Something I'm Not (18 page)

We are gazing at each other. My heart is playing heavy chords in my chest. Dylan is gripping my wrists even more tightly. His face is so close, I can feel his warm breath, can smell the camomile on it. Some of his freckles are larger than others, which I've never noticed before; but then I've never been quite this close before. I imagine the weight of him on top of me. He leans down and our lips meet – his are soft, and seem to merge into mine. And then he pulls away slowly and we are back to looking into each other's eyes. I think he's about to kiss me again, deeper this time, the way a tentative kiss in a film is always followed by something faster, more intense, often up against a wall. Instinctively my insides are aching for that gear change, that moment of ecstasy, and the other part of me, the voice in my head, is screaming:
You idiot, this is Dylan
!

‘God, I forgot to say,' he says quickly, scrambling up to sit on the piano stool. ‘You've got a part in the show.' And he fans out a couple of arpeggios.

I sit up and hold my breath, so that I don't say anything stupid. I feel dizzy. I have just kissed Dylan. Dylan has just kissed me. And I feel as though he has stepped inside me, taken a good look around and then stepped back out again. All my skin feels alert, unbearably sore. Physically, Dylan still looks the same. Yet when I look at him, the air between us jangles, and he seems blurred somehow. ‘What did you say?'

‘I said you've got a part in
Company
. Bea telephoned last night.'

I stand up slowly, still light-headed. ‘Gosh! Wow!' I try to smile. ‘Really? Who?'

‘Amy.'

‘Amy who doesn't want to get married?'

‘Played by Amber who doesn't want kids. It's perfect.'

‘You told Bea Whateverhernameis that I don't want kids? What the fuck did you do that for?' Oh Christ, that kiss has destroyed us. I bend over, a fierce stitch in my side.

Dylan holds up open palms. ‘Don't blame me. She was asking after you, that's all.'

‘She mentioned me?'

‘She caught you watching her. During the audition.'

I stand upright again. ‘I can't have been the only one, surely? She is barking, after all.'

‘Yes, she's used to scrutiny! The deputy head can't make her out at all. It's amazing how often Stanislavsky can be worked into a discussion about classroom refurbishments. But you were looking at her differently, she said. Not out of curiosity or derision. But as if you were sizing her up.'

‘What does she know? I thought her area was the stage, not the couch.'

‘I think when you've been in The Biz' – here Dylan mimes quotation marks, like David always does, and I feel defeated – ‘as long as Bea has, it amounts to pretty much the same thing. She's spent her whole life imagining what it's like to be other people. Apparently, it's one of the techniques she's developed to get to the
biographical truth
of a role!' He raises his eyebrows.

‘Good grief. So, what did this thespian psycho unearth about me?'

Dylan starts playing a song.

‘Tell me, Dylan. What did she say?' Strident is how I'd describe my voice.

‘She said that damaged people see very clearly. That's how they've survived.'

*

Dylan leaves soon after this revelation, to return to the neonatal unit, where he'd left his bottle of sacramental water. He gives me a rushed kiss, a clash of cheekbones; I thought fleetingly it might bruise. I don't blame him for wanting to leave. The atmosphere between us since we were rolling around on the floor has been so pregnant – Christ, no, not pregnant – so awkward, we haven't been able to look each other in the eye. Fifteen years, and nothing like that has ever happened before. Does this mean I fancy him; have always fancied him? Does Dylan fancy me? I feel I might cry, and reach up to press a fingertip to my right cheekbone.

I sit at my piano, and stroke its cool keys. I had a piano when I was younger but, when my parents separated my mother sold it. ‘I need more space,' she said when I asked her what had happened to it. The fact that Mother now lived alone in a property that formerly housed three people was clearly an inconvenient inconsistency. She spoke of the sale as casually as brushing one's hair. And I took the absence of any apology or remorse (such as one might offer had one genuinely acted in error) as evidence of my hunch that the disposal was motivated by spite. Part of me hated her for her indifference, and part of me hated myself for having left home and abandoned the piano to its fate.

The telephone trills and I stop playing mid-bar.

‘Dylan,' I say, surprised. My heart starts playing a sort of ragtime. What on earth is he going to say? I feel again the warmth of his camomile breath on my face. I want to throw up. And I remember that I still haven't confessed to yesterday's crime; and it occurs to me that Dylan will somehow keep invading my space until I do.

‘Amber, I'm still at the hospital—'

I guess William. Oh, poor Louisa. And Prue. What an awful business. Another funeral. We could hold the wake here—

‘Amber, sweetheart. Are you sitting down?'

‘I know what you're going to say. And I'm—'

‘Amber, listen to me. I'm coming to get you.' Thus speaks my dear friend born for the pulpit, the voice of authority and unswerving conviction.

‘Now?' I whisper. The tone of his voice makes me want to barricade the house and hibernate for ever.

‘Amber. It's not what you think. I've seen your mother.'

It's very tempting in that moment to get all nit-picky, to retort that ‘I've seen my mother, too – all my life.' To protect myself behind a wall of flippant semantics. But already I can hear Dylan correcting himself, when he adds: ‘Amber, your mother's in hospital, here in London.'

Chapter Twenty-five

B
Y THE TIME
Dylan arrives, I have decided not to open the door. Instead, I sit on the second stair, my buttocks pricked by the sisal matting.

Somewhere deep inside, where I've parked my darkest fears and hoped to have mislaid the keys, there lies the belief that my mother will spoil the things I love. I can't remember when I first felt this way, but all my life it seems I've kept the woman at bay.

Take relationships. As a teenager I listened to my mother speak of boys with a sneer, as if they were feral creatures out to wreak untold misery. Even though her comments were clearly part of a backlash at Dad and his ilk, there was something unpleasantly addled about her condemnation.

At college, I built a new life for myself, away from her; Mother left school early without a piece of paper to her name, never learned to drive, cannot even swim. It's as if her timidity became my lodestar, by providing opposite coordinates. And up until this moment, I thought I'd put sufficient distance between me and my past to be rendered strong and content.

‘Are you going to let me in?' Dylan shouts above the swish of tyres from mothers making nifty back-doubles on the afternoon school run.

I know I'm going to have to let him in eventually; to be talked down like a hijacker from the cockpit of my hysteria. Just as, sooner or later, I'm going to have to confess my crime. Dylan knocks again. On the hall table stands one of my father's vases. I've filled it with the peach roses Nicole brought when she came to Tim's funeral. Their drowsy heads hang heavy over the rim of the vase. I stand, and a petal drops on to the table. I reach slowly for the latch.

Dylan's grave expression shocks me. I expect irritation, given that patrolling a wet doorstep constitutes a very overrated pastime. Instead, standing there in his damp tweeds, he oozes compassion, his head cocked to one side in that concerned way patented by people like Matt.

In the kitchen, tousling his curls with a towel, he tells me how he was strolling across the hospital lobby on his way back from the neonatal unit, reassured to feel the phial of water in his pocket bumping against his hip-bone, when an Indian chap had burst through the main doors saying a passenger had collapsed in his minicab, and could someone give him a hand? While staff sprinted to his aid, Dylan stood next to the information station, which is how he came to be in prime position to see my mother, propelled in at speed in a wheelchair.

As he speaks, I realise I'm holding my breath. London's infamous pollution has suddenly become more toxic.

Dylan fell in step behind the minicab driver, a few paces behind the wheelchair on its way to Casualty. He wasn't sure what made him follow, other than a vague need to keep track. The driver kept trying to assure the medical staff that this incident wasn't his fault. Eventually, after miles of squeaky corridors, my mother was shoved through two floppy plastic panels, which swung back together to reveal a sign barring the way to anyone lacking the appropriate authority.

Dylan was about to return the way he'd come when he felt a hand tugging at his jacket.

‘Father. I do no bad thing. See, my card. Good driver. No accident. No 'dorsements.'

Dylan saw that the man was holding out a piece of paper. He took it and, looking closely, found it to be a business card printed from one of those machines found in railway stations. Dylan nodded and then began walking away.

Suddenly he remembered the driver's words, identifying him as a man of the cloth. It was enough to prompt him to turn on his heels and make for the plastic doors. Adjusting his dog collar to full prominence, he flung them open.

*

At the hospital, we gather outside my mother's room.

‘She's comfortable,' replies the nurse to Dylan's opening question. ‘Still, it's probably best you don't go in. Her heart needs a great deal of rest.'

You seem so sure she has one
, I think.

We peer through the porthole. The room is dimly lit. A face the colour of parchment lies swamped by pillows. Complicated breathing apparatus is clamped to the jaw. The lumps in the bed look barely human. I remember bones I saw once as a child at a local Roman ruin – a pelvis and a skull in the dry earth. Those bones were no one in particular, and they mattered only because of what they were in the past.

These bones are my mother.

The nurse rambles on about prognoses. I blank out her commentary, aware of the absence of air in the empty corridor. Not like the bustle and competing libidos in the medical TV dramas Matt and I adore. I glance back through the porthole. Mother's room contains only a bed, a mobile drip and a bedside cupboard.

The nurse is trying to interest me in felt-tipped lines on a graph. I nibble the quick of my thumb. Maternal recovery is too frightening to contemplate. The rough flap of skin stings as it tears; I suck a droplet of blood. I glance down at the graph paper. Spiky red lines elbow their way up and down the page. They make me want to burst into Mother's room and demand an answer to the question which has haunted me since Dylan's call:
What on earth are you doing here in my London?

*

Dylan starts the engine, reverses from the parking space, and slots the car into heavy traffic. It has started to drizzle again. Vast grey shapes have appeared in the sky, puffing themselves up with their own self- importance. Leaves fall to the ground in the autumn wind. At one set of lights, a leaf plops on to the windscreen and becomes so ensnared in the wipers that Dylan is forced to get out and remove the fragments now mulched across his windscreen. I am reminded of torn flesh.

We inch down the main road, past the kind of shops that like to imply a higher calibre of seasonal reduction by using signs saying ‘
Solde'
. Dylan sits with one finger loosely hooked over the bottom of the steering wheel. Kiss or no kiss, I'm just grateful for the way Dylan, the consummate Pol Roger Padre, knows just when to shed his daffy image and assume control.

‘I'd like to go to your church,' I say, trying to make it sound as casual as needing a pee.

Outside the vicar-cage, Dylan fishes in his pocket for the key and hands it to me; the police suggested the door remains locked. ‘I'll put the kettle on, shall I?'

I nod. And then hitching my coat above my head, I jog towards the building, zigzagging to avoid the puddles.

In the porch, my cold hands fumble with the key in the lock. I pause to blow on my fingers. And looking up, I notice an inscription carved into the architrave: ‘Ask and it will be given; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you'. I feel unworthy of this sanctuary. But some impulse makes me continue. I thrust my hand inside my jumper to give better purchase, and try the lock once more.

The church inside is silent and cold, the air stiff with prayer. Uninviting; but then, I feel I deserve to be shunned. I keep my gaze on the floor. I daren't look around. If I were to glimpse a candle now, a beacon of hope or of unconditional welcome, I'd be finished.

My heart pounds so much that my armpit is sore. With every step away from the west door, I am less sure I want to be here. Part of me dreads seeing chaos, the shock and the shame of it, and part of me dreads finding everything restored. I have so little experience of absolution.

The first evidence of tidying up lies on the stone floor, slumped against a pew. Two corpulent bin liners act as gatekeepers to the nave. A third sack has split. Broken hymn books weep from its wound. The sight hints at hurt and rage and destruction. I ignore the leaden sensation in my stomach and move to the start of the nave. My footsteps ring out on the stone. I move slowly, steadying my breathing. I try to recall happier times – for example, our wedding, when Matt had been waiting for me at the other end.

Then I see them. Tucked into the creases where the pews meet the flagging, I see small chips of blue or oatmeal plaster missed by the sweeper's broom. My head feels light, my knees buckle, and I walk shakily down the rest of the nave by grabbing pew-end after pew-end. I still can't look up, but I sense a flicker of light out of the corner of my eye.