Sottopassaggio Read online

  Sottopassaggio

  Nick Alexander was born in Margate, and has lived and worked in the UK, the USA and France. When he isn’t writing, he is the editor of the gay literature site BIGfib.com. His latest novel, The Case of the Missing Boyfriend, was an eBook bestseller in early 2011, netting sixty thousand downloads and reaching number 1 on Amazon. Nick lives in the southern French Alps with two mogs, a couple of goldfish and a complete set of Pedro Almodovar films. Visit his website at www.nick-alexander.com.

  Also by Nick Alexander

  THE FIFTY REASONS SERIES

  Fifty Reasons to Say Goodbye

  Sottopassaggio

  Good Thing, Bad Thing

  Better Than Easy

  Sleight of Hand

  SHORT STORIES

  13.55 Eastern Standard Time

  FICTION

  The Case of the Missing Boyfriend

  Sottopassaggio

  Nick Alexander

  First published in Great Britain in 2005 by BIGfib Books.

  This edition first published in Great Britain in 2011 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Nick Alexander, 2005

  The moral right of Nick Alexander to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-0-85789-639-1 (eBook)

  Corvus

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26-27 Boswell Street

  London WC1N 3JZ

  www.corvus-books.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Surprise

  Family Ties

  Spinning Free

  Double Entendre

  Disneyland

  Past Tense

  Past Imperfect

  The Gift

  Different Days

  Defrosting

  Incompatibility Issues

  Lost and Found

  And Lost Again

  Déjà Vu

  French Pickup

  Pavlov’s Terror

  Different Truths

  Entrapment

  Boulevard of Broken Dreams

  Public Offer

  The Devil You Know

  Partial Truths

  Leap Of Faith

  Strategic Decisions

  Look-alike

  Fat Fighters

  Profound Discoveries

  Life Goes On

  Chasing Rabbits

  Ghosts

  Red Means No-Go

  General Stickiness

  Lost In Action

  A Difficult Client

  Food For Friends

  Keyhole Truths

  Nightmare Reality

  The Only One

  What Needs To Be Done

  The Paths Separate

  What Friends Are For

  Perspective Lines

  Limits

  Cold Blooded Manipulation

  Improbability Drive

  Dogs And Babies

  Pizza Picnic

  Desperate Plans

  Bad Karma

  Morning Clarity

  Last Minute Gestures

  Close Brackets

  Here and There

  Sottopassaggio

  After It’s Over

  The Big Picture

  Epilogue

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Fay Weldon for encouraging me when it most counted. Special thanks to Davey, with-out whom Tom would have been speechless, to Rosemary and Liz for their help with the final manuscript and to Claire at Turnaround for her help with getting the book out into the wider world. Thanks to everyone who has filled my life with these stories and to everyone who shared their memories with me when I ran out of ideas. Thanks to Apple computer for making such wonderful reliable work tools, and to BIGfib Books for making this book a reality.

  Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.

  John Lennon

  Prologue

  A son, remembering packed lunches and childhood picnics, makes a flask of coffee for his mother and tells her to be sure to drink it as she undertakes the long drive back to England. He is worried about her leaving, for she is not, emotionally speaking, in the best of ways.

  But she reassures him. “I don’t know how I’ll be when I get there, but the drive will do me good,” she says.

  As he waves her off, he has one last moment of hesitation, but his boyfriend slides an arm around his waist and says, “Don’t worry she’ll be fine.”

  He hands the flask of coffee through the window, kisses his mother on the cheek and, as she drives away, he makes a meow sound, mimicking Riley, the caged cat next to her on the passenger seat.

  As Sarah drives, she marvels at her convincing acting.

  “He shouldn’t have let me go,” she thinks briefly. “He should have realised.”

  She discounts this as a bad thought. It’s not her son’s fault after all if he can’t read her mind, is it? It couldn’t really be his fault if his imagination isn’t big enough to see the terror of driving back alone to all that mess. Could it?

  After half an hour on the monotonous Italian motorway the cat quietens and Sarah’s mind drifts over the absurdly dramatic events of the last few months. Her shocking realisation that she didn’t, or perhaps had never really loved her husband of 27 years, and then in the middle of that crisis, her son’s revelation …

  And now this so-called holiday. “Out of the frying pan and into the fire”, she thinks.

  Away from Pete and the terrible drama of “home”, to be sure. But two weeks of trying to get her mind around the fact of those two together, trying to think about her son, trying find a new way of relating to him while also trying not to think about it; specifically trying not to think about the sex thing, the reality of their two bodies together.

  But more than anything else, she has spent the time trying not to think about what she will do when she gets back, if she gets back to Wolverhampton.

  As she drives past motorway exits for Monaco, Nice, then Antibes, she pictures each of those places, memories from 20 years ago, before Pete decided to hate travelling. She is tempted to leave the motorway and re-visit them all, to never go home. She wonders if French hotels take cats and briefly her hatred focuses on Riley; it becomes the cat’s fault she can’t do what she wants.

  The desire not to return to Wolverhampton is overpowering. She could just carry on, just drive and drive until …

  Until what though? Until her bank account is empty? Until both their accounts are empty?

  The future strikes her as deep and dark and endless, and she wonders if she can face it.

  “Am I capable of doing any of this?” she asks out loud. But what is the alternative?

  As tears well up in her eyes it starts to rain. She swallows determinedly and in strangely symmetrical acts, she brushes away the tears and flicks on the windscreen wipers.

  A sign shows that she will have to change motorways soon, to turn the whee
l and swing north towards home, or continue straight-on towards Marseille, Perpignan, Barcelona.

  A tiny smile spreads across her face as she contemplates the choices. Wolverhampton or Barcelona. It seems absurd that she will choose England as she knows she must.

  Outside it gets darker and the rain gets harder and starts to hammer against the windscreen. She flicks on the radio, which glows cosily and scans briefly before settling on FIP FM. A woman is talking with a late night voice even though it is mid-afternoon. Sarah doesn’t understand the actual words but the language, the foreign-ness of it sounds beautiful.

  Another sign announces the beginning of the A7 and she braces herself to turn the wheel towards home. To turn her wheel away from the adventures she always dreamt of, and towards the resumption of her life in Wolverhampton, her trips to the shops with her husband, and to establishing some kind of platonic relationship with the man she secretly loved all these years.

  It’s still too painful to even think his name. Having had his life of adventures without her he has now returned and will be living down the road! “How absurd!” she thinks. “How selfish!”

  She thinks about what it means, this turning of the steering wheel, for turning onto the A7 is hugely symbolic.

  It is the final and ultimate acceptance of her ordinariness. It is acknowledging, once and for all, that at 56 she isn’t going to become anything else. That it’s too late for adventures, too late to leave Pete, and too late for the lover. Only she doesn’t feel old inside; inside she doesn’t feel like it should be too late at all.

  She glances at the cat. “It’s not a life of Riley at all,” she tells it.

  The cat replies with a plaintive meow and Sarah nods.

  “You know that already huh?” she says.

  As she stares out through the windscreen at the road, her eyes start to tear again, and through two layers of running water it’s hard to see the road works.

  As she enters a tunnel, a sign tells her to move to the right-hand lane for the A7, so she waits until the end of the road works and then slows and slips in behind a truck.

  “Am I doing this then?” she asks, suddenly shocked by the loudness of her voice as the noise of the rain bashing against the windscreen ceases.

  The tears start to flow again and she’s having trouble seeing in the darkness of the tunnel. She puts on her hazard lights and starts to slow and shift onto the hard shoulder.

  As the car halts, only feet before the exit from the tunnel, she thinks of another option she hasn’t considered – turning around and going back. But it’s not really an option; her son will be flying home at the end of the week and his lover …

  She swallows and re-phrases the thought. His friend will be heading back to wherever it is his parents live, and another different family will bring their own set of hopes and fears into the villa.

  She pulls a tissue from her sleeve and blows her nose. She opens the cat’s cage, but it doesn’t move. As she reaches into the glove compartment for the flask of coffee, a passing truck blares its horns at her, and she is momentarily aware of the danger of where she has chosen to stop, glad yet again that she traded the tiny Daihatsu for a Volvo.

  “OK, just a minute,” she mutters, filling the cup and trying to consider her options.

  “But I don’t want to do any of it,” she thinks. “I’m sick of it. I’m tired of it all.”

  A motorcyclist with a dirty visor is travelling back from a romantic weekend.

  Riding much too fast in his haste to be home, he misjudges the bend inside the tunnel, misses the grey Volvo parked on the hard-shoulder but clips the crash barrier beyond, loses control and skids across the tarmac, out of the tunnel and into the safety of the bushes.

  A yellow Calberson delivery truck, with a tired driver who spent the weekend arguing with his wife, swerves to avoid the motorcycle and starts to skid and jack-knife across the glossy wetness of the three lanes.

  Behind him, a juggernaut swerves bravely towards the hard shoulder and for a moment the reactive, nervy driver thinks that he might make it. For a few exhilarating seconds he thinks that he might be able to squeeze his huge articulated truck through the tiny space, but as he glides through the gap with only the slightest of scrapes, as he squeezes past the yellow Calberson truck on the left, and the crash barrier on the right, he sees a parked Volvo on the hard shoulder, then glimpses the aterrified eyes of the woman within. As he ploughs into, then over her grey Volvo, sweat pours from every pore of his body.

  In the terror of this collision he forgets to steer and as his truck piles into the curved wall of the tunnel it starts to tip and slide and scrape and he thinks he knows from other accidents he has witnessed that he will die right here right now. He feels terror then a strange silent peace as he gives up and slides into grey.

  Behind that, a little white Fiat with a rain-spotted windscreen starts to skid. Inside it are two young men who, as chance would have it, are, at this very instant full of more love and hope for the future than either of them have ever experienced in their entire lives.

  Cesaria Evora is incongruously singing her heart out through the car speakers, and the two men hold their breath and stare wide eyed as their car slews hopelessly towards the rear of the juggernaut, now on its side.

  A split second before the moment of impact, the driver – Steve – removes his foot from the brake enabling him to steer to the left. His half of the car will be stopped dead by the huge piercing bumper of the truck while the passenger side of the car will rip and sheer and twist and fold, catapulting to safety two freak survivors of the year’s worst traffic accident; his most loved possession, a saxophone and his passenger, Mark.

  Surprise

  I don’t know how I ended up in Brighton; I’m in a permanent state of surprise about it. Of course I know the events that took place, I remember the accident – or rather I remember the last time Steve looked into my eyes – before the grinding screeching wiped it all out. I remember it so vividly and with such a terrible aching pain that I feel as though my heart will stop every time I run the image through my mind.

  As for the accident itself, I’m no longer sure what I remember or have dreamt, what I have been told or read in the newspaper clippings Owen, my brother, collected.

  The headline I remember is, French M-Way Pile-Up. 27 dead, Hundreds Injured, but only one death mattered to me, and only one of the injuries. I know that could sound callous, but my heart just doesn’t have space for anyone else’s pain.

  I know how I got from there to here as well, how I got from that unrecognisably deformed Fiat near Fréjus, to this sofa in Brighton. I know the mechanisms of humanity that dialled numbers, rushed people to the scene, cut me from the wreckage and drove us all, sirens screaming, to hospitals around the area.

  Intellectually at least, I understand the unravelling of obligation, shared history and love that made Owen, my brother, leave his wife behind in Australia and fly half way around the world to sit holding my hand before scooping me up and bringing me here.

  But it all seems so unexpected, so far from how things were supposed to be, that I am at a total loss to see how things will pan out, to see how things can ever pan out again.

  I had a life and a job and a new boyfriend. I was supposed to hear him play saxophone, supposed to spend a dirty weekend of sex and laughter before sitting at work on a Monday morning pretty much like any other, and trying not to fall asleep at my computer screen. That’s all that was supposed to happen.

  So I am surprised, and my surprise is confounded by just how familiar Brighton feels, just how like Eastbourne where I grew up, it is; by how normal it feels to be sitting in this bay window, in this seaside town and to be hearing the sash windows rattling behind me as a distant seagull screams. How obvious it seems, to be sitting here looking at Owen opposite reading The Guardian.

  It’s all such a surprise, and so unsurprising, that I sit in numbed, stunned disbelief as I try to work out whether I am having trouble b
elieving that I am here, or trouble believing that I was ever there. Did those twenty years since Owen and I last sat on opposite sofas in a seaside town really happen at all?

  I open my mouth to ask him but think better of it. He’s worried enough about me as it is, and, logically at least, I know the answer.

  As if he has captured my thoughts Owen looks up at me and frowns.

  I wonder what he is going to say to me, wonder what he will ask, how I will reply, what reassuring answer I will find to his concerned questioning.

  But Owen just smiles at me. “You want a cup of tea?” he says.

  I exhale. “Yes,” I reply.

  The reply came a little too quickly. I sounded breathless and I realise that I am also frowning, so I force a smile.

  Owen raises an eyebrow at me, shakes his head and sighs. I think he’s decided that I’m taking the piss but he says nothing.

  He stands and turns towards the kitchen.

  Family Ties

  I sit and stare at the spring light falling through the bay windows forming hard geometrical squares on the varnished floorboards. Particles of dust jump and float in the light, pushed by invisible currents of air.

  I drift, thinking of the same squares of light on another floor in another time; a carpeted floor dusted with Lego and Meccano from the big wooden box. I can almost feel the tension in the house, the alertness that I, that we all grew up with, our hidden antennae constantly scanning the horizon for the next breach of the peace.

  I pull Owen’s dusty bike from the cellar and pump the tyres. The bike, which is filthy, but apparently new – the tyres still have those little rubber mould-marks on them – sits next to an equally unused ab-machine and a sprung chest expander. I grin at the idea of Owen buying this stuff.

  It’s another grey day. I had forgotten just how terrifyingly grey England can be, even in springtime. Out of sheer habit, not from here but from Nice, I head down to the seafront and west.