‘No!’ said Kim defensively, before contradicting himself to say, ‘Well, yes… I did think some of those things, you’re right, though I don’t know about the pearls… and I’m sorry because I’ve got to kind of like you.’
‘Oh!’ said Clate, thrown by his unexpected honesty.
They walked through the tunnel under Putney Bridge, up the steps next to Bishops Park, and stopped to look at the view.
It was like twilight, thought Clate, looking at the sparkling river with its promenade sweeping alongside it. Old fashioned street lamps threw small circles of warm dim light between evenly spaced wooden benches and after all the walking it didn’t feel in the slightest bit cold. The moon had lit the tips of the trees with magnificent panache and she could do nothing but stare.
‘Do you want to go in there?’ Kim watched her rapt expression.
They sat on a bench next to the river and somehow Clate found herself telling Kim everything. Her argument with Sarah, who had been her only friend, how Hugo had made her feel, constantly watched and trapped; that she had left the house wearing nothing but her underwear under her coat because he was that strict he would have gone mad if he’d answered the door; how bored she was being grounded and cooped up in her bedroom the whole time.
She stared out across the water.
‘… and the joke is I can’t seem to leave,’ she finished. ‘You’d think I’d be dying to get out of the place yet I stay and I don’t fight or protect myself.’ She hung her head in shame. ‘I don’t understand how I can fling someone like Paula to the floor yet when it comes to him…’ She trailed off as she so often did.
‘It’s clear to me,’ said Kim.
‘It is?’ she said, looking at him.
‘Hugo’s got the hots for you and what’s he going to tell himself? That he fancies a kid he’s known since birth and is meant to be a father figure to, over his own wife? That he’s a sad old pervert? Or that you’re a terrible kid who needs disciplining for your own good and he’s doing you a favour by smacking you about?’
He started to roll a joint. ‘Everyone’s their own best spin doctor, Clate.’
She let his words sink in. Hugo fancied her. It made sense of all the times she’d felt the need to cover herself, the horrible feeling he was trying to catch her naked when he burst into her room unexpectedly. But he was so much older than her, husband to her mother and the nearest thing to a father she had; she didn’t want to believe it.
‘But why don’t I get out?’ she said at last.
‘The frog theory,’ he said decisively. She hadn’t heard of the frog theory and asked him to explain.
‘You must know that old thing. You put a frog in boiling water – it jumps out and lives, but if you put it in cold water and heat it up gently… stays in and dies.’ He licked the edge of the Rizla and stuck it along the cone. ‘Wonder what sick fuck found that out?’ he said as an afterthought.
Clate had been in that house her whole life so far and the violence had gradually got worse. Maybe it was already too late and she would never be strong enough to get out?
‘Oy!’ said Kim, nudging her away from her thoughts. ‘Don’t miss a great night because of that arsehole, Clate.’ He handed her the joint.
It was her turn to look at him properly for the first time. She felt he was showing her how to get out of jail and her tummy flipped. She wanted to stop banging on about herself and searched around for something light-hearted to say. She happened upon a silly limerick.
‘There was a young man from begoda, who wouldn’t pay a whore what he owed her. With her cunt flaming red, she leapt out of bed, and pissed in his whisky and soda!’ Why the hell had she come out with that? ‘Not that there’s a profound moral behind it…’ she trailed off, going seriously red and hiding behind her hair in possibly the biggest cringe of her life so far.
‘Always pay your debts?’ said Kim, laughing, not at the limerick but at the way she’d come out with it in her own self-conscious way.
He was intrigued, now, by the attraction he felt for her. The chemistry was still there, but he was keeping a vision of Flow clearly in his mind at all times, and it had stopped scaring him now that he was in control of it.
They talked.
A lot.
And time passed.
She was quick-witted and funny, interesting, too, and the more they spoke the less she stuttered and hid behind her hair. He connected with her mentally in a way that didn’t generally happen, even with Flow. ‘Listen to this,’ he said eventually, handing her one half of his iPod headphones, trying to forget that she was wearing nothing but her underwear beneath that coat.
Some sort of pumping dance music was playing, similar to the stuff she’d heard coming from one of the flats on the estate, and she loved it. ‘Good, isn’t it?’ said Kim, closing his eyes.
They sat listening. The music and the buzz of the joint had relaxed her and she moved closer to him, her shyness temporarily gone.
‘Kim, will you kiss me?’ she found herself asking huskily. ‘I’ve never been kissed before.’
It didn’t cross her mind that Kim would want to be loyal to his best friend, Flow was engaged to Jackie, after all, so when he jumped up like he’d been prodded with a hot poker, an action that pulled the headphone abruptly from her ear, she assumed he found the idea repulsive.
‘You should go home,’ he said. ‘Hugo… all that,’ he said. ‘Didn’t realise… look at the time!’
Being rejected by Kim hurt more than Hugo slapping her face.
After dropping Clate off Kim went to one of his favourite places, the roof of the Glass Block. It was a clear night and you could see the whole of London from up there. He didn’t feel good and he wanted to clear his head. He could have kissed Clate but he would have been left with his conscience to contend with; resisting had been the right move.
He texted Flow two question marks, which meant ‘I’m on the Glass Block if you want to join me, not urgent.’
Jackie was sleeping after sex but Flow was wide awake. The engagement party had gone by in a blur for him while he had tried to work out why Ryan would be phoning his girlfriend, sorry, fiancée and why he, himself, had started to find other woman attractive?
He was dying to check Jackie’s phone but personal integrity stopped him. Personal integrity/the fact that he had failed to guess her password despite many attempts – minor discrepancies of motive.
While he was still trying to guess, his own mobile phone vibrated on the bedside table, giving him a guilty start.
??
He got up and pulled his clothes on, making as little noise as possible, and grabbed his backpack containing his spray paints. The opportunity to practise his art often arose on these spontaneous little excursions.
‘You’re not going out?’ said Jackie, stirring. ‘It’s gone midnight!’
He was. That was that.
He climbed onto the roof via the lift shaft, the only way to get to it without a key, and saw Kim sitting there with a beer in his hand, looking at the stars.
‘So?’ Flow asked. ‘Did you call for her?’
‘Uh huh,’ said Kim.
One look at Flow’s face made him feel relieved that he hadn’t fucked up. He subconsciously touched the scar on the side of his head, as was his habit.
Flow sat next to him, cracked open a beer.
‘Fuck that’s good,’ he said, after a lot of glugging.
Kim gave Flow a synopsis of the evening with Clate, leaving out the part about the kiss that wasn’t a kiss.
Then Flow confided his doubts and fears concerning his relationship with Jackie.
Kim was careful not to say too much because in his experience people often stayed together despite leading you to believe otherwise at the time of a rant and, if you were too quick to fling the insults, it could leave you in a compromising position.
It did briefly cross his mind that if Jackie had something going on with Ryan it would explain why she had made the effo
rt to go all the way to the New Forest, but he quickly dismissed it as impossible, Ryan simply wouldn’t do that.
They checked their crop of grass, congratulating themselves on the contraption they had built which ran neatly off the same electrics as the communal hallways and lifts, then took a short-cut up Clate’s road, their favoured route towards the all night kebab shop, when Kim stopped abruptly to eye up a pristine Porsche.
‘That belongs to Clate’s stepfather, doesn’t it?’ he commented, ‘the dick who split her lip open?’
Flow had seen Hugo plenty of times around Fulham in that distinctive car and yes, it definitely belonged to him, they’d seen him going in and out of the house enough times when they’d worked near there.
You only needed a few colours and you could do almost anything if you knew how, so it didn’t take Flow long to do his thing, after which they continued on to the kebab shop, Kim crying with laughter.
A police car sidled by and two coppers peered at them suspiciously. Without thinking, Flow spat his gum hard and it hit one of the windows.
‘Agup,’ said Kim.
‘Dagown,’ said Flow. With that they ran in opposite directions like the wind. ‘Dagoragia!’ yelled Flow over his shoulder.
‘Bragoomhagouse!’ shouted Kim over his. Adrenalin pumped through him as he ran and the power of his strides made him feel like he was running to a satisfying rhythm that was speeding up and fuelling him.
They had been speaking in their childhood secret language: back slang. You put an ‘ag’ before certain vowels and it sounded like gobbledygook, but if you knew how to do it and what to listen for it made perfect sense. Useful for speaking in front of police.
‘Agup’ meant ‘up’, so Kim was going onto a roof in Broomhouse Lane. Flow had yelled ‘dagown’, (down), which meant he was going to hide on the ground in Doria Road. The speed with which they’d done it meant that the police hadn’t even worked out which one to follow first and they were nowhere to be seen by the time they tried.
Kim had gone up the front of a house and onto the roofs, sliding down a pitch and into the middle, panting hard. Flow had ducked under a 4x4, holding onto the piping to keep him off the ground.
The trick now was to stay very still and very quiet for a long time. They weren’t going to get helicopters out or spend very long on such a small incident. After a couple of minutes they heard the siren fire up and disappear into the distance; they had been called to something more important.
Flow dropped to the ground and sprinted to the kebab shop, knowing that Kim would need pacifying.
‘Idiot,’ said Kim scornfully, immediately softening when Flow handed him the much needed food.
‘Gotta keep fit!’ Flow said, cramming chips into his mouth, not in the least bit phased by the trouble he’d just caused.
Mr Whippy
‘Hugo – it looks like you!’ said his wife in amazement, referring to the caricature on the driver’s side window of her husband’s car depicting a man in a Mr Whippy cap, tie flying over his shoulder, licking the top off a huge ice cream with a ludicrously long tongue.
‘Don’t be so bloody ridiculous,’ puffed Hugo, hyperventilating. ‘How could it possibly look like me?’
Somehow his once beautiful car had been turned into an ice cream van overnight and he was still pinching himself, convinced he was dreaming and would wake up any minute.
The police were filling in a report and asking him lots of questions. They surveyed the various images of iconic ice creams and lollies next to a trompe l’oeil hatch whilst struggling to keep straight faces.
‘Are you sure nobody’s got a vendetta against you, Mr Warren?’
‘Or a cornetta?’ quipped the other policeman, pleased with his joke. It didn’t improve Hugo’s temper.
From her vantage point at an upstairs window, it was only Clate who noticed Kim and Flow sitting at a safe distance on one of the roofs opposite, casually witnessing the fracas unfolding below.
Although she laughed, she ached with pain and embarrassment that Kim hadn’t wanted to kiss her and she never wanted to see him again. How could she ever have thought that someone like him would have wanted to kiss someone like her?
Nonetheless, she felt deeply touched that they would make Hugo’s car into an ice cream van for her and the heartbeat of their world hammered in hers, filling the spaces with evocative thuds.
Maybe the world heard it hammering too.
Whilst Clate’s mother and Hugo were at the mechanics’ assessing the damage, fielding jokes about ice creams (if one more person asked Hugo for a 99, thinking it was funny, he was going to floor them) a mysterious man came to the house looking for Clate.
He was wearing a suit and he said that he must talk to Clate and Clate only, though he called her by her real name, which was Clea. It made her think of Men in Black and at first she thought Hugo had hired a hit man to get rid of her but, after inspecting his card, she realised that he was from a firm of solicitors and had been sent on behalf of her biological father.
She was to make an appointment to see her father’s solicitor at their offices and it was a matter of the “utmost confidentiality”.
Intrigued and nervous she made the appointment. She knew nothing about her father. All her mother had told her about him was that he was a “bad person” who didn’t care for her, and that Hugo was her father now.
The solicitor
Clate stepped into the solicitor’s office to find a kindly looking man who asked her to sit down. He told her that he had a letter for her and had been instructed to give it to her under certain circumstances. He said that it had been sealed and that he had not read it himself. He suggested that he gave her some time to read it and left her alone.
As soon as she heard the soft click of the office door closing she tore the envelope open and unsheathed the handwritten letter.
Dear Clea,
What do you say to a daughter you’ve never met? For a start, if you’re reading this, I’m dead. Not the greatest way to introduce myself, I admit, and I apologise. However, best to get the bad news over first so moving swiftly on.
I met your mother when I was a young man of twenty-two and was very taken with her fragile beauty. She was a lady of few words, which I took to signify mystery, depth and intrigue. I was wrong. It turned out that she was dull, selfish and shallow.
I had already decided to leave her when I discovered she was pregnant with you. I could have kept in touch and all that, but I admit that I am a weak and greedy man entirely concerned with my own pleasures.
I have enjoyed many affairs and have travelled extensively. I surmised that you might come and find me when you were old enough if you had any gumption, or a romantic notion that meeting me would somehow enrich your life; a bridge I would have crossed if necessary.
An unexpected conversation in a bar with a life insurance salesman, who was almost as dull as your mother, prompted me to leave you everything in my will in the unlikely event of an untimely death so that the bloody government didn’t snaffle it.
Enjoy!
Dad
Clate sat very still and very quiet for a moment only, before calling the solicitor back in; she didn’t want to be alone. He expressed surprise that it had taken so little time to read the letter and asked whether he could see it himself. He read through and shook his head sadly.
‘Well,’ he said, laying the letter on the desk in front of him. He was a family man with two daughters and a son, all of whom he loved very much. How could he possibly be detached and business-like with this young lady who was little more than a child?
He buzzed his secretary and asked for hot chocolate and biscuits for two, and left the formality of his desk to sit next to her. Clate’s father, his client, had been killed in a pile-up on a motorway in Spain, which had prompted his firm to act on instructions to contact the client’s estranged daughter to present her with the letter.
‘Did you ever meet him?’ said Clate.
The
hot chocolate and biscuits arrived and the solicitor gathered his wits. He wanted to offer some inspiring words for her to remember. He wanted to give her strength, comfort and hope.
After his secretary had left he took Clate’s hand in his own and imagined that she was one of his daughters.
It was different from how she felt with Hugo because the solicitor’s touch didn’t give her the creeps. His contact was strong, caring and wise. He told her that he had much more important things to tell her than what her “weak, greedy” father had been like.
He cancelled all his appointments and spent the afternoon talking to Clate, imparting useful advice. He said that all a parent can do is teach their child as much as they could and hope that they would find happiness, and that even children with the most loving and diligent parents lost their way. He said that having great parents was nice but not the thing that made the difference, she was the one who could make the difference.
He tried to teach her how to listen to people. Amongst other things he told her that if ever she was nervous to take deep breaths and listen rather than letting the fuzz of her own thoughts make it worse. He told her she was beautiful and bright.
He explained her new wealth in depth, said that she could find her personal journey and personal strength if she really listened to herself, and told her she could do it.
He filled her with positive words and useful information. That afternoon became a comforting, inspirational memory for her that she returned to often.
At the end of it he assured her that she could contact him if she needed to, as much as she wanted.
She left that office feeling energised, excited and confident for the first time ever. She made a promise to herself that she wasn’t going to spend a single moment of her life regretting. She was young, she was rich, and she was going to place her focus on all the good things; she shed a skin that day.
The Frog Theory Page 5