Sweet Sorrow Read online

  Contents

  Also by David Nicholls

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One: June

  The End of the World

  Sawdust

  Slowies

  Infinity

  The Meadow

  Full Fathom Five Theatre Co-operative

  First Sight

  Mum

  Best Behaviour

  Corners

  The Name Game

  Romeo

  Walking Home

  Part Two: July

  Wedding

  Heron

  Cinnamon

  Dad

  Sampson

  Performance Anxiety

  Beginnings

  Hobbies and Interests: Socialising

  Swords

  Pygmalion

  Jamming

  Brown Bottles

  Culture

  The Jazz Section

  Stage Laughter

  Improvisation

  Prospects

  Examination

  Masks

  The Angler’s

  The Pines

  Queen Mab

  Part Three: August

  Love

  Running the Lines

  River

  Starry Starry Night

  Press and Publicity

  Workshopping

  ‘I have bought the mansion of a love’

  Mr Howard

  Scars

  Forceps

  Shame

  Fête

  Home

  Results

  Swings and Slides

  Canada, Malaga, Rimini, Brindisi

  Little Stars

  Last Night

  Part Four: Winter

  1998

  2x 4x 8x 16x

  Digging Down

  Last Love Story

  Pleasure

  Curtain Call

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by David Nicholls

  Starter for Ten

  The Understudy

  One Day

  Us

  First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Maxromy Productions Ltd 2019

  The right of David Nicholls to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  eBook ISBN 978 1 444 71543 9

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.hodder.co.uk

  To Hannah, Max and Romy

  What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory – meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subject to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion – is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.

  William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

  Part One

  JUNE

  –

  This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid.

  Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding

  The End of the World

  The world would end on Thursday at five to four, immediately after the disco.

  Until then, the nearest we’d come to such a cataclysm at Merton Grange were the rumours of apocalypse that took hold once or twice a term, the circumstances broadly the same each time. Nothing as banal as a solar flare or asteroid. Instead a tabloid would report a Mayan prophecy, some throwaway remark from Nostradamus or freak symmetry of the calendar, and word would spread that our faces were due to melt off halfway through Double Physics. Resigned to the hysteria, the teacher would sigh and pause the lesson while we squabbled over who had the most accurate watch, and the countdown would begin, the girls clinging to each other, eyes closed and shoulders hunched as if about to be doused with icy water, the boys brazening it out, all of us secretly contemplating the missed kiss, the unsettled score, our virginity, our friends’ faces, our parents. Four, three, two …

  We’d hold our breath.

  Then someone would shout ‘bang’ and we’d laugh, relieved and just a little disappointed to find ourselves alive, but alive in Double Physics. ‘Happy now? Let’s get back to work, shall we?’ and we’d return to what happens when a force of one Newton causes a body to move through a distance of one metre.

  But on Thursday at three fifty-five, immediately after the disco, things would be different. Time had crawled through five long years and now in the final weeks, then days, an air of elation and panic, joy and fear began to take hold, along with a crazed nihilism. Letters home and detentions couldn’t touch us now, and what might we get away with in this world without consequences? In the corridors and common rooms, the fire extinguishers took on a terrible potential. Would Scott Parker really say those things to Mrs Ellis? Would Tony Stevens set fire to Humanities again?

  And now, unbelievably, the final day was here, brilliant and bright and commencing with skirmishes at the gates; school ties worn as bandanas and tourniquets, in knots as compact as a walnut or fat as a fist, with enough lipstick and jewellery and dyed blue hair to resemble some futuristic nightclub scene. What were the teachers going to do, send us home? They sighed and waved us through. With no plausible reason to define an oxbow lake, the last week had been spent in desultory, dispiriting classes about something called ‘adult life’, which would, it seemed, consist largely of filling in forms and compiling a CV (‘Hobbies and Interests: Socialising, watching television’). We learnt how to balance a chequebook. We stared out of the window at the lovely day and thought, not long now. Four, three, two …

  Back in our form room at break we began to graffiti our white school shirts with felt-tips and magic markers, kids hunched over each other’s backs like tattooists in a Russian jail, marking all available space with sentimental abuse. Take care of yourself, you dick, wrote Paul Fox. This shirt stinks, wrote Chris Lloyd. In lyrical mood, my best friend Martin Harper wrote mates4ever beneath a finely detailed cock and balls.

  Harper and Fox and Lloyd. These were my best friends at the time, not just boys but the boys, and while some girls circled – Debbie Warwick and Becky Boyne and Sharon Findlay – the group was self-sufficient and impenetrable. Though none of us played an instrument, we’d imagined ourselves as a band. Harper, we all knew, was lead guitar and vocals. Fox was bass, a low and basic thump-thump-thump. Lloyd, because he proclaimed himself ‘mad’, was the drummer, which left me as …

  ‘Maracas,’ Lloyd had said and we’d laughed, and ‘maracas’ was added to the long list of nicknames. Fox drew them on my school shirt now, maracas crossed beneath a skull, lik
e military insignia. Debbie Warwick, whose mum was an air hostess, had smuggled in a carrier bag full of miniatures in the chocolate-box flavours that we favoured, coffee and cream, mint and coconut, and we wrapped them in our fists and swigged and winced and spluttered as Mr Ambrose, feet up on the desk, kept his eyes fixed on the video of Free Willy 2 that played in the background, a special treat ignored by everyone.

  The miniatures served as an aperitif to our very last school dinner. Memories still remained of the legendary food fight of ’94: the ketchup sachets exploded underfoot, breaded fish sent skimming through the air like ninja stars, jacket spuds lobbed like grenades. ‘Go on. I dare you,’ said Harper to Fox as he weighed a leathery sausage experimentally by its tip, but the teachers patrolled the aisles like prison guards and with the promise of brown sponge and brown custard to come, the dangerous moment passed.

  In the leavers’ assembly, Mr Pascoe made the speech that we’d all expected, encouraging us to look to the future but remember the past, to aim high but weather the lows, to believe in ourselves but think of others. The important thing was not only what we’d learnt – and he hoped we’d learnt a great deal! – but also the kind of young adults we’d become, and we listened, young adults, stuck between cynicism and sentimentality, boisterous on the surface but secretly daunted and sad. We sneered and rolled our eyes but elsewhere in the hall hands gripped other hands and snuffles were heard as we were urged to cherish the friendships we’d made, the friendships that would last a lifetime.

  ‘A lifetime? Christ, I hope not,’ said Fox, locking my head beneath his arm, fondly rubbing his knuckles there. It was prize-giving time, and we sank low in our chairs. Prizes were awarded to the kids who always got the prizes, applause fading long before they’d left the stage to stand in front of the photographer from the local press, book tokens held beneath the chin as if in an ID parade. Next, led by Mr Solomon, Music, the Merton Grange School Swing Band clattered out to satisfy our craving for the American big-band sound with a cacophonous, lolloping rendition of Glenn Miller’s ‘In the Mood’.

  ‘Why? Just why?’ said Lloyd.

  ‘To put us in the mood,’ said Fox.

  ‘What mood?’ I said.

  ‘In a Shitty Mood,’ said Lloyd.

  ‘“Fucked off” by Glenn Miller and his Orchestra,’ said Fox.

  ‘No wonder he crashed the plane,’ said Harper, and when the barrage came to an end, Fox and Lloyd and Harper leapt to their feet and cheered bravo, bravo. On-stage, Gordon Gilbert, looking quite deranged, held the bell of his trombone with both hands and sent it high, high into the air where it hung for a moment before crashing down onto the parquet and crumpling like tin, and while Mr Solomon screamed into Gordon’s face, we shuffled out to the disco.

  But I realise how absent I am from the above. I remember the day well enough, but when I try to describe my role, I find myself reaching for what I saw and heard, rather than anything I said or did. As a student, my distinctive feature was a lack of distinction. ‘Charlie works hard to meet basic standards and for the most part achieves them’; this was as good as it got, and even that slight reputation had been dimmed by events of the exam season. Not admired but not despised, not adored but not feared; I was not a bully, though I knew a fair few, but did not intervene or place myself between the pack and the victim, because I wasn’t brave either. Our year at school was distinguished by a strong criminal element, bicycle thieves and shoplifters and arsonists, and while I steered clear of the scariest kids, neither was I befriended by the bright, obedient ones, those garlanded with book tokens. I neither conformed nor rebelled, collaborated nor resisted; I stayed out of trouble without getting into anything else. Comedy was our great currency and while I was not a class clown, neither was I witless. I might occasionally get a surprised laugh from the crowd but my best jokes were either drowned out by someone with a louder voice, or came far too late, so that even now, more than twenty years later, I think of things I should have said in ’96 or ’97. I knew that I was not ugly – someone would have told me – and was vaguely aware of whispers and giggles from huddles of girls, but what use was this to someone with no idea what to say? I’d inherited height, and only height, from my father, my eyes, nose, teeth and mouth from Mum – the right way round, said Dad – but I’d also inherited his tendency to stoop and round my shoulders in order to take up less space in the world. Some lucky quirk of glands and hormones meant that I’d been spared the pulsing spots and boils that literally scarred so many adolescences, and I was neither skinny with anxiety nor plump with the chips and canned drinks that fuelled us, but I wasn’t confident about my appearance. I wasn’t confident about anything at all.

  All around me, kids were adjusting their personalities with the same deliberation that they gave to changes in clothes and haircuts. We were plastic, mutable and there was still time to experiment and alter our handwriting, our politics, the way we laughed or walked or sat in a chair, before we hardened and set. The last five years had been like some great chaotic rehearsal, with discarded clothes and attitudes, friendships and opinions littering the floor; scary and exhilarating for those taking part, maddening and absurd for the parents and teachers subjected to those fraught improvisations and obliged to clear up the mess.

  Soon it would be time to settle into some role we might plausibly fit, but when I tried to see myself as others saw me (sometimes literally, late at night, staring profoundly into my father’s shaving mirror, hair slicked back) I saw … nothing special. In photos of myself from that time, I’m reminded of those early incarnations of a cartoon character, the prototypes that resemble the later version but are in some way out of proportion, not quite right.

  None of which is much help. Imagine, then, another photograph, the school group shot that everybody owns, faces too small to make out without peering closely. Whether it’s five or fifty years old, there’s always a vaguely familiar figure in the middle row, someone with no anecdotes or associations, scandals or triumphs to their name. You wonder: who was that?

  That’s Charlie Lewis.

  Sawdust

  The school-leavers’ disco had a reputation for Roman levels of depravity, second only to the Biology field trip. Our arena was the sports hall, a space large enough to comfortably contain a passenger jet. To create an illusion of intimacy, ancient bunting had been strung between the wall bars and a mirror-ball dangled from a chain like a mediaeval flail, but still the space seemed exposed and barren, and for the first three songs we lined up on benches, eyeing each other across the scuffed, dusty parquet like warriors across the field of battle, passing and sipping the last of Debbie Warwick’s miniatures for courage until only Cointreau was left, Cointreau a line that none dared cross. Mr Hepburn, Geography, on the wheels of steel, veered desperately from ‘I Will Survive’ to ‘Baggy Trousers’ and even ‘Relax’ until Mr Pascoe told him to fade it out. An hour and fifteen minutes to go. We were wasting time …

  But now came Blur’s ‘Girls & Boys’ and, as if some signal had been given there was a great surge onto the dance floor, everyone dancing wildly, then staying on to bellow along to the pop–house anthems that followed. Mr Hepburn had hired a strobe light and now he jammed his thumb down with a wild disregard for health and safety. We stared at our flexing fingers in awe, sucking in our cheeks and biting our bottom lips like the ravers we’d seen on the TV news, arms punching and feet pounding until sweat started to soak through our shirts. I could see the ink on mates4ever starting to run and, suddenly sentimental about this relic, I pushed my way back to the bench where I’d stashed my bag, grabbed my old sports kit, pressed it to my face to check that it met the lowest of standards and headed to the boys’ changing rooms.

  If, as horror films had taught me, the walls and foundations of a space absorbed the emotions of those who passed through it, then this changing room was somewhere to be exorcised. Terrible things had happened here. There was the pile of fetid lost property, mouldy towels and unspeakable socks as dens
e and ancient as a peat bog, in which we’d buried Colin Smart, and there, there was the spot where Paul Bunce’s underpants had been pulled up so violently that he’d been admitted to A&E. This room was a caged arena in which no blow, physical or mental, was forbidden and sitting on the bench for the very last time, carefully locating my head between the coat-hooks that had claimed so many victims, I suddenly felt fantastically sad. Perhaps it was nostalgia, but I doubted it; nostalgia for the pencil cases filled with liquid soap and the snap of wet towels? More likely it was regret for the things that had not happened, changes that had failed to take place. A caterpillar forms a cocoon and inside that hard shell, the cell walls dissolve, molecules churn and reorganise and the cocoon breaks open to reveal another caterpillar, longer, more hairy and less certain about the future.

  Recently I’d found myself susceptible to bouts of this kind of soulful pondering and now I shook off the introspection with a literal toss of the head. Summer lay ahead and in this interval between past regret and future fear, might it not be possible to have fun, live life and make something happen? At this very moment my friends were nearby, dancing like robots. Quickly I tugged the old T-shirt down over my head, looked over the scrawled inscriptions on my school shirt and saw, near the tail, in blue ink, crisp and neat, these words:

  u made me cry.

  I folded it carefully and put it into my bag.

  Back in the hall, Mr Hepburn was playing ‘Jump Around’ and the dancing had become wilder, more aggressive, with boys hurling themselves at each other as if breaking down a door. ‘Goodness, Charlie,’ said Miss Butcher, Drama, ‘it’s all so emotional!’ Throughout the day the familiar passions, malice and sentiment, love and lust, had been ramped up to a degree that was not sustainable. The air hummed with it and, seeking some escape, I climbed the monkey bars, folded myself in between the rungs and thought about those four neat words written with care and purpose. I tried to recall a face, find it amongst the faces in the hall, but it was like one of those murder mysteries in which everybody has a motive.