No worries. Hope you feel better. Love YOU xxxx
Outside, I turned left and began to run along the coast road. It was raining, that fine rain that deceived you into thinking it didn’t mean business, but which soon drenched you through to the bones. My hair clung to my head and I was breathing like an old man, filled with my usual conviction that everything about this activity was wrong and unnatural.
Drum and bass thumped through my earbuds, which usually spurred me on to run harder, but just felt annoying today. I switched the music off and all I could hear was the roaring of waves hitting the shore, my own rasping breath and the hiss of the odd car going through puddles as it passed me.
The sea was to my left; silvery grey in the rain, lace-edged waves licking at the slick, shining sand. There was a low wall and scrubby grass between the road and the beach down below, yellow signs dotted here and there that warned of unfenced cliff, with a dramatic stick man falling to his death.
This road seemed to go on for ever, past bungalows on the other side that already had a closed-up-for-winter, sad look about them, and the café that still gamely had bright beach towels and deckchairs with ‘witty’ slogans for sale on its covered porch.
After a while I turned right, heading up the hill that led to Petrel Point, where there was a World War Two lookout and a great view.
This was a savage bit of the run, and there was an easier route via a path leading from a car park on the other side, but the view at the top made it worthwhile.
As I made my way up the hill, the usual metamorphosis began to occur. I slowly began to transcend the feeling of hating running and everything connected with running, as my body warmed up and my stride became more fluid.
I’d never run in my life until we moved here. At first, I did it because it seemed like the sort of thing people in their thirties did when they left London and, frankly, I was a bit lost. The endless space around me felt as though it might suffocate me, in a weird way, and I couldn’t get used to everyone looking the same. Why are people so obsessed with having space? Buildings make me feel secure. I’ve never had much of a desire to be the tallest thing on the horizon.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of those people who thinks London is the be-all and end-all of civilization. I wouldn’t want to have stayed where I grew up, in a shitty council flat in one of the more depressing bits of north London. It was just a bit more of an adjustment than I’d expected it to be.
Anya grew up in the next town along.
Lathebridge is a genteel place, with its famous Grand Hotel on the front that hosts a small arts festival every year, and its white regency houses along the seafront.
Casterbourne is more crummy arcades and charity shops than cream teas and literary folk, but it was cheap enough for us to buy a small house, with help, and well, there was always the sea. Right now, a silvery band was spreading across the horizon and promising brightness to come. It was one of the things I’d come to love about living here, that the weather could change so quickly. I could see for miles as I reached the top.
I was starting to feel simultaneously better and absolutely knackered, so I looped round past the fort and made my way back down towards home.
I pictured what Anya was probably doing right now. She’d be on the long sofa in their living room – sitting room – probably curled up watching telly and maybe drinking her beloved green tea.
I had an idea; maybe I’d have a shower and just turn up. No one was going to object, were they?
Many, perhaps most, people felt quite differently about their parents-in-law.
When friends made disparaging jokes about their own, bemoaning Christmases and birthdays in their company, I smiled along as though I got it, but really, mine were two of my favourite people in the world.
When I first met Julia and Patrick, I was a little nervous of what they would make of me. I worried that a primary school teacher who came from my sort of background would be a terrible shock to their middle-class sensibilities. All manner of Tobys and Julians and whatever, with Oxbridge degrees and jobs in the City, must have been queuing up.
I had enough of a chip on my shoulder without them even knowing my full story. They still don’t know about my so-called father. Only Anya does.
But the minute I met them, I felt welcome. Sometimes I marvelled at how quickly they’d accepted me. Almost like they had been waiting … and there I was.
Anya told me about her sister, Isabella, who had died of an infection when she was a few days old and whose solo picture – a small, red face in a white blanket – sat among all the ones of the sister who lived. Anya confessed that she felt guilty for having no feelings about this stranger at all and I could understand it, a little. But I think it was one of the reasons they were all so close, as a family. They were grateful for what they had, and maybe conscious that it could be taken away in a few failed breaths.
I was a bit taken aback that Anya was really called Anastasia. Julia only brought that out to wind her up though, as she hated that name. As a tiny girl they had called her ‘Stasi’, but it was a little too East German Torture Squad when written down, so it morphed into Anya, which she used as her official name now.
Patrick was a barrel of man with a hearty laugh and a propensity to see the positive in everything. He came from working-class roots, growing up in Liverpool and going on to work in shipping. Sometimes he made a comment about me and him having things in common, but we didn’t, not really. Very occasionally, you would witness him on the phone dealing with someone difficult and there would be the smallest flash of something else – something sharp-edged that was swaddled by his comfortable home life. He liked to go hunting now and then in Scotland, and I was grateful he never felt the need to ask me along for a father-son-in-law bonding session over dead, furry animals. Not my thing, in any lifetime.
Julia worked in publishing as a literary agent and was lively, fun company. She tended to clasp me in perfumed hugs and say things like, ‘Darling, how is my most favourite son-in-law?’ as though there were competition for the title.
That’s not to say that I hadn’t found her intimidating when I’d first met her. She’d peered at me over her glasses with a slight frown and, for the first half hour in her company, I’d felt a little like I was under a microscope. Then she’d seemed to change, just like that, and was warm and welcoming. I never really knew what it was that turned her around. Maybe she just saw how I felt about her daughter and approved of the sea of love that was on offer.
Anya was their everything. That was clear to anyone who knew them. She was the golden child – the one who survived – and they would do anything to protect her.
Neither of them ever mentioned my own mum. I think they found it hard to know what to say.
I sometimes imagined how it would have gone if my mum had lived long enough to meet them. I pictured Julia, dressed with her usual style, smelling of some sort of subtle perfume, then Mum in those shapeless dresses that were the only things that fit her and leggings, feet overflowing from her shoes like uncooked dough. She would have smelled of smoke because she would have been so nervous about meeting them and she’d have said, ‘Come on, Elliott, don’t give me that look. It’s one of my few pleasures in life and I only have one or two a day.’
I hated myself for thinking like that and I’d put up with any number of worlds-colliding awkward meetings if she was still here. But she had been dead
