‘Lorn, I’m really sorry, but it’s all been settled,’ I said.
‘I’ve got the money here. Please. Otherwise I will just be cadging off you all night.’
This was true. Lorna took two notes from the pocket of her jeans and handed them to me.
‘OK. I’ll see. I’ve got to go,’ I said.
I felt sharper, less woozy and romantic, as I walked up the stairs to my room, Lorna’s money folded into my palm. At the bottom of the next flight of stairs my friend Naomi sat on a step smoking and reading Wyndham Lewis, a little ceramic bowl next to her for the ash. She spent most of her time here because she was a chain-smoker who did not like to smoke in her own room.
‘You’re off now?’ said Naomi.
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I won’t be long though.’
How was it that everyone knew about this trip?
I opened the door to my room. My mobile phone was upright in its charger. I normally just left it there, but decided it might be a good idea to take it today.
I opened my Latin dictionary and removed the envelope I had placed there for safekeeping, adding Lorna’s forty pounds. I felt as if I was in a film as I did this, a film about spies, perhaps, or covert activities. I pushed the envelope to the bottom of my black Kookai bag, along with my phone, my wallet, some lip gloss and a book; although there would be no time for reading.
Dan was parked just outside the front gate. He wasn’t really allowed to be parked there. I walked across the cobbles fast, not wanting us to get into trouble.
‘Hiya!’ he said, smiling through the window.
I got in, stretched across to kiss his cheek hello. There was a half-smoked joint in the ashtray.
‘Lorna wants me to get some for her too,’ I said as we drove over the bridge, cyclists swarming on either side, grand college buildings looming ahead of us.
‘So does Tom. Didn’t he tell you?’
‘No, he didn’t. For fuck’s sake,’ I said.
I composed the text message as we drove past King’s, St John’s, forbidden lawns and old gates, past tourists and famous cake shops. Hi, I’d like two more tickets for the show please, thanks. Gx.
‘We’re going to get there on time, aren’t we?’ I said.
‘Of course we are,’ replied Dan.
I was happier once we were out of town and on to the motorway. I performed the same passenger duties for Dan that I would perform for my father, changing the music, lighting cigarettes, one for him, one for me, winding down the car window and singing along to whatever song was playing. It was hard to wind the window back up though; the glass kept slipping down, even as I was turning the handle. Dan’s car was red and had been purchased from an old lady in his parents’ village. Dan had crashed it, just the once, and it had been patched up by the village mechanic.
‘It’s basically stuck together with superglue,’ he explained, which was why it rattled whenever he took the speed over forty miles per hour.
We were in the fast lane, doing ninety, ramming up behind slower cars so that they would move out of our way. We listened to the same song by Josh Wink three times, rewinding it again and again.
No problem x came the reply to my text.
We were meant to be meeting Neil at midday, and we were making good time, speeding away from professors and sherry, herbaceous borders and cobbled entrances; back to London, to gritty streets and dodgy deals.
The Raven wasn’t busy. It wasn’t the sort of place people came to for lunch, with its black-painted concrete floor and shabby seats. People came here at night. People like my dad, his friends Neil, Dodge and Del, petty criminals who ran gangs of teenagers on bikes out of the World’s End estate, who sold drugs and stolen goods. Dad always got my Christmas present from Del, usually a stolen scented candle, but last year a man’s Adidas shell suit because that was all he’d had left.
‘But you said you wanted to get into running, G, I thought you’d like it!’
I wondered if Neil had told Dad that we were meeting like this.
Neil was sitting in the corner, a copy of the Evening Standard on the table in front of him, and a half-pint of lager which he had not yet drunk from.
‘Hello, my darlin’,’ he said.
I had never got to the bottom of how Neil and Dad knew each other. He had been a club promoter, or in the music business, or something like that. Dad had helped him out with publicity once upon a time, or done the hair of one of his artistes. They went back a long way, that was all I knew for certain.
‘Hi, Neil,’ I said.
He was wearing a baggy leather jacket, the sleeves pushed up so the cuffs were tight around his elbows. He had a gold watch and tightly curled hair, black but greying, almost squared off at the corners, as if it had been cut with hedge-trimmers.
‘Fancy a drink?’ he said, motioning at his half-pint.
I didn’t want a drink. I still had the taste of sherry in my mouth and the smell of jasmine on my fingers. But I wondered if I ought to have a drink, for show.
‘I’m fine, thanks, actually,’ I said.
‘How’s uni?’
‘Really good, thanks.’
I wondered why he called it uni, not university, why he was so familiar about a place he had never been.
‘My son probably won’t go to uni. I mean, he wants to be a motor-racing driver, so he doesn’t see the point, but I say it’s important to have something else up your sleeve.’
‘I suppose. But there is no point doing it if you don’t want to. It’s a lot of hard work. And he’s doing well with the driving, anyway, isn’t he?’
‘Oh yes, really well.’
We paused to eye each other meaningfully.
‘So it’s ten tickets,’ I said, and I was surprised at the sound of my voice saying those words, and surprised by the tense feeling in my throat, by how aware I was that I was swallowing noisily and that my fingertips felt unusually warm.
He pushed the Evening Standard towards me.
‘Have you read the newspaper today?’ he said.
‘No,’ I replied.
‘I think you should. I think you should take it away with you.’
‘OK,’ I said, and I laid my tingling palm on the paper, felt the ink adhere to my skin, and felt something lumpy, something that shouldn’t be there, beneath the thin pages.
Neil stood up and walked around the table so that he was standing next to me. I twisted my body to look up at him. I realized then he was doing this on purpose, to shield the barman’s view of me.
‘Do you have something for me?’ he said.
I reached down under the table to find my bag. There was a shaft of sunlight coming through the window, illuminating the dinginess of the pub interior, the scuffed black table-top, the tear in the vinyl seat covering. Neil reached forward to pick up his half-pint. He took a small sip. He was relaxed and leisurely, while my hands shook as I fumbled in my bag, which suddenly seemed to contain many more things than it had previously.
‘Ooh, that’s nice. Really cold,’ he said.
My fingers found the edge of the envelope. Had I sealed it properly? I wondered. Would the cash fall out as I handed it to him, flutter around us and fall to the floor?
Neil took the envelope, folded it and slipped it into his back pocket.
‘Nice doing business with you,’ he said. ‘Send my love to Dad.’ He left, strolling out of the pub, giving the barman a small salute. ‘Bye, mate.’
‘Bye, Neil.’
I waited for him to leave.
I forced myself to remain sitting there, light a cigarette, take a sip of Neil’s lager. It was not cold. He had lied.
I folded the newspaper in half and gripped it under my arm.
I smiled at the barman as I left, walking slowly. I did not run across the road. I waited for a gap in the traffic, proud of my sanguine self-control.
The red car clattered and rattled as we drove back to Cambridge on the motorway. I unfolded the newspaper, opened it. Between pages nin
e and ten there was a jiffy bag, already used. I opened it and looked inside, saw the plain white wraps of cocaine.
The red car clattered and rattled as though it might break apart.
It was only at this moment that I realized I had a choice, and my choices were what made me the person that I was, the person that I might become, that the wrong choices had consequences, and that life didn’t just happen to you, you happened to it.
‘Slow down,’ I said.
But the music was too loud, so Dan didn’t hear.
‘Slow down!’ I shouted, turning down the volume.
‘What?’
‘We have over three hundred pounds’ worth of cocaine in the car with us. We don’t want to get pulled over. Your dad’s a fucking barrister.’
And we were both quiet as the flat East Anglian countryside sailed by.
29
2016, London
We are in our local branch of Sainsbury’s, in the baking aisle.
‘Can we have this?’ says Minna, shoving two tubes of silver balls and some multi-coloured sprinkles in my face.
‘And this?’ says Hebe, finding the edible glitter spray.
‘And this?’ says Minna with a handful of packets of chocolate buttons.
‘You can have whatever you want,’ I say.
We are buying supplies to make a cake. The best cake ever.
The girls continue to fill the shopping basket with sugary treats, eyeing me with suspicion and wonder. Has she gone mad, is she going to change her mind, can this be real?
‘Right, we’ve got everything we can here, let’s go to the sweets,’ I say.
Hebe and Minna run all the way to the sweet aisle. They grab packets of Smarties, mini marshmallows, sugar strings, jelly beans.
‘Can we eat them now, can we eat them now?’ shouts Minna.
‘No, this is all for the special cake. When we’ve made it, then you can eat the jelly beans. Then you can eat so many sweets you’ll probably explode.’
Minna looks as though she is going to explode right here in front of me, in the middle of the supermarket.
I never could escape. When Dad moved out of home and went to live in Putney, finally giving me the space to start becoming my own person, I couldn’t really keep away. I would visit him on Friday nights after I’d finished my homework. There would be a party, Julia and her friends, the young girls who lived with him (there were always a couple, making their beds on the floor out of sofa cushions), wine and cocaine. I went to Rome seeking order, an ancient civilization famous for its straight roads and laws, but Dad followed me there too. At Cambridge I tried to be prim, but found I had nothing to say to the gentle girls at the chocolate fondue evenings, gravitating instead to the naughty girls, the feisty ones, the messy ones; and I couldn’t help but say, ‘I know someone who can sort you out,’ when they mentioned wanting to buy drugs (although I only actually bought drugs for other people the once. And, unlike my father, did not make a profit).
I thought I had finally found a refuge in my home, my family, my husband – a man so different to my father – my ordered life; but then the past came and bashed me on the head, dragging me back by my ankles.
I never could escape. I have to stop trying. Instead I have to integrate my past into my present in a way that will not destroy it.
I have told the world about my sister, but I still have not spoken to my children about her.
Candy needs to be part of our family. But how can I talk to my children about a nine-year-old girl who died in the night? I don’t want my girls to think of Candy and feel afraid, I want them to think of a little girl who liked dancing and swimming, who painted colourful pictures, who loved pink clothes and sweets, a little girl who was full of life.
‘I am going to tell you about my little sister,’ I say when we get home from Sainsbury’s. ‘She was called Candy. She was four years younger than me, and when she was nine she caught a virus and she died. The virus is very rare, so you don’t need to worry about it.’
They watch me as I speak. They look solemn.
‘More than anything else Candy loved sweets and she loved things that were pink. She had a big pink coat that she loved so much she wore it all the time, even when it was sunny. Tomorrow is her birthday and the cake we are going to make is for her.’
‘How many candles will it have?’ asks Minna.
‘I don’t think we need to worry about candles. There won’t be enough room for them anyway. There will be too many sweets.’
The next day I make the cake, two chocolate sponges stuck together with chocolate icing. I make triple the amount of pink frosting recommended and slather this over the cake with a red plastic spatula as my girls watch, gripping the edge of the table. Then they get to work, sprinkling, attaching, spraying, lacing the cake with what seems like all the sweets in the world. The icing sags and is soon completely overwhelmed by this multi-coloured medley of sugary insanity. It is the maddest, most over-the-top cake ever seen. I invite my mother over and she pops one of her diabetes tablets in preparation. I cut thick slices, the icing oozing, Smarties and jelly beans tumbling, and we eat, finishing the slices, feeling sick and high afterwards.
We decide to make the cake every year.
‘I think that is a really good idea,’ says Hebe.
A few months later I go to Minna’s parents’ evening. I sit on a small plastic chair intended for a six-year-old and Minna’s teacher shows me a piece of work she has done. It is a drawing of Candy and a description of her, written phonetically, the little girl who loved sweets and who died, my mummy’s sister.
I try not to cry as I look at what Minna has made. It is not that I am sad. The tears are because I am happy. I have created a memory of Candy for my children. Sweet and pink and a bit bonkers.
30
2005, London
I could never believe my father would die. He was a bull of a man, built for endurance, a happy god with a big belly and a wolf smile, gulping wine as though it was water, sucking so hard on his cigarette that he made the filter soggy, snorting two lines of cocaine just to hoover his flat on a Saturday morning.
Once he was very proud of himself because a doctor had examined him and told him that all the cocaine had cleared his lungs of tar, that the amphetamines had made his heart strong. Dad was so pleased with the awe this young doctor felt for his miraculous sixty-year-old body. The best bit was when the doctor said that the only other case he had ever seen like it was Keith Richards. ‘Me and Keith, it’s just me and Keith! Two old rockers,’ Dad said. It was as if the drugs, the alcohol, the smoking, had made him healthier. Which sounds impossible, but if you’d met him you’d have believed it.
My mother would sometimes say, ‘It is going to be so hard on you when he goes,’ and I would say, ‘Yeah,’ without commitment or concern. Her heavy words were light to me because she didn’t understand what I understood. That it was never going to happen. She didn’t know what I knew.
I am not sure whether this myth of immortality was his or mine. Either way, I took it more seriously than he did. For him everything was a joke. Even death.
Dad hadn’t even told me about his latest visit to the hospital. The first I knew was when he phoned me at work on a Thursday afternoon. We were due to have dinner that night at Pucci’s, a pizza restaurant on the King’s Road where we always went because we’d known the owners for years and because Dad liked going back to the same places, again and again, the same way he liked watching the same films and telling the same stories, again and again.
‘All right, my darling, it’s your old dad,’ he said, sounding as if he was lazing on a sun lounger somewhere exotic, even though it was late November and already dark outside, black branches thrashing in the wind.
‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Seven thirty, right? Bella is coming too.’ I was being short with him, but I had a lot to do and this conversation was superfluous. All the arrangements had been made. I would relax when I saw him, when the wine was in front of me.
I was looking forward to it.
‘Great. Oh yeah, you’ve got a minute, right, because I’ve just been to the hospital. That new one, Royal Brompton, it’s like a hotel in there. Anyway, it was just meant to be a check-up. Scans and stuff. But the guy said that I have an, an anurarism.’ He paused; then he said it more carefully, as though he was reading from a prompt, ‘An aortic aneurism. I think it’s quite serious!’
I already had the phone lodged between my ear and my shoulder, hunched to keep it secure while I typed the words into my computer, the sounds of the newsroom fading, so the only thing I could hear was my father breathing, the laboured rasping amplified and made more dangerous by the hollow plastic handset, the coiled wire, the distance between us, all the way to a satellite floating beyond the earth’s atmosphere and back.
I read quickly. A dilation of the aorta which could result in sudden rupture and massive internal bleeding.
‘Fucking hell, Dad, this is serious. What did the doctor say, what are they going to do, where are you now, are you at the hospital?’
‘No, mate, they sent me away. With my aneurism!’ He laughed, and then coughed. He was trying to make it sound fun, as though he had a new pet, ‘my aneurism!’, but I could tell by the thin pull in his voice that he was scared. I heard him light a cigarette, the sudden intake of breath, the slow outward whoosh. I had read enough in those few seconds to know that smoking was one of the things that could cause a rupture: smoking, drinking, unhealthy living. A massive rupture that would cause instant death.
‘Fucking hell, Dad,’ I said again.
The sub-editor who had been standing by my desk, unnoticed, placed two proofs on my keyboard.
‘I’ve really got to go. I’ll see you later,’ I said.
‘OK, love you!’
‘Yeah.’
I felt too scared to talk, fizzy and numb at the same time. I put down the phone. I could still feel the pressure of the handset against my ear. It must have left a red mark because I had been pushing it against my head so hard.
The Consequences of Love Page 17
