Remember Me This Way (33 page)

I let Howard off the lead when I reach a wide arc of beach. To my relief, he seems much better today. I’ve picked up a map from a stand at the hoverport so I know roughly the direction I need to go in. I follow the sea path, past a shut-up café, a row of abandoned beach huts, and through a park to another main road. The path is quiet. No one follows me. Beyond a sweeping view of the grey Solent, the towers of Portsmouth are teeth marks on the horizon.

At the end of this raised walkway, where the huts dribble out, a path leads back down to the road. I put Howard back on the lead and have another look at the map. The next turning leaves the sea and climbs sharply up a hill. A few houses, mostly divided into flats, are set back from the road, interspersed with trees. It’s so very different from Cornwall. Zach was right about that. It feels tamer here, more suburban. Most of the buildings look like holiday lets and are shut up.

At the top, past the entrance to a noisy Wildlife Encounter where Howard struggles to break free, I reach the main road and it’s a fifteen-minute walk along this to the village where Zach grew up.

I’m not sure what I am expecting – a pretty green maybe, Miss Marple, some
thatching
. But this is more – well, it’s a brow of hill, a curve of road, a junction. The village has a primary school – though I know Zach went to Tennyson Prep, the ‘best education on the island’ – an off-licence (heavily barred) and a Londis. A pub advertises Sky TV and a Sunday carvery.

I sit on a bench on a scratch of grass next to a dog-poo bin. Howard lies down at my feet. I’m glad he’s with me. There’s no one in sight. I hadn’t imagined feeling so desolate. I thought the house Zach grew up in, Marchington Manor, would be obvious – a sweeping driveway, a walled garden, a tennis court. I haven’t seen anything resembling that.

In Londis, the young girl with the nose-ring doesn’t recognise Zach from the photograph I have brought – him on a deckchair in our garden, half asleep, his head tilted to the sun. It’s my favourite. I took it one day without him noticing. She hasn’t heard of anyone called Hopkins. The only big house she can think of is the Priory, but that’s a luxury hotel. Zach once mentioned a nanny called Miss Caws. She wore a starched uniform and lived in one of the farm cottages. The girl with the nose-ring says there is a Caws Avenue, but she doesn’t know of any old ladies who used to be nannies. As for farms, ‘There’s a petting farm over at St Helen’s. The café’s under new management, not sure they’ve got cottages – maybe holiday lets?’

Zach’s father didn’t drink in the pub. He imported his own booze into the house, preferring to drink alone. I ask behind the bar anyway. The landlady, who’s from Thailand, knows nothing. She suggests I take the road back down to the coast, to the small seaside resort at the bottom of the hill. The man who owns the gift shop has been there for years – he might know something.

It is spitting with rain now. I zip up my fleece, pull the hood over my head, and set off in the direction the landlady sent me. As a teenager, he must have drunk in that pub, wheeled down this hill on his bike. He must be living a life, if he’s hiding out here. He will have to be walking these pavements, using these shops. Have I got this wrong? I hear his voice in my ears. ‘I thought you trusted me.’

The village is genteel in a higgledy-piggledy way, all blue and yellow curtains. It’s hard to feel scared. I find the gift shop at the top of the high street. The door dings as I enter. It smells sweet and stale inside, of pencil shavings and second-hand books. Did my husband spend his pocket money here, on paper planes, water pistols or art materials – wax crayons and pads of sketching paper? I try to imagine him as a little boy, choosing carefully. When I can’t, my heart lurches. I ask the owner, a fat man with rosy cheeks and new teeth, if he remembers him, or has seen him recently, but he doesn’t, and he hasn’t. He suggests I ask next door at the post office.

In here, three blond schoolchildren are choosing a crab net and a bald man in red trousers is extracting money from the cash machine. I’m beginning to feel frustrated. It’s much bigger, this island, than I anticipated. The map says twenty-five miles by thirteen. He might not be here. He could be anywhere. The young woman at the till doesn’t recognise the name Hopkins, either. Caws, though, oh yes, they’re an old family in these parts, but no nannies as far as she knows. As for big houses, not so many round here, most of them were converted into flats way back.

‘Sorry I can’t be of any more help,’ she says, reaching for a packet of Silk Cut to give the man in the red trousers. ‘I’m sorry he’s gone missing, love. It must be a heartache.’

I stand in the street outside the post office, where two dachshunds are tied up, yapping.

An elderly woman with swollen ankles is sitting in the pharmacy opposite, on a chair by the counter. The chemist is tall and thin with hollow cheeks and a prominent Adam’s apple. I give my spiel – I’m looking for a friend, Zach Hopkins, who has gone missing, and I’m on a hunt to find him. I describe what I know about his childhood home. The chemist shakes his head, with only a glance at the photo, but a younger woman with long dark hair comes out of the back room with the old lady’s medication and cranes her neck.

The old lady peers too. The younger woman says: ‘Do you think that’s Jilly Jones’s son? It could be, couldn’t it?’

The old lady takes it and holds it up to her nose. She nods and hands it back to me. ‘That’s Jilly Jones’s boy.’

‘Jones? No. I don’t think so. I think you must be—’

The younger woman has turned away. She doesn’t seem to want to talk any more. I feel awkward, as if I’ve said something wrong. When the old woman slowly gets to her feet, I hold out my arm to help her up, and she and I leave the shop together. She leans on me as we cross the road to the yapping dogs. As she unties them, she says: ‘Do all right, did he, in the end?’

I nod. ‘Yes. If we’re talking about the right person, he did OK. He became an artist. A good one.’

‘Mrs Bristock – you should talk to her. She was Jilly Jones’s next-door neighbour. Still lives in the same house. She’ll remember – she used to babysit for the lad. Go on. Take that picture and show her.’

She gives me the address, indicating the direction with her stick, and shuffles off with her dogs.

I cross the road again and take the turning she pointed at into a modern estate. The road bends and I follow it, take a left and a right, doubling back on myself at one point – it’s confusing, the houses all look the same – until, after ten minutes of spiralling up the hill, I reach the right address. The house is small and square, with a patch of grass at the front and a large satellite dish attached to a mansard roof. Scalloped net curtains at the single window.

I expect it to be embarrassing and a waste of time. I imagine Mrs Bristock taking one look at the photograph and shaking her head. Part of me is hoping for that.

To the door comes a small woman with tight white curls and milky blue eyes behind enormous glasses. She is wearing bulbous pearl earrings, a floral dressing gown and gold lamé slippers on heavily veined feet. When I explain what I have come for – I am still using the name Zach Hopkins – she puts a bony hand on my arm and tells me to come in. ‘Don’t worry about the dog,’ she says. ‘He can run around in the garden.’

She takes a while unlocking the back door to let Howard out. He sees a cat and tears past her. The two of us go into her sitting room.

It’s hot and crowded with knick-knacks. A gas fire is bubbling under a fake mantelpiece and the television is on, with the sound off. There’s a dizzying, synthetic smell of rose petals.

‘Right, dear,’ she says, lowering herself into an armchair. ‘Tell me again what you’ve come for.’

I perch on the edge of the sofa facing her; on the side table next to me is a bowl of potpourri and a tall black cat made of twisted glass. I take out the photograph and lay it carefully on the table.

‘That’s Jack Jones,’ she says immediately. ‘Poor Jilly’s son.’

Jack Jones. I feel myself slipping back into the sofa, the cushions giving way beneath my head. ‘Are you sure? When I met him he was called Zach Hopkins.’

‘No, Jack Jones. She called herself Mrs Jones, for appearances’ sake – but she was never married. It was her maiden name, though . . .’ She waves one hand in the air. ‘Now you mention it, I think the boy did take his father’s name, when he got old enough. Changed it by deed poll.’

‘His
father’s
name? What do you mean?’

‘It upset poor Jilly quite a bit. His father never had anything to do with him, you see – one of the fairground lads, or one of those boys over from the naval academy on a day trip. Came to visit once when the boy was about five. But I know he didn’t pay maintenance.’

‘I don’t understand. The Zach I knew had two parents. Are you sure . . . ?’

I pass the photograph to her again and she brings it close to her face. ‘Yup. That’s Jack from next door all right.’ She leans forward and pulls the lace curtain apart with her index finger. ‘That house to the right, over there. Exactly the same as mine, only their garden is on a slant and I’ve got a bigger airing cupboard.’

I look where she’s pointing. A house like this, with a satellite dish on the roof. A small blue trike lies on the front path. No manor. No tennis court. No staff. No abusive father. No father at all.

‘I think you’ve got the wrong person,’ I say.

Mrs Bristock heaves herself to her feet and opens the cupboard under the television. She brings out a photograph album and flicks through it. ‘There,’ she says, pointing. ‘There he is. With Jilly at the village fete.’ She brings it to her face again to read the writing under the photograph. ‘In 1985. He must have been thirteen or so.’

She holds the album out and I look at it closely. The woman is thin, with a pinched face. She is in high heels and wearing a pink coat, cinched at the waist with a black patent belt. Next to her, unwillingly, half moving out of the picture, is a tall boy with brown hair and blue eyes and a distinctive mouth.

‘Did she beat him?’ I manage to say eventually.

‘She
doted
on him, did Jilly,’ Mrs Bristock says. ‘She worked up at Tesco. When they opened the twenty-four-hour superstore she took on double shifts. She never learned to drive, but she used to cycle up there. Nothing was too good for her boy. Spoilt, of course. Overindulged. That was his problem.’

After a long pause, my voice cracking, I say: ‘Where did he go to school?’

‘Local primary, then the comprehensive over at Newport. Jilly wanted him to go to the grammar school in Portsmouth, but he didn’t get in. He was mad keen for art college, I remember. He won the village art competition one Easter and he had a stall doing caricatures of people in the fair at Regatta Week. But it wasn’t to be. He didn’t get the grades.’

She stops talking and smiles at me. My expression must have stopped her. ‘Can I get you anything, dear? A drink?’

I tell her I wouldn’t mind a glass of water but I can fetch it myself. I ask her if she’d like anything and she quite fancies some tea – ‘bit early but what the heck’. I tell her I’ll bring it and I stand in the kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil, staring out of the window. Howard is lying in the middle of her lawn, next to a low bird bath.

No abusive father, no beatings, no cold corridors and freezing cellars. An ordinary childhood in an ordinary village. A mother who doted on him, who gave him everything he wanted. A single parent – but no one died of that. Nothing he told me is true. It’s all lies. How many times did I excuse his behaviour, his need for control because of what he went through? How much did I let him get away with?

He didn’t go to art college. He never lived in Clapham. I think about the bare white walls of his Wimbledon studio: did he paint at all? The gallery in Exeter, how hard I tried to track it down after his death, to reclaim his work – was
that
an invention? This man I loved. I lay next to every night. I touched each part of his body. I let him inhabit me, possess me.
He slept with Onnie.
He is a stranger. Even his name is a fabrication.

When I finally make it back into the lounge, Mrs Bristock is gazing through the crack she has made in the lace curtains. She is ‘ever so grateful for the cuppa: my goodness, waitress service’, and starts to tell me about her husband, Mr Bristock, who had run a school-uniform shop in Southsea. He had been unlucky enough to suffer an early death from cancer in the 1960s.

‘Jack Hopkins,’ she says thoughtfully. ‘I always wondered what happened to him. Remind me why you’re after him?’

‘He was a friend of mine. Is. I lost touch. You haven’t seen him . . . in the last year or so?’

‘Not since the day he upped and left. I believe he became a tourist guide. Coach trips. Over in Europe?’

‘Probably. That’s what he told me, but . . .’

‘After everything – I thought we might see him when the house was sold, but the only person through the door was the estate agent. He probably didn’t want to show his face after. . .’ She loses her thread. ‘Well, the new lot, they’re nice enough. They’ve let the garden go to pot, though. Jilly loved her garden.’

‘What was he like?’ I ask. ‘As a child.’

She glances at me. ‘A gorgeous face. Butter wouldn’t melt. Sweet as pie. Those big blue eyes: he could make you do anything. I used to sit for him, when Jilly was at work. When he was very little, of course. That stopped later.’

She pats gently at her fine white curls. Her eyes fix on a patch on the carpet. ‘He was a complicated lad.’ Her voice flattens. ‘I’m not sure it’s my place . . .’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, if you’re sure.’ She begins to tell stories, long anecdotes. At first, they sound like nothing, schoolboy pranks: fireworks set off at odd times, tortured frogs, dissected mice, her missing pet cat. ‘I always said he had something to do with it. She scratched him once when he was quite small and he hated her after that. He wouldn’t go near her, said she was evil. He searched for her with all the other kids – I’d promised a reward – but I caught him giving me a look that was almost gleeful.’