No reply comes. I wait and wait, repeatedly checking my phone, simultaneously freaking out at being back in contact with Shane, yet desperately wanting him to reply. Did my message sound curt? Oh God, it did. Who does she think she is with her ‘up in the air’ plans!
I re-read the whole thread, picking over it forensically. In just one evening I seem to have regressed to being that deranged teenager who once loved him madly. But then, I loved lots of things back then. Pints of snakebite! Spudulike! Fluorescent hair colour from an aerosol can! It doesn’t mean I want them now.
Curt is fine, I decide. At least, it’s preferable to best golden love. And maybe Shane has forgotten everything that happened between us. After all, it was a lifetime ago. It’s not that I’m wishing cognitive decline on him, but I very much hope he remembers nothing before 1988.
4
ELEVEN DAYS LATER: A CELEBRATION FOR RAVI
Shane
As his train pulls into the station, Shane is already telling himself to just get through this. It’ll all be over soon enough, and first thing tomorrow he’ll be heading home, satisfied that at least he did the right thing. He’ll have shown his face. Never mind the weirdness of seeing Josie after all these years. This is about Ravi and her family and nothing else matters.
As Shane crosses town he makes a conscious effort to unclench his jaw. His earbuds are plugged in, all the better for insulating him from the surrounding sights and sounds. It’s been two years since he’s been back in his home town, and normally he wouldn’t venture into its beleaguered centre at all. He would actively avoid it. Instead, he’d drive up from London and drop in on his mum. Then – duty done – he’d head straight back home at the first opportunity. However, Fletch – his partner in their musical instrument shop – needed his car to pick up a consignment of guitars for sale in Cornwall. Figuring that a train journey would give him the chance to get his head together, Shane was happy with that.
As he plods along the main shopping street, he notices that the much-loved café where he’d hung out with Josie and Ravi is all boarded up. The signage now reads Mary’s Milk Ba, the final ‘r’ seemingly long gone. But he shakes off the rush of nostalgia because things change, don’t they? Life moves on and that’s fine! He regrets losing touch with Ravi after the band – and everything else, really – had imploded. But that’s what happened back then. No mobile phones, no social media; once you moved away, the thread was broken, friendships pretty much lost.
Shane cranks up his music to push away feelings of shame and regret. Shane loves music. It’s his life, really – apart from his family, obviously: the kids he and Paula never thought they’d be able to have. It had taken several rounds of IVF. Now Ryan and Liv, sixteen and eighteen respectively, are spending the May bank holiday in Copenhagen with their mother and her partner, Tony Rich. Among Shane and his friends, he is referred to as Rich Tony, which was funny up to the point at which Shane realised that his equivalent would be Poor Shane. Or at least, Keeping-Things-Hanging-By-A-Thread Shane. ‘We’re keeping on keeping on,’ Fletch always says with a shrug. And they are, Shane supposes. Their shop, tucked away down an alley in an unnoteworthy area of south London is, against all odds, just about staying afloat.
In contrast, Rich Tony is listed on LinkedIn as both a ‘Mindset Engineer’ and a ‘Success Architect’. Although Shane has deduced that this is nothing to do with engineering and architecture as he understands them, he cannot begin to fathom what these terms actually mean. However, when he was woken at 2.47 a.m. by his housemate Elaine tumbling in, banging cupboard doors and setting about frying up a feast in his kitchen, he wondered briefly how a mindset engineer might have dealt with that.
Shane once asked his daughter what Tony actually does. ‘I think he’s like a motivational coach,’ she explained, with a note of uncertainty. Shane suspects that he should be motivationally coaching Elaine not to start frying onions at all hours, filling his flat with acrid fumes and incinerating his pans. Still, he holds himself accountable for the awkward situation he’s found himself in.
During a particularly tricky patch, Shane had taken on some evening shifts at a local pub where he and Elaine – a fellow bartender in her mid-forties – had formed a larky friendship. Among the sea of smooth-faced Gen Zs, he’d found it refreshing to work alongside someone who didn’t make him feel quite so ancient, and who’d been around the block a bit. Long after he’d ditched the pub job, they’d run into each other in a supermarket. ‘I’m being evicted,’ Elaine lamented, ‘just for complaining about mould in the bedroom!’ Well, Shane had a spare room, didn’t he? It had twin beds, set up for Ryan and Liv, but they never stayed over any more.
He’d imagined it would be a temporary arrangement until she got back on her feet. It’s been six months now – Elaine’s room and a good proportion of his hallway are crammed with boxes of her stuff – and he’s at a loss as to how to suggest she move on. Or at least switch to an alternative method of cooking. Surely, he keeps telling himself, she’ll tire of the single bed and lack of space pretty soon? And him! Why isn’t she sick of him? Long divorced and apparently happily single, Elaine seems to have an extremely active social life. Surely this involves friends? Friends who’d be delighted to have her move in with them? Shane has been tempted to hack into her phone in its fluffy orange case and contact some of them himself. Even set up some flat viewings, if that would speed things up. He has a car – a shabby old Volvo, acquired for its capricious boot space – and would happily move her stuff. Anything to help!
Now Shane is frowning at his phone, having resorted to the maps app to locate his hotel. His mum and stepdad still live on the sprawling council estate on the edge of town, in the same house he grew up in. This time he hasn’t told them he’s here. His last visit was just as awful as all the others – and didn’t someone once say that the definition of insanity is to repeat a terrible experience over and over, and expect a different result? Einstein, he thinks it was. And Shane has no desire to do that – to make this short trip even more of a headfuck than it is already. Keep it simple, he’d decided.
He stops again and checks his phone for messages. Nothing more from Josie. Not that he was expecting updates on her journey progress, but he can’t help wondering if she’s arrived yet, if she’s close by.
He goes back to the map. It seems bizarre, having to follow directions in the town in which he lived for the first twenty-one years of his life. Every corner, every bench and bit of wall to sit on was once as familiar to him as his own hands. But the intervening years – and life – have faded the mental images, and also things have changed a lot around here.
The mill, he notices with a wave of some feeling he can’t quite identify, is all spruced up, its crumbling facade rebuilt. It’s now a Synergy Complex, whatever that is. The park, which he crosses briskly, is tidier than he remembers: the broken fountain replaced by a stark black windowless ‘information hub’. Shane remembers him and Josie and Ravi lying out here one long, hot summer’s afternoon. He’d been stupid, and declared that he didn’t need sunscreen, that he never burnt in the sun. What followed sizzles brightly in his mind now, and he quickly shuts it down. How can these memories be so vivid when so much has happened since then? (Marriage, fatherhood and divorce, for starters.) He shakes them off, impatient with himself for even allowing them into his brain.
Out the other side of the park, Shane passes the stout stone building that used to be The Regal Hotel. There was nothing regal about The Regal. Its cellar club, with its red glossy walls permanently wet, as if sweating, was how Shane imagined the interior of a large intestine. Rank and smelly, yet also fantastic – a universe away from home.
It was amazing that their ramshackle band had managed to get any bookings at all. Musically, they were all over the place: an indie trio with a dash of Bananarama flung in. The girls backcombed their hair into wild thickets, wore a mishmash of charity shop clothes and bellowed out their vocals, roughly in unison. At least, no attempts at harmonies were made. As the drummer, Shane tried in vain to keep them in time. Sometimes he’d attempt to call order, like a teacher trying to control a rowdy class on a school trip to Blackpool. They’d just laugh him off, or Ravi would scoff, ‘Shut up, Dad!’ She was ambitious for the band, in a way that he and Josie weren’t really. To Ravi it was all about energy, but to Shane it often felt as if their shaky performance was one note away from falling apart. Yet somehow, people liked them. Remembering it all now causes something like an ache in Shane’s chest.
The Regal has shut down and the ground floor is now a solicitor’s office: BEST CRIMINAL DEFENCE IN TOWN! NO WIN NO FEE! a sign screams. Just as well, Shane reflects, or he might have been tempted to nip in for a nerve-steadying pint.
He rounds the corner and spots his hotel looming in the distance. It’s hardly salubrious – a gloomy grey concrete cube tucked behind a frozen foods cash & carry. Yet he’s relieved to check in and let himself into his small, plainly furnished room, as it’s one step towards all of this being over.
A single teabag and milk sachet have been placed thoughtfully next to the kettle. A packet of two digestives bears an illustration of a grinning old lady with her hair in a bun: presumably Nana Pickles of Nana Pickles’s Yorkshire Biscuits. Shane pulls off his backpack, tugs out his phone from his jeans pocket and perches on the edge of the bed. Without even thinking, he’s navigated to Liv’s Instagram. He studies the photo of his daughter and son and their mother, all positioned around a table laden with platters of miniature open sandwiches, excessively garnished with brightly coloured dots and squiggles – like a picnic for Playmobil figurines.
Shane’s heart twangs. Why is he even looking at this? Irritably, he tosses his phone aside.
In the shower, he sluices himself down with blue gel from the big plastic dispenser that’s bolted to the wall. Although he already showered first thing, he wants to ensure that no lingering whiff of fried onion from Elaine’s cooking has followed him all the way up from London. He worries about this sometimes: that he carries it with him to the shop, the swimming pool, and on those occasional nights out with his mates.
Plus, he is trying to blast off any residual bitterness he’s harbouring towards Rich Tony. It’s not that he dislikes the man (actually, no – all cordiality aside, he does!). And of course he’s happy to see Ryan and Liv having a brilliant time. Paula too. He holds no resentment towards her. It’s just a little tricky to accept that this is their life now – a life of lavish trips and holidays – as it’s one that he was never able to offer his family.
As he pulls on clean black chinos and a smart shirt, Shane tries to mentally prepare himself for seeing Josie again. All day he’s tried not to think about her, and how it will be to be flung back together again for the first time since—well, he doesn’t even want to go there. Not today. Giving his appearance a final check, he spots that eyebrow hair: the freak one that shoots out, over a centimetre longer than all the others. This has been happening sporadically for the last couple of years. He tugs at it ineffectually until, in the absence of a pair of scissors, the only option is to hack at it with his disposable razor.
Calm down, he tells himself as he sets off on foot to the Kapoors’. How did Josie sign off that first message again? Best golden love. Sounds like she’s a yoga/meditation type these days. Chia puddings and green juices, like Liv is into. It’s obviously suiting Josie very well.
Over the years, he’s had the occasional glance at her Instagram, to see what she’s up to – the way you do with friends from your distant past. Just casually, out of curiosity, nothing more than that. He’s seen the handsome, tousle-haired partner who seems to wear a vest in all seasons, all the better for displaying his enviably toned physique. Then there’s the grown-up daughter, blonde and looking quite sophisticated – the way young people seem to be these days. As if they were born more groomed, more together and conscious of their microbiomes and protein intake. Josie’s daughter has a baby, Shane discovered. So Josie is a grandmother. It hardly seems possible.
Maybe, he muses, that’s why she looks so relaxed and happy and, he has to say, beautifully radiant in the photos he’s seen. But then, to Shane, Josie always radiated joy. She was always laughing and messing about. Clearly, she is enjoying a full and vibrant life, and he’s certain that she won’t be in a stew about this event today, like he is.
