The shops were busy with families out returning unwanted presents, spending their gift vouchers or examining the sales racks. We moved slowly, always peering around heads or jostling for space between bags and buggies and elbows. Whenever we reached the centre, I huddled into Barbara’s wake, hiding from the boys sitting around the edge of the fountain. They were leaning over in brand-new sports tops and trainers, close to the water – fishing out coins or blowing the paper skins off straws in a private competition.
We rode the escalators upwards and waited outside the men’s on either side of the door like two stone lions. Barbara asked a man to go in and check the cubicles. We waited.
‘He was all right this morning, wasn’t he?’ I said.
‘Fine. Fine,’ said Barbara.
The man we asked to help took ages. I thought about urinals, rows and rows of them lined up like seats in a white porcelain auditorium. And rows of men, too – standing with their hands in front of them, moving the weight from one foot to another, the way I sometimes saw them in the bus station alley, or down the back end of the park. The idea was dirty and exciting and my cheeks tingled and, without meaning to, I thought about Chloe and Carl.
‘We should check the library,’ I said. ‘He’ll have gone to the library; his research.’
Barbara didn’t say anything, but rapped on the door with her knuckles and used a voice like Margaret Thatcher – pretend posh – to call through the crack. The sound echoed inside, rattling along the tiles with the smell of piss and yellow disinfectant. I peered over her shoulder but there was nothing to see except torn scraps of toilet paper sticking to puddles on the floor.
‘He’s been pestering me to take his books back,’ I said, ‘and I haven’t done it yet. I bet he’s worried about the fines. He’ll have gone in to see about it.’
‘You shouldn’t encourage him,’ Barbara said quickly, ‘it isn’t fair. His projects. All those books. The papers!’
‘What do you mean?’
Encourage. It was a new idea. I had thought Barbara and I had a kind of agreement about this. She took charge of the practical things. Changed his bed in the middle of the night, checked on him during the day when things went too quiet. Took care of the bills and his razors, complaints from the neighbours about things he tried to build in the garden. His meals and prescriptions.
I typed. I did research with him. I listened to his stories and sorted out library fines. Stuck pictures into scrapbooks. Taped things off the telly. I took it all very seriously, accepted token and sometimes not-so-token payments for my services, and it wasn’t my fault I liked my part of the deal better than Barbara liked hers. We were supposed to keep each other’s secrets, Barbara and I. I’d say nothing about the occasions when I’d come home from school and Donald would still be in his pyjamas, distressed and ravenous. Barbara would put on a video and close the door on him when Chloe came round. It was a deal.
‘I don’t encourage him,’ I said.
‘This report he’s writing. Three typewriter ribbons in a month. He tried to oil the thing with a lump of lard and I’ve had to send it to be repaired.’
‘I said I’d type it up for him at school. When we go back. I’ll do it for him at lunchtime, on the computers.’
‘That isn’t the point,’ Barbara said. She leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes. A strand of hair fell over her face and she did nothing to tidy it away. ‘You’ve got to stop condoning him. Joining in. I know you think you’re helping, but you’re not. Do you understand?’
She stood upright and looked at me. ‘Lola? You know it’s all in his mind, don’t you? This trip he thinks he’s going on. Making money out of his idea? Glow-in-the-dark shrubbery? You know it isn’t right, don’t you?’ She looked frightened.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘all right. He’s just making it up.’
She sighed. ‘Not making it up. Your father isn’t a liar, Lola. He thinks it’s all perfectly reasonable. That’s why he’s taking so much time over it. It needs to be just right. But it isn’t—’ she cut herself off. ‘Let me put it this way. It would hurt him, very badly, not to be accepted onto this mission – not to get to talk to the scientists about his big idea, wouldn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘sure. He’d be gutted. That’s why I’ve been—’
‘No,’ Barbara said firmly. ‘That’s encouragement. If you care about him, you won’t be helping him to make it better – you’ll be distracting him from it. Getting him to think about other, more ordinary things. Saving him from the disappointment.’
A man came out of the toilets then – the man who we’d asked to help us. He was drying his hands on the front of his jeans and looked surprised we were still there.
‘My husband?’ Barbara asked. The man shrugged and walked away without even looking at her properly.
‘Come on,’ she said, and tugged at the sleeve of my coat. ‘We can’t stop looking. He could be anywhere. We’ll talk more about this later.’
We found Donald in WHSmith. Barbara saw him through the window and pulled me inside. He was crouching over a pool of spilled newspapers, the rack at an angle behind him. Donald murmured calmly as people stepped over the mess. He was struggling to put the pages in the right order and every page looked the same: pictures of the half-frozen river, the leafless, whitened trees, the bundled kids sliding down hills on metal tea-trays, reams and reams of closely printed columns about global warming.
I saw his neat fingers shuffling over the pages and heard the whisper of the paper. His head was bent forward and the bald patch on his scalp was shiny and humiliating. Barbara pushed past me and knelt beside him to fold the papers, working slowly, saying nothing, bumping her shoulder against his.
I hesitated on the mat in front of the automatic doors, feeling them slide close and bounce open behind me, the electronic sensor under my feet not sure what to do with a weight that hesitated so long.
Are you staying or going?
The draught at the back of my neck was icy.
I was thinking about Chloe again – of course. I’d stopped imagining her and Emma at the New Year’s party now – the booze, the streamers, the late-night trip out in Carl’s car. Now I was thinking about when I’d see her next – how I was going to approach her. I’d almost decided to pretend I’d forgotten about her because I’d been whisked away to a last-minute party of my own. It would have been transparent and ridiculous. Chloe would have smirked and then let me tell my story as if she was doing me a favour. Emma would have openly laughed and passed me the packet of photographs – her and Chloe in party dresses, hair up, doing ‘Auld Lang Syne’. Even worse if they walked past WHSmith and saw me kneeling on the carpet with my whole family, fumbling with newspapers while the shop assistants stared.
The doors bumped closed, and then opened again behind my back. Barbara looked up.
‘Go home,’ she said quietly. ‘Go and peel the potatoes and we’ll be with you shortly.’
I went.
Chapter 9
The buzzer sounds.
It is a thrumming, crackling noise that I cannot stand. The casing on the intercom unit isn’t screwed down tight and the plastic rattles against the wall and the noise rattles around the flat and right into my teeth and skull. It’s horrible but I’ve never done anything to fix it because I don’t get people coming round that often.
I turn away from the television and scramble towards the hallway. I pull my hair straight and brush Dorito crumbs off my jumper. My teeth will be grey and blue with wine, but tough.