Genie

by Kitty French

  A tap on the locked glass doors made her frown and look up. Wasn’t it obvious that the place was closed? Was the scaffolding not enough of a sign that things were deeply amiss in here? Genie was flouting every safety rule in the book by being here herself, yet she was drawn back day after day, to keep the old girl company, holding a bedside vigil for a beloved.

  Outside, a girl was huddled against the glass, her hair as dark as the goth circles drawn around her eyes. Genie sighed, knowing she was going to have to go and be polite because she’d now made the mistake of making eye contact.

  Unlocking the door, she pushed it open.

  ‘We’re not looking for dancers I’m afraid,’ she said, barely looking at the girl. ‘We’re closed.’

  The girl dragged her thin jacket around her skinny body. ‘I’m not a dancer,’ she mumbled, thrusting a scrap of paper at Genie, leaving her no choice but to take it. ‘I’m looking for him.’

  Unfolding the paper, Genie looked down, reading the rounded, childish handwriting slowly.

  Abel Kingdom. Theatre Divine.

  She folded the paper back up with a terse shake of her head.

  ‘He isn’t here.’

  A hesitant flicker of uncertainty passed through the girl’s heavily kohled eyes. ‘So when’s he coming back?’

  Genie half laughed, half sighed, wrapping her arms around her torso. ‘He isn’t.’

  The girl’s eyebrows knitted together. ‘Never?’

  It was as if she were speaking the word Genie hadn’t dared to. She shook her head, her eyes looking past the slight frame of the stranger and back over the weeks when she’d had him here and missed every chance she’d had to create anything other than conflict.

  ‘I don’t think he is, no.’

  The girl’s shoulders slumped. ‘Do you know where he’s gone?’

  ‘Home.’ Genie said. ‘He’s gone back to Australia.’

  ‘No!’ the girl exclaimed, unguarded and alarmed, and her tone of voice finally pulled Genie from her self-indulgent state. Looking at her visitor properly for the first time, Genie realised her mistake. Despite the heavy make-up, this girl couldn’t be more than sixteen years old. Younger, possibly. As Genie watched her carefully she pulled herself together, shoving her chin in the air with an air of shabby defiance.

  ‘Right,’ she said, snatching the folded paper back from Genie’s fingers and shoving it into the pocket of her sprayed on jeans. ‘Figures.’ She hesitated for a moment as if she was going to say something further, then turned and walked back down the steps.

  Genie watched her slender body move away, and on impulse followed her and placed a hand on her shoulder. Many years ago she herself had been abandoned on these steps. She wouldn’t turn her back on someone else in trouble now.

  ‘Who are you?’

  The girl turned back and shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’ She stared for a second and then turned away again. Genie was faster this time, stepping around her onto the pavement.

  ‘I’m sorry I was sharp,’ she said. ‘Please. If you’re looking for Abel I can probably help you.’ She didn’t miss the badly disguised flare of hope in the girl’s brown eyes. ‘Come back inside. We can talk easier in there.’

  ‘Shit,’ the girl said, wide-eyed, as she looked at the state of the place. Genie gestured for her to take a seat in the back row of the stalls. ‘It looks like someone dropped a bomb on the stage.’

  It was as apt a description as any. Genie certainly felt as if someone had dropped a grenade right into the middle of her life and pulled out the pin. Sitting down alongside her visitor, she crossed her legs and studied her.

  ‘So. Let’s start again. I’m Genie Divine,’ she said. ‘This is my family’s theatre.’ She didn’t add that it wouldn’t be by this time next week.

  The girl’s eyes darted around, taking in the beauty and the damage that surrounded them.

  When she finally looked back at Genie, it was to reply, tentatively. ‘I’m Lizzie. Lizzie Kingdom.’

  Genie looked at her, and then stared at her. ‘Kingdom?’ she said, slowly, as if it were another language.

  The girl, Lizzie, nodded.

  ‘Are you related to Abel?’ Genie asked, trying to fathom the link.

  One of Lizzie’s delicate shoulders lifted as she huffed out. ‘Apparently.’

  This wasn’t making any sense. ‘You might have to help me out here, Lizzie. I don’t get it.’

  Lizzie shook her head and her slender fingers played with the hem of her faded tee shirt. ‘I don’t either, really.’

  The jaded tone of her voice struck Genie as odd for someone barely more than a child. Even though she’d known Lizzie for all of ten minutes, the urge to wrap her arms around her came from nowhere. She didn’t though; she just sat and waited for her to speak again.

  ‘I think he’s my brother.’

  ‘Oh,’ Genie said, winded. Thinking back to their lunch date upstairs, Genie was certain he had told her he had no siblings. Had he lied? ‘Does he… does he know about you?’

  Lizzie looked down, hiding her eyes. ‘Dunno.’

  It was like trying to do a jigsaw with a blindfold on. Genie tried another tack. ‘How old are you, Lizzie?’

  ‘Fourteen.’ Lizzie looked up again, her expression guarded. ‘Why?’

  Genie shook her head, still confused. ‘And you’ve never met Abel?’

  ‘I’d never even heard of him until a couple of days ago.’

  Okay. ‘So who told you?’

  There it was again, that jaded, hunted look. ‘My mother.’ She paused. ‘Our mother.’

  ‘Your mother told you out of the blue that you have a brother you’ve never even met?’

  ‘Well, she didn’t exactly tell me.’ Lizzie rolled her eyes. ‘I found his name and address on a piece of paper in the kitchen bin yesterday. ‘She grabbed it off me and ripped it up when I asked her about it, yelling and all that.’ Lizzie’s mouth turned down in distaste. ‘Didn’t matter. I remembered what it said and wrote it down again.’

  Genie sat quietly, listening to Lizzie and trying to work out how Abel could not even know his sister existed.

  ‘Do you live with your mum, Lizzie?’

  Lizzie snorted and looked away. ‘Sometimes.’

  How could a young girl, a child really, live anywhere sometimes? She waited silently for Lizzie to elaborate.

  ‘I lived there when I was a kid,’ she said.

  Genie nodded, a little heartbroken already for this tough little girl. Because she was little. She was still a kid.

  ‘Then the social got involved, and I lived a whole load of other places too. Sometimes back with her. Sometimes not.’ Lizzie shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter. I’m old enough to look after myself now.’

  She so obviously wasn’t that Genie wanted to wrap her in a blanket and give her hot chocolate.

  ‘And the first you knew of Abel was this piece of paper?’

  Lizzie nodded. ‘I asked her who it was. Because of the surname, see? She did some more yelling and said he’d called round out of the blue weeks ago, flashing his cash and laughing at us.’

  It didn’t sound at all like the Abel Genie knew. ‘I’m not sure he even knows you exist, Lizzie,’ she said, carefully.

  ‘Probably won’t care,’ Lizzie said, full of false bravado.

  Genie couldn’t offer Lizzie any guarantees, but everything inside her told her that Abel didn’t know that this child had even been born. It made sense. He’d left at eighteen. His mother could have had another child, if she’d had him at a relatively young age, and by the sounds of it, he hadn’t been home since. The dark parts of him that she hadn’t understood were slowly starting to become clearer. He’d had the same start in life as the girl beside her, and looking at her now, there were obvious similarities. Lizzie shared Abel’s dark, expressive eyes, and the same full mouth. Realising those things made it almost hard to look at her.

  ‘You remind me of him,’ she said softly, without thinking.


  ‘Do I?’

  Genie nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you his girlfriend?’

  The ghost of a smile touched Genie’s lips at the idea of being Abel’s girlfriend. It seemed too childish a term to apply to the feelings she had for him.

  ‘No,’ she said in the end. ‘But I do know him pretty well.’

  Did she? In some ways maybe, and yet she’d learned things about him today that had subtly painted him more clearly in her mind. She knew the man he was, but she still had much to learn about the child he’d been.

  ‘Will you let me email him for you?’ she asked, trying to work out how best to help both Lizzie and Abel. She had his email address from business messages her uncle had forwarded. She didn’t let herself feel anything for herself; this wasn’t about her.

  ‘All right.’ Lizzie shrugged, aiming for casual and not managing it as well as she must have hoped. She added, in a rush, ‘Shall I come back again another day?’

  Genie watched the girl gather herself together to leave. ‘Where are you sleeping tonight, Lizzie?’

  Lizzie’s mouth twisted with sarcasm. ‘Home. She works on Tuesday nights, thank God.’ Lizzie drew air quotes around the word ‘work’ as she spoke.

  Genie nodded, walking Lizzie to the door. Lizzie’s tone set off a whole series of alarm bells. ‘What does your mother do?’ she ventured, every bit as fake casual as Lizzie had been earlier.

  ‘She likes to say she’s a hostess.’ Lizzie laughed, a thin, miserable sound that said she thought it anything but funny.

  Genie didn’t push any further. She’d heard enough to draw her own conclusions, and her heart twisted for the man on the other side of the world. Reaching out, she laid a hand on Lizzie’s shoulder.

  ‘Come back and see me again tomorrow?’

  Lizzie hesitated, then nodded and hurried quickly down the steps and away.

  It turned out to be a difficult email to write. Genie pressed delete more times than she could count, trying to keep her own emotions out of her words. She so wanted to ask him to come back for her. She typed out how very much she loved him and then deleted it. She told him instead of the girl she’d met that afternoon; how Lizzie shared Abel’s eyes, the scant details she’d revealed of her home life.

  How should she end the email? Love Genie? Regards, Genie? In the end she simply signed it G, her heart in her mouth as her finger hovered over the send button before she pressed it, breathing out hard when it was done. Glancing at the clock in the corner of her screen, Genie calculated it would be the early hours of the morning now for Abel. She didn’t need to check out the time difference. She knew it by heart.

  Closing her emails, she locked the theatre doors and headed for Deanna’s flat, which passed for home just now.

  Huddled inside her coat at the bus stop ten minutes later, her phone buzzed. Pulling it out, her email alert flashed. One new message. Clicking her inbox, Genie’s heart jumped involuntarily at the sight of his name. She’d longed so often to see it there, and now there it was.

  The bus came, and people moved around her to board it while she stayed rooted to the spot, staring at the screen. She didn’t notice the driver duck to try to catch her eye, or see him close the doors with a shrug before he pulled away.

  She clicked on the message, desperate for news of him. There was just one line of text. Five words. No greeting, no sign off.

  I’m on the next plane.

  Chapter Eighteen

  ‘You sure you don’t want me to come in with you?’ Deanna asked, protectively.

  Genie shook her head, glancing into the window of the cafe a few doors down from the theatre. It was quiet in there, too late for breakfast, too early for lunch.

  ‘I need to do this on my own, Dee.’

  Deanna nodded. ‘I’m a call away if you need me,’ she said, leaning in and hugging her friend. ‘Be careful around him, okay?’

  Genie hugged Deanna to her carefully to avoid squashing the ever-present camera around her neck. ‘I will.’ They’d spent enough late nights talking over what went wrong, for Deanna to be more than aware of how much power Abel had over Genie right now.

  ‘Go. You’ll be late for class.’ She pushed her friend gently off down the road with a small, affectionate smile, then turned and headed into the warmth of the cafe.

  She was early, deliberately so, to give herself chance to gather herself together. It had been two days since Abel’s message. She knew from the second, equally scant email she’d received from him that he’d landed at Heathrow last night and checked into a hotel. He had made arrangements in the briefest of words to meet her here today at noon. Lizzie was going to join them half an hour later. She’d spent the afternoon at the theatre yesterday, and from the snippets she’d revealed of her home life, Genie was painfully aware of how difficult an existence she’d had up to now. Lizzie hadn’t been able to hide her shock when Genie had told her that Abel was flying over. Any doubts about whether he’d known about her and disregarded her were chased away instantly as childish hope lit her face.

  ‘Wow,’ she’d said. ‘That’s fast.’

  ‘He’s kind of like that,’ Genie had observed.

  Lizzie had fallen silent for a while, chewing her lip. ‘What if he doesn’t like me?’

  Genie had rolled her eyes and squeezed the younger girl impulsively around the shoulders. ‘He will,’ she’d said. ‘Trust me. He will.’

  Sitting in the cafe nursing a mug of coffee between her palms, Genie watched the windows for him. She was nervous, the kind of gut wrenching nervous that makes you breathless and on the edge of panic. She didn’t doubt he’d come. He was coming for Lizzie’s sake, but that made it even more difficult to read the situation. How would he be with Genie when he came in? Openly hostile? Distantly polite? She wouldn’t know how to handle either. It would have to be enough just to see him, what came next was up to him.

  Her throat constricted as she caught sight of the tall, familiar figure crossing the road between the traffic, and her hands trembled a little around the mug. He was here.

  She watched as he scanned the cafe, and held her breath when his eyes met hers. He didn’t smile, just studied her for a long second before threading his way through the tables to get to her. Relief overwhelmed her at the sight of him; it was almost painfully good to look at him again. He pulled the chair opposite hers out and sat down.

  They faced each other wordlessly across the table, and tears rushed into her eyes. She just loved him so damn much.

  ‘You look well,’ she managed, nodding towards his unstrapped shoulder.

  He nodded. ‘I am.’

  She looked down when he spoke, letting the sound of his voice soak into her bones. She wanted to remember the sound of him forever. When she looked up again he was studying her.

  ‘How’ve you been?’ he asked.

  She half smiled, half shrugged. ‘All right. You know.’

  He looked up at the waitress as she hovered nearby and asked for a couple of fresh coffees.

  ‘And the theatre?’ he said. He must have seen the state of it as he’d walked past.

  ‘Gone. Or else it will have in a few days.’ She sighed heavily. ‘Probably for the best.’

  If he was surprised, he didn’t show it. They fell into silence as the waitress placed two steaming mugs in front of them and whisked Genie’s old one away.

  ‘How is she?’ he asked. ‘How’s Lizzie?’ There was already affection and anxiety in the way he said her name.

  Genie smiled at the thought of Lizzie. ‘She’s a sweet kid.’

  His expression darkened. ‘I should have been here.’

  It was so like him to take the guilt onto his own shoulders. ‘How could you have been? You didn’t even know she existed.’

  His mouth thinned into a line. ‘I was so intent on getting away. Always running. If I’d known…’ he huffed out and dragged his mug towards him.

  ‘You didn’t know, Abel. Don’t blame yourself. This wasn’t
your mistake, and you’re here now. That’s what matters.’

  He didn’t look convinced. ‘Fourteen fucking years. Why didn’t my mother ever tell me? I came back once in that time and she never said a word. I would have stayed if I’d known. Knowing that she… what she…’ He looked down, unable to finish his sentence.

  ‘Don’t do this. Don’t go over and over what might have been. It won’t help either of you.’

  Genie spoke from experience, but wasn’t great at taking her own advice. From the day Abel had left she’d gone over and over what she could have said or done to make him stay. She’d become an expert at wishful thinking, hurting herself with perfect daydreams of what might have been if only she’d played things differently.

  She raised her gaze and held his.

  ‘We should talk,’ he said, quietly. ‘Not right now, but I won’t leave without coming to find you first.’

  Genie nodded, tears tightening her throat again until she didn’t trust herself to speak. Just knowing that he wasn’t going to run out of her life again without a chance at least to talk was enough to overwhelm her.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said, reaching across the table and covering her hands with his around her mug. ‘I can’t watch you cry again.’

  She couldn’t help herself. She couldn’t look at him; he stole her breath. Beneath the table his knee brushed her leg, and his hands were warm and strong over hers. She wanted to stop the world turning and stay there forever with him in that small, steamy cafe.

  ‘Genie?’ An uncertain voice spoke her name, and when she looked up, Lizzie was hovering behind Abel, looking smaller than ever in the shadow of her brother’s powerful frame. Abel pulled his arms sharply back across the table and Genie jumped to her feet, dashing the backs of her hands over her eyes.