by Lesley Kara
I’m still smiling to myself like an idiot when I come out of the shop. I don’t know what makes me turn right towards the sea instead of left towards home, but I do. Maybe it’s intuition. My foot freezes mid-air. I can’t believe my eyes. The mannequin in the Oxfam window display is wearing a Cranberries No Need to Argue world-tour black T-shirt. Simon had one just like it.
It’s not his. Of course it isn’t. How could it be his?
I inch towards the window, compelled to look closer but dreading what I’ll see. Because if it’s there, the small bleach stain near the hem on the left side, then I’ll know for sure. I’ll know it’s the same limited-edition vintage T-shirt he bought off eBay. And if it is …?
I peer at it, my eyes devouring the photograph printed on the front. It’s the very same one. Noel and Mike Hogan and Fergal Lawler sprawled indolently on the grass and Dolores O’Riordan – the tragically late Dolores O’Riordan – with her elfin haircut, standing in the foreground. Simon’s voice whispers in my ear. ‘Everybody else is doing it, so why can’t we?’
My stomach contracts. I stand, motionless. It isn’t real, it’s in my head. It must be. Just like all the rest of it. It’s what he said that first time I met him, and I’d smirked, thinking it was a come-on. Then I heard what track was playing and felt like a right twat. It was ‘I Still Do’ by The Cranberries and what he’d just said was the name of their debut album.
I can’t see whether there’s a bleach stain on the T-shirt from here because of the angle of the mannequin’s arm. I’ll have to go inside and take a closer look. But as I’m moving towards the door a deep voice calls my name from the other side of the street.
It’s Richard Carter, Josh’s dad. He’s hurrying towards me, grinning from ear to ear. ‘Hi there, Astrid. I see you’ve bought a sketch pad.’
Flustered, I hold it out in front of me, as if I’ve only just realized it’s in my hands.
‘Yes, I’m going to make a start later today.’
‘Fantastic. I can’t wait to see what you come up with.’ He slides his glasses up his nose with his finger. ‘To be honest, I was worried I’d scared you away last night.’
My cheeks burn. ‘Sorry about that. I’d promised my mum I’d go with her to the doctor’s.’ The lie slips out automatically. ‘I only just got back in time.’
‘Ah, I see. Maybe another time, eh?’
‘Yes, that’d be nice.’
‘It’s a good thing you’re doing, Astrid. Looking after your mother. Lots of young people wouldn’t put their careers on hold the way you have.’
I force a smile and watch as he raises his hand in a mock-salute and marches off. He has the same confident, loping stride as his son. Now he’s stopped to talk to a woman with red hair. She turns and looks in my direction. Is he saying something about me? No, of course he isn’t. I’m being paranoid, as usual. She’s probably just keeping an eye out for a traffic warden. Why do I always think everything’s about me?
I turn back to the shop, bracing myself for what I’m about to do. I’m going to go inside and check the hem of that T-shirt. The T-shirt that can’t possibly be Simon’s. It’s a coincidence, nothing more. But in the short time I’ve been talking to Richard, someone has hung a ‘Closed’ sign at the door.
Josh’s text comes through just as I’m hurrying back to the Oxfam shop to see if it’s reopened.
‘Hi Astrid. Dad said he bumped into you earlier. Hope your mum’s ok? Let me know if you fancy going out for a drink. Or maybe I’ll see you down on the beach some time? x’
I stop to tap out a reply.
‘A walk on the beach would be good. What about Saturday? x’
I could suggest tomorrow, but I don’t want to sound too eager.
‘Great. Ten o’clock at the spit? x’
‘Ten is good. x’
I fire off the last message just seconds before I reach the shop. I stop dead in my tracks. This can’t be happening. The mannequin is wearing the same black jeans and blue trainers as before, but the T-shirt is different. It’s a plain grey crew-neck. I’ve only been gone half an hour and the shop was shut. Surely someone hasn’t bought it already?
I open the door and go in. The sight of Rosie behind the counter gives me a start. I’d forgotten she volunteers in here.
‘Hi, what happened to the Cranberries T-shirt in the window?’
Rosie lifts a pile of books from a chair and places them on the counter between us, starts scribbling prices in pencil on their inside covers. ‘If it’s not there now, then we must have sold it. I’ve only just got in.’
Why do I get the impression she’s lying?
‘You don’t happen to know who donated it, do you?’
She carries on writing. ‘Sorry, no. Sometimes people just leave things outside in bags.’ She looks up then and fingers the silver locket at her neck. ‘What did you say it was?’
‘A Cranberries No Need to Argue T-shirt.’
She makes an ‘O’ shape with her mouth. ‘I don’t remember seeing it. Doug must have dressed the mannequin this morning and sold it before I came in.’
‘When will he be back?’
‘I don’t know. He’s gone home sick. That’s why I’ve had to come in on my day off.’
She carries the books over to a set of shelves and slots them into the gaps. Then she turns and gives me that sly smile of hers, as if we are conspirators in a secret, which of course we are. We are members of a secret club. What’s that Groucho Marx quote? ‘I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.’ AA is the sort of club nobody really wants to join. We might not have a special handshake, but we have our own literature and our polite little rituals and, thanks to our founder and his insistence on anonymity, we have our secret code. We are all ‘friends of Bill W’.
‘How are you?’ she says.
‘I’m fine.’
She’s got that strange look on her face again, as if she knows things about me, or thinks she does. This is what some of these old-timers at AA are like. Just because they’ve been round the block a few times. Just because they’ve laid themselves bare and dished themselves up to God on a plate, they think that gives them the right to your secrets too. Perhaps it’s like Scientology. Tell them all your shit and they’ve won. They’ve got you.
‘I’d better go,’ I say.
She reaches out and rests three fingers on my wrist. ‘You will come back? To meetings, I mean.’
I nod. Her fingers are still on my wrist.
‘He wants you to,’ she says. ‘He’s watching over you.’
I give her a blank stare. Then it dawns on me. She’s talking about God. She withdraws her hand and I turn away. I don’t want to offend her, not if she really believes in all that, but I can’t stay and listen to it. I really can’t.
Outside on the street, I stare once again at the mannequin. There’s something menacing about its faceless white head, the way it’s cocked to one side. Could someone really have bought that T-shirt and this Doug person have re-dressed the mannequin in the short time it took me to go home and come back again? It’s possible, of course it is, and anyway, there’s no reason to think the T-shirt was Simon’s. There must be a fair few of them knocking about, limited edition or not. But what are the odds of one of them turning up in a charity shop in the very same town I’m now living in and of me seeing it?
Could I have imagined it? I haven’t had a drink in months. I’m stone-cold sober, but my mind’s still playing tricks on me. What with thinking I saw him down by the beach huts last night and now this …
But what if I’m not imagining it? What if it really was him and he’s deliberately trying to freak me out? I hurry away from the shop window, trying to convince myself that the mannequin with no eyes isn’t watching me as I go.
If only I’d been able to check for that bleach stain.
9
As I walk home, I try everything I can to get that mannequin out of my head. I watch my feet pound the pavement. Left
right left. I had a good home and I left. I left on my own and it served me right. Left right left. It’s a marching song my nan used to sing – something her nan had taught her. Funny the random things that pop into your head. Things you thought you’d forgotten rising to the surface like bubbles. Dear old Nan.
I’m so deep in thought I almost walk straight into a pushchair, swerve out of the way just in time. The young mother tuts and I mumble an apology and keep going, head down, heart thumping. I know what’s coming next and there’s nothing I can do to shut it down. There’s a painful lump at the back of my throat as all the bad things crowd into my mind at once. Things my nan would struggle to believe. I blink away the tears of shame and hurry towards the cottage, narrowly avoiding a dead baby bird splattered on the pavement like a tiny foetus.
My stomach lurches. It’s so unexpected and horrible, so pink and raw. The poor, helpless little thing. I cringe at the thought of what it would have felt like if I’d trodden on it. The soft squelch. The splintering of tiny bones. Maybe if I was wearing my DMs I’d nudge it off the kerb into the road so that nobody has to go through that, but I’m wearing my cheap plimsolls today and can’t bear the thought of its limp little body rolling against my toes, gathering the grit of the pavement in the folds of its skin.
Mum’s sorting through a pile of post in the porch when I arrive.
‘Anything from the DWP?’ I say.
She gives me a blank look.
‘Department of Work and Pensions. My benefits letter?’
She shakes her head. ‘It’s all junk mail.’
She hands me the pile of leaflets and flyers to dump in the recycling box by the front door. Are they ever going to sort out my claim? It’s so demoralizing living on paltry handouts from my mother at the age of thirty-two.
She notices my sketch pad. ‘Oh, that’s good, darling. I was going to suggest that you start drawing again, but I didn’t want you to think I was nagging.’
I tell her about the sketches I’ve offered to do for Josh’s dad.
‘I think I’ve still got some of your old charcoal and graphite pencils somewhere,’ she says. ‘Do you want me to look for them?’
I nod and her face softens in pleasure. It’s so rare to see her smile these days and, before I know what’s happening, my eye sockets are tingling. Mum used to be so proud of my art. She used to pin my pictures on the kitchen wall when I was little. She even got a couple of them framed, the ones I did for my art GCSE. They’re still on the wall in the living room.
I look away. It’s one of those charged moments that seems to encapsulate everything that’s gone wrong between us, one of those moments when either one of us might reach out and say something profound, something that spans the chasm between us, and I know it should be me that says it.
But now I’m sliding my plimsolls on to the shoe rack in the porch and Mum steps back into the hall. The moment has passed.
*
It’s ten past ten on Saturday and Josh is standing by the spit, gazing out to sea. He hears me approach and turns, a slow smile spreading across his face. He didn’t think I was coming.
I like that about him, the visibility of his emotions. His openness. Simon was always so guarded, so secretive. I used to ask him what he was thinking, and he’d just narrow his eyes and say, ‘You don’t want to know.’ But I did. I always wanted to know. Even when I didn’t.
‘I wasn’t sure whether to give up on you,’ Josh says.
‘Sorry. Lost track of the time.’ In fact, I was ironing my jeans dry, then cleaning my teeth a second time and swilling my mouth out with Mum’s extra-strong mouthwash (alcohol-free, it goes without saying), holding it there till my tongue burned. No way am I going to smell like Rosie.
He puts his hands on my shoulders and draws me towards him, so close I see flecks of gold in the green of his irises. He brings the palms of his hands to my cheeks and cups my face.
‘Your cheeks are cold,’ he says. It’s intimate, and a hundred times more exciting than a kiss, but I wish he’d kiss me anyway. Especially after all that effort. A mouth this fresh deserves to be kissed.
‘How’s your mum today?’
I swallow hard. Lying used to come so easily I didn’t even have to think about it. Perhaps if the notion of my hale-and-hearty mother succumbing to depression, or any other illness come to that, wasn’t so outrageous, I wouldn’t be having this much of a problem. My mother is not the sort of woman who needs looking after. She might be small and thin, but she has wrists and nerves of steel. I’ve seen her advance upon a gang of youths with nothing more than a wooden spoon in her hand. I’ve seen her wrestle a live rat from a drain.
‘She’s not too bad at the moment,’ I say.
‘I’m glad you got back in time for her appointment.’
‘Yes. Me too.’ I clear my throat. ‘Which way shall we walk? Towards Mistden?’
‘Why not?’
The sea looks grey and uninviting today. Large rollers sweep in at a curve and break noisily on the shore. Even on a weekend, at this time of morning on an overcast day there aren’t many people about. The odd dog-walker or jogger. A mother making sandcastles for her toddler, who promptly kicks them over and shrieks with high-pitched giggles. That girl in the grey puffa jacket again, marching along the esplanade, head bowed against the wind. But for long stretches of time we have the beach to ourselves.
Josh makes a sudden detour round the name ‘Billy’, which has been written in the sand in big, shaky letters.
‘Did you use to do this?’ he says. ‘When you were a kid?’
‘Not that I can remember.’
‘I did. And I used to get really angry when people walked over my handiwork.’
‘I hated my name so much I wouldn’t have wanted it scrawled across a beach for everyone to see.’
‘Really? I think Astrid’s a lovely name.’
‘So do I. But it isn’t the name I grew up with.’
He spins round to face me. Why am I telling him this? It’s as if I’m approaching the truth from an odd angle. Feeling my way towards it in stages. Trying to make up for the lies.
‘Well, come on, then. Don’t keep me in suspense. What was it?’
Me and my big mouth. ‘Hilary.’
He narrows his eyes. ‘You don’t look like a Hilary.’
‘Do I look like an Astrid?’
He puts his head on one side and squints at me. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘You do.’ He stoops down to pick up the pointy piece of driftwood that Billy probably used as his pencil. Oh God. I hope he’s not going to do what I think he is. Please don’t turn this into a scene from a cheesy movie, Josh.
He runs his hand over the smooth, bleached wood, then tosses it back on to the sand. I breathe a sigh of relief.
‘How did your parents react when you changed it?’ he asks. ‘Were they upset?’
‘Mum refused to accept it at first. Thought it was just a silly phase I was going through.’
I kick a pebble with the toe of my plimsoll and watch as it shoots across the sand and lands in a dip by the wooden breaker up ahead. Maybe if she hadn’t rolled her eyes and tutted every time I refused to respond when she called me Hilary the novelty would have worn off in time. As it was, her disapproval made me even more determined to go through with it.
‘Dad was fine about it. He used to call me Asteroid, just to annoy me.’
Dad’s face flashes into my mind. Those amused, crinkly eyes. The gentle set of his mouth, always on the point of a smile. The image is so clear, so heart-wrenchingly familiar, it makes me gulp for air.
‘I’m sorry,’ Josh says. ‘I shouldn’t have asked.’
‘It’s okay.’
‘No, it isn’t.’
He’s standing in front of me now, hands on my shoulders again. His eyes are so kind. I look at them for only a fraction of a second and before I know what’s happening it’s too late. The grief is never far from the surface. It only takes a tiny trigger and down it comes like an avalanc
he, collecting all the other debris in its path.
Josh pulls me towards him and I bury my face in his chest. We stay like this for ages. Until his sweatshirt is damp through. Until he strokes my head and kisses my left earlobe. Then we start walking again, except this time we’re holding hands.
Look at her. Crying on another man’s shoulders. Starting all over again with someone else.
My fingers find the envelope in my pocket and curl around its stiff edges. I work one of the corners under my thumbnail and push it in till it hurts. I do that all the time now. I like the little V-shape it makes at the top of the nailbed. I like the pain – the way it throbs.
She thinks she can reinvent herself just by moving away and cutting her hair. She thinks she’s leaving the past behind her. Getting better.
She needs to think again.
10
Somehow or other, we resurface at Josh’s dad’s house. The table in the kitchen has been cleared and scrubbed. Josh opens the giant fridge and brings out lettuce with dirt still clinging to the leaves, big beef tomatoes and a small, curved, dusty-looking cucumber, like the type you find in French supermarkets. He blasts the lettuce under the cold tap, then dunks it in a bowl of water before tearing the leaves off one by one and shaking them out with concentrated force over the quarry-tiled floor.
Now he’s boiling two eggs in a pan and I’ve been presented with a glass chopping board, two tomatoes and a razor-sharp knife. There’s something comforting in this silent communication, the wordless allocation of tasks. I like the way the knife drops through the firm red flesh of the tomatoes and lets me slice them really thinly.
