The Enemy Within, page 25
‘You don’t want to know,’ I muttered. I certainly wished I didn’t.
TEN
The second I got back to my flat I shoved the box and all its contents under the MFI desk in the corner, right at the back against the wall, so the only way it could impinge on me was if I stubbed a toe on it in the unlikely event that I sat down and actually did any work for my diploma. I emptied out my haversack and shoved the stuff I had taken into the box too, without stopping to look inside the exercise book and certainly not to read any of the rest of the newspaper. Tales of the City I did allow back onto my bookshelf, but only after I’d taken out the torn paper bookmark, crumpled it up and thrown it into the kitchen bin. And then I made myself a strong cup of tea, wishing I still had the medicinal whisky from Pride day so I could pour a slug into it, and sat down at my kitchen table and tried to stop shaking.
How could I have been so stupid? Liam had practically spelled it out for me. I’d sat there in the front of his car when he talked about how he was going to drive out the imperialist forces, however long it took. And I had just nodded gormlessly along, thinking about what he might be hiding inside his jeans rather than what was going on inside his head. I’d even encouraged him. It’s sure to happen soon, Liam! Sounds amazing, Liam! Brilliant badge, Liam! Let’s face it, I’d chosen to hear exactly what I wanted to hear. The way he had talked about life on the streets of Belfast had only made him seem more glamorous. And when he’d given me that line about ‘Britain’s Vietnam’, the picture in my head had been Grosvenor Square and protesters putting flowers in the barrels of guns, rather than what sprang to mind now, which was that girl running down the middle of the road screaming because all of her clothes had been napalmed off her burning flesh.
That was it then. It was over. Even if Liam were to walk through that door right now like he’d never been away, I’d give him the full Gloria Gaynor treatment. No welcome back. No second chances. No opportunity to try and explain, because there were some things you just couldn’t explain away. This was too much. A red line hadn’t just been crossed, it had been vaulted over so emphatically he was out of sight on the other side.
So why the hell was I having to tell myself this over and over again, except to try to stave off the actual physical yearning in every part of me, the desperate desire to see him again?
No. Whatever we’d had was gone. Worse, it had never really existed in the first place. I’d let myself make up too many stories about him, cast him in too many roles: the prince I could rescue; the victim of circumstance; the love of my life. This, right here – this was who he really was. And I wanted no part of it at all.
I forced myself to get up again and fish the box out from under the desk, and went painstakingly through it until I was certain I had recovered every single bullet and crammed them gingerly back into the carton they had come in. Christ, they were horrible things. Their points were tipped in red, like lethal lipsticks: the blunt end had a silver centre ringed in gold which, I assumed, contained the explosive that would send that horrific spike roaring out to tear through flesh and bone and life and anything else that was in its way.
When I had checked, double and triple-checked that I definitely had them all, I forced the warped top of the carton back on, ripping the last of the trailing gaffa from it, then wrapped it in an old t-shirt, put that inside a plastic carrier bag and stashed the whole package away at the bottom of my chest of drawers next to my porn mags, tucked in beneath the jumpers I wouldn’t be wearing again until winter, or at all.
Out of sight, out of mind. Still I couldn’t stop thinking about all the Gay’s The Word directors who’d had their homes raided and the police picking through all sorts of things that had nothing to do with the bookshop at all in search of something – anything – they could prosecute them for having. And then, even more alarmingly, I thought of Annie Maguire and her family and that one-millionth of a sugar cube, and I stood in front of my kitchen sink and scrubbed at my hands until they were red raw.
Then I took off everything I had been wearing, stuffed it into a carrier bag and, even though most of it had been fresh on that morning, took it all to a launderette that is further from my flat than the one I usually use and put it all on the hottest wash available. And when that was finished it was late enough for me to go out to the Fallen Angel and get blindly, determinedly drunk, pausing only to phone Neil’s number on the way and leave a message with Simon saying Liam had moved on from the address he’d given me, that no one there knew where he had gone and it was sad but there you go, that was that, no need to phone me back.
The next few weeks saw me do everything I could to stop speaking or even thinking about Liam. I steered clear of Gay’s The Word, avoided everyone from Icebreakers and didn’t go anywhere near the Poly. I finally wrote to the bank manager to cancel my standing orders to Labour and the WRP: I was done with politics, never wanted to think about any of it ever again. Screw everyone else; it was time to start looking out for number one. I’d managed like that for years: self sufficient, street smart, not getting taken in by anyone. I needed to get back to those days.
And I almost managed to convince myself that was what I was doing. ‘Oh, we broke up ages ago,’ I found myself saying one Saturday night at the Bell as I made my drunken but determined move on a very sexy northerner with a Martin Gore haircut, after he asked if he hadn’t seen me in there with someone else a few weeks before. Judging by the enthusiasm with which he French-kissed me in response, it sounded more convincing to him than it did to me. I was all set to go back to his that night – he lived down in Brixton, and we’d done a couple of bumps of speed in the toilets together and I thought I was really up for it – but we’d only got a few stops on the nightbus before I gabbled, ‘You know what, mate, I don’t think I can do this, I’m really sorry,’ and jumped off and walked all the way home and spent the night and the next day’s comedown on my own, grinding my teeth into Liam’s pillow, which still carried the ghost of his scent on it. I’d been sleeping with it almost every night since I’d stolen it from his place.
It felt like I was carrying the weight of him around with me everywhere I went, however much I tried to shrug it off. I even tried running away, spending a few days in Brighton at the end of July at Brian and Gary’s place. I’d bumped into Brian at the Fallen Angel one night – he was on a flying visit to London to deliver some chairs to a dealer in Camden Passage, so he could sell them at twice the price Brian had sold them to him, which in turn was twice what he’d actually paid for the stuff at a French flea market. He’d declared that Liam and I would have to come down and stay at some point over the summer, a proposition that had turned into a concrete invitation for the coming weekend, accompanied by a very touching wave of sympathy and concern when I admitted that actually there was no Liam and me these days and infuriated myself by bursting into snotty tears.
The pair of them did everything they could to cheer me up and make it a proper summer holiday. We’d filled an afternoon burning our bits at the nude beach, partly for fun and partly to stick it to the Tory councillors who were trying to shut it down for being ‘a disgrace to the town’, and spent Saturday night watching Maisie Trollette belt out showtunes at the Pink Coconut, but despite my best efforts I hadn’t been able to shake off a morose mood that deepened with every cocktail and left me feeling, for all their insistence otherwise, that I’d done more to ruin their weekend than they had to brighten up mine.
‘You’ve got every right to be pissed off,’ Gary assured me over a Bloody Mary as Brian was putting the finishing touches to a spectacular Sunday lunch the next day, honing in irritatingly on exactly what I’d been pretending hadn’t been bothering me all weekend. ‘I can’t believe Liam just walked out on you like that with no explanation. We came away from Derek’s saying we were sure that was you set up for life – the two of you were so obviously into each other.’ By rights I ought to have felt resentful at them trying to pair me off – ever since they got together they’ve been convinced no one else can possibly be happy unless they’re part of a couple – but instead I was just touched, both by the sentiment and by how obviously outraged Gary now was on my behalf. Of course he didn’t know the half of it. And of course, there was no way I could possibly tell him.
A few days after I got back from Brighton my mum called and said she had the day of my birthday off and she’d like to come down to London and take me out for lunch unless I had other plans. I told her I wasn’t planning to celebrate at all this year, but she was having none of it – ‘it’s the last one with a twenty in it; trust me you’ll miss them when they’re gone’ – so I agreed to meet her in town, because I didn’t want her, or anyone else, coming anywhere near the flat while the box of bullets was still burning a hole in my jumper drawer and my conscience.
She gave me her ‘concerned’ look when I met her at Oxford Circus, so I knew I must be looking pretty awful. ‘You still feeling under the weather, love?’ she asked, after she’d pecked me on the cheek, told me my dad sent his love and ruffled my hair so that it fell exactly the way I don’t like it to.
‘I’m OK,’ I lied. I’d had the results of my blood tests at the clinic the previous Monday. My T-cells were still ‘well in the healthy zone’, apparently, but the doctor had made it very clear that this could change at any moment. ‘From what we know of this syndrome, it can take several months to show up after an infection,’ he explained, glancing through the questionnaire I had filled out on my first visit. ‘So if you’ve been sexually active recently, it’s really in your interests to keep coming in for regular blood tests.’
‘You sure?’ Mum could tell something was wrong. She always can.
‘Yeah,’ I attempted to breeze. ‘Just, you know, been busy.’
‘Mmm. Coming up to your deadline, isn’t it?’
Of course that made me feel even worse, because I hadn’t so much as opened a library book in weeks, and even Mal seemed to have given up on me and stopped sending me notes about the possibility of an extension if needed. It obviously showed on my face, because Mum declared I looked like I needed a good healthy meal, which is how we ended up in Cranks looking at two plates of what looked like the same stodgy brown stuff in different shapes, but were apparently a nut roast and a spinach roulade respectively.
‘You been watching the Olympics?’ Mum asked, after making the requisite, not entirely convincing, enthusiastic noises.
‘Some of it.’ I’d actually spent much of the past few days sat goggle-eyed in front of the BBC coverage, which was about as much as I felt capable of. I really fancied Daley Thompson, and I couldn’t help hoping the rumours about Carl Lewis were true.
‘I’m glad we got Zola Budd in the end.’
‘Yeah.’ I couldn’t bring myself to join in with the chorus of enthusiasm for our big white hope in the athletics. It seemed to me that if people weren’t allowed to compete because they were South African, the problem didn’t magically go away just because they could somehow wangle themselves a British passport.
‘Although she’s storing up a world of problems for herself when she’s older, running barefoot.’ She caught my look. ‘Well, she is! You should see some of the things I see on the wards.’
I grinned, enjoying the familiar territory. ‘Not while we’re eating, Mum.’ I took a sip of my lemonade, and winced at the sourness. On a menu that featured apple and cabbage juice and something called Carob Cup it had seemed like the safest option.
‘How’s your college work going?’
I took a deep breath. ‘Er, not so well. I’m… Mum, I think I’m going to drop out.’
Her forkful of salad back went down on her plate. ‘What?’ It wasn’t the scandalised and angry ‘what?’ I’d have got from my dad, but it did have a good dose of disbelief in it.
I avoided her eye. ‘I just… I don’t know, I’ve just lost any interest in it, really. I thought I’d enjoy all the reading, but…it just seems so pointless, what with everything else that’s going on in the world.’
She had pushed her plate away, and was looking at me in that shrewd way I didn’t like. ‘What’s brought this on?’
I was going to spin her a line about the pointlessness of spending your life in the seventeenth century when there was so much wrong in our own, but instead, to my surprise, I found myself spilling out the truth about being dumped by Liam. Not the whole truth, obviously: I skipped our Aids scare and the fact that he had turned out to be an IRA killer, but I did talk about how much I had liked him, in fact that we had both said we loved each other, and then he had gone and vanished off the face of the earth.
She took it really well. ‘Oh love, I am sorry. That’s rotten. You know it’s his loss, don’t you?’ She reached across the table and squeezed my hand.
I was sniffling, I couldn’t help it. ‘It’s just… I don’t know what I did wrong, and now I’m never going to find out.’
‘I’m sure you didn’t do anything wrong.’ Another squeeze. ‘It sounds like he was having difficulty accepting who he was. It can take time, you know. Look at us!’
I sniffed. ‘I suppose…yeah, I can’t really criticise anyone for running away, can I?’ We both laughed, out of relief rather than it actually being funny. We’d never really talked about any of this stuff.
‘And maybe he’ll come back too, when he’s sorted his own feelings out?’ Mum suggested.
‘I don’t think so.’ I retrieved my hand from hers and unfurled one of the scratchy paper napkins to blow my nose on. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to…’
‘Don’t be daft, love. I’m glad you feel you can talk to me about this stuff.’
I gave her a wobbly smile. ‘I wasn’t sure you’d want to hear it.’
She batted the idea away with a wave of the hand. ‘All I want is for you to be happy, Alex. Your dad too. I’d be much more worried if you didn’t have a love life at your age.’
I giggled snottily. ‘I don’t though, do I? Look at me. All on my own and nearly thirty.’
‘Not yet, you’re not.’ She raised her glass of carrot juice and I clinked my own against it. ‘Anyway, you’re lucky. I was stuck at home with a baby by the time I was twenty-one.’
I pretended to be outraged on my infant behalf. ‘Thanks a lot!’
‘No, but…’ She was looking slightly wistful. ‘We married young in those days. You were expected to. I think it’s better now there’s less pressure on people; they can wait until they’re really sure.’
Now we were veering into territory I wasn’t totally comfortable with. Thankfully she seemed to think the same, sliding her knife and fork together emphatically to the centre of her plate. ‘Now, what I would like to do this afternoon is take my lovely twenty-nine-year-old son out shopping and buy him a birthday present he’d really like. And then after that I would like to go for a proper celebration drink with him. Not carrot juice this time.’
‘Sounds good.’ I didn’t have many ideas, but there were worse ways to spend an afternoon than being spoiled on Regent Street.
‘You can take me to one of the places you go with your friends,’ Mum said pointedly.
‘Really?’
She nodded. ‘Really. I’d like that. Now you finish your spinach roulade. You need some colour back in your cheeks.’
Which is how I ended up in The Bell with my mum that evening – something I’d never have expected in a million years. She really liked it, or at least she said she did, and they loved her – Wayne the barman even produced some white wine for her, which was something I’d never seen or heard of in there before, and Mary the lesbian barmaid made a point of telling Mum she could see where I got my looks from, which made her blush and go a bit giggly. Of course she then went and told them it was my birthday, which meant the whole bar being forced to join in with a chorus of Happy Birthday, and then a couple of people insisted on buying us both drinks so we were each, in her words, ‘a bit squiffy’ by the time she had to leave to catch the eight o’clock train back to Reading. That was probably a good thing, considering what the place gets like later on.
‘Thank you, Alex, that was the most fun I’ve had in ages,’ she told me when I kissed her goodbye on the platform at Paddington.
‘Me too,’ I said, and it was the honest truth, given everything else that had been going on lately. ‘And thank you for this.’ I held up the plastic bag I had kept close to me all evening: it had a brand-new Walkman in it that she’d insisted on buying me. It wasn’t a proper Sony one, but it still cost twenty-five quid. Dad’s card had a twenty-pound note in it too, so it was turning out to be a very good birthday all round.
‘My pleasure.’ There were only a few minutes before her train was due to leave. She’d insisted she was ‘not going to leave half my drink behind when someone’s been kind enough to buy it for me.’ But she had something more to say before she got on board. ‘Don’t drop out of your course, Alex. You’re not a giver-upper.’
I squirmed. ‘It’s a bit late now. I’m supposed to hand my extended essay in at the start of September.’
She waved a hand airily. ‘That’s weeks away. Look at how quickly you studied for your exams before. You can do it.’
‘I’m not sure I can,’ I protested.
‘It doesn’t have to be a work of genius, does it? But you’ll regret it if you don’t hand something in. I know you. You’re not a giver-upper,’ she repeated.
The guard had started slamming doors at the far end of the platform, and she gave me another peck on the cheek before turning to clamber up the step. In the doorway she turned around again to blow a kiss. ‘Love you.’
‘Love you,’ I echoed, reaching up to close the train door. As I watched her make her way, tottering slightly, down the carriage to a table seat, I was mostly thinking that I hoped she wasn’t going to fall asleep and end up in Bristol or Exeter. But after the train had pulled away, and I was walking back up the platform towards the Tube station, I reflected on all the home truths I’d heard that day, and how out of all of them that last one – not a giver-upper – might be the truest.
