‘Wake up. You look miles away.’ Laura lays a hand on her shoulder as she passes by her desk on her way to the Wealth Preservation office.
‘I’m just daydreaming,’ Violet laughs. ‘About Kenya. About what it was like coming over here.’
‘I bet it was a shock.’
‘It really was!’
Leaving Karen when she was eight to settle in damp chilly Bakewell was like being expelled from paradise. In fact for a long time, she had believed it was her fault, a punishment for some naughtiness. Her infant antennae picked up her parents’ grave looks and silences, but it wasn’t until her teens that she learned that the move was not about her but about her parents’ hopes for another baby. However, the longed-for sibling never arrived, and she grew up a lonely and over-protected only child with a rose-tinted memory of immense warmth and lushness, of a half-forgotten language and a vast sky that was blue or dramatically red, but seldom grey like this.
Grey — that’s the colour of England. As she watches from the window, a bank of cloud rolls over the sun and settles on the tall buildings around her office. A fine rain, hardly more than a mist, draws a fine veil through which she can see in the distance the outlines of the familiar City skyscrapers — the Gherkin, the Shard, the Cheese Grater — all poking their ugly stumps at the sky. Their numbers seem to increase all the time. Where do they find room for them all?
‘Listen,’ Laura taps her shoulder again. ‘I’ve just reminded Marc that I’m starting my maternity leave next month.’
‘You never even told me you were pregnant, Laura!’
‘Isn’t it rather obvious?’
‘Well, I didn’t like to ask, in case you weren’t.’
They both burst out laughing.
‘I told him you might be interested in a secondment to Wealth Preservation.’
‘Laura, you didn’t! What did he say?’
To work in Wealth Preservation, she thinks, would be like entering an exotic secret world of glamour and high finance, an exclusive community peopled by handsome bachelor billionaires with London mansions, private jets and Caribbean islands.
‘He said it was an interesting possibility.’
Berthold: Silk
I’d seldom been inside Mother’s bedroom for more than a few minutes at a time while she was alive. It had seemed an exotic secret place, a private shrine with long-dead faces transfixed in sepia, crystal glasses with sticky residues, strewn jewellery, spilled powder, dried-out nail varnish, faded silk, intimate odours, mothballs and stale perfume. As a child I had found it both repellent and fascinating. Sometimes at night it had echoed with strange and fearsome cries which, despite the pillow over my head, had leeched into my nightmares. Now it was time to empty it out and to prepare it for another resident.
Like a trespasser I picked my way through the scattered clothing, paperback romances and crumpled lingerie with a bundle of carrier bags in my hands, steeling myself to start disposing of her belongings. I threw open the window and set to work, grabbing the creased peach-coloured silk and stuffing it roughly inside the plastic bags.
I thought I was coping well by keeping myself busy but I’d barely filled two bags when a tidal wave of grief crashed over me, knocking me totally off balance. I slumped down on the bed, feeling my head and my limbs suddenly adrift like seaweed, and I let myself weep, my shoulders heaving helplessly with the rhythm of my sobs, snot dribbling into my mouth, my eyes blinded with salt.
The weeping must have exhausted me, or perhaps the sudden overwhelming fatigue was a symptom of the crushing depression that dogged me ever since … no. Stop. Don’t go there. Not now. Always on the sunny side. I slammed my mind shut to memories and tried to focus on the moment, keeping the taste of salt at the front of my consciousness. I must have fallen asleep like that on Mother’s bed, because when I opened my eyes again the sun had disappeared and a strange mottled twilight was pouring in through the window. In the far distance, I could see the sinister glint of the Shard, and in the next room Flossie was rattling the bars of her cage, calling, ‘God is dead! Ding dong! God is dead!’
She had been jumpy and unsettled ever since Mother had been stretchered out of the flat.
‘Hold on, old girl!’
I hunted in the kitchen cupboards for the bird food. The packet of seed was almost empty. Where the fuck did Mum buy it? I seemed to recall that hemp seed is mildly hallucinogenic. Maybe I should try some. I crunched one or two between my teeth then spat them out. While Flossie pecked busily, the silence in the flat flooded over me once more. I realised how utterly alone I was: alone to the bone. No one would come and put an arm around my shoulder, and say, ‘Sorry about your mum.’ No one at all. The thought was so chilling that it seemed to freeze up my tear ducts. If I let myself cry again, who would ever tell me to stop?
Keep a grip, Bertie. Food. That’s what you need. I peered into the fridge. Lettuce. Milk. Sliced bread. No butter. No tuna.
A takeaway from Shazaad’s was my only hope.
‘Curry sauce or balti, mate? Did you see Ramsey’s goal? Incredible.’
‘Curry, please, Shaz. No chillies, thanks.’
It was those few sentences of banal conversation that I was hungry for, I realised.
Apart from Flossie, I hadn’t spoken to another soul all day.
On my way back to my flat, I encountered Legless Len down in the grove. He was in a jubilant mood, wearing his Arsenal cap and spinning around in his wheelchair with a bottle of beer in his hand.
‘Did you see Ramsey’s goal?’ he whooped. ‘I wonder who’ll kick the bucket this time?’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Don’t you know? Every time Aaron Ramsey scores a goal, somebody famous dies. Obama bin Laden. Colonel Gaddafti. Robin Williams. That Apple Jobsy bloke. You name it. The Grim Reaper, he’s called. Heh heh.’ He chuckled grimly.
‘That sounds like a load of bollocks, Len, if I may say so. I mean, statistically, the chances of somebody famous dying once a week are pretty high.’
One of the problems with Len is that he is drawn towards the irrational. That’s how he ended up with a UKIP poster in his window at the last election, much to Mum’s chagrin. ‘Len, you are supporting the forces of reaction. Stick to budgies,’ she said.
‘You just see, Bert, some celeb’ll die by tomorrow, for sure.’
‘Actually, Len, my mum just died.’ I hadn’t meant to embarrass him; it just slithered out, and ended on a sniffle.
‘Lily? Oh God, I’m sorry, mate. I didn’t mean nothing. About Ramsey’s curse and all that. It’s just a joke, an Arsenal superstition. I’m really sorry. She was a lovely lady, your mum, one of the greatest. Never mind her bolshie politics, she always meant well to everybody, like she radiated sunshine wherever she went.’ He was beside himself with apologies.
‘It’s all right, Len. You weren’t to know. Just don’t spread it about.’
I was worried that the whiff of gossip would reach the council offices. One of the problems with the traditional East End communities that architects like Lubetkin had rebuilt as ‘streets in the sky’ is that everyone knows everybody’s business.
‘Listen, Bert, she would have liked this.’ He spun around in his wheelchair once more, brandishing a crumpled brown envelope like a magician who has produced a rabbit out of a hat. ‘I just got a letter from the DSS saying I’m going to have my claim for disability allowance reassessed.’
‘Reassessed? That doesn’t sound good. I don’t know why you say Mum would have liked it. She was all for the welfare state.’
‘Lily was all for welfare, God bless her, but she couldn’t stand no scroungers.’