Summer in the City

by Fiona Collins

  ‘You look upset,’ he says. ‘Maybe I can help, if you need to talk.’

  ‘No. I told you, I have an appointment!’

  I extricate his hand from my arm and start walking away from him, swiftly, my phone still in my hand. Derek is now seven minutes away. Kemp is on my left, walking at pace beside me, his hair flopping over his forehead. Bugger off, just bugger off, I mutter in my mind. Why can’t people just bugger off?

  ‘Can we talk about something?’

  ‘Not right now.’

  ‘About your paintings?’

  ‘Not that again!’ I’m striding but he’s matching my pace.

  ‘I’ve just been to see a friend of mine about them.’

  ‘What?’

  Derek is five minutes away. He’s still on Malden Road.

  ‘They deserve to be seen. They should be hanging in a gallery. I’ve just come from my mate Col’s gallery in Old Street and I showed him the photos I took. Of your work.’

  I almost drop my phone. It slides into my elbow and Kemp catches it and hands it back to me, with a smile. I have to look at his face. We’re still walking fast. I check my phone once more. Six minutes again? For God’s sake, hurry up, Derek!

  ‘Don’t you want to know what he said?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘You don’t want to know?’

  ‘No, I don’t want to know!’

  ‘You’re still angry with me, aren’t you? About that stupid friends with benefits thing?’ He veers past a couple sharing a huge panini. ‘You really don’t see it, do you, Prue?’

  ‘No, I guess I don’t.’ I am walking so fast now I think I might take off into a run and run for my life.

  ‘Oh, come on, slow down. I’m sweating cobs here.’

  ‘I don’t want to slow down.’

  ‘Then shall I tell you what I want?’

  ‘It does seem to be all about you, so yes, if you must.’

  ‘I want you.’

  A tourist pushes past us with a backpack. Hello Kitty, like the one I had on my face when I met Salvi. Mysterious, intoxicating Salvi. The right man for me. The right man for me.

  ‘Yeah, you said.’ I check my phone again. Thank God. Derek is three minutes away.

  ‘You’re always seeing things the wrong way! Right – bloody hell, you walk fast. Look, I’m going to say something, and I want you to listen. Actually listen. I don’t want you to say you don’t believe me, or throw it back in my face, or twist it, or say it’s only because of this, that or the other, or some other crap you like to come spouting out with – which is one of the reasons I’m going to say this, actually – that you’re a colossal, infuriating pain in the arse, yet somehow …’ I dare a sideways look at him and he gives me a sheepish grin. I jerk my head frontwards again. ‘I’m going to say this, and I want you to listen and then you can go away to whatever this mysterious appointment is, and you can think about it. But don’t take too long, OK? Because there’s less life left for us both than there’s already been, you know? So, I want to say this and then, well, we’ll see. OK?’

  ‘OK.’ I don’t mean it. I just want him to stop talking.

  ‘So, just please stop a minute!’

  ‘I don’t want to stop.’

  ‘Would you just stop?’ He turns and grabs both of my arms, not tight, but determinedly, and we come to a halt, on the pavement. A man with a messenger bag almost crashes into us. A boy on a scooter goes into cruise mode to avoid us, muttering, ‘Bloody idiots.’ Kemp’s hair is damp on his forehead but his eyes are shining.

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘Oh, fuck off, Kemp!’

  He laughs, astonished. ‘“Fuck off!” I tell you I love you and that’s all you’ve got to say to me?’ He is looking right in my eyes with ones I once wanted to drown myself in.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ I say. The touch of his fingers are hot on my arms. I want to shake them off, but I don’t want to.

  ‘Well, then I’ll tell you again.’

  ‘Go on, then.’

  ‘I love you.’ The notification beep – Uber – goes off on my phone but I ignore it. Well, I don’t ignore it completely – I look down quickly to see that Derek is two minutes away. ‘Do I need to say it again?’

  ‘Probably.’ I look up, stare at the half-pearl shell of his necklace, on its leather cord, for a moment, then I decide I will shake him off and I carry on walking again, my mind racing faster than my feet.

  He catches up with me. ‘God, you’re infuriating. I love you. I love you. You’re home for me, Prue. And not because I’m getting old and want to bloody settle for anyone I can just grab to grow old with. Or because I want – or ever wanted – some friends-with-benefits, unsatisfactory, shallow, surface bollocks. I called the world home for many years; it was what I wanted. Until you. You’re home for me because you’re the person I want to come home to, from my trips. I want to turn the key in the door – any door – and have you there … or be waiting when you turn the key and come in; it doesn’t matter which way round it is. I want to take you with me when I do go away, if you’d like to. I want a life with you. I want to wake up with you in the morning and have you irritating me at night and it to just go on, until almost for ever. I want to grow old with you, Bertie! I want your sock back in my bloody sock drawer!’ I realize we have come to a stop again, somehow. That I am just staring at him, here in the hot sun, out on the streets of London. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying? Are you listening to me?’

  Of course I’m not. I feel like I can’t even see him. The sun is in my eyes and the thought that my mother is a few miles down the road is a bloated poisonous mushroom filling every corner of my brain. I don’t have room for this. Not right now. ‘No,’ I say.

  Kemp shakes his head. ‘Come on, Prue. It’s you. It’s just you. Every time I look at you, I just think, Yeah. Her.’

  ‘I’ve got a date tonight. You’re too late,’ I say. I don’t want to believe him. I don’t want to believe a word of it. I don’t want to be almost crying and willing, willing my tears to dissolve before they fall down my face.

  ‘He’s not right for you, that Salvi. I know from the way he looks at you, Prue.’ Kemp takes both my hands and holds them fast. ‘Look, ever since I met you, you’ve been wearing a mask. And I don’t mean the make-up – don’t look at me like that! – you know I’ve never had any issue with your birthmark – and don’t ever mention paper bags again, do you hear me? The mask you’ve been wearing is that bullshit mask you put on every day that says, “Keep your distance from me; don’t touch me, don’t love me.”’

  I flip. ‘Why would you love me? I am angry and I am aimless and I am ugly, with ugly secrets! I don’t deserve you. I didn’t even deserve you as a friend. And you don’t deserve me!’

  ‘They are not ugly secrets once you’ve shared them,’ says Kemp gently. ‘They are just things that happened to you. Things in your past. They don’t make you less beautiful to me. They don’t alter how I see you. And I want to see you. To see all of you, to know all of you. Always.’

  He looks at me. He just looks. I can’t see clearly enough to read him. I don’t want to read him. I’m scared to. But there’s something there in his eyes that speaks of tenderness, of love, that speaks of something I have been searching for my whole life. I look away. I can see Derek, just up the road; that’s his registration number. I march towards the car.

  ‘I deserve you!’ shouts Kemp. ‘Your past, your present and your future. Most of all, your future. There’s still plenty of it left and I’m right here to share it with you, if you’d only look at me! I deserve you, Prue! I deserve you!’ Kemp shouts so loudly that people on the pavement around him turn their heads and a white van beeps, from the middle of the road, and a man with no top on calls out, ‘You go get her, pal!’

  I turn back, one last time. ‘I’ve got to go, Kemp! I’ve really got to go. Derek is here.’

  ‘Who the fuck’s Derek?’ calls back Kemp. I open the back door of Derek’s Mondeo a
nd get in. ‘I’m coming over to see you again tomorrow, Bertie!’ shouts Kemp. I can hear him through the open window. ‘I’m not giving up! Think about what I’ve said.’

  ‘No!’ I shout back, a petulant child in my mask. ‘I don’t want to!’

  ‘Impossible!’ says Kemp to the man with no top on, who’s further up in the line of traffic now, and the man shrugs and raises both palms up and Derek pulls away with an undramatic splutter and I don’t look back any more.

  CHAPTER 44

  The tinkling bell isn’t working at Loved Before this afternoon.

  ‘It overheated,’ says Maya as I walk in. It’s quiet in the shop; there’s only an hour or so until it closes. ‘Too much sun, apparently,’ she adds, with a smile. ‘We don’t normally see you on a Saturday. We’ve got some new dresses in, if you’re interested.’

  I wander over and have a look at them, without seeing them. Maya has followed me. She looks nice today; she’s wearing white dungarees with a black floral top underneath.

  ‘This pink one’s lovely,’ she says, pulling out a floaty midi dress from the rail. It’s a bit like the one I wore to lunch with Salvi at The Monastery. Not as pretty, though. Not quite as sexy.

  ‘Yes, it’s nice. Thank you.’ I give it a cursory glance and hang it back up with the others. I am shaking slightly. Now I’m so close, I’m stalling for time. I’m hiding out. I walked in here, almost on automatic pilot, but I need to come out of here, walk past the clinic and into the shop next door. To her. ‘Actually,’ I say, not looking at Maya, ‘I didn’t come to look at clothes today. I’ve got something I want to ask you. It’s a bit random but please bear with me.’

  ‘Oh?’ Maya smiles. ‘Ask away. If I can help you, I will.’

  ‘Do you know Ellen who works in the travel agent’s?’

  ‘Ellen who works at the travel agent’s … Jameson’s? Two doors down?’ I nod. ‘No, I don’t know the staff there. Why do you ask?’

  I feel slightly deranged. Why am I in here, talking to Maya? Stalling for time so pathetically?

  ‘I don’t know. Well, I do know. Ellen’s my mum.’

  What a strange sentence. Ellen’s my mum. And what a strange thing to say to Maya.

  ‘Right, right.’ Maya is looking at me with such puzzlement and such kindness on her face, I can’t bear it. I feel like I don’t even belong to my own body right now.

  ‘I need to speak to her,’ I blurt out. ‘I haven’t seen her for a really long time.’ I have a thought. ‘What time do they close?’

  ‘I think they close at seven on a Saturday … So, OK … Well, do you want me to come with you? To Jameson’s? I can lock up for a moment.’

  I’m so tempted by Maya’s offer. To say ‘yes, please’ and let her handhold me through what I need to do. ‘No. No. Thank you. Thank you for the offer, though. It’s OK. I’m being silly. Sorry.’

  ‘Are you sure? Are you sure you’re OK?’

  ‘Yes, I’m going to go now.’ I have to go. I have to do this. I have to do this for Angela. ‘Thank you, Maya.’

  ‘I’m here anytime, you know, if you want to talk? I’m always here.’

  ‘Thank you. Thank you so much. I’d like that.’ I would like that, I think. I like Maya. I head to the door.

  ‘Take care, won’t you?’

  ‘I will, thank you. And I’m fine, I promise. I’ll see you again soon.’

  I leave the shop and Maya looking both bemused and concerned and walk the two doors to the travel agent’s. There’s a woman at the desk. She is not my mum. There’s a laugh and a door opens at the back of the shop and a different woman walks out.

  ‘Hello,’ I say.

  She is short, like me, and is wearing an A-line black skirt and a pair of silver flat sandals and a dark grey sleeveless T-shirt and she has the same hairstyle as me, including the fringe, except her hair is a stripy palette of blonde and grey highlights. She’s not a hippy or a punk or an eighties Wham! fan. She looks a little like she did when we were young.

  ‘Hello,’ she says. Actually, she looks like she’s seen a ghost, which is what is happening here, after all. I am a ghost, and she is a ghost to me.

  ‘Hello,’ I say again. I know she knows it’s me. I mean, there’s no mistaking me, is there? I could be immediately pulled from any line-up. I’m amazed she looks so familiar, though. I thought she’d be all drug-addled, starey-eyed and Starflowered; wizened and ruined by substance abuse. But her eyes are clear and her face is relatively unlined. It doesn’t tally with Angela’s description of her from 1990. Of Starflower. Age and recreational drug use have clearly been kind to her, after all.

  ‘Would you like to go and get a coffee with me?’ I ask. ‘Can you take half an hour off?’

  A half-hour audience with my mother. Half an hour after thirty-four years. It’s not much to ask, is it? And I think it will be enough.

  ‘Can you hold the fort here?’ my mother asks the woman at the desk and the woman nods. ‘I’ll just get my bag,’ she adds, and she turns and goes back through the end door. I wonder if there’s a window at the back, an escape hatch, so she can run away again. Is she now squeezing her body through a narrow gap and preparing to leg it down the road? Does she have a hippy friend waiting for her in a 1970s getaway van?

  She reappears. I walk to the exit and she follows. We slip out the door and we are walking down the street.

  ‘How did you know I was here?’

  It’s so weird hearing her voice, the same one that used to tell us to eat up all our fishfingers or do up our shoes. It’s perhaps a little huskier, but I would know it anywhere.

  ‘You look nice grey,’ I say. ‘Grey-y blonde. It suits you.’ I deliberately don’t answer her question. I don’t have any explaining to do; she does.

  ‘Thanks, it’s been like this for ages.’

  ‘So, you’ve been here for years, then? At the shop. And in Haringey?’ I try not to sound bitter and disgusted. I try to sound like I’m just making small talk.

  ‘Yes, I’ve always lived in Haringey.’

  Well, not always, I think. There were all those squats, and once you lived with us. ‘How long have you worked at that travel agent’s?’

  ‘Six years.’ Such a quiet voice, I can barely hear what she is saying. ‘I—’

  ‘Let’s go in here,’ I say.

  We stop outside Harry’s, the coffee shop near the key cutter’s. It always looks cosy, whenever I walk past. Workmen on a break supping tea. Teenage girls enjoying a cheese-and-ham toastie during a college lunchbreak. Mothers and daughters chatting over a coffee and a bun.

  ‘What would you like?’ I ask her. ‘Sit down and I’ll get it.’

  ‘Just a tea, please,’ she says. ‘Two sugars.’

  ‘You can put your own sugar in,’ I say, pointing to the sachets on the table.

  She nods, then looks away. I spot tears coming into her eyes and she sees me notice them, wipes them away with her hand and says, ‘Sorry. It’s just such a long time since I’ve seen you.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. I can’t be trusted to speak so I go to the counter and order two teas.

  ‘Are you well?’ she asks, as I sit back down with the drinks. Her absence, for all those years, settles on the table between us like thick fog.

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  ‘And Angela?’

  ‘Alive and well and living in Canada,’ I say chirpily. There’s a sharp bit at the edge of the table, where some Formica has peeled off and is grazing my arm, but I don’t move my arm away.

  She nods. ‘And your father?’

  Hasn’t she got more to say about Angela living in Canada? That’s quite a big deal! ‘Still blind,’ I say. ‘You found that quite hilarious, once upon a time.’

  ‘I wasn’t well.’

  ‘No. Angela said she saw you in nineteen ninety. That you were in a right state. She moved to Canada after that. You know, Canada? That big place above America?’

  ‘I know Angela lives in Canada,’ she says quietly an
d she smiles. It’s a turned-down smile. Her mouth never used to do that.

  ‘Oh? How do you know that?’

  She looks at me, her gaze even and steady. Her eyes are exactly the same colour as mine. ‘I came to see you both, one evening, in the summer of nineteen ninety-six. Neither of you were there so I went next door, to the Chinese takeaway. I saw a girl there, she was about your age – I mean the age you would have been at the time. She was behind the counter, reading the newspaper. I asked if she knew you and I asked her where you were – you and Angela. She told me Angela had moved to Canada and you were working in Spain.’

  Cherry Lau, I think. It was Cherry that she saw. I’d been in the week before Tenerife, I expect, for Dad’s Singapore noodles, and had probably mumbled something about my trip in one of our awkward conversations. And I bet it wasn’t a newspaper, I bet it was Cosmopolitan.

  ‘Both girls living abroad!’ continues Ellen. ‘I was a little surprised you’d left your father, but he had the guide dogs and, knowing Vince, he’d encouraged you both to be go-getters, to make something of yourselves—’

  ‘Dad didn’t have the guide dogs then,’ I say flatly. ‘He became allergic to them. He said goodbye to the last one in nineteen ninety, a few months before you came to see Angela that time. You know, the time you called her a bitch.’

  She looks like I have just slapped her. ‘Yes, I did. Fuck, that was awful!’ Her hand is over her mouth but something about that ‘Fuck’ makes me think that in another life I could warm to her, just a little. ‘I didn’t realize about the dogs, but I wasn’t capable of realizing much, at that time. I—’

  ‘And I wasn’t living abroad. I’d gone to Tenerife for a week, for work.’

  ‘Oh. The girl said you were working in Spain. Well, that was a huge misunderstanding,’ she says. She looks quite shocked. What exactly had Cherry Lau said? I wondered. Had she misunderstood what I’d said, in one of our usual half-listened to, excruciating exchanges, or had she been deliberately ambiguous? ‘I immediately thought I’d lost both of you, then, that it was too late. I thought you’d both literally gone places. I was clean then, you know. I had been clean, actually, since the early nineties. After I’d seen Angela that time … Well, I knew I had to stop. I went to France for a few years. To a kind of retreat, a commune. I sorted myself out, with help. Then I moved back. I felt I didn’t deserve to ever see either of you again – I was frightened to, to be honest, but in nineteen ninety-six, I came.’