Summer in the City

by Fiona Collins

  ‘You never know.’ Angela sounds clipped, like she’s been rehearsing this. ‘I want to reach out, as they say these days.’

  ‘Like the Four Tops? I wouldn’t bother.’ My bulletproof heart is very cold beneath its crust today. Although other parts of me are very warm indeed. For Salvi.

  ‘OK, well, I’ve already sent it. The letter. A couple of weeks back.’

  ‘Oh. What on earth did you say?’

  ‘I said I hoped she was well and gave her my address if she wanted to get in touch.’

  ‘Well,’ I say. ‘I suppose you never know.’ I think of all the letters Angela wrote before and all the stupid postcards I sent her to stop her crying. Maybe I shouldn’t have done. Maybe I should have erased all hope way back then, so it couldn’t resurface now. Angela may be under the misapprehension we have a mother who replies.

  ‘Well, good luck,’ I say.

  ‘You don’t need to sound so stroppy about it. I can do what I like. “Doing your own thing is a generous act” – Barbara Sher said that.’

  ‘Never heard of her. And of course you can. Haven’t you always?’

  Angela tuts, then gives a huge weary sigh. ‘You sound desperately unhappy, Prue. But haven’t you always?’

  ‘Actually, I’m not,’ I say. ‘I’m very happy indeed, as it happens.’ I’m not sure if this is true, or not. ‘I guess you’re the one who’s unhappy if you’re writing to Mum again.’

  ‘Don’t you feel there’s something missing in your life?’

  ‘There’s loads of stuff missing!’ I laugh. ‘Though I’m working on it. But Ellen is not one of them.’

  ‘Don’t call her Ellen.’

  ‘She’s lucky I’m mentioning her at all! You think she mentions our names? Tells people she has daughters? I bet she doesn’t, because then those people might ask her what we’re up to and her answer – “I have absolutely no clue. I don’t even know what they look like any more” – might shock people.’

  ‘You don’t miss her.’ A flat statement.

  ‘No.’ An equally flat statement. ‘Why are you always asking me this?’ Our mother’s simply a missing jigsaw piece, I think, of a puzzle that makes just as much sense without it. The corner of a square that suddenly became a triangle, and so what? ‘Anyway, do you want to speak to Dad?’

  I am already up and out of the bedroom and taking the phone over to him in the sitting room.

  ‘Yes, please,’ she says, clipped and affronted. ‘Warren has bought a new sailboat. I’m hoping Dad might love to hear all about it.’

  I imagine Angela’s neat, backward-slanting handwriting on an airmail envelope. Her fingerprint on the licked stamp to Sweden. A hopeful missive forwarded by cousin Torge and delivered to the mailbox of a tiny apartment above a sweet Swedish bakery. A shard from the past piercing Mum’s present like a poisoned dart piercing a balloon.

  ‘Angela,’ I say to Dad.

  ‘Thanks, Prue.’

  I return to my chair and look across to the window where dusk is now descending over London. Things are changing. Dad and I go out together now. Angela has written to our mother. And I sort of have a man called Salvi.

  I check my mobile but there is nothing from him. Nothing at all, and, although it’s only been a few hours since I was with him, I have the sudden gripping, choking fear I may never hear from him again. That, like my mother, he is gone. This is how it’s going to be with him, I realize. Never knowing what’s going to happen. He has set a spell into suspension – of black satin sheets and fast cars and the promise of something – a spell that hangs in the night; a tangible portent, a beautiful destiny. And if it is my destiny then it is one edged in both dark and light, as this is how I feel when I am with him – picked up and laid down; illuminated then plunged into darkness.

  He’s part of it all, isn’t he? The darkness of my life that was set in motion on a night over thirty years ago – a night of brash lights and jangled music and all the fun of the fair – when I was a teenage hopeful: of being loved, of being looked at with desire, of being part of something, like everyone else. But I am not like everyone else. I am a motherless paper-bag girl, a girl not to be loved but chosen as a plaything, a booty call. Salvi wants me. I hope. I want him to want me. He’s my choice when not much else has been in my life.

  I check my phone again. There is nothing.

  CHAPTER 33

  It’s 9.30 am and Dad and I are at Central Hall, Westminster. We’re sitting second row from the back in the George Thomas room, which boasts lemon-and-white panelled walls, a large empty fireplace, several chandeliers, a sumptuous blue carpet and, currently, lots of very intelligent-looking, earnest architect types. Dad is opening a packet of Fruit Pastilles. I am looking at a screen that says, ‘Architects, Bring Me Your Ears’.

  We’ve come to a talk. We haven’t been out for a few days as Dad has had a summer cold, but he found out about this on the internet. Expressed an interest to come. It’s an hour-long presentation by an architect called Lawrence P. Sullivan, who wants to ask how sound can and should influence British design.

  ‘“Sound is one of our primary senses”,’ reads Dad, from the Braille brochure on his lap he picked up in the lobby. ‘“Yet architects tend to focus almost exclusively on the visible, without paying attention to the other senses. Sullivan explains why architects need to use their ears and not just their eyes.” Should be fantastic. Did you bring a book?’

  ‘No, why?’

  ‘You might get bored. Not really your scene, is it?’

  ‘I’ll be all right. And is it your scene?’ I ask. ‘Your scene again?’

  ‘It’s always been my scene. Fruit Pastille?’

  I take one and Dad puts the packet back in his pocket. ‘No, I mean to actually get involved in. Come on, Dad, the subject matter! Architects using their other senses. It’s right up your street! Or it could be.’

  ‘One step at a time,’ says Dad, and I take this as a small Dad Hint not to bang on about him becoming any sort of a blind architect again, especially as John Harrison Burrows, the one from Hawaii, is featured in the brochure. There’s a short interview with him. A couple of photos. I see Dad trace his finger over that page of his Braille version now, but he says nothing.

  There’s an air of anticipation in the room, an intellectual frisson slightly disturbed by the man next to us, who is noisily unveiling a huge foil pack of sandwiches that look worryingly like corned beef and piccalilli. Even more worryingly, he appears to be holding them out to Dad.

  ‘No, thank you,’ I say on Dad’s behalf. ‘You’re being offered someone’s picnic,’ I whisper to him.

  ‘No, thank you,’ he whispers back. The man shrugs and takes an enormous bite out of one of the sandwiches. He has an interesting face, I think, like a basset hound, from the side. He would be great to draw.

  Finally, Lawrence P. Sullivan – a unit of a man in an immaculate suit – takes to the podium, welcomes us on this fine Thursday morning and begins to talk, in great detail, about modern architecture and the employment of the senses. Dad nods. He smiles. Mr Sullivan’s enthusiasm is palpable. You could reach out and take hold of his passion; it surrounds him like a chunky aura. I think about passion, about art; about my paintings. Am I passionate? Could I let my art become a proper passion, something I bring out to the light, like Dad said: show people, share with people? Or do I keep it as hidden as my heart?

  I know the answer. I’ll probably keep it hidden. I wish it was hidden. I hate that Kemp has seen my work. I hate that he has photos of it on his phone. I don’t want to put myself out there. I never have done. I may be traipsing all over London now but my confidence is far from sauntering about, troubling anyone. My heart (and my art) is better off under lock and key.

  I feel unsettled, out of kilter: Salvi hasn’t contacted me in three days, leaving me in perilous limbo; hanging off a rickety rope bridge over a churning river of my own insecurities. A letter is winging its way to my mother, breaking the seal of silence she h
as spun between her and her daughters for so long; I fear it will shatter, like glass. And Kemp was going to invite me to India to be his friend with benefits. I see no benefit in that at all, as I loved him. I don’t want to be his friend with anything and I can’t even be his friend at all, any more. I wish Dad and I had never gone to beautiful St Dunstan in the East; I wish I had never seen Kemp there – returned, handsome, not ever able to love me.

  Lawrence P. Sullivan is talking about a community project in Canada. I look at Dad and he is enraptured. He is nodding at things I don’t understand. Words of wisdom about sound textures and sonics and acoustics. Basset Man next to us is still providing his own sound textures by tinkering with his scratchy-foiled wares. Astoundingly, he proffers them to Dad again.

  ‘My Dad’s blind,’ I whisper across, in the hope of erasing the tireless sandwich-offering and the irritated look on the man’s face at Dad’s non-acknowledgement.

  ‘Oh, you’re blind!’ shouts the man, causing a lot of people to turn round and a few to shush. ‘I thought you were just rude!’

  ‘I try not to be both at the same time,’ says Dad.

  The lights are dimming. Dad and I settle back in our seats. There’s going to be a film. It is set in sunny California, where a man walks through a new museum, explaining how the architect designed it the way he did. There are interviews. There is uplifting music. It’s pretty interesting, actually. I am not bored, like Dad predicted. As the architect is interviewed about absorption acoustics and his use of voice-activated technology, I am surprised by Dad feeling for my hand and placing his own warmly on top of it, in the dark. His sturdy hand, with the neat fingernails. The hand I used to hold, crossing the road, when I was a small child and he was the one to guide me. The hand with which he used to pull the big blue hanky from his pocket when I had ice cream over my face. The hand that wiped away the few and only tears I cried following my mother leaving – tears he discovered in the airing cupboard where I had retreated for a silent sob about an hour after Angela and I had sat on his lap like wriggling fishes.

  ‘Thank you for coming with me,’ he whispers, and I smile, in the dark, with him holding my hand. ‘You’re a good girl.’

  My heart lurches; rises then falls. At these words. These words. Dad used to say them to me when I was that little girl. He would say them when I reached up to give him a kiss on the cheek or gave him his flask of coffee when he set off for days studying to be an architect. He would say them when I fed one of the guide dogs, or brushed their vanilla coats with a special two-sided brush. He would say them when I danced on his feet; even when I was too big to do so. And he would say them when I told him my childish secrets – how I had been laughed at at school or how I had won a prize for a painting of a butterfly. He said it was good for me to share my secrets with him, that it would always make me feel better.

  He hasn’t called me a ‘good girl’ for a long, long time and I am horrified that tears start to fall, in the dark of this panelled room. That they silently track through my make-up and my artfully applied edifice. That they are unstoppable.

  I have not been a good girl to my dad. I have let him down. I have sat with him in that flat year after year, indulging him in his isolation, being glad of it so I could wallow there, too, in mine. I have let him fade, as I have faded. I have let him disappear, as I wanted to disappear. Even when I worked, when I was a reluctant part of the world, I made no effort to bring Dad out of the flat and out of himself – I made no roads to try to encourage an embrace of the world, or this life, from either of us.

  I’ve had a lacklustre career, which stalled. I’ve not fulfilled any kind of potential because there was never any there. I’ve painted but not let anyone see. I’m a purposely blank canvas I have let other people write on. I’ve not been a good girl since that first secret – the night at Finsbury Park, when I was fourteen and so desperate to be wanted by someone, to be looked at for the right reasons, that I let a bad thing happen. A bad thing that became a catalyst for so many other things in my life and the reason I was marked out to Jonas, in Tenerife: an easy target.

  On screen, the Californian architect is now showing us around his sprawling home. He has floor-to-ceiling glass everywhere. He has light and tranquillity. He is introducing his Sound Room. He talks about something called The Golden Ratio.

  My tears continue to fall. A long time ago, Kemp came into my life and unwittingly showed me what love was, and it was a pretty picture laid out on a piece of cartridge paper – beautiful, but not to be touched, and, like a painting, one-sided. It was never something for me. Love was never something that could be returned. Until Salvi … maybe. Successful, charismatic Salvi. And now I am a bad girl – again – because I have offered it to him on a plate and he has said ‘no’.

  And Kemp wants me for one thing and not everything, like I wanted of him.

  That bad thing. That first bad thing, that first bad night. I can’t escape it. I can’t ever get away from it. I invited that bad thing in, when I was fourteen. I asked for it, didn’t I? I’m a good girl gone bad who bad things happen to and I deserve them.

  I don’t want to remember it now – that encounter, that night – as tears pitch down my face, unchecked. I don’t want to remember. But as I close my eyes I am back there. I am back there, that summer’s evening, and I can taste the candyfloss on my lips and smell the kerosene and the danger.

  CHAPTER 34

  Summer 1984

  ‘All right, Roo?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Where first?’

  ‘Waltzer?’

  My friend Georgina and I strode into the fair at Finsbury Park to the mangle of four loud and colliding bassy pop songs (UB40, Bob Marley, A-ha and Mel and Kim, as far as I could make out), and the intoxicating stink of candyfloss and kerosene. There was a buzz in the air, competing neon lights; excitement. It was warm enough that we didn’t need jackets over our black-and-white-striped T-shirts emblazoned with ‘Blondie’. It was clear to anyone we were a double act, a duo, a force to be reckoned with. We were identical, apart from the obvious; our hair short and on-trend, our dark blue jeans with red piping down the sides skin-tight, and our demeanour defensive.

  I felt pretty good, or as good as it got for me. I had new boots – pointy, cone heel, kick arse, should there have been any arses that needed kicking. Two coats of Heather Shimmer lipstick, the tube a bullet in the pocket of my jeans, ready for reapplication. Glittery eyeshadow under brows shaped to death and slicked with Vaseline to make them both neat and iridescent, something I had read about in Vogue in the waiting room at the laser clinic, as I flicked through the pages of the beautiful people. And bags of slapped-on confidence, dredged from nowhere like mud from a dirty river, that I willed to be as thick and all-concealing as my foundation.

  ‘Let’s get some candyfloss first.’

  ‘OK.’

  We stomped past the stall where you threw rings over ducks to win an enormous cuddly hippo with nails for eyes. It was busy everywhere, already. Flashes of fairground neon in red, yellow, royal blue, green and pink illuminated people’s faces, making them look flushed, excited, up for it. Teenagers eyed each other up. A boy in a green bomber jacket chucked me a crooked grin that I returned with a sassy smirk under my aggressively winged eyes. Fantastic.

  We passed the Hall of Mirrors to ‘Don’t You Want Me’ and I caught a glimpse of myself in one of them – stretched to seven feet of bendy elastic with arms that seemed to be coming out of my feet but, apart from that, I looked all right. My hair was Studio-Lined into a truculent pixie cut Annie Lennox would be proud of. My mask was as impenetrable as I could get it, with the high-street make-up I could get my hands on. My dug-up halo of confidence may have had a fuzzy border and been likely to collapse at any moment, but it was there. From a distance, I could have passed for pretty.

  ‘We’ll go to the one by the Hearts and Diamonds.’

  ‘OK.’

  Georgina was my best friend. My only friend, act
ually. She had a steel-hard glare to rival mine. The ability to dispatch jeering school mates with a curt ‘Fuck off!’ She had been my friend for precisely four months, three days and six hours. Before that, I hadn’t had one. I was not the sort of girl other girls wanted to be seen with. I was not popular. I was not funny. Actually, I was funny, but my sense of humour seemed to be an acquired taste. I was certainly not pretty. It wasn’t the greatest truth – not to be pretty – when you’re fourteen, but hey, other truths are worse. Mum used to lie to me about it all the time – when she was our mum. She’d tell me I was lovely, but I wasn’t. Her words meant little. She meant little. She’d meant little again earlier this evening, when she’d visited us, meaning she was faithless, groundless, insubstantial … for the very last time. And I was ugly. I was a freak with a stellar line in eye-rolls and that steely stare that could strike you dead at twenty paces. I could see people off, if they started. And Georgina could, too. We made an excellent team.

  ‘Medium or large, Roo?’ asked Georgina as we watched the floss swirl round the stainless-steel pan. Something being made out of nothing. Sustenance out of air. My family and my friends called me Roo. I liked that. It was much better than Prudence or The Prude, or The Freak or Ugly Fucker – all names thrown at me across the playground or in the dinner queue when I was minding my own business adding to the slops bin or getting seconds of cornflake tart and custard. School kids could be so charming, couldn’t they? Other girls got dates and snogs and phone calls in the evening that they took while sitting on the stairs in the hall, the curly phone cord wrapped round their eager fingers; I got, ‘What happened to your face, freak?’ or, ‘Did someone punch you at birth?’ What joy, being a slightly plump North London schoolgirl with a massive heart-shaped birthmark on my face, lurking tonight like a stamped-on mouse under three layers of Maybelline’s finest (colour-matched for me in Boots by a simpering blonde in a white coat) and a supplementary slick of Rimmel’s Hide the Blemish.