There was no one in at Sheila and Dora’s little house; in fact all of Quorn seemed utterly deserted. Wide empty streets, blazing blue sky, frontier architecture – it all looked strange and wonderful to Dan, and emphatically far from home. He’d switched off his phone hours ago, to hold back the intrusions of his world; then he’d slipped willingly through a narrow gap in space and time to be here in the back of beyond with Alison Connor. All the way from Adelaide he’d kept glancing across, checking her profile, and finding excuses to touch her. If someone had told him she wasn’t really there, he wouldn’t have been surprised. Devastated, but not surprised.
Sheila’s fat stone Buddha looked happy to see them, but Ali ignored his smile, just tipped him up, and there was the promised key – but they’d have broken in anyway if it hadn’t been there; they’d have smashed a window or battered down the door, because four hours of proximity in the car had them at a kind of fever pitch, and they both knew that until they’d had their fill of each other, they couldn’t speak another word. She unlocked the door and in they went; then she kicked it shut with her foot, dropped her bag, leaned against the wall and stared at him. Wordlessly, he came at her, kissing her mouth, her face, her neck, and she hung on to him, responding with the same furious passion. She moved to the stairs, pulling him with her, and they stumbled up to the prayer-flag room where the window was propped open, though there was no relief from the heat, no breeze at all, and the flags above their heads might have been painted on the walls, they were so still. Dan and Ali fell on to the sleeping mat, half laughing, half crazed, tearing off their inconvenient clothes without ceremony or erotic ritual; they simply flung themselves at each other, and if they should’ve been solemnly honouring their teenage selves – remembering the first time, remembering the last – they absolutely didn’t, not for a second. She’d wondered, in the car – worried, truth be told – if, when this moment came, there might be awkwardness, or self-consciousness, an awareness of their bodies that in youth were so effortlessly, casually lovely. But then, in the end, all that mattered was here and now: this delirium, the heat and damp, this flood of feeling; they claimed each other with a kind of desperate, selfish urgency, and when at last they fell away, they lay quiet for a while, slightly stunned, face to face, inhaling each other’s exhaled breath while their heartbeats calmed to an ordinary rhythm.
‘Alison,’ he said, ‘Alison, Alison, Alison,’ stroking her hair, her back.
She lay in his arms and felt like lost treasure, found again. It was such a long time, such a long, long time, since sex had felt like anything other than a kindness to a person she cared about, an act of generosity to clear the air, to keep things on an even keel. Desire such as this … oh, it belonged to the past, but she remembered it, she did, she remembered the drama of it, the heat and passion, the exquisite longing; it was exhilarating, life-enhancing, empowering. She kissed him and kissed him and he laughed and kissed her back and then, when she’d calmed herself and gathered her wits, she stood up, entirely unselfconscious now under his gaze, and walked to the door, on the back of which hung an old satin kimono, as red as the rising sun. She unhooked it from the peg, and turned around. He was watching her every move; watched her slip into the gown, tie the broad silk sash.
It felt cool against her skin, and light as air.
They stared at each other, stunned by the miracle of being alone together in this room, then he said, ‘You look like a very dishevelled and sexy geisha in that. Where you going?’
‘Downstairs for a drink of water. Want to come?’
‘You bet.’ He stood up and pulled on his shorts and T-shirt, and followed her downstairs. ‘Where are we, exactly?’ he said, looking about him at the peculiar furniture that crowded the living room.
‘I told you, it’s Sheila’s house, she lives here with Dora, who used to be a train driver on the Pichi Richi Railway, but now she’s just a nomad, like Sheila.’
‘The what?’
‘Steam train, named after the Pichi Richi Pass. Long story.’
Dan sat down cross-legged on the wide green sofa and patted the space next to him, so she handed him a glass of water and sat down too. She felt completely comfortable with him, completely at home in every possible way, and then he seemed to read her mind because he said, ‘You know that Bill Withers song “Can We Pretend”? That’s how I feel. Like there was no yesterday, like all those years away from you never happened.’
She rested her head on his shoulder and didn’t reply, because she didn’t wish to articulate her thoughts, didn’t wish to reflect upon the life she might have had with Daniel, the life she’d felt compelled to let go, and it wasn’t exactly that she regretted the years she’d spent being married to Michael – how could she, when they’d made such a life together and Thea and Stella, those glorious girls, were the result of their union? It was more that when she considered Daniel as a flesh-and-blood possibility, she experienced a kind of unease that came from knowing she would be happier still with him, happier than she’d been with Michael, her loving husband, their daughters’ loving father. She hadn’t fully realised, until she saw Dan again, that there was a different kind of love waiting for her, and that, in some essential, deep-seated way, it completed her. She knew this. She did. He’d turned up in Adelaide and reduced her to a romantic cliché, made her heart race and her spirits soar, and when she looked into his eyes she recognised a kindred soul, her Sheffield boy, and it wasn’t just nostalgia, although that was part of it too; but no, it wasn’t just nostalgia: it was an absolute certainty that this was meant to be, that the stars were aligned when she and Dan were together. She considered this now, and it made her melancholy, made her face the reality of this life she hadn’t lived, which was presented to her now as a possibility for the future, amid all the complications and commitments of her real world, her chosen path, her beloved family. Pain and joy, joy and pain, promised in equal measure, indivisible.
They drank their water, and leaned together, and for a while they were silent, alone with their thoughts, then he said, ‘So, talk to me about Sheila,’ and Ali told him about Catherine’s oldest friend, who had sailed to Australia on an assisted passage and made a new life for herself here just as the sixties tipped over into the seventies. ‘Did you miss her, when she left?’ Dan asked, and Ali said no, not at all, because she hadn’t known her; Sheila used to live in Liverpool, but she’d written to Catherine after she emigrated, brilliant, dazzling letters, full of incident and sunshine.
‘Catherine didn’t care about Sheila by then, but Sheila kept writing because she didn’t know what Catherine was like, and she hoped she would follow her out there, to Elizabeth, because she was all evangelical about it.’
‘Elizabeth?’
‘It’s where she used to live when she first came. It’s north of Adelaide. There was industry there, and lots of northerners migrated to work at the car plant.’
Dan said, ‘You’d think the last thing they’d want on the other side of the world would be to trade one shithole job for another. You’d think they’d want to try something new.’
‘Oh well, it was new all right – the heat and the parrots and the roos: that’s what Sheila used to write home about. But people did what they knew for a living. Cornish tin miners came to work the copper mines, Welsh sheep farmers came to run sheep stations, and folk from the industrial north sniffed out the muck and toil and noise.’
‘Hey, you’re losing your Aussie accent,’ he said, and she laughed and gave him a shove; then he said, ‘And what about you? You didn’t come for the tin or the sheep or the cars. Why did you come here, and stay for ever?’
She turned, and looked at him steadily. ‘Honestly? Because I felt completely safe in Adelaide.’
There was a beat of silence; then he said, ‘And why didn’t you feel safe in Sheffield?’ He was shocked. Hadn’t he made her feel safe? Hadn’t he been enough? Certainly she’d been enough for him. He’d had to rewrite his future when she left him, and that’s not easy when you’re eighteen and heartsick.
‘I wasn’t safe in Sheffield,’ she said. ‘I thought I could stay safe, but I couldn’t. I protected you from all the parts of my life I was ashamed of, and they were legion. I was steeped in shame and you didn’t know any of it.’ She glanced at him, saw his face, and said, ‘Oh, don’t be thinking you let me down somehow. Don’t think that for a moment. You were my refuge, you and your family, but in the end, I had to go. At least, I felt then that I had to go. I don’t know if it was the right thing to do, if the braver choice would’ve been to stay, but I ran away, and this is where you find me, still here.’
She was looking down now, her head too low for him to see her expression. He could see she was taking long, slow, steadying breaths. He took the half-finished glass of water from her hand and placed it on the floor; then he lifted the curtain of hair that hid her face and said, ‘Hey, look at me, darling.’
She shook her head. ‘I’m going to tell you everything,’ she said, ‘but I can’t look at you while I speak,’ so Dan sat back and waited. He wondered how – and if – he could help her, and decided he should simply be patient, so he let his mind drift as he stared across the small room at the alien world outside the window. In the boughs of a small fruit tree there was a posse of parrots with Day-Glo crests, and they were squawking fit to burst, a terrible cacophony that made him think of Brian Johnson screaming out the lyrics in one of those thundering AC/DC tracks. He thought: This girl grew up with sparrows, and the occasional robin for a splash of colour. Imagine waking each morning to a flag-cracking yellow sun and a heavy metal dawn chorus? He closed his eyes and tried to remember the lyrics to ‘Back In Black’, something about hitting the sack and being glad to be back, but he couldn’t get there, he’d never been much of a headbanger, but then she started to speak, and he listened to a story that was unthinkable, about a world he hadn’t known existed. Catherine, Martin Baxter, Peter, and there among them Alison, trying to cope, trying to be strong in the bleak and increasingly messy melee of her domestic life. Dan listened, shattered by this account of a dark and barely manageable life in Attercliffe, bitterly reproaching his younger self for never really pressing her for details, never trying hard enough to overcome her fierce privacy about home, always happy to simply meet her off the bus in Nether Edge, never picking her up, never taking her back to her door, never really questioning her vehemence that he shouldn’t do either of these things.
On she went beside him: the drunkenness, the chaos, the role Peter played as her ally and support, until his own shame drove him to attempt suicide. She told him about the scene at Brown Bayley’s, the photographs displayed there by Martin Baxter, how she’d torn them down, then gone home and had to cut Peter down from the light flex, and then had fled to his, Daniel’s, house, forgetting he’d be long gone to Manchester. Dan groaned, thinking of the hard time he’d given her only yesterday for missing the gig. But she wasn’t finished; she continued on in the same low, expressionless voice, as if she was reading a written account of someone else’s terrible history. Peter revealing the escape fund, urging her to get the hell out of Sheffield and be free. Her refusal; her confidence in her own ability to tough things out. And then Martin Baxter, fulfilling the menace and violence he’d always threatened, overpowering her, raping her, treating her with bottomless contempt, showing her just how weak and worthless she really was. Dan moaned with a kind of visceral pain, a futile agony that she’d borne this abominable assault and its consequences entirely alone, undefended, unprotected. Lovely, clever, talented, incomparable Alison Connor, thought Dan: his shining light.
‘There were two versions of me,’ she said. ‘Two Alisons, leading two separate lives. Peter and I, we cobbled together a kind of normality for each other, but it turned out to be built on sand. I was ashamed, always, of where I came from, who I came from. Catherine was a liability, an embarrassment, she was no mother, to me or to Peter. It was our job to try and look after her, and we had a father who upped and left us to our fate, probably started again with somebody more functioning, probably never gave me or Peter a thought—’ She stopped speaking suddenly, although it’d seemed she was about to go on; then, ‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘No more to tell.’
She allowed herself to drop sideways, away from him, until she was lying down, curled on her side like a sleeping child, although her eyes were open, wide and anxious, as if she’d forgotten how to shut them. He placed himself down in the narrow space alongside her and stroked her cheek. She hadn’t shed a tear; her face was stone.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘It’s OK.’ He drew her eyes closed with his fingers and kissed her eyelids softly, and she kept them shut, then reached out and pulled him closer still, so that she could fall asleep, and he stayed with her there and watched her for all the time it took for her to stir and stretch and open her eyes, and then they made love again, but it was very quiet this time, and slow, and healing.
Two hours later, they were both showered, dressed and drinking gin and tonic, a poor version of it with no ice and no lemon – none to be found – but it was better than no drink at all. They were sitting blamelessly and respectably in the living room, chatting about their worlds and the people they’d known, and there was so much to talk about, so much to say, and Dan was now detailing the current state of his Sheffield family with such spin and colour that Ali felt she still knew them. But he hardly saw his parents, he said, and this weighed on his conscience, not that he did anything about that. ‘Trouble is I don’t like going. It’s a time warp, I’m forever a sullen teenager in Nether Edge. Nothing’s changed in that house, except Mum talks even more, and Dad talks even less.’
‘Does he still have his pigeons?’
Dan shook his head. ‘He had a long spell in hospital ten years ago and Mum couldn’t cope. She sold them all, without telling him.’
Ali was horror-struck at this. ‘Those beautiful birds,’ she said. ‘Didn’t Marion realise how he loved them?’
‘She’d wanted rid for years. Hated the smell of ’em, and she got into gardening and wanted the shed for the usual stuff people keep – y’know, spades and shears and whatnot. He was in hospital for the best part of a year, and he wasn’t himself, he withdrew, and I think she assumed he’d just not notice, but actually, I think she might have unwittingly destroyed his one chance of rehabilitation. He seems to have been sad for a very long time now, my dad.’
‘Poor old Bill,’ Ali said. She thought about that pigeon loft. It’d felt a little like sitting in a church, a church with a congregation of birds. It’d had a holy quality to it; at least, that’s what she remembered. Perhaps, she thought, the passing of time had elevated it in her mind.
‘When were you last in Sheffield?’ Dan asked, and immediately he wished he hadn’t, because she stared at him with an expression that clearly questioned whether he’d listened to anything at all of what she’d told him.
‘OK, right, you’ve never been back?’ he said, trying to keep his voice level, so she couldn’t hear the incredulity. Jesus, he thought, that was one hell of a bolt you did there, girl. Ali still didn’t answer, just looked at him.
‘I didn’t realise,’ he said. ‘I thought perhaps you’d have gone back to see Peter … show the girls Sheffield …’ He petered out. ‘I’ll shut the fuck up,’ he said.
Ali said, ‘No, I never went back. I’ve never even spoken of it, until today. Don’t you understand that?’
‘Never told Michael? None of it?’
‘Dan, no. Like I said, I’ve never spoken about it until today and I certainly haven’t been back for a magical mystery tour.’
Dan exhaled, a long, low breath. ‘That’s some serious poison you hung on to there.’
‘Least said, soonest mended – isn’t that what they say in Yorkshire?’
He shook his head slowly. ‘But you’re not mended.’
She was affronted by this, and she gave a short, bitter laugh. ‘What do you know? You know nothing about my life here.’
‘I’m not attacking you, Alison, and by the way I know plenty about your life – it looks gilded, from what I’ve seen online. I’m just saying there’s such a thing as—’
‘Oh God, please don’t say closure,’ she said, cutting into his unfinished sentence. ‘I can’t bear that word.’ She brought her knees up to her chest and hugged them, making herself small, and tight, and inviolable.
‘I wasn’t going to.’ He moved a fraction closer to her, although the language of her body made physical contact seem suddenly inappropriate and he knew he’d have to try to navigate her defences with words. ‘I was going to talk about justice, a kind of justice, for you, for that girl you were, and I was going to say how going back to Sheffield could be a positive move, if that’s what you decide it’s going to be.’
‘I don’t need justice.’ She was very pale, and she wouldn’t look at him.
‘Not justice as in dragging Baxter through the courts, although it’s not too late for that if you wanted to report the fucking lowlife weasel bastard. I mean justice in a looser sense, I mean justice as in taking back what’s yours, reclaiming the parts of the past you still need.’
‘Such as?’
‘Well – Peter. I suppose I mean Peter.’
Now her head was resting on her knees, and the very last thing Dan wanted was for her to be miserable; he only wanted to make her happy, and yet, he thought, how had Peter fared? Alison should know the answer to this, and if she didn’t, she ought to find out. He placed his hand very tenderly on her back, and she let it stay there, but she was speechless, because hearing her brother’s name was an agony; he resided in her conscience, and her neglect of him was a terrible cross to bear. She’d never intended this to happen, this severing of all ties with the person who’d once been her most trusted friend and protector; she hadn’t meant to abandon him for ever, but then she hadn’t known what she meant to do – there hadn’t been any kind of plan at all. In Paris, where she’d first stopped running for a while and found a job as a waitress, she’d felt reinvented, as if after all it was possible to sweep away a past life and begin again. She was just Al-ees-on to her Parisian colleagues, a hard-working English girl with decent French, what a find, what an asset when the bistro filled with les Américains, who seemed not to realise any language existed other than their own. She’d rented a chambre de bonne, a former servant’s garret on the sixth floor of an apartment building on the Rue de Courcelles, and from that address she’d written her three letters to Daniel, and one letter to Peter, too, to tell him she was alive, to express her love and gratitude, and to say goodbye. She thought about that letter now, still imprinted on her mind all these many years later. She hadn’t told him about the rape – wouldn’t share that nightmare with anyone and least of all Peter. So, she’d written:
I saved your life only once, but you saved mine every day, and now I’ve left, I want you to remember, always, that you are beloved to me. But I think you meant me to go far away, so I shall, and I’ll try and live the life you wanted for me. I don’t know when I’ll see you again, but I’ll keep you in my heart, and I know you’ll keep me in yours.
Always and for ever,
Your Alison xx
She’d included no address on Peter’s letter, and this was because … well, why was it? She believed now that she’d needed to turn her back on him to survive, and the more time passed, the less she saw a path back to him. Peter had made her escape possible, but he was also an integral part of the horror. While Daniel … well, he’d inhabited higher ground than the Connors, he lived where the air was pure and clear. She’d stayed on in Paris for far longer than she’d intended, in case he should one day knock on her door.
‘I saw Peter,’ Dan said. ‘When I went looking for you.’
If she hadn’t been sitting down, her legs might have given way. Slowly, she turned her head, which still rested on her knees, to look at him.
‘He said you weren’t coming back, but he said it kindly.’
‘You saw Peter.’
‘The day after you disappeared, yeah. He didn’t say why you’d gone, but he didn’t seem to be freaking out, so I figured he knew more than I did.’
She lifted her head. ‘Peter was my saving grace, for all of my childhood and adolescence.’
‘Wonder where he is now?’
The question was casually asked, and not unreasonable, and Ali knew that not having an answer to it was a disgrace, an abdication of love and duty. She shrugged and looked profoundly unhappy. ‘All I can say is none of this seemed quite so abysmally dysfunctional until I said it out loud to you. Michael didn’t seem to need to know anything about my past, it was enough for him that I’d pitched up in his life in Spain, and when we went back to Australia together, it felt to me almost like a sort of symbolic flourish, the completion of my disappearing act. I was subsumed by the McCormacks, and I made no protest, put up no resistance. Why would I? It was a relief, on so many levels.’
Daniel heaved a long sigh, leaned back where he sat, and stared at the ceiling.
‘What?’ Ali reached out a hand and took hold of one of his. ‘What is it?’
He looked at her, and considered her question. What is it? It was Michael McCormack, Spain, Australia, her disappearing act: it was the series of events that had rolled inexorably onward and kept them apart, when they’d been young enough and full enough of love for each other that they could have conquered anything.
‘What?’ Ali said again.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I need another drink.’
They slept in the prayer-flag room – deeply, for eight hours, as if anaesthetised – and in the morning Ali woke with a kind of lightness of spirit that puzzled her, given the intensity of the previous day. Catharsis, Dan said, the calm after the storm. She said yeah, maybe, and then said she was ravenous, so he went off into downtown Quorn and bought provisions: eggs, bread, fresh coffee and milk, and when he got back they were no longer alone. First he noticed a little red Renault parked next to Ali’s Holden, and then as he pushed open the front door he could hear voices, women’s voices. He had an impulse to back away and disappear again until the coast was clear, then realised that if this was Sheila and Dora – and who else was it going to be, realistically? – then they wouldn’t be going anywhere. He walked down the small hallway and into the kitchen, and there was Ali with two much older women, both of whom immediately eyed him up and down like farmers at a stock sale.
‘Well, hello,’ one of them said, the shorter of the two, although the taller one didn’t look much over five foot two, and she now approached him with arms stretched wide and said, ‘Welcome, Daniel, welcome. I’m Sheila,’ and she enveloped him in a powerful embrace. Dan looked at Ali over the top of Sheila’s wild grey hair and she grinned at him, and shrugged.
‘And I’m Dora,’ said Dora when Sheila released him. They shook hands, and Dora moved in a little closer and looked up at him, staring hard into his eyes. ‘D’you know, I think we’ve met?’ she said.
Dan said, ‘Really? Seems unlikely, but you might be right.’
‘In a previous life, I mean,’ Dora said. ‘You have a very strong aura, and it’s familiar to me.’
‘Oh, this is exciting,’ Sheila said, turning to Ali. ‘Dora’s got a sixth sense for this. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, hang on to your hat.’
Ali laughed and said, ‘Dora, stop staring at Daniel, you’re scaring him,’ and Dora said, ‘Oh shivers, am I?’ and let go of his hand, which she’d hung on to while she examined his soul.
‘Ah, don’t worry, I can cope,’ Dan said. ‘And look, if you work out who I was last time you met me, I’d love to know.’
‘He’ll be hoping he was Rory Gallagher,’ Ali said.
‘I don’t know Rory Gallagher from a bar of soap,’ Dora said, ‘but anyway, darling, it doesn’t work like that, it’s way more abstract.’
‘Well, whoever you think he might once have been,’ Sheila said, ‘he’s certainly a good-looking devil now.’
‘Give over,’ Dan said, laughing. He was still holding the bag of groceries, and Ali took it off him and began to unpack.
‘Like I said before he walked in,’ she said, ‘he’s Daniel Lawrence from Edinburgh, via Sheffield. There’s a lot to tell, but I’m not doing it on an empty stomach.’
‘Quite right,’ Dora said, and she grabbed a whisk from the utensils jar and waved it at Dan. ‘Got a treat for you, matey. Eggs my way, coming up. They’re the bomb!’