by Jo Verity
She’d imagined that choosing what to give him would be fun. But, the more she’d thought about it, the more impossible it became. She’d mulled over things they’d talked about, places they’d gone together, hoping that the perfect object lurked amongst these memories. During the process she’d realised that, astonishing though it was, their shared history spanned less than two months.
She’d looked around her flat. Books. Music. Pictures. She’d contemplated giving him the musical box that had belonged to her mother. It was in the form of a traditional Bavarian house complete with balcony and tiny dancing bear. It was special to her but, unlike the book which virtually contained him, it would mean nothing to him. A piece of jewellery? A photograph of her as a child? What about her favourite pyjamas?
‘Merry Christmas,’ she said, watching as he eased the wrapping off the small package, fearful that she’d got it wrong.
‘This is perfect,’ he said.
She’d cut the hair from behind her ear where she hoped the irregularity would go unnoticed. ‘A lock of hair’ conjured up a blonde curl trapped in a locket or the back of a gold pocket watch but her hair was black and straight, and when she’d placed it in the plain silver frame it had looked more like the business end of a watercolour brush.
‘It doesn’t seem arrogant?’
‘Not at all. Your hair, your amazing, beautiful hair, was the first thing I noticed about you. And the fact you were making notes.’
‘If you’d prefer my notebook…’
‘Shhhh,’ he said.
This time it was easy. Gil’s patience, his soothing and encouraging voice and, yes, his expertise, played their part. But the simple truth was that she wanted him.
Afterwards, they went upstairs and she steered him into the spare room, away from everything to do with her father. They spent the night pressed close to each other, murmuring apologies as they attempted to accommodate knees and elbows.
30
It had snowed overnight, only a couple of centimetres but enough to conceal the blemished remnants of earlier falls. As they walked to the hospital, it seemed to Vivian that the world was new again – sprinkled with possibilities.
Her father seemed pleased to see them, although she wasn’t sure he knew who she was. He was still muddled, today convinced that he was a guest in a hotel and that Gil was one of the staff, but as long as they took their cue from him, they were able to carry on a bizarre, shifting conversation. There was no reference to a van but he spent a considerable time discussing the pattern on his pyjamas. ‘I’m not sure I like stripes. Paisley. That’s the one. I used to like stripes. Not any more.’
Vivian promised that she would track down some paisley pyjamas and bring them with her next time, which seemed to satisfy him.
‘I’m going to sleep now,’ he said after they’d been with him for barely an hour. ‘Can you put me straight before you go?’
Taking this as a signal that they were dismissed, they tidied his bed, scrubbed their hands and escaped from the ward. The coffee machine had an ‘out of order’ sign on it today but Tartine on the High Street was open and doing brisk business. They ordered coffee and croissants, and found a table near the window.
‘How does he seem to you?’ she said.
‘Happy enough.’ He smiled at her. ‘And you’re doing fine.’
‘Am I? I feel I’m playing a game without knowing the rules.’
‘Isn’t that the human condition? A lifelong game where you’re never given the rules?’ He shook his head. ‘Jeez. I sound like Irene.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Irene knows all the rules, thanks to Moses. When d’you go back to work?’
‘Tomorrow. There won’t be any clinics for a couple of days but they need a photographer to cover emergencies. I volunteered so Kevin could spend time with his family.’
She’d assumed that he would have a few more days off and last night, nestled against his back, she’d planned how they might occupy the week. They could walk on the snowy Heath. Watch old movies. Cook delicious meals. If Gil was up for it, they might even go to Cologne. She would buy his ticket. She could show him the gallery site. And the cathedral. And the thousands of padlocks – ‘love-locks’ – fastened on the Hohenzollern Bridge. None of that was going to happen.
‘That was sweet of you,’ she said.
‘Not entirely. I need to chalk up a few brownie points before I push off to Australia. What about you?’
‘Howard shuts the office between Christmas and New Year. He’s a generous employer.’
He raised his coffee mug. ‘Good old Howie.’
She remembered his dig at Howard after the party. ‘You are jealous,’ she said.
‘How could I not be? The man leans over your drawing board. Takes you to building sites. You have intimate conversations about…’ he waved his hands in the air.
‘Sections. Elevations. Fenestration. Building regulations.’
‘Stop,’ he groaned.
He was teasing, of course, nevertheless his readiness to admit to jealousy made her feel something close to adolescent excitement.
Over a second coffee they discussed how to spend the remainder of the day.
‘I’m happy to go back to the hospital,’ Gil said.
They’d left her father calm and on the verge of sleep. It had been an okay visit – certainly better than yesterday’s.
‘I think I’ll quit while I’m ahead,’ she said.
‘Any idea when you’ll next be here?’ Gil said, as they were packing up.
‘Not tomorrow. Tuesday, maybe? Am I being callous?’
‘Not at all. You’re wise to pace yourself.’
She told him of her intention to get Richard more involved. ‘I’m sure he’ll call in here. That’s why I want to leave the house tidy.’
As she was returning the cutlery to the sideboard drawer, her mother’s voice came, soft but clear, telling her to put away her toys before her father came home. Schnell, schnell. Wir müssen alles tipptopp machen bevor dein Vater kommt. She shivered.
They were nearing the Tube station when she remembered Gil’s confession.
‘We can take the bus,’ she said.
‘It would take forever. Anyway, it’s time I faced up to this.’
‘Sure?’ she said.
They entered the station and were caught in the wind tunnel of stale air funnelling up from the platforms. Gil grimaced and she grabbed his hand, and they stood side by side on the descending escalator. A Sunday timetable was in operation and they had to wait eight long minutes for a northbound train. By the time it emerged from the tunnel – a giant piston, shunting lukewarm air ahead of itself – a crowd had assembled on the platform.
The train slowed to a stop and the doors slid open, the surging crowd sweeping them into the carriage. All but a few seats were taken and they stood near the door, Gil’s eyes fixed on her face, his hands clamped around the pole as if at any moment he might be swept away. His forehead was slick with perspiration and she got ready to bale out at the next station if he couldn’t handle it.
‘Okay?’ she said, resting her forefinger on the back of his hand.
‘Piece of piss,’ he said.
Once through the West End, the crowd in the carriage thinned. Gil had willed himself into something akin to a fugue state, where it was all going on around him but he was somewhere else. By the time they were nearing Camden Town, the point at which the Northern line forked into two branches, he felt wrung out. This train continued via Kentish Town – his stop – but Vivian needed to change here for Belsize Park. When the doors opened he expected her to make a move but she stayed where she was.
‘I’ll be fine from here,’ he said.
She shook her head. He knew arguing would be a waste of time and, to be truthful, he wasn’t sure he was quite ready to go solo.
They reached their stop and left the train. The dead air grew sharper and fresher as the escalator trundled them up and up, and, when they reached the ticket ha
ll, it was all he could do not to raise his fist. For forty minutes he had held it together, focusing on the next blob on the Tube map but now, almost out of the blue, he was in Kentish Town with Vivian and no idea what might happen next.
‘How far to your flat?’ she said.
‘Not far,’ he said, scanning the street for somewhere to get a coffee. But apart from a couple of convenience stores, everything was shuttered and he had no alternative but to add ‘Would you like to come back?’
‘I would,’ she said.
He’d known that, sooner or later, she would come to his flat. They were friends – lovers – whatever – and it would be weird if she didn’t. But he’d imagined he would get fair warning. Time to square the place up. Stock the fridge. His mother would have clucked disapproval. In her book, being caught with a grubby bathroom was second only to dropping dead in dirty underwear.
They called in at Saeed’s for bread, milk and eggs and he watched her studying the stock as though the tins and cartons on the dusty shelves were archaeological specimens that might reveal something of civilisation in these parts. When he paid for his goods, Saeed’s eyelid dipped in a wink and Gil knew it wouldn’t be long until news that he’d been buying groceries with a young woman filtered back to Feray.
Until now they’d inhabited Vivian’s world – her flat, her father’s house, her boss’s party. During their spell south of the river he’d had the feeling they were laying down the foundation for something that might last but he was no longer sure of that because, by a twist of fate, she had strayed onto his territory.
‘This is it,’ he said pointing to the steps up from the pavement. ‘I’m at the top.’
The gloomy hallway reeked of Oskar’s garlic-heavy concoctions. The floor tiles were cracked and curling, the paintwork grubby. As they climbed the stairs, he couldn’t help but see it through her eyes. Contrast it with her spotless home.
When they reached the top landing, he was dismayed to see his portrait of Feray leaning against his door and, alongside it, an Argos carrier bag on top of which was his striped robe. She must have dumped his stuff here before leaving for Christmas. Pushing the bag and the picture to one side, he opened the door and shepherded Vivian in.
The place was a tip. Unwashed crockery. Unmade bed. Drawer emptied on the floor in his search for matching socks. Clearing the armchair of accumulated clothing, he gestured for her to sit down.
‘I don’t get too many visitors,’ he said.
She pulled up her coat collar. ‘I’m not surprised. It’s freezing in here.’
He plugged in the oil heater and lit all four gas rings, then took the duvet from the bed and tucked it around her knees. While the kettle boiled he scooped up his socks and stuffed them back in the drawer.
‘Back in a sec,’ he said.
Once in the bathroom, he replaced the used hand towel with the most respectable one from the shelf, rooted out a new bar of soap and flushed a double dose of bleach down the lavatory. But there was nothing he could do about the stained lavatory pan and the blackened mastic around the shower tray.
When he returned Vivian was holding the portrait of Feray.
‘I brought your things in,’ she said indicating the bag which now lay on the bed. ‘She’s beautiful.’
‘I guess she is.’ He attempted to keep his tone light and neutral, waiting for the next comment.
‘She must be very angry to have left your stuff out there like that.’
‘She’s entitled to be angry,’ he said, feeling the need to defend this woman whom he had so recently failed. ‘She’s rearing two kids on her own. Her job’s on the line. Her ex doesn’t pay his whack. Actually, her life’s pretty shitty at the moment.’
‘But why take it out on you?’
He shrugged. ‘Who else is there?’
She shook her head, dismissing his lame explanation, clearly expecting him to come back with something more plausible. But he felt wiped out – the sleepless night and the ordeal of the Tube – and he didn’t have the energy, or the necessary ammo, to put up a fight.
He raised his hands. ‘Okay. I wasn’t entirely straight with you. We had a bit more than a casual thing going. It was easy and it suited us both. But we’d made no promises to each other.’
‘She has a sensuous mouth,’ she said, studying the photograph. She looked up, fixing him with her gaze. ‘Was she good in bed?’
He could say that it was none of her business, or parry her question with something similar about Nick Mellor.
‘Yes,’ he said and when she nodded, in what he felt was acknowledgement of his honesty, he was glad that he hadn’t tried to sidestep her question.
‘So why give her up?’ She sounded genuinely puzzled.
‘Simple. A bomb went off, and I met you and… Look. Are we having a row? Because if we are, I think I’m entitled to know what it’s about.’
‘I don’t know what you expect from me,’ she said.
‘Don’t you get it? I don’t expect anything from you. Nothing at all.’
She looked again at the photograph, as if determined to fix every detail in her memory, then she leaned it, face inwards, against the wall.
‘That’s easy then,’ she said.
‘It can be if you’ll let it.’
She took hold of his hand and kissed it. ‘I’m ravenous.’
He wasn’t sure what had happened there – whether he’d set her mind permanently at rest – but he didn’t much care because they’d come through the skirmish and she hadn’t walked out on him.
They ate scrambled eggs on toast and followed it with tinned mandarin oranges. Afterwards she inspected his bookshelf and his album collection, wrinkling her nose at his choice of music. He insisted she listen to Jimmy Guiffre, jubilant when she admitted to ‘quite liking’ ‘The Train and The River’.
For two days, cocooned inside their private Christmas, they hadn’t listened to the news. When he switched on the TV, they learned that yesterday at around the time they were eating breakfast, the body of the missing girl had been found by the roadside in Bristol. The police were appealing for information, displaying family photographs of an open-faced girl, laughing at the camera. And there was CCTV footage – jerky and grainy – of her buying groceries on the way home to her flat and her fate.
‘It’s too sad,’ Vivian said.
‘It is,’ he said, thinking how often Vivian was alone, a soft target for anyone on the lookout for young women.
31
Richard’s phone was going straight to voice mail. Vivian left increasingly vehement messages and when he finally got back to her, she told him that their father had lost his mind.
‘He’s disorientated, I’ll give you that,’ he said. ‘But let’s not forget he’s an old man, in unfamiliar—’
‘I don’t forget things,’ she said. ‘For instance I haven’t forgotten that you were the one who first said he was confused.’
‘Confused, yes, but I wouldn’t say—’
‘I spent Christmas listening to his ramblings. Believe me, Richard, he’s lost his mind.’
She ended the call before he could tell her to calm down.
Her outburst was effective and, presumably not relishing a slanging match, he mailed her, promising to come to London before the end of the week.
Vivian’s abhorrence of the hospital was mutating into stoicism and the next time she visited she made it as far as the ward before the heebie-jeebies set in. In the forty-eight hours since she was last there, her father had changed. He looked thinner. Smaller. His eyes were dull and sunken, crusty at the corners. The skin on his arms was flaky and dry to her touch. He barely acknowledged her. There was no babble about vans or pyjamas. In fact he hardly spoke, responding to her questions with ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or nothing at all, smiling occasionally and wistfully at some invisible thing (or being) beyond the foot of his bed.
A nurse arrived to check the various bags and monitors. Despite the woman’s steady wittering, he contin
ued to stare ahead. Vivian wished he were playing one of his games but she knew he wasn’t.
‘Could you make sure he takes these, dear?’ the nurse said, handing her a plastic cup containing several pills.
‘Okay. Are his results back?’
The nurse took a ring binder from the window sill and flipped through it. ‘Mmmm. Doesn’t look like it.’ She smiled brightly. ‘But it’s Christmas, don’t forget.’
‘Really?’
Vivian’s sarcasm was rewarded with a nervous glance.
After she’d gone, Vivian inspected the tablets – two white, one blue and a red-and-yellow capsule. Hard to believe these harmless-looking objects were capable of halting an old man’s slide towards disaster.
She tipped them onto her hand and offered them to him. ‘Tablets, Dad.’
He watched her warily, making no move and saying nothing.
‘Come on,’ she said.
She wished she could walk away. Leave this to someone who knew what they were doing, someone who wasn’t repulsed by flaccid lips and toothless gums. Steeling herself, she pushed the blue tablet into his mouth, her stomach heaving at its warm, damp pliability. When he showed no signs of swallowing, she tried flushing it down with a drink of water, her attempt resulting in a regurgitated tablet and wet pyjamas. She retrieved the tablet, draped a towel around his neck and tried again, her revulsion to some small extent counteracted by satisfaction in success.
‘There. That wasn’t so bad, was it? Three more and we’re done,’ she said, surprised to hear herself murmuring trite reassurances.
She checked the locker. She must tell Richard to bring more pyjamas and moisturiser for his skin. She was bundling washing into a bag when she became aware that he had turned his head and was watching her.
‘You’re Vivian,’ he said and smiled, as though she had emerged, without warning, from dense fog.
‘Yes, I am.’
She kissed him, not minding his sour breath, ashamed that minutes before she’d made such a big deal about touching him.
‘We should have…’ he said. ‘We should have…’
She waited for the rest, and when it didn’t come she prompted ‘What, Dad? What should we have done?’