‘Bloody hell, Chloe,’ Alex spluttered, turning sharply to look at her, then swivelling back to the road when the cars started to slow. His knuckles clenched, blanched, against the steering wheel. A muscle twitched near his jaw- line. ‘No, of course not.’ His voice softened to become earnest and his face was pained.
‘Then how do you know Julia?’
‘Chlo, I really want to talk to you, but not like this… it’s a long story… She… Julia… I never thought that I’d see her again.’ Alex’s jaw was set tense and firm and his mouth was a thin line.
Chloe digested this, but persisted, ‘So were you in a relationship with her?’
Alex hesitated. He looked across at Chloe, then back at the road. ‘Yes, we were.’ He paused before adding, ‘But it seems like another lifetime now.’
Neither of them spoke. The cars in front of them sped up and Alex put his foot down hard on the accelerator. They raced forward, gaining momentum quickly, before realising the same cars were stopping again. Chloe thrust a hand out to steady herself for possible impact while Alex cursed and slammed his foot onto the brake.
The car lurched to a stop.
Chloe bit her lip and rubbed her stomach protectively under the coarse strip of seatbelt.
‘Chloe…’ Alex’s voice was gentle and he moved his hand across to caress the nape of her neck. It made her shiver and she looked up at him. ‘I’m so sorry. It’s nothing for you to worry about, but I want to talk about this properly, not in the sodding car, or in front of your mother. It gave me one hell of a shock, seeing her like that. Can we just wait till we’re alone?’ He waved his hand angrily at the traffic.
His words were something of a balm to her nerves. She looked at his face and saw his expression, guileless and caring, but still, she was wary.
‘I want to know everything,’ she told him. ‘I don’t see why you need to be so cloak and dagger about it.’
‘Because,’ Alex said slowly, his eyes fixed on the road, ‘what happened to her was beyond terrible.’ His voice cracked on the final words. He cleared his throat but the raw emotion was still present as he added, ‘I can hardly…’ He trailed off.
Chloe cursed herself for making them come up to her mother’s. They should have stayed at home where they could have talked. She almost told Alex to turn around, but as she thought of her mother’s sorrow-filled face the traffic began to speed up and Alex indicated for the next exit.
‘Okay,’ she said when he was no more forthcoming, alarmed at how quickly he’d got upset. ‘You can tell me later.’
‘Thank you,’ Alex replied, and Chloe heard the heartfelt timbre of his voice and leaned back against her chair, suddenly very, very tired.
9
The memories came in droves in the night.
Screaming – her own.
Shouting – everybody else.
As Julia half-dozed fitfully her remembrances held her down and whispered cruel things into her ears.
She saw her father’s face in the hospital, the light gone from his eyes. She saw him before that, at home when she had been a child, his strong, solid arms, a face full of lines that deepened into great crags when he laughed, his hands shaking slightly as he went about day-to-day tasks, his craftsman’s fingers thick and gnarled. Tinkering away in his shed, while her mother cooked for them all. The miniature garden in the wicker basket that he had made for her so that fairies might visit them, which had been a constant feature of her childhood, and which they had both continued to tend long after she stopped believing in magical creatures at the bottom of the garden. That miniature bucolic idyll had come to represent all the fundamental feelings that lay between them, shared without words.
She sat bolt upright with a pounding heart and tried to recover her breathing. Blearily, she wondered if the basket was still there in the garden; hoped fervently that it was. If it had gone, then, irrevocably, so had one more small part of her. But there was no way to find out without making that dreaded call home.
Gradually, she succumbed to a half-sleep again, until she was gliding through a Turkish beach resort, accosted by an old lady who spoke bad English but had kind eyes, who grabbed her hand, saying, ‘Wait, lady. I see man, he walk with you. Wait! Lady, wait!’ When she turned around the woman was frowning as though some invisible being were whispering something in her ear that was hard to understand. ‘He say you are lost soul.’ The woman turned big, heavily pencilled mournful eyes towards her, as if a hundred things suddenly made sense. Julia wanted to run from that knowing gaze, but it seemed the message wasn’t finished, and her legs were unaccountably heavy. ‘He say you lost somebody, but they will come back to you. So it okay,’ the woman smiled, tears in her eyes, bouncing Julia’s hand up and down in her own cold, gnarled grip. ‘They will come back to you.’
She came to again with a start, her whole body trembling. Was this a memory or a dream? She wasn’t sure – and that in itself frightened her. If it was more than a dream, then who was the message from? Her father? Who else would it be? And who did it refer to? Was it Alex, who had just come back to her in such an unforeseen and painful fashion?
She pictured her father’s face. Maybe he had forgiven her, now he could see everything up in heaven, and was paying the puppetmaster who dangled everyone’s lives beneath him so ruthlessly to do him this one big favour, to make the fates turn just once in the right direction. That way his daughter might become a truly earthbound person again, instead of just a wandering lost soul.
But then perhaps it was only a dream, came a cloudy thought, as her head grew heavier once more against the pillow.
Later on, in the hazy time between sleeping and waking, sleeping and waking, more things came back to her; things she had pushed away for years. She had separated her life into two halves – Before and After – although she knew the line was really a lot more blurred than that.
One image replayed itself over and over: of Alex’s twisted face as he walked away from her. That had been After.
But, now and then, there was also Alex’s kind face, peering down at her.
Before.
10
Chloe was already exasperated after a few hours with her mother. After Margaret had woken her at what felt like dawn, they had raced into town and spent twenty minutes driving around the multi-storey searching for the perfect spot, before Margaret phoned Alex in a panic to remind him to lock the house up when he went out. They made it into the shopping centre, only for Chloe’s mother to realise she’d left a voucher for Marks & Spencer in the car’s glove box, so they trudged all the way back again to find the voucher wasn’t in there at all – she had in fact carefully added it to the zip pocket of her shopping bag. Once they were inside M &S, Margaret headed straight for the accessories section, and spent half an hour wondering about a scarf there, before deciding she needed to come back when she was wearing her other coat to see if they matched properly.
And so it went on. All the time, Margaret wittered away, Chloe hardly getting a word in. Her mother hadn’t always been like this, she thought. She could recall a much more confident and self-contained woman, although it was only through the fog of childhood memory. But then something had happened, their grandmother had looked after Chloe and Anthony for a while, and it was after that that her mother had changed. But after what? The shadows of a memory began to float into the edges of her mind, and she felt her heart begin to race and pushed it back quickly. However, now its presence had been felt she couldn’t wipe it completely.
As they sat down for elevenses, Chloe’s mother took a good look at her.
‘You look a bit peaky, dear. Are you okay?’
‘I’m fine, Mum.’ Chloe set down their tray of steaming coffees and muffins.
‘Working too hard again? You must be careful. You know what they say – “all work and no play…”.’ Margaret chuckled to herself as she placed her plastic bags carefully on the seat next to her, and then fussed over which one
