Excerpt
Who Did You Tell?
1
I smell him first, or rather the aftershave he used to wear. Joint by Roccobarocco. A ’90s vintage scent—masculine and woody. A discontinued line.
I spin round, but no one’s there. Only a girl in a puffer jacket squatting to tie her laces. I almost trip over her. Then I see him, sprinting toward the sea, the furry flaps of his trapper hat flying in the breeze like a spaniel’s ears. Simon.
My knees give way. I stare after him, but he’s disappeared into the night. That’s if he was ever there in the first place. Maybe it’s all in my head. A hallucination. I’ve had a few of those in the past.
Whatever it was, I scurry home. A small, frightened creature, suddenly afraid of the dark. Afraid of him.
Mum pounces on me like a sniffer dog the second I walk through the door.
“Where’ve you been? I’ve been worried sick.” Her fingers dig into my arms and I have to shake her off.
“It’s only ten o’clock, Mum. You can’t keep doing this. You’ve got to trust me.”
The snort is out before she has a chance to think better of it. “Trust? You’re talking to me about trust?”
She crumples onto the bottom stair with her head in her hands, and something inside me crumples too. I kneel down beside her and bury my head in her lap.
“Sorry.” My voice is muffled in the folds of her dressing gown and the years roll away. I’m in my first year of secondary school and someone has upset me. Mum is telling me to rise above it.
Now, as then, she rubs her hand in a circle between my shoulders.
“I just don’t understand why you have to walk when it’s so late,” she says, and I want to explain that if I have to come home and sit in this dreary little cottage night after night without drinking, my head will explode. I want to tell her that I walk to stay alive, that I have to keep on the move, doing things, going places, even when I’ve nothing to do and nowhere to go. Especially then. But all I can do is shed hot, silent tears into her lap.
It’s been five months since I woke up in hospital, Mum standing at the foot of my bed with “That Look” on her face. A fortnight since my spell in rehab came to an end. It was she who suggested this arrangement. If she hadn’t, I might have been forced to ask, wouldn’t have had the luxury of indignation.
“Move in with you? In Flinstead? You’ve got to be joking.”
Simon and I had laughed about the place on the few occasions it cropped up in conversation. Said the day we ended up somewhere like Flinstead was the day we gave up on life. It’s got this reputation as being somewhere you go to die. Like Eastbourne, only smaller and with nothing to do of an evening.
“What are your other options?” Mum said. That must have been the moment she decided to adopt the dispassionate tone of a counselor. She’s been using it ever since, when she can remember. Open questions. No hint of disapproval. I’m not fooled for a second. It’s just another of her strategies. All that anger and frustration, all that disappointment—it’s still seething beneath the surface, ready to boil up and spit in my face like hot fat.
It’s past midnight now. I’m lying in bed, curled on my side, facing the window. My braids feel tight and itchy and I have a sudden urge to unpick them all, but they cost so much to put in, money I can ill afford, and besides, it’ll take ages. I don’t have the energy for it.
A sliver of moonlight seeps in through the gap in the curtains. I roll onto my other side and hug my knees against my chest, finally allowing myself to think of Simon. My mouth goes dry. There’s a strange whooshing noise in my ears and a prickling behind my cheekbones. It couldn’t have been him earlier. It was just my mind playing tricks on me.
We met in a bar. Where else? One of those cavernous London pubs with paneled wood walls and massive mirrors etched with the names of beers. Packed to the rafters on a Friday night, but depressing and sepulchral at four fifteen on a Tuesday afternoon. Was it a Tuesday? I don’t really remember. Back then, the days were all pretty much the same. They are now, of course, only in a different way.
I just walked right up to where he was sitting and told him he had an interestingly shaped head. That’s what drink does. Did. Gave me the gall to approach complete strangers, to bypass all the meaningless chit-chat and get straight to the point. Whatever point my f***ed-up head was currently obsessing over. I thought I was being witty and flirtatious.
“No, Astrid. You’re being foul and warped and ugly. Drink isn’t your friend. It’s your enemy. Your poison. Can’t you see what it’s doing to you?” Jane’s words ring in my head. Jane, who was supposed to be my friend. My ally. I’d lost her by then, the latest in a long line of friends and acquaintances who couldn’t hack it anymore.
Then I met Simon and none of it mattered. We drank cider till the men-in-suits brigade swaggered in and we slunk off back to his place. A dingy bedsit on Anglesey Road in Woolwich. His sheets were rank, but I didn’t care. He already had a girlfriend, but I didn’t care about that either. We weren’t just a couple of drunks hitting it off; we were kindred spirits. Soulmates. Two sides of the same coin.
Must have been a bad penny, then, says that little voice in my head. The one that sounds just like Mum.
He can’t have come back. He just can’t.
