‘It’s Mrs. Arnold, actually. Have a nice day, Miss Bloom.’
Lana lets herself fall backwards and smiles. She feels a wild surge of joy inside her. He has not changed his mind. It seems almost impossible to imagine but she has pulled it off. Raised the money. Her mother will go to America. Still, she never expected such competence or thoroughness. This is more like a business takeover than the simple transaction she had envisaged. Naively, she had thought up the oldest scheme in the book, imagining visits to seedy hotels or an odd-smelling flat somewhere in London, probably Soho, but with brutal efficiency he was drawing up her reality to mirror his unemotional world where everything is black and white, and every effort must be made to stop any sort of grey in the form of confusion or disorder creeping in.
She glances at her beside alarm clock. She must have been more tired than she had realized. It is already nine thirty even though it is another grey day outside. She holds her tender head in her hands. A couple more paracetamols should do the trick.
She sits up and looks down upon herself. The orange dress is badly crumpled. The details of last night are fuzzy. Only the kiss remains crystal clear. She lies back on the bed, closes her eyes and remembers his eyes—how unaffected he was. If not for that pulse drumming madly in his throat she would have thought he had felt nothing. Eventually, she can no longer put off meeting her mother so she drags herself out of bed and pads to their shared bathroom. The tiles are sickly green and one or two are cracked, but everything is sparkling clean.
She takes off the orange dress and carefully hand washes it in the sink. She wrings it out, hangs it inside the bath, and gets in it herself. She turns on the shower head, and holds the warm stream over her body. When she comes out, she feels like a new person. She slips into clean underwear and dresses in jeans and a white shirt. Then she combs her hair, ties it into a ponytail high on her head and with a last look in the mirror she goes into the kitchen.
‘Morning, Mum. How are you feeling today?’
‘Today is a good day.’
Lana smiles brightly at her mother. Both look forward to the good days. The good days are what keep them going.
‘Didn’t you have to go to work today?’ her mother asks.
‘Nope. Got fired yesterday.’
Her mother shoots her a surprised, worried glance. ‘Sit down. I want a word with you.’
Lana sits and her mother puts a bowl in front of her. ‘Is this man really giving us the money?’
‘Unless he backs out,’ she says and pours some cereal into the bowl.
‘What’s his name?’
‘Blake,’ she says pouring milk.
Her mother sighs. ‘Are you purposely making this hard?’
‘All right. His name is Blake Barrington.’ She sprinkles two spoons of sugar on her cereal.
‘Barrington?’ Her mother’s forehead creases into a frown. ‘Why is that name familiar?’
Lana finishes chewing before she answers. ‘Because it’s that famous banking family,’ she mumbles and quickly spoons more cereal into her mouth.
Her mother gasps and sits on the chair opposite her daughter. There is something in her mother’s eyes she has never seen before. ‘How long have you been seeing him?’
‘I met him yesterday.’ More cereal gets immediately shoved into her mouth. She wants to end this conversation as soon as possible.
‘You met him yesterday and he agreed to give you fifty thousand pounds.’
‘Mmnnn.’ She makes a production of munching.
‘Why?’
‘Guess it must have been love at first sight.’
Her mother’s eyes narrow. ‘Is there something you are not telling me, young lady?’
‘Nope. The rest are all gory details,’ she dismisses cheerfully.
But her mother is not put off. She is like a hound that has scented blood. ‘How old is he?’
‘I didn’t ask, but he didn’t look a day over thirty.’
‘So he’s not an old man?’
‘Definitely not.’
‘When do I get to meet him?’
Lana slips out of her chair with her empty bowl and goes to the sink. ‘Soon, Mum. Very soon,’ she says, quickly rinsing her bowl and spoon.
Her mother sits at the table as still as a statue. ‘Does Jack know?’
‘Jack?’ Lana turns to face her mother. ‘We’re not boyfriend and girlfriend, you know.’
‘I know, I know but…’
‘But what?’
‘Well, I always assumed you’d end up with him.’
‘We don’t feel that way about each other.’
She sighed. ‘You just seem so right for each other. I always dreamed that he’d be my son-in-law.’
‘Since when?’
‘You could do a lot worse than him, Lana. He’s tall and handsome and he’ll be a doctor soon.’
‘I’m not marrying Jack, Mum. He’s like my brother.’
‘The path of true love is not always smooth,’ her mother insists stubbornly.
Lana goes into her bedroom, puts the orange coat on a hanger, picks up the orange shoes from the floor, and goes out of the door, saying, ‘Popping over to Bill’s.’
Seven
The door next to their home is open. Lana enters her neighbor’s home without knocking or calling out. The air is full of the smell of bacon cooking. A big woman wearing a faded apron in the kitchen shouts out to her.
‘Morning, Jane,’ she replies and takes the blue stairs two at a time. Billie has been her best friend since they were in primary school, and she has been taking these stairs all her life. She doesn’t knock on the door, but enters and shuts it behind her. Billie’s room has exactly the same view and dimensions as Lana’s but it has been done up in myriad colors and is perpetually messy. When it is clean, it reminds Lana of a piece of modern art. She hangs the orange coat on a hook behind the door, opens a cupboard, puts the shoes inside and closes it. Then, she carefully sidesteps over a mess of clothes and a pizza takeaway box to sit at the edge of the single bed.
Billie has her head buried under a pillow. She was born nondescript with pale eyes and mousy brown hair and given the equally nondescript name Jane, but when she was eleven years old she reinvented herself. She turned up in school one day, her hair bleached white and turned into an Afro.
‘Why have you done that to your hair?’ the bad, white boys taunted.
‘Because I like it,’ she said so coolly and with such confidence that their opinion no longer mattered. She had become a law unto herself. She changed her name to Billie knowing that it would be shortened to Bill. Then she found a tattooist in Kilburn High Street, who agreed to tattoo a spider on her left shoulder. ‘Wouldn’t a butterfly have been better? Spiders are so creepy,’ her mother worried. But more and more spiders crawled onto her back, down her thin left arm, and eventually a few small but intrepid ones began to climb up her neck. Now Bill Black has given up the Afro, but her hair is still dead white and her lips perpetually crimson.
‘Wake up, Bill,’ Lana says.
Billie mutters something. It sounds very much like fuck off, but Lana is persistent.
‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ she says, and gently shakes Billie’s shoulder.
‘What time is it?’
‘Nearly ten.’
Billie extracts her crown of white hair from under the pillow. ‘This better be good,’ she grumbles and hangs her head off the side of the bed with her eyes still shut.
‘Come on, Bill. I’ve only got thirty minutes.’
‘Pass me a fag,’ Billie mumbles, and makes a silent snarl with her lips. Lana takes a cigarette out of a box she finds by the bedside, lights it and puts it into the curve of Billie’s snarl. Billie inhales lustily.
Lana stays silent until Billie has sat up, propped up some pillows behind her, and is leaning back against them. ‘OK,’ she says, ‘did you do it?’