PROLOGUE
Wind howls through the rafters. A hundred candle flames waver in response, sweet-smelling smoke coiling into the air. The floor flashes green and magenta as a shaft of sunlight darts through the stained glass. Symbolic, these people are probably thinking. It feels more like a taunt. In any case, it’s hastily whipped away by the storm.
The organ falls silent as the vicar takes his place. Expression unbearably serious, as if there’s any danger of the solemnity of this occasion being ignored. I follow his instruction for the congregation to stand, my legs like they belong to someone else. His eyes settle on me and soften.
I nod. I’ll be okay.
My hands are near-translucent, aside from the tar stains on the index and middle fingers of my right. Whiskey sticks to my throat, together with something bitter, rough as sand.
Just get this done. It’ll be over soon. You can get through this.
The booze hasn’t helped; I’m still burned-through with grief. I rest my chin on my collarbone, gazing down at my charcoal suit. It’s like there’s nothing inside it, shoulders like a clothes hanger, as though I could look clean through myself if it wasn’t for my ill-fitting jacket.
The doors at the rear of the church clank open. It is time.
The vicar’s eyes meet mine again. A smile spreads across his face.
A rustle as best clothes turn rearward.
Like he’s lived for this moment, the organist hits the one note of the introduction over and over. Wagner’s “Bridal Chorus.” All stops out.
“Congratulations, mate,” says the guy next to me, dressed the same as me but otherwise unfamiliar. “Boy done good.”
I can’t turn around. Not yet. I have no idea who’s walking toward me. All I know is that the one person in this world who I yearn for, it cannot possibly be.
SEPTEMBER 6, 1995 | AGE 20
Her street looks like a TV commercial. I let the car coast and glance again at the beer mat in my lap. 44 Poplar Avenue, it says in Holly’s tipsy scribble—handwriting that could only belong to a trainee doctor. I stop over the driveway. We said three and it’s barely five past. I feel early, uptight. Half past would’ve looked better.
The white town house is dazzling in the sun. A sash window rumbles open on the second floor and two women—her housemates, I guess—stare down at me, making no attempt to hide that they’re sizing me up.
It’s close to eighty degrees and my shirt is soaked against my back as I get out of the car. I nod an all right up at the window, try to guess the verdict, but their grins give nothing away.
Holly steps through the front door. There’s the bolt of electricity in my chest, stopping me midstride. For a moment too long we’re both silent, sharing awkward smiles between two people who saw each other naked for the first time when last together. Four days ago now; we got wrecked on rum and Coke celebrating my birthday, ended up on her mate’s sofa where too many interruptions and a room that wouldn’t stop spinning turned the moment from intense to hilarious.
“You look—”
“Ridiculous?” Holly says, holding the hem of her tartan dress and performing a twirl.
“Incredible.”
“Digging the granny skirt? Thrift shop’s finest...”
It really is a granny skirt, pleated with buttons up the front. But she’s wearing it pulled up over her chest, coupled with a string of pearls bound round her wrist and what appear to be kids’ plastic sunnies. As with all her recycled ensembles, the whole is a million times the sum of its parts.
“Shit, almost forgot,” I say, darting back to the car. I’ve never bought a girl flowers before, and I’m certain I’m making a dick of myself as I extract the bunch from the back seat, slicing a couple of heads clean off in the process.
“Wowzer!” Holly says. She peeks over her lime-green shades. Her eyes swell, and I glance up to see one of her housemates giving me a look that reads fair play, mate.
“Sorry. Bit cheesy, I know.”
“Hardly,” she says, fingers stroking the red and white heads.
I think of the woman in the florist’s earlier, wonder why she gave me that funny look and asked twice if I was sure when I picked the crimson tulips and white roses. I have, it seems, got this right at least.
“Water,” Holly says. “Won’t be a second.”
I follow her up the steps as far as the open front door. The house beyond is wall-less, sunny straight through. Even the escaping air smells expensive.
“Loving the car, baby,” she says as she emerges minus the bouquet.
“Don’t take the piss, you’ll hurt her feelings.”
“The color, though...”
“Heinz cream of tomato?”
“Delicious.”
I jump in, and the old Mini groans on its suspension as Holly drapes herself across the hood. I think better of flicking the wipers on as she squidges her face against the windshield, making eyes at me and licking the glass. “Will you please just get in?” I say.
“So cool,” she says, dropping into the passenger seat and wriggling to get comfortable.
“You can buy it if you like?”
“How could you?” Holly’s glumly stroking the dashboard.
“She’s in this week’s Exchange and Mart. Yours for three hundred quid or very near offer.” Until this morning there were signs in the window too, but they didn’t survive the preparations for this afternoon: removal of some stubborn stains from the back seat, consideration of which tapes should and shouldn’t be tossed about the place.
Holly’s absently turning Green Day’s Dookie over in her hands. “Liquidating assets for the next big step, yeah?”
“You got it.”
“It’s the right move, baby.” She rubs a Converse against my calf as I spin the car around.
“Nice part of town, this,” I say.
“You don’t think it’s a bit lame I’m back at my parents’ place?”
“Not sure I’d say lame, exactly.” We accelerate past Mercs nosing from driveways and razor-edged hedgerows. “What brought you back?”
She unwraps a fresh deck of Marlboro Lights. “It’s twenty minutes on the tube to my hospital placement. My folks are in the States till New Year, place was empty anyway. Me and my girls thought we’d give squatting a go. It’s very now.”
“So I’ve heard.” I tease two ciggies from her pack, blue clouds dispersing against the windshield as I light them at the same time. My hands are off the wheel. The old Mini straddles lanes, weaving around imperfections in the road like a runaway shopping trolley.
“Two years in halls was quite enough, thanks very much,” Holly says through a giggle, her hands hovering toward the wheel. “You’ll see, toy boy.”
“Will you stop it with calling me that?” I’m grinning as I hold a finger up. “One year!”
“Nearer one and a half.”
I laugh it off, but it needles me the way it always does when she says I’m her toy boy. She means no harm, but it’s a reminder to feel inferior to her, in case it might’ve slipped my mind. The question is rarely far from my thoughts: What is she doing with me? She’s twenty-one, expensively educated, halfway to a medicine degree. And style radiates off her like a perfume. I was a teenager till a few days ago, my long hair has more to do with hiding acne scars than looking like Kurt Cobain, and I can’t imagine I’ll be cool handing her my home address anytime soon.
“So where you whisking us away to?” Holly asks. She’s kicked off her boots, feet resting on the dash.
“Nowhere really,” I tell her, like I’ve given it no thought.
“So exciting,” she says, screwing her face up.
We pick up the South Circular, the smell of tarmac and takeaways on the hot breeze. I steal a glance at her profile. Funny how you can picture someone all the time, and then find your imagination doesn’t come close. The world beyond this car looks so ordinary, banal. My hands are clammy on the wheel.
“Weird, innit?” she says.
“What is?” Our eyes lock and we both laugh.
“Us. An actual date.”
“Bit weird, maybe.”
“Nice weird. Not sure I’ve ever really seen you by daylight.” She makes a show of checking me out. “Probably still would, though.”
“Why, thank you.”
“Is this the first time we’ve even been sober together?”
I shrug. “Probably.” I have
a thirst all of a sudden to correct that fact.
We’ve known each other five weeks. It was an open-mike night at the Blue Moon, a dingy, low-ceilinged pub with platinum records and signed photos of rock royalty covering the walls, with a legendary history on the London music scene. I’ve spent nigh on every evening in there this past year—five nights a week behind the bar, the other two in front of it, sinking a little liquid courage before playing guitar and singing for whatever the punters drop in a pint glass. Together with laboring on a city development by day, it’s been twelve months of sweat that means I’ll start uni with some money in my pocket.
It was the sort of night to remind those of us who perform why we live for it: packed out, noisy but interested audience. Attention without scrutiny. I was third act on and four pints down—the perfect arrangement. The set I played was typical enough: some Counting Crows, Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World,” one Blur and one Oasis to split the crowd.
I asked if there were any requests, braced for my manager to shout his stock reply: “Would you mind playing somewhere else?” But instead it was a girl left of the stage with a mass of corkscrew hair and a business shirt that was buttoned wonky, collar slung over one shoulder, who called out. She asked if I knew any Buddy Holly. I asked if she was kidding, and she swore she wasn’t—she’d later tell me how her dad was such a fan she’d been named after him. So I played “Everyday” and “Peggy Sue.” No self-doubt to take the shiny edges off—performance of my life. Our eyes never left each other’s. Two hundred people turned invisible, irrelevant.
It’s not that Holly’s the first woman I met in my time at the Blue Moon. A handful of times I’d caught someone’s eye as I played, enjoyed the unfair advantage gifted to someone who’ll risk everything and bare themselves into a microphone. I’d sort a few free drinks from the bar, be loose enough to deliver a line just so. I’m not sure if it was the probability of sex when I left with someone on my arm that gave me the biggest kick, or the jealous gaze of other blokes following me out.
With Holly it was different. That first night, we drank and talked till long past closing. Every shift I worked from then on fizzed with life, my eyes forever flitting through crowds and to opening doors. When she did show, she’d stay after her St. Thomas’s colleagues left, and in the low light of the closed pub, we’d talk about God and karma and Marmite versus Bovril and the futility of existence and who was likely to be better hung out of Major or Blair, till we were forced to go our separate ways into London’s lonely small hours. Sometimes she’d linger on the goodbye, but it was four whole weeks before I kissed her.
I’m yet to shake the first-proper-date nerves as I swing the car into a parking bay.
“Are we there yet?” Holly says in a child’s voice.
“Very nearly,” I reply, dashing into the Victoria Wine we’re parked outside. The shop simmers with that offie smell: soggy carpet and ciggies. I grab eight Stellas, two bottles of white wine, a bag of ice and a shiny bucket. What with buying flowers earlier, this spree nearly cleans me out of the cash I allocated for today. The guy at the till complains tonelessly about the heat as he bags my stuff with shaky hands, squinting eyes to the floor. I tell him to keep my last three quid. At the cash machine outside, I plunder some uni savings.
“Nice work,” Holly says as I pass the shopping over. “What you having, though?”
I pull my collar high, make a show of sheepishly looking around us before cracking a beer open. The sound is like a wave crashing on an island paradise. Hiding beneath the dash, I vacuum up the foam and knock back a quarter of the can so quick it gives me brain freeze. I pass it to Holly.
She takes a swig as we hit the road again. “You’re a bad man, Alex Dean.”
I can smell the river on the fresh air that drifts through the car. The hit of booze loosens my bones; I’m inching toward being myself.
STAYING OUT FOR THE SUMMER
I’m lying on the bench seat of the small boat with my hands behind my head. A tower of ash teeters on the ciggie between my teeth. My bare foot rests on the wheel, not that I’m looking where we’re going.
“So peaceful,” Holly says, trailing her fingers through the green water.
The sun is lower now and even hotter; I can almost hear my forehead sizzling. I pour some wine into my mouth, most of which trickles down to my ear.
“It all changes out west. Could be in the middle of the countryside.” The Thames is a third of the width it was at the boatyard, waterside offices and flats replaced now by willows that dangle into the murky shallows.
“You’ll be doing a lot more of this soon,” Holly says. There’s a hint of sorrow in her smile. I’m surprised by it.
“Getting pissed in the daytime?”
“Well, that too. But I mean this...boating.”
“Kinda goes with the Cambridge territory, I guess.”
“Definitely.”
“Well, as long as they run on batteries like this baby, I’ll be just dandy.” I slam the lever beside the wheel from Forward to Reverse repeatedly. The electric motor beneath us whines in protest, the water in our wake losing its composure.
Holly nods toward an approaching rowing boat. “This does feel a bit cheat-y.”
I stand up and wave excessively at the passing couple. “Cracking day for it,” I shout, wine slopping everywhere. Holly clings on as the boat sways.
They mutter a polite reply. Their oars gather pace all of a sudden.
“Too busy to even wave back, see?” I point out. “Let alone drink and smoke as well. This really is the only way to travel.”
“As long as you don’t want to be out more than three hours.”
“Well, there is that.” The guy at the hire place, Nige, was sternly adamant about the time limit, and the penalty should we run out of power and have to be towed back.
Holly grabs us another two beers, bucket running with condensation. “How long till you go, now?”
“Two weeks, give or take.”
“You’ll be fine,” she says, detecting the wariness in my tone. “More than fine. Awesome, in fact. Just wait.” She holds up her can and I tap mine to it.
“Sure.”
“Best make the most of the time left. With me and all your other girls.”
I smirk. “There are no other girls.”
“Hmm. Alex Dean, rock and roller. One-woman man?”
Her words buoy my ego. I sink half the beer and light another two cigs from the dying embers of my last. “You’re kind of the reason why I’m going at all.”
She gazes suspiciously at me, jetting smoke diagonally skyward. “Pretty sure you got your Cambridge place long before you knew me.”
“Having a place and actually taking it up—that’s two different things.”
She looks unconvinced.
“I was kind of struggling to imagine myself there. Before you.”
It’s true—the sort of truth that gets shaken loose once you’ve had a few. Holly was never surprised about Cambridge the way most people are. I never imagined I’d get a place, wouldn’t have bothered applying without my maths teacher, Mrs. Watson, practically standing over me as I registered for college open days, and later when it was time to do the entry forms. She’d taught me for five years and swore I was going places. It’s not that I’m especially clever or anything. But ever since I can remember, I’ve had this restlessness about wanting to know things. Sometimes it’s almost a panic: so much to learn, too much for one lifetime.
Three days I was in Cambridge for the interview. I was certain it would be a waste of time. But as I watched those people who’ll one day own the world breezing through the winter mist, and as I passed the small hours drinking
warm beer in bright rooms with people my age but otherwise alien, it began to creep on me: the world got wider, fences I hadn’t seen became visible, then fell. The voice that answered interview questions became less boringly recognizable as my own.
I got in. Surprise outweighed celebration, aside from Mrs. Watson, who bought me a fountain pen too nice to use. It was barely mentioned at home after the initial shock. Dad could be heard explaining how “they have to take a few kids from state comps.”
“How d’you figure I’ve got anything to do with it?” Holly says. She lies beside me, twizzling my hair. “This bright future of yours.”
“Cause and effect, darling,” I say, waving my cigarette around. “In fact, we had a very interesting chat about the whole causality subject at my interview.”
“One event being responsible for another.”
“Quite.”
“So what am I, a cause or an effect?”
“In this instance, you are a cause.”
“Must’ve blinked and missed it.”
I turn and our faces are almost touching. “Meeting you was a...reminder.”
“Right.”
“The world is as wide as the chances that come our way. Take an opportunity, and it leads to more opportunity, and so on. The world opens up, like wings or...something.”
“Profound.” She laughs.
“Stop it, I’m trying to be deep,” I say. “After I got that Cambridge place, my life was no different than before. Then I spent this last year working like a dog, scraping plaster off concrete all day, working the Blue Moon every night. Going home to the same old housing estate where I’ve spent my whole life. Back in the world I’m used to. No causes. No effects. Stagnant.”
“The future is a consequence of the present.”
“Exactly. And when the present is dull as anything... Started to wonder if I could do it. Couldn’t see myself there anymore.”
“That’s silly.”
“Sure. But then there was you. Great big cause that you are.”
“Whatever. Really?”
“Christ, you save lives for a living.”
“Not yet I don’t. After a thirty-hour shift I’m more likely to be accidentally ending them.”
“And you look like you’ve taken a wrong turn off a catwalk.”
She slaps my arm. “Now I know you’re ripping the piss.”
“I’m really not. You make me want to...do better.”
“You don’t need me.”
“Do I sound like a wanker?”
“A very charming one.”
“That’s something.”
“Well, I’m glad to be of service.” Her lips meet mine, hot and boozy. “I think we look rather good together.”
I smirk, although a part of me is wondering if she means we look good in the way her recycled clothes do. Remarkable in part for their shitty origins.
“You’ll miss
me, though?” she says.
I’ll miss her all right. But becoming the person I should be for her is more important than seeing her. “No chance,” I tell her, winking like a twat.
“Still no thoughts on what you want to do after?”
“Be a success.”
Holly rolls her eyes. “That again. I want to be looked up to,” she says in a poor impression of my voice. “Nothing more specific yet?”
“I’ll work it out.” I haven’t a clue. I do want to be looked up to—is that so bad? I want people to hear my name and think: That guy’s done all right for himself.
“Alex,” Holly says, surveying the scenery. “Not sure we’re going anywhere.”
“Now, let’s not be having any of that chat.”
“Not in the relationship sense. I mean more in the nautical way.”
We are in the middle of the river, turned diagonally. “You may have a point.”
Holly takes the controls. There’s grumbling beneath us.
“Move aside,” I say, before running through the exact same operations whilst she stares incredulously at me. “Bloody batteries,” I shout with some comedic fist-shaking. “Looks like we’re out here all night.”
“Nige will be worried sick.”
I snort into my beer. “Shit—Nige! What we gonna do about Nige?”
“Not so fast,” Holly says. “Not sure this is a battery issue.” She grabs hold of the blue rope tied to the side of the boat. It disappears into the water, taut as a guitar string. She tugs at it whilst operating the motor. Nothing gives.
“What’s the score?” I ask, pulling on the rope too, a sudden compulsion to be taking control.
“All tangled up, babe. The mooring line’s got wound round the prop by the looks.” She leans over the back of the boat, arms stretched into the water. “Maybe we should’ve been paying a bit more attention.”
“Mooring line? Prop? Are you in the navy or something?”
“It’s just...boats.”
“You know about boats?”
“Not really. Just, you know, Henley Regatta and shit.” She starts giggling uncontrollably, likely to fall in any second. “You’ve got longer arms than me. You have a go.”
I slip my shirt off my back, my belly seared pink. Holly sings that Etta James song from the Diet Coke advert, waving her beer and cigarette in approximate time to the beat.
“Maybe if I can undo this end from the cleat,” she says.
“Cleat,” I echo, rolling my eyes.
“Stop making me
laugh,” she says, kicking my half-exposed arse.
“Can’t get a decent grip on it,” I say after a minute’s fumbling.
“All under control.” Holly kneels behind me, having unlashed the two oars from the side of the boat.
“Great.”
“You put your feet up, baby,” she says, snapping the metal rings to the side of the boat. “These things here, they’re called rollocks.” She eyeballs me, waiting on a response.
“Rollocks?”
“Yup.”
“Useful to know.”
Holly paddles an oar and we rotate gracefully, parallel with the banks once more. I take one of the oars from her and sweep it into the river. We are showered as the boat rocks dramatically.
“Let me guess, you’ve not done this before?” she says.
“Not really.” I hope it looks like I don’t care.
“Out the way, toy boy,” she says. “I’ve got this covered.”
I light a cig and lean uneasily on the wheel as we glide along the glassy surface. Holly’s forehead glistens with sweat. Surely I’m the only guy she knows who’d take her on a boat and not be able to row the thing.
“Bollocks to this,” I say, on my feet now. “Far too much like hard work.” With a Chippendale’s flourish, my jeans are off. Followed by my pants, for no reason other than a show of commitment to the task. Beyond the first few lukewarm inches, the water is soberingly cold on sunburnt skin. I sink like a stone before thrashing my way to the surface. The Thames tastes even greener than it looks.
“You are such a tit,” Holly says, as I tread water behind the boat.
“Give it some power,” I say after a couple of minutes fumbling with the propeller. A jetsam of shredded rope surfaces around me as the motor spools up.
Holly swings the boat in an arc till she’s alongside me. We’re on a slow curve in the river, and all around us is quiet. I stare up at her standing at the wheel. The blurred sun behind her stings my wet eyes. She checks twice that we’re not overlooked, before tugging her repurposed old-lady skirt over her head. One arm covers her chest as she shuffles her knickers down her thighs. I look away till I hear her jump in.
“Not as warm as it looks?”
“It’s perfect,” she says, grinning at me as she smooths her hair back. We tread water in close proximity, brushing against each other more than is accidental. For twenty minutes we swim laps of the boat, shouting pleasantries to occasional passing watercraft.
Shielded by the boat, I float on my back, feel the sun on my palest parts. “Having fun?” I ask her.
She links her arm into mine and we float together like sleeping otters. “There is, in my experience, a particular type of man who, when presented with a body of water and an audience, can’t resist stripping off and jumping in.”
“That’s a good thing, right?”
“Not usually, if I’m honest.”
“Is this to do with the unflattering effects of cold water? Because my old chap’s
usually bigger than this. Much bigger.”
“It’s a rather deeper character observation, actually.”
“Go on.”
“Met a few in my time. Show them a pier or a swimming pool in winter and they’re off. Not sure if it’s the nudity or the demonstration of hardiness that does it for them.”
“Maybe that’s just the posh kids.”
“Hmm. It’s usually the self-styled legends, the I can drink you under the table types. Last man standing.” She prods me in the ribs. “Ringing any bells?”
“Not even slightly.”
“Okay.”
“You are in here too.”
“So I am.” She coils her leg around mine. Our naked bodies are pressed together, the veil of water between our skin hot now. “All the dickheads together.”
“Not sure I’m quite the life and soul you imagine,” I say, slightly surprised she’s not yet seen through me.
She eyes me suspiciously. “It’s okay. You have enough redeeming features.”
Maybe she’d think I was lying if I told her how I was a loner for most of my school days. Might struggle to believe that my guitar skills and academic successes are owed to the need to fill the long days and nights and years hiding in my room. It was only in the reshuffle that occurs at the start of sixth form, aged sixteen, that I began to have any sort of social life. Parties, which scared the shit out of me initially, were easier after a few drinks. And the more I sank, the more popular I became. The more I was included. It took no more than a couple of very public passings-out and an inability to refuse a dare before I had people fooled: Alex Dean, party animal. Sure, those nights involved multiple trips to the bathroom to purge, clearing room for more booze, but the thought of being anything other than the last person to leave terrified me. ...
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