‘You told me a housing association owned it,’ I said.
‘I thought it did,’ said Josh, a look of wonder on his face. ‘The agency dealt with everything.’
‘I’m not surprised she employed them, actually. She barely knew what day of the week it was, bless her.’
One misty day in late October, after a short memorial service, we scattered Coral’s ashes beneath a tree on Hampstead Heath. ‘She would have preferred Stonehenge during the solstice,’ sighed Stella, and Mikey D, who looked dishevelled even in his smart funeral suit which happened to be red, let out a loud hoot of laughter. There was only a small group of mourners: Me and Josh, Lucia, Fleur, grown with two boys now, though no longer with Rufus, Bryn and Mokomo, Gabs and Vita, and Harmony’s brother, who, it emerged when we looked through her papers, had stayed in touch with Coral throughout their lives. We tried to give her a good send-off. Mikey, who greeted Bryn with a slap on the back that almost knocked him off his feet, played ‘Spirit in the Sky’ on the mandolin, and as we clutched handfuls of her ashes and released them in finger starbursts we all sang ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’, accompanied by Bryn on the harmonica and laughing through our tears.
‘She’d have liked that,’ said Stella back at the house, sipping on a glass of red, her dangly earrings chiming metallically as she spoke. Her mascara had run and she hadn’t bothered to clean it up, but otherwise, she looked wonderful in the bell-sleeved floral dress she had dug out in tribute. None of us wore black.
‘She would have liked it to see us all together again.’ Bryn clinked his mug of green tea against our glasses and put his arm around me. ‘I can’t believe the old girl was still here.’
‘I don’t think she ever really moved on,’ I said.
‘It was a colossal mess at the end, but we had some great times in this place.’ My parents smiled at each other, a temporary intimacy restored. Their initial meeting had been polite and stilted, with both taking refuge in other people’s presence. As I walked away, I heard my dad turn to her and say, ‘hey, remember when . . . ’. After reaching a polite distance, I turned and saw Stella raise her eyes to his and laugh at some anecdote or other that I couldn’t have made out, and my throat caught and my nose tingled as it struck me that one day they too would cease to be, and that all those ‘remember whens’ they’d shared, all those trips and parties and rows and mornings would fade to nothing, and I felt glad to have had the chance, just to see them standing there together, once.
Then came the job of clearing her flat, a doddle considering she owned barely anything, save for a few boxfuls of photographs that I was happy to inherit. We burned Harmony’s suicide note, which Coral had folded into eighths and kept in a carved wooden box. There was no need for it now. I knew that she had loved me; and by telling me her story Coral had fulfilled her final wishes: I would remember her. I’m not one for hippie bullshit, but keeping the note felt like bad energy.
I’d asked Mikey if he wanted anything but he told me to have it all. He was living in a maisonette in Hackney now and had set up an online group called ‘Longhope Crescent Commune 1970–1992’. ‘You should join,’ he said. ‘You might find out some more stuff.’ I declined the offer. I felt I had had enough reminiscing for a lifetime, though I hear that Bryn and Stella both remain active members.
Josh, Lucia and I planned to remain in the flat, but when I finally got around to having a survey done it was found to be structurally unsound and I was told that the whole building would need to be demolished. Coral’s final joke. ‘If anyone was going to inherit a condemned building, then it was going to be you,’ said Josh, patting me on the shoulder. But nevertheless, the sale of the land would be enough to set up comfortably somewhere else.
In early spring of the following year, we decided to leave London. An ageing photographer with links to my old department was looking for an archivist to come and sort through the chaotic back catalogue he had amassed in his house in Italy, so I volunteered myself, and Josh decided to come with me. Lucia, who had offered to stay behind in the building until the sale went through, helped me fill an entire skip, a process that was agonising at the time. All those lost things, all that history, off to the dump. Letting it go was a wrench, but afterwards I felt a lightness, and I haven’t thought of a single one of those objects since.
The day before we loaded up the car and drove away from Longhope I took one last walk along the Regent’s Canal. It was a boiling hot afternoon, unseasonably so, and I felt drunk with love for the city and the people in it. I passed the Muslim families filing into Central Mosque and smiled at the furious cockney objections of a small boy dawdling in full traditional dress, ‘We’ve been walking for ages, Dad’ as his sister, in a headscarf, clipped him around the ear. Around the back of the zoo I marvelled at the caged exotic birds and wondered whether sometimes they forget where they are and take flight, only to hit a mesh threshold thousands of metres short of where they want to be. The manicured lawns of the opulent houses around Regent’s Park spoke to me of hidden lives, lives which even Lucia – privileged though she was – had only brushed past some gilded cocktail evening. On the approach to Camden Town I saw a woman in a baggy denim shirt painting an enormous canvas, an abstract view of the scene that was vivid with colour; I pointed two lost tourists from Yorkshire in the direction of the lock, and skipped past a barge dweller swearing at his pit bull – ‘scuse my French, love’. There were the people on the bench smoking conspiratorially, their intimacy unbreachable despite the looseness of the mood, and, under a bridge, a begging hippie in a patchwork jacket, stinking of pot. As I reached Camden the crowd got thicker, the Rastas mixing with the tour groups, who sat with their containers of dodgy street food, their legs dangling along the edge of the canal and joggers wove in and out, doing their best to avoid the swarms of people jostling for the perfect photograph next to graffiti that politely read, ‘Can we have the revolution yet, please?’.
I would be sad to leave this city, but it wasn’t what it once was. It certainly wasn’t the place my parents had found when they had come here; it wasn’t even the place that I had found, and no doubt, for some stranger who arrived with a suitcase the day that we left – one in, one out, because that’s how it always goes – it is now no longer the place that they first found, either.
But as we drove away from Longhope for the last time, giddy with the freedom of movement that would take us somewhere warmer, cheaper, lighter, I gazed out of the window at the sunlit streets, and all of the Londons of the past seemed to shimmer and converge, with each house and open window and pedestrian springing from a different era as the film of the air flickered and constricted. It felt as though the city, smelling as it did of a mixture of pie and mash and weed and jerk chicken and rubbish and expensive cologne, had become, momentarily, a projection screen for all its histories, reaching back, far back into the past of its people, the hippies and punks and migrants and rappers, city workers and career politicians, cabbies and dealers and hookers, the gypsies in the underpass at Marble Arch, the woman in a mobility scooter outside the chippy, the addict grasping at remnants of scratchcards on the pavement, and Bryn and Stella and Lucia and Coral and Mikey and Josh and Gabs, and Harmony, and me. All of us just passing through.
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The Tyranny of Lost Things Page 24