by Lisa Jewell
A man with a cropped Mohican answered the door to them. He was wearing a pair of combat shorts that hung so low that Vince could see the first few millimetres of his pubic hair, and had black tattoos all over the top half of his body. He stared at Vince and Lara questioningly.
‘Hi. Is this Jon’s place?’
‘Uh-huh,’ said the man with the pubic hair, scratching his chest.
‘I’m looking for Jess. Do you know where she is?’
‘Uh-huh,’ he said again. ‘She’s here. You wanna come in?’
‘Yes. Please.’
They followed the American in the shorts through a wide, white corridor to a large open-plan room at the end. He walked so slowly that Vince almost trod on his heels. The room had full-height plate-glass windows overlooking the canal that led on to a balcony. There were various people sitting on the balcony, swigging beer from bottles and smoking under a glowing chrome patio heater.
‘Any of you guys know where Jessie is?’ asked the American.
The people on the balcony turned and glanced at him, then did a double take when they saw Vince and Lara standing behind him.
‘Oh, cute!’ a girl with plaits and cut-off jeans said when she saw Lara, jumping to her feet and coming over to say hello. ‘Hello, little girlie,’ she squeaked, breathing fag breath all over them. Aren’t you just a cutie, cutie little thing?’
Lara took one look at the girl with plaits and turned and buried her face into Vince’s shoulder.
‘Oh, bless,’ said the girl, ‘she’s shy’
Vince smiled grimly and looked at the other people. There were about six of them. They were all younger than him and none of them was Jon.
‘I think she’s in the bedroom,’ said a posh bloke with long hair wearing a T-shirt and a tie. Are you Vince?’
‘Yes,’ he said, moving Lara on to his other hip when she started wriggling.
‘Cool,’ he said. ‘Good to meet you. I’m Rio.’
‘Right,’ said Vince.
‘And this is Todd,’ he said, pointing at the American. ‘That’s Simone,’ he added while indicating the girl in the plaits. ‘And this is Dex and Puss.’
‘Nice to meet you all,’ said Vince, absorbing the reality of the people behind the stupid names and realizing that they were just a bunch of people he wouldn’t give a second glance at if he passed them in the street.
Todd beckoned him with his head. ‘Third door on the left,’ he said, pointing at the corridor they’d just come through.
‘Right,’ said Vince, ‘thanks.’
He put Lara down and she ran towards the bedroom. Lara seemed very confident in her surroundings, and Vince suddenly remembered that she’d spent a lot of time here since she was born. The thought made him feel prickly and uncomfortable.
‘Mummy, Mummy!’ She pushed open the door and ran in ahead of him.
Vince followed behind her and watched as she threw herself on to the enormous bed in the middle of the room.
He stopped in his tracks when he saw that Jess wasn’t alone in the bed.
She was with Jon.
‘Shit. Jesus.’ Jess sat bolt upright as Lara threw herself at her. Her hair was matted, her mascara was smudged around her eyes and she wasn’t wearing a top. ‘Christ,’ she looked at Vince, ‘what are you doing here?’
Vince glanced from Jess to Jon and back again. Neither of them had the decency to look guilty ‘I had no idea where you were. I was worried,’ he said flatly.
‘Jesus,’ said Jess, ‘what time is it?’ She looked totally confused and disoriented.
‘It’s one o’clock,’ he said.
‘Shit. You’re kidding?’ She pulled the palms of her hands down her face and tried to shake herself back to life. ‘I’ve been out cold. Shit.’ She glanced at Jon. ‘Why didn’t you wake me?’
Jon shrugged. ‘Didn’t know what time it was, either.’
Lara snuggled herself between the two of them on the bed, showing not the slightest confusion at finding her mother naked in bed with another man. Vince stared at the three of them feeling a dark rage start to boil up in the pit of his belly. ‘So,’ he managed, ‘what’s going on?’
‘What – you mean…?’ Jess looked at him, then looked at Jon. ‘Nothing,’ she said bluntly. ‘Nothing’s going on.’
Vince opened his mouth to say something, then looked at Lara, sitting innocently at the epicentre of this triangle of deceit, and decided to pursue a different line of questioning.
‘Why are your phones switched off? Why didn’t you come home?’
‘Oh, God.’ She let her head fall into her hands. ‘Christ. Jon. You tell him. I haven’t got the energy.’
Jon sighed. ‘We were at this party last night. In Islington. We shouldn’t have gone. It was all a bit heavy…’
‘Heavy?’
Yeah. You know. A lot of stuff going on that we didn’t really want to be around.’
Vince’s mind raced with possibilities. ‘Like what?’
‘Not stuff I’d want to talk about in front of…’ Jon glanced at Lara. ‘You know.’
‘What – sex?’
‘No! Not sex. Just people jacking up, crack, that kind of thing.’
Vince shook his head in disbelief.
‘It really wasn’t our scene and we knew that the minute we walked in. But we just kind of felt we should hang around for a while. And then this bloke started getting… a bit full-on with Jessie…’
‘What d’you mean, “full-on”?’ Vince could feel the veins on both temples standing proud of his skull.
‘I mean, trying to, you know… get off with her,’ he whispered.
‘Christ – and where were you?’
‘I was there. Keeping an eye on it. But then it got a bit out of hand and he started getting a bit aggressive.’
‘Shit. Jess. Did he hurt you?’
‘No… no,’ she shook her head, and pulled Lara on to her lap.
‘I didn’t want to get involved in a scene. It was too dangerous. So we just made a run for it. Slipped out the front door and legged it to the nearest cab office.’
‘And that was when I realized that I’d left my bag there. At the flat.’
‘Your bag? What. With all your stuff in it? Your frontdoor keys? Your wallet?’
Yes,’ she sighed, and scraped her hair back from her face. ‘And my mobile phone.’
‘You left a handbag in a crack den with our front-door keys in it?’
‘Yup. And pictures of Lara. And all my credit cards. And fifty quid. And my driving licence. And my digital camera.’
‘Crack addicts have pictures of Lara?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘And our address? Shit – Jess, what about our address?’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘it’s on my driving licence. So, yes – they’ve got our address.’
‘And you didn’t think to let me know? You didn’t think that maybe I’d like to know that a bunch of crack addicts have our front-door keys and our address. While I slept with our baby daughter…’
‘Shit.’ Jess dropped her head on to her hands again. ‘Shit. Vince. I’m sorry. I didn’t think. I was so busy cancelling my credit cards and my mobile phone, and I just thought that we could get the locks changed this morning. I didn’t think they’d come that quickly, you know… then I overslept. I had no idea it was so late.’
‘Christ, Jess, they’re probably there now. Do you realize that? As we speak. Taking everything.’
‘Shit. Vince. What are we going to do?’
Jon got out of bed, revealing himself to be wearing boxer shorts, a small detail which Vince, in his panic, was unable to take any comfort from. ‘I’ll come with you,’ he said. ‘The girls should stay here.’
‘Yes,’ said Vince. ‘You’re right. Stay here. We’ll be back in an hour.’
They called an emergency locksmith as they drove.
‘I’m really fucking sorry, mate,’ said Jon.
‘It’s not your fault,’ said Vince, t
ersely.
‘No, I know, but I should have thought. I should have got Jessie to phone you. We were so wasted and so wired by the time we got home…’
‘Not a problem,’ he muttered. ‘Not your responsibility.’
‘It was. You’re my friends. I should have thought.’
‘Yeah. Well. You’re not a parent. You think differently when you’ve got a kid.’ He said this knowing that it was a verbal kick in the balls, especially in the light of Jess’s abortion, but not caring.
‘I hope you don’t think – ’ Jon paused.
‘What?’
‘Jessie. I hope you don’t blame me for her veering off the rails again. I know she was pretty together when you met her. It must be a bit weird.’
‘Just a bit,’ he sniffed.
‘It’s the bus thing again. You know. She’s taken the bus off course. She’s driving too fast. You can ask her to slow down, but she won’t hear you. If you want to get off the bus, you’re gonna have to jump.’
‘Yes, but I’m not the only passenger on the bus any more, am I? There’s Lara now, too. She has to slow down, for all our sakes. And maybe after what’s happened today, I don’t know, maybe it’ll be like a wake-up call.’
Jon smiled wryly and shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t count on it.’
The locksmith was waiting outside the flat when they got back. There were no marauding crack addicts in the vicinity of the flat and everything was quiet. Vince breathed a sigh of relief. But it wasn’t until he’d handed fifty quid to the locksmith and watched him pull away in his van that Vince started to relax. And as he started to relax, a few pertinent questions popped into his head, rudely demanding answers.
What was Jess doing in Jon’s bed?
Why hadn’t she phoned him?
Why was Jon’s phone switched off?
How had they ended up in a crack den?
He bit his tongue and waited. He wanted Jess to be there. He wanted to see the whites of her eyes when she answered them.
Apparently, Jess had slept in Jon’s bed the previous night because she was feeling ‘freaked’. She’d been wearing knickers and they hadn’t so much as shared a hug under the duvet. Apparently it wasn’t any big deal because they’d done it loads of times before. She hadn’t phoned home because she didn’t want to wake Vince and Lara, and she hadn’t come home because she didn’t have her frontdoor keys. Jon’s phone was switched off because it had run out of juice (he showed him the dead phone by way of evidence) and the reason they’d ended up in a crack den (which wasn’t apparently an actual crack den – just a flat full of people taking crack) was because they’d met a nice middle-class bloke at a club and he’d invited them back to a party being held by a graffiti artist in Islington. Being, on the whole, nice middle-class boys and girls, this had conjured up images of a groovy lateral conversion in a Georgian town house with a roof terrace and oversized canvasses on the walls, not the eighth floor of a tower block off the City Road.
And although these answers were, in and of themselves, wholly satisfactory, not one of them went even a quarter of the way to mollifying Vince. Because, however innocent the night had been (and Vince believed that it probably had), nothing could take away from the fact that Jess had gone to sleep last night knowing that potentially dangerous people had her front-door keys and her address, that she’d fallen into a naked, impenetrable slumber in her ex-boyfriend’s bed, leaving her daughter as open prey.
And even as he drove his wife and child home from Jon’s flat, even as they discussed plans for tea in the park and a visit to his mother’s, Vince was mentally filing away the details of his wife’s shocking negligence to use as future ammunition to fire from his position on the moral high ground.
Fifty-Eight
Joy pushed down hard on the lid of her suitcase in an attempt to get the two locks to meet.
She was only going away for two weeks, but because she had absolutely no idea what to expect from her trip she’d felt obliged to pack almost everything she owned.
She checked her handbag again for her passport, tickets and purse. And then she sat and waited for her mother to collect her. It was a straight journey on the Piccadilly Line from Southgate to Heathrow, but Joy couldn’t face the prospect of an hour on the Tube, trying not to look at people, trying not to think about what she was about to do. So Barbara was going to drive her there. She’d offered to fly with her, too, but Joy knew the offer was born more out of maternal anxiety than a desire to share the experience with her. And besides, Joy wanted to go to America on her own.
Because that’s where her father lived.
Not quite in a San Francisco penthouse or an LA mansion, but in a house with a big number in Columbus, Ohio, with his second wife and their ten-year-old son.
She’d found him on the Internet, like a second-hand wedding dress or a hotel room in Bristol. It took a total of three hours to find her father. It felt too easy.
She’d had to sift through dozens of Charles Yungs to get to the right one. Porn stars, film agents, university professors, dead musicians, electrical engineers. And then she’d found him on a website for a small chain of supermarkets in the Mid West called Reisens. He was regional CEO for Columbus and Dayton, in charge of ten stores. She knew it was him because there was a picture of him on a page called ‘Meet the Management!’. He still had a full head of dark hair, but had developed a quite pronounced grey stripe at the front, like a racoon. He wore wire-framed glasses and was very slightly jowly, but there was still no doubt that it was him. It was the eyes. Her eyes.
She sent him an e-mail the very same afternoon:
Dear Charles,
My name is Joy and my mother’s name is Barbara. I believe you are my father. I would love to talk to you if this is the case, but appreciate that this might be difficult for you.
I am thirty-three years old, single and living in London.
I hope very much to hear from you.
There’d been a reply in her in-box the next day:
Dear Joy,
Yes, I am definitely your father! I am delighted that you have got in touch. I have thought about you many times, particularly on your birthday, and wondered what might have become of you. I am married to my second wife, Carrie, and we have a young son, Curtis, who is about to turn eleven.
I have two grown-up children from my first marriage – Deanna, who is twenty-three, and Debra, who is twenty-two. They live in Maryland with their mother, and I see them as much as I can.
There are so many things that you and I have to discuss. I would love for us to talk properly. Maybe we could speak on the phone?
Yours,
Charles
They did talk on the phone after that, a handful of times, and it quickly became clear that, although Charles Yung was not the most exciting person in the world, he was decent, polite and uncomplicated enough for a face-to-face meeting not to be out of the question.
Carrie wouldn’t hear of Joy staying at a hotel and insisted that she stay with them, in their house with the big number.
In the run-up to her departure date, Joy received a flurry of e-mails from Carrie:
We have a small Jack Russell terrier called Barney. I do hope you don’t suffer from any dog allergies or phobias?
I have made up your bed with a goose-down quilt.
Please let me know if you have any feather allergies.
I was just planning your welcome dinner and wanted to be sure that you eat meat. In particular, beef and chicken.
Charles wanted to cook for you one night, some traditional Singaporean dishes. Some of it might be a tad spicy. Are you OK with this?
Curtis was wondering if he might interview you for the school magazine? (He is the editor-in-chief! Grand plans to be an international reporter!) Everyone in his class is very excited about his English ‘sister’!
Please be sure to bring photos of you ‘through the years’! Charles and I would love to see how you’ve changed and grown through the ‘missing
’ years.
It was obvious to Joy that Carrie was thoroughly enjoying her role coordinating this exotic visitation. She had corralled cousins and second cousins and great-aunts and great-uncles from five different states to come to visit while Joy was with them and had, it seemed, planned a menu for the full two weeks of her stay.
In the days leading up to her trip, Joy started to feel nervous.
Would she find it suffocating?
Would it be too intense?
Would she end up spending more time with Carrie than with her father?
How would Curtis react to her?
Was she staying too long? Not long enough?
But she put these concerns to the back of her mind and focused on the positives.
Her father was alive.
He was normal and ordinary and wanted to see her.
He’d been incredibly easy to track down. It felt like destiny. It felt like perfect timing.
His family was going out of its way to make her feel welcome.
She had her mother’s full support.
Everything was in place for a successful and constructive experience.
She looked round her flat. Her home. By the time she next sat and looked at these four walls, she’d be a different person. Stronger, maybe; weaker, possibly. But definitely different. Nothing would ever be the same again.
The doorbell buzzed and Joy got to her feet to let her mother in.
The adventure started here.
Fifty-Nine
Halfway through the third week of March, Jess’s friend Clare sent her an e-mail announcing that she was coming back to London after five years in Australia.
Clare had just found out that Dave, her live-in lover and love of her life, was sleeping with three other women, including her best friend. Her heart was broken and she wanted her mum. So she was coming home. In two weeks.
This snippet of girlie gossip from across the globe would not normally have registered particularly with Vince. But this piece of gossip came attached to a bunch of major implications for himself. Because Clare was the owner of their flat. And she wanted it back.
