Summer in the City Read online

  He rises from his chair and I rise from mine. I wait while he uses the bathroom then I go and brush my teeth and wash my face and gently dab Savlon on my left cheek. I know it won’t do anything. I know when I look in the mirror in the morning my birthmark will still be there, loud and proud, but hey, sometimes people are really, relentlessly stupid.

  I get into bed, place my phone on the floor to charge, and lie there with the lamp on for a few minutes. I can hear Dad bumbling round his bedroom: opening and closing drawers, getting into bed with a creak of his bedframe and setting his morning alarm on the iPad, like he always does – with the help of Siri – despite there being nothing to get up for. After I hear Dad turn his light off, I turn off mine.

  CHAPTER 4

  My sister often forgets the time difference and calls us in the middle of the night.

  ‘Prue?’

  ‘Ug?’

  ‘It’s Angela.’

  Angela has a Canadian inflection to her voice now. It’s super-annoying. I prefer it when people who run away keep their original accents.

  ‘It’s two in the morning,’ I say, leaning over and noting the time on my mobile phone.

  ‘Sorry.’

  I know she is not sorry. She’s the kind of person who does what she feels like, when she feels like it.

  ‘I forgot. Never mind, I know you don’t sleep well.’ Well, that’s true, but there’s no need to hold it against me … or disturb my sleepless hours. She always was a disturber. She would dance in front of the television if I was watching it, knowing I hate to miss anything. Sometimes it was ballet, sometimes a jazzy freestyle; sometimes it was just hopping, and always with a mischievous look on her face as I screeched and pelted KitKat wrappers at her. I’m one of those people who rewinds snatches of dialogue they’ve misheard, who has to look again at something in a drama they think might be a clue. And I hated having Worzel Gummidge danced in front of.

  ‘How are you? How’s Dad?’

  ‘He’s fine. Still blind, you know …’

  ‘There’s no need to be like that!’

  We have this same exchange every time she calls. Neither of us can help ourselves.

  ‘How are you?’ I ask flatly. I know how she is. She’s happy. She’s the only one out of the three of us who has managed it.

  ‘Great, thanks. I need to ask you a favour,’ she says chirpily. ‘Not now, of course, when you get up.’

  ‘What is it?’

  She was always one for favours, our Angela. Or Angela Pangela, as I sometimes called her. She had a way of asking them, when we were kids, that made it seem like she’d give you the earth in return; for lending her your best cardigan – the one with the robin on it – or bringing her a glass of orange squash (‘Strong, with two straws, please’) as she lolled on her bed in her candy-pink bedroom with a book about ponies, or for fibbing to Dad on her behalf about where she was last night (telling him she was round at Paula Dawson’s doing homework and not out with Mark Sinclair, the baddest boy at school, doing an underage pub crawl round Camden). She never gave the earth. She’d just say ‘thanks’ in a breezy voice and move on to her next thing.

  ‘Been up to anything recently?’

  ‘It’s two o’clock in the morning, Angela! What’s the favour?’

  ‘So? You don’t have to get up in the morning. Or do you have a job again now?’

  I sigh. ‘No, I don’t have a job.’

  ‘Thought not.’ Ah, the eternal air of superiority. She’s pretty, she’s got a career, she’s married.

  Angela was always moving on. I knew she would run away. As she approached the end of her teens you could see the waves of restlessness just rolling off her like static electricity. She plotted her escape for a year. She hung around the local community college, attended a pottery class, but mostly she lurked in the café so she could chat up wealthy foreign students who’d come to learn English; she hoped that one of them would take her away from all this. The poor sap she eventually ensnared was actually the pottery teacher – thirty-one-year-old Warren Defaille from Nova Scotia, who was returning to Canada at the end of the summer term. She went with him.

  I adjust the phone slightly away from my ear: Angela’s voice is loud.

  ‘Have you left the flat recently?’

  ‘No,’ I say. I’m not telling her about the dentist and the ‘jumper’ and the card. I never tell her anything.

  ‘Dad should see people,’ she says, after a giant tut (I don’t bother to pick her up on her terrible choice of words). ‘It’s no good for either of you, being stuck in that flat. You really should make a change, reconfigure your lives.’

  When did my little sister become so humourlessly superior? I wonder. It hadn’t always been this way. At one time we had fun. At one time I was her protector. Now I refuse to stroke her inflated ego and her younger-sister-made-good superiority. To indulge her transatlantic tripe.

  ‘So, what’s the favour, Angela?’ I repeat. ‘Is it, you know, the one about looking after our father for ever so that you don’t have to?’

  Angela sighs back at me. ‘Oh, Prue. Really? That self-pitying baloney again? You’ve said yourself he doesn’t need looking after. No, the favour is, actually, dig up a photo for me and send me a shot of it? Please. I told Warren about that picture of us on the beach in Old Leigh – you know, up from Southend – when I fell in that rock pool and got a crab on the end of my nose?’ She laughs her flute-y laugh; the one that really irritates me.

  ‘Yeah, I know the one,’ I say. And I had a massive birthmark on my face – permanently – I think. Nobody even used suncream in those days, so it would shine out like a Belisha beacon from the coast. Ships used to launch themselves at it. ‘All right, I’ll look for it. Is there anything else?’ I add. I’m beginning to get a headache and I want to go back to sleep.

  ‘No, there’s nothing else. Hey, you haven’t heard from Cherry Lau, have you?’

  ‘Cherry Lau?’ There was a blast from the past. ‘No, why?’

  ‘She found me on Facebook. She sent me a message.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yeah, she’s in corporate entertaining or something now, in Shanghai.’

  ‘Shanghai!’ Cherry Lau used to live next door to us, above her parents’ takeaway place. She was round at ours all the time, when she wasn’t working there. And when she was, I was over there. For a while.

  ‘Yeah, she looks ever so glam. Expat husband. Two children, like me. Doing ever so well for herself.’

  Like me, I think she’s going to repeat, but she doesn’t. Angela’s eventual escape was rather glamorous, too. She went long haul, flying by British Airways to Halifax Stanfield International Airport, Nova Scotia, with Warren the pottery teacher, when she was nineteen. She ended up getting a job in air traffic control at that very airport; she was one of the top people, until she had the girls – Clara when she was forty-one and Amelie when she was forty-three – via IVF. A whole life was waiting for her in Nova Scotia. Dad and I didn’t even know she was on that British Airways flight – we thought she’d gone on a girls’ weekend to Camber Sands. But she did it. She escaped Dad and me – the burden of the blind father and the ugly sister – to take off into the love story of the century.

  Bloody bon voyage, Angela!

  ‘Did Cherry ask after me?’ I say.

  ‘No.’

  I am not surprised. I did the dirty, eventually, on Cherry, the ‘funny little Chinese girl’ – as she was horribly christened at school – who lived next door and temporarily became my best friend, until I fucked things up.

  ‘You don’t ever speak to her?’

  ‘No.’ I don’t speak to anyone, I think, no one at all. And I don’t particularly want to speak to you, either, Angela. Not even every three months.

  ‘Right, I guess I’ll have to call back again,’ she says. ‘To speak to Dad … Do it as soon as you wake up, can you? The photo? I don’t mind what time it is here.’

  No. ‘Yes, OK.’

  We
used to sit and chat for hours, me and Angela. Usually on her bed, while I painted her nails and she scolded me for not doing it right. We’d laugh, too. Laugh so hard at ridiculous things until one of us fell off the bed and dragged the other with her on to the pink fluffy rug with all the gum and hairclips and jelly sweets embedded in it, and we’d lie there looking at the cracks in the ceiling and giggling at other ridiculous things until Angela got bored and would get up.

  ‘Can I leave you with something?’

  ‘If you have to. What is it?’

  ‘Be the change you wish to see in the world. Gandhi said that.’

  Unbelievable.

  ‘Bye, Angela.’

  I put the phone down, unprop the pillows and let the sheet fall loosely over me. My fanlight window is open and I can hear a police siren competing with a car alarm competing with Mr Alkazi’s alarm at the newsagent’s, which goes off between midnight and three every night. Outside the window there’s a shout for ‘Janine!’ and the barking of a disgruntled dog. The sheet is light and cool, but I suddenly feel draped in dark, dank dread, a shroud of it wrapping round me. Angela, my fun, flighty sister, has escaped. Cherry Lau is now popular and successful, sipping mysterious cocktails in mysterious bars in Shanghai. And I am tethered here with no friends, no one to tell my dark secrets or the dull truth of my life to, and how it is slipping away, day by day, nothing to nothing.

  I live with my father but I am as alone as a woman who has leapt to her death under a tube train. I had dreams once, dreams of happiness and fulfilment, long since gone. I had hoped for love, at some point, but that is now a stale joke; a joke first played on me years ago when I loved a man who couldn’t love me back. I am as blind as my father is to the world. I lie in my bed night after night, watching as shadows and slices of light slide across my bedroom window: whites, reds, yellows, greens; the blue of a police car. My view never changing. Never evolving.

  I shift my head so it’s on the coolest part of the pillow and go back to sleep.

  The next morning, before Dad stirs, I take the Transport for London card from my purse and sit at the console table by the Palladian window. Outside in the world, real people are already busy.

  ‘Hello,’ I say into my phone, feeling nervous. ‘I’m phoning up about the free counselling session.’

  I know, I know – it’s damn cheeky of me. I didn’t see the jumper. I saw nothing, except the crowded entrance to a platform and a horrendous busker. I have not been affected in any way, except giving her life some thought, and wondering about mine. I am taking advantage.

  ‘Which incident?’ says a voice that could be announcing the next train to Edgware.

  Which incident …? My entire life? ‘Er … the jumper on the tube. Northern Line. Warren Street. Yesterday. Wednesday.’

  ‘In the afternoon?’

  ‘Yes, in the afternoon.’ How many jumpers did they have?

  ‘OK. Hold on one moment, please.’ There is a muffling and a shuffling, something that sounds like a cup of coffee being stirred with a plastic spoon and a folder being dropped on the floor. ‘Next Monday, ten a.m. until eleven a.m.; 34 Princelet Street, E1. Press the buzzer for Room B. Do you need a pen?’

  I almost say, Look forget it, I don’t want to come after all, but I don’t. ‘I say, ‘No, I can remember that. Thank you.’

  ‘Good luck,’ says the voice, and the call ends. Very British, that good luck, it covers a multitude of future scenarios – although sometimes it sounds like a trap.

  CHAPTER 5

  It’s Monday. Days usually roll around like monoliths for Dad and I. Dull and indistinguishable. For some, it’s ‘Another day, another dollar’; for us, it’s ‘Another day, another day …’, but today I’m already at my second destination. My first, Loved Before, the dress agency next to the laser clinic in Muswell Hill, was quiet early this morning. I go there now and again – and not just when I’ve been to an appointment next door. I don’t frequent high-street clothes shops. They have gorgeous, unblemished girls slinking out of cubicles with smug looks on their faces; bored and beautiful women manning the cubicles. Too many mirrors. I like charity shops and this rather wonderful boutique, a haven of blush-pink walls and chandeliers and a polished dark-wood floor, where the only mirror is in the gorgeously lit changing room and I never feel intimidated.

  ‘Hi, Prue.’

  Maya, the owner, appeared from behind the swishy pale gold curtain of the back room with a mountain of delicious-looking things over one arm. I like Maya. We’ve chatted a few times.

  ‘Hello, Maya.’

  ‘One of my favourite contributors brought in lots of amazing items this morning,’ she said, walking over to me, a vision in a tangerine slip dress and bejewelled sandals. I was fingering the hem of a gorgeous lace shift dress I’d never have the guts to wear in a million years … ‘This woman’s always travelling,’ she explained. ‘She just came back from Belize. I reckon she never wears the same outfit twice.’

  Loved Before sells second-hand party wear and beautiful work wear, nothing else, and strictly no tat. Everything acquired by the shop is what Maya calls ‘lovely quality’ and has been previously owned by women who live glamorous, useful lives. Women with stories to tell. That’s how I see these women, anyway. I imagine women glittering at cocktail parties, stepping on to giant yachts with a glass of champagne in their hand, dancing barefoot on the beach on tropical nights and storming it in the boardroom in stern, sexy navy and the highest of heels, as shards of the shattered glass ceiling fall around them. Women who are literally going places. Places I would never go.

  ‘I’m here for a jacket,’ I told her. I feel a jacket will set off my usual T-shirt-and-leggings combo and make me feel a little more together for my counselling session. Or at least not such a fucking fraud. I love clothes – I’ve loved them since I was a little girl and I looked through Nonna’s giant mail order ‘club’ catalogues, marvelling at how the models could be transformed from one thing to the other just by what they wore: twinkling party-goer, tousled beach babe, efficient office girl – but I am not brave enough to wear the ones that really make my heart sing. The beautiful ones. Because I am not beautiful. I am not brave enough to go anywhere, either. And the stories I have to tell would not inspire or delight a soul.

  ‘Lots came in at the weekend. Let me show you,’ Maya said, directing me away from the beautiful dresses I can never resist looking at to Workwear, where I was ready to choose a workaday plain black office jacket, but Maya persuaded me into a smart grey hip-length blazer with white stripes, which, she said, complements my skin tone and honey-coloured hair. It’s chic, and I feel it provides me with just the right protective barrier I need.

  It’s making me very hot, though. I’m currently wearing it sitting opposite a TFL counsellor, somewhere inside a red-brick building in Spitalfields, and I have the sleeves pushed up like Simon Le Bon in the ‘Reflex’ video.

  Verity Holmes, BACP registered, accredited counsellor, is wearing possibly the prettiest pair of shoes I’ve ever seen. They are velvet T-bar, blocked-heeled sandals – in floral and polka-dot print – with burgundy bows along the T-bar and the heels wrapped in a kind of floral silk. They are amazing. She’s also wearing a full cotton skirt, white with London buses on it, which I know to be Cath Kidston, and a purple T-shirt topped with a pendulous necklace of wooden beads. She looks about thirty-five. She has nice curly auburn hair. I have my leggings and long T-shirt and flip-flops on, like I do every day in the summer, but I’ve painted my nails for this occasion, and I have the jacket.

  I’ve got Verity Holmes’s name written on a piece of paper on my lap. She gave it to me when I came in. I’m worried I should have given her something with my name on, but surely she already knows it. She tucks two sprigs of spiralled hair behind each ear; she crosses and uncrosses her legs, displaying those beautiful shoes. She’s kindly pretending she hasn’t noticed the birthmark, but I know she’s clocked it. I’ve barely given it one coat today, so Verity know
s what she’s dealing with. The hope is I won’t feel such a fraud if she can see I’m already a flawed person. That I have issues.

  I look around me. The room is less glamorous than Verity. The walls are wood-chipped beige, the carpet a sticky caramel. There’s an incongruous, slightly lopsided Betty Boop poster on one wall, one of those anodyne faded paintings of a bowl of fruit on another. A fly, over at the window, lazily trails its way up the dirty pane, fizzes a bit, then scoots down again. I randomly muse on whether Verity in her lovely shoes is going to stick any whale music on. Is that what counsellors do? Or is she going to make me hold a pink crystal in my hand for the duration?

  The fly buzzes in an attention-seeking fashion. I idly wonder if it’s the same fly that was at the dentist’s. Is it following me?

  Finally, she speaks. ‘Good morning, I’m Verity Holmes.’

  I sit back on this too-soft sofa that smells faintly of tea tree oil and gone-off cinnamon. ‘Hi, I’m Prue. Prudence. Prudence Alberta.’ I’m trying to sound perky but my voice has gone a bit husky, like I’m on sixty a day. I clear my throat. I’m nervous. I feel as though I’m in a job interview, a terror I haven’t visited for a while. Having to pretend I’m something I’m not … In the case of job interviews: a hard-working ‘people person’ who sees the cashier position in the local bookies as a long-term career progression. Today: the authentic witness to a tragic suicide. Could I conceivably stand up and say, ‘Sorry, I can’t do this!’ like they do in films? Grab my bag from the sofa and flee, leaving Verity with a startled look on her face? I don’t have the courage to do that. It takes less courage to stay and pretend I have seen some poor woman take her own life by jumping in front of a train.

  ‘So, Prudence, how are you? How are you feeling? You saw something tragic on the underground last Wednesday? Or you saw the aftermath?’

  Oh, she’s straight to it. Her romantic shoes belie her desire to get things cracking. I thought she might start with my school days, or something. I was ready with the story about the paper bag and the Tippex …