by Ann Morgan
She delved into her coat pocket but her fingers met wrappers and scraps. Apart from that her pockets were empty. Then she remembered the hyacinth tub on the locker.
‘It’s in the room,’ she said. ‘Wait here.’
She didn’t hang around for the lift but took the stairs two at a time up to the second floor. She ran down the corridors, erupting through swing doors, barging past trolleys, impatient with anything standing in her way. Soon it would be out. Soon it would all be out. And Mother would be forced to acknowledge the truth.
But when she got to Hellie’s room, the bed was bare, the mattress stripped. She turned to the locker and saw only the scuffed plastic of its surface. She ran to it in panic and pulled open its doors. She wrenched it away from the wall and peered down at the balls of dust behind it. Everything was gone. There was nothing left.
She heard footsteps and looked round.
‘Poor child,’ said June, coming up to pat her arm. ‘I’m so sorry about your sister. It’s cruel how it can happen like that, totally out of the blue.’
But she couldn’t focus on June’s kindness.
‘June,’ she said. ‘Where would they have put things when they cleaned out the room?’
‘What, the flowers and such? I expect most of them went into the bin. They were getting a bit past it.’
‘There was a tub of hyacinths…’
‘Oh, yes,’ said June, smiling. ‘We’ve got that at the nurses’ station. I’ll put it in a bag for you to take home.’
‘It had some paper under it. Pages with writing on it. Money too. I don’t suppose—’
June sucked her teeth and frowned. She leant closer.
‘There’s been trouble since we’ve had these new cleaning contractors in. We’ve had food go missing – biscuits and people’s lunch. If there was money, I’m afraid you’re unlikely to see it again. If people will take the food out of other people’s mouths, they’ll surely stop at nothing.’
Smudge waved the words away. ‘The money’s not important,’ she said. ‘It’s the papers. They were letters from my sister, you see, and… I mean, they didn’t look like much. The cleaner probably thought they were rubbish. But if there’s a recycling bin, perhaps—’
June squeezed her shoulder. ‘Let me go and check,’ she said and bustled out.
Smudge looked around the room as she waited, trying to remember it as it had been when Hellie was there. Already she was struggling to recall the colours and scents of the flowers, the sounds of the machines. It was as though, with the chlorine bleach and swipes of the mop, the cleaner had not only disinfected the space but neutralised it too. It was faceless now: an insipid backdrop ready to form the setting for someone else’s drama.
She turned as June came back into the room and saw sorrow in the nurse’s eyes.
‘Oh, sweetness, I’m so sorry,’ she said gently. ‘The collection’s already been done. They emptied the bins an hour ago. There’s no way you’ll get things back now.’
Smudge said goodbye and left, carrying the bag with the hyacinths. When she got to the ground floor, she glanced across at the canteen. Through the glass doors, she could see them sitting at the table, Mother holding forth on something to Nick while Horace jabbed at a Bakewell slice. She would not go in and tell them what had happened. There was nothing she could bring herself to say. Let them stay there with the possibility of the truth for a little while longer. They would draw their own conclusions soon enough.
She left the hospital for the last time and stepped into the dull daylight. A bus sighed as it pulled away from the stop outside. Somewhere, a siren wailed.
58
You don’t know precisely when you become aware of it. The knowledge comes upon you gradually, like a photograph developing, becoming more and more distinct every time you look at it until you feel the truth: your body, which has been filling out over the past weeks, has begun a new project. Deep within you a little knot of life is forming: a hard, condensed nubbin of all the happiness you’ve taken in since you’ve been here. Of all the love.
At first, you don’t believe it. You’d never have thought that was possible for you. Not after all the years, the risks. You’d always assumed that part of you was broken, and that it was probably for the best.
But your body keeps insisting on a different account, until, one Saturday morning, you stand in front of the crooked little mirror in the Amsterdam apartment’s bathroom with a hand on your belly. As you let the realisation in, your stomach takes a roller-coaster plunge. Seconds pass. Minutes. But the giddy whirling doesn’t stop. You probe the feeling cautiously. It’s unfamiliar to you, this fluttering, tingling sensation. It’s so unknown that it takes you some time to decode it. At first you think it’s fear, plain and simple. Then you realise, wonderingly, that it’s joy. You’re joyful. You.
You carry the feeling carefully from the bathroom, vigilant in case it spills or cracks. You get dressed with the fluttering going on inside you, shocked into smiles by the pinch of your jeans about your waist as you try to do them up.
When you and Gareth go out to a bar a bit later, you hum to yourself as you stroll past the ponds in Vondelpark.
‘Happy?’ he says, catching hold of your hand.
You nod and smile, give him a kiss. But you don’t say anything. It’s too early yet, too unformed. It’s like the flash of an image you have when you first get an idea for a drawing. You need to give it time to become solid and three-dimensional before you can let him in to walk round it, appreciate it for what it is.
‘Beer?’ he says when you sit down at a little table at the bar.
You open your mouth to say yes, before you remember. ‘Yes,’ you say. ‘I mean, no. Apple juice, please.’
He shrugs OK and lopes off to the bar.
You watch him standing there talking to the bartender in the halting Dutch he’s somehow picked up, despite everyone here speaking English. And that’s when it hits you in a warm, glad flood: you are going to have this baby. You are going to be a family. You are going to choose this life.
59
The sun was sinking towards the tip of the Shard, and the space on the skyline where Nick’s Hairpin would eventually stand, when she arrived in Walworth. She drifted to the flat. In the absence of a better plan, she thought dully, she would spend the night there. Time enough to face the rest of her life in the morning. Hours – years probably – to sit in the battered armchair in the living room, staring at the slant of sun making its way across the ripped lino and bare concrete, and take it all in. She sniffed and blinked away the memory of Hellie lying in her hospital bed, holding her hand. One thing was certain: no one would bother her now.
But when she walked round the side of the maisonette, she found the back door smashed open. A rotten, charred smell emanated from the interior. Gingerly, she pushed her way in, trainers crunching broken glass.
‘Hello?’ she called. ‘Hello?’
The only reply her calls met with was the reproachful glare of the kitchen cabinets, which had been smashed and splintered and sprayed with red paint. There were cans and bottles strewn over the floors, graffiti tags and scribbles on every surface, and in the living room, she saw, someone had tried to start a fire. There was a blackened circle on the space where the coffee table once stood. She didn’t bother to go into the bedroom.
Back on the street, she stood and stared at the bay window of the front room. She could just make out the slashes of paint across the dirty glass and remains of the tie-dyed sarong. From here, they looked like large red crosses banning her, cancelling her out.
‘Disgusting, isn’t it?’ said a voice.
Smudge turned to see the woman from next door emerging from her flat, the Rottweiler straining at its lead.
‘Estate kids got in,’ said the woman, squinting against the afternoon sun. ‘Trashed the place.’
‘Oh,’ said Smudge.
‘Not that it was much better before,’ said the woman with a shrug. ‘Some scrub
ber lived there. Drug addict most likely. Real piece of scum. The sort you didn’t want to be around your kids, you know?’
She shifted and wrapped another loop of the lead around her hand. She looked at Smudge and unease flashed on her face.
‘Sorry. You don’t know her, do you? She wasn’t a friend of yours?’
Smudge shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘She used to be. But that was a long time ago.’
The woman exhaled noisily. ‘Well, that’s a relief,’ she said with a guffaw. ‘Thought I’d gone and put my foot in it there. Me and my big mouth.’
She turned and headed off up the road in the direction of the high street, the dog surging and strutting. Smudge watched them go. A cold wind blew through her. Well, that was it then. She was finished. There was nowhere left to go. She felt blank – emptied out like the little hospital room – and tired. Even her mind seemed to have abandoned her body, floating off into the ether so that she seemed to be looking down on herself from a cloud. Dully, she wondered what would happen if she just stood here for ever. Whether anyone would do anything.
She dug her hands into her pockets against the beginnings of the evening chill. Amid the wrappers and shreds of receipts, her fingers met a small, smooth rectangle tucked into the seam. She pulled it out. Anton Cartwright, it read.
60
The end of your time in Amsterdam seems a long way off and then all of a sudden it’s next week. The autumn has faded and blown away, stripping the trees in Vondelpark. Christmas has come and gone – a quiet one that you spend together in the little apartment, wrapped in a duvet on the sofa, eating Kerststol and chocolate. By the middle of January, the ideas you and Gareth have been playing with and kicking around have crystallised into six sharp canvases. There’s a reworking of The Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede with a big water-cooling tower where the original building stands, and one of Van Gogh’s sunflower paintings with some of the blooms creased and crumpled around the base of the vase, showing that they are, in fact, paper imitations. There’s also – you’re particularly proud of this one – a rendering of the Girl with a Pearl Earring with headphones where the jewellery should be.
The client can’t get enough of them.
‘We love how they’re so subtle,’ says Jan. ‘You have to look twice. That’s what we want. That’s what the product is all about. You shouldn’t notice anything is different at a first glance. Only later should you see that there has been a modification. In fact, an upgrade.’
The company is going to launch the campaign at a grand reception in an exclusive restaurant in town: a place serving tasting menus on tiny plates, with flights of wine to match. It’s in a carefully restored seventeenth-century building. You’ve walked past it a few times but never dared to go in. Now you’re set to be guests of honour, schmoozing the local glitterati.
‘We want them to feel they can talk to you about the process,’ says Heike, Jan’s assistant, toying with a lettuce leaf over lunch at their pristine head office one day in the final week. ‘We hope you don’t mind. We know artists are particular about that sort of thing, but you see it’s so interesting for those of us who are not talented in such a way to hear how it all comes together. And, of course, for us it adds something to the campaign.’
You bite back your smile and try to look grudging, feeling that it would be unprofessional to seem too keen. If your eighteen-year-old self, setting out from the unit that grubby day, had known that you would be here now, preparing to do this, she’d scarcely have believed it.
The final few days are so filled with last-minute alterations and decisions about the best way to display the works that you and Gareth barely get a chance to talk. You fall into bed exhausted, your feet throbbing, your head pounding. For you, it’s extra tiring. The little knot of being in your belly has started to exert its influence over you, whipping up squalls of nausea from the flat calm of a bright morning and sending your thoughts straying into sleepy backwaters when you should be focusing on the problems at hand. There are times when Gareth has to repeat things to you, hammering sentences out slowly and deliberately to make the meaning plain. He looks at you strangely now and then but he never asks what’s going on and you haven’t said a word.
On the afternoon before the launch, you treat yourselves to lunch in a cafe by one of the canals. Everything’s done. The paintings are up and the room in the restaurant is in the capable hands of the client’s PR firm. There is nothing for you to do but while away the time between now and six o’clock when you must present yourselves at the launch looking artistic and approachable.
You take a sip of your orange juice and set the glass down on the table. You clear your throat.
‘It’s been great, hasn’t it?’ you say.
‘Mmmn?’ says Gareth. He looks distracted, his mind on the show.
For a moment, your resolve falters. Then you remember that tomorrow the pair of you will be on a plane back to Manchester. This time won’t come again.
‘All this,’ you say. ‘Being here.’
‘Oh God, yeah,’ he says. ‘It’s been a dream.’
You relax, smile. It’s going to be all right.
‘What’s been your favourite part of it?’
He puffs out his cheeks, looks around. ‘The work, I’d say,’ he says. ‘Getting to do that sort of work. Having that freedom. It’s incredible.’
Something curls up inside you. You strive to keep your smile from slipping. The bright future you’ve imagined starts to tarnish. A voice whispers that you have been a fool, that life is a game you have never understood, at which you will only ever fail.
‘And us?’ you say, running your finger around the rim of your glass.
He looks at you. Blinks. ‘God, yeah,’ he says, reaching across the table and taking your hand. ‘That’s a given. You know how I feel about you. This is amazing. You don’t need me to tell you that.’
Your insides begin to untwist.
‘So you want to continue,’ you say. ‘When we get back, I mean. You’re not all, like, “what happens in Amsterdam stays in Amsterdam”.’
This last bit you say in a brash American accent with your hands doing the quote marks and your face zany. It’s the only way you can dare to bring it out. And that scares you again. The thickening layers nestled inside your pelvis seem to throb.
Gareth frowns. ‘What’s got into you?’ he says. ‘Is something wrong?’
You shrug and sniff back the embarrassing urge to cry. Hormones, you tell yourself. Fucking hormones.
‘Nothing,’ you say, your mouth trembling. ‘I guess it’s just this coming to an end. Everything.’
He nods. ‘I know,’ he says. ‘But you don’t have to worry about me. I’m not going anywhere. You know that, right?’
You incline your head to look like you do. You don’t know anything. All you know is that out of nowhere you have something precious and it makes you scared.
‘This is fixed,’ he says, taking your hand and pulling it to somewhere above his heart. ‘This is solid. This is going nowhere.’
You nod. You take a deep breath. Now is the time to say it. You open your mouth. But his eyes are following a pleasure boat ploughing along the canal outside.
‘You know what I’m really looking forward to?’ he says.
‘What?’ you say.
‘Just the two of us, back in Manchester, building our life together.’
You nod and open your mouth to speak again, but he isn’t finished.
‘I mean, a-we wouldn’t even necessarily have to stay working for Anton – or in Manchester,’ he says. ‘I’ve been thinking it might be nice to go travelling. See the world, you know. Experience life. A-We’ve neither of us g-got ties or responsibilities. There’s nothing to stop us taking the leap. It’s something I’ve always dreamt of doing and I can’t imagine anyone I’d rather have adventures with than you.’
He leans in and kisses you. You taste the sweet, slightly biscuity savour of his lips.
‘Right,’ he says, pushing back his chair. ‘I need to pee.’
You watch him walk between the tables to the toilets. Then you turn to stare out at the canal, at a couple huddled together posing for a picture by the lock. It’s fine, you tell yourself. Life is good. Unbidden, Gareth’s words float back into your mind – ‘This is going nowhere’ – and you realise with a catch of fear how they can also be understood. But he didn’t mean it like that. He meant it as a statement of commitment, you rush to reassure yourself. It was just an unfortunate turn of phrase.
61
The cafe in Shoreditch was called The Bathroom. It was tricked out in avocado plastic and orange tiles from the seventies, and there was a big mirror just inside the door which showed her to herself as she walked in. She started at the sight of the scraggy woman in an anorak, with lined eyes and greyed skin from all those days under the hospital’s fluorescent lights, not to mention the last few nights spent hunched in an all-night caff on the Old Kent Road.
‘Excuse me,’ said a man with a beard and glasses, pushing past her as she stood there undecided.
She stumbled on into the main room. There were chandeliers constructed out of scraps of bathroom fittings, and two toilets suspended from the walls and filled with giant spider plants. She stood bewildered for a moment, blinking at the space.
It wasn’t until Anton raised a hand that she saw him. He was sitting at a table made out of a giant mirrored cabinet. He was wearing a leather jacket. His hair was cut in a sharp, angular way and when she got closer she saw that there was a stud glinting in the lobe of his right ear.
‘Hullo,’ she said, staring down at him. ‘I didn’t recognise you.’
Anton smiled. ‘There’ve been one or two changes.’
Then he seemed to recollect himself. He stood up and pecked her on the cheek. The chairs scraped loudly on the tiled floor as they sat back down.