This time it was April who kissed me. Who led me under the trees, where we lay on fallen leaves and very slowly she let me undress her.
* * *
It was dark by the time I got home. I crept in, wondering if anyone would be able to tell just by looking at me. As I closed the front door behind me, my mother called out from the kitchen.
“Noah? Is that you? Where've you been?”
As I thought of April's letters, resentment coursed through me. I prepared to confront her, but then her face came into view, wearing the anxious expression that these days never left her. I couldn't do it.
“Do you remember that girl, Ma? The one I helpedâfrom my school, a few years ago?”
My words were tempered, not just by her world weariness but by the knowledge that she wouldn't understand, that she'd never known how love could truly make you feel. The rush that was joyous, tolerant, impulsive all at once. I knew she'd never loved my father that way. You couldn't know love and end up empty, as she was.
I watched her closely, not sure she'd even remember. Her medication meant her brain worked slowly at bestâand at her worst, she jumbled words and lost threads, hearing as if through cotton wool. Change had crept up on her slowly, unnoticed, the way it did with people you saw all the time, until the day I'd properly looked, shocked, seeing a stranger.
A troubled expression flickered across her face. “The girl who was hurt.”
“That's right. It was strange,” I said slowly. “She said she'd write. And she never didâor did she write to you, Ma?”
I watched her eyes flicker again, then shift toward the window. “I don't remember,” she said, more clearly than she'd said anything in a long time.
The helpless fury that rose up in me was pointless. The moment had long passedâthree whole years ago. Turning away, I went to finish packing.
She was lying. She remembered, I was almost certain. For whatever reason, she'd taken the letters before I'd seen them. It was another reason I couldn't wait to get away from there.
* * *
April and I had arranged to meet again the following day, our last before she returned to London.
This time, we would stay in touch, I'd decided. No matter what. London and Bristol weren't a million miles apart. I could get the train up to see her on weekends and she could come to stay in Bristol. But that night, I couldn't sleep, instead replaying every second of that afternoon. The incredible feeling of losing myself in April's body, the scent of her,. as I lay there restlessly, hating the thought of us being apart.
In the darkest, most silent hours, the solution came to me, so obvious I wondered I hadn't thought of it before. The world wouldn't miss another lawyer. Instead of going to university, I'd go with April back to London. Get a job. We'd be together. My mother wouldn't like it, I knew that, but I was eighteen. I was an adult. I was leaving anyway. It was up to me where I went.
Now I'd made the decision, sleep was out of the question. I got up and found some paper, then, sitting at my desk, wrote my mother a letter. It was a cowardly way to do it, but this way, I'd be certain she couldn't stop me.
And with the letter written, as the dawn light crept through my curtains, at last I slept.
8
I
slept until midday, lying in bed as the hazy recollection of the previous day drifted over me, the magnitude of what I'd decided only mildly shocking in the light of day. It was inevitable, that much was clear to me. Then seeing the time with horror, I leapt out of bed, afraid I'd miss April, imagining her reaction when I told her I was coming with her. As I showered, I rehearsed what I'd say.
University's not for me. . . . I can't stand more years of studying.. . . I thought I'd go to London and get a job....
I'd say it casually, as though it wasn't important to me, frightened she'd try to change my mind, when the truth was the thought of being away from her was killing me.
And I knew she felt the same. After yesterday, I'd seen it in her eyes, felt it in the way her body responded to mine. I looked at the bag I'd packed the previous night. At all my uni stuff still piled on the floor, thinking only fleetingly of the law career I was turning my back on. Then, after glancing at my watch again, I tore down the stairs and out the door.
In my haste, I was halfway down the street when I realized I'd forgotten my wallet. I sprinted back and let myself in, cursing the time I was wasting. It was as I came downstairs for the second time, out of the corner of my eye, I saw it. The envelope on the hall table, with my name on it.
The handwriting was unfamiliar but as I ripped it open, almost as if I'd guessed, I felt my heart start to pound, then as I read it stop altogether, as my dreams, my hopes, my plans for the future, all of them melted away.
Dear Noah,
I've decided to go back to London early. I think it's for the best. You are sweet, dearest Noah. The sweetest boy I've ever known, but even a goddess can fall from grace. I don't deserve your devotion or that pedestal you put me on.
There's too much you don't know about me. But I don't want you to know, I just want to remember what we had.
I read it again, hearing a sob that seemed to come from deep inside me. I couldn't lose her. Not now, after the last two days, when it had become clear we were meant to be together. I'd been heartbroken the last time she left, when I was fifteenâor so I'd believed at the time. But it was nothing compared to this. Wave after wave of utter despair washed over me, and as I drowned, I felt a new kind of pain grip my heart, then rip it in two.
Ella
We weave the first strands of friendship like a spider's web. For a therapist, she's cool. But then I get caught.
“So what about when you have friends round?” she asks, casually, the next time I see her.
I hesitate, because casually is anything but; and it's the
f
word. It was there the minute I walked in, because it always is. It was just a matter of time before we got to it. It's taken her three appointments. Mostly they get there in one.
“It's complicated.” I think how I'm going to explain, it's just like my clothes.
“My parents insist on the right kind of friends. The ones who get invited over to our house, that is.” I pause, then look directly at her. “It doesn't work though, does it? I mean, you can talk about stuff with anyone. . . .”
Like this crap, I'm thinking but don't say.
“Only it doesn't make you close. They have to, like, really get you. . . .”
Like laugh at the same stupid crazy things and share secrets.
“I do have those kind of friends.” I add hurriedly, “Proper ones,” before she thinks I'm a total loser. “Only they're at school.”
She nods slowly. “They don't come over to your house?”
I shake my head. “I don't really want them to, because then my mother would get to know their mothers, and she'd be in the middle of everything . . . and it would ruin it. School's different.”
What I really mean is, when I'm there, I'm different. It's the same when my parents go away. I'm more like me, or at least the me I want to be.
“So your mother organizes your life,” she says quietly.
Not just organizes, she freaking controls itâthat's why I like it when she goes away.
“She probably wants what she thinks is best for you.” She adds, “Is that so bad?” Yet another question fluttering around, a little annoying fly I want to swat away.
There's a vase of stiff, scentless roses on the windowsill. Roses. Rose garden. My mother, every-fricking-where I go. I glance at my watch, thinking of her, perched on the grey sofa on the other side of the door, flicking through
Vogue
magazine or maybe the paint charts the interior designer brought her, checking her phone every few minutes. Inconvenienced, because Gabriela had to sprain her wrist, today of all days; that she's had to shoehorn my appointment into her diary yet again, when she should be somewhere else.
Feeling a jolt as another strand of the web gives way.
“Why don't you tell me about your friendsâyour school friends, that is?”
“Well, Sophie and Katarina are my closest friends. Sophie's like me, into music. Kat's on the drama course.”
“But you don't really see them out of school?”
“Not really.” I shrug. “Kat's family live in Italy. I went out to stay with them once. And Sophie's parents travel a lot.”
“You must miss them.”
Do I? I've never thought about it like that. Anyway, it's not like I'm alone. I have Theo. And sometimes I'd rather be alone.
Â
“You were a long time. Did you have a good talk?”
One of my mother's questions that doesn't require an answer. The seamless movement as she glances in her driving mirror, smoothing an imaginary strand of hair behind her ear, then changing gear, so that I'm pushed back into my seat as she pulls out and accelerates past the car in front.
“God, some people shouldn't be on the roads,” she says, turning to her radio, clicking through the stations until she finds what she wants. Not seeing the car coming toward us until it blasts its horn and swerves out of her way.
“That's better. What were we saying? Yes, I'm sure a few more sessions will help.”
By help, she means effect some miraculous transformation, turning me into superdaughter, with the incredible social life and the hordes of desirable, glamorous friends she thinks I ought to haveâforgetting the more basic, fundamental things that are totally missing from my life. Noticeable only by their absence.
When I get home, I kick my shoes off and run, feeling the cool, soft grass under my bare feet. I stretch out my hands, catching handfuls of air, relishing my freedom, wishing Theo was there under the low branches of the old cedar, a ray of sun lighting his face.
9
2016
Â
T
alking to Will has unleashed a storm surge of memories. About him and about April, too. About the last time I drove to Musgrove, for my mother's funeral, grieving and guilt stricken that I hadn't been with her at the end; feeling that I'd deserted her; realizing that it took losing her to see how alike we were, both of us unhappy, lonely; not knowing, until it was too late. About my childhood; a sense of dread I could never explain; the hollow feeling I could never fill.
It's early when I leave the house, the past still preoccupying me, its presence unwelcome, as I'm assailed by the kind of silent questions that can't be answered, that only belong to such an hour. As I drive, I'm wondering where it went wrong; why April fell out of love with me; where my mother's inherent sadness came from; why Will betrayed me. Unable to stop the most illogical of thoughts that as the common denominator of them all, I'm somehow responsible, when I hear an echo of Clara's voice.
“You young people don't know how good you have it.”
It's almost as if she's here, beside me, in the car. Irritation rises in me, at her all-knowingness. And in a sense, she's right, because I've never been homeless or starving, but even so. She has no idea. I'd suffered, I knew that. Maybe no less or no more than anyone else, but what happened all those years ago almost destroyed me.
I keep driving, barely noticing as the darkness lightens to a pale, pearlescent blue, breaking off just outside Portsmouth to take the familiar road that winds its way toward Musgrove.
The decision's impulsive, motivated more by curiosity than anything else. And in the time I've been away, the town's sprouted shiny new housing developments that encroach across farmland toward the hills that lie to the north; the vast school playing fields I remember are pockmarked by a rash of porter cabins, yet the road where I grew up is strangely untouched. I pass my parents' old house, where an unexpected wave of déjà vu sweeps over me. It's smaller, more modest than I remember, with the ghosts of my mother inside cooking and cleaning, my father in his favourite chair, reading the newspaper. I feel a nostalgic pang for my childhood, which is as suddenly gone.
The North Star is a couple of similarly untouched streets away. Apart from the police presence, the tape cordoning off the car park, the yellow notices by the roadside asking passersby for any information, it's as I remember it, yet changed forever by the knowledge that a man was killed here, brutally. Today, for now, I keep going, through the town that's stirring into life, taking the narrow lane that twists away from it toward the hills.
Where the lane ends, and a stony path stretches across bare fields, fading into Reynard's woods, I pull up, temporarily blinded as the low sun edges above the horizon.
It's a quiet, timeless landscape that, unlike the town, hasn't changed at all. As a teenager, I had felt miles away out here, removed from the world. It had been the place where we were free of the constraints of the adults in our livesâa forty-minute walk that had been irrelevant when I was with April, that's somehow diminished by the ten minutes it takes by car.
* * *
On the outskirts of Tonbridge I find a small barbershop, uncomfortable that by the time the barber's finished, without the overgrowth of hair to hide behind, like the white skin around my hairline, I feel exposed. Catching sight of my reflection as I'm walking out, I realize I also need clothes. Chinos and a couple of shirts, which I buy in haste from the first shop I come to.
Yet again, as I walk back to my car, swept along by the flow of people who have both place and purpose, I'm besieged by doubts, questioning what good I can do, why I'm even here. April deserves better than I can give her. Silently reminding myself that I've come here out of choice. No one forced me. That now I've driven all this way, I should at least see her.
But too easily, around the next corner I find a B&B, in a white-painted Victorian town house that's just a short drive from the hospital where April is. The street is quiet, the house imposing in stature yet reassuringly shabby, so that I hesitate only briefly before I pull over and park.
When she opens the door to me, the landlady looks me up and down, as if, for some reason, I'm not what she's expecting. Then while she takes down my details, a column in yesterday's paper, left folded open on a glass-covered coffee table, as if on purpose, instantly catches my eye.
While she continues writing, I pick it up, hoping it's not what I think it isâto no avail.
A man's body was found in the early hours of yesterday morning, in the town of Musgrove, north of Portsmouth. His body was discovered by the landlord, in a car parked behind a local pub. The man has been identified as Bryan Norton.
It's started. I'm guessing that already the press has picked up that there's a story, because not all murders reach the national papers. Tomorrow, or the day after or the day after that, if a journalist has contacts, or if someone can be persuaded with a surreptitious bribe to let it slip, they'll have April's name. Just a matter of time before they start tunneling relentlessly into the past.