The Hiding Place(21)
Of course, by this point Marie barely noticed me at all.
She wasn’t unkind or cruel. At least not on purpose. Occasionally she would walk past me on the street and it was like she was seeing someone she vaguely remembered or couldn’t quite place. She would offer a distracted “Hiya,” and I would glow for hours at the acknowledgment.
Annie used to tease me sometimes: “Oooh, look. It’s your girlfriend.” And make kissy, kissy noises. “Joey and Marie, sitting in a tree, K I S S I N G.”
It was the only time I used to get properly annoyed at Annie. Perhaps because it hit a nerve. Marie was not my girlfriend; she would never be my girlfriend. Girls like Marie did not go out with boys like me: skinny, awkward nerds who read comic books and played computer games. They went out with proper boys who played football and hung around the playground, spitting and swearing for no reason.
Boys like Stephen Hurst.
They started going out in the third year. In a way, it was sort of inevitable—Hurst was the village bad boy, Marie was the prettiest girl in school. It was just the way things were. I wasn’t particularly jealous. Well, maybe a bit. Even then, I knew Marie was better than Hurst. Brighter, nicer and, unlike a lot of girls at our school, she had ambitions greater than to get married and have babies.
When I found myself accepted into Hurst’s gang—and Marie began to notice me again—she would tell me how she wanted to go to college and study fashion design. She was good at art. She dreamed of moving to London, planned to support herself with a bit of modeling. She had it all planned out. There was no way she was staying in a dump like Arnhill. As soon as she could she would be on the first bus out. The one that got away.
Except, she never did. Something changed. Something stopped her. Something tore her from her dreams, trampled those ambitions underfoot and ground them into the dirt. Something kept her here.
Or someone.
—
I stand at the corner of my old street, staring up the road and smoking. I intended to walk straight back to the cottage after school. But it seems my subconscious has other ideas.
The street has changed, and it hasn’t. The same red-brick terraces stand shoulder to shoulder, facing each other defiantly across the road, like they’re squaring up for a fight. But there are new additions: satellite dishes and skylights, PVC windows and doors. More cars are bumped up along the narrow pavement. Shiny Golfs, 4x4s and Minis. In my day, not every family had a car. Certainly not a new one.
Some things remain the same. A group of youths stand around a half-dismantled motorcycle, smoking and drinking from cans of Carlsberg. A couple of dogs bark loudly and incessantly. Music drifts from one of the windows: heavy on bass, short on tunes or lyrics. A gang of young kids kick a ball around.
My old house, number 29, is halfway along the street, a few houses up from the amateur mechanic’s, a few down from the wannabe Rooneys. Of all the houses, it’s the one that looks the least changed. The door is the same black-painted wood I remember, although the old brass knocker has been replaced by a smarter silver one. The wrought-iron gate still hangs a little lopsidedly, there are a couple of tiles missing from the roof and the brickwork around the front could do with repointing.
My room was at the back, next to Annie’s. She got the box room, the shorter straw. When we were younger we used to knock on the wall between us before we went to sleep. Later, after she came back, I used to lie in my room with my headphones on and the covers over my ears so I wouldn’t have to hear her.
Mum sold the house soon after I came out of the hospital, after the accident. Her excuse was that we needed somewhere that was easier for me—still hobbling on crutches—to get around. The narrow row house with its steep stairs wasn’t really practical.
Of course, that wasn’t the real reason. There were too many memories. Nearly all bad. Mum bought a small bungalow not too far away. We lived there together until I was eighteen. Mum stayed until the day they took her to the hospital to die, just ten years later, at the meager age of fifty-three. They said it was lung cancer. But that wasn’t all of it. Part of Mum died the night of the crash. The rest of her just took a while to catch up.
I turn away. The light is failing now, the air getting cooler and, if I lurk here much longer, there’s a good chance someone might call the police. The last thing I want is to draw any attention to myself. I pull up the collar of my jacket and start to walk back down the street.
—
There’s a line people spout, usually people who want to sound sage and wise, about wherever you travel, you can never escape yourself.
That’s bullshit. Get far enough away from the relationships that bind you, the people that define you, the familiar landscapes and routines that tether you to an identity, and you can easily escape yourself, for a while at least. Self is only a construct. You can dismantle it, reconstruct it, pimp up a new you.
As long as you never go back. Then, that new you falls away like the emperor’s new clothes, leaving you naked and exposed, all your ugly flaws and mistakes revealed for the world to see.
I don’t mean to walk back to the pub. But somehow that’s the way I end up going. I linger outside for a few moments, finishing a cigarette, trying to convince myself that I am not going to walk inside. Definitely not. I don’t need to start another school day with a hangover. I’m going to go back to the cottage, make some food and have an early night. I stub the cigarette out, congratulate myself on being so sensible and walk inside.