Chapter 2
Jude knew Hannah had found him annoying at first.
Even at thirteen years old, he’d been acutely aware of her immediate irritation with him – but it wasn’t his fault he was new and nervous, and he couldn’t help that she’d been tasked with babysitting him on his first day at Hassop Hill Community School.
Nor could he be blamed for the fact that, after nine years in Surrey’s private education establishments, he looked all wrong in a Derbyshire comp.
His wrongness shone as brightly as his leather brogues: everything about him screamed different.
Jude stuck out in every way possible, and Hannah had been given the unenviable task of hiding him in plain sight.
All too aware this was impossible, he’d told her not to bother helping him.
For reasons he didn’t understand, she’d disdained the idea of abandoning him to his fate – which, had she not intervened, would certainly have involved his head becoming forcibly, intimately acquainted with the nearest toilet bowl.
She’d stuck with him all day. Then for the rest of the week, and then the remainder of term.
Around Christmas, he’d dared to consider that she might actually like him.
Only as a friend, of course, but that was more than enough.
In the way that’s only possible for an awkward, tender-hearted teenage boy, Jude was grateful just to breathe the same air as Hannah.
Truthfully, he’d ached with pure, unreserved adoration of her from the moment he first saw her; before they’d even spoken, when he’d noticed her laughing a few metres away in the playground, her red-gold hair glinting in the early-September sunlight.
The brightness of her in that moment seemed to tell the full story of who she was – and he’d been seized by a powerful feeling he couldn’t name, yet recognised as real.
She’d been strong and sharp. Smart-mouthed but soft.
She had fascinated him in a way that gave him stomach pains.
Then, in a twist that shocked, delighted and eventually frustrated him beyond belief, she’d somehow become his best friend.
Now, Jude stared at his computer screen, eyeing a long list of flight times, nauseated by the idea of spending more than twenty-four hours travelling back to the UK next week.
He and Hannah no longer spoke, which meant there was no one in his life who truly understood the horror that seized him at the prospect of getting on a plane.
What even Hannah – especially Hannah – couldn’t know was that his phobia was now worse than ever.
Despite understanding that it was statistically safer than driving a car, Jude had been terrified of flying for as long as he could remember.
His fear had been supercharged by the journey out to Australia, which he didn’t think it was dramatic to say had left him traumatised.
He’d flown to Sydney solo, shaking and emotionally shattered, his heart so broken he’d worried he might die from internal bleeding.
Somewhere over North Africa he’d had a panic attack and ended up slumped in the arms of a deeply sympathetic flight attendant called Guy.
Jude’s alarm had ebbed eventually, as had his insistence that the plane needed to turn around, giving way to laboured wheezing about five things he could see, four he could touch, and so on.
He’d avoided the return leg of the journey for so long he’d begun to think he might never have to make it. Yet suddenly, there was no swerving it – at least, not if he wanted to keep his job.
‘It’s your project,’ an unsympathetic Larry had said to him last Friday, ‘and your old university co-hosting the conference. Not to mention your country’s National Health Service we’re trying to flog the technology to.
We’ve already spaffed the sponsorship fee, so unless I’m missing something, stop fannying around, grab yourself a prescription for some downers and get your plane ticket sorted. ’
Finding himself unable to argue with any of this, Jude had merely nodded – but now, on the point of selecting dates, times and return options, his stomach twisted.
The sick feeling only intensified at the thought of the onward journey from London Heathrow to Beckford, Derbyshire: his first trip home in four years.
Home. As he contemplated booking a hire car for the long drive up the M1, he realised he was no longer sure what that word meant.
It had never attached easily to his mother’s house, and he already regretted agreeing to stay there while he was in the country.
One minute he’d been telling her about the event he was speaking at; the next, she had informed him she’d have his room aired and ready well in advance of his arrival.
Lillian Gibson was a formidable woman, and conversations with her often felt like 4D chess matches.
This was saying something, since Jude had a genius-level IQ of 152.
His mother had never said so, but Jude suspected hers was in the same ballpark – and that her general, seething resentment of life as a middle-class housewife was born of frustrated ambition.
That, and the in-all-but-name abandonment of their marriage by Jude’s father, who’d typically spent eleven months of every year working overseas.
In a move that had made almost no difference to anyone, George Gibson had officially pulled the plug on family life when Jude departed for Cambridge, aged eighteen.
He glanced around the office: pristine, bright and sparsely furnished, with floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked Sydney’s Harbour Bridge and Opera House.
He was the sole person working on an unseasonably warm Sunday morning, which he had to admit probably meant he’d made this his home since arriving here.
To most – and certainly to Lillian – that would imply success.
And it wasn’t like he was sorry he was sitting at a designer desk on the fifteenth floor of one of the most sought-after buildings in the city.
Yet there was a sterility to this space that Jude had never reconciled himself to.
The air conditioning made the atmosphere dry and frigid, forever scented with the heady odour of an expensive diffuser system.
Nothing here was natural or soft or comfortable.
The plants were all plastic. Even the sofas were stiff, angular monstrosities: triumphs of style over substance.
His mobile began to buzz across the tabletop in front of him, its screen lit up with the words Dr Smart Arse and a photo of his brother, Joe.
Three years his senior, Joe had spent much of their childhood defying the diktats of their mother, whose interest in her eldest son diminished as her expectations of Jude – calmer, cleverer and less inclined to argue with her – climbed ever higher.
More to spite than to impress her, Joe had achieved excellent exam results, qualified as a psychotherapist and built a multimedia career as a no-nonsense ‘sexpert’ and intimacy coach.
He hosted a wildly successful relationship podcast, Swipe Right?
, had released two best-selling non-fiction titles and regularly appeared on TV as the BBC’s resident ‘love doctor’.
He and Jude were close, despite living on opposite sides of the planet – but whenever they caught up, Jude studiously avoided talking to Joe about his own love life, or (more accurately) the damp squib that had passed for one in recent years.
It was easier to keep certain topics off the agenda during their regular phone calls – their respective relationships with Lillian also key among them.
Joe was good-hearted, but frank in a way that frequently felt almost confrontational; never unkind, but often incisive in a way that made Jude sweat.
He grabbed the phone before it could vibrate off the desk. ‘Hey,’ he said.
‘Hey yourself,’ Joe replied.
‘What can I do for you?’ Jude asked, though, given it was still yesterday in Manchester, he suspected he already knew the reason for this call.
‘For a start, you can confirm you’re still in one piece. Not drowning in a vat of some piss-weak Aussie lager,’ Joe said.
‘I’m at the office,’ Jude informed him. ‘And Australian beer is great, for the record. There are at least three craft breweries within walking distance of here.’
‘You’re bearing up, then? Not poring over the pieces of your still-battered heart on the anniversary of its breaking? You know I like to be sure.’
Jude sighed. On pain of excommunication, Joe tightly restricted his references to his brother’s former best friend and ex-girlfriend – but once a year, he felt the need to poke the wasps’ nest. It was his way of showing he cared, Jude supposed, and of signalling that they could talk about it if Jude felt ready. He didn’t.
He appreciated, however, that Joe didn’t sugar-coat his questions: there was an honesty, a respectfulness, in these unflinching annual exchanges.
Hearing the matter stated baldly, rather than being blindsided by polite chit-chat that led somewhere painful, was arguably the difference between being punched in the face and stabbed in the back.
Both hurt, but Jude knew which he preferred.
‘It’s already Sunday here,’ he said. ‘So you’re late. And yes, I’m fine. I’m well.’ This exaggeration was a step too far, and he realised his mistake immediately.
‘So well you’re at your desk a full twenty-four hours before the working week is supposed to begin,’ Joe pointed out.
Jude bit back a groan. ‘Thanks for checking in, Joe, but did you want anything else? I have things to be getting on with.’
Nothing that couldn’t wait until tomorrow, though, came a treacherous voice from some dark corner of his brain. And you can book a flight from your phone while eating brunch, or at the gym, or on the beach . . .
Jude instructed the voice to shut up, but not before he absorbed the grim truth that he had no interest in being anywhere ‘fun’ today. Nor anyone local he wanted to hang out with.