Summer in the City

by Fiona Collins

  ‘So, how are you?’ he asks me. ‘Really?’

  ‘Fine, thanks.’ I always say that, even if I’m not. People don’t want to hear the truth, do they? That you are ill, or mightily pissed off with life, or dying inside. ‘Fine, thanks’ is the British way of saying, ‘I can’t begin to tell you how I’m really feeling …’

  ‘And you? Are you still going away on photography assignments?’

  During our friendship, Kemp went abroad on trips for National Geographic magazine; he came back again. We’d see each other for a while; then we wouldn’t. That was a good thing. It kept me out of the danger zone. His lengthy absences gave me back enough control not to launch myself at him, weeping like a lunatic and making feverish declarations of undying love when he got back and nonchalantly invited me to the King’s Arms again.

  ‘Yes, I’m still off on my travels now and then. Got to make a living, you know.’

  ‘Right. Great. Good.’ He lived in another world and always had. A place of mystery and adventure and self-discovery. He would send me postcards, while he was away – of jungles and beaches and cities and desert plains. He would write ‘Wish you were here!’ but I knew he never meant that. There was something about me he liked enough to make me his friend, but he didn’t wish I was there.

  There were women, sometimes, in some of these places. A text would buzz on his phone, in the pub, and he would glance at it quickly and then turn his phone over. He told me he had occasional one-night things, in these far-flung locations. With women he would never see again but sometimes gave his number to. I would nod and smile, say things like ‘Good for you’ while dying inside. I hated the thought of him being lonely, but I hated those women more.

  ‘What were you doing in the tube to get all dusty like that?’ I ask. It’s so hard to look at him. Every minute we ever spent together is the space between us he doesn’t even notice.

  He grins. ‘I’ve been down at the Kingsway Exchange.’

  ‘What on earth’s that?’

  He scratches at his chickenpox scar. ‘A secret Cold War-era telephone exchange, below High Holborn. I’m between assignments so I’m doing a bit of urban exploring – you know, going into hidden places, disused and neglected buildings, former mental institutions, that kind of thing. Places where the public aren’t allowed access. Taking photos. It’s really interesting.’

  ‘Oh right, sounds it.’

  ‘What, you break in to places?’ Dad interrupts. I realize his headphones are off again. He’s halfway out of his chair, probably to get a drink.

  ‘Not really break in,’ says Kemp. We exchange looks. ‘Well, kind of, but it’s not illegal. It’s just exploring, going where you’re not allowed to go. It’s fun. And I’ve been sent into some places by a couple of magazines. The rest, I go by myself. Hopefully I’ll be able to sell the photos somewhere.’ He pushes back his hair with his right hand. He tucks some of it behind an ear.

  ‘All right to go in the bathroom?’ Ryan is at the doorway.

  ‘Not much to see in there, but yes, of course,’ I say.

  I’m standing too close to one of the side windows and the sun is coming in and hitting the left side of my face. I step forward and out of the sun. I turn my face from Kemp. Even now, I must hide all the worst parts of me from him. He has seen my birthmark, of course. Once we got caught in a rainstorm on the way back from the pub and I knew my make-up had run off; another night, in August, when there had been a terrible skiffle band at the pub we’d attempted to dance to, I sank one Jack Daniel’s too many and threw up in his chemical toilet (the shame!) while he held my hair back. Afterwards, I looked in his tiny bathroom mirror and my birthmark was exposed and raw-looking, a mocking, witchy reminder he could never love me.

  ‘Do you still live on the houseboat?’ I ask, and I wish I hadn’t as I am blushing again.

  ‘No, I don’t now. Another winter in that place almost did me in. I’ve got a flat in Primrose Hill. A studio – you know, the ones with a pull-down bed and no room to swing a rat.’

  I smile. There were plenty of river rats in the houseboat days. Streaming on down the Thames or peering at us, curious from the bank, as we clambered drunkenly aboard Summer Breeze, their eyes shining in the dark.

  ‘I’ve got a photo on my phone somewhere. I’ll show you.’

  He takes his phone from his jeans pocket, flicks to his photos and hands it to me. Kemp’s studio flat has the same kind of decor as the houseboat. A silly batik rug on the wall, bottle-green walls, a bed with a Thai gold and purple bedspread thing. A guitar he doesn’t play slouching against a wall. A didgeridoo. I’m sure I can spy his tragic fisherman’s hat, hung on a hook on a wall, just like it always was. Wherever he lays his hat that’s his home, it seems. He has re-created the entire houseboat in flat form. I can understand why he moved. I remember all too well the houseboat in winter. Condensation on the tiny windows. Kemp’s selection of blankets, including the treacherous electric one, with the frayed seams, which his grandmother had once owned. The other dangers in that houseboat: candles and Calor gas bottles and how close my heart was getting to a different kind of flame … Then I remember my sock. It moved with him?

  ‘Very nice,’ I say, handing the phone back. ‘Cute.’

  ‘I’ll have to show you in person sometime.’

  He looks at me, with those lighthouse eyes, and I pile on another blush. ‘Maybe,’ I say. This should not happen. I don’t want to go where he lives, to see his things; his life. I took myself away from him for a reason and I won’t put myself back there.

  ‘Maybe?’ echoes Kemp, teasing.

  ‘I’m quite busy,’ I say, shutting him down.

  I stacked all the postcards he sent me in my knicker drawer, a pile of misery. When he told me he was going away again, that last time, seven years ago – to India; to the pink palaces of Jaipur and the white palaces of Udaipur – I knew that temporarily taking back control of my senses, while I chucked postcards in my knicker drawer, was not going to work for me any more. I knew, on the night he told me – a night where we escaped from the pub and ended up sitting on stone steps in the moonlight, and I’d looked at him and despaired at how much I loved him and how hopeless it all was – I had to end our beautiful friendship. Later that same night I quietly left his bed and his houseboat at 3 a.m., while he lay on the floor in jeans and black T-shirt, barefoot, sleeping – the most beautiful man I had ever known – and as I crept across his floor he opened his eyes and looked at me, a serene and almost tender look that made me want to cry.

  ‘Just going to the loo,’ I’d said, as he closed his eyes again and I silently said goodbye.

  I simply cut him off. Stopped replying to his messages. Stopped answering his calls. I couldn’t explain that his ridiculous friend had fallen in love with him, so I just had to ignore him. Walk away – swiftly – without looking back. I’ll always remember his last message. It said, Bertie! I don’t know why you’ve gone, but I haven’t. I’m still here. Take some time, if you need it. I’ll be waiting. But I didn’t want him to wait. I wanted him to realize I could never see him again.

  ‘I’m done.’ Feline-toothed Ryan is back in the sitting room, clutching his plastic file. ‘I got loads of photos.’

  ‘Great, great,’ says Kemp, still casually leaning against my wall, his feet crossed at the ankles, and making no move to go. He is sipping his water and looking all lovely and genial and good-natured. His hair is perfect. His eyes are kind. I’m trying not to meet them.

  ‘I’m seeing Ellie at eight,’ says Ryan.

  ‘Yes, OK, we’re off, then,’ says Kemp, and he rights himself and hands me back the glass of water with a smiling ‘thank you’, and our fingers almost touch and I want to die.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ I say.

  ‘We’ll see ourselves out. Thanks again, Vince, Prue. Don’t be a stranger,’ Kemp adds, to me. ‘I mean it. Reply to my bloody texts.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I reply, a mere million millionth of what I actually wa
nt to say.

  ‘Thanks,’ chimes Ryan. ‘Great place.’ And off they go, shutting the door behind them, and I can hear them clattering down the metal stairs with Kemp ribbing Ryan about something and them both laughing and then they are out the brown doors and on the street below.

  ‘Nice kid,’ says Dad, from his chair. ‘And Kemp really is a great guy. Why did you stop seeing him, again?’

  I take Kemp’s empty glass and walk into the kitchen.

  ‘I had to,’ I whisper to myself.

  CHAPTER 22

  Kemp was the only person I told my Cherry Lau story to. How we had stopped being friends after a house party one summer when we were seventeen. I’d been invited by some boys in Sixth Form – I’m not sure why. I think I’d told one of them to ‘do one’ in the lunch queue earlier that week and they decided – finally – I was some weird strain of cool novelty.

  It was the kind of house party where the parents were at a golf club dinner and someone would end up puking in the bushes of the neighbour’s garden and teenagers ‘got off’ with each other (if they got lucky). I had my toothbrush in my back pocket because it was intimated I could stay over, and I brought Cherry Lau with me. If there was to be a Carrie-style bucket of pig’s blood over my head as I walked in, she would get covered too and the humiliation would be shared. If there wasn’t, there would be booze and we could sit in the corner and talk about people.

  As it happened the humiliation was all hers.

  I told Kemp in the pub one night. We’d had a skinful of Jack Daniel’s and Cokes and he was trying to get stuff out of me. History kind of stuff. Stories. Anecdotes. I had a whole dubious pack to shuffle through that I really didn’t want to share, but I’d had just enough bourbons to confess to this shameful one. How it was a very drunken party. That the bush-vomiting had started early, about nine o’clock. I didn’t tell him a boy tried to stick his tongue down my throat at about ten o’clock, while we were moshing to Madness in the hall, then burst out laughing and said, ‘You’d look all right in the dark. I should have taken you down to the bottom of the garden.’

  ‘Full moon and too many stars, arsehole,’ I’d replied. ‘You’d still see me.’

  I told Kemp that at about midnight, Cherry and I were at the bottom of that garden, sitting on a swing chair and necking a bottle of Southern Comfort. We were talking to a group of idiot boys who were pretending to smoke weed. They were talking about going to the dog track the next day and although they hadn’t asked or cared what we were doing, Cherry piped up with a Southern Comforted slur that she had a family wedding tomorrow.

  ‘What, a Chinese wedding?’ asked one of the boys.

  ‘Yes, my cousin.’ She was so pissed her eyes were all over the place behind her thick glasses.

  ‘What does that involve?’

  ‘It’s just a wedding,’ she shrugged, ‘there’s nothing different about it. Oh, the bride wears a red dress and we drink tea and it goes on for two days and we give red envelopes with money in them to the newlyweds.’

  This was the most she had ever spoken to a member of the opposite sex, I reckoned.

  ‘Sounds stupid,’ said one of the boys, and then the swing chair had lurched and Cherry had fallen off and her Madonna T-shirt got soaked from the damp night grass and she spilt her cup of Southern Comfort down the leg of what were already terrible jeans and everyone laughed, including her as she was so shit-faced she didn’t care.

  By 4 a.m. most people had left and about eight of us crashed out on the sitting-room carpet in spaces between spilt alcohol patches and fag butts and empty Twiglet packets. I had attempted to crash in the bathtub, thinking I wouldn’t be disturbed as the toilet was in a separate room next door, but there was a manky soaking-wet towel lying in a puddle of something orange in the bottom, so the sitting room it was. My head was on a flowery cushion stained on one corner with red wine and I had pulled a smelly white cotton jacket with scrape-y buckles over me. I couldn’t sleep, as a boy was snoring somewhere down near my left foot, so I got up and walked to the kitchen where Cherry was lying flat out asleep on the lino in front of the fridge, a bottle of Southern Comfort rolling near her head. Three boys were kneeling over Cherry and one, who we’d talked to in the garden, had a large black marker pen in his hand. Her glasses were off – I later spotted them on a kitchen worktop under a half-eaten piece of toast – but he’d already drawn them back on her, black and thick, great round circles around each eye, right into the socket, plus a black bridge across her nose and one chunky arm up to her left ear. The other boys were laughing.

  ‘Problem, fuck-face?’ he asked me as I stood in the doorway.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Good. She’ll still look better than you when I’ve finished. And hers will come off – eventually. It’s permanent marker.’

  The other boys laughed. The artist, his tongue out in concentration, steadily drew the second arm, up to her other ear. A ‘Fuck you’ came to my lips but I left it there. A strange feeling was coming over me. A feeling of relief, almost joy – that for once it wasn’t me. Another victim was in town. He drew a comedy moustache above Cherry’s top lip. I started to laugh, too. He drew two comedy clown cheeks on Cherry’s and filled them in pitch black – she looked like a weird cherub suffering from the black plague. I laughed some more. The longer I laughed, the better I felt, and I liked that feeling. I was one of them and it felt good. I’d had a big fat target on my back since the day I was born, and now it was pinned to Cherry.

  He turned to me and held the marker pen up in the air. ‘Want to have a go?’

  I hesitated. I was enjoying the laughing and I fancied him a bit, but did I want to draw on my best friend?

  ‘OK,’ I said. In my drunken logic – and because there wasn’t a lot of space left – I thought I’d give her a beauty spot, like Elizabeth Taylor. She was a bit of an idol of ours; Cherry had a knackered old ‘Girls World’ styling head we used to muck about on and we often used to whack an Elizabeth Taylor beauty spot on it, as a finishing touch. So, I gave Cherry a nice one on the corner of her lips, mistakenly thinking I was both appeasing the boys and improving her look.

  ‘What’s that?’ derided one of the boys.

  ‘Beauty spot,’ I defended.

  ‘Can’t really see it,’ he judged.

  ‘OK,’ I said. And I made it bigger and bigger until it was a huge witch’s wart.

  In the morning Cherry went upstairs to go to the loo. There was no mirror in that bathroom, but when she came back down she noticed the constant giggling. I wasn’t joining in with them now as I felt really bad, now I was sober. I was ashamed of myself. Harsh sunlight was coming in through the curtains that nobody had bothered to draw, illuminating my shame; my brief searing moment in the sun with these hateful arseholes.

  ‘I’m going to call my dad to pick me up,’ Cherry said.

  I panicked then, so I took her up to the main bathroom and showed her her face in the mirror above the bath.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  She was horrified. She cried. And then she noticed the witchy beauty spot.

  ‘A beauty spot?’ she exclaimed, turning to me. ‘Like Elizabeth Taylor?’

  I blushed. I blushed a hungover crimson.

  ‘Oh my God, you joined in,’ she said. I went even redder. ‘You think I’m just a stupid ugly little Chinese girl, too. I’ve got to go to a wedding today! How am I going to get this off?’

  Tears came to my own eyes. I knew in that instant I had lost her as a friend and I totally deserved to.

  ‘You of all people,’ she said, and then she went downstairs and out of my life. She never called round for me again and when I went to visit her at the takeaway her dad said she wasn’t there. Every time. And much later, if I ever reluctantly called in for sweet ’n’ sour chicken and Dad’s favourite Singapore noodles, and she was behind the counter, we’d have the most awful of small talk conversations, as she purposefully jabbed through Cosmopolitan magazine, and, if she loo
ked up at me, I’d see the vestigial hatred in her eyes.

  ‘Don’t be too hard on yourself, Bertie,’ Kemp said when I told him, sitting at that little table in that beautifully dark and cramped and cheerful pub.

  ‘But I must be!’ I said. ‘After everything, I did that to her! It’s unforgivable.’ I remember tearing a beer mat into a hundred pieces, scattering them like confetti on the table.

  ‘It was a long time ago; you were a teenager. I think you need to cut yourself some slack.’

  ‘No, no,’ I said. ‘No slack. I don’t deserve slack.’ I was ashamed. I’d shown him a black part of myself when I’d been trying so hard to keep so much concealed. And now I had shown him, he knew exactly who I was. I wanted to forget I’d told this story and get another drink. I needed to be fun, night-time, pub-time Prue again. Grabbing his sunglasses from the table (he always had sunglasses on him), I put them on, tipped them on to the bridge of my nose and peered over the top at him. ‘I demand more booze,’ I said, in a poor attempt at a line from Withnail and I.

  Kemp has left his sunglasses behind now. I can see them on the windowsill, left there from when he and Ryan came into the flat a few hours ago. I don’t suppose he’ll come back for them; he always had plenty of cheap pairs, for all that travelling.

  Dad and I are in our chairs. Dad has his headphones on and is listening to a podcast on the modernism movement and London’s tower blocks – so he tells me. I am idling on the internet again, trying to erase the new incarnation of Kemp from my mind.

  I need a distraction. I need the equivalent of putting a cheeky pair of sunglasses on and having another drink. It’s such a crying shame I won’t be seeing Salvi again – he would have been more than a decent distraction. That charismatic, cheeky man with the swagger and the grin and the bad, black edge to him I feel could mirror me in a sharp, glittering way. I’d hoped he’d really like me. I’m still so disappointed that he didn’t. I remember how he kissed me, how astonishing and remarkable and wonderful that was. How completely pointless.