You Don't Have to be Good Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Copyright

  Also by Sabrina Broadbent

  Dedication

  You Don’t Have to be Good

  1. Gone

  2. What

  3. Cow

  4. Fetch

  5. Love

  6. Hot

  7. Work

  8. Endgame

  9. Urn

  10. Pray

  11. Go

  12. Rip

  13. When

  14. Late

  15. Missing

  16. Bad

  17. Sign

  18. Because

  19. Night

  20. So

  21. Memo

  22. But

  23. Wife

  24. Beach

  25. What

  26. Sorry

  27. Best

  28. Scream

  29. Gin

  30. Cold

  31. Tender

  32. Stairs

  33. Fair

  34. Exit

  35. House

  36. Flat

  37. Temp

  38. Over

  39. Sorry

  40. Venus

  41. Daddy

  42. Went

  43. Ithaca

  44. Bitter

  45. Seen

  46. Her

  47. Lost

  48. Us

  49. Found

  50. Yet

  51. Snap

  52. Perhaps

  53. Falling

  54. Ever

  55. Steel

  56. Yes

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781407049106

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Thanks to the Arts Council England, to Tom Badger and Dal Chahal of the Metropolitan Police, to my father, John Broadbent, for his tireless editing, to mi amiga, Olivia Lichtenstein, for Spain.

  Published by Chatto & Windus 2009

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Copyright © Sabrina Broadbent 2009

  Sabrina Broadbent has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  Lines from ‘Ithaka’ from CP Cavafy: Collected Poems; translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, published by Chatto & Windus. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.

  First published in Great Britain in 2009 by

  Chatto & Windus

  Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,

  London SW1V 2SA

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  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

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

  ISBN 9780701183943

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  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Descent

  A Boy’s Guide to Track and Field

  For Mum and Dad

  And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.

  Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,

  you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

  C.P. Cavafy, ‘Ithaka’

  Gone

  FRANK FIRST noticed his wife was gone a month before she disappeared.

  It was night-time, in the dead hour. It was long before dawn, before the milk float and the blackbird, when he woke and saw a face inches from his own staring at him. The room smelt peaty.

  ‘There’s someone in the house.’ Her voice was afraid, dry like a quill scratching parchment.

  ‘Bea?’ he said, peering through the grainy dark.

  He raised himself on one elbow and listened to the house. Light from the landing leaked into the room and he felt a shift in pressure, as if a door somewhere closed. Dry-mouthed, he looked down at her and saw that she had gone. It wasn’t Bea lying there beside him on the rumpled, sweat-soaked sheet. Not Bea, but a grim-mouthed stranger with clammy skin and a sour tang on her breath.

  She brought one finger to her lips and said, ‘Shhh.’

  Frank held his breath.

  And then they heard it. A small, quiet sound like the click of the latch being eased gently home. Her eyes held his for one last time and then, heart racing and with the cloyed slowness of the dream, Frank struggled from the bed. Naked and slack-bellied, he took two steps to the window and parted the curtains a crack. Outside, Oyster Row was deserted and still. Narrow terraced houses stared back at him, blind and dumb. He watched the space between the crumbling gateposts, but no figure slipped through to hurry down the street.

  ‘Frank?’

  He rubbed the rough skin of one buttock and caressed the bald dome of his head.

  ‘Frank?’

  A shudder ran through him. He was afraid to turn round and look at her.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, eyes still on the street. ‘There’s nothing there.’

  DOWNSTAIRS IN their frayed dressing gowns, the draughty floor chilled their feet. The fridge hummed, the boiler ticked and the sweet smell of decay drifted up from the bin. Nothing appeared to be missing and there was no sign of an intruder. Relief made Bea smile as she switched the kettle on to boil.

  Frank came in from the front room and checked the back door again.

  ‘You were brave,’ she said, feeling shy and strange.

  He moved away from her and looked out into the hall.

  She heard him open the front door, close it again and turn the key in the lock. She waited.

  When he appeared in the doorway, his face was like putty. A laugh escaped her.

  ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

  She sat down at the table and pushed a chair out for him with her foot. She wouldn’t sleep now. It could be nice, a dawn cup of tea, just the two of them.

  ‘Your tea,’ she said, holding a mug out and sipping her own.

  She was thirsty, always thirsty. What she lost in the night in sweat, she replaced in the day with tea. She was becoming a tea lady, a teapot, a tea bag . . .

  She laughed down her nose. ‘Oh dear,’ she said.

  Frank saw nothing amusing in the situation. He sighed. ‘I might as well get some work done now I’m up.’

  Bea watched his old-man slouch and the sheen of his head. Crestfallen, she thought. That’s what I’m seeing. Your crest is fallen, Frank, and let’s face it, so is mine. She felt wrung out, hung out to dry. Perhaps they s
hould see someone, a counsellor, a doctor, or a priest. There were books they could read, Mating in Captivity or Hanging on to the Bitter End. She should smile more, she knew that for a fact. The plumber said so, and so did Frank. She pulled her mouth wide, and looked at the crowded years of the walls and shelves around them. Apart from the floor, the kitchen felt warm and safe; their home, their hutch.

  ‘I’ll sleep on the couch,’ said Frank and left the room.

  Bea said, ‘Ouch.’ Then, ‘What work?’ to the space where he had been.

  We’ve reached the couch stage, she told her window reflection. She could hardly blame him. She had sweated litres of herself during the night, cocooned in her larval bed, metamorphosing in their marriage swamp. She wished there had been an intruder in the house; some drama or event, Frank doing battle on the stairs, defending his homestead, his wife and his chattels . . .

  ‘Don’t be so ridiculous,’ she said aloud.

  Her reflection looked back at her from the garden, where a solitary bird had begun to sing. She drank her tea and saw herself there, on the outside, looking in.

  What

  JUST THEN, a wolf did come out of the forest.

  Frank raised his fingers from the keyboard and looked at the sentence he had written. He shuffled forward in his chair, stared at the crack in the wall two feet from his face and nodded. The writing had gone slowly today. Ten words since lunchtime, and now it was half past five. But, he peered at the screen, this was something.

  He cleared his throat, got to his feet and read out loud, stepping around the piles of clutter on the floor of his workroom. ‘Scene 24. Ext. Marsha’s flat with the woods behind. Night. We watch Marsha hurry from the bus stop, look up at the moon and enter the building. Peter steps from the shadows. Dr Anton (Voiceover): Just then, a wolf did come out of the forest.’

  Yes, he had found a way to bring the predatory Peter into Marsha’s world. And he had managed to create the requisite sense of threat, inevitability, animalism and— He sat down abruptly and felt his lower lumbar seize. He was tempted to email his agent right away and let him know that great progress was being made with Lupa, but his agent had yet to reply to the last email, in which he had told him that Lupa was proving problematic. Frank frowned. How long was it since then? Two months? Three? The floorboards behind him creaked.

  ‘Would you rather be stupider than you look, or look stupider than you are?’

  Frank sighed and looked up at the crack in the wall again. Adrian, his nephew, had crept into the room.

  ‘What?’ said Frank without turning round. He had a shocking headache advancing up behind his eyes. He could do with a drink.

  ‘Would you rather be stupider than you look, or look stupider than you are?’

  Frank closed his laptop and swivelled slowly round in his chair.

  Adrian had a way of standing in whatever space he found himself in that reminded Frank of the way tall seaweed swayed upward from a rock. At thirteen, he didn’t pose and he didn’t slouch. He just was. In his school uniform, a dismal array of greys in acrylic and polyester, the most striking thing about him was his head of frantic flaming hair. Like a Caravaggio, Bea always said; like a young Bob Dylan, his mother, Katharine, always said. Like a young Frank, in fact, thought Frank, stroking the smooth dome of his own head and wincing at the worrisome fact that all the really great writers possessed a head of magnificent hair. The evidence was there for everyone to see. Hair and genius go together. Look at Chekhov, Balzac, Beckett. Frank’s eyes scanned the shelves to his left. Look at Hemingway, Ibsen, Strindberg. Every single last man of them crowned with a glorious mane of hair. And when it wasn’t what could be called a crowning glory exactly – for example, Dickens, Trollope, Tolstoy – then there was a beard the size of a beehive. Damn. Was this the real, the awful, the actual, the inescapable reason that he had not had a script or play accepted for . . . what was it? Five years? Had all his creative energy fallen away on his forty-fifth birthday, the year he wrote an episode of Casualty and he and his hair parted company for ever?

  ‘Would you rather be—’

  ‘Yes, yes, I heard what you said.’

  Adrian rubbed his bottom this way and that across the ribs of the radiator in a way that Frank found faintly offensive. The boy didn’t swear, had a brain the size of a planet and liked girls. He was an anomaly, and exceedingly irritating. He was at an age when the unconscious child in him had yet to be put to death by the scimitar of sex and surliness. That wasn’t a bad phrase. He ought to write it down, but Adrian was still sweeping up and down the radiator and was now doing a boggle-eyed, slow, head-rolling-back-on-his neck movement that suggested he was entering the nethermost reaches of boredom.

  Frank tried to apply himself to the question. As it happened, he felt far from brilliant and looked appalling. Perhaps it was the strangeness of the night before. Now he came to think about it, he felt shredded and unaccountably close to tears.

  He raised himself from the chair, paused until his lower back spasm eased, and made his way carefully to the fireplace, managing to become more or less upright by the time he got there. A bust of Chekhov frowned back at him from the mantelpiece. A string of red beads dangled from its neck. Wanda’s no doubt. She was pushing it, leaving things like that around the place. He sighed, lifted them off and dropped them in the waste-paper bin. Wanda. Even the thought of her failed him these days. There had been a time in the last year when the knowledge of what he had with Wanda made all the difference, when just the image of her name in his head, the feel of her name in his mouth, Van-da, would be enough to set his blood racing. But lately, the ‘what’ had been bothering him. What was it that they had exactly? The answer, knocking quietly and persistently at a small door down some long corridor in his mind, was becoming difficult to ignore.

  Adrian started up an urgent fingernail tapping on the radiator. ‘Fra-a-nk.’

  ‘I’m thinking!’ Frank said.

  A gold bullet of lipstick and a tube of mascara lay in the ashtray beside Chekhov. He really must speak to her about her encroachments. He had, after all, made it completely clear that the relationship could never edge towards the domestic, although as Wanda was in fact their cleaner, boundaries were possibly not as clear as they should be.

  Adrian came and hovered alongside him, opened the lipstick and sniffed it, then repeated the question in a loud whisper. ‘It’s not a riddle,’ he added and began rocking from one leg to the other, knocking Frank’s arm in an arrhythmic beat. He drew a crimson smear across his lower lip and pouted at his uncle.

  ‘For God’s sake, Adrian.’ Frank gave the boy a shove so that the lipstick dropped from his fingers and fell to the floor.

  Frank leaned forward to study himself in the mirror. There was something tired and diminished about him today, he thought as he scanned his face, taking care not to look himself in the eye. He turned his head a little and examined his profile. His nose was good, sculpted and rather fine, and he had what some had called a sensual mouth. Wanda told him that the crest of greying copper curls above his ears made him look distinguished as long as she kept it trimmed and neat. He leaned closer to the mirror. His eyebrows could do with a trim, and the tops of his ears too. It was strange what was happening to his hair. Having retreated from his head, it seemed to sprout and flourish in places it had never done before. Thank God for Wanda’s nail scissors and tweezers.

  Adrian was back by his side and making kissing noises in the mirror.

  ‘You see, if you look stupider than you are—’

  Frank held out a finger to shush the boy. He needed to collect his wits for this one. He laid his hand on Chekhov’s head and thought about it. Chekhov had an impressive mane of hair and a sublime, extraordinary face. No doubt about it, Chekhov looked like a genius, and when last winter Frank had studied the late manuscripts, seen the beauty and the power scratched on the page, seen with his own eyes the man’s conflict about which direction the piece should take, he had felt he was in the presen
ce of divinity. He ran his thumb across Chekhov’s lips. The fact was that Chekhov’s face, though magnificently clever-looking, probably appeared stupider than he was. He nodded and turned round.

  ‘I would rather be stupider than I look.’

  In the pause that followed, Frank had the sense that he had fallen short of the mark and was a disappointment. Adrian wandered over to the window and drew a face in the dirt. When the phone rang, they both leapt for the table but Adrian reached it first. Frank glared at him.

  ‘Bea!’ said Adrian, hugging the handset to his ear. He placed one hand over the mouthpiece and said, ‘It’s your wife.’

  Frank snapped his fingers for the phone but Adrian flapped him away. He listened carefully to his aunt and said, ‘Oh,’ ‘Er,’ and ‘What?’

  ‘What does she want, Adrian?’ said Frank, getting slowly down on his hands and knees and looking under the couch for Wanda’s lipstick.

  Adrian said, ‘She’s in the river at Grantchester and can’t get out.’

  A vision from the night before surfaced in Frank’s mind. He sat back on his heels and sneezed. ‘Grantchester? What on earth is she doing all the way down there?’ There was plenty of river at the bottom of their road. Grantchester was two miles away.