by Adam Thorpe
‘Don’t look all shocked. Accompaniment! On the old ivoires. The finger’s crap for at least another fortnight. Jaan was full of you, apparently. You don’t mind, do you? Poor Estonian immigrant. You can do it for free, you rich sod. She’s not got wheels.’
Howard had opened his diary and was scribbling a number on the dayglo-pink Post-it pad by the phone, peeling it off and handing it to Jack before Jack really knew what was happening.
‘Here’s her mobile. Your bit for the new Europe, mate.’
‘Thanks, Howard. Great. I’ll see what I can do.’
He poured a whisky for Milly and a beer for himself and set to on the meal while she chilled out as usual by phoning a close friend like Perdita Knowles or Olive Nicholson. He was cooking a fish pasta dish. He had learned today from the fishmonger in Hampstead that fish had to be laid out on kitchen paper to be dried before cooking. Sure enough, the slippery white slices soaked the paper, turned it transparent. He hoped Milly would come in and admire this professional secret, but she was deep in her call. He reckoned it was Olive Nicholson, from the tone of her voice. She was speaking quite slowly and a little huskily. By the time she came off, the cod was sizzling in a film of butter. He generally overcooked everything by a crucial fraction, so had been telling himself to underdo it, to give each side not more than a couple of minutes at the most.
Milly came in just at the wrong time. He asked her who it was on the phone, and she told him it was Claudia.
‘Claudia?’
‘Claudia Grove-Carey. You know she’s half-Greek?’
‘Half-Italian, half-Greek?’
‘Yes. Do you find her attractive?’
‘Not particularly. Planning on inviting them back, oh my Gawd.’
‘Eventually. Give it time.’
‘Why were you phoning her?’
‘Because I knew Mr Pukesville wasn’t in.’
‘My composition tutor. You have to show some itsy-bitsy crumb of respect.’
‘No I don’t.’
‘Why did you call her?’
Milly snorted. She was leaning against the fridge. The cod was cooking happily, but once again he’d forgotten at what precise time he’d put the slices in. He turned them over and they started to flake, tending to mush.
‘Gestapo time,’ said Milly, her vowels slightly lengthened by the effects of the whisky. ‘I phoned her because I feel sorry for her. I phoned her yesterday, from work, to see how she was after our visit. I get the feeling she’s very alone. We had a lovely chat up in Ricco’s room, when we were there. She’s very keen on green issues. Italy’s not very green, as we know. Mafia and stuff.’
‘Whereas the UK …’
‘Puts Sweden or Denmark into the shade, doesn’t it just?’
Milly stamped her foot, as she did when frustrated by the inability of humanity to get its act together. Jack had always loved that little stamp of the foot. She was wearing her side-lace sneakers, which softened the effect. He stirred the white sauce, wondering if he’d put in too much milk.
‘Ze secret of cooking,’ he said, in a French accent, regarding the soft wreckage of the cod, ‘ees to have a perfect sense of ze timing.’
‘Like the secret of screwing,’ said Milly, quietly and unexpectedly.
She had showered and changed before phoning, and smelt of the cake of Pears soap Mummy du Crane would ritually, even superstitiously, replenish by post. She was wearing a jeans skirt and an embroidered lacy camisole he hadn’t seen before, or not noticed. Jack had also overdone the pasta, and the prawns were stubbornly unthawed. He was forcing a block of frozen petits pois into a small saucepan (whose circumference was slightly less than the block), when he felt arms around his waist. They were Milly’s arms. Her hands, with their solid, no-nonsense fingers (her father had the same fingers, as no doubt the knight did under his mailed gloves back in 1087), locked in front of his belly.
‘You’ll burn yourself on the ring,’ she said. ‘I hope that’s not cod. Cod’s way overfished.’
‘Course it’s not cod.’
‘I’ve got to go to bloody Hitchin tomorrow. And Hull on Thursday. What a turn-on.’
He backed a step away from the cooker. Her cheek pressed against his spine. She squeezed him, pressing his back against her front. He felt her breasts as a firmish resistance under the lacy camisole. The petits pois were scattering like pellets over the cooker and, as the other rings were still hot, sticking to them and burning.
‘How can I cook?’ he said, mock-despairingly.
‘Love you, man,’ said Milly, dreamily. ‘I love you because you’re so useless and you’re so clever.’
He wasn’t sure why, but a sharp burn of anger shot straight up from his belly to his head. He sighed, to blow it away. She must have felt his body stiffen, because she released him.
‘I really hate people bothering me when I’m cooking,’ she said, pouring herself another shot. ‘Do you know, Hitchin was a kind of green pioneer town?’
‘Are you trying to make her leave Roger?’ he asked, slopping the tagliatelle strips into the glass oven dish.
‘Piss off,’ said Milly, laughing. ‘I’m not a marriage breaker!’
‘Just wondered.’
‘I’m not preggers, by the way.’
He looked at her. She was rubbing her lower lip with the whisky glass, staring down at the floor, her arms half folded. He was not sure whether this was an invitation to make love to her, or just a familiar confession. He felt sorry for her, but not for himself.
‘Wait,’ he said.
He slipped the fish in on top of the pasta, scattered the half-thawed prawns out of the colander, and poured on the white sauce. This was all done in silence, and Milly never moved, except for the whisky glass rubbing on her lip. The petits pois could be added in a minute, he thought. He shook grated cheese from the packet over the top and slid the dish into the oven, the heat hitting him in the face. Then he went to Milly and folded her in his arms – awkwardly, because of the whisky glass. She allowed herself to be folded, her eyes closed, holding up the glass by his head. His hands were greasy with butter and with the unpleasant polish of fish, so he held them free of the back of her camisole. He felt exposed to the street and to the Heath beyond – it was twilight, and the spots in the kitchen were switched on, but he didn’t care. It was a simple, loving hug.
He felt her body quiver, then shudder, then shake, and shake again, as if it was being given a mild electric shock. There were no sounds.
It was just her body and the deep inside of her. By the time they separated, though, his shoulder was as wet as the kitchen towel on the cutting board, where he’d lain the fish to dry as the fishmonger had suggested.
‘Nearly ready,’ he said.
That was all he could think of saying.
Bounds Green was a bit nicer than Jack had expected. Dull to the point of comatose, but not crumbling or even that grim. He’d looked at the map and found it just too far to walk comfortably, incredibly awkward to get to by Tube and the buses were complicated. Unfortunately, Milly’s appointment in Hitchin meant she’d got the wheels: she was transporting samples of pure-wool loft insulation in the boot. He told her he’d be working all day, but may well emerge for a breather on the Heath. As soon as she’d left for Hitchin, he’d phoned for a taxi, but the bombings meant they were still booked clean out.
He had backache, and didn’t feel like cycling all that way. He resigned himself to dropping down on the Tube to King’s Cross and then up on the Piccadilly Line – a daft dog’s leg, but one which gave him time to think.
On the last stretch, he imagined what might happen if a bomb did its thing and he was killed and Milly would wonder for the rest of her life where the hell he’d been off to. The girl next to him was attractive in a bony French way, deep into The Da Vinci Code. A bomb might blow them together in a heap and Milly might wonder for the rest of her life; he actually pictured her looking feverishly at the entwined, calcinated bodies in the morgue.
>
The squeaky brakes on the train reminded him of Roger. He reflected on their Friday evening together, concentrating especially on the part that had begun once they’d left. Milly had talked a little about Ricco, and how frightened she was that they would be disappointed yet again. She had already bought a pregnancy-test kit from Boots, but couldn’t bring herself to use it, not yet. Anyway, it was maybe too early to tell. Jack had drunk over the limit, unintentionally, and he knew he had to be careful. Then Milly told him he was driving too fast up Belsize Avenue. It was midnight, and there was no traffic on that particular wide road. He denied he was driving too fast, and then Milly had flipped.
Thrusting her face towards his, she had shouted: ‘I lost my baby! I lost my little baby! How much have you drunk?’
He slowed down, shaken. He was doing twenty, which felt absurdly slow. It felt more like a walking pace.
‘Milly, chill out. There’s no madwoman coming out of a side road in a four-by-four.’
‘How do you know? You won’t know until you’re on top of her.’
‘I’m doing nineteen.’
‘Now you are. Now you are. Men are so fucking pig-headed.’
‘You could be married to Roger,’ he said, inwardly agonised that she could still be blaming him for the loss of their baby five years back.
She didn’t reply, which could have meant anything. She had her arms folded and was turned away from him as they drove too slowly up Rosslyn Hill so that he all but stalled in third.
Then he said, changing down awkwardly as the car juddered: ‘If you go on thinking I killed our baby, then why don’t you leave me?’ He didn’t want to say it, but he said it. And the worst thing was, she kept silent again.
He felt, therefore, that the evening had been really negative and that he was floating towards some mental or domestic crisis which meant he had to take affirmative action. Last night, maybe because of Milly telling him that she wasn’t on the way, and the sunset sadness over the fish supper, he’d had insomnia. He’d lain awake in bed, composing emails to send to Roger that would really shake him. In the end he settled on, and actually tapped out: Hi, Roger, I’ve recently come to the conclusion that Vaughan Williams’s ‘Flos Campi’ is one of the great works of the twentieth century. I mean this. Jx
That would probably mean Roger breaking off all contact. That suited Jack. He was into burning clapped-out bridges. If he could do the same with Howard, he might well solve the Kaja threat. Kaja’s number was burning a dayglo-pink hole in his back pocket. He’d considered memorising it and then destroying it, like James Bond. But he was hopeless with numbers.
Anyway, he meant what he’d said in the email to Roger, although he didn’t even send it. The next morning he set out, albeit blindly, perhaps instinctively, certainly bleary-eyed, for Kaja’s neck of the woods. It was better to be the hunter than the hunted.
Bounds Green station might have been quite interesting in the thirties, when it was new and modernist with its big windows and brick tower and glazed tiles. Now, stranded on a main artery and edged with litter, it looked like a public convenience. Happens to all of us.
Jack was struck by the lack of trees. He didn’t like the look of the main road and its roars of traffic, so took a parallel route which, studying the A–Z, he saw would still take him up to the right spot on the North Circular with only a minor additional kink. The gas works was marked on the map as an unnamed circle. He passed sad-looking shops and agencies and then turned up a tree-lined residential street which was surprisingly quiet after the main road.
He felt oddly at home, here; Hampstead was vaguely unreal, even after six years. Here there were no cobbles, no boutiques, no one who looked as though you should know them by reputation or from a recent film you couldn’t quite place. Bounds Green must have been built around a hundred years ago for minor clerks in one great late-Victorian orgasm and then given up the fight somewhere around 1936 on a grey, drizzly day smelling of coal. Hayes had felt like that, even on their spanking new council estate. Much of London felt like that, when it wasn’t on the razzle. But Hampstead didn’t.
Real life went on here, he thought, if it went on anywhere. Which meant that stuff happened without anyone noticing, or suddenly and shockingly, or very secretly. Someone had chalked CUNT in huge letters on the bucking pavement slabs. He somehow felt he understood why. It was the land where you visited your great-aunt and then scurried home. He thought of something Howard had said about his own family back in Derby: he hoped they were insured against death by dowdiness. And then, as if to rebuke his shallow first impressions, a girl with a sharp, cheeky smile passed him carrying a cello in its case.
He came out on the North Circular five minutes after he had heard it at the end of the long, straight street. A multilane nightmare, with cars moving fast and much closer to each other than on any motorway. He had never seen it except from behind the wheel, corroded by frustration. It was even worse from a pedestrian’s viewpoint. The day was stuffy and lidded with grey, and the fumes were already making his eyes smart.
The houses on either side were set back a pavement’s width from the road. It was crazy: ribbon development gone mad. Yet the houses were respectable semi-detached jobs with bay windows and tile-lapped frontages. In the twenties, this road must have been like a quiet, calm river, set in pale concrete. Modernist, like the Tube station. You could have driven out of your garage and shot off anywhere, like a message in a suction tube. It must have been thrilling, even, living on the North Circular seventy or eighty years back. The future.
He walked towards the gasholder, which was the other side of the road and the size of the Titanic in dry dock. It was a throwback. It didn’t fit with the postmodern times of big-box stores and their convenience car parks put to shrubbery and flags. Slap bang next to the towering gasholder was the entrance to Homebase. From where he was standing, if what Howard had said was true, he might well be looking at Kaja’s house.
He leaned against the tubular rail that lightly separated the pavement from the road and felt its grime on his palms. There were no houses immediately opposite the gasholder, only a no-man’s-land with dirty-leaved trees and a litter of what looked like condoms, so he walked east again. Cars coming the other way were close enough to touch and he was conscious of their occupants staring at him, strangers and more strangers, over and over again.
Some of the houses were boarded up, their front gardens filled with rubbish, while others were clinging by their nails to respectability, their bedroom windows put to lace, their plots neatly mown or cemented over for a car. There were shops, too, if you could call them shops, but he didn’t think Kaja would be living above a shop: Howard would have mentioned it. He’d have said, ‘The poor girl rents above a Chinese and is suffocated by the smell.’ Or: ‘She’s woken horrifically early by the delivery men, of course.’ Or perhaps not.
The more houses he passed, still in view of the gasholder, buffeted by the noise of the North Circular’s traffic, the more he realised how hopeless his mission was. Howard always exaggerated for effect. She might well live down the street he’d come up, or the one next to it. Immediately ‘opposite’ the gasholder there was nothing residential. So there was already a discrepancy. Did Kaja exaggerate? She might have done; she might have said to Howard, ‘I’m very close to an enormous gas tank next to a big store called Homebase.’ It was strange, imagining her voice, her decent English with its Estonian lilt, putting words into her mouth. He felt he was creating her in some way.
He suddenly wondered what the hell he was up to. He was sweating from the heat, because it was hotter here than in Hampstead – artificially hot. It was cooking in fumes. He was getting poisoned by the filth. Milly would know which poisons, what filth.
The last words Kaja had said to him were: ‘I think you will come back before you forget me.’ Six years ago, that was. With a view of the Bay of Finland.
A lorry the size of a house belched black diesel smoke over him as it set off from the
lights. He could no longer see the gasholder. He had gone much too far. He could make enquiries, but that might get back to her and she would grow suspicious. He didn’t know what she felt about him. Whatever she felt, she would interfere in some way with his marriage, with his life. Blow it all up. He’d turned and was walking back, now, making not much less headway on foot than the cars and trucks and excruciating motorbikes. How the hell did you come out of one of these houses in your car? Boldly, or inch by inch?
Near a footbridge over the railway, the pavement spread out to a fence and three blokes lounging among green shards and crushed cans. They called out to Jack as he passed, and one of them, in ripped-up Belgian Army gear, caught up with him and asked him for change, walking adroitly backwards as Jack carried on shaking his head. He didn’t want his head bounced off the pavement, and so kept smiling. The man, who was missing teeth between his sunken cheeks, gave up and shouted after him, ‘I know what you’re fucking thinking, fuckface,’ and the others laughed.
Jack wasn’t sure what the guy had thought he was thinking, but it wouldn’t have been what he was really thinking, which was a muddle of fear and sympathy.
He got to the street he’d come up, a few blocks before the main road that ran back past the Tube. It was a massively overused junction, the main road carrying on over the other side, past the gasholder and Homebase. He tried a few doors. This was dangerous, because it might well be Kaja answering the bell. In which case, he would accept his destiny. His heart hammered each time he knocked or rang. It was a bit like hearing the phone go off at home, since Howard’s visit. From two of the houses there was no answer. A third yielded a young Asian girl in a sari, who shrugged her shoulders shyly and smiled. The door was on its chain. All he saw behind her was a thick, flocked carpet. The fourth was answered by the frenzied barking and snarling of several dogs. There was a card taped under the bell: Hypnotherapist. Past Life Regressions. Spirit Releasement. Give Up Smoking. He felt quite tempted.
The fifth, reached by squeezing between a supermarket trolley and sheets of warped plywood, had him chatting with a podgy, thickset bloke in a stained white T-shirt and shorts – a friendly Londoner who wanted to help as best he could and who gave Jack a long, tedious description of an accident that had taken place a few doors up last month and the inability of the powers that be to improve the safety of the local residents. He was clutching a can of White Stripe, shouting over the traffic noise. Jack could see the telly on in the front room. The guy had an almost misshapen face, and Jack wondered briefly what it must be like being this man, as he went on and on in a smell of socks and stale fries.