shoulder just to look.
‘I’m glad you found me,’ Zoe says, unexpectedly. ‘I mean . . . I know it’s my fault and everything . . . the fact that we’ve seen so little of each other . . .’
My eyebrow twitches irrepressibly at this massive understatement, and Zoe notices and corrects herself. ‘OK, that we haven’t seen each other at all, then,’ she says. ‘But I’m glad you found me. Hanging out like this. Well, it’s nice.’
I nod and swallow with difficulty. My emotions are so confused that I’m struggling to work out what I’m feeling.
‘And your mum?’ Jessica asks. ‘Do you think you’d be ready to see her as well?’
I’m a bit stunned by Jessica’s intervention. I hadn’t been expecting that at all, and now I hold my breath as I wait to see how Zoe will reply. But she just shakes her head vaguely and then sips at her can of Coke.
Why, Zoe? The question is there once again, waiting on the tip of my tongue like a slowly melting acid drop. But I still can’t say it. Saying it out loud is somehow beyond my physical capabilities.
Jessica, apparently, has no such issues. ‘Why is that?’ she asks, provoking another sharp intake of breath on my part.
‘I don’t . . . really . . .’ Zoe mumbles, glancing off along the beach – anything to avoid eye contact.
‘You don’t really what?’ Jess asks softly, reaching out to touch her arm. ‘What is it?’
I put my drink down and start to chew a fingernail. I, too, look away along the beach, but in the other direction. The tension of the moment is becoming unbearable.
‘I don’t really want to go there,’ Zoe says, now turning back to face Jessica and beginning to sound a little annoyed. ‘If it’s all the same to you?’
‘Well, I don’t think it’s all the same to Jude,’ Jessica says. ‘Do you realise just how hard this has all been for him, all this not knowing?’
Though I can see what she’s doing and why, and though I understand that her motivations are all good ones, the fact of her asking the question in this way is unbearable to me, and for so many reasons.
I begin to list and decode those reasons: that Jessica is trying to get my sister to tell me something I’m too scared to ask her myself; that her doing so implies a sort of shared ownership of the problem, the sort of suffocating coupledom where one partner feels authorised to speak for the other; that she’s talking to my sister about something that is my problem with my sister, that has nothing whatsoever to do with Jessica, and that she’s daring to tell Zoe how hard this has all been for me when she really has no idea how hard it’s been, when neither of them do, because it’s been so fucking hard that for most of my life I’ve had to pretend that it’s all fine and that it’s had absolutely no effect on me whatsoever. And even now that I’m starting to accept that’s maybe not the case, I still can’t find a way to think rationally about it or even begin to quantify what effect losing two dads and a sister within the space of a few years – as Jess so rightly pointed out – might have had on me.
‘The thing is, Zoe—’ Jessica says.
But suddenly, it’s all just too much for me. ‘Stop, Jess,’ I tell her.
‘But you two really need—’
‘Just stop!’ I say sharply, my anger leaking out.
‘But you need to talk about this,’ Jess insists. ‘You have to.’
Only I don’t. What I need is for Jessica to stop. What I need is to get away from both of them. What I need is to be able to breathe. I stand and walk – almost run, actually – off along the beach, leaving them sitting in the café behind me.
‘Jude,’ Jess calls out, pleadingly. ‘Jude!’
But I don’t pause, and I don’t look back.
Once I start walking, I find I can’t stop. I’m feeling angry and upset, incomprehensibly scared and confused, and the more distance I put between myself and Zoe, the better it feels. And so I continue to walk.
Halfway along the enormous beach, I pluck up the courage to look back. Neither Jessica nor Zoe appear to have moved from the café, and I’m relieved to see that they haven’t been following me. My breathing is starting to ease.
I sit down at the water’s edge and see some tiny fish nibbling at some algae. I watch a cormorant dipping and diving until it finally comes up with a fish in its beak, and then glance up to see that the line of cloud has advanced so far that it now ends directly above my head.
I think about Jessica tramping all over my private garden in her yellow Dr. Martens boots and feel angry at her lack of discretion, at her failure to understand the impossibility of asking that question, or more precisely, her failure to realise that if it had been askable, I would have asked it myself.
I think about her reasons for having done so and force myself to understand that she had merely been trying to help.
Only at the end of this process do I think about the fact that she’s right – of course she is. Zoe and I do need to have this conversation. That conversation is the reason I am here today; it’s the reason we’ve tracked her down. I need to take my courage in both hands and let her tell me what happened all those years ago, because time is running out.
Yes, I’ve been pretending, for years, that I’m fine. I’ve been telling myself that none of this really affected me. I’m a bloke, after all. I’m solid. It’s all cool. Only it isn’t, is it? Because look at the state of my relationships . . . And look at the state of me now.
I sigh deeply and shiver. The winter sun, still visible in its ever-shrinking strip of blue sky, is already dipping towards the horizon, and the temperature is dropping quickly. I glance back up the beach and see that Jess and Zoe are heading my way.
Seeing that I’m looking at them, Jessica now points towards where our car is parked and beckons to me. I stand, take one difficult gulp of air as if in preparation for a dive, and then head across the beach to join them.
The drive back to the campsite, towards the menacing gloom of the storm clouds, takes place in complete silence. It’s not an empty silence, or even an ang
ry silence. Neither Jessica nor Zoe seem upset with me, which is a relief, but they both seem pretty strange. Actually, they both look as if they’ve been crying, which is weird. It’s what people in novels call a pregnant silence, I suppose – a silence desperate to be filled; a silence biding its time before delivering its secrets.
The first drops of rain start to plop on to the windscreen at the exact moment we pull into the campsite. Jessica takes the keys from the ignition but then, placing one hand gently on my thigh, instructs me to stay put. ‘Zoe has something to tell you,’ she informs me, her voice unusually brittle. ‘I’ll go for a wander.’
I glance back at Zoe in the rear of the car and see her reach forward with her own keys. ‘Take them,’ she tells Jessica. ‘You can wait in the caravan. I think it’s going to chuck it down.’
Jess nods and takes the keys from her grasp. ‘Thanks,’ she says, then to me, ‘Be calm. Try to understand. And don’t forget to breathe.’ As she pushes open the door of the car and stands, she adds, ‘. . . Love you.’
‘You coming up front?’ I ask Zoe. My voice is gravelly with fear.
Zoe shakes her head. ‘I’m fine here,’ she says.
I shift in my seat so that I can face her. I think about the fact that she feels safer with the headrests separating us and wonder what she’s going to tell me. ‘Whatever,’ I say.
Zoe turns away to look out of the side window. I follow her gaze and watch Jess until she disappears from sight behind the campsite office. A sudden flurry of raindrops hits the car, wetting the windscreen and hammering on the roof before abruptly stopping again.
‘So?’ I prompt. ‘What do you want to tell me, Zo?’
When she turns back to face me her eyes are watering. ‘I . . .’ she says.
‘Yes?’
‘I . . . think it was easier talking to Jess,’ she says.
‘Because she’s a woman?’ I ask.
Zoe shakes her head.
‘’Cause she’s not involved?’
Zoe nods.
‘So you told her, then? You told her everything?’
Another nod, then, ‘Pretty much. Maybe you could just get Jess to tell you? That might be easier.’
The Road to Zoe Page 24
