The month I turned forty-four my parents moved to California. Around the same time I moved to the High Peaks. It was a coincidence, but also, a mutual understanding. We needed vast amounts of space not just between us; we needed space around us, too.
We were always close and so it is strange to be so far apart. They send me photos on Facebook messenger. I am forced to admit it does look nice. A-frame entrance and raised wooden porch. Cypress trees and banana plants. Big lake out back. They swim in it and then sunbathe by the side. Dad plays Joni Mitchell on his phone. I suppose now I will have to explain the whole thing.
We had been apart once before. I went to university in Norwich. It was a four hour drive from the family home, in Bristol, and longer on the train. Still, I’d come home every other weekend: we’d go for walks along the Avon, book a table for lunch. Sometimes drive to the seaside so they could swim in the sea. Mum would make me sandwiches for the journey home; sweeping a knife over sliced bread, the smell of softening butter.
After graduation I got a job doing marketing for a small arts festival, then another job, doing marketing for a slightly bigger arts festival. I had friends. I would see a show once a week; text people with recommendations for beer. It was around that time I met Nora.
I met Nora at a social media seminar. I had not had a girlfriend before and the ease with which we became a couple was exhilarating. On the weekends we were together we’d eat crumpets with Marmite and a soft boiled egg. In the afternoons we’d take out the bikes. But every other weekend I’d go back to Bristol, go stay with mum and dad. Occasionally I’d bring Nora and it would be a big deal. We’d eat dinner in the conservatory and dad would top up her wine. But mostly she couldn’t understand why I went back so much, said it was ‘boring’, complained about having to sleep on the sofa. Once she was quite rude to mum, made one of her sarcastic comments, about the sandwiches and the sofa. She moved out not long after.
I got a new job managing the website for a company that sold distance learning packages. I started wearing a suit to work every day and joined a gym. I made new friends: friends who would text me about small plates restaurants and the different series they’d been watching on Netflix. I still saw the old friends, the ones I went to shows with, but I had less time for them. Their lives seemed so comparatively small and stilted.
I’d visit my new friends at the pubs near their houses. Sometimes there would be an extra woman there, a friend of their girlfriend or wife, of varying levels of attractiveness, though always with a steady, stable job. They would stare at me like they were trying to force something to be something else, and I would smile self-consciously from behind my beer. On the weekends I was at home I ate crumpets, just with Marmite, no soft boiled egg, no bike ride after. And every other weekend I’d go back to Bristol, think about looking for a job there, scroll through the dating apps and talk to local girls. ‘I live in Norwich,’ I’d message them. ‘Cool,’, they’d reply. ‘I live in Bristol’. These conversations felt Shakepearean, doomed. ‘Whatever’, I’d reply after a while.
One evening I met one of my friends' girlfriend’s friends. She was telling me a story about how incompetent everyone at her work was and she was so outraged at their incompetence that I started feeling outraged too. ‘There’s just no joined up thinking!’ she exclaimed, pounding a fist to the table. I imagined our lives together, mutually outraged at the incompetence of other people. It seemed like such an important life. When I looked at her I had the novel thought that I wanted to get her pregnant. She was called Lucy and she had wavy, brown hair. I asked my friend, Michael, to ask his girlfriend to give her my number. A year later she moved in.
My parents liked Lucy. They said she took care of me. I would take her back to Bristol, not every other weekend, but at least more often than I took Nora. I’d leave her at the kitchen table talking to mum about the books they were reading or recipes they admired, and dad would take me out to the garden to show me what he was planning to do with the rockery. Once, Lucy saw mum making the sandwiches. She rested a hand on her wrist. ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘We’ll just get something from Pret’.
Friends would come visit the pubs near our house and it felt like a victory. Our conversations were suddenly about how boring our lives had become. ‘Spent all morning looking at vacuums!’ Lucy’s friend said, and we all cheersed. ‘Eight o’clock,’ added her husband, tapping his wristwatch. ‘Bit late for me!’ I bought another round. Though we spent all evening talking about how much we enjoyed early nights, we would stay till closing, get so drunk we’d frequently throw up when we got home. Soon, came babies, and then there were no more late nights, no more semi-ironic conversations about how much we hated our lives. Lucy told me she wanted a baby, and I remembered looking at her from across the table, listening as she called her colleagues idiotic, wanting to impregnate her with my child.
She downloaded an app to her phone and started tracking her temperature. She had well and truly called my bluff. I didn’t want a child; I was a child. I hated how she’d stopped mum from making my sandwiches, how now I’d eat ‘crayfish’ and ‘chipotle’ on bread that didn’t feel even slightly like a pillow. I started going back to Bristol to stay with my parents more, again, on my own. We’d visit our usual lunch spots and they’d ask me questions about my career. I’d speak in knowingly impenetrable technical terms and they’d tell me I was very clever. I’d trail behind them in the garden centre, messaging Lucy. ‘New blinds in the spare room!’, attaching a photograph. ‘I want you to come home and fuck me,’ she replied.
Our home stopped feeling like our home. Lucy had started wearing underwear that made me panic. She didn’t talk about how stupid and ineffectual everyone was anymore, sometimes she’d even say nice things about the people we knew. At work I would look up Nora in an incognito window, minimised so it was the size of a business card, in the lower left corner of my screen. She retweeted gentle criticisms of politics, had retrained as a nurse. I thought about our mornings in bed, chewing marmite sodden crumpets, getting egg yolk on the sheets. I sent her a message on Facebook saying ‘Hey’ but she didn’t reply. I picked a fight with Lucy that evening, said she’d changed, was so obsessed with having a baby she’d become impossible. She looked very ugly when she cried. I noticed she no longer wore her hair in waves, and hadn’t done so for a while. ‘Why don’t you run home to mummy and daddy?’ she spat, as our argument neared its end. It was a good question and one I couldn’t think of a reasonable response to. I got in the car and drove four hours to Bristol. ‘What are you doing here?’ dad asked. It was the middle of the night and he was wearing his pyjamas. ‘Can I stay for a while?’ I said. He nodded his head.
I started doing freelance work, mainly SEO, bidding for jobs that didn’t pay for very much on websites that took a significant cut. I wondered what I was going to do with my life. One evening I messaged Nora again, a long, rambling message, apologising for the many mistakes I had made, saying she was getting sexier with age. The next day she had unfriended me, which meant I could no longer see where she was working or who she was going on holiday with.
On Tuesdays I went with mum to the supermarket where we had lots of good private jokes. One about the woman who worked the cheese counter and another where I would pick up identical packets of biscuits and say: ‘This one? Or this one? Or this one?’ On Thursdays I went to the pub with dad and always paid for the round. It was at the pub that I ran into my old friend Richard, a friend who I used to go see shows with. Richard had moved to Bristol with his wife Rachel. They were looking to buy somewhere in Filton. ‘Rachel’s from the Peaks,’ Richard said, and I wondered why he had told me this information. We talked about Norwich and our jobs for a while, and then I said I needed to head back to my dad. ‘You still go see shows?’ Richard asked, as I was leaving. I told him I did not.
Lying in bed I looked at photographs of the Peaks on my phone. I imagined moving through those dark mountains, the fresh capacities they might awake. I looked up rental properties, small terraces made of stone. I had savings. I made a plan. I heard dad go to the bathroom and flush.
When mum told me they were moving to California I took it initially quite well. They said they wouldn’t move until I’d found somewhere to live, and then I did, a stucco fronted semi-detached in Chesterfield. They helped me move in. Mum sewed me some curtains. ‘You’re going to be happy here,’ she said, but she said it with a quiet upswing at the end, the fishhook of a question.
On the morning of their flight I made a ham sandwich, sent a photo of it to mum. ‘Miss you already!’ I typed, then deleted it. I tracked their flight on the airline website. They rang me from the ranch. Mum sounded drunk. I hung up on them. I wasn’t going to beg.
I think it might have been easier if they’d moved to the East Coast. Looking at the map the East Coast didn’t seem that far away. It was just one stretch of sea, if you ignored Ireland. I dragged my cursor over a map on my screen, trying to work out the fewest amount of states you would have to flyover. Also, I didn’t like the way California sat on the American map, how it hung low to the side. It reminded me of Tom Cruise clinging to a rock at the start of the first Mission Impossible, arrogant and precarious.
We had a weekly scheduled video call: the late afternoon for me, the late morning for them. They would call from the porch, twist their iPad around to show me the weather. I would call from the sofa, moan about the rain. Mum started sending me gifts in the mail: crocheted poppy, plastic toy gecco, box of saltwater taffy. Even though all I did was walk I began gaining weight. ‘Such a big boy!’ dad would say.
In the end, I did beg. It started with letters, sensible ones, in which I made lists of the logical reasons they should return. Climate change. Shoddy American healthcare. What if I had a baby and I needed the extra help. They wrote back assuring me that they weren’t worried and had insurance. That if I did have a baby we would work something out. I thought about getting in touch with Lucy, telling her I was ready to have a child, but she was married now. And I thought back to the message I had sent Nora. I put this to my parents: Should I try to start things up with Lucy again? Should I find another way of contacting Nora? Please come back, I will do anything.
The Black Hole appeared on my six month in the High Peaks. I was speaking with my parents only once every few weeks at that point and I wasn’t sleeping. They say you cannot see a Black Hole because the gravitational pull is so strong no light can escape it, and that you need light to be able to see. But I could see this Black Hole. It was like a blue tornado ringed with fire. It hung low in the sky. I stared up at it and thought of Lucy’s friend, spending a full morning looking at vacuums.
I went about my business as usual. I wrote SEO copy from home. I took long walks in the evenings and afternoons. I still sent photographs of my sandwiches to mum. Occasionally, I went on dates with women from the websites, and we’d discuss television shows and the news.
The Black Hole was getting bigger everyday, hanging lower in the sky. I told mum and dad about it, all the facts I’d been learning: how they are formed from the embers of a dying star. ‘The sun will never become a Black Hole,’ I said. ‘It is too small’. They stopped telling me about California, about the jojoba trees and the size of the avocados and their trips to Santa Monica to swim. Instead they just asked questions about the Black Hole: Was it still there? Was it getting any smaller? Could I see it right now?
They told me they were taking a trip home. I met them at the train station. Dad sat in the front and mum sat in the back with the luggage. I took them on the scenic route. I pointed out some of my favourite sights, the walks I enjoyed the most. I told them about how moisture hung in the air, how when you got home you were as hungry as if you had been swimming. When we got back to mine I helped them with the luggage then took them into the back garden, the spot from which you could see the Black Hole the clearest. ‘Do you see?’ I asked. ‘Can you see it?’ They tilted their heads towards the sky and we looked at it together.