The Trouble with Henry and Zoe (10 page)

‘Where have you been?’

‘Hotel.’

My mother snorts derisively. ‘
Hotel.
Alright for some, isn’t it? Have fun, did you?’

I almost answer, but Dad catches my eye and shakes his head slowly.

Mum takes a sip of her gin and tonic, turns on her stool and throws the rest of the drink at me. Typical of a landlord’s wife, she is an excellent shot, and pretty much every drop of cold
liquid hits its mark. One of the ice cubes catches me on the lip, another bounces off my forehead.

‘Jesus, Mum!’

And she’s off her stool and on me before I can raise my arms to defend myself. She is hitting me about the face, neck, chest and shoulders, slapping me, hitting with her forearms and the
sides of her fists. She’s shouting, too, an incoherent garble of
yous
and
stupids
and
bastards
and
poor poor girls
. When she runs out of breath she stops, and how
I have managed to remain on my stool is a miracle. My mother’s face is red and wet with sweat and tears, strands of hair stuck to her cheeks and forehead.

Like a fighter at the end of a round, my mother returns to her stool. Big Boots puts a fresh gin and tonic in front of her, and I note that this one contains considerably less ice. We all sit in
silence while my mother regains her breath and decides what to do with her drink. She takes a sip, and my father refills my glass.

‘How could you?’ she says.

My mother looks me in the eye, and when she continues to hold my gaze in the echoing silence, I realize that the question is not rhetorical. It crosses my mind to shrug, to try and communicate
in a simple physical gesture the confusion, sadness, regret, hopelessness and complexity of my dilemma and actions. But it might be interpreted as indifference.

‘It wasn’t right,’ I say.

My mother’s jaw clenches. She pushes her hands through her hair, brushing it back off her face and twisting it into a rough ponytail. With no make-up and her cheeks livid with blood, she
is mesmerizingly handsome. So much so I almost comment on it.

‘Not right?’

I shake my head.

‘What exactly wasn’t right, Henry? My God, that girl. She’s gorgeous, kind . . .’ As if answering her own question, my mother’s list of April’s qualities
trails off into silence.

‘It’s like in those films we used to watch.’

Mum takes a drink and then, very carefully, sets down her glass on the bar top. ‘Films?’

‘Cary Grant,’ I say.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell,’ I say. ‘They had . . .’ The word I want to say is ‘chemistry’, but I have a strong feeling that it won’t fly. I
glance at my father and he winces as if reading my mind, as if braced for an impact. ‘. . . something,’ I say.

‘Cary Grant?’ my mother says again. She glances at her husband behind the bar, paunchy and tired, his thin pompadour hanging in strands. ‘Let me tell you something,’ she
says, giving me the full heat of her attention. ‘This is real life, not a fairytale.’

‘I’m sorry, Mum, I just . . . I’m sorry.’

She slides down from her stool, puts her arms around me and hugs me tightly, kissing my neck and stroking my hair. ‘I’m sorry I hit you.’

‘I deserved it.’

‘You deserve a damn sight more than that,’ she says, disengaging. ‘And you’ll probably get it before this is done with.’

‘Probably.’

‘So,’ says Mum. ‘What’s the plan?’

I shake my head.

‘Where will you go?’

‘What do you mean?’ I say, looking around the empty pub. ‘I don’t have anywhere to . . . I thought . . .’

My mother looks at me as if I’ve just said something funny.

‘You’re not planning on staying here?’

‘Well . . .’

‘Henry, love. That’s just not going to work out. I love you to death, son – to death – even if you are a stupid, stupid bastard. But . . . here?’ My mother shakes
her head sadly but emphatically. ‘No. That just isn’t going to work, love.’

‘But . . . what about my job?’

She laughs. ‘Do you really think anyone within twenty miles of here is going to let you near them, Henry? God, they wouldn’t take a pint off you, let alone a root canal. Son, you
can’t be here.’

I turn to my father. He shrugs. ‘Don’t see how you can stay, son. Sorry.’

‘I . . .’ I hold up my glass. ‘I’ve been drinking.’

‘I’ll set the alarm,’ Dad says.

‘Set it early,’ says my mother.

We’re at three thousand metres, my parents and me, playing Scrabble in a faux-log chalet and drinking thin red wine (although not as much and as fast as I want). The
mountains are thick with snow, but the ski season hasn’t officially started yet and the lifts don’t open until December. Even so, Mum thought the scenery and fresh air would be good for
me.

‘I’m suffering from vowel obstruction,’ my dad says – a familiar joke around this dog-eared board – then, nervously, glances up from his tiles, checking whether
this mild humour has upset or offended me.

I harrumph a short laugh, and while Dad drops his eyes back to the board I take a long sip of my wine, aware of my mother watching me from the corner of her eye.

‘Have some of mine, I think I’ve got all of them,’ I say.

Mum laughs lightly, putting her hand on my wrist.

It’s been almost three weeks; a fragmented and disjointed sequence of grief, shock, guilt, compassion and bureaucracy – as random and incomprehensible as the seven letters sitting in
front of me.

E-E-E-I-G-L-V

One letter short of L-O-V-E. One shy of L-I-K-E. Funny how the two words begin and end with the same letters, identical on the surface, entirely different at their core. Live, too, ironically.
This tragic coincidence should jolt me into spontaneous tears, but it doesn’t. In the first days after Alex’s accident, I cried myself to sleep and cried myself awake. I cried myself
sick, literally; sobbing hysterically until I dry retched and tasted bile mixed in with the snot and salt of my tears.

Less so since the funeral, though. Since the slow mechanism wound Alex’s coffin towards the flames, the main thing I feel is numb. Numb and guilty.

They say you grieve for yourself. Although no one has said it to me personally. But it’s one of those things we trot out in the days following death. To your face, they say,
I’m
sorry for your loss,
which amounts to pretty much the same thing – the idea that we cry for our personal loss, more than for the lost themselves.

What else they say is,
You were so good together.
And I nod and say
Yes
, and
Thank you
, and I let them hold my hand while I cry. But they’re wrong; we weren’t
so
good together. We were
okay
together, and as much as I try to live up to the role I’ve been thrown into, I’m not crying for me, I’m crying for Alex.

He was kind, sensitive and considerate more often than he wasn’t. He was a good man. Funny, clever, cool. He loved his mother and brother, was loyal to his friends, loved me, I think, and
it breaks my heart that his life was stopped short. But a part of me (a cold, dispassionate part I don’t like very much) knows that Alex’s death has given me a way out of a bad
situation. It’s a thought I try very hard not to think, and if I could bring Alex back, I would, but not for us to be together again.

‘Here we go,’ says Dad, laying down two tiles on the back end of a dormant word. ‘
Wrongly
, what’s that . . . fourteen, not too shabby, considering.’

If I woke up now to find it were nothing more than a dream; if I woke to the sound of Alex returning from the shops, clattering through our front door with a bag full of provisions, then I would
cry into my pillow with relief. We would eat breakfast, ride our bikes, drink a bottle of wine and maybe have an early night. And then the next day, or week or certainly not longer than a month
later, I would tell him it’s over. Certain in the cold knowledge I had acquired during this nineteen-day nightmare of death and grief, I would break his heart, and it would be horrible. We
would fight, call each other names, cry and drink and make accusations and let our worst qualities bubble up to the surface and we would come to loathe each other. But his death has spared me that,
so no, I don’t cry for me, I cry for Alex. I have cried my eyes dry out of grief and guilt and relief.

‘Just going to get another,’ I say, picking up the empty wine bottle.

‘I could make hot chocolate,’ Mum says. ‘Marshmallows!’

‘Thanks, but I’ll stick with wine. Anyway, it’s your go.’

Mum glances at Dad. ‘I’ll make it,’ he says. ‘Just don’t go looking at my tiles.’

‘Sure,’ I say. ‘Thank you.’

Mum rearranges her tiles while Dad moves through to the kitchen. ‘You okay?’ she asks.

‘Yeah, I’m fine. Numb, you know, but . . . just a bit numb.’

‘Did you speak to work?’

I nod. ‘I’m going to go back in on Tuesday. Start off with short days.’

‘That sounds sensible.’

‘Means I don’t have to cry in front of the other commuters,’ I say, still not sure how much humour is appropriate two and a half weeks after your boyfriend was killed while
crossing the road.

Mum wraps her hand around my fingers and squeezes. ‘Damn letters,’ she says.

My mother is a fiercely competitive Scrabble player, taking longer than everyone else over her turn, playing tactically and challenging frequently. But looking at the board now with its primary
school vocabulary, I’m pretty sure she’s going easy on me.

‘Will someone stay with you?’ she asks.

‘They would if I asked, but . . . I think I’ll be okay on my own now.’

‘Are you sure, Zoe? You’ve had a dreadful shock, a . . . a heck of a shock.’

I nod –
I’m sure
. Of all the emotions I’m going through, loneliness is not one of them. The compassion that people have gently wrapped around me, I don’t deserve
it. While Alex lay dying on the side of the road, I was lying in bed thinking unkind thoughts. Maybe he was already dead as I curled up under a warm blanket, cataloguing all of his faults and
indiscretions. I don’t deserve sympathy, and the weight of it is suffocating. I don’t want to be protected and hugged and looked at like I’m about to break. I want to be by
myself. I need space – not to think, necessarily, I’ve done too much of that – but just to breathe.

Rachel met me at the hospital, held my hand while the policewoman – the family liaison officer – asked me to describe Alex: his hair, any scars, any tattoos or distinguishing marks.
My friend for more than ten years, Rachel was the first person I called after Alex invited me on a date. She put her arm around my shoulder while the policewoman showed me a photograph of a tattoo
taken from the body they had removed from the road several hours earlier. Alex’s tattoo, a Thai character on his left shoulder meaning love. When I’d teased him about its significance
–
Was it for Ines, your German girl?
– Alex had denied it, saying the tattoo was a snap decision made high on weed. But I was never convinced.

When they took me to Alex’s body, the man pulled the sheet back just far enough to show me one half of Alex’s face. His eye closed, his stubble in need of a shave.

We spent that night at Rachel’s, staying up late, drinking, scrolling through photographs, crying. Her fiancé, Steve, cooked supper, kept our glasses full and did his best to stay
out of the way. On Sunday Vicky went over to the house and filled a bag full of clothes, underwear and toiletries, and in the evening the three of us went through the same vigil on the sofa. A far
cry from our university days, alternately crying and laughing at weepy movies, never imagining these fictional dramas could ever reach out into our own worlds. They took alternate days off work, so
I wouldn’t be alone. My parents wanted to come up immediately, but the prospect of too much sincere compassion filled me with a hot destabilizing dread. They arrived the following weekend;
bags of food and an inflatable mattress in the boot of the Land Rover. They insisted on sleeping in the spare room while I slept in
our
bed. I’d have preferred it the other way around,
giving me a good reason to change the sheets Alex and I had made love on just seven days previously.

On Tuesday morning, we set off early and drove to Yorkshire for the funeral. I sat in the back, pretending to sleep so I didn’t have to speak. After the service, at Alex’s
mother’s house around a buffet of over-buttered sandwiches and dry sausage rolls and too much wine, the other thing people say is:
I can’t imagine how you feel
. And you think to
yourself,
No, you really can’t
.

Remembering how I sat on the bed in Alex’s old room on the morning of the funeral, crying with his mother and telling her how much I loved him and how devastated I was, I feel hot with
embarrassment and shame. As we cried with our arms around each other, I underwent something like an out-of-body experience, and I wondered how long it would be before I could stop calling or
returning her emails.

‘Three
chocolat chaud
,’ says my father, setting a tray down on the table.

‘Thought we’d lost you,’ says Mum, the short laugh dying on her lips as she realizes what she’s just said. She glances at me and I pretend not to have noticed. A strategy
I have had ample opportunity (
dead even, heaven help us, you’re killing me!
) to perfect since the accident.

‘Right,’ says Mum, clicking down four tiles. ‘And all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a M-O-U-S-E. Double on the S, eight points.’

After the funeral my parents stayed one more night, during which arrangements were made to reconvene in France the following weekend. I promised that one of my friends would be staying with me,
but after eleven days of constant watch and pity I was desperate for space and silence. I changed the sheets the minute my parents drove away, waving and blowing sad kisses through the Land
Rover’s window. I cleaned all day and all night and well into the morning, dusting every square inch of the house, vaguely aware that dust was human skin; mine, my parents’ and my dead
boyfriend’s. For reasons I’m not sure I understand – momentum, perhaps – I emptied every item of food from the fridge and then the cupboards. Vegetables, milk, packets and
cans and jars of condiments. Every consumable item, with the exception of a single bottle of champagne, consigned to bin bags. I vacuumed the carpets, cleaned the windows, the mirrors, toilet,
sinks and the tiles on the bathroom floor. I pulled the cushions from the sofa and the armchair, vacuuming up the dust and crumbs and pennies and pen tops. I polished door handles, light switches,
the banister and every lampshade in the house before falling asleep on the sofa sometime in the early hours of the morning.