Nightingale Point

by Luan Goldie

  ‘Ah, too small, too small,’ she mutters. But no one could accuse Mary of failing to make the best use of her space. In each corner of the lino two-litre bottles of Coke are stacked like bowling pins; on tops of cupboards tins upon tins are stashed, heading slowly towards their expiry date; and on a small shelf above the fridge sits no less than seven boxes of brightly branded breakfast cereals. She buys them for her grandbabies. Though after a long shift on the ward she loves nothing more than to peel off her tights and eat two bowls of Frosties while lying on the sofa listening to The Hour of Inspiration on Filipino radio. Mary shuffles around some things, swears to finally get rid of the dusty sandwich maker and to stop buying five-kilo bags of long grain rice.

  Her elbow. Twitch twitch twitch.

  ‘Stupid old woman,’ she mumbles. She knows she is being ridiculous, worrying too much about everything and nothing. She makes a mental list of her worries and tries to remember what the doctor on The Oprah Winfrey Show said to do with them.

  ‘You think of a worry, you cross the street,’ she says as she pictures the studio audience of determined, applauding, crying American women.

  Mary thinks of each worry: talk that teenagers are gathering in the swing park at night to watch dogs fight; the cockroaches that continuously plague her kitchen; the smell of gas that sometimes lingers on the ninth floor; the woman from the top floor who was robbed of her shopping money last week as she got in the lift. It’s a long list.

  ‘Cross the street, cross the street.’ Mary waves her arms as she imagines each worry float off behind her. But then larger worries, those that are more likely to happen, these are things she can’t dismiss as easily, namely the imminent arrival of her estranged husband, David. Fifteen months he had been gone and then a call from Manila Aquino Airport two days ago: ‘My love, I am coming home, but I am on standby. You know what these airlines are like: locals back of the queue.’ She has heard this from him before, claims of him booking a ticket, being at the airport, getting on the next flight. Even once a call to say he had been diverted to Birmingham and would arrive the next day. She had wrung her fingers with anxiety for almost a week until he finally landed on her doorstep – their doorstep – with an excuse she now struggles to remember. For David, there is always some excuse, some distraction, some offer of money he can’t turn down. Whenever he is due to return home the world is full of people desperate for a poor Johnny Cash tribute act. Or maybe he is with one of his many floozies. Mary has never gotten over her own brother’s accusation that David had ‘a floozy waiting at the side of each stage’.

  ‘Cross the street,’ she says more weakly as she pictures David’s travel-weary face, greasy rise of hair and fake Louis Vuitton suitcase. ‘Cross the street.’ She cringes as she imagines David pulling her in for an obligatory married couple kiss. ‘Cross the street.’

  ‘Talking to yourself again, Mary?’ Malachi waves a hand as he enters the kitchen.

  She felt bad for pulling him away from his studies, but also pleased for an excuse to check in on him and his younger brother Tristan. When had she turned into such a meddling old woman?

  ‘I’ve fixed the TV,’ Malachi says.

  Mary takes the two small steps needed to cross the kitchen and throws her arms around his middle.

  ‘It wasn’t even broken.’ He shakes free from her arms and wipes the small beads of sweat on his dark brown skin. ‘Your aerial was unplugged. Tell the kids to stop playing behind the TV.’

  Mary nods, knowing she will never tell her grandbabies any such thing – those perfect little girls would have to throw the TV out of the window before she dare aim a cross word at them. Each time they come to stay they leave her exhausted, and the small flat trashed, yet she can’t wait till they come again.

  ‘Why don’t you open a window in here? It’s twenty-four degrees already.’ Malachi leans over the sink and pushes on the condensation-streaked glass. It screeches loudly as it gives way, allowing the heat from outside to do battle with the steam from Mary’s cooking.

  ‘I have the vent on, see.’ She indicates the tiny, spinning, dust-covered fan. ‘You look tired,’ she says gently, keen not to nag the boy. ‘Too much study, study, study.’

  He looks up at the window and undoes the top button on his shirt. Mary does not like the way he has taken to wearing collarless shirts; she watches MTV sometimes, and knows this is not a fashion among young people. She notices too, as he goes under the sink, that his trousers – muted green cotton with a sharp crease down the middle – are for a much older man.

  ‘What you looking for?’ she asks as he rummages around her collection of multi-buy discount cleaning products, fifty pack of sponges and long abandoned, but not yet disposed of, cutlery holders and soap dishes.

  ‘You need to oil your window.’ He twists the nozzle on a rusty can of WD-40.

  ‘Don’t worry about my window.’

  He stops and looks down at her. His almond-shaped eyes search for something.

  ‘What?’ She touches her face, wondering if a stray Rice Krispie is stuck on her cheek.

  ‘You’re saying I look tired. You all right? You look a bit … frazzled.’

  ‘I worked forty-eight hours already this week – what do you expect me to look like? Imelda Marcos?’

  Malachi blesses her with one of his rare smiles and then positions his knees into the two small free spots on the worktop. He seems more sullen than usual.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Mary asks as he squirts the window frame.

  ‘Yep. I’m always okay. Just hot and this smog, it plays havoc with my asthma.’ He jumps down and stares blankly across the kitchen.

  Mary knows he’s still hung up on the blonde girl from upstairs. ‘Well, I’m glad you’re not still sad about whatshername.’

  ‘I have a hundred other things to think about,’ he snaps.

  She was the first girl of Malachi’s Mary had ever met. He even brought her over for dinner once, one wet afternoon where they sat, with plates on their laps, eating chicken bistek.

  ‘Some things are not meant to be. I could see it from the start,’ Mary lies, for all she saw that afternoon was Malachi buzzing around the girl like she was the best thing since they started slicing bread. ‘I always know when couples don’t match. I even said it about Charles and Diana, but did anyone listen to me?’

  ‘I really don’t want to talk about this.’

  Mary throws her arms up. ‘Me neither. Goodbye, Blondie. Plenty more pussy in the cattery.’

  He wipes his face to hide his embarrassment and she’s pleased to see the tiniest of smiles emerge on his sad face.

  ‘Why’d you make so much food?’ he asks.

  ‘I told you, I need to work every day next week so I’m stockpiling. Like a squirrel.’ She wraps an old washed out ice-cream tub with cling film and hands it to him. ‘This is for your tutor.’ She had been sending food parcels to anyone related to Malachi’s education since his first semester of university. Anything to boost the boy’s chances. ‘The rest is for your freezer.’

  ‘Thanks. I appreciate it.’

  ‘And I appreciate if you put on some weight. What is this?’ She pinches the flesh of his side.

  ‘Ow.’

  ‘Heroin chic!’ she announces. ‘I saw it on GMTV. Teenagers with bodies like this.’ Mary holds up her pinkie finger. ‘No woman wants that, Malachi. You need to eat properly.’

  She had looked in Malachi’s and Tristan’s fridge a few days ago and saw nothing but a loaf of value bread and jar of lemon curd. The freezer was even worse: a half empty box of fish fingers and two frosty bottles of Hooch, which Tristan explained were ‘for the ladies’. If their nan knew they were eating so poorly under Mary’s watch there would be murder.

  ‘Freezer, you hear me? Tell your brother he can’t eat, eat, eat all in one sitting. And why has he got zigzags shaved in his hair? Does he think he’s a pop star or something?’

  ‘You know what he’s like. He’s a little wild.’


  ‘He can’t afford to be wild.’ Mary tries to put the word in air quotes but uses eight fingers and makes a baby waving motion. ‘Too many riffraffs around here going wild like this.’ She makes a stabbing gesture and tries to look menacing, but her only reference point is West Side Story and she makes a dance of it.

  Malachi puts a hand under a piece of kitchen roll and drags out a bamboo skewer of prawns. Mary slaps him.

  ‘Did you hear me say help yourself? Does this look like the Pizza Hut buffet to you?’

  ‘You just told me I need to eat.’

  ‘Not prawn. Too early for prawn.’ She turns her back to him as she rewraps the skewers. His eyes burn her; she must explain her snappy mood. ‘I need to leave my spare keys with you in case David gets in early. He’s on standby for a flight so could be here tonight, tomorrow or next week. Oh God.’ The reality of him arriving hits her again. It sends her elbow into overdrive.

  ‘David?’

  ‘Yes, David, my husband. Remember him?’ There’s a hysterical edge to her voice. She puts a hand on her forehead to save herself as Oprah has taught her. ‘I don’t even want to talk about it.’

  ‘I didn’t know David was coming back.’

  ‘No. But we didn’t know Jesus was coming back either.’

  Mary takes her nurse fob watch from her pocket – a present from David on one of his rare jaunts back home. An obscure-looking Virgin Mary with oversized arms ticks around the clock, hung on a thick, gold link chain. Well, it was gold once, now it’s more silver, the shine, like everything else to do with David, rubbed away by the sweat and grime of real life. Quarter to twelve.

  ‘Mary?’ Malachi waves his arms to get her attention. ‘Hand me these keys then. I need to get back home.’

  Mary nods as she looks in the junk drawer, rifling through papers, wires and replacement batteries for the smoke alarm until she finds the spare keys. Tristan had once attached a plastic marijuana leaf to them thinking it was funny. Mary had given him a lecture about the dangers of drugs but never bothered to remove the key ring.

  She fusses with the catch on the watch as she pins it to her uniform, swearing to get it fixed. ‘You want some tea before you go?’ she asks Malachi.

  He spins the keys around a long finger. ‘No, thanks. Too hot.’

  ‘You call this hot? It’s thirty-five degrees in Manila today.’ She lifts the kettle and gives it a shake before she flicks the switch.

  ‘Right,’ Malachi says. ‘I better get back to my books.’

  He sulks off and she rolls her eyes at his constant grumpiness. But as she hears the front door close she stops cold. The twitch becomes a scratch. Something is wrong, for her feelings never are. Today, something horrible will happen.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Chapter Three ,Pamela

  There is not a stitch of breeze on the roof of Nightingale Point. Today, up here is just as suffocating as being in the flat with Dad. Pamela places her new running shoes on the ground and holds onto the metal railing; her long rope of blonde hair falls forward and dangles over the edge. The sunrays hit the nape of her neck and she feels her skin, so dangerously pale and thin, begin to burn. She shifts her body into the shade of the vast grey water tanks and imagines the water as it rolls between them and into the maze of pipes around the block’s fifty-six flats. Pamela loves the roof. Since she returned to London a few days ago it’s become the only space Dad does not watch over her. Sometimes she wishes she was back in Portishead with her mum, just for the freedom from his eyes. But in a way being there was worse, because it meant Malachi was over a hundred miles away rather than two floors. At least here there is a chance she will see him, run into him in the lift, or bump into him in the stairwell.

  Blood runs into her face as she leans further over the railings. Her head feels heavy. She wonders, not for the first time, how it would feel to fall from this spot, to flail past all fourteen floors and land at the bottom among the cars and bins. It would probably feel like running the 200 metres. Air hitting your face and taking your hair, your lungs shocked into working harder than you ever knew they could. Pink and yellow splodges dance in front of her eyes as she lifts her head. It’s coming up to noon, only halfway through another monotonous, never-ending day.

  She assumes it’s other teenagers that repeatedly bust the locks on the door that leads up to the roof. They leave their crushed cans of Special Brew and ketchup-smeared fish and chip papers across the floor as evidence that they are having a life. She often fantasizes about coming up here at night, catching them in the throes of their late-night parties, tasting beer and throwing fag butts among the pigeon shit with them. If only Dad would let her out of the flat past 6 p.m. No chance.

  The sky appears endless. Unnaturally blue today, almost unworldly, not a blemish on it apart from the single white smear of a plane.

  Does she need to run back? Has it already been twenty minutes? She doesn’t care. What does time matter if you’re all alone? What difference does any of it make if you’re about to throw yourself from the top of a tower block? She takes three deep breaths but knows that she doesn’t have the confidence to do it. But the thought alone makes her feel like she has some edge on Dad, something that she can do without his permission.

  In front of the estate people are living their lives: a child runs, the drunks drink, some girls sunbathe in pink bras and denim shorts, and a lone large figure in billowing purple crosses the grass at speed. Pamela tries to picture who the bodies are, how they would feel if they witnessed a girl fall from the building, their faces upon discovering her body bashed at the bottom. They would be traumatised, she thinks, for a while at least, and then her death would become another estate anecdote. The tale of the broken-hearted teenager with the strict dad. It would become just another story to get passed around the swing park and across balconies, along with tales of who is screwing who and which flat plays host to the biggest number of squatters.

  Pamela wishes she could go for a run. She needs to clear her head. Surely Dad will let her out.

  ‘Please, one hour out,’ she rehearses. It sounds so feeble out loud, so knowing of a negative answer.

  Her running shoes swing by her sides as she pads across the greyness in her socks. She steps over the glossy ripped pages of a magazine; a girl in a peephole leather catsuit stares back at her. The door bounces against its splintered frame as Pamela enters the building. Her world starts to shrink. With each step down to the eleventh floor the brightness of the unending blue sky disappears and the stairwell begins to close in on her. The concrete walls suck the air away until there is only the suffocating stink of other people’s lives.

  ‘Do you think it will be okay if I went out today? Maybe. Perhaps.’ Her voice echoes eerily; she feels even more alone. ‘I’m thinking of going out today.’ This time with more confidence. But what’s the point? He will say no. He will never trust her again.

  She opens the door onto the puke-coloured hallway and the shouts and music of her neighbours. Outside flat forty-one she stops and rests her head on the security gate, takes a few breaths and then pulls it open. She looks down at the letterbox and for a moment feels like she has a choice. She could still go back to the roof. But, as always, the choice is taken away from her as the lock clicks from within and the front door swings open.

  Dad fills the doorway; a fag hangs from the corner of his mouth. ‘You’re pushing your luck, girl.’ Patches of psoriasis flame red on his expressionless face. He’s put back on the same sweat-stained yellow T-shirt and army combat trousers from yesterday.

  ‘I was getting some air.’ She pushes past him into the dim, smoky living room.

  He follows her, sits on the sofa and pulls his black boots on. ‘Air?’ He methodically ties up each of the long mustard laces. The woven burgundy throw falls from the back of the sofa to reveal the holes and poverty beneath it. ‘We got a balcony for that. I don’t wanna start locking the gate, Pamela, but if you’re gonna be running off every opportunity—’

>   ‘I didn’t run off. It’s a nice day. I was on the roof.’

  ‘Well, I’ve heard that before. You can’t blame me for not trusting you.’

  She rearranges the throw and stands back. She only wants an hour outside, just enough time to clear her head. So much can change in that time; like the day she first met Malachi. Dad had given her an hour then too, explained how grateful she should be for it. ‘More than enough time to go round the field and straight back home.’ She grabbed that time, and even though he was watching her from the window, she felt free as she ran loops around the frosty field.

  The drunks, immune to the freezing temperatures of the morning, watched from their bench as she ran past them several times that hour. ‘You should be running this way, blondie,’ one called, while shaping his hands in a V towards his crotch on her last lap. They all laughed and she ran faster. She could always go faster and with time ticking she needed to get home before Dad came out for her. She cut onto the grass, slipped and fell awkwardly. It hurt straight away. Her ponytail caught the side of her face as she turned to check if the drunks were still laughing at her, but they hadn’t even noticed her fall. The dew began to seep through her leggings and she tried to stand, but buckled immediately with the pain.

  ‘Hey,’ someone called. ‘You okay?’ A tall man came running towards her and put out a gloved hand. ‘You really went down hard there.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Here, let me help you.’

  As he helped her to a bench she tried to concentrate on the hole in his glove to stop herself from blushing.

  ‘You really do run out here in all weathers, don’t you?’ he asked.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I live up in Nightingale Point. I always see you out here.’

  He had seen her before. How had she never seen him? She tried not to stare, or lean into his arms too much.