Perfectly ordinary peopl.., p.1
Perfectly Ordinary People, page 1
ALSO BY NICK ALEXANDER
From Something Old
The Road to Zoe
You Then, Me Now
Things We Never Said
The Bottle of Tears
The Other Son
The Photographer’s Wife
The Hannah Novels
The Half-Life of Hannah
Other Halves
The CC Novels
The Case of the Missing Boyfriend
The French House
The 50 Reasons Series
50 Reasons to Say Goodbye
Sottopassaggio
Good Thing, Bad Thing
Better Than Easy
Sleight of Hand
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2022 by Nick Alexander
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542032476
ISBN-10: 1542032474
Cover design by @blacksheep-uk.com
Cover illustration by Jelly London
For Ethel and Pierra; for Pierre and Jo.
For anyone who ever needed courage to love against the odds.
And for those whose dreams of love were cut short.
May we never forget them.
CONTENTS
Prologue.
Ruth. Part One.
Interlude.
Ruth. Part One (continued).
Cassette #1
Ruth. Part Two.
Cassette #2
Ruth. Part Three.
Cassette #3
Ruth. Part Four.
Cassette #4
Ruth. Part Five.
Cassette #5
Ruth. Part Six.
Cassette #6
Ruth. Part Seven.
Ruth. Part Eight.
Epilogue.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Prologue.
Tall Tale #1: Living With Wolves.
Did I ever tell you the story about the man who replaced his guard dogs with wolves?
He was a rustic young farmer with a huge moustache – we’ll call him Moustache to make things easier – living out in a remote village called La Vieille-Loye at the western edge of Alsace, right in the middle of a forest. He’d been struggling for years with the local wolves that continually visited, killing his sheep anytime they fancied a snack.
Some nights, in summer, he could lose ten or even twenty sheep in a single night, and that made him incredibly sad, because not only were his sheep his livelihood, but he loved them, giving them names and treating them like pets. The wolves didn’t always seem to kill because they were genuinely hungry, either. He knew this because sometimes they would kill twenty sheep and only eat three of them. So it seemed to him that they were killing just for fun.
When Moustache spoke to the other farmers, they advised him to get some Pyrenean Mountain Dogs – in French they call them patou. These are huge dogs with shaggy white fur, and what the farmers do is to raise them with the sheep from the moment they’re born. That way these dogs end up thinking they are sheep as well and, because they think the sheep they live with are their mothers and brothers and sisters, they’ll do anything they can to protect them, even laying down their own lives.
So that’s what this farmer did. He bought three baby patou dogs and he raised them to think they were sheep. And for years afterwards he didn’t lose a single animal, because the patou would scare off any marauding wolves.
But one day, when he was in his thirties, he went down to his field and found that a massacre had taken place overnight. Not only had the wolves killed ten of his sheep, but they’d killed all three guard dogs as well. Why had they killed them? Well, the dogs believed they were sheep, and so I think the wolves just thought the same thing.
Now Moustache loved those dogs even more than he loved his sheep, so this made him very, very angry.
He thought about replacing them but worried that any new dogs would also be killed by the wolves.
After a few days thinking about the problem, he came up with what he thought was a better idea. Instead of dogs, he would raise wolves to think they were sheep. The only problem was getting hold of wolf cubs, but he asked around until someone told him about a wolf breeder in the South of France.
That was a very long way from where Moustache lived, but he decided to go and get them anyway. It took him two days and about ten trains to get there, and two days and ten different trains to get back.
But finally home with the three baby wolves he’d bought – they were still tiny and fluffy and cute – he put them in with the sheep. And he was in luck, because one of the sheep, who’d just given birth, fed the wolves, letting them suckle alongside her lambs.
When these wolves grew up, his plan worked perfectly, because the wolves were convinced that they too were sheep. And whenever any wolves tried to attack his flock, the wolf-sheep would defend the real sheep and chase the wild wolves away.
This worked well for years, but then one day, at the beginning of the Second World War, the Germans invaded Alsace, and everywhere they went they robbed and killed and plundered.
Eventually some very bad soldiers happened upon the remote village where our farmer lived. Luckily he was out at the market that day, because otherwise the soldiers would no doubt have killed him. Instead they started killing the sheep, initially because they thought they might want to eat them, but then because, just like the wolves, they decided that killing was fun.
When the wolf-sheep heard all the commotion they came bounding over the hill, and when they saw what was happening to their brethren – because wolves are very intelligent, you know – they ran so fast across the fields that the Germans didn’t even have time to shoot them. They leapt at them and with single bites ripped out their throats, killing them as easily as sheep.
By the time the farmer got home, everything was calm again. There were three dead sheep lying at one end of the field but he was surprised to see that they hadn’t been killed by wolves but had been shot. His wolf-sheep looked fatter than usual, and rather sad, as if they were maybe grieving the deaths of the three sheep, one of which was the ewe that had suckled them when they were cubs.
But it was only at the end of summer when he happened to cross the field in exactly the right spot that he was able to work out what had happened during his absence at the market that day. Because he found something strange in that field: three German soldiers’ helmets, and three German rifles.
But that’s all he ever found. There were no arms, no legs, no swastikas, no uniforms, no boots . . . Turns out that his trusty wolf-sheep had not only killed those German soldiers, but they’d eaten every last crumb!
Ruth. Part One.
My grandfather Chris told us a lot of rather gruesome stories that my parents didn’t entirely approve of, and he always began them with the phrase, ‘Did I ever tell you about . . . ?’
There weren’t that many different tales, so I can only remember about ten of them, but when we were little and we saw him, he would sit us down and tell us a story without fail. We never tired of hearing them, either – especially the scary ones. In fact it would be true to say that the repetition made our excitement, our anticipation, even greater. Our eyes would widen at the first mention of the wolves and our mouths would drop as we awaited to learn the fates – awful fates we already knew – of those evil German soldiers.
My grandparents had divorced before I was born, though in a rather bizarre fashion they’d continued to live in the same building. It was all, apparently, quite amicable.
Grandpa had rented a bedsit upstairs while Grandma Genny remained in the marital home, which, for financial reasons, she shared with her cousin, a woman we referred to as ‘Aunty’ Ethel.
We didn’t see a great deal of either of them, and I never really knew why that was. With them living over in Vauxhall while we were back home in Walthamstow, getting together more frequently would hardly have been a logistical nightmare, but that’s just how things were.
We would see them once before Christmas, when they would drop by to deliver our gifts, and once before each of our birthdays for the same reason. And because things had never been any different, we never really questioned it.
In the seventies, Grandma Genny moved away and Grandpa Chris reclaimed the original, larger apartment.
As I say, we’d never seen a great deal of either of them, but once Genny was an epic forty-five-minute train journey away in Brighton, she all but vanished from our lives. Oh, she’d come up to London once or twice a year and have lunch with Dad, and if my brother and I weren’t at school or with Mum or out on a play date – basically if Dad was having to look after us – then he’d take us along. But there was always a weird feeling that something wasn’t quite right. The conversations he had with his mother were shockingly bland: how was her Billy doing? Did he have a lot of work on? How were we doing at school? If you’ve ever had to have lunch with a stranger, you know the kind of mundane conversation I’m talking about.
Looking back on it, I think one of the reasons things seemed stilted was that Dad never reciprocated by asking Grandma Genny about herself, merely answering in the most efficient way possible so it felt more like an awkward interview than lunch between mother and son.
But she was lovely to Jake and me – don’t get me wrong. She always brought sweets or a toy, or some clothes, and she always gave us a lipsticky kiss and sat us on her lap for a cuddle. So I liked her. It’s just that we saw so little of her that I never felt entirely at ease. We saw so little of them both.
My mother’s family, on the other hand, were omnipresent. Being Irish Catholic and with her mother and brothers living less than a mile away, they completely filled any family-shaped void we might have had. On any given day we’d receive drop-in visits from at least two of Mum’s three brothers – usually around mealtimes – and as for Grandma Siobhan, who everyone referred to as Mavaughn, Dad used to joke that she spent so much time at ours she should pay rent. Her husband, Mum’s father, had died when Mavaughn was in her thirties, so I suppose she had her own husband-shaped void to fill.
Overall, we were a happy family, and I consider my childhood quite gilded, especially when compared with the horror stories told by some of my friends. Dad was a mellow, happy-go-lucky sort of chap, and Mum a warm, generous homemaker who liked to hug everyone constantly, and that included her kids. I got on well with both my parents and for the most part with big brother Jake as well. In a way, I think that thanks to Grandma Siobhan and my three uncles (plus wives), and their numerous children – our cousins – there was so much coming and going through our house that it was hard to concentrate long enough to develop any kind of grudge. Mum always complained that the place was ‘like Connolly Station’, but with a special half-smile that revealed just how much she loved it that way.
We weren’t rich, but we never lacked for anything, and our house was full of noise, and fun, and love.
My point in telling you this is to say that if things had been different, if we’d had needs that hadn’t been met, whether material, spiritual or emotional, then we might have made more effort to get to know our paternal grandparents, or at least to question why they were so distant . . . And knowing what I know now, that’s almost certainly something that would have enriched all of our lives. But I didn’t feel I had any unmet needs – none of us did. And so that distance remained essentially unnoticed, their absence barely felt.
Jake and I did well at school. Jake was – is – the geeky one. He excelled at physics and science and geometry: in a nutshell, the subjects that made my brain bleed. He ended up studying computer science and now works as a network engineer, whatever that might be. Occasionally he’ll try to explain it to me but something weird happens every time, and I can sense my mind glazing over just the way it used to during geometry lessons in that awful hot classroom way back when.
I, on the other hand, am the arty-farty one – that’s what Jake says. He actually introduces me that way, as in, ‘Do come over here and meet my arty-farty sister.’ He doesn’t mean it in a bad way though. I’ve always been aware that he’s proud of my arty-fartyness.
Even as a child, I was into drawing and photography and poetry, though I shan’t be inflicting any of my poems on you.
Mum pushed me towards the arts quite heavily, exorcising her own unrealised ambitions, I suspect, by enrolling me in dance classes and theatre workshops, buying me paints, a weaving loom and a sewing machine. But I thrived on it all and, as I say, we both ended up doing pretty well: Jake in Birmingham learning to be a network engineer and me at Exeter studying English lit. To everyone’s relief, we both found jobs after college without any problems at all.
Throughout uni I told friends that I wanted to be a writer, but if I’m honest it was more the concept that appealed rather than the actual work involved. I’d picture myself working from home in my pyjamas, sipping cups of tea and sucking thoughtfully on a pencil, and that seemed like a great way to make a living. The only problem was that I had no actual desire to write. Specifically, my concentration isn’t great, so the idea of sitting down to work on a single project for months on end has always given me the heebie-jeebies. So at some point in my twenties, I stopped mentioning my illusive-yet-imminent novel and gave up on ever publishing a book. Until now, that is. Let’s see how I do with this little non-fiction project.
After college I got a job in journalism, working for a local rag, which seemed to suit my butterfly nature much better, and then in the nineties I went to a PR company, before ending up in the job I do today.
I’m an acquisitions editor for a minor London publisher you won’t have heard of (we’re called Impressionable – see?) and that basically means I get to read manuscripts all day while, you guessed it, wearing my pyjamas, drinking tea and thoughtfully sucking on a pencil.
My friends seem to think I’ve got the world’s cushiest job, but that’s merely because they fail to realise just how dreadful most of the dross on the slush pile is. The things I have to plough my way through . . . There are no words to describe just how bad most of it is.
As you have probably guessed, Jake and I have very different personalities. He’s a practical, methodical, rather reasonable sort of chap, while I tend towards vague, flighty and emotional. Jake, for instance, had precisely three girlfriends during college, one for each year he was there, while I was single for two years – a period I used to refer to as the Great Desert Crossing – followed by three passionate, overlapping affairs with otherwise involved men. The overlapping bit was complicated while the otherwise involved aspect surprisingly wasn’t. After these came a brief three-day love affair with a pretty holidaymaker from Tokyo called Sakura. Of the four, I’d have to admit that the one I loved the most was, without a doubt, Saky. But the sex thing . . . was . . . Look, I don’t want to go into details, so let’s just say I tried it and it wasn’t for me. Whereas sex with men . . . Well . . . Never had any problems there.
In a nutshell, my love-life was as dramatic and amorphic as Jake’s was methodical and geometric, which raises the question of how two people who share that much DNA can be so radically different. Because as everyone constantly reminds us, we look like identical twins.
What kept me sane throughout these crazy shenanigans was my friendship with touchstone Gina. Gina defines herself as flexisexual, which means that she alternates between guys (mainly) and girls (occasionally). She doesn’t, like, care about gender, yeah? She only, like, cares about the person who’s, like, inside. Obvs.
And before your mind goes there, there’s never been a hint of romance between us. If I’d been able to be with a woman, it would have been Saky, and it would have lasted for eternity. But the sex thing just wasn’t possible, and as I can’t imagine living without sex, that, pretty much, was that.
If I need a drinking buddy, Gina’s a drinking buddy, and if I want to go dancing then she’s up for it. If I’m sad and need someone to listen to my moaning then she’s the most sympathetic ear I could hope for, and if I need to shop for clothes then she’s just about to go shopping herself. The list of Gina’s strong points just goes on and on.
So other than her tiny, admittedly annoying tendency to insert the words like and obvs at random points in every sentence, she’s, obvs, like, a perfect friend.
Christmas at our place tended to be wonderful. During my teenage years I rebelled from time to time by insisting on spending Christmas at a friend’s house but it was never a patch on our Christmases because, though there might have been better-dressed participants or a video game to play, though there were sometimes more gifts – and I remember one, in particular, where the pile of gifts was so high, so obscene, that the sight of them all ploughing their way through them made me feel physically sick – they simply weren’t as much fun as Christmas back home.
The major reason for this was that at our place the drinking started before lunch, which meant that the present opening was drunken present opening, and charades meant drunken charades . . . And when you combined alcohol with the fact that Christmas rarely involved less than fifteen participants, and when you threw into the mix the genes from the Irish side of our family that make us the happiest drunks on Earth, what you got was a level of fun and mayhem that was just about impossible to beat.
