by Julia Gray
It was only as we were halfway down the fire escape that I realised that today was the ten-year anniversary of my father’s death.
I took Oscar to the park for a short while, keeping an eye on the time, letting him go about his canine business.
Then we walked for the best part of an hour in a westerly direction, along the river. My father, who was easily lost wherever he went, used to say that you could always find your way if you followed the river. Oscar and I kept up a fairly brisk pace as we passed the spot where Evie had once tried to go for an ill-advised swim. It was sometimes a struggle to keep him out of the gutter, but in general he wasn’t too tricky to handle.
I wondered how Evie and Aunt Petra were doing, and whether they had got onto Past Life Regression yet. I had a sneaky interest in Past Lives; I quite liked the idea of having lived through some place and time and circumstances that bore no relation to my own. Evie had probably been a vampire, I decided, while Petra … I saw her as a kindly old washerwoman. I told Oscar that he would have been a locust in Ancient Egypt, or maybe a germ of some kind.
Now that I knew what day it was, I kept seeing the date everywhere I looked. There it was on a rusted news-stand; there it was on a poster at a bus stop.
Had Evie forgotten?
No, I decided: she hadn’t. We did not observe the anniversary of the death of my father, you see, other than with a silent hug or a quick, soulful catching of each other’s eyes. Long ago we made the decision to celebrate his life, and not his death; we marked his summer birthday, not his autumn demise. It was better that way. That was why she had kissed me goodbye, I thought. She wanted me to know: she hadn’t forgotten.
‘Did you know,’ I said to the rat, ‘that my father died ten years ago today, exactly?’
Tell me about it, said Oscar, doing a quick 360-degree shuffle and crapping on the pavement. As soon as he was done, I hustled him on, before anyone could accost me. Dogsitting was enough of a task; I wasn’t going to clean up after him as well, not unless Aunt Petra was planning on paying me.
‘Well, young sir,’ I said. ‘It just so happened that my father, a very quiet man who hated crowds, was in a terrible hurry one day, and he needed to get across Paris très rapidement in order to meet with a magazine editor. So he did something which, for him, was most unusual. Instead of taking his bicycle, he decided to get on the Métro. It was a complicated journey my father had to take, changing not twice but three times. And he was a shy, anxious man, very easily discomposed. But we know, from where he was found, that he’d taken the right trains and changed at the right junctions, two times out of three. The third time, he missed his stop. So he was still on the train, Oscar, when the Unfortunate Tragedy took place. Perhaps there was a signal failure of some kind, or perhaps the driver fell asleep – we will never be sure. But the train was still travelling at high speed when it collided with another … and Oscar, there were no survivors from my father’s carriage.’
Oscar, nose-deep in the gutter, failed to react with quite the shock and horror that I’d been anticipating.
‘Heartless brute of a rat,’ I said. ‘You are not paying attention.’
He got hold of a chicken bone, green with decay, and I spent a while wrestling it from him. The kerfuffle resulted in some piteous howls, but I won and he lost, and on we walked. From a not-too-horrible-looking bakery I bought a few small cakes. Some I would save for Evie and Petra. Another I ate, crumb by crumb, dropping the occasional morsel for Oscar as I walked. Soon there was nothing left but a frill of damp paper. As I dropped it into a bin, I found myself wondering when I would stop telling those stories about the death of my father, and who I would be – what sort of person – if so.
Finally, the Rat and I diverged from the river path and made our way through the eye-candy streets of Fulham. I’d made a careful study of the route before we left, as I do not like to track my progress with my phone when I’m out and about. I find it distracts me too much. I checked the time. Just about perfect, I reckoned, if I’d done my research correctly.
By the time Oscar and I reached the Stamford Bridge football stadium, the cacophony of chanting told me that the match was about to end. I knew that Jonah Trace was a Chelsea supporter. When he’d told Annabel that he went to the footie, this, surely, was what he’d meant. It was another kind of temple, I realised.
‘Now, where to wait?’ I said aloud to Oscar.
This was new terrain. It wasn’t Lady Agatha’s, where I knew the geography well. In the end, I settled for a nonchalant lamppost, in sight of the main entrance. There was, I thought, a low-ish chance of this experiment working. But what else did I have to do with my Saturday, other than experiments of this kind? I fished out the package of cakes and shared another with Oscar. They were oversweet, lemony, quite delicious. Mentally I made a note: we would wait ten minutes, perhaps fifteen, and then take a bus back home.
But we did not have to wait even half that time.
A hand touched the back of my arm, and I’d been expecting it, but I jumped in surprise as anyone would if a strange hand touched them in the street, while they are midway through a cake of lemony sweetness.
‘Oh!’ I said.
‘Sorry, so sorry,’ said Jonah Trace. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you. Fancy seeing you here! You haven’t just come out, have you?’
He was with a handful of people. Nodding at them in an I’ll-catch-you-up way, he bent down to pet Oscar’s head. Oscar, rather sluttishly, looked pleased by this attention.
‘No,’ I said. ‘We just went for a walk. I’m dogsitting.’
This sounded noble.
‘But you don’t live round here, do you?’
‘My aunt does,’ I said.
‘I love dogs,’ said Jonah Trace. This, of course, I knew already, along with most of his other likes and dislikes. His social media profile pages were all publicly viewable, and concealed little.
‘So do I,’ I said.
A blue tide of football enthusiasts washed us down the road.
‘How was the game?’ I said. I considered asking some questions that would indicate that I, too, was a Chelsea supporter, but I didn’t. Firstly, I hadn’t had time to properly revise. Secondly, I didn’t think I could carry it off. I’m not a fan of the half-hearted lie. But I listened intelligently as he described a match of indescribable dullness, clinched by a single, victorious penalty just before the final whistle.
Then, as we came to a street corner, I said, ‘My favourite café is just near here. Do you know the Troubadour?’
He beamed at me. ‘Seen a couple of acoustic gigs there not too long ago. I dunno – I’m meant to head to a mate’s house, but – d’you fancy a coffee there now? I feel … I owe you a coffee. To make up for the ambi—the two-handed thing. I was so totally shit scared, those first few weeks at school. I feel like I singled you out unnecessarily.’
I said I quite understood. We crossed the road. This time he touched my arm, as though to protect me from the waiting traffic. Oscar, forging across to the opposite pavement with a wag of tufty tail, seemed to be in an unusually cheerful mood, which would soon be enhanced by a gift of bacon from a waiter at the Troubadour.
Although I hadn’t been for years, I did know the Troubadour. Evie had a penchant for their Full English breakfasts. Famous for its history of players (Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix had filled its basement with noise in the 1960s) and its window display full of variegated teapots, the Troubadour drew a mixed crowd of artistic locals and grungy tourists. My father would have liked it, for sure. That Jonah Trace liked it too, I did, of course, already know.
And I also knew this: he liked me. Already.
Quite a lot.
I smiled up at him through my eyelashes as he held open the café door.
8
After a day of Psychic Awareness, my mother looked wan, and Aunt Petra looked elated. ‘Oh,’ she said, as though I’d had a choice, ‘it was good of you to look after Oscar.’
‘He was no tro
uble,’ I said. ‘We went for a walk. Sat in a café.’
‘Did he eat his kibble?’
‘Yeah.’
I made no mention of the bacon gift. I had an idea that Oscar was also supposed to be a vegetarian. I watched as he wound himself around Petra’s portly ankles, and listened to Evie and Petra describing their day, their accounts and impressions spilling over each other like competing radio stations.
‘And what about the man in the khaki jumper!’ Aunt Petra was saying.
Evie, who was now on the phone to our local Indian restaurant, rolled her eyes, saying: ‘Graham! Ugh.’
‘What about him?’ I said.
‘Peshwari naan or regular?’
‘Regular,’ I said, at the same time as Aunt Petra, ever sweet of tooth, said, ‘Peshwari!’
‘Make it two of each,’ said Evie. ‘Mutter paneer. Sag aloo – no, sag gobi. Mushroom rice for three. And that’s everything, thanks.’ She hung up the phone and exhaled. ‘Really,’ she said, ‘I just don’t know … how far I was really able to suspend my disbelief, if you see what I mean. You have to be essentially open-minded to begin with – if you’re an absolute cynic, you’re not going to pay good money to attend, are you? But then … there’s always a moment where you look around, and everyone’s holding hands and sniffing the air and imagining their sodding chakras opening up like roses and you just think: “Oh, Lord, I have to get out of here!” Don’t you?’
‘Evelyn, really?’ said Aunt Petra. ‘I thought you were enjoying yourself.’
‘Oh, I was.’ My mother caught my eye and smiled. ‘They just wouldn’t let me drink my coffee in there. Caffeine messes with the energy fields. Apparently.’ She rolled her eyes again, very subtly.
I listened as Aunt Petra gave a detailed account of the day’s activities, from a thorough review of the different ‘planes’ – physical, etheric, astral – to a session at the end of the day ‘tuning in’ to each other’s energies. The group had spent a long time practising the opening and closing of the chakras. The chakras were seven energy points, each with a different associated colour and with a different location on the body.
‘How did it feel?’ I said.
‘Oh, astonishing,’ said Aunt Petra. ‘Like opening a jewel-lery box inside oneself.’
‘I dunno. I just felt hungry,’ said my mother. ‘My stomach kept rumbling. My problem was, I couldn’t see what I was supposed to see: you were meant to think of these different coloured flowers opening up and the energy flowing through them, and I’m just not visual like that. You’d have been brilliant at it, Nora. With your imagination.’
‘I don’t think you tried hard enough,’ said Aunt Petra to my mother, earnestly. ‘Truly, it was the most empowering sensation.’
I have always been interested in the concept of tuning in to other people, and I found myself listening closely to Aunt Petra’s tale. After the chakras were open, each took a turn at sitting in the middle of the circle, eyes firmly closed, mind open. The rest – eyes also closed – tried to pick up images, thoughts, and memories from the sitter’s head. After five or six minutes of silent contemplation, all eyes would be opened, chakras paused or dimmed or whatever the correct expression should be, and the tuners-in would each report what it was that they had seen. The results, as described to me, sounded full of curious discoveries. The man in the khaki jumper, Graham – who apparently had been very quiet all day – was one of the last to sit in the middle of the circle.
‘One of the first things I saw – absolutely clearly too – was a red tractor, outside a tractor shed, on a farm,’ said Aunt Petra. ‘And when I said as much, Graham looked so surprised – I’m sure he wasn’t faking this at all – and said that he’d been deliberately thinking of a tractor the entire time! There was one next to his house in Ireland when he was a child.’
So saying, she relaxed her frame into the sofa, as though the entire realm of the Occult had now been categorically proven to exist. On the TV screen behind, highlights of the Chelsea game were flickering. The match looked just as dull as Jonah Trace had made it sound.
‘Was it red?’ I asked.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Was Graham’s tractor red? The one he was thinking of?’
Aunt Petra was explaining tersely that the redness or otherwise of said tractor was hardly the point, when the buzzer sounded from the street; our takeaway had arrived.
Oscar, for some reason, insisted on sleeping on my bed that night. I didn’t know our relationship had developed so much. It made it really impossible to get to sleep, particularly since I had just watched Alien for the second time, in case Jonah Trace and I ever discussed it in finer detail. Around midnight, I went to the kitchen for some water. I saw that Evie’s light was on. Crossing the hallway, I knocked softly on her door.
I heard feet on floorboards; the door opened and Evie stood there in a Where’s Wally nightdress and bright pink socks. She had obviously been crying.
‘What’s the matter?’ I said.
‘Don’t wake Petra,’ she said. ‘Come in.’
I sat on the edge of her bed while she climbed back into it. ‘What really happened today?’ I asked her.
She took her time.
‘There was just so much desire in the room,’ she said eventually. ‘You could feel it. I saw a black-and-white film, once, a long time ago, about a row of broken toys in Santa’s workshop, and they all just wanted to be fixed so they could be packed onto the sledges by the elves and taken away. We were like those broken toys. The people in the group. Just wanting to be … I don’t know, healed.’
‘Even Aunt Petra?’
She shook her head, and said, ‘I don’t know. When it was her turn to sit in the middle, I switched off completely. I couldn’t peer inside the head of my oldest friend. Not that I’d have been able to anyway, I suppose.’
‘What about when you sat in the middle? Did you feel … peered into?’ As I said this, I felt a little shiver of sympathy: I couldn’t stand the thought of allowing myself to be scrutinised, like somebody’s crystal ball.
‘Oh, no. That bit was funny. This Russian girl said she saw “a really English childhood, with a castle in it”. As if! Your grandad worked at a car dealership; we lived above a fishmonger’s. It really wasn’t my thing, any of it. I mean, let’s face it. It’s all a big lie, isn’t it? So many lies we tell ourselves.’
I said nothing, waiting.
Evie’s room had changed over the years. It was still over-stuffed with clothes, but now they were lovingly stored, ranged from light to dark (mostly dark) in her custom-built closets. The ashtrays and drink-rings were gone. Books were piled like bricks beneath the window. Her favourite pieces of clothing – a Vivienne Westwood basque, a Harlequin costume, a Pucci bikini – were hung on padded hangers around the walls, like museum exhibits. In the dim light of her bedside lamp, they floated like watchful ghosts.
My mother said: ‘I thought I’d find out how to reach him. Somehow.’
‘Reach him?’
‘Your dad,’ said Evie. ‘I wanted to see him again.’
9
After my father died, we left Paris. We had only rented our apartment, somewhere east of Bastille, but my father had owned a run-down cottage – a gîte – near a Normandy beach, where we’d spent our summers. This he left to my mother, and although it proved difficult to sell at first, eventually she succeeded in parting with it. I was sad about the cottage. It wasn’t until later that I understood why Evie had wanted to sell it.
Tiny, as all my parents’ spaces were, the cottage had only five rooms. There was a funny mezzanine-level micro-bedroom, where I slept. The bathroom had a pea-green bath and a blue-veined sink. My parents slept next to the kitchen, in a room that overlooked a handkerchief of a garden. The fifth and last room was scarcely more than a cupboard. This is where my father drew his illustrations. It had a shelf of a desk, no wider than an ironing board; when he worked, I sat beneath it, as a pet would, listening to the scratch-
scratch of his dip pen, and his irregular, drawn-out sighs. For many years, the cottage would appear in my dreams – sometimes as itself, and at other times disguised, like a gingerbread house.
If Evie thought that by leaving France behind, that by crossing the Channel one final time, our possessions sold in the Sunday markets, she would also be leaving her sadness, she was wrong. For the next three years, my mother made a vault of her sadness and buried herself inside it. I was cared for in our flat in London by my grandmother, Nana Finocchi, a tiny and fearsome Scot who had buried three husbands (the last from Argentina by way of Venice), seemingly without blinking an eyelid in sorrow. Nana slept on our sofa bed and stuffed me full of cosmopolitan goodies: shortbread, of course, and alfajores, the sickeningly sweet sandwiches of dulce de leche and cake that she brought from trips to Buenos Aires. Although she was by nature frugal, Nana Finocchi had money; the dead Argentine had dealt profitably in antiques.
‘Leave her be,’ she would say, when Evie spent each day in a kind of glassy reverie and a Victorian nightgown. ‘She’ll come out when she’s ready.’
But Evie did not want to come out.
So Nana kept us afloat. It was Nana who took me to school, her arthritic fingers knotted in mine for the whole of the twenty-minute walk; it was Nana who cooked and cleaned, and it was Nana who read to me at bedtime. Along with long tracts from the Old and New Testament, which she was able to recite from memory, Nana had an arsenal of fairy tales. Tales of the selkies and the kelpies, of mermaid brides and water horses, ogres and angry fishermen. Tales that drew me out of myself completely and took me away to a place of peace and safety.
And it was Nana, and her many tales, that stayed the same, while Evie changed.
For a time, I thought she was changing for the better. About two and a half years after we first came to London, she suddenly seemed to wake up. She swapped her dole cheques and occasional stints in flower shops for a bartending job in Brixton. Evie had a Romantic’s attachment to British pubs, where the carpets were stained with nostalgia and bells were rung for last orders. But it turned out not to be a good idea. Her vault of sadness opened up; the whole of London became her vault. She was still buried, but she no longer knew it.