The Other Lives Read online

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One

  All One

  You

  Belter

  Somebody Else's Dream

  The Ragged Man

  The Cherry Tree

  The Truth

  Streaming with Filthy Light

  Inescapable Closeness

  Who We Are is Not Important

  Part Two

  Say Sorry

  Things that I Know Happened Once

  Following Poppy

  The Scarf

  Feeling Their Bones

  Who You Used to Be

  One Particular Life

  I Know

  Just a Trick

  Lifeline

  Proof

  Schmidt

  Afraid to be Ignored

  The Bench

  Part Three

  Help

  Nothing Man

  The Other Lives

  Emily Havers

  The Beach

  A Dead Man's Memories

  We Are Not Strangers

  Enemy

  Mercer

  Watson's

  Pasties & Milkshake

  Part Four

  William

  Just a Theory

  Gone

  The Grand Unifying Myth

  Extremely Pleasant People

  No Time

  The Tree

  Eggs

  Cats

  Something Wrong with the Day

  The Knot

  Memory

  Cover your Ears

  Mr Cooper's Letter

  Missed Calls

  Ideas

  Epilogue

  The End

  From the Author

  More by the author

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  For Rachel

  PROLOGUE

  Lasswick, 1985

  ‘ARE YOU ALL RIGHT, Elliot?’

  Elliot was not all right. He had spent the morning in a daze, and now he found himself alone in an empty school corridor, blinking from yet another trance. Alone, that is, apart from Miss Craven, his French teacher, into whose face he was now staring. She was kind and pretty, only twenty-three. Her perfume broke his heart.

  ‘Yes, thank you, Miss Craven.’

  ‘Where are you supposed to be?’

  ‘Maths, I think. With Mr Mackenzie.’

  She laughed.

  ‘That’s at the other end of C Block, you silly wally!’

  She cradled his shoulder — he felt shudders of joy — and pointed him in the direction of his class.

  ‘Now get going. You don’t want to be late.’

  ‘Yes, Miss Craven.’

  He wandered away down the corridor.

  Later he tried to concentrate as Mr Mackenzie grumbled quadratics from the blackboard. But he could already feel another trance approaching. Everything around him — his book, the teacher’s bold sweeps across the board, the increasing looks of scorn from his classmates — seemed to be losing substance.

  His eyes found the window to his left, and the school car park below.

  ‘Childs!’ growled Mr Mackenzie. ‘Eyes front.’

  The boy did as he was told, but before he knew it his eyes had drifted back to the car park. Things looked different outside. Nothing had changed, but everything had. It was as if the world had acquired a new gravity. A new light. A new significance.

  Something was about to happen; he could feel it. It was like a memory.

  He saw his P.E. Teacher, Mr Hodges, carrying a huge pile of tennis rackets to the minibus. One fell and he heard a distant fuckit as the stocky man tried to rescue it, but the racket pile was too high and more fell off. He heard a singsong voice and heels rushing as Miss Craven arrived behind him, picking up the stray rackets and giggling. She helped him to the minibus and opened the rear door for him, then laid a hand on his shoulder as he thanked her. Mr Hodges threw the rackets in and she walked to her car, smiling in the sun with her keys jangling.

  ‘Elliot Childs!’

  Mackenzie’s crimson face glared across the room at the boy.

  ‘Sir,’ he replied.

  ‘Are you finding the sight of Miss Craven’s rear end more interesting than quadratic equations?’

  The classroom erupted with laughter.

  ‘Silence!’ he shouted, and the class obeyed.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Magnificent. Then concentrate.’

  As the teacher turned his back, one of the boy’s classmates, Daniel Hough, turned from the seat in front and mimed a bout of furious masturbation at him. Two girls sniggered from the back.

  The boy tried his book again, but he knew it was useless. The paper danced, and the numbers separated like leaves in the wind. He let his eyes return to the only sensible place — outside, where Miss Craven was getting into her blue Austin Allegro.

  Two veiny hands slammed down upon the boy’s desk, and Mackenzie’s fuming face was suddenly inches from his. The man’s eyes bored into him.

  ‘What,’ he said, thin lips trembling with rage, ‘is so incredibly fascinating out there, Childs, that could possibly distract you from my attempt to teach you quadratic equations?’

  ‘Sir,’ said the boy. ‘Mr Hodges, sir.’

  Mr Mackenzie looked outside, where Mr Hodges was struggling with the minibus door. He huffed and reached for the cord to the window blind.

  ‘He needs to get that bloody van fixed,’ he muttered, and let the blinds fall.

  His classmates’ amusement fell to derision as the classroom darkened, but the boy did not notice. He was already elsewhere, growing heady with the scent of Miss Craven’s perfume, which could not possibly have found its way into the room.

  He stood up. His last memory was the sound of his chair toppling into the desk behind.

  He was outside. He was in Miss Craven’s car, in Miss Craven’s driving seat. He was Miss Craven. He was not just looking out of her eyes, not just borrowing her perspective; he was her with no trace of himself. He felt everything it was like to be her. He heard the voice of the disk jockey on her Allegro’s tinny radio, the squawking sound effects and jingle blasts that led up to his next record. He felt the gear stick between a small, soft hand and the click of long nails against the dashboard as she turned up the volume. He felt her loop the seatbelt over her shoulder, then felt a little jiggle of excitement as the next song began — ‘Don’t you Want me Baby?’ by the Human League. Oh, I love this song, he felt her think, or rather, he thought.

  He felt the pull of the car as it reversed out of the space, the seatbelt still looped, unfastened, over her shoulder. He felt her hand dawdle back from the radio, running a finger up the inside of one of her lovely legs, lingering a little near the hem, bringing a smile. He felt her humming the words to the song as she changed into first.

  The tingle on her thigh remained, married to some hazy thrill about something that was happening later that evening — I can’t wait to see him, she thought. She felt another rush between her legs, a rush that turned into a drive to push down on the accelerator as the song reached its chorus and she pulled away, full of joy. He felt her fingers reach for the volume and turn it up to full.

  She was moving a little too fast. The seatbelt was still not fastened.

  Something glinted. Blinded, she shielded her eyes against the sudden low sun streaming through the tree at the gate. She pulled down the sun visor and eased off the accelerator, caught her face in the mirror. There was a crumb on her cheek from her lunch. She picked it off and flicked it onto the seat beside her, pulling away with a little too much vigour.

  She turned back to the windscreen and gasped at the sigh
t of Mr Hodges leaping from the minivan, still cursing at the door. He saw her and froze, ducking into a crouch, his eyes and palms wide with fear. There was no time to brake. She swerved, missed him, swerved again and screamed. The seatbelt flew from her shoulder as the song played on at full blast.

  Don’t you want me, baby?

  The Allegro mounted the curb and she felt herself rising from the seat. Weightlessness, the urgent sound of tyres and metal, the sight of a large vertical bar rushing towards her.

  Don’t you want me, oh, oh, oh, oh…

  Breath stolen from her as the steering wheel caught her in the trachea, a sharp, wet pain in her eyes as they moved through broken glass. Something pulling at her legs, then a sense of something splintering, and…

  …The boy was standing up in the classroom.

  The room was silent apart from the sound in his throat. He was speaking, but the words were deep and constricted by the position of his jaw, which was sunk upon his chest. His eyes were crossed and bulging and his tongue lolled. His right arm was rigid against his side, and his left was pointing at the window. He croaked like a toad.

  ‘Don’t you want me baby? You want me baby? Lamppost, lamppost, lamppost, legs, legs, legs. Don’t you want me b-b-b…’

  The stutter seemed to break him from the trance. He swallowed and looked around.

  Everyone was looking at him. Blank eyes, wrinkled noses, open mouths. Mr Mackenzie stood at the front, chalk aloft, his face unusually pale.

  Daniel Hough’s finger shot out.

  ‘Look at his trousers!’ he said, in cracked teenage baritone.

  Palms slapped mouths. Throats gasped. The boy looked down at the growing wet stain around the crotch of his charcoal C&A chinos. He felt a shudder of doom. A puddle was growing on the floor beneath him.

  The room filled with laughter. Mr Mackenzie stormed the desks.

  ‘Silence! Be quiet!’

  But the laughter continued, the spectacle too great to be quelled by a single man.

  ‘Silence!’

  He picked up a board rubber and slammed its wooden edge against the desk. The laughter died away, replaced by nervous breaths and shoe shuffles.

  ‘Nobody is to make a sound. Do you hear me?’

  The room was finally still and quiet.

  ‘Good. Now…’

  Outside, there was a screech of tyres and the sudden blare of music. Everyone turned to the windows, but the blinds were still shut. Before Mackenzie could open his mouth to speak, there was a thump and a crash and the sound of glass breaking, then a car horn on permanently, the chorus of a song underneath.

  ‘Don’t you want me baby? Don’t you want me, oh…’

  Mackenzie rushed to the window and pulled open the blinds. Chairs squealed on the floor as the rest of the class followed. The boy stood, rooted to his spot.

  ‘Oh, my Christ,’ breathed Mr Mackenzie. He turned to the flock of craning heads that had joined him. ‘Oh, my Christ. Get back, children, get back! Don’t look!’

  But they had already seen.

  Outside, a blue Allegro’s front end was folded around the lamppost by the school reception. Steam and smoke hissed from the engine and broken glass littered the kerb. In front of it, on the ground before the doors of the school, lay Miss Craven, facedown in a growing red pool. Her head was pointing right, vertebrae bulged from her neck, and a long triangle of glass was sticking through the fabric of her jacket. Her legs were slick with blood.

  Somebody screamed.

  PART ONE

  ALL ONE

  London, Present Day

  ‘WHAT WOULD IT TAKE, I wonder, for us to regain this truth?’

  The lights are down, the studio is quiet and my well-trousered legs are positioned in a firm but casual cross. I hold a clipboard, the clip of which, I have just realised, has an incredibly sharp corner. It has made a neat cut in my forefinger from which a glinting balloon of blood is now oozing. I make a vague mental note to tell Nina.

  ‘That we are, all of us, connected.’

  The man talking opposite me is in his eighties, and wears a smart tweed suit and cream shirt. Professor Sir George Cooper-Wright has aged well and carries little in the way of tum or jowls. His shoe buckles gleam. The Truth Be Told audience are unusually hushed.

  I, Elliot Childs, am behaving myself. I am being kind.

  ‘Be kind.’ That’s what my mother used to tell me. The only thing my mother used to tell me, in fact, due to the fact that she was mad. If she wasn’t offering me this advice, then she was papering the walls of our house with random photographs or drooling in her chair, looking out at the wind-ravaged Atlantic coastline upon which our ancient house teetered.

  ‘Be kind, Elliot, we’re all the same.’

  Yeah…hard though isn’t it, eh, Mum? I mean, Christ, people: they’re everywhere.

  You will have heard of my show — let’s face it, it’s all anybody’s talked about for two years. Essentially ‘chat’, but not like Graham Norton or good old Parky or Jay Leno across the pond. No, Truth Be Told is what would happen if you filmed Newsnight from the freak-show tent of a Sodom fairground. All are welcome — council estate dealer, city boy trader, pregnant teenager, politician, starlet, diva, rapper, singer-songwriter, doctor, lawyer, beggar, thief — it doesn’t matter who you are. So long as you have a story I can use to reflect upon our society’s merits or woes — mostly woes — then you are in, my lovely. We have big band glitz, comedy cutaways, guest performances and, of course, a live studio audience — my own angry mob, who respond to my every whim like a pack of dogs. It’s like a stream-of-consciousness carnival of vice, a hundred-mile-an-hour flaming death party careering through the end of days.

  And, like all parties, it always ends with fists and tears.

  The twist, of course, is that nobody knows where those tears will come from. It could be who you expect, but not always. Your teenage mother with a heroin addict for a dad might end up being lauded for bravery. Your community nurse might be roasted for hypocrisy. And I mean roasted. You just never know.

  But what exactly, I hear you ask, is a national treasure like George Cooper-Wright doing on my gutter-fuck of a show?

  Because this is all there is. This is what people watch now.

  For those in the public eye, it’s a rite of passage; survive the Truth Be Told gauntlet and you’ve made it. What’s more — and I’m not boasting here (all right, you got me, totally boasting!) — it is by far the most watched show on television, so it really is the only place to promote your book/film/show/album/whatever cretinous bile Satan has vomited through your worthless being in exchange for your pitiful soul.

  It’s simple: You come to me if you want to sell your wares. Or spread the word, just like George here. (He’s still talking, by the way.)

  ‘That we are all one thing on this pale blue dot.’

  I mean, wow. Just wow.

  Thursday’s show is winding down. The circus is over and we’re into the final segment — the refined bit, you might say. Basically we tone everything down and I have a one-to-one with a celebrity about some cause they’ve decided to paste their needy little names across. It’s what my co-producer Patti likes to call the ‘part with the heart’. It’s what I like to call ‘dead air’, but the advertisers seem to like it. Besides, it gives our audience something to make them feel better about themselves. They can’t be all bad if they clap politely at whatever bleeding heart we’ve got simpering for them that week as well as scream for the blood of the social washouts. Can they?

  Well, actually, yes. Yes, they very much can.

  Before the break I gleefully exposed the affair of a Sheffield mother named Tracy with her own father-in-law — a dribble of a man with whom she has also allowed the youngest of her three children to have a little too much ‘alone time’ than is appropriate. Since Tracy believed she was on the show to lambast her husband — a loser with eyes like sinkholes and one knee trapped in a perpetual bounce draining the fumes of his last hit
— she is understandably upset.

  Now, she and her newly enlightened family are being made to sit in the shadows while I interview Sir George. You can still see Tracy fidgeting in the background, and her husband’s knee now bouncing at twice its normal rate. The low lighting calms the audience too. They’re exhausted, poor mites, after all that shouting, and now they lie like tranquillised hounds, eyes drooping to their master.

  George is still rambling on.

  ‘…For our children to be born into a world in which this understanding is held as the highest, most sacred thing, well…I think this would be a wonderful thing. And this at least is my hope. But I still wonder. What would it take?’

  There is a pause and the camera cuts to me.

  ‘Well, indeed, indeed,’ I say. ‘And who better to answer that question than you?’

  I read from my clipboard.

  ‘CBE, Professor, Knight of the Realm, you cut your teeth on BBC radio in the 1950s.’

  George nods and smiles, remembering with me.

  ‘A young man, fresh out of Cambridge and brimming with inventive ideas about archaeology, mathematics and psychology. You rode the great surge of pop science, straight into the turbulent tides of the 1960s, where you joined anti-nuclear movements and led countless peace protests before writing your first book, Be What You Are. Your unique style of writing made this accessible exploration of human consciousness and behaviour a worldwide bestseller, and it is cited by thousands across the globe as one of the most powerful self-help books ever written.’

  I pause. George still smiles, but looks at his feet. He is humble.

  ‘In the 1970s and 1980s you cast off your academic image and adopted the flares, long hair and scraggy beard…’

  A forty-year-old photo of him posing in blue dungarees with Noddy Holder and a host of puppets springs up on the screen behind him. The audience laughs and George blushes, head in hand.

  ‘…of the country’s favourite zany TV scientist. Kids loved you and so did their parents. You were on Tomorrow’s World for ten years and that period of your career etched your name on a generation, who still to this day remember you fondly.