Ro hated school. Soon after arriving at his boarding prep, he had been locked inside a cupboard by an older pupil, his eye welded to the crack of light that ran the length of the door. Outside, the sound of squealing boys, the punt of a football. Inside, the rush of hot piss down his leg. And at that moment, he realised that he would always be locked in or out. One way or the other, real life would be taking place somewhere he couldn’t access.
The people waiting outside the school are nearly all women of about Jess’s age. Some are wearing gym gear, others look like they’ve rushed here from a meeting. Hana goes to speak to one of the other nannies while Ro stands at the back of the crowd and waits for the double doors to open. It reminds him of bunking off school for a Radiohead gig, when he can’t have been more than about fourteen. He stood popping pill after pill as the air turned flamingo pink and burning orange and the music flowed like honey in his head. Afterwards, he waited at a side door for Thom to appear, hour after hour until the colours faded and the music did too and he felt himself shrivel and the world go grey.
His mother seems more confident than she did at the party; here in Toddlerland she might even be commanding, in a kindly sort of way. The good witch, maybe. But, witch or not, she still doesn’t look like the kind of woman who would abandon her children on a beach. She stretches her hand out to each child, then bends to their level to hear whatever it is they’re saying before pressing them on their way.
Hana waves over to him to say that she’s going down to Ruby’s classroom, and to wait for him there. Most of the older children have left now, and Hana disappears into the depths of the building with an exaggerated swagger, palming the empty buggy through the double doors. By now, the choke of parents waiting to collect has eased, and there are only a few people still hanging around. His mother is deep in conversation with an emaciated woman who looks as if she rarely sleeps. As the numbers thin out, Ro walks straight up to her, lingering round the back, waiting for the moment to approach.
The badge hanging around her neck on a laminated lanyard says MAYA … The surname is in a smaller font, and he can’t decipher it. Above the name, there is a thumbnail photo and, dominating it all, the Maltese cross of the school. He scrutinises the movements of her hands, to catch the ghost on the inside of her wrist. Her hands move a lot, he thinks. Doesn’t that mean something? He can’t remember if it indicates a lying nature or just an airy-fairy one. He’ll google that when he gets back to Jess’s place. Overuse of hands. Meaning. He is beginning to feel light-headed, tense and out of breath from the effort of following those hands. But when he finds what he’s been looking for, he feels like yahooing. Her watch slips and reveals a stripe of holiday white, and there it is. The little round scar he saw the other night, on the inside of her left wrist, just where he thought it was.
In all the acres of newsprint devoted to speculation about Sophie’s possible whereabouts, the tattoo was the thing. If she were still alive, perhaps suffering from memory loss, perhaps lying low, the tattoo would be the sure-fire identifier. But nothing lasts these days, not even an inked-on rose. The sight of the scar feels even better this time around, without the alcohol and the noise. But when she still doesn’t look at him, let alone acknowledge his presence, he feels the void open up again, along with all those other voids: the emptiness of a Sunday afternoon away at school, sitting alone on a bench on the side of a windswept playing field, the voices of the other boys like screeching gulls, the rain pelting his face. And the fact that she has felt the need to hide herself from him empties him out.
Hana reappears with Ruby already strapped into the buggy. The woman who is her grandmother bends right down to the child and squeezes her fingers. And he is so engrossed by that sight that he doesn’t quite realise that Hana is making introductions. His wayward mother looks up, but it’s clear she doesn’t remember him. How could that be, when she was reunited with him only yesterday? How could he not be at the very forefront of her mind? His hand is stiff in his pocket while hers appears to float in mid-air as it moves to greet him. He is transfixed by that hand – its pearly nails, its silver moonstone ring, its weathered skin. Just in time, he recovers himself. He stretches out his fingers, and lets her shake them gently once, twice. Her hand is warm, and softer than it looks, but there is a burr to it, too – perhaps a callus at the root of a finger or a tiny plaster.
He is entirely unable to tell if this is how his mother’s hand should feel. Everything has stopped. His heart, the clock, the movements all around him. And then someone nudges him, and the world cranks up again and takes off without him.
‘This is Jess’s brother,’ Hana is saying. ‘Just staying for a few days.’
And when he realises that it is Hana who has spoiled the moment, he almost spins around and thumps her.
His mother’s face is blank. He wants to find excuses for her. It was late, after all, and everyone had been drinking. He tries to say that his name is Ro, but he is afraid that even the shortened version sounds infantile, and he can’t afford to be a little boy again. Instead, he uses the name his father’s family insisted upon, the name they used at school. Even then he was always told that using his father’s name made matters easier. It was simpler all round.
‘My name is William,’ he says, but it’s clear that means nothing at all to her, and so he adds, ‘I’m also known as Sparrow.’
There is no one else in the whole world called Sparrow. She can’t hear that name and not know who he is. And yet she doesn’t comment, her eyes don’t even flicker. She just smiles at him, then addresses Hana, as if he’s one of the toddlers, ‘Oh, but I met him at the party.’ And there’s a tiny bit of an accent in the way she says party, paa-teh.
‘And how do you like London?’ she asks, as if he’s a commoner and she’s the Queen. She doesn’t even look him in the eye, but gazes blankly at his forehead, or his hairline maybe. And she doesn’t wait for his reply either, not that he has one.
‘Well, I hope you have a good visit,’ she continues. Before she even finishes the sentence, she has moved to greet the child behind.
This is the moment when he should walk away. Travel somewhere far from here. He could go towards the sun. Somewhere they are looking for people to dole out aid or build things. Famine. Disaster. War. There is always somewhere, after all. There is no real need to stay around. He has survived twenty-five years without her, why prostrate himself before her now? Because an alternative scenario, playing out in one of those awkward corners of his brain, has him flinging himself at her feet and tugging at her skirt and begging her to … what? Begging her to what, exactly? Because it’s all too late for her to be a mother now. Acknowledge? Atone? Hana pulls him by the sleeve and he wants to push her away, and tell her just to let him have a moment to grieve. What? The end of dreams. What? The loss of hope. What? The cruelty of mothers.
They walk out the gate and stand at the zebra crossing until someone has the decency not to mow them down. He turns to look at Hana, breaker of spells and of homes. Her face is too small for the rest of her, he thinks. It is perfectly regular, but somehow meaner than it ought to be. She seems to be lost in thought, and even though Ruby is grizzling, stiffening her body in an effort to capture Hana’s attention, she doesn’t react. It’s extraordinary how certain she seems to be of the security of her position in Jess’s house, in that room of hers she rarely seems to occupy, while insisting to all and sundry that his is the temporary stay. He takes her up on that as soon as they leave the school grounds.
‘That’s what Jess told me,’ Hana says, perfectly matter-of-fact about it. ‘And she should know. I think she needs the room.’
‘For what? She has plenty of rooms. And even if she does, I could always sleep in the cellar.’
She screws up her nose at that. ‘Down there with Charlie’s precious wine? With the mice and the spiders?’
She has no idea the places he’s been. None.
And now that he’s been told his time is short, he feels like ru
nning back through the school gates and shaking his mother by the shoulders until the truth falls out.
He is scarcely aware of Hana now, he is thinking so hard about how to do this. The little boys in red are still trickling back and forth across the green, but the light has turned to acid. Leaving the Common, they pass a circular pillbox building. He’d almost forgotten about the deep shafts to the old air-raid tunnels. The building seems newly painted, and he wonders if they do tours now. Anything is possible. There must be some way in, some way down. But how terrible to spend any more time than necessary underground.
They say that everything works its way to the surface one day. Long-lost mementos uncovered by a plough working a grassed-over battlefield, Frechen pots or mammoth bones unearthed by Crossrail. She must want to be found out; she wouldn’t have come here otherwise. And he wants desperately to be the reason for her return. But Mags is in his ear again. Jess, Jess, Jess. And the likelihood that her return has nothing whatsoever to do with him lodges in his heart like grit.
Who knows how things might have turned out if she’d been half the mother she should have been? As for his father, he is just a ghost. There is scarcely any memory of him at all. Except now and then, a certain manly, oaky scent of sap and fibre. If that was his father, Ro can’t imagine that he could ever be that kind of man.
At the duck pond, they pass someone in a yellow singlet who is doing a funny walk. His arms are like windmills, his stride ridiculously wide.
‘Idiot,’ Hana says, loud enough for the man to hear, and laughs, and for a moment she looks as if she might be about to ram him with her buggy.
There is a malice about her that sets him on edge, and excites him too. He wonders what she values most, power or money? He wonders if he might make use of her. How far she can be trusted. He can feel her eyes on him, but he doesn’t turn to face her. He wonders what she’s going to say.
‘I heard all about the newspaper at the one o’clock club. That new au pair of Martha, she told me all about the missing mother, the beach, the woman who was hiding her passport. I think this is the kind of thing you should tell me, Ro, now that we are friends. This is the kind of thing I need to know. If the house where I am living is in a newspaper – it is something I should be told. You were cute little boy, Ro …’
If she keeps on going she will put her finger on it. And he isn’t ready for that.
‘ … And your mother was beautiful. But I hope Jess is better mother,’ she says. ‘That right, Rooby Roobs?’ and she bends to ruffle Ruby’s soft blonde hair. ‘We hope that Jess is good enough for Ruby, because we don’t think she is good enough to keep Papa.’
On Jess’s behalf he hates this girl. But there is no doubt that a girl with such balls might come in useful, down the line. To prepare the ground, he starts to tell Hana his story. What he tells her, though, is quite a different version from the one he usually tells, a very different one from the story he told Nefertiti just the other night. In this scenario, he is not an abandoned boy at all. He is a man with a mission. At the centre of the wrong that has been done to him, he places Eddie. Eddie who took them away to the Yellow House so that for two days the police in Goa didn’t even know where they’d gone. Eddie who knows more about what happened than he’s letting on. Eddie who is not what he seems, with his ponytail and his organic ice cream. Unlike Nef, Hana is non-committal, only half interested. But as he nails Eddie like this he feels a sense of satisfaction. This is not the paedo crap he fed to Nefertiti. It is something half remembered in his own past that is being honoured here. He is edging towards a kind of recollection that might lead to more. He turns to look at Hana and the little catlike moue of satisfaction on her lips, and he can’t help thinking that Hana is the kind of person who might very well end up in a black plastic bag at the bottom of a lake.
As they turn in off the gritty running track that skirts the back of the house, he sees her look around her as she presses in the code.
‘I guess you’ve got to be careful,’ he says. ‘You don’t want someone coming by and rushing you as you enter the garden.’
She looks at him, astonished. That possibility hasn’t even occurred to her, and even now that he has articulated it, she clearly finds the thought ridiculous. ‘Oh no,’ she says, ‘I just like to see their faces as they trudge the long way round. The look when they realise that people actually live here and can walk straight out onto the Common like it’s theirs.’
She smiles over her shoulder at him, and he wonders what could have possessed his sister to have employed someone without tattoos and pink hair but with so much spite in her.
10
Hana is sitting at the bottom of the stairs playing with Ruby when Jess gets home. Her eyes are edged with greater definition than usual, and she has painted her nails a strange shade of green. On my time, Jess thinks.
‘Date?’ She tries to keep the sarcasm out of her voice.
‘Kind of date.’ Hana glances at the door into the kitchen. ‘Ruby is Superbaby today. She has eaten up all her broccoli.’
Ruby clenches her hands up over her head like a tiny prizefighter and shows her perfect little bud teeth as she reaches out for Hana. In three deft movements, Hana kisses the child, untangles herself, and is gone. Jess tries to ignore the hand outstretched in the direction of Hana’s departing figure, the turned-down mouth. But as soon as the heavy front door slams shut, Ruby begins to cry.
She is taken aback to find Charlie in the kitchen, and then she is deflated. Charlie looks a little sheepish in return to have been caught playing house. He is wearing a butcher’s apron she hasn’t seen since the period early on in their marriage when he specialised in curries with extensive lists of arcane ingredients that he would leave strewn across the countertop in a dozen unwashed bowls. Today, he has a stack of clean plates in his hands, and appears to have emptied the dishwasher. She adds this to the growing list of hints and clues that she will have to force herself to face. But not now. Later, sometime soon, when she can bring herself to confront this.
‘Where’s Ro?’ she says.
‘Out having a smoke. That’s why I’m here, in fact. My meeting in the West End was cancelled, so I decided to show up unexpectedly, see what he gets up to. I don’t want him feeling too settled. The last thing we want is him turning into a permanent fixture.’
‘Relax. He’s only just got here.’
‘I was only in the door when he and Hana arrived back with Ruby. Poor mite was starving, so I made her a bowl of pasta. She’s just sitting in her high chair, happy as Larry, when he comes and sits down opposite her. And then the little bastard starts to mimic her. Even poor Roobs seemed to realise there was something odd about it. But, you know, good girl and all that. So, she laughs along with him anyway, though she’s puzzled, you can tell, and cautious. He pushes it then. You know? Push, push, push, the way he does. Takes the bowl up to his face and starts snorting into it like a pig. He keeps on and on and on at her, way past the stage when that feels funny or even normal. And next thing, she’s bawling her eyes out. Because even though she’s just a kid, she can sense, you know, that he’s being bloody weird.’
The word puts her hackles up. ‘Oh come on. I’m sure he didn’t mean to make her cry. At least he’s joining in. He’s just trying to play with her. I think it’s quite sweet, really.’
‘I don’t find him sweet,’ says Charlie. ‘I just find him weird. And I don’t want him hanging round Ruby.’
‘He’s her uncle. The only one she’s got.’
Charlie’s face looks grim. She is sure that when they first met he was set differently, more loosely. She doesn’t know where the clip and clamp of him came from. She has no idea how he got to be like this, and how she failed to notice it happening.
‘For Christ’s sake, Jess. This isn’t helping him. You know that. He’s got to learn to make a life for himself. He can’t just come and piggyback on us. He has an allowance, after all. Let him find a flat. He’s not destitute, is he? Well, is he?
’
She doesn’t know. He might be, she supposes. He might have spent it all, be in hock to someone. In fact, it’s quite possible that he owes someone money, somewhere along the line. It’s happened before.
‘In fact, he bloody has a flat. Didn’t he buy a studio in Balham when he got his lump sum from the trust? What’s happened to that? Is it rented out? Jesus, Jess. How long is he going to be here? I mean, what’s he planning on doing?’
‘For God’s sake, keep your voice down. Try and be a tiny bit sympathetic.’
When Charlie goes upstairs, she looks for Ro in the garden. The evening has turned cool, and the wind has caught the high leaves of the chestnuts on the other side of the gate.
She finds Ro leaning against the blue wall, and goes to stand next to him. It feels companionable, and they remain there for a while, side by side like in the old days, until Sparrow is the first to move away. She broaches the subject casually.
‘Have you thought about what you want to do, Ro? A course maybe? You could take the bus to Wandsworth and see what they’re offering. A guy I used to know, he—’
He levels his eyes at her, and she is reminded how very pale they are. Paler than hers. Paler than almost any eyes she’s ever seen. Swedish eyes. Maya drifts across Jess’s mind until she blinks her away. She wonders where those eyes came from. What dalliance with the invader. She wonders what else has come in with the blood.
‘You could think about woodwork, maybe. Remember that thing you made? The little house?’
The Orphans Page 13
