So that Dan had some privacy with Marion and Bill, Ali insisted he drop her and McCulloch at a café in Nether Edge, just a short walk from his house. She’d give him half an hour or so to explain their situation, then she’d walk round with the dog and knock on the door. Dan hadn’t wanted to agree to this, he wanted her by his side when he went in, but Ali said, ‘No, you owe them an explanation without me standing there, the homewrecker.’ He wasn’t having that, he said; he’d take full responsibility for his own wrecked home, but could he be sure she’d turn up, and not bolt?
‘Bolt where?’ Ali asked. ‘I’ve already bolted here, there’s nowhere else for me to run. Just go,’ so he did, and he knew her instinct had been right when he let himself into number forty-two with the key he’d always kept, and Marion had run at him, stricken, saying, ‘Daniel, how could you? How could you?’ because Katelin had been on the phone, blowing their minds with his treachery. Blowing Marion’s mind, anyway – not much reached Bill these days.
Dan didn’t go into the emotions of the case, only the hard facts, and he could see from his mother’s face, her searching eyes, that she wanted to be reassured, she wanted to know he knew what he was doing. She had always, always, taken her children’s side in adversity, and she wanted to now. She’d been the sort of mother who would march along to school and demand to know from the headmaster why Joe had been caned, or why Claire was left out of the hockey team, or why Dan – the youngest, the pet – didn’t have a speaking part in the Christmas play. Embarrassing, but they’d known as they grew up that they’d never be alone in their corner, there’d always be Marion, believing they were champions, watching their backs. But this: this was a lot for her to take in, and it carried with it the tinge of disgrace. Already she was imagining saying to her friends the dread words that, oh dear, yes, Daniel and Katelin had separated. Even as she listened to her son, she was dimly aware of – and, now, sorry for – the complacency she’d felt over the passing years when she’d heard similar tales from others in her circle, the underlying smug satisfaction that yes, life together was a challenge, but her own offspring understood loyalty and decency. Well, Joe never married. But Claire and Daniel had made their choices, and hadn’t they seen her stick with Bill despite everything? You don’t just bin somebody, do you? But now, Daniel had binned Katelin, and Marion didn’t know what to think. Granted, she was a prickly girl, so easy to offend, so difficult to please, and why she wouldn’t ever marry Daniel, Marion had no earthly clue. But it had been a marriage, in the end, hadn’t it? As good as, anyway, in all but name. And it was going to be very difficult for Marion to condone and support her dear boy, now that he’d walked away from Katelin, for Alison Connor, of all people. She wondered, had she started all this herself, by buying that book for Katelin last Christmas? Oh, how she shuddered and recoiled from this idea. She certainly hadn’t meant any harm, and if she’d known who the author was, she’d have put it straight down. Trouble with a capital T, that girl, the upset she’d caused! Daniel sad for months and months, dropping out of university, taking up with any girl who gave him the eye, travelling around after his blessed pop groups like a lost soul. These wounds, inflicted by Alison, ran deep and everlasting in the tender centre of Marion’s being. She’d never forgotten, and rarely forgiven, a single slight against any of her children, even the playground spats, so she’d certainly never forgiven Alison Connor. Certainly not.
But, look now, here she was, knocking on the front door, coming into the house with Daniel’s dog on a lead, and there was something about this incidental detail – Alison’s easy, familiar stewardship of the little terrier – that struck Marion as comfortably intimate, as if everything was now settled between them. She was surprised. She’d expected blushes and awkwardness and averted gazes. But then Alison Connor had been only seventeen last time she laid eyes on her … only seventeen, and in considerable distress. She remembered watching her run away down their road. She remembered thinking maybe it’d be for the best if Alison never came back, and then she hadn’t come back, but it hadn’t been for the best, not really; not for Daniel.
‘Hello,’ Ali said, and gave her such a lovely, full, ingenuous smile that Marion found herself immediately faltering in her resolutions. Ali stepped forward and gave Marion a hug, which she returned, a little hesitantly. ‘I’m determined to call you Marion,’ Ali said, ‘even though I really feel you’ll be Mrs Lawrence for ever and a day.’
Australian accent. Slim as a girl. Dark brown hair, brown eyes, pale face, pretty – oh, very pretty. She always was.
‘Well, Alison, you’ve not altered much,’ Marion said, stepping back and giving her a full appraisal. ‘I can’t say this isn’t a shock, love, you turning up here, but it’s nice to see you. It’s like going back in time, looking at you!’
‘It’s really nice to see you too.’ Ali wasn’t going to apologise, for either the past or the present. She was here, and that was that. ‘Is Mr Lawrence here?’ she said, and then she laughed. ‘I can’t call him Bill, I just can’t.’
‘Dad’s gone upstairs,’ Dan said. He tried to communicate with only his eyes that he was so fucking proud of her, of everything about her, the way she was, the way she’d handled that arrival, the way she looked. Christ, even the dog was besotted. McCulloch had never had much time for women, but he was all Alison’s now.
‘May I go up and see him?’
Marion and Dan exchanged a look. He’d been shocked himself at how reduced his dad was, how much he’d deteriorated since he last saw him, which – to his shame – had been last Christmas.
‘Sure,’ he said now. ‘But he’s … well, he’s sort of retreated right into himself. It’s hard to know what he’s thinking any more.’
‘No, I know, but I’d really like to go and sit with him, if that’s OK?’
‘Of course, love,’ Marion said. ‘He’s in our bedroom. He likes to sit looking out of the window. I’ll bring some tea up, when it’s mashed.’ Anyway, she thought, she’d value a few minutes more on her own with Daniel. She was full of questions she didn’t want to ask in front of Alison.
Sometimes, if he waited long enough in front of the glass, pigeons would land on the sill outside and look in at him with black diamond eyes. None of these birds were his. There were house martins too; they’d made a mud nest in the eaves, but they’d be gone soon, off on their travels, and anyway they were never still, and not bold enough to study him like the pigeons did. He saw other things as well, although, oddly, his eyes seemed only able to see what was very close or very distant; the middle ground was grey matter, as if a permanent blanket of low-lying fog had settled on the street. Marion said he couldn’t be long- and short-sighted, but all he knew was what he saw. Birds at the window, and other things, very far away, such as the weather changing in the sky, way over north-west; he knew what was coming and when it would come, and if Marion said, ‘Oh blast, it’s raining on my washing,’ he always thought, I could’ve told you that would happen, though he never said it out loud. You could fall out of the habit of speaking, he’d found, and if you did, you had a job to start again. Marion chirruped like a noisy budgie, saying everything, anything. He wanted to say hush, just hush.
So, Daniel was here; that was nice. Marion had somebody to talk to now, other than Claire. Joe didn’t come. He hadn’t seen Joe since, oh, since all them months in hospital, when nobody knew what was up. Joe came then, sat by his bed, watched him breathe, then after that he stayed away; maybe he saw too much of himself in the silent, sad old man in the hospital bed. Joe liked his own company; he wasn’t a family man. Lived in the mountains, in France, a long way from where he started.
There was a low knock on the bedroom door. Bill ignored it, and a woman’s voice, unknown to him, said, ‘Mr Lawrence, it’s Alison.’
He said nothing, because it was always easiest, but she came in anyway; he heard her approach. A nurse, perhaps? Or another one of those cheerful women from the day centre, with an invitation to sit and say nothing there, rather than sit and say nothing here.
A hand on his shoulder, a soft kiss on his cheek, the lightest touch of her hair on his face like the feathers of a prize racer grazing his skin. He looked up and saw at once it was Alison Connor. He watched as she pulled Marion’s chair from the dressing table and sat as close to him as she could be.
‘I knew you’d come back,’ he said, the words rolling like small pebbles off his tongue, heavy and a little misshapen. She lifted his hand and held it, and with her thumb she made small stroking movements, very tender, very loving.
‘I’m sorry it took me so long,’ she said.
‘I knew you’d come back,’ he said again, practising the words, the first he’d uttered for six months. The doctor called it selective mutism, but Bill – had he spoken – would’ve disagreed. It was simpler than that. He just never heard anything that justified the effort of a response. All his life, he’d enjoyed silence, and the less you said, the less you had to listen to. By now, it no longer felt natural to speak, but it felt very natural to sit beside Alison like this. He’d forgotten a lot of the detail of his life, but he remembered as if it were yesterday the first time she’d visited his loft and the first time she’d handled one of his birds without panicking, and, always, that respectful way of listening to him talk about the pigeons, with no mockery in her eyes, only concentration. A kind, quiet, genuine girl. He’d been waiting for her to come back for donkey’s years.
‘Like one of your homing pigeons,’ she said. ‘Like Clover.’
His failing eyes brimmed with ready tears, and she said, ‘Oh, Mr Lawrence, forgive me, I didn’t mean to upset you,’ but he shook his head, and although he didn’t manage to frame the words, she understood from his expression that he wasn’t sad, he was only overcome. Alison talked to him then, in her new voice. She told him every single detail she remembered about his pigeon loft, everything she’d loved about those brave, clever, dignified birds, and all the things he’d taught her about them. She named them, counting them off on her fingers, and she talked about Clover flying home six hundred miles from Lerwick, about Violet and Vincent, his breeding pair of Flash Pied Emperors, and what made them champions, how he’d known from the light in their eyes and the slope of their shoulders that they were going to be winners. Mr Lawrence tilted his head upwards, closed his eyes, and listened to her in a kind of bliss, the way some people lose themselves in music, or others lift their faces to the warm, repetitive balm of tropical rain.
When Marion came in with tea in her best china mugs, she was stilled and silenced by what she saw. She placed the tea on the nearest surface and walked soundlessly from the room. Outside, on the landing, she allowed herself the release of what she called a good cry, but she did so only for a short while, and very quietly, so as not to disturb the tryst, then she took off her shoes and trod lightly downstairs in her stockinged feet, pausing between steps like she used to do when her children were fractious babies, and mustn’t be disturbed from their daytime naps.
‘What’ve you told Alex?’ Marion asked Dan.
‘An edited version of the truth,’ he said. ‘Katelin’d already involved him anyway, months ago, when I first told her about Alison.’
She shook her head in a weary, defeated way that irritated him.
‘Do you remember throwing Alison’s letters away? The ones she sent from Paris?’
‘When? I’ve not thrown away anything of yours!’ But she coloured, giving herself away.
‘Thirty years ago, I think you did.’
‘Oh, thirty years,’ Marion said dismissively.
‘What? It doesn’t count after thirty years?’
‘You were only kids. I did what I thought was best.’ She hadn’t ever erased that memory, though, and there’d been something lasting and terrible about destroying those three unopened airmail letters, addressed to Daniel in Alison’s tidy italics. ‘You were very upset, Daniel, and I couldn’t see how passing on her letters would’ve helped you.’
‘It was wrong of you,’ Dan said, and Marion said, ‘It seems it now, but it didn’t then.’
‘Oh, well, anyway,’ Dan said, relenting. ‘I’m not here to give you a hard time, Mum.’
‘I’m worried for you, though,’ she said. ‘All this hoo-ha, it’s upsetting.’
‘Try not to think too much about it. Trust me to sort out my own life.’ He was making a lasagne, the sort of dish Marion liked to eat but never made. She watched him layering ragu, pasta, béchamel, and marvelled as she always did at a man who could cook, not that she’d ever given Bill a chance to. Not that he’d ever asked.
‘How can I not think about it? My grandson’s caught up in it all.’
‘Alex is pretty mature, Mum, he’s living his life, getting on with things, and I speak to him whenever he wants to speak to me. He’s going to be fine.’
‘Going to be?’ Marion said. ‘So he’s not fine now?’
‘Look, no kid ever wants anything to change,’ he said. ‘No kid ever wants to have to think about their parents’ lives at all, let alone their sex lives.’
‘Daniel!’
‘Sorry, but it’s true, right?’
‘Well, I wouldn’t know,’ she said. ‘But I never gave you three anything to worry about, I do know that.’
‘You didn’t.’ He smiled at her, but she wasn’t quite ready to smile back.
‘It hasn’t been easy being married to your dad.’
‘I’m sure.’
‘But I stayed, didn’t I? I didn’t have to, but I stayed.’
He slid the lasagne into the oven and shut the door quickly on the gust of escaping heat. ‘Well, I hope you did that for yourself as well as for me and Claire and Joe?’ he said. ‘Because none of us would’ve asked you to be unhappy on our behalf.’
She wagged her head, non-committal, and said, ‘I haven’t been unhappy. I’m just saying don’t assume I haven’t been flattered by other offers.’
‘God, Mum, I’d never assume that,’ he said, grinning. ‘But if you’re talking about that randy old goat Wilf Barnes, I’d say you’ve had a lucky escape. He’d still be chasing you round the bedroom at ninety-five.’
She laughed at this, unable to help herself. ‘No, you cheeky devil,’ she said, flapping her hands at him. ‘I do not mean Wilf Barnes.’ She didn’t know who she meant, really; there’d never been any feasible alternative to what she had, no one to tempt her from the straight and narrow. She just wanted Dan to know that she’d done her very best, for all of them.
‘Well, look.’ He folded his arms and looked at her with profound affection, and she waited to see what he had to say, full of faith, because he was Daniel, her precious youngest child, the gift she hadn’t expected, the late blessing. ‘I for one am deeply grateful you stayed with Dad, because I don’t know what would’ve become of him if you hadn’t. I do know what you’re saying, Mum. I do understand, and I’m not walking away lightly, and I won’t let Alex and Katelin down, any more than I already have. But you must be able to see yourself, already, that there’s something one hundred per cent right about Alison? Can you not see that? How well she fits?’
Marion considered this for a while before answering. ‘I can see that, yes,’ she said. ‘She’s a lovely woman, and she has a way with your dad that nobody else does. But she’s left somebody in Australia, I expect?’
‘Her husband, Michael.’
‘Children?’
‘Two daughters, both adults.’
‘Well then.’
‘Well then, what?’
‘Well then, I’m saying yes, I can see how lovely she is, but, Daniel, it doesn’t mean I approve.’
‘OK,’ Dan said. ‘Understood.’
Claire came around like a shot when Marion told her about their visitor, and her blithe, non-judgemental, slightly child-like interest in Alison was a relief at dinner, because although Bill looked a good deal happier, he still ate his lasagne as if he had a train to catch, and was as silent as he ever had been, while Marion was wrestling too much with worry to be entirely relaxed. Claire, though: she bounced into the house like Tigger, with indiscriminate scatter-gun enthusiasm and a kind of comfortable, pleasing inanity. Claire had gained a lot of padding over the years, but she was as carefully put together as ever, well groomed and fragrant, and had probably made an extra little effort before turning up tonight to reacquaint herself with Alison. Hair, make-up, nails: all glossy and immaculate. She wore a startling yellow tailored jacket that demanded comment, and when Ali admired it, Claire immediately took it off and said, ‘Try it on, it’s MaxMara, fifty per cent off at House of Fraser.’ She wasn’t fazed at all that here was her brother, without Katelin. It was as if all that mattered to her, all that counted, was the here and now. Alison Connor? Great!
‘God’s sake, Claire,’ Dan said, ‘you’re three sizes bigger than her,’ but Ali shot him a look and said, ‘Go on then,’ to Claire, and put the jacket on, and yes, it was far too big, but Claire couldn’t care less, she just bunched in the excess fabric at the back and said, ‘Suits you! Aren’t you slim though! They’ve got small ones still, if you want one, they’re always the ones left, all them eights and sixes, like the shoes, it’s always tiny threes and fours that are left, but I’m a seven in shoes and a fourteen slash sixteen in clothes, and round here those big sizes go first, I have to be quick off the mark.’
This was all very hard to follow, but then off Claire went on another tangent, this time about her neighbour’s new book club, and would Ali be in Sheffield long enough to go next month to their first meeting and talk about Tell the Story, Sing the Song?
‘Claire,’ Dan said, before Ali could answer, ‘pipe down.’
‘Oops, sorry,’ she said, all smiles. ‘Big gob, me, I do go on, but it’s lovely to see you, Alison, I suppose I’m just over-excited, it’s a big event, you turning up, famous author, y’know.’ Daniel caught her eye. ‘Sorry,’ she said again, and she applied herself to her lasagne, trying to look contrite.
‘No, it’s fine, Claire, honestly,’ Ali said, ‘and it’s really lovely to see you too; I don’t know how long I’ll be here, but I’ll come if I can,’ and Claire said, ‘I can’t get over your Australian accent,’ and then she blushed in case this sounded stupid, but Ali only laughed. She was remembering the pleasure Claire had given her the first time they’d met; how she’d painted Alison’s nails the same shade of pink as her own, how she’d admired her hair, how open she’d been, and affectionate. Claire was entirely without guile, as lovable now as she’d been then. Daniel thought his sister was inexcusably daft, but Ali, miraculously back among the Lawrences, knew for certain that he didn’t know how lucky he was to have a family such as this one; a family to get irritated with, to depend upon, to be loved by and to love. He took them for granted – my parents are right where I left them – but it was a lifetime’s abundance of love that informed this casual complacency, the rock-solid security, the unshakable assumptions about the permanence of familial love and support.
Alison observed them at the table, comfortable in their habitat, and she knew that nothing would ever stop them loving each other, even this present upheaval, about which Marion really wasn’t sure. Ali could see from her shifting eyes and uncertain smiles that she was troubled and wary, and fair enough, she was entitled to be, she had Daniel’s happiness to worry about, and Alison’s track record to date had been lamentable. Oh, to have a mother as vigilant and steadfast as Marion! Ali glanced at her, and saw the concern in her face, and the corresponding irritation in Daniel’s, and she wanted to say, ‘Be good to her, it’s only that she loves you,’ and at the same time she wondered if she could ever win Marion Lawrence’s trust. She doubted there were enough years left to accomplish such a task, but what a worthy endeavour, what a prize it would be.
The Northern General at 7.45 a.m. was less busy than it’d been the previous afternoon, which was a blessing, because Ali needed to see every single face that emerged from the interior doors and corridors beyond the entrance where she stood, shivering slightly in the morning chill, trying to ignore her churning gut and pattering heartbeat. Seriously, she was almost bored by these symptoms of high anxiety. Marion, knowing what the morning held, had offered her a Valium first thing – a Valium and a cup of tea – and she wished now that she’d accepted it, because a mellow glow of unconcern would be a special kind of state. But she needed to be alert, couldn’t risk befuddlement even if it brought with it a sort of comfort. As it was, she felt more than alert, hyper-alert, her senses lean and limber, straining towards their goal, although the truth was that she didn’t even know if she’d know him, if this Peter Connor was her brother. She had no photographs of him, only memories, three decades old. But she hoped that if the man she was waiting for was her Peter, he might recognise his only sister – he had photographs, after all. He had had photographs, anyway; it was possible, Ali admitted to herself, that he had them no longer. But assuming it was him, and assuming he knew her on sight, then his instant look of recognition would reveal his identity to Ali, and she need never let him know that she’d forgotten his dear face, after far too long away. That is, if he hadn’t already scarpered to avoid her, through a staff entrance at the back.
It was lonely, standing there waiting. She missed Daniel’s courage, and his ease, but he’d dropped her off at the hospital gates and then left her to it, because this was between Alison and Peter. He was coming back at nine.
The big clock on the wall stared at her and took its time. Slowed down. Went backwards.
She scrutinised everyone, men and women alike. Some of them stared back with a challenge in their eyes, and she quickly looked away.
A loud burst of laughter took her by surprise, offended her almost. This seemed no place for hilarity.
Quarter past the hour.
A man ran past her holding a child, and the child was screaming and bleeding from the forehead, and their arrival created a small, contained tornado of efficient activity, sweeping them into privacy, calming the child, calming the father.
Twenty-five past eight, and he wasn’t here, and Ali realised that she had no idea how long was too long to stand and wait.
This plan felt flimsy now, and ill-begotten. Too many variables.
Hope was a demon, but hopelessness was worse.
She thought about Peter, aged sixteen, on his first day at work, sent to the workshop by the foreman for a long stand, but it’d just been a trick, a laugh at the rookie’s expense. They let him stand for an hour and then sent him packing, and when he told Alison later, she’d cried at the injustice, but he’d laughed and tweaked her ear, and told her to grow a thicker skin, because she’d need it.
There was a man, tall, round-shouldered, grey-haired. He was standing still, searching for someone and, with no real faith, Ali stepped forwards, raising her arm, but his eyes skimmed across her face to settle on another woman, waiting nearby on a plastic chair, flicking through a magazine. ‘Maureen,’ he said loudly, and the woman looked up, stood up and, without smiling, said, ‘Quick, I’ve only got five minutes left on that ticket.’ Ali watched them leave, then turned her face inwards again. Quarter to nine. She’d been here an hour now, and Peter wasn’t coming, was he? Disappointment was the only thing keeping her there: a great weight of disappointment, too heavy to drag all the way outside. Five more minutes she waited, and then ten, fifteen, twenty, and at five past nine she decided that at quarter past she would leave, because Dan would already be back, parked somewhere along Herries Road, waiting for her.
She watched the hands of the clock, and at nine fifteen, she turned her back on all her dashed hope, and walked outside down the steps, and it was then that she heard Peter’s voice calling her name, although it was more than a call, it was a bellow, a wild and feral roar, as if all of Sheffield needed to know he was looking for her. She turned and saw him before he saw her. He was standing just within the open doors, scanning the faces around and about him with frantic, disorganised haste, and it turned out she’d have known him anywhere, she could have picked him out of a crowd of thousands. She felt a great surge of emotion, a wave of wonder, and relief, and a kind of fear, which caught in her throat because when she tried to shout his name, nothing happened, no words would come. He looked desperately anxious; she could see him losing confidence, and she could hardly bear it, so she just ran at him, and he saw her then – everyone did; everyone turned to watch the woman run up the steps to the man, and they saw the man open his arms and wrap them around her, and lift her off her feet. Then they cried and laughed and clung to each other, so that the people watching them looked away, to give them a kind of privacy on this garishly public stage.
‘Peter, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,’ was the first thing Alison said when she found her voice, and he held her face, and looked down at her.
‘There’s nowt to be sorry for,’ he said, and his voice was breaking with joy. ‘Nowt at all. I’m sorry, I couldn’t get away, I thought you’d be gone.’
‘I found you,’ she said, amazed, incredulous.
‘You found me. Were you going, just then?’
‘Only for a little while. I was coming back. I would’ve come back every day, to find out if you were the right Peter Connor.’
‘How did you …?’
‘Mr Higgins, one of your asthma clinic men.’
He nodded at this, unfazed by life’s coincidences, and they stared at each other, smiling idiotically, and all the pressing questions they each still had to ask were crowding round them, unanswered. Later, later.
Ali thought: My brother, how I love him, but she didn’t say this, because, well, this was Peter, and they didn’t talk about love.
‘I don’t know why I didn’t come sooner,’ she said. ‘I can’t explain, but it just got harder and harder to do.’
‘Ey, none o’ that,’ he said. ‘You’re here, that’s what matters.’
‘I’m so glad you didn’t leave Sheffield.’
‘Me? Where would I go?’
She laughed. ‘Anywhere.’
‘Not me. You’ve been a long way though, by the sound o’ you. What’s that accent?’
‘Australian,’ she said. ‘Adelaide. They all think I have an English accent there. Hey, do you remember Sheila, the letters she used to write?’
He nodded. ‘Parrots and snakes and kangaroos. Did you go looking for her, then? Did you find her?’ No reproach, she thought. Not one hint of reproach.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I can take you to meet her one day, if you want.’
He shook his head. ‘Not me,’ he said again. ‘Unless there’s a bus.’
They laughed, and she leaned against his chest again, against the warm, solid reality of him, and he held her and considered all the new feelings that crowded his heart. A nurse, walking briskly towards them, stopped and looked at his damp, dishevelled face and said, ‘All right, Peter? Who’s this then?’
‘My sister,’ he said. ‘Our Alison.’
‘That’s nice. I didn’t know you had a sister.’ She smiled at Ali and said, ‘I’m Dawn, nice to meet you, love. Have you been away?’
‘You could say that,’ Ali said.
‘Aye,’ Peter said, and his face shone with unalloyed pleasure. ‘But she’s back now.’
‘Right,’ Dawn said. ‘Smashing. I’ll let you get on, then.’ She clipped off into the hospital, and somehow her departure seemed a signal to them that they should probably move. When they turned to leave, Alison saw Daniel watching them, standing a respectful distance away, and smiling at her in that way he had that made her feel entirely beloved. They walked towards him, and Peter, who instantly knew who this was, sought no explanation. He’d already witnessed a miracle this morning; that Daniel Lawrence was waiting for them across the car park was almost mundane by comparison.
When Dan went to Salford for his Thursday morning radio gig, Alison and McCulloch stayed in Sheffield and spent the day with Peter, the dog lending some earthy normality to their heightened emotions, their journey into the past. Peter lived in a small flat in a low-rise block near the hospital, a place with an unremitting absence of charm, not helped by the state of disrepair he’d let it get into, and the festering towers of takeaway cartons heaped across the kitchen surfaces like a BritArt installation. He led a solitary life, he said, apart from work and his visits to Bramall Lane to watch every Blades home match he could get to. This was how he liked it. He liked his flat too, just as it was. He wouldn’t let her clean it; he’d do it himself when it got just a little bit worse, he said. McCulloch ate a pizza crust under the table, and then whined and scratched at the door to go out, so they clipped on his lead and took a bus to the botanical gardens, where they lost themselves down the winding pathways and then occupied a wrought-iron bench and talked, in a faltering, careful way, about the things they had on their minds. First thing he asked her was did she drink? Yes, she said, but she had rules: never alone, never when she felt sad, and never vodka. He didn’t drink at all, he said. Teetotal. He’d drunk himself senseless a few times, after he left Brown Bayley’s, and he’d realised he had it in him, the capacity for self-destruction, so he hadn’t touched a drop for thirty years.
Alison said his capacity for self-destruction was as much Martin Baxter’s legacy as Catherine’s; then she told him, without unnecessary detail, what Baxter had done to her before she fled, and Peter’s eyes were black with hatred as he listened, and he told her Martin Baxter was killed in a hit-and-run, no more than a year after she left Sheffield. ‘Nobody ever got done for it, but he was hit full on by a speeding car, a pimped-up Escort. It knocked him down then reversed over him.’
She listened, and frowned. ‘How do you know those details?’
He shrugged.
‘Was it you?’ Ali said.
‘Toddy.’ He couldn’t look at her at the mention of his former lover’s name, just sat stiff-backed and stared ahead at the lawns and late roses.
‘I wish I’d done it,’ she said. ‘I wish I’d killed him.’ Then she asked about Catherine, told him that Sheila had told her about their mother’s death years ago, and that she hadn’t cried, only felt glad that he, Peter, was free of obligation. ‘Were you with her when she died?’ she asked.
He nodded. ‘She didn’t know it though, she were in a coma by then. She’d been laid up in hospital for weeks, longest she’d gone for years without a drink.’ That’s how he ended up as a hospital porter, he said; spent so long at the Northern General, he thought he might as well get paid for it.
‘Peter, I’m really sorry I left you alone for so long.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘You did right.’
Such economy of language to express a world of meaning. In three words, Peter absolved her of blame, acknowledged his own role in her trauma, addressed the – far greater – damage Martin Baxter had done, and granted his full approval of her choice to go as far away as she was able, until she was ready to come home.
She took his hand and squeezed it, and he squeezed back.
‘Is Toddy still around?’ she asked.
‘No, no, long gone, went to work on an oil rig, got married, a Scottish woman. No kids. They breed dogs, them Rhodesian ridgebacks.’
‘Did he tell you all that?’
‘His mam. I think she wanted me to know he weren’t queer any more.’
‘Right,’ she said. ‘A likely story.’
He gave a small laugh. ‘Aye.’
‘Don’t you have anyone, Peter?’
He shook his head, set his mouth in a hard line. She thought about the burdens of his life, the sacrifices he’d made, the fleeting, stolen happiness he’d found with Dave Todd at the back of the Gaumont. His had been a life cauterised by bigotry, ignorance and shame. She’d be forever indebted to Peter, but each time she tried to express this, to thank him, to heap gratitude upon him, he shut her down. All he’d ever wanted was an ordinary life, he said, and to be left alone.
‘That’s not much of an ambition.’
‘Aye, well.’ He shifted his gaze from the flowers, to his feet.
‘Don’t expect me to leave you alone,’ she said, ‘not again, never again, not likely.’ She leaned in and planted a kiss on his cheek, which made him smile. Once upon a time, when she was very young, she’d thought him as handsome and lucky as a prince, tall and fair, funny and brave-hearted. Now he seemed a kind of self-made ruin of a man: his solitary life, his unresolved shame. But still, there was a seam of contentment running through him. She made a silent pledge to help make him as happy as he wished to be, for evermore. ‘You’re stuck with me,’ she said.
They were very happy right now, side by side on a bench in the park, and they stayed there for a long time. He loved listening to her talk about Adelaide, describing her house, her road, the ocean, the parklands. He had no idea she’d written a bestselling book, no idea at all. This pleased her, although she didn’t quite know why. He said he’d read it, if she gave one to him, but he hadn’t read a novel since Stig of the Dump. Ali found this hilarious, and her amusement caught on, so that soon they were both rocking with laughter, defying the miserable ghosts of their past to bring them down.
‘I could live in Sheffield,’ Alison said to Dan. ‘Part of the year, anyway.’ It was Monday evening, a week after they’d arrived. He’d brought her to a backstreet dive with an Irish landlord for Guinness and a packet of Walkers cheese and onion. McCulloch sat at her feet, and she reached down to scratch the top of his head. ‘We could buy a house by the botanical gardens maybe,’ she said.
Dan grimaced. ‘God, Sunday lunch with Mum and Dad, and burnt sausage barbecues with Claire and Marcus.’
‘But I really think I could write here. I could write a book set in Sheffield, about Sheffield people.’
‘It’s still a novelty to you, that’s all.’ If he’d wanted to live in Sheffield, he’d be living here already. He loved his folks, but he loved them most when they were at a distance.
‘You could go and watch the Owls.’ She liked saying ‘the Owls’; it amused her. Crows in Adelaide, Owls in Sheffield.
‘That’s not much incentive, these days.’
‘I could come with you, sing the songs, learn the offside rule.’
‘Oh yeah, that’s true,’ he said. ‘That might work.’ He smiled at her across the table, loving the sight of her smiling at him. He’d live anywhere with this woman, that was the truth of it. ‘But still, if we’re going to live in Sheffield, it won’t be without a fight from me first.’
She folded her arms, pondered for a while, then said, ‘I’ll need to go back to Adelaide soon. Face the music, come to some arrangement with Michael.’
‘I’ll come with you when you go.’ No way was he letting McCormack back in. He’d fight to the death if he had to.
‘I need to see Tahnee and her crew, too, catch her between gigs somewhere.’
He nodded. He knew all about the prodigious talent that was Tahnee Jackson. ‘I’ll come with you when you do that too,’ he said. ‘Wherever you go, there I’ll be.’
‘Fine by me,’ she said.
‘We should take Peter along,’ Dan said. ‘Mind you, he’d need a passport first. And he’d have to be drugged and blindfolded.’
Ali laughed. ‘I wonder if he could be coaxed on to the aeroplane though? I’d love to show him Adelaide.’ It would transform his existence, she thought: jacaranda season, evenings on the beach, the sun warming his bones.
She drained her half of Guinness and thought about how sometimes – and right now – anything and everything seemed possible and happiness buzzed through her like electricity down a wire, then other times her certainties seemed riddled with fault lines. She’d fixed herself up with a new phone, a very necessary move, but the floodgates were open once again to emails, phone calls, texts, and there were days Ali wished she could just fling it into the River Don. Meanwhile Dan’s phone rang nine or ten times a day, and it was usually Katelin, and he was always calm and steady when he spoke to her, whatever she accused him of, however much she raged. He knew he was at fault here; he knew he couldn’t say, as Alison could to Michael, that in the end Katelin had made him unhappy. It was just he belonged with Alison, and always had.
Dan went to the bar for two more, and while he was gone, Ali’s phone chimed with an incoming email, which she opened, then wished she hadn’t. Michael, writing to her from the future. It was tomorrow morning in Adelaide, but still pre-dawn, only 3.12 a.m. – a telling fact, which wasn’t lost on her.
Sleeping beside you these past few months, I had no idea how far from me you really were, so by the time you decided to leave, I had no hope at all of reaching you. I know you believe I lack imagination, and perhaps I do, imagination is rarely required in my world. But my feelings for you are as deep as they are true, and I hope you’ll look closely into your own heart, and then, if you need to, look closer still, and finally know that what you want, and what you need, is what you already had.
Dan had been gone for less than five minutes, but when he came back with their drinks her face was white with distress. ‘What?’ he said. She pushed her phone across to him, and he read Michael’s words, then looked up at her. She waited for him to speak; she counted on his conviction.
‘Yeah,’ Dan said slowly. ‘I know this is tough to read, and he’s really suffering, but look, it’s early days, and everything’s so raw. The extraordinary will eventually become blessedly ordinary, and this storm will blow itself out.’
She nodded. She could cling to those words; his certainty could keep her afloat. But her breath had caught in her throat as she’d read Michael’s message, and she shuddered to think of him, in the small hours of the new day, unable to set his broken world back to rights. He’d written many emails to her since she left but he’d never before expressed his feelings so effectively, although their conversations in the days before she’d left Adelaide had been the most honest and open they’d ever had. He’d wanted to know why, if she’d been so unhappy, she’d waited this long to leave. Because, she said, it was possible to get addicted to a certain kind of sadness. Then he’d said all she was doing by leaving him for Dan Lawrence was exchanging one prop for another, and she hadn’t been able to refute this, except to say Dan had given her back a side of herself she’d long ago forgotten, and anyway, she’d said, wasn’t it true that Michael’s own feelings towards her were altered these days, and born of habit, not emotion? He’d been angry at this, had said she was entitled to decide she didn’t love him, but she didn’t get to decide he didn’t love her. That was just before she left the house, when he told her she didn’t know the meaning of love, and slammed the door, and this memory, she knew, would remain like a bad seed, planted deep in her mind.
She did know the meaning of love, she thought now. She did.
And yet, hadn’t her heart had a bad start? Certainly, Catherine hadn’t known what love meant, and doesn’t a child, on some fundamental level, observe the mother for the blueprint?
So.
Dan was watching her, seeing all the shadows of these thoughts pass over her face, and he knew he had strength for them both, and that he’d need it. She looked at him and said, ‘It’s just, every time I feel totally happy, I remember that soon there’ll be a phone call, a text, whatever, to remind me of the price we’re paying to be together.’
‘Alison,’ he said. ‘There are going to be more emails from Michael, and more phone calls from Katelin, more demands, more explanations, more apologies, more tears. But there’s nothing we can’t deal with, and we’ll find a path through, and love each other, and show our families the way.’
Then the door of the pub swung open, and a blast of cold air made them both look round. An elderly man walked in, short and stocky, bald, with coarse, florid features, and Dan said, ‘Oh shit,’ just as the man said, ‘Ey, Dan Lawrence, I thought you must be dead.’
‘Who’s that?’ Alison whispered.
Dan was standing up now, and he said, ‘Oh, just some geezer who knew somebody who knew Joe Cocker. He got me an interview once, and thinks we’re colleagues now. I’d better have a word, but I’ll spare you the experience. I’ll be right back, OK?’ She nodded. He paused and looked at her, and said, ‘Keep the faith, right?’ as if she might change her mind while his back was turned, then he walked over to where the newcomer stood at the bar, and she could see Dan buying him a drink and giving him the time of day, and from time to time glancing back at Ali, to gauge her state of mind, interpret her expression.
He met her eyes each time he looked, because she kept her steady gaze on him. Oh, she didn’t want to cause him a moment’s concern! She didn’t want him to have to question her belief, not even for a fraction of a second. This was her overriding thought, among all the thoughts she had coursing through her mind: she wanted Daniel to be completely sure of her, to know with cast-iron certainty that he would never, ever again look round and find her gone. She picked up her phone from the table and quickly found a song for him, because that’s how their love had first found a voice, and she needed to affirm it now with something beautiful and peerless, soulful and serious; something to articulate this extraordinary welter of emotions, and her faith in him, and her own resolve.
She watched as he felt the buzz of his phone in the pocket of his jeans, watched him pull it out and take a look, and then – as if he was alone at the bar, not with a friend of a friend of Joe Cocker’s – watched him click on the link to hear Dusty Springfield, ‘I Close My Eyes’: mellow, intimate, perfectly judged. He turned to her, and for a moment they just held each other’s eyes across the room. Then he made some hasty excuse, and walked back to her with Dusty still singing, and when he reached Alison, he stooped to kiss her. ‘Thank you,’ he said.
She looked up at him looking down at her. ‘You know, you’re everything to me, Daniel,’ she said. ‘Everything.’
‘Good,’ he said, and grinned at her grave expression. ‘Good, because you’re everything to me, too.’
No one should turn their back on happiness such as this, she thought. ‘This is our time, Alison,’ Dan said. ‘We’ll just roll with it, right?’
‘Right,’ she said. ‘But look, you might have to keep telling me it’s all going to work out, because, for a while, I might have to keep asking.’
The pub was busy, the tables all around them occupied, and although people stared when he pulled her up from her seat into his arms, Daniel and Alison were oblivious, alone together in the crowd. ‘Hey,’ he said, tilting her face up to his so she could see he meant it. ‘Listen to me, Alison Connor. Every little thing … gonna be all right.’
She laughed. ‘I know what you did there.’
‘I know you know. I’ll never fox you with a lyric, you’re weird like that.’
Then she sat down again, he did too, next to her this time, and close enough that she felt the solid warmth of his body through the sleeve of her shirt. She finished her drink and then scanned the room for a while, taking a snapshot in her mind of this ordinary, over-lit, backstreet pub; all the men and women it contained, the motley collection of drinkers and talkers and thinkers. And some of them stared back into her frank and open gaze, one or two of them even smiled; but all of them, she thought, whether they knew it or not, were witness to her happiness. When she turned at last to Dan, she found he was already looking at her.
‘You OK?’ he asked.
She smiled. ‘Never better.’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘You know what? That’s music to my ears.’