Chapter 4 Adam “Don’t You Want Me” #2
But it’s my reflection that does it, as whatever the hell’s in charge now smoothly steers us into the little en suite shower room—yep, the same damn little en suite shower room my dad built for me when I was a teen—and just stops dead center in front of the mirror and stares.
At myself.
Only not the me I know now, the middle-aged me.
No, this is the teenage me, the me I once was, now jauntily checking out not just his skinny, wrinkleless left-side profile, but his skinny, wrinkleless right-side profile too.
Then adjusting his enormously bouffy hair at least twenty times, before squirting GoldSpot mint mouth spray onto his tongue, squeezing a zit on his forehead, and thinking Nice one to himself.
Nice one. Yep, again I hear this thought of his loud and clear. Like not only am I seemingly trapped inside his body—seeing everything he sees, sensing everything he senses—but I’m also eavesdropping on everything he thinks.
“Hi, Juliet,” he says out loud, trying a smile, and as he says it, I can feel something in his stomach. Nerves. “Hey, Juliet,” he tries again, without the smile this time. “How’s your week been?”
“Ads,” a man’s voice calls from downstairs. “You awake?”
Ads. Bloody hell. What my dad used to call me. The only one apart from Jules and Darius who’s ever called me that, in fact.
“Yeah, Dad,” I—he, this younger me, whatever—call back.
“Then come and get yourself some grub. We’re leaving in twenty.”
Jerking on a pair of busted white All Stars, younger Adam reaches for his desk drawer. To grab the pack of Marlboro Lights he’s hidden inside. Not only can I read his thoughts, but I can also feel his addiction too.
But as his hand darts out to grab them, a part of me, the real me, twenty-first-century Adam, thinks, No. Because I don’t want them. I don’t even want to touch them. I’ve read Allen Carr’s bloody awful quitting book too many goddamned times to go through that shit again.
And—bloody hell!—somehow my resistance seems to have an effect, because I can feel it then for the first time: me imposing myself on him. On his hand. His fingers are now refusing to grab.
Teenage Adam tries to reimpose himself. Almost like he’s sensing me inside him for the first time.
But then that fleeting inkling is gone. He turns away, forgetting about the smokes, already thinking about breakfast. Like on some subconscious level, he’s now accepted this intrusion of mine.
Like he doesn’t need to fight it or reject it, because we’re both somehow already the same.
Then we’re off, with him in charge again, and me riding as a passenger, as he reaches for a tape on the desk. No, strike that. Not just any tape. The tape. For Juliet. The exact same bloody one that I was just listening to in the shed before I woke up here.
Only it’s not just the tape for me, it’s the tape for him too. I can sense it. This is the one he’s been slaving over making for her.
For Juliet, which—of course!—is what I used to call her before I really knew her. His Juliet is my Jules.
I—he, Young Adam—barge out onto the landing and slide down the banister on my arse. It’s a rush. A buzz. And I love it too. His body feels so damned zingy, like he could run a hundred miles right now if he wanted to. Like he could do it twice.
Only then, as we reach the bottom of the stairs, I freeze. Or rather my mind does. It locks.
Mum. My mum who died twenty years ago in a car crash. Mum, turning toward me from where she’s been gazing, stooped, at her reflection in the gloomy hallway mirror.
She tuts, glowering at this younger me with his hands still on the banister. “You’re not ten anymore, Adam,” she tells him. An opaqueness to her eyes. How she always looked when the pain got too bad and she ended up back on her pills. “And you know what happens when people fall.”
He does. I do. That’s what happened to Mum. She hurt her spine falling when she was out dancing with Dad, back when I was ten. The last time she ever did anything “reckless”—her word—like that.
“Sorry.” And the quick way he—this young Adam—says this reminds me how many times I had to say it. Because of Mum’s rules, set after her fall. Don’t run, be quiet, tidy up, be grateful, don’t whine, don’t cry…
“What?” she asks, clawing her wiry black hair up into a bun. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
And, wow, I only now realize I’ve imposed myself over Young Adam again.
Maybe just from the shock of seeing her.
And, still in control, I march right up to her and pull her into a hug.
So tight. This shouldn’t be possible, yet she feels so alive.
My nostrils fill with the forgotten smell of her perfume.
But already Adam’s letting go. Pulling back and reasserting himself.
A bit freaked out by what he’s just done, but kind of okay with it too.
She almost smiled, didn’t she? She almost cracked.
As though his old mum from before her accident, who he’s still convinced is somewhere inside her, nearly broke out.
“What’s that for?” she asks.
“Nothing, I—” Adam doesn’t know why he just hugged her.
“I do wish you’d come to church,” she says, her dark eyes glazing over.
Another of her catchphrases. One she used every Sunday from the day I stopped accompanying her when I was sixteen, even though I knew she wanted me to go. Even though I knew church was the only thing that gave her relief.
“I can’t. I’m helping Dad.”
Her lips purse. A staple-thin line. Like this was a choice I made between them. Which it was. But I couldn’t bear the suffocating silence of the drive to St. Mark’s and back anymore. The way the other people in the congregation were with her. Like she needed their pity.
“I was talking to Gareth Thompson after Wednesday Bible class,” she says. “He works for one of the big insurers up in London and he says that a boy like you who’s good with figures should definitely do maths at university.”
“I’m more interested in computing.”
“But that’s a hobby.”
A hobby. Christ, just like I said to Liam. A deflection I learned from her?
“Banks use computers too,” Adam points out. And I remember it now; I remember this whole conversation.
“Yes, but if you want to have a serious career…”
Computers are serious, he thinks. Just like I once thought. Even, or even most especially, games.
But he knows there’s no point in trying to tell her this.
Nor can he bring himself to confess that he’s already applied to study computing at uni—something she’ll repeatedly refer to in later years as “one of your biggest mistakes,” even after the internet is invented.
The other being Jules, he’ll come to suspect from the way she’ll always look at her, like she’s too flighty, too flippant, not quite good enough…
“Where is he?” Adam asks, quickly changing the subject.
He means Dad.
“Where do you think?”
The shed. Where he always is, at least whenever she’s around, Adam’s thinking. Because their marriage now is nothing like in the photos of them dancing together in their younger days, before she got hurt. Then, the two of them looked so close it’s like they were one, and made of pure joy.
She leaves without saying goodbye and Adam walks through to the kitchen, telling himself it’s not her, just the pills.
But as much as I’m now remembering all this crazy shit I grew up with, I’m also marveling at Adam as he scarfs down a bowl of Rice Krispies the size of a swimming pool, then two frosted strawberry Pop-Tarts, leaving me feeling his—our—enamel practically stripping itself off his teeth in protest, and wishing he’d rush back upstairs and brush them again. A thought that doesn’t enter his mind.
He turns on the radio instead, switching it from Sunday Worship to Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” on Radio 1.
Taking in the rest of the kitchen, I see some things are the same.
Like the lime-green laminated cabinets that Dad built, which I’ve resisted Jules throwing out for the last twenty years.
But there’s a load of old eighties crap I’ve forgotten we ever had too.
Empty glass milk bottles next to a yogurt maker, and a SodaStream and a Philips TV the size of a tank with a plug-in aerial on top.
“All right, kiddo,” Dad says, wandering in wearing paint-spattered jeans and a Motorhead T-shirt, gently patting Adam on the back.
For a moment I can’t stop staring at him too. He’s so alive. Just like her. Even though I know him and Mum died in the exact same crash.
“Come on. Best get a shift on,” he says, “or we’re going to be late.”
A flare of excitement bursts inside Adam.
Inside us. I get a snapshot image of his Juliet—my Jules—as a teen.
Bloody hell. That’s who we’re off to see now, isn’t it?
Right, because it’s October 1989, just like it says right here on the cover of Dad’s Racing Post that he’s pulled down from the top of the cupboard where he keeps it hidden from Mum.
Meaning we’re off to continue fixing up the Peregrine Hotel today.
Adam follows him out into the drive and there it is. Dad’s old minibus. A decrepit school bus that he scrubbed the school’s name off along with a couple more letters, so that it now reads c ool us on the side.
And we were cool, weren’t we? Are. Me and my dad.
In this memory or dream or whatever the hell it is.
Or at least that’s how it feels to both me and this Adam as he jerks open the minibus’s rusty door and breathes in the familiar reek of Golden Virginia and varnish and paint drifting through from the timpani of pots and brushes in the back, before hitting “Play” on the dashboard’s tape player, cueing up the pair of them bellowing out Led Zep’s “Good Times Bad Times” in perfect caterwauling sync.