by Robert Webb
Her body seemed to love the shower; the water and soap and shampoo – the attention. She imagined it saying: ‘This feels good, right, Kate? We’re a team again, yeah?’
‘Don’t get carried away,’ she replied to her hopeful friend. ‘I’m still going to kill you tonight.’
She swiftly dressed and found an envelope. She addressed it to Charles Hunt at BelTech and marked it CONFIDENTIAL. She parted the memory stick from Luke’s keyring and dropped it into the envelope. She sealed it and pushed it into the pocket of her jacket. It was none of her business. Life and everything in it was none of her business.
Luke had been a mistake. She’d been right the first time. She wasn’t a ‘sympathetic’ person. She was disgusting. She needed no one and no one needed her. In the hallway she noticed a postcard in a clipframe featuring humorous cartoons of cats – a souvenir of a trip to Paris. Without thinking, she took it from the wall and shoved it in her bag. Danielle liked cats.
What would Dad say about all of this? He wouldn’t understand. He’s not here.
She went through her front door, slamming it hard behind her.
Chapter 5
‘Danger in front of you, danger behind you, danger to the sides.’
Kate was fifteen and taking her first driving lesson. She was sitting in the driver’s seat of her mother’s Mini Metro with Bill beside her. He had driven them to a disused aerodrome in Kent.
‘Blimey, Dad. I mean, by all means make it sound as terrifying as possible.’
Bill chuckled and opened a bag of crisps. ‘If I had my way, driving a car would be the most dangerous thing you ever do. That said, it really is bloody dangerous.’ Bill allowed himself to mildly swear in Kate’s presence as long as Madeleine wasn’t around. It had opened up yet another conspiracy between father and daughter. There seemed to be an assumption that she was ‘courting strong’ with Pete Lampton. And that Madeleine had given her some kind of ‘sex talk’. Actually, Madeleine had done no such thing. Kate had been content to cobble together the gist from the older pupils she sat in class with, as well as a BBC Horizon programme and a breathless combination of D.H. Lawrence and Jilly Cooper.
Seat belt fastened, mirrors adjusted, engine running. She’d been watching her parents drive for years and understood the function of the pedals in theory. Bill had a typical physique for a crisp-loving cab driver and squirmed uncomfortably in the tiny passenger seat. But all London taxis had automatic transmission and Bill was determined his student begin with the awkward mysteries of a manual gearbox. Kate was disappointed not to be behind the wheel of her dad’s sleek new FX4 Fairway. For the last year and with just a London A-Z map as her guide, she had insisted her father set weekly route tests for her. In theory, she was nearly halfway through the Knowledge.
‘She’s not going to be a cab driver, Bill,’ Madeleine had objected one Sunday afternoon. Kate had just confidently explained the best route from Whitechapel to Marble Arch on a weekday lunchtime.
‘I should hope not!’ Bill agreed.
‘Maybe we should ask Kate,’ said Kate. She didn’t really want to be a cab driver but the gigantic challenge of her A-Z task, coupled with its homely normality (there is nothing so reassuringly dull as what your father does for a living) was currently one of her chief pleasures. That and Pete Lampton’s tongue.
‘Right,’ said Bill, ‘clutch all the way in, into first, right foot on the footbrake, handbrake off, right foot to the gas, feel where the revs are … there they are, that’s where you’ll find your bite … not too much, Nigel Mansell … that’s better, and gradually let the clutch out …’ The car juddered violently and stalled. ‘No problem. Get it wrong: that’s what we’re here for.’
‘Well, it’s one of the things we’re here for.’
‘Heh! We’ll get it right in due course, my dearest.’ Bill munched happily on his cheese and onion. ‘I shouldn’t need to tell the likes of you about the egregious value of practice.’ Kate went back to the beginning of the starting-off procedure.
She hated correcting her self-educated dad but felt not to do so was patronising. They had a code for it. ‘How are you using “egregious” there, Dad?’
‘By the sound of that question, Katie, I’d say I’m using it … wrong.’ They both laughed. ‘Go on, then.’
Kate was easing the clutch out again. ‘It means outstandingly bad. But you’re right in a way, because it used to mean outstandingly good.’
‘How far out of date was I? Mind those revs.’
‘About four hundred years.’ Kate managed a wonky transition to the accelerator and the car started to move forward.
‘They think she’s driving a car!’ Bill exclaimed like a posh football commentator. ‘She is now!’
Kate moved into second gear.
‘Best foot forward, Katie.’
She smiled to herself and nudged the gas.
Bill went on. ‘So if I’d told Mr William Shakespeare that I thought his plays were egregiously good, he’d have been pleased, would he?’
‘He’d have bought you a pint.’
‘Of your finest mead, sir! Watch the speedo and keep it under thirty for now.’
Kate slipped awkwardly up into third and sensed her dad glancing at her. He said, ‘Keep your eyes just a bit further down the road, love. Nasty surprises everywhere but not so many if you’re looking ahead.’
‘Is that some kind of life lesson?’
‘No, it’s some kind of driving lesson, Mrs Metaphorical.’
She focused further along the track and felt an immediate gain in control.
‘To be fair,’ Bill continued, ‘it’s really just a working-the-car lesson. Proper driving is about other drivers. Who’s about to cut in, who’s about to act like a lemon, who’s about to signal left and then turn right. All that.’
‘How do you tell? By the cars, you mean?’
‘Well, sometimes it’s the cars but sometimes you can see the actual driver. I mean, a young lad in a secondhand Cortina is almost guaranteed to be driving like a pillock. You want to give them a bit of room. It’s the testosterone.’
‘I’ve got testosterone.’
Bill said through a mouthful of crisps, ‘Y’telling me!’
‘No, seriously. Men and women both have testosterone. Obviously most blokes have a lot more than most women. But it’s a spectrum.’
‘Where d’you get this, then?’
‘Library.’
‘Right. Well, I won’t argue.’
‘So maybe I’ve got more than most girls.’
Bill pondered this briefly. ‘Yeah, but wouldn’t that make you all hairy?’
‘Erm …’
‘No offence, love, but you don’t seem that hairy.’
‘Well, no.’ Kate frowned and Bill noticed the car beginning to slow.
He said, more softly, ‘What’s on your mind then, Kate?’
‘I dunno, just …’ Kate struggled to find the words. She’d never really admitted this worry to anyone. ‘Y’know, all this driving and maps and computers and fighting. It’s all supposed to be boys’ stuff, right?’
Bill put his bag of crisps in his coat pocket and waited.
‘And well, sometimes I worry that it’s not very … feminine. That I’m not doing feminine properly.’
Bill exhaled with relief. ‘Oh, thank God. For a minute there I thought you was worried about something important.’
‘Well, it’s important to me …’
‘I’ll tell you what you’re doing properly,’ Bill interrupted firmly. ‘You’re doing Katherine Jennifer Marsden properly. In fact, you’re doing that to a tee and always have.’
The road began to blur in Kate’s eyes. Bill continued. ‘You’ve always felt drawn to certain things, love. And you’ve followed them with all your heart and not given a monkey’s. And I know you don’t like talking about it, but you’re gifted. Brighter than your mother and me put together and then some. People think that makes life easy but we know different, don’
t we? It sets you apart and that’s been bloody ’orrible for you at times.’ A tremble had entered Bill’s voice and he saw the tears in his daughter’s eyes. ‘All right, pull over. Rule number one: you can’t drive if you’re having a cry.’
‘I’m not crying.’
‘Well, I am. Let’s have a break and a good old cry.’
Ten minutes later, they were side by side, leaning against the car and looking out across the wheat and maize fields of northwest Kent; the crops yielding to woodland and a golf club in the distance. Gravesend and the Thames were going about their business behind them. Kate felt a pleasant, post-weeping calm in which anyone could say anything and it didn’t really matter.
‘They still call me a freak, Dad.’
Bill fought down his usual reaction to the news of anyone bullying his daughter. The violence and mayhem he had imagined over the years – the injustice Kate attracted, not just because of her tomboyish hobbies but because of her extraordinary mind. She was only fifteen but it felt to him like she’d taken a crash course in bad news about human beings far too early. She was free at home – he and Madeleine took her talent for granted. Madeleine had taught her French from an early age but if Kate wanted to teach herself Russian from a book when she was seven, well, that was just Kate. But Bill knew that at school she had learnt to dissemble: that she kept a private rule of raising her hand only once every ten minutes and sometimes got answers deliberately wrong. The incident with Blanchard the gropey geographer had given ammunition to Madeleine’s ongoing campaign to have Kate privately educated despite her knowing perfectly well that they couldn’t afford it. Bill’s socialist principles notwithstanding, his wife had no answer when he said, ‘What, so she can attract a better class of groper?’
Kate had come to accept her isolation with a grim sense of inevitability. She knew that it must be deeply annoying for her classmates that a piece of text that they would puzzle over for half an hour could be taken in by her with a longish glance. The teachers, though – the ones who needed to ‘take her down a peg or two’ – they were not to be forgiven.
She had pounced on the physical demands of her karate training and practised at home with religious devotion. Here was a place where it was okay to excel: it was already so peculiar for a girl to be doing this stuff in the eighties that her swift progression through the grades and belts was almost beside the point. The insistence on discipline and mutual respect gave her a space to compete without apology, and her sensei Jerome had become an admiring/admonishing second dad. Kate found this inconvenient because what she really needed was a second mum – but then nothing’s perfect. Jerome made Kate’s training his personal project, giving her extra lessons for free, entering her for London-wide and then nationwide tournaments. In a few months from now, she would be competing in the 9th edition of the World Karate Championships (Girls, Under Eighteen) in Granada, Spain, with Jerome essentially working as her private coach.
It was a lifeline. But she knew at the same time that she was just adding to the list of transgressions, the rap-sheet of otherness.
By the car, Bill kept his temper and said, ‘Freak’s just a word people use when they’re scared, love. Jealous people, frightened people set in their ways.’
‘It could be worse. I’ve got Jerome. And I’ve got you.’
Bill swapped his crisps and gave her hand a squeeze with his non-cheese and onion fingers. ‘Poor old Jerome. No wonder he loves teaching you. He’s got three daughters and they all want to be Princess Di.’
‘Nothing wrong with that,’ said Kate. ‘The royals could do with a black princess. I think that would be cool.’
Bill gave a chuckle. ‘Cool for you, maybe. Blimey, can you imagine what the Daily Mail would do to her? Come on. Let’s have another go.’ Kate eagerly climbed into the driver’s side and restarted the car.
She said, ‘It’s fun but it’s all a bit redundant, really, isn’t it? Probably in the future we’ll all have jetpacks or cars will be driven by robots.’
‘Sounds horrible. “If the bus is going to Utopia, let me off one stop early.”’ This was one of Bill’s favourite political sayings and, as far as Kate knew, his own. He was so pleased with it, she could almost hear the quotation marks.
‘Neil Kinnock’s not heading for Utopia, is he?’
Bill was used to her lateral jumps. ‘Nowhere near it, love. He’s a socialist all right, but no Utopian, no Commie. That’s the main reason I can vote for the ginger gasbag.’
Kate opened her mouth to defend the redheads, thinking of Pete, her strawberry-blond boyfriend. But she thought better of it, remembering that Pete’s hair was at its gingerest in regions she didn’t want to discuss with her father. Instead she said, ‘You used to love old Neil. You haven’t gone off him just because he lost, have you? That’s not like you.’ Bill took the compliment but looked out of the passenger window as Kate raggedly moved the Metro off again. The result of the 1987 election was a recent and painful memory.
‘I never loved him,’ he said.
‘Bollocks. When he did that speech giving Militant the boot you literally danced around the kitchen table.’
Bill had finished his crisps. As was his habit, he started to fold the empty packet into a neat triangle. ‘There was a pendulum, Kate. And now it’s broke.’ She’d heard a version of this speech before but only when Bill was a few sherries down on a Sunday night. She waited for the sober version but Bill was never quite sober when it came to politics. She steered the car in a wide loop, allowing him to talk.
‘It used to swing between Left and Right, love. Not gently – nothing gentle about it. But reliably. Predictably, so to speak. Bit of compromise from time to time. Labour more about the good of the people. Tories more about the public good. I can’t really stand the Tories, as you know, but these were decent people, some of them. Trying to do what’s best. So you’ve got a pendulum, swinging back and forth. Then the union leaders got cocky and started taking the piss. And now Thatcher. She’s smashing them to pieces and she’s smashing the pendulum too. That’s why you need someone like Kinnock, pompous prat though he is. Fix your own house first, get rid of the nutters. Otherwise the other side respond in kind and you’ve got fucking Blackshirts marching around London. London, for crying out loud! We don’t need that again, Katie. Believe me.’
Kate kept her eyes on the asphalt ahead, a pattern of pressed grey endlessly repeating itself. It always came back to this. Cable Street. Grandad Marsden had been there in October 1936, in solidarity with the Jews of the East End, seeing off Mosley’s fascists. But somehow Bill took no pleasure in it. There always seemed to be something he was holding back. Between her parents, the subject of William Marsden Senior was a matter of tight glances and rapid changes of subject.
Bill combined his crisp packet triangle with another two examples he found in his coat pocket. He slotted them onto his middle three fingers and started to animate the opening titles of Dad’s Army. The invading triangles of Nazi forces entering Kate’s field of vision made her laugh and she joined in with the song.
‘Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Hitler,’ they sang, ‘if you think we’re on the run?’
We are the boys who will stop your little game.
We are the boys who will make you think again.
’Cause who do you think you are kidding, Mr Hitler
If you think old England’s done?
Chapter 6
Screw you, Toby.
Kate stalked down her road bitterly resenting how clean, renewed and exhilarated she felt. Even the exercise was helping. Stupid exercise. And now she realised she was extremely hungry. If she wasn’t careful, she could wind up in her favourite café having a delightful lunch which would make her feel even better. It was intolerable.
Toby. How dare he? She turned up the Sex Pistols on her phone, glancing around and half hoping that Petrov had sent a gang of hoodlums to steal the memory stick. She would beat the living shit out of them and then hopefully get stab
bed to death.
‘Morning, Kate!’
‘Morning, Vicar.’
Father Lawrence was already slowing down for an exchange of pleasantries. Oh joy.
‘You’re looking very determined!’
Kate took her hands out of her pockets and removed her earpods. ‘Oh, you know – things to do.’ She paused the track and readjusted the shoulder strap of her bag the way she’d seen local mums do. Tall and rangey in his dog-collar and black shirt, it was generally found that Father Lawrence had a faint foxiness going on. Kate found her own curiosity doubly inappropriate as he seemed to be remarkably young. Twenty-six, tops – and in charge of a big London parish. A prodigy of some kind. Kate wondered if it had isolated him. ‘Did they call you a freak too, Lawrence?’ she always wanted to ask. ‘And how do you get to be outstandingly good at Jesus Christ anyway?’
Lawrence said, ‘I just wanted to thank you for helping out with the Christmas jumble sale. I think your book stall made more cash than all the fairy cakes put together!’
Of course it fucking did, Kate did not reply. Instead she said, ‘Oh well, I needed to do a bit of downsizing so … win-win!’
‘Win-win indeed!’ exclaimed Father Lawrence. In public he only really talked in exclamations and it was infectious.
She had cleared the house of the books she knew she would never read again. It was all of them. She had thrown herself into bookselling with a ruthless lack of sentiment. ‘What, this F. Scott Fitzgerald paperback that Luke bought me between bouts of mad lovemaking on that wet weekend in Swanage? Sure! Have it for two quid.’ Kate had never run a jumble sale stall before and it had been a good day, full of contact and conversation. Later, she had knocked back a pint of Chardonnay and cried herself to sleep.
Kate said, ‘I’m just off to the bookshop now!’
‘Oh good! Stocking up again!’
Kate thought of the pills in the kitchen cupboard and her plan for the evening. It reminded her to get a bottle of vodka on the way home. ‘That’s right,’ she said, ‘although knowing me I’ll probably just buy something I won’t have time to read!’