Page 3 of After the Rain
“I may as well get on with it, huh, Mum? What did you always say? What’s for you won’t go by you? Well, I fucking hope you were right. If this little misadventure straight out of one of your happily-ever-after movies, or my gay romance books, ends up going the way ofDoctor Zhivago, I’m going to come up there and let you have it, I swear to the goddess!”
Being careful not to move too quickly and inadvertently aggravate the pain in my ribs, I crouch down beside my car, hidden from the road, hastily brushing my teeth with bottled water, and then step behind a copse of trees to pee. Feeling a bit more refreshed, I get back in the car, plug my phone in again, and reset the directions to Fenside Common. Just over an hour to go. I glance at my petrol level when I start the car – thank fuck it started first time – and see that I have just under a quarter of a tank left. That should be enough to get me there, but only just.
I pull back onto the dual carriageway and mentally calculate how much money I have on me as I drive. I can’t use the bank account to withdraw any, so I have maybe two hundred quid from Dan’s wallet. I need to keep an eye on the amount I’m spending until I can, hopefully, find someone to give me a job. I sigh heavily. I know Ihad to leave, but the prospect of surviving on my own is intimidating. I had Mum, then I had Dan. And, rightly or wrongly, despite his cruelty, Dan did take care of me. He paid the bills, found the flat, and arranged our move with ease. He helped me organise Mum’s stuff after she died and held me while I fell apart. In hindsight, I see how some of his behaviour was controlling and coercive, but I have never stood on my own two feet in my entire life. I’m not sure I know how to do it.
Fuck it. I couldn’t stay with Dan and risk his temper killing me in the end, so I better suck it up and find a way to manage.
I wipe a frustrated tear from my cheek, and, as the scenery gets more and more rural, and the number of cars around me gets fewer and farther between, I can’t help but think how beautiful the Norfolk countryside is. It’s nearly dark, but the dusky light gives the scenery a ghostly feel, with mist rising from the fields on either side and the silhouettes of bare trees looming like sentinels over the road, creating dark tunnels that I pass through, struggling to see the smaller and smaller roads my phone’s directions are telling me to take.
My car’s also starting to struggle, but I pray that it’ll make the remaining four miles, according to the sign I just passed, to Fenside Common. But my luck is my fucking luck, andapparently, they use ‘country miles’ in Norfolk, because, twenty minutes later, I’m still not there. It’s quarter to five at this point, so I must be close but, of course, my car is a dick, and I’m not entirely surprised when it starts crunching and whining before making a loud grinding sound and coming to a complete stop just as I manage to pull it over to the side of the road. Great. I turn the ignition off and pull on the handbrake before leaning forward to rest my forehead on the steering wheel, my ribs loudly protesting the position.
My eyes are burning with more pointless, silent tears of frustration, but I can’t break down just yet. I can’t. I have to get to Fenside Common. I don’t know at what point my bruised, battered, and exhausted self decided that Fenside Common was the destination I absolutely had to get to, even if I did only learn of its existence this morning with a finger on a random page in a road map, but we are where we are. Taking a deep breath, I haul myself out of my car, straightening up my hoodie, and pulling on my jacket again. The air outside is freezing, and it’s very much dark, not dusk, at this point. I just hope it doesn’t start to rain, or worse, snow. I grab my phone, deciding to leave everything else in my car for now. It’s not ideal to leave my stuff, but I know I can’t carry it, not with my ribs complaining just from beingcramped in the car for a day.
I zip up my jacket and start the slow process of walking up the single-track road, still following the sat nav directions on my phone. One more mile, according to Google. I can walk one more mile. Of course I can!
As it turns out, I can’t.
My lungs are burning from the cold air and the exertion of walking up, what must be, the only bloody hill in Norfolk. Isn’t Norfolk supposed to be famously flat or something?For fuck’s sake.I look behind me and I can still see my car in the distance. So, yeah. Pretty flat then. Ugh. Whatever. My ribs are crying, and every fucking muscle in my body aches. Not to mention, I can’t walk straight after what Dan did to me in the kitchen. I really should check if he damaged me internally, but I need a safe place to rest before I can even begin to think about that. I pass an entrance to what I think is a driveway on the right and keep focusing on my destination. My steps slow, and the cold air continues to burn my lungs as I breathe. I stop, needing to catch my breath, and decide to sit on a big rock I spot just to the side of the road. I can see a few buildings ahead, so I must be close. I’ll rest just for ten minutes and then I’ll get up.
Fifteen minutes later, I still can’t summon enough energy to get up. It’s dark, and I’m so cold,and everything hurts. An errant thought enters my head, that maybe I should have just stayed where I was. At least I had a bed to sleep in. An image of my bed in my childhood bedroom pops unbidden into my mind. Mum’s standing beside it, smiling at me, and kissing the top of my head as she tucks me in, under the warm quilt encased in a Boofle duvet cover. She tells me she loves me and to sleep tight.
“Not a sound, not a peep, not a word,” she says in her soft voice.
And that’s the last thing I remember, before I feel myself sliding down the rock I’m sitting on, and everything goes completely black.
Two
Aidan
The text alert notification sounds on my phone, and I feel it buzz in my pocket. I swing the axe over my head and slice through the piece of seasoned wood with practiced ease, leaving it embedded in the tree trunk underneath. I wipe the sweat from my brow with the back of my arm. It may be early November when the temperature in this remote corner of the Norfolk Broads rarely goes above freezing, and the threat of snow lingers in the air without ever actually falling, but let me tell you, chopping wood with an axe is a surefire way to warm yourself up.
I reach into the pocket of my grubby, dusty, threadbare jeans and pull out my battered older model iPhone. My friends – my brothers especially – give me shit for how old my phone is, but I drop it on an almost daily basis, and have lost more than one phone in the river, so I refuseto waste loads of money on a fancy new one. I open the message from my brother, Nash.
NASH: Mum told me to tell you to get your miserable arse to the house for Sunday lunch. She said, ‘I mean it’. You know what that means, mate.
I chuckle, taking a deep breath and holding it for three seconds before blowing it out slowly. I take another deep breath, visualising a square shape in my mind, and do the same again. My counsellor assures me it’s the best way to ward off a panic attack. I’ll take her word for it. Pax, my German Shepherd therapy dog, is already at my side, leaning into my legs, grounding me. Pax is not an official therapy dog. He’s a rescue dog. Well, he’s a dog I rescued when his arsehole owners fucked off home from their holiday and left him on one of our hire fleet boats. We connected, and he’s been my shadow ever since.
The waves of nausea and tightness in my chest ease. I crouch down and face Pax, scrunching the fur on his neck and behind his ears.
“Good boy,” I tell him, getting a wet nose to the face for my trouble. Rising to my feet, I type out a reply to Nash.
ME: I’ll be there. I’m not invoking the demonic side of Bev Foster.
My mother, Bev, is approximately five feet three inches tall, but she unquestionably rules the roost of the Foster family, including naming her kids like they could be singers of her beloved country music. My dad, Mike, is still so in love with his wife that he’s happy to follow her lead on everything. With the singular exception of ice hockey. He supports the Seattle Kraken, and she’s a Boston Bruins fan. Don’t ask why we, a family born and bred in Norfolk, England, have an unhealthy obsession with ice hockey. None of us knows how it started, it’s just one of the few things we all agree on. Myself, my brothers, and our sister all support the Kraken with Dad, and Mum is the outlier, not that you’d know it from how fiercely she supports them. The two teams don’t meet often, but when they do, we enjoy the fireworks. At least, I used to enjoy them as a kid. Now, the prospect of a crowded, noisy house fills me with dread.
I’d love to be able to say that my anxiety is an after-effect of some distinguished military career or some tragic childhood trauma – obviously not something I’d wish upon myself, or anyone else – but sadly, no. My anxiety just…is. It started when I was a teenager, and I began to realise that, unlike the other lads on the rugby team at school, I didn’t get excited by oversexualising the girls in our class and loudly celebrating – or more likely bragging – about every kiss and over-the-clothes clumsy fumble I achieved like I was unlocking levels in some third-rate computer game. No. I got excited by, well, by the other lads on the rugby team. As I began to flirt with the idea of coming out as gay in such a hyper-masculine environment, my anxiety began to manifest, and it has been part of my psyche ever since.
My counsellor, Angela, assured me that it’s very normal, and she helped me with techniques to handle panic attacks as they arose. They are fewer and farther between nowadays, but they are very much still there. Even when my younger twin brothers joined me outside the proverbial closet, and I knew I wasn’t alone, the anxiety was still there.
I take another deep breath as I pocket my phone and make my way into the converted boathouse that I live in to have a shower and get changed.
An hour and a half later, I turn up the drive that leads to my parents’ farmhouse. The drive is full of Land Rovers and a few pickup-style trucks – the hazard of growing up on a farm – and I pull up and park behind Nash’s blue Ford Ranger.
Nash is my eldest brother at age thirty-four, and I’m the second eldest at thirty-one. Archer and Cole, the twins, are twenty-eight, and although they’re not identical, they’re freakishly alike in personality. Wren, at twenty-two, is the baby. She may be the youngest of us, but she learned early on how to hold her own with four overgrown, overprotective big brothers, and now, I swear, she’s the scariest one of all of us.
Taking one last deep breath, I climb out of the car and open the back door of my compact, black Defender 90. Pax jumps out and immediately heads round the path to the back door – we always use the back door at Mum and Dad’s – stopping every few steps to make sure that I’m following. He knows his job is to stay close to me, but he’s an attention whore where my family is concerned. As soon as I open the door, he heads inside to find Wren. She’s his favourite. After me, obviously.
The smell of roast beef fills the air, and I can hear the hubbub of my family in the kitchen just inside the house, off the boot room where I came in. We have a formal dining room, but we never use it except on Christmas Day. The kitchen is just one-half of the open space at the back of the house, the rest of it being a second giant dining table tucked in the corner, with built-in bench seats on two sides, and chairs on the other two sides. My mum is in the kitchen cooking upa storm with my dad assisting her as always. My brothers and sister are already crowded around the table, their eyes going wide when Pax approaches.
