Nick
Nick
The day after their argument, Nick wakes up feeling more hopeless than ever.
Everything is broken and it’s all his fault. His mother is in hospital, injured, because of his own feebleness. And Beth is no longer speaking to him.
There’s only one thing he can think to do now. It doesn’t matter that it will upset her. He doesn’t have a choice. He has to do something , because doing nothing hasn’t worked. And sometimes the kindest things to do are the hardest. This is what he should have done before.
So, while his mother is still in hospital, he calls in sick at work and phones a local skip company and does what Beth suggested: he clears most of the junk from downstairs.
The task is methodical, rhythmic, cleansing. It’s exactly what he needs.
He’s stunned by how much his mother has managed to cram into such a small house. Even when the skip is full, the house is still cluttered by any normal standards. But for the first time in years – actual years – when he’s finished the floors are clear and the worktops are empty and there’s a small patch of space in both the dining room and the living rooms, so she’ll be able to use them again, if needed.
He doesn’t go into his mother’s bedroom, or the small box room, out of respect. But if she complains about where he has been, then he’ll tell her he wasn’t sure if she’d be able to make the stairs with her twisted ankle, so he had to do it, to provide space downstairs to set up a bed for her if necessary.
He didn’t have a choice.
Afterwards, he takes a photo of the tidy living room. He wants to send it to Beth, to thank her, but instead he sits at the bottom of the stairs and from nowhere, he begins to cry.
For some reason, he finds himself thinking of his uncle’s funeral last year. He’d driven his mother up to Norfolk and they’d stayed in the village pub afterwards – the sort of place that has remained exactly the same for years.
There were only a handful of people at the funeral: neighbours, a couple of Ian’s old work colleagues. He had never married, and he had no children. Nick had never been close to him. In fact, he’d only met him a few times.
His mum always said she couldn’t believe they were related.
‘We had absolutely nothing in common,’ she said, as they left the crematorium, shaking her head in a sadness that Nick thought was probably more about that than Ian’s death. ‘Life makes less sense the more you try to make sense of it, I swear.’
She was right about that.
Ian was their last surviving blood relative. The last tenuous link back to his grandparents, who Nick adored, and who raised his uncle exactly the same way they raised his mum, with curiously different outcomes.
He has never felt so alone.
He doesn’t even have Beth any more. How could he have misjudged things so spectacularly?
Aside from anything else, his timing was so inconsiderate. She must be so nervous about her show opening. He’s learnt a bit about the entertainment industry over the years, even though it’s so out of his own experience. He understands the pressure performers feel before a show opens.
He doesn’t know whether he should go and see it tomorrow, as he had planned. He hadn’t told her he was coming. Beth once said having friends and family watching made her even more nervous than when the critics were in.
‘There’s nothing worse than disappointing people who actually know you.’
But she has never disappointed him. Not once, in all these years.
Just a few weeks ago, she told him that her nerves had only got worse with age.
‘It’s pathetic,’ she said. ‘But the better I supposedly get, the less confident I feel.’
‘Further to fall,’ he’d murmured.
‘Or bruised by experience,’ she replied, and she’d stared at him, with her inky blue eyes, and he’d blinked back, hoping to convey his faith.
She will be brilliant though. Because she always is. There’s a reason she’s one of the UK’s best-loved actresses. And that’s because she’s the real deal. Attractive, yes, but talented and hardworking too.
Despite it all, despite what they went through, she has done the impossible: risen to the top of a highly competitive profession.
No wonder she doesn’t want him.
Like she said, he had her once, twice, and both times, he threw her away.