She has vowed not to get mad with Ro. At least, not so early on. She is not going to get riled by him, by his willingness to bend the facts. But she doesn’t want to join in. She doesn’t want to subscribe to these theories of his. The week has started again, and it will be a fraught one. She needs to keep a clear head at work, to tie things down. She needs to think about Charlie, about Hana, who will still be looking after her child this week. As for the passport, it is easier by far to let it all go.
Ro reads her mind, of course, as he always does. ‘Let sleeping dogs lie, Jess. Yeah? I don’t think so.’
‘But Maya? You’re being ridiculous now, Ro. Maya is Swedish, she’s been with Eddie for – I don’t know – years now.’
Jess has never given Maya much thought. She has always been kind, and ready with advice and little treats for Ruby. She runs the nursery Ruby has just started to attend, and everyone there is crazy about her. Jess can see where this is going, and she won’t have it. Besides, she likes Maya. She reckons Eddie has lucked out there. She recognises that expression on Ro’s face, and it makes her queasy.
A tattoo is bad news, because a tattoo is one of the core tenets. Along with the overpierced ears and the rosacea and the chipped tooth. Things that might not be easy to conceal. All she knows is that she doesn’t want a week where her brother believes that the mother who disappeared on a Goa beach twenty-five years ago has just attended a party in this house.
Upstairs, Ruby is crying. She has started tentatively, but in no time at all she can wind herself into a rage.
Jess puts her hand on his arm, then points to the ceiling. ‘Help yourself to granola or whatever. I need to hold off an earthquake.’
He has no idea what she’s talking about. He looks confused, and for a moment she wonders whether he might have forgotten that she even has a child.
When Hana appears, Jess feels her throat tighten, her face burn, but she busies herself in gathering up the throwaway cameras she bought for the party and putting them in a plastic bag to drop off at Snappy Snaps on her way to work. She’s been warned not to expect much. Alice said she left cameras on every table at her wedding, but there had been practically nothing worth retrieving – feet, floor tiles, wild swipes of fuzzed colour.
Once she is outside the house, she finds that last night’s events have lodged inside her like a splinter. She keeps replaying in her head the image of Hana standing barefoot in the kitchen next to Charlie, her glittery mules kicked away. It is an intuition, that’s all, but perhaps intuition is everything. The day is such a beautiful one that she pushes the thought away. Perhaps nothing will change, and the significance of this will fade, just as all the other things have faded too – the sightings at unlikely branches of Tesco in the North East, on top of a bus in Rotterdam, in Nepal.
She is barely in her office when Miles’s face appears at the glass panel. He doesn’t open the door, just points to himself and raises five fingers. Five minutes. She recognises a summons when she sees one. She is waylaid by a call from Grosvenor, requesting a meeting at their offices, another from the PSL about a precedent she requested the week before.
As she walks into Miles’s office, she can tell right away that the few minutes she has kept him waiting have allowed his temper time to stew. He is standing with his back to her, his fists clenched at his sides, looking onto the market below where a queue has formed outside the falafel stall. She notices the creases at the back of his knees, and wonders idly if his wife has thrown him out.
‘You wanted to speak to me, Miles?’
He acts as if they’re already mid-conversation and she knows exactly what this is all about.
‘Know what? The client doesn’t give a shit. He doesn’t care that you’ve had a bad day. He doesn’t care that your nanny’s walked out or that your husband has left you. And if your kid is wandering down the A3 with the local kiddie fiddler, he doesn’t really give a shit about that either. All he cares about is that you document his deal to his best advantage. That’s it. Nothing more.’
She knows now, of course. He has found something, a small thing that he will blow up into something big.
And then he turns to her. ‘They were on to me this morning and They Are Pissed that you walked out of that meeting. They Are Even More Pissed that you didn’t draft in anyone to take your place.’
She opens her mouth, mumbles something about Carl. But he puts his hand up to stop her.
‘Carl isn’t qualified, remember? You might as well have had the girl from reception in there.’
She tries again, but he isn’t listening.
‘You’ll have your chance. In the meantime, I’ve instituted disciplinary procedures. The email should be with you later. But you’d better call the client and do some serious fucking grovelling.’
She feels a flash of hatred for him. The strength of the emotion surprises her, frightens her a little. Often, her working day feels bland and impersonal, as if the climate control has done its work too well.
‘This is ridiculous,’ she says.
‘Oh yeah? What about the Trentino contract? That could have cost the client dearly if I hadn’t caught it. As for Grosvenor, you’re clocking up billable hours at a rate that just isn’t sustainable, given the fee we’ve agreed. Besides, I don’t think it’s desirable to have a senior associate’s private life in the papers.’
He pokes his pinkie into his ear and vibrates it.
In the silence, she can hear the rapid clip of a printer outside the room.
‘I’m hardly Katie Price,’ she says quietly. ‘I’m surprised you’d try to use that against me.’ She is outraged, actually, but she is just managing to stay calm.
‘It’s not the image we—’
‘I didn’t ask to be abandoned on a beach. I think you’ll find that I’m the victim here.’
‘And clearly stressed.’
His signet ring glints under the halogen and she concentrates on trying to work out if they will still be able to stay in the house if she loses her job.
She walks over to his desk, where a nauseatingly overblown rose is propped up in a tumbler of water. Miles is a gardener? She can’t think how he finds the time. Someone is a gardener, but probably not Miles. As she passes it, her hand flicks at the glass. From the expression on Miles’s face, he isn’t sure if she’s done it on purpose. She isn’t sure herself. The water bubbles on the gleaming surface of the desk, a little stream of it inching its way towards a pile of paperwork. The rose looks like it’s been spat from between the teeth of a passing gypsy. The image almost makes her laugh out loud. She grasps at the flower, her fist full of petals. It feels moist and slightly human. She gasps, and he does too, and then she drops it on the floor.
The email about the meeting arrives just as she has settled herself deep in the subclauses of a distribution agreement. It is to be held on the Sixth Floor, on Friday. The floor is the giveaway. She knows what’s coming, and it’s still only Monday. She can’t wait till Friday – she’d be tumbled in anxiety for days. And so she emails HR and asks them to bring the meeting forward. They need a certain partner in attendance, the woman says, but so long as they can rustle him up at short notice, she sees no reason why that can’t be done.
Jess really doesn’t need to ask which partner will be attending. She thinks of Delia, who is, after all, the person she should talk to about these things. She has often said to Sarah how lucky they both are to have Delia rooting for them. No better mentor in the whole firm. Someone with clout. She does what she now knows she should have done the morning after the Summer Party, and calls Delia’s direct line. But there’s no reply. She goes to try and find her, but the PA says she’s in Dubai. ‘She’s convening the Middle East group conference on the seventh, so I’m not expecting her back for a fortnight at least.’
She has to stand all the way home on the Tube, her document case wedged between her ankles. She is determined to work all night, if need be, to secure her job, to make it up to the client. But, wary
of putting any of this in writing, she has decided not to email Delia in Dubai. Besides, there are so many other things jostling around in her head that the prospect of the Sixth Floor seems like a detail. Charlie and his late nights, the passport, Ro.
Up ahead, a dog is leading his owner on the end of a taut chain. Magnificently white, its tail rests on its back like a boudoir puff. Despite yesterday’s rain the path of beaten earth is dry and dusty, and chestnut trees crowd out the sky. A man in a business suit is sitting on a little clearing he’s made. No rug, no reading matter, just himself. There is another business suit, over by the fitness area. Standing motionless, alone. And it seems to Jess that they are the silent heralds of some disaster she hasn’t even begun to perceive yet.
Ro has spent the day with Hana. He has eaten bowl after bowl of cereal, drunk mug after mug of strong tea. He has conducted a thorough search of Jess’s room for images of his mother that will prove they are in constant contact. He has been through the bottom of the wardrobe, the bedside drawers, the row of cupboards beneath the windows where he found some Christmas decorations and a violin, together with what must be every note Jess has ever taken for every lecture she has ever attended. The photo albums were in the living room on an open shelf, and there seemed to be nothing to hide. While Hana popped out to the shops, he took the precaution of Sellotaping the keypad on the garden gate, just in case he might some day need an alternative way in. By the time Hana returns, he has trawled through three years’ worth of Jess’s emails, checked her Facebook photos as far back as he can go, but he has found nothing.
Ruby is at nursery, and there is still nearly an hour until pick-up time. Hana is slumped on the leather sofa in the TV room with the shutters closed. She is watching music videos and painting her nails a violent shade of green. He’d thought she might be Finnish on account of the hair. He knew a girl from Rovaniemi once with hair like that, and the same slightly slanted eyes. In fact, her colouring reminds him of a winter sunset somewhere in the Arctic Circle. All that pink and ice and blue. But she laughs at Finland, and tells him she’s from Brazil.
‘It’s not like you probably think it is – all football and samba,’ she says.
That isn’t what he thinks at all. His image of Brazil is way more apocalyptic. It involves unfinished tower blocks inhabited by knife-and-needle people, the laying waste of areas as big as Wales. He wants to keep in with Hana, though, so all he says is that he’s always fancied Carnival, all those long-legged black girls in feathers. She shrugs, takes a puff or two at her nails, then turns on the hairdryer next to her and waves her absinthe fingers in the hot air. The motor is too loud for conversation, and he wonders how much longer this is going to take. He has wasted a whole day here already, and he is still no further along.
‘I suppose it’s nearly time you picked up Ruby,’ he says as she gets up to leave the room.
‘I suppose.’ She is wrestling with the buggy in the hall, her hands held straight and stiff so as not to spoil her nails. She bends to yank some lever that will make the contraption unfold. When she doesn’t succeed, he takes over from her, then finds he can’t manage it any better than she does. She laughs at him, showing her little white teeth. As she dips the front wheels of the buggy down over the front step, she turns to him, and there is a sly look on her face.
‘Why don’t you come with me to pick up Ruby,’ she says, and he hopes she hasn’t guessed because that’s exactly what he had in mind.
He is stoked up now, and finds he can’t stop talking. She can’t stop talking either, all about the boyfriend who fucked her best friend back in Bauru and how she got her own back by reporting him for tax evasion.
‘I got all the evidence they needed. Easy. He was so fucking stupid.’ She shrugs again. It seems to be her default setting. ‘I’m going to train as a lawyer when I get home,’ she says.
‘I can’t stand lawyers,’ he says. Why not test her out, is what he’s thinking. See where the boundaries are, if she has any sense of humour. See if she dares mention Jess.
She barely reacts, just keeps on pushing the pram.
‘Rules, that’s more like it,’ he says then, backing off. ‘I hate rules, and forms and small print.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry,’ she says. ‘Most lawyers hate those things, too. For me, I want to know enough about the rules so I’m smart enough to fuck the system real good.’ And she turns towards him, in her chilly way, and smiles. There is nothing warm in that smile. She is not the kind of person he would let take care of his kid, if he had one.
‘See much of Eddie?’ he asks.
For a moment, she doesn’t seem to recognise the name. And then she nods. ‘Oh yeah, him? I don’t think of him as Eddie,’ she says. ‘He’s just the old hippie to me. Eddie, is that his name? Your sister calls him Dad,’ she says.
At first he thinks she said Dan, which would be odd enough when the man’s name is Eddie. But the way she looks at him shows that she realises she has planted a bomb and is quite prepared to walk away while it explodes behind her.
‘Could you just repeat that?’ he says.
‘Which bit?’ And then she realises. ‘Oh yeah, the Dad bit. Pretty weird, huh?’
As she walks ahead of him, he has a chance to take a really close look at her arse. She is wearing leggings, if that’s what they’re called, or maybe those are yoga clothes. He wonders how long she’s been fucking Charlie.
They pass a fallen tree that has rooted itself again. A squirrel flits along its length, darting, twitching, darting. As if nervous of putting its faith in a dead tree, the squirrel streaks up into a living one instead until it is lost somewhere in the high foliage. A line of young birches casts wavery stripes of shadow onto the scuffed lime of the football pitch as Hana turns the pushchair towards the café.
The idea of the café at this time of day is a nightmare. It’s not just that he would rather not run into Nefertiti with Hana around, it’s the combination of tiled floor and bare walls, the clatter of cups and glasses and the mad chatter of attention-seeking kids worn out by playground exertions. Today, the place is crammed with truffling dogs on rattling leads, with children falling over scooters or peevishly struggling against the restraints on their pushchairs. But at least there is no Nefertiti.
‘We could always have a coffee after the pickup,’ he says, because that’s the only reason he’s bothering with this, to have her with him, a kind of alibi to allow him to stand outside the school and view his mother.
But Hana seems determined to extract her coffee first. He buys her an inky espresso made by the Sicilian woman at the counter who is so proud of her work that she delivers a personal flourish to everything she does, a drizzle of honey on a cake, an extra piece of chocolate with your coffee.
‘I wonder why she calls him Dad, though,’ Hana says, once they have taken their seats and pulled Ruby’s buggy alongside. She is looking at him, wide-eyed, clearly not willing to let this one go.
‘We don’t have a dad,’ he says. Actually, they never did have a Dad, that’s the last name their father would have selected for himself. She doesn’t catch on at first, looks at him blankly over the rim of her tiny cup. ‘Maybe it’s a joke,’ he says. ‘A lawyer’s one.’
‘She might be sleeping with him, of course,’ she says in her blasé, seen-it-all way. ‘It might be some weirdo sex-game thing they have going on.’ She fixes him with her cold eye.
I’ve seen it all, too, he thinks. But that’s a very odd thing to say.
He watches her quick fingers as they grasp the spoon and give the coffee a vigorous little whirl.
She drops in two ancient-looking sugar lumps and tips her spoon against the side of the cup as they melt. ‘Strange, though, to call him Dad.’
He agrees. ‘Strange all right, if it’s true.’ And he smiles.
The girl from Brazil looks at him, and her eyes narrow. She knows she has hit her target, but she can’t be sure if the dart will hold.
‘How long are you staying?�
�� she asks. ‘You’re the older one, right?’
He is not the older one, but he doesn’t bother to put her straight on that. One question at a time, that’s his policy.
‘Like me, until the wind changes?’
And he supposes that’s as good an answer as any.
‘Or until they throw us out.’
He isn’t sure when me changed to us. But she smiles at him, and he can tell she wants him to notice the change. OK, he thinks. This is interesting. Let’s run with this.
As they leave the café, he notices a girl with bright pink hair who is filling a plastic beaker with juice and handing it to an angelic-looking toddler. Their eyes meet, and she smiles up at him, warm and wide. His sister would never have employed a girl with bright pink hair, or with tattoos either. She would never have looked twice at Nefertiti. Whereas Hana, with her perfectly adequate English and her neat jeans and her fake Burberry raincoat – she fits the bill exactly. He looks at the back of Hana as she disappears out the door, tipping the buggy up to negotiate the threshold. He might help her with that, he supposes, but she is more than capable. He knows that. She is capable of a lot, he thinks.
Outside, she stops a moment and takes a look at her phone. A small smile on her face, she taps at the screen before putting it away. There is never any reception here anyway. It’s one of the annoying things about the Common. Perhaps she’s gone to the trouble of signing up with the only service provider to cover this place. That would say something about her, he supposes. He wonders if Charlie has competition. Some biker dude. Some bit of rough.
‘Come on,’ she says. ‘We need to go.’
It seems his mother stands at the school door at home time, shaking hands. How ridiculous. How unhygienic. And how heartless to shake the hand of every other mother’s child, with no thought for her own.
His mood nosedives as they stride across the open prairie of the Common, where the little boys in red are being marshalled together, where a big net is being filled with footballs, and stakes are being pulled out of the ground. They cross the thundering road just behind the kids, at a spot where the lollipop lady is being ignored by a Sainsbury’s juggernaut. He sits outside on the wall. And he waits. A little boy in a pirate outfit with jagged trousers and a cardboard parrot fastened to his red plastic belt is play-fighting with his brother, over in the tousled blond grass that fringes a path of beaten earth.
The Orphans Page 12
