Richard leant against the doorpost, breathing more evenly. When he had recovered himself he went over to where Petal lay cowering and kneeled down beside her.
‘Stupid old dog,’ he murmured, his voice soft and coaxing. He raised the flat of his hand and stroked the dog’s trembling side, feeling for where he had kicked her, shaking his head slightly from side to side. ‘Stupid . . . old . . . dog . . .’ His hand found the place. Petal whimpered. He stopped stroking.
Then he pressed – gently at first, then harder – until the dog let out a strangled, choking sound; a long, slow, inarticulate cry of bewilderment and pain.
Chapter 4
Benny had followed the girl for two hours.
From Sutton Street she walked through Deptford to New Cross Gate, to a row of bus stops around which a disconsolate but mostly philosophical crowd was milling. She pushed through them and got on a bus. Benny could tell the bus was going nowhere and simply waited on the pavement, hidden amongst a crowd of macs and denim jackets and duffle coats. Being small had its advantages – and being dark. The one thing about London that Benny appreciated was that it was impossible to stand out in a crowd. Eventually, the girl got off again and joined the others. Benny watched her from behind the safety of a woman’s bulky shoulder. The girl stood glancing around, rolling her eyes and pulling faces, then extracted a sweet from her pocket, popped it into her mouth and worked it round her cheeks, peering down the road to see what was happening and tapping her foot to keep warm. A few feet away from the crowd, a smartly dressed woman in her middle years was haranguing a lamp-post.
‘Think yer big, don’t you?’ she was calling up at it, pointing with a raised bony finger, ‘yer big bastard, think yer big.’
Eventually, the girl turned on her heel and began to walk. Benny followed. The girl kept her head bent, broke into a trot once in a while, then slowed down again. The wild wind seized her hair and wrapped it round her head like a bandage until she stopped, put down her bag and tied it back with a rubber band. Even then the wind pulled strands free which flapped upwards illogically, making her look like some small demon.
He lost her somewhere between Camberwell and Brixton. They were making their way down Cold-harbour Lane, a long road full of crumbling terraces set back from the street, with stone steps and railings leading up to doorways or down to basement flats with iron bars over the windows. Many of the houses were boarded up, the windows blinded eyes of brick. One of them had been occupied by squatters who had hung bright banners from the first floor. Another had a damp, yawning Rottweiler chained to the railings, unenthusiastically guarding an open front door.
They came to a row of shops: newsagent, butcher, junk shop. Helly paused to tie back her hair again and Benny stopped and looked in the butcher’s window. Apart from a plastic tub of mince, the only product was an obscenely long protrusion of bone and bloodied gristle which lay diagonally in a metal tray: Frozen cow’s tail, 75p/lb. Benny shook his head in disbelief. In his country, poor people had some dignity. When he looked up again, Helly had gone.
He stepped out into the road and peered ahead. She was nowhere in sight. Even if she had broken into a run, she couldn’t have reached the curve in the road.
The junk shop had windows filled with rusting gas cookers. In front, on the pavement, was an assortment of seventies furniture, wood veneered tables and chairs with orange plastic seats from which fleshy yellow foam protruded. Just beyond it, Benny could now see an entrance.
The alleyway was long and gloomy, then broadened out at the end into the white light of a street. Dustbins and doorways lined either side and in the doorways lay bundles. The girl was already half-way down. He began to follow, but cautiously. If she turned round now he would be spotted.
Then, suddenly, two things happened at once. Benny had the sensation of treading on something small and unyielding, and there came the loud hollow yelping of an animal in pain. He jumped back. As he did, a brown shape at his feet metamorphosed into a skinny snarling dog – muzzle black, eyeballs huge and shiny, lips drawn back over tiny pointy teeth. The dog performed a neat frantic circle, then sank its teeth into a filthy grey coat which lay on the floor beside it. The filthy grey coat leapt to its feet. Underneath it was a man with wild brown hair and a sand-filled beard.
‘Spot!’ the man screamed in fury.
Benny withdrew swiftly behind the safety of a bin.
‘What did you do that for?’ the man hollered at the dog. ‘Spot!’ Then he began to beat the dog with the flat of his hand.
The noise roused the other bundles which lay in other doorways. Several grey coats sat up, scratched their heads and began calling out to know what the hell was going on. Two more dogs started to bark. Benny stepped out from behind the bin and sidled swiftly down the alley.
The commotion was still going on as he reached the street. He scanned both ways, but the girl had disappeared.
As she neared home, Helly’s feet slowed down. She had decided not to go to work about an hour previously, as she had been walking through Peckham. It was already mid-morning. The storm was still raging. No one was going anywhere. As she neared Stockwell, she realised she didn’t want to go home either. Her mother would be there.
The wind had dropped slightly. She was walking down a deserted street which the storm seemed to have passed by. Small sturdy trees lined the road on either side. On her left were white-painted terraces with stripped wooden doors and coloured blinds. As she passed one, opera could be heard playing from the basement. Next to it was a Montesorri nursery. On the other side of the street there was the solid dark brick of a council block. London in microcosm. All at once, she felt unutterably depressed. She stopped and sighed. If only it wasn’t so cold, then she could go up to Brockwell Park and walk around, or just walk around anywhere. There weren’t even any decent cafés in Stockwell, none in which she could sit without being stared at by groups of wet-lipped men sucking roll-ups.
She paused for a moment, then turned and took a side-road that would lead up to Vauxhall. She wasn’t going home or to work. She was going to go to the only place which was warm and free and quiet.
She had been going to the Tate for years. To start off with it was just somewhere out of the wind. Then, it was a place to hide. Nobody she knew would go to the Tate. It was anonymous and, at the same time, cosy. All the other people in that building, they had chosen to go there too. Even though she never spoke to any of them or even liked the look of them, these strangers and her had something in common. They all wanted to be inside.
At the entrance she handed over her bag to be searched by the security guard. It was quiet and he was bored so he took his time, rummaging around through her woollen gloves, make-up bag, box of mini-tampons, cigarettes. The inside of her bag was filthy. A biro at the bottom had leaked and blue ink was seeping through a seam. There was no Semtex but there was a label which said, Luxury leather imitation, Made in Taiwan. She sometimes felt as though that was the real purpose of the search, as if the guard might look up, shake his head sadly and inform her she was barred until she could afford a better handbag.
Inside, she took a left turn and trotted down the stairs to the toilets. To the right was the coffee shop. She paused and glanced through the glass door. It was almost empty. A small scattering of people sat at wooden tables punctuated by shiny dark green plants in terracotta pots. At one there was a fair-haired woman with a forkful of cake held carefully in front of her face. She was looking down at her Tate plan which was spread out next to her plate. With her free hand, she was pushing and pulling at a baby buggy next to her. The toddler in it was asleep.
At a table nearby, two young men in suede jackets were smoking and talking quietly, gesturing lightly with their hands. That is what being educated means, Helly thought. Talking quietly. Quiet talk has no real function, like taking a long bath.
She wandered over to the entrance arch and looked at the menu in its glass case on a stand. Blackcurrant and almond tart sounded nice: o
ne pound eighty. Coffee was ninety-five pence. That was what having money meant: wandering into an art gallery café to have tart and coffee, sitting at a table on your own for as long as you liked without being bothered. For a man, money meant you could go to nice places. For a woman, money meant you could go to places where you would be left alone. It’s all for sale, Helly thought: warmth, blackcurrant tart, personal safety, peace. It’s all on the market. Every day of my life I will be reminded that I don’t have the money to buy it, but it will never go away.
The woman rocking the buggy looked up, her forkful of cake still suspended, and glanced at Helly. She put down her fork quickly. A poor kid, thought Helly, that’s what I look like. She was not intimidated by class. She knew what people thought of her and didn’t care. Fuck ’em. She never tried to smarten up her accent – on the contrary, she put it on. Sometimes, she would work her mouth while she talked, as if she was chewing gum, because she knew it annoyed people. She would lounge against bus stops with her arms folded, glaring at passing drivers who looked her way. You want Cheap Slut, her gaze would say? Fine, you’ve got it. I can do that one in spades. Eat your heart out, Pig.
The toddler in the buggy had woken and begun to grizzle. The woman bent to lift it out. As she did, a curtain of straight fair hair fell forward over her face. Rather you than me love, Helly thought. Why did upper class women always have straight hair? How boring could you get? She turned away to the Ladies. Thank God pissing was free.
Upstairs, she went straight to room seventeen, to make sure her favourite painting was still there. It would probably be coming down soon. She had bought Bob and Joanna a print of Cossacks. It wasn’t really their kind of thing but that somehow didn’t matter. She just wanted them to have it. She had laughed when she found out they had hung it in Nan Hawthorne’s room. What on earth did the old lady think when she woke up each day and saw all those mad coloured swirls? Like the tube map gone bananas. She probably thought she was going sane. With any luck, Helly had mused, it will give the old bint a coronary, then I can have her room. If Kandinsky didn’t do the trick, maybe she would try a Surrealist.
After the cold wind outside, the rooms felt light and warm. Helly wandered round for half an hour, looking up at the vaulted ceilings from time to time, loving the space and air, listening to the soft echoes of footsteps and murmuring voices. Room twenty-three contained Abstraction, 1945–65. She paused in front of a picture called North Sound. The plaque next to it told her, Hoyland’s paintings have proclaimed their self-sufficiency as visual facts or events. While she had been in the Ladies, she had peered at herself in the mirror and seen what the wind had done to her hair. She stood back from the painting. I am pretty abstract, she thought. Some people might think I’m a bit on the scruffy side, but I’m just proclaiming my self-sufficiency as a visual fact or event. Then she went to the shop.
Sometimes, she enjoyed the shop more than the gallery. It was easier, more concentrated. It could fit inside one glance – the rows and rows of great works of art all reduced to postcards, like a universe shrunk down to a rug. She could spend hours flicking through the racks of posters, listening to the metallic clicking of the frames, losing herself in each picture one by one, the slow fall of an individual world as she passed on to the next. Her room at home was full of rolled up posters representing the different phases she had been through. She had catalogued by subject matter rather than artist or movement. Landscapes, for instance, were gathered together in a small forest next to her stereo. A couple of ballerinas were stashed under the bed. She was a bit embarrassed about the ballerinas now. They had been purchased in the early stages, when she was thirteen or fourteen. These days, she wasn’t into people.
Today, she went over to a pile of glossy hardback books in a carefully arranged pyramid by the entrance; the latest arrivals. She scanned it quickly, then picked up the largest – at last, something new on German Expressionism. She glanced around. An assistant was lounging behind a nearby till, picking at her fingernails. There were only two other customers. It was too quiet. She would have to come back when the shop was more busy and nick it then.
At work the following day, nobody referred to Helly’s absence. The office was agog with tales of the storm. She grew sick of hearing about greenhouses that had taken wing and flying garden gnomes. She didn’t seem to have missed much work. Joan told her that Richard had sent everyone home early.
The next day was Friday. After lunch, she returned to her desk to find a pale yellow form lying on it. She picked it up, scanned it and then took it round to where Joan and Annette sat. Annette was nowhere in sight. Joan had her handbag on the desk in front of her and was counting out ten pound notes, folding them neatly one by one and placing them in the back of her purse.
‘What’s this?’ Helly asked, proferring Joan the form.
Joan took it from her. ‘It’s a leave form,’ she said, handing it back. ‘Haven’t you taken any holiday yet?’
‘No,’ said Helly, ‘and I’m not planning to either.’
‘It’s for Wednesday,’ said Annette, as she swept round the corner. She was holding a cup of tea. She swung herself into her chair and took a sip from it. Her face was slightly flushed and she was wearing a soft silk blouse with full sleeves that fluttered like butterfly’s wings. She seemed unusually bright and cheery. She put down her tea and looked up. ‘You’ve got to take a day’s leave for not coming in.’
‘I told you,’ said Helly. ‘I couldn’t get in. No buses.’
‘The rest of us made it,’ Annette replied.
‘Bollocks.’
Annette sighed. ‘You didn’t even ring in.’ She turned to her computer.
Helly continued. ‘Only half the surveyors came in, Joan told me. And Richard didn’t get in till lunchtime. I don’t suppose anyone is making him take half a day, are they? And you all went home at three.’
Annette began to type, speaking as she did. ‘What those people who made it did is nothing to do with it. You didn’t turn up and you weren’t sick, so you take a day’s leave.’
Helly stood glaring. She pursed her lips. She drew a breath. Then, slowly, she tore the leave form into two, screwed it up for good measure, went over to the bin by Annette’s desk and dropped it in.
Annette looked up and met her gaze. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Do what you like. I’ll let Personnel know and they’ll dock your salary.’
‘Do what the fuck you want,’ said Helly as she turned and went back to her desk.
After she had gone, Annette and Joan looked at each other.
‘Oh dear,’ said Joan.
‘It’s not my fault. Richard told me specifically this morning, anyone who didn’t come in was to take a day’s leave. It’s not my fault.’
‘What about the surveyors?’ asked Joan.
‘I don’t know about them,’ Annette retorted. It would be up to Richard to tell the surveyors to come to her for leave forms. It wasn’t anything to do with her. The surveyors weren’t her responsibility. She lowered her head and continued to type.
Joan shook her head. She hated arguments, even when she was only an innocent bystander. Arguments made her want to put the kettle on or tell a joke – or suggest they all discussed the weather. She folded the last tenner, placed her purse back in her handbag and put the handbag underneath her desk, just by her feet.
The incident with Helly preyed on Annette’s mind. She knew she had been in the right but at the same time she knew how she must have appeared – the school marm, the office harridan, a dried up old boot. She wouldn’t have bothered with the leave form but Richard had insisted. He was a stickler for all that stuff. And now she was going to be responsible for Helly losing a day’s pay. She would have been horrified if something like that had happened to her. She budgeted each month down to the last penny: mortgage, standing orders, insurance, savings account. She was not well off but she managed, and she always knew exactly where she stood. No treats, no disasters – that was how she handled her own fina
nces. An unexpected loss or gain would be equally disturbing. It was so important to be organised about these things.
But how else to handle it, she thought as she sat on her train going home that evening. Richard would have only told her to dock Helly’s pay anyway.
She had come back from lunch with a head full of William and their kiss in the lift, feeling like somebody light and graceful. In the pub, she had gone to the Ladies just to look at herself in the mirror, to glance at the peculiar beauty she knew she would see. Her spat with Helly had put an end to all that. She felt heavy and responsible and old. Rationalising usually helped, but not this evening. Perhaps she was just tired. Perhaps Helly would get over it soon and not hate her after all. Perhaps, Annette thought, I could just go to sleep tonight and never wake up, then I wouldn’t have to think about any of this any more.
She stared at her own reflection in the train’s grimy window, the thin translucent picture of her features over the passing landscape of suburban London: factories, office blocks, building sites – wastelands. Her watery face passed over them all, each image sliding through the dark of her eyes.
It was Friday night and she was babysitting for Sarah and Jason. They lived in Lewisham, in a basement flat filled with toys belonging to their ten-month-old daughter, Dawn. Dawn was a placid, cheerful baby, large for her age, who could already crawl and stagger and wave her clammy fist in an entertaining variety of gestures. She loved Annette.
Sarah and Annette called themselves best friends. They had been secretaries together during Annette’s first job, at an engineering firm in Beckenham. The job had been awful – the people they worked with even worse. Annette and Sarah had bonded. They went out to the pub together after work and talked about the rest of the staff. They took up smoking. Then together they gave it up. Annette was with Sarah when she met Jason, in a wine bar in Forest Hill. When she and Jason split up, Sarah spent the night at Annette’s house and cried until four in the morning. Annette was the first to know when, three weeks later, Jason proposed. At their wedding, Annette had been the maid of honour, resplendent in peach-coloured satin and holding a bouquet of floppy sweet peas. Her main task had been to look after a host of tiny bridesmaids, also in peach, who spent the day losing their tiny gloves and tiny handbags and tiny shoes. Sarah’s gown was raw silk, off-white, and appeared to be built up in a profusion of frills and layers. Annette cooed and aahed along with the best of them, although her candid opinion was that her friend looked like a meringue.
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