Then my phone is ringing and I answer it in a quiet library-voice and it’s Danny.
‘Where are you?’ he says. ‘No one’s answering at home. Are you with Nick?’
‘No. We were at the coffee shop but he had to go and pick up an order.’
‘Did he?’
‘John’s got a bad heart and can’t drive.’
‘Who’s John?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘So where are you?’
‘I’m in the library. I’m on my way home.’
‘On your own?’
‘Yeah. Well, there’s a librarian.’
‘I mean you’re walking home on your own?’
‘I will be in a minute.’
‘I’d like it if you went home, all right? You shouldn’t be wandering aimlessly around the streets on your own when there’s this kind of—’
‘I’m not wandering aimlessly around the streets, I’m in the library.’
‘Well, I’d like it if you went home.’
‘I am. I will be. As soon as I get off the phone.’
‘Fine.’ Danny pauses, and says, ‘I didn’t know I’d be here all day. I meant to be home by now.’
Now I’m standing in the lobby of the library. A little kid is going round and round in the revolving doors while his mother stands inside waiting for him.
‘What were you doing?’
‘Drafting a statement. Press stuff. Jake wanted to get out there a little bit, talk about safety.’
‘Zahra said he was on the news.’
The little kid tries to escape from the revolving doors at the last minute but he messes it up and falls over and starts crying like kids do. His mother goes and picks him up.
‘Yeah,’ says Danny. ‘He was.’
‘Is that good?’
‘It’s good for him. I don’t know. It is what it is.’
‘It is what it is.’
‘Yeah. Listen, when you see Nick, tell him I’m going to be really late. I’ll have dinner here.’
‘Why don’t you phone him and tell him yourself?’
‘Because I’m asking you to tell him.’
‘Do you know anything about the bombing? Does anyone know who was killed?’
Danny sighs. ‘Yeah. They haven’t released it yet but it sounds like it was a tourist. Some guy. They think he might be Italian.’
This is terrible, I think. Not any better than if it was a kid. Someone who thought that London would be a nice place to visit and look what happened. He was probably buying snacks before he went to the museums or something. He probably had a guidebook in his pocket where he’d circled the stuff he wanted to see.
‘Lena?’ Danny sounds far away. I can hear people talking in the background, and a man laughing. ‘You still there?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I’m going home.’
NINETEEN
I say to Nick: ‘Apparently you’re going to Colombia for a month.’ He stops in the doorway and stares at me for a few moments, and then comes inside and carefully closes the door behind him. He takes a few steps towards the kitchen where I’m sitting at the counter with my laptop. He puts his keys down on the counter.
‘I’d like to talk about your tone of voice,’ he says.
‘I’d like to talk about you going to Colombia for a month.’
‘Drop the attitude,’ he says, ‘and we can.’
It was nearly six o’clock when I got home and there was nobody here. I ate half a packet of biscuits and two pieces of toast and rearranged the postcards round my mirror and read the first page of one of Danny’s Bob Dylan books. I got out The Beatles’ songbook and tried to play ‘We Can Work It Out’ but I couldn’t even get my hand to form the shape of the first chord. I watched the news, and they replayed the Jacob Carlisle interview. He said that he was feeling devastated. I turned it off again. I looked up the Save Ocean Court campaign and looked at all the comments people had written on the website. When Nick finally gets home I’m tired of myself.
‘I’ve never even heard of Colombia,’ I say, knowing this will wind him up.
He puts the lid back on the tub of butter that I’ve left out and puts it in the fridge, and takes the sticky knife from where I’ve left it on the counter and places it in the sink. ‘How many hours of your life have you spent in the coffee shop?’ he says. ‘There’s a huge map of the world on the wall and all the places we source from are labelled in huge letters.’
Now that he says this it sounds familiar, but without actually looking at it I couldn’t tell him where Colombia was, which anyway is not the point. ‘Is it true?’
He takes off his coat and hangs it by the door, takes off his shoes and lines them up by the doormat, goes into the bathroom probably to fix his hair. When he comes out he has a face on like something he’s practised in the mirror. ‘Did you hear this from Zahra?’ he says.
I don’t really see why that matters either. ‘She seemed to think it was something I would already know.’
‘Well, she’s wrong about it. I need to talk to her.’
‘So you’re not going?’
‘There’s a possibility—’ he holds up a hand ‘—a small possibility, an opportunity, a chance that I might go on a work-related trip to meet some of the growers we source from and look into building new possible—’
‘For a month,’ I say. ‘A whole month.’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘How would you feel about that?’
‘I don’t care,’ I say.
He looks at me steadily. ‘OK, then.’
‘How does Danny feel about it?’
‘I only just found out about it.’
‘How could you only just—’
‘I said I couldn’t go, initially, but somebody just dropped out of the trip so the space has opened up again, which means—’
‘When is it?’
‘Obviously I’m going to talk about it with Danny.’
‘When is it?’
‘The end of April.’
It’s March. The end of April is not very far away.
I pinch the top of my thumb as hard as I can and look at it as the skin turns white. It leaves an indentation when I stop.
‘Someone was killed today,’ I say.
He sits down at the counter and looks at me. ‘I know. How do you feel about that?’
I wonder if this how do you feel about that routine is something he’s got from a book. One of the books they’ve got in the bedroom, hidden on top of the wardrobe where normal people probably keep porn, with titles like Progressive Parenting and Understanding Your Child, most of which I think Nick’s parents gave them when I was little. After my thirteenth birthday they got some new ones. Understanding Teenagers. Teenage Girls and What (Not) to Say to Them. Some of them have Post-it notes in. Like I’m a homework project or something, and one day, Nick is going to write a really good essay about his parenting experience. Danny, I know for a fact, has never read any of them, since he only reads detective fiction and Bob Dylan biographies.
How do I feel about it? I feel weird. On the news now they’ve said that he was a tourist in London with his family, and that he had a new baby daughter. He could have left his hotel five minutes later or stopped to tie his shoelace. He would have loved her for years and years. She will have one less person that loves her than she was supposed to have. And still no one even knows what the point of the bombs is supposed to be.
The last time the windows of the coffee shop got smashed in – it’s happened three times in the last two years – I remember standing on the street opposite and thinking that the front of the shop looked like a broken face, and thinking, but why though, but why, but why. Like if there was a good reason for it that would be better. ‘It’s just kids,’ Nick says, every time, but Danny says he’s being targeted because of all the posters and stickers he lets people put up in the windows. Maybe it doesn’t make a difference.
‘They interviewed Jacob Carlisle on the news,’ I say.
A
hard look comes into Nick’s eyes and he rubs his hand over his face. ‘I know. I heard it just now in the car.’
‘What did you think?’
‘I didn’t think a lot of it, if you really want to know. I thought it was cynical and exploitative. If you really want to know.’
I try to remember these words because they sound right, they sound like words that I could use myself sometime. Cynical and exploitative.
‘So did I,’ I say, and he smiles, half-heartedly.
‘Are you going to Colombia because you’re angry with Danny?’
‘Who says I’m angry with Danny?’
‘You are. I can tell.’
‘I’m probably not even going, Alena. Try not to worry about it, all right?’
‘You think he’s wrong about Lynn Wallace, don’t you? You think I should be allowed to meet her.’
‘I never said that.’
‘But you—’
‘I think he’s got his reasons and they’re complicated.’
‘So complicated that nobody will tell me what they are.’
He doesn’t answer.
‘Why did you say no to going on the trip the first time?’
‘What?’ he says. We are sitting directly opposite each other, the counter between us, and it’s very quiet, so you can hear the kitchen clock ticking.
Lately I get the feeling that Nick and my brother find me exhausting. That now that I’m a teenager and not a cute little kid, they don’t really like me that much any more. But there’s nothing I can do about it. I can’t switch back. I have to keep going.
‘You said the first time you heard about the trip to Colombia you said no.’
A long, long pause. ‘We didn’t – it didn’t seem like a good idea at the time.’
‘Like Danny didn’t think it was a good idea?’
‘Danny thought a month was a long time to be away and I agreed.’
‘And now you don’t agree.’
Nick gets up, then, and I twist round on the stool to look at him as he goes to the fridge and opens it, stares into it for a while.
‘Sometimes people have to do things for themselves. Like Danny and his job, for instance. Sometimes people have to make decisions on their own.’
‘OK,’ I say. ‘What decision do I get to make? What do I get to decide?’
‘You get to decide what we have for dinner,’ he says, but it turns out all there is are baked potatoes and broccoli, so it’s not true, I don’t even get to decide that.
I don’t hear Danny come home but I wake up thirsty in the middle of the night, and when I go to get a glass of water he’s sitting in the dark on the sofa, still in his work clothes, staring blankly at the news channel which is on mute. There’s an empty bottle of wine on the coffee table in front of him and a plastic tumbler in his hand. The living room is freezing because all the windows are open.
Very slowly, he drags his eyes from the television to my face, and looks at me like he’s not sure who I am.
‘Why are the windows open?’ I say, trying to keep my voice down, and then I see a red lighter and a pack of Marlboros on the table and work it out myself. ‘Were you smoking in the flat?’
‘No.’
I grab a blanket that’s hanging over the arm of the sofa and wrap it round myself. Danny squints at me. ‘Why aren’t you in bed?’
‘Why aren’t you?’
He glances back at the TV. ‘I will be in a minute,’ he says. He rubs his eyes. ‘Do you need something?’
‘No. I was just thirsty.’
I drink a glass of water in the kitchen and then I go back and sit down on the arm of the sofa. I twist a loose thread from the edge of the blanket round the tip of my finger. ‘Nobody told me that Nick might be going to Colombia.’
Danny blinks, stares at the television. Light flares over his face, red, blue, white, like police cars. ‘He’s not going.’
‘What?’
‘He’s not going.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I just had a conversation with him about it.’
‘You mean a fight.’
‘Yes.’
I yank the loose thread and it snaps. ‘Oh.’
‘So don’t worry about it.’
‘Did you tell him not to go?’
‘I didn’t tell him anything. Nick’s free to do what he likes.’
There’s a silence. I don’t know what to say. ‘I don’t even know where Colombia is,’ I say eventually.
‘Me neither,’ says Danny. And then, like he’s talking to himself, he says: ‘My mum used to say I should be embarrassed how bad my geography was. Like hers was any better.’
I freeze. I could swear this is the first thing in years he’s told me about her without having to be asked, and I hold my breath for a moment in case there’s more. But he just sits there for a minute longer and then he puts the plastic tumbler down on the floor and gets up to close the windows.
It’s like conjuring her into the room, I think, and just when I’m about to see her she’s gone again.
TWENTY
Ollie’s house is a ground-floor flat and it smells like a hot day when nobody’s taken the rubbish out. It’s not overpowering or anything. It’s just unfresh, like you’d think somebody would want to open all the windows. His dog leaps up and goes mental when we walk in on Monday after school, barks and barks and throws itself at our legs, super-happy to see us.
‘Is anyone home?’ says Teagan.
‘No,’ says Ollie automatically. But then he pauses, jingles his keys in his hand for a moment, looks round like somebody might appear and offer to make us all sandwiches.
Definitely no one is home. It’s silent apart from the dog.
In the living room, someone has left the TV on standby. There’s an empty birdcage in the corner, jammed between the sofa and a big suitcase that’s obviously too big to store anywhere else but the main room.
‘What’s that for?’ Teagan says, looking at it. ‘Are you getting a bird?’
‘Huh?’
‘The birdcage.’
‘Oh. No. I dunno. We just never got rid of it. My dad wanted a bird. He got this bird once but it died straight away. So.’
It must have been standing there for years because as far as I know Ollie’s dad left before he even started secondary school.
‘Anyway, sit down or whatever. If you want. Hang on a second.’ Ollie disappears down the corridor to what must be the bathroom.
Me and Teagan look at each other and sit down on the edge of the sofa. There’s one sofa and two wicker chairs that look awful and uncomfortable.
I get my phone out and take a photo of Ollie’s dog while it rolls around on the floor trying to get its belly scratched, waggling its little dog legs in the air.
‘Ollie, your dog wants love,’ says Teagan, when Ollie comes back into the room. He has washed his face and his hair is damp at the edges, pushed out of his eyes for once.
‘She’s not mine.’ Ollie looks at the dog and she leaps up, starts running rings round his ankles, yapping. He nudges her away but she tries to scrabble up his leg so he bends and picks her up, holds her like you’d hold a baby and she goes still and happy. ‘She’s Aaron’s. My brother’s. Only somehow now I’ve got to take her out all the time and feed her and everything like that.’ He looks at Teagan. ‘Do you want her? Her name’s Brandy.’
‘No, not at all,’ says Teagan.
‘Alena?’
Brandy’s head is dangling back over the crook of Ollie’s arm so she’s looking at me upside down and it looks like she’s smiling.
‘I’d be scared your brother would come back and then hunt me down for stealing his dog or something,’ I say.
Ollie nods, and looks at Brandy for moment. Then he puts her down, very gently. She tries to scrabble up again. ‘He’s not coming back,’ Ollie says.
I’ve always thought Aaron was a nice name. It didn’t suit Ollie’s brother at all. I don’t like to make judgements abou
t people I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure Aaron was – is, because I don’t suppose he’s dead – a really bad person. Just like a fundamentally not-nice person that nobody liked and everybody was frightened of, including teachers. After he got busted and he disappeared it was like when Christmas returns to Narnia the way everyone talked about it at school. And what should Ollie even care because Aaron never even spoke to him.
Ollie obviously does care. I have no idea what to say about it.
‘She loves you,’ says Teagan. ‘Look at her. You can’t give her away. Look at her little face.’
I hold up the photo I took to show him, just in case he doesn’t know what she looks like. ‘Cute. Look. Girls will like her.’
‘You’re girls and you don’t seem that interested.’
‘Well, my dad’s allergic,’ says Teagan.
He takes Brandy out to walk her round the block and leaves us sitting in his living room, Teagan picking dog hair off the sofa, carefully. I go into the kitchen wanting a glass of water. There are glasses and plates piled in the sink but there’s nothing clean, and when I look in the fridge it’s empty apart from half a bottle of tonic water and some out-of-date milk. I go back into the living room and sit down again.
‘This place is a bit – you know.’
‘I know,’ says Teagan.
Then I feel bad. ‘I mean, where I live is a mess, too, most of the time,’ I say, but Teagan shakes her head.
‘No. This is like no one really even lives here.’
‘Do you know what his mum does?’ I say. I lower my voice a bit even though I know there’s no one here.
‘He told me she drinks a lot,’ says Teagan, which isn’t really what I was asking, but then we hear the key in the lock and the dog barking, Ollie coming back.
We stand up, ready to leave.
‘You can bring her to the coffee shop if you want,’ I tell Ollie, as he puts out a bowl of water for Brandy.
‘Nah. She’ll bark and everything. She doesn’t like lots of people.’
We all watch the dog for a moment as she laps at her water. You’d think Aaron would have had some big ugly dog called Spike or something. Maybe she was a rescue dog if she doesn’t like people. One of those dogs with lots of psychological trauma.
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