I read it out and asked the boys what it meant.
‘It don’t mean nothing, boss,’ Kevin said. ‘It’s a song.’
I googled Random later. Somebody called him a leading exponent of anarcho rap. There was a link to the title track of his new album. The party’s over. Get off your well-fed arses and on your feet. We’ve burst your pretty balloons. Randomocracy is in the street.
He looked like the enemy – it was the end of my party he was celebrating, the bursting of my balloon – but as a class warrior I didn’t take him seriously. We were both riding the same wave.
I was always good at pushing things out of my mind and dealing with what was in front of me. But I’d never really shaken the thought of Penny in that squat. I felt bad about her. And my life had changed since then. I was feeling more sure of you, Caro. The recession had slowed me down, but it had also given me Talgarth Hall on a plate. I had a sense that I’d arrived somewhere. And Penny was family. So I tracked down Random’s agent and emailed a message for Penny with my new number telling her I’d like her to call.
We met for a drink. I almost didn’t recognise her, walked right past her table looking for the same rat’s nest hair and refugee dress I remembered from her squatting days. She’d dyed her hair silver blond with a pink forelock. She was bubbling with excitement. I asked her where she was living and she said Random was renting a flat with a recording studio in the basement and for now she was living there with other members of the band, and Random sometimes, though he had his own place. But they had plans, her and Random. He just had to finish with his girlfriend.
‘And you’re a singer now?’
‘I’ve always been a singer, Jase. It’s just no one ever noticed before. We weren’t supposed to sing in Hebron, remember. Random’s about the music but about so much more than the music. Random’s got something really important to say.’
What I’d never noticed was how good-looking she was, my kid sister. And there was something fierce about her that made you pay attention even when she was talking crap.
She wanted us to get together, the four of us. I said OK, on condition that she didn’t talk about the Jesus bus. I explained that as far as you were concerned I’d lived in Southwark until my Dad died and my mum had taken up with Derek. Penny said she’d finished with all that anyway, never thought about it. She was making her own life. Sod Caleb and sod Jesus.
So we met in that pub in Borough Market. Random was a performer and I saw how you took against him, Caro. You were kind to Penny because she was my sister and because you were a kind person. But Random pressed all the wrong buttons. ‘You so fine, Caro-line’ wasn’t the kind of flattery you were susceptible to. I watched your eyes roll and glaze over. Me he called the Argonaut, which I didn’t mind. It was a step up from Tory wanker anyway. He had a nickname for Penny too. You thought he was calling her Masha, and asked if it was Russian. He laughed. ‘Russian, that’s good. She might be Russian. She might be from Paraguay. That’s why I call her Mash-up because she come from all over, you know, bit of this, bit of that. She my mongrel queen, my riverside penthouse life-on-the-street scene, my going-some-place has-been. She a champagne and caviar backroom piss-up. Gotta get real, gotta fess up, she my hard living, feather bed, down and dirty, pristine mash-up.’ He’d do that, without asking anyone’s permission – break into words. And then he’d laugh enough for everyone. His accent was hard to place – two parts Peckham, one part Caribbean, with a dash of something more exotic – Tonbridge, maybe. I had him pegged as a fraud from the start. I couldn’t help liking him though. He was just making his way in the world. No different from me. It was just that I sold property, while he sold himself, or some version of himself. That’s what we did back then, when there was a world to make your way in. We lived on our wits. And he was being nice enough to Penny, so I liked him for that. I’d run out on her twice, which so far he hadn’t. I was happy for him to put on whatever face worked for him.
Afterwards we walked through the market to the station. You led the way, eager to get home. Random kept pace with you, knowing he’d failed to charm you, not ready to give up on an audience. Penny and I trailed behind, wandering among the iron pillars.
‘Remember,’ I said, ‘you can always come to me if you need help.’
‘Why would I need help? Random loves me. He’s excited about our baby.’
‘Jesus, Pen, you’re not pregnant are you?’
‘Why shouldn’t I be? I’m old enough.’
‘And Random’s the father?’
‘Obviously.’
‘And you think he’s going to stick around?’
She stopped walking. ‘You’re a real shit, you know that?’
‘I’m just looking out for you.’
‘I don’t see you for years and then you crap on my life, on everything I’ve got.’
‘What you’ve got is great. It’s what you’re going to have when this baby is born that worries me.’
‘He loves me, Jase. He’s my family now. He’s done more for me than you ever did.’
‘And what about his career?’
‘Our career, you mean – his and mine and the band’s. You see, we don’t think the way you do. The whole money system’s on the way out, by the way, the whole property thing. Then you’ll be the one needing help.’
‘Yeah, come the revolution. Meanwhile family values aren’t exactly an asset in his line of work, are they. It’s not like he’s a vicar or an MP. His life isn’t meant to be tidy. He doesn’t call himself Random for nothing.’
She called me a bastard and a mean-minded capitalist fuckhead and some other things I couldn’t hear for the train screeching overhead.
Later I put a cheque in the mail with a note telling her to buy something nice for the baby. I got a text saying ‘ta bro’. After that she blipped off my radar.
Agnes
What have I done? I heard his bones break. Unless it was the branches breaking under him to slow his fall. There was a cracking anyway that held my heart from beating until it must race to catch up. It was a long fall and I’d never have had the strength to do it, but he stood on the edge of the road where it rises on stalks above the forest.
There are walls in perfect lines on either side, and places where the road has crumbled and the wall has fallen away, or the wall arches through the air and nothing under it.
It was a long fall. How long I don’t know with the trees in leaf, the green roof sagging under him to sway up again once he was gone.
I think he’s dead. Or I wish him dead but think the branches saved him. He may be dead whether I wish him dead or not. I hope he doesn’t lie broken for wolves and crows to find.
It was night still when I heard him on his horse come after me. I was on the high part of the road and nowhere to hide, no shadow to stand in and a staring moon. I was walking, leading Gideon by the reins. He shouted to me and said he’d ridden hard to fetch me back.
‘Ride all you want,’ I told him, ‘I won’t come.’
He dropped from his horse and came closer. I thought even then he would beg me to claim him from himself, to lead him by the hand to my father’s cottage, as if I had come that night to his calling and we’d slept, and just then woken dew-stained in the woods, blushing at muffled footsteps and laughter and the primrose petals falling from our hair.