‘Right, Ed,’ says Alan, a few minutes later. He offers me the most severe expression he has, which is not at all severe. ‘I’m afraid this isn’t good enough.’ Alan is one of the gentlest, warmest people I’ve ever met. Tonight he smells of strawberries and sourness, and his jumper is covered in pink stains. Lily had a tantrum involving strawberry yoghurt when he told her he couldn’t read her bedtime story.
I grin at him, although I can’t remember a time I felt less jolly. ‘I know. Just give me another week or two to get over the business with . . .’
I can’t say her name.
‘. . . with . . . the lady . . . and then I’ll be on it. ’
The lady ?
Alan is kind enough not to laugh.
I’ve been summoned to the pub to discuss my fortieth birthday, which is less than four weeks away. So far, I’ve organized nothing and Alan says he’s ‘concerned’. I think I should check up on you , he messaged yesterday. Get some plans brewing & make sure you’re not growing a beard.
He’s chosen the Bear in Bisley for the intervention. It’s a lovely old pub, and it reminds us both of the glory days of our youth, but it’s convenient for neither of us. We’ll have to share an expensive taxi later, and Alan’ll have to somehow pick up his car tomorrow. But he’s moving to the village soon, and wants to check out the beer situation, and I was very happy to walk here after a day of hospitals and kitchen building.
Hannah Harrington lives only a few doors from here. I bumped into her in Stroud a couple of years back, in the health food shop of all places. I was buying something not particularly healthy, like banana chips, but she was carrying armfuls of oat bran and all sorts of other things that have become curiously indispensable to middle-class people. It was perhaps the fourth or fifth time I’d seen her since Alex died, and – as ever – I was struck by the remarkable similarities between twelve-year-old Hannah and grown-up Hannah.
I wondered how much my sister would have changed, if she’d lived.
Hannah had told me that she and her husband had had an offer accepted on a house in Bisley. We’d discussed house prices and builders, and then gone our separate ways. I wish she’d told me that Sarah had moved to America. I wish she’d said, ‘Hey, remember my evil big sister? She buggered off abroad, years ago, so you and Carole need never worry about bumping into her again! ’
Alan puts a pint in front of me and sits down.
‘Thinking about the lady?’ he asks.
‘Yes. Stop me.’
He karate-chops my forearm and says, ‘Stop it, Ed. Right now.’
Then he looks at me, and I see in his eyes the ghoulish fascination of the long-term married. ‘What were you thinking? Was anyone naked?’
I smile. ‘No.’
‘What, then?’
‘Just stuff about how avoidable it all was. How I’d have been able to work it out in seconds, if only I’d known that she moved to America.’
Alan looks thoughtful. He takes a good draw on his pint, and I notice that the yoghurty stains extend down his shorts. There’s even a splodge of pink in his leg hair.
‘Even if you had worked it out, though, you might not have stopped yourself,’ he says. ‘You told me you fell for her almost straight away.’
I think back to those first few minutes in Sarah’s company. How smart and funny she’d been, how pretty. How I’d dragged on the joke about the sheep for far too long because I’d wanted to keep her talking.
‘But I did stop myself. The moment I realized. And by then I was pretty far gone. Listen, you knob, I asked you to stop me thinking about her.’
He chuckles. ‘Yes. Sorry.’
Alan is the person people think I am. Easy in his own skin, troubled by little. The sort of man who’s always on the edge of laughter, even when he’s just missed a train (which he does frequently) or lost his wallet (ditto). We became friends the day I noticed him launching an exploratory finger up his nostril during our welcome speech at secondary school, and instead of blushing, he had grinned and carried right on. Later he had challenged me to a game of shithead and didn’t mind in the slightest when I thrashed him.
We didn’t discuss becoming best friends because we were too busy kicking footballs and pretending not to notice any of the girls, but best friends we became. Partners in crime; frequently in trouble. We were even suspended from school once, for concocting a vomit-like substance and throwing it out of the toilet windows where the rebellious teachers smoked, the ones who wore leather jackets and didn’t have their hair cut often enough. I thought Mum would actually kill me, but when we got into the car, she started laughing. She often laughed, back then. ‘You’re only boys,’ she said.
Nearly thirty years on, Alan and I probably seem unchanged.
Only I’m not the same as Alan anymore. That boyish, uncomplicated Eddie was almost certainly lost the first time I found Mum unconscious, puddled in vomit and surrounded by pill bottles. And if he wasn’t lost then, he would have been extinguished maybe the second time, or the third, when I found her in the bath with newly cut wrists leaking red trails into the water. And if those first three attempts didn’t finish me off, the fourth attempt would have done, years after she’d been discharged from the psychiatric hospital, long after I thought I was done with ambulance journeys and the Mental Health Act and late nights fumbling for change by the hospital drinks dispenser.
Don’t get me wrong: these last two decades haven’t been all bad, not by any means. I’ve plenty of friends, a decent social life (for a barn-dwelling hermit), and I’ve even had girlfriends. I do a job I love, and I live in a beautiful place, and when I need to go away, I’ve a very patient aunt who comes to stay with Mum .
But then I met Sarah, and I remembered how life could feel. The lightness, the ease, the laughter. Life sung in a major key.
I’ve often wondered if I presented her with a counterfeit version of Eddie David during our week together. A happier, freer version. But I don’t think that’s what happened. I think she just got to see a version of me I’d long forgotten; a version that only she seemed able to revive.
‘It’s rough, Ed,’ Alan sighs, leaning forward to scrape off the yoghurt spot on his leg. ‘I’m sorry.’
Firmly, I tell him I’ll get over it.
I take a long sip of beer and settle back in my chair, ready to talk about the problems Lily’s been having at primary school, or the baffling news that our friend Tim has been cuckolded by his pregnant wife.
But Alan’s not done with me. ‘Are you sure?’ he asks. ‘Forgive me, Ed, but you don’t look like you’re getting over it. You look bloody awful.’
He catches me unawares. ‘Yes, I’m sure,’ I say, although it sounds more like a question than a statement. ‘But regardless, what choice do I have? Me getting together with Sarah would finish Mum off. And I mean that quite literally.’
Alan winces. ‘I know. I don’t disagree. But that’s not what I asked. I asked you if you were sure you were getting over it.’
He looks straight at me, and I feel it. Right under my skin. Years and years of it, pressing desperately outwards, contained only by thin dermal layers.
‘No,’ I say, after a pause. ‘I’m not.’
He nods. He knows.
‘I’m on the edge. I’m on the fucking edge, and I don’t know what to do.’
I turn my pint round and round in circles, fighting the heat that’s pushing at my eyes. ‘Not sleeping. Can’t concentrate. All I can think about is Sarah. I just feel . . . well, desperate, knowing I’ve cut off any possibility of anything. And since LA, looking after Mum has started feeling impossible. I keep catching myself thinking, I can’t do this anymore. But that’s not an option, Alan, because what the hell is she supposed to do if I just flip out and run off? I . . . Fuck.’
‘Fuck,’ Alan agrees quietly.
I don’t trust myself to speak.
Alan takes a sip of his pint. ‘I do often wonder if you need to get some extra help with your mum, Ed. Gia was telling me about some friend who’s been caring for her husband for fifteen years. Awful story – he fell off his bike and now he’s completely paralysed . . . Anyway, this woman had a breakdown last month. Just hit a wall. Couldn’t do another minute. And it’s not as if she’s fallen out of love with him. She adores him.’