by Alex Marwood
‘Of course.’ She makes a lacklustre gesture towards one of the cold metal bistro chairs. ‘I’m sorry. Did I disturb you?’
She sits down. ‘No, of course not. And besides, it’s your house.’
Doesn’t feel like it, she thinks. Never has.
‘I just smelled a cigarette and thought I’d come down.’
Sarah looks at her fag. ‘Really? You smelled it?’
‘I’ve been keeping my bedroom window open. It’s so nice to be able to. Can I try one? I’ve never smoked before.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Why? Is it instantly addictive?’
‘No—’ Sarah nods at her stomach. ‘I was thinking about the baby, more.’
‘Oh. Is it bad for her?’
‘Yes, it is. So it’s a her, is it?’
‘No idea,’ she says. ‘Figure of speech.’
‘Anyway, yes. I’m surprised nobody’s told you. Which reminds me. If you need, you know – if you need to go to a check-up or anything, you’ll let me know, won’t you? Unless you’re ready to go home, of course. Sorry. Assumptions.’
A tiny little pause. Then: ‘No, it’s okay. I’m not due anything. Aunt Sarah, can I ask you how you’re feeling? I don’t think anybody’s done that.’
A lump forms in Sarah’s throat. ‘No. Thank you. I’m okay. Well, I’m upset, if I’m going to be honest. And worried.’
‘We should always be honest,’ says Romy.
‘Yes. Yes, you’re right, of course. Okay, yes, I’m upset. I don’t understand how Ilo could have been so reckless. I’m afraid I don’t know how to communicate with them. I’m scared I’ve made a dreadful mistake.’
Romy’s expression is inscrutable. Sarah starts to lose confidence. ‘I mean – I don’t mean for a minute that I’m thinking … you know. But what on earth am I going to do now? I can’t leave a thirteen-year-old home by himself all day. I don’t suppose it’s even legal for me to leave him home all day. It’s less than three weeks till the Christmas holidays, and I already used unpaid leave getting them settled in … ’
The words come at such a pace that she runs out of breath. Romy just sits quietly and listens, her eyes meeting Sarah’s all the while she’s speaking.
‘Would you like me to stay? At least till you find a better solution?’
Relief floods through her. The thought hadn’t even occurred to her.
‘Would you?’
Romy nods. ‘Of course.’
Sarah puts her face in her hands. She finds herself filled with love for her niece. ‘God, that would be amazing,’ she says.
Romy shrugs. ‘Don’t be silly. You’ve been so kind, helping me. I don’t know how well I’d have done, by myself in that flat.’
‘No,’ she says. ‘It worries me, you being all alone in your … state.’
‘I’m only pregnant. Not dying.’
‘I know, but still.’
‘If you want me,’ says Romy, and looks unutterably sad for a moment, ‘that would be wonderful.’
It’s a solution for all of us, Sarah thinks. At least for now. And next year? Maybe I need to learn to worry less, to take one day at a time a bit more. Maybe it’ll be better in the long run if he and Eden aren’t spending every waking moment together.
‘Honestly, stay as long as you want,’ she tells her. What’s one more on top of all the new souls Gethsemane Villa has taken on this year? All of them, chasing out the ghosts. Some kind of strange family.
‘I’ll try to be helpful,’ Romy says. ‘All I want is to make sure everyone’s safe. And that you’re okay, Aunt Sarah. I want you to be okay too.’
Sarah stubs her cigarette out on the leg of her parents’ green metal table. ‘Thank you, Romy,’ she says. ‘I can’t tell you how grateful I am.’
37 | Romy
‘Are we going to drill?’ he asks, once Eden and Sarah leave for the day.
‘We can,’ I say, ‘but it’s not going to be the same. I don’t think I’ll be high-kicking again for a good six months.’
‘That’s okay,’ he says. ‘You can still do squats and stuff.’
‘I can’t run.’
‘Not at all?’
‘I did, a couple of weeks ago. I thought my stomach was literally going to bounce off.’
‘You’ve got soft.’
I poke his midriff and it gives under my fingers. ‘You don’t have an excuse, like me,’ I tell him.
‘Romy?’
‘Yes?’
‘Is she still angry?’
‘I don’t think she ever was, honestly.’
‘I sometimes get the feeling she is angry.’
‘Not about you, Ilo.’
‘What about?’
‘Her life. Our grandparents. Her husband. Marie Spence.’
‘Her husband? I didn’t even know she had one.’
‘Ilo, you need to start asking questions.’
‘I thought it was rude, to ask questions.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘In the home.’
‘Oh. That’s different.’
‘Different how?’
‘If you want Cairngorm, Ilo, you need to make friends with Sarah. I told you.’
‘Friends?’
‘Yes.’
He thinks for a long time. ‘How do you make friends?’
‘You ask questions, and you listen to the answers.’
‘Oh. How do you know that?’
‘I had a friend called Spencer in Weston,’ I tell him. ‘He told me.’
‘Spencer? What happened to him?’
‘He fell off the wagon.’
‘Ouch. Badly? Was he hurt?’
‘He died,’ I say, and I feel a bit sad. I kick Ilo’s feet out from under him.
On the grass of our grandparents’ lawn, he lands with an ‘oof’, raises himself up on his elbows and looks at me with his piercing eyes. ‘But Aunt Sarah … she’s never going to just hand me over.’
I give him a hand up and all the stretched muscles in my abdomen pull so hard I have to stay bent and clap my hands to my sides until the cramps pass. ‘That’s up to you,’ I say. ‘She can come too, but that’s up to you.’
‘And how can we take Eden to Cairngorm?’ he asks. ‘We can’t just leave her here all by herself. She’d never survive.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I say, and I massage my intercostals. ‘She’ll be safe. But we have things to do first.’
‘It’s in here,’ Ilo says, and lifts the garage door.
‘Oh, my,’ I say.
It’s a boxy car, all corners and straight lines. Dark blue, tweed seats. Not a scrap of damage or rust, though it must have been sitting here unused for two years and it’s clearly a lot older than Aunt Sarah’s silver runabout with the scratch on the wing mirror and the dent in the door. Much older. But it’s a car, and a car is what I need, if Uri wants me to go around the country at his behest.
‘Don’t you think she’ll notice?’
‘I’ve not seen her come in here since we arrived. Not once.’
‘But she’ll notice when we come in and out.’
‘Not if we do it when she’s at work. We can park it round the corner if we don’t know if she’s there or not.’
Sounds reasonable.
I take the key. The lock is slightly stiff and the door creaks as it opens. I settle into the driver’s seat. My grandfather was clearly taller than I am. I have to stretch to reach the pedals. I put my key in the ignition and turn it. Nothing happens.
‘It’s dead.’
‘What sort of dead?’
‘You heard it. Dead dead.’ I knew my luck wouldn’t last. It would just be too damn simple.
‘Mmmm.’ He ducks in around my knees again and pulls a lever that pops the bonnet. I might have known he’d know how to do these things. He was always engine-mad, hanging around the Farmers in the hope of getting a drive of the tractor, hanging around the Engineers doing things with fulcrums. ‘Hold on.’
W
hile he’s out of sight I check my reflection in the mirror. My nose has shrunk back down to its normal size, which is good. I’ll be attracting less attention in the suburbs, anyway. I’ve still got the black eyes, but there’s less blood in them now. I’m getting old. I used to heal from a bruise in no time.
‘Try again,’ he calls.
I turn the key and the engine springs to life. He slams the bonnet and gets in beside me, grinning with self-congratulation. ‘Someone unplugged the battery,’ he says. ‘They do that sometimes, if a car’s going to be sitting a while.’
‘Told you I needed you,’ I tell him.
He grins. ‘Some of us paid attention when we did the Engineer apprenticeship.’
‘Whatever,’ I say. He wouldn’t know wolfsbane from hogwort if you shoved them under his nose.
We are in the car turning the engine over to build up the battery when Uri calls. ‘Where are you now?’ he asks.
‘Finbrough,’ I say.
‘Oh, right,’ he says. ‘Closer, then. Jaivyn is in Bristol, you’ll be glad to hear.’
Bristol. I remember that. That jumble of houses, warehouses, blocks of flats that went for miles below the motorway with the glittering sea beyond.
‘How do you know?’
‘Same way I knew you were in Hounslow,’ he replies. ‘He’s started using his card. I guess he must be running low on other sources. Or maybe he thinks that now Vita’s dead it’s just free money sitting around. He’s taken £300 out every day this week. So he’s either eating off gold plates and bathing in asses’ milk or he’s saving up to make a run for it. You’d better get down there sooner rather than later.’
I look at my little brother, and nod at him. His mouth drops open, just a little bit.
‘Bristol’s a bit of a vague destination,’ I say. ‘I went past it once. It’s huge.’
‘The Old Red Lion, Strickland Road, St Paul’s,’ he says.
‘What, now?’
‘It’s a pub. He’s been withdrawing cash in a pub. Been using ATMs all over the place, but he gets a couple of hundred out there a couple of times a week, too. Either that or he’s drinking enough to do your job for you.’
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘What do you want me to do? Hang around the pub till he turns up?’
‘Yes,’ he says.
Yes, that’ll work. A pregnant woman with a faceful of cuts and bruises will never attract attention in a pub. My lower lip is still so swollen it sticks a full half-inch out from my face.
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ I say.
‘Don’t see about it,’ he says, ‘do it.’
38 | Romy
I’ve never forgiven Jaivyn for the day Eden was born. You don’t see that level of contempt on someone’s face and forget it easily. I guess he must have been twelve, almost Ilo’s age now, when that happened. The beginning of adolescent arrogance, the last throes of infant narcissism, exacerbated by the ego boost of knowing you’re special. But still.
He’ll still be bigger and stronger than me now. He was one of the tallest of us, over six foot by the time he hit his majority.
But I guess I’ll have the element of surprise.
After he ran, things got worse for us. Lucien was furious. They were all furious, and we all kept our heads low and hoped that we would not be the next to be punished. That was the end of outreach. The gates were closed and nobody left, apart from Vita or Uri, unless they were accompanied. A dozen people got demoted to farm work and half a dozen more were shunned for months. He didn’t believe that none of them had known what Jaivyn was planning. I wondered why someone would have helped him plan his bunk and not gone too, but Lucien said traitors were everywhere. ‘I can no longer trust you,’ he said that Friday. ‘From now on, none of you are to be trusted.’
And, when the punishments were done, we never spoke of him again.
Jaivyn could never be the One. He could never be a Leader. If anybody had been going to run, it was him. Always the first to the food, always the wildest at solstice, always looking at the girls as though they were his houris, always arguing back when someone gave him an order. If he were the One, we’d all die off in a couple of years. Discipline. You need discipline, if you’re going to survive.
So funny: by the time Eilidh went, Lucien barely even seemed to notice. I guess he’d got used to losing children by then. By the time Lucien died, he only had six children left. Now there are only four.
Strickland Road is a grim little road where blankets hang in windows and rusted cars line the gutters. A few trees try bravely to lift the mood, but even they are grey with dust, stunted in their little paving-slab beds. I looked St Paul’s up on the internet and it said that the area was gentrifying, but there’s little sign that the gentrification has reached as far as here. The Old Red Lion is small, and the old brass plating on its windowsills looks sticky, even from a distance. Three men, different colours, different ages, same tracksuits, stand around a huge cylindrical ashtray. Each has one hand in a trouser pocket, fondling his balls, and the other cupped around a cigarette as though trying to hide the glow of the cinder from a sniper. One of them speaks to the air; the others just stare vacantly at the wall beside them.
I park. It’s already four o’clock and dusk is beginning to make itself known. Sarah thinks we’ve gone to Hounslow to collect the rest of my gear and that we’re staying for a couple of days. She trusts me already.
‘You can do your maths while you wait,’ I tell Ilo. ‘Okay?’
He rolls his eyes.
‘No, seriously, Ilo. You need to keep up your school work.’
‘It’s miles behind where I’ve got to,’ he says. ‘It’s like they think I’m stupid or something.’
‘You’re in disgrace. I think they generally don’t expect high academic standards in kids who fight in schoolyards.’
‘Thanks,’ he says. ‘I only did it ’cause you told me to.’
‘I know. I didn’t actually tell you to punch anyone, though.’
‘To be fair, you wouldn’t have me now if I hadn’t.’
‘Just make sure that workbook’s completed, okay?’
He nods and gets out his phone, sinks down in his seat and I go into the pub.
Will it be okay, leaving him out in a car by himself in this place? Of course it will. He’s Ilo.
I’ve never been into a pub before. It was against the rules at the Halfway – drink, and that. But I’ve seen them on TV. The Old Red Lion is really barely recognisable as the same sort of establishment as the Queen Vic and the Rovers Return. For a start, both of those are clean.
I open the door to one of those rooms where the lamps sticking out of the walls actually seem to absorb the light. A long room that runs all the way to the back of the building, with a cramped bar on one side and a series of wood-walled booths on the other. A pool table, the lights hanging over it unlit, in a gloomy space by the stairs. So this is what pubs are like. You don’t really pick up the sour-beer-and-damp thing from the television.
It’s not very full. A handful of men stare at me silently from the bar. Two women sit in a booth. One has a black eye and one has no teeth. I should fit right in.
I walk to the bar and manage a smile for the man behind it. He’s five and a half feet tall and not much less wide. Eyes me with little enthusiasm, but I get the feeling that that’s just his normal greeting.
‘Yes, love,’ he says, and picks up a tea towel. Spreads the sticky patches across the surface of the bar with it.
‘A G&T, please,’ I say in my confident voice. People order those all the time in the Queen Vic.
He eyes my belly. ‘Single or double?’
I think I’ll see if I like it first. ‘Single.’
‘Ice and slice?’
Someone sniggers.
Must be a trick question. ‘No, thanks,’ I say.
He takes a glass and goes over to one of the bottles hanging upside down against a mirror. Pours a measure into the glass. Bugger, it’s gin. That must b
e what the G stands for. ‘Can I have a glass of water as well, please?’ I ask.
He sighs as though I’ve insulted him in some subtle way, but pulls out a little hose from under the counter and squirts water into a second glass. Presses a button on the top, and whatever the T is – it’s fizzy, I know that – goes in with the gin. He plonks them down on a towelling mat. ‘Anything else?’
‘Have you got any food?’
Another snigger. ‘It’s a pub, not a restaurant,’ he says. ‘I’ve got cheese and onion, salt and vinegar and dry roast.’
‘Dry roast,’ I say, because that sounds the most substantial. He reaches behind him and pulls a small pack of peanuts from a display. ‘Not sure you’re meant to eat those when you’re pregnant,’ he says. A bit of an afterthought in a man who’s just sold me gin.
Oh. What a lot of rules. At Plas Golau the only rule of pregnancy was ‘don’t make a fuss’. ‘Well, maybe cheese and onion, then,’ I say. He reaches beneath the counter and produces a bag of crisps.
For a moment I want to cry, because I know absolutely nothing and this exchange has just reminded me of that. Instead, I give him Uri’s money and take my drinks over to an empty table.
They’re all drunks. Dedicated, isolated drunks. Not completely at the bottom of the heap, because I don’t suppose people at the bottom of the heap can pay for drinks in pubs. But you don’t spend your days silently soaking up the booze in a place like this if you have many choices in life. The women don’t speak; just sit together drinking the coloured liquids the men occasionally carry over to them, staring at their phones, staring at their chipped nail polish.
‘You meeting someone, love?’ calls the landlord across the room.
‘No,’ I tell him, because it’s true. I’m not meeting Jaivyn, in any orthodox sense. ‘Just got to wait somewhere for a bit.’
‘Fair enough,’ he says, and goes back to wiping the bar top.
I think they think I’m waiting to ambush the father of my child.
I text my brother. U OK?
Yes, he texts back. S called. I said you were on the bog.
I have trained him well.
Once night falls, which at this time of year is not far off four o’clock, the place starts to fill. The accomplished drinkers don’t change, as though they’re simply keeping going with their maintenance dose rather than looking to change their world. The people who start to trickle in drink faster, talk louder, eye the table I’m taking up with greedy eyes. There’s a circle of space around me, and, though they throw glances in my direction, they stand with their backs turned firmly to me.