A Cast of Vultures

by Judith Flanders

  I was horrified. ‘That was my fault? They were pissed off because I was there?’

  ‘It was not your fault.’ He was vehement. ‘Reilly was nasty because he thinks the same way you do, and he doesn’t like someone else pointing it out.’

  That was Reilly. ‘Why was Pau—’ Oh. ‘Paula is your ex?’ Jake looked like Billy Bunter, caught with his hand in the biscuit tin. Except that Billy’s biscuit consumption before he met me was his own business, not mine. ‘It’s fine. She’s ex. Why would I care? Hell, why does she? She’s got a partner and a child. She’s not languishing for you.’ I made what I liked to believe was a languishing expression, although I think it probably looked more like a cow with indigestion in at least three of its four stomachs.

  ‘It’s not that. It’s—’ He stopped, and started again. ‘Apart from Paula, the team is entirely men. She had to fight to get where she is. She has trouble when another woman comes along. It’s territorial.’

  ‘Fair enough. Dickish of her to take it out on me, but fair enough.’ The whole morning had me too rattled to give this any importance. ‘We’ll try again when she’s not there, or she can get used to me. Whatever you think will work best. In the meantime, let’s get something to eat so that you don’t faint at Kew. But not back in there, or I’ll start correcting the apostrophes on their blackboard menu.’ It’s my version of community service, providing a good spelling environment for all, but some people just don’t appreciate it.

  CHAPTER TEN

  BY THE TIME we’d finished eating, the afternoon was winding down, but I’d said I wanted to go to Kew, and by God, after the debacle of the pub, Jake was determined that I would get my visit. We scrapped the river walk, and headed for the nearest entrance.

  It had been spring the last time I’d been to the gardens, and I’d aimed for the acres of crocuses and bluebells and flowering cherry trees and magnolias, none of which was now in season. We started with a map consultation, and agreed to head to the water-lily house, but we quickly went off track, literally, diverted by pretty views, then veering to avoid school groups, and then simply wandering without paying much attention to our destination.

  My main purpose, walking my jitters out, was as well served by being aimless, and for an hour or so, Jake left the decisions to me. When we saw the pagoda from a distance, however, he began to nudge me in its direction. In all the time he and I had been together, we had never done anything sightseeing-like, and now I wondered if our approaches might not be compatible. I’m more of a once-over-lightly type – I like art, for example, but after an hour in a museum I’m That was fun, now where’s the cake? Just as Jake liked hitting things in a gym rather than ‘going round in circles’, as he dubbed my early-morning runs, so now it seemed that he liked excursions with a purpose.

  From a distance, the Chinese-style building was a charming landmark, a way of locating yourself in the botanical garden’s huge grounds. When we reached it, however, it became clear that those eighteenth-century builders put their hearts into it: the pagoda was still sweetly silly plonked down in south London, but it was also ludicrously, disproportionately tall. Two hundred and fifty-three steps, the sign announced: ten storeys. I drew Jake’s attention to this with a small cough.

  ‘It’ll be an amazing view.’

  Yes it would, if my lungs, and my legs, didn’t abandon my body for the body of someone more sensible, someone who didn’t decide to walk up ten flights of stairs for fun. On the one hand, I didn’t want to be a killjoy. On the other, maybe I wouldn’t have to be, because there was a second sign, warning that admission was strictly limited, owing to the narrowness of the spiral staircase. But, ‘No problem,’ said the cheery man at the door. ‘It’s late, and almost everyone is on their way out.’ Fantastic.

  And then, when we came out at the top, it was fantastic. The standard thing to say when you see a view like that is that it looks like a picture, or a postcard, or, if you’re old-fashioned, a picture postcard. But those comparisons suggest that what you’re looking at is something familiar. From the middle of this enormous park, the distance, the light and the angle combined to make the city that sprawled in front of us seem entirely strange: not a picture, not a postcard, but something new, something that had been carefully designed to be seen only from this one vantage point. An embroidery, perhaps, as the late-afternoon sun bounced off the details. The roads were made of black silk, the glass skyscrapers were little pieces of mirrored sequins sewn onto the fabric next to the rough, dirty-brown wool of the river.

  We were alone on the viewing platform, and the solitude intensified the feeling that all of London had been created just so it could be seen from this one place, at this one time, by us two, from above. Thinking the word ‘above’ had me drawing back from the balustrade. While I don’t exactly have vertigo, heights are not my friends. So as we moved around the full circuit of the pagoda, I lurked slightly behind Jake, peeping around his shoulders, keeping his body between me and the great out-there.

  Because I was hanging back, I heard a slight scuff of shoes. Someone else was with us at the top.

  There was no reason why there shouldn’t be. There had been a steady trickle of people descending as we’d climbed up. It would have been more surprising to find ourselves alone. It was just that, while the gardens below had been filled with people, up above they had vanished from my mind as the sampler-like perfection of the view, and the silence, gave the illusion of complete isolation. The thin shuffle of feet was therefore oddly jarring, a reminder that we were in a public space.

  It was one person – there were no voices – and whoever it was must have been enjoying the solitude as much as we were, because they stayed resolutely on the other side of the platform, walking at the same pace, keeping the turret housing the central staircase between us to preserve the illusion of privacy.

  It was Jake, not the unseen tourist, who destroyed the pagoda’s sense of being set apart from the world, or, at least, his phone did.

  He looked at the screen and sighed as he tapped it. ‘Field.’

  I stared out to the north, but he didn’t take long. ‘I need to go in,’ he said apologetically.

  I’d worked that out. ‘I’m going to stay a bit longer, but I’ll walk over to the entrance with you.’ If I got to Kew only once every five years, it was silly to cut the visit short.

  He looked at me curiously. ‘You’re being very good-humoured about this.’

  ‘I am? I’ll have to up my game.’

  He smiled and tugged at my earlobe. ‘I forget how self-sufficient you are.’

  I don’t think of myself as self-sufficient. I read for a living, and reading isn’t something you need other people around to do. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to ham it up. I put my hand to my forehead in tragedy mode. ‘You’re right, I don’t need you. Go, and never darken my pagoda again.’ I stopped play-acting. ‘Are you going to the office?’

  He shook his head. ‘On-site.’

  That meant a crime scene, but Kew was peaceful and pastoral and I didn’t want to hear about dead people.

  We had reached the head of the stairs, but Jake lingered. ‘You don’t have to come down if you’re not leaving. You probably won’t want to climb 253 stairs again anytime soon.’

  I hadn’t wanted to do it the first time. I looked back at the view. Mind made up. ‘I’ll stay up here for a bit, and see you back at the ranch.’ Jake’s footsteps lightly running down the stairs quickly faded, and without a body to block me from the reality of how high I was, I stayed back against the wall that surrounded the staircase, keeping one of the upright supports in my peripheral vision. That quieted my vertigo, and I just let my eyes roam, thinking of nothing in particular.

  The silence was complete, and I stood enjoying it before I began to move around the platform again, shifting carefully to keep the supports between me and emptiness. As I did so, I heard the feet on the other side. Once again I’d forgotten I wasn’t alone. I stopped. So did the feet. I r
olled my eyes. That was, surely, taking a desire for privacy to an extreme. I moved more swiftly, the hell with keeping my eyes on the uprights. Vertigo could be cured, I found, by being irritated by someone so ostentatiously staying away from me.

  Whatever, the mood had been broken, and I headed back to the stairs. The invisible tourist had the same plan: the feet moved swiftly again. I slowed. If we ended up going down together, I might have to make inane wasn’t-that-lovely chat for ten storeys, a special sort of hell. I feigned renewed interest in the view, which I was no longer seeing. Let him leave, and I’d follow after a few minutes.

  But no one did leave. Why the hell not? I mentally shouted. What was the lunatic doing, apart from driving me mad? I wondered if it was Andrew Reilly. As soon as the thought appeared, I knew how absurd it was, but I couldn’t shake the idea that it was someone I knew, and they were hiding from me. Who, or why, anyone would want to do that was beyond comprehension, but there it was.

  I had just made up my mind to head down when I heard the steps again, even though I hadn’t moved. And now I realised that it wasn’t one person. At least two people were coming around to my side of the viewing platform, although they hadn’t said a word to each other the entire time we’d been up there. And they were picking up speed.

  I turned my back, standing nearer the balustrade despite my vertigo, determined to let them pass behind me as I pretended not to be aware of them. But before they rounded the corner, an explosion of sound boomed out of the staircase. Well, not an explosion, just two children shrieking, ‘Last one up is a rotten egg!’ over and over, while adult voices below carried on another conversation. And then they tumbled out the door and sprinted round and round the platform, both of them shouting that they were the winner.

  I took the opportunity and slid past first the children, and then their parents puffing along a few corkscrew turns below. Even if the other visitors followed me, they would be a couple of dozen stairs behind, and I could pretend not to know they were there. Or so I told myself. In fact, I was ashamed to admit, even to myself, that the fact that two people had been at the top for half an hour without saying a word to each other had brought back my jitters. So I didn’t admit it. I just decided that I wanted to be somewhere else, somewhere with lots of people nearby.

  I walked over to a map. The Palm House wasn’t far, but it was too hot to head for an environment temperature-controlled for tropical plants. I was also near the treetop walk. That sounded cooler, even if it meant more sodding stairs. My legs already hated me for the pagoda, so I might as well introduce them to another few flights and make today masochism central. With luck, when I got there the queue would be too long, and I could call it quits without having to admit it was because I was out of shape.

  Naturally, the queue was not only not too long, it was entirely non-existent. Most visitors were heading home, and I was moving against the flow. I began to climb once more. After the fifth flight of stairs I was pausing to breathe heavily at each landing. If Jake had been there I would have pointed strategically to interesting sights, even though he would have known, and I would have known that he would have known, that it was really so I could do important things like inhale. I never knew who I was trying to fool, him or me.

  By the eighth landing, there was no one at all going up, and instead of pretend-admiring the view, I switched over to pretending to stand aside so the crowds going down could pass. I looked at the city in the distance. I was just reaching the height where we were above the trees. Because the walk was in a small wooded close, London looked paradoxically much further away than it had when I’d been at twice the height at the top of the pagoda. I was trying to work out why that was when a body slammed into me, knocking me flat against the railings. If I’d been tall, or even average height, it might have been scary. For most people the railing was waist high, but for short-stuffs like me, it was closer to chest level, and I’d more or less bounced off the top bar. As it was, I was more annoyed than hurt. By the time I turned, all I could see were the backs of a school group. One of the kids must have thought push-the-lady was funny. Or maybe it had been one of the teachers, infected by extended exposure to adolescents. Ho ho, I enunciated. But silently. I didn’t want to be taken for a madwoman.

  I continued on up, and in another five minutes had reached the top. The staircase was in a sort of nodule, a round outcropping of the walkway, which was a wooden path like one of those rope bridges in a 1950s’ movies set in Africa, usually starring Deborah Kerr, where the hero escapes across the bridge while the rascally villains hack away at the support ropes. I took a giant step back onto the staircase, then shook my head. This wasn’t a rope bridge in a film; it was a tourist site in a botanical garden. And the ‘ropes’ – I flicked a nervous glance behind me – were steel beams. But even if it wasn’t a rope bridge, part of my not-quite-vertigo is that I don’t like it when the floor moves. I bounced lightly on my feet. Like this one was doing.

  I gave myself a pep talk. It was a lovely piece of design, I silently encouraged me. I looked again. The sign below had said the walkway was two hundred metres long, but as it wove in and out of the trees growing beneath, the circuit looked longer. More nodules like the staircase outcropping were set along the path at intervals, except that they weren’t stairs, they were viewing platforms. If I kept to the centre of the walkway, I’d be fine, and I could leave admiring the view, or the vegetation, or whatever the hell I was supposed to be admiring, till I reached the platforms, which were wider, and had concrete floors.

  I started off, only to hear a tannoy announcement: the attraction would close in another ten minutes. I considered. Ten minutes was enough time either to walk fast around the whole walkway, or to admire the views, but not both. I decided I’d do the circuit, and I stopped clutching at the railing as I set off just as someone was leaving one of the adjacent platforms. We crashed into each other like Laurel and Hardy at their most tiresome.

  I stumbled, pushed into the railings once more, apologising as I went. I didn’t think it had been my fault, but if English manners require you to apologise to a person in the street when they step on your foot, then the logic behind it requires you also to apologise if someone bumps into you twenty metres in the air. I expected to hear the same sort of apology back, but instead, ‘My ankle.’ The man dropped to one knee and wrapped his hands around the other leg, his head down. Really? I’d done that much damage?

  I stood silent. ‘Are you all right?’ was redundant, since he plainly wasn’t. But walking away wasn’t an option, and I wasn’t sure what else to do. The man was maybe in his late twenties, and dark. Dark, close-cropped hair, dark colouring, dark stubble. Dark T-shirt and jeans. Altogether, not a look I associate with Kew, but my head is filled with so many stereotypes, sometimes I think there can’t be space for anything else. Silently I held out my hand. He took it, and I helped him to stand. He was less than average height, and slight, but the arm I was holding was muscled. This was no lightweight I’d brought down. He shifted his weight, testing his ankle, which made him hiss with pain.

  ‘Sprained,’ he said in an accusing tone, the subtext of which was You brute. I resisted flexing my muscles strong-man-at-the-circus style, and merely bent to pick up my handbag, which I’d dropped when we clashed. ‘I’ll go and find someone to help you down.’

  He didn’t let go of my arm. ‘There are lifts over there.’

  Now they tell me. I could have taken a lift up. Or I could have left with Jake. Or I could have stayed at home, found a packet of chocolate digestives and had a pleasant day reading on the sofa.

  Life is filled with roads not taken. ‘Lean on me.’

  He lifted his arm to put it round my shoulder. And the lights went out.

  I was curled in a ball, my knees pressed tight against my chest, my hands tucked under my chin. It wasn’t comfortable. I had the headache from hell, and I was – I tried to straighten my legs – I was jammed in somehow, and couldn’t move. I opened my eyes, although my
head was begging me not to do that. A pair of legs was in front of me, dressed in black jeans. The feet were facing away from me. I lifted my head and a starburst of pain exploded behind my ear. I closed my eyes again and concentrated on not vomiting. If I couldn’t move, vomiting wouldn’t be pretty. When the bile receded, I looked up again. The legs were attached to the man with the sprained ankle. His head was down. He was – listening? I heard voices, and footsteps. Sprained Ankle moved back towards me as they went past.

  By the time my half-functioning brain had worked out he was hiding from whoever the voices were, they had passed. It was probably better to figure out what was happening before I drew attention to myself, anyway. Sprained Ankle didn’t move, so I looked around as much as I could without lifting my head. I was in an enforced foetal curl, with my bum and feet pressed against the railings I’d looked over earlier: we were still on the treetop walkway. At the other end, my head and shoulders were propped up against a wall of some sort. I couldn’t move my hands or my head to check it out without Sprained Ankle discovering I was awake. Working out as much as I could while he thought I was unconscious felt like the way to go.

  I reconstructed what I could remember, and was forced to conclude that the man had coshed me. Even if I had sprained his ankle by knocking into him, that seemed an overreaction. Furthermore, most people don’t carry coshes – they are not part of the dress code at Kew – so it was unlikely he had been a passing victim of my clumsiness and had responded in a fit of pique.

  I had got that far when he moved. I could feel it coming – the tenseness left his body – which gave me time to close my eyes. I heard him walk a few steps away. And then I could more than hear his nearness as he turned and his foot thudded into my ribs. ‘Stupid bitch,’ he said. Sprained ankle my arse, I thought. Indignation at being fooled kept both my mouth and my eyes shut. I grunted, but didn’t move. I don’t know if unconscious people grunt when they’re kicked. Either they do, or he didn’t know either. At any rate, it didn’t faze him. He kicked me again, then I felt my handbag pulled out from underneath me. If I’d realised it was there, I might have risked moving to get at my phone. Too late.