‘I’m not being funny …’ she says, ‘ … but your brother’s way out of order. Four in the morning, he’s flinging gravel up at my neighbours’ windows. Woke half the street before he clocked which house was mine. That must be six months back.’
The only other possibility is Pia. She met Pia once, and liked her. Pia supplies little green marzipan cakes to a shop in Notting Hill according to a recipe a forebear devised for some nineteenth-century Swedish princesses. They bonded over an obscure Kentucky rock band whose name Jess has since forgotten. For a while (well, for three months or so), it looked as though the relationship with Pia had legs until Ro ended up behaving just as badly as he’d done with all the others. She tries the number, but the call fails. She feels suddenly overwhelmed by all the things she can’t control, the numbers that aren’t the right ones, the people she can’t read.
Ro has lost himself to Ambien, but he has shaken off Mags. If anyone has tried to enter his Travelodge room, he’s been blissfully unaware. He slips down the stairs and out a fire exit into the car park while the girl on reception is playing with her phone. He is restless for London, hungry for answers. And he needs something else, too, something soft and sweet. Pia, that’s what he needs. Because the bitterness is creeping back again, soaking in with the daylight. All those wasted days spent sitting knees-to-chin on a stinking bus on some shuddering road, in search of Sophie who was really Mary who was all the time with Jess.
He screams into reverse, then puts down his foot and goes. For most of the journey, Mags stays away. In the breathing space of the long drive back he concedes certain things, and maybe that’s what shuts her up. He should not have held her head like that, or twisted her arm. He should never have kicked, then kicked and kicked and kicked. You are always the loser when you lose the rag. Who taught him that? Not his mother anyway. It must have been Auntie Rae, who had him figured out all right.
‘The trouble with that fella,’ he heard her tell the priest who came to the door that first Christmas after Goa, ‘is that he doesn’t want to grow up. He thinks if he grows up he’ll be turning his back on her for ever.’
Even now, he knows he looks immature, half built. He is a sparrow of a man, just as he was a sparrow of a boy – more frame than padding, more bone than brawn. But he is more resolute than he looks. There are powders he could take, no doubt. He could probably make some difference without ever entering a gym, but why bother when this deceptive appearance gets him everything he needs?
It is late morning by the time he has dropped off the car and taken the Tube to Brixton. Pia’s flat is in a Victorian terrace not far from the market. He knows the route by heart though the shops have become funkier since he came here last. She will be happy to see him, even if she isn’t. The happiness will be unspecific however, because Pia herself is never less than sweet. But though the door is still purple, the first-floor blinds have changed. The white linen has disappeared, and so has the little glass heart that used to catch the light, and when he rings the doorbell he has already guessed that Pia no longer lives there. From upstairs, a middle-aged woman glances down at him. She moves away, and he waits awhile, but she never comes to the door.
It is just another ending, and there have been many of those, but it brings Mags back. Nagging at him, whispering in his ear, all breath and spittle, and struggling to keep her balance. She is poisoning his day before he has even got it started. He uses a cashpoint near the station and finds the Merc has nearly cleaned him out. A pity about the state of his finances, he thinks, as he appraises his reflection in a nearby window. He could do with a haircut. Although there is money somewhere (at least, he thinks there is), he has lost the means to access it. Pin numbers long forgotten, cards lost. There is just one account now, with monthly subventions from the trust set up by his paternal grandparents, a sum he supplements from time to time with casual work in hipster bars that like his look. He wonders about moving back here, putting down roots one day when all his questing has been done. As he walks away, the rain begins – a proper, pelting shower – and he lifts his face to it, and lets it cleanse him free of both of them, Pia the sweet and Mags the sour.
He darts into a newsagent’s, partly for shelter, partly for information. He picks up one of each of the red tops, five or six in all, and tucks them inside his jacket. He stands under the bowed blue awning while the rain drips onto the back of his neck and drenches his Converse. He is aware of the cars swishing by, until the moment when they no longer swish and the rain has stopped. When he has figured out the access to a rank of rental bikes lined up by the Tube station, he rides off into the traffic, pedalling furiously until he reaches the Common. Ahead of him, a small boy with a shiny red and black helmet, his knees like tiny pistons, is powering away from him. The boy is hunched over the handlebars, peeking up now and then at the punting, swearing footballers, at the white girls working off the baby fat under the instruction of lean black men.
He cycles the perimeter first, then edges closer in. On the outer circle, a knot of leggy guys are whacking a basketball around a fenced-off rectangle. At the half-pipe next door, grown men swoop and clatter beneath a wire slung with braces of ruined trainers. There are the usual bubble-written tags and, on the gable end of the café, a family of psychedelic owls. The grit sizzles under his wheels as he cycles across the beaten-earth path where summer has exposed the Common’s archaeology – tree roots like bones and the glint of long-broken bottles. Over in the distance, a red van is parked haphazardly across the grass. Propped in front of it, a sandwich board: Ed’s Organic Ice Cream.
He passes a woman who is holding the hand of a little boy. She is so much taller than he is that his arm is forced almost upright, at five to the hour. He recognises the uniform – the dark green trackie bottoms, the white shirts with a splash of purple on the pocket. Before Goa, he’d felt safe in that nursery. He has never felt safe since.
He overtakes the kids and passes the café on the Common where a woman with dreads who looks like Queen Nefertiti is stacking away the chairs. Years ago this was a sad, sallow place, yellow with grease and nicotine. On better days, there was chess played at tables outside by old men who had pissed their pants. On worse days, there were fights. Round the back, there was a place he used to visit when he wanted to get away from them all – Auntie Rae and Jess and the girl cousins who treated him like he was one of their Care Bears. A slice of dank space between two walls – the back wall of the café and another wall that seemed to have no purpose other than as a canvas for graffiti or something to kick a ball against. It smelled a bit in there, but it was his secret place.
Nowadays, the café is all pistachio madeleines and almond cannoli. It is redundant, sad-eyed dads in shorts, and harassed mums whose heads are dulled by Nurofen Plus and last night’s bottle of supermarket white.
He stops his bike outside the café and the girl with the Nefertiti hair eyes him, then the bike. ‘You looking for a docking station?’
How pretentious, he thinks. OK then, a docking station.
‘Might have to go back to the Tube.’
Instead, he wheels the bike inside the café and props it up against the wall.
Nefertiti is at the levers and pistons now, making a drama out of her coffee-making. He spreads the papers out in front of him, flicks through the pages. He draws blanks with one, two and three. No mention of Mags at all. But he finds her in number four, on an inside page of the Daily Post. And there, on the same page, is Jess. Jess and her house. Her big new, big old, big big House. Charlie’s arm is clamped around her shoulders, so tightly he could be a parliamentary candidate. How do the papers get these things? Facebook? A treacherous friend?
And then he realises that dead old Mags is not the main story at all. The main story is Sophie Considine and those two little children on that Goa beach. It seems the Orphans are still news, even now. This is a piece about the discovery in dead Mags’s caravan of a passport that says what he knew all along – that his mother didn’t die
on that beach. He speed-reads the article, gulping down the paragraphs, then goes back to the top and reads more carefully what Jess has to say.
I found it hard, growing up, not knowing. I suppose that was the worst thing. Not knowing if she’d come back, if she’d suffered. Each Christmas until I was fifteen or so, I fantasised about her turning up at my aunt’s doorstep dressed in a Christmas jumper and bearing the kind of parcel you see in Home Alone, a big one with an oversized red bow.
Where the hell did that come from? And where the hell is he in all of this? If it weren’t for that old photo of the two of them by the water’s edge, he’d have been airbrushed from history by now, purged. Jess has nothing to say about the passport, nothing about Sophie Considine. She doesn’t even mention him. This is all about what it feels like to be Jess. And yet, none of this would have been discovered were it not for him. He’s been grating the side of his hand on the rough wood at the edge of the table. He doesn’t even notice until he’s rubbed the skin raw. As he rereads the article, he puts the wound to his mouth and sucks.
When he goes to drink the coffee, it tastes harsh and bitter by comparison. He approaches Nefertiti at the counter and asks her to tip it into a large takeaway cup and top it up with foamy milk. He adds sugar, two tight twists of it, and a generous shake of chocolate powder on top. He hugs himself, just because. It’s a habit he’s retained. And he is definitely taking up less space these days. He splays his fingers out in front. Getting thinner, no doubt there. He looks speculatively at Nefertiti. He’d prefer a blonde tonight, but it’s not a deal-breaker. Besides, it’s early yet. Retrieving his bike, he catches her eye and when she smiles he decides to come back for her later.
The sun slips behind a cloud. Without it, the Common feels like what it really is, a vast field in the city. For a moment he loses all sense of connection with the place; it is rendered alien, meaningless. But the Common mattered to him once, just as he and Jess were once the best of friends. Even before the beach, he can remember dancing with Jess in the garden with the purple flowers, and singing and stomping along an imaginary yellow brick road. And all the adults laughing and Jess lifting him up and carrying him to Mama who put a party crown on his head and told him he was her little golden prince.
As he spirals out from the bandstand towards Jess’s place, he passes the choppy little pond where old men in padded jackets used to race their remote-controlled boats. Over in the distance, a rash of boys in red football tops are spreading and clustering. Ref. Ref. He passes the fishing pond, where the fishermen are all camouflage and bivouacs, enacting some fantasy he can’t access. There is a guy in army fatigues – Atomic Tackle on his back, ‘Mellow Yellow’ on his speakers, his three rods propped over the soupy water like tripwires. Men whose tiny cycling sweaters are stretched across their big chests are eating burgers by the sheen of the pond as a flock of Greenland geese honks overhead and a duck skids onto the water, settling on its surface.
One warm summer night during a long-ago World Cup, he got high on the muddy bank there and waded out through the green water, thick with duck shit and fronds of menacing vegetation. The hardest part was clambering up the steep bank of the island. Several times, he’d grabbed at dead branches or lost his footing on the mud and found himself thrown back again into the water. He dreamed of bringing a tent over there, just to see what it felt like to disappear, but he never did.
He is almost at Jess’s house now, but if Jess knows he’s here, she’ll pull up the drawbridge and he’ll find out nothing. He needs to watch. To wait, if needs be. He needs to be calm. He stops a moment at the back wall of her garden, where a wooden gate gives directly onto the Common, then moves on to where there is a break in the terrace and a passageway links the Common to the road in front. Most of these houses have shutters, slatted off-white or cream or chalky blue-grey. Most of them have tubs of lavender or box that sit demurely on the pale gravel. He hates the greyish foliage and old-lady scent of lavender. He wonders what would happen if you planted a row of fuck-off sunflowers in a street like this, installed some plastic planters of begonias and marigolds, let the whole thing go wild. If you put a rusty swing in the front garden or a shed from B&Q, if you failed any one of the rules of taste and order, what would they do? It’s impossible to walk up to any of the windows without crunching on the gravel and attracting attention. And so, he gives up on the front of the house and returns to the closed rear gate instead.
When the rain begins again, he stands in under the trees while it splatters the bald earth track that’s been beaten into the grass by runners and cyclists. He is soon bored; there’s nothing to see, and a little worm of wet has worked its way under his collar. His thoughts shift to Nefertiti and the sweet smell of coffee. He’s just about to go back there when someone stops at the gate. An ice-blonde girl with a buggy is punching a code into a box recessed into the wall. She angles the front wheels up onto the step, and then she’s in. And once she’s in, there’s nothing else to amuse him until, minutes later, two burly men approach the back gate with the thud of cardboard, the clink of bottles. They bring one case of wine, then another and another and another. And then the beer, so much beer, stacks of beer. Next, it’s speakers, tabletops and trestles, moulded plastic stools. A party? With all that booze piled up outside the gate, one of the men stands guard, eyeballing Ro, as the other disappears back through the gap in the terrace.
Ro sees his chance. ‘Need a hand there, mate? Just waiting for my football crowd.’
The man looks him up and down. Football crowd? Like he’s swallowing that.
‘Nah, ’sfine. No worries.’ He answers his phone, then jabs at the buttons on the gate and lets himself in.
Ro is glad that it’s a keypad and not a lock. There’s a tip he learned once from a guy in Hamburg – a couple of strips of Sellotape will do the trick, that’s all. He’s sure he could find his way in there if he wanted to.
‘Happy to help, mate. Not doing anything sitting here.’
‘You sure? There’s a warden outside so he’s had to go round the block. Cheers, ’preciate it.’
Ro stacks one carton of beer on top of another and follows the deliveryman into the back garden. It’s like another world in there, a very precise one. The garden is composed of four squares edged off with knee-high box hedges. The rest is gravel, raked and golden. A couple of pale blue wooden benches curve along the side walls. There is a purple scooter, a small child who must be Ruby, the ice-blonde girl. But the only movement is from the magpies opposite. He can hear the triple rasp of their call as they dig for something on the roof.
‘Where do you want them?’ he asks the deliveryman. ‘In the kitchen?’
‘No, mate, I’m good.’
The girl with the blonde hair is looking at Ro, and the kid is looking at him, too, and he’s wondering what makes him so interesting all of a sudden.
‘Got a lot of booze here,’ he calls over to the girl. ‘Birthday coming up?’
She shakes her head. ‘Not my birthday, not my nothing. Boss’s birthday at the weekend. Big party.’ And then she yawns.
The deliveryman is looking at him strangely. Time to go. As he walks back out through the gate onto the Common, he glances back and the guy is still standing there, watching him. No thanks, no appreciation at all.
It’s easy to visualise them – Jess and little Ruby, who is less baby than she was last time, sitting with his mother on the other side of that wall. He can imagine them discussing the passport, and how it’s just like Mags to hold on to something she was never meant to have in the first place. He can imagine Jess keeping their mother to herself.
He grows gloomy with the light. And then, at a first-floor window, the girl with peroxide hair appears for just a moment and sticks her phone out for a pic.
5
GOA ORPHANS. MOTHER MAY HAVE LIVED. The piece in the Daily Post is accompanied by a photo, the photo. The image itself is unexceptional – two golden children on a golden beach. But once you know that
those children are about to be orphaned, its nature alters. It is no longer just a depiction. It is a reminder. Look at the beauty, it is saying, the innocence. See how unknowing they are. How little they anticipate. Even in 1992, to photograph a stranger’s half-naked children might have been considered strange. To send it without explanation to a London newspaper while the story was raging on every front page?
Jess doesn’t know who took that photo, and maybe it doesn’t matter much who it was. What matters now is the message, because that’s what lingers.
One day even paradise will fail you.
That photo was endlessly reproduced, along with the words they liked to use – ‘Nightmare’, ‘Hubris’, ‘Hippie’, and the name they had for Jess and Ro: ‘The Orphans on the Beach’. For the duration of their front-page fame, Jess and Ro had a monopoly on orphanhood. Later, she would encounter others, of course: Victorian wards, little match girls, governesses who would never know love, children in faraway orphanages rocking at the bars of their empty cots. From the start, she was determined not to be that kind of orphan.
While Jess turned her head away from orphanhood, Ro searched everywhere for orphans on which to model himself. And when he found that Superman had been an orphan, and Harry Potter too, he would fantasise about the unique powers the status might confer. The orphan tag gave Ro’s life a certain meaning, even an emerging destiny when he was sent off to school – though he discovered soon enough that it wasn’t Hogwarts. He gave up on orphans after that. Between one exeat and the next he had switched his focus to the paranormal, the unexplained. He couldn’t have been more than ten when he became obsessed by spontaneous combustion and alien abduction. But while Ro looked for answers in Roswell and the Mary Celeste, Jess simply tried to close the book.
The Orphans Page 6
