The Missing Marriage (33 page)

She crossed the road and sat down on the low brick wall circling the horse chestnut where she'd seen Bryan all those months ago, waiting. Today was a Thursday and on Thursdays they'd started going to the leisure pool at Whitley Bay because Martha was teaching Jamie to swim – or how not to drown, as she put it. They made a strange pair – the white sinewy, tattooed man with the shaved head, and the skinny, laughing girl – but the lifeguards had got used to them, looked out for them even, and made encouraging comments on Jamie's progress.

It had taken Martha a fortnight to get him to let go of the side, but now he was using a float with only one hand. They had a wave machine at the pool and a separate diving pool whose deep, narrow proportions and dark blue water terrified Jamie. The diving pool had an underwater window that Jamie stood shivering at as he watched Martha dive, waiting for her small body in its black school swim suit to cut through the liquid mass of blue. She would swim towards the window and put her hand against it – the flat palm an amphibious white against the glass, her face covered in goggles and an underwater smile that bubbles escaped from, the water around her full of her slow moving hair – until he banged on the glass, worried that she'd been under for too long. Then she would rise to the surface of the deep, narrow pool, breaking it with a spluttering laugh as she pushed her goggles up and swam to the steps.

She waited on the wall until half four then made her way slowly to the metro station.

The day felt suddenly all wrong – fathomless in the way it had the day her dad disappeared.

She got out at Whitley Bay and caught a bus going up the coastal road towards Blyth. It wasn't until she saw the line up of vast warehouses to her right that she realised she'd completely missed her stop. They were going past South Harbour on the outskirts of Blyth. She stayed on the bus as it made its way down Ridley Avenue, getting out on the edge of Ridley Park. She could walk to the Quayside from there – she hadn't seen Anna in a long time.

As Jamie shut the van door, he saw a man standing in the twelve-centimetre length of the wing mirror. The man was gaunt and had blond hair and looked nothing like he remembered his brother looking, and yet he knew – without a doubt – that the man was his younger brother, Bryan.

He stood momentarily inert with disbelief that the man in the mirror was a reflection of something real; half expecting, as he turned round – which he now did – to find the Quayside behind him empty.

It wasn't.

Bryan was still there – and he'd grown. He was no longer twelve centimetres tall, but well over six foot.

The two men were suspended somewhere between grief and panic.

In spite of everything, a brief joy – too instinctive to be suppressed – passed across both their faces. They were brothers, after all, and it had been a long time.

Then there were the memories; unbidden, but as impossible to suppress as the brief joy they'd both just experienced – and so long forgotten they had no form as they fell shapelessly between them on the Quayside where they stood.

Jamie remembered a silver stereo he used to have that he recorded songs on from the radio; a black and orange NCB jacket, which had only just been hung up on the back of the door and was swinging still . . . a pile of laundry on the bedroom floor and a woman's legs in tights and slippers standing beside it . . . sellotape covering the holes in the carpet . . . him grabbing a red tractor out of Bryan's hands, the tractor breaking and Bryan crying . . . a tea towel on top of a brown gas heater and the smell of the tea towel as it started to burn . . . a blue deck chair with a white rose motif on it, and their mother's perfume . . . not their mother, just her perfume, which was dusty and sweet smelling because it had been saved for too long, for a life that never happened, and gone off . . . she'd used it all up the day she died because she knew it was the last time she was ever going to wear it. The wash house – the washing out on the line in the garden; the garden itself – had been full of the smell of it. He'd smelt it in his dreams ever since, and it was the smell of departure . . . unspeakable loss.

Jamie felt suddenly closer to this woman who was his mother than he ever had anybody. For the first time, he understood the creeping despair she must have felt when the one man capable of making her happy no longer had the time, energy or inclination to manufacture so much as a minute's worth of joy between them, forcing her to first wait then lose hope then go looking for it elsewhere.

She was a woman who loved to laugh; who felt that laughter was the best cure for the indignities life imposed. After the joy had gone out of the big things in life, she was happy to look for them in the little. It was after the joy went out of these as well that the despair set in. It was despair that sent her to Roger Laviolette, it had to be – that tight, airless man who was no match for his mother.

‘I loved her too,' he said suddenly to Bryan, poised opposite him still – it was the first thing he'd said to him in twenty years.

Afterwards, he wasn't even sure he'd said the words out loud so he said them again. ‘I loved her too.'

‘Then why didn't you do it? I waited and waited for you to do something.' Bryan shifted position, distressed. ‘It was an accident,' he finished helplessly. ‘I just wanted to look at the house, that's all. I thought – I don't know – I wasn't even thinking about Roger Laviolette, I just wanted to see the place she'd gone to when she left us because part of me didn't believe it existed. I went round the back . . . then I saw him, the kitchen door was open. He was sitting at the table mending something. There was this patch of white skin at the back of his neck. It . . .' Bryan searched for the word; trying to articulate something not governed by reason, ‘bothered me. A lot. D'you remember how things used to bother me? Like that time I went through your drawers and cut up all your T-shirts? Well, it was like that only much worse.

‘There was a kid in a buggy beside him and I thought . . . I thought maybe it was his and her's. That's what I thought – without thinking. Of course it wasn't,' Bryan said – to himself – almost angry. ‘But the things is, that man was whistling, Jamie. There he was, mending a radio, whistling and the sun was shining into the kitchen, and it was like nothing had happened; like none of it could ever have happened. I half thought that if I went home then, I'd find her there doing the same thing . . . whistling in the sunshine. But that wasn't true. So I picked up the radio and brought it down . . . on his head . . . hard. I kept on banging the radio on his head, and the kid was just staring at me.' Bryan looked like he might laugh at this recollection. ‘There was blood, and he was moaning, and the whole place smelt of white spirits. He'd been using it to clean the radio and I must have knocked it over because I remember him trying to right the empty bottle, but his hand wasn't working properly. I watched him stand up and go over to the cooker, and put the fucking kettle on or something and there was all this blood on his shoulders and running into his eyes and mouth. He'd stopped whistling by then, but he turned to me and said, ‘Rachel's boy.'

Then the fire started on his hands and arms and he was screaming and by then the kid was screaming, and I tried to get the kid out the buggy but couldn't work the straps, so I just picked it up with him in it still and pushed it down the garden away from the house. I ran then. It was an accident – an accident, Jamie. I never would of done it if he hadn't been whistling . . .'

It was then that Jamie saw Laviolette, and called out instinctively – not his name, just a sound. He heard the sound fill the air, shocked.

They needed to run – Bryan and him – but Bryan was already running.

Jamie ran after him, trying to close the gap between them – and the gap was closing – yelling, ‘Bryan!' as he swung his arm towards his brother's collar, hitting him on the side of the head and pulling him so forcefully towards him that Bryan lost balance and ended up trying to hold on.

Up close, Bryan saw the horrible brightness of Jamie's eyes – remembering now that they were blue – then they started to fall.

Jamie had the sensation of falling before they actually started to fall.

Holding onto each other as though they'd been wrestling like this for years, they carried on falling, anticipating a landing that never came as they fell over the edge of the Quayside into the sea.

Bryan, disorientated, couldn't hear anything any more – Jamie had hit him on the side of the head and he'd lost his hearing almost immediately then his leg got caught in the ropes belonging to one of the fishing trawlers and instead of landing, he carried on falling, hitting his head again on the side of the prow as he went down.

It was dark and cold, and he was bearing a great weight.

He'd heard his daughter's voice – he was sure – calling out, but not for him; for his brother. How did she know Jamie, and why was it that her calling his name out like that – which was enough to bring any man back to shore – left him, Bryan, with nothing? The love and intimacy of the past fifteen years – an intense, wrenching sort of love – became incoherent and meaningless.

He didn't think to struggle. He was no longer thinking at all . . . not even about Martha.

He was alone, and ceasing . . . he was nothing.

Just before hitting the water, Jamie heard voices – he thought he recognised Martha's – then the water closed over his head and he started to struggle to find a way out, quickly losing all sense of direction. He wanted, more than anything, to go up, but couldn't be sure where up was. There was no light and nothing to hold onto even though he had been holding onto something, he was sure, before falling. He pushed his arms through the water, but the only thing they came into contact with was more water.

Martha had seen her father and Jamie disappear over the edge. Without thinking, she'd thrown her bag to one side, yelling, ‘He can't swim!'

‘Martha!'

It was Anna's voice.

Turning round, she saw Anna running across the Quayside towards her. Her mother was there, just behind Anna, running as well, but not as fast – and Laviolette. Everybody was there. If only they would stop rushing about and stand still . . . they'd lost all sense of perspective, and with it their balance. They'd spent too long making happiness their goal when all they needed to do, was be. She'd tried showing them when she took the picture of Bryan in Cephalonia – that it didn't matter. It didn't matter that he was sad; it didn't have to mean anything. It was just sadness, for a moment – terrifying, beautiful, real and true. Why did it have to be anything more than that? Why couldn't they all just stop this rushing towards – what?

Turning her back on them and their shouting with relief, feeling suddenly calm and full, she jumped into the dark messy water. The sense of emptiness that had kept step with her all her life had gone. She loved everybody – Laviolette, Anna and her mother (even her mother) on the Quayside above, and Jamie and her father down here in the water.

When she broke the surface, the sea was washing noisily against the hulls of the trawlers moored there and the rigging on the masts sounded irate. She saw a head, briefly, about three metres away – then it disappeared beneath the surface. She swam instinctively towards it, hearing Anna's voice again, a long way away now.

Jamie flung out his arms, desperate to find something to hold onto, but there was nothing. After what felt like twenty years of falling, he wanted to land and come to a rest. Water was everywhere, rising above him, over him, entering him through every orifice it could find, filling him. His throat was burning and his eyes felt as though they were being pulled from their sockets. His insides were collapsing and he was still falling; it was like falling twice. If he didn't find something to hold onto, he'd carry on falling like this forever.

He had a short breathless memory of a girl in water, her hair moving around her and her costume black against white tiles. Tiles . . . the pool. His feet sought out the chipped edges of the pool's tiles and touched something . . . there was a girl in the water.

It was the hair – he thought it was Laura and tried to hold on. Then he remembered Laura had already tried to kill him once. Using her body to haul himself up and break the surface, he took in one last lungful of air before pulling her tightly to him and down with him this time.

Anna wrenched off her trainers – she took off her trousers as well, but left on her running top – as Laviolette, standing beside her, slipped awkwardly out of his coat and suit jacket.

Anna curled her toes over the edge of the Quayside. She could see what was happening and knew that if Martha managed to haul Jamie to the surface, he was going to struggle – uncontrollably – and probably drown her.

‘Who are you going for?' Laviolette asked.

‘Martha.'

Anna dived in at the same spot Martha had – it was a good spot – cleared the trawlers and their moorings, and surfaced, trying to swallow as little water as possible, which was difficult with waves this high. She saw them breaking now over the north harbour wall, crashing in from the open sea, then turned and swam back towards the trawlers, her arms already aching – as Jamie and Martha broke the surface, reaching them at the same time as Laviolette.

As Jamie pulled Martha back under, she found herself momentarily alone in the water with him.

‘Get Martha away!' he yelled.

They went under.

Below the surface there was only panic and silent struggle – any sense of individuality was lost. All Anna could make out was a mass of limbs, darkly clothed, indistinct, constantly moving. It felt as though they weren't attached to anything; that there was nothing completely human in the water with her. In the end, it was Martha's hair she managed to get hold of as the current brought it billowing slowly towards her. She took hold of as much of it as she could, filling her hands and kicking hard, pulling Martha backwards through the water towards her.