Nightingale Point

by Luan Goldie

  Elvis does have a lot of questions, like why can’t he watch Breakfast with Susan Hill? What is he meant to wear while he waits for his dirty clothes to be cleaned? Why can’t he go to his old bedroom at the Waterside Centre? Has someone told Lina where he is? Can he have a chicken sandwich? But instead, he says nothing.

  ‘Okay,’ George says, ‘remember to try and keep your stitches dry.’ He closes the door gently behind himself and Elvis wants to ask for tips on how to have a shower while keeping the stitches across his forehead dry, but it is too late.

  He takes off his sandals and then his shorts, T-shirt and pants. They are very dirty. He opens the bedroom door and throws them, one piece at a time, down the hall. The vomit-covered shorts go far but not as far as the T-shirt, which has nasty brown blood all over the front, and not as far as his pants, which he manages to get all the way to the top of the stairs. He quickly closes the door before anyone can see his naked body. In the shower he watches the water turn from dark grey, to light grey, to bubbly white as he washes himself down with all the lovely products from the little shelf. Grapefruit and Bergamot, Tea Tree and Papaya, Strawberry and Mandarin. It is a very nice shower. The water comes out much faster than his shower at the Waterside Centre and even faster than the water at his perfect flat in Nightingale Point. At first he finds it difficult to shower and keep his head dry at the same time but when he gets out and wipes a clear circle in the steamy mirror he sees that his body is squeaky clean and his forehead, which has a track of tiny string stitches, like Johnny Depp in Edward Scissorhands, is still dry.

  As he sits naked on the bed he begins to feel very tired. He slept for a little bit last night in the hospital. He had tried to sleep for longer but there was too much noise; a woman kept crying loudly, and even though Elvis asked her what was wrong she didn’t talk to him or stop crying. Also, his back hurt, he kept having bad dreams and a lady woke him up several times to tell him off for snoring, even though Elvis never snores.

  He is still not sure what happened yesterday. There was an explosion, a fire. The boy was hurt and Elvis helped him. He wants to ask George what caused the explosion, if he did the right thing by leaving the boy, and what made him fall asleep outside Jade Garden. George would tell him if he asked, but Elvis is a little bit embarrassed as he does not want George to think he was not concentrating.

  He remembers going to the hospital in the ambulance. The lights were on but it did not move fast or go through red lights like they do on Casualty, the best hospital drama on television after ER. This was disappointing.

  Elvis wanted to look for the boy last night at the hospital but instead he was made to sit and breathe into a funny machine that made a loud beeping noise. Then he had to have his head stitched up by a doctor, who was grey-haired and handsome like Dr Ross from ER, but better than Dr Ross because he was a real doctor, not an actor. Then Elvis had been very busy eating two Mars bars from the vending machine in the corridor. Then George came and Elvis cried. He felt silly after that and worried that he would be sent to Sonia, at the Waterside Centre, to talk about his feelings. Elvis does not like Sonia as she always carries around a big suitcase, which you think will be filled with something good but it is actually filled with ugly puppets she uses to tell stories about emotions.

  Elvis knows he has a strong emotion now and it is sadness, like Sonia’s blue puppet with the stitched on tears and yellow mouth that looks like an upside-down banana. Elvis feels sad that his perfect home has gone and that he has a big cut on his forehead that stings and that his chest hurts and that the ambulance did not drive fast and that he does not know where Lina is, because even though she is sometimes unkind to him, she is still his friend. He also feels sad that the boy got so badly hurt.

  Elvis lies diagonally, as planned, on the double bed. It feels lovely and soft. He is hot but pulls the bed sheet, which has prints of tiny tulips on it, over himself in case someone comes through the door into the lemon-coloured bedroom and sees his penis. He wishes he had pyjamas. He wishes he knew if the boy was okay. Has his foot stopped bleeding so horribly? Does his eye still look like an old, squashed plum?

  Elvis yawns and rolls onto his side. There’s a lovely fruity smell coming from his body, but it is mixed with the horrible smell of smoke coming from his hair. When he wakes up he will go and knock on George’s door down the hall and ask him all the questions he has. But before that he closes his eyes and falls asleep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Chapter Twenty-Five ,Mary

  The radio is playing a Fleetwood Mac song. David begins to sing along. He grabs Mary’s hands, a tea towel in one, the cotton pad she puts in her bra to stop the milk leaking in the other.

  ‘Dance with me.’

  The pot is boiling over and Mary knows she has just half an hour left before one of the babies wakes up and steals her time.

  ‘You used to love dancing.’ David lets go of one of her hands to turn the radio up. ‘Come on, dance with me.’

  The washing machine beeps. The load needs to be emptied and pegged on the rope that goes across the small balcony.

  ‘You never dance with me anymore.’ He looks wounded, hurt. His first time home in weeks and his own wife has no time for him, no energy.

  She catches her reflection in the kitchen window: the outline of her young face, hair pulled back, small body still swollen and saggy from carrying the babies.

  ‘Why do I bother asking you?’ he sulks. ‘I’m going to the snooker club. I’ll leave you to it.’

  Relief. The front door closes gently, but as if the babies know their dad has gone again, they both wake up crying.

  5.26 a.m.

  Mary sits up in bed. The sheets are damp and the room filled with a harmony of birdsong, which feels baleful this morning. The curtain was not pulled all the way last night and the visible strip of overcast sky is at odds with the sticky, heavy heat she feels.

  David. Where is David? She counts back to when she thinks he left the message yesterday, trying to calculate the hours of the flight between Hong Kong and London. Eight hours? Nine? Twelve, maybe? The last time she made the journey home to the Philippines was over two decades ago and then, with the twins sulking teenagers on either side of her, the flight had felt endless.

  David. He never arrived yesterday. It was common for him to do this, though, to leave Manila one day, arrive in London ten days later. It was typical of him to go missing in transit. No one else knew he was coming. She had not told the children. In the back of her mind she still had that thing of not wanting to get their hopes up about their dad arriving home, especially Julia. Though for John, recently, the relationship with his father had changed. The last time David was home, John passed by as if ticking a box. Refusing to remove his jacket or eat, he stood against the kitchen counter, watching the clock on the oven before rushing off to do an errand.

  Mary wipes the sweat off her body with the sheet and shuffles her legs to the side of the bed. She feels exhausted. Her sleep had been patchy and she remembers waking frequently through the night, seeing each hour pass until it was no longer the day the plane came, but the morning after. Harris always slept like his life had expired and no amount of her shuffling and twitching seemed to rouse him, for which she was grateful.

  Her feet touch the rug and she tries to indulge herself in the thought that maybe it was not real. Perhaps it was just one of her dreams, another night time ordeal. But she can’t ignore the change in atmosphere, the unpleasant lingering smell of smoke and syrupy aftertaste of the madeleine cake Harris made her eat at the relief centre. Her uniform is crumpled; she strokes the creases from it before the stench makes her drop it to the floor.

  Harris stirs and she has an urge to get away from him, to be alone with her thoughts and figure out what to do next. From the wardrobe she pulls out one of his work shirts and the pair of navy jogging bottoms he bought her in the winter.

  She creeps into the living room, embraces one of the Indian elephant cushions for co
mfort and pulls the telephone onto her lap. It does not even complete a full ring before being picked up.

  ‘Julia?’

  ‘Mum!’ she screams. ‘Do you have any idea what you’ve put us through?’

  The phone sounds as if it has been dropped on the other end and Mary’s son shouts in the background. He comes on the line. ‘Are you okay? We’ve been going crazy with worry.’

  She is suddenly too confused to speak. Why are the twins awake and together at this hour?

  ‘Why didn’t you call us back?’ he shouts at her. ‘One call, Mum. One. Then nothing.’

  ‘I’m sorry. You don’t under—’

  ‘Where the hell are you? We’ve had no way of getting hold of you. I called that relief centre and nothing. No one has a clue what’s going on. You just disappeared.’ He shouts at her again, her own son, frantic and hysterical.

  Julia is in the background now, shrieking the phrases: ‘complete panic’ and ‘up all night’. They are within their rights to be angry. She feels guilty for putting them through it, the worry they must have felt, but she wasn’t thinking. She wasn’t able to think.

  ‘I went round all the bloody church halls and community centres last night looking for you,’ John continues. ‘Julia called everyone. Where are you?’

  ‘I’m with a friend.’

  Mary can hear one of her grandbabies, the pitiful, stressed cry of a child woken before it’s ready. Should she mention David? How can she bring him up? She would not even know what to say.

  ‘It’s all over the news. The footage,’ John exhales loudly, ‘it looks terrifying.’ He sniffs into the phone and for a moment it sounds as if he’s walked away. ‘Where are you? I’m coming to get you.’

  Mary does not want that, for her son to run over and save her, to see her secret life. There are so many things she needs to get straight in her own head first.

  ‘I am close by. I will get the bus.’

  ‘Bus? No.’ He sounds paranoid, as if everything is now a threat. ‘No way. Give me the address.’

  ‘It’s fine, John. I will come now.’

  ‘The address, Mum. Please.’

  Harris stands in the doorway, his flamboyant gold and green dressing gown pulled around his reedy body.

  Mary closes her eyes as she tells her son the address of the bungalow.

  ‘I’m leaving now,’ John says.

  They hang up and Mary searches for how she will explain to her children what she is doing here, with a man neither of them knows about.

  Harris walks towards the sofa, his face creased from sleep. ‘Was that the hospital?’

  She shakes her head.

  He sits down next to her and pulls the phone from her lap. ‘We should call that emergency line again. It’s been several hours. They may have some news.’ He uses that bright tone of his, the tenor of a man used to telling everyone everything will be okay.

  Mary pictures how David could effortlessly sleep on flights. Seat reclined, mouth open to reveal the extensive NHS dental treatment he took advantage of every time he returned to the UK. Is he flying now? Or is he still waiting in a terminal somewhere? He used to treat layovers like mini holidays, binging on American fast food and flicking through Sports Illustrated in the newsagents, poring over young girls in bikinis. How can she not know where he is? Her own husband.

  In all those dreams that plague her, those terrible, sweat-drenched nightmares, David never features. In them it’s always something terrible happening to her neighbours, to strangers, to her own children, and to Malachi and Tristan. Never David. So why does she feel the weight of dread now sink in her stomach? Like a rock. She thinks of all the double shifts she accepted the last time David was in London. How she would rather work till her feet swelled and eyes stung with tiredness than spend a night lying next to him.

  ‘I forgot about David,’ she says to Harris.

  His face clouds. ‘He’s in Hong Kong.’

  ‘Yes.’ The rock sinks further, deeper into the pit of her stomach. ‘Of course he is.’

  There have been so many times over the years David has left her messages to say he was getting on the next flight to London. How rarely he showed up when he said he would. But this time he was in Hong Kong. Where did he go from there? Maybe there was a woman he needed to spend a night with. A floozy at the side of each stage.

  ‘Mary?’ Harris takes her hand.

  But she can’t let him hold it. ‘I need to go. My son is coming. I will wait outside.’

  ‘Mary, did David have the keys to the flat?’

  ‘I gave them to Malachi.’ What does this mean? She can’t think clearly for she is too overwhelmed by worries that can’t be dealt with by simply following the advice of a chat show host like she used to. ‘The only person who would know if he collected them is Tristan,’ her voice wavers, ‘and we can’t find him.’

  She raises her head and looks into the room where so many secret hours have been spent. It looks cold and lifeless today, washed in a milky grey light as the sun struggles to rise.

  ‘I can’t stay here.’ Her legs wobble as she stands.

  ‘Everything is very uncertain at the moment. Let’s just stop and wait.’

  At the front door she pulls on her plimsolls, spoilt with splashes of brown tea, a spray of rust-coloured blood. Her eyes settle on the curled photograph leant against the rubber plant, the image of them both outside St Augustine’s Abbey during their first weekend away in Canterbury. How could she do it? Be that woman who smiled at the camera while allowing a man who was not her husband to put his arm around her? How could she look so happy and carefree, as if she was not betraying everyone in her family?

  She opens the front door but Harris pushes it closed.

  ‘Let me go.’

  ‘You can’t walk out like this. What about Malachi?’

  It breaks her heart to hear his name, to know she is leaving him, but for once she needs to do the right thing. ‘Please, look after him for me. I don’t want him to be alone. But I can’t be there for him, not now.’ She wipes the tears from her face as the front door opens. A dark plume of smoke in the sky catches her attention as she begins to walk to the mouth of Vanbrugh Close, where she sits and waits for her son to take her away.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Chapter Twenty-Six ,Malachi

  He lies awake in the darkness. His eyes are drawn to the weak line of light that seeps in around the blind. Daylight? He can’t face it. Not yet. An ache spreads across his body as he rolls onto his side. From under the door there’s the gentle chat of voices, a radio, perhaps, or television. It flows in with the light and urges him to get up. Malachi can’t think of the last morning he woke up on his own rather than from Tristan as he rapped to himself in front of a mirror or slammed doors in the flat as he walked about in search of his school uniform.

  He pulls himself up and tugs the cord on the slat blinds. On the wall are two photos of the Kremlin in the snow, washed in blue light. Above the bed is a shelf crowded with thin books and ring binders labelled with phrases vaguely familiar from school: Battle of the Somme, Britain 1905–1951, People & Poverty.

  His socks are crusted into the shape where they lay over his wet shoes. His mouth is dry, his teeth furry. But he’s glad he managed to sleep, and is thankful that Mary’s friend, Harris, had driven him to a twenty-four hour chemist to get a packet of sleeping pills. Malachi had been using them since he was tall enough, to pass for old enough, to buy them. Last night he needed them more than ever.

  The hallway is plant-filled, crowded with old brown furniture, knick-knacks and wide bowls of potpourri – the kind of clutter Tristan would itch to sift through. It leads to a main room where Harris sits at a small wooden table, one hand curled around a mug. His face points towards the ceiling, as if listening attentively to some beautiful piece of music rather than a radio news report. Phrases jump out at Malachi: ‘major incident declared’, ‘PM said’, ‘damaged wing fuel tank’, ‘complex rescue operation’. He
tries to block it out. He wants to get Harris’s attention but can think of no morning greeting that suits the situation. Finally, Harris must feel his presence and looks over, startled, as if he forgot Malachi was still in the house. He clears his throat. ‘Mary has left. She needed to go and see her children.’

  Malachi nods, glad Tristan is not here to feel the sting of being reminded that Mary, despite her relentless doting on them, does have children of her own.

  ‘When is she coming back?’ he asks, surprised that she left without speaking to him.

  ‘I’m not sure. Her children are quite distressed.’ Harris is not an old man but his long, thin arms and tired eyes give him a frail look, almost sickly. ‘I have called the emergency line several times this morning, but it’s a mess. They didn’t even have Tristan on their lists, though your name seems to appear three times with three different spellings.’ He shakes his head. ‘I’m sorry, Malachi. There is no news.’

  Malachi gasps as he catches sight of the clock. ‘It’s after seven. I can’t believe I slept so late. I need to go.’

  ‘The hospitals are advising against people showing up. They will send you to one of their so-called victim relief centres. It’s sounds more chaotic this morning than yesterday afternoon.’ Harris furrows his brow. ‘Stay here, please. We’ve given this number – this is where they’ll call when there’s news.’

  News. Malachi’s not sure what kind of news he’s waiting on. ‘I can’t just sit here.’

  That’s what he did yesterday, while Pamela’s dad was locking her in the flat, he was sitting in the café, their café, thinking about all the things he should have said to her, to her dad, all the things that could have possibly saved her.

  ‘Malachi? You don’t look well,’ Harris says. ‘Please stay.’

  ‘I need to find my brother.’

  ‘I understand.’ Harris scribbles something on an envelope. ‘Here, this is my address and phone number. I will stay in all day. If you can get to a phone box, check in with me every few hours. Come back when you’re ready.’