Summer in the City

by Fiona Collins

  ‘All right, Roo?’ calls Dad.

  ‘Yes, Pops!’ Pops. Another nickname from the past. I haven’t called Dad that since I was a little girl. ‘I’m sorry!’ I shout.

  ‘What are you sorry for?’

  ‘For being angry with you about Mum and Sweden. I’m not angry any more.’

  ‘Did you see her?’

  ‘Yes! It was strange – very strange – but it was OK. I’ll tell you about it later.’

  ‘I’m sorry, love! I’m sorry for keeping such a secret.’

  ‘It’s OK, Dad! I understand. And the things that I told you … I’m sorry—’

  ‘No! Don’t you ever be sorry about anything!’ yells Dad. ‘Don’t you ever be sorry! We can move forward now, both of us, but most of all I want you to move forward.’ I am at the third arch now. I’m in the middle of the pool and cold water is up to my knees and I’m trying not to think about how far I have to go, in the dark.

  ‘I’ve wasted so much time, Dad!’ I yell back to him.

  ‘But we’re not going to waste any more of it, are we?’ calls Dad.

  ‘No, Pops, we’re not!’ I keep walking: the next two archways, the next two thresholds. I walk in the dark and in the cold water, blackness all around me. I mustn’t panic. Dad has been all over London now. He has been afraid, at times; he has faltered – but he’s done it anyway. I mustn’t panic, for Kemp. I can do this, for Kemp.

  ‘You can do this!’ Dad’s shout is fainter now, but I let his words echo in my brain as I walk until I begin to believe them. I can do this, I can do this, I can do this. The drip drip of water ahead of me is again a ticking clock; the beating of my heart gives me a rhythm to walk to. Step. Step. Step. Step. I’m at arch number six, the water not so cold, the way ahead still daunting. ‘This is quite the role reversal,’ Dad calls. ‘Me guiding you!’

  ‘You have always guided me, Dad! I should have listened to you more!’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t going to say anything …’

  I laugh a small laugh, walking in the cool dark of the womb of this beautiful underground vault, and listen as my laugh, a little alien-sounding down here – a little fragile – rebounds off its bricks and its shallows. Dad was right about Salvi. He was indeed nothing but a distraction. He was a man who had me looking in all the wrong places. The feelings he gave me weren’t real. Nothing about him was real. The way he looked at me in the fairground – however cruel that was – was actually nothing to do with me. It showed me exactly who he was all along – that the truly ugly have blights and abrasions and stains that run so much deeper, and are so much more hideous, than any surface imperfections. All I had to do was open my eyes. Oh, Kemp, I think. Oh, Kemp …

  ‘I’ve got this!’ I yell, a little unconvincingly. ‘I can do this, Dad!’

  ‘You’re strong!’ calls out Dad, more echo but less decibels to his voice, now. I’m at arch seven. ‘You’re so much stronger than you realize.’

  Am I? Can ‘strong’ be a word for me? I’ve always thought it the preserve of the women I read about, not for me, but I think about the past few weeks. Where I’ve been. What I’ve seen of the world and what I’ve learnt from it. I’ve loved walking round London with my father, this summer, I realize. I was reluctant, I fought against it, but in the end I really loved it. I’ve grown to know Dad again. We’ve talked – actually, properly talked. We’ve shared our secrets – finally. Has it made me strong? Has it made me strong enough to do this?

  ‘I love you!’ shouts Dad. ‘I love you, Prue!’

  ‘I love you too, Dad,’ I call, and in the cold and the dark, through arches seven, eight, nine, my dread heart is pierced by a sliver of light. There’s no cost, I think. There’s no cost to the secrets Dad and I hid but have now revealed. A conduit of relief rises from me like ether as I reach arch ten and surges from me, to the domed ceiling I know is above, and fills a gap in my heart, making me feel freer than I have in a long time. Dad loves me. I could see it on his face, on the street outside The Palladian. I saw it in his expression, on Albert Bridge. I’ve seen it in all the places we’ve been in London this summer and I’ve known it every day of my life – it’s just that, for a long time, I stopped noticing what he stopped being able to make visible. My Dad loves me, as much as he always has. I am still that little girl in the photos, the one at the rock pool and outside Nonna and Papa’s gelato parlour. I am still that girl on my father’s knee, one of Neptune’s little fishes – held and hugged tight, the girl who had her face wiped with the enormous hanky. He still loves me, and it took one summer in London to show me.

  Arch thirteen.

  ‘Are you OK?’ A very faint shout.

  ‘Yes, Dad!’

  ‘Are you scared?’

  ‘No, I’m not scared!’

  ‘Good! Just keep going!’

  Arch fifteen. I am scared; of course I am. Scared for Kemp, scared I’ll never make it out of here. I’ve always been scared, as a default. As a child, as a teenager, as an adult. I haven’t had Angela’s front. Angela’s breezy confidence in herself and the world around her. Angela wouldn’t be scared. She’d probably be marching through here in a pair of her high heels, dictating a luxury shopping list to herself. She said she misses me. I know I miss her. Can we get back what we had, as kids? When we were Roo and Angela (Pangela), the sisters who laughed and loved together? Maybe. Maybe we can. There are things I need to say to her. Things I need to tell her. Including telling her Mum is here in London and that she is clean and came looking for us all those years ago. That she is going to call her, so Angela can make her decision: if she wants to love Mum after all this time and allow Mum the chance to love her.

  Arch seventeen. The water feels particularly deep and cold here. I shiver and want to fold my arms around myself but I need to keep them out at my sides, so I don’t fall. I have my own choice to make: whether I let Mum back into my life or not. I see her face, how it was in the café, when she looked at me. How so much was written there, while so much remained unsaid. I need to really think about that look. I need to wonder how she felt when she came to look for Angela and me, and Cherry Lau told her we weren’t there. When she was finally ready for us, but it was too late. Do I want it to be too late for my mother and me? That’s what I need to decide.

  I’m at arch twenty.

  ‘Can you still hear me?’ comes a distant call, faint and ghostly, from the end of the tunnel I am far from now.

  ‘Not really,’ I shout, at the top of my voice, as I trudge through unseen water.

  ‘We’ll say goodbye for now.’ At least I think that’s what the distant voice says. The words sound dreamlike, melancholy. Goodbye. It’s never goodbye with us, Dad, is it? It’s, Mind how you go.

  ‘Just for now, Pops!’ I whisper. I won’t be long, Dad. I promise I won’t be long.

  It is silent now, bar the occasional drip of moisture from brick to shallows and the steady beating of my own heart. The slurp of my lower legs in soaked denim through dark water. I’m on my own. What if I can’t get the hatch open? What if no one hears my cries? What if I get help but it’s too late?

  Kemp. I haven’t dared think about what he said to me earlier, but now, here in the dark, in this cathedral-like chamber, I hear him again. His words … ‘You’re home to me … I look at her and I think, Yeah, her.’ I can see the look in his eyes when he said those words to me, on the streets of London, in bright sunlight. How he smiled. How I could see the whole universe in those eyes, if I chose to.

  All that time. All that time I loved him, when he was sitting in the pub opposite me, or up on the stage doing a bad Def Leppard tribute, or roaming the earth, a piece of my heart tucked in the pocket of his fisherman’s hat that he didn’t even know was there … and now I know he loves me too. Loved me. And I believe him. I want to love and be loved, and I believe what he has told me. I’d always thought he was too perfect for me, too handsome, too brilliant, too lovely. That I was too ugly, too dull and too noxious for him. But it seems he lo
ves me anyway. Maybe ugly, dull and noxious are things he really likes. Or maybe I am not those things at all.

  Maybe I have never been.

  I’m at arch twenty-one. What if I never see him again? What if I can’t get help in time? I can’t be too late; it can’t be too late for Kemp and me, can it, not now I realize I am loveable after all? Loveable …! I would laugh, if I wasn’t in this awful pitch-black gulley of a reservoir. I am loveable! Prue Alberta is loveable! I am loveable despite my birthmark, and every bad experience I’ve had in my life. Kemp loves me anyway. Is it because these things are part of me? Is it because they are me? None of them have ever been my fault, I acknowledge that now. Nothing has been my fault. Kemp loves me, and Dad does, and Angela and Mum may too, after all, if I decide to let them. I am worth something. I am good enough. We are all good enough. And I am goddam loveable. What a fantastic word. I may get it printed on a T-shirt and wear it around London.

  Arch twenty-two. Thank goodness I know the number of them. Thank goodness for Dad and his architectural brain. I keep one foot trudging in front of the other. Wading through the water, crossing each threshold. And I just keep counting. Counting all the good things in my life and all the things I have to do. I have to get to the hatch, open it up and open up my future. I have to create memories instead of shutting myself away. I have to not simply survive but live. Live for me; live for Philippa and all the people who could not find a way forward. Dad and I will both live. We’ll do exciting, brilliant things together and we won’t sit in those chairs any more – I might just burn the damn things!

  I’ll get out of here. I’ll get to the light. The darker places I’ve been in – places of despair, disgust, loneliness, self-loathing – will fade away and I won’t shy away from the things I fear, things that terrify my heart. I promise myself I will step towards those things; that I will not only head for the light but head there fearlessly. Isn’t it about time I did?

  Arch twenty-three. Arch twenty-three! As I feel for the threshold, I realize I am crying. Not shameful tears of regret or hot tears of anger and fear, but tears of hope, and I realize I’ve had it all along – hope in my heart that I had kept chained and away from myself all this time. My hope is me. I can love and be loved. I can be brave. I can be strong. I can maybe even be passionate; to paint and to show my paintings to people who might like to see them. Isn’t it about time I had a plan, too? Isn’t it all about time?

  Arch twenty-four. One more pool of water, one more threshold. I begin to walk very slowly. I go into a stoop so I’m ready to feel the bottom tread of the steps that will take me back up to my life. And as I move forward, my tears of hope still softly falling, I understand that not only have I been my father’s eyes, but he has been mine. He has shown me how to live, now: the path to follow, the road to travel down. It would be wonderful to saunter along that road, one day soon, giving a little whistle as I go. And even more wonderful if Kemp could be beside me.

  There it is. The bottom step. It is flat and cold under my hand. I grin with relief.

  ‘You’re here, girl!’ I say out loud, to the echo of my own heart. ‘You’re here.’

  I put one foot on the step, then the other: one, two, one, two. Then the next, left foot, right foot, and I count. Eight steps. OK, now the four-foot distance of the platform then sixteen more steps. Left foot, right foot; left foot, right foot. I’m not crying any more. I am on the sixteenth step. I walk a few careful paces forward and reach up in front of me and feel for the ladder and it is there, it is there! I grab one of the rusty rungs and I climb six of those thick staples that cling to amber brickwork, then I feel for the metal of the hatch. I prop my foot on the rung above to give me leverage and I push against the hatch with all my might. Shit, it’s heavy. It’s really bloody heavy. I try again and again. Eventually it lifts a little, causing a slim chink of light to appear, but it clanks straight back down into the hole again.

  ‘Come on, you bugger!’ I hiss at it and I have another go. It lifts again and this time falls back at a slight angle, not covering the whole hatchway. I get my leverage.

  ‘Come on!’ Finally, heaving it with all my might, I’m able to lift the hatch up and away from me enough that I can get a handle on the front edge of it and then I push and push until I can heft it very slowly, slowly away from me and on to the grass beyond the hatch.

  I collapse on to my forearms on the top rung of the ladder, breathing in the air and the light and the freedom above me. I’ve done it. I’ve made it. I climb the final three rungs and scramble out of the hatch and into the fading summer sunlight, the day’s last hurrah, where the sun is disappearing behind the top of the Ferris wheel and I can hear people laughing and living their best, absolute lives, and I’m sprinting on the grass towards the fair, feeling the rush of air and sunlight and sky in my lungs and my veins and I’m running towards hope and praying I’m not too late, that I’m not too late for everything.

  Three Months Later

  The sun is lowering behind a bank of clouds that streak and drift. It shyly peeks from behind cotton-wool white then disappears again. The horizon is periwinkle blue, tinged with pink. It’s a beautiful evening.

  I’ve just finished another sketch of Dad, a small one. He is sleeping, his chin resting on his hand like The Thinker – he’s been asleep for the last couple of hours, on and off. I hope he won’t mind me capturing him off guard again. He shouldn’t do, really, since he recently gave his blessing to have six portraits of him hung in Perspectives, the gallery just around the corner from Old Street tube station. Kemp’s mate Col is holding an exhibition of local artists – all portraits – and mine were squeezed in, on the last available square of blank wall. A gallery! We went to the little party there, on the first night. Dad kept nudging me and calling me ‘The artist, Prue Alberta’. He said he was so proud that I have a talent that’s emerged after all these thousands of years. That he knew the job at the Custard Cream packing place would lead to bigger things. I poked him in the ribs and then we had a hug and he told me that he loved me, again, and I told him I love him. We’re saying it a lot these days – it’s like now we’ve said it once, we can’t stop.

  Jack Templeton, Dad’s old mate, came to the party. Dad tracked him down – he still lives in the area, still dresses a bit like a dandy – and they’re getting on like a house on fire, after all these years. Jack’s also offered to ‘sit’ for me. I need a few more real faces for my portraits. More people in my life. Ryan might sit for me, too, if I ask him nicely. He’s been coming over a lot recently, to see Dad and talk architecture. To let Dad play all his old records to him. Sometimes they go out together, into London. Quite often Dad will go out on his own, now his ankle is better. He says he’s got his confidence back. He likes to go for walks – a ‘mosey about’, as he puts it. Sometimes he goes on errands. A couple of weeks ago he posted something for me.

  ‘I’ll do that,’ he said, when I was about to nip out. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Just something I’m returning to sender,’ I said. ‘Well, not quite that. But thanks, Dad.’

  It was an envelope with a purple card in it addressed to Jennifer Dixon at Egon and Fuller. With it I had written a note that said, Please investigate your colleague Salvi Russo in relation to this website. I have never looked online at The Profilo Club. I don’t want to see my face there. Or Philippa’s. But I reckon as a member of the law, Jennifer can take it. If she was the colleague I saw him with outside the Old Bailey, I’m hoping she’ll be grateful for the alert. If she wasn’t, she can investigate objectively. And I might even be wrong. The Profilo Club may not be what I think it is at all, but I’m pretty sure I’m right. And I’m pretty sure Salvi is behind it. He has just the kind of casual arrogance to assume he will be untouchable.

  Dad posted the envelope for me. He didn’t know it, but he was part of what I hope is some small justice for me and for Philippa, and for the other women out there. Nobody can change the things that have happened to me. My father cannot a
lways protect me. But we are there for each other. We can do the small things, and the bigger things, that make all the difference. We can move forward.

  Maria, the chef from the café, also came to the party. Dad invited her. We walked back to Kenwood House a few days before and he asked her if she’d like to come and she said ‘yes’. I think she had a nice time. She and Dad seemed to get on well. I asked him afterwards if he thought she might become his girlfriend and he said you never knew what was around the corner, even for a blind old git. Maya came, too. I invited her. I was brave. I actually think there’s a small chance the two of us might become friends. Wouldn’t that be something? My father might be right about those corners …

  This little sketch I’m doing of him now is quite good, I feel. I have caught Dad’s likeness in just a few strokes of an HB pencil. His nose, his mouth, his forehead. He still has a slight contusion under his chin. The paramedics said he bashed it when he tripped and hurt his ankle.

  Three paramedics came into the reservoir with me, once I’d persuaded them from their tea and Garibaldis in the St John Ambulance tent at the fair, and convinced them I wasn’t some mad person who had jumped in a water butt, and there really were two injured men down in the disused Hornsey Wood Reservoir, under the park. The paramedics were two big burly women and a jolly bloke with a very kind face. We all did a half run/half walk back to the hatch; the ambulance parked next to the tent that kids had been climbing in all afternoon arriving minutes afterwards.

  Dad had a sprained ankle and a slightly battered face. Kemp’s injuries were a lot more serious. He had fallen while trying to rig up a caving light from the top of one of the arches and had cracked his head open on some brickwork. It was a good job I never saw all the blood. Like Humpty he needed to have his head put back together again. He was in hospital for three weeks, the first week of which he was mostly unconscious (I spent a lot of time just sitting and watching his face and its contours as he slept), but he’s made a full recovery, apart from a scar by his temple, and is back retelling bad jokes and laughing that laugh of his.