The Race by Nina Allan

Author:Nina Allan [Allan, Nina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NewCon Press
Published: 2014-08-02T21:00:00+00:00

3: Alex

Alex hadn’t been back to his home town in twenty years, not since his parents moved to Scotland and he split up with Linda. Not that these two events were connected but they had become linked in his mind, simply because they had happened so close together. Alex had wanted to move too, not as far as Inverness but definitely out of Hastings and preferably back to London. Linda had been happy where she was. She liked her job at the dance school and didn’t want to leave, even though she knew there were likely to be better opportunities for her in the capital.

It was the only thing they really rowed about, the biggest stumbling block to their relationship and the main reason they’d split up in the first place. Alex carried on where he was, working at the Gateway supermarket in Queen’s Road and trying to amass enough money to get away on. He found he couldn’t forget Linda though. He kept waiting for her to get back in touch but she didn’t. At the end of three months he finally caved in and phoned her.

He remembered how just hearing the sound of her voice had brought tears to his eyes. Linda sounded pleased to hear him, too. They were on the phone for two whole hours. She wouldn’t let him see her at first.

“I think it’s safer if we just talk for now, don’t you?” she said. Alex had gone along with it at the time because he would have done anything to get back with her and it was better than nothing. There was even something exciting about it, at first anyway, something romantic. It made him feel like a horny teenager again, complete with the endless jerking off and falling asleep in the afternoon from lack of sleep.

Later he found out that the whole not-seeing-each-other business was because of Derek Peller, was because Linda didn’t want Peller to find out about him. Next came the appalling scene outside The Tower and he had lost her again. Alex hated men like Peller, thugs who got their way through bullying and violence, and Derek Peller he hated especially because he’d shagged Linda. He remembered the feeling of rolling in the gutter outside the pub, the taste of blood on his lips from where he’d bitten his tongue, the ringing in his ears, the unspeakable urge to get up and hit Peller, to slam him in the face hard enough to break his nose, to send the blood flying, to render him silent.

At that moment, Alex had wanted to hit him hard enough to kill. If he could have killed him, in that instant and without thinking twice, he would have done so. At the time, Alex’s flight to Sierra Leone had seemed like the ultimate fuck-you gesture, but Alex realised in hindsight that it had more to do with not wanting to be in the same physical space as Derek Peller. Even a whole country was not big enough for the two of them.

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