Guerillas In Our Midst

by Claire Peate

  “That’s just crap,” I continued. “Can we change the subject please? I spend the night in bed with a sexy artist and just because the following evening I happen to fall asleep on the floor with my lodger you straight away think—”

  “On the floor?”

  “So the café idea, then,” I said. “Thoughts?”

  “OK, fine then.” Beth held her hands up in submission. “Let’s ignore your completely blind sense of self for a moment. If you don’t want to talk about Robert—”

  “Which I don’t.”

  “Or about how little you talk about Guy—”

  “No.”

  “Then we’d better talk about the café idea. Otherwise we’ll just sit here and stare at each other for half an hour.”

  I wiped my greasy hands. “Sounds good to me.”

  “Well, talking about the café, I’m really pleased for you, honey.” Her hand was suddenly on my hand, across the table. “I really thought you’d – well that you’d struggle once I was having this baby. But you’re not are you? You’re thinking seriously – finally – about your café idea. You’ve got a lodger, you’re meeting blokes and sleeping around and—”

  “You know, it’s probably illegal to hit a pregnant woman,” I said, “but I am willing to try.”

  “Well, joking aside, I do think it’s good that you’re doing your own thing… Am I patronising you enough?”

  “Pretty much.” I said. “But thank you.”

  “I don’t mean to patronise you. I’m sorry, honey. So, the café idea, well, to be honest with you, I think it’s been utterly depressing this morning.”

  “It has hasn’t it?” I said. We’d driven round all the areas that surrounded Brockley: Catford, Lee, Hither Green, Forest Hill, Ladywell, Nunhead, Charlton, St Johns and Woolwich looking for the next up and coming place. But not one of them had looked up and coming; all of them had looked utterly depressing.

  “You’re still adamant you don’t want to set up in Greenwich or Blackheath?” Beth said through a mouthful of congealing sausage. “Why can’t you want to open a café somewhere nice – somewhere that people actually want to spend their leisure time? You seem set on the grimmest areas.”

  “Shh! Beth, keep your voice down, you’re going to get us lynched! Anyway, I can’t afford Greenwich or Blackheath and besides, they’re already packed full of cafés. What I need to do is what Neil did with V-2: I need to find the new Brockley.”

  Beth leant in. “Well, it’s not Catford.”

  “I so know that.”

  “Can’t you set up in competition with Neil? Open a café on the High Road?” There’s enough people living in Brockley to support two cafés.

  “Nope. Eustace mentioned at the secret society meeting that Starbucks has just applied for planning permission for a double shop there. Three cafés might be overkill.”

  “Bugger.”

  “I just wish I’d been more proactive and not spent the last five years dithering around and saying I wanted to open a café but not actually doing it. Then I could have opened up in Brockley and caught the wave and now I’d be happily serving cappuccinos.”

  “Yes but what would your friend Babs think if you ran a café in Brockley? I don’t have nothin’ to do with no poncy types servin’ three quid hot chocolates.” Beth mimicked Babs perfectly.

  I threw a greasy grilled mushroom at her. And then darted round the table and picked it up off the floor when the owner shot me a look across the counter that suggested he wanted to nut me. It was definitely time to be leaving.

  Eighteen

  It was the weekend but, rather than feel a sense of dread at the Bethlessness of it, I now looked forward to my weekends again: time to chat to Robert, Babs, Neil and Anja and time to clean and get my house in order. My inner Miss Havisham had been banished for good now that I shared my house with a lodger. Today I’d set myself the task of focusing on my front garden: although it was out of a sense of guilt rather than any more noble intention.

  Maintaining an Elizabethan knot garden was back-breaking work. For three hours I had been on my knees clipping the low box hedging into its original shape. My knees were sore from the shale and my back ached. I could understand now why the style didn’t endure. But I didn’t feel I could very well leave the box hedging to go rampant, since Eustace and the guerrilla gardeners had spent what must have been a considerable amount of time and money on it. And especially as Fox Estates was so close to my garden – Eustace would no doubt be keeping an eye on its maintenance and I didn’t want to be told off for not keeping it neat and tidy – would he throw me out of the secret society? Cut me off, socially, from Nouveau Brockley society? Would he convince Neil not to keep slipping me a free doughnut every time I bought a coffee at V-2? While I shuffled forward and debated how little gardening I could get away with, I became aware of wafts of cheap cigarette smoke blowing my way.

  “Funny ’ow things turn out ain’t it?” Babs called out.

  Grateful for the opportunity to get up off my hands and knees, I staggered over to her on my bloodless legs. “What’s funny Babs?”

  And suddenly there were two Babs’ standing by my wall.

  “Me daughter.” Babs nodded towards the slightly younger version. “Jan.”

  “Alrigh’, darlin’?” Jan said. “’eard a lot about yer, Edda. Nice garden yer got ’ere. Right posh ain’t it ma? Don’t get none o’ that down Woolwich Arsenal way.”

  “Well we’re on the up, ain’t we, Edda, eh?” Babs lit her daughter’s fag in a tender mother-daughter moment.

  “Your mother’s convinced that Old Brockley is being pushed out,” I said, to Jan, by way of explanation.

  “Yeah, I just saw yer Mini Mart,” Jan said, “Pett-it Marsh now, ain’t it? I mean fuckin’ ’ell there was a bleedin’ bike outside with strings o’ bleedin’ onions ’angin’ from it. What’s that Indian bloke tryin’ to do?”

  “It ain’t ’im,” Babs said, looking straight at me. “In’t that right, Edda, eh? We know who’s behind the Mini Mart: who’s puttin’ pressure on old Iqbal.”

  “Who?” Jan said.

  “It’s that Eustace Fox what’s tellin’ ’im what to do,” Babs said.

  “Well, if it helps improve Mr Iqbal’s business—” I began and then abruptly closed my mouth. Babs and Babs II were not impressed by my pro-Fox stance.

  “Friend o’ Eustace,” Babs said to her daughter, pointing at me.

  “I’m not. Not at all. I just know him, that’s all.”

  Babs raised her eyebrows.

  “If I was a friend of Eustace Fox,” I came closer to the wall, “then I wouldn’t be helping Tyrone out with the stencils, would I? You know Eustace wants Da Notorious Baron strung up from the crossroads.”

  Babs and Babs II cackled.

  “Nah – she’s one of us, ain’t yer, darlin’?” Babs winked at me.

  Pub or bistro? V-2 or Greasy Finger? Mini Mart or Petit Marché? I didn’t know whether I was Old Brockley or Nouveau Brockley. I couldn’t answer her question. But as I was slightly afraid of Jan leaping over the wall and nutting me I gave a very firm, “Yes I Am.”

  I was cooking risotto while Robert was at the kitchen table ostensibly marking; in reality he was dividing his time between chatting to me and staring into space. Earlier that afternoon he had taken pity on me and come out to help me tackle the front garden, bless him, so I’d offered to cook us dinner by way of a thank you.

  “Can I ask,” he said after some moments of silence while I scrabbled around in a blind panic for the stock, “why you have that photograph of Vikings in a longboat right over your fireplace?” He got up and read the inscription beneath it.

  “Oh. Well...” I left my pan and went over to the photograph. The quality of the photo was poor because it had been so enlarged: grainy Vikings in a freshly carved boat on an iron grey sea. “It was given to me by a friend of the family. He was a Viking re-enactor.”

  “Oh my God, I’ve heard of people lik
e them!” Robert snorted. “They’re a bit weird aren’t they? They go about the Shetlands in animal … hides … and … and … erm…”

  He stopped. He put his hand over his mouth. He looked, in fact, like a man who has just realised his landlady’s house was stocked with an unusually high volume of Viking-style paraphernalia.

  “And how bad do you feel right now?” I took the picture off the wall and perched next to him on the table, sitting on a short essay about Bonnie Prince Charlie and the battle of Prestonpans.

  “Pretty bad.” He said through his hand which was still clamped firmly to his mouth.

  “It’ll get worse. This is my mum,” I pointed to a grainy female Viking near the front. “And this is my dad, sitting beside her. I can tell it’s my dad because he only had one horn on his helmet: the other had broken off during a staged fight and he hadn’t got round to mending it. Anyway, my parents had worked with all the people in the boat to carve it out, over a summer holiday, and this was its maiden voyage. They’re off the coast of Shetland.” I said. “We spent every summer in Shetland. And sometimes we wore animal hides.”

  “I am so sorry about what I said.”

  “Don’t be. I agree with you: they were freaks.”

  “Oh, no. It’s really quite normal isn’t it? Re-enactors. It’s just me being stupid…”

  “No. It’s mad. It was really mad. They were mad. But it was fun – I do remember that we all had a good time: we were close like one large family.”

  There was a long silence in which Robert’s hand came down from his mouth and we both looked at the picture. I could just make out Mum’s smile as she hefted the oar and I could make out that Dad was looking at her and grinning. Everyone was pulling hard at the oars but they were so happy: so proud of what they’d achieved. As was I: I had been allowed to paint the eye of the dragon on the front of the ship. It had taken me hours to get it right but I remember being over the moon with the end result: it looked angry and intimidating, which was exactly as it should be.

  “Your parents are dead, aren’t they?” Robert said.

  I turned to face him. “Yes.” And then, surprising myself I added, “This is when they died, seconds after the photograph was taken.”

  There was a silence from Robert: what else would there have been – applause? And then, without looking up from the photograph, I made the decision to tell Robert about my parents. This was usually the They’re dead! They’re dead and gone! moment and I was determined that this time I wasn’t going to do that.

  “You see, the boat in the picture was new and untested when they took it out to sea. And for its maiden voyage the local news were filming it – which is what this is; a still from the film footage. You can make out on the photograph that they had already breached the headland and just after this a massive wave smashed into the side of them. The boat split in two, a lifeboat was scrambled but they were all swept out to sea and every one of them died. Twelve adults and two teenagers. I wasn’t old enough to go. I remember being really angry at them for not letting me in the boat. The last thing I did was shout at them about how unfair they were being to me.”

  Robert stared at the photograph. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “That’s fine. Neither do I. I’ve not told anyone for years. Well, I’ve not really told anyone. Most of the people who know about it knew about it when it happened. It doesn’t tend to crop up in conversation these days.”

  “So is your name a Viking name?”

  “It means poem in Old Norse.”

  “And do you have a middle name?”

  “Yes.”

  Robert looked at me. “So, are you going to tell me it?”

  “No.”

  “Fair enough.”

  We contemplated the photographs again.

  “If you think about it,” I began, “it’s not too terrible what happened. If you’re a Viking then what better way to go than to sail to Valhalla? Better that than die in a traffic accident, or wilting away in an old people’s home with your dentures fallen onto your lap. That wouldn’t be very Norse. At least they died like heroes. Sort of.”

  “And they left you at what age?”

  “Fourteen.” I said in a slightly mangled voice. I had a lump in my throat now. But apart from that I was enormously proud of myself for keeping it together while I told Robert.

  “What… ” Robert looked up. “What is that smell?”

  “Oh SHIT! Shitty shit!” I leapt up and dashed to the cooker. “I’ve spent half an hour on this stupid dinner and it’s completely ruined!”

  “Come on,” Robert stood up and grabbed his coat and mine from the rack. “Let’s eat out. I don’t much like risotto anyway.”

  “What?”

  It had been a beautiful, if chilly, evening walk down into Greenwich. It had become a sightseeing expedition, me pointing out the Brockley places of interest: this house belongs to Eustace Fox. He has a giant stuffed bear in his hallway, and him taking me on a detour up Croom’s Hill where his dad had a serious-looking Georgian town-house: this house belongs to Max Willoughby. He has a giant picture of himself and Lawrence Olivier in his hallway.

  “This is where you lived? Where you grew up?”

  “Yup.” He pointed to the front. “Up there on the top floor is my bedroom. I could see all the way over to the City from my window – it’s a beautiful view, especially at night.”

  “Robert?”

  “Yes, Edda.”

  “When did you lose your mother?”

  As with my parents there was never a good time to bring the subject up in a conversation. But as we’d talked about my parents it seemed like an ideal time to talk about something we both shared.

  “When I was seventeen.”

  “Oh.” We had turned and started to walk down the hill and into the centre of Greenwich.

  “She died in a Norman conquest re-enactment when an arrow went through her eye.”

  “Really?” I gasped.

  “No, not really! It was cancer.”

  I didn’t know whether to punch him or sympathise with him. So I punched him.

  “Oh come on – it would have been funny though, wouldn’t it?”

  “No!” But at least the heavy conversation topic had lightened again. “So, is your dad still loved up with Amanda do you think?”

  “Completely! It’s good to see him like this: he’s been down in the dumps since … well, since he was widowed.”

  “There haven’t been any other women after your mum?”

  “God, yes! Don’t you know what these actor types are like? I can’t remember how many times some new woman tried to make polite conversation with me at the breakfast table when I was younger. And quite recently, too. But your friend seems to be a project for him. In the nicest sense of the word.”

  “I know what you mean. She bounces into the office and tells me about the theatre or the history of the Strand or wine tasting … she’s lapping it up.”

  “You see what advertising your room to rent has done.”

  “I know. I’m quite the fairy godmother.”

  We found our way to the Trafalgar, a Georgian riverside pub tucked away behind the dry-docked and charred remains of the Cutty Sark. We settled in a bar filled with rowdy rowers and a few beer-drinking locals and I bought the food: I still owed him for the gardening. We took a table in one of the bay windows, looking out through the old glass and onto the blue-white lights of Canary Wharf across the Thames.

  I chose risotto – because I’d already got my head around it and was disappointed by my disaster in the kitchen. Robert had sausage and mash, because I still don’t like risotto, and we shared a bottle of wine. By the time the sticky toffee puddings had arrived we had moved on to which of us Finley loved best.

  “Well, me, obviously,” Robert announced.

  “Yes. I can’t argue with that. But I can’t help feeling horribly rejected: the minute you moved in to the house he switched his allegiance from me to you.”
/>   “Maybe he’s gay.”

  I laughed. “My cat is not gay: I think you’ve bought his affection with expensive treats that I won’t buy him: that’s what it is.”

  “Ahh, you’ve worked it out.”

  He poured more wine into the glasses.

  “I saw a Gourmet Cat Cuisine wrapper in the kitchen bin the other day.”

  He laughed and held up his hands. We sat for a moment in companiable silence, listening in to a loud conversation about a female rower who was caught naked in the club house with another female rower.

  “You know,” Robert fiddled with the stem of his glass when the story had finished, “you’re full of surprises.”

  “Am I?” I said. “You mean surprises about my parents?”

  “No.” Robert toyed with his post-dinner pint. “Well, that as well I suppose. But I was actually thinking about the guerrilla gardening…”

  “Pardon?” I couldn’t have been more surprised if my wine glass caught fire.

  “Guerrilla gardening,” he said, and then added: “You are one of them, aren’t you?”

  Oh. I felt like my eight-year-old self at the point when my dad had caught me with my hand in the Jorvik Viking Centre biscuit tin. I was caught in the act and there was nowhere to hide.

  “How do you know that?” I hissed, in barely above a whisper. “Who told you? Was it Babs? Does she know about it? Oh, pants, she doesn’t know about it, does she?”

  “Oh, come on!” He grinned, clearly pleased to have got the rise out of me that he’d been hoping for. “It’s so obvious what you are.”

  “It is?” I surreptitiously checked my fingernails. Perhaps I hadn’t been quite busy enough with the nail brush…

  “Well, for starters you sneak out at night – late at night – and the next day somewhere in Brockley is beautifully gardened.”

  “Well that doesn’t— ”

  “And there’s the skip that sat opposite our house that was full of flowers. You said yourself that you did that. You told me when you interviewed me for the room.”

  “Well I…” I didn’t know what to say. My head was reeling: he’d said our house. My stomach had unexplainably flipped when he’d said it.