Summer Lies Bleeding

by Nuala Casey

  Now looking at her eating her porridge, a fine girl of six, he thinks how precarious every little stage is. Though he is less afraid of her choking now, there are new concerns, new dangers to look out for – talking to strangers being the biggest one as Cosima is such a chatty, outgoing child, trusting and open. And as she grows up there will be other dangers, ones that he won’t be able to protect her from …

  ‘Can we switch over to the cartoons?’ Cosima’s voice interrupts his thoughts. She is pointing her spoon at the small, flat-screen television that stands on the kitchen worktop, wedged between various open cookery books and a thick wooden chopping board. The bright red graphics of BBC Breakfast flash across the screen accompanied by sharp, tinny music. The cartoons would be a welcome respite from this, thinks Seb.

  ‘All right,’ says Seb, picking up the remote control. ‘But just a couple, okay? We’ll have to be getting ready in a bit.’

  ‘Thanks, Daddy,’ says Cosima, flashing her widest, gappy smile. She is starting to wake up now and her eyes dance as she follows the movement of the little cartoon mouse in a tutu and ballet slippers as it pirouettes across the screen.

  Seb finishes his porridge and drains his cup of coffee then takes the dishes over to the sink. He picks up his iPad from the worktop and scrolls through his online calendar. Each day is filled with appointments, lunches, dinners, meetings, reminders and work schedules and today, 28 August, is no different. He glances down the page:

  10 a.m.: Drop Cosima at Gracie’s – Wandsworth Common

  11 a.m.: Meeting Vita from Royal Opera House re: poss commission @Asphodel

  1 p.m.: Lunch with Henry at Chelsea Arts Club

  3–5 p.m.: Painting

  5:30 p.m.: Collect Cosima

  And there it is; almost every minute of the day accounted for, every spare moment filled. But it has to be this way, otherwise all would descend into chaos. He and Yasmine sit together every Sunday morning and compare their diaries, making sure there are no overlapping appointments. They made a decision early on that as far as possible, one of them should be with Cosima, and if that couldn’t happen then Maggie would step in. Nannies and childminders were completely out of the question and anyway, Seb’s hours are a lot more flexible than Yasmine’s and he was happy to take on the primary carer role. Yet they still have difficult times. The restaurant launch has meant that Yasmine is often in Soho from early morning until last thing at night, and Seb has only just finished a big project for the Cultural Olympiad creating eight giant portraits of real Londoners that have been displayed around the city. From January to June, he was pretty much locked away in his studio at the back of the gallery, emerging late at night to eat a hurried dinner before falling into bed and waking up to do it all over again. That period was tough, he missed Cosima terribly, but thank goodness for Maggie stepping in as always, making everything okay.

  But it will all be worth it, he tells himself as he closes the calendar. He and Yasmine are laying the foundations not just of their own future but Cosima’s too, and there aren’t many people who can say that they earn a living, a good living from doing the thing they love. The late nights and long hours are a small price to pay for the happiness Seb feels he is creating for his family.

  ‘Come on then, tatty head,’ he says, as the closing credits of Angelina Ballerina flicker across the screen. ‘Time to get ready.’

  ‘Oh, Daddy,’ moans Cosima.

  Seb is opening the blinds at the window. The sky is bright and clear and a hazy sun is filtering through the trees in the park. There are people walking their dogs, others are jogging, some are doing both.

  ‘Right,’ he says, clapping his hands as he turns from the window and looks at his daughter who is sitting at the table stirring the remnants of her porridge sulkily. ‘I’m going to time you and if you’re ready in ten minutes we can have take-away pizza tonight. Just don’t tell Mum, okay?’

  She looks up at him and raises her eyebrows. ‘Ham and pineapple?’

  ‘Ham and pineapple,’ he agrees. ‘And a tub of Cherry Choc ice-cream if you’re ready in five.’

  She jumps up from the table and disappears down the corridor, leaving Seb standing at the window. An old, lumpy dog stops outside, cocks his leg and pisses against the lamppost. ‘Oh, yes,’ thinks Seb. ‘Another day in London town.’

  *

  Even before Kerstin opens the door she knows that something is wrong. She felt it as she crossed Green Park and stepped onto St James’s Street just a few minutes ago; a strange sensation of change, of time altering, the silent inhalation of breath the world takes before one age gives way to another. It stays with her as she slowly climbs the stairs, as she steps onto the third floor landing and carefully types the numbers 6043 into the white plastic security panel.

  It is such a strong feeling, that when she eventually opens the door and steps into the reception area of Sircher Capital it is like she already knows, has had a prior warning that things are not the same.

  A rather cross-looking young woman, pale, with a doughy face and thin, bobbed, auburn hair, is sitting behind the reception desk, occupying the place that, yesterday, belonged to someone else. Like the art that mysteriously appears on the walls, someone had smuggled this girl into the office overnight, or so it seems to Kerstin. She hadn’t particularly liked Susie, the last receptionist, had in fact found her loud and brash, an annoying presence, but a familiar one; part of the landscape of the office, like a desk or chair. The girl sitting here unnerves Kerstin with her newness, her strangeness, her out-of-place-ness. If she had known yesterday that there would be a new receptionist she could have prepared herself for the change. Doesn’t Lindsay, the office manager, think it important to tell when the personnel changes or does everything have to be thrust on them, like the ever-changing artwork and Cal’s choice of lunch, to keep them on their toes.

  ‘Good morning,’ says the receptionist, a thin, blank smile flickering across her impenetrable face, and Kerstin feels something die inside as she smiles politely and turns left into the office.

  There is something unreal about the receptionist, about all the receptionists that come and go in this place; before Susie there was Christine, a bespectacled blonde from Northern Ireland; before her there was a black American girl called Hilary and before her someone else and someone else and someone else, a long line of them spreading back in time like holograms, fluid half-people, they seem like to Kerstin, propping up the beams of London without being seen, bit-players coming on and saying their lines – like this one’s ‘Good morning’ – before disappearing into the shadows.

  The issue of the receptionist bothers Kerstin as she sits down at her desk and turns on her computer; it bothers her as she opens up the unfinished report which now stands at twelve-and-a-half pages and tries to ignore Cal’s loud post-mortem of his dinner last night. She tries to focus as she scrolls through her emails but it feels like her brain is stuck.

  Familiar names flash in front of her as she mentally notes which need immediate attention, which can wait and which are pointless, and then she sees a name that she doesn’t recognise: Honey Vision PR. Probably spam but she clicks on it anyway. The screen fills with black and then an outline of a tree emerges, followed by white fairy lights, spindly tables and chairs – a line drawing developing in front of her eyes like a photograph in a darkroom. Then the music starts, soft Moroccan voices and a hypnotic guitar, strumming the same vibrato note slow at first then faster and faster, the voices rising to a crescendo as the screen fills with rose petals falling down from the darkened ‘sky’ of the picture. As they settle they merge and form a set of words in pinks and reds and deep orange: Launch Party. The words then dissolve and the petals scatter and form a set of numbers: 29.08.12. The music grows louder and louder as the petals explode into the sky like fireworks then sprinkle across the screen as though tiny fireflies, dancing and twisting, jumbling and untangling themselves until, again, they reassemble and form a set of letters. The voices stop and
the guitar strums one solitary note over and over while the words the petals have spelled grow bigger and bigger until they fill the screen, obliterating the tables and chairs and fairy lights. Kerstin feels like she has been hypnotised as she reads the name: THE ROSE GARDEN, then watches as it slowly fades and the screen grows dark.

  ‘I see you got your invitation. It’s cool isn’t it?’ Cal’s voice snaps her out of the spell and she quickly closes the email.

  ‘Yes, it’s nice,’ she says.

  ‘Will you be going?’ asks Cal, leaning back in his chair.

  Kerstin shrugs, hoping that by not engaging Cal he will take the hint and leave her be.

  ‘I bet you won’t,’ he says, rapping his fingers on the desk. ‘You never come out; I mean I’ve worked here two years and not once have I seen you outside this office. We’d all love it if you came to at least one office night out.’

  There is nothing Kerstin would like less, she thinks, but his use of the plural unsettles her. So they all talk about her when she is not there? When they are on their ‘office nights out’, they huddle together and pick her apart; probably egged on by Sharon Porter, the horse-faced PA to Dominic Stratton who has been watching her like a hawk for the past few months. Should she be worried?

  Suddenly Cal leans over her desk and clicks the computer mouse.

  ‘What are you doing?’ She is horrified that he has touched her computer and she tries to rack her brain as to how many sets of counting she will have to complete to remove the taint of his sweaty hands from the mouse.

  Cal grins at her as he walks across to the printer on the far side of the room.

  She stares at the mouse in disbelief; how can she work today? How can she even begin to touch it now he has had his hands all over it?

  ‘Here you go.’

  She looks up and sees him holding out the printed invitation. She will not take it; all at once her whole world has become as filthy as a cess-pit; her carefully controlled workspace has been violated in the most horrendous way.

  ‘Here you go,’ he repeats, leaning across the desk and placing the invitation on top of her in-tray. Now you’ve no excuse not to come.’

  ‘Let’s see how we get on with these reports,’ she replies, brusquely. ‘Or we won’t be going anywhere.’

  Cal shakes his head playfully, then sits up and returns to his computer screen.

  Kerstin slides her hand into her pocket and pulls out a packet of anti-bacterial wipes. Sliding one quietly out of the pack she rubs it across the mouse and counts to twenty and back. Satisfied that there is no trace of Cal left, she scrunches the wipe into a ball and tosses it into the waste-paper basket. Then, her heart pounding with anxiety, she clicks open a new document and begins to prepare a brief for Cal on the next report. But her head is full of Moroccan music as she types, the deep male voices and mosquito strumming of the guitar form a soundtrack to her fingers as they punch the numbers and letters on the keyboard, then settle onto the screen like a thousand petals forming and reforming until they make sense. She is so engrossed, so inside the music whirring about her head that when the phone rings, she thinks at first that it is part of the beat, a syncopated buzz, playing alongside the scratchy sounds in her head. Only when Cal nudges her and gestures to his ears does she notice the green lit screen of her mobile phone, another set of words appearing then disappearing like a dying light: Mutter.

  She stops typing and picks up the phone, suddenly aware of where she is and of Cal’s presence just centimetres away. She clicks the green square on the screen and hears her mother’s agitated voice, telling her that her father has collapsed.

  A thick fog fills the air, opaque and smoky like the room is on fire, as Kerstin listens to her mother telling her about the heart attack that struck as Kerstin’s father was leaving the house yesterday morning, how a neighbour found him on the driveway spread out like a starfish and called an ambulance that took thirty minutes to arrive as it was delayed by a learner driver crashing into the back of it. And all that time he lay there, her father, her brilliant father, the man they called the human computer so precise and advanced was his brain, the brain that had spent thirty years engaged in theoretical physics, in Complexity Theory and chain reactions, in finding pre-determined patterns and sequences, finding answers to questions that other people did not know existed and trying to establish order from chaos; the brain that slowly shut down through lack of oxygen as he, Felix Morgen Bsc/Msc/PhD/Emerit, lay sprawled on his driveway like a great, ungainly beached sea-creature.

  There is too much for Kerstin to take in all at once. She needs to put the phone down, to silence her mother’s stream of information, to let her own thoughts in.

  ‘I will call you back in a moment, Mama,’ she whispers, but as she goes to hang up she hears those words, dreaded words weighted with agony and impossibility.

  ‘You must come, Kerstin. Jump on a plane and come now, before it is too late. You must come.’

  She presses ‘end call’ and sits motionless. No tears come to her eyes, no compulsion to tell any of her colleagues what has just happened. Instead, she types out a hurried email to Karen, informing her of an urgent dental appointment. Then she switches off her computer, picks up her coat and bag and heads out of the door. Now she must focus, she must do the thing that will keep all of the bad things at bay; as she reaches the top of the stairs she begins to count.

  11

  It is hunger that eventually drives Mark out of the bedroom; a ravenous, gnawing hunger in the pit of his stomach. He had planned to have breakfast in some quiet café nearby, a big plate of bacon and eggs and a mug of strong tea to set him up for his day of reconnaissance. He was going to slip out of the room quietly, like a shadow, avoiding the huddles of backpackers in the refectory and grinning Stewart perched behind the reception desk ready to pounce. But this hunger is so powerful, he needs something instant to stem it. He rummages in his rucksack to see if there’s a bag of crisps or some sweets he can eat to stave it but there’s nothing but a packet of chewing gum.

  He remembers the vending machines out on the corridor, the ones he passed last night. The hunger is making him light-headed, he hasn’t got the strength to even think about taking a shower and getting dressed. He is still wearing the T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms he slept in last night. The day has not started as he had planned at all. He had set the alarm on his phone for 6 a.m. but then slept through it. If he’d got up then he could have gone across the corridor to the shower room without any fuss, without being hassled. Now, at nine forty-five, the hostel is alive, he can hear their voices outside, their high-pitched laughter, their heavy footsteps and the twang of someone attempting to play a guitar.

  He looks in the mirror. His eyes look tired, heavy from over-sleep and a dark line of stubble has spread across his jaw. But as much as he would love to stay in this room, to crawl back into bed and sleep, hide away in this tiny cell, away from it all, he knows that he is here for a reason; he has to get on.

  Taking his wallet from his bag, he picks up the plastic key-card and opens the door a fraction. He looks up and down the corridor; the noisy group that passed a moment ago have gone. He slips out, closes the door behind him and speed-walks down the corridor towards the vending machine.

  The landing area is empty. Thank God, thinks Mark. He looks at the machine; everything seems to be £2 or more. Two pounds for a fucking Mars Bar, he mutters as he roots around in his wallet for some change. He counts out a pile of ten and five pences but they only come to £1.25. Sod it, he thinks as he unzips the inner compartment of his wallet but there are only ten- and twenty-pound notes in there and the machine clearly states in large black letters that notes are not accepted.

  Mark suddenly fills dizzy with hunger and frustration and he slams his fist at the machine.

  ‘You okay there?’

  A female voice behind him; a low husky voice, American? Mark closes his eyes and sighs. Just what he doesn’t need. All he wanted was a lousy bar of chocolate
and now someone is here, and she will ask questions and offer to help when all he wants is to get the hell out.

  He turns from the machine and sees a slight young woman sitting on the red sofa. Her hair is short and messy, a strange, dirty-blonde colour. She reminds him of the little stray Tabby cat his mother adopted when he was a kid. She has the same wide-eyed, slightly dazed expression, the same gaunt little body. She is sitting with her legs pulled up towards her chest and Mark can see the white lace of her knickers peeking out from her denim shorts.

  ‘I’m fine,’ he mutters. ‘Er, don’t suppose you can change a tenner?’ He holds the note limply in his hand.

  The girl stands up and starts to rummage in her pockets, pulling out sweet wrappers, travel cards, notes and a handful of coins.

  She counts out the coins in her hand, lightly brushing her tongue along her bottom lip as she concentrates on the counting. ‘Yep, I got a five-pound note and five pound coins,’ she says, holding the handful of money towards Mark.

  Mark nods his head and curls the corner of his mouth into what should be a smile but which comes out as more of a sneer. ‘Cheers,’ he says, as he takes the money and hands the girl the ten-pound note.