by Daisy Pearce
‘Katie,’ Marco was saying, looking concerned, ‘I have my car outside. Let me take you home.’
He drops me at the flat in his smooth, expensive car. It is built like a sleek, dark bullet and as well maintained as a racehorse. It even has a name. Sadie. Marco puts the radio on quietly and other than asking me where to turn off barely speaks on the journey to Lewisham. I ask him if he wants to come inside. He tells me no and kisses me softly on my head. ‘Call me when it gets better,’ he says, and watches me walk into the house. Afterwards Carmel comes home from work and finds me on the sofa beneath a duvet. I’ve started myself on a crying jag which lasts nearly half an hour. She rocks me and soothes me and tells me over and over again it’s all right, it’s all right, Stella. I like the feeling of being cosseted again: it makes me feel plump and indulged, just like I was as a little girl.
Marc-o. Marc-oh. I need to remember that. He’d shown me such kindness.
Chapter 2
In the early evening the city light is the colour of sucked toffee, still warm. Carmel and I are laughing, squeezed onto the tiny metal balcony which creaks beneath our feet. We won’t die if we fall, Carmel tells me, only break our backs. It’ll be fine, it’ll be fine. Traction could be fun, it’ll be fine. We’re laughing at our mortality and drinking beers, the windows open wide behind us to let in the last of the daylight. The view from up here on the second floor is municipal: the patch of littered concrete which serves as parking for all the tenants, the back of a Lebanese restaurant, a line of bins. Further ahead, we can just make out the tower of St Saviour’s Church on Lewisham High Street. We’re talking idly, bare legs pressing warmly together, when Carmel suddenly pitches forward, hissing as though in pain.
‘It’s them! It’s them!’
I lean over the railing, beneath us that sound of grinding metal as the balcony groans. I hear Carmel telling me to be careful. I’m clinging to the wrought iron until my knuckles turn white. The cyclists are back. Our neighbours from upstairs, shiny with sweat, muscular bodies packed into taut Lycra, slick and glossy as seals.
‘I need my glasses,’ I’m saying.
Carmel says, ‘Look at those calf muscles. Thank you, Jesus.’
They haven’t seen us although I’m sure they know we’re here. We heard them leave and came straight out here, and we haven’t moved since. They are locking up their bikes, wiping the backs of their necks, which are deeply tanned from a summer bent over the handlebars.
I turn to Carmel. ‘Say something.’
‘Hello!’ she calls out, unfolding herself. She is all legs, glistening conker-coloured thighs. That gets their attention. They look up, shielding their eyes.
‘Good ride?’ She is smiling down at them; strong white teeth. One of them steps forward, the blond one, although really they are interchangeable: all hardened muscle and sweeping jaws. They’re almost Grecian, as though carved from marble and somehow animated.
‘Yeah – great, thanks.’ He lifts the hem of his cycling top and scratches at his flat stomach idly. I wonder if Carmel is going to collapse. ‘Listen. Uh – you girls haven’t seen anyone hanging around here in the evenings, have you? Noticed anything like that?’
Carmel and I look at each other and shake our heads.
‘Okay. Keep an eye out. Been a lot of break-ins round here recently. Good idea to double-lock the doors when you go out.’
‘Thanks,’ Carmel says, sliding an arm around my waist. ‘But the only thing I have of value is her.’
‘Shut up!’ I hiss, but I’m laughing and it feels good. The warm sun on my skin, the last heat of the day. It’s been a week since my dad went into hospital and he’s being released soon. Aunt Jackie sounded upbeat when she called me earlier, her voice high and happy. Carmel and I went out for food and ended up by the river eating chips greasy and crusted with salt. Her eyes were kohl-lined electric blue, her skin a soft dark shimmer.
‘I got the email today,’ she told me shyly, failing to hide her smile behind her napkin.
‘And?’
‘I got an interview. Listen to this. They’re flying me to Paris. Oh, Stella!’
‘Oh my God, that’s amazing! Well done!’
She couldn’t conceal her excitement, wriggling on the bench. I felt, briefly, a flare of envy as sharp as a needle puncturing my chest. Then it was gone. Carmel has been after this job – a buyer for a very prestigious lingerie company – for a year, more or less. Twelve months of networking and being in the right place, being introduced to the top people, her smile as broad and gleaming as a chrome grille.
I drew in a deep breath and smiled. Well done, I heard myself say. She told me we were going to cautiously celebrate so as not to jinx her chances but I could see it in her eyes. She knows this job is hers. Everything else is a formality. The idea of her moving away – moving on – filled me with cold. She saw, because that is how she is, and slid an arm around my shoulders.
‘We’ll work on your job next, Stell. Promise.’
I leaned against her shoulder. I took on the job at the hotel as a tide-over, a way to pay the rent while I ingratiated myself with the local galleries. Nine years later I’m still there on front of house, checking guests in, answering the phones, smiling, always smiling. Nine years of treading water.
The wall behind us was spilling over with honeysuckle. The smell of it drowsy, heavy. Carmel is so beautiful, even in her jeans and an old T-shirt. Next to her I happily evaporate, ghost-like. Short hair, thin face. I always look tired, always cross. People are often surprised by my warmth. I wasn’t expecting you to be nice, they tell me; you look so cold. I saw myself once, reflected in the dark glass of an empty shop window. A woman with hunched shoulders, as though braced for impact.
A week later, and my dad is out of hospital. I am able to go and see him, staying on a rusting camp bed in the sitting room of his tiny flat with its comforting smells of tobacco and leather. Dad’s voice is only slightly slurred at the edges.
I grip his hand until Aunt Jackie says, ‘Stell, I think you’re hurting him.’
I don’t think about Marco at all until I arrive back at King’s Cross. I’m crossing the platform towards the exit, thinking about dinner, and then, boom, I see him. He is standing outside the newsagent’s with a woman. I slow and stop and feel a pinch in my chest, a cold needle beneath the skin. They are talking, her head craned to look up at him. She has blonde hair cut in a severe bob and delicate pink lips like a little doll. She is petite and pulled together, smiling at him with a row of perfect teeth. He touches her on the arm, saying something, and they both laugh, and when he lifts his suitcases and leans towards her as though for a kiss I turn away, ducking behind a coffee stand and out through the side exit, to where the taxis are. I am crying, and I don’t know why.
I’m not going to call him, I tell Carmel and Martha the following week at the opening of a new gallery in Brixton, in fact I’m going to delete his number off my phone. But I don’t delete it and I do call him, leaving drunk, slurry voicemails on his answerphone at two o’clock in the morning until I pass out with my face buried in my pillow. My lipstick leaves a red smear on the cotton like a strange kiss.
Two days later I am in the shower and Carmel is knocking on the door.
‘Your phone has rung like a million times,’ she barks as we pass each other in the corridor, ‘and leave your hair like that, it suits you.’
I pull a face at her and reach for my phone. An unknown number, nine missed calls. While I am holding the phone it rings again. This time I answer. The line is fuzzy and chaotic with traffic.
‘Hello? Hello?’
‘Katie? Do you know who this is?’
‘I think so.’
‘Go on.’
I laugh. This time I have remembered his name. ‘Marc-oh.’
‘Very good.’ He sounds like a cat, smug and contented with himself. ‘Now tell me yours.’
‘It’s Stella. I’m sorry – I know I should have told you right at the start.’
>
To my surprise he laughs. ‘You think I didn’t know?’ There is a beat. ‘I got your messages.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I was drunk.’
‘I noticed.’
Another beat. I feel awkward and prickly.
I open my mouth to apologise again when he says, ‘Now, can you guess where I am?’
I hesitate. ‘Piccadilly Circus.’
‘Wrong country. I’m in Lisbon. I came here for a meeting and it’s ended early.’
‘That’s a shame.’ I pick at the nail polish on my toes.
‘Yes. I’m due to stay here for another two nights but I’m bored.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Well?’
‘Well what?’ I am frustrated, mildly waspish. I remember the look of the woman with her pastel-coloured dress and gleaming blonde hair, slippery like water. I am not in the mood for games.
‘Do you want to keep me company?’
‘Sure, what do you want to talk about?’
‘No, honey.’ Patient. ‘I mean here. Come here and keep me company.’
‘Okay, well. No. I mean, there are lots of reasons.’
‘Hold on—’ He holds the phone away from him for a moment and I hear him briefly speaking in Portuguese. ‘Sorry. You come here. I’ll have Alice book you a flight this afternoon.’
‘Who’s Alice?’
‘My girl Friday. And my girl Monday, Tuesday and so on. She’s my personal assistant. She’ll sort it for you. All you need to do is pack.’
‘Is she blonde?’
‘What?’
‘Alice. Is she blonde? Quite small?’
‘I suppose so, yes. Why?’
‘What about work?’
‘Skip work. Forget work. Come here; it’s beautiful. Do you have a passport?’
‘Yes – uh – somewhere. In the tin in the kitchen drawer, I think.’
‘Tell you what, Stella. If you find it, call me back and I’ll book a flight. If you can’t find it, don’t call me, and I’ll never bother you again. There’s your get-out. All right?’
I hesitate. I can hear him breathing down the line. I imagine him smiling, standing in the sunshine, bigger than I remembered, broader in the chest.
‘Okay,’ I tell him. ‘Okay.’
I find my passport.
A month later my dad has another stroke. This time an intracerebral haemorrhage in the brain tissue itself; a pointless, violent death, he had said about my mother, and now those words come back to me as I leave London on the 17:26 towards Cambridge. At school I had learned the word haemorrhage came from the Greek, ‘blood bursting forth’. I write that phrase down in my notebook, pressing the pen into the paper so hard it leaves indentations on the pages beneath like braille. I want to print it onto my skin, carve it with sharp edges; blood bursting forth. I get into Aunt Jackie’s car and see her pale and morbid-looking, unable to stop crying. I swallow against a lump building in my throat. She is saying, ‘I’m sorry, honey. I’m sorry, Stella. I’m sorry. He’s gone.’
The bureaucracy of death is daunting. A steep-sided, slate-grey pit without handholds. Death certificates and probate and government departments and utility companies and creditors. The council need to know, and so do friends. Aunt Jackie takes out an obituary in the local paper. The man on the phone asks her if she wants it with an ornamental font and a filigree frame and she says yes, ending up spending nearly fifty pounds.
‘I don’t know how we’re going to afford the funeral, Stella,’ she tells me as we stand outside the front door to his block of flats. It’s windy and cold, the clouds thick and low and white. ‘It’s not like we can sell the house – it goes back to the council. And he has so many debts. I don’t know if we’ll even be able to afford a plaque for him.’
And she dissolves into fresh tears, opening the door to his little flat – the one with the kitchenette in the sitting room and the shared bathroom down the hall, the one that smells of tobacco and fried food. There’s his old chair with the high back and the place where his head faded the pattern in the fabric, his television with the taped-over remote, a lamp, the bookshelves. Tins of food piled into the plywood cupboards. The remains of his life. I find his last betting slip on the fridge – the horse is called the ‘Rose of Jericho’. When I take his suit out of the wardrobe – old and cheap and faded to grey, this will be his mortcloth, his funeral clothes – I tuck the betting slip into the pocket.
That night I travel back to London, and Marco collects me from the train station. He pulls me into him with a long exhale of breath and briefly the grief which has been permeating everything, black and heavy like tar, lifts. He raises my hand and inspects my nails, which I have been biting in quick, birdlike pecks. The skin there is ragged painful. I like the pain. I can focus on the pain. He kisses them gently, one after the other.
‘I don’t know what we’ll do.’ Later I’m talking to Marco and Carmel around our table, drinking wine. Their faces are twin moons of concern. ‘Have you any idea how expensive funerals are? I’ve been looking all week. The cheapest we found is nearly two grand. Two grand!’
‘Didn’t he have anything at all? No secret stash of money squirrelled away? They usually do, gamblers.’ Carmel lights another cigarette.
I shake my head. ‘We’ve been through everything. Nothing but final demands and overdrafts. Aunt Jackie is beside herself. And we’ve still got to clear out the flat.’
Marco leans forward in his seat. ‘Give me her number.’
‘Aunt Jackie? Why?’
‘Just give it to me. I’ll talk to her. Neither of you should be worrying about this, not now. When my dad died I remember my mum had to deal with all this shit on her own. It’s horrible.’
Carmel is looking at him askance. I don’t think she’s drunk – not yet – but she is glassy-eyed, overly emotional. She was fond of my dad. Told him he looked like Cary Grant. It hadn’t been true, but he had puffed up with pride all the same.
‘That’s good of you, Marco,’ she tells him, and he smiles at her, pats her on the knee clumsily. She responds by placing her hand atop his and squeezing. ‘You’re a good man.’
My man. My good man. I’m thinking about him a lot, two weeks later. Of how he had called Jackie the next day and arranged to pay for the funeral my father would have wanted; a quiet and simple ceremony and an uproarious wake, a stack of money behind the bar and drunken toasts shouted over the music. Of how Marco had travelled to Cambridge and helped Jackie to clear out the flat when I hadn’t been able to face it, hiring a van to take everything to charity that couldn’t be sold. He’d even managed to find a home for the ageing cat my dad had insisted on feeding and calling Skipper even though it did not belong to him, or anyone else. Marco did all of these things because the grief had folded me double, like decompression sickness, the bends. Agony in my joints, trouble breathing. I have surfaced too far and too fast.
The night Marco returns from Cambridge he comes to my flat. He looks tired, and as I slide my arms around his middle I can smell sweat on him, and dust. He kisses the crown of my head and tells me, ‘I have something for you. I found them today. They belonged to your parents.’
I open the small box. It is their wedding rings. I stare at them for what seems like a long time, a rushing sound building in my ears. It makes it hard to hear Marco telling me how they’d found a large block of ice at the very back of my father’s freezer, how he’d chipped it out and left it to defrost in the kitchen sink. And encased inside, prehistoric: the rings. He and Aunt Jackie had dug them out with teaspoons.
‘He must have been given your mother’s ring by the coroner all those years ago. Your dad put his in the freezer with your mum’s so he couldn’t get to it, at least not quickly.’
I nod, understanding. I’ve seen Carmel do similar with her credit cards. If you can’t get to them, you can’t spend them. My dad hadn’t wanted to pawn the only thing he had left of her, of them.
‘Jackie wanted you to have these. Sh
e thought you might – I don’t know – maybe you’d want them, to remember.’
‘Thank you. Thank you, Marco.’ I press them to my chest, to the ache there. ‘You didn’t need to do that. You’ve already done so much.’
He shrugs, looking worn out. I kiss him, long and lingering, and he circles my waist with his arms. My heart throbs, engorged with something. Love, I tell myself. You love this man.
‘It’s good to see those dimples again,’ he tells me when he pulls away. ‘That famous smile.’
I smile wider, and he ducks his head and kisses me again. I let him. As he follows me into the kitchen to get a beer from the fridge he shows me the newspaper he is carrying tucked under his arm. He spreads it on the table, and I peer down at it. The article is about Bossman. It stars Joey Fraser, the boy who played my brother in Marigold! although of course he is a man now, older than me. Since Marigold! ended he has been in Hollywood action movies – always the quirky sidekick, the nerdy engineer, the third murder victim, never the starring role. The article mentions that following a sexual harassment claim Fraser has returned to England and gone into hiding. That won’t last long, I think. I’ve never met a man who craves the limelight more. There is a photo of him accompanying the piece. He has barely aged, despite being in his forties at least. The same wide, adoring eyes, the same treacle-coloured hair. He’s had work done, I am sure. There are no tell-tale frown lines, no crow’s feet around the eyes. He looks polished and buffed and tanned. I realise my hands are shaking. It’s his photograph, I think. It has been a long time since I have seen him, and I don’t like the way it makes my heart quicken, the queasy distaste in my throat.