by Lesley Lokko
‘Sorry about that,’ he said after a while, so quietly she thought she might have misheard it.
‘Nothing to be sorry about,’ she said softly.
‘No, there is. I don’t know why I even bothered to go there.’
‘Why did you?’ She lifted the heavy coverlet and turned it over. The iron gave off a satisfying puff of steam.
He shrugged, his eyes on the television again. ‘I don’t know … I’d promised Diana I’d go round if I was here over Christmas.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me who she was?’
He was quiet for a moment. ‘It didn’t seem relevant, to be honest. I don’t know … back there in Djibouti, it seemed much simpler, somehow. Just you and me.’
‘What happened between you, Josh? Between you and your brothers, I mean.’
He shrugged nonchalantly, but there was a great tension in his shoulders. ‘Childhood stuff. Long time ago.’
‘What sort of childhood stuff ?’
Again, it took him a while to answer. He was struggling with something, something he couldn’t bring himself to say out loud. She could feel the energy of it like a new kind of heat in the room. She continued with the slow, unhurried lift and press of her task, waiting for him to answer. Whatever was smouldering inside him would need to burn itself out, she saw, before he could bring himself to speak. She waited. And at last he began to talk.
He couldn’t say when he first knew. It seemed to him somehow that he’d always known. It wasn’t just that he looked different – he was different. In every way, not just physically. Rafe and Aaron were like Harvey … simple, straightforward, uncomplicated. They knew what they liked and why. There was nothing in either of them that hinted at the kind of slippery, dark territory he inhabited, even back then. His dreams were full of mystery and secrecy, things he could only guess at but couldn’t explain. He would wake in the morning exhausted from the effort of trying to understand what was being told to him in the silent dark hours between Diana putting out the light last thing at night and waking in the morning to a world that was so utterly different from the one he inhabited in his sleep that he sometimes had difficulty distinguishing between them – which was the dream and which was real? Diana understood. She would be there in the morning, already dressed for chambers, that far-off place where she worked and which took up almost every second of her waking time, but the slow, special smile she had just for him made him realise that she understood. Not Harvey, not his brothers – only Diana.
‘Tell me about your dreams,’ she would say to him on a Sunday morning when the others were at rugby practice or out somewhere in the garden, which was their second home. ‘Tell me about the one you had on Tuesday.’ That she remembered exactly which day it was, which precise dream, sent a warm glow coursing through him. Diana understood everything. ‘How utterly marvellous,’ she would say, listening to him recount whatever it was that had come to him in the early hours of Tuesday morning. ‘Imagine that. And all of that came out of that little head. What a wonderful imagination you have.’ She often caught hold of his head, squeezing him to her and tousling the short, thick black curls which were like hers but not theirs. ‘Good Lord, where’d he come from?’ people would often ask when presented with the Keeler brothers all at once and for the first time. He hated hearing it and yet he loved it too. It marked him out as different. Special, as Diana would always whisper to him. You’re special because you’re mine. The others felt it too. Or did he feel it because they showed it first? He didn’t know; couldn’t say. All he could say for sure was that when it happened, there was no surprise involved. He’d looked at the scene unfolding in front of him and his only thought had been, Yes. This is how it is. This is how it’s always been. This is why.
‘Why what?’ Niela interrupted him softly. She was sitting opposite him, her knees drawn up against her chest.
They were in Mougins, his favourite place in the whole world. He was ten at the time. In those days, there was a wonderful pattern to their summer holidays. Diana’s chambers always closed exactly to the day when they came home from school. Rafe and Aaron were at boarding school; Josh was still at home. The following year he too would go to Eton, the draughty, forbidding school that his brothers loved. He was dreading it. Not because he couldn’t hold his own – at ten he was already nearly as tall as Aaron, who was four years older, and his lean, tough physique meant that he’d never been bullied at school, not once. He was more than capable of looking after himself. It wasn’t the bullying that he was afraid of – it was being away from Diana. That summer, his last before the dreaded lonely years of boarding school began, the four of them, Diana, Rafe, Aaron and himself, had gone ahead to Mougins; Harvey was due to follow them in a couple of weeks.
They drove down from London in the Volvo estate with Buster in the back, yapping excitedly all the way. The ferry crossing was magical. It was windy and the clouds were giant, shape-shifting puffs of white chasing each other across the sky. He stood on the upper deck gazing mesmerised at the creamy white foam thrown up behind them by the ferry’s engines as they ploughed through the dark green sea, marking out their progress. At Calais, Diana took them to a café, where they all had café au lait and paper-thin croissants stuffed with almond paste and chocolate.
They stopped overnight in Lyon at the small pension they always stayed at – the owner and his wife, M. and Mme Santos, made the usual exclamations at how much they’d grown, how their French had improved, how wonderful Diana looked … where was M’sieur Keeler? Ah, working. Such an important job, saving lives. Rafe looked particularly pleased when they said that. He wanted to be a surgeon, just like Dad. Aaron wanted to be a lawyer, just like Maman. And you? Mme Santos looked at Josh indulgently. He felt the tips of his ears reddening as he answered. He wanted to be a cook. No, a chef. A cook was a lady. The roar of laughter sent the pigeons scattering in fright. A chef! ‘Darling, whatever do you mean?’ Diana’s hand was on the back of his neck, affectionately stroking the soft curls that fell over his collar when his hair had grown too long. ‘A chef ?’ Rafe and Aaron threw him sidelong looks of such smug satisfaction that he was taken aback. What was wrong with wanting to be a chef ? Mme Santos was a chef, wasn’t she? He liked cooking. ‘Of course you do, darling,’ Diana murmured, silencing the other two with a look. ‘Of course you do.’
‘Tosser,’ Aaron murmured under his breath so that no one would hear it. ‘Stupid, silly tosser.’ It was his favourite insult that year.
The farmhouse was just as he remembered. The big oak tree was in full and splendid bloom; the oleanders, roses and hyacinths that Diana had painstakingly transplanted from London were out in colourful force. They pulled up as the shadows were already beginning to lengthen and the sun was slipping out of the sky. He rushed ahead with Buster to open the gate. There was a car in the driveway. He stopped in confusion, turning his head to look enquiringly at Diana. ‘There’s someone here, Mum,’ he shouted. ‘Someone’s here.’
‘It’s all right, darling, I know. It’s only Uncle Rufus.’
Josh looked uncertainly ahead. His uncle Rufus – his dad’s only brother – was strange. It had been a few years since he’d seen him. He dropped in and out of their lives at random. Sometimes he’d be around in London for a few weeks; there’d be a dinner at the house and some presents … he’d be there in the morning for breakfast and lunch and then he would disappear, sometimes for a couple of years. In between there’d be no word, not even a postcard from all those exotic places he went to … South America, Asia, Japan, Africa. He couldn’t say exactly what it was that Uncle Rufus did … something with the word ‘development’ in it, but he had no idea what that really meant. He came back to the house in Islington with stories of meetings with presidents and con-men, being shot at in places with unpronounceable names and narrow escapes that always seemed to involve guns and being smuggled in the boot of a car. Josh didn’t know why he didn’t like him. It wasn’t that the stories were implausible – no, one look a
t Uncle Rufus and you could see that it was all true. He was tall, like Dad, but much more powerfully built … thick dark brown hair, dark brown eyes, a curved, Romanesque nose (he’d had to ask Diana what that meant) and a deep, booming laugh. He was nothing like Harvey, in the same way Josh was nothing like Aaron or Rafe. But Diana seemed to like him. She was different when he was around; livelier, somehow, less guarded and less reserved. He didn’t like her like that. He preferred the quieter Diana whose attention wasn’t claimed by the man who, however temporarily, seemed to him to have usurped his father’s place.
‘Uncle Rufus is staying for a few days,’ Diana said to him out of the window as she manoeuvred the car into the driveway. ‘Just until Dad gets here.’
Josh stood in the doorway of the farmhouse, curiously unwilling to go in. There was music playing in the background – deep, flowing music that washed over the whole house, stealing around the doors and windows, entering every room. He didn’t like it. Dad never played music so loudly.
‘You’re here!’ Uncle Rufus emerged from the living room at the end of the long corridor and stood there, his hands in his pockets as he surveyed them coming through the doorway. ‘At last. Thought you’d never arrive.’
‘Sorry, sorry …’ Diana came through into the hallway struggling to hold on to Buster and a large suitcase at the same time. ‘We left a bit late this morning. When did you get in?’
‘Last night.’ Uncle Rufus made no move to help her, Josh noticed. His dad would never have let Diana struggle with a suitcase.
‘Here, Mum … give me that.’ He took the case from her and threw his uncle what he hoped was a suitably murderous look. Uncle Rufus affected not to notice. Josh took the case – it wasn’t that heavy – and marched upstairs with it. His earlier good mood was completely soured. It wasn’t even the first day of their holiday and it was already ruined.
It was on their third night that it happened. They’d all gone into the living room after supper, each preoccupied in their own way – Aaron and Rafe were playing a card game; Diana was reading a thick stack of files; Uncle Rufus was listening to the stereo with his headphones on and Josh was lying on his stomach, his eyes closed, going over the events of the day – eating, swimming, more eating, more swimming – thinking of how he would tell his friends at school what he’d done during the holiday. Uncle Rufus suddenly stood up, took off the earphones and announced that it was time to play a game. Hide and seek. Aaron and Rafe jumped up enthusiastically; it was exactly the sort of rowdy game they loved to play. Diana looked up, an expression of indulgent cheerfulness on her face. ‘A game? Oh, Rufus … really? You really want to? You’re as bad as these three.’ Josh didn’t like that. He didn’t want to play; he was nothing like Uncle Rufus or the other two.
‘Come on, then … who’s going to be the catcher?’ Uncle Rufus shouted cheerfully. ‘You, Rafe? You’re the oldest. Count to a hundred and then come and find us. Come on, everyone. Let’s scram!’
Josh found himself being swept along in the rush to get out of the living room. Even Diana had joined in enthusiastically. Rafe stood in the corner, his face turned away from them as he counted slowly and loudly. ‘Twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight …’ Aaron had opened the front door as soundlessly as he could and slipped out. Ahead of him, going up the stairs, Josh could see Diana and Uncle Rufus. He waited for a second, his hand on the banister, trying to think of the one place in the house where Rafe would never look. Ah, he had it. He grinned, in spite of himself. If he was lucky, he could hide out there all evening, away from the others and their stupid, silly games. Maybe even until morning.
He ran up the second flight of stairs, wriggled easily into the space at the end of the corridor and then up the short flight of wooden stairs to the attic. It ran the entire length of the farmhouse and had always been a junkyard storage room for all the things they’d inherited from Diana’s parents’ farmhouse just down the road when her father died. Diana didn’t want anything that had been left to her. Josh thought he could vaguely remember the removals people one year lugging huge, ugly pieces of furniture up into the roof, where they’d stayed ever since, buried out of sight.
He moved through the dark, his feet remembering the loose floorboards, his hands judging the distance between objects with ease. It had been a year since he’d been in the attic space but he knew every square inch. Outside he could hear the trees in motion; a light wind had blown up since that afternoon, setting the garden in gentle movement, trees whispering to one another and the birds chattering in reply. He found the spot where the mattress had been slung and lay down, cracks of light appearing as his face was laid close to the ground and his eyes and ears attuned themselves properly to the dark. He could hear someone moving about in the room below – through the floorboards he could see that it was Diana. He was directly above the spare bedroom at the end of the corridor. She opened the door and the movement sent the curtains blowing. The crack of light widened; he put his face closer to the ground and peered downwards. There was a figure standing in the doorway, lit from behind. It was Uncle Rufus. Across the room the curtain rose and fell like a veil. Diana was standing by the window, looking out into the inky darkness of the garden. Uncle Rufus closed the door behind him and turned the key, locking it. Josh felt a sudden tightness in his chest, as if he knew what was about to happen next. In a way, he did. He’d dreamed it, he realised, many times. He heard his mother sigh, a soft, tense little sound that rose up from her throat. He wanted desperately not to look, but he couldn’t turn away. Uncle Rufus came up behind her. The tips of his fingers came to rest on her face. His own skin tingled uncomfortably as he watched the next moves in an act that he knew he shouldn’t be witnessing. He lay there, his face close to the floorboards, with the curtains lifting and falling in time to the lifting and falling of Uncle Rufus’s back, on top of his mother, squashing the breath out of her. Only the sounds coming from them both didn’t suggest an ending of life – rather the opposite. A beginning. Something new. Something that shouldn’t have been seen, especially not by him.
He couldn’t remember how long he stayed there, or how it ended. He remembered getting up and tiptoeing out of the attic, not wanting to be seen or heard. He went first to his own room, unaware that his hands were still pressed against his ears. He caught sight of himself in the mirror that hung on the wall of the landing. He sat on the edge of the bed for what seemed like a very long time. Then he got up and did the only thing he could think of to do … he went downstairs to tell his brothers. He wanted Rafe to make Uncle Rufus leave. He was the oldest; he could do it. They’d given up playing hide and seek and were lying in front of the empty fireplace, playing some silly card game that they wouldn’t teach him. ‘Rafe,’ he said, and he realised as soon as he spoke that he was crying. He could feel his lip quivering though he desperately wished it would stop.
Rafe and Aaron looked up. It was Aaron who began laughing first. ‘Cry-baby … did you get scared? Were you all alone? In the dark. Look at him! God, you’re such a baby …’
He blurted it out. Everything. He couldn’t hold it back. Make him stop, he remembered begging Rafe. He’s hurting her. Make him leave. He didn’t know who hit him first. What he did remember was the taste of blood in his mouth and the thundering in his ears that was the sound of his own heart. They took it in turns to push and shove and slap him. He was a liar. A sneaky, dirty little liar. And a cry-baby. You couldn’t get much worse than that. If he didn’t shut up and take it all back – those nasty, filthy, ugly lies – they would jolly well see to it that his life from then on was hell. He didn’t. They did. And that was the beginning of the animosity between them that had lasted for almost twenty years. It wasn’t the end, though. He’d got his own back.
‘How?’ Niela whispered, though the answer was already there between them.
He shrugged, unable to meet her eyes. He was the difficult one; the wild charmer, the one no one could tame. It had its … attractions. He recognised it, early
on. He’d taken away everything he could from them, whenever he could. Especially girls. Women. He’d lost count of the number of times he’d seduced one or other of their girlfriends and then chucked them immediately aside. It had started out almost as a game – just to see if he could, that was all. Meaningless, quick revenge. And then he found he couldn’t stop. The more they pushed him away, the more he pursued what they loved. The last had been Rafe’s fiancée, a silly, simpering girl called Amy. The night they announced their engagement, he’d kissed her in the upstairs bathroom; a couple of days later he took her to his bed. She told Rafe; a few days later the engagement was off and Josh left for Burma. That was the last time. There was no pleasure in it; he wasn’t sure there ever had been. And now he didn’t know how to make amends.
There was absolute silence in the room when he finished speaking. He sat very still. She had seen something in him that he’d never shown anyone, not even Rania. No one had ever seen him like that, open and completely exposed. It put you at risk, he thought to himself, but with Niela it was different. She would not let him down. He reached across and took her hand, very gently at first, then he tightened his grip. She responded with a gesture that had become familiar to him, though he’d never really thought about it. She reached up with her free hand and lightly brushed the top of his head, her fingers barely touching his hair. She had to look up at him to do it and her lovely long throat was bared, turned towards him, giving away so much of herself to anyone who’d care to look. He found himself inexplicably choked. All the anger and hot, uncomfortable pain he’d felt in the retelling of the story suddenly went right out of him. An ordinary little gesture, of the sort that could – and probably did – mean nothing. She looked at him in that clear, candid way of hers that tried to see what there was behind his aloofness; something she’d glimpsed, long ago, and had been looking for ever since. He took in the smooth dark skin of her face, the neat, beautifully drawn eyebrows and the dark eyes, and understood that what mattered to her the most was also hidden in her, and that if he intended to find it, he would have to do as she had done with him, discovering it slowly, bit by shy, hesitant bit.