Nick looks up. ‘Find what interesting?’
‘Yeah. I mean, it’s funny, actually.’
‘All right,’ says Nick, and then there’s a long pause.
Danny glances over at me. ‘I thought you liked mushrooms.’
‘I don’t like it when there’s this many of them.’
‘You liked them yesterday.’
‘I still like them. I just don’t want to eat a meal entirely made of mushrooms.’
‘So far this isn’t interesting or funny,’ says Nick.
Danny looks between us, wipes his hands on his jeans, leans back in his chair and folds his arms. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘So, Nick, do you remember my friend Leonie?’
‘Not really.’
‘My friend Leonie that I went to school with. I ran into her the other day. She’s actually – it’s interesting. She’s something like Chief Executive of Southwark Council now. Or Deputy Chief Executive, or something like that. Something pretty high up.’
‘That’s interesting,’ says Nick, which it isn’t.
‘Yeah. And I mentioned to her that I was looking for work—’
‘Why would you—’
‘I mentioned that I was looking for work, and she was talking to somebody she knew, and – anyway, so, it’s interesting, but I actually ended up getting offered a job.’
Nick frowns. ‘With Southwark Council?’
‘No. With someone else. It’s on a campaign.’ Danny very carefully starts twirling a strand of spaghetti round his fork. ‘I suppose you probably remember Jacob Carlisle.’
I don’t know who Jacob Carlisle is, although if Danny has started working for him he’s probably going to lose whatever it is he’s running for. But Nick has gone stone cold silent and they are having some kind of intense staring match.
‘Yes,’ Nick says, very slowly.
‘I know how you’re going to feel about this, but it’s working with Jacob Carlisle.’
‘Who’s Jacob Carlisle?’ I say. Nobody answers. ‘Hello. Who’s Jacob Carlisle?’
‘He’s a politician.’ Danny goes back to concentrating on his food. ‘He used to be our local MP. He’s running as an independent candidate for mayor. He hired me as a researcher for his campaign. They liked the stuff I did with Sally.’
‘He’s running for mayor now?’ Nick says. ‘As a joke?’
‘No. For real. I mean, not that he’s going to win or anything, he just wants to kind of put himself out there and—’
‘Danny—’
‘Listen,’ says Danny. ‘Before you get on your high horse, just listen. This is going to be full-time for the next four months, and the pay is like – you know, they’ve offered me an actual salary, proper money, not just—’
‘Well, I would hope you got a good price, since you’ve sold your soul.’
‘Mayor of London?’ I say, which is a stupid question but I’m unnerved. Nick and Danny don’t fight, not really, at least not in front of me. They bicker all the time, but you can tell they both enjoy it.
What does happen: sometimes – hardly ever, just sometimes, like for a few seconds – it will seem like they forget that I exist. I’ll be right there in the room and they’ll be talking about something and in this way I can’t really explain, I will just know that they’ve forgotten I’m there: like for a few seconds they think that they have normal lives and no responsibility to anybody but themselves and each other. I notice this sometimes.
Nick is shaking his head. ‘How long ago did this happen? Why are you just announcing this now?’
‘I thought you might have a problem with it, but I obviously shouldn’t have worried.’
‘You thought I might have a problem with it. I can’t even – Danny.’
I hear the elevator ping as it reaches our floor, and footsteps down the corridor. A door opens and closes. Mrs Segal next door.
‘Let’s talk about it later,’ Danny says, his voice gone suddenly quiet.
‘Fine,’ says Nick.
‘Look, I need a job,’ Danny says. ‘I need a career. We can’t just eternally live off of coffee and maybe next week I’ll get some freelance, you know, whatever – we can’t. We need to save.’
‘Why is this suddenly—’
‘Lena might want to go to university when she’s eighteen, which is not, like, a hundred years away—’
‘I don’t want to go to university,’ I say.
‘Oh, well, problem solved,’ Danny snaps.
‘I do want to learn guitar.’
‘OK, she wants to learn guitar, so now we have to buy her a guitar.’
‘I didn’t say you had to—’
‘You have a guitar,’ says Nick.
‘And then we’re going to have to pay for – I do not have a guitar.’
‘Yes you do. It’s in the storage locker.’
Danny is briefly distracted by this revelation. ‘Really?’
‘Really?’ I say. ‘Can I have it?’
‘Of course you can have it,’ says Nick. He looks at Danny. ‘Right? I don’t know what it sounds like. Probably needs a bit of fixing up.’
‘I had a guitar when I was about fifteen,’ says Danny. ‘And I sold it or gave it to charity or something.’
‘Nope,’ says Nick. ‘You put it in your mother’s garage, and then we put it in storage with everything else.’
‘Which, by the way,’ says Danny, ‘renting that damn storage locker is something else we need to pay for.’
‘Can we go and get it tomorrow?’ I say.
‘Yes,’ says Danny. ‘Let’s go and get it tomorrow. And maybe we can find something in there that we can sell, since I’m expected to be unemployed for the rest of my life.’
‘Don’t be so dramatic,’ says Nick.
‘I don’t think I’m the one being dramatic.’
‘Everybody knows that he’s a shallow, opportunistic, fear-mongering – he doesn’t have a single conviction in his – everybody knows, Danny. You know.’
‘When you say everybody you mean you and your friends at the coffee shop.’
‘I mean our friends at the coffee shop, yes, for starters.’
‘And hardly anybody else has even heard of him, so there’s not exactly a widespread—’
‘I haven’t heard of him,’ I say.
‘See? Lena hasn’t heard of him.’
‘Lena.’ Nick turns to me. ‘Do you remember when the council tried to close the coffee shop down?’
‘No.’
‘Nick, they didn’t try to close—’
‘About five years ago I got into all kinds of trouble because our friend Jacob Carlisle decided that the coffee shop was harbouring extremism because some animal rights organisation held a meeting there once—’
‘They held all of their meetings there, and it wasn’t just the animal rights people, it was those anti-capitalist anarchist whatever—’
‘—and left a few leaflets lying around or whatever and all of a sudden I’ve got some guys from Special Branch accusing me of selling lattes as a cover for all my terrorist activities—’
‘That is a massive exaggeration of what happened—’
‘And it was all part of Jacob Carlisle’s Let’s clean up the streets campaign which basically meant Let’s kick out independent business in favour of—’
‘And you acted like Jacob Carlisle personally supervised the whole thing when I’m pretty certain he hadn’t then and still hasn’t even heard of the coffee shop, much less developed some personal animosity towards it.’
‘Well, OK, then, that absolutely absolves you from selling out your community,’ says Nick.
There’s a very hard silence.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I don’t remember that.’
Nick starts cutting up his food into little bits. He’s looking at his plate when he says – under his breath but loud enough that we can both hear – ‘God, I’m just trying to imagine what your mother would think.’
I freeze, my fork hovering in the ai
r.
My mother died very suddenly. She had a brain haemorrhage. Or an aneurysm. Something like that. Danny doesn’t talk about her. Any time I mention her at all it’s like a power cut. The lights go out behind his eyes. If I want to know anything about her, I have to ask Nick, and he hardly knew her. He knew her for like a year or maybe even less. Some of the stuff he tells me I think he makes up just to try and make it seem like she was a real person. She isn’t, really, not to me. She’s more like a photograph, or not even that.
Sometimes I pretend that I remember her but I don’t. I say things like, Oh I was playing in the kitchen and she was there reading a book or Oh she used to sing this song to me, when probably she didn’t sing at all, that’s just a stupid idea I got from somewhere, a film or something. When I was little Danny used to ask me, sometimes, stuff like, Do you remember this and What can you remember about that?, almost like a test, and I’d lie and say yes and make things up, because I thought that he wanted me to remember her. I thought it would make him happy, but it didn’t, and anyway he must have known that I was lying. And now we never talk about her at all. Like she never existed.
We definitely don’t just casually bring her up around the dinner table, and Nick already looks like he knows he’s made a mistake, like he’s said something really irreparably terrible.
I scoop up some spaghetti and flinch at the sound my fork makes as it scrapes against the plate. I’m trying to think of something to say to break the silence, but I can’t think of anything, and Danny is screwing up his napkin and dropping it on the table, shoving back his chair and taking his plate to the kitchen.
‘Danny—’ Nick says.
‘Let’s talk about it later,’ says Danny without looking at us. He dumps his plate in the sink and then walks down the corridor to their bedroom and goes in, slamming the door.
Nick leans his elbows on the table and rubs his eyes.
I don’t know if I should just carry on eating or what. ‘Why are you trying to imagine what our mother would think?’ I say, lowering my voice so Danny won’t hear.
‘I shouldn’t have said that,’ Nick says. ‘That was a stupid thing to say. Sorry.’
‘But—’
‘It’s just she’d have hated Jacob Carlisle. She’d have just – politicians like him. You know. She just didn’t have a lot of time for them. She thought they were all the same. That’s all.’
‘Oh.’
‘Never mind. Forget it. I’m sorry.’
‘I’ve literally never even heard of him.’
Nick smiles, a little. His eyes are red where he’s rubbed them. ‘Lucky you,’ he says.
Lucky me.
FIVE
I look him up, obviously. Jacob Carlisle. After dinner when I’m sitting cross-legged on my bed with my ancient laptop that barely works. On the front page of his website there’s a black-and-white photograph of him writing something down in a notebook, with a phone tucked between his ear and his shoulder, like he was too busy working to pose for an actual portrait. He has short silver hair, but he looks young and healthy and serious. Kind of good-looking, if you like that kind of thing.
There’s only four sections on the website. Who I Am and What I Stand For, My Vision for London, Election News and Get Involved.
Get Involved is asking for money and people to deliver leaflets.
Election News says, Coming soon!
Who I Am and What I Stand For has another black-and-white picture of him – this time he’s leaning against a desk with a cup of coffee, laughing. Underneath, it says:
My name is Jacob Carlisle. I’m a lifelong Londoner; I’m a single parent to a teenage son; I’m a marathon runner, a dog lover, and a football fan. I’m a believer in real democracy, and in an era of cynical party politics, I’m a true independent. You may not have heard of me, and my opponents would like to keep it that way, but I am running for Mayor of London and I propose an alternative to ‘business as usual’. I’ll be shutting down the venues that harbour radical and extremist views before they can infect our communities with hatred; making sure that violent crime is swiftly punished, and that chaotic public protests are better controlled. I’ll be ensuring that innocent Londoners are never caught in the crossfire of someone else’s war.
That’s all it says. I start to wonder if nobody on the campaign knows how to run a website, because me and Teagan have done websites for school projects that have more content than this.
I kind of like the idea that the coffee shop might harbour radical views. The walls and windows are covered with flyers and stickers and leaflets campaigning to stop this and start that and vote for that but not for this, and let’s meet here to protest whatever. If you stop and read any of them you realise a lot of them don’t even agree with each other, but Nick will let anybody put stuff up as long as it’s not, quote, against the general ethos of the shop. There’s a feminist book club that meets there once a fortnight, and sometimes people give talks and do book signings for their self-published novels about radical utopias.
But truthfully: the idea that it might infect a community with hatred is pretty funny. It sells milkshakes and mango smoothies and as far as I can tell nobody at the feminist book club has ever even read the book – they just turn up and drink coffee and laugh a lot. I’ve spent almost as much of my life at the coffee shop as I have at home and I feel safe there. I feel calm. If it ever closed down it would be like the end of the world.
If Nick thinks that my mum would have hated this guy then I believe him, but then, what do I know? I have no idea what she thought about anything. The idea that she would hate some politician is interesting. Not earth-shattering or anything, but interesting. It’s specific and human.
There’s a bunch of her old books in the storage locker, but I usually ignore them because I only really like novels, and these all have titles like Women’s Struggle and Global Injustice and Resisting War – the kind of thing that Nick reads, in fact. But I think maybe tomorrow when we go looking for the guitar I’ll flick through them, maybe take one when Danny isn’t paying attention. Look for clues.
Politicians like him, I imagine myself saying sometime, if Jacob Carlisle is ever on the TV. They’re all the same. Danny looking at me like I’m a ghost.
SIX
On Saturday morning they find another bomb. That makes four. This one they have to blow up in a controlled explosion. It’s in Mile End or somewhere. A tired-looking man in a suit is on the television, saying that the investigation is ongoing and that people should be vigilant. Danny and Nick both watch with serious faces.
‘Morning,’ I say, padding towards the kitchen in my slippers. There was a cup of tea by my bed when I woke up but it was already cold. Danny and Nick both have coffee and they look exhausted, like maybe they were arguing all night.
They spend the morning being carefully nice to each other, and to me, until I remind Danny that he said he’d drive me out to the storage locker to get his old guitar, and then he gets annoyed again, and tries to make Nick do it. Danny hates going out there. But Nick has to go in to work, and eventually I persuade my brother that me getting a guitar will lead to the two of us sitting around talking about Bob Dylan all the time, so he sighs and looks at his watch and says, ‘Fine, all right, fine, but we’re making it quick.’
The storage locker is like this vault of treasure. Or: it’s like someone’s mouldy garage filled with broken furniture and sad old children’s toys. They’ve been renting it for years, ever since our mother died and Danny sold her house, and it’s a forty-minute drive so all the stuff just sits there, unwanted, rotting away in the dark because nobody – because Danny – can’t ever commit to getting rid of any of it. It’s mostly stuff that belonged to her, and some of his things from when he was a teenager.
Any time we go there I find something, though. As well as broken furniture there’s photo albums and birthday cards, old clothes and cushions and books with yellow pages and cracked spines, letters, coffee tins filled with bea
ds and necklaces, tins of paint and comics and tennis racquets and bicycle parts. Last time I came home with an old Pentax camera that still works and a portable record player and a stack of old vinyls by folk singers nobody remembers. My room is strewn with all this stuff: weird, contextless ornaments and photos of people I don’t recognise. ‘How can you ever find anything you’re looking for?’ Teagan always says to me when she comes to my house. I can’t.
We’re in the car on the way and Danny is really quiet.
‘I read some stuff about Jacob Carlisle last night,’ I say.
He glances sideways at me. ‘Where?’
‘On the Internet.’
‘Where on the Internet?’
‘Did he really try and shut the coffee shop down?’
He looks back at the road, hands braced on the steering wheel. ‘No.’
‘Then what’s Nick’s problem?’
‘He just doesn’t like him.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he’s Nick. Because that’s what he’s like.’
‘That’s not what he’s like.’
‘Yes, it is. Come on. Nick’s like, black and white, good versus evil, he’s like—’
‘Is he evil?’
‘Is who evil?’
‘Jacob Carlisle.’
‘Yes, Alena. He’s evil. He drowns puppies. Makes children cry. Hates Fairtrade coffee.’
‘But do you think he’s OK?’
There’s a silence. The traffic is slow and up ahead you can hear sirens, like maybe there’s been an accident.
‘It doesn’t matter what I think,’ Danny says, eventually.
‘It kind of does if you’re going to work for him.’
‘Look, I don’t think he’s a bad person. I don’t think he’s going to destroy the world.’
‘Is that going to be the campaign slogan?’
He grins. ‘I don’t know, what do you think?’
‘I’d probably spend a bit longer on it.’
‘Yeah, maybe.’
‘There wasn’t that much on the Internet about him running for mayor,’ I say.
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