The Beauty of the End (5 page)

This time it was April who kissed me. Who led me under the trees, where we lay on fallen leaves and very slowly she let me undress her.

* * *

It was dark by the time I got home. I crept in, wondering if anyone would be able to tell just by looking at me. As I closed the front door behind me, my mother called out from the kitchen.

“Noah? Is that you? Where've you been?”

As I thought of April's letters, resentment coursed through me. I prepared to confront her, but then her face came into view, wearing the anxious expression that these days never left her. I couldn't do it.

“Do you remember that girl, Ma? The one I helped—from my school, a few years ago?”

My words were tempered, not just by her world weariness but by the knowledge that she wouldn't understand, that she'd never known how love could truly make you feel. The rush that was joyous, tolerant, impulsive all at once. I knew she'd never loved my father that way. You couldn't know love and end up empty, as she was.

I watched her closely, not sure she'd even remember. Her medication meant her brain worked slowly at best—and at her worst, she jumbled words and lost threads, hearing as if through cotton wool. Change had crept up on her slowly, unnoticed, the way it did with people you saw all the time, until the day I'd properly looked, shocked, seeing a stranger.

A troubled expression flickered across her face. “The girl who was hurt.”

“That's right. It was strange,” I said slowly. “She said she'd write. And she never did—or did she write to you, Ma?”

I watched her eyes flicker again, then shift toward the window. “I don't remember,” she said, more clearly than she'd said anything in a long time.

The helpless fury that rose up in me was pointless. The moment had long passed—three whole years ago. Turning away, I went to finish packing.

She was lying. She remembered, I was almost certain. For whatever reason, she'd taken the letters before I'd seen them. It was another reason I couldn't wait to get away from there.

* * *

April and I had arranged to meet again the following day, our last before she returned to London.

This time, we would stay in touch, I'd decided. No matter what. London and Bristol weren't a million miles apart. I could get the train up to see her on weekends and she could come to stay in Bristol. But that night, I couldn't sleep, instead replaying every second of that afternoon. The incredible feeling of losing myself in April's body, the scent of her,. as I lay there restlessly, hating the thought of us being apart.

In the darkest, most silent hours, the solution came to me, so obvious I wondered I hadn't thought of it before. The world wouldn't miss another lawyer. Instead of going to university, I'd go with April back to London. Get a job. We'd be together. My mother wouldn't like it, I knew that, but I was eighteen. I was an adult. I was leaving anyway. It was up to me where I went.

Now I'd made the decision, sleep was out of the question. I got up and found some paper, then, sitting at my desk, wrote my mother a letter. It was a cowardly way to do it, but this way, I'd be certain she couldn't stop me.

And with the letter written, as the dawn light crept through my curtains, at last I slept.

8

I
slept until midday, lying in bed as the hazy recollection of the previous day drifted over me, the magnitude of what I'd decided only mildly shocking in the light of day. It was inevitable, that much was clear to me. Then seeing the time with horror, I leapt out of bed, afraid I'd miss April, imagining her reaction when I told her I was coming with her. As I showered, I rehearsed what I'd say.

University's not for me. . . . I can't stand more years of studying.. . . I thought I'd go to London and get a job....
I'd say it casually, as though it wasn't important to me, frightened she'd try to change my mind, when the truth was the thought of being away from her was killing me.

And I knew she felt the same. After yesterday, I'd seen it in her eyes, felt it in the way her body responded to mine. I looked at the bag I'd packed the previous night. At all my uni stuff still piled on the floor, thinking only fleetingly of the law career I was turning my back on. Then, after glancing at my watch again, I tore down the stairs and out the door.

In my haste, I was halfway down the street when I realized I'd forgotten my wallet. I sprinted back and let myself in, cursing the time I was wasting. It was as I came downstairs for the second time, out of the corner of my eye, I saw it. The envelope on the hall table, with my name on it.

The handwriting was unfamiliar but as I ripped it open, almost as if I'd guessed, I felt my heart start to pound, then as I read it stop altogether, as my dreams, my hopes, my plans for the future, all of them melted away.

I read it again, hearing a sob that seemed to come from deep inside me. I couldn't lose her. Not now, after the last two days, when it had become clear we were meant to be together. I'd been heartbroken the last time she left, when I was fifteen—or so I'd believed at the time. But it was nothing compared to this. Wave after wave of utter despair washed over me, and as I drowned, I felt a new kind of pain grip my heart, then rip it in two.

9

 

T
alking to Will has unleashed a storm surge of memories. About him and about April, too. About the last time I drove to Musgrove, for my mother's funeral, grieving and guilt stricken that I hadn't been with her at the end; feeling that I'd deserted her; realizing that it took losing her to see how alike we were, both of us unhappy, lonely; not knowing, until it was too late. About my childhood; a sense of dread I could never explain; the hollow feeling I could never fill.

It's early when I leave the house, the past still preoccupying me, its presence unwelcome, as I'm assailed by the kind of silent questions that can't be answered, that only belong to such an hour. As I drive, I'm wondering where it went wrong; why April fell out of love with me; where my mother's inherent sadness came from; why Will betrayed me. Unable to stop the most illogical of thoughts that as the common denominator of them all, I'm somehow responsible, when I hear an echo of Clara's voice.

“You young people don't know how good you have it.”

It's almost as if she's here, beside me, in the car. Irritation rises in me, at her all-knowingness. And in a sense, she's right, because I've never been homeless or starving, but even so. She has no idea. I'd suffered, I knew that. Maybe no less or no more than anyone else, but what happened all those years ago almost destroyed me.

I keep driving, barely noticing as the darkness lightens to a pale, pearlescent blue, breaking off just outside Portsmouth to take the familiar road that winds its way toward Musgrove.

The decision's impulsive, motivated more by curiosity than anything else. And in the time I've been away, the town's sprouted shiny new housing developments that encroach across farmland toward the hills that lie to the north; the vast school playing fields I remember are pockmarked by a rash of porter cabins, yet the road where I grew up is strangely untouched. I pass my parents' old house, where an unexpected wave of déjà vu sweeps over me. It's smaller, more modest than I remember, with the ghosts of my mother inside cooking and cleaning, my father in his favourite chair, reading the newspaper. I feel a nostalgic pang for my childhood, which is as suddenly gone.

The North Star is a couple of similarly untouched streets away. Apart from the police presence, the tape cordoning off the car park, the yellow notices by the roadside asking passersby for any information, it's as I remember it, yet changed forever by the knowledge that a man was killed here, brutally. Today, for now, I keep going, through the town that's stirring into life, taking the narrow lane that twists away from it toward the hills.

Where the lane ends, and a stony path stretches across bare fields, fading into Reynard's woods, I pull up, temporarily blinded as the low sun edges above the horizon.

It's a quiet, timeless landscape that, unlike the town, hasn't changed at all. As a teenager, I had felt miles away out here, removed from the world. It had been the place where we were free of the constraints of the adults in our lives—a forty-minute walk that had been irrelevant when I was with April, that's somehow diminished by the ten minutes it takes by car.

* * *

On the outskirts of Tonbridge I find a small barbershop, uncomfortable that by the time the barber's finished, without the overgrowth of hair to hide behind, like the white skin around my hairline, I feel exposed. Catching sight of my reflection as I'm walking out, I realize I also need clothes. Chinos and a couple of shirts, which I buy in haste from the first shop I come to.

Yet again, as I walk back to my car, swept along by the flow of people who have both place and purpose, I'm besieged by doubts, questioning what good I can do, why I'm even here. April deserves better than I can give her. Silently reminding myself that I've come here out of choice. No one forced me. That now I've driven all this way, I should at least see her.

But too easily, around the next corner I find a B&B, in a white-painted Victorian town house that's just a short drive from the hospital where April is. The street is quiet, the house imposing in stature yet reassuringly shabby, so that I hesitate only briefly before I pull over and park.

When she opens the door to me, the landlady looks me up and down, as if, for some reason, I'm not what she's expecting. Then while she takes down my details, a column in yesterday's paper, left folded open on a glass-covered coffee table, as if on purpose, instantly catches my eye.

While she continues writing, I pick it up, hoping it's not what I think it is—to no avail.

It's started. I'm guessing that already the press has picked up that there's a story, because not all murders reach the national papers. Tomorrow, or the day after or the day after that, if a journalist has contacts, or if someone can be persuaded with a surreptitious bribe to let it slip, they'll have April's name. Just a matter of time before they start tunneling relentlessly into the past.