We sat and talked as Mokomo prepared dinner in the background. We discussed the current state of politics, the anti-austerity protests of the previous autumn and the death of the counter-culture, the coalition government, London and its smirking, constantly changing face. I say discussed, but mostly he talked and my eyes flickered around the room, taking in the Eastern art and marijuana plants and back copies of the Guardian, and wondering if he knew he was a cliché or thought his way of living renegade and unique. I explained my departure from university, and he looked momentarily disappointed before joshing about having brought me up with a healthy disrespect for structure and authority. I’ve been anxious and depressed, I said. He replied that this was a rational response to late-stage advanced capitalism.
‘No, Daddy,’ I said, putting a hand on his arm. ‘I went back to Longhope, after leaving,’ and he raised his eyes to mine and shook his head almost imperceptibly to mean, later, not while she is here.
We were able to talk freely only after our dinner of homemade pizza (toppings foraged from the garden, naturally) and a big fat joint that saw Mokomo retire to their bedroom, bidding us goodnight. We sat in what he called his study, though what exactly it was he studied and to what ends had always been a mystery to me. He poured us some elderflower champagne that he had made and began rolling us another spliff. I watched the expert movements of his fingers as he wetted the Rizla and rolled that breed of three-skin joint that no one knew how to make any more, thanks to the introduction of king-size papers, an innovation that my father had always regarded as cheating.
‘I know about Harmony’s death,’ I said, as he twisted the end and handed it to me to light (he always let me do this, even though he always rolled). I inhaled sharply, three times. ‘I remembered it. And Coral and Mum confirmed it.’
Bryn coughed to hide his surprise, then shifted in his seat, looking embarrassed.
‘Hiding it from me wasn’t exactly the best way forward. I’ve been having nightmares, panic attacks . . . if I hadn’t met Coral I might never have realised why it was happening.’
‘Coral is still there? Blimey.’
‘She’s in a bad way. Drink.’
‘That’s sad.’
‘Not as sad as what happened to Harmony,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘We haven’t exactly had a close relationship in recent years,’ said Bryn. ‘Plus, I let your mother decide what to do about all that.’
‘You used her,’ I spat, hot smoke burning the back of my throat. ‘Aren’t you embarrassed?’
‘With all due respect, Harmony, you don’t have a clue what you are talking about.’ He frowned at me. ‘What have Stella and Coral been saying, exactly?’
‘Just the truth. About your whole free love bullshit, which was, by the way, about twenty years out of date even in the eighties. Nice work keeping up with the times.’
He was shocked into silence.
‘Very convenient philosophy that, isn’t it? Allowing you to have sex with much younger women, not caring when you knock them up. Leaving Harmony to suffer alone.’
He looked pained. ‘I didn’t know she was pregnant, or that she had miscarried. I only found out at the funeral. I’ll never forget the look Coral gave me when she told me, as we walked away from the church yard.’
His eyes were watery. I actually thought he was going to cry. The only time I had seen him do that before was when the cat died.
‘And if by free love, you mean the fact that I don’t believe in monogamy, then yes, you’d be correct. But everyone involved was consenting. You can’t really understand unless you were there. When we moved in, in the early seventies, we wanted to form a new type of community. A new way of living, and loving, and bringing up children, communally. Which includes you, by the way. You had a house full of parents, don’t you feel lucky to have had that?’
I didn’t say anything.
I knew what he meant, in a way. There were always people in the house, and they cared for me, certainly. But most of the adults were around only as vague, shadowy presences – they cooked your dinner and they put you to bed, but it wasn’t the same as the bond I shared with Stella, Bryn and Harmony. A child can only take in so much, after all.
‘I don’t remember Stella saying that you changed any nappies.’
Bryn sighed, and reached out and stroked my cheek with his thumb.
‘You’re my only daughter and I love you very much, but I’ve never been good with children. Or at least, I was never made to feel as though I was. I always tried to show you that I loved you, and to treat you as an equal, give you the respect that you deserve as an intelligent being.’
‘But that’s the thing, Dad,’ the last word as loaded as one of his bongs, ‘we’re not equals. I’m the child. I. Am. The. Child.’
I was shouting now, despite feeling slightly ridiculous.
‘Harmony, you are not a child. You are twenty-five.’
‘You’re a misogynist.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘With all your women. It’s pathetic. It was all free love for you. But not them, oh no.’
‘That was their choice.’
‘Of course. Of course it was their choice.’
‘I’m not a misogynist. Do you think Mokomo – a feminist – would be with me if I were?’
‘I doubt Mokomo can even spell the word feminist, to be honest.’
‘Don’t talk about her like that.’
I was standing now, while he remained seated. I felt a fury that was foreign to me, but at the same time there was a pleasurable electricity to it. I felt alive with livid possibility.
‘Why couldn’t you just be normal parents? Why couldn’t we just live in a normal house, with you in normal jobs, doing what parents are supposed to fucking do rather than all this insane hippy bullshit that has by the way totally messed me up, not that you give a shit. You’re too busy following your sainted ‘principles’ to care about anyone around you. And someone ended up dead, because you just couldn’t help yourself. You had to go and seduce her.’
Bryn spoke in a measured tone. ‘I did not seduce her. The thought of having a family seduced her. She was a lost soul.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘It’s true. And I loved her very much. She was a wonderful young woman, and particularly great with you. She mother-ed you more than Stella, in the early years. That’s what she couldn’t stand, actually, it wasn’t just about losing Stella and me, it was about losing you, too, it was about the break-up of the house. For us, it was the natural end of an era. We were sad, but in many ways it was time to grow up and take some responsibility. She didn’t feel the same. That house had become everything to her.’
‘So it’s my fault.’
‘I’m not saying that. But you have to understand, it was a different time. We gave it a go but after having you we quickly realised that we wanted something more private, more stable. I wanted to make your mother happy. I don’t see what’s so misogynistic about that. I resent that accusation, in fact. We used to take in lots of single mothers, actually, with their children, who had left their violent partners. Bit of an occupational hazard with communes – you end up with people who have nowhere to go. But we could never say no, we always tried to help them. Harmony had been through the ringer, what with the strike. And Longhope made her happy, but it had to come to an end.’
‘Why?’
‘A multitude of reasons. I think – and I hope you don’t find this patronising and if you do I really don’t mean to be – but you’ve always glamorised Longhope a bit. I know you have problems with the way we brought you up but I can see secretly you’re quite proud of it. It gives you a touch of bohemianism perhaps, and sets you apart from your peers . . . ’
‘Oh, please.’
‘Hear me out. You need to realise that it wasn’t like that. We had to have a cleaning rota. There would be furious arguments about whether or not we should be vegan or vegetarian or macrobiotic or whatever.
No one ever did the washing up, or if they did they demanded a parade afterwards. Once one of the mothers blew a gasket because Harmony gave you all beans and fish fingers for tea. We had to ask her to leave. Mikey D was off his face on drugs all the time and sometimes used to leave them around within reach of you all. Fleur had furious arguments with her boyfriend where she threw things across the room. And there were always, always people there. Never any privacy at all. Most of them we didn’t even know where they had bloody come from. It was like a temporary holding pen for the lost and directionless.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘Why do you think I live with Mokomo now? Just the two of us? Yes, we have people come and stay for retreats and storytelling workshops, but I just couldn’t run a commune full-time. It didn’t work.’ He took another toke and gestured to me, and I sat down again. ‘And by the way, I don’t believe that humans are meant to be monogamous. That’s never been a line of thinking that has held much sway with me, and it’s why it never really worked with your mother. It’s not really in our nature. But what I will say is that it is a hell of a damn sight easier.’
I laughed, but he wasn’t joking.
‘For what it’s worth, sweetheart, I am sorry that Harmony died. And I’m sorry that your mother and I weren’t honest with you about it. We blamed each other, and that was difficult. And most of all, I’m so sorry that we left you alone with her and that you had to see her . . . doing that. I’ll never forgive myself for that.’
I reached out a hand and put it on his shoulder. There’s something about seeing your dad cry, even if he hasn’t been all that good a father. But there he was, in front of me: my rubbish dad, and I didn’t have another one.
We stayed up for the rest of the night talking, not amicably, exactly, in fact the whole exchange was fairly challenging, but with a newfound comradeship. He saw me, and I started to see him, not as a hero or a villain in a children’s story as I had had it, or as the prisoner of uncontrollable events he was in his version, but as a man with flaws. He had disappointed me, and I loved him. The two would have to coexist.
He drove me to the station the next day in his beat up old van. I didn’t want to hang around. For a start the weather was atrocious, but I was also keen to get back to Josh, a man who didn’t look at me with an expression that implied I was some strange unidentifiable creature, but with a soft familiarity coupled with a healthy helping of wry scepticism. I suppose what you need the most in that other person, if you are fortunate enough to find him or her, is an ability to cut through the mythology you have created around yourself and really see you.
Bryn walked me onto the platform and we hugged goodbye.
‘You really should sort out that house of yours,’ I said. ‘Or else one day they’ll find you crushed beneath a mountain of stuff.’
‘I think we know that is never going to happen,’ he said. ‘But speaking of stuff, I thought you’d like to have this.’
He handed over a large brown envelope that was stuffed almost to bursting.
Once I had found my seat, I emptied it out onto the folding table in front of me. Letters. One for each day that Stella and I had been away from him. Letters pleading for us to come home, saying how much he missed us. Messages he posted to me and saved from the house, written in childspeak, saying Daddy loves you, Daddy will see you soon. I spent the rest of the journey reading them, and cried properly and hideously and without shame, almost all the way to London.
Then, at the bottom of the pile, a small, rather kitsch card with a rainbow set against a blue sky peppered with cartoon clouds, and a small smiling yellow sun not unlike the one on the side of that old squat that I had loved so much when I was little. It read: ‘You are my sunshine’, and inside, in a childlike hand, was written ‘Gabriel’, and three kisses.
It wasn’t difficult to find him. Stella passed on Vita’s phone number, and as soon as I arrived back in London I called her from a payphone and took the underground down to Brixton. I hadn’t been watching the news, and my phone had run out of battery several days before, so when I emerged from the train and was met with the eerie silence of the station I was completely unaware of the chaos that had already begun to sweep the city. ‘You should probably get yourself home, love,’ said the solitary member of TFL staff hovering by the ticket machines. ‘Take care.’
The absence of any music struck me as strange. There was always music at Brixton station. The year before I had watched smiling as three beautiful teenage girls clutching cans of beer danced to the beat of a steel drum, laughing as their skinny limbs flailed carelessly, and the gathered crowd applauded in the drawing dusk. All I heard this time as I mounted the stairs were the sounds of smashing glass and police sirens. As I came out of the exit, something lobbed from the other side of the street made contact with the window of the adjacent Sainsbury’s, and I jumped. There were no cars on the high street, just groups of teenagers in dark clothing clustered in groups, their faces covered. Half the shop windows had been smashed up, the pavement and road iced with broken glass that crunched beneath feet as a couple of kids rushed to help themselves to the stock. Towards the Ritzy cinema I saw what seemed to be a large bonfire, framed by dark figures flickering. A few people stood back, watching from the relative shelter of the station, but apart from the looters running back and forth the street was mostly deserted.
And there, in the middle of this war zone, was Gabs, in jeans, white trainers and a Grandmaster Flash T-Shirt. Two decades later and I’d have known those eyes and those smooth, chubby cheeks anywhere. His face broke out in a massive smile when he saw me walking over. When I reached him, I threw myself upon him, feeling the lithe tightness of his muscles beneath the cotton as his arms enveloped me. I was crying hard, and it was only after several minutes of this that I noticed that he was crying too, and that we should probably get out of the way or else we would be hit by the car that was pulling out, its boot loaded up with half the stock of Curry’s.
‘Let’s head to mine,’ he said. ‘Can’t stay here. They’ll arrest me. Though to be honest I could do with some new trainers.’
‘Those look pretty box fresh to me,’ I said, and he grinned.
As we walked, he explained that a man had been shot by police, and that there were riots all over the city. ‘But to be honest, it was only a matter of time. It’s been bubbling for a while.’
I had never seen London looking like this, lawless, anarchy crackling in the air. The sirens were deafening, but I didn’t feel frightened. Gabs and I had seen worse than this.
Vita enveloped me in her bosom as soon as she opened the door of the flat. ‘I told him not to go and fetch you,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want him getting stopped and hassled, or arrested’ – a silent ‘again’ – ‘but the boy wouldn’t listen, he never would. Come here, let me look at you. I can’t believe how big you are.’
We sat in the small living room as Vita busied herself in the kitchen, the stern cadence of BBC news announcers booming from the radio. ‘You’ll have to stay the night,’ she shouted through the hatch. ‘I’m not letting you back out there darling. Your mum would kill me.’
‘You can stay in my room, with me,’ he said, and we exchanged a look.
We talked of many things that night, Gabs and I, of that summer together, of what we had been doing since. Gabs was a student at Camberwell, but had struggled with depression on and off since his teens.
‘What happened was never a secret in this house,’ said Vita, as we sat around the tiny table, her hands clutching one each of ours as though in a circle of prayer. ‘We talked about it whenever you raised the subject, didn’t we darling?’
‘Yeah. And maybe it helped. I dunno. I spend months in my room, sometimes. At school . . . didn’t want to see my mates, or chase after girls. Smoked a lot.’
Vita clicked her tongue against her teeth.
‘When I get that way, it’s like there’s a part of me missing. Some vital organ. I’m not sure if our way of handli
ng it was better or worse.’
‘Just different,’ I said. ‘I was never depressed, but I felt separate from everyone. It’s only now that I can see how lonely that was.’
Vita squeezed my hand. ‘And what will you do now? Gabs is teaching drawing, one day a week.’
‘They wanted to put me on workfare. Make me stack shelves at Poundland for my benefit.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, in answer to her question. ‘Go somewhere abroad, maybe. Get some sun. Have an adventure. I can’t just be a waitress forever. And London feels harsh to me now.’ I nodded towards the window.
‘It’s not the same city,’ said Vita. A siren somewhere outside blared as if in response.
‘By the way, I’ve got something to show you.’ It was the card he had given me. Vita roared with laughter and said he had always been a smooth talker. ‘Your first girlfriend,’ she goaded. ‘The first of many.’
I couldn’t keep my eyes away from his face, and he could barely speak for smiling, and so eventually long after midnight she left us like that, bathed in the warm light of the kitchen, speaking softly to one another, drunk on our pasts and several cans of Red Stripe, until the fingers of sleep engulfed us and we curled, fully dressed, into one another on the faded sofa.
Coral died that autumn, her liver packing up as she had always said it would. Josh and I were the ones who found her, slumped in her armchair as though asleep, the door ajar: a hint that she had known and wanted to be found in good time. As I stood there, looking around her decrepit flat, anywhere but at her bloated face, I felt glad that she died knowing someone was around. She may have been a rude, cantankerous addict, but I had grown fond of her.
Her death came as a surprise to no one. What did, however, were the details of her estate. She left the house in Longhope Crescent entirely to me. I discovered shortly after the funeral that she had owned the entire building – bought for £50,000 from Islington Council in 1993 – and had amassed a not-insubstantial fortune as a result of the income from tenants. ‘That dark horse,’ said Josh, in a low whistle. ‘You think you’ve got the measure of someone.’
The Tyranny of Lost Things Page 23