Never Go There Read online

  ‘Whatever happened between you, whatever you said to each other, I’m sure he would have forgiven you in time.’ She looked up.

  Lois turned back from the window, her lips tight. ‘Is that what you think? We had some measly argument? That I was waiting for his forgiveness?’ She gripped the windowsill with one hand, the other pointing at Nuala, spittle spraying at every word.

  ‘Don’t you force your presumptions onto me, Nuala. I wasn’t waiting for his forgiveness.’ Lois looked back to the window, to the road, to the drip of pedestrians, to the sad grey sky. ‘I was waiting for him to come home. They all think I did a terrible thing, that I told lies and kept secrets to keep him away from her, but they never tried to understand. They never knew what it cost me, sending my only son away.’

  Her fire was gone. She returned to her chair and sat, slumped and still.

  ‘Tell me this, though,’ she said, ‘was he happy?’

  ‘Yes!’ Nuala said, and tried to believe it. ‘We were happy.’ She tried to ignore the words Lois had said earlier, the horrible possibility that James had lied to her, for so long.

  Lois closed her eyes. ‘James cried when he left, did he tell you that? He cried like an infant because he was scared. I had to be cruel, I had to stop him crying. I had to send him away from me, away from her.’

  Nuala winced at Lois’s final word. ‘I let him cry,’ she said. ‘If he needed to cry, I let him.’

  Lois just sneered. ‘And that’s probably why he never amounted to anything. A gardener, what a waste.’

  ‘A groundsman, actually.’

  ‘I always thought he’d make a good businessman,’ Lois said, ‘like his father.’

  ‘I thought his father was a mechanic.’

  ‘And I thought he never told you anything.’ Lois’s lip curled sadistically. ‘He would have come back eventually of course.’

  ‘I’m sure he would have.’ Nuala placed both feet squarely on the floor, readying herself to stand, to leave.

  ‘You don’t understand. He would have come back, but not for me.’

  Nuala thought of the letters, always the letters, the brief notes of longing she had hoped were sent by his mother.

  ‘Please, don’t,’ she said though she knew her objections were useless. She didn’t want to know who they were from, who had been writing to James for years, who had been begging him to return.

  ‘Oh no, I’ll go on. It’s my turn now, Nuala.’ Smiling, Lois leant forward, elbows on her knees. ‘He would always have come back for her eventually, married or not.’

  Nuala stood, brushed herself down, held her head high, chin up.

  She needed air, fresh air free from the sourness of embittered grief, from the spite that was filling the room. But her way was barred. Lois shot past and stood at the door, one arm blocking the way and the other gripping Nuala’s shoulder, her nails clawing through the fabric.

  ‘You think you can be the only one to devastate? That you have all the bad news? You held on to this for months and didn’t tell me! You think you can burn him without me, mourn him without me, and not pay for that?’

  Nuala tried to wrestle Lois off, but her grip was too strong.

  ‘You were nothing to him, understand? You didn’t know him, not like I did. You couldn’t have loved him, not without truly knowing him. I loved him!’ Lois’s eyes were terrifying, her stare boring straight into Nuala, her face so close that Nuala’s cheeks were dewy from her breath. ‘But there was someone else, someone he kept secret from you, but I’ve known about her for years! I was there when he left, I know why he left, I knew who he was leaving behind him!’

  Nuala turned her head from Lois’s open mouth, the rank bitterness making her want to retch. She had to escape. She nodded.

  ‘So you do know something, then?’ Lois persisted.

  ‘There were letters.’ Her shoulders sagged beneath Lois’s grip.

  Lois was still so close, her face only inches away. She could feel the air around her ebb and flow with the tide of the woman’s lungs.

  ‘There were letters.’ She stepped back and her arms returned to their familiar pose, one resting on the elbow of the other, her hand tapping at her chest. ‘I can tell you who sent them.’ She looked Nuala up and down again. ‘I can tell you her name.’ Tap, tap, tap.

  ‘I don’t want to know,’ Nuala managed to speak, though her lungs ached for a breath she couldn’t pull. She sidestepped Lois and ran into the hallway. The front door was within reach, but she could feel Lois at her heels.

  ‘Oh, but you do.’

  Lois’s voice turned soft, caressing.

  Nuala tried to ignore her, began fumbling with the latch, but when it finally sprang open she was still trapped, the chain across the door barring her way.

  Lois reached out and slammed the door closed, resting her weight against Nuala, her chest against Nuala’s back, her mouth by her ear.

  Nuala shrugged herself free, wrestled the chain loose, the metal cold and slippery beneath her fingers. Lois stayed behind her, still close but not touching, her hand tapping her chest.

  ‘You’ve met her already, Nuala.’

  Tap, tap, tap.

  ‘Her name is Emma.’

  Tap, tap, tap.

  ‘Emma Bradbury.’

  The name, like a bullet, shot through Nuala. She heard Emma’s voice inside her head before picturing her face. She could feel the blood drain from her cheeks, her legs sway. Seven years ago, Emma couldn’t have been more than fourteen, James nineteen. Surely he wouldn’t have touched a child?

  Nuala had come here for closure, for comfort, for the warm arms of James’s mother wrapped around her. To find that those letters weren’t maternal but romantic, to find out her husband, the father of her poor baby, had lied to her, kept them hidden, was too much.

  The door opened and Nuala stumbled through, gasping for breath, smelling the dung from the surrounding fields.

  A gunshot rang out from a crow scarer, the sky darkening with black birds as they fled from the closest field, the sound of the shot, the flap of the wings, pounding through Nuala’s skull.

  And still, Lois wasn’t finished. She waited until Nuala had reached the gate, had fumbled with the lock on her car, waited until she was just about to enter the safety of her own space.

  ‘James got her pregnant, Nuala. Did he tell you that?’

  Emma

  Saturday, 18th November, 2017

  Maggie had ordered her upstairs to rest, but she went to the bathroom first, washed the bleach away, rubbed moisturiser into the cracks on her wrists, avoided the inflamed skin on her knuckles.

  ‘Jesus, look at your hands!’ Maggie had cried when she got back from the graveyard, holding her hands up to the light. ‘You have to dilute it, Em!’

  Maggie had overreacted, Emma thought, and the way the old woman kept looking around her, furrowing her brow and stroking the scar on her cheek, made Emma think she had something else on her mind.

  ‘I’ve been cleaning, that’s all.’ And she had been, all morning, her mind so preoccupied with James, by the memory of her fourteen-year-old self, of the very last things James had told her, that she hadn’t felt her skin start to wrinkle, fingers throb, as the bleach worked its way up her hands. For the first time in seven years she had called herself an idiot, immediately hating herself for it.

  ‘With neat bleach? Did you even use a cloth? It looks like you’ve been scooping it up bare handed!’

  And then Maggie noticed the gap in the photographs was still there, that James’s picture was still in Emma’s pocket. And though she tried to change Maggie’s mind, none of her arguments, her reassurances, removed the pity from her godmother’s eyes.

  ‘Upstairs,’ Maggie said, rubbing the base of Emma’s back, kissing her forehead, ‘get some rest.’ As if the memories were a hangover she could sleep off.

  Emma still thought of James, not every day but often enough. Of the last time she saw his face, and the last words he had said to her.<
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  Even her bedroom reminded her of him, of who she had been with him. Maybe it would have been different if Toby had stayed over last night, left his scent on her bedsheets and clothes, but he hadn’t. And she didn’t want him to, she reminded herself.

  It was an adolescent’s bedroom designed for a different girl: single divan bed (bedspread faded yellow, base of the bed marked with black and grey spores) small desk and plastic school chair (for what? She’d always wondered. University papers she’d never have the chance, or the funding, to write?), mould-spotted pink curtains. It had been the spare room before it was opened up for the not-quite-grown-up Emma, though why she wasn’t given Lee’s old room she never knew.

  It’s not as if he was ever coming back.

  Three apple cores sat on the radiator, the bedroom full of the rotting sweetness as they dried, the smell reminding her of Toby’s drunk breath as he whispered in her ear. At least it covered up the smell of damp. The wallpaper, at the base, was black with mould, the only dry patch of wall around the radiator where the apple cores lay.

  The two from this morning were still fresh and wet, but the one from yesterday evening, the husk wrinkled and matt, was just dry enough.

  She sat at her desk, the apple core in front of her, the drawer, with the half-filled jars and the blunt-edged knife, open at her side.

  Emma moved her tongue in her mouth, felt the soft, wrinkled flesh of the scabs on her lip, the light metallic taste of them, the sharp jolt through her jaw and into her nose and she scraped the scabs with her teeth. The shiver of that name beneath it all.

  James Lunglow.

  She held the knife by the handle and pulled the flesh of her lip into her mouth until blood leaked in an iron tang on her tongue, nose smarting. So, too, the scars on her belly.

  And now it wasn’t blood in her mouth but something else, a memory of a different tang, different taste, and James above her hidden by wheat shafts, her mouth full of him as his whole body shuddered.

  Her eyes continued to sting, but not from the pain of her lip. She had been such a fool, back then. Such a silly, naïve school-aged fool. To think he would stay. To think he had wanted her for anything other than her body, her mouth, her hands.

  Angry that she still thought about him, after all this time. Still hoped that she had been wrong and he would, after all, come back home. Where had her backbone dissolved to?

  She could smell him in the sweetness of the apple core, in the vague scent of the chip pan that had followed her everywhere since the fire at his old house, next door, could sense him in the blunt edged knife in her hand.

  ‘Mama!’ came a call from outside.

  Knife dropped, the apple seeds splayed, a click as their hulls hit the desk.

  Who had said that?

  And her empty hand itched to hold that child’s hand, for a small, sticky palm in her own, remembering the daydreams she used to hold on to.

  ‘Mama?’ The voice muffled by the glass and the distance between houses, a boy in a garden down the road.

  She could see him outside, not the child but his shadow, calling, ‘Mummy! Mama?’ down the street.

  How easy it would be to run outside, to lift him up and pretend he was hers, that James had left her with something she could keep, something he would come back for. To pretend that the last seven years of pain, abandonment, destruction never happened. To wash away the ghost of that chip pan fire, the speculation, the suspicion, the unofficial blame which had dogged her, with the smell of talcum powder and milk.

  An open front door and a woman’s voice calling, ‘John, I’m right here, come on in.’

  And the taste of blood returned to her mouth. Emma had been to school with that woman, had seen her waddle through her pregnancy at nineteen years old, still a teenager, heard her complain of tiredness, lack of help. Emma should never have seen all this, should have been far away (with him, yes, with him) with bumps and babes of her own, or university papers to write, a future to plan.

  The apple seeds glistened mahogany, a white stripe of soft flesh showing through. They had cracked in the fall, rendered useless.

  ‘Now, John!’ called the woman outside and Emma wanted to call back, ‘Don’t shout at him, please!’ but instead just listened to the slap-patter-pat of his little plimsolls along the garden path, imagined his creased thighs and dimpled wrists as he ran into the hug from his mother and Emma’s head fell, chin down on her chest, and she stared at the broken seed husks.

  Useless, useless.

  Couldn’t even get that right, couldn’t even get a few poxy seeds from a dried-out core without messing it all up.

  Except it wasn’t her who fucked it up this time, made her hands shake and crack the damn seeds. (‘Don’t swear,’ Elaine would have said. ‘It does you no favours.’ And the memory of her step mother made it worse.)

  It was Nuala Greene for bringing it all back, making her think of him, making the scar on her belly throb.

  Making her hope that maybe she wouldn’t need the apple seeds and lye, or the powder she’d made from the two. That maybe some kind of life was salvageable, because he was coming back for her, regardless of what he had said in the past, and she could tell him all the things she had been burning to say.

  John was laughing outside, the laugh bursting her hope, all hope.

  ‘We’ve everything we need right here, you’ve a future, a career, right here,’ Maggie had said, the one time Emma mentioned going back to school, studying. ‘No better people, no better place.’ And despite Emma’s joke of an existence Maggie believed it. And, despite herself, Emma was glad that she did. At least one of them was happy.

  Maggie could be right. It could be the best place on earth and how would Emma know? She’d never been anywhere else. And if she couldn’t make it here, she wouldn’t make it anywhere so what was the point in obsessing? If even Toby had stopped coming by, if the old men just stared at her chest and the women looked down their noses and ushered their children away, what made her think it would be any different anywhere else? She couldn’t even pluck out a few seeds without damaging them: what made her think she could do anything else? Raise a child, build a home, a relationship?

  What made her think Toby would be any different from James?

  And the apple seeds winked in the light and the jar of powder at the back looked like smoke.

  She’d had enough now, had done for weeks, so why wait?

  ‘Nuala Greene has nothing to do with James,’ Maggie had said, after the kiss to her forehead downstairs, ‘I promise you, whatever reason she’s got for coming here, it’s nothing to do with him. He’s not coming back.’ And she was right. Why would he come back for someone like Emma?

  What did she have to offer anyone?

  Why wait?

  Her hand on the jar, not of seeds but of powder, the lethal promise of nothingness held in its grains. She could dissolve it in whisky and drink it with her father, show Arthur Bradbury what she thought of him abandoning her when she was so young, leaving her to deal with Elaine’s death, with James’s flight, all alone. Leaving her with Maggie, who needed looking after herself and had been in no fit state, back then, to care for a teenage girl.

  She could visit Lois and shove some down her throat. Force the woman’s jaws open, those deceitful jaws, and pour some down her gullet. Show her what it’s like to be on the receiving end of someone else’s venom.

  Another noise below, the door creaking open. Someone else was in the bar.

  Emma’s hand stalled. Who had come in?

  She left the jar alone, cocked her head to one side.

  A smash downstairs, a plate or mug breaking.

  Something else for her to clean up.

  Her eyes moved to the floor, saw the knife she’d dropped earlier lying there, drifted to the divan and thought of what was inside: the brown holdall which had been left for her on the doorstep of the pub on that day, years ago; on the day of the funeral she was banned from attending. It contained the last
letter she had ever received from Elaine. Her eyes glossed over as she tried to focus on what she could hear from downstairs. Maggie was talking to someone, but she couldn’t make out a clear word. Couldn’t make out a single name.

  James? Were they talking about him?

  Was he here, was Maggie wrong?

  And what would James find? A woman at twenty-one with no future, a jar of oblivion in her hand, contemplating who should receive the first dose when she knew, full well, she should bloody well take it herself.

  (‘You’re still so young!’ Maggie had said, at her birthday that year, the big two-one no one else had remembered. ‘Not here, I’m not,’ she’d spat back and Maggie had looked so hurt Emma had made out she’d been joking, laughed and ate the dry cake her godmother had bought, kissed her cheek, cleaned up the crumbs and gin splashes later.)

  Wiping her eyes with the heels of her hand, she took a breath to steady herself, calm down, still aware of the muffled voices downstairs. All wasn’t over, not yet.

  Maybe James had come back.

  Maybe everything would work out, one way or another.

  She picked up the butter knife, the jar of apple seeds, the one of powder, and returned them all to the drawer, her bleach-burnt knuckles catching the writing paper at the very back: folded letters in her handwriting hidden from view, the written words desperate and begging for help. How many of those letters had she written, now? How many pages were filled with her black, crabbed writing, filled with her longing?

  She slammed the drawer shut on the whole damn lot, inched herself closer to her bedroom door. Opening it, just a crack, she tried to catch the words floating up from the bar.

  She heard Maggie, her thick West-Country tones warm, familiar.

  She heard Nuala, the regionless, well-to-do accent marking her out.