Page 4 of From Now On

Oh, that endless summer. Sitting at the Cliff Top Café, feeling like he was on top of the world, head almost touching the clouds. Bottles of Coke speared with red and white striped straws; chips doused in vinegar. Charlie kicking his legs against the harbour wall, watching various dads scoop sand into buckets, kids collecting feathers and pebbles to decorate their castles. Mum had pushed two-pence pieces into his hand so he could amuse himself in the arcade while she practised with the band. Dropping the coppers into the coin pusher.Waiting for the clatter of tumbling coins to spill out of the machine. He wouldn’t say he was happy exactly, that seemed too far out of reach after… but he had begun to feel a contentment when everything had changed.

Again.

‘Why did you stop playing?’ Sasha asks.

‘When Ronnie and Charlie came back here, I moved with them. I tried, but…’ Bo shrugs. ‘Had to get a proper job. Who knows, there might be a talent scout there tonight. This could be our big break.’

‘Bo has never given up on his dreams,’ Charlie says. Even on jam nights at the local pub he was optimistic he’d get his big break.

‘Ah, Charlie lad. You know your mum is my dream.’ It’s true. They’re devoted to each other, never stopped showing affection the way that some couples do. A touch of the hand. A brush of the lips. ‘But music is a close second. Anyway, we’re a happy family now, aren’t we?’

Bo doesn’t reference what it took to get here. Charlie’s own dreams broken. His spirit broken.

Family.

Charlie thinks about what that word means to him. He fingers the ring box in his pocket.

Family is hope, a future, a choice.

Love.

‘But you’re playing again tonight?’ Sasha asks.

‘Yeah, putting the band back together.’ Bo grins but then his smile slips. ‘Our drummer, Marty, has been diagnosed with prostate cancer. He’s based in Sheffield now but Fingers, our keyboard player, lives in Cornwall, and he’s organised a fundraiser.We thought a beach party would be fun and…’ Bo’s voice drops. ‘It might be the last time… you know.’

For a moment they sit in silence until Sasha asks if there are any photos of Charlie in the album.

Ronnie turns the page and points out a younger him, not quite a child but not yet a man. If you look past the mop of curly dark hair, which nowadays is tamed with product, you can see the sadness shadowed in his eyes. His jaw tightens as his mum tells Sasha that after that picture had been taken, he had eaten so much candyfloss he’d felt sick for the rest of the day but it wasn’t the sticky spun sugar that had made his stomach churn; it was the fear, the confusion, the knowing that they had come here because he had lost something, and recognizing that, from the adoring way his mum and Bo were gazing at each other, he’d also found something and he wasn’t sure it was something he wanted.

Still, as Sasha screams with hilarity at his too-short-shorts, his protruding knees, his unkempt hair, he laughs good-naturedly.

He’s a world away from that child who had been thrust into an unfamiliar and uncertain situation; he is the man he’dchosento become. Sasha is the swirl of vanilla buttercream on top of the perfect cupcake. His happily ever after. He reaches for her hand and gives it a squeeze.

‘Where are Duke and Nina?’ He throws a distraction Mum’s way before she can turn the page again. For a second Sasha looks blank as though she’s forgotten they’ve come to babysit Charlie’s half-brother and -sister rather than to poke fun at the ungainly teen he’d once been.

‘They’re next door baking with Pippa,’ Mum says. ‘They shouldn’t be too long.’ She checks her watch just as a horn beeps outside.She cranes her neck to peer out of the window. ‘That’s Marty, we must get going.’ She stands. ‘We can drop into Pippa’s to say goodbye.’ She turns to Charlie. ‘The kids might want to stay up for “Auld Lang Syne”.’

‘That’s okay. It will be nice to see in the new year together,’ he says, although inwardly he’s disappointed. He wants that midnight kiss with Sasha without an audience; he’s already planned an inordinately romantic speech, but then if they aren’t alone he won’t do anything stupid like propose tonight, here.

They all bustle back into the tiny hall again.

Mum and Sasha hug their goodbye, exchanging a premature ‘Happy New Year’.

‘Charlie.’ Mum opens her arms to him.

He bends down and fastens his fingers around Billie’s collar on the pretence she’s about to bolt through the front door.

‘See you tomorrow.’ He tilts his head upwards, not quite looking at her face, as he crouches on the floor among the dog hair and his resentment which, even now, he can’t quite shift. It wasn’t her fault. Heknowsthat and yet he still can’t release his grip on the bitterness he’s been carrying around for so long it feels like part of him.

And yet as she gazes down at him with tenderness, he knows she’d be devastated if she had any inkling how conflicted his feelings towards her are. How complicated.

‘Look after them for me, won’t you?’ she whispers. ‘And look after yourself too,’ she adds but not as an afterthought. It’s as though this is what she wanted to say all along.

‘I promise.’ He crosses his chest with his finger the way he used to when he was small. Not a hug, but enough.

For a moment their eyes meet, and he feels held. The way he had when he was younger,before Bo and Nina and Duke. Before any of it. The way he had when he’d had a nightmare, a tummy ache, a fear of the monster living under the bed. There is a split second when he longs to hurl himself into her arms, tell her that he loves her, that he knows she loves him really and has done her best and that he’s sorry he has brought her so much shame, but his words are tangled up with his emotions and his memories, and he can’t unpick them before she turns away from him and walks down the path. The garden gate creaks open. She spins and raises her hand in a wave but before he can free his fingers from Billie’s collar and wave back, she’s disappeared from view.

Sasha has healed the crack in Charlie’s bruised heart, but in that moment, suddenly he wants to make it right, all of it. He vows that when he sees his mum tomorrow, he will tell her everything, the way he felt all those years ago, the way he felt until recently. He wants to say goodbye properly. To promise that he’ll call her every week and mean it. Leave for New York with a clean slate, a clear conscience. He doesn’t want to feel like he’s running away.

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