Lara turned to introduce Stephen, but he had vanished.
‘Well, hey then, gotta split,’ the painter said. ‘Hungry mouths to feed.’ He indicated the bag.
He climbed into his pick-up truck and drove off.
‘Who was that?’ Stephen reappeared at her elbow.
‘I met him at Gina’s place. I forget his name, though.’
‘Gina?’
‘Gina. She lives just opposite the theatre?’
‘When were you there?’ he asked, looking at the street that rose up to their left. At the top of the slope was an illuminated white church that made Lara think of Italy.
‘Last night,’ she said.
‘I didn’t know you went out last night.’
‘We were invited.’
‘I see.’ Stephen adjusted his hat so it came down further over his face. ‘You didn’t say anything? About me.’
‘Of course not!’
‘Good.’
He led them to a restaurant attached to the wholefood shop. ‘This is a great place. I’ve reserved us a table or we’d never get in. The chef used to work under Mario Batali, so it’s upmarket Italian with a locally sourced organic twist.’
‘Bella would have loved this,’ Lara said.
‘Silly Bella, staying in bed,’ Olly said to Jack.
A waiter showed them to their table, tucked away in a booth at the far end of the candlelit dining room. Stephen positioned himself in the shadows next to Lara, his thigh resting against hers. The nearness of him killed what little appetite she had, so she ordered a salad, and a kiddy pizza for Jack. Stephen and Olly went for pasta dishes. Stephen also ordered fresh lemonade and a large glass of Italian Sauvignon Blanc for Lara.
‘Can you stop that, please, Olly?’ Lara said as the waiter left with their orders. He had been drumming on the table since they sat down and it was setting her nerves on edge.
Over dinner, Stephen explained that this little town was different from the others around the area because it was home to a SUNY campus, which gave it the middle-class, liberal trappings of a university town – including moneyed students keen on having a good time. Lara rather liked the place, and indulged a brief fantasy where she and Stephen lived a bookish, anonymous life in that
New York Times
journalist’s house by the lake, near this town.
Every now and then, Stephen – who, under the cover of the dim restaurant lighting, had removed his hat and sunglasses – caught her eye. And each time she felt a jump in her belly, like a small bird fluttering around her insides.
‘Where’s the famous Olly appetite?’ Lara said, nodding towards her son’s pasta, which he had barely touched.
‘I’m on a diet,’ Olly said, levelling a bloodshot eye at her. ‘Go on, Mum, give me a sip of your wine.’
Surreptitiously, Lara let him finish her glass and Stephen ordered her another. When they were done – both Lara and Olly leaving at least half their food on their plates – Stephen paid for the meal using a pseudonymous credit card. They slipped back out on to the street, where the crowd had got bigger and younger. It reminded Lara of Brighton’s North Laine on a Friday night, except the sense of being on an island surrounded by countryside gave it a more concentrated atmosphere. They passed a group of young women in pretty vintage dresses and beaten-up leather jackets, heading for a night out. Had Lara been a student, she would have liked to have gone to this SUNY campus. She would have liked this life.
They drove for a mile or so to the end of the town, where a large marquee dominated a flat river meadow. The damp warmth of the earth gave itself up to the colder night air, providing natural cooling for the motley crew milling around the box office entrance.
Fully disguised again, Stephen presented their tickets and they filed inside to a seatless central space. A live band to one side played loud jazzy rock as acrobats and performers mingled with the audience, improvising small dramas, shouting out for each other in English, Spanish, Italian and French, shimmying up posts and tumbling on the ground, through air scented by perfume, sweat and sawdust. The pressing crowd pushed Lara up against Stephen. Emboldened by the wine, she held her position, glued to his side. It was intoxicating. She could hardly bear it and, when she looked up at Stephen, his eyes were closed.
‘Jack,’ she called, looking round for him in the crush.
‘It’s OK. I’ve got him,’ Olly said. He was holding Jack, who he had put up on a hay bale a little way away so he could see.
The last of the audience filed in and the music stopped. In a moment of silence, what had appeared to be the sides of the marquee fell away, revealing, Tardis-like, yet more tents beyond, where eight beautiful young punk-acrobats dangled from high-slung trapeze swings. The lights dimmed so only the top part of the tent was lit.
The band struck up again, a prowling bass line with snare drum, built on to by a repeated vocal line, rasped by a man who looked as if he had seen it all.
I. Will. Not. Be-Good.
I. Will. Not. Be-Good.
The instruments added to the song one by one: electric guitar, congas, sax and trumpet. By the time the brass extinguished the vocal line, filling the tent with its anarchic energy, the acrobats were describing great arcs across the ceiling with their swings, whooping and trilling.
Stephen took off his hat and shook his head in the warm tent air, enjoying the anonymity of being in an audience in the dark.
‘Can I wear that, man?’ Olly said, appearing out of nowhere, now with Jack in his arms.
‘Sure.’ Stephen smiled and passed his hat to Olly, who pulled it on low over his eyes, mimicking Stephen’s stance.
‘You’ve made a friend there,’ Lara whispered up into Stephen’s ear.
‘It makes me very happy.’ He smiled down at her.
The acrobats spun and twirled above their heads. Somehow, through leaping, flying and falling, they all came to the spotlit ground to mark the beginning of the show proper. They used the whole vast space, from tumbling over the floor in giant silver hoops to leaping across the ceiling on bungees. The spectators were ushered from one side of the tent to the other – at one moment huddled in the middle while a woman in knee pads and glitter looped herself in and out of a piece of rope, then made to form a circle around an impossibly muscled man who shouted in French as he performed extraordinary feats with a single rod of steel.
Through it all the band played their raucous music – songs about breaking taboos, about conquering loneliness and desire by transgression.
Not once were Lara and Stephen separated by the movement of the crowd. Instead, they hung back out of the light, enjoying the secret contact the darkness allowed them. But Olly and Jack roved all around the space. For one disorienting moment Lara thought the person standing close behind her, pressed into her back, his hands on her shoulders, couldn’t be Stephen, because he was over on the other side of the performers, in the front, looking up. But seeing the jaw working on the gum, she realised it was Olly, transformed for a moment by the lighting and Stephen’s hat. Jack was by his side.
Above them a statuesque woman in a dove-grey silk dress swooped and arched around a static trapeze bar. She reached up into the void of the tent. Then she fell, plummeting towards the audience underneath. The crowd flinched and moved back as one, caught between the thought of catching her as she plunged down into their midst and the urge to run away and save their own skins. Lara hid her face in Stephen’s sleeve. The woman’s move was planned, though. She was saved, caught at the last minute by the foot she had looped around one of her ropes.
‘Come to me tonight,’ Stephen murmured into Lara’s hair.
The acrobat hooked one strong thigh around her bar, her silk dress swung away like wings and she arched her back in victory over her fall.
‘I can’t,’ Lara said, her mouth grazing his ear. ‘I want to. But I can’t.’
‘Tomorrow then. Come during the day, if you can.’
Lara nodded. As she watched the boldness and beauty above her, she felt close to tears. If she had envied the lives of the girls in the leather jackets and vintage dresses, she ached to be the woman above her. She would run away and join this group of free-wheeling bodies and souls, living their lives in each others’ beautiful, raggedy pockets, each week a different town, a different country, their only duty to perform with all their hearts.
The tears came, quietly, for her lost youth.
The trapeze was winched back up into the gods, and the acrobat melted down a long rope to the ground. An older man in a hat and mac not unlike Stephen’s – although under his open coat he was bare-chested and wore only a pair of leggings – hustled the crowd into another formation to watch a couple perform a double-act on a loop of rope above another part of the tent. Their bodies twisted into each other, moving on top and around, the man holding the woman up in one arm. Then they flipped and she was supporting his entire weight from her leg. He jumped up and their bodies moulded to each other. Lara felt Stephen’s hand as his arm circled her waist.
‘There you are, Mother,’ Olly said into her ear.
Instinctively, she moved away from Stephen. She had thought Olly was still over on the other side of the audience. She looked up at him. Nothing suggested that he had seen anything, but Lara realised that, walking a tightrope of her own, she had let her guard drop.
‘It’s great, isn’t it?’ she said. To her relief, Olly nodded.
‘Beats Dad’s boring sort of stuff,’ he said, gazing on the coupling going on fifteen feet above his head. ‘I want to do that,’ he groaned.
‘Let’s get the A levels out of the way first,’ she said.
At the end of the show they spilled out of the hot tent into the cooler night air, the rhythms of the band still pulsing through their veins. As they crossed the rutted grass to the car park, a couple passing them turned and stared at Stephen.
‘It
is
him,’ the woman said. ‘I told you.’
‘Hey, Olly man, could I have my hat back?’ Stephen said, slipping his sunglasses on. ‘Forgot I wasn’t a normal person for a minute,’ he said to Lara, who squeezed his arm. ‘Forgot I had two heads.’
Olly pulled the hat off.
‘Shit,’ he said, as his curly hair snagged in an adjuster buckle. The couple up ahead had stopped, the woman debating with the man whether she should go up and address Stephen.
‘Don’t pull,’ Lara said, but Olly yanked the hat away from his head, taking a hank of his hair with it.
‘Ow, shit,’ he said.
With the hat and geek glasses on, Stephen was another person.
‘Well honey, we’d better get our little guy back home to bed,’ he said in his Deep Down South accent, his arm around Lara as they approached the gawping couple.
‘Someone needs their eyes testing,’ the man said to the woman as they passed.
‘Whatever,’ they heard her say behind them.
‘And the Oscar for the part of the hillbilly daddy goes to Stephen Molloy,’ Olly said once Stephen had started up the Wrangler.
Stephen had bought the CD of the show music and they drove under a fiercely starlit sky, singing ‘I. Will. Not. Be-Good’ at the tops of their voices. Jack, who had loved every minute of the show, led the way, screaming out the words and swallowing them in gurgling laughter. For the first time in a long while, Lara felt entirely encased in the moment, not wishing to be anywhere else. She continued the scene Stephen had set going back in the car park, imagining that they
were
a family, returning to their home in the forest, where they lived together. She put herself outside the car, thinking how happy they must sound as they passed noisily along the road.
‘Damn lights,’ Stephen said.
Lara glanced round. A car was right on their tail, so close it was almost in the back seat. Its lights were on full beam, blinding Stephen. He tried to flip the rear-view mirror into reflector mode, but he was still dazzled.
‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Hold on to your hats.’
The car began to overtake them, but as it did so, it edged into them, nudging them sideways. Lara looked over Stephen to their tormentor. To her horror, it was the same dun-coloured car that had nearly run her and Jack over, the same vehicle she had accosted at Pretty Fly Pie … Again she saw the silhouette of a woman through its tinted windows. This was Elizabeth Sanders, and it was pretty clear she was acting out her warning.
‘Go away,’ Stephen yelled. ‘Get away from me.’
They bumped along the road, half on the tarmac, half on the verge. The bridge they had crossed on their way out loomed a couple of hundred yards away. If they carried on as they were going, they would be over the side and into the river below.
‘Brake!’ Lara cried, her hands gripping the dashboard, white at the knuckles. Just in the nick of time, Stephen came to his senses and floored the brakes, bringing them to a screeching halt in some gravel about ten feet away from the bridge.
With a final swerve into them, denting the side of the Wrangler and nearly toppling it, the other car swooped past them and bombed off into the night. Stephen rested his forehead on the steering wheel while the CD played on, an unstructured, atonic improvised brass section riff. Lara reached forward and switched it off, and the sound of the crickets resumed in the empty fields around them.
‘Everyone all right?’ She looked at her sons, both hunched-up wraiths. They nodded silently. ‘Stephen?’ she said, carefully laying a hand in the middle of his back.
‘See?’ he said at last, lifting his head and smiling. ‘Load of arseholes on the roads round here.’
Lara searched his eyes to see if he believed what he was saying, if he really didn’t know what was going on, but he was inscrutable. He shrugged, switched the engine on and turned back on to the road.
‘Let’s get these young ’uns back home,’ he said, in his accented disguise voice.
‘Go, Daddy, go,’ Olly said, in the same Deep South tones.
When they got back to Trout Island, Marcus and Selina were on the porch, smoking. A large, nearly empty bottle of Yellowtail Pinot Grigio stood on the shabby plastic table in front of the swing seat.
‘How was the show?’ Marcus boomed across the front garden after Stephen cut the engine.