Summer in the City

by Fiona Collins

  ‘That was very amusing,’ says Dad. ‘Are they in love, do you think?’

  St Dunstan in the East has had a weird effect on Dad, too, I think. I glance at him and he has an odd look on his face. Contemplative. Lost somewhere, somehow.

  ‘Yes, Dad, definitely in love.’

  We walk up St-Mary-at-Hill in silence. Traffic is light and there are not many people around in this business district. They are all at work, like real people.

  ‘You know … this is not what I wanted for you,’ Dad says suddenly and rather quietly, his hand on my arm as we walk in tandem.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I ask him.

  ‘This life without love.’

  I want to stop walking but I carry on. I don’t want to draw attention to the catastrophe of his words. Please don’t go there, Dad! I cry to myself. Don’t talk to me about love. Not when I have just seen Kemp. Stop talking about people in love and all the things denied to me, and to us.

  ‘That’s very serious,’ I say flippantly. ‘Is this the Italian family thing?’ I ask. ‘The pressure to get married, have loads of bambinos, be in an apron by my age, well on the way to Nonna status, feeding everyone?’

  ‘No, I don’t mean all that,’ he says. ‘I mean love. Proper romantic love. Love for you in your life. It would be lovely for you to have someone. You need someone. You need a relationship. I wish you would open your eyes and see who’s out there.’

  ‘I don’t need a relationship!’ I protest. ‘I don’t need anybody! And there’s no one out there, Dad! I’ve looked.’ Yes, I’ve looked and I couldn’t have who I saw and who I loved. ‘And I’m quite bloody old now – it’s all a bit late.’

  ‘I’m sad for you.’

  ‘Well, don’t be! I’m all right, I promise you. Love is overrated, anyway.’

  ‘Is it?’ he asks.

  ‘Why have you never dated again?’ I ask. He’s been without romantic love for a long time, too, I think. All that time since Mum. And, although I have asked him this before, I wait for his answer to see if it’s different from his usual reply – that he ‘can’t be bothered’; that it would all be too much ‘fuss and nonsense’.

  ‘Well, I’m blind,’ he replies. He has answered with this before, too. Sometimes I have said, ‘So?’ Often he has shrugged and changed the subject.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he adds carefully. ‘I suppose I was so disillusioned with the whole notion of it that for such a long time – after your mother – I simply didn’t have the energy, and all the energy I had, I poured into you girls, which I don’t regret for a second, by the way.’

  ‘No,’ I say. This is a new answer. And he’s mentioned Mum in it, which is surprising.

  ‘And then time just went on,’ he adds. ‘I became blind and time just went on.’

  We walk. A bird clatters out of a tree wedged between two buildings and soars into the sky. Yes, I reflect; after our mother, everything changed. For Dad and for Angela and for me. Her absence sliced something into us that we then had to gather round, to fill. We had to be more than the gap she left, the three of us. We tried so hard to be, for a long time. To put all our energy into filling that giant, mother-shaped hole. ‘But still. There might be someone out there for you now. You never know.’

  ‘It’s all a bit late,’ Dad echoes, ‘and we were talking about you.’

  ‘Love is overrated,’ I repeat.

  There’s a road sweeper on the pavement in front of us so I tell Dad we need to cross to the sunny side of the street. A white van waits for us to cross. We walk with the sun in our faces until we get to the junction with Monument Street. I’m sad I’ve just lied to Dad. I’m sad because love is not overrated at all. I know what it is and how much it hurts when you love someone who can never love you back. And I don’t need to open my eyes to romance. I don’t want to. I’ve seen who is out there and he can’t be mine and never will, and now I’ve seen him again – this beautiful man in my memory and my heart, who I now have an up-to-date vision of to torture myself with – I feel a hollowness re-open in my soul that I know has the danger to swallow me alive.

  ‘Thank you,’ Dad says finally, as we stand by the column of the monument to commemorate the Great Fire of London and he has finished telling me of its provenance, of Christopher Wren and Dr Robert Hooke, who designed it. ‘Thank you for bringing me out today, for forcing me out of the door. St Dunstan in the East … it’s magical, isn’t it? Did you think so?’

  ‘It’s one of the most magical places I’ve ever seen,’ I reply. And I feel gutted, as gutted as the ruined church and its tower, destroyed by bombers in the Second World War, except part of it still stands (the beauty remains) and I have nothing still standing, just my memories of the past and the pain of the present and how much I hate myself for not being someone else, anyone else, who might be loved.

  CHAPTER 12

  Summer 1975

  My mother left us when I was five and Angela was three. Dad was two years into his architecture degree. He told us, at first, that she’d gone away for a while on a ‘little holiday’.

  ‘And when will she come back from her holiday?’ Angela had asked. Dad had picked us up from school and nursery – which was a surprise – and we’d had a snack of digestive biscuits and a Nesquik chocolate milk, and we were clinging on to Dad’s legs once he’d told us about Mum’s Holiday – like street urchins – while I patted Angela on the back with a consolatory hand. I’d overheard Dad on the phone to Nonna about an hour and a half before and had caught the words ‘flighty’ and ‘hated to be tied down’ and ‘struggled with everything’, amongst many more in Italian. I knew they were talking about Mum. Hadn’t she told us herself how she’d run away from home three times as a child – with a cheese sandwich, an apple and a clean hankie in a tin lunchbox, each time – and once from school, one Thursday lunchtime, to go and watch The Beatles’ rooftop concert at Savile Row?

  ‘I really don’t know,’ Dad said, and that was that, for a while, but later I began to see my mother as a character in a series of vignettes – or as one of those cardboard dolls you cut out from a book and put paper outfits on by folding tabs around them – because every time she came back to us, she was a slightly different version of herself.

  A month after she left – which to us had seemed like a lifetime – my mother breezed in as though she had just popped out to pick up a pint of milk; if popping out for a pint of milk involved a complete change in image and a personality transplant. Gone was the quiet but increasingly sullen mother who, in unremarkable clothes that smelled of Bold washing powder, unenthusiastically made us fish fingers, instant Smash and peas, followed by butterscotch Instant Whip. In her place was a laughing imp in flared jeans and a T-shirt that said ‘Love’ and showed her tummy; who had frizzy, crimped hair and a giant butterfly on her forehead courtesy of a pale blue bandanna, and who smelled like herbs. It was like our old mum had put her finger in an electric socket – something she had always shouted at us not to do – and had become a super-charged Mum, all lit-up inside.

  Dad kept staring at her, as we all kind of stood around in the sitting room. He stared at her so much I thought she would laugh and say something funny to him, but she didn’t. She only really talked to us.

  She brought us a Sherbet Dip Dab each. I didn’t even like Sherbet Dib Dabs but she seemed to have forgotten that. I licked the sherbet off carefully, trying not to let my tongue touch the liquorice. We were all sat on the sofa by then and Dad sat behind us, on a chair he’d brought in from the dining room, although there would have been room for him.

  Mum had not really been on holiday. She’d been at her friend Janice’s in Hoxton, she told us, not in France or Africa, places in my junior atlas I had imagined her exploring, in a big hat. But she wasn’t coming back to us! She said she was sorry, but she wasn’t! (Everything this new Mum said was in giant exclamation marks.) She was now going on a tour of Europe! Europe! In a van! She was breathless, her eyes were all wide and bright. Didn’t we wi
sh for her to have a lovely time?! She would miss us! She would send us a postcard! She got up from the sofa and squeezed Angela and me in a joint hug and the herb smell was even stronger and I didn’t like it, and then she went out the door, blowing silly kisses at us, and the frayed hems of her jeans brushed the floor and reminded me of the brushes Nana Larry had on the bottom of all her doors.

  After she had gone, Angela and I shrugged miserably at each other and Dad said a midge had flown into his eye and he had to get a tissue and then he put the tea on and he let us have Cherryade.

  There were no postcards from the European tour. I did them myself, after a while. I went with Dad and bought a pack of blank postcards from Woolworths with my pocket money – for school, I said – and I drew a sun on the front of each, or a boat, or a beach umbrella and carefully pencilled silly things like ‘I miss you’ and ‘Having a grate time!’ on the back, in a childish approximation of our mother’s handwriting, and stuck them through our letter box in secret. For Angela.

  There were no postcards, no nothing, until 1977, which was when she next manifested.

  It was summer again. Our mother’s skin was tanned and she had a short dress on with weird and wonderful patterns all over it and leather flat boots that went up to her knees and had laces that criss-crossed up, like Eskimo boots. And her hair was even frizzier and she had a headband round her forehead and she looked very tired. She still laughed and smiled a lot, and she hugged us when she came in, but this time we sat on the sofa with Dad – with him in the middle and his arms round us – while she sat on a dining-room chair and stretched her Eskimo boots out in front of her.

  She brought us a paper bag stuffed with Black Jacks and Fruit Salads, and she wouldn’t stop talking. She told us she had been to lots of different countries and had been to music festivals and how much fun it had been and maybe she would take us to one, too, one day. And that she missed us so much and she would come and see us the next day, definitely. And she talked on and on, and after a while Dad got up from the sofa and started folding up some laundry he’d left in a basket, although he had already folded it, and then she left and Dad shut the door with a bit of a bang and Angela started to cry.

  The next evening, when we had eaten all the Black Jacks and the Fruit Salads and the paper bag was in the bin and Mum hadn’t come back again, Dad said, ‘We’ll get by,’ or something like that.

  We were sitting in a huddle at the bottom of the stairs and he had one arm round each of us, like Neptune with two wriggling fishes on his knees. Angela was wearing the crown she had made at school for Easter a few months before. It had cardboard Easter eggs stuck on to each point; she’d saved it – desperate to show it to Mum – but Mum had put her brown crochet bag on it, on the hall table, when she’d come, and squashed it.

  ‘We’ll manage on our own,’ Dad said. ‘I’ve got the pair of you, and you’ve got me. My love is going to be as big as a mum’s and a dad’s put together and it will wrap you up like an enormous blanket and we’ll be safe and warm because we’ll be together.’

  ‘How big will that be?’ asked Angela, her eyes all wide and her crown all crumpled. ‘That love?’

  ‘Well, as big as a blanket,’ said Dad. ‘I’ve just said.’

  Angela frowned. ‘That’s not that big.’

  ‘OK,’ said Dad. ‘As big as the moon. How about that?’ And we had a huge hug, where Angela and I pressed our faces into the warmth of his soft cotton T-shirt and Dad clasped his big, warm hands around us nice and tight.

  In 1981, Mum came back as a punk. A rather startling one. I mean, a pair of ripped jeans scribbled on with a black biro, patent pointy black boots with buckles, a T-shirt with swinging chains and a black leather jacket proclaiming ‘The Damned’ on the back in white emulsion was not quite the look I expected from my mother, after the four long years since she last came to see us. She stood shaking in the doorway with a studded collar thing round her neck, which made her look like a scary bulldog we once saw on the school run; her hair was dyed burgundy and cut short into rock-hard spikes and she had a lot of black make-up on.

  I was wearing a bra for the very first time. Lots of girls wore one already, in my new secondary school, and boys, with the unintentional goal of proving their immaturity by attempting to refute yours, found it hilarious to constantly ping the back of your blouse to see if there was a strap there. As I was laughed at enough already, I asked Dad for the money to buy a Fame rah-rah skirt, but instead went to Marks & Spencer on Oxford Street and bought myself a lightly padded teen bra, despite having next to nothing to put in it. I wondered if Mum would notice I was wearing it, under my Depeche Mode T-shirt, but I don’t think she did. She didn’t really notice us at all, and Angela and I spent most of the visit staring at her.

  She was nervous, coming in, as she’d heard on the grapevine (I wasn’t sure what kind of grapevine wound its way into the ‘squats’ of North London – not that I knew what they were – but Dad said she was living in one) about the ‘whole blindness thing’, as she put it, and she didn’t know quite where to put herself.

  ‘Oh, Vince,’ she kept whining. ‘Oh, Vince, I’m so sorry.’ She quickly became a very broken record. She repeated herself over and over, one whiny ‘sorry’ after another layering up, until the sitting room was a nauseating fog of them and Dad snapped, ‘That’s enough, Ellen!’ She then became fascinated by Dad’s first guide dog, Sunny. We’d had her for two months or so. She was amazing. Mum kept saying ‘Awww’ and ‘Oh, would you look at her?’ and ‘Bless her little heart!’, until I wanted to snap, ‘That’s enough, Ellen!’ too.

  Apart from that, Mum didn’t have much to say. She didn’t ask us how we were. She didn’t ask me about my new school or how bullying the kids were, on a scale of one to ten (about a nine and a half), or about my bra. She just prattled on a bit about her new ‘man’, Dave, and how he was taking care of her in a little place on the Old Kent Road, all the time staring at Dad. How she was going to go down the Job Centre and get a job, just as soon as they got a permanent address; how she would soon be getting herself ‘sorted’ so she’d have the ‘energy’ to be in our lives more (how much energy did it take to be a mother? I wondered) and wouldn’t that be great?

  ‘You really can’t see anything, Vince?’ she drawled. Then, when he said ‘no’ – his face all set and weird-looking – she wheedled another, ‘Aww, you poor thing’, like Dad was a very old dog that was about to be put down. Eventually, she slouched after Dad like a punky scarecrow into the kitchen and there was lots of whispering and a loud, ‘Oh clever, you! You know where the kettle is, Vince!’ The kettle boiled but they didn’t come out holding mugs of tea. Dad looked angry and Mum scuttled out the door, after flinging two packets of Flying Saucers at Angela and me and blowing us theatrical kisses.

  We didn’t see her again until 1984. There was only one more vignette to come. One more memory. One more character popped out from the book of her life, of which we knew so little and which she so absolutely wanted to keep us from reading, or even looking at the pictures. She remained a series of paper dolls to Angela and me: thin and without substance, unable to be pinned down or held on to; a papery wisp of a mother who fluttered in a wavering slipstream of her own design, always out of reach …

  CHAPTER 13

  I’m wearing a beautiful boho dress I bought from Loved Before last winter – another item acquired in a fit of imagining a lifestyle I don’t and won’t ever have and a dress I admired long before I felt brave enough to wear it. It’s maxi length with an off-the-shoulder neckline – floral print. It’s probably too young for me, but there you go. I look OK in it, if you squint your eyes quite tight and ignore the birthmark squatting above the dress, like a demon. If you don’t squint, I probably look like a blemished Nana Mouskouri – and if you remember her then you’re as old as me and there’s no hope for either of us.

  Dad and I are off to Covent Garden. The escalator at Chalk Farm is out of order so we take the stairs.

&n
bsp; ‘Thirty-four spiral steps then a turning platform then twenty more flat ones,’ says Dad and he counts them as we descend, his cane tap-tapping and his hand on the railing.

  ‘How do you remember all this stuff?’ I ask him.

  ‘I just do,’ he replies.

  On the platform, the air that whooshes up the tunnel is hot and dry. As we walk to an empty space in order to wait for the train, Dad takes in a long deep breath of it, like he is actually relishing the thick, underground pollution filling his lungs. He seems cheery this morning. He wasn’t scared on the threshold, before we came out. He seemed raring to go. Perhaps he is buoyed by our trip to St Dunstan in the East. Perhaps he is just getting used to being out in the world again.

  ‘Eight stops to Covent Garden,’ he says, ‘changing at Leicester Square.’

  The next place on the list. One of the busiest places in London. Even on a Monday. The tube we squeeze on to is sardined and crazy hot. Covent Garden tube station is absolutely packed. When we arrive, there’re a million people choking the cramped barrier area: tourists; families with multitudes of swerving, meandering kids; people waiting for people or saying goodbye; gaggles of teenagers with bags over their shoulders, shouting at each other as they all have headphones on; a blind man and his daughter, just trying to make our way through them all, without injury, and out on to the street.

  We turn right out of the station and head down to Covent Garden. James Street is also swarming with excited pedestrians and punctuated with those human statues: metallic frozen centurions and rigid Victorian ladies with parasols; a static, silver ballet dancer with fierce calves, sitting on a stool; a motionless Laurel and Hardy, in bronze. Each has a circle of gaping people around them, staring and staring, willing the spray-painted bodies to move and trying to get them to blink.