The Accidental Wife (10 page)

‘Look, I have to come in to pay. I promise that after today I’ll never come near the place again. I’ll even walk ten paces behind you now and pretend I don’t know you.’

She had been joking but Dom exploded out of the car and took off ahead, taking her at her word.

‘Right, well, wait here, girls, then,’ Alison said. ‘I’ll lock you in. Don’t open the doors to anyone. I won’t be long.’

‘Hurry, Mama,’ Amy said, her voice quivering, her big brown eyes looking up at the sky as if it might fall in on her at any moment.

‘Oh, come on, Muffin,’ Alison heard Gemma say as she grabbed her bag. ‘Let’s play I spy – I’ll let you win.’

As she walked back into her old school Alison was unprepared for how the building and its surroundings would make her feel.

It wasn’t an especially old building – it had been built in the 1920s – but it was an exact replica of a grand eighteenth-century building, complete with palisades, colonnades and even a chapel. From a distance, set in its own expansive grounds, it looked like a very grand private school, not like the local comprehensive at all.

Close up, though, it was another story. The smell, that slightly musty and acrid combination of disinfectant and damp, was still exactly the same, and, as Alison followed Dominic through the impressive panelled double oak doors that marked the main entrance to the school, she was fairly certain that the interior hadn’t been decorated once in the sixteen years since she had last set foot in it. The walls were still that insipid greyish green colour with patches of pink plaster showing through where paint had chipped or peeled away. Even the same framed prints lined the corridors: faded and dusty scenes from Shakespeare, so grimed with dirt that Alison was sure it had been a long time since anyone had looked at them properly or even noticed they were there.

As she looked around her and breathed in, all at once Alison
saw
her past reflected, bouncing back at her, almost blinding her like sunlight off a mirror. Once this place had been the centre of her universe. There on the stairs she saw where she had made Cathy wait in vain with her for a whole lunch hour just to catch a glimpse of Jimmy Ashley, the hottest boy in school, whom Alison had loved from afar right up until the minute she had met Marc and he had eclipsed everything.

As she walked into the main hall, where her son had already headed, no doubt hoping to dissociate himself from his stalker of a mother, she could see herself up on the hall stage, painting the scenery for the school production of
Grease
and imagining herself as Sandy and Jimmy as Danny, while Cathy scoffed at her and told her she had no idea what anybody could see in Jimmy Ashley.

Alison smiled as she remembered the lower sixth form end-of-year dance. Cathy wasn’t allowed to come to the dance, or any dances since that time her mother had caught her sneaking off to the Valentine’s disco, which left Alison alone to pluck up the courage to talk to Jimmy. Finally, at the end of the evening, after sneaking several slugs of illicit vodka into her orange juice, she had worked up the courage to ask Jimmy to dance with her. Reluctantly he had consented, holding her waist gingerly as they turned in slow circles to a song by The Cars. Alison had not been able to take her eyes off her feet, certain she would faint clean away if she looked into Jimmy Ashley’s eyes. How strange, she thought to herself as she watched Dominic greet a couple of other boys, and a girl in a very short skirt, with studied nonchalance. She had once considered those three minutes, that dance with Jimmy, the pinnacle of her life.

Then only a few weeks later she had found out about Cathy’s secret boyfriend, and a few weeks after that she had run away with Marc without giving Jimmy Ashley or Cathy
a
second thought. The course of her life had changed for ever.

What surprised Alison the most was that these memories, now so vivid and visceral, hadn’t crossed her mind in fifteen years. It was as if on the night she’d decided to run away from home, she’d run away from this part of her life for ever, dissecting it from her heart and her head with the kind of bold decisiveness that only a seventeen-year-old in love can have. She had hoped that the detritus of her youth, the wreck of the life she had abandoned so wholly, all those people and the places would be long gone, rotted into the past. It was a doomed optimism that led her to hope that.

Apart from anything else, the school looked as if it had been preserved in aspic. There was even someone over there talking to her son who looked exactly like Jimmy Ashley.

Alison’s heart stopped beating for the longest second. That
was
Jimmy Ashley. When it began to beat again it was racing.

Alison felt a blush extend from her ears downwards, and pins and needles in the tips of her fingers. She clapped her hand over her mouth to stifle the burst of hysterical laughter that threatened. She felt just as she had with his hand on her waist at the sixth form dance – dizzy and dazzled. It was the shock, Alison told herself, retreating into a shadowy corner to regain her composure, and the fifteen years that seeing him again had seemed to disintegrate in a second. Thinking about him, the boy she’d once admired so wildly, and then just seeing him standing there in the flesh, tuning her son’s guitar, had given her vertigo.

She simply hadn’t expected Jimmy to be there looking almost exactly the same as he had the last time she’d seen him. On the other hand, she didn’t know where else she expected him to be. He obviously hadn’t hit the big time like he’d always said he was going to, so perhaps teaching guitar back at
his
old school was the obvious location for this living, breathing relic of her youth.

He didn’t look like a relic, though. He looked good – better even than he had at eighteen. His shoulders had filled out and his bare arms were toned and muscled. His skin had cleared up and he looked relaxed, at ease with himself. Yes, he looked like a reject from an eighties rock band but if anyone could carry it off, he could. Alison admired his thick long brown wavy hair. Once she had dreamed about tangling her fingers in it.

Biting her lower lip as she hovered in the shadows, Alison was taken aback by how much pleasure seeing him gave her. He still had that hint of a smile on his lips, as if at any second he might start laughing. He still wore jeans so tight that you wondered how he sat down without them ripping apart at the seams. One of the most popular girls at school, Alison had had a boyfriend every other week from the age of fourteen. Other upper sixth formers asked her out, but not Jimmy, never Jimmy. Not the boy she really wanted. Not her son’s new guitar teacher.

Desperately she tried to shake off this ridiculous
frisson
of excitement, which had engulfed her the moment she set eyes on him. It made her want to laugh out loud. It was embarrassing, uplifting and foolish all at once. Alison took a deep breath and determined to pull herself together.

Hoping Jimmy wouldn’t notice her (and wishing she had put some make-up on and brushed her hair before leaving the house), she edged over to the table where a register book lay open and leaflets about the club and forthcoming events were on display. She found out from a leaflet the amount she owed for Dominic to attend for one term and hurriedly wrote out the cheque, breathlessly expecting that at any moment Jimmy would tap her on the shoulder and say, ‘Alison Mitchell, how wonderful to see you!’

But before she could even sign the cheque a sudden burst of electric rock music crackled in the air, making Alison almost jump out of her skin, as if her internal feelings had suddenly transformed themselves into pure noise.

Twelve or fifteen kids were standing around the stage, two playing complete drum kits, three or four (including the short-skirted girl) on microphones and at least seven guitars, which Alison’s limited knowledge told her included a couple of bassists. Alison didn’t recognise what they were playing and then she realised that was because they weren’t playing anything. Jimmy had just got them up on the stage and got them to start making music. The first minute and a half was pretty unbearable, and then suddenly a cohesive tune emerged and Alison saw Jimmy’s head go down and his shoulders rock to the rhythm just like he used to when he played at the school dance. And then she looked at Dominic and for the first time since they had arrived he was smiling – no, not just smiling; he was grinning from ear to ear with the pure joy of doing something he loved. Alison knew that neither Jimmy nor her son would notice her now if she cartwheeled the length of the hall and back, which made her feel happy and sad all at once.

She slipped the cheque into the register book and then, caught on a sudden impulse, ran out of the school, narrowly avoiding colliding with the head teacher as she careered out into the car park. Once in the car Alison found herself laughing until the tears rolled down her face, caught up in the moment with the seventeen-year-old girl she once had been. And then as the laughter faded the idea of seeing Jimmy, still living his life out here almost as if nothing had changed since she left, inspired a sobering thought.

Coming back to Farmington wasn’t going to be nearly as easy as Marc had promised her, because there were ghosts everywhere. Living, breathing ghosts.

*

Dominic had expressly told Alison that she was not allowed to pick him up from Rock Club, and so even when it had begun to rain, thick grey sheets of water that clattered against the windows in wave after wave, Alison sat tight and waited for him. He was over an hour late when his dark and sodden figure finally emerged out of the torrent of water.

‘Where have you been?’ Alison asked him as he peeled off his T-shirt and threw it into the laundry basket. She didn’t like the shrill tone of her voice any more than he did but somehow, lately, since Christmas, whenever she tried to talk to him normally, that was the voice that came out.

‘I got lost,’ he told her with a shrug.

‘Lost? The school’s only down the road.’

‘I know. But I wanted to have a look around, and some of the kids said there was this well lame skate park down by the canal that they go to sometimes. I went to have a look and I got lost.’

Alison tried to imagine her son in the canal park, the very same canal park where she had met his father. It seemed like an impossible paradox, as if time had folded back on itself, and not for the first time she got the feeling that her being back here was all wrong. As if somehow Marc was marching her back to the point at which they had met, looking for a way to change a future that was already past.

Alison shivered as she picked up the sodden T-shirt and inhaled deeply. Even in its soaking state it reeked of cigarette smoke.

‘Lost with a packet of cigarettes?’ she asked him.

‘I wasn’t smoking, it was the kids I was with,’ Dominic retorted automatically. ‘They’re all at it at that school. I told you, it’s a real dump.’

‘So you were with local kids who know the area but you got lost?’ Alison persisted.

‘Just leave it out, Mum, all right?’ Dominic’s voice rose and Alison knew he was reacting to the look on her face, the expression she could see reflected in the glass door of the eyelevel grill. In the dark smoky glass she looked sharp and aged. She looked like the kind of mother who never wanted her teenage son to have any fun, the kind of mother who only wanted to ruin everything for him, the kind of woman who was happy to rule his life but who didn’t have the courage to take control of her own. That was who Dominic saw when he looked at her, and at that moment that alien, hard-faced woman was who Alison was.

‘You dragged me to this fucking awful place,’ Dominic swore at her. ‘And now I’m just trying to make some mates – is that such a big deal? It’s not as if I’m dealing crack, Mother. I couldn’t score any in this place if I wanted to.’

Alison stared at him for a long moment, waiting, waiting for that woman reflected in the glass door to fade away.

‘I’m sorry. You’re right. I do trust you, Dom,’ she told him, lowering her tone with some physical effort. ‘It’s good that you’re making friends … so tell me all about your first day then.’ Alison squeezed all of the tension out of her voice in a bid to make the question sound purely conversational and not like a declaration of war.

‘The same old shit,’ he told her, watching her carefully for any sign of reflex to his choice of language. ‘Just a different fucking place.’

‘But you made some friends?’

‘I said, didn’t I?’ Dominic asked her, lifting a carton of juice out of the fridge and taking a swig from it. Alison considered getting into the ‘use a glass’ argument with him, but then that bitchy mother would be back again for sure so she let that particular battle go the same way as the ‘don’t swear in the house’ debate had gone, which was out of the window.
Dominic
had a lot less respect for her moral qualifications recently, and swilling juice direct from the carton was only one of the ways he chose to show her that. The trouble was, Alison felt that her son was largely right about her so she tried to ignore his challenges, happy to have contact with him at all.

‘We can invite your friends over if you like,’ she’d told him. ‘For tea.’

‘Ooh, yes, we can have a tea party and Jammy Dodgers,’ he said to her. ‘Tally fucking ho.’

He was about to exit the kitchen when he stopped in the door frame for a second, and looked back over his shoulder at her.

‘How did Muffin get on?’ he asked, using the pet name that he had coined for Amy when she was born because of her two black button eyes that looked like blueberries in a muffin.

‘She found it hard,’ Alison told him with a sigh. Once, less than two years ago, she and Dominic had always talked like this when he got in from school. He’d been her confidant, her best friend. The struggle with his emergent manhood hadn’t got to him then; he hadn’t discovered his father’s imperfections or his mother’s weaknesses. He hadn’t been so angry.

‘Did she cry?’ Dominic asked, his voice gentle now. He’d been with Alison when Amy was born. Marc had not got there in time, caught up with something or someone at work. Dominic was always especially protective of Amy, that was one thing about him that had never changed.