Tommy’s family lived on a residential street called South Bedford Drive that was as wide as the M4. Tommy’s house was a strange taupe-coloured affair that looked as if a Spanish bungalow had mated with a Georgian mansion. I stood in front of it on my first day, sick and dizzy with heat and jet lag, and wondered if I’d landed on the moon.
In fact, it turned out that I’d landed in Beverly Hills. ‘They can’t afford to live here,’ Tommy said grimly, when he showed me round. There was a pool! A swimming pool! With a deck with chairs and tables and vines and roses and tropical flowers hanging in pink clouds.
‘The rent is crazy. I can’t imagine how they’ll keep it up, but Mum loves telling people back home that Saks is her corner shop.’
Even though Tommy’s mother had become barely recognizable, and even more preoccupied with things like clothes and treatments and lunches where she surely couldn’t be eating anything, she was kind enough to see that I needed a break. She told me I could stay as long as I wanted, and told me where to get the exotic-sounding frozen yoghurt Tommy had written about in his letters. ‘But don’t eat too much,’ she said. ‘I can’t have you get fat.’
Beyond the neatly mowed squares of their high-fenced garden stretched a city that stunned me. I’ll never forget the first time I saw a road lined with palm trees reaching up into the sky; giant street names hanging off traffic lights; mile upon mile of squat little buildings, chequered with flowers, engineered for earthquakes. The never-ending whine of planes, the nail bars and rugged mountains and valet parking and clothes shops full of stunningly expensive and beautiful clothes. It amazed me. I spent weeks just staring. At the people, the festoons of fairy lights, the huge expanse of pale gold sand and the Pacific, crashing away at Santa Monica every day. It was a miracle. It was Mars. And for that reason it was perfect.
I realized soon after arriving that Tommy’s invitation for me to stay hadn’t been purely philanthropic. He was lonely. True, he’d escaped the relentless savagery of his classmates, but nothing about his family, his relationship with himself or his trust in humanity appeared to have changed for the better. Those early signs of body consciousness he’d had when he left England seemed now to have blossomed into something a lot darker. He ate nothing or everything, he exercised sometimes two or three times a day, and his bedroom was full of clothes from which he’d not even removed the labels. He looked embarrassed when I went in there, as if a part of him remembered who he’d been before all of this.
I asked him outright one day if he was actually gay. We were at the farmers’ market, queuing for tacos, and Tommy was already beginning to mumble some falsehood about not being hungry. I remember standing there, fanning my face with our parking-lot ticket, and the question just kind of tumbling out of me.
Neither of us was expecting it. He stared at me for a few seconds and then said, ‘No, Harrington. I am not gay. And what the hell does that have to do with tacos?’
From behind us there was a quiet eruption of laughter. Tommy cringed deeply into himself; I turned round to see a girl, maybe a couple of years older than me, laughing quite openly. ‘Sorry,’ she said, in a London accent. ‘But I couldn’t help overhearing. You, mate’ – she pointed at me, still laughing – ‘you need to work on your bedside manner.’
Tommy agreed.
So did I.
An hour at a rickety table eating tacos led to a lifelong friendship. The girl, Jo, was working as a mobile beauty therapist and living in a crummy apartment share nearby. Over the next few months, before she ran out of money and was forced to go back to England, she bullied us back to a semblance of happiness and functionality with which we could move forward. She made us talk – something we were failing at quite miserably – and she forced us relentlessly out to parties, to the beach, to free concerts. She’s as spiky as a porcupine, Jo Monk, but she’s a woman of infinite kindness and courage. I miss her terribly when I’m not in England.
September came and I had to go back to England to finish my A levels. Only I couldn’t go. Whenever I phoned my parents and they talked about my return, I’d start crying. Mum would fall silent and eventually Dad would have to pick up the extension outside the downstairs loo and crack jokes. Mum did her best to seem resilient – cheerful, even – but it slipped out one day, as if she had turned her back on her voice just for a moment: ‘I miss you so much it hurts,’ she whispered. ‘I want my family back.’ Self-loathing blocked my throat and I couldn’t even manage a reply.
In the end they agreed I should postpone my A levels for a year to stay a while longer. They came to visit me, and although it was a relief to see them, it was acutely painful that Hannah wasn’t there. They kept wanting to talk about her, which I found almost unendurable. I was relieved when they left.
Then I met Reuben, and got a job, and decided it was time to become someone I could respect. I’ll tell you about that next time.
Sarah
P.S. I’m going home to see my parents tomorrow. Granddad is staying with them for a bit. If you’re in Gloucestershire and you’re ready to talk, call me.
Chapter Twenty
‘Sarah!’ Dad, who looked exhausted, hugged me tightly. ‘Thank God,’ he said. ‘Thank God you’re here. Our still, small voice of calm.’
He offered me some wine, which I refused. After my meeting on the South Bank yesterday with Kaia and Reuben, and the text message warning me off Eddie, I’d gone to Jo’s and drunk far too much. My body had told me this morning that it would not tolerate an alcoholic drink for some time.
‘Oh, Sarah.’ Mum hugged me. ‘I feel awful about the last few weeks. I really am so sorry.’ My mother spent a lot of time apologizing for her failings, in spite of having done nothing but love and look after me from the day I was born.
‘Stop saying that. I had a lovely time. You saw me in Leicester. Was I not happy?’
‘Happy enough, I suppose.’
I still wasn’t sure why I hadn’t told them about Eddie. Perhaps because I was supposed to be home for the anniversary of the accident, not having sex with a handsome stranger. Or perhaps because, by the time I had arrived in Leicester, I was beginning to worry.
Or perhaps, I thought now, handing some flowers to Mum, it was because a part of me already knew it wouldn’t work out. The same part of me that had stood facing Reuben on our wedding day and thought, He’ll be taken away from me eventually. Just like Hannah.
Mum put my flowers in one vase and then swapped it for a different one. And then a different one still. ‘Mind your own business,’ she said, when she caught me watching her. ‘I’m a retiree now, Sarah. I’ve earned the right to opinions on flower arranging.’
I smiled, quietly relieved. Last time I’d seen Mum, she had seemed diminished somehow, squashed, like a carton flattened for recycling. Which didn’t feel at all right, because, save for the odd lapse, she had seemed so splendidly robust in the years following the accident. In fact, her fortitude was the only thing that assuaged my guilt at having just cleared off and left them in all that pain and chaos.
Today she – and Dad, for that matter – were how I’d always held them in my mind’s eye: kind, solid, assured. And mildly alcoholic , I reminded myself, as Mum poured herself some wine, even though we were soon to leave for the pub. Don’t put them on a pedestal. They’ve just dealt with things in a different way.
I glanced up at the ceiling and lowered my voice. ‘How’s it been? How is he?’
‘He’s a rotten old bastard,’ Mum said squarely. ‘And I’m allowed to say that because he’s my father and I love him and I know what a rough time he’s had. But there’s no denying it – he’s a rotten old bastard.’
‘He is,’ Dad admitted. ‘We’ve been keeping tally of the number of complaints he’s made today. So far we’re at thirty-three, and it’s only a quarter to one. Why aren’t you drinking?’
‘I’ve a hangover.’
Mum slumped. ‘Oh, I feel terrible when I’m mean about him,’ she said. ‘He’s impossible to be with, Sarah, drives us mad. But underneath it all I feel very bad for him. He’s been on his own so long now. His quality of life is awful, cooped up in that house on his own, nobody to talk to.’ My grandmother, a woman so round she had seemed almost spherical in the photographs, had died of a heart attack when she was forty-four. I had never met her.