The Orphans

by Annemarie Neary

  ‘It was a kennel.’

  ‘Oh yes, of course it was.’

  ‘For Puzzle.’

  Puzzle was Auntie Rae’s dog, a wild little mongrel. She remembers Ro struggling home from school one holiday, a thick green bin bag over his shoulder. He spent the entire weekend assembling the sections he’d cut in woodwork class, then painting the little kennel in carefully applied stripes from dregs of old paint he found in the shed. He’s probably never had a dog of his own. He can’t have done, with all that travelling. Maybe she should get a puppy, with the Common just outside. Ruby would love that. But Ro has turned away now, and she can’t tell if she’s insulted him or if it’s just the wrong suggestion.

  ‘Or a cocktail course, maybe? In case you wanted to take up—’

  ‘It’s not the right time,’ he says.

  ‘I’m pretty sure they do summer courses, too,’ she says, but he keeps on moving.

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘If it’s about the passport—’

  He stops then, and turns around.

  ‘It’s not about the passport. It’s about my mother.’

  ‘Ah,’ she says.

  ‘I mean, it’s obvious now. With her living around the corner.’

  ‘What are you talking about? Who are you talking about, even?’ And then she gets it. ‘Not Maya, I hope … Oh, you are kidding me. I thought that was just a passing whim.’ And though she is showing him frustration and disbelief, not worry or fear, she is much more fearful than she’s letting on.

  ‘It’s her, isn’t it?’

  ‘Of course it isn’t her.’ She won’t get anywhere with him while he’s in this mood, so she changes tack.

  ‘What happened to the flat on Stinton Street? It was Stinton Street, wasn’t it? You had it with some agency, didn’t you?’

  He mutters something about people kipping there. She doesn’t ask him why he doesn’t kip there too because that would be unkind and she doesn’t want to be unkind to Ro. She knows that she’s the lucky one. Despite Charlie and his secrets, whatever might happen on the Sixth Floor, she is still the lucky one.

  ‘But you’ll want the flat yourself, Ro, won’t you? If you’re planning to settle back in London.’

  He looks sheepish, then defiant. ‘I got rid of it.’

  ‘You sold the flat?’

  ‘How else do you think I manage to live like this? Keep on top of things, follow sightings halfway round the world?’

  She is teetering on the brink of saying something she regrets. ‘Look, Ro, I’ve had a really shit day at work. I’m just going to go upstairs for a while. OK?’

  In their bedroom, Charlie is propped up on a pillow and scrolling down his iPad.

  ‘Did you tell him his days are numbered?’

  When she doesn’t answer, he looks up, then throws the iPad to one side. ‘Oh Jessie, you’ve got to tell him he can’t stay. You’ve got way too much on your plate. One toddler already, you don’t need another one. As for work—’

  ‘That’s another thing we need to talk about. I’m in the doghouse, Charlie. I mean, in the shit, really. I had to leave early because Han— oh, it doesn’t matter why. A meeting, a client. It wasn’t good. And now it’s disciplinary procedures, all that.’

  ‘Is that Miles Rennie again?’ he asks. ‘Anyone would think he had it in for you. Prick.’

  She should have told him. But it is too late to bring it up now, the garden full of fragrance, her terrible disabling fear.

  ‘I think they need me, though. That’s the thing. I don’t know how they’d manage if they lost me.’

  ‘He’s a bastard, Jess. I’d watch him. Doesn’t fancy you, does he? Because it sounds like he’s getting off on putting you down.’

  That takes her aback, and for the first time she wonders what Charlie is like at work, how he is to women. She’s never considered that before, and she’d rather not go there. Instead, she adopts a lighter tone, as if none of this matters, as if her job is a frippery she can afford to cast away.

  ‘Oh, you know what it’s like. If the client complains, well—’

  ‘I’m sure you’re overreacting.’ He pats her leg. ‘You don’t make mistakes.’

  His eyes have shifted back to the iPad and she can tell he’s trying to find the right moment to get back to it without being rude.

  She reaches over his knees and hands it to him. ‘Here. Check your emails.’

  He has the grace to look embarrassed. ‘Have you eaten, by the way? There’s some of that pasta bake Hana makes. I left it in the oven.’

  But she doesn’t feel like eating, and certainly not Hana’s pasta bake. She glances at the clock radio. It’s not even nine yet. ‘It’s OK. Thanks, though.’

  He stretches out his hand and takes hers, but his eyes are still on the screen. ‘New York’s going ahead. God knows how long that will take.’

  She is reckoning on as much as a fortnight – two weeks away from Hana – and feels a little twinge of satisfaction. ‘We’ll manage,’ she says. ‘Ro might even be a help.’

  ‘Dream on.’ Charlie is tapping out something on the iPad. He pauses and looks up at her. ‘I’m going to have to take the red-eye tomorrow. You’ll be OK, yeah? Just get Hana to do overtime whenever you need her.’

  ‘I’m not sure Hana’s that keen on overtime.’

  ‘I’ll have a word.’

  ‘You’ll have a word?’

  He doesn’t catch her tone, or if he does he chooses to ignore it. ‘Sure. I’ll tell her we’d appreciate it if she could be extra flexible while I’m away. Anyway,’ he says, ‘the one you really need to sort out is your brother.’

  She ignores that remark. They both work on their laptops for a while and later, when it’s time to sleep, he kisses her chastely on the cheek, then moves as far away from her as possible into the vast white tundra of their bed. In the silence and the dark, she realises she is jealous of his trip. Before she had Ruby, travelling was something she did too, zipping herself into other lives, seeing places she’d never have thought of visiting were it not for work.

  On her last trip to Algiers before Ruby was born, the afternoon meetings cancelled, she decided to leave the artificial sphere of the hotel, with its orange trees and carefully whitewashed walls. She walked up the avenue lined with clumps of oleander and just as she reached the gate one of the staff, uniformed in Arabian Nights garb teamed with an unlikely purple fez, stepped in front of her and asked if she was leaving. He mentioned that most guests took a driver who could bring them to all places of interest within the city.

  ‘No,’ she’d said. ‘I’m fine. I can walk.’

  The road deteriorated quickly and soon her unsuitable business shoes were kicked over with a reddish dust. Down below, the city spread out like an intricately stacked puzzle of whitish squares and oblongs interrupted now and then by a narrow tubular minaret. The bay was generous and blue and she knew there would be a corniche along it. There was always a corniche. There would be men standing aimlessly here and there in clumps, or playing backgammon at bars that weren’t actually bars at all but cafés selling small cups of strong, gritty coffee. She imagined there would be a pastry shop, some French patisserie where she could buy a gift to bring back to the office. Tiny fruits made of marzipan, buttery little biscuits.

  As she walked further from the hotel, she realised that she wasn’t used to being shut out from the sense of a place. She had no idea what the signs said, for instance, no idea where she was going other than that she was heading towards the sea. But it was really only when the streets grew narrower that she began to realise it wasn’t the custom here for people to wander about on their own, by which she meant women, of course.

  She was out of place and vulnerable. She started to think about her mother, and to allow herself to skirt the worst fears that had plagued her once. By the time she heard the car pull up next to her and realised that this wasn’t someone come to lock her in a cave but one of the costumed flunkeys from the
hotel, she was pathetically grateful. On the way back, his eyes glanced up now and then at the rear-view mirror. He didn’t say anything until the gates swung slowly open.

  ‘What if you had been taken?’ he asked. ‘What if you had disappeared out of sight?’

  He couldn’t have known, of course, and the poor man was horrified to have caused her such distress. She found herself weeping uncontrollably, submerged by an image she had spent much of her childhood attempting to shift – her mother in a basement somewhere, chained to a wall, and men who came now and then and did things to her that she didn’t understand other than that they were terrifying and unspeakable.

  It had been humiliating to become so terrified by a walk into town, to have fear lie so close to her skin. She was not the kind of orphan Sparrow was. She wasn’t freed up by it like a boy with a raft on the Mississippi or a book of spells or a cape. She was made diligent by it, cautious. She had been turned into a locker of doors.

  As she lies there, with Charlie just out of reach, her mind helicopters between the back gate and the Sixth Floor and Ro’s obsessions. She thinks about Miles Rennie and how he has a mission now. It’s intolerable just to lie there doing nothing about any of these things, and so she forces herself out of bed and up the stairs into the attic room where her desk is.

  As soon as she is up, she realises that there is nothing that can be done. All she can do is displace her worries for a while. She sits in front of the blue screen of her laptop, and it soothes her, that screen. It presents her with options, pleasant situations in which to place her little family, new versions of herself brought to possibility by a random purchase. Tonight, it is a picnic rug, some place in Scotland that weaves in limes and heathers and soft pinks, new colours in the old tartans. She clicks, and is calm. But unease follows her back down the stairs and she is still awake, flat on her back in the dark, an hour later and an hour after that.

  Someday, she wonders, will she look at that rug laid out on the crisp summer grass of the Common or flung over the arm of the sofa, and remember this night? Will she remember today as a day on which she bought a lime and pink rug, or as the day she crushed a rose in her fist?

  Ro is up just after dawn. He passes silently through the house, then out the door into the greyish light. As he reaches the Common, a small, bent man in overlong trousers is picking out his path as if selecting things to spear with his stick. Overtaking him, Ro has the sense that he is seeing his ancient solitary self.

  They are renovating the bandstand. Overnight, a sign has gone up. Lottery funding. Friends of the Common. Two rows of crash barriers surround it, and there are sheets of thick plastic draped over the structure itself to keep the rain off the ridged, jelly-mould dome. Already, someone has taken a pneumatic drill to the concrete paving.

  He strides on past the shuttered café across the flat expanse of green towards the school. He wants to get there long before the teachers arrive, to find the best vantage point on the forecourt, the narrow in/out drive. There is a bench opposite the school and that’s where he waits.

  Slung over the railing that separates the Common from the busy road, he notices a workman’s abandoned high-vis gilet. He tries it on and immediately he belongs. He remembers then about the camouflage there is in being obvious. If only he had a prop with him – an attribute for this new persona he has adopted, for Sparrow Considine, road sweeper. One of those grippers, perhaps, for picking up litter. But the nod he gets from a man with a backpack, the smile from a woman with a pram, makes him realise the gilet alone is enough to transform him from a loner loitering outside a school to a man who’s paid to be there.

  Bolder now, he breaks both his rules on visibility. He stands stock-still in the middle of the pavement and waits. He almost misses his mother in her small, silver woman’s car with its comical sad face. When she slows down for the entrance, however, he spots her long blondish-greyish plait, the soft sweep of her face. She has pulled out from the side road onto the main drag, her hand flapping out the window to show that she’s about to pull in. There is a bracelet on her wrist. And he thinks he might remember a bracelet – a cool slide against his skin.

  Now that he knows the reg of her car, and where she parks it, he can keep tabs on her. And keeping tabs is the start of action. The thought of action makes him light-headed, delirious. Soon, his spirit is rising high above that boy of a man in his high-vis jacket, way above the level of the roofs and even the oldest chestnuts. From up here, the little world down there is child’s play – the white-fronted school with its Smartie-box columns and its red and white toy minibuses, the bandstand with the high-vis ants – it all seems manageable for once. Up here, he is Superman and Batman and any number of orphans turned superhero. He is both avatar and player; as he soars above the 4X4s, and the Waitrose lorries and the number 35 and 37 buses, he can see the future begin to play itself out.

  He can discern the matrix of streets he knows by heart from summers spent patrolling on a bicycle, practising his navigational skills for all the journeys he would one day make – Renoir, Sisley, Stuckfield, Renishaw, Stubbs. He can see the football pitches and the skate park and the café. And, over on the very edge of the Common, something he’d forgotten about – the old half-derelict changing rooms. Boarded up now, what, twenty years? And, like the superhuman it’s become, his avatar swoops down again to join his high-vis self.

  It takes Ro about ten minutes on foot to reach the place, past rectangles burned into the grass by disposable barbeques, through a double row of trees whose arms are stretched in supplication to the dusty sky. The building itself is surrounded by a fence made of fragile larchlap strips, degraded by weather and lack of maintenance. At the far corner, three or four of the boards have fallen away to leave a hole just big enough to let him through, should he dare. Next to the fence is an antiquated contraption equipped with rotating brushes for cleaning boots. He stands there a moment, gazing at the stubborn, yellow head of a dandelion while he decides what to do.

  A girl comes jogging past. She stops just next to him to take a call, and he can hear her talking macarons, and how come the pistachio ones are such a weird shade of green. She sees him standing there and, though he doesn’t think he looks as if he’s listening, she turns away. He decides then that if he doesn’t make himself part of the scenery, she will remember him. He can’t afford to be remembered and so he gets up on the contraption, which looks like something you might find in the Torture Museum, and scrubs his trainers back and forward on the brushes. She nods at him before jogging off, as if she’s mistaken him for a member of her club. The club of healthy participators. He stays there, scrubbing away, until the girl is out of sight.

  When he takes a closer look, he realises there is work to do. He would have to create a proper entrance; you couldn’t ask a woman of her age to squeeze herself through a gap in the fence. And she would be afraid of things. Of rats and spiders. Of hobos hiding out in the undergrowth. Of people pressing flesh under the chestnuts. She might even be afraid of him, at least at first. He would need to kit it out, make it into a reassuring, homely place.

  The building might be a derelict changing block, but whoever designed it made it look like a red-brick cottage, borderline gingerbread, its central door flanked by four-paned windows that might be made of barley sugar. Were it not for the absence of a chimney, a curved path up to a shiny front door, this could almost be the house that all kids draw, that perfect haven. But it is not that house; the brick is stained and there are flourishes of graffiti around the windows, with love hearts and WOZ HEREs scratched into the brick. There are certainly no roses around the door. The roof looks like it is made of corrugated metal beneath a battened-down tarp. He pulls back the loose slats in the fencing and squeezes himself through. On the other side, a patch of long grass and dandelions surrounds the building, the cottage that is.

  There are two entrances – that central door and another one to the side. The main door is secured by a stainless-steel bolt, too large a
nd brutal-looking for the task. Although perhaps such things are necessary, since someone has plainly tried to wrench it off. On the side entrance there is just an old-style lock. When he puts his shoulder to it, the wood comes away in sodden lumps of splintered pulp until the whole door gives. And it’s as easy as that to find a place to put his mother.

  Once inside, he thinks spores, asbestos, poisoned air. Little light penetrates, although the grimy windows have not been boarded up, but are covered in a thick plastic film, yellowish, with a criss-cross pattern, as if the cottage was only shut up temporarily and then forgotten about. The single room is lined with pegs and benches, the main source of light a gaping hole in one flank of the building where a wooden hatch cut into the brick has rotted away and fallen into the weedy grass.

  He can just about make out something in the middle of the floor. At first, he thinks it might be a dead rat, but it turns out to be an ancient football boot. Further in, there is a jumble of empty cans – Red Stripe, Stella – and bottles of Lidl whisky. Outside the wooden hatch, there are the remains of a fire, or perhaps of many fires, corralled inside a circle of rubble and brick. For obvious reasons, he won’t build a fire, but he will need to find some way of generating heat, light, food. He will need to make the place safe and warm. Warmth will be important.

  He senses something move behind him, a kind of shifting sound, but he turns and there is nothing there, or nothing visible, at least. He feels a whisper at his neck, the shallow wheeze of Mags, come to pour poison in his ear. He turns his back on her, light-headed with the sense that he is standing on the threshold between how things are and how they might turn out to be. This is no changing room. Despite the lack of roses, this is a cottage. His cottage, not Mags’s. Theirs. Leaving it, his mind is so full of images that it’s like leaving a cinema in the middle of the day.

  He powers across the Common without any thought as to where he’s going until the world rematerialises around him and he finds himself on a road that heaves ahead of him with its own sense of destination – surging down into a valley, then sweeping up into a matching hill on the other side. From where he is standing, there is no way of seeing to the end of that road, no way of discerning what might lie beyond its sink and swell. And the fear of never knowing seizes him again. Unless he acts, he might never know what happened on that beach.