by Susan Duncan
He scans the house numbers, realises he’s close to his destination and starts searching for a parking spot, but cars are banked up tighter than cans in a supermarket and most of them look as though they haven’t budged in a month. Dead leaves and broken twigs, bird shit and spiderwebs festoon them like gothic flourishes. Could almost be the car park at the Square. It takes him five minutes to shoehorn his ute into a metered parking spot two blocks away. He checks the fee and sighs loudly. Welcome to the exciting city, folks, where every time you take a step you get stung. Shouldn’t be legal to charge punters thirty-eight bucks a day to leave a car in a dodgy neighbourhood.
He carries his soon-to-be-flying mat up the dusty, leaf-littered front steps of the Victorian terrace where the New Planet Fountain of Youth teaches and fleeces the gullible. There’s not a goon in sight. For the rest of the afternoon, in the midst of forty other acolytes with painfully young faces, he sits (in excruciating discomfort) cross-legged with his eyes closed, chanting: ‘I’m light as a feather, I can fly.’ He fights hard to control an urge to grab the white-robed leader by his throat to shake some plain, old common sense into him.
Chapter Eighteen
After a twenty-four-hour stopover in Dubai, Kate’s plane lands at Heathrow airport. Almost itchy with excitement, she completes the formalities of customs and immigration and makes her way to the Underground to hop a train to Kensington. When she comes up from the bowels of the earth, she emerges into the thin daylight of Britain’s winter for the first time. She wonders whether it’s possible for a native Londoner to eat, sleep, work and play without ever being exposed to daylight. Probably, she thinks, envisaging the Morlocks from HG Wells’s The Time Machine beavering away underground and sustaining themselves by eating the tanned, healthy, lotus-eating sun dwellers from above. What sun, she thinks?
The weather is bitter. The residual warmth of air-conditioned spaces flows out of her. Cold seeps into her bones. She blinks. Pulls her jacket tighter. People pass in a hurry, huddled inside heavy coats, swaddled in scarves, gloves, knitted caps. Eyes cast down as though the pavements hold some weird fascination. She lets go of her small suitcase and drags a map out of her backpack, vowing to switch to a smartphone as soon as possible. It takes her three minutes to check directions and head in towards the small hotel where she has a room booked.
Half an hour later, she’s checked in, showered, changed and back in the busy London streets. It’s now three o’clock in the afternoon. She feels pumped with adrenalin. She knows from experience that people find it easy to politely say no when you’re calling from the other side of the world. Her brother will find it much harder to ignore her if he knows she’s come a long way to meet him. She walks off her jetlag looking for a shop where she can buy a smart phone. She purchases twenty-five pounds’ worth of calls and data.
Back in her tiny hotel room, she searches the phone database for Alexander Conway. She hits on twenty-three possible candidates and begins dialling the ones closest to the region mentioned in the letters. It is eight pm. The first seven attempts are duds. A man too deaf to hear her. A young father with screaming kids in the background. Two women who say their husbands are in their early thirties. Two answering machines where she fails to leave messages. Another old habit. Leave a message and if your call is unwanted, all future calls are screened. The seventh attempt is diverted to a mobile. This Alexander is in a bar and he’s drunk. He’s also twenty-four years old.
She falls back against the pillows in her chintzy English hotel room, where the radiator is so close to the bed the heat is burning her left leg. Crosses her ankles because once, long ago, a healer told her it captured energy in the body. Flimflam superstition of the kind her mother indulged in. The thought pulls her up short. She realises she hasn’t thought of Emily, Ettie – and only briefly of Sam – since she boarded the plane. Her old instincts and skills have kicked in. You have to stay focused to get the story. She dials the next on the list.
Her call is picked up: ‘Alexander Conway.’
‘You don’t know me, but –’
‘If you’re selling anything I’m really not interested.’ He is polite. His voice is pleasing.
Kate’s heart beats faster. On some primal level, she knows it’s him. ‘No. Nothing like that. My name is Kate Jackson. I’m from Australia and I think I may be your half-sister.’
She wants to kick herself. She’d meant to reveal a few facts. Give the man time to adjust to what might be coming. She crosses her fingers. The silence goes on and on.
‘Is our mother with you?’ he asks, after an age.
‘No. I’m alone.’
‘Kate Jackson, you say?’
‘Yes. I’m in London. If you wouldn’t mind too much, I’d like to meet you. There’s no agenda. More like closure, really. I only found out you existed a few weeks ago.’
An even longer silence.
‘So she’s dead, then, is that what you mean?’
Kate swallows. ‘Yes.’ She hears a sigh. Long and deep. She loosens her white-knuckled grip on the phone a little. Waits. She can guess what’s going through his mind at a thousand miles an hour. Is she mad? Does he need this kind of complication in his life? Where is this going? Is she after money, does she want to move in, will he ever be able to get rid of her once the door is open?
‘I’m a journalist for a financial paper – well, I was. Right now, I’m the partner in a rather wobbly old waterfront café in a place called Cook’s Basin on the eastern coast. And I am not, I can assure you, mad or after anything other than meeting you. Just so you know –’
‘Ah, so you’re a cook?’
She understands he’s looking for a link, something that connects them beyond a mother he’s never laid eyes on. She’s tempted to say yes. It would be so easy. But if she begins with a lie, where will it stop? ‘No. I’m a lousy cook. My partner, Ettie Brookbank, is the star; I wash dishes, mop floors and look after the money.’
She strains to hear what sounds like a quick laugh. Finds herself smiling, hopeful.
‘If you can navigate your way to Newbury in Berkshire in the morning, there’s a café that serves quite a good English breakfast. Not exactly traditional but satisfactory all the same.’
‘What time?’
‘Catch an express train from Paddington. The café isn’t far from the station. Say ten o’clock?’
‘Perfect. And thank you. I was afraid you might say bugger off or something.’
‘Actually, I’m a little curious myself.’
He tells her the name of the café. They exchange mobile phone numbers.
‘See you tomorrow.’
It’s only after she disconnects that Kate realises she hasn’t a clue whether he’s tall or short, dark-haired, blond or grey, fat, thin or just plain ordinary. She likes the sound of his voice, though. Substantial, middle-class British, neither too plummy nor too slangy. He has a measured warmth in his tone so she mentally pictures him in textured trousers – maybe corduroy – a conservative tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbow, lace-up shoes. She stops short of giving him a pipe with vanilla-scented tobacco.
The iron radiator gurgles and hisses and she gets up from the bed to see if there is a thermostat she can turn down. Waking in a lather of sweat isn’t going to help her jetlag. Through the window, streetlights throw pools on black streets. No one stirs. In the all-white bathroom, tiles are warm under her bare feet. She stares at her features in the mirror as if seeing them for the first time, wondering if his eyes are blue too.
London looks forlorn under a grey drizzle when Kate sets off. The streets are a moving sea of umbrellas that go up and down in a mad dance to avoid clashing and smashing. Standing on the steps of the hotel, shielding her new phone from the rain with one hand, she calls up street directions on the screen, then hoists a hood over her hair and steps out. She’s booked a seat on an earlier express train so she
can arrive way ahead of her half-brother. At the last minute, she decided to suss him out before stretching out her hand to shake his. Or should she kiss him on the cheek? She wonders: Is there a protocol for meeting a sibling for the first time?
At Paddington Station, she listens to a mind-boggling selection of ticket options before she buys a return ticket for forty-seven pounds and thirty-six pence from a worn Cockney woman with frizzy bleached hair and a mouth like a thin red slash. ‘Same day use only, luv, you got that?’ Kate nods, feels the pushing pressure of the man in the queue behind her. She steps aside and he jumps forward, harried and hassled. He gives her a look of disapproval and says, ‘Not all of us have all day.’
She ignores him. Glances at the station clock. The trip will take fifty-two minutes. If her brother looks feral, the smartest course of action would be to bolt. But she’s come too far to give up at the finishing line. Or perhaps it’s the starting barrier? She has no idea.
After twenty minutes whooshing through dimly lit tunnels, brakes squealing, wheels clanging, the train breaks into the low-hanging gloom of a British winter. The rain has stopped but the cityscape is drab and lifeless. Kate stares into bleak backyards where abandoned children’s bicycles, rusting barbecues and naked trees line up depressingly. It is all so still, she thinks, except for the neon flash of television sets in nearly every house. She whizzes through more bleak and wintry stations with long corridors of columns and waiting passengers hunched over one electronic device or another. One or two people read newspapers. If ever there was a signal that hard copy was a dying industry . . . People always need to eat, though. The Briny Café will be around long after the last broadsheet folds, the last tabloid, too. For a second she feels a wave of homesickness.
Outside the train station in Newbury, Kate finds herself in a street of quaint redbrick buildings with pretty casement windows. She follows the map on her phone to Northbrook Street where it’s market day and the street is awash with stalls selling everything from homemade jams to second-hand clothing. The stallholders are encased in puffer jackets, their hands woolly in rainbow-coloured mitts. They stamp their feet, slap their arms against their chests, and spruik like slick East End showmen. A lone busker strums a guitar and sings a song made famous by Donovan in another era. She struggles to remember the name. Something about wind. Once or twice, the sun makes a half-hearted attempt to break through the low-lying cloud. For a brilliant second, metal bits hanging from noses, lips, eyebrows and ears catch fire and the drizzle sparkles. It is still bitterly cold.
Kate finds the coffee shop easily enough. A bell tinkles when she opens the door then the central heating hits her like a hot slap. She finds an empty corner table with a view of the street and notes the red-checked tablecloth is spotless, the condiments shiny and topped up. She runs her finger along a windowpane, checking for dust. It comes away clean. A waitress bearing a striking resemblance to blonde and bosomy Big Julie, a former employee of The Briny Café, hands her a menu with a smile. Kate orders eggs, bacon, fried tomatoes and toast. ‘And a long black with a double shot.’
‘English breakfast and a strong coffee. On the way.’ The waitress scoops up the menu and walks towards the swinging kitchen doors.
To fill in time, Kate writes a list of questions. How has life treated him? Was he adopted into a loving family? Are his adoptive parents still alive? Light, social chitchat until she strikes out for the mother lode: Why did you decide to seek out your birth mother? Were you ever in touch personally? She glances into the street, checking the passers-by as if a sixth sense might help her to sniff out a matching bloodline. She sees winter-white faces, cold-reddened eyes, a few dogs on leads, people carrying old-fashioned cane shopping baskets as though they are off to buy a pound of blade steak, two lamb’s kidneys and a loaf of bread to make a steak and kidney pudding for dinner. As though fast food and supermarkets haven’t yet evolved. Kate has the disorienting feeling of having landed in another century.
She checks her watch as her order is placed in front of her. Half an hour to go. She gives the bacon, still so hot the fat is sizzling, a close look, then picks up her knife and fork and hoes in. It’s the first meal she’s had since she arrived in England and every mouthful is an exquisite explosion of the robust smoky meat, slippery poached eggs, salty fat and sweet tomato. As soon as she finishes, a man who’s been nursing his coffee on the other side of the room comes up to her table.
‘I heard your accent. Australian?’ he asks.
Kate nods, but offers nothing, thinking it’s a bad pick-up line.
‘Your name wouldn’t be Kate, would it?’
She sees a man of medium height dressed in faded jeans and a heavy cream Aran sweater over a pale blue shirt. His hair was once black but is now flecked with grey, his lean face is clean-shaven, his gaze direct. He is crisp and soft, a bundle of contrasting textures that add up to a man who seems comfortable in his skin. He has Emily’s nose. Her mouth, too, but without the twist of dissatisfaction that defined her face. His almost feminine hands belong to a man who has never known physical work.
Kate silently pushes back her chair and stands. ‘Yes,’ she says, looking into eyes that are indeed as blue as her own. ‘You must be Alexander?’
‘So, do I look a little like her?’ he asks, smiling.
Kate shakes her head. ‘Sorry. Didn’t mean to stare. It’s just that you’ve been a ghost till now. And yes, you do look like her. More than just a little.’
‘May I?’ He indicates a chair opposite. ‘I came early so I could take a good look at you before I decided whether to proceed. You obviously did the same? We were both being so careful we could’ve missed each other altogether. It would have been shockingly ironic, don’t you think?’
Kate nods, scrabbling for something to say, unable to find her voice.
He grins, and holds out his hand. ‘So now we know we’re neither lunatic nor dangerous, tell me how long you plan to be in London. How long do we have to get to know one another?’
‘A few days, that’s all. Businesses don’t run themselves and, at the risk of sounding pathetic, your English weather is pretty depressing.’
‘Well, who knows? I might make it to the other side of the world one day and look you up on your own turf. Look, I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough of this place. How about we move on to somewhere we can get a sinful pastry or a rich slice of cake and spend some time sorting out a few facts? Then we can decide whether to wave goodbye forever, no harm done and on the mutual understanding we have nothing in common beyond a woman who once made a mistake and paid for it for the rest of her life. Or we can decide we like each other, get along, might even develop a sibling fondness in time and continue with the contact. Deal?’
Kate shrugs wordlessly, won over by Alex’s easy charm. ‘One thing,’ she says, standing up and gathering her belongings. ‘What made you decide to look for Emily?’
He laughs: ‘You mean did I have an ulterior motive?’
‘No, no . . .’
‘Relax, Kate. It’s quite possible I might have wanted revenge, to upset whatever family she had, to put in a bid for the family fortune – if there happened to be one.’
‘Well, there isn’t –’ She swallows.
He holds up his hands, cutting her off, as though it’s irrelevant: ‘As it turns out, I have a very rare medical condition. I wanted to find out whether it was hereditary or just one of those things that afflict people for no reason at all.’
‘Oh.’ Kate blushes. ‘Are you worried you might pass it on to your children?’
‘Children? No. I don’t have any. Never been married. Commitment doesn’t seem to be a strong point.’
‘Well, that’s certainly hereditary.’ Kate gives Alex a wry smile. ‘Is it too rude to ask what the condition is?’
‘I’m afraid it’s not very glamorous. Intermittent fibrillation, that’s all. Had it all my life. I
t didn’t bother me when I was young. I made a point of eating properly and keeping fit. Which I still do. But as I age, I wonder whether heart attacks have been a family curse . . .’
‘Emily was completely indestructible until she had a massive heart attack, which is not the same thing, is it? And she would’ve survived if she’d gone to the doctor instead of stubbornly refusing to have a check-up.’
‘So. That leaves my father’s side of the family.’
‘Any idea who he is?’
Alex calls for a bill. ‘I was hoping you might know.’
He pays for Kate’s breakfast over her protests and they leave the restaurant together. Outside on the pavement, he reaches for her backpack. She gives it up without a word.
‘Would you care to adjourn to a typical English pub?’
‘Actually, I’m not much of a drinker.’
‘Neither am I.’
Relieved she’s not being invited to a drink-a-thon in a bid to loosen tongues and unearth deep family secrets – a journo’s tried and true formula – Kate smiles brightly: ‘I’ve always loved English pubs. What the walls must have heard from one century or another, eh?’
‘Would you like sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth or twentieth century?’
‘Anywhere warm. My toes are already going numb. Does it ever stop raining?’
‘This is only damp air. You’ll know when it rains. The whole of Britain is sodden and everywhere you go you can smell the ripe odour of wet wool and wet dogs.’
‘Ah, I wondered what that smell was . . .’ A thunderclap explodes like a cannon, the heavens disgorge a blinding torrent and they dash for an impossibly small pub called Bird and Barrel, nestled at the end of a cul-de-sac. It is crooked, uncannily reminiscent of The Briny.