Summer in the City

by Fiona Collins

  ‘Bye,’ I say flatly, and he is going, the escape artist, out of the exit behind a group of middle-aged bikers with ZZ Top beards and matching Blondie bandannas. He is running out on me again. Something or someone better to do. Something better to see. As I watch him speeding through the exit, he turns once to catch my eye and mouths what I think is ‘I’ll make it up to you’, and just as the back of his head disappears through the doorway, flanked by denim and leather, I see a shiny flash of red.

  Outside on the pavement, the night air is warm and muggy. The stars above us are diamanté studs to my disappointment. The moon a mocking orb. I steer Dad clear of a pile of McDonald’s cartons and wrappers, and around a smashed beer bottle.

  ‘So, you had a good night, Dad, apart from that last bit?’ I say, as we start to walk home. ‘You are OK, aren’t you?’

  ‘For pity’s sake, I’m fine!’ exclaims Dad warmly. ‘And yes, I did, pet. A really good time. Did you?’

  ‘Yes, very much.’ This is true; I enjoyed the concert, I love that Dad and I have turned that corner, yet all I can think about is Salvi pushing through that exit. The flash of red. The flash to my heart of disappointment, fear and envy.

  ‘Kemp is very good company. I like that boy.’

  Why is Dad talking about Kemp? I can only focus on Salvi. Red hair on black sheets.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it serious, you and that man?’

  ‘Why are you calling him “that man”? You sound Victorian.’

  ‘I’m not sure about him; I wonder how much you are.’

  ‘Oh! Well, you haven’t had a lot to go on, so far,’ I say. I feel the chasm opening up between Dad and me again. A fracture, creaking with disapproval and unsaid things. I haven’t got a lot to go on, either, have I, when it comes to Salvi? I haven’t got a particularly compelling defence to make, should one be required. ‘What are you not sure about?’

  ‘Well, for one,’ says Dad, ‘he has never shaken my hand. That’s just basic politeness, unless he thinks it doesn’t extend to blind people. Two, he’s very full of himself. I had a conversation with him, towards the end, when you went to the loo. It was very illuminating. He talks about himself to the exclusion of everything else. He’s full of stories, and I bet I shouldn’t believe half of them. Three, he kept calling me “sir”, which to be honest is worse than being “blessed” all the time. And “boss”. I didn’t like it.’

  ‘What’s wrong with “boss”? That’s quite nice!’

  ‘He’s as obsequious as Uriah Heep. Cold, with it. He’s a performer, Prue, and I’m not sure what this particular performance is all about. With you.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I’m just telling you how I see it …’

  ‘Right. Er … weren’t you the one telling me to go looking for love, to open my eyes to it?’

  Dad sighs. ‘Look, everyone knows if you’re blind the other senses get sharpened. Isn’t that the kind of bollocks everyone spouts? Well, I can smell this bloke is a bullshitter, and I can suss a patronizer at fifty paces. I just don’t like him, Prue, especially when you compare him to Kemp.’

  ‘I don’t want to compare him to Kemp!’ I retort. ‘Salvi is … more complex.’

  ‘Complex is often shorthand for “arsehole”.’

  ‘Dad!’

  ‘I’m being serious. I think he’s a wrong’un.’

  ‘Now you sound like a weird cockney. Let’s just agree to disagree, shall we? After all, you’ve met him for – what? – two minutes, and I’ve had four whole dates.’ Four dates and what do I really know about him? Is Dad right? Is Salvi the worst kind of complicated? The hurting kind?

  ‘If he’s telling you who he is – listen. If he’s showing you who he is – see it.’

  ‘Maybe it’s too late,’ I mutter.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Nothing, Dad, nothing.’

  We’re almost home. I get the keys out of my bag ready to unlock the double brown doors.

  ‘Come on, then,’ I say, helping Dad over the threshold.

  ‘Cup of tea and a KitKat?’

  ‘You know me so well, Dad.’ Yes, I think, Dad knows me well, but he can’t know everything. He can’t know my heart – what’s really, truly inside it. He doesn’t know that Salvi is supposed to save me. He doesn’t know my secrets. He doesn’t know the things I yearn for in the present to erase the past.

  Because I have never told him.

  CHAPTER 39

  ‘How’s tricks?’ Angela asks, at nine o’clock five evenings later, when she calls again. Dad and I have eaten and I was just about to settle down with a blog article about Eva Peron, some Alanis Morissette and my misery.

  ‘I don’t have any tricks,’ I say. Why on earth is she calling again?

  ‘You know what I mean. What’s new?’

  ‘We went to see Blondie,’ I say flatly. I am absent-mindedly scrolling down Alanis’s tracks on my phone to find the most soul-scouring.

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘Me and Dad and a couple of friends.’

  ‘Dad went to a concert? And with what friends?’

  ‘Just a couple of people I’ve met.’ I’m not telling her about Salvi – it’s been five whole days and he still hasn’t called. Five days of phone-checking and teeth-gnashing and disenchantment – and I never told her about Kemp.

  ‘What did you wear?’

  ‘Clothes.’

  ‘Oh well, good.’ There is silence; I wonder if the phone has gone dead. ‘So … I didn’t hear back.’

  ‘Back?’

  ‘From Mum.’

  ‘It hasn’t been that long.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Were you really expecting to?’

  ‘I don’t know. No. I don’t think so. I still feel quite disappointed, though.’

  ‘She moved to Sweden,’ I say. To be a Swedish drug addict. ‘Despite her occasional crappy visits, she didn’t want to be in our lives any more. I don’t know why you’d think she’d suddenly want to be, again, just because she gets a letter.’

  ‘Maybe she hasn’t got it yet. Maybe she’ll never get it.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘I’m going to keep on trying. I’m going to call the consulate there. Or the British ambassador or something. See if they can help me find her.’

  ‘Good luck with that.’

  ‘You sound like you don’t want to find her.’

  ‘No, I think she’s a missing person who doesn’t want to be found.’ I sigh. ‘She moved to Sweden to escape us and that’s where she wants to stay, undetected. I don’t think she’s going to welcome being tracked down, and Dad feels the same.’

  ‘What? What has Dad said about it?’

  I sigh again, wishing I hadn’t said anything. ‘Well, not that much. Just that you shouldn’t expect a reply from her.’

  ‘Right.’

  There’s a devil on my shoulder, patting me there. I’m trying to ignore it, but I can’t. I can’t help myself. I’m disappointed and angry and let down, too. About a million different things. ‘You left too, you know. It seems you don’t want to be found either.’

  ‘What? What do you mean I don’t want to be found?’

  ‘You left too,’ I repeat. I am despondent and numb enough to bring this up now, after all these years. I just don’t care about putting it out there.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re getting at.’

  I sigh again. ‘I get the impression you’d prefer to have no contact with us at all. That you want to be free of us. Free of me and Dad. You left to be free of us, after all.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that.’

  ‘What was it like, then?’

  ‘I was nineteen, a grown woman. I was just making my way in the world.’

  ‘A way that involved plotting your escape at a local college full of foreign students and buggering off to the furthest place you could manage!’

  ‘That’s unfair!’

  ‘I don’t think so. I think you were positiv
ely Machiavellian about it. Actually, your timing was pretty horrendous, if I remember rightly.’ I am bitter. I am as sour as an under-ripe lemon. I move into the kitchen and run myself a glass of water. ‘But leaving is soooo easy, isn’t it, if you’re the one who’s going?’

  ‘I don’t believe this! Prue, for God’s sake!’ Angela falls silent, well, apart from the fact I can hear her positively seething down the phone. ‘Do you know why I left?’

  ‘Who is it on the phone?’ Damn, Dad must have taken off his headphones.

  ‘PPI!’ I call out. ‘Hold on a minute,’ I say to my sister. I take the phone into the bedroom and shut the door. ‘There’s no big mystery, Angela,’ I whisper. ‘You left because you were selfish, because you wanted to have fun and be free. You left me and Dad, with a clear conscience and no regrets, because the guide dogs had gone. You left us so I could be there for Dad and you didn’t have to be. So you wouldn’t have to worry about him being blind or what that meant for all of us any more. You left me at the coal face, Angela, and it was really bloody hard.’

  ‘That’s really not true.’

  ‘I think it is! And when you left, you left so completely. It’s like Dad and I didn’t exist for you any more. Like we don’t exist. You’ve closed your eyes to our lives. You just hear our voices, every three months, when you can bear to. Even when you came over for those awful visits, it was like you weren’t really with us. Whereas I could probably write a thesis on your life: how wonderful Warren and the girls are, what your backyard looks like, the kind of cakes you can buy at the idyllic little bakery down on the shore. I can picture your life, Angela; I can picture every aspect of it.’

  ‘You never phone me,’ says Angela quietly. ‘And I know I don’t phone very often. I have closed myself off to you and Dad, I admit it. You’re both so miserable when I phone up, although I try to be happy and chirpy. Positive. I make the effort, but you have nothing to say … You don’t sound like you particularly want to talk to me … Can I speak now? Can I tell you why I left?’

  I sit down on my bed. ‘Go on then.’

  There is silence. Then I hear her take a deep breath. ‘It had nothing to do with not being there for Dad,’ she says quietly. ‘It wasn’t that at all. It was because of how it was with us, once the guide dogs had gone. How everything slipped into a kind of despair.’

  ‘Despair? What do you know about despair?’

  ‘Let me finish! Please! Ever since our last dog, Folly, trotted out of The Palladian with that woman, it was a soulless existence in that flat – Dad so depressed and all his cheerful hope gone; you fighting your own demons, as always. It’s like you both just gave up! I felt I was being gradually swallowed up by it all. Our home life. I ran away because I couldn’t bear it. I missed the three of us. I had missed Mum for so many years and now I was missing the two of you as well, because it was like you were both there but yet you weren’t. I missed the fun and happiness we used to have. I missed everything.’

  At home, in The Palladian – behind closed doors – we had known fun and our own brand of happiness, before the guide dogs had to go. The hole Mum left in our lives had been closed over by the three of us until it wasn’t visible any more and its seams remained invisible, despite Dad going blind. Despite the things that had happened to me. When the dogs left, didn’t that hole we’d closed over open up and swallow Dad into it, with me jumping in willingly after him? Isn’t that something I’ve always known?

  ‘I had to make my own life,’ she continues. ‘Some kind of life. Because our life in London was life in the dark.’

  ‘You left when we needed you most,’ I say to her. ‘We needed your sunniness to pick us up and stop us falling into that darkness – but you took it away.’

  For much of my life, I’ve wanted to keep the light from me. I’ve slouched along, living it with headlights at half-beam. I let something bad happen to me as a teenager. I was raped, in my twenties, by a man who saw that distance and breached it, with lamps turned down low and an insidious force that nearly destroyed me. I’ve wanted to talk, but not about the things that matter. Did Angela feel the light go out on her, too? I thought she was OK, that she was immune to everything. That her determined self-centredness shielded her from any despair; that she remained carefree, doing her own thing, until doing her own thing meant leaving us.

  Have I always been so wrapped up in my own issues that I just couldn’t see what was really going on with her?

  ‘I had to,’ she says quietly. ‘I just had to. Something else happened around that time, you know. Before I left.’

  ‘Something else?’

  ‘Mum came back.’

  ‘She came back in nineteen eighty-four … The time with the Opal Fruits and the Choose Life T-shirt …’ The day of Finsbury Park. ‘That was the last time.’

  ‘No,’ says Angela. ‘She came back again in nineteen ninety. I was eighteen. You and Dad were out – a doctor’s appointment or something. I was so surprised to see her. I opened the door and she was wearing normal clothes, for once. Jeans and a lilac T-shirt with buttons down the front and a pair of trainers, but she looked awful. Like, worse than she ever had. She was, what, thirty-six? But she looked about seventy. She had massive bags under the eyes and her face was all wrinkly and she looked drawn and ill. I think I actually winced. And she made no sense whatsoever – you know what she was like. Muttered something about the ferry, you know, back to Sweden – “the boat” she kept calling it, and giggling – and about money and did I have any. In fact, that’s pretty much all she kept saying – did I have any money? Did I have any money? – and when I said “no” she got angry and she whacked her own head on the door frame and she called me a bitch.’ There’s a huge sigh down the line, all the way from Canada and my sister. ‘She actually called me a bitch, Prue. And I was frightened. So, I shut the door on her, and I watched from the window as she walked away, and I knew then that the mother she should have been was never coming back. That any dream I’d had of that was gone. So, I might as well be gone too.’

  ‘Bloody hell, Angela! Why didn’t you tell us she’d come again?’

  ‘What was the point? I didn’t even want to talk about it. All I knew was I didn’t want to be in London when she next came for a pathetic, self-pitying visit. That I had to make sure I wasn’t there. That I was a long long way away. So, yes, I did go to that college for the foreign students. I was looking for an escape route. And then I found Warren. And a career. I was aimless in London, Prue. I’d scraped through my A levels but I had no clue what to do next. I had no direction, no drive.’

  Angela and I have never talked about this stuff before. How directionless we were. How we drifted through school with no purpose. Angela’s escape finally gave her one, while I continued drifting in a boat with no oars and no rudder, apart from my truncated career at the conference centre, where I was eventually kicked overboard. She didn’t have to go quite so far, but that’s Angela for you. And I realize she had to go; that I had been blind to just how badly our life in The Palladian – in London – had affected her.

  ‘If you’d seen her, Prue! I knew then, there was no hope for her. If she hadn’t grown up and got herself sorted out by thirty-six, I knew she never would.’

  ‘I was already long done with her,’ I say. ‘But I knew you still had hope.’

  ‘Not after that.’

  ‘But you have some now?’

  ‘It’s been nearly thirty years, Prue. Things may have changed.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  There is silence again – this time, silence from London all the way to Canada and back again.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. And I am. I am so so sorry. ‘I’m sorry that I didn’t realize that you were feeling like that, when you left London. I’m sorry you felt you had no choice but to go.’

  ‘I’m sorry I could never explain,’ says Angela. ‘I’m sorry I’ve been absent for so long, in every way.’

  I sigh. But in that sigh is a little bit of relief an
d a little bit of hope. ‘We never talk like this,’ I say.

  ‘No,’ says Angela. ‘I’m glad we are. I miss you.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  Angela laughs. ‘I miss you! I’ve always missed you, and when I’ve spoken to you and Dad recently you’ve been … different, both of you. You’ve been going out on those trips; you seem, suddenly, to be getting closer again, after all this time. It’s making me really miss you both!’

  ‘Miss us! I can’t really believe this, Angela!’ I’m teasing now, and it feels nice.

  ‘Yeah,’ she says, and I can hear the smile in her voice and I can picture her shrugging, just like the teenage Angela used to do. ‘Do you think you two would ever come over here for a visit?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I’m not sure I can get Dad on a plane.’

  ‘He’s not bloody Mr T, Prue.’

  I laugh. The A-Team was one of our favourites. How we loved it when a plan came together. ‘We’ll think about it,’ I say.

  ‘Good. So, can I talk to him now?’ she asks. ‘To be honest, I’m exhausted after talking to you.’

  We both laugh. ‘Of course.’

  ‘We’ll speak again, Roo,’ she says. ‘Properly. Like we have today.’

  ‘Yes, Angela Pangela,’ I reply, ‘we’ll speak again.’

  CHAPTER 40

  Dad and I sit in silence. Dusk falls. It will be bedtime soon. He spoke to Angela for half an hour. There was a little laughter. Dad cracked a couple of jokes. I’m still digesting everything she said to me. How she had no choice but to go, as life was darker than night. How all her hopes about Mum were seemingly extinguished, yet she still has reserves for more, all these years later. I thought I knew my sister so well but now it feels as though I have never seen her clearly at all. I need to re-shape her, in my mind. Adjust my view. She has appeared as many things to me over the decades: sunny playmate and surly teenager; arch deserter and selfish escapee; irritating Tiger Mom and boastful Canadian wife … But perhaps all along she was just my sister. And she was hurting, like I was, though I was too blind and wrapped up in myself to see it. We were all hurting. And she missed me.