Sweet Sorrow Read online

  Wait for me, Fran had said, but she was trapped with Romeo. Exhausted from the work, he’d contrived to take his top off and now leant against his car, a battered white VW Golf, sword at his hip, pausing only to drink deeply from the large bottle of water he carried everywhere; like a dolphin in transit, he could not be allowed to dry out. Miles had a torso – that was the only word for it, the musculature apparently cross-hatched and shaded like one of my drawings, and he’d learnt that trick, beloved of topless teenage boys, of grasping his left bicep with his right arm to bunch up his meaty cleavage. As he drank, the water ran down his neck and chest and I heard a clatter as Lucy dropped her stick.

  ‘Pop your eyes back in, Luce,’ said Colin and Lucy jabbed him with her sword.

  Bored, Fran glanced my way. ‘One minute!’ she mouthed, and raised one finger. I saw Miles grasp Fran’s arm and my hand went to my broom handle, but now Fran suddenly twisted Miles’ nipple hard as if turning off a radio. He yelped and, laughing, Fran walked over.

  ‘God, I thought he’d never … thanks for waiting. Let’s go.’

  I braced the sword across my handlebars. ‘Did you know him before?’

  ‘No, and yet it’s like I’ve known him all my life, if you know what I mean. He’s harmless I suppose, he’s just so hard to listen to. Have you noticed, whenever anyone else speaks, he gulps at his water? So he doesn’t have to waste time listening, I suppose.’

  ‘What were you talking about?’

  ‘The demands of the role. He’s insecure apparently. “I just don’t know if I’m right for it.” That’s what he says. He just wants to be contradicted.’

  ‘He’s very good-looking.’

  ‘And I don’t think that news would necessarily come as a surprise to him.’

  There was a rumble of gravel behind us and we made way for Miles’ car, his bare arm lolling from the open window, waving lazily as Bob Marley played on the stereo.

  ‘Some reggae there,’ said Fran. ‘Little taste of downtown Kingston. Kingston-upon-Thames.’

  ‘He’s jammin’.’

  ‘It’s “jamming”, Bob, you have to sound the “g”. Who drives a car with their top off anyway? Those hot leather seats. When he gets out it’s going to be like the skin off a roast chicken. Hey, don’t say anything, but I think he’s waxed his chest. His first big acting choice: “note to self. Make Romeo as smooth as an eel.” I mean he’s buff and all, but believe me, girls don’t like that stuff as much as boys think they do. Body like a wall-chart in a butcher’s shop. Sirloin, tenderloin, top rump, silverside …’

  ‘I think Lucy likes it. I think she’s a bit in love.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure, he’s a hunk. Hunk of Cheddar, hunk of wood. Not wood – limestone.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Do you … find him attractive?’

  She glanced at me, half smiling, then away. ‘For the play I can. Real life?’ She gave a little shiver. ‘Boys like that, they’re just … all laid out. Walking CVs. Rugby in winter, cricket in summer, debating team, Oxbridge application on the go. What’s left to find out? I’d much rather— ow!’

  I had accidentally jabbed her in the ribs with the broom handle. ‘This is ridiculous,’ I said, ready to hurl it like a javelin. ‘I’m getting rid of it.’

  ‘You can’t do that! You’ve got to bond with it!’

  ‘I’m not going to bond with it, I’m going to chuck it in the woods.’

  ‘What if Alina finds out? Here, let’s do this instead …’

  We were at the gatehouse, the flint-covered cottage where the driveway met the lane. She tucked the stick out of sight in the doorframe, then hesitated a moment.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  She looked around to check no one was in sight, then rattled the door handle, barely held in place with loose screws. The paint was flaking, the wood decaying and one good shoulder shove would have opened it. Instead she reached up and felt along the lintel – ‘Bingo’ – pulling down a heavy key, red with rust like something from a fairy tale. ‘Shall we?’

  The key jammed but she rattled the door and it suddenly opened onto a small, dim single room. Ancient faded rugs covered the floor, dingy yellow curtains hung over small, high windows. The room was as cool as a refrigerator, the only furniture an immense ancient brown chesterfield, its leather cracked, leaking horsehair.

  ‘It’s where Polly keeps her hostages,’ I said.

  ‘Cast of Midsummer Night’s Dream from last year. “Heeeelp us!”’ She pulled the door closed. ‘Still,’ said Fran, ‘it’s good to know,’ a remark that I’d come back to again over the next few weeks.

  Brown Bottles

  When I returned home the house felt stuffy and silent, and I had to resist the desire to turn around and walk back out. Since the weekend, the sadness had rolled in like a fog, finding its way into every corner, and now here he was in the bedroom, curtains drawn, on top of the sheets with his back to the door.

  ‘You asleep?’

  ‘Just dozing. I had a bad night.’

  ‘So don’t sleep in the day.’

  No reply.

  ‘It’s lovely out. You sure you don’t want to—’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘You want something to—?’

  ‘No. All good.’

  I loitered in the doorway. Someone smarter, kinder than me would have found the right tone, frank and easy and free of fear or anger or irritation. Perhaps crossed the room to see his face. But the air was stale, dust floating in the shafts of evening light, and I lacked both voice and language, and it was easier to pull the door closed and try to forget that he was there.

  I went downstairs to turned on the computer to play games.

  A bit blue, that was one of the terms we’d used. Not himself, sad. Things on his mind. Concerned, anxious. A bit down, down in the dumps, in the mouth. Disappointed, suffering from a setback, under the weather, knocked back, confidence taken a bit of a knock, money worries. It was remarkable, really, our ability to devise coy phrases and euphemisms, like a parlour game in which you’re not allowed to use a particular word.

  And that word came bracketed with other terms – ‘clinically’, ‘chronically’ – which gave it an unnerving, medical edge, because if it was chronic enough for a clinic, then surely the psychiatric ward and the Bin couldn’t be far behind. We took what comfort we could from linking his condition to his circumstances, the loss of business, the bankruptcy, the break-up of his marriage. In the face of these bad breaks it was only natural to be a little grumpy, down in the mouth, blue. When circumstances got better, then the sadness would go away too.

  But the malady had a deeper hold than this. His two great loves were music and my mother, and both had abandoned him. In giving up his own ambitions and taking up business, he had compromised for the sake of his family. Now he had failed even in that compromise, and this was not something that you shook off or got over, much as we’d have loved that.

  Sometimes I wished that he’d cheer up just for my sake. Sadness and anxiety are contagious and at sixteen, didn’t I have enough to worry about? And it was boring, too; this torpor, the fussing, the hours spent behind closed doors, emerging with red eyes, the flashes of irrational and malicious fury and the embarrassment that followed. Boring to have Mad Dad sulking round the house, boring to listen to his pessimism and self-pity and negativity, boring to inspect the barometer of his mood when I came through the door.

  Predicting that mood was made harder by two recent developments. My father had always been what was commonly called a ‘social drinker’, a little boozy but only in company, in a good-natured way. He drank at gigs but only after he’d played and never more than three pints, and then he’d tell stories and jokes, flip beermats and do tricks with matches.

  Now he drank every day, spirits as well as beer, methodical and solitary as if it were a private hobby. It alarmed me more than I can say and if he asked me to join him I would always decline, not b
ecause I didn’t like alcohol – God knows that was not the case – but because I didn’t want what he had. Whether accompaniment or catalyst, drinking meant self-pity, introspection, lethargy and now, more commonly, rage. When I was very small, he’d respond to spilt juice, to crayons on the wall or broken plates with nervous laughter and an exasperated tug of his own hair. Now it was as if he’d discovered a new emotion and was embracing anger with the same passion other mid-life men give to marathon training or rambling.

  The most trivial infraction of the household rules, a coat on the floor, a mug in the sink, an unflushed loo, would bring on an awful, contorted fury, made all the more terrible through being accompanied almost simultaneously by regret. You could see it in his red-rimmed eyes, his horror at this loss of control even as he snapped and bawled – why am I doing this? This is not who I am. And just as he discovered anger, I found out the pleasure of provoking it, and of feeling finally old enough to stand chest to chest and shout. We’d both discovered terrible new voices, and I confess I sometimes deliberately provoked him just for the satisfaction of reflecting the rage back into his face. It was a squalid, shabby kind of pleasure, like rousing an animal in the zoo by banging on the glass, and the only consolation I had was that in the aftermath we’d be excessively polite, lying head to toe on the sofa and watching old movies until he could sleep.

  And here was the other development. On his bedside table there now stood a small cluster of brown bottles, the medication that he’d started to take to ‘even things out’. Someone more well informed than myself might have seen the bottles and been pleased that he had a helping hand, some professional guidance. Like bankruptcy, prescription drugs might seem alarming but at least there was a process underway. Given time, we’d come out the other side. Perhaps he wouldn’t need them any more.

  But no one said this and, under the influence of film and TV, I was incapable of seeing a brown bottle of pills without imagining the owner tipping his head back and guzzling the lot. Few things are more compelling than our parents’ medication, and soon the bottles began to exert a terrible pull on me, and when he was out I’d go and look at them, press down and unscrew the lid, examine one of the pills in my palm, looking for … I don’t know what, but I’d note the warning labels. ‘Take as prescribed. May cause drowsiness. Do not combine with alcohol.’ Really, he might as well have had a loaded pistol by his bed.

  And now this possibility joined the roster of terrors and anxieties that accompanied me through the night and on until morning, and it occurred to me then, just as it does now, that the greatest lie that age tells about youth is that it’s somehow free of care, worry or fear.

  Good God, doesn’t anyone remember?

  Culture

  ‘Madam, an hour before the worshipped sun peered forth the golden window of the east—’

  ‘One more time.’

  We’d meet every day in the same spot beneath the tree, working methodically, the progress like crossing a jungle bridge, hopping happily from board to board, picking up momentum, then stumbling as my foot punched through rotten wood.

  ‘The worshipped sun peered forth the golden— I can’t do this.’

  ‘Yes, you can!’

  ‘I feel silly!’

  She scrambled up to lean against the tree.

  ‘But you understand it!’

  ‘I’m not stupid.’

  ‘I didn’t say you—’

  ‘He means before dawn.’

  ‘Exactly!’

  ‘So why can’t I say “before dawn”? Two words. Before dawn.’

  ‘Because this is what’s written and it’s better! Picture it – sun’s little face peeking out the window …’

  ‘Fine, you say it then,’ I said, and tossed the script into the long grass.

  ‘But they’re not my lines,’ she said, retrieving the script. ‘They’re yours.’

  ‘Only ’til Friday.’

  ‘Rubbish. Come on. Who’s he talking to in the scene?’

  I took the script back. ‘Lady Montague.’

  ‘Exactly, the boss’s wife, and all of a sudden he’s changing the way he speaks and maybe it’s because—’

  ‘He’s trying to impress her.’

  ‘Or maybe he’s scared of her or he fancies her.’

  ‘Which is it?’

  ‘I don’t know! That’s up to you.’

  So I tried to impress Fran. If I couldn’t do it with talent or intelligence, then I’d be constant and persevere and my reward would be to walk home with her each day.

  I continued my policy of pelting her with questions, and soon I knew about her best friends at school: Sophie (hilarious, should meet), Jen (cool, I’d probably fancy her) and Neil (tells him everything, just friends). I knew her favourite music, which was either very old – her mum’s LPs, Nick Drake and Patti Smith, Nina Simone and the Velvet Underground and obscure old disco – or so new that I’d not heard of it. She’d been listening a lot to the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack, not because of the film, which she ‘liked but didn’t love’, but because of the Radiohead track at the end, and I had what I thought of as the Radiohead reflex – a rounding of the shoulders, a concerned knitting of the brow. Her favourite movies, too, were what I thought of as ‘university films’ by Jarmusch and Almodóvar, beautiful youths in large-framed spectacles, smoking in Tokyo or Paris, Madrid or the East Village. She had a favourite colour Kieslowski film. Her taste in books was heavily influenced by the GCSE English syllabus, and she loved T.S. Eliot, Jane Austen and the Brontës. She liked Thomas Hardy too, but thought of him more as a poet than a novelist, to which I could only nod because I only knew him as a street name, and so thought of him more as an Avenue than a Crescent.

  In short, she was as pretentious as to be expected at sixteen and I rearranged my own tastes accordingly, shuffling The Piano up above Total Recall, Thai green curry over deep-fried prawn balls, while the things she hated – Schwarzenegger, serial-killer movies, Tarantino – were quietly stowed out of sight. In all her cultural passions, her parents – her mother in particular – loomed large, and I found this strange because weren’t we meant to form our personalities and passions in opposition to the older generation? I’d resisted jazz on principle, and countered with guitar music, great slabs of rudimentary and predictable chords in thumping 4/4 time, devoid of syncopation, modulation and improvisation. It was a puerile and predictable form of rebellion but if ever I came close to liking any of Dad’s music, it seemed important to keep it to myself. I wanted my discoveries to be my own, even if I secretly knew they were no good.

  But perhaps this was one of the markers of the upbringing that had produced Fran. The Fishers weren’t wealthy, but they knew things, they went on holiday so that they could walk great distances, had wine with meals and used fresh herbs, went to the theatre, and all of this weird, secret knowledge would be passed down along with the good furniture and expensive kitchenware. I wasn’t intimidated, or I resolved not to be but, apart from jazz, I didn’t have the same legacy to draw upon, and so listened instead until I knew her favourite places (Lisbon, Snowdonia, New York) and the places she’d like to go (Cambodia, Berlin), her musical accomplishments (Grade 5 piano, Grade 3 viola, thinking of giving up because ‘Who’s ever going to say, “Fran, play us something on your viola”?’) and the band that she and her friends played in together, called either Savage Alice or Goths in Summer, depending on how seriously they were taking themselves. ‘We’ve played the Chatsborne Summer Fête so it looks like things are going to take off for us soon.’

  ‘Well, if you’re playing the fêtes …’

  ‘Next year it’ll be school fêtes all over the region.’

  ‘What kind of music?’

  ‘We specialise in covers that no one recognises. I shout out, “Here’s one you all know! Help us out with the chorus!” and everyone sort of looks at each other and shrugs.’

  I loved those walks home, our pace slowing as the days went by. I retained a sense that I was being
taught – quietly instructed on what was cool – but I didn’t mind. Music, books, films, even art, seemed to have a concentrated power at that age. Like a new friendship, they might change your life and when I had time – I would have time – then I would let some new things in. Over the days, the conversation became easier, so that every now and then I’d let a question slip through.

  ‘What do your mum and dad do?’

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘You don’t talk about them much.’

  ‘Well, Mum works at the golf club. She used to be a nurse, then she helped Dad, now she organises weddings and events and all that stuff. But I don’t live with her.’

  ‘You live with your dad?’

  ‘Uh-huh. Mum moved out in April with my sister.’

  ‘You didn’t say that.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Christ, I’m such a cow.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Banging on about, I don’t know, my top three fruits, and you’ve not told me that.’

  ‘You asked before, I just changed the subject.’

  ‘Yes, why did you?’

  ‘Change the subject? I don’t know, living with my dad – bit weird, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, it needn’t be.’

  ‘No, but it is. It feels the wrong way round.’

  ‘And what does he do?’

  ‘He’s unemployed at the moment.’

  ‘He got made redundant?’

  ‘Bankrupt. Lost everything. House, savings.’

  ‘But he used to …’

  ‘Run the music shop on the high street.’

  She grabbed my arm. ‘Vinyl Visions! I loved that shop! I used to get everything there.’

  ‘Thank you. It didn’t work out though.’

  ‘I know, I saw that, just after Christmas. It’s a real shame. Wait a minute, I know your dad – nice man, sort of tall, sort of … crumpled.’