Misspent Youth

47. LIFE GOES ON

THE START OF TIM’S BREAK found him more relaxed than he’d ever been while staying with Alison. He was looking forward to seeing Vanessa—for several reasons—and the last of his artificial skin had been taken off, leaving only mild tingles where his injuries used to be.

Vanessa was waiting for him when he got off the train at Nottingham’s elaborate brick-built station, and drove him out to the village where her family lived. She’d borrowed her mother’s Ford ZA-7, a twenty-year-old, two-seater urban car powered by polymer batteries. “It looks like a plastic rickshaw,” Tim exclaimed delightedly as he walked a circle around the well-maintained antique.

“Shut up or I’ll make you walk alongside.”

“Are you sure you could keep up?”

Her home was a lovely old rectory house, with stone walls besieged by climbing roses and evergreen clematis creepers. There was no air conditioning like Tim was accustomed to; the thickness of the stone, over a meter, helped keep it cool inside throughout the long hot summer months. She showed him his room. “Right next to mine,” she said, pointing at the next door along the landing. They looked at each other for a moment before smiling. Nothing was said, but Tim’s ill-defined hopes suddenly skyrocketed. This was nothing like the usual frantic game of chase they’d all played together for the last three or four years at school. What the two of them had begun now was a lot more casual and cool than that. He liked it. There was no pressure.

A large garden at the back of the rectory was bounded by a three-meter-high stone wall, whose individual blocks were slowly being consumed by moss and lichens. They protected a traditionalist layout of flower borders and a small lavender bed. Hordes of butterflies danced erratically through the air between the purple flower stems, hounded by Vanessa’s two young sisters. Both of them waved and said a cheery hello to Tim.

“Nobody’s going to see in through these,” Vanessa said as they walked around the walls.

“You wouldn’t believe what the reporters did in Manton,” Tim told her. “They were tramping through crop fields and everything to try and get a view of Alison’s bungalow. Someone said a couple with ultrazoom lenses were set up at Hambleton. That’s kilometers away.”

“I hate the media. They debase everybody.”

A tall GM evergreen beech hedge marked the end of the broad lawn. Vanessa led Tim through the wrought iron gates in the middle. A broad orchard lay beyond it, also enclosed by the beech hedge. To one side of the gate was a small outdoor swimming pool, with a tiny whitewashed Spanish-style building behind it for changing and showering. Opposite that was a line of wooden stables running out from the end of a big old stone barn.

“Do you ride?” she asked.

“Haven’t for ages.”

“We can try going for a hack tomorrow if you like.”

“Yeah, why not.” Tim was looking longingly at the pool. He hadn’t realized how much he missed swimming.

“There’s trunks inside,” she told him sympathetically.

He tried not to make his stare too blatant as they splashed about together. That was probably the most difficult part of the day; in her chrome-yellow bikini Vanessa was quite something. It was hard not to leave eye tracks all over her.

“Like old times,” she said eventually. After a while they’d stopped swimming, and now just lay about on big inflatable chairs, drifting randomly around the pool as the mild late-afternoon breeze pushed them along.

“Yeah,” Tim agreed. He was wearing wraparound sunglasses, so she couldn’t see him looking at her now.

“Do you still miss her?”

“I don’t really think about her, to be honest.”

“Good.” Vanessa was at the far end of the pool, her head tipped back with her eyes closed as the big chair started to twirl round. “Boys always think they like bad girls best. You think they’re more exciting. And she was bad; the rest of us all knew it.”

“You never said.”

“Would you have listened, or even believed?”

“No. Probably not.”

“She was always going to wind up on the tabloid streams. If it hadn’t been with your father, she’d have gone back to a football team’s hotel to be their training bunny. That’s what she is.”

“Simon said as much,” Tim admitted.

“He was right. She’s very insecure, that makes her needy. It’s not a good thing to be when you’re that beautiful.”

“Yeah.”

“I hope she didn’t hurt you too much.”

“It doesn’t get much worse, though it wasn’t just her.”

“I know. I’d just die if my dad ever hit on one of my friends, never mind the pair of them actually going to bed. Urrgh! That is so much the worst thing in the world.”

Tim grinned, amazed at how easy it was to talk about what had happened—he never could with Alison. One hand trailed lightly in the water, a tiny push for the inflatable chair, moving the two of them closer. “I’m really glad you asked me here. It feels good to be away from Dad. He’s so desperate to try to make up. Every day I have to listen to him going on about regrets and how being young again makes things difficult for him, that he hasn’t got a perspective back on his life and who he should be. It almost makes me feel guilty for getting pissed off with him for what he did.”

“So how do you feel about that?”

“Now? Not much, I suppose. It was a real bastard when it happened. I hated them so bad I could have killed them. And I still resent the hell out of the pair of them for screwing up my life like this. But…everyone was right—which I really hate, too. If Annabelle could do that to me, then she wasn’t worth getting worked up over in the first place.”

“Sounds like you’ve got perfectly healthy reactions if you ask me.”

“I’ve just calmed down, I guess. Time always quiets emotions. That doesn’t mean I’ve forgiven him, though. And I’m still angry he got to meet Sir Mitch. I so much wanted to do that.”

“Will you ever forgive him?”

“I don’t know. It would be kind of weird. Besides, that would be like admitting they were in the right to do it. I can never do that.”

“Then why are you talking to him?”

Tim shrugged, which just produced a squeaking sound between his skin and the plastic chair. “I don’t know. He’s my dad. Can you ever really hate your parents?”

Her chair touched his. She smiled and put a hand out across his backrest, holding them together. “Any other good reasons for coming here?”

“Maybe a few.” He leaned over. She giggled as the chairs started to dip down in unison. Then they were kissing, and the angle was increasing rapidly. They fell into the pool together, both of them laughing as they surfaced. He put his arms around her for a more insistent kiss. Vanessa clung to him, he felt one leg curling around the small of his back as she climbed up against him. Thankfully they were in the shallow end, so he could keep his feet on the bottom.

“Vanessa!”

They broke apart to see Margret, her youngest sister, shouting at them from the edge of the pool. “Vanessa, there’s a fight in London, a big one. It’s on all the news streams.”

“A fight?”

“One of the marches. People are throwing things and everything. It’s horrible.”

They made their way back to the house and occupied the big old leather chesterfield sofa in the lounge. The screen on the wall was showing one of the preprotest marches. Over two thousand people were moving along Whitehall with the intention of handing in a petition to Downing Street calling for the Euro Socio-Industrial summit to be canceled. But the police weren’t letting anyone near the solid metal security gates sealing off the prime minister’s residence. There was a lot of pushing and shoving, cans and plastic cartons were landing on the police. Several fistfights had broken out.

“That was stupid of the cops,” Tim said. “If they’d just let them hand in the petition there wouldn’t have been any trouble.”

“What are they all doing?” Margret asked.

“They don’t like the summit,” Tim explained gently. “A lot of people believe it’s an attempt by Brussels at social engineering. They want to either stop it or have their say.”

“Why?”

“They feel excluded. It’s like at school when the teacher just tells you what to do for no good reason you can see.”

“But fighting’s silly,” the young girl exclaimed. “We don’t do that at school.”

“I’m glad to hear it. But there are so many people protesting that you’re bound to get some silly ones in there.”

Vanessa frowned, searching the faces of the crowd. The news stream was showing images from cameras within the main body of the march. There was a great deal of anger and frustration building up. “I’m not so sure. They look like they’re out for trouble no matter what.”

“You still want to go down on Monday?”

“Yes. Brussels won’t listen to us otherwise, we have to show them just how strongly we feel about them. This is our only option.”

They carried on watching the news all afternoon, seeing the police block off Parliament Square with big metal and concrete barricades. The marchers began to spill back into Trafalgar Square. Shop windows were broken. Police vehicles raced in from side streets.

IN THE EVENING, Vanessa put some frozen pizzas in the microwave. They sat around on the old chesterfield, eating slices and swigging beer straight from the bottle as the news continued relentlessly. Sometime after ten o’clock an overturned police Land Rover was burning furiously outside the National Gallery. Vanessa had curled up against Tim, with his arms holding her protectively. She stirred, finally repelled by the images on the screen, and turned to kiss him. They made their way upstairs.

In bed, together, it was more for comfort’s sake than for passion, a physical action whose excitement and pleasure managed to obscure the grim outside world with all its pain and tragedy. For a while, at least.