‘There’s no plaque.’
‘You don’t get a plaque just for drinking somewhere. He didn’t live here. Come on, what would you like to drink?’
I scan the menu again, even though I have looked at it ten times already.
‘I’ll have a Copperfield Collins, please.’ Gin. It could be the only way.
He gestures to a passing waitress and she stops at our table. She is very attractive, too. He orders my drink and a beer for himself.
‘Olives and crudités?’ she asks.
He nods. ‘So,’ he says, once she has gone. ‘Have you had a good day?’ I already feel he is just going through the motions. I already feel he is regretting asking me here. ‘What is it you do?’
‘Do?’
‘Yes, you know, for a job?’
I should have prepared for this question. I should have prepared an answer for it so I don’t sound like an utter loser. ‘Nothing. I don’t work. I’m sort of my father’s carer.’ Ugh. I hate that this falsehood rolls off my tongue so easily.
‘Oh, it seemed like he can look after himself quite well.’
‘Well, he can, but I just need to be there, you know?’ God, I’m boring, I think. And I can’t tell him the truth: that I gave up work because I wanted to run away from life; that I retreated from the world just like my father – but without his excuse – to sit on my backside and do nothing. I can see a great big cross hovering over Salvi’s checklist as it is. ‘How was your day?’ I ask. ‘Were you at Covent Garden again?’
‘No, I was at the Old Bailey.’
I’m surprised. ‘What, outside?’
‘No, inside.’
‘What, with the unicycle?’
He laughs again. His big green eyes dance and I feel warmth radiating off his skin. ‘No, with a bunch of files and a wig. I’m a barrister; the street performer stuff is just something I do on the side.’
‘Oh!’ My view of him instantly shifts and he acquires a new, glossy layer – the sheen of stiff card; corporate, expensive. ‘You’re a barrister,’ I repeat, like a total imbecile. ‘You’re a barrister as well as a street performer?’
‘Yep, criminal defence – the street theatre is a nice release for me. In between defending serial killers. Well, this week it’s a rapist. But I should get him off.’
‘Oh, right.’ I gulp a little, wishing I already had my drink. I fiddle with the food menu in front of me, picking at one corner. I’m trying to take this all in. He’s a barrister who defends serious criminals. He’s a street performer as a sideline. He’s currently defending a rapist. He doesn’t work at that Ultra Laser place as an entertainer. He didn’t meet Philippa Helens there. ‘Well, that’s … unusual,’ I say. What is he doing here with me?
‘I’m a natural born show-off.’ He shrugs. ‘I always have been. I show off in court and I show off in Covent Garden, when I get the chance.’ He sounds so delighted about it, all this showing off. So unapologetic. This man who rides a unicycle and juggles with fire.
‘Do they know?’
‘Who?’
‘Your law firm.’
‘Egon and Fuller? Oh yeah, they know how I get my kicks, but I’m the best barrister they’ve got, so they don’t mind. They think it’s a hoot, actually. As do I. All the fun of the fair,’ he laughs.
‘I don’t like fairs,’ I say. I wonder why on earth I’m telling him this. I also marvel at the utter banality and flatness of my conversation. He’s so confident, I think. I have no idea how people get that way.
‘Something bad happen to you at one?’ he asks, looking at me curiously.
‘No,’ I lie. I peel a small fin of cardboard from the corner of the menu and roll it between my fingers. Of course, I won’t tell him that something did, once. The night my mother showed up for the last time and I went to Finsbury Park with my sometime friend, Georgina. The first bad thing that happened to me. I check myself and smile brightly at Salvi. Try to lift myself. Try to look like someone he might be glad to be on a date with.
The waitress returns with our drinks plus a tiny double serving dish stuffed with green olives and slivers of red and yellow pepper. Salvi winks at her, grins at me. ‘What would you like to continue with?’ he asks. ‘Shall we get a meat and cheese plate, and share?’
‘Yes, please.’ It’s hopeless. My smile is hopeless. I have absolutely nothing to balance all this confidence with, nothing at all. The barrister and the unemployed loser … I’m an empty vessel … there you go, Dickens. I’m in the right place. Put that in your tankard and drink it. The waitress is staring at Salvi, but he is staring at me. I want to put my hand up to my face, but I worry I will rub off some of my careful make-up.
Once the waitress has gone, Salvi starts talking to me about some case he defended last month, a tale of a guilty-as-sin miscreant, aggravated burglary and driving into a cashpoint with some home-made armoured truck. He peppers his tale with jokes and enthusiastic bursts of laughter. Sometimes he closes his eyes.
‘You don’t mind defending those who are clearly guilty?’ I ask. I feel like a robot, firing out a series of dull, robotic questions.
‘Of course not.’
He treats it all so lightly, like it’s a game. Perhaps that’s what you have to do to work in law, I think. It’s all theatre, I suppose, like the street performances.
‘Here we are.’ It’s the waitress with the cheese and meats; I move my glass over a beer stain on the table to make room for the platter but I’m not sure I’ll be able to eat a thing. I wonder how many other women Salvi may have brought here on a date. Women he may have picked out of the crowd to throw batons up to him, then brought to this dark, beautiful place. I’m sure they’ve all been a darned sight more interesting than me …
‘How long has your dad been blind?’ he asks. ‘From birth?’
‘No, thirty-eight years. He was just starting out as an architect when he had an accident and lost his sight.’
‘Oh, that’s tough.’
‘Yes.’
‘Still, there’s a blind architect living in America, I believe; LA or somewhere. I read about him in the Evening Standard.’
‘Hawaii,’ I say. ‘John Harrison Burrows. I’ve read about him too.’ And I follow him on Twitter. And on Facebook. I saw you on there. (I’m never telling him this in a million years.)
‘That’s it. Knew it was somewhere beachy and American. Whereabouts in Chalk Farm do you live?’
‘Above the tube station.’
‘Hey, not The Palladian?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Wow, famous! I’ve read about that somewhere, too. I’d love to see inside sometime. Would you like another one? I’m going to the bar.’
‘Oh, OK.’ I look down at my cocktail and it is nearly gone. ‘Yes, please.’
As he leaves the table, my phone rings. Dad. I’d forgotten we had a prearranged call, in case Salvi turned out to be a serial killer.
‘Hi, Dad.’
‘Say “yes” for, it’s going OK; “no” for, I need to say I’m in hospital and you must come right away,’ he whispers, in the voice of an Italian spy.
‘Yes,’ I say, although I’m really not sure. ‘He’s gone to the bar. We can talk.’
‘Ah. That’s good,’ says Dad, in his normal voice. ‘So, how’s it going?’
‘Good, good,’ I say distractedly. ‘He’s a barrister, as well as a street performer. He’s interesting.’
‘Oh, right. How surprising. And that is interesting. Are you going to see him again?’
‘It’s way too early for that, Dad!’ I can see Salvi at the bar, chatting to a woman in a black dress, who is laughing. My gut feeling is ‘no’ …
‘OK, well, enjoy yourself. Stay out as late as you like. Have you got your key?’
‘Dad, I’m forty-eight, of course I’ve got my key.’
‘Good. OK, bye then, love. Mind how you go.’
‘Thanks. Bye, Dad.’
Salvi stops talking to the woman and returns to the ta
ble with two more drinks. Mine is ice cold and, again, delicious. I will sip this one more slowly.
‘Did you ever study for anything?’ He’s really staring at me again. Staring at me and smiling. More questions.
‘No, I left school at sixteen.’ I hope my make-up isn’t sliding off. I have powder, I have concealer and I have foundation in my bag. ‘I’ve had lots of different jobs.’ I think of the conference centre. Catering, Badging. The work trip to Tenerife, after which I switched departments for something more backroom. The bad night there. ‘I worked for about twenty years in a conference centre. I was made redundant.’
‘You could apply to another conference centre?’
‘I’m a carer to my father.’
‘Right.’
Salvi starts to talk and talk. He talks about the Old Bailey and Covent Garden and juggling skills and cases. He talks about films and TV and people in the news. I answer his questions. I try and fail to be witty. He is radium; a magnet. I am dull metal; tarnished. I am neither too drunk nor drunk enough. The jury is still out. But I know he won’t want to see me again.
‘Shall we go?’ he says suddenly, finishing what I didn’t know would be his final pint.
‘OK.’ What does this mean? We? I was expecting a polite rebuttal at the end of the night, a quick, ‘Well, this was nice,’ and I’d never see him again … He’s already standing up. He has fished keys out of his back pocket and holds them in his left hand.
I stand up, too. I reach for my bag from under the stool. I am wobbly on my wedges and my heart is not sure whether to thud or deflate.
‘See ya, mate.’ Salvi says this to at least four people as we make our way out. He kisses the beautiful girl at the desk on both cheeks. I stare at his bum, his biceps, the back of his neck. This will be the last I see of him, surely?
Outside in the dark, the air still humid, he looks up the street as though for a taxi. There are no taxis; the street is empty. A lone cyclist comes by, ringing his bell, although we are not in his way. Salvi is still looking up the street at nothing.
‘Come here,’ he says, turning to me suddenly and – how astonishing! – he draws me towards him, tucks his arms around me and leans down and kisses me. His lips are warm and surprising, and he tastes wonderful, and I close my eyes and surrender to this very unexpected moment, because that’s what I am absolutely doing – surrendering. I’m not an experienced kisser. I don’t really know what I’m doing. But it’s a tender kiss. Exploring. Naughty. I surprise myself by wondering what it would be like to go to bed with him, and I’m wondering if he is wondering the same.
‘I’ve got to go,’ he says, pulling away from me.
What? ‘Come here’ and ‘I’ve got to go’ are bookends to this kiss? ‘Oh?’ I stammer. I am breathless, in the moment; a moment I hoped would be longer, or maybe even a lifetime.
‘Yeah,’ he says. Yeah, and in one smooth moment Salvi is raising his arm and hailing a cab that isn’t there, but suddenly there is one and it’s sailing down the road like a ship with its yellow light on top and it is pulling up to the kerb and I am being ushered in and Salvi is saying ‘See you’ and he shuts the door on me – the sliding door – with a clunk, well, it’s a really stiff door and it takes three goes until he finally gets rid of me, and I find myself sitting like a small child in the back seat, small and small and small with disappointment, and the taxi pulls away and I see Salvi’s face staring at me, from the night, his hand half-raised in an approximation of goodbye.
CHAPTER 18
Why are men never who you expect them to be? Why is there always something to trip you up or bring you down or leave you crying in the night? Why do you always have to be so very very careful?
I don’t cry in the night over the fact that one minute Salvi and I were kissing on the street, the next I was in a taxi, alone, going home. I arrive home to find the lights off and Dad already retired for the night, and I take off my make-up and I put Savlon on my birthmark and I go to bed. Salvi kissed me, then he had to go. It was abrupt, it was incredibly disappointing, and it was startling, but it wasn’t terrible. I’ve had terrible.
I’ve had really terrible.
Why does that other man come into my head now? That other man who hurt me? That stranger, in Tenerife? I lie in bed and watch the colours of a London night alight on my window then disappear, in a moving slide show. Why do I allow him to haunt my dreams, both awake and asleep?
I place a pillow over my head and block out the light, but it cannot block out everything. I’ve only ever told the story to one person – well, some of it, I don’t even know how much – and I shouldn’t have said anything, as I was tainted enough already and it was hardly a story that would make Kemp, my friend, fall in love with me. Why do I even continue to tell myself the story of what happened in the summer of 1996, in Tenerife? It was just a work trip. It was just a work trip to teach a badging system to a hotel on the coast.
I was good at Badging, at the conference centre in Highbury – printing, issuing, organizing – and that summer I was sent to Tenerife to train staff at a Spanish hotel on the same system. At twenty-six, I’d never been on a plane before – we’d never stretched to foreign holidays, as a family – and I loved the flight out. I liked being up in the air where everything stops and you are largely ignored; where fellow passengers only glance at you cursorily and cabin staff are trained not to flinch. I wondered how Angela had felt on her maiden flight to Nova Scotia; how excited she had been. Leaving us.
When we landed and I caught the bus to the resort hotel, I was disappointed. It was cloudy when I expected blue skies and dazzling sunshine; it was dry and somewhat commercial looking, not lush and exotic. There was bushy scrub, dusty roundabouts, random mountains with no purpose; two-storey buildings with shuttered apartments above, estate agents and restaurants boasting egg and chips below. It was dull and I felt dull there, after the excitement and promise of the flight. In the mornings I taught the badging system; in the afternoons I lay by the kidney-shaped pool behind the hotel. It was the school summer holidays so it was always busy, with lots of children. Lots of screeching and lots of splashing. I liked hearing them.
One afternoon, a rare sunny one towards the end of the trip, I put my minidress over my head, stretched out on my front on my sunlounger and, with my left cheek squished against its stiff fishing-net-like material, stared through the fretted squares to the chalky-white tiles below until a big toe with fine blond hairs on it appeared.
‘Hello,’ said a voice. European. Sing-song. ‘Are you on your own?’ The sort of thing an escaped murdering lunatic might ask.
‘No,’ I replied, raising my head and looking up from under my dress. The man was very tall, silhouetted against the denim-blue sky. Glittering droplets of water on his body. Taut and honed. Silken-skinned. The kind of man the boys I liked at school probably grew up to be. ‘No, I’m not. I’m here with my husband and seven children. They’re just in the pool.’
I waved a finger airily towards the centre of the pool, where it was absolute carnage.
‘Oh, OK.’ I knew he didn’t believe me. ‘Would you like a drink?’
‘I’ve got water,’ I said, indicating the plastic bottle under the sunbed.
He sat down on the end of my sunlounger, tipping it so my end went up like a see-saw. Very presumptuous, I thought, but it was the type of thing men like him did. The kind of man who would shorten your name to a nickname before asking you if you minded. I sat up so the weight could shift to the end of the see-saw and balance return. He was quite good-looking, I thought. I wasn’t sure why he was sitting on my sunlounger and asking me about drinks.
‘Wouldn’t you rather have a cocktail?’ He was squinting at me, but I detected from the slits that his eyes were aquamarine blue. I squinted back at him, aware my birthmark was only covered by factor 50; that I was unmasked.
‘OK, then,’ I said.
We walked to the bar, which had a roof like a giant straw hat. He walked with his f
eet splayed out, like a duck, but had the kind of Tintin hair you wanted to play with and eyes that reflected the pool. A woman in mirrored sunglasses was singing in the bar – cumbersome, jazzed-up, synthesized versions of ‘Hotel California’ and ‘Billie Jean’ – as a beautiful girl I decided was Swedish danced alone in a floor-length white crochet maxi dress so everyone could see just how beautiful she was.
His name was Jonas. He was from Belgium. He was some kind of salesman. He asked me my name and what I was doing at the hotel. After a while, I wanted to get away from him. He had rather a high opinion of himself. An equally high tolerance for banal chat. I was uninspired but I drank three Tequila Sunrises.
The woman eventually finished singing and wheeled her gear away on a luggage trolley. I made my excuses, muttered something about going back to my book. I saw him loiter at the bar for a few minutes, from behind my sunglasses, back on my sunlounger, then he wandered off in the direction of the Sunrise restaurant.
Later that afternoon they closed the pool. A man in a white uniform went from chrome steps to chrome steps and joined them up with suspended crime-scene tape. The sun had gone in anyway, so I went upstairs.
My room had the kind of door that doesn’t immediately swing shut after you, it just stays open. When I turned from putting my beach bag on a chair, Jonas was standing there, in the doorway.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked him, trying to sound nonchalant. Away from the pool I felt self-conscious in my bikini and sheer mini-dress and tugged at the hem.
‘I wanted to know if you’d join me for dinner tonight.’
‘Did you follow me up here?’
‘Yes, I did. Well, no, not really. I asked which room you were in. At reception.’
‘And they told you?’
He shrugged. ‘I said you were a friend of mine; no big deal, is it?’
‘No, I wouldn’t like to go for dinner with you,’ I said. You’re boring, I wanted to add.
‘That’s a shame.’
The beautiful Swedish girl walked past, down the corridor – she must have been staying on my floor – but Jonas didn’t look at her, he didn’t even glance in her direction. He only looked at me, so I changed my mind. I said I’d go for dinner with him.
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