Eleven Lines to Somewhere

by Alyson Rudd

  Lloyd looked up, beaming.

  ‘Bit of a turn-off, aren’t they? I mean, if you inherit a disease there’s nothing you can do about it. We’d not even be educating. We can’t say drink less cola and ward off sickle cells, can we?’

  Paul stared at him sneeringly.

  ‘You’re being a touch medieval there, Lloyd,’ he said. ‘The right diet can help sufferers of sickle cell disease enormously.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Lloyd said as if he knew that all along, ‘but I think you are missing the main point here, which is that twins are funny, triplets are fascinating, and finding out your daughter isn’t yours on her twelfth birthday is full of drama and pathos.’

  ‘Isn’t that all in the latest episode of Silent Witness?’ Paul said.

  ‘Exactly,’ Lloyd retorted, ‘we see this vehicle as the unfolding drama of our genes.’

  Paul took a deep breath and looked across at his producer, who made a pushing gesture with her hands to ward off the imminent flounce.

  ‘I think,’ she said, ‘this would be a good time for us all to retreat, think again, refresh the script.’

  Lloyd swiftly gathered his notes and leaped from the room in keeping with his carefully nurtured persona of a man too busy for niceties.

  As the door glided to a close behind him, Paul stood and turned to the room.

  ‘Episode one,’ he said, ‘should definitely cover the DNA behind small-man syndrome,’ and Lloyd’s willowy deputy snorted with forbidden laughter.

  Just as Riya had wanted to thank Sylvie, Ulla wanted to thank her too. They met in the booth at Waterloo.

  ‘You’ll recognize me because I look like my son,’ she had told Sylvia via email, and so Sylvie sat down, without checking she was in the right place, in front of a woman in her late thirties wearing no make-up, her eyes swollen but, still, quite possibly, the most distinctive-looking person she had met in the flesh.

  ‘You have no idea how much I owe you,’ she said with a slight Scandinavian accent. ‘It was my fault he was so confused but now I have the chance to get him the help he needs. He’s hard to like sometimes but I love him very much. He’s my only child.’

  Sylvie did not feel abashed or awkward. Saving Isak had lifted her so much that she bobbed everywhere she walked. She was a helium girl, cloud-walking, happy and full of bonhomie. She and Ulla sat for an hour and a half, bearing their souls, being more honest than they had ever been with anyone. They each shed a tear over the other’s story, they clasped each other’s hand over the table, they ordered the first wine Ulla had touched since the day Andrew died.

  ‘I have no friends here,’ Ulla said. ‘I am toxic, it would seem, now that I have no partner, and so I think it for the best that I return to Stockholm. My father is there, and an aunt, and I can perhaps make new friends.’

  ‘It’s not my place to say, having just met you, but from what you have told me, wouldn’t Isak be better with some of his old routine? A new clinic, obviously, but if you could find a swim partner, a father figure, then maybe…’

  ‘They are not easy to find, these father figures who can handle boys with Isak’s problems,’ Ulla said, ‘and I can’t go near the pool. I need to leave but yes, I’ll try to find him a routine he likes.’

  Sylvie ran her index finger along the rim of her glass. She wanted to say, ‘I’ll be your friend, stay in London,’ but she had to stop now; this mission to make things right – it was over. Ulla would do what she felt was best for her small family. Sylvie needed to be unambitious, unremarkable.

  ‘I should have gone for therapy,’ she told Ulla. ‘I can see that now. I was a bit weird. You might not have liked me had we met six months ago.’

  ‘Who knows?’ Ulla said. ‘But I like you very much now and I’d like us to keep in touch if you’d like that too.’

  Sylvie nodded enthusiastically.

  ‘And the baby you saved, do you keep in touch with her family?’

  ‘Not after that meeting I mentioned but, you know what, I’d like to write to her auntie, who was kind to me when she needn’t have been.’

  ‘I think you should,’ Ulla said, sounding much older and wiser than Sylvie, who was still in a state akin to euphoria and while talking with Ulla had veered from wanting to cry to needing to smile.

  ‘I’ll come to visit you in Sweden,’ she said and Ulla raised her eyebrows.

  ‘If you do, you’ll be like no Englishwoman I have known,’ she said.

  Chapter 27

  Grace sat in Grandpa’s chair. There was, for a few seconds, complete silence. No voices in the street, no radio, no TV, no traffic. Nothing but the sound of her own breath, which she decided did not count as a sound as without it she would be dead and unable to notice the silence in the first place.

  She had had the house to herself for two days and seen no one, spoken to no one. She told herself this was a real treat but she was not convinced. Of course, the bathroom was always clean now and smelled lovely and the washing load was so reduced that she could go three days without having to touch the compact Hotpoint in the corner of the kitchen, but she did wonder: what was the point of being here? What was her purpose?

  Hana would come home rejuvenated and move out, she was sure of it. Ryan’s furrowed brow would be replaced by a smooth-lined devotion to his pretty girlfriend and she would see far less of her children. One day she would bake for her grandchildren instead of for Grandpa but that could take years. She had never sat alone and brought out the photos and she was not about to start now so she sprang to her feet, found a cardigan, and left the house, a woman on a mission.

  Hana and the ramblers were on a break from the coastal path and had headed inland for a cream tea. Poppy was salivating as they walked into the walled garden with its fat black-and-white cat, ceramic pots of pink geraniums and tiny laminated menus detailing how the café made all the scones in its cottage kitchen and would be served warm unless advised otherwise.

  ‘Who wouldn’t want a scone that was warm?’ Poppy said, convinced her tongue had swollen in excited anticipation of an afternoon tea par excellence.

  An elderly couple in matching thin fleeces and matching silvery hair were already deep into their second round of scones and stared at Ed as if he could well be carrying a gun.

  ‘Don’t you get tired of that?’ Hana asked him. ‘I mean, the minute we leave London, people look at you as if you might be out to rape their daughters.’

  Ed winked at her, stood up and approached the couple.

  ‘Are you local, or on holiday like us?’ he asked in a friendly voice.

  The pair gawped and then the husband said they were visiting from Yorkshire.

  ‘First time?’

  ‘It’s our – what is it, Archie? – our thirty-fourth year and this place has been going that long too.’

  ‘No way,’ Ed said, sitting at their table. ‘You are quite the bonus discovery. Tell me, what’s the very best spot – the most beautiful – the place you simply have to see every time, other than this café, of course.’

  The pair smiled, flattered.

  ‘We love St Brelade,’ the wife said, ‘it’s very pretty with excellent restaurants overlooking the sea and a church. I mean, how often do you see a church on a beach and—’

  The husband interrupted her.

  ‘It’s bloody expensive is what it is, but we keep on going back. S’pose you’d call it irresistible.’

  Ed laughed good-naturedly.

  ‘I’d like to see it,’ he said and stood up again and shook their hands.

  ‘Lovely to meet you and thanks for the tip,’ he said. Hana could hear the wife whisper too loudly and too incredulously what a nice man that was.

  ‘Bravo,’ Poppy said after the couple had walked to their hire car, ‘but you shouldn’t have to do things like that.’

  ‘If good men do nothing and all that jazz,’ he laughed and, for the one and only time on the trip, Hana, Poppy and Ed felt like a gang, all for one and one for all.

&nbs
p; Hana stood on deck as they pulled out of the harbour on the Monday morning. Who on earth am I? she wondered. Not once had she raised the topic of their break-up, not once had she uttered Naomi’s name. She knew there were two sides to this. She was either being incredibly mature or a lovestruck patsy, sending Ed the signal that he could leave her again and again and she would be there, waiting, until as silvery as the lady in the geranium café.

  She gripped the deck rail tightly. There would be a time to let him know he could not do a repeat show – she would know the time when it came but, for now, she was, astonishingly happy and free of jealousy. She had won, after all. It had not been Naomi’s nose from which he had licked some errant clotted cream. It had been her nose. Her little nose, positioned well below his, but that was fine. She could buy big heels for big occasions. She could grow, but Naomi could not shrink.

  Grace was not there when she reached home. Hana sniffed. Something was wrong, or at least different, and then she realized the house smelled clean and anonymous. There was no lingering aroma from a freshly baked fruit loaf or coffee sponge. Hana placed her laptop in the bathroom, lit a candle scented with rosewood and treated herself to a long soak listening to Fleetwood Mac. She and Ed had played album ping-pong and Rumours was the only one they had both owned as well as downloaded. She placed some bubbles on the end of her nose and giggled. She told herself she was quite pathetic but she really did not care. She had won, hadn’t she, and she was closer to death than birth and living in a world that had a Doomsday Clock, so did it really matter if she had once thrown her coat into a bin?

  As she wrapped herself in the fluffy dressing gown she could tell her mother had washed for her while she was away, Ed sent her a message.

  Bring an overnight bag to my house,

  he said,

  bring it now

  and Hana, being the new Hana, packed for three nights and did not spare a thought for how ghastly her commute to work would be for the next few days.

  When she returned on the Thursday evening, Grace was, again, not home. Hana sniffed the air once more. No cakes but something was different, an earthiness, and something else, Grandpa’s chair had vanished. The key sounded.

  ‘Hello, Hana, are you here?’ called out Grace. ‘Come and meet Jarvis.’

  Hana turned to see her mother with a gold-and-white speckle-faced cocker spaniel. Grace decided to cut to the chase.

  ‘He needs me,’ she said, ‘and I need to be needed. So here he is, two years old and in need of a home, he is.’

  Hana felt her eyes sting, which startled her as she was not overly fond of dogs, but she quickly realized she was in the middle of a life shift. She and her mother would be living apart more often; she might move out permanently and Grace had sensed it, her dear mother, a mother who refused to hold photographs of her beloved Tom, a mother who strode on in her mission to nurture.

  ‘I love you so much, Mam,’ Hana said, giving way to tears and, for the first time in a very long time, Grace let tears fall as well. ‘Does he come with the name Jarvis, then?’

  ‘Yes, Jarvis Cocker Spaniel. I like it? Don’t you like it?’

  ‘I like it, Mam, I like it. But the big question is, do you think Jarvis is as homophobic as Grandpa was?’

  Grace laughed, her eyes still sparkling from the surprise of crying.

  ‘I don’t know yet for sure, but he’s better toilet-trained, most definitely.’

  Paul was in too deep, so said his producer, but her loyalty to Lloyd over him meant he noticed that she had a small old scar on her left cheek and elbows that were too pointy and her accent could become an Essex drawl when she had drunk too many vodkas.

  ‘We are not in too deep, are we?’ he said and regretted how callous that sounded because she blinked rapidly and wobbled on her four-inch heels.

  It left him alone in a high-ceilinged flat with a balcony and the sound effect of tennis balls being hit sometimes elegantly, sometimes poundingly, but rarely badly. He decided he had let the seduction of the world of television interfere with his common sense. There could be a quite brilliant series made about genetics and he was not about to be part of a stupid one. He pulled out the script and looked at all the information – allied to wit – that Lloyd had placed a black line through. It was not quite a redacted text, the sort seen in films about conspiracy theories involving politicians, presidents and national security. He could still read what it was that Lloyd was seeking to bin. He attached the script to an email to all involved.

  Please see the amendments I accept and the original points I, as the expert and the presenter, feel strongly should remain.

  Paul rejected every amendment made by Lloyd bar one.

  Excellent point,

  he typed next to Lloyd’s rejection of the word ‘phenylalanine’.

  We should replace with the phrase ‘this particular amino acid’. We could be accused of dumbing down, especially as phenylalanine can cause brain damage, a reasonably serious side effect, I would argue, but sometimes, perhaps, the flow to a script for a TV show should take precedent.

  Paul pressed send without re-reading his sarcasm. He had nothing to lose. He would happily be ditched if the alternative was to let the idiotic Lloyd have control of a project that could yet be worthwhile. He had no insight, no notion that to be so unapologetically defiant would create a stir. Lloyd interpreted the missive as a climbdown. He adjusted his blue-rimmed spectacles and absorbed only the words the flow to a script for a TV show should take precedent.

  To his astonishment, in spite of the climbdown, he was removed from Blue Genes (working title only) three days later and Paul was taken to lunch by an executive with seductive, intelligent brown eyes and a hard-to-pronounce Sri Lankan name.

  ‘Don’t worry about the whole twelve-syllable thing, just call me Gani,’ she said. ‘You know, I let schoolfriends call me Annie to avoid attention but then had a lightbulb moment aged, oh, about six, and realized I was burying my ethnicity. Born in Paddington, but even so, I refuse to be an Annie.’

  ‘Maybe tomorrow, tomorrow?’ Paul said, hoping he would not have to explain his joke, and Gani smiled.

  ‘Maybe that’s why,’ she said ‘I loathe musical theatre.’

  ‘That’s a shame,’ Paul said, ‘I was hoping we were here to discuss turning Blue Genes into a musical. “Jean Genie”, “Forever in Blue Jeans”, “Baby’s Got Her Blue Jeans On”. I could go on but am sensing crossed wires.’

  Gani pursed her lips.

  ‘I will now have David Bowie’s voice in my head for the rest of the day.’

  ‘Not Neil Diamond? That indicates an advanced filter system for your subconscious.’

  ‘There, you see, this is why I am here. I just don’t think Lloyd thought you were very funny in spite of wanting to make the whole shebang a sort of Strictly Come Genoming or something.’

  Paul shrugged.

  ‘Lloyd and I, we didn’t see eye to eye on anything at all. Are you, effectively, my new Lloyd?’

  Paul assumed, later, he must have imagined it, but he thought he saw Gani uncross and re-cross her legs as she leaned in to whisper: ‘Sits like a man, but smiles like a reptile.’

  Paul coughed.

  ‘Sums up Lloyd for me,’ he said, uncertainly, and Gani chuckled.

  ‘We are going to have fun “DNA Paul”, we are going to have such fun.’

  Chapter 28

  ‘Oh, Ryan,’ Hana said with deliberate exasperation, ‘you’ve been here ten minutes and not even noticed.’

  ‘What, what?’ Ryan said. ‘Have you cut your hair?’

  ‘The house, stupid. Look around you.’

  Ryan swivelled in his chair.

  ‘Ah, that,’ he said, pointing to a freshly re-upholstered armchair, Grandpa’s chair, but now a deep red velvet.

  ‘And?’

  ‘And, and, ah, the curtains, they’ve gone and we didn’t have those blinds hiding behind them, did we?’

  ‘No, we most certainly did not,’ Grace sa
id. ‘They’re calling them plantation blinds. It’s like living in the Deep South.’

  ‘Um, sort of,’ Ryan said, ‘but shouldn’t Jarvis be a raccoon or a prairie dog or something in that case?’

  Hana glared warningly at her brother.

  ‘Mam, it all looks really great, a nice change,’ he said.

  ‘Well, I’m pleased with it,’ Grace said.

  ‘Except,’ Ryan said, as Grace stiffened, ‘I don’t see why you can’t bake when you know I’m popping round. I love your cakes.’

  ‘That’s because we’re going out for cake,’ his mother said.

  ‘We never go out for cake,’ Ryan said.

  ‘I’m changing it up,’ Grace said defiantly and both her children spluttered with laughter.

  She linked their arms as they walked to the new café she had noticed on her now frequent walks with Jarvis, whose leash was being held by Hana. Inevitably the cakes were comparatively dry but perhaps that was the point, thought Ryan, perhaps his mother was in need of compliments and attention.

  ‘Still, the tea’s nice,’ Grace said as the sun lit up her face to reveal a complexion remarkably low on wrinkles given the life she had lived.

  ‘You’re really rather pretty, Mam,’ Ryan said.

  ‘For an old woman, maybe,’ she said.

  ‘No, really, you are,’ Hana said.

  There was a pause.

  ‘As you’re both here…’ Hana said and both Ryan and Grace placed their mugs carefully and expectantly on the white pine table. ‘I’m, er, back with Ed, as you know, and I’m moving in with him. Soon. Not tomorrow, but soon.’

  Ryan nodded as if he had been expecting this all along but he was in fact taken aback and wondered if he was fated to always be the last to know about any sort of gossip at all.