‘Are you with someone?’ said the guy. ‘Do you want me to call someone for you?’
Danny did: he wanted to say yes call my mum, my dad, my brother, my grandma, but there wasn’t anybody, anywhere, who would come. He just shook his head and drank the second glass of water when it came, and put his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands and when he was able to speak he said, ‘Sorry. This is weird. I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said the guy, mildly. ‘No problem. You’re fine.’
‘God. Sorry.’
‘Do you want a drink or something? An actual drink?’
‘I don’t have any money.’
‘You weren’t just mugged or something, were you?’
‘No, I just—’
‘It’s all right. I just finished my shift. You can have one of my free drinks.’
The guy got him a whiskey and Coke and had one himself. Danny was too exhausted to be embarrassed. The guy said, ‘So are you just having a bad day or what?’
‘My mum had a baby today,’ Danny said. ‘I have a baby sister.’
And the guy said, ‘Really? Congratulations.’
Danny said, ‘Yeah. No. It’s complicated.’
The guy said, ‘In what way?’
And he had that kind of manner – that kind of vibe some people have where you just kind of want to tell them everything – so Danny told him everything, and the guy just listened and nodded, and at the end he said, ‘That does sound complicated.’ And then he said, ‘I guess the good way to look at it is that your sister probably won’t remember any of it. This probably won’t be part of her life at all.’
And Danny realised that yes, that was true. He could make that be true.
He could look after the baby until Heather got out, and by the time she was four or five she probably wouldn’t remember anything about it.
He’d done a year and a half of university. He could still finish his second year. Then he could take a year out. Three years, if necessary. And then as soon as Heather was home he would go back and finish. And then he’d go on to a law conversion course, like he’d been planning.
It was possible that things would be OK. The baby didn’t even have to know.
The guy finished his drink. They were about the same age, Danny guessed, except he had that kind of zen-like maturity some people have, which was fine, because Danny felt like he’d aged about ten years in the last few months and other people his own age now mostly seemed impossibly young.
The guy was wearing a white shirt, Danny remembers, with sharp lines like it was freshly ironed, even though he’d been working in a hot bar all night. There was a cleanness about him. He finished his drink and said, ‘I’m Nick, by the way.’
Danny never finished his second year of university. He lasted six more weeks and then he dropped out.
They let her keep the baby for nearly five months, in the end, but in that time he spent every weekend either visiting them in prison or trying to find a flat to rent that the social worker would think was an appropriate place for a baby, which was a nightmare, even though Danny was pretty much like, anywhere is still more appropriate than a prison, but the social worker didn’t see it that way. So he didn’t turn in any of his spring term essays and his advisor told him there was no point taking any of his summer exams because he was so far behind.
Lynn, by her own admission, knew nothing about babies either, but Heather begged her to help and so Danny and Lynn called a temporary truce to the fight they’d been in ever since the first arrest, and she helped him buy baby things and set up the flat and was relatively cheerful while Danny snapped at her about everything.
Danny’s heart sank, a little, when Lynn was introduced to Nick and the two of them hit it off and started talking about viable alternatives to capitalism and the future of nuclear disarmament, but he didn’t say anything because he was still thinking that any minute Nick was going to realise what he’d gotten himself in to and leave.
Nick was useful because he hit it off with everybody, including the social worker who – until that point – had seemed less than convinced that Danny was going to be an appropriate caregiver for baby Alena. They’d only been seeing each other a few months but Nick seemed happy enough to be presented to various parties as a sensible guy with a savings account and a straightforward manner, all of which Danny felt reflected back on him in some useful way. It turned out Nick only worked in the bar in the evenings, and the rest of the time he was the manager of an organic food shop in Camden. He had a second job because he was saving money; he wanted to start his own business. He thought maybe a coffee shop.
Nick had two younger brothers and was good with kids, he said, and he’d talk about Heather being in prison like she was Nelson Mandela or something, which was nice, because most of the time Danny was still so angry with her he could hardly think about it. When Nick talked about police brutality and the right to protest, Danny felt something loosen in his chest, felt like he could breathe more easily. Nick had a way of casting out the shame of it all, of finding the good in things.
‘You met me at a very strange time in my life,’ Danny used to say to him sometimes. It was the last line from Fight Club and they both thought it was funny. But every now and then, Nick would say, ‘I met you exactly when I was supposed to meet you,’ or something totally straightfaced and serious like that, and Danny would roll his eyes because he wasn’t the romantic one in the relationship, but secretly he’d think, Yes, yes, yes and exactly and think that maybe there was a pretty good chance that they were going to be together for a really long time – although, honestly, they were young enough that a really long time was like a year or two, and it was hard to ever think much beyond that. It was hard to really get his head round the fact that one night he’d walked into a bar having a panic attack and six months later he was living with his boyfriend and was totally one hundred per cent responsible for a baby. He was twenty years old. Sometimes he’d wake up in the middle of the night and hear me crying and not know where he was.
The first time Niamh showed up was right after Danny brought me home from the prison where I’d spent the first five months of my life. Danny hadn’t seen her in years and Nick was suspicious right away, but she bought me presents and was mostly polite and Danny thought maybe she just wanted to help.
Danny had loved Niamh when he was a little boy. But when he was a teenager, she’d apparently said to Heather one day, while they were drinking coffee and Danny was at school: ‘Do you think Danny’s sort of normal, Heather? With girls I mean?’ and Heather had laughed and said that no, she did not think that Danny was normal with girls, and Niamh had retreated, after that, from both of them.
But Danny had tried to forgive her and to remember that Niamh was screwed up because she’d had a husband who’d left her three weeks after they got married, and when she moved to Australia with her new husband, Drew – ‘A fascist,’ Heather said at the time, ‘that’s all I have to say about him,’ – Danny had continued to send polite Christmas and birthday cards, and occasionally he’d get one back.
But Heather, calling him on the prison phone, sounded genuinely panicked for almost the first time when he told her that Niamh was visiting. She said, ‘Danny, be careful. Find out what she wants. She’ll want to take Alena back with her. I know she will.’
Danny said, ‘I don’t know, she seems like she just kind of wants to help out—’
‘She thinks I was a bad mother to you. That’s why she thinks she can do this.’
‘Since when does she think you were a bad mother?’ said Danny. Only he was allowed to think that she’d been a bad mother, and even then he was capable of admitting that she’d plainly adored him every day of his life and there had always been breakfasts lunches dinners and birthday parties and clean clothes so really.
‘Just please tell me that you’ll be careful, Danny. Find out what she’s doing here.’
‘I honestly think she just wants to help,’ said Danny.
She did not just want to help.
Danny still doesn’t want to talk about everything that happened, other than to say that before she finally went home there were lawyers and fights and tears and calls to the police and Nick losing his cool for the first time Danny had ever seen and if Danny had maybe had a couple of doubts himself about looking after me, he was at least convinced that he’d be a better parent than Niamh or Drew, which was reassuring, in a weird way.
She never visited Heather in prison. She sent Danny an email before she got on a plane back to Australia. ‘I hope neither of you ever tell Alena that she started her life in a prison,’ it said. ‘I hope she never knows.’
It was the only thing they ever agreed on. The conviction had been in the local newspaper but it never showed up online – he searched at the time, every couple of weeks, but nothing ever appeared, and he figured that as soon as Heather got out she’d want to forget it ever happened. Niamh was right about that one thing: there was no reason I ever needed to know.
Mike had given him a job at the Hackney Standard and a lot of the time Danny was able to work from home, and he got me a place in a pretty good nursery and at some point he moved out of the flat he’d rented and Nick and him rented a flat together. Nick’s parents made it clear that they thought the whole arrangement was crazy and that neither of them was remotely qualified to be looking after a baby but, in the end, they were distracted and charmed by the sudden introduction of a de facto grandchild into their lives, and they were always making excuses to come in to London to visit. And there would be invitations to family barbecues, and Nick’s brothers would be there with their girlfriends, and cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents, and Danny would watch them all feeling like he was behind a glass screen, and he’d be thinking, This must be what a family looks like, and then he’d miss his mum so much he could hardly breathe and he’d think, Two years, one year, six months, or however long it was until she was coming home.
Except.
When it got closer. Once she started to talk about it. When, in the visitors’ room, she said to Danny, ‘I’ve been thinking about where Alena and I are going to live.’ Some treacherous, dark part of him thought, Maybe she should stay with me. Because I was happy, after all: a happy little kid who liked stickers and colouring and was fiercely attached to Nick, and it was hard to see how it was going to work, just passing me over to somebody else. They’d already tried to introduce the idea to me – that, at some point, my mum was coming back for me and I’d live with her. But they’d realised they were just scaring me, that I understood it as some kind of threat, that I’d have nightmares about somebody coming to take me away, so they’d mostly shut up about it because they didn’t know what else to do.
But how could he say that to Heather, whose guiding light for the last three years had been getting home to her daughter? And, anyway, Danny had plans. One night a few weeks before, while Nick was asleep, he’d dug out his first-year university transcripts and emailed his old advisor to ask whether he could come back in and finish his second year or if maybe he should start again from scratch, and was there maybe any funding that he could apply for? And the email his advisor sent back had been so warm and enthusiastic that Danny had read it three times a day for like a week, and then felt guilty every time he saw me and told himself he wouldn’t do it, he wouldn’t go, he’d stay with me and he’d tell Heather that it wasn’t fair to uproot me at this age. Then he’d read the email again and see himself in the university library, in the campus bar, going to lectures, coming home at weekends and staying out late with Nick in Soho bars, with nobody waiting for them to get home, not that Nick ever went to Soho bars but still, but still.
The most he could bring himself to say to her was that he thought they needed to take it slowly. Because I hardly knew her. I knew Nick and Danny, and I cried pretty much every time I was taken to visit her in prison, even though there was a family friendly visitors’ centre with toys and pictures on the wall. I still screamed, every time, Danny tells me, like I just had a bad vibe about the whole place, and he totally sympathised. The visits all ended with everybody fraught and upset and close to tears.
‘As long as it takes, Danny,’ Heather said. ‘I know it’s not going to happen straight away. I’ve got my own life to rebuild, anyway. I know I can’t take her back straight away.’
Danny nodded. Couldn’t speak. He couldn’t see a way through it that wasn’t going to hurt somebody.
In less than four months it wouldn’t matter.
It was three o’clock in the afternoon and Danny was at work. My playschool called him to say that nobody had come to pick me up. I was three. He could hear me talking in the background. And Danny was furious because they’d arranged it so carefully: that Heather would pick me up and take me back to her house for a few hours, and Danny would come later to collect me, and if it went well then, maybe, she could start to do it once, twice, maybe three times a week, slowly, slowly, just to see how I reacted. She’d been out of prison for three and a half weeks.
Her mobile phone just went to voicemail because she’d probably forgotten to charge it, and Danny honestly felt like she’d forgotten how to live in the real world while she was in prison. So he had to leave work early to come and get me. Which he did. Then he took me to her house to see if she was there.
Then he went into the kitchen and she was lying on the floor.
He took me to the neighbours’ house and they called an ambulance. He went back into the kitchen. Then he went out again and went into the back garden and sat down on the grass, thinking he was going to be sick. He went back inside. An ambulance came. It was Wednesday afternoon. He called Nick. Nick did everything else that day, as far as Danny can remember. He remembers that there was still a pot of tea on the kitchen counter and nobody thought to pour it out until a week later.
There’s no way to prove that it was because she hit her head on the ground four years before at an anti-war protest, but Danny says it was. He says to me, ‘I know that it was, so don’t ask me to explain it to you, I just know that it was.’
Niamh and Drew came to the funeral. Made a scene. Standing outside the crematorium they said they were going to start legal proceedings, that they wanted to take me to Australia. Then Nick threatened to call the police and they left. Lynn was there, and said she could help, that she knew a lot of lawyers herself, and Danny said he didn’t want her help; said none of this would have happened without her, and soon they were shouting at each other, both in tears, and someone from the crematorium had to come and intervene.
Niamh wrote to Danny, afterwards, saying they would consider relocating to London if Danny would give custody of me to her and Drew. He never replied.
I’d still have the nightmares, sometimes, after she died. Somebody was going to take me away. No, no, no, they’d say. Nobody’s going to take you away.
And by that time it was true. She wasn’t coming back for me.
And I had that feeling for years, for ages even after she was gone, that fear.
It was her I was afraid of. It was her I was screaming at, not Niamh. My only memory, stubborn as a weed, her coming towards me, me screaming. My mother, who loved me.
I was with her in prison for five months. I never lived with her again.
FORTY-SIX
He tells me the whole story without looking at me. It’s probably the longest he’s ever spoken for, and when he stops the clock is still ticking; our reflections in the TV are exactly the same, the sun is still bright outside, and everything about my life is different because what I thought I’d lost it turns out I never had.
‘Alena,’ Danny says, in the new silence. His voice has got hoarse. ‘Do you want to say something?’
Take it back, I want to say. Take the whole thing back. This is not what I was waiting for.
I thought I was getting closer and now she is further away than ever.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I don’t want to say anything.’ I get up and go to my r
oom, close the door. I lie down in bed, pull the covers over my head, lie there, just breathing, until it starts to feel like I’m suffocating.
Nick comes home later, and knocks on my door. I’m still in bed.
‘Lena,’ he says, gently, opening the door just a little. ‘Do you want to talk?’
I tell him no.
‘OK,’ he says, and goes again.
It unfolds in my mind in little pieces, the meaning of it, all the people who have lied. Not just Danny, but Nick, who I always thought never lied to anyone, and Nick’s parents, too, and Mike, and Mike’s wife, and Zahra, maybe, as well. The effort of it all, just so I wouldn’t know – what? What a troublemaker she was? What a bad person?
I roll over, take my Greenham Common postcard from where it’s tucked into a book next to my bed, the four pieces stuck back together with sellotape. I look at her face. Nineteen, fist raised, shouting at the sky. She would never even know me. Not even for a few years. We would never know each other.
After a while, I get out of bed, change into jeans and a shirt and flip-flops, leave my rumpled school uniform lying in a pile on the floor. I tie my hair in a ponytail and go into the living room. Nick is doing paperwork at the kitchen counter and Danny is leaning next to him with a cup of coffee. My room, the flat, the three of us: everything feels small and claustrophobic, locked-in.
They both look up, look guilty, look at me like I’ve caught them doing something wrong.
I tell them that I’m going out.
They glance at each other, back at me, not sure what’s going on. ‘Where are you going?’ Danny says.
‘The cinema,’ I say, improvising, and they look at each other, again, and back at me, again, hesitant, uncertain, and then say OK and Nick gives me a twenty-pound note from his wallet.
‘That’s for the cinema,’ Danny says. ‘That’s like – don’t go and buy junk food in the supermarket. Buy it at the cinema. All right? No supermarkets.’
In the lift on the way down I call Teagan, but the phone goes straight to voicemail and I wonder if her dad’s crappy Nokia phone has died now too. I send her a message anyway, call me asap? but then I remember she was supposed to be going to a recital with her parents this evening.
Troublemakers Page 24