The Trouble with Henry and Zoe Page 8

  Less so since the funeral, though. Since the slow mechanism wound Alex’s coffin towards the flames, the main thing I feel is numb. Numb and guilty.

  They say you grieve for yourself. Although no one has said it to me personally. But it’s one of those things we trot out in the days following death. To your face, they say, I’m sorry for your loss, which amounts to pretty much the same thing – the idea that we cry for our personal loss, more than for the lost themselves.

  What else they say is, You were so good together. And I nod and say Yes, and Thank you, and I let them hold my hand while I cry. But they’re wrong; we weren’t so good together. We were okay together, and as much as I try to live up to the role I’ve been thrown into, I’m not crying for me, I’m crying for Alex.

  He was kind, sensitive and considerate more often than he wasn’t. He was a good man. Funny, clever, cool. He loved his mother and brother, was loyal to his friends, loved me, I think, and it breaks my heart that his life was stopped short. But a part of me (a cold, dispassionate part I don’t like very much) knows that Alex’s death has given me a way out of a bad situation. It’s a thought I try very hard not to think, and if I could bring Alex back, I would, but not for us to be together again.

  ‘Here we go,’ says Dad, laying down two tiles on the back end of a dormant word. ‘Wrongly, what’s that . . . fourteen, not too shabby, considering.’

  If I woke up now to find it were nothing more than a dream; if I woke to the sound of Alex returning from the shops, clattering through our front door with a bag full of provisions, then I would cry into my pillow with relief. We would eat breakfast, ride our bikes, drink a bottle of wine and maybe have an early night. And then the next day, or week or certainly not longer than a month later, I would tell him it’s over. Certain in the cold knowledge I had acquired during this nineteen-day nightmare of death and grief, I would break his heart, and it would be horrible. We would fight, call each other names, cry and drink and make accusations and let our worst qualities bubble up to the surface and we would come to loathe each other. But his death has spared me that, so no, I don’t cry for me, I cry for Alex. I have cried my eyes dry out of grief and guilt and relief.

  ‘Just going to get another,’ I say, picking up the empty wine bottle.

  ‘I could make hot chocolate,’ Mum says. ‘Marshmallows!’

  ‘Thanks, but I’ll stick with wine. Anyway, it’s your go.’

  Mum glances at Dad. ‘I’ll make it,’ he says. ‘Just don’t go looking at my tiles.’

  ‘Sure,’ I say. ‘Thank you.’

  Mum rearranges her tiles while Dad moves through to the kitchen. ‘You okay?’ she asks.

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine. Numb, you know, but . . . just a bit numb.’

  ‘Did you speak to work?’

  I nod. ‘I’m going to go back in on Tuesday. Start off with short days.’

  ‘That sounds sensible.’

  ‘Means I don’t have to cry in front of the other commuters,’ I say, still not sure how much humour is appropriate two and a half weeks after your boyfriend was killed while crossing the road.

  Mum wraps her hand around my fingers and squeezes. ‘Damn letters,’ she says.

  My mother is a fiercely competitive Scrabble player, taking longer than everyone else over her turn, playing tactically and challenging frequently. But looking at the board now with its primary school vocabulary, I’m pretty sure she’s going easy on me.

  ‘Will someone stay with you?’ she asks.

  ‘They would if I asked, but . . . I think I’ll be okay on my own now.’

  ‘Are you sure, Zoe? You’ve had a dreadful shock, a . . . a heck of a shock.’

  I nod – I’m sure. Of all the emotions I’m going through, loneliness is not one of them. The compassion that people have gently wrapped around me, I don’t deserve it. While Alex lay dying on the side of the road, I was lying in bed thinking unkind thoughts. Maybe he was already dead as I curled up under a warm blanket, cataloguing all of his faults and indiscretions. I don’t deserve sympathy, and the weight of it is suffocating. I don’t want to be protected and hugged and looked at like I’m about to break. I want to be by myself. I need space – not to think, necessarily, I’ve done too much of that – but just to breathe.

  Rachel met me at the hospital, held my hand while the policewoman – the family liaison officer – asked me to describe Alex: his hair, any scars, any tattoos or distinguishing marks. My friend for more than ten years, Rachel was the first person I called after Alex invited me on a date. She put her arm around my shoulder while the policewoman showed me a photograph of a tattoo taken from the body they had removed from the road several hours earlier. Alex’s tattoo, a Thai character on his left shoulder meaning love. When I’d teased him about its significance – Was it for Ines, your German girl? – Alex had denied it, saying the tattoo was a snap decision made high on weed. But I was never convinced.

  When they took me to Alex’s body, the man pulled the sheet back just far enough to show me one half of Alex’s face. His eye closed, his stubble in need of a shave.

  We spent that night at Rachel’s, staying up late, drinking, scrolling through photographs, crying. Her fiancé, Steve, cooked supper, kept our glasses full and did his best to stay out of the way. On Sunday Vicky went over to the house and filled a bag full of clothes, underwear and toiletries, and in the evening the three of us went through the same vigil on the sofa. A far cry from our university days, alternately crying and laughing at weepy movies, never imagining these fictional dramas could ever reach out into our own worlds. They took alternate days off work, so I wouldn’t be alone. My parents wanted to come up immediately, but the prospect of too much sincere compassion filled me with a hot destabilizing dread. They arrived the following weekend; bags of food and an inflatable mattress in the boot of the Land Rover. They insisted on sleeping in the spare room while I slept in our bed. I’d have preferred it the other way around, giving me a good reason to change the sheets Alex and I had made love on just seven days previously.

  On Tuesday morning, we set off early and drove to Yorkshire for the funeral. I sat in the back, pretending to sleep so I didn’t have to speak. After the service, at Alex’s mother’s house around a buffet of over-buttered sandwiches and dry sausage rolls and too much wine, the other thing people say is: I can’t imagine how you feel. And you think to yourself, No, you really can’t.

  Remembering how I sat on the bed in Alex’s old room on the morning of the funeral, crying with his mother and telling her how much I loved him and how devastated I was, I feel hot with embarrassment and shame. As we cried with our arms around each other, I underwent something like an out-of-body experience, and I wondered how long it would be before I could stop calling or returning her emails.

  ‘Three chocolat chaud,’ says my father, setting a tray down on the table.

  ‘Thought we’d lost you,’ says Mum, the short laugh dying on her lips as she realizes what she’s just said. She glances at me and I pretend not to have noticed. A strategy I have had ample opportunity (dead even, heaven help us, you’re killing me!) to perfect since the accident.

  ‘Right,’ says Mum, clicking down four tiles. ‘And all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a M-O-U-S-E. Double on the S, eight points.’

  After the funeral my parents stayed one more night, during which arrangements were made to reconvene in France the following weekend. I promised that one of my friends would be staying with me, but after eleven days of constant watch and pity I was desperate for space and silence. I changed the sheets the minute my parents drove away, waving and blowing sad kisses through the Land Rover’s window. I cleaned all day and all night and well into the morning, dusting every square inch of the house, vaguely aware that dust was human skin; mine, my parents’ and my dead boyfriend’s. For reasons I’m not sure I understand – momentum, perhaps – I emptied every item of food from the fridge and then the cupboards. Vegetables, milk, packets and cans and
jars of condiments. Every consumable item, with the exception of a single bottle of champagne, consigned to bin bags. I vacuumed the carpets, cleaned the windows, the mirrors, toilet, sinks and the tiles on the bathroom floor. I pulled the cushions from the sofa and the armchair, vacuuming up the dust and crumbs and pennies and pen tops. I polished door handles, light switches, the banister and every lampshade in the house before falling asleep on the sofa sometime in the early hours of the morning.

  On Saturday, the night before we flew to France, Alex’s London friends met for drinks in his memory. No one used the word ‘wake’, but that’s what it was. I realized early on that my presence was killing the atmosphere, so stayed as long as was decent before making my excuses and calling a taxi. Besides which, I had to leave for the airport at eight the next morning. So this was not Zoe the magnanimous, this was Zoe the knackered with half a pizza and an entire bar of chocolate in the fridge.

  As I opened the door to the taxi, a voice called my name. One of Alex’s closest friends, Tom.

  ‘Tom, hey.’

  ‘Zo, I . . . I’m sorry we didn’t get to talk. It’s a bit . . . you know.’

  I noticed Tom had his coat on. ‘Are you not staying?’

  Tom shook his head. ‘Hugh’s doing my head in, to be honest. The whole overdone grief thing. “To Al!”’ he said, raising an invisible pint, mocking Hugh’s loud and repeated toasts. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said, smiling, then, despite myself, laughing. I know how close Tom and Alex were, and I don’t doubt his grief. ‘I don’t think Alex liked him all that much.’

  ‘Well,’ said Tom, rubbing a hand over his stubble, ‘I’m afraid that if I stay much longer I might twat him.’

  ‘Share a cab,’ I said, and I knew exactly what I was doing.

  ‘It’s not really on your way, Zo.’

  ‘I know. I . . . I don’t feel like being on my own tonight. Watch a movie with me?’

  We didn’t even turn the TV on. Instead, we opened a bottle of wine and sat at opposite ends of the sofa with the bar of chocolate sitting on a cushion between us like a gradually diminishing barrier. When we started kissing, with instant and urgent intensity, I stood up from the sofa, taking Tom’s hand and motioning for him to come with me.

  He shook his head, ‘Let’s stay down here,’ and pulled me back onto the seat beside him. Maybe it made him feel less guilty; fucking me on the sofa instead of his best friend’s bed. But Alex and I had made love on those three cushions more than once, so there was no such leniency for my conscience.

  ‘We can’t sleep on here,’ I said afterwards, the wine, the chocolate and the urgency finished.

  ‘I’ll take the bed, you take the sofa,’ Tom said, laughing. And I was grateful for that; that he chose not to give the guilt any oxygen. That he didn’t call a cab and leave me on my own like a coward.

  ‘I’ll get you a blanket,’ I said, throwing a cushion at him.

  We ate breakfast together the next morning, the final wisps of whatever had happened in the night lingering (an overlong good-morning kiss), before dispersing gradually over coffee (a touching of hands) and toast (a complicit, apologetic smile). We were embarrassed enough to satisfy decency, and both understood – I think – that this one time was forgivable and understandable and possibly even natural, but that it would never happen again.

  ‘Zozo?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Your go, sweetheart.’

  My parents are both smiling at me, attempting to project amusement instead of concern.

  ‘Sorry, miles away. Blame the hot chocolate.’

  I don’t really know what that means, but my parents laugh and I make a show of examining my tiles.

  E-E-E-I-G-L-V

  From the minute I picked my last few tiles from the bag, I knew I could hang GRIEVE off the end of WRONG. But triple letter score on the V or not, I can’t bring myself to do it. LIVE is slightly more bearable, but it’ll only net me seven points, so is hardly worth the discomfort.

  ‘R-E-L-I-E-V-E,’ I say, ‘triple on the I, twelve points.’

  Henry

  The Answer, I Think, Is Love

  My hair is a mess.

  Not just untidy or unkempt, but an erratic, uneven, split-ended disaster area. I’ve seen bus drivers with better hair. That said, I haven’t had it cut since the week before my scheduled wedding, so this shouldn’t come as a shock. A lot can happen in fourteen weeks. Looking at my reflection, if I had to guess my profession going by nothing but the chaos attempting to escape my scalp, I’d probably conclude I was the drummer in a pub tribute band – Less Zepp, Deep Mauve, Bums N’ Roses, or something similarly cringeworthy. Or maybe I’d mistake me for a brilliant academic, an alcoholic mechanic, or a drug-dealing taxi driver. Not a dentist. Certainly not a hairdresser’s son.

  The man massaging my shoulders is called Gus, and he is the proprietor of this establishment. I haven’t asked him to do this, and he didn’t ask if I minded, but he’s doing it all the same. Kneading the muscles of my neck as we both regard my cartoon mop. What I’ve asked this man to do is cut my hair, but he clearly doesn’t know where to start. Nothing about Gus suggests a sexual inclination in any particular or exclusive direction, but he is certainly sexually present – confident, uninhibited, coiffed yet rough, ruggedly masculine yet somehow effete. If he has an orientation at all, I’d guess it’s a three hundred and sixty degree humankind kind of thing. I wouldn’t trust him with my girlfriend, if I had one, or my mother, or grandmother if I had one that was still breathing. Paradoxically, though, despite his palpable sexual readiness, I don’t detect anything aimed at me. I’m probably below his radar. No, this massage, this deep, insistent full-handed mauling, seems to be the physical manifestation of Gus’s thought process as he considers the quantum problem of my hair.

  ‘I’m in your hands,’ I told Gus after he sat me in the chair and asked what I wanted. Who knew he’d take it so literally.

  ‘Let’s give it a wash,’ says Gus. ‘Might make more sense once it’s wet.’

  In a peculiar variation on the great unfathomable tradition, the place is called The Hairy Krishna; the sign above the door features a fat Buddha with rock star locks, a pair of scissors in one hand and a hairdryer in the other.

  After a hurried breakfast in the Black Horse three months ago (leaving the rental car under my old man’s care), I pointed the brick-gouged Audi south, hitting London shortly after lunch. Following the path of least resistance, I found myself on a busy high street south of the Thames, with nothing more on my mind than a pee and a spot of lunch. After an overpriced pie and pint, I found a room in a guesthouse across the street, booked two weeks’ accommodation and went back to the pub to watch the boxing. By the following Tuesday I had four offers of work and took the one closest to the guesthouse; eight weeks’ paternity cover at a dental practice five minutes from my front door.

  I have barely stepped beyond the triangle formed between the Red Lion, the Lavender Lodge and 32 White since. Within that roughly one mile isosceles are more amenities and distractions than in the entire village I called home for the majority of my life. Amongst others, there are bars, restaurants, gyms, a cinema, a supermarket, launderette and Gus’s bohemian hairdressing salon. Not that I’ve availed myself to any great extent of the local attractions; I have worked every shift offered to me, including on-call duty over both Christmas and New Year’s Day.

  We also have two charity shops, one of which sold me fifty jigsaw puzzles for twenty-five pounds. The puzzles range from five hundred to two thousand pieces printed with detailed images of the countryside, the sky at night, and everything that lies between the two. I have even bought myself a specifically designed jigsaw mat, so I can roll up my work before turning in for the night. After my first four weeks in a single room in the Lavender Lodge, the ‘premier suite’ became available – double bed, TV, toilet, shower, bay window, mini kitchen and folding table. So I packed my bag and moved up one flight of stairs. Occa
sionally I venture beyond my small triangle to hit pads, jump rope and shadow box at a shabby boxing gym nudging the southeast border of the borough. Otherwise, I work, watch old movies, assemble poster-sized jigsaw puzzles and think.

  I think about how I have exiled myself from my family and my home, how I have escaped to one of the most vibrant cities in the world, only to live like a hermit, shuttling between work and the sofa where I eat meals for one in front of old black and white movies I’ve seen dozens of times before. If I measure my life now against the one I ran out on, the significant differences are that I am now crushingly lonely but much improved at jigsaw puzzles. It’s depressing.

  I call my parents once a week, my mother alternating between tearful hostility and weepy melancholia, Dad talking about the pub, the weather, the fight if there’s been one. In the first few weeks following my exile I called Brian, too, but we’d never talked on the phone before, other than to name a time and a pub, so our cross-country phone calls were awkward, tentative affairs. Maybe because the default topic was so uncomfortable. In the immediate aftermath of the ruined wedding, anyone even closely associated with me, meaning Brian, meaning my parents, was contaminated with the fallout. There was a general belief in the first wave of hysteria that the best man must have been complicit, and Big Boots had to physically restrain both Mad George and April’s father as the mania turned into physicality. The Black Horse was boycotted, the way the home of a serial killer might be; a local embarrassment fit only for demolition or burning. Small pubs operate on a precarious profit margin at the best of times, and if it hadn’t been for April’s intervention, my parents could easily have gone out of business. Hearing this – how she would drink defiantly at the bar with my mother, and stand beside Big Boots in front of the big screen on fight night – I felt myself admire and . . . maybe even love her, more than I ever had before. This realization has caused me more than once to doubt the wisdom of my early morning flit, but I would never say as much to Brian. With stubborn parochial elasticity, village life appears to have contracted back into shape and routine, returning more completely to its old form the longer the irritant has been removed.