Summer in the City

by Fiona Collins

  Today Dad and I climb the wide steps in front of the building then follow its curve to the right, along the lowest tier of this majestic layer cake, where the brickwork is creamy and embossed with heraldic shields. The sun has warmed the bricks to warm biscuits and Dad stops and places his hands on one like it’s a talisman.

  ‘I haven’t been here since you girls were in that concert,’ he says. ‘It’s been a long time.’ Almost talking to himself, he adds, ‘The Albert Hall was designed by two architects in the Royal Engineers and opened by Queen Victoria in 1871. It wasn’t called the Albert Hall until after Albert died; it used to be called the Hall of Arts and Sciences.’ They’re probably the same facts he told me and Angela all those years ago. I wonder if we’re standing in the same spot. ‘The design was partly based on the Colosseum in Rome. The original dome was made in Manchester before being taken apart and transported to London.’

  ‘It’s so beautiful,’ I say. ‘I love the shape of it.’

  ‘Its shape probably saved it from being bombed in the Second World War, you know. The German pilots used it as a landmark. Did you know it’s oval, not circular?’

  ‘No, I didn’t know that.’ Dad looks melancholic, with his hand on the warmth of the Albert Hall. I wish I could reach him, reach out to him, but I still don’t know where to start.

  We walk all the way around. Dad asks me to describe the building how I see it, so I talk about the gateau, the layers, the pinks and the plums. For the first time I notice the mosaic frieze that ribbons all the way around it, and Dad tells me it’s called the Triumph of Art and Letters and what each panel of the mosaic depicts.

  ‘Do you want to go inside?’ I ask him, once we have done the full circumference.

  ‘No, I don’t think so. Let’s head home now, Prue.’

  We walk back to South Kensington tube station. Exhibition Road is busy. A woman in a pretty dress led by a guide dog walks towards us and there is so little space on the pavement that the dog, in its neon harness, brushes Dad’s leg as he passes. It gives a muffled snort, as they continue on their way, a small elephantine trumpet.

  ‘A guide dog,’ Dad says, stifling a small sneeze.

  ‘Yes,’ I reply.

  He is quiet for what seems like a very long time.

  ‘I still miss them.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I never wanted to have to rely on anyone, Prue.’

  ‘I know, Dad. Mind the kerb.’ I guide him further over to the right, my heart contracting. This summer. This summer maybe everything we want to say will be said. Dad is talking. Dad is talking to me. We walk and I listen.

  ‘You know, as soon as I became blind my goal was to qualify for a guide dog,’ he says, smiling sadly into the lowering sun. ‘You have to demonstrate you have sufficient mobility and orientation skills before they’ll give you one, show you can travel safely and independently around the local area. So I practised. Nonna and Papa would take you to school and afterwards I would go out, bumble round the neighbourhood until I could convince the guide dog people I was OK. And then we got Sunny; do you remember her?’

  ‘Yes, she was gorgeous.’

  ‘She had a lovely temper. Do you remember how she would jump up to the box at pelican crossings and rest her paws on it to indicate to me where the button was?’

  I smile. ‘Yes, I remember.’

  ‘She saved my life. Well, all three of you girls did. I began to head out with almost nothing to fear. I loved people’s reactions. Knowing they were smiling at Sunny – I could feel a warmth radiating from people, you know? Not like now. The buggers.’ I laugh. ‘When the last dog, Folly, had to go, I … Well, you know there’s a bereavement service now for losing a guide dog …? Not in those days. I just internalized it; I couldn’t talk to anyone. One day, when you were at school, I tried to go out alone again with just a cane but it was a disaster. I became disoriented and panicked. I barked – oh, the irony, Prue – at a woman who tried to help me, who grabbed my arm and tried to lead me off somewhere. I felt awful. I went back home and I couldn’t go out again. I just couldn’t do it. All because of a stupid allergy to dogs.’ He shakes his head. He sounds angry and really Italian. ‘It’s ridiculous and I lost everything I had before. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry you have to lead me around now.’

  ‘I’m not leading you around. We’re out on a trip!’

  ‘I can’t even go down to the doctors on my own!’

  ‘Dad, it’s fine. I’m happy to take you where you need to go. I’m enjoying these trips! And losing the guide dogs, it’s just one of those things. It wasn’t your fault.’

  He sighs, a deep deep sigh that makes me feel quite wretched. ‘I know it wasn’t, but it feels like it. It feels like it was my fault.’

  We fall silent. I digest the story Dad has told me, the pain he has kept secret. It’s hard for fathers and daughters to share the secrets of their hearts; but we have made a start, Dad and I. Now it’s my turn, I know that. But I also know I am not brave enough to share my secrets with him. Not yet. But I want to. How I want to.

  We’re entering the long subway to the tube entrance now. I welcome the absence of sun. The echo of footsteps. It’s cooler down here. There are flagstones underfoot, and glazed tan and cream tiles flanking the walls and the domed ceiling. A snaking line of chirruping school children in fluorescent bibs bounces ahead of us, as patiently smiling teachers punctuate the snake at intervals and occasionally pop a darting child back in.

  ‘Children?’ asks Dad.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Maybe coming back from a school outing.’

  There’s a busker at the end of the tunnel, by the tube entrance, gruffing along to ‘Wonderwall’, with an accompanying mournful guitar. As the children pass him, he segues into ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’, and starts to sing the nursery rhyme gently, plucking at the guitar like it’s a lute. A child to the front of the snake joins in, lending his high, slightly out-of-tune voice to the husk of the busker’s, and then another and another adds their voice – an escalating symphony – until the sweet pure voices of the children completely mask that of the busker and swell in the cool, echoing chamber of the tunnel. As they walk in time, now, to the music and sing so joyously, I breathe in the sweet sound of those voices like honeysuckle and I glance across at Dad and he is singing too – so softly I can barely make out the words – and he has tears in his eyes and I have tears in mine. And we’re in step now, too, with the children, and as I also lend my voice to join in with this nursery rhyme that is as old as the hills and worlds far beyond them, one of the children turns from the tail end of the snake and holds her hand out to me, fingers spread, as though she is trailing them through a rippling stream, and she smiles at me, her face lit up like a beacon as though mine is – amazingly – a beacon to her, too, and I smile back, through my unchecked tears.

  CHAPTER 21

  When we get back to Chalk Farm, standing on the pavement outside the brown doors to The Palladian is a young man holding a blue plastic file and standing next to him is Kemp.

  ‘Hi, Bertie,’ says Kemp as we approach, and I remember I never replied to his final text, outside the Dickensian. ‘This is my nephew, Ryan.’ He gestures to the young man to step forward and shake Dad’s hand. ‘I promise you we have a reason for being here and I’m not just randomly loitering in the vicinity of your flat again.’ He grins at me. I shake Ryan’s hand and look at Kemp quizzically. ‘Ryan’s interested in The Palladian.’

  ‘A little young to be a property shark,’ I quip, thinking of all those brochures from speculating estate agents.

  Kemp laughs. ‘He’s doing a sixth-form project on Leslie Green, the tube station architect,’ he explains. ‘I told him I knew someone who lived above one of his stations.’

  ‘Leslie Green didn’t actually design the flat,’ I say. ‘The Edwardians did.’

  Kemp raises his eyebrows. ‘No, but is it OK? If we come up and take a look around? Just a swift one? Ryan was too shy to come and knock on h
is own.’

  ‘No I wasn’t!’ retorts Ryan, and I feel like Kemp wants to give him a comedy kick in the shins. I also feel this is a ruse for Kemp to see me again, but why? Why does he want to see me? I was just his friend and not a very good one, at that. Doesn’t he have anyone better?

  ‘Dad?’ I ask, hoping he’ll say ‘no’.

  ‘Fine with me,’ Dad says with a shrug.

  ‘Great!’

  Kemp winks at me. I try to avoid his gaze. I don’t want him looking at me. I don’t want to keep seeing him. To be reminded that I loved him, but he couldn’t love me. That he would never look at a woman like me in the way a woman wants to be looked at by a man she has regretfully fallen for and never got over. The damn fool idiot.

  Ryan winks too, surprisingly, although despite this copied trait of his uncle’s they look nothing alike – he is pale and placid-looking, with cropped blond hair and brown eyes. As he grins he shows sharpened teeth, like a cat’s.

  ‘Can you dust down your trousers a bit first, though?’ I ask Kemp.

  He laughs again. ‘Yeah, sure. I’ve been underground.’

  On the tube? I think. What’s he been doing down there? Lying in a siding? He slaps tanned hands, edged at the wrists with those leather bands, in a show of dusting down his thighs, then he and Ryan follow Dad and me up the clanking metal staircase.

  I take them straight through to the sitting room. ‘Go wherever you like,’ I say to Ryan. ‘Take photos, whatever.’ He wanders off in the direction of the kitchen and the remaining three of us stand awkwardly. Eventually Dad goes to sit in his chair.

  ‘So,’ says Kemp. He has never been inside The Palladian before. He knocked one morning after I decided I couldn’t be friends with him any more – and had spent about a week ignoring his texts and phone calls. He knocked and I looked out of the window at him standing on the street below with his phone in his hand and I didn’t answer. Eventually he went away. ‘Lovely place,’ he says, looking around him. ‘Nice window,’ he adds, wandering over to the Palladian window and running his hand over the painted wood of the sill. Dad is already reaching for his headphones. ‘Hey, can I get a glass of water? I’ll help myself. Kitchen?’ He gestures, towards the door Ryan ambled through.

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Live, laugh, bollocks?’ he whispers to me as he passes me, rubbing at the back of his head, and I blush.

  I didn’t really know Kemp at school. I mean, we were in the same art class, for GCSEs, but despite being generally smiley and quite bouncy, he was an enigma. A loner. He was always in the darkroom, emerging like an abashed vole with his shaggy New Romantic hair all messed up and a grin both joyous and sheepish, smelling of those weird chemicals and clutching photograph after photograph he had developed: people, buildings, animals, landscapes; everything. Colour, black-and-white, sepia. Not that I was watching.

  He didn’t seem to have any particular friends. There was one boy – David somebody – a peer-besmirched ‘speccy runt’, who he hung around with a lot but who moved away in the third year. Then there was just Kemp and his darkroom. I heard Kemp’s mum was a hoarder, the sort they make programmes about now, and his dad an obsessive jigsaw doer, in a summerhouse at the bottom of the garden. That they had a cat they only allowed out on a piece of elastic, which stretched as far as that summerhouse and no further. No one really knew for sure, but it stopped him being popular. It deterred girls from finding him good-looking. His smiles were declared creepy and his bounciness viewed with suspicion. He had a cat on elastic.

  I was not an enigma. I was viewed not with suspicion but with contempt. I was an ugly non-entity who did straight-up drawing, still life, painting onions and things. And I didn’t see Kemp for many years, after we left school. Then one day in my early twenties, not long before I got my first job at the conference centre, I bumped into him when I was waiting in a lay-by for Dave, the man in a blue van who picked me up every morning when we worked together going around pubs and leisure centres collecting cash from vending machines. Sheryl Crow wrote a song about a vending machine repairman once; in the song he picked her up when she was hitch-hiking and it was quirky and cool – he had a daughter named Easter and was surprisingly intellectual. Riding in the van with Dave was far from that. He ate stinky pasties, played Westlife CDs and had a daughter called Big Stacey. Anyway, one morning there was a whistle – not a wolf whistle but a ‘Lookee here!’ kind of whistle – and Kemp from school came bounding towards me. I’d just told a couple of giggling teenagers – identikit Impulse body spray and frosted-pink lipstick – who were giggling at my face from a nearby bus stop to ‘Piss off!’

  ‘Do you need any help?’ he asked me.

  ‘No, I’ve dispatched them, thanks,’ I said.

  He laughed. ‘Good for you. Haverstock Comprehensive, right? Art class?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  At school it had intrigued me that Kemp was an outsider, like me, but always looked so cheerful about it, while I scowled and shuffled my way through classes, a ghost of the ghost I would become. I thought he was good-looking. I found his bounciness endearing. I liked seeing him dancing in the corner of school discos in his ruffly shirts and pointy boots. His smile, given out in the general direction of everyone and no one in particular.

  I would have quite liked a cat on elastic.

  ‘You did a lot of onions.’

  ‘I did. And you were a really good photographer.’

  ‘Thanks. I try to be. Sure you’re OK?’

  ‘Definitely. What, you’re a photographer now?’ I ask. ‘As an actual job?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Kemp. ‘I’m a photographer.’

  ‘You always had a plan,’ I said.

  The lone boy in the dark room without any friends. The New Romantic fan who took brilliant pictures. It had all worked out for him.

  He shrugged. Looked slightly amused. ‘Yes, I guess I did. Well, see you,’ he added, and just like that he bounded off again.

  I didn’t see him again until approximately fifteen years later. I was on a work’s night out in Camden with the Bookings team from the conference centre, had drunk a whole bottle of rosé and was fending off the ill-conceived chat-up lines of a random Australian. Kemp was on a stag do for an editor at National Geographic and was wearing somebody else’s very Jamiroquai-esque hat. Somehow we ended up chatting wildly at the bar, spring-boarding from people who hated us at school to art to Brit Pop and everything in between. Everyone else melted away, until it was just me and him, drinking and talking. Two former misfits in their late thirties; except I still was one.

  I was raptured. I decided after twenty minutes he was the most amazing man in the world; he looked at me after about an hour and said, ‘You know what, I think you’d make a really good friend, Prue Alberta.’ And there we had it. I was Huck Finn to his Tom Sawyer. Charlie Brown to his Snoopy. David Somebody to his enigma. And that was how it began. Our wonderful, highly disappointing friendship. A friendship I had to take as all I could get, when I wanted so much more.

  Kemp returns from the kitchen with the glass of water as I am ramming ‘Bollocks’ into a drawer. His jeans have dark sploshes on them. ‘Sorry, you’ve got a fast tap. Some water went everywhere. I used a tea towel.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I say. He was always accident prone. Always hitting his head on the door frame of his houseboat or cracking his shins on the side of the tables in the pub as he wound his way up to the front to do really bad karaoke to really bad power ballads. He grins at me. I want him to go away. I don’t want to see his face because his face – his smile, the way his eyes crinkle when he laughs and the lines at the side of his mouth join in; that chickenpox scar I want to touch with my finger and smooth away – is what I love about him most of all.

  ‘Are you still working at the conference centre?’ he asks. He is leaning against the wall, feet crossed at the ankles. Relaxed. How can he always be so relaxed? I am a tightly wound spring, ready to unravel.

  I hesitate. I reall
y don’t want to come across as a total loser. Not to this man. A man who I mostly met at night but who I always viewed as someone who walks on the sunny side of the street; who belongs on the sunny side of life … I got made redundant not long after I decided I couldn’t have him in my life any more. When my heart was still breaking at the thought of never seeing him again, I was called into my own office and told I had managed so effectively and set up such a brilliant system, for all the tiers of staff below me, that I was no longer required.

  ‘Prue’s been looking after me,’ says Dad and he settles back in his chair.

  ‘Oh, right. Right,’ says Kemp. ‘That’s excellent.’

  After the night in Camden, Kemp took my number and he used to call me, about six o’clock, when I was on my way home from work, to ask me if I wanted to go to the pub. We’d meet in the tiny King’s Arms near his houseboat, we’d drink too many Jack Daniel’s and Cokes and eat salt-and-vinegar crisps and talk and talk and talk, and then we’d stagger, laughing usually to one of those recycled jokes of his he could never quite reach the punchline of, back to Summer Breeze and talk and drink more bourbon and talk and drink more bourbon. I found out he really did have a cat on elastic. That his mum was a hoarder and his dad an escapee jigsaw doer. That he slept, as a child, in a box room crammed with old magazines and plastic tubs rammed full of tat, and that his roaming the world as a photographer was his own escape, making up for the confines of his childhood. That he got into photography in the first place as a means to literally see beyond his stuffed and chaotic home life.

  We drank too much, we realized that. We weren’t teenagers any more, but we acted like them. No kids, no real responsibilities; lives that weren’t entirely grown up. While we talked and talked, I realized we were never going to be more than friends. Sometimes I’d pass out on his bed, though, with him on the floor, and wake, a befuddled twit, in the early hours, to stare at him sleeping for a while, before making my way home.