Summer in the City

by Fiona Collins

  ‘Shall we?’

  A band is setting up on the small stage in front of the end wall with the lit-up panels. A guitar is being tuned, there’s a sizzle from the drum kit, a squeak from the microphone – a spark created elsewhere; not just us. They launch into an enthusiastic ‘Livin’ la Vida Loca’.

  I nod.

  He leads me through the chattering tables and on to the dancefloor, where we are the first there. He starts dancing and I, shy but drunk, begin to sway from side to side. He is laughing at me, but not unkindly. His hand is still in mine, warm and nice.

  ‘OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  We dance, while laughing at each other, awkwardly at first and then we start to really get into it and we are twirling and doing what we think are all the Latin moves and I haven’t laughed like this for a long time. Ricky Martin segues into Prince – ‘I Would Die 4 U’ – and the hem of my dress is flippy and I like the way it feels as it flips. I am all bum and boobs and hips, but I don’t care. I am cool girl in cool bar, dancing with cool guy. All those boys from a hundred years ago who didn’t want me and would shout about the fact they didn’t, to a laughing audience? They are gone. All those girls who thanked their lucky stars they didn’t look like me and never hid their relief? They have slunk away. I am dancing with Salvi in the West End on a Thursday night and it feels utterly fantastic. What do they say? Just go with it. I’m five cocktails in and I’m beginning to believe I can.

  We dance and we dance, song after song; there’s a circle forming around us – admiring us. We’re grinning in each other’s faces; I’m basking in Salvi’s reflected gaze. I feel free, freer than I ever have. I begin to feel a little bit beautiful. Just a little bit.

  Salvi pulls me to the side of the dancefloor. We flag down and demolish another cocktail each then it’s back into the arena again. Spinning and laughing. The band slows it down – they’re playing an oldie – an eighties oldie. It’s ‘The Long Hot Summer’ by The Style Council, when Paul Weller left Mod for Soul. It has always reminded me of teenage years, when long hot summers were to be endured, but now, now … Salvi pulls me towards him and I am the girl in hot pink in the window. I am one of the joyous, beautiful sinners. He holds me in his arms and I lean into his neck.

  Suddenly his thumb comes from behind my head and towards my face like a weapon, and I wince. What is he doing? Is he going to wipe off my make-up? Expose my cheek and the real me that lies beneath? Just when I was feeling so amazing.

  ‘Hey,’ he says gently. He doesn’t wipe anything off my cheek. He tenderly wipes just below my left eye, with a light yet firm touch. ‘Your eye make-up is smudged,’ he says. ‘You’re clearly having too much fun.’

  ‘I really am,’ I reply.

  His grass-green eyes hold mine. I’m still in his arms, his face close to mine. I am spellbound. ‘Can I take you home?’

  Something is happening to me, when for all those years it hasn’t because I have pushed the world away. Kept it locked outside. Kept all the light away. If I let it in, will Salvi notice the dark shadows of my soul? The black spots deep inside me as indelible and as un-scrubbable as my birthmark?

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Yes, you can take me home.’

  ‘Fantastic,’ he whispers into my ear. ‘That’s so fantastic.’ I gaze at him. His eyes are like jewels in a rock warmed by the sun, his mouth an open-ended promise. The man is a complete and utter miracle. ‘Let’s go,’ he says.

  I am drunk, so bloody drunk – just the right side of staggering blindly about, bumping into people. I let Salvi lead me off the dancefloor and pull me through the dancing throng. Our waitress, from earlier – a sliver of black and white and blonde – is standing at the edge of the dancefloor and looks at us with curiosity. A look that says I am punching, that I had got my proverbial coat and pulled. I smile at her – conciliatory, patronizing – when do I ever get the chance to throw a patronizing glance at a pretty blonde? Never. Not like this.

  A taxi is waiting outside like another small miracle on this miraculous night. Salvi opens the back door for me and I slip inside, on to the back seat; the windows are open and the night is coming in. Let everything in. I think. I want to be flooded with light and life until there’s no room for any more. Salvi jumps in after me, plomps on the seat, leans forward and thunks the sliding door closed. He turns to me and takes my face in his hands, both hands, cupped round my face, and starts kissing me again. I press my breasts into his warm chest. My heart into his body. And as the taxi putters into a sprint, past another green set of traffic lights, another of my black spots turns light and dances off into the night.

  CHAPTER 24

  When I was about nine or ten, Angela and I went to stay with Nonna and Papa in a caravan somewhere near the white cliffs of Dover for the summer holidays and Nonna gave me an annual – I think it was Bunty – and I was obsessed with one of the comic-strip stories in it, reading it over and over, until, if someone had asked me to reproduce it, word by word and picture by picture, I could have done. It was about a young girl with blonde hair who had a hideous scar under her right eye which distorted that side of her face, and she was teased and taunted because of it, mercilessly. She cried every night, so one day she bought a mask – a black eye mask, a bit like Zorro’s – and she ran away into the country and lived rough, like a gypsy, whilst wearing it; always. She had all sorts of adventures and forgot about her face, for many years, until one day the mask came off in one of her adventures and she happened to look into the reflection of a pond in the moonlight and she was beautiful. Just beautiful. I stared at that final panel of the story for ever. I wished so hard that this sequence of events – this story, told in black and white, in illustrations and speech bubbles – would happen to me. I wished and I wished and I wished, and of course it never did, but this morning, just a little, I feel like the girl in the final panel.

  The scene is Salvi’s flat. His open-plan sitting-room-slash-kitchen. One single corner lamp is still switched on. Two half-drained wine glasses and an empty bottle of red sit on a trendy glass coffee table. And I am sitting on a high stool in one of Salvi’s T-shirts while he’s in the shower, and I’m drinking strong black coffee he has made in an actual cafetière, with my hair all tousled and half over my face and a big thumping headache.

  ‘How’s your coffee, madam?’ Salvi emerges from the bedroom in a dark grey suit and tie.

  ‘Perfect, thank you.’ I hug my coffee mug like an actress and sip from it slowly.

  I didn’t sleep with him. It’s not that I didn’t want to; I did. I was ready to be arch seductress, fevered femme fatale – roles I have never taken on and have no clue about, but was ready to give a good go – as we tumbled through the door, kissing and kissing, but it didn’t happen. Salvi pressed pause – to get us another drink, to fuss over preparing a bowl of trendy-looking snacks – and somehow we ended up sitting on his bed, the room spinning slightly, and then I was in that bed, somehow, and I have a vague memory of him tucking me in, the covers tight round me, like swaddling clothes, then waking at a very hungover 6.30 a.m., to him sitting on the side, staring at me.

  His smile was gentle. He took a stray piece of hair stuck to my face and tucked it into the rest, he trailed a finger down my arm; he said I looked beautiful. I felt amazing. I felt looked after, cherished – almost; he looked at me like I was a precious porcelain doll in a box. Something exquisite. Something delicate and breakable. No one has made me feel like that before.

  ‘I’ve got to go, I’m afraid.’

  Salvi is grabbing briefcase, papers, keys.

  ‘Already? It’s not even seven yet.’

  ‘Big case on.’ Salvi comes over and plants a soft kiss on my lips. ‘Thank you for a fantastic night, though,’ he says. ‘No need to run off, stay as long as you like. Just let yourself out, the door will lock behind you.’

  ‘Oh, OK. Thank you.’

  His gaze lingers on me. His eyes then flick over the breakfast bar.

  ‘Ah. Ther
e it is.’ He grabs his phone from beside me, half hidden under a napkin. ‘You haven’t touched this, have you?’ he asks.

  ‘Of course not! Why, you got something to hide?’ I joke.

  ‘No,’ he says quickly. ‘It’s been playing up, that’s all.’ His eyes soften. ‘I have to be careful with it.’

  ‘I promise I haven’t touched your phone,’ I say sweetly.

  ‘Bye,’ he says, with a grin, and with another kiss and a look that makes me feel treasured and special, he is gone.

  ‘Bye,’ I whisper, as the door closes behind him.

  I finish my coffee, place my mug in Salvi’s sink and go to the bedroom to retrieve my dress and my shoes. I fold up Salvi’s T-shirt and place it on top of his chest of drawers, then I snoop around a little, like they do in films. I’m not sure what I’m expecting to find – a gun in a drawer or a sealed letter to an unknown woman? There’s nothing. Just suits and shoes and underwear and a couple of Jack Reacher books on a bedside table. It seems Salvi has nothing to hide. I even look on the top of his wardrobe – but it is dust free and there is no locked box of secrets. The only thing of remote interest I find, in the drawer of his bedside table, is a small stack of cards for somewhere called The Profilo Club. A purple card with simply the name and a website address on it. ‘Profilo’ is ‘profile’ in Italian: I imagine a swanky gentlemen’s club full of Italian professionals all drinking grappa and talking about the Old Country. I take one of the cards – as a souvenir, I suppose – and slip it into the pocket of my dress then, once I’ve brushed my teeth with Salvi’s toothbrush and rinsed it, it’s time to leave.

  I wash up for him, place the tea towel over the handle of the oven door and grab my bag. It’s only as the door gently clicks behind me that I realize I have no idea when I’m going to see him again.

  CHAPTER 25

  ‘What’s that tickling my calf?’

  ‘A Womble. Orinoco, I think.’

  The Northern Line is experiencing a few problems this afternoon. Dad and I have been stuck in the black soot of a tunnel for five minutes and counting, and people are starting to get restless. There’s been a few ‘Bloody hell’s and a couple of ‘Fuck’s sake’s. A child has asked ‘Mummy, why are we stuck?’ about fourteen times. A man with a violin case has sighed the sigh of a man who finds the world simply intolerable. Dad and I have seats, but it’s really hot and oppressive and we’re wedged in by a Stonehenge of enormous suitcases and a giant retro cuddly toy.

  ‘I don’t remember Wombles,’ Dad frowns, but then he smiles vaguely in the approximate direction of Orinoco’s owner. He – a boy in a red baseball cap and an Avengers T-shirt – pats Orinoco on the head and looks a bit worried, as children often do around blind people – it’s that natural embarrassment he’ll be able to hide when he’s older. I smile at him, too.

  ‘And what’s that smell?’ asks Dad.

  ‘Ssh.’

  For some unfathomable reason, the woman opposite us has pulled a glass jar from her bag and is tucking into the first of two huge stinky hardboiled eggs.

  ‘Well, what is it?’

  ‘Eggs,’ I say, and I don’t care if the woman has heard me. This isn’t the time and definitely not the place for sulphuric treats from a specimen jar. Passengers are starting to catch each other’s eyes, gurning resignedly at one another, because of the delay; hoping desperately no one will have a panic attack and need talking down. Dad, of course, is not catching anyone’s eye but staring straight ahead with nothing but the feel of Orinoco’s paw to distract him from this sauna of horror.

  Why we’re coming to London Bridge on a Saturday, I really don’t know.

  ‘Sorry.’ A tombstone suitcase shunted by a fidgeting foot whacks me on the ankle.

  ‘No problem.’ I have plenty to distract me, in this dark tunnel. Plenty of lovely places for my mind to wander to. Every time I think of Thursday night I get that delicious shiver of excitement in my stomach and I love this feeling, unexpected and delicious. My phone is in my bag, latent and waiting. I’m willing for a text to arrive; something cheeky, an emoji would do – a little red devil or a winky face. A sign Salvi wants to see me again. I have my bag slightly open on my lap and my phone angled so I would see if it lights up – not that it would in this tunnel – but there’s been nothing yet. Then again, it’s only been twenty-eight hours and twenty-two minutes since I left his flat.

  I can wait.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ says Dad, in a general kind of manner, and as soon as the second word is out of his mouth the tube lurches into action then anticlimactically begins to trundle very slowly through the tunnel. At last we reach London Bridge.

  ‘Thank, Christ. Come on, then.’ Dad is standing up before I am, feeling for my arm, and we are suctioned off the train – minding the gap with the best of them – into the marginally cooler air of the platform.

  ‘All right?’ I say as we walk toward the lifts.

  ‘All right,’ Dad says.

  The platform is busy. Our train has expelled a lot of people and we’re all heading the same way. Dad’s tapping cane seems to be annoying a few of them. One woman is stuck, revving, behind us; I can feel her aborted attempts to get past. She eventually takes a jeopardy-tinged swerve over the yellow line and scoots up the platform and out of sight.

  When we turn into the hall where the escalators rise, there’s the plaintive nasal sound of a saxophone weaving through the space like ether. A busker in an incongruous woolly hat and a Sound of Music T-shirt is performing Dire Straits’ ‘Romeo and Juliet’. This is incredibly romantic for a Saturday afternoon, I muse – I’m not sure many will find love at the bottom of the escalators at London Bridge tube station, but who knows? I drop 50p into his hat as we pass.

  As the escalator takes us up, I check my phone and it chimes to signal the arrival of a text.

  Beautiful night, Prue. Lunch on Sunday?

  I quickly reply.

  Tomorrow or NEXT Sunday?

  And then feel incredibly foolish and overeager. Capitals, for God’s sake! A text chimes in return.

  2 pm, The Monastery on the Embankment. Not tomorrow. Next Sunday.

  Oh, the shame … and that’s ages away …

  Great!

  Still, I’m pleased. As well as being ridiculously keen to see Salvi again, The Monastery is one of the restaurants of the moment; I read about it in the Mail online. It’s tiny and exclusive, with a waiting list as long as the Thames, and very very expensive. It’s way out of my league and so is this man, probably. What the bloody hell am I going to wear?

  ‘Who was that texting?’ asks Dad as we queue for the barriers. ‘Covent Garden Man?’

  ‘Barrister man,’ I correct.

  ‘Bandits in striped trousers,’ says Dad.

  ‘I thought that was solicitors?’

  ‘Yes, maybe it was. You would have made a good lawyer,’ he adds.

  ‘Barrister,’ I correct, again. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah, you’re very good at arguing the toss!’

  I laugh, although my father is wrong. I could never stand up in front of people every day, performing like that. I could never have had a stellar career – something truly amazing. That was what my father was supposed to have done. He was the one with all the talent.

  ‘He’s taking me out for lunch next Sunday. The Monastery. Here, Dad, we’re at the barrier. You go first.’

  ‘That place still going?’ Dad asks, once we are through. ‘I remember that as a massive hot spot back in the sixties. It’s a beautiful building – has been standing since 1521. Five central pillars and twelve arches. Designed around a central courtyard for the comings-and-goings of the monks.’

  ‘You would have made a really excellent architect, Dad,’ I say warmly.

  ‘Don’t you know it!’ He laughs, but then a cloud comes across his face and I’m sorry for putting it there and as we walk through the concourse, to the exit, I say something I’ve never said before, ‘I’m sorry things got cut short for you,
Dad. Your career. Everything. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Thank you, love, I appreciate that.’ It’s hard to read my father’s expression when his feelings are not reflected in his eyes. I can’t see hurt in them now, for example, but I know that hurt is there. We keep walking. ‘Sometimes I don’t know if I’m more sad or angry about it, you know?’ he says, and I am surprised, as he has never said anything like this to me before, either. ‘I came so close to being an architect. I was qualified. I was ready. And then it all just slipped away. So easily. Maybe I let it slip away so easily—’

  I jump in, feet first. ‘It’s not necessarily all over for you, you know. You could still do something, in architecture. Consultancy or research or teaching or—’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ He is angry, I think. ‘You’re not going to go on about that architect in Hawaii again, are you – that John somebody?’

  ‘John Harrison Burrows,’ I say weakly.

  ‘I’m blind, Prue. I went blind a long time ago and the opportunities to do any of the stuff you’re talking about also went a long time ago. I gave up, you know. I realize that. And I’m sixty-four. Like in The Beatles song.’ I think of my mother; she would also be sixty-four. Does Dad think of that, too? ‘I’m too old for anything. And I don’t bloody live in Hawaii!’

  ‘Norman Foster is over eighty.’

  ‘Norman Foster is not blind and has been an architect for six decades! There is absolutely no comparison!’

  ‘I know, sorry. I’m just saying. I’m just saying it’s never too late, Dad.’

  ‘Does that also apply to you?’