‘I know. I thought she’d been turning a corner, lately, is all.’
I thought maybe we both were.
For a second I saw the woman’s eyes flicker towards something on the wall by the side of her desk – a scrappy piece of A4, corners curled by the sun and Blu-Tacked to peeling paint.
‘Well, listen … whatever you do, don’t look at that piece of paper. It’s our contacts sheet. I’d hate for you to see something you shouldn’t. Now, do you want a cup of tea?’
She walked out of the room taking her mug with her. Maureen would be proud.
I looked at the piece of paper. Then at the photo of Pia again.
‘Can I ask a question?’ I called out, and the woman backed up, poked her head around the door, gave me permission.
‘It’s just that this place doesn’t seem very … Pia.’
I hoped she didn’t find this too rude.
‘God, love, no, it’s not,’ she said. ‘I think she wanted to work here because … well, she wanted to be close to things.’
She made a you-understand face.
I nodded, like I did, like I knew what she meant.
But I didn’t have a clue.
She saw me the second she walked out, her parka on, hood up, the fur of the hood like a scarf on her shoulders. I watched her as she stood there, outside the battered door of her second floor flat on Eric Street, framed by satellite dishes and St George flags, and she watched me right back.
The kids on the estate were kicking a football against an Astra.
I had my hands in my pockets, not hiding, not trying to go unseen. Our eyes met and though there was a moment of surprise, she understood.
I wasn’t here to talk.
I thought of what Andy had told me as Pia and I walked, one after the other, keeping our distance, her leading, me just following, all the way down Eric Street onto the Mile End Road and through the ticket barrier at the station.
We rode the tube together, her three seats away from me, head leaned back against the window, staring up at the lights, neither of us acknowledging the other, nor what was happening here.
Hayley had been right: Pia had known all about her. She knew all about Jeremy. She’d known, and she’d followed me out of CC that day to tell me. She wanted me to know the truth – partly out of kindness, partly because she hated Hayley’s pomposity and grand ideas – but when she’d followed me she’d seen something frail in me; something that couldn’t cope. And as we locked eyes on the bridge, and I stormed off towards the Tesco, she trailed after me, part of her still wanting to tell me about my girlfriend and her lover, part of her wondering what would happen if she didn’t. What if I wasn’t strong enough to hear it? What if I could be made to be stronger?
We got out at East Ham. Walked a few hundred feet, waited at the bus stop in silence for what turned out to be a 101, found seats on the same level, but six or seven people apart. Wordless. More jumpers these days, the odd hat too, autumn knocking on the door. No one could guess we knew each other, no one could guess we were going to the same place, no one could see I was just following.
The phone again.
Blocked.
Not here.
Decline.
She stood, now, and glanced behind her to make sure I’d seen, and she pressed the bell and I got up as she climbed off the bus, hands back in her pockets, head down, moving past the other, normal Londoners, heading home to loved ones, or at the very least microwave meals-for-one.
But now I knew where we were going. Now I was sure. The signs, leading us there, just as we’d all go there one day.
Andy had kept schtum about the zoo for a while, breaking only when pressed, but I wanted to see this for myself, and more importantly …
Pia had to show me.
She stopped by a florist’s, waited for me to catch up, went inside.
We left together with white lilacs, her a few steps ahead of me, and moments later were at the small walls and the three short arches of the City of London Cemetery.
Pia had lost it all, one day, two Decembers back.
The man she came to London for had been the man her family advised her against. Not just advised. Said would ruin her.
Not because he was a drunk, or a wife-beater, or a stoner. But because he was so very, very normal. He was a nice enough guy, they’d said, he just lacked ambition. He’d drag her down, slow her down, there was ‘nothing about him’. He was boring.
But Pia didn’t think he was boring.
He was a biologist. He favoured amphibians. She’d just completed her Diploma in the Management of Zoo and Aquarium Animals from Sparsholt. Got her City & Guilds. World at her feet – or if not the world, then at least the animal kingdom.
They’d met two weeks after he’d returned home from China, after a guest lecture at the Royal Society. He’d been out of the country six months, volunteering for the ZSL, studying a Chinese giant salamander project in central and southern China, and he talked of them with enthusiasm and care. The salamander was dying, because the salamander found it hard to adapt to its environment.
They fell for each other, hard. And six months later, Simon Jones and Pia Kosinski had been married, in front of just a few friends, at the zoo.
He wanted to show her the marmosets that day. He said Ash could get them in. He said his best man had to do everything he asked on his wedding day.
But Pia’s mother didn’t come. It was too quick for her. Her daughter was settling. They were getting married in a zoo, for Christ’s sake. Cracks widened.
Pia’s mother hadn’t been the love of her father’s life and Pia knew it. He had done the sensible thing when he’d moved here from New York, a man with sad eyes approaching his thirties. He’d opened up one night at Christmas, drunk on the daiquiris his great aunt used to make, and drunk also on memories, and he talked of a girl with eyes that could light up the sky, the daughter of the man who’d become his best friend over a few months in the early 1980s – the man whose work he’d helped spread round the world with his first ever published-work. An essay that eventually made it into the New Yorker and now languished, ignored, somewhere deep in the web.
Pia didn’t call her mum to beg for her forgiveness. Why should she? This was the man Pia loved. But how could she explain she needed to follow her heart without using her dad as an example? Cracks turned to chasms.
Chasms to an ocean.
I let her walk on her own, the final fifty metres or so.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. I ignored it.
She stooped by a grave. Lay the flowers gently down. Thought something private, for this guy, for her Simon.
Even when he’d gone – the illness short and swift – her mother couldn’t bring herself to call.
Instead, just to be a good Christian, Andy said, she’d sent a condolence card.
Blank.
Could Pia really go ‘home’ after that? Forgive and forget? Maybe one day. She wasn’t ready to leave her husband yet. But to live in this city at all she had to work. She’d just have to make life work in the gaps.
‘So now you know,’ she said, suddenly there, hands pushed deep into parka pockets, but not stopping, not making eye contact.
Pia had less than anyone I knew.
My phone buzzed again. I pulled it out.
Blocked.
I turned, watching her walk away.
This time I answered.
‘Matthew?’
‘Tom, what the fuck?’
His voice urgent, angry.
‘I’m sorry. I’m not ready. I don’t think I can do this.’
‘What?’ he said. There were voices in the background. A man shouting at another man. ‘Tom, don’t do this to me. We have to do this. I chose you. This will be good for you.’
‘I can’t, Matthew,’ I said.
‘Oh, Christ,’ he said. ‘You were in on this. This was the plan. Why are you doing this? We need to do this tonight!’
Pia reached the gates. She walk
ed through.
‘Matthew,’ I said. ‘I’m going to give you a number …’
thirty-seven
‘I didn’t think I’d see you again,’ she said, and we watched the steam rise from the mug she gripped so tightly.
We sat in Pia’s flat in Eric Street.
It was ex-local authority. One bedroom. Thump-thump-thump of the stereo next door, then quiet.
We let the silence win.
Then the next song … ‘Carry On’ by Aphra.
We laughed.
‘You didn’t tell me,’ I said, when we’d stopped. ‘About your husband. About Simon.’
‘If I had, then that’s who I would have been to you,’ she said. ‘That’s who I’ve been to everyone in that office all this time. But I figured it’s time to stop being that person. And with you I didn’t have to be.’
‘It’s why you follow,’ I said.
‘It’s like exploring,’ she said. ‘My dad said Cockroft told him exploring is just another way of saying it’s okay to get lost. I wanted to get lost. I used to be different, before all that happened. I was happy. Can you believe that?’ – she laughed, shook her head – ‘I was the happy-go-lucky one always making light of things. I always had something to do; a new idea. And then one day that all went away, and I thought it would come back but the only thing that stayed was the dark.’
‘I know about the dark,’ I said.
‘I know you do,’ she said. ‘Amitriptyline. I looked it up.’
‘How did you know about that?’
‘Why do you think I wanted to dye my hair back at your place? So I could look in your cupboards. I knew you were taking something.’
‘You dyed your hair just to get in my bathroom? Why not just say you needed the toilet?’
She shrugged.
‘More dramatic,’ she said. ‘But I could see it in you. That day I first saw you, I was going to tell you all about Hayley – where she’d gone, why, with who.’
‘I know.’
‘Your life was about to get ripped apart and I didn’t want that to happen.’
‘You made my life better,’ I said. ‘Showed me another side of it all.’
‘I think this is who you’re supposed to be,’ she said, gently. ‘Or at least, getting close.’
‘What about you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But if you’re exploring, you’re looking for something and you might not know what it is. The others – Andy and Jackie and the others – they do it because they’re looking for who they could be. You do it because you’re looking for who you used to be.’
She stared into her tea.
‘You want to come back,’ I said. ‘You want to be who you were.’
She nodded.
‘I do.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
She sighed.
‘Face up to things. I think I could move back to mum’s. We’ve been talking a little on the phone. You sort of helped with that.’
‘Me?’
‘You once said, “How hard is it to pick up a phone?” You were banging on about love and you were doing it with such conviction that I thought you had a point. I thought I should follow your example.’
‘And what then?’
‘Get a job. Sue at Mandrake said she’d give me a reference. Says her brother owns a timber merchants up there, there might be some casual work.’
‘You’re going to be a lumberjack?’ I said.
‘Office work,’ she smiled, and she batted my arm.
I’d miss that.
‘What about you?’ she said. ‘What are you going to do? Go back to Hayley?’
I smiled.
‘She’s left a few messages,’ I said. ‘Said she’s made up her mind. Wants to move to Bristol. Wants me to take her back. She wants to settle down with me, have a family with me …’
‘Do you believe her?’
‘For all I know she saw someone say that on EastEnders and decided it sounded good. No, I went round there this morning after work. Packed the rest of my stuff. Left her a note.’
‘A note? What did it say?’
‘It said, “Hayley – this is how you leave someone.”’
She laughed.
‘I’ll miss this awful place,’ she said.
I looked around.
‘Maybe I’ll take it,’ I said. ‘I can’t stay in the Holiday Inn forever.’
‘They have a wonderful meeting room,’ she said. ‘Free Wi-Fi.’
I finished my tea, put it down, stood up.
‘You used to say I didn’t know what I wanted,’ she said. ‘But I think I’ll find it. I think I’ll know it when I see it.’
A thought struck me. A memory. Dr Moon’s waiting room.
I got my wallet out, opened it.
‘What are you doing?’ she said. ‘You going to give me a book token?’
There, behind my bank cards, that was where I’d put it.
I handed it to her.
‘I saw this and thought of you. Think of it as a goodbye present.’
She smiled. Held it in her hands. Thought for a moment.
‘I’m Pia,’ she said. ‘I’m twenty-seven-and-a-third, and my favourite colour is blue too.’
I smiled. She took my hand.
‘Goodbye, Tom Ditto.’
thirty-eight
Do you know what?
Leslie James’s interview with Matthew Channing had been a sensation, in the end.
He’d taken the call that night from Matthew himself, recorded the whole thing down the ISDN line at his house, and gone big on it the next day on Sunrise. The Sun on Sunday had to play catch-up. They’d gone huge, though. Front-page splash. Called Matthew a Love Rat. Used the picture of him outside the Randolph, cropped so you could see him and Alice – but not without noticing he had me in a headlock, too.
Leslie had given him exactly what he needed, and exactly what I wouldn’t have. A very hard time. ‘We’re here to report,’ Leslie once said. ‘Not help.’ The audio had been pounced upon and used up and down the country immediately – every news website had it, every Twitter feed seemed to point at it. It was played on Newsnight in a debate about press intrusion, it was played on Lorraine in a debate about unfit fathers.
And each time, there I was – unnamed friend in a headlock.
Leslie was asked to do interviews himself. Suddenly, he wasn’t the Mad Jam Nazi Rant guy any more. He was the guy with two broken arms and a black eye who’d got the exclusive with the man everyone wanted to hear from. He was the eccentric-looking DJ that TMZ, Deadline and the Hollywood Reporter all at one point or other called ‘hard-nosed radio journalist Leslie James’.
He’d been pathetically grateful to me. Six months later, when he was offered drivetime back at Talk London (and he could use his arms again) he let them hang on for a while before saying yes – and asking if I’d join him. This time, though, his agent ensured contractually that Leslie got his own cupboard for jam.
I thought about the offer. Weighed it up against Bristol, and breakfast again. Drivetime meant I’d really have to be up and out of bed by … let me see … 11.15 or so. Plus there was a pay bump. A fixed contract. Something approaching the first hints of respect.
I let him hang on for a while before saying no. I told him I was happy where I was.
Which was lucky, actually, because one month later he was arrested on suspicion of a string of historic sexual harassment offences which took place in the 1970s and early 1980s.
Mike Brundell got drive and couldn’t believe his bloody luck.
The piece of paper I’d given Pia. She’d opened it right there in front of me that day, and something had happened in her eyes. Some moment of determination. Like she’d seen a sign. In reality, what she’d seen was a job ad.
She’d applied. Used me as a reference, and Ash, too. They had her in for interview, she’d been nervous but held it together, but they knew her there already. They’d been waiting fo
r her to come back, they said. She had experience. She had her DMZAA. Slowly, she had found her enthusiasm, again.
Maybe she had even finally found herself.
So Pia Jones became a junior keeper at Whipsnade Zoo on twenty-three grand a year plus pension. She said Simon would have loved it.
She bought a small blue car, and had a badge that said Mammal Team. I did not stop making fun of her about this for weeks.
Because although we said goodbye that night on Eric Street, it was only so we could say hello again a fortnight later, somewhere else, when the dust had settled, when we could say hello like it was for the first time.
I’d just turned around – in a Tesco Express – and there she was. Standing at the self-service till behind me, matching me bleep for bleep, beaming up at me in that very same blue parka.
They never did find Binky, now that you ask. I like to think he’s still out there. I like to think maybe he found his way to CC, and learned to follow, adapt, blend in, did what Pia always says: ‘subscribe to life in a different way.’ Maybe he was out there now, finally part of society, no longer an outsider looking for the way in, making friends, having fun, taking lovers, laughing loudly, following. Monkey see, monkey do …
Or maybe he’d been hit by a car.
Ding.
Email.
‘Who’s it from?’ said Pia, resting her head on my shoulder. ‘Is it from Cass?’
It was 10am. A bright, clear day. If I had to guess, I’d say highs of nineteen.
We were on the Heathrow Express. We’d been waiting with our bags at Paddington until we’d spotted someone suitable.
It had been seven months, two weeks and a day since I’d left Hayley. Hayley – a girl I’m not sure I’d ever even really had. And finally I was getting my holiday. It was Pia’s idea, and that’s a pretty big step for flatmates. You spend so much time together, talking about the small things, the big things, arguing, bickering, laughing, that it seems odd to want to do it all together somewhere else for two weeks.
‘Not Cass, no,’ I said.
‘You’re lucky,’ she said. ‘Some girls would kill you for this.’
‘I don’t think Cass sees you as a direct threat to our relationship, if I’m honest,’ I said. ‘You’re a small woman in a big parka and a panda hat. I look like your carer.’
Who is Tom Ditto? Page 28