One Thousand Stars and You Read online

  ‘Shit.’ Maureen ran an agitated hand through her dark hair and Max caught a whiff of apples as she tossed it over one shoulder.

  Alice had got up from her chair and wandered over to where a set of small wooden steps led down to the beach. Her shoulders were hunched, and she had wrapped her free hand around her middle. As Max stared after her, his heart telling him to get up and follow her but his head reminding him about the development in her relationship, Alice turned towards the light, and he saw tears coursing down her cheeks.

  39

  Alice had known almost immediately that something was seriously wrong. She knew Richard well enough to recognise even the slightest change in his tone, even when he was thousands of miles away in a different time zone. And his manner wasn’t stilted because she hadn’t called him since he’d sent the text message containing the ring box – this was something else, something far more important than any of the unspoken drama between them.

  When Rich had taken a deep breath and said, ‘It’s Freddie,’ a tumble of panic had engulfed her. She immediately assumed the worst – that her brother had been in an accident, or that he was gravely ill, and she fired questions at Richard as she stumbled away from the table and headed blindly across the sand-covered floor of the bar.

  ‘I wasn’t sure if I should call you,’ Richard said, sounding torn. ‘Your mum said not to, given that it was your birthday, but I thought you would want to know sooner rather than later.’

  A plethora of horrible images flashed through Alice’s mind. Her brother trapped in a burning car, or wired up to some machine that was keeping him breathing, the stoic expression of a doctor as he broke the news of a terminal illness.

  ‘For God’s sake, tell me!’ she cried, not caring if her impatient tone annoyed him.

  ‘Freddie has had …’ Richard began.

  Oh God, it must have been an accident. Alice clutched the back of an empty chair.

  ‘Had what?’

  A mosquito buzzed towards the candle on the table below her then promptly flew away. Alice stared at it distractedly. Not her brother, not Freds. She was aware of a sob building like lava in her throat, constricting her airways until all she could do was croak down the phone.

  ‘Just tell me,’ she said. ‘Is he hurt?’

  ‘He’s safe,’ Richard assured her, and Alice let go of the enormous breath she’d been holding in.

  ‘Thank God,’ she exclaimed, but the fear was still holding her frozen limbs to ransom.

  ‘He’s had … Well, I guess you would call it a breakdown.’

  Alice’s hand was over her mouth now.

  ‘It all happened not long after you left, apparently,’ Richard went on. ‘I only found out this morning, but it’s been eating me up, you not knowing, and I knew you would be wondering why he hadn’t messaged you for your birthday.’

  ‘I was wondering that,’ Alice said, her voice small. There was a needle of guilt threading its way through her as she realised just how much she had been distracted that morning, and how little her mind had strayed to her brother’s unusual lack of communication. ‘I haven’t heard from him once since we got here.’

  ‘He checked himself into a rehab facility in Essex,’ Richard told her. He sounded flustered, and Alice pictured the redness in his cheeks, and his hair askew where he’d run his hands through it. She knew how much he cared about her big brother.

  ‘It turns out that he lost his job months ago,’ Richard explained. ‘He had been pretending to go into work, when in reality he was at home, drinking himself into a stupor most days. And that’s not all.’

  ‘Shit.’ Alice sighed, an acidic taste rising in her throat. ‘You mean drugs?’

  Richard took a deep breath. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh no,’ she managed, tears now snaking their way down her cheeks. Freddie was the rock against which Alice had always been able to bash, her myriad follies balanced out by his uncomplicated strength. She could not fathom that this had happened to him – or that none of them had noticed it.

  ‘Your mum hadn’t heard from him in a few weeks, so she went over there to surprise him one evening and found him and the flat in a right state. The only reason I even found out is because …’ He stopped, and Alice gripped the phone.

  ‘What?’ she demanded, hearing the muffled footsteps of someone approaching. The next moment, Maureen was standing next to her, her face etched with concern. Alice shook her head and held up her hand to shoo her friend away.

  ‘Because I wanted to tell your mum that we were setting the date,’ he said, and Alice only just caught her huff of exasperation in time. She thought they had blooming well agreed to wait until after she got back from Sri Lanka.

  ‘Your dad let me in,’ Rich continued. ‘When I asked where your mum was he just lost it. Alice, it was horrible. He was crying and everything.’

  ‘Oh shit,’ Alice said soberly, wiping her eyes as she pictured the scene. ‘Bloody hell.’

  ‘I can’t get my head around it,’ Richard admitted. ‘Freddie always seemed so together, and so sensible, you know, just like you. I can’t believe he let things get this bad.’

  ‘I need to call home,’ Alice said, sniffing away her sobs. Maur was still behind her, but had at least moved a discreet distance away.

  ‘OK.’ Richard did his best not to sound put out at her hurry to get him off the phone, but Alice could tell he was miffed.

  ‘Don’t be like that, Rich,’ she sighed. ‘I’m grateful that you told me, and I’m sorry you had to deal with my dad by yourself – but I need to know what’s going on. I need the whole story. I’ll call you back afterwards, I promise.’

  ‘You can’t.’ He sounded exhausted. ‘I’ve got six kids coming in for detention in five minutes.’

  ‘Tonight then,’ she said, and heard the click of a car door shutting. He must have gone outside to the school car park to call her from the privacy of his Renault Clio, and Alice closed her eyes against the inevitable waves of guilt.

  ‘Tonight’s fine,’ he said, his tone now more conciliatory. ‘Talk to you then. Oh, and Alice?’

  ‘Yes?’ Her voice was barely a whisper.

  ‘I love you.’

  Alice imagined that she could feel Max’s eyes boring holes through her back.

  ‘You, too,’ she said.

  Maureen hurried back over as soon as Alice lowered the phone from her ear, and listened with increasing shock as she was brought up to date with what had happened.

  ‘Fuck,’ she pronounced, and Alice nodded weakly.

  ‘I need to call my mum.’

  ‘Of course.’ Maureen held her by her shoulders. ‘It will be all right, you know. Freddie’s done the right thing, he’ll be getting the help he needs now.’

  Alice pictured her brother’s kind eyes. She thought about all the times he had defended her, encouraged her, teased her and offered her his shoulder when she had messed up. He was one of the good guys – one of the best people in the world – and the thought of him being so hurt, and so alone, and so afraid, made Alice want to lie on the ground and cry.

  ‘I must call home,’ she said again, and Maureen let her go.

  ‘Go ahead,’ she urged kindly. ‘Me and Steph will be waiting. We can talk it all through, or we can just get drunk and forget about it – or maybe not,’ she added, seeing the look on Alice’s face.

  ‘Thank you for being so nice,’ Alice mumbled, and Maureen gave her an uncharacteristically timid smile.

  ‘Well, durr,’ she said gently. ‘You’re my friend, even if you do think I’m a terrible person. And it really will be OK, I promise. We all care about you – and Freddie, too – and we’ll get you through this.’

  Alice watched her walk back towards where the others were still sitting, and registered Max’s worried gaze. She could not believe that while her poor family had been dealing with the shock of Freddie’s illness – and he clearly was very ill – she had been throwing every caution to the wind. Quite literally, in fact – she h
ad thrown herself into the wind. What if there had been an accident? What if her actions had landed her in hospital – or worse? As if her parents didn’t have enough to worry about without her behaving like a child, a reckless and stupid child. Alice had been here before, and she knew how the story ended – with pain and regret and horrible guilt. What the hell had she been thinking?

  She turned her back on Max as she scrolled through her phone and found her mother’s number. Freddie was the only person who mattered now – that fact was as big and as clear as an elephant in the road. Everyone else would have to wait.

  40

  After speaking to her mum on the phone for almost an hour, Alice felt utterly drained. The giddy high of that morning’s skydive and the rush she had felt upon seeing the ocean when they arrived in Tangalle had long been chased away by worry and guilt, and her neck and back felt stiff with tension. It had been difficult to hear her mother so upset. Freddie was the centre of her parents’ world, the compass point of strength upon which they had always relied, and for him to fall so spectacularly apart had hit them very hard.

  Alice had been assured by first her mum, and then her dad, that her brother was perfectly safe, and that he had agreed to get help as soon as the true extent of his problems had been discovered. While this made Alice proud of her brother, it also broke her heart to know that there wasn’t anyone in his life who was close enough for him to confide in them. Freddie had loads of friends, but most of them were people he worked with in the City. They weren’t old friends like Steph and Maureen were for her, and clearly, they didn’t know Freddie very well at all – or, if they did, then they did not care about him enough. Rich and her brother got on well enough, but her boyfriend was not the type of person to pry into other people’s lives or suggest a deep and meaningful chat. She supposed that not many men were that type, although she wished they would be. Max and Jamal seemed like they had that closeness – but then, even Max had kept the pain in his leg a secret from his friend.

  Alice’s initial instinct on speaking to Richard had been to try and change her flight home, and hurry back to Suffolk to help in any way that she could, but her mum told her tersely not to bother.

  ‘Of course, it would have better if you were here,’ she had snapped. ‘I knew this holiday of yours was a bad idea, but it’s a bit too late to start fretting about that now, isn’t it, Alice? And anyway, your brother is not allowed any visitors for the first week. What could you do for him that I can’t?’

  Alice hadn’t meant her offer to sound like an affront to her mother’s capabilities as a parent. She bit her lip. Her mum was hurting, that was all. It was only natural that she was going to be feeling defensive and sensitive – something terrible had happened to one of her children, and she had not been there to catch Freddie before he fell, just like she had not been there to catch Alice, either – that was why she was lashing out. Alice taking offence wouldn’t help matters.

  ‘We just need to get him through this rehabilitation programme,’ her mum had added. ‘As soon as you’re home again, you can help out and look after your dad, while I spend time with Freddie. He may be out next week, and we’ll be looking after him here.’

  Alice thought privately that her dad, a grown man, was probably capable of looking after himself, but again she said nothing and listened while her mum continued to talk.

  ‘This is just a blip, that’s all – a bump in the road,’ Marianne said. ‘He’ll be back to normal before we know it.’

  There was that word that seemed to keep cropping up, Alice had thought coldly: normal. For Freddie, normal had become a litre of vodka before lunchtime and a gram of cocaine to chase it down. Alice wondered just how sad her brother must have been in his so-called successful life to have sought such an extreme escape. She considered whether he might have been in a relationship that had ended badly – Freddie would usually tell her about a new girlfriend, but maybe this time he had chosen not to, for whatever reason. Alice wanted nothing more than to see him, to speak to him, to tell him that she was here – would always be there for him. Where before, the miles of distance from home had felt like a blessed relief, now they frustrated her – she was needed at home, where she could become the voice of reason to temper her mother’s despair. She knew her mum wanted her there really.

  ‘I just don’t understand,’ Marianne had wailed. Alice had left the bar area to sit on the beach, where she stared numbly at the repetitive motion of the dark waves as they scurried up the shore, only to hurry out again a moment later.

  ‘He had everything he ever wanted,’ her mum went on. ‘A beautiful flat in London, a sports car, a great job.’

  All the trappings, Alice had thought, but had not said.

  ‘And now he’s going to lose it all. Everything he has worked so hard to achieve. If I wasn’t so bloody worried about him I would be furious!’

  And at that, she had started crying again, great wracking sobs that made Alice cry again, too.

  ‘Mum,’ she tried to soothe. ‘Mum, please don’t cry.’

  Eventually her mother had been unable to speak through her misery, and Alice talked briefly to her dad instead, who sounded shaken but determined.

  ‘You just concentrate on having a nice birthday, darling,’ he had said, and Alice had barked out a hard laugh, hearing her mother doing the same in the background. How could she possibly even think about something as pathetically unimportant as her birthday?

  When she had finally said her goodbyes, Alice made her way back to the table. Steph, who knew Freddie almost as well as Alice herself, was in tears, leaving Alice full of remorse, on top of her worry, for being the one to bring a downer on everyone’s day.

  ‘Nonsense!’ Maureen said, flapping her hands at Alice’s mumbled apologies. ‘You haven’t ruined anything. It’s still your birthday and we’re still going to celebrate.’

  Alice could think of nothing worse. She didn’t have the energy to pretend that everything was going to be OK, or that she was fine.

  Jamal and Max had both offered their commiserations as soon as she sat back down, but she wished they would leave. Her guilt about the skydive was making it impossible for her to even look at Max, who now felt absurdly like an enemy. She knew she was being unreasonable, but it was all too much; the thoughts were all too much. They were racing around in her head, and she was struggling for the self-control simply not to fall apart. She wished they would all just disappear.

  ‘Why don’t we leave you girls to it?’ Max said suddenly, and Alice glanced at him in surprise. He wasn’t looking at her, though. His eyes were on Jamal.

  ‘Um, sure.’ Jamal reached for Steph’s hand across the table and squeezed it. ‘We’ll be up in Wood House if you need us, yeah?’

  Alice opened her mouth to say sorry, but her throat felt as if it was full of earth.

  The three girls watched the two men leave in silence, and Alice’s heart went out to her friends, for the sacrifice they were both making to stay and support her. It was their holiday, too, and Steph was missing precious time with Jamal. When she said as much, though, the words muffled by the curtain of her hair, they both told her not to be silly.

  ‘To be honest,’ Maureen confided, a smirk on her face, ‘I could do with a few hours where I don’t have to watch those two lovebirds pawing at each other.’

  ‘Oi!’ Steph braved a laugh. ‘I would hardly call it pawing.’

  Alice listened to their clumsy banter with envy. She felt wholly detached from the situation, as if her body was sitting there but her mind had long since departed. Her friends were already trying to distract themselves from the unsettling news – and she didn’t blame them – but Alice could not simply place her brother’s plight on a shelf and forget about it. She ordered a Lion Lager without really thinking, but found that she couldn’t bear to drink it when it arrived. She closed her eyes against the image of Freddie sipping neat spirits at his desk. Alice’s mother had told her that he’d filled his water bottle with vodka
every day – that he had needed to in order to make it through the working day. Why hadn’t he just talked to her? Was she such a bad sister that he didn’t trust her?

  She was vaguely aware that she would have to call Richard back soon. It was nearing four-thirty UK time, so he would be on his way home from school. For the first time since the plane had landed in Sri Lanka, Alice felt a pang of yearning for their little rented flat, for the comforting familiarity of the faded old sofa Richard’s parents had given them, and her clothes neatly folded away in the chest of drawers that they had picked up at the second-hand furniture store in Cornard. She was missing the stoic presence of Richard, too, who she knew would stay calm and pragmatic throughout all of this. Alice used to assume that she would be strong in the face of a crisis, but she had been wrong. On the contrary, she now felt as if she was crumbling into pieces.

  She kept wondering if things would have been different if she had never come to Sri Lanka, if she had done what her mum wanted – and what Richard wanted, really, even if he had pretended otherwise – and stayed behind, celebrated her thirtieth birthday with a pub quiz in the Black Boy and a Chinese takeaway in front of the telly. But there was little point in speculating. She was here now – what had happened had happened; there could be no changing it. She could only attempt to rebuild things.

  Alice had also been worried that her mum would be cross with Richard for telling her about Freddie after she had forbidden it, but again her assumptions had been way off the mark.

  ‘Oh, I completely understand why he told you,’ her mum had declared, her voice wobbling. ‘He’s practically part of the family, and you know how I feel about secrets.’

  Alice’s mother hated secrets. It had begun as a knee-jerk reaction to Alice’s accident, which her mum blamed in part on her daughter’s perpetual need to sneak off and get herself into trouble. There had been no locks on any of the doors in the family home – save for the front and back ones – since Alice got her scar. Even the bathroom door didn’t have a bolt. In her mother’s mind, secrets were things that shifty, untrustworthy people kept, and liars were even worse. The irony was, of course, that Alice had begun lying to her mum about some of the riskier activities she still indulged in purely because she had grown up with her cut-and-dry, black-and-white, right-and-wrong way of viewing the world. As far as Marianne Brockley was concerned, there were no grey areas, and so Alice had no choice but to create them herself.