‘Yeah, well,’ says Danny. ‘He’s only just declared his candidacy. And he’s kind of an outsider. He’s an underdog.’
‘So why is he even bothering?’
‘Hey, another great campaign slogan,’ Danny says. ‘Jacob Carlisle: why is he even bothering?’
‘Yeah. But really. Why is he bothering? Why are you bothering?’
Danny sighs. He goes serious again. ‘It’s complicated.’
‘I am capable of understanding complicated things.’
He sighs again. ‘I know you are,’ he says, but he sounds so tired I give up asking, thinking maybe I don’t even want to know. Sometimes you can’t talk to Danny at all.
I reach and turn on the radio. ‘We will not be terrorised,’ a voice is saying. ‘The people of this city are stronger than that.’
I change the station.
SEVEN
We find the guitar; it only has two strings but when I wipe away the dust with my sleeve the body is smooth and unscratched, almost like new.
Danny wants to leave as soon as we find it, but I persuade him to let me look around for a bit.
‘Ten minutes,’ he says. ‘I’m going to go talk to the manager. See if we can get some kind of discount for renting for so long. Don’t touch anything that looks dangerous.’
‘Like what?’ I say, but he’s already gone.
I prop the guitar up carefully by the door, and squint through the gloom at the rest of the stuff. There’s an old dressing table with a cracked mirror that’s been sitting in the corner for as long as I can remember and on top of it there’s a stack of books. I go over and pick up the top one.
It’s an old paperback with a yellow cover and it says in black letters: A Guide to Disobedience by Ellen Caffrey. It’s tattered and fragile and there’s a coffee ring staining the front. I open it, and on the first page someone has written, To Heather. Thought of you! Happy birthday. With love, Lynn.
Heather is my mother. I try to think of when her birthday is but I realise I don’t know. I don’t know if I’ve ever known.
I stare at some woman called Lynn’s loopy, unfamiliar handwriting for a moment, and then flick through the pages of the book, which are dry and delicate and sun-faded, even though it’s been sitting here in the dark for years.
Someone has tucked a postcard into the middle and I take it out. I actually collect old postcards. I used to be organised about it: I have folders at home where they’re all categorised by theme. But all my recent ones are just stuck round my mirror or inside my locker and tucked inside books. You can buy whole boxes of them at charity shops and markets, but I’m selective. I like ones with people in.
I squint at the picture. It’s black and white, and there are lots of women lying on the ground with their arms linked together. Some of the women in the middle have their fists raised in the air. I like the expressions: they look angry and joyful at the same time.
No one has written anything on it, but there’s a few lines of small printed text on the back.
Published by Sheffield Women Against Pit Closures and Hackney Greenham Women: WOMEN MAKE LINKS. Set of eight postcards. Women blockade the Blue Gate, USAF Greenham Common, in July 1983. L-R: Sue Dines, Lynn Wallace, Heather Kennedy, unknown, DeNel James, unknown.
So I turn it back over and look at the third woman from the left, who has her eyes closed and is shouting something at the sky, and who is, apparently, Heather Kennedy.
Then I hear Danny coming back, so I tuck the postcard back inside the book and put the book into my bag. There’s a pair of glasses with black plastic old-fashioned frames on top of the dressing table, too. I pick them up and turn them over in my hands, and then I put them on and turn to look into one of the dusty mirrors leaning against a wall.
‘I can see through these,’ I say, as Danny comes back in. It’s true: the glasses are filthy but even through the grimy lenses everything seems a little sharper. Danny comes and stands behind me, and we look in the mirror.
‘We should get your eyes tested,’ Danny says. Then he glances at what I’m wearing, obviously noticing for the first time today. ‘Lena, are you trying to style yourself as an eccentric character?’ he says. ‘Don’t we ever buy you new clothes?’
I can see what he means. I’m wearing a t-shirt that used to be his, and an old cardigan from a charity shop with leather patches on the elbows. My jeans are washed-out and rolled up at the ankles, and my red Converse are scuffed beyond recognition. My hair is getting way too long and my parting is crooked. A few weeks ago I tried to dye blue streaks in my hair: it didn’t really work because my hair is too dark, but you can still see them, uneven widths and faded indigo, growing out at the roots. The glasses basically complete the look.
He’s not much better, in a t-shirt I happen to know he’s had since before I was born, and jeans splattered with white paint from when he repainted the bathroom. Which is still basically like formal-wear for him.
‘Were these our mum’s?’ I say, carefully, touching the frame of the glasses.
He hesitates, meets my eye in the mirror for a moment. Then he turns away, picks up his jacket from where he’s tossed it on the back of an old chair. ‘I suppose so,’ he says, flatly. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here. I’ve got stuff to do.’
I take the glasses off and put them in the front pocket of my bag. I don’t want them to get broken but I reckon if they’ve lasted all this time they must be hard to break.
EIGHT
‘Listen,’ Danny says when we get back in the car, after I balance the guitar carefully on the back seat. ‘I actually have to swing by my new job, just for ten minutes. It’s out of the way but I have to sign some stuff. You can come with me or you can wait in the car, and then we can go and get guitar strings or whatever you need, OK?’
‘Whatever I need?’
‘Yeah. Do you need something?’
‘Yes,’ I say, although I don’t know what. I’ll think of something. Then I look at him. ‘Are you trying to buy my loyalty?’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Will it work?’
I say that yes, it probably will.
Danny takes us to a tree-lined street of big, white terraced houses in west London, and parks on the street outside. There’s a Jacob Carlisle poster in one of the ground-floor windows.
‘Is this his office?’ I look down the road, wondering if anybody famous lives in any of the houses.
‘Yeah.’ Danny turns off the engine, and sits for a moment as it ticks, cooling down. ‘But I think it’s his house. Or one of his houses. Something like that.’
‘Oh right. Just one of his houses.’
‘Yeah. He’s pretty rich. Do you want to come in?’
‘Not especially. Do you want me to come in?’
‘Not especially, since you’re dressed like some orphan I just found in the street.’
‘You don’t want to do your Hey, everyone, here’s my sister who I heroically raised single-handedly, aren’t I a great guy routine for them?’
He grins. ‘No,’ he says. ‘Not today.’ Getting out of the car, he says, ‘Ten minutes. Don’t get in trouble.’
I’ve never been in trouble a single day in my life but Danny says this to me probably fifteen times a day. He says it to Nick too. I’m going to buy some milk. Don’t get in trouble. What trouble he thinks we’re going to get into I have no idea.
I watch him as he walks up to the front door. He punches a key-code on the security panel, and goes inside.
This isn’t the first time he’s been here, I realise. And for some reason it’s not until then, until I watch the door swing shut behind him, that it occurs to me that he must have been lying to us for a while.
I decide I need a new set of highlighters for school and somehow Danny ends up buying me twenty-five different colours of the most expensive kind, even though, honestly, I don’t highlight that often. Then he finds a music shop for guitar strings and then we stop at a Starbucks for coffee and orange juice. We sit at one of the
tables by the window and I watch people going past with their shopping bags and headphones. Across the road there’s two policemen standing in front of the tube station with huge guns and blank expressions; neither of which, I think, will help all that much if someone leaves a home-made bomb in a sandwich bag somewhere, but anyway.
There’s a weird nervousness everywhere, here included; people looking at each other suspiciously while they drink their coffees. I get a message from Teagan. I have literally been in that Mile End Tesco’s 100s of times it’s near where I used to do orchestra, she says, followed a few seconds later by !!!!!!!!
You could be dead right now! I text her back and then feel bad for making a joke.
I could literally be dead!!! she replies.
I send her a photo of myself, looking fake-shocked, and she replies, You’re in Starbucks! I can see the cups! Nick will flip.
This is true. If he knew we were inside Starbucks he’d go mental: he’d deliver his lecture about protecting independent businesses and make me and Danny both read A Very Short Guide to Ethical Living again.
‘So,’ I say, putting down my phone.
‘Hm?’ Someone’s left a newspaper on the table and Danny’s trying to do the sudoku with a blunt pencil. He can’t do sudoku and is therefore obsessed with it even though it’s basically for old people who don’t want to get Alzheimer’s, which I’ve told him.
‘When I’m seventeen, will you teach me to drive?’
He stops what he’s doing and looks up, studies me for a moment. ‘Don’t talk to me about you being seventeen,’ he says. ‘That makes me feel ancient.’
‘You’ve got the sudoku to keep you young, though.’
He looks back at his paper. ‘Yes, thank you.’
Squeezing my hands together under the table I say, in a rush, ‘So do you know someone called Lynn who was friends with our mum?’
His pencil is pressed against one of the empty boxes but he doesn’t write anything. He goes very still and puts the pencil down and I knew it. I knew he would do this and I don’t even know why I thought it was worth trying because I knew it. Power cut, all systems down, you have trespassed into a forbidden area. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘Someone called Lynn.’
‘Someone called Lynn.’
‘Yeah.’
‘No. Why are you asking me that?’
‘I think she was a friend of Mum’s.’
‘What are you talking about?’
I reach under the table for my bag, search around inside and find the book, push it towards him and flip open the first page. He looks at it and I almost snatch it back because, for some reason, I get this idea that he will take it and not give it back. My heart is beating a tiny bit faster than it should. It’s weird how you can still sometimes feel nervous with someone you’ve known every single day of your life.
‘What’s this?’
‘I found it just now. See, it says, Happy Birthday from Lynn inside. I wondered if you—’
‘Alena, I told you not to go hunting through all that shit, all right? It’s not safe in there, all that old furniture is dangerous. There’s nails and god knows what.’
‘Nails.’
‘Yes, nails.’
‘Right,’ I say. ‘It’s amazing I wasn’t killed when I picked up this book, by a nail—’
‘All right, cut the attitude.’
I take the book back, hold it on my lap. ‘Happy birthday. With love, Lynn. I thought you might know who she was. There was actually – that’s not the only thing I found. There was also this postcard—’
‘All right, OK. Yeah. Lynn. She had a friend called Lynn, maybe. Yeah.’
‘I’ve never heard of her.’
‘So? She had lots of friends.’
‘Did she?’
‘If you want to call them that. She knew a lot of people. Like anybody does.’
Not anybody. I have one friend. Two if you count Ollie. Danny thinks he has friends but they’re mostly people he hasn’t seen in years. He really only spends time with me and Nick.
‘Did you – I mean, you obviously didn’t – did you stay in touch with any of them?’
Danny folds his newspaper over and finishes his coffee, puts the mug down in a let’s go way. ‘No.’
‘Didn’t you ever want to—’
‘Look, not right now, OK?’
‘Not what right now?’
‘This.’
‘What?’
‘Alena.’
‘What?’
‘We need to get going. We should get home. We shouldn’t be in Starbucks. Nick can sense it.’ He sees the expression on my face and says, with what sounds like a lot of effort: ‘Yes, she had a friend called Lynn. It was a really long time ago. All right? There’s nothing else I can say about it.’
Greenham Common, A Guide to Disobedience, a postcard with a picture of both of them on it – it seems like there’s a lot he could say about it, or someone could say about it. She would have hated Jacob Carlisle, Nick reckons.
But I back off. I drop it. We are having a nice day. I have a guitar. And I want him to think of me like a grown-up, not some kid who’s always nagging him.
Nick always says, you have to be careful with Danny. Whatever that means.
NINE
This is what it means.
You have to be careful with Danny. In fact, there are lots of people out there that you have to be careful with: treat them like they might be carrying ancient unexploded weapons inside, like those Second World War bombs they find buried in allotments. We had a maths teacher once who found one of these at the end of her garden. She had to call a bomb disposal team. Things that are old are not necessarily inert, she said. She spoke like that. She was very profound. Sometimes I used to write her sayings down on the inside of my maths book. Anyway.
Danny is like this. I never even really knew it for years until this one day when I was twelve – I know I was twelve because it was right after my twelfth birthday and right around the time all the women I know, like Nick’s mum, Teagan’s mum, Zahra at the coffee shop, started giving me boxes of tampons and telling me I could talk to them anytime if I ever didn’t want to talk to Nick and Danny about Things, which Danny found hilarious and Nick was offended by.
The things people think must be difficult about my family are never the same as the things that are actually difficult.
Anyway, I was twelve, and I asked my brother why there was no grave.
I was going through a weird religious phase which they had both been stoically ignoring. We had done in school about different religions and their traditions around death. And all of them had seemed beautiful to me, really nice.
And someone had said in class that they didn’t know anybody who had died, and without thinking I said, me neither, and a couple of people in the class had whispered to each other behind my back and that’s the only reason I remembered that I did know somebody who had died.
Isn’t that bad? That I forgot? I know. Her not being there was like cars and windows and breakfast. It was every day. I just never thought about it.
‘Is it because she was cremated?’ I asked him. And then suddenly I wasn’t even sure about that. ‘Was she cremated?’
It didn’t seem like that serious a question. Like how did Napoleon die, or something.
Danny stopped what he was doing but he didn’t look at me. He was standing on a chair. He’d been trying to reattach the smoke alarm to the ceiling, and I was holding the back of the chair so it didn’t wobble. He’d given up trying to connect it properly and had just been trying to force it to snap back into place. It had been broken for weeks, just the plastic base on the ceiling with a few wires hanging down. But Teagan was coming round later, plus this other girl from school that we were briefly friends with, and Danny obviously wanted their parents to think that their daughters wouldn’t die in a fire at my house, because he was a competent parent who could fix a smoke alarm, which he couldn’t.
‘Yes,’
he said eventually in that flat voice that I recognised but hadn’t yet worked out was a warning sign. Danger, danger. Abort.
‘Oh. But you didn’t do a plaque or something?’
‘A plaque?’
‘Or something.’
‘No.’
‘Wouldn’t it have been better if there was somewhere to visit?’
‘Wouldn’t what have been better?’
‘For me. Like if there was somewhere to visit. Somewhere I could go and think about her.’
He lowered his arms and held the smoke alarm in both hands, looking at it.
‘Or we could go together. Or we could all go. Every year or something, like at Christmas.’
He raised the smoke alarm closer to his face and tried to do something with one of the little gold connections where the wires are supposed to attach. Maybe he thought if he ignored me I’d shut up.
‘Or we could go on her birthday. Or my birthday.’
Still not looking at me, Danny said, ‘What’s this about?’
‘What’s what about?’
‘Why are you asking me this?’
‘I think it’d be nice if there was somewhere to visit. A grave or something.’
‘This is the first time you’ve ever said that to me.’
‘I know it is.’
‘So you’ve just suddenly got this idea or why are you—’
‘I’ve just been thinking about it.’
He whacked the smoke alarm pointlessly with the heel of his hand and started speaking monotone. ‘She wouldn’t have wanted anything like that. She was all like, stars and dust and rivers. Returning to the cosmos. The idea of some kind of block of stone—’
‘Or a tree. Some people plant trees. There are these special parks—’
‘So let’s add that to the list of my many failures. I could have planted a tree. I’m sorry. I didn’t plant a tree. I didn’t think about it. I was twenty-two. I didn’t plant a tree.’
‘You don’t have to be like—’
‘Why are you suddenly – what is this about?’
‘It’s not about anything, I was just thinking that—’
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