Close up, though, it was another story. The smell, that slightly musty and acrid combination of disinfectant and damp, was still exactly the same, and as Alison followed Dominic through
the impressive paneled double oak doors that marked the main entrance to the school, she was fairly certain that the interior hadn’t been redecorated in the intervening seventeen years since she had last set foot in it. The walls were still that insipid grayish green color, with patches of pink plaster showing through where paint had chipped or peeled away. Even the same framed prints lined the corridors, faded and dusty scenes from Shakespeare so grimed with dirt that Alison was sure it had been a long time since anyone had looked at them properly or even noticed they were there.
As she looked around her and breathed in, all at once Alison saw her past reflected, bouncing back at her, almost blinding her like sunlight off a mirror. Once, this place had been the center of her universe. There on the stairs she saw where she had made Cathy wait in vain with her for a whole lunch hour just to catch a glimpse of Jimmy Ashley, the hottest boy in school, who Alison had loved from afar right up until the minute she had met Marc and he had eclipsed everything.
As she walked into the main hall, where her son had already headed, no doubt hoping to disassociate himself from his stalker of a mother, she could see herself onstage, painting the scenery for the school production of
Grease
and imagining herself as Sandy and Jimmy as Danny, while Cathy scoffed at her and told her she had no idea what anybody could see in Jimmy Ashley.
Alison smiled as she remembered the end-of-term dance before the summer she met Marc. Cathy wasn’t allowed to go to the dance, or any dances since that time her mother had caught her sneaking off to the Valentine’s disco, which left Alison alone to pluck up the courage to talk to Jimmy. Finally, at the end of the evening, after sneaking several slugs of vodka into her orange juice, she had worked up the courage to ask Jimmy to dance with her. Reluctantly he had consented, holding her waist gingerly as they turned in slow circles to a song by the Cars. Alison had not
been able to take her eyes off of her feet, certain she would faint clean away if she looked in Jimmy Ashley’s eyes. How strange, she thought to herself as she watched Dominic greet a couple of other boys and a girl in a very short skirt with studied nonchalance. She had once considered those three minutes, that dance with Jimmy, as the pinnacle of her life.
Then only a few weeks later she had found out about Cathy’s secret boyfriend, and a few weeks after that she had run away with Marc without giving Jimmy Ashley or Cathy a second thought. The course of her life had changed forever.
What surprised Alison the most was that these memories, now so vivid and visceral, hadn’t crossed her mind in seventeen years. It was as if on the night she’d decided to run away from home, she’d run away from this part of her life forever, excising it from her heart and her head with the kind of bold decisiveness that only a seventeen-year-old in love can have. She had hoped that the detritus of her youth, the wreck of the life she had abandoned so wholly, all those people and the places would be long gone, rotted into the past.
The school looked as if it had been frozen in aspic. There was even someone over there talking to her son who looked exactly like Jimmy Ashley.
Alison’s heart stopped beating for the longest second and she realized. That
was
Jimmy Ashley. When it began to beat again it was racing.
Alison felt a blush extend from her ears downward and pins and needles in the tips of her fingers. She clapped her hand over her mouth to stifle a burst of hysterical laughter. She felt just as she had when he’d put his hand on her waist at the sixth form dance, dizzy and dazzled. It was the shock, Alison told herself, retreating into a shadowy corner to compose herself and regain the sixteen years that seeing him again had swept away.
She simply hadn’t expected Jimmy to be there looking almost exactly the same as he did the last time she’d seen him. On the other hand she didn’t know where else she expected him to be. He obviously hadn’t hit the big time like he’d always said he would, so perhaps teaching guitar back at his old school was the obvious location for this living, breathing relic of her youth.
He didn’t look like a relic, though. He looked good, better even than he had at eighteen. His shoulders had filled out and his bare arms were toned and muscled. His skin had cleared up and he looked relaxed, at ease with himself. His hair was still long, but it suited him. It was one of the reasons she had first fallen for him. He had been the only boy in the school brave enough to grow his hair and the only one who could carry it off. Once she had dreamt about tangling her fingers in it.
Biting her lower lip as she hovered in the shadows, Alison was taken aback by how happy she was to see Jimmy again. He still had that hint of a smile on his lips, as if at any second he might start laughing. He still wore jeans so tight that you wondered how he sat down in them without them ripping apart at the seams. Alison had been one of the most popular girls at school, with a new boyfriend every other week from the age of fourteen. Even the older boys asked her out. But not Jimmy, never Jimmy. Not the boy she really wanted. Not her son’s new guitar teacher.
Trying to shake off this ridiculous frisson of excitement that had engulfed her the moment she set eyes on him, Alison took a deep breath and determined to pull herself together. Hoping Jimmy wouldn’t notice her (and wishing she’d put some makeup on and brushed her hair before leaving the house), she edged over to the table where a register book lay open and leaflets about the club and forthcoming events were on display. She found the amount she owed for Dominic to attend for one term in a leaflet and hurriedly wrote out the check,
expecting with a breathless edge that at any moment Jimmy would tap her on the shoulder and say, “Alison Mitchell, how wonderful to see you!”
But before she could even sign the check, a sudden burst of electric rock music crackled in the air, making Alison almost jump out of her skin. Twelve or fifteen kids were standing on the stage, two playing complete drum kits, three or four (including the short-skirted girl) on microphones, and at least seven on guitar, although Alison’s limited knowledge told her that included a couple of bassists. Alison didn’t recognize what they were playing, and then she realized that was because they weren’t playing anything. Jimmy had just got them up on the stage and got them to start making music. The first minute and a half were pretty unbearable, and then suddenly a cohesive tune emerged. Alison saw Jimmy’s head go down and his shoulders rock to the rhythm, just like they used to do when he played at the school dance. And then she looked at Dominic and for the first time since they had arrived he was smiling—no, not just smiling, he was grinning from ear to ear with the pure joy of doing something he loved.
She slipped the check into the register book and then walked quickly back to the parking lot, laughing and feeling as light as air, caught up in the moment with the seventeen-year-old girl she once had been. When she got into the car, the thought of seeing Jimmy still living here sobered her.
Coming back to Farmington wasn’t going to be nearly as easy as Marc had promised her, because there were ghosts everywhere. Living, breathing ghosts.
Dominic had expressly told Alison that she was not allowed to pick him up from Rock Club, and so even when it had begun to rain, thick gray sheets of water that clattered against the windows in wave after wave, Alison sat tight and waited for him. He was
over an hour late when finally his dark and sodden figure emerged out of the storm.
“Where have you been?” Alison asked him as he peeled off his T-shirt and threw it into the laundry basket.
“I got lost,” he told her with a shrug.
“Lost? The school’s only down the road.”
“I know,” he told her. “But I wanted to have a look around and some of the kids said there was this crap skate park down by the canal that they go to sometimes. I went to have a look and I got lost.”
Alison tried to imagine her son in the canal park, the very same canal park where she had met his father. It seemed like an impossible paradox, as if time had folded back on itself, and not for the first time she got the feeling that her being back here was all wrong. As if somehow Marc was marching her back to the point where they’d met, looking for a way to change a future that was already past.
Alison shivered as she picked up the sodden T-shirt and inhaled deeply. Even in its soaking state it reeked of cigarette smoke.
“Lost with a pack of cigarettes?” she asked him.
“I wasn’t smoking, it was the kids I was with,” Dominic retorted automatically. “They’re all at it at that school. I told you it’s a real dump.”
“So you were with local kids who know the area but you got lost?” Alison persisted.
“Just leave it out, Mum, all right?” Dominic’s voice rose and Alison knew he was reacting to the look on her face, the expression she could see reflected in the glass door of the eye-level microwave oven. In the dark, smoky glass she looked sharp and aged. She looked like the kind of mother who never wanted her teenage son to have any fun, the kind of mother who only wanted to ruin everything for him, the kind of mother who was happy to rule his
life but who didn’t have the courage to take control of her own. That was who Dominic saw when he looked at her, and at that moment, that alien, hard-faced woman was who Alison was.
“You dragged me to this fucking awful place,” Dominic swore at her. “And now I’m just trying to make some mates—is that such a big deal? It’s not as if I’m dealing crack, Mother. I couldn’t score any in this place if I wanted to.”
Alison stared at him for a long moment, waiting, waiting for that woman reflected in the glass to fade away.
“I’m sorry. You’re right. I do trust you, Dom,” she told him, lowering her tone with some effort. “It’s good that you are making friends … so tell me all about your first day, then.” Alison squeezed all of the tension out of her voice in a bid to make the question sound purely conversational and not like a declaration of war.
“The same old shit,” he told her, watching carefully for her reaction to his choice of language. “Just a different fucking place.”
“But you made some friends?”
“I said I did, didn’t I?” Dominic asked her, lifting a carton of juice from the fridge and taking a swig out of it. Alison considered getting into the “use a glass” argument with him, but then that bitchy mother would be back again for sure, so she let that particular battle go the same way as the “don’t swear in the house” debate had gone, which was out the window. Dominic had a lot less respect for her moral qualifications recently, and swilling juice directly from the carton was only one of the ways he chose to show her that. The trouble was Alison felt that her son was largely right about her, so she tried to ignore his challenges, happy to have contact with him at all.
“We can invite your friends over if you like,” she told him. “To hang out.”
“Ooh, yes, we can have a tea party and jammy dodgers,” he teased her. “Tally fucking ho.”
He was about to exit the kitchen when he stopped in the door frame for a second and looked back over his shoulder at her.
“How did Muffin get on?” he asked, using the pet name he had coined for Amy when she was born because of her two black button eyes that looked like blueberries in a muffin.
“She found it hard,” Alison told him with a sigh. “All she wanted to do was to stay at home with that mutt.” She nodded at Rosie, who trotted cheerfully out of the utility room dragging a Wellington boot that was almost twice her size.
“Come here, hound.” There was a flicker of a smile on Dominic’s face as he bent down and gently retrieved the boot from between Rosie’s jaws. “I don’t blame Amy, I want to stay at home all day with Rosie too.”
Alison smiled, enjoying this brief moment of normality with Dominic. Less than two years ago she and Dominic had always talked like this when he got in from school. He’d been her confidant, her best friend. The struggle with his emergent manhood hadn’t gotten to him then, he hadn’t discovered his father’s imperfections or his mother’s weaknesses.
“Did she cry?” Dominic asked, his voice gentle now. He’d been with Alison when Amy was born. Marc had not got there in time because he’d been caught up with something or someone at work.
“She cried a lot,” Alison admitted. “And when you didn’t come back she was really worried. You know how she is, so make sure you go in and say hi, okay?”
“I don’t know why you made us come here,” Dominic remarked, turning to face her and leaning against the door frame. “Muffin was pretty happy at home, Gemma was the queen of all her friends. And the stuff I was into wasn’t that bad. If you’d told him where to
go after that business with the Christmas party and showed some self-respect, then you wouldn’t have had to worry about what the neighbors thought and move us all out of the city.”
“The neighbors?” Alison laughed harshly. “Is that why you think we left? The month we left London, eight kids your age were stabbed to death in less than two weeks. I didn’t want you to be one of those kids, Dom.”
Dom shook his head. “That was never going to happen to me. Don’t use me as an excuse for this. You’re running away from the wrong thing. It’s not houses or areas you need to run away from, Mum, it’s him. It’s Dad that causes all the trouble, not me.”