by Jonathan Lee
She has found half an hour before her eleven o’clock handover meeting, so she has come here, to take one last look at the Thames, the stretch of river that once relaxed her. Mess is a thing she’s always hated – she passes a woman hugging a baby who smells of, of…vanilla? – the horror of the frogs was not so much their death as the mess it left, and the whole point of the meeting, the pretence of going on holiday, is to enable Joy to leave things in good order. Today the river’s glassy green surface holds one of those land—water vessels they dress up as ducks. Tourists, ducks, but no whales – not like five years ago, when the bottlenose got lost in London. Drifting in the wake of the mechanical duck is a thing that, if you squint, looks like a tennis ball or an apple, but is actually a swollen plastic bag. The Millennium Bridge is above, two joined hammocks hanging, Londoners swaying in nets.
Nets, tennis balls, Christine. Competitors and friends ever since starting as trainees, but it is a remembered day in 2005 that is the curious glue between them. Joy got three Wimbledon tickets from the pro at her club: Ladies semifinals. Her five-year-old nephew was charged at full price, which seemed steep, but there was no choice but to take him along.
‘Can I want a mini tennis ball, Auntie Joy?’
In the intimate pink of memory the child’s questioning face is intense.
‘Yes sweetie,’ Joy replied, holding his hand on the walk down the hill.
‘Offal please.’
And then she told Christine, didn’t she, that he meant ‘official’. His friend Alfie had an Official Wimbledon Tennis Ball Key Ring. Christine nodded; Joy remembers the motion of her complicated hat. It was supposed to supply the drama her features needed, but it looked a little sci-fi with her sharp ears either side.
‘So, Joyous,’ Christine said, probably then, probably on the hill. ‘Is this Dennis chap a keeper?’
‘Not sure there’s enough.’
‘He seems clever and charming.’
‘That’s a euphemism for old and average-looking.’
‘It’s a euphemism for what’s-wrong-with-you,’ said Christine, with the pouty smile that is her only form of firmness. ‘And anyway, me and Peter, it may look perfect but punching above my weight has caused its own issues.’
Joy did not give the empty compliment protocol required – it’s Peter who’s punching above his weight! – for even then her life was overfull with lies, the big and the small all intertwined. Instead she said, ‘What issues?’
‘Oh, you’ve seen how it is in the office. I think he gets a lot of attention, and we married young. I worry his head will get turned. Do you see his head getting turned?’
She came up with a line by way of reply. ‘Show me’ – yes, this was it – ‘Show me a man whose head doesn’t turn, and I’ll show you Stephen Hawking.’
With bad taste smothering the truth they passed giggling through the gates, found a food stall and a merchandise stall, bought strawberries and a key ring, circled Centre Court. Her nephew nibbled at the fruit delicately, sharing the neatness of his mother’s features. It was day three of four in Joy’s first full-time babysitting assignment – her sister would return from France tomorrow – and the prospect of handing him back filled her with grief and relief.
How lucky were they? Their seats were only three rows back, metres from the umpire’s futuristic chair. All they needed was for the child, perched on a cushion that needed constant rearrangement, to settle down and enjoy the show.
‘I thought the key ring would keep him busy,’ Joy said, might have said, over his head. ‘But he seems to have wrapped it in tinfoil and put it in the cold bag.’
‘Safest place, Joyous. He’s a boy genius.’
‘Can I want a fridge manet, Auntie Joy?’
‘Sweetie, you’ve already had a toy, and you’re thinking of magnet. Do you consider this normal,’ she said with an upward glance, ‘this obsession with products?’
‘Oh yeah,’ Christine said. ‘My niece, she’s massively into merchandising.’
Too quick for them, seeing hair dangling over the back of Row B, he tugged on the tighter of two pigtails.
‘So sorry,’ Joy said as the middle-aged victim revolved, ‘he’s very into hair.’
‘If you can’t control it,’ the woman replied, ‘you shouldn’t bring it.’
And Joy, glancing at Christine to confirm that this meant war, pointed out that his particular area of interest was impossibly outdated hairstyles and the humourless women who wore them. Even the child looked pleased with the put-down, chuckling with a brilliantly exaggerated shoulder shake he’d seen somewhere. Despite the brutal weather, his small compact body was padded with layers of designer pastels, the idea being that the more clothes he had on, the more easily his appearance could be revised after inevitable accidents with food and drink. The three of them were, in this moment, their own empire: the boy on his cushion was king, they were his loyal subjects, and no one would dare invade their world.
‘Ah, here she is, the Lovely One.’
Maria Sharapova stepped off the corner catwalk and into Wimbledon sunshine, fine-spun fingers raised to the crowd, racket pack swinging from an elegant shoulder. A suited man standing by the service-speed machine stopped whispering into his walkie-talkie. Hooded TV cameras swung towards her legs. The crowd made tiny transitional gasps and sighs.
‘Bitch,’ said Christine over the clapping.
‘Utter bitch,’ said Joy.
They looked for corroboration from the child, but he stared straight ahead, oblivious, in love with another woman.
If there were points for style, style and only style, Sharapova would have taken the first set. Instead, her fine ground strokes tensed in the tiebreak and – as the match reports have since corroborated – she gifted Venus a break when the second set had barely begun. The American looked powerful, focused, a sure thing for the final, and on that day Maria looked lovely but ineffectual, bending forward like a ballerina, twirling her racket, giving the ball a sensual pat, straightening her back. She sprang into the air with liquid grace, knickers flashing at the precise moment the ball slapped the tape, a strong sharp noise like flesh on flesh. The yellow orb shivered in mid-air for a charged second, then dropped on the server’s side of the net.
‘Another break point,’ Christine said, then mumbled something about defending the title.
Joy’s nephew interrupted. ‘Can I go toilet, Auntie Joy?’
She ran fingers through the soft blonde quills of his hair, but otherwise ignored him. ‘Sis says he’s going through a false-alarm phase,’ she explained to Christine, Little Miss Pigtail hushing them as a second serve looped and blurred. It landed deep, didn’t it, but Maria’s opponent saw it coming, had a gift of foresight Joy lacked that day, dispatching the ball with a brutal shovelled backhand.
‘Toilet,’ he said, louder than before, and as the crowd clattered its hands she became convinced of his need, told Christine they’d be back in a minute. The light was slimmer now, the sky cross-hatched by wet slate clouds. They ascended the cement staircase, a thin grey break in the patchwork of people, finding a path framed by exposed beams and posts.
Joy selected – always would select – a cubicle that was clean, its surfaces wiped and swept, helping the child unzip his flies.
After waiting a while, inventing some mental escapade to amuse herself, she said, ‘I thought you needed the toilet.’
‘Yes.’
‘But not now.’
‘Yes.’
Nothing came. She was in a toilet cubicle on her annual leave, staring at miniature Nikes, the criss-cross laces suncream-stained. Waving his hands under the tap, she gave the feeble wrists a sadistic squeeze.
Hands dry or nearly dry, they stepped back out into the corridor of concrete, and it was at this moment, definitely, now or a second later, that the rain came, heavy on eaves, thoughts of tennis bomb
ed away. Joy heard distant seats flicking into upright positions. They were alone in their shelter, hidden by the curves and grades of the stadium’s bowl, but not for long. A crocodile of giggling schoolgirls headed their way – tanned girls, pale girls in tight jeans, girls with wet ponytails that wagged in the eel-skin light, their voices ringing with boys’ names, with celebrity news, insults and compliments they’d heard their parents use.
She picked up the child and heard his plea: ‘Toilet please.’
‘No way. We’ve just been, and you didn’t need to go.’
‘Now I’m very ready,’ he said, eyes so close she could discern the blurs, swirls and shadows between the pupils and the whites.
There was by now a long unstable queue for the ladies’ lavatory, a capricious line of sun hats and flip-flops and the occasional glittering cagoule. Joy carried the child to the back, the whorl of her ear tickled warm by his breath.
The stretch of queue behind them became longer and thinner, and the tract in front became short and fat. People sighed and looked at their watches. They tried to create the illusion of progress by taking small sidesteps, turning to one another to discuss the weather, stroking the dials of portable radios to tune in to predictions, warnings, odds. Joy looked down and saw the child jigging his leg, a sure sign he couldn’t hold on much longer. She checked her BlackBerry, tenderly stroked the rollerball to keep up to speed. There were only seven or eight people ahead of them now. She flicked through two more emails, sighed when she saw she was wanted in the office tonight. Would he wet himself before their turn? Could the day get any worse? The feeling of something brushing against her ankle seemed to offer answers: it would be him, tugging for attention, about to tell her it was too late. But a glance down revealed the disturbance to be something else entirely: chocolate wrappers sparring with her shoe. She tilted her head right, then left. She swallowed, repeated the movements. The child was gone.
Joy did a clumsy pirouette on twisted knees, found herself facing the belt buckle of the person behind, a twenty-something guy in a pinstriped suit who must have been waiting with his wife or mother because otherwise he wouldn’t be in the queue for the ladies, would he? She gave him an apologetic smile. She was not yet beyond self-consciousness.
‘Sorry, the Rugrat seems to have given me the slip. Did you see him?’
She was worried by the tremor in her own voice; it alerted her to a panic she didn’t know she felt.
The man said something like, ‘No, I mean, I didn’t even see…’ but by now Joy was pacing up and down the line, crouching, looking through legs. The shower was softening and people heading back to the court made clicking noises with their tongues as she ducked at their feet. She felt a thickening of the spit in her mouth, strings of mucus whipping around the larynx as she took short shallow breaths, but still she thought this was a symptom of unreal anxiety. Easy, with fear wobbling your eyeballs, to overlook a small child. He wasn’t an explorer. He liked colouring and eating and wrapping key rings in tinfoil. He wouldn’t take himself far.
Not until Joy had skidded up and down the length of the queue twice, made herself tall, made herself small, did all sense of decorum leave her. She shouted the child’s name, rearranging the rhythm, changing the pitch. A strange liquid heat crept up her spine. This was it, she was being punished: the childish violence with which she held his wrists too tight under the tap; her objection to the sickly squidgy language of preening mothers; the way that on day two, in the tent in the dining room, she gave him cereal for all three meals. She was tired, just tired! Shapes slinking into her field of vision; astonished faces appearing; mouths whispering in the rain.
What’s this?
Tell me.
What’s she doing?
Tell me why.
They spoke like children, confined to basic phrases. She turned away, ran into the toilet, banged the doors of cubicles, re-emerged bawling louder. She only had to keep him safe for four days. Her feet beat concrete, useless heels clipping her own grey shadow, taking her to sets of steps and gratings and fire escapes, vantage points from which she looked up, looked down, cursing passers-by. Four days. Four days! Didn’t recognise this wild flailing version of herself. Didn’t recognise the ground beneath her feet, strangely hard, the way it seemed to rise and fall.
Why; why; what’s this why?
When she returned to the chocolate-bar litter for a third or was it fourth time the onlookers were waiting and they began to speak once more. A boy? they said. Child, missing, here? And Joy, suddenly sitting, her weight on one arm, veins pulsing, breathing with awful desperate effort, heard them fully for the first time.
‘Gone,’ she said, and her own vowel came out long, Gone, a weird airy drone that seemed to expand and surround her. Tears came at the thought – he was gone – they came all at once like the shakes in her hands.
Soon a human circle had formed around her, growing wider, more volatile, with time. And then Christine finally arrived, looking embarrassed. She asked strangers questions as she was pulled into the middle, her voice flat and enquiring. Only when she saw Joy’s crumpled figure did the hat come off.
Looking out at the river now, at the bridge strung across the Thames, Joy remembers Christine’s mouth, opening and closing, miming some useless message. No words came but Joy could see in the slow, slow parting of the lips that Christine knew, had knowledge that for an instant could not be processed or expressed. A child had been lost. This was the simple, unspeakable truth. Lost; she’d lost him; he was lost.
For Joy it is the moment her friend’s lips parted, the point at which the mouth filled with pink light, that comes back to her most often – a space, an instinctive blink, a soft little pause in the flow of her days and nights.
Peter
AROUND MY eyes? I’m not surprised. They’re regularly considered to be among my Top Ten Physical Features but in the days since Joy tried to top herself I’ve barely had time to sleep or eat. Been too busy on Project Poultry. It’s a hospital pass of the highest order. Granted, Joy’s the one in hospital, but who’s left clearing up the chicken shit? The Meat Musketeers have been on TV. Claim to have received a leaked document proving their statements about the company were true all along. Maybe you saw the coverage? Egg on their face, as the Sun put it. Manufacturer didn’t give a cluck what went into your nuggets. Board accused of Fowl Play.
The share price has sunk through the floor. Jessica and I are left billing sixteen-hour days. Outside my practice specialism to begin with, more a favour than a career case, but now it looks like it might become an insolvency job after all. Mental Brian has declared himself happy for me to take the lead in Joy’s continuing absence.
Here are the papers, he said yesterday. It’s all I’ve got.
Lawyer-speak for It’s off my desk! It’s off my desk! It’s off my fucking desk!
When he’d gone I raised my eyes up over the piles and piles of marbled-cardboard files and saw the lovely Jessica coming towards me, all shiny shoulders and mammoth eager eyes. I love the bright panelled light at Hanger’s. It’s more real than daylight, somehow, and people never seem as golden as they do here. With that pendant dancing on her collarbone she looked a bit like Joy used to when we first started, before a decade of late nights gave her beauty an edge of feasibility.
Hi Pete, Jess said, for I allow her to call me Pete. Sorry, got stuck in a big meeting with that partner who’s got the cat with Aids.
Gray? I said.
No.
Harris?
Yeah, Harris, exactly. He’s really nice, she said. He was asking for my views on stuff. Says he really values input from all strata of the team.
She will learn. She will learn to distrust those partners who encourage participation. She will learn that they recruited you for your three-dimensional character, freethinking nature and abilities at team sports precisely so that they could spend subsequent
years making you flat, subservient, and too busy to play. She will learn that the constant email surveys to assess employees’ work/life balance are covertly linked to the redundancy consultation process, ensuring that those who feel overworked will soon have ample time to devote to their families. She will learn that every six months a Health and Safety officer will have you fill out a Workstation Assessment Form, and that if you remark in the Any Additional Comments box on your chronic all-nighter-induced back pain, screenburn or borderline blindness they will punish you by replacing your adjustable swivel chair with a catastrophically humiliating exercise ball. She will learn that everyone has a film-script idea or a promising design for a new kind of duck-down duvet, but that everyone ultimately lacks the energy to write the words or pluck the duck. She will learn that the senior PAs know a thing or two about fear, the small words and gestures that send terror bubbles bobbing through the blood (He wants to see you now; I’ll schedule the meeting for midnight), and as such are some of the most revered professionals in the firm. She will learn, in addition, that when a piece of privileged and confidential information falls into your lap, e.g. re the long-term health of a superior’s British shorthair, you store it up, hold it back from everyone, even from your magnificent mentor of a supervisor, and wait to trade the secret in an appropriate forum, for instance the annual Hanger, Slyde & Stein Christmas Party, hoping to receive in exchange some lascivious factual nugget about the sex life of your secretary.
I told Jessica she should have the confidence to wear more skirts. Then I got her to spend the next six hours producing a set of lever-arch files containing all available press clippings re the Project Poultry matter. This was in case the client’s Head of Legal wanted a set of said files to impress his Marketing Director. The opposite transpired, alas, so when the files were finished and properly indexed I told her with a hint of regret (but not so much that it would compromise the hierarchy of our professional relations) that she was going to have to spend the evening dismantling the files and feeding the contents through the shredding machine. You see, the client has, since the press leak, insisted that all its advisers amend their engagement letters to include an undertaking in relation to the production and destruction of non-essential hard-copy materials. Studying the look on her face, I sensed that I was making progress towards achieving the exact blend of unpleasantness and confidence that all women find irresistible.