‘Shut up!’ The words escape me like air. My impulse reaction. My knee-jerk.
‘Shut up?’ His eyes are sparkling at me. I shrug. I have never been called pretty in my life. Not once. Never. He can’t possibly be sincere. ‘It’s true,’ he says.
‘Whatever,’ I reply. ‘I’m here, Dad!’ I say to Dad as we come to a stop in front of him. Salvi is still holding my hand.
‘I’m being entertained,’ says Dad, smiling in the direction of my voice.
‘Again?’ lilts Salvi. ‘Your daughter was flat on her back with someone’s bag on her face,’ he adds, and I am reminded of the boys at school always saying they would need to put a bag on my head, in order to do anything with me. ‘She fell, in the scramble for shelter. I’m the juggler. I rescued her.’
‘Entertained further, then,’ says Dad. ‘Are you all right, Prue?’
I hold out my free hand – Salvi still has the other one – and squeeze Dad’s. ‘A bit of a wet bottom, but yes, I’m fine. You?’
‘Right as rain,’ says Dad. ‘I knew you’d find me. And there was no point me looking for you …’ he jokes. ‘These kind ladies escorted me to safety.’
‘We can take you for lunch, if you like,’ says one of the women, broad New York accent. ‘You and your daughter. There’s a fantastic Italian here.’
‘That’s a very kind offer,’ says Dad, ‘but we cannot impose, thank you.’ Apart from looking briefly horrified at this suggestion, Dad appears perky; what’s left of his hair is flattened by rain, but he has an animated look on his face I also haven’t seen for a long time: an almost raffish air. It makes me want to giggle, suddenly. ‘Prue and I have a table booked at Pizza Express,’ he fibs.
‘Only the best for us,’ I quip.
I turn to look at Salvi and he is staring at me intently. I realize the wrong side of my face is closest to him. I want to get my hand and place it right over my cheek.
‘Thank you,’ I say to him, ‘for helping me up.’
‘Damsels in distress can never be ignored,’ says Salvi. ‘Or a pretty lady.’ I wish he would stop saying that. ‘So, I have to go now. It’s been really nice meeting you,’ he adds, still staring at me. ‘Can I have your number?’
‘What for?’ Knee-jerk, again; that metaphorical knee is busy today.
Salvi looks amused. ‘So I can call you. We could go out sometime.’
‘Go out? Where?’ Men don’t ask for my number. Men never ask for my number.
‘A bar, a restaurant, you know, like people do. Please may I have it?’
I fight the urge to look behind me again. For another woman with a fringe. Why is he asking me out? What does he want with me? ‘Really?’
‘Yes, really.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, give him your number,’ says Dad. ‘I’m starving and I want to get going.’
‘You could be a serial killer,’ I offer.
‘I’m not a serial killer,’ says Salvi, both mock wearily and with another wink. ‘Honest. I just like the look of you.’
Those fir-green eyes are dancing. That smile curls at the edge of his lips. Would I be contemplating saying ‘Yes’ if he wasn’t so mesmerizingly magnetic? Would I be thinking about saying it if he hadn’t said I was pretty? And wouldn’t I be saying ‘No’ if I didn’t feel that somehow, when my eyes opened, there he was …?
‘OK,’ I say. I open my bag and scribble my mobile number on the back of the receipt for a bottle of water and a packet of Extra Strong Mints. Salvi folds the piece of paper and tucks it into the tiny pocket on his waistcoat.
‘I’ll call you,’ he says, and I feel suddenly foolish and think, Yeah right. Just because Dad has been asking me to open my eyes to the world and its possibilities and I opened them and he was there, it doesn’t mean he is going to call me. Just because I quite fancy him doesn’t make him a man standing in what’s left of my future, smiling on some kind of shimmering horizon. I fell prey to thinking that once – that there could be a man who held my happiness in his hand, like a throbbing heart. There wasn’t.
As Dad and I walk away, his hand on my arm, I can still feel Salvi watching, those eyes boring into my back. We walk through the multiplied crowds, back past the silent human statues painted gold and silver and bronze, as the revived early-afternoon sun dries rainwater shallows on the cobbles and translucent speckles on shop windows. Dad’s cane is suddenly magical: crowds part as it taps its path.
‘I enjoyed that,’ he says.
‘Me too,’ I say, ‘apart from landing face up in the gutter.’
‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,’ say Dad.
‘I know,’ I say. ‘Oscar Wilde.’
‘It was fun,’ he adds. ‘Fun is something I wasn’t sure I’d ever have again … you know?’
‘I know, Dad.’
Dad has basked in the sun and been funny and found things funny and I have taken part in a street performance with all eyes on me, and while I was lying in the gutter I looked up and saw Salvi. I can enjoy a little bit of hope, can’t I? I can imagine there might be a shimmering horizon, somewhere, one day, for me … That there is light and there are stars, with my name on them. And if that horizon and those stars dissolve to nothing, as they inevitably will, can’t I enjoy this moment, when they are the flicker of a possibility?
‘Are we nearly there?’ asks Dad.
‘Where, Dad?’
‘The tube station?’
‘Yes, we’re here now.’
I have a sense, as we enter the tiny ticketing hall and shuffle with the crowd towards the entry barriers, that things have changed since we came through them earlier today. Shifted a little. I feel, for the first time in years, on the margins of hope. But hope, just like pride, can come before a fall. I’m not counting on the rogue mirror to the left of the barriers, a frameless square – pitted and dulled – which lurks as unconcerned passengers, their blank faces only to be written on by the afternoon, pass by. I don’t reckon on catching my eye in it and realizing, with a jolt, that I can never be unconcerned. This waiting trap is not so pocked and murky that I can’t see my concealer has been erased by both the Hello Kitty backpack and the rain. I am not so blinded by shiny new adventures that I can’t witness, in this sudden looking-glass ambush, the streak, the flash, the burn of my birthmark – indelible and always there, no matter how I try to hide it.
CHAPTER 15
I had a sewing box when I was a kid, which Nonna bought me one birthday. It was hexagonal and had a creaky raffia lid with red and orange raffia flowers embroidered on it. She laughed when I unwrapped it, said she thought it was pretty and you never knew, I might find it useful. I had laughed, too. I wasn’t really a sewing kind of girl. Crafts that involved sticking things? Yes. Cutting doll’s hair into harsh asymmetric bobs? Yes. The contents of this box – everything a girl who likes sewing might need – went unused. Sorry, Nonna. But I found a purpose for that sewing box. I wrote secret notes to myself which I folded into small squares and hid under the soft material needle book and the clanking reels of cotton and the plump Japanese lady pincushion.
Some were in the form of questions: ‘When will someone love me?’ (I meant boys, of course. My father loved me a lot, I knew that. His love was like a warm jumper I never wanted to take off.) ‘Will it ever happen to me?’ (Really bad pop song territory.) ‘Will I ever be beautiful?’ (A question with an absolute answer.) Sometimes they were whimsical statements, written in red or green, by one of those pens where you slide bars down to get different colours: ‘When I fall in love I shall sink like a stone.’ (Terrible.) ‘One day, the light of love will shine on me.’ (Excruciating nonsense.)
I’m thinking of these embarrassing notes when the first of two surprising things happens on the journey home from Covent Garden. The first of the surprising things starts when the doors open at Oxford Circus and four men get on the tube, already grinning as they leap on board, a quartet of fizzing energy. They have instruments strapped to thei
r fronts – a violin, a trumpet, an accordion and a set of spoons – and a square black box, which they place on the floor between the two sets of doors. The man with the spoons turns a knob on the box and, with a whine and a twang, the recognizable opening bars of ‘La Bamba’ strike up and the four men launch into it with great exuberance, the man with the spoons slapping them on his thighs and enthusiastically providing the vocals. It sounds great. I’ve always hated that song; it was one of three songs guaranteed to clear me from a dancefloor when I was a teenager: the other two were Lulu’s ‘Shout’ and Phyllis Nelson’s ‘Move Closer’. Particularly that last one. Slow dances. Ugh. Dad used to come in with all the other dads to stand in the corner of the hall ten minutes before discos ended, despite all my pleading – the only father who couldn’t see that I was the only one not snogging a boy in the middle of the dancefloor.
A few of my tragic notes were written after getting home from these soul-scouring school discos. The pen with the different colours would come out and I would scribble my questions, my hopes and my dreams, and secrete them at the bottom of the sewing box, far from anyone’s eyes. Anyway, these men make ‘La Bamba’ sound bouncy and brilliant. Even the most hard-hearted tube-goers can’t help but smile. The carriage is literally rocking.
The surprising thing is that Dad’s foot starts tapping. There it is, Dad’s right foot, in black Adidas Italias, tapping in time to ‘La Bamba’, on the floor, next to his cane. I look from the foot to the men with the spoons and the trumpet and the violin, then back again, and I smile too. It’s some kind of miracle.
The second surprising thing is when I look at my phone just before we rumble into Chalk Farm station, there’s a text there from Salvi.
Lovely to meet you, Prue. I’ll call you tonight.
I should really believe this is some kind of joke. I should really believe that it hasn’t been lovely to meet me, that he won’t call me tonight. But I want him to. I want to imagine that he’ll call me, that we’ll go out, that he’ll banish the returned ghost of Kemp; that I might fall in love and sink like a stone. I may not have my little notes any more, my dreams, however stupid, locked up in that sewing box, but I still keep them inside me, under the sharp needles and the clacking cotton reels of my hardened heart. It would be lovely to think this isn’t a joke.
I put my phone back in my bag and Dad and I get off the train at Chalk Farm. The platform is empty. A crisp packet, whipped up from somewhere by the hot wind of the tunnel, flies up the walkway and grazes him in the face, on his right cheek, but he doesn’t scowl; instead, he laughs, my dad laughs. This has been a good morning for him. I really do believe he has enjoyed himself. The lifts are working now and we glide up to floor level, the blind bloke and the daughter who has a text on her phone from a sexy street performer called Salvi, who hopefully isn’t joking.
There’s a third surprising thing. When we come out of Chalk Farm tube station, Kemp is on our street.
‘Hello,’ he says cheerily. He is slouching against the oxblood tiles just outside the Stop n’ Shop, munching on what looks like a Crunchie ice cream.
‘Hello,’ I say suspiciously. ‘What are you doing here?’ I wasn’t expecting to see him again. I don’t want to see him again. What is he doing here, on our street?
‘You look nice,’ he says.
Hardly, I think. I’ve been flat on my back in a stampede. I’m hot and bothered. And when have I ever looked nice? ‘So do you,’ I say, to throw him. He does, though. He’s wearing the ubiquitous jeans and boots. A ‘Caracas’ T-shirt. Scruffy and handsome, as per. I can’t let it throw me.
‘I knocked on your door, but you weren’t in.’
‘No, we’re here,’ I say. ‘I mean, we’ve been out.’
He nods. ‘Although, thinking about it, it’s not like you haven’t got form for not opening doors …’ he says with a grin. I ignore him. ‘Where’ve you been?’
‘Covent Garden.’
‘Nice,’ he says. ‘All right, Vince? How’s it going?’
‘Good, thank you,’ says Dad. Somehow he seems to know Kemp is holding out his free hand to him, and they shake hands. Dad is smiling. He likes Kemp and is probably happy bumping into him again. I am not. The very sight of him is the undoing of me. ‘Well, a bit tired, actually. It’s been an entertaining morning.’
A silly part of me hopes Dad will mention I met a man this morning, and that he asked me out, then I realize this would be totally embarrassing.
‘It’s always really busy there,’ agrees Kemp.
I’m looking at Dad; I don’t want to look at Kemp. I have to look back at Kemp.
‘You’ve got ice cream on your beard,’ I say.
‘Oops!’ He wipes his chin with his hand. ‘Gone?’
‘Gone.’ This exchange feels way too intimate. Like we’re still good friends. I once wiped sauce off his chin with a napkin, in a restaurant, just like Dad used to wipe ice cream off mine. It felt natural, nice, even though I had wanted to lean forward and kiss him. I hate that I still have that urge, looking at him now. That I just want to kiss him.
‘Oh,’ he says, reaching into one of the back pockets of his jeans with that same free hand, ‘this is that Diane Arbus biography you lent me.’ He hands me a rather battered-looking paperback and reaches back into his pocket again, ‘and this is one of your socks. You left it in the houseboat.’
‘Oh,’ I say, surprised, staring at the blue and yellow sock in his hand. ‘Seven years ago? You should have just chucked it.’
He shrugs. ‘It’s nice. It has stripes. I thought you might want it back.’
‘Oh, right. Well, I don’t have the other one any more so …’
‘I’ll chuck it,’ says Kemp with a grin, tucking the sock into his front jeans pocket. He stands and looks at me. At Dad. Then back to me. ‘Hey, did you get caught in that rain shower earlier?’
‘Yes,’ I say, running my thumb along the top edge of the paperback. I wonder why Kemp is talking about the weather again. We never talked about the weather or remarked how ‘busy’ places were. We talked about movies and television and art and photography and politics and life. He said he liked to hear my opinions on things, that I often had a different slant, and these different slants made him laugh. But I don’t want to remember all that. He mentioned the rain shower, so instead I think of Salvi.
‘Dreadful, wasn’t it? Still we needed it – well, the grass did, anyway.’ I look at him, bemused. What grass? ‘Well, I won’t keep you,’ he says, popping the last bite of ice cream in his mouth and screwing up the wrapper in his hand. ‘I was just passing and thought I’d say hi.’
‘Well, hi,’ I repeat, as though I didn’t once secretly give this man my heart.
‘Do you want to get together sometime, Prue?’ he asks me quickly. ‘For old times’ sake?’
‘No,’ I reply, equally quickly. ‘No, not really.’
‘Prue!’ scolds Dad.
‘Oh!’ Kemp laughs, surprised.
‘How rude, Prue!’ says Dad. ‘And why are you saying “No”? You two were really good friends once upon a time.’
‘Once upon a time was a very long time ago,’ I mutter. ‘People change. Things move on. Sorry if I sounded rude,’ I add, like a child.
‘Have you changed?’ asks Kemp fixedly. ‘Because I don’t think I have.’
‘Of course I have.’ I shrug. ‘Like I said, things move on, don’t they?’
‘Well, that’s a shame,’ says Kemp, and he looks at me in an odd way I can’t read. Well, maybe I can read it. Maybe he needs a friend again. I don’t. ‘Would be a shame to never see you again, Bertie.’
‘OK, well. Right, let’s get you in, then, Dad. Time for lunch and a cuppa,’ I say briskly. I can’t look at Kemp any more and I don’t want him looking at me. I need to get away, again.
‘Maybe I’ll bump into you again!’ calls Kemp as I bustle Dad away and Kemp mooches off down the street, hands in pockets. ‘See you!’
‘Bye,’ I call feebly
and Dad and I stand at the doors to The Palladian and I rummage for my keys, and I wish and I wish and I wish for no more bumping, not from him, as – despite rain showers and Salvis and promised phone calls and eyes open – my stupid heart cannot bear it.
CHAPTER 16
Dad is tired tonight. He declines a leftover portion of his delicious tiramisu and a mug of frothy coffee, after dinner. He closes his eyes in his chair in front of the window I opened without his objection, and I gently take his headphones and put them on the table. He doesn’t even stir when the phone rings.
It’s Angela.
‘Hello?’ Her voice is shrill and chirpy, as clear as a bell. My ‘hello’ is a muffled trumpet, muted by pasta and tiramisu and blunted by waiting for my mobile phone to ring all night.
‘I said I’d call back and here I am!’
‘Here you are.’ About two weeks later …
She sounds sunny and light. It speaks volumes, our tones, our light and shade. My unblemished, unburdened sister, brightened by love and Nova Scotia. Living her happy ending. And me, lumbered by life and insecurity.
‘What have you been up to?’
A silly question, usually, and one she always twitters at me, but I could actually give her quite a good answer today. Dad and I have been to all sorts of places around London and today we’ve been to Covent Garden and I’ve been asked out by an actual man. I can’t be bothered, though. And if he doesn’t call, it won’t be true. ‘The usual. Nothing,’ I say.
‘OK. Warren and I have just bought a new swing set for the yard. The kids are out in it now. Adorable.’
‘Wow,’ I say. I have no idea what a swing set is. ‘Great.’ Angela always sounds so free, I think. She shrugged off the burden of Dad and me, let it fall like Dick Whittington’s knapsack to the ground, and ran. She made herself a man out of clay, in those pottery classes, fashioned it just how she wanted it and pressed herself against him to make an indelible impression. She has children – part of her, out there in the world. Well, in her back garden, at least. She has everything.
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