Summer in the City

by Fiona Collins

  ‘Inspired by it, too?’ I venture to ask. ‘For the future?’

  ‘Don’t push it.’ Dad grins. ‘But maybe.’

  ‘That’s great, Dad,’ I say. ‘Really great.’

  ‘It’s all thanks to you, Prue.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ It was Dad who came up with the list. Dad who instigated coming today. Dad who suggested the walk to Camden. Dad who’s been brave and can say ‘yes’. Dad who has pushed us back out into the world. While I was crying in the dark, my father was inspired, for the first time in years. While I was trapped in the past, Dad took a possible and hopeful step into the future. I wish I could do the same. I wish for so many things.

  My phone buzzes in my pocket. It’s a text in capital letters suggesting I’ve suffered whiplash when I don’t even own a car. Of course it’s not Salvi texting me. He is not interested. He is too interesting, too successful, too charming, too present in the world for me. Then why did he offer to save me? What is he saving me for? I wish I could get it back, that feeling I had with him on the first night in his flat. That I was precious, that I was beautiful. I want that back so I can be a good girl again.

  ‘Tomorrow night is Blondie,’ Dad says, as we navigate the barriers at Westminster station.

  ‘Yes. You’re still OK about going?’

  When I first asked Dad, he was taken aback. Then he shook his head and laughed and said, ‘Blondie, eh? I did really love them, back in the day. Especially Debbie Harry.’

  ‘Who didn’t love Debbie Harry?’ I said.

  ‘What a night me and Jack Templeton had back in nineteen seventy-eight …’ he mused, and then he added he was a little worried about the hundreds of people who’d be there, and I said that it’d be OK, that I would look after him. And I thought Salvi would be there to look after him, too, but he doesn’t even know about it. I forgot to mention it when we had the lunch and the evening and the morning, and since then he hasn’t called me. If we went out again, I’d be that girl again. The one he looked at with tenderness in his eyes. I wouldn’t ask him to sleep with me; I wouldn’t ask him for anything. I’d be exactly who he wanted.

  I’ll text him. When we get back to The Palladian, where the three Blondie tickets are in the drawer of the console table, waiting, I do just that. This is not the Dark Ages and women can ask men out to things. We can put ourselves forward. We can be brave. And I’m thinking of tomorrow night, and the possibility of Salvi’s arms around me at the concert. The possibility that he does really like me, after all. And me getting that feeling back.

  Do you want to go and see Blondie tomorrow night?

  There’s no answer. An hour sludges by, like treacle down a plate. I try to read an article about Frida Kahlo but I can’t concentrate. At the end of that leaden hour, I have a mad idea. I could go and present his ticket to him. I could go to the Old Bailey and wait for Salvi to come out, for his lunch break, catch him outside. Then he’s got to come.

  ‘Dad, I’m going out again for a bit,’ I announce. ‘Is that OK?’

  ‘Sure, love. Where are you off to?’

  ‘Just to my charity shops. Won’t be long.’

  ‘OK, pet, mind how you go.’

  I’ve stood here for fifteen minutes, over the road from the Old Bailey, by the fountain, and there’ve been lots of coming and goings, but no sign of Salvi. I’m thinking about leaving. I feel foolish. My insecurities are starting to sweep across me again, like the shade in the courtyard of The Monastery. I look down the street. A car passes me, a woman staring out of the passenger window. I watch the car round the corner and disappear.

  When I turn back, there’s Salvi, standing outside the grand, arched entrance with a young colleague, a woman, short brown hair, gamine, with the look of Mia Farrow, though this woman is tall and willowy. Is it Jennifer Dixon, the new clerk he mentioned? She’s not quite how I imagined. She is wearing enormous Jackie-O sunglasses that cover half her face. She is wearing capri pants and perilously high heels. Yet, she and Salvi look friendly. She tilts her face down towards his and he gives her a kiss on the cheek, lingering perhaps a little too long. He takes a finger and raises her sunglasses a little, at one outer rim. She shakes her head, a little cross, and pushes them back down again. Then she walks away and gets into a cab that sweeps in to pick her up.

  I’m already crossing the road.

  ‘Salvi! Salvi, hi!’ I am slightly out of breath with nerves. I’ve dressed up for this. I’m wearing the jacket, again, plus a cotton fifties skirt (not a London bus in sight) and a cute white capped-sleeve top. I hope I look a little like Audrey Hepburn, not a budget chorus member from Hairspray. I had this whole ad hoc meeting in my mind as a rather romantic encounter. Me dashing to meet him, him looking surprised and delighted, his face breaking into a great big grin and his eyes lighting up. Us going for an impromptu cosy lunch somewhere, in a deep dark bar where barristers hang out. A bottle of red wine and a few furtive snogs. His hands underneath the jacket, moving down to my waist …

  ‘What are you doing here?’ His eyes are narrowed and glacial and he looks at me as though I am a piece of dirt on the bottom of his shiny, prohibitively expensive shoe. A carbuncle on the face of a cherub. A blight on the world. My heart chills, humiliated and confused and fallen. I’m back there again, aren’t I? Back in that place. The look on his face and his cold words conjure up the look and the words of every boy and every girl who ever threw taunts at me. The stares. The scowls. The cruel laughter. Ugly. Pig. Put a bag on it. I feel both the claw of Shaun the Waltzer charioteer and the heavy press of Jonas’s body on mine in that hotel bed in Tenerife. Why is Salvi looking at me in such a terrible way?

  ‘I know you’re busy, but I thought I’d come and meet you for a quick lunch? Maybe.’ I’m stuttering, stammering; an instant wreck. ‘Did you get my text about the Blondie tickets? I’ve got yours here. I hope you can come with me – it should be great …’

  My voice trails off. He looks at the ticket in my hand as though it’s a turd and at me as though I am a mad witch who has just escaped a drowning. I shrivel under this look on his face until I feel exactly like a wizened witch, decrepit and desiccated. Twisted and hideous. Beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder and if the beholder is looking at you the way Salvi is looking at me right now, then you are ugly, ugly, ugly.

  ‘Thank you,’ he says finally, his voice so quiet I can barely hear it above the traffic. ‘Yes, I did get your text.’ He sighs and looks at his watch. ‘I haven’t got time for lunch, I’m afraid, is that OK?’

  ‘Yes, that’s OK,’ I say brightly. ‘Of course it is. I’m sorry for bothering you.’ Now I sound like a meek bloody below-stairs housemaid, chastised for daring to arrive at Master’s chamber five minutes early, to ask if she can draw his morning bath.

  He looks at me again, a detached stare, like he’s seeing me for the first time – curious, almost – then, to my utter, utter relief, his face breaks into a belated smile and the sun comes back out.

  ‘I’d love to come. When is it?’ I hand him the ticket. ‘Tomorrow night, yes, I can make it.’

  ‘Great,’ I say. ‘That’s really great.’

  He puts the ticket in his inside jacket pocket and goes to give me a kiss on the cheek, my bad side, but I’m so grateful he has given me this crumb, I let him. He won’t have his hands inside my jacket this lunchtime, we won’t be snogging over a wonderfully neglected bowl of arrabiata and a savoured bottle of Merlot – so I let him kiss my bad cheek. He smiles at me after the kiss, a clipped, finite, professional smile I sense he reserves for his clients in court or, worse, his opponents. I have the terrible feeling, yet again, that’s the last I’ll see of that ticket, and of him, but then he corrects his smile into something a little less disarming and the sun comes out again.

  ‘Bye.’ He is already walking away. There’s a whole line of cabs now, at the kerb. He leans in through the window of the first one and says what sounds like ‘Capaldi’s’ – is that the name of a restaurant? – and
he gets in, sliding the door shut, settling straight down to look at something on his phone and the cab sets off in the wake of the previous one.

  CHAPTER 36

  Dad and I are heading to the Roundhouse. We’re going pretty early; the concert starts at eight and it’s only just gone seven. We’ll get in, have a drink, meet Salvi, get ourselves a good position on the floor. I want Dad to feel as relaxed as possible.

  It’s fairly busy out and about this evening. As it’s the end to another glorious day, people are wandering to restaurants, heading to bars, lingering outside pubs where they’ve been all afternoon. They and we are in good spirits. Dad’s cane taps rhythmically as we walk. He’s been playing Blondie’s Greatest Hits on the old record player all afternoon. He’s told me three or four times how much he’s looking forward to tonight. I am, too, as Salvi’s coming. And I’m excited to be going to the Roundhouse, at last.

  ‘Twat!’

  ‘Uh-oh,’ I say. We are passing a small, busy pub. Men and women are huddled at and standing around picnic tables out front, laughing and drinking, but a couple with matching hostile glares are squaring up to each other further along the pavement. Beer is sloshing from his pint glass; she is brandishing a huge goblet of red wine.

  ‘Oh, do fucking shut up, there’s a love.’

  I automatically swerve Dad over and bring us to an alarmed halt as the woman wallops the man on his bicep, where a bright, apparently freshly done tattoo of a tiger’s head stares out from under a wrapping of cling film.

  ‘Aargh! You bitch!’

  The couple start screaming at each other.

  ‘Oh dear,’ says Dad, still holding my arm. I’m glad he can’t see the spittle flying from the woman’s mouth; her grubby pink vest top falling off her shoulder to reveal a purple bra strap, or the man’s face, a canine snarl.

  The pair stumble off the kerb in front of us. There’s a shout from one of their mates to ‘Get out of the bloody road!’ They tussle a little, drunken and ineffectively, like kids in a playground, or sumo wrestlers, then the woman trips on what looks like her own foot, in red wedged peep-toes, and stumbles forward like an ungainly flamingo, her head slam-landing on the man’s chest. He catches her by the elbows and she rests her head there awhile then she suddenly starts to cackle hysterically. His meaty face, too, breaks into a laugh.

  ‘You stupid cow!’

  ‘Oh, fuck off!’ And, as they laugh, the man rams his arm across her shoulders like the top bar of medieval stocks, forcing his good lady into the gurning, temporary stoop of a hunchback, and frogmarches her good-naturedly back into the pub.

  ‘Some people love a good old barney,’ I comment, as the delighted onlookers trail into the pub behind the reconciled couple.

  ‘Some people shouldn’t be together,’ says Dad.

  We resume our walk, Dad’s cane tapping; my feet, in new flat sandals, clacking; my mind going to lots of places.

  ‘Angela is writing to Mum.’

  ‘Is she? In Sweden?’ We keep walking, but I can tell by the change in the rhythm of the tapping that Dad is surprised.

  ‘Yeah, she’s already sent a letter. To Torge’s address. She hopes it will get forwarded. Surely Mum’s not still living with Torge after all this time?’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘Angela wants to “reach out”. She wants to find out if Mum’s happy or not.’

  Dad pulls a face. ‘I’m not sure your mother is capable of that,’ he says. ‘But you never know. How do you feel about Angela writing?’

  I shrug. ‘I don’t feel anything one way or another. I’ve always just been happy with you.’

  Dad looks pleased. ‘Have you? The blind bloke …?’

  ‘Yes, the blind bloke …’ I have been. I have been happy just with him. Despite all the other layers of unhappiness my life has been wrapped in. I’ve never said this to Dad before. ‘How about you?’

  ‘I think it’s up to Angela,’ Dad says.

  I have more questions. Other things I want to say.

  ‘Dad …?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Do you think that you and Mum shouldn’t have been together? Do you think it was doomed from the start; that she was?’

  Dad pauses. And, Was I? I wonder. Was I doomed from the start, too? But I am not my mother, I think. Yes, I have distanced, yes, I have removed myself from situations and from people, but I am not her. I don’t think I possess quite her level of froideur. Or her addiction. Or her selfishness. When I disappeared from life, I didn’t keep popping back, to tease and to betray.

  ‘Yes,’ he says finally, ‘I don’t think it was ever going to work. But I really hoped it would as I loved her. I loved her a lot, considering we were two bewildered kids, pregnant and married at sixteen. And she loved me, too, for a while. But she felt suffocated.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘No, not suffocated. I felt I had to step up. Make something of myself. Provide for my family. I had to become a man. Cheeky little Vince Alberta, a husband and a father at sixteen! Who could ever have imagined it! Could you imagine being a parent at sixteen?’

  ‘No,’ I say. I manoeuvre us under an overhanging branch. I never imagined being a parent at all.

  ‘Neither of us got the life we had expected,’ Dad says thoughtfully. ‘Although I expected better of her, for a long time. I expected her to try. I expected her to try to keep on loving us, but she just didn’t have it in her. It’s best if Angela doesn’t expect a reply from your mother,’ he adds. ‘I don’t want her getting hurt, or disappointed. I don’t think she should have written to her …’

  ‘Bertie!’

  We’re at the Roundhouse. From outside a bar opposite, Kemp detaches himself from a cluster of men in jeans and band T-shirts, holding pints, and bounds across the road to us.

  ‘I was hoping I’d see you. You’re on your way into the concert, right? Hi, Vince.’ He reaches out and shakes Dad’s hand.

  ‘I’m guessing you are,’ I say. He’s wearing a Parallel Lines T-shirt with a charcoal linen shirt over the top. ‘I didn’t know if you were coming or not.’

  I hoped he wasn’t. After that drink with him, I hoped he was never intending to come to this concert. That he gave me tickets just because they were spare. But here he is. And he was hoping to see us. I remember what he said about not giving up on me and he must mean it. I mean, I was so angry with him, yet here he is, with a big smile on his face, once again. He doesn’t look even remotely discombobulated by the fact that he’s confessed to asking me to be his fuck buddy. He must be remarkably thick-skinned, after all.

  ‘Yes, of course I was. I’ll walk in with you.’

  ‘What about your mates?’

  ‘I’ll see them in there. See you in there!’ he shouts to them. He is answered with some thumbs-ups and a couple of ironic salutes. Where did he get them all from? I wonder.

  ‘My new neighbours,’ he says, ‘most of them. I met them in my new local.’

  ‘Oh, right.’

  He’s had his beard trimmed since I last saw him; and his hair is a bit neater at the sides and the piece that falls into his eyes doesn’t fall down so far. I wonder what his new pub is like and whether it’s anything like ours used to be.

  ‘How was your lunch at The Monastery?’ he asks, as we join a small queue of people waiting to go through the Roadhouse doors.

  ‘Oh, great, thanks.’ I then fall silent. I have nothing else to say. I’m hardly going to go into details. Kemp is looking at me, so I look away. I want him to know I’m still angry.

  ‘Been anywhere you shouldn’t have, lad?’ Dad pipes up, across me, as we start to shuffle forward. ‘You know – the trespassing lark?’

  ‘Yes, a couple of places, since I last saw you, Vince,’ answers Kemp and I think of Dad showing him my paintings and feel slightly sick. ‘A disused police station and an old orphanage, in Buckinghamshire, that’s been closed since the eighties.’

  ‘Sounds fascinating,’ says Dad.

  ‘The
y really were, and I’ve got loads more coming up. On Tuesday I’m off to another derelict psychiatric hospital and next Saturday I’m going to the Hornsey Wood Reservoir, underneath Finsbury Park.’

  ‘Hornsey Wood?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I know that place,’ says Dad. ‘I went down there once when I was qualifying. It’s a fine example of Victorian architecture. I like to read up on it sometimes. Can I come with you?’

  ‘What?’ I say, in the middle of them both, as we take another couple of steps in the queue. Dad and Kemp have been batting across me like jovial players in a tennis match. ‘What are you talking about, Dad? What even is it? Like, a sewage works? You can’t go there!’

  ‘It’s a reservoir,’ says Dad, ‘and people go down there all the time. People like Kemp – urban warriors or whatever they’re called.’ Kemp grins, and I find myself shaking my head disapprovingly at him, but when he winks back at me, I abruptly stop. ‘Plus, they filmed scenes from the Sherlock Holmes and Paddington movies there. It’s perfectly safe. I’d like to go. Can I join you, Kemp?’

  ‘You can’t go to a bloody underground reservoir, Dad!’ I cry. ‘You’re blind, and it sounds really dangerous!’

  ‘“Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure,”’ says Dad, tapping his cane on the ground. ‘Helen Keller said that. And she was blind as well, you know.’

  ‘What’s your point?’ I ask.

  ‘My point is we can’t stay in all the time, avoiding things. I’ve realized that recently.’ He beams in my direction. ‘I’d like to go down there. You don’t have to parachute in or anything, Prue. There’s a hatch and a ladder.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Kemp, finally able to get a word in. ‘Prue might be right. It might be wise not to do that one, Vince. Sorry, mate. Perhaps you can come somewhere else with me.’

  ‘Oh, sciocchezze!’ replies Dad. ‘Tush! I could wait up top for you. You could go down and then come back up and describe it all to me. Maybe you’d even let me sit and dangle my feet down the hatch, so I can soak up the atmosphere. Have pity on the poor old blind boy and let him soak up a bit of the atmosphere,’ he pleads dramatically, in the voice of a randomly Italian Dickensian waif.