“Mmm-hmm.”
“And the impression we’d had up till then was that the man had been fairly quiet, fairly normal . . .”
“Andrew, I’m not sure this is okay . . . the kids . . . ?”
“Ohhh it’ll be fine!”
Peggy took his hand under the table and squeezed it firmly. It would only be much later that he’d realize this wasn’t an affectionate gesture but an attempt to get him to stop talking.
“So, the bedroom’s bare apart from a telly, and I accidentally turn it on and lo and behold—”
“Andrew, let’s talk about something else, eh?”
“—he’d been watching a dirty film called Quim Up North!”
Peggy had spoken over him, so the impact of the punch line was deadened.
“Come on, girls, shall we play cards or something?” Imogen said. “Maisie, you can help teach Suze.”
While Maisie went to get the cards, Andrew—as is the preserve of the drunken—suddenly decided it was imperative he be as helpful as possible while doing so ostentatiously enough to be praised for it.
“I’ll do the washing up,” he announced determinedly, as if volunteering to go back into a burning building to rescue some children. After a while Peggy came up to him at the sink as he struggled to pull on washing-up gloves.
“Oi, you, you lightweight,” she said in a low voice. She was smiling, but there was a firmness to her voice that went some way to sobering Andrew up.
“Sorry,” he said. “Got a bit carried away. It’s just . . . you know. I’m feeling quite . . . happy.”
Peggy went to say something but stopped herself. She squeezed his shoulder instead. “Why don’t you go and relax in the living room for a bit? You’re the guest, you shouldn’t be doing the washing up.”
Andrew would have protested, but Peggy was standing closer to him now, her hand on his arm with her thumb gently caressing it, and he very much wanted to do exactly as she asked.
The girls and Imogen had briefly abandoned cards to see how fast they could play pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man, their hands a blur, collapsing into giggles as they finally lost coordination. Andrew heard the tail end of their conversation as he left.
“That pasta we just ate now,” Maisie said.
“Yes, pet,” Imogen said.
“Was it al dente?”
“I think it was Jamie Oliver, love,” Imogen said, cackling at her own joke. At least I’m not the only one who’s pissed, then, Andrew thought. He slumped onto the sofa, feeling exhausted all of a sudden. All of this euphoria was very tiring, but it didn’t stop him from wanting the day to go on forever. He just needed to rest his eyes for a minute.
—
In the dream, he was in an unfamiliar house, dressed for a property search in his regular protective suit, except it was beginning to feel suffocatingly tight against his body. He couldn’t remember what he was supposed to be searching for; he had a feeling it was to do with some documents. “Peggy, what are we looking for again?” he shouted. But her reply was muffled, and though he looked in every room he couldn’t seem to find her. And then he was lost—and more and more rooms kept appearing, so that every time he crossed a threshold he was in a space he didn’t recognize, and he was calling Peggy’s name and asking for help and his protective suit was starting to constrict him to the point where he thought he might pass out. And there was music—jarringly out of tune, so deep it was vibrating through his body. The song was Ella’s, but her voice sounded like it was playing at half speed. Bluuuue moooooon, you saw me standing aloooonnnne. Andrew tried to shout for someone to turn it off, to play anything—anything—but that, but no sound came out of his mouth. And then suddenly he was in his own flat and Peggy was in the corner, her back to him, but as he approached and screamed her name, the music getting louder all the time, he saw it wasn’t Peggy at all, but someone with brown, wavy hair, a pair of orange-rimmed glasses in her hand at her side, and then the glasses had slipped through her fingers and were falling in slow motion toward the floor—
“Andrew, are you okay?”
Andrew opened his eyes. He was on the sofa and Peggy was leaning over him, her hand cupping one side of his face.
Is this real?
“Sorry—I didn’t know whether to wake you, but you looked like you were having a nightmare,” Peggy said.
Andrew’s eyelids flickered and closed.
“You don’t have to say sorry,” he mumbled. “. . . Never . . . ever have to say sorry. You’re the one who’s saved me.”
— CHAPTER 21 —
Trust me, it’ll help.”
Andrew took the can of Irn-Bru from Peggy with a trembling hand and took a tentative sip, tasting what seemed like fizzy metal.
“Thanks,” he croaked.
“Nothing like a four-and-a-half-hour trip on a train that smells of wee to cure a hangover,” Peggy said.
Suze nudged Maisie and gestured for her to take her earphones out. “Mum said ‘wee,’” she said. Maisie rolled her eyes and went back to her book.
Andrew was never drinking again, that much he knew. His head was throbbing, and every time the train took a bend he felt a horrible pang of nausea. But far worse were the incomplete flashbacks from the previous night. What had he said? What had he done? He remembered Peggy and Imogen looking annoyed. Was that the point when he’d started a sentence three times with increasing volume and urgency (“I was . . . So, anyway, I was . . . I WAS”) because people didn’t seem to be concentrating? He’d at least managed to get to bed rather than sleeping on the sofa, but—shit—he remembered now that Peggy had practically had to drag him there. Luckily, she hadn’t lingered there long enough for him to embarrass himself further. Ideally now they’d be re-creating the spirit of excitement and adventure of the journey up there, but Andrew was having to focus all his attention on not puking himself entirely inside out. To make matters worse, there was a small child sitting directly behind him whose favorite pastime appeared to be kicking Andrew’s chair while asking his father a series of increasingly complex questions:
“Dad, Dad?”
“Yes?”
“Why is the sky blue?”
“Well . . . it’s because of the atmosphere.”
“What’s a atmosphere?”
“It’s the bit of air and gas that sort of stops us from getting burned by the sun.”
“So what’s the sun made of?”
“I . . . Um . . . why don’t we find you your bear, Charlie? Where’s Billy the Bear gone, eh?”
I hope Billy the Bear is a nickname for a strong sedative, Andrew thought. He tried to will himself into unconsciousness, but it was useless. He noticed Peggy was looking at him, arms folded, her expression unreadable. He scrunched his eyes shut, Peggy’s face slowly fading away into nothing. He fell into a horribly uncomfortable pattern of falling asleep but almost immediately jolting awake. Eventually he managed to doze, but when he woke, expecting to be south of Birmingham at least, it turned out they were stationary, having broken down before they’d even gotten to York.
“We apologize for the delay,” the driver said. “We appear to be experiencing some sort of technical delay.” Apparently unaware that he hadn’t turned off the loudspeaker, the driver then treated them all to a peek behind the magician’s curtain: “John? Yeah, we’re fucked. Have to chuck everyone off at York if we can even get a shunt there.”
After said shunt finally materialized, Andrew and Peggy hauled their bags off the train along with a few hundred other passengers traveling back that Saturday whose phasers were all set to “grumble,” only to be elevated to “strongly worded letter” when they were told it would be forty minutes before a replacement train could get there.