Beat the Rain Read online

  “Nothing.” She finishes her coffee in one gulp. “I want to go back to the room.”

  “Why? You have to spoil everything, don’t you?”

  * * *

  In her sitting room, she cries as she watches Tom and wishes that she’d acted differently. She wishes he’d allowed her the opportunity.

  “So that’s it. I’ve run out of things to say. Or I haven’t got enough time to say them. One or the other.” Tom lifts his glass, drinks Rioja.

  “So this is goodbye.” He smiles at her and she knows that when he sips his drink, when he tastes his wine, the picture will fade. He’ll say goodbye and go. Forever. He’ll never say another word to her. She scrambles for the remote control and as his glass meets his lips, the wine touches his tongue, her finger finds the pause button. She breathes heavily and watches his face stammer, settle. Freeze.

  I loved you. You can sit there and tell me I but it won’t change the truth. Why didn’t you give me the chance to tell you that? You were the only one for me. Adam’s…I…I didn’t love him then.

  She jumps to her feet, knocking her wineglass over as she runs from the room, leaving Tom’s paused face drinking. The stairs lead to her bedroom, her room leads to her bed. The sheets don’t hold the comfort they promised as she sobs into them. They bristle. Sleep, when it comes, isn’t restful.

  In her dream, the walls are white. Heat rushes towards her face as she opens the large shuttered windows. She is high above the ground yet the church is still above her. Enormous stone steps rise from the square below up and up and up until they meet the church. She breathes but already the warm sea air tastes stale. This is the end of the dream, the part she dreads. She knows when she turns back Tom will be behind her, smiling. She knows that as she pulls the window shut and brushes her hair behind her ear, she’ll start to turn. She’ll search for Tom’s face. Then she’ll realise where she is and she’ll feel the sheets beneath her and she’ll wake. Alone.

  So though she feels Tom behind her, this time she won’t turn and she won’t wake. She’ll stay here and won’t try to look at Tom – to do so is impossible. Maybe that was always the problem. Is that what the dream is telling her? She’ll search the faces of the people in the square below her instead. The men and women scattered across the steps of the church. She already knows that a young man has been trying to get her attention. For months she’s noticed him from the corner of her eye but today she’ll see him. Today she’ll look for his face and forsake Tom’s. She leans forward and places her hands on the windowsill. The air is dry in her eyes and it takes all of her willpower not to turn around. One more glimpse. But it won’t be allowed, she knows that, so this time, she searches the market stalls instead.

  The sun is large and casts shadows of the church. And there he is. Beautiful. Patient. Sitting on the first layer of steps, somehow avoiding the shadow and catching the sunlight, making his dark hair seem lighter, more vibrant than she’s ever seen it. She wants to shout his name, to wave and call to him but for a moment she drinks in his image. He’s alive and he’s waiting for her, she can see that now. All this time she’s been trying to look backwards, trying to hold on to someone that no longer exists, but Adam does, he’s the here and now. He’s waiting on the steps, so calmly, so patiently. She opens her mouth to shout his name but a loud banging drags her away from the room. She flinches and arrives behind swollen eyes. It’s him. She jumps up and runs down the stairs, beating. She stands behind the closed front door. Tom is still paused in the sitting room. Wine is still on the carpet. Makeup still smudges her eyes. But she thinks it’s over. Nearly over. Can she restart now? Is that possible? Is it as sordid as it seems? Is it even him beyond the wooden barrier? She’s smiling. It’s him. She’s going to live in real-time, not within a paused DVD. Not within an Italian holiday. She knows he can sense her here. He knows she’s debating whether to answer the door.

  She opens the door to see Mr Carmichael, trimming his roses after the rainstorm and offering one to Adam.

  “Thank you,” Adam says, taking the rose. Mr Carmichael smiles and continues gardening.

  “I love you,” Adam says. Mr Carmichael chuckles and Adam glances nervously at him before making eye contact with Louise again.

  “I love you, Louise.” Adam rubs his right eye and shifts uncomfortably. Louise stands in the open doorway staring at him. He scratches his cheek. Louise doesn’t speak but stands aside to let him in. Mr Carmichael glances at Louise as she begins to shut the door.

  “Spring leaves,” he says.

  “Thank you,” she says quietly. She thinks she means it. Mr Carmichael bows his head slightly and continues clipping his roses. Louise shuts the door.

  In the sitting room the television holds Tom’s picture. Adam stands solid, eyes fixed on his brother. He hands Louise the letter he has been gripping, without looking away from the screen. She reads it. Strokes his hand. Doesn’t speak.

  “Do you miss him?” Adam says quietly. Louise reaches out and touches his cheek but they stand in silence.

  “Always,” she says eventually. He nods and sits down on the sofa and stares at his brother’s flickering face. Louise looks from one brother to the other and can’t help thinking of Tom’s parting comment.

  “For the record I don’t think you and Adam will go the distance either. But at least give it a go. For me?”

  Louise presses rewind.

  Interlude

  I got into the habit of reading Tom’s New Scientist magazines after he died. I’d never been interested before, thought it was one of his weird things, but loss like that changes your perspective on the world. Some people turn to religion, I suppose, but I went the other way, into contemplating the universe and its unimaginable vastness, its inexplicable nature. It’s a habit I never lost, I read it for years, right up until I…well, until now.

  Memories are flooding over me like chilling, icy waves. The white wooden living-room windows of our flat were dirty around the edges. Had they ever been cleaned? I shouldn’t think so. I suppose we could have paid someone else to do it but we never did, I’m not sure why. Middle-class guilt? We got over that once the kids were born, that’s for sure, we took any help we could get once we become parents. So this memory must be from early on in our relationship. When we were happy, not that long after Tom died.

  Outside, I can see Mr Carmichael’s garden, always so perfect. There’s the gnarled, arthritic oak tree opposite us that looks like an old woman stooping to pick up her shopping. I’d forgotten all about that, funny how you can forget things that are tucked away somewhere inside your brain. I stare intently from the window, studying people as they clean cars, walk dogs, interact: lives still being lived. Not like mine, rushing headlong towards its end.

  “Wow, did you see that puff?” a little boy on the television exclaims. I glance backwards in my mind to see a little round plastic mushroom on an advert on the TV screen in our old flat, spraying clouds of perfume, chemically flowering the room with every spluttered exhalation. Shouldn’t these thoughts be more…I don’t know…important? Shouldn’t these last memories be about something else, not just compressed knitted together streams of nothing? Or is that all life is in the end, moment after moment after moment of not much at all, punctuated by feelings of worthlessness?

  No, that can’t be true. I had children. If I did nothing else I did that. Our marriage may have not been perfect, but we had Maria and Matthew so my life wasn’t meaningless. Why am I remembering this shit? I don’t even know what’s real anymore. I was filled with toxic worry, apparently. A magazine told me so it must be true. Of course it also told me if I popped butter beans out of their skins whilst still warm they’d make a groovy paste so perhaps it wasn’t the most reliable source.

  I don’t want to think like this, I want something more positive, something tangible, something that will overpower my senses and stop the hurt getting in because I don’t want to die hurting. I don’t want to die at all. I just wanted to prove a point. I ca
n’t begin to tell you how ridiculous that feels now.

  We’re good swimmers for land mammals. I read that once in Tom’s New Scientist magazine. “We cannot go long without a drink and seem to waste large amounts of fluid in sweat and urine,” the article said. I forget who wrote it. “By wading upright, the ancestral primate would have kept its hands free for manipulating objects and climbing. This would have allowed the hands to evolve into a supremely dextrous tool-making appendage.” Aquatic Apes the writer called us. She was convinced we’d spent a good part of our history living by the coast, wading in the water and catching food from the sea. Our babies have fat like the blubber whales have. Matthew was like that, a real porker as a baby. Other land mammals, even other primates, don’t have this blubber. Not sure if that proves the writer’s point or not. Probably not, things are always a lot more complicated than that. I’m a good swimmer. I won badges for it when I was at school. I doubt it will stand me in good stead now, though. I don’t think people survive plunging off Beachy Head. Mostly they don’t want to.

  But I do. I want to go back. This has all been a terrible mistake.

  * * *

  In the past, in the beige neutrality of our flat with lawn mowers and televisions and scaffold poles and chirping seagulls outside, I swallow and open my eyes. Blink. My back aches because I’ve been sitting cross-legged on the living-room floor for what seems like an eternity.

  “Are you meditating?” a voice says, but I’m not sure if it’s taking the piss or not. That’s the thing about marriage, after a while, you stop knowing when your spouse is serious or not, when they’re joking or jibing. Next – and you don’t remember when – you stop even caring. At least, that’s how my marriage became. But not yet, not in this moment.

  In this moment, I’m trying to remain centred and in the present, removing myself from all past and future concerns. I’m holding my palms face outwards, resting them on my knees.

  “Shhh,” I’m saying gently. “I’m concentrating.”

  “I’ve got something to tell you,” the voice continues. I struggle to open my eyes and stand up but my legs are still crossed and twisted. The blood rushes past my eyes and I see a blur, like white rock and sky, spinning out of control. I can hear the sound of children wailing, but they’re trapped inside white, feathered, seagull bodies. I see the sea, crashing waves, needle-sharp rocks.

  “You okay?” The sunlight is filtering through our living-room windows and I am desperately trying to focus, to remain here, in the past, when we were happy and alive and our world was filled with possibility. Our lives were wonderful sometimes. Ordinary and humdrum and wonderful. I forgot that towards the end, but now I’m seeing it through dying eyes, I remember. It wasn’t all bad – we both fucked up. But people do that all the time don’t they. And there’s always a way back if you want it hard enough.

  “What?” I struggle to say, clinging to my memories desperately, like a child clutching a balloon in the wind.

  “Doesn’t matter,” the voice says simply, disconnecting from me. Disconnecting permanently, maybe. My heart stops beating, just for a moment. I think it did matter, but I didn’t notice until now. Too late, always too late. But it mattered. Listening to one another mattered.

  Perhaps that’s how all relationships end, not with a bang but with the accumulation of millions of tiny moments that matter, going unnoticed by one partner or the other because life gets in the way. And then one day you both stop trying to make the other one notice anymore. And that’s it, the slow death is in motion. The rest is entropy.

  We should have taken better care of each other – that’s what we promised. It could have been either one of us dying right now. We both thought about it, for different reasons. I guess it was always going to be me though. Despite everything, I was never the survivor. The thing I find most heart-breaking is that the kids will think I left them and I wasn’t coming back.

  I can see things with such clarity now, such useless, blinding clarity. But what’s the point in that now? Knowledge isn’t always powerful. Sometimes, it’s just heart-breaking.

  Part Two: These Other Things

  “You’re nothing like your mother.”

  Chapter Six

  Adam sits in his kitchen, staring through the window into the garden and listening to the next-door neighbours banging and hammering, trying to fix the legs on a broken chest of drawers. The sounds of suburbia, something he never thought he’d find comforting. They’ve been in this house for five years now and he’s surprised how much he loves it.

  “I don’t know, Louise,” he said when they’d first viewed it. “I grew up in suburbia, I don’t know if I can do it. It just feels so…dead behind the eyes.”

  Louise flashed him a smile: “But look at the size of it,” she said, her smile turning into an enormous grin. “We can’t get anything this big in the city centre, nothing like it.”

  And she was right. At first, with just the two of them, it seemed massive in comparison with the flat, extravagant even. But now, with a four-year-old girl and a three-year-old boy haring about in it, it doesn’t seem too big: it’s just right. He loves it, it’s a real family home, somewhere he thinks he can stay forever. He can’t believe he’s been this lucky, that out of the tragedy of Tom’s loss, something so good could have happened. Louise, Matthew, Maria. His family. He leans back in his chair, a feeling of warm calm settling over him as his mobile phone starts buzzing on the table. He glances down to see ‘Imogen’ flashing.

  “Hey, Imogen,” he says, her name forming a question as he speaks. She’s Louise’s friend from antenatal classes. She never rings him.

  “Adam, how are you getting on?” Imogen asks, her faux concern not even disguised.

  “Oh, I’m fine, we’re fine.”

  “Going off on a conference all week and leaving you all alone with two young children,” Imogen continues, oblivious to his protestations. “I know she’s my friend, Adam…”

  “They’re at school and nursery, it’s fine, I don’t need…”

  “But honestly, I don’t understand Louise sometimes.” Imogen’s voice is firm, she’s not going to be persuaded out of her way of thinking.

  “It’s just a conference, Imogen, she must have told you about it.”

  “I’ll come around, I’ve made a casserole,” Imogen says. “Do you have food for the kids? Of course you do. Gavin can look after Timmy for a couple of hours. Not all dads are as hands on as you, you know, Adam. It’ll do Gavin good, teach him parenting is every bit as hard as investment banking.”

  “No, honestly, Imogen, it’s…”

  “Scones,” she says, pronouncing it sc-owns, not s-cons. He wants to interrupt, to tell her she’s saying it wrong, that posh people – real posh people, would never say it like that, just like they’d never say dessert, they’d say pudding.

  “I’ll bring sc-owns. Do the kids like sc-owns? Of course they do, everyone likes sc-owns. Well, except Alice, she doesn’t, but she’s always on a diet isn’t she, especially now she’s met John. Did Louise tell you she’d met someone? I wish her all the happiness, Adam, I do, but I can’t see it working.”

  “Imogen…” Adam interrupts. If she says ‘sc-owns’ one more time, he’ll have to hang up, he can’t bear it.

  “So, I’ll see you around eight,” she says, and she hangs up before he can protest any more. The last thing he needs is Imogen coming over to try and help or, heaven forbid, to keep him company. He’s never been fond of her at all and he’s not sure that Louise is either. She’s one of those friends that somehow hangs on, despite the fact nobody can stand them. It’s odd that she wants to come over, though. She’s never paid him that much attention before. He suspects in reality she’s on a fact-finding mission, wondering if there’s something going on. Why has Louise gone away? Is there something going on I don’t know about?

  * * *

  Adam sits back in his kitchen and returns his mobile to the table. He can hear next door shouting and ranting at
one another as they try to fix their chest of drawers. Not angry shouting; the type of banter and arguing that comes with being a family. Adam actually finds it quite comforting. Initially he liked the house simply because it wasn’t Louise and Tom’s flat. Now he loves it because it’s where his children are growing up. It drinks in their memories, absorbing them into its walls so that its essence has become their essence.

  Adam had never felt comfortable in the flat. Replacing Tom in his own home, with his own girlfriend seemed like it was a step too far, somehow. Not that either of them had cared what other people thought. Once they’d committed to each other, everything else became secondary. Their lives became a happy haze of…well, just a haze. Watching movies, smoking weed, drinking and eating and shagging. Wearing sunglasses when they went out so people wouldn’t see how fucked up they were from their eyes. Or maybe in the early days, it was so they could avoid the stares from the neighbours with their gossip and thoughts and opinions.

  Is that Tom? He looks like Tom? It can’t be Tom, he died.

  The word died would be whispered under their breaths Adam knew, because people couldn’t bear to say it out loud for fear of bringing it – death – too close, close enough that it might attach itself to them, a tiny limpet on their skin that would grow and eventually turn into a boil, a tumour, devouring them and their loved ones from within. Better to whisper the word, almost so quietly as to not say it at all, just to be safe.

  But death had no such power over Adam and Louise after Tom. Despite how raw they were from his loss, they’d been wildly happy. In some strange way, their experience had made them grab life and wring everything they could out of it. Having committed what seemed to many the ultimate taboo, Adam and Louise didn’t have to pretend to be anything. They’d blown their chance of ‘fitting in’ with society and its norms – and that was liberating for both of them.