Life at the End of the Road Read online

  Of course, this was all symptomatic of working in a ‘blossoming industry’ (read: digital industry). The online journalism field placed significantly more focus on the ‘online’ aspect than the ‘journalism’ aspect, with the quality of work produced being, even to someone who worked at the company, sub-par.

  I had no ongoing projects, which meant it was time to catch up on my ‘free time’ posts. This was a project which the new boss was trying to push in which all employees needed to meet a certain quota of articles written about… anything. It was supposed to encourage ‘creative thinking’, but nothing about this place (except for maybe the bean bags) screamed ‘be creative’. The cynic in me, as well as in my fellow colleagues, thought that this scheme was more about getting as many articles produced as possible, which would generate more page views, and more ad revenue. It was a scheme to line the directors’ pockets - as most are.

  I took the instructions of this project very literally, and set myself a personal challenge to go as far as possible out of my comfort zone until someone noticed. So far, I’d written about baby formula (despite not being a mother), the possible effects of the legalisation of drugs (despite not being a drug user), and the benefits of banning plastic straws (while sipping a drink through one while writing it).

  It was a simple writing process: I would pull something out of my arse, and then I would hit ‘publish’.

  On this particular day, I decided to continue my personal challenge by writing about the future of driving (despite not having a driving license). I took a very strong point of view, as always, and essentially wrote an article about driving lessons being a con because there are going to be driverless cars everywhere within five years. Surely, this time, someone was going to say something.

  Once finished, I left my Word document open on screen - in case anyone was looking - and began to wait out the remainder of my day. Laura was probably only just waking up. Or at least only just getting out of bed. In the mornings she’d normally make awkward grunting noises whenever I started getting ready - a form of gentle complaining. Then she’d bury her face in her pillow and fall straight back to sleep.

  If it was the weekend, I would wander down to the local artisan cafe, order a tall black coffee, and sit down to write. I’d stare out at the river and write two, maybe three, wonderful articles, with beautiful prose, all while enjoying the best cup of coffee I’d ever had and nibbling on a pain au chocolat. A dog would wander up to me, I’d give him a pat. I’d look at my phone - four new Twitter followers. The new follows just didn’t stop coming in. Everyone wanted to hear what I had to say.

  But, no, that wasn’t reality. That was the heavily-romanticised idea of writers that we’d all collectively been sold on. If I ever tried to write in a cafe, I’d produce fewer than 200 words before finishing my coffee, getting annoyed by screaming children, and leaving in a huff.

  ‘Driverless cars?’ someone crowed from over my shoulder, ‘Very nice. Very current. Keep it up!’

  Looking up, a well-dressed young woman beamed at me with approval. Sonja patted my shoulder with enough force for it to be reassuringly platonic. Being the boss of a predominantly-male writing team, she was careful to avoid signals that anyone could have misinterpreted - not that I was prone to doing so.

  ‘Cheers’, I replied, forcing myself to sound engaged, interest, ‘this is something I’ve been looking forward to writing for a while.’ A lie, but a harmless one. Not like the kind of lies that Craig in Sales liked to tell.

  ‘And I look forward to reading it!’ she lied - but it was hard not to appreciate the sentiment. We were an industry of liars.

  Three days later, I was making use of my weekend alone to centre myself, to recharge my batteries before the working week ahead. Taking an extended walk, I ended up in a park several miles away from home, in a part of the city that I didn’t know. As I sat on a bench surveying the nearby sunbathers, I received the phone call from Laura’s mother.

  After the call ended, I sat on the bench for a few minutes longer. I’d known Laura to be careless with her time, often staying out until the early - or late - hours of the morning, without prior warning. However, even for her, not making contact for two days seemed unlikely. I checked the usual digital haunts - surely there would be a status update, a story, something to give an indication that she was alive and well. I found nothing.

  There is no feeling worse than not knowing whether or not a loved one is ok. As I sat on this bench, surrounded by hundreds of local residents enjoying one of the few days of actual sunshine they’d experience in this dreamy summer, I found my gut twisting and my head spinning. I, as many partners would, feared the worst - feared that she was face down in a ditch off some lonely country road, and would be found in a couple of days. I feared that I’d blown it with her, that she was sick of my attitude, and she’d run off with someone else. I feared that she was never coming home.

  It was in that moment that I decided I would be calling in sick to work for the next few days. If something had happened to Laura, I was going to make sure I was there to help find her.

  Laura had always been fairly quiet about her early life in Redbury, which I attributed to some kind of trauma, likely caused by her parents’ separation. As we rarely made the trip, I knew very little about the town, her friends, or her father, who I was still yet to meet.

  Staying remarkably level-headed in a situation which could very easily turn out to be disastrous, I resolved to speak to one person who did have some insight into Laura’s early life, and where she might have disappeared to - Anna Tyndall.

  Anna and I had butted heads from the start. It was possible that Anna thought I was taking her best friend away from her - and in reality, I probably was. In the first couple of years of our relationship, we spent most of our time together, making little room for old friends. Laura spent less and less time with Anna, and although Laura and I were now not so interdependent, the time spent apart meant that their friendship was never quite the same as it had been before. Perhaps they had matured, become different people, hadn’t had quite so much in common. I wasn’t quite sure of the reason.

  This meant that when I turned up unannounced at Anna’s doorstep, I was met, primarily, with shock - and a little concern thrown in.

  ‘Rey?’ Anna asked, ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Hi.’ I hadn’t prepared the words just yet.

  ‘Hi.’

  There was a pause as I arranged my thoughts into a passably coherent sentence.

  ‘I’m looking for Laura. I mean- I dunno where Laura is.’

  Anna raised an eyebrow. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean - she went back home. Back to Redbury. Her dog died so she went back. But then her Mum rang me and…’

  The truth of the situation hit me out of nowhere and I found it hard to breathe. My heart started pumping. Fast. The noise was filling my head.

  ‘And I…’ I attempted to continue.

  Pound. Pound. Pound. Sharp pains attacked my chest.

  I was on the sofa. I didn’t quite know how I got there. Anna was staring at me. Perhaps she had sat me down.

  ‘What’s going on, Rey? What are you doing here?’

  I was still breathing deeply. Erratically. I struggled to form words. Anna became exasperated. Went to dig through her kitchen drawers for a paper bag. She dropped it in my lap. It fell through my legs. I reached down, scrambling for it, barely knowing up from down.

  As I breathed into the bag, my heart rate seemed to slow, the pain stopped, and most importantly of all, I no longer felt completely overcome by terror. I, slowly, carefully, searching for the right words, told Anna everything from the death of Max, the family dog, and Laura leaving for Redbury, to the painful phone call I received earlier that day. I left out any details that might allude to any ‘trouble in paradise’.

  As I finished, I took a moment to look around the room. Previously it has been pristine and completely devoid of clutter, but now opened boxes
and dirty clothes lined the floors.

  ‘Everything alright here?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. Why shouldn’t it be? Because it’s messy? People get busy.’

  ‘Sorry, sorry, I didn’t mean anything by it. I just know that you’re usually quite organised and just making sure that I’m not disturbing anything, I don’t want to be disturbing anything.’

  Anna shook her head - in response or exasperation? ‘Everything is fine.’ A pause - out of awkwardness or consideration? ‘So why are you here?’

  ‘I thought… I thought I just told you.’

  ‘Yes, you told me what’s going on - or what you think’s going on, at least - but that’s not my question. I’m asking: what are you doing here?’

  ‘Oh. Right. Well I thought you might be able to help. I don’t know the- you know the town and I don’t and I wanna go up but I don’t know it. I thought you could help.’

  My head was starting to pound again, although it was possible that this was just a symptom of a stress headache. I must have been looking particularly anxious, as Anna’s typically stern expression broke into one of concern.

  ‘Ok… I guess I have the weekend. I’m sure Laura is absolutely fine, but just to reassure everyone… fine. I’ll come.’

  I smiled at Laura’s friend.

  She continued, ‘But we’re taking the train, cos I know you still don’t drive and the M1 was a fucking nightmare last time, its just not even worth it.’

  ‘Ok, OK, sure. Cheers, Anna.’

  2

  This Is Your Great Western Service to Highford. This Train is Formed of Eight Coaches.

  To avoid any confusion that might arise from the upcoming change of point of view in this chapter, allow me to - very briefly - provide some context on both the current situation and legal complications that surround the publication of this novel. While “Anna” is loosely based on a real person, who previously considered herself Laura’s best friend, this is not her real name. When I asked “Anna” to be involved in this project as a way of working through these devastating events, she refused, saying that publishing a piece of writing about my lost partner was ‘horribly misguided’ and came across as ‘profiteering off of her death’ [sic].

  Of course, this is not the case. I would like to emphasize that this project is not a commercial venture, and rather a coping mechanism - albeit I do concede that it is not a typical one.

  This means, then, that as I write as “Anna” below, it is as I believe “Anna” would have acted and thought in the heavily-fictionalised version of events to follow. You will find that both in this chapter and later in the novel, there are increasing allusions to dark and troublesome events that took place in “Anna”’s early life, which I stress are not intended to be read as anything but fantasy, and have never been proven in a court of law.

  Once again, I reiterate that this is a work of fiction, and although some of the strange incidents in this book might appear to reflect strange incidents that took place in reality, aspects have been adapted. Indeed, as you will discover, these such aspects mean that this tale could not have taken place in our reality as we understand it.

  We left the house less than half an hour after Rey asked me to join him on a trip back to Redbury. There was never a great time to return to that fucking town, but having just broken up with Josh, I wasn’t having such a great time away from there, either. This way, I figured, I could be away while he collects his bits, which were currently lining the floors, work surfaces, and, somehow, the walls of the apartment. It had never been a particularly big flat, but now that we’d broken up, it seemed smaller, more crowded, than ever.

  Josh blamed me for being increasingly distant, and I didn’t care. The novelty of having him around had worn off within weeks, and while he was between jobs, I couldn’t even be placated by the novelty of him paying half the rent. It was no longer meant to be. ‘Fuck it,’ I’d thought to myself as I cried for the first and final time over him.

  When I wished for an escape from the hellish situation of simultaneously caring too much and too little about this breakup, I had not imagined that Rey would be the one that the universe sent to distract me. He was a pillock - one of those people who considered themselves the hero in their own story and didn’t care that cynicism wasn’t in and of itself an interesting character trait. When Laura had started dating him, I found myself less excited to see her, because I could no longer bear to hear her talk about this one-dimensional excuse for a partner. At least worrying unnecessarily over Laura (who historically had pulled this kind of shit all the time before she met Rey) had given him something to care about.

  Backpack hooked over one shoulder, I followed Rey to the nearest train station, where I waited for him to pay the extortionately expensive last-minute fares to somewhere that nobody in their right mind actually wanted to go.

  Once on the train, Rey had begun to calm down. There was no sign of this pathetic fainting thing that apparently he’d started to do. In fact, he had returned to explaining his views on various subjects, all presented as fact - as though this was a lecture rather than a conversation. His delivery, as always, was much weaker in person than on paper, with words spilling out of his mouth quicker than his lips could pronounce them, resulting in a mess of mumbled sounds.

  ‘…And don’t get me started on that, cos we’re never going to be able to leave our jobs, are we? So we were told, as kids, that we work until we’re 65, right, and then we get a pension. But now, now they’re telling us that we’re gonna have to work til we’re like… seventy! So what’s gonna happen in five years, or ten years, or whatever? Is this age just gonna keep getting higher? Are we ever gonna reach it? It’s like that math problem, isn’t it? That one with the tortoise and the hare? Oh, no, that’s the… that’s the… fable, isn’t it, that’s different, err…’

  He trailed off for a moment and my ears were afforded a very temporary break.

  ‘It’s the tortoise and that Greek guy. The one with the dodgy ankle. What’s his name?’

  I didn’t reply, knowing he wasn’t expecting an answer from me. How could he? Clearly I was nowhere near as smart as the great Rey Morfin.

  ‘Achilles! That’s the one. So, yeah, the retirement age is like this… math problem. Achilles and a tortoise are having a race for some reason - not sure why… I assume there’s a bet involved or something. And Achilles, being, like, cocky, gives the tortoise a head start. And then Achilles says, cool, so every 10 seconds or something I can close half the lead. So he does that, and the gap is half the distance. And he does it again, and it’s half again. But then he keeps doing that, over and over, and he’ll never catch the tortoise up, right? Just the gap is going to keep halving in size, even if it’s really small, he’s never gonna catch the tortoise.’

  I used to own a tortoise. It was supposed to live for years but it died within a couple. My working theory was that the person who sold it to us was lying about how old it was in the first place.

  ‘…So I reckon our retirement is like that, right? We keep working, and every few years they raise the retirement age. So we get older and older, dreaming of that day where we can just say Alright, I’m done, let’s play some golf or bridge or whatever, and that day never comes, because the retirement age keeps getting higher. I know, like, we don’t have to stick to that in lots of industries, but there’s people out there, working for the government or whatever, and they’re probably looking at this and thinking about Achilles too.’

  ‘I don’t think anyone thinks about Achilles as much as you do.’

  ‘Well maybe not that particular problem, but you get my point, right?’

  ‘Yeah, I get your point,’ I replied, ‘I might try and grab a few minutes sleep if that’s alright.’

  ‘Yeah, no worries, Anna, no worries. I’m thankful you’re here.’

  When Rey said things like that, my stomach sank. Maybe I was being unfair to judge him as harshly as I had.

  ‘I’ve actually been having t
rouble sleeping recently,’ he continued. There it was; I had just told him that I wanted a quick kip and he was going to carry on talking my ear off. Maybe I’d judged him correctly after all.

  ‘So I’ve been having this weird recurring dream. Or at least, parts of it are recurring, I’m not sure all of it is. But then with dreams, you don’t always remember them all right? So, anyway, I keep having this dream where-’ He trailed off. I didn’t know what he’d almost told me and I wasn’t sure I really wanted or needed to know. He was flustered.

  ‘This dream where… well, I keep seeing a cat,’ he mumbled.

  ‘A cat?’

  ‘Yeah, one of those weird colour cats, I forget what they’re called. Not tabby but similar.’

  ‘Tortoiseshell?’

  ‘Yes! That’s it! Like in the math problem.’

  I nodded with pursed lips. ‘Well, I might have a cat nap now, if that’s ok with you?’

  ‘Oh, right, yeah.’ This time he got the message.

  Rey woke me up at our stop. Typically I wouldn’t sleep for that long on public transport. A bump in the line here or a sudden stop there and I would be wide awake again - but not this time. I’d planned to only pretend to be sleeping to avoid having to hear any more of Rey’s socioeconomic ramblings.

  We’d stopped at the closest train station to Redbury, which, of course, was too small to have its own dedicated line. It barely had a bus stop, having just one route which, theoretically, ran once an hour. It was the sort of area where you really needed to drive to get around. Fortunately, the bus service was running on time on this particular day, which meant that I only had a small wait between train and bus in which I expected to hear more from Rey - but suddenly he was quiet. Perhaps, being this close to Redbury, he could no longer stop himself from thinking about Laura. It was almost ridiculous for him to be worried about her. If only he’d known her when they were younger. He wouldn’t be worried then (but then again, if they had met then, they probably wouldn’t be together).