‘Right?’
‘Seriously.’
‘You were right, though,’ I say, carefully. ‘When we had that fight. When you said my family was nothing like Ollie’s.’ I look at her, checking that bringing up the fight isn’t a bad idea, but she’s just twisting her earring, listening to me. ‘I was thinking about it. My family’s probably a lot more like yours, honestly,’ I say. ‘I mean, my actual family. Now.’
‘Right, with a few more prison sentences and massive feuds.’
‘Right.’
We go quiet for a minute, listening to the distant shouting and yelling from the football field.
‘It’s good that we’re friends with Ollie,’ Teagan says. ‘I think it’s good.’
‘So do I.’
She nods. I can hear a teacher blowing a whistle, then shouting at the football players to wrap it up.
‘Speaking of feuds,’ says Teagan. ‘Have you worked out what you’re going to say to this Lynn Wallace person tomorrow?’
Then the bell goes for the end of lunch and I stand up, brush my skirt down with my hands and reach out a hand to pull Teagan up. ‘No,’ I say. ‘I have no idea.’
FORTY-NINE
So Saturday morning, Danny buys me and Lynn Wallace a coffee and a tea and then he says to me that I should call him and he’ll come and pick me up when we’re finished. Then he leaves. He doesn’t really look at Lynn or talk to her except to ask her what kind of coffee she wants. When he’s gone Lynn says, for some reason, ‘That poor boy.’
We’re in a café near Brick Lane, sandwiched in between a hairdressers’ and vintage clothes shop. The café serves tea and coffee and wine, and square pizza on a board instead of a plate. Lynn is wearing a bright necklace with multicoloured gems. I can’t tell if it’s worth five hundred pounds or if it’s from a charity shop but I like it, and it gives me something to look at because she is studying me very intently and it’s hard to meet her eye. Some part of me is still a little angry with her.
‘Can I buy you something to eat?’ she says.
‘I’m fine,’ I say. ‘Thank you.’
I can tell that this will be the end of small talk. I can tell that Lynn is not the kind of person to sit around and talk about the weather.
Before we left the house, Danny said to me, ‘Look, if she says anything bad about me, please remember that there’s two sides to every story.’
Lynn stares and stares at me until I get awkward and I can feel my face start to go warm, and she says, ‘Well, this is quite emotional for me. To have not seen you since you were such a little girl.’
‘You saw me a few weeks ago.’
‘Well. That’s true.’
‘You got me in a lot of trouble.’
‘I can imagine.’
She clearly isn’t going to apologise, so I say, ‘When was the last time you saw me before that?’
She looks into her coffee for a few moments. ‘I’d have to say it was about two days after Heather’s funeral,’ she says. ‘I came to see you when it was just Nick there. I came to say goodbye to you. And it seems like yesterday. It’s hard for me to believe you could be fifteen already.’
I don’t know how to answer, so she carries on. ‘But I used to look after you all the time when you were a baby. Your brother had the flat with the blue carpet. I’d take hundreds of photos of you to bring to your mother. You were always happy. Always had a huge smile. You were really very sweet.’
‘I don’t think I am any more.’
‘Well, that’s all right,’ she says. ‘There’s better things to be.’
‘Danny thinks you’re going to say all kinds of terrible things about him.’
‘I’ve no idea why he thinks that. He’s wrong.’
‘He’s said some bad things about you.’
She smiles, slightly, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. ‘Yes. I’m sure he has.’
‘But mostly he’s never said anything about you. I never even heard of you until this year.’
‘Yes. Well. That was the way he wanted it.’
‘And you went along with it.’
‘And I went along with it, and I can see that you’re angry about that.’
I don’t answer.
‘I always had it in mind that when you were eighteen I would try and look you up,’ she says. ‘That I would send you a letter. I can’t tell you how often I’ve thought about you. And then suddenly here was an email from you, saying I might remember you, I might remember your brother. As if I could have forgotten.’
I think about that stupid email and still feel a twist of hurt that she didn’t reply, that she phoned Danny instead.
‘You know, don’t you,’ she says, ‘that your mother was my best friend. When she died it was the worst thing that ever happened to me. I think about her every day.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘I didn’t know that.’
She picks up her coffee but doesn’t take a sip, just holds it in her hands for a while. We’ve got serious really quickly. I almost wish she would ask me about school and what I want to do when I’m older, give us both space to breathe before we get into the worst things that have ever happened to us.
At the next table a couple are arguing about what kind of pizza to order.
‘Part of me thought that Danny would come round. After he’d given himself some time to recover, he’d realise he still had a child to look after and he’d want help, he’d want to get in touch with Heather’s friends, he’d want a community round you. But he only accepted my help when she was in prison because Heather forced him. Once she was gone—’
‘He only just told me about her being in prison. I only just found out about it.’
‘I hope he told you it was a terrible injustice.’
‘He said she hit someone in the face with a glass bottle.’
‘In self-defence.’
‘He didn’t really say it was in self-defence. He said she didn’t mean to do it.’
‘It was in defence of a larger principle.’
‘Oh.’ I fiddle with a hairband that’s round my wrist. ‘Because I don’t really agree with violence,’ I say. ‘I don’t think.’
‘Good,’ says Lynn. ‘Your mother believed in non-violent resistance and so do I.’
‘Oh.’
‘But chaos finds a way. Things go wrong. We’re all fallible. It’s hard to commit to non-violence when there’s a police horse coming at you. The prison sentence was ludicrous. Really, Alena. All out of proportion.’ She shakes her head, like she doesn’t want to get angry all over again. I don’t want to argue about it either, really, or not today, but part of me thinks things go wrong isn’t an excuse.
Part of me understands how angry Danny must have been with her back then.
‘Anyway,’ says Lynn. ‘If she hadn’t died so soon after, we’d all have forgotten about prison by now. We’d be laughing about it. But for your brother it was all the same thing in his mind, just one terrible thing after another. And there he was after the funeral, under siege for the second time from your aunt and uncle – who are appalling people, by the way; she was trying to physically pry you from his arms and saying the most awful things – and I could have helped, Alena. I only wanted to help him, and he told me he never wanted to see me again, that he didn’t want me to have anything to do with you.’
She looks at me almost pleadingly, as if I might be able to explain this terrible decision he made or to undo it, somehow. But I can’t and it does seem like a terrible decision, but at the same time I think how he must have felt, how awful everything must have seemed right then, and how easy it would have been for him just to let me go, just to let Niamh take me and for him to go away and get better and carry on with his life.
‘Don’t get me wrong,’ she says. ‘I know what he thinks of me, but Danny’s a good boy. He always was. He did the right thing to take you and he did it without hesitation. It never crossed my mind that you wouldn’t be all right with him. It never crossed my mind. And your mum
was smitten with Nick. I can tell you that. He used to visit her a lot. She really thought Danny had hit the jackpot, there.’
‘Yeah. Everyone thinks that.’
‘It’s not that I blame him for what he did,’ she says. ‘He had to make his own decisions. And he was still young. And he was very close to Heather, despite all his moaning and theatrics about her behaviour.’ Then she is quiet for a while, and then she says, ‘No, I do blame him. Whatever he thinks of me, it’s hard for me not to be angry with him for wanting to keep you away from Heather’s friends and from her community and from everything she did. As if there was something to be ashamed of. You know she founded the London Women’s Anti-Militarisation Coalition? It’s still going. It has hundreds of members. We have a plaque for her on the wall in the committee room. I’d like you to come and see it.’
‘OK,’ I say. And then: ‘I’ve never heard of it.’
‘He’s really never mentioned it to you?’ she says, sounding a little bit like she might cry. ‘She used to bring him to the meetings when she couldn’t find a babysitter. He used to make us tea.’
‘Danny doesn’t talk about anything like that,’ I say. ‘Ever.’
‘No. Well. I suppose he was never very political. Had a conservative streak, if anything. That’s Heather’s fault, probably. She never really wanted him to get caught up in it all. She was happy for him to read his books and play football and go to school and come home safe and that was it. She didn’t want him getting in trouble.’
‘That’s what he’s like with me.’
She smiles. ‘Well, and Heather was young when she had him. She was more protective, more nervous. By the time you came along – she might have brought you up differently. I don’t know.’
She can’t have been that nervous, I think, that she would take him to a women’s anti-nuclear protest camp when he was one year old, but I don’t mention this.
Lynn sips her coffee, puts it down, drops another sugar cube into it. ‘She was just thrilled with you, Alena,’ she says. ‘Thrilled to have a little girl. She couldn’t wait to come home to you.’
She is wearing black mascara and it’s smudged a little bit at the corners of her eyes. She is looking at me very directly.
‘She never even really knew me,’ I say.
‘Not to sound overly sentimental, Alena, but she knew you in her heart.’
That doesn’t mean anything, I think. That’s just one of those things people say. I feel disappointed for a moment.
Lynn says, ‘Before Danny was born she was convinced he was going to be a girl. And then just after he was born she said she still thought she’d have a daughter one day. And you know, there was a German girl at our school when we were teenagers. Her name was Alena. She was a prefect, I think. She was very beautiful and political. We were both rather in love with her. So I think she had your name picked out for years.’
This was a thing I thought I’d never know.
I take a deep breath. ‘My brother says she died because she hit her head at the protest. It caused a haemorrhage or something and she didn’t even know.’
Lynn doesn’t answer.
‘Do you think that’s true?’ I say.
She is quiet for a long time. Then she says, ‘He was desperate for someone to blame. Really desperate. He should have blamed the police, if anyone, but instead he blamed her and then once she wasn’t there any more he blamed me. Blamed me for that day at the protest, for the arrest, for prison, for her death, the lot. Blames me for world poverty and the sinking of the Titanic, too, I expect.’
‘But do you think that’s what happened?’
‘I have no idea. There’s no way to know. It was Danny who came up with that idea and once he thought it, it just stuck. But knowing why it happened won’t mean that it didn’t happen, will it, so what’s the point? It happened. She’s gone. Blaming me won’t bring her back.’
‘It’s not just you,’ I say. ‘It’s her. It’s like he’s still angry with her. When I mention her, it’s like he’s still angry with her for what she did and for going to prison and for dying and for everything.’
‘Well, he thought she abandoned him. That’s what he felt like. He was a teenager when she went to prison. He was nineteen. I can’t say that I think he’s right but you have to understand how young he was, Alena. And then she was pregnant and there was another child she was abandoning. That’s how he saw it. And he thought if she’d just stayed at home in an apron – well. We all like to imagine the ways our parents could have been better, don’t we?’ She sighs. ‘He thought she and I were going round causing trouble when all Heather should have been doing was looking after her children. But she was, Alena. Listen to me. I said this to him and he wouldn’t listen, but she was looking after you just like she was looking after him. She was looking after the world you were going to inherit. She didn’t want you to grow up in a world of endless warfare and she knew that’s the way we were heading. And she was right, wasn’t she? Look at the world we have now. We all went out shouting and fighting because we wanted it to be better than that for our children. The same when Danny was a baby and she took him to Greenham. We wanted a less dangerous world for you.’
I wrap my hands round my mug of tea, feel the warmth seep into my palms.
‘I don’t know any of this,’ I say.
‘Then it’s about time you did.’
‘So you really knew her since you were at school?’
‘Alena. Yes. We were ten years old when we met. We were best friends for thirty years. Since we were children. Mine was the first Caribbean family on the street when we moved in and Heather’s parents didn’t even want us to play together but she ignored them. We were inseparable.’ She stops stirring her coffee and lays the spoon carefully on the saucer, looks at me with clear, dark eyes. ‘What is it that you want to know?’
When I was a kid, Nick and Danny once took me to Hamley’s on my birthday and said I could choose three toys. But I spent like four hours going round the shop and I couldn’t choose a single thing, couldn’t even start to imagine what to pick, and in the end I just sat down in the middle of the floor and said that I didn’t want anything, that I just wanted to go home. There was too much. I wanted everything.
Suddenly, in a café on Brick Lane on a Saturday afternoon, I run out of questions. I can’t think of a single thing to ask.
We are quiet for a moment, and then Lynn nods, sits up straight. ‘Well,’ she says. ‘We don’t have to do this all at once. We’ve got time. And your brother will be back for you soon.’
She gives me her phone number and says next Saturday we should go and see my mother’s plaque in the London Women’s Anti-Militarisation Coalition committee room. Then, just before she leaves, she takes something out of her handbag, an envelope, and hands it to me.
‘Here,’ she says. ‘I’ve got all kinds of letters and photographs you’d probably like to see, but I wanted to find something to give you today. I had a search and found a note your mother sent me the day that Danny took you home from prison. I thought you might like to have it.’
I don’t have time to answer before she snaps the clasp on her handbag shut, smiles brightly, and leaves.
I wait a few minutes, alone, before I open the envelope. Inside there’s another copy of the Greenham Common postcard, undamaged, and then a piece of notepaper with a date scrawled at the top – five months after I was born.
Lynn, it says.
Not enough tears in the world here since saying goodbye to my beautiful baby girl this morning but I know she’s all right with my beautiful baby (grown-up) boy (and the terribly handsome new bartender boyfriend who we adore). Feeling very sad and reflective and responsible as to how we all ended up in this less than perfect situation. But! Everything I’ve done has been with the best of hopes and intentions and so I hope stubborn aforementioned baby boy will start to forgive me soon. What do you think?
Another q – what will Alena think when she’s old enough to under
stand all this?
I think she’ll be a forgiving human with an open heart.
But who knows? I suppose I’ll have to wait to find out.
Lots of love to you, Lynn, out there in the world. I’ll be joining you all again soon.
H.
I don’t notice, at first, when my brother comes back for me. But when I look up he’s standing opposite me.
I fold up the note and put it back in the envelope with the postcard, put them both in my bag underneath the table.
‘So she just left you sitting here alone, then,’ says Danny. ‘That’s great. What, did she have to go and picket an embassy?’ He pulls out a chair and sits down. I notice the woman at the table next to ours give us both a long, curious look, like trying to work out our relationship.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘American.’
‘Naturally.’
A waitress appears and asks if we’d like anything else. ‘Yeah,’ says Danny. ‘Please. A black coffee. Lena?’
‘Can I have a chai latte?’
‘A black coffee and a chai latte.’
The waitress scribbles it down and leaves. Danny glances at the prices on the menu on the table and flinches. Then he looks at me and says, half nervous, ‘Well?’
‘Well what?’
‘Has she signed you up for the revolution? Are you going to drop out of school to go and fight in Spain?’
‘I don’t think they’re fighting in Spain any more.’
He slouches in his chair. His clothes are covered in paint, again. They’ve been working every day at the coffee shop, trying to put it back together and coming home every evening probably high off paint fumes, both a little manic. I think they’re waiting for me to run away from home or have a breakdown or start screaming and crying but I don’t feel like that any more.
‘So what did you talk about?’ he says, and then, quickly, ‘I mean, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. I respect your right to – you know, whatever.’
He’s trying so hard. I start to wonder if he’s been reading Nick’s parenting books.
‘Next week she’s invited me to go with her to the London Anti-Military Women’s Committee,’ I say. ‘She says there’s a plaque, for Mum.’
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