by Adam Thorpe
After four thirty there is no entrance fee and so Cosmina moves into the cathedral itself, enjoying the vast cool space. An idea comes into her head. The care home refused to give her the contact details of Janie Watkins’s son; it was private, and Cosmina was a thief. Luckily she has written down the address of his bookshop website in her diary. She doesn’t want to phone him or to go to the bookshop itself; it is all too difficult. She can go to the library or the Internet café and use a computer to send him an email. Ask him whether he gave the iPhone to Bronwen. If not, then she would have written proof that Bronwen stole it; the manager would understand and give her a letter of recommendation.
She sits down on one of the hundreds of padded dark-blue chairs. For the first time since coming to Lincoln, she bows her head and prays. Not for herself, but for Janie’s soul. Then for Diane. ‘Please, Lord, take her into your arms. There is no point in her existence. Amen.’ And she doesn’t even believe in Heaven! She’s not so sure about God. Who can be?
Then she goes to the Internet café and sends her email, spending too long on it because she doesn’t want him to laugh at her English. She doesn’t leave her number. Then she sees how you apply for a vacancy with 2 Sisters.
Her cheap phone rings her dad’s tune. She answers quickly.
‘I don’t get it,’ comes his voice. ‘Why didn’t you take the phone?’
‘How did you get my number?’
‘Why didn’t you take what was a simple gift?’
‘It’s on my duty to help myself to this life.’
‘To help yourself? I don’t understand.’
‘My English. I’m so sorry, Mr Watkins. I mean, Mike. And I am sorry about your mum,’ she adds, only then remembering.
‘It’s OK. Cosmina, all my life I’ve been misunderstood. Join the club. We need to talk this over.’
‘Over what?’
‘A cup of coffee and a cake. Somewhere like Polly’s Kettle on Bailgate, for instance. Know it? Nice and quiet. This afternoon? I’ll close up early.’
It is always like this. He sounds as though he’s been running. All she wants is for him to tell the police that he didn’t give the phone to Bronwen but instead gave it to her as a gift, that it was her property except that she hadn’t taken it so that it was still his property. Simple. But no, he wants to date her. To take advantage. Immediately. Pushing her on too fast. Like an object. His voice, distorted by the cheap mobile, hissing and quite sinister. How did he get her number? From the care home?
‘Cosmina? Maybe we can talk about Janie too. Your memories of my mum. Janie. It would help my loss. I can’t quite take it in.’
Maybe she does need something cold and clean, in fact. Like swimming naked in the mountain lakes. Minus twenty degrees. Smoky breath. Maybe she would rise like her friend – assistant manager, decent pay, a garden. The coldstore is not like a walk-in fridge after all.
‘Hello? Cosmina?’
‘Sorry. It’s OK in fact. Sorry. Bye bye, Mike. Bye.’
She looks it all up again on the web. The Five Star Fish coldstore covers an area of two thousand square metres. It supplies Iceland, Morrisons, 3663 – everybody. Even she knows these company names.
Later, when the mobile keeps screaming that it can’t take this any more, over and over, she switches it to silent. She is embarrassed about showing this nasty thing in public, and hides it in her bag as she walks through the centre among the Saturday shoppers. Until she turns it off, people frown at her every time it rings, because the ringtone is so aggressive, but that’s because they have never suffered as her nation has suffered. They have no idea what fear and frustration are like when mixed together into one liquid. It bubbles and spits.
Nearly twenty-five degrees, like yesterday. Everyone in summer clothes. Soon she’ll be earning enough to buy a new iPhone, if she does overtime in the coldstore in Grimsby. Sharp, cold air.
A little ladder, leading to another one. Then another. Each like the very old wooden ladder her grandpa scrambles up each year to pick the apples and the cherries. The crooked ladder, made a hundred years ago by her grandpa’s own grandfather out of cherry wood, and still intact. Rising into the leafy branches in the dazzling sunlight of the mountains.
‘You see, sweetie? As good as new. It’ll never let you down, believe me. There’s one you’ve missed, just there. Don’t stretch too far! Leave it for the birds. Halal! That’s it, sweetie. Always leave a few for the birds, the pretty thieving bastards.’
She wipes salty moisture from her upper lip, thinking hard. She returns to the Internet café. There is one place free, next to the far wall. She searches for the Five Star Fish website to apply for a post online, but there is only an email address. This is the wrong approach. She rubs her eyes, exhausted. The noticeboard on the wall is full, and only a part of one notice is visible, but some words on it catch her attention.
She was also wearing a reddish-brown coat with a furry hood.
She has seen this poster before in Lincoln, she believes, but has never read it. It is for a missing girl called Fay. Fay Sheenan. She lifts the rock concert announcement that hides the rest, sending a drawing pin tinkling across the lino. The victim’s face smiles out. Fay is a happy, outgoing girl. She and the family dog (black and white, mixed breed) went missing from her home in Ermine West, Lincoln, on Friday, 27 January this year. She is described as a white girl, aged 14, about 5ft 2 ins and of slim build. She has long red hair, green eyes and distinctive freckles on her nose. We are keen to piece together where she went after leaving her home on Friday. Any information, no matter how insignificant you consider it, might prove crucial in helping us find Fay.
It is a local constabulary notice. She thinks of the coat lying twisted in the woods near the road. She should tell the police. But the girl went missing four months ago and the coat looked older than that, streaked with moss and decayed and its furry hood torn. But how does she know what a piece of clothing left in a damp English wood would look like after four months? She has no idea. It was brown, not reddish-brown, but maybe that was the effect of cold and rain. Maybe there are long red hairs left on it!
She shivers at the thought. At the end of last month, she remembers, a couple of weeks or so before her accident, it poured and poured, water trickling like a stream down the streets and lanes, umbrellas not coping. Any hairs would have been washed away. She is afraid of going to the police, anyway. Of provoking them. They were nice to her, but now they might think she was wasting their time. They would only need to take her name and check on the computer. Coats with hoods are very common. No matter how insignificant you consider it. Surely they wouldn’t be angry with her for trying to help! On the other hand, the poster is already four months old, with tears in it and marks of drawing pins poked through. That’s why it was half hidden behind a notice for a rock concert this week. Perhaps Fay has been found. Or – and here she shudders again as she did in the woods – perhaps it is too late and she has been found murdered.
She types Fay’s full name on the search engine, adding ‘Lincoln’ and ‘missing’. Photos of the girl, of the posters (there are two types), a couple of local articles dated from the end of January, and nothing more. The mystery has not been solved. She looks around her. Mostly teenage boys, except for an old man who might be the source of the sour and (to her) familiar smell. The blips and hissings and stutterings of computer games.
She leaves quickly, without applying for a job as a cold-store or fish-packing operative. It would be too like death, like working in a morgue. She feels cold already, as if she is deep underwater, deep in freezing water, despite the air outside feeling so warm, everything ablaze with sunshine so that this rainy island feels like somewhere else – Lincoln is like a city in Spain or southern France. There are people standing drinking outside the pubs or sitting under parasols, laughing and talking loudly, reflective sunglasses flashing, the streets full of the sweet sickly smell of beer and sun lotion mixed together, one bare-chested man showing fiery tat
toos, his plump white flesh bright red at the neck and on lower arms sprinkled with gingery hairs. He whistles at her, and there are guffaws from his mates. They have T-shirts with stupid words. No one knows how cold she feels inside. She knows that shock makes you feel cold however warm it is outside: a dip in blood pressure, that’s all. Blankets, hot-water bottles. A warm hand in yours. A kiss on the forehead.
Everything she is missing. This is the best, most perfect time for the mountains. May. The summits sharp against the blue sky, the air fresh as snowmelt, meadows carpeted with flowers, so much later than here, but so much brighter and more plentiful!
And then that voice starts again as she walks down the steep hill, but it is whispering this time. Urgent, a child’s voice. That pressure. She wants to go home, like a child. To come home. All she wants is to come home, safe and no longer striving for something better. For something impossible. Fighting with life. Fighting.
All she wants is to come home.
5
FAY
24 January 2012
She’s running with Pooch to the massive field off Lincoln Road. Half on it is TO LET – the grassy half, up to a ditch running across the middle. Ken says it is all going to disappear under more poncy offices and restaurants and hotels and Audi fuckin car dealers. The bypass is like thunder there because that’s what the field ends on. Once you’re onto the field’s bumpy grass, everything outside is hidden behind bushes and trees except for the edge of the estate – a long row of way-off houses with tiny windows spying on her. You’d need binoculars, though. She’s really out of breath.
TO LET: DESIGN AND BUILD PREMISES. A spanking-new building stands facing the road near where the field starts, with a big car park behind. SOLICITORS. She hasn’t been here since the summer, when this patch was just muddy trenches. Soon there’ll be buildings all over, looking like the estate but more modern. She slows to catch her breath a bit then runs with Pooch into the field and keeps on running and shouting and thinks, This is what our garden looks like to an ant. Pooch runs like he is in the Olympics, in his own world of adventure. Ken reckons he is really intelligent. The teachers say her stepbrother Craig is intelligent enough for university, but Ken says you have to be loaded to go to that waste-of-time.
On the way back, sparkling all over but puffed, she stops to read a poster in the bus stop, saying the words under her breath: ‘I always wanted to study at a university with first-class sporting facilities on campus. Thanks to DMU’s new £8 million leisure centre now I can.’ So she reckons Ken must be right. He is right usually, more’s the shame.
Now I can. But how?
Eight million!
Today is food-shop Tuesday. Tomorrow she’ll bunk school and go to Sheena’s after lunch. Wednesday en’t Saturday, but who cares? Work’s work. Sheena gid her a big hug last time and a ten-quid note.
She ties Pooch’s lead to a drainpipe outside the store. She can smell burnt cheese from the pizza place next door, but they’ve treated themselves already this week. She’s spent a quid of what she got from working at Sheena’s (three packets of Fizzy Fangs) and put the rest (three pound coins) in her savings box under her bed. She is too late for the Co-op’s discounts and there’s only 10 per cent off the pasta shapes she doesn’t even like. Rochelle has given her a fiver, but it won’t stretch what with the milk and bread and margarine and stuff, so a budget packet of Edam happens not to get clocked up on the self-service till.
Pooch thinks what she did is really clever and wags his tail like a hairy windscreen wiper.
‘Oh look, Pooch. There’s yer brother!’
Fay is looking at the news-stand outside. A photo of a Jack Russell takes up most of the paper’s front page. UGGIE: A DOGGONE STAR! Ken likes to read the paper now and again, to keep up with the news, even though his head is back in the Seventies when he was a baby, and she still has 30p. He prefers the Mirror but this one’s the Sun. It’s all rubbish anyway, he says. If he don’t like it he can do one.
‘Full Story – Pages 4 and 5’. She sits on a wall under a street lamp before they reach home, reading out loud for Pooch and starting on her Fizzy Fangs. She doesn’t like reading out loud in class, especially when the others make stupid noises. Hollywood’s top dog. The canine genius born to be a showman. Crazy and very smart, says his trainer. Who saved the cheeky Jack Russell from being put down and guided him to fame. Uggie, skateboarding star of the Golden Globes. In line for Oscar glory.
‘The talk of Tinseltown, he is,’ Fay goes on, tucking a fang under her upper lip and letting the tip of her tongue taste the fizz. ‘The world at his paws.’
Pooch doesn’t really look like Uggie, unless you screw your eyes up into a fog. Ken says Pooch’s face is like he’s been licking yellow snow off nettles all day and it’s got stuck.
But looks en’t everything, are they? Ken’s no picture. Not when his eyes are bloodshot. Back of a tram in a crash, as Mum says of blokes on the telly. Fay scares Pooch with her Dracula teeth but he only wags his tail, thinking he’s going to get nosh out of her.
By the end Pooch is panting and whining, showing his own canines, his paw on her knee like Uggie on the front page. Uggie’s paw is on a golden box. His owner must be dead chuffed. The fangs are now a slippery lump and she swallows them. Sour and sweet. Dead good day, so far.
‘Youch, but that’s an ace start, Pooch.’ She holds his paw and feels his dry pads in her palm. ‘I love you,’ she says, gazing into his yellow eyes. Heck, it is raining and the newspaper tears like wet Kleenex, goes all crinkly. She throws it onto the grass and they race each other home.
Ken is on the sofa. All Fay can see is the back of his head and the tat on his neck, that big cross with wings. Smoke curling up. The telly is showing posh types in suits, a village with snowy mountains behind, igloos like the North Pole. Then words.
World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2012.
Ken swears and stabs his spliff at the screen and says without looking round, ‘Bloody Davos. They’re taking the Michael out of us all, Fay. Selling us crap that goes bollocks so we have to buy more crap. And we don’t lift a finger. We should do, right? But we stupid knackers just let ’em.’
‘It mightn’t have been me. Could’ve been a deadly killer.’
‘Pongo Dog here gave you away,’ says Ken. Pooch jumps onto the sofa but Ken shoves him off. ‘OK, the stink’s on me hands now. Progress or what?’
The Great Transformation: Shaping New Models.
‘It’s the wet on his coat,’ says Fay, shivering. The wet on her coat – her long shit-brown coat, Mum’s hand-me-down, used to be red – has got through to the inside fur. She takes it off and hugs her thin body, rubs her damp leggings.
She asks Ken where Mum is and Ken says, ‘Tantrum factory has retired to bed. Refused to take her meds. She says to me, can you take the sheets to the bag wash, I says no, I’m on the phone, speak proper English, it’s called a laundrette. So she loses it. Swears at me an all. National Debtline’s engaged all day, but I done me best, yeah? Not like them sick prats poncing about in the snow. Did you get a paper?’
‘I only had nosh dosh,’ Fay lies. Nosh dosh is what Ken calls grub money. She likes his expressions because they are London, like EastEnders. He talks posher on the phone, though.
‘Give us a sweetie,’ he says.
He can smell it on her breath. Just one, Ken. He stubs out his spliff really carefully in the ashtray on the table so he can puff on it again and shoves the fangs in under his upper lip and plays Dracula, waving his fingers like in a magic show and rolling his eyes at her. Like, so original.
She goes into the kitchen and puts the shopping away, heart sinking because she’ll have to play MasterChef tonight when all she wants to do is start on the training and then tomorrow she’ll have to take the dirties and wait an hour in the bag wash and half the folk’ll be staring into their phones. She’s going to give it all she can. That’s what you have to give it, the training. Fame and money don’t come out of the blue.
It is passion. It is all about passion and putting in the work. That’s what Katie Perry said. And that’s what the dog trainer said in the Sun too. Passion and hard work, like magic ingredients mixed in with canine genius. She’ll have to bunk off school again.
She goes back into the sitting room and now there are clips of film stars in shimmy dresses, lights flashing, golden skin. The Oscar nominations. She sits down next to Ken, waiting for the star pet to skateboard on. The commentator is excited too. She’ll get herself some bronzer before hitting Hollywood, even doing her white bum, because them dresses split in the middle and you have to wear thongs.
‘Yeah, we’re all breathless with anticipation,’ Ken growls and changes the channel again. Fay moans but he doesn’t hear. Adverts.
‘Give us another.’
‘Finished.’
‘Piglet. Bad for your teeth, right? All them fillings.’
He changes channel again. The North Pole.
‘Davos Man,’ he says and swears softly. ‘Superhuman powers. Camping it up in the woods. Minted bastards. Buying their own sodding stairway to Heaven. They call it making history. Not for us, though, is it?’
He shoots off to have a piss. He’s always going off to have a piss. You can hear it like a waterfall. Hardly ever a bob, though. Fay switches to the Oscars. When he comes back he tries to grab the remote from her and they end up on the floor, with him tickling her around the waist. She goes all paralytic when she’s tickled. ‘Fuck off,’ she squeals, still laughing almost to death, unable to catch her breath. ‘I really hate you, Kenneth, you slob.’
He sits back on the sofa, grinning, and plonks his ugly bare feet on the coffee table. He switches over to the cricket somewhere so hot they have white hats on and sleeves rolled up. Sky Sports. A ball rolls along and bumps over the boundary edge. Everyone waving in the stands.
She could smell the soap off him, at least. She stays sitting on the rug. His feet are like the cricket bats.