The Race (26 page)

In his final year he met Janet Baxter. They almost got engaged then. Instead they had a massive row about one of Janet’s ex-boyfriends and split up three weeks before finals. Alex felt crushed by the break-up, which as it turned out wasn’t the end. He and Janet met again, at someone’s wedding, three years later. Six months after that they were married themselves.

He had met Linda on the rebound from that first cataclysmic break-up with Janet. Linda was beautiful and talented. Unlike many beautiful and talented people she was also kind. Alex had no idea what she saw in him. For a while he was as happy as a pig in shit, but then the trouble started. He wanted to leave town and she didn’t, they split. Three months later they were back together again but if Alex were honest with himself he knew it was doomed, even then, because their problems hadn’t changed or gone away. Also, he had no idea Linda had been involved with someone else in the interim, mainly because she never said a word to him about Derek Peller until it became impossible not to.

When Alex finally found out he was mad as fuck. Mainly because he hadn’t suspected, not for a moment. It took him a couple of weeks to work out that Linda was scared of Derek Peller and even when he did realise he felt pretty smug about it. He hoped the fear might go some way towards making Linda realise what a gigantic wanker Peller was. He didn’t take it that seriously though, not until Peller knocked him down in the street outside The Tower.

He remembered coming out of the pub with Linda. They’d been arguing a bit – about Peller, what else – then Linda started crying and Alex suddenly saw himself for the moron he was.

He was a coward and a bully. He was as bad as Derek Peller, if not worse.

“I don’t give a shit about that arsehole,” he said suddenly. “All I care about is you and me.”

He put his arm around Linda’s shoulders and she leaned in close. They started walking back down the road towards Linda’s flat. Alex felt a peculiar lightness overtaking him, the sense that so long as he and Linda stuck together everything would come out all right. Derek Peller seemed to hit him out of nowhere. Alex realised he still hadn’t worked it out even to this day, the exact direction Peller had come from. He remembered thinking: he’s going to kill me. He could hear Linda screaming – Derek,
Derek
– as if it were just the two of them in the street and he, Alexander Adeyemi, was nowhere at all.

The night smelled fresh and dark, like soil after rain.

He spent that night at Linda’s place. He didn’t remember much about it, just Linda cleaning the cuts on his face with Dettol and dosing him with paracetamol.

The following day he called in sick at Gateways. His whole body felt sore and aching, but it wasn’t just that. He felt nervous of going outside, though he would never have admitted that to anybody and least of all to Linda.

Linda went to work as usual. She called him at lunchtime to check he was okay and then again at four o’clock to tell him her classes had overrun and she would be late. When she still wasn’t home by six Alex tried calling the dance school but the switchboard was closed. As he listened to the voice of the answer phone inviting him to leave a message, the thought started circling in his head that Linda was with Peller, that she’d decided to get back with him after all, that the two of them were holed up together in The Tower having a good old laugh about him.

He felt sick of her, sick of them both. He gathered his things and left, slamming the door behind him on his way out. He headed for the Railway Arms, a dive of a place just up from Warrior Square. He normally avoided that kind of pub like the plague, but he told himself it was a free country, he would drink where he damn well chose. Two guys with tattoos glared at him ominously as he went in but the cuts on his face and the look in his eyes must have made them reconsider their options.

He sat in the darkest corner of the pub, angrily downing his beer and turning the pages of a
Daily Express
someone had left behind and wondering how the hell he had ended up there.

What are you doing with your life, Alex?
His mother’s voice.

He was damned if he was going to call Linda, but of course it was the first thing he did when he got in.

The phone in her flat just rang and rang. There was no reply.

~*~

He resigned the tenancy on the Devonshire Place bedsit then took all the remaining money out of his bank account and booked himself on a flight to Freetown, Sierra Leone, convinced he was going to be the next John Reed. Alex had recently seen Warren Beatty’s film
Reds
, and Reed was his hero.

He didn’t see Linda again for many years.

~*~

“You’re Alex,” Christy said.

She was small and dark, with the narrow wrists and skinny arms that reminded him, out of the blue, of a woman he had spoken to in Freetown whose husband had been mortally injured by the rebel forces. The woman had seemed both frightened and defiant, and Christy Peller seemed a little bit the same, Alex thought, her face familiar to him through its wary expression. It was the face of someone living under siege from their private fears.

Her hair hung loose to her shoulders. The ends curled up slightly and she was beginning to go grey. She was wearing blue jeans with a blue-and-grey plaid shirt tucked into the waistband.

“Come through and I’ll make some coffee,” she said. “Lunch will be ready in about an hour.”

The house on the inside was box-shaped, the hallway surfaced with red-and-black quarry tiles. A panelled-in staircase led off it immediately to the right of the front door. There was a row of brass coat hooks, faded sage-coloured wallpaper stencilled with a William Morris pattern. The effect was subdued but calming. Christy showed him through to the room at the back, a cramped-looking sitting room dominated by a large green-tiled open fireplace. There were postcards on the mantelpiece, and a few framed photographs. To the right of the fireplace and immediately behind the door there stood a low, fat sofa upholstered in cocoa-coloured corduroy. Opposite the sofa was an armchair in the same fabric. Between the armchair and the sofa stood a wooden coffee table. Alex noted a large, gilt-framed mirror above the fireplace and a glass-fronted bookcase with one of its panes cracked. The walls of the room were painted cream, and a tall sash window looked out on to the garden. It was a pleasant room, Alex thought. There were just the books, the fire, the sofa, the things you need. There was no sign of a desk, or a computer, and Alex supposed that Christy Peller did her actual writing in another room.

“Please, sit down,” Christy said. “Coffee won’t be a moment. Do you take milk or sugar?”

“Neither, thank you,” Alex said. He sat down in the armchair, but once Christy was out of the room he stood up again and crossed the floor to examine the bookcase. He was expecting it to contain copies of Christy’s own books, for some reason. In fact it was filled with volumes by writers he’d heard of but never got around to reading: Alice Munro, Ingeborg Bachmann, Flannery O’Connor. John Cheever and Raymond Carver he had read, because he did them at school. He remembered reading Cheever’s story ‘The Swimmer’, thinking he was going to hate it because the book’s green-and-grey covers made Cheever seem dull. The story turned out to be riveting, magical almost, and Alex ended up reading every story in the volume. They were weird but he loved them.

“Do you like Cheever?” Christy said. She had returned to the room without him noticing. Alex turned round hurriedly, the Cheever volume still in his hands. Christy was carrying a tray with two mugs on it, faintly steaming, and a plate of custard creams.

“I haven’t read him in ages,” Alex said. “Not since school really. But I liked him then.” He replaced the book carefully on its shelf. Christy set the tray down on the coffee table.

“I think Cheever’s very special,” she said. “It’s strange to think that most of his stories are more than fifty years old now. I don’t think they’ve dated at all.”

“A teacher of mine said she thought that what Cheever’s stories most represented was the gradual decline and fall of the bourgeoisie,” Alex said. The memory came back to him clearly, Miss Foregate, in her ancient Harris Tweed skirt and horn-rimmed glasses. She had seemed ancient to them, though Alex supposed she’d probably been in her early thirties. He hadn’t thought of her in years.

“I suppose that’s true,” Christy said. “But I don’t like to think of his stories that way, it makes them sound pompous. Cheever wrote about people, not politics. He was interested in how the lives of ordinary people can become unfastened from reality. That’s how I read him, anyway.”

“I think that’s right,” Alex said, remembering how he’d felt when he first read ‘The Swimmer’. It was a terrifying story, even though nothing much happened in it apart from some guy deciding to set himself a bizarre swimming challenge. It felt odd, talking to Christy Peller about John Cheever. He didn’t know Christy at all, she was a stranger to him, and yet because of the people they had in common – Linda, and Derek, and Cheever – his intimacy with her had become curiously accelerated.

He wondered what he was doing there really, why she had summoned him.

“Are you from Hastings originally?” Christy said. Her question was innocent enough, Alex supposed, yet he knew how questions like this still made him bridle, his temper stretched thin and tight, like cling film over a jam jar. He had never become used to it, this insatiable curiosity people seemed to have about his origins. Even now, when he knew that the questions were not the same, perhaps, as they once had been, the tight-lipped, near-demands for proof of residency his parents used to have to endure on an almost-daily basis.

Mostly, people were just interested. Where was the harm in it?

The shame of it was, he would have liked to speak of Lagos more often. He would have liked to tell this woman about the life of the port, about the unmade, red-dust roads of the interior. He would have liked to describe Aunt Clo to her and Uncle Midas and his cousin, Bella, to share his memories of the carefully tended garden behind their house, to describe its sounds.

He was able to talk about these things with his parents of course, but it was surprising, Alex reflected, how rarely he did so.

“Yes I am, I was born here,” Alex said. “I’m based in London now though, I haven’t lived in Hastings since my early twenties.”

Something passed across Christy’s face then, a faint shadow. His Aunt Clo would have said
she has an inkling
, but Alex had never believed in inklings, or astrology, or any of that stuff, even though Aunt Clo once told him he had a talent for it. When he told his mother what Clo had said, Marielle Adeyemi had scoffed.

“She’s a little bit crazy, my sister,” she said. “Take no notice.”

And it was true that Clo had always put her trust in the spirit world even more than she had lately come to rely on the internet.
With the spirits you don’t get no power cut
, she insisted.
You ever heard of broken satellites in the after-world?

Alex tried to ignore the feeling he had, that Christy Peller was about to reveal a secret to him, something important that would reshape the landscape of his life.

“I’ve been reading your articles online,” Christy said. “I really liked the Dale Farm piece, and the piece about the football hooligans. You’re a very good writer.”

“Thank you,” Alex said. “I’m glad you enjoyed them.” Christy Peller was holding her coffee cup in both hands, clasping it by the base as if she was using it for support. She looked pale and nervous, almost as if she were afraid of him, or of something he was about to say to her, but how could that be? It was she who had invited him here, not the other way around.

He remembered what Linda had said about Christy, that she seemed scared of her own shadow.

“She barely said a word to me for ages,” Linda said. “She’s a bit strange.”

“That’s hardly surprising though, is it, when you think who her brother is,” Alex had retorted. “She’s scared stiff of him, I bet.”

At the time he’d spoken out of pure contrariness – he wanted to see Derek Peller as the villain of the piece across all categories. Now he wondered if he’d been right after all. If he’d had an inkling. Linda in any case couldn’t have had much in common with Christy, they were such different people. Alex remembered a particular afternoon, when he clocked off early from the supermarket and walked across town to meet Linda at the dance studio. She was teaching a class of girls, visiting from Eastbourne or Bexhill or somewhere, not trained dancers, just ordinary schoolkids in their PE kits. He remembered Linda in her leotard and leggings, showing one of them how to position her foot beside the barre. The girl was overweight, and it was clear she felt exposed in her boxy green shorts and aertex shirt but Linda spoke to her gently and with a smile, placing her own foot beside the girl’s in its chubby-soled gym shoe. He remembered the way the fat girl smiled as she suddenly grasped the essence of what Linda was showing her, beautiful for a moment as she forgot how uncomfortable she was normally made to feel with the sight of her own body.

He sensed that Christy felt the same discomfort, but for different reasons.

“I wanted to ask you about Linda,” Christy said suddenly. Her voice was unsteady, and Alex realised that this was it, that the mystery surrounding his visit was about to be solved. “You went out with her, didn’t you? Linda told me about you.”

“We were together for about six months, and then we split up,” Alex said. “You do know that Linda was seeing your brother Derek?”

“Yes, of course.” Christy set her coffee mug back down on the tray, and Alex noticed with a shock that her hands were shaking. “I thought of Linda every day, for years,” she said. “I still think about her now. I wonder how her life would have been if she’d never met my brother, where she’d be living and what she’d be doing. Linda was so gifted. I liked her a lot.”

Was?
Alex thought.
Liked?
He felt an odd little shiver go through him, coursing up through his feet and into his fingertips like the shock waves from a minor earthquake. That’s what it’s like when the world rearranges itself, he thought. That’s what it’s like.