But now she was good. She and Romeo made a good team. She and Romeo and the dog. The brown dog that had become their friend and lived under a collapsed fence on the edge of the street above them. Herself in her blue sleeveless puffa over a ragged, multicoloured jogging suit, woollen hat and trainers, Romeo in his hooded top, jeans and trainers too, and the dog, which they had named Artur.
Romeo had taught her what kind of tourists were best. Elderly couples. They would approach them as a trio, she, Romeo and the dog on a length of rope. Romeo would hold out his withered hand. If the tourists recoiled in revulsion and waved them away, by the time they were gone, she would have the man’s wallet in her puffa pocket. If the man dug in his pockets to find them some change, by the time Romeo accepted it, she would have the woman’s purse safely out her handbag and in her own pocket. Or if the people were sitting in a café, they might just grab their phone or camera from the table and run.
The music changed. Rihanna was singing now.
She liked Rihanna.
The baby fell silent.
Today had been a bad day. No tourists. No money. Just a small amount of bread to share around.
Simona curled her lips around the neck of the plastic bag, exhaled, then inhaled, hard.
Relief. The relief always came.
But never any hope.
12
A quarter to six, and for the third time today, Lynn was sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, this time the consultant gastroenterologist’s. A bay window looked out on to the quiet Hove street. It was dark outside, the street lights on. She felt dark inside too. Dark and cold and afraid. The waiting room with its tired old furniture, similar to Dr Hunter’s, did nothing to lift her gloom, and the lighting was too dim. A tinny sound of music leaked from the headset plugged into Caitlin’s ears.
Then Caitlin stood up suddenly and began staggering around, as if she had been drinking, scratching her hands furiously. Lynn had spent all afternoon with her and knew she had drunk nothing. It was a symptom of her disease.
‘Sit down, darling,’ she said, alarmed.
‘I’m kind of tired,’ Caitlin said. ‘Do we have to wait?’
‘It’s very important that we see the specialist today.’
‘Yeah, well, look, right, I’m quite important too, OK?’ She gave a wry smile.
Lynn smiled. ‘You are the most important thing in the world,’ she said. ‘How are you feeling, apart from tired?’
Caitlin stopped and looked down at one of the magazines on the table, Sussex Life. She breathed deeply in silence for some moments, then she said, ‘I’m scared, Mummy.’
Lynn stood up and put an arm around her, and unusually Caitlin did not shrink and pull away. Instead she nestled against her mother’s body, took her hand and gripped it hard.
Caitlin had grown several inches in the last year and Lynn still had not got used to having to look upwards at her face. She had clearly inherited her father’s height genes, and her thin, gangly frame looked more like some kind of bendy doll than ever today, albeit a very beautiful one.
She was dressed in the careless style she always favoured, a grungy grey and rust-coloured knitted top over a T-shirt, with a necklace of small stones on a thin leather loop, jeans with frayed bottoms and old trainers, unlaced. Additionally, in deference to the cold, and perhaps to conceal her swollen, pregnant-looking belly, Lynn guessed, her camel-coloured duffel coat that looked like it had come from a charity shop.
Caitlin’s short, spiky, jet-black hair protruded above the Aztec patterned band that covered much of her head and her piercings gave her a vaguely Gothic look. She had a stud in the centre of her chin, a tongue stud and one ring through her left eyebrow. Out of sight at the moment, but which the specialist would no doubt expose when he examined her, were the ring on her right nipple, the one through her belly button and the one in the front of her vagina, the insertion of which she had coyly confessed to her mother, in one of their rare moments of closeness, had been rather embarrassing.
This truly had turned into the day from hell, Lynn thought. Since leaving Dr Hunter’s surgery this morning, then returning with Caitlin this afternoon, her whole life seemed to have been upended, as if it had gone through a seismic shift.
And now her phone was ringing. She pulled it out of her handbag and looked at the display. It was Mal.
‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Where are you?’
‘Just coming through the lock at Shoreham. We’ve had a shitty day – dredged up a corpse. But tell me about Caitlin.’
She filled him in on her consultations with Dr Hunter, all the time eyeing Caitlin, who was still pacing around the waiting room, which was about a third of the size of Dr Hunter’s. She was now picking up and putting down one magazine after the other with great urgency, as if she needed to read all of them but could not decide where to begin.
‘I’ll actually know more in about an hour. We’ve just come from Dr Hunter straight to the specialist. Are you going to be in range for a while?’
‘At least four hours,’ he said. ‘Might be longer.’
‘OK.’
Dr Granger’s secretary appeared. A matronly woman in her fifties, with her hair in a tight bun, she had a distancing smile on her face. ‘Dr Granger will see you both now.’
‘I’ll call you back,’ Lynn said.
Unlike Ross Hunter’s spacious surgery, Dr Granger’s consulting room was a cramped space, on the first floor, with barely enough room for the two chairs in front of his small desk. Angled so that they could be clearly seen by all his patients were framed photographs of a perfect, smiling consultant’s wife and three equally perfect, smiling children.
Dr Granger was a tall man in his forties, with a big nose and a thinning thatch of hair, dressed in a pinstriped suit, with a crisp shirt and a neat tie. There was a slight aloofness about him, which made Lynn think he could as easily have passed for a barrister as a doctor.
‘Please sit down,’ he said, opening a brown folder, inside which Lynn could see a letter from Ross Hunter. He then sat down himself, reading it.
Lynn took and gently squeezed Caitlin’s hand, and her daughter made no effort to remove it. Dr Granger was making her feel uncomfortable. She didn’t like his coldness, or the over-the-top display of family photos. They seemed to give out a message that read, I am OK and you are not. What I have to say will make no difference to my life. I will go home tonight and have dinner and watch TV and then perhaps tell my wife I want sex with her, and you – well, tough… you will wake up tomorrow in your private hell, and I will wake up as I do every morning, full of the joys of spring and with my happy children.
Having finished reading, he leaned forward with the faintest thaw in his expression. ‘How are you feeling, Caitlin?’
She shrugged, then was silent for some moments. Lynn waited for her to speak. Caitlin extracted her hand from her mother’s and began scratching the back of each hand in rotation.
‘I itch,’ she said. ‘I itch everywhere. Even my lips itch.’
‘Anything else?’
‘I’m tired.’ She looked sulky suddenly. Her normal look. ‘I want to feel better,’ she said.
‘Do you feel a little unsteady?’
She bit her lip, then nodded.
‘I think Dr Hunter has told you the results of the tests.’
Caitlin nodded again, without making eye contact, then rummaged in her soft, zebra-striped handbag and pulled out her mobile phone.
The consultant’s eyes widened as Caitlin stabbed some buttons, reading the display. ‘Yes,’ she said distantly, as if to herself. ‘Yup, he told me.’
‘Yes,’ Lynn stepped in hastily. ‘He has, he’s – he’s told us the news – you know – what you have told him. Thank you for seeing us so quickly.’