Don't Get Me Wrong

by Marianne Kavanagh

  • • •

  It was waiting for him when he got back from work. Stiff white card with a fine silver line all round the edge. Curly black writing: “Mr. and Mrs. John White request the honor of your presence at the marriage of their daughter, Emma Rose, to Mr. Martin Palmer . . .” Harry stood there in the entrance lobby, still holding the invitation, staring into space. After a while, he put it back in the envelope, very carefully, as if it was important to keep it safe. It had been redirected twice, in handwriting he didn’t recognize. An invitation that had gone all round England, from address to address, trying to find him. And now had caught up with him in the hallway of a tall block of flats overlooking the Thames.

  For a moment, he toyed with the idea of sweeping up to the church in his silver-gray Porsche. Wearing shades, perhaps. Unfolding himself from the driver’s seat just slowly enough for an audience of guests to stare, openmouthed, at the impeccable cut of his handmade suit.

  But then he thought, with a hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach, I don’t think even a Porsche would get me noticed. Not by Mr. and Mrs. John White.

  The last time he’d seen Emma Rose she’d been about eight. He remembered her as small and pink with a mass of frizzy curls. She’d never liked him much. She sensed him as a threat. Which he was, in a way. A permanent reminder of what Mr. and Mrs. John White could do to a child who didn’t fit in.

  He’d blocked most of it out. But he remembered the beginning. One day, it was just him and his mum. Then John White was at the breakfast table. Harry was five, maybe six. He watched carefully. John White liked the fat on bacon, listening to radio news bulletins (on the hour, every hour), and his clean socks paired by being folded over twice. His skin was colorless, like the gins he enjoyed before dinner, and the buttons of his shirt strained across his stomach. He expected total obedience, right from the start. “You do right by me, Harry, and I’ll do right by you.”

  It was a lie, of course.

  As he got older, Harry slowly realized that this had been a match based on compromise. His mother was young and pretty. But she had a child. And she was tired of worrying about money. John White was middle-aged, charmless, and a bully. But he could provide financial security. And he accepted Harry as part of the package.

  It could have worked. Compromises sometimes do. But John White got greedy. Once he had the young and pretty wife under his control, he broke the contract. Looking after another man’s son was irritating. Especially as the boy had a mind of his own.

  “Don’t, Harry, don’t.” His mother’s voice in his ear, urgent, desperate. “Don’t cross him. He’s got a terrible temper.”

  A year after they married, Emma Rose arrived. John White was besotted. His chest swelled with pride. Every visitor to the house was told about Emma Rose’s extraordinary abilities. She did everything early—talking, walking, counting, reading. She was brilliant at ballet, superlative at gymnastics, gifted at music. To her credit, little Emma Rose was intelligent enough to realize that she wasn’t the superstar her father imagined. No one could be that perfect. But she didn’t know how to open his eyes to reality. And she didn’t have a mother who was brave enough to fight for a little girl’s right to be ordinary.

  So Emma Rose, terrified of falling short of her father’s expectations, and exhausted by the constant pressure to be the best, became wary and mean. Sometimes the only way to stay on top was to sabotage the competition. She cut off the ribbons from other girls’ ballet shoes. She hid violin bows and descant recorders. She stole homework and tore up letters home about auditions and after-school clubs.

  Sadly, the one thing Emma Rose was extremely good at was making sure she was never found out. In public, Emma Rose’s halo never dimmed.

  Harry’s great mistake was to point out the obvious.

  “What’s this?” he said, flicking through her maths book. “Five out of ten?”

  Emma Rose tried to snatch it back. Teasing her, Harry held it high in the air. Emma Rose screamed. Harry felt the slap to the back of his skull before his head, just above his right eye, hit the edge of the table. Stunned, winded, he lay on the kitchen floor.

  “You pick on someone your own size!” shouted John White.

  “Try not to provoke him, Harry,” whispered his mother that night as she pressed a cold flannel to his forehead in the dark.

  Harry had never met his real father. His mother was able to tell him very little, except that they had both been very young, it had been a holiday romance in the summer of 1979 (on a French campsite, with families from all over Europe), and they had said good-bye before his mother had even known that Harry was on the way.

  “What did he look like?”

  “Like you.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Everyone called him Zee. But it was just a nickname.”

  “Where did he live?”

  She looked sad. “I never asked.”

  Dark skin, brown eyes, black hair. Tall. Quite thin. Always smiling. She remembered that he spoke good French and good English. (He sang along to Donna Summer and the Bee Gees.) But who knows? He might have spoken other languages too. Harry thought about all the places his father (the man he had never met) might live now—Italy, Germany, Spain, Morocco, Israel, Turkey, Brazil—and the world in his head got bigger and wider, and harder to navigate, and more impossible to understand. He felt lost and hopeless. And then he would look down at his hands, at his own strong hands, and he would think, I am what I am. Someone once said, you don’t need to know where you’re from. You just need to know where you’re going.

  But it made him vulnerable, not knowing. And angry. As his mother shrank back further, and Emma Rose took up center stage, Harry began to feel resentful. He had done nothing wrong. But he was treated like a temporary lodger who never paid rent. John White belittled him, goaded him, laughed at him. He hit him round the head so that his ears rang. He pushed him against walls so hard that Harry was permanently covered in bruises. Once, because Harry held his gaze a fraction too long, he kicked him down the stairs. Harry landed at the bottom in a crumpled heap, breaking his collarbone.

  By the time Harry was fourteen, there was an evil, simmering atmosphere in the house.

  And then came the day that John White opened his mouth to sneer and saw his stepson clench his fists.

  “I’m sorry,” said his mother. “He says we can’t go on like this. It’s him or you.”

  Harry found his own foster parents. He advertised in the local paper. He remembered that, years later. But he had blanked out everything in between.

  His foster parents were evangelical Christians in their fifties. They were kind and well-meaning. But the day Harry finished school, he packed a bag and left. He never saw them again. (He never saw Mr. and Mrs. John White again either. Over time, he accepted what his mother had done. But he never forgave her.) He got a train to London and sat in the vast, plush reception area of the bank for two days before he got an interview. He used the time well. He listened to snippets of conversation. He studied mannerisms. He saw how people dressed. In his head, he began to see how he could adapt, transform, fit in. The old Harry was dead. His new life had begun.

  Eventually, amused by Harry’s persistence, the head of equities gave in. On the third morning, he sent down his chief of staff to give Harry a cursory interview. It didn’t take long to discover there was more to Harry than his rather mediocre qualifications. Harry had a logical mind and a natural aptitude for maths. He was interested in business and how companies worked. He was open and straightforward, easy to talk to. But, much more important than any of this, he was hungry. Very, very hungry. This was a young man with something to prove.

  The bank offered him a job as a desk assistant. Harry, who didn’t know one end of London from the other, stuck a pin in a map and rented a room in Crystal Palace. It had brown lino, a sash window that rattled, and a bed with a mattress so thin that it felt like lying on cardboard. If ever he came back from work early enough to ne
ed to find somewhere to eat, he went to the small Greek restaurant round the corner. Their specialties were stuffed vine leaves and phyllo pastry filled with feta cheese.

  One summer evening, he met Eva at a bus stop in Camberwell. The bottom had fallen out of her patchwork velvet rucksack, and her possessions were scattered all over the dirty gray pavement. Harry rescued a silver chain from the metal grille in the gutter. He held it up in triumph and she laughed.

  A few weeks later, sitting at the kitchen table in Nunhead as the darkness began to lift outside and the first glimmerings of light turned shifting shapes into bushes and shrubs, Harry said, “How come you’re always so happy?”

  They had been up all night, talking, drinking tea. She made him feel safe. He could tell her anything. And nothing he said would go any further. She’d promised. They stay with me, she said. All your secrets stay with me. I won’t ever talk about anything you tell me. To anyone.

  “I get sad sometimes. Especially when it rains.”

  But this wasn’t what Harry meant. “Your parents don’t give a shit. But you don’t hate them. You never say a bad word about either of them.”

  Eva thought about this. “Because it wouldn’t change anything.”

  “Wouldn’t it?”

  She shook her head.

  Harry looked down at the table. “Sometimes I can’t sleep at night because I’m so angry.”

  Eva looked at him, her eyes full of sympathy.

  “I start thinking, and it feels like I’m going to explode.”

  “You have to let it go.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. Imagine it floating away.”

  Harry looked unconvinced.

  Eva said, “You can’t control what other people do. The only thing you can control is how you think about it.”

  “Let them get away with it?” He touched the scar above his right eye.

  “Let them live their life. You live your own.”

  Harry was silent.

  Eva looked sad. “Maybe it’s because I’m not very brave. I don’t like facing up to things. So if something really bad happens, I try not to think about it. Or I get drunk, or stoned. Go somewhere in my mind where it doesn’t matter. I just think, Do I really care about this? Is it that important?”

  “Even when other people fuck up?”

  “Especially then. Sometimes people are just strange. They have their reasons for doing things, but they bury them really deep. Or they shut their eyes to what they’re doing, because it’s sad, or it makes them feel lonely or afraid. So nothing makes sense on the surface. Not even to them. And if things are that hard to understand, you just have to let them go.”

  “You can really do that?”

  “You can try.” Eva smiled. “Live and let live.”

  “Make love, not war.”

  “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”

  Harry laughed. “You’re such a hippie.”

  She liked talking about the Summer of Love. Nineteen sixty-seven. A hundred thousand people converging on San Francisco, all trying to find something different. Fed up with conformity. Fed up with a society focused on money. It started with the Monterey Pop Festival—Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, the Mamas and the Papas. The Byrds. It was the first time Otis Redding had played to an audience full of white people. Then, after the festival, a whole long summer spent listening to music, creating art, talking politics, taking drugs. Middle-class America was terrified. What did they want? Why were they doing it? What did it all mean?

  Sometimes, talking to Eva, Harry had the uncomfortable feeling that he would have been one of the mystified onlookers. Maybe it’s easier to reject something if you’ve always had it, thought Harry. I want money. I want the respect it brings. I want to make so much money that I feel safe and powerful forever.

  Eva reached out across the table and touched his hand. “You know Killian? The one from Dublin with the dreadlocks? He goes to a gym. A boxing club. He says it helps.”

  “Helps what?”

  “When he’s angry. Centers his energy. Maybe you should go along and see what you think.”

  At night, when I lie there full of rage, I have fantasies of hitting John White. Breaking his nose. Smashing the bone. Blood all over his fat, sneering face.

  Eva said gently, “You’ve had a bad time, Harry. I’m not surprised you feel a bit lost sometimes.”

  For a moment, he couldn’t speak. It was all locked away in his mind. But he could feel the pressure of it, like a cupboard crammed full of old coats that someone has forced shut. Sometimes the effort of keeping it closed exhausted him. “I wouldn’t know anyone.”

  “So? You’d get to know them.”

  “Will you come with me?”

  “You’re such a baby,” she said, her eyes laughing at him.

  He looked down at their hands on the table, the fingers intertwined. Outside, the first eerie calls of birdsong echoed, as if the world were a huge, empty space that could never be filled. It was a lonely sound. But when I’m with Eva, thought Harry, I know that everything’s going to be OK. I know I’m in a much kinder place than I ever thought possible. “We’ll always be together, won’t we?”

  “You’ve only just met me.”

  “I don’t care. I’m going to know you forever.”

  “Forever’s a long time.”

  They sat, smiling at each other. He said, “I should go.”

  “Come back later and meet my little sister.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Kim.”

  “I could buy her an ice cream.”

  “She’s thirteen.”

  “Roll her a joint?”

  Eva laughed. “She’s not like me. She has plans. She’s going to change the world.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. Take power. Go into politics. Start a revolution. You watch. One day she’ll be famous.”

  At the door, he turned back to look at her. The early morning sun, glancing through the window, made her hair shine gold. He said, “See you later.”

  She smiled at him in a way that made it hard to breathe.

  • • •

  Kim had spent hours working out what to wear for her first day in the new job. After three years as a student, most of her clothes had holes in them. For the interview, she’d borrowed a coat from Damaris and had kept it tightly buttoned, sweating, the whole way through. But that wasn’t going to work on a regular basis.

  “Borrow something of mine,” said Eva.

  An Indian dress with tiny little mirrors sewn onto the bodice? A floor-length skirt in red velvet? Jeans with butterflies and daisies dancing up and down the flares?

  In the end, Kim settled on a navy-blue velvet pinafore that Izzie had bought in the Mind shop in East Dulwich because she thought it might make a nice cushion.

  “Does it make me look pregnant?” she said, standing in front of the full-length mirror.

  “No,” said Eva, whose bump was now sticking out alarmingly. “This is what pregnant looks like.”

  But on the way there, an elderly man on crutches tried to give her his seat on the bus.

  The offices of the housing charity were in Vauxhall, just south of the Thames.

  “Site of the old pleasure gardens,” said Jake. His hair was thick and fair, sticking out like straw on a thatched cottage. “Mentioned by Pepys and visited by thousands. For two hundred years. Concerts, fireworks, tightrope walkers, hot-air balloons. They had a reenactment of the Battle of Waterloo in 1817. Finally closed in 1859.” He sat down in a large gray office chair that rolled backwards with a sigh. “But I expect you knew that.”

  Kim, who had lived in London all her life but had never heard of the Vauxhall pleasure gardens, stared back, tongue-tied.

  “You’ll be shadowing me for a week. So that you can see what we do. Watching my every move.” Jake pulled his face into an expression of mock alarm, like someone who’s just seen a putrefied corpse. “Stalking me.” />
  Kim swallowed. “I hope I won’t be too much trouble.”

  He looked at her. “You will be. Lots of trouble. But that’s the only way to learn.”

  He’s weird, thought Kim. She suddenly wished she was in a normal open-plan office with lots of people and healthy potted plants and a water cooler. She wasn’t sure being stuck in a cubbyhole with Jake was such a good idea.

  “So where were you working before?”

  “I wasn’t,” said Kim. “I’ve just finished my degree.”

  Jake leant back in his chair. He had chunky thighs, like a rugby player. Or maybe it was just the baggy jeans. “In what?”

  “Social policy.”

  “Interesting.” He picked up a sheaf of papers and banged them together to make a neat block. “Where?”

  “Edinburgh.”

  He raised his eyebrows, but she had no idea why. “So that’s your desk, facing mine. I can set you up with a password and log you into the system.” He had a slightly nasal voice, as if he had a permanent cold. “Our priority in the next few weeks is the London Homelessness Report. Cross-checking all the figures in advance of the media launch. But they probably told you that at the interview.”

  She nodded.

  “And you’re on a six-month contract, apparently. A sort of paid internship. Although I wouldn’t worry about that too much. You’ll probably be renewed. We’re currently in a state of chaos. New CEO. Got rid of the entire staff and brought in her own team. New faces. New IT system. No one has a clue what’s going on. Apart from me.”

  Jake was momentarily distracted by something on his screen, so she sat down at her new desk and busied herself opening the nearest drawer. It was empty apart from two pencils and what looked like the wizened remains of a mummified apple core. When she looked up, he was staring at her. “Why housing?”

  “Sorry?”

  “What made you want to work in housing?”

  He had an intense gaze. His eyes were pale blue.

  “Social injustice. You can’t do anything unless you have somewhere to live.” Despite herself, she felt a lump in her throat. It kept happening these days. There were just two months before they had to move. She and Izzie had already paid the deposit on a smelly bedsit in New Cross with alarming stains on the carpet and black mold growing round the shower. The kitchen was two electric rings in the corner of the living room, so they wouldn’t be eating anything more complicated than stew. The only consolation was that it was less than ten minutes on the bus from Eva’s tiny new flat overlooking Peckham Rye. So I’ll always be able to babysit, thought Kim. Whenever she needs me.