After You (13 page)

I put the lid on the paint. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s go out.’

‘Where?’

‘You’re the one who says I need to have some fun. You tell me.’

I pulled out a series of tops from one of my storage boxes until Lily finally determined which one was acceptable, and I let her take me to a tiny cavernous club in a back-street near the West End where the bouncers knew her by name and nobody seemed to consider for a minute that she might be under eighteen. ‘It’s nineties music. Olden-days stuff!’ she said cheerfully, and I tried not to think too hard about the fact that I was, in her eyes, basically geriatric.

We danced until I stopped feeling self-conscious, sweat came through our clothes, our hair stuck out in fronds and my hip hurt so much that I wondered whether I would be able to stand up behind the bar the following week. We danced as if we had nothing to do but dance. Lord, it felt good. I had forgotten the joy of just existing; of losing yourself in music, in a crowd of people, the sensations that came with becoming one communal, organic mass, alive only to a pulsing beat. For a few dark, thumping hours, I let go of everything, my problems floating away like helium balloons: my awful job, my picky boss, my failure to move on. I became a thing, alive, joyful. I looked over the crowd at Lily, her eyes closed as her hair flew about her face, that peculiar mixture of concentration and freedom in her features that comes when someone loses themselves in rhythm. Then she opened her eyes and I wanted to be angry that her raised arm held a bottle that clearly wasn’t cola, but I found myself smiling back at her – a broad, euphoric grin – and thinking how strange it was that a messed-up child who barely knew herself had so much to teach me about the business of living.

Around us London was shrill and heaving, even though it was two a.m. We paused for Lily to take joint selfies of us
in front of a theatre, a Chinese sign and a man dressed as a large bear (apparently every event had to be marked by photographic evidence), then wove our way through crowded streets in search of a night bus, past the late-night kebab shops and the bellowing drunks, the pimps and the gaggles of screeching girls. My hip was throbbing badly, and sweat was cooling unpleasantly under my damp clothes, but I still felt energized, as if I had been snapped back on.

‘God knows how we’re going to get home,’ Lily said cheerfully.

And then I heard the shout.

‘Lou!’ There was Sam, leaning out of the driver’s window of an ambulance. As I lifted my hand in response, he pulled the truck across the road in a giant U-turn. ‘Where you headed?’

‘Home. If we can ever find a bus.’

‘Hop in. Go on. I won’t tell if you won’t. We’re just finishing our shift.’ He looked at the woman beside him. ‘Ah come on, Don. She’s a patient. Broken hip. Can’t leave her to walk home.’

Lily was delighted by this unexpected turn of events. And then the rear door opened and the woman, in a paramedic uniform, eyes rolling, was shepherding us in. ‘You’re going to get us sacked, Sam,’ she said, and motioned for us to sit down on the gurney. ‘Hiya. I’m Donna. Oh, no – I do remember you. The one who …’

‘… fell off a building. Yup.’

Lily pulled me to her for an ‘ambulance selfie’ and I tried not to look as Donna rolled her eyes again.

‘So where have you been?’ Sam called through to the rear.

‘Dancing,’ said Lily. ‘I’ve been trying to persuade Louisa to be less of a boring old fart. Can we put the siren on?’

‘Nope. Where’d you go? That’s from another boring old fart, by the way. I won’t have a clue whatever you say.’

‘The Twenty-two,’ said Lily. ‘Down the back of Tottenham Court Road?’

‘That’s where we had the emergency tracheotomy, Sam.’

‘I remember. You look like you’ve had a good night.’ He met my eye in the mirror and I coloured a little. I was suddenly glad to have been out dancing. It made me seem like I might be someone else altogether. Not just a tragic airport barmaid whose idea of a night out was falling off a roof.

‘It was great,’ I said, beaming.

Then he looked down at the computer screen on the dashboard. ‘Oh, great. Got a Green One over at Spencer’s.’

‘But we’re headed back in,’ said Donna. ‘Why does Lennie always do this to us? That man’s a sadist.’

‘No one else available.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘A job’s come up. I might have to drop you. It’s not far from yours, though. Okay?’

‘Spencer’s,’ said Donna, and let out a deep sigh. ‘Oh, marvellous. Hold on tight, girls.’

The siren went on. And we were off, lurching through the London traffic with the blue light screaming above our head, Lily squealing with delight.

On any given week-night, Donna told us, as we clutched the handrails, the station would get calls from Spencer’s, summoned to fix those who hadn’t made it upright to closing time, or to stitch up the faces of young men for whom six pints in an evening left them combative and without any accompanying sense. ‘These youngsters should be feeling great about life, but instead they’re just knocking themselves out with every spare pound they earn. Every bloody week.’

We were there in minutes, the ambulance slowing outside to avoid the drunks spilling out onto the pavement. The signs in Spencer’s nightclub’s smoked windows advertised ‘Free drinks
for girls before 10 p.m.’ Despite the stag and hen nights, the catcalling and gaudy clothes, the packed streets of the drinking zone had less of a carnival atmosphere than something tense and explosive. I found myself gazing out of the window warily.

Sam opened the rear doors and picked up his bag. ‘Stay in the rig,’ he said, and climbed out.

A police officer headed over to him, muttered something, and we watched as they walked over to a young man who was sitting in the gutter, blood streaming from a wound to his temple. Sam squatted beside him, while the officer attempted to keep back the drunken gawkers, the ‘helpful’ friends, the wailing girlfriends. He seemed to be surrounded by a bunch of well-dressed extras from
The Walking Dead
, swaying mindlessly and grunting, occasionally bloodied and toppling.

‘I hate these jobs,’ said Donna, checking briskly through her pack of plastic-wrapped medical supplies as we watched. ‘Give me a woman in labour or a nice old granny with cardiomyopathy any day. Oh, flipping heck, he’s off.’

Sam was tilting the young lad’s face to examine it when another boy, his hair thick with gel and the collar of his shirt soaked in blood, grabbed at his shoulder. ‘Oi! I need to go in the ambulance!’

Sam turned slowly towards the young drunk, who was spraying blood and saliva as he spoke. ‘Back away now, mate. All right? Let me do my job.’

Drink had made the boy stupid. He glanced at his mates, and then he was in Sam’s face, snarling, ‘Don’t you tell me to back away.’

Sam ignored him, and continued attending to the other boy’s face.

‘Hey! Hey you! I need to get to the hospital.’ He pushed Sam’s shoulder. ‘Hey!’

Sam stayed crouched for a moment, very still. Then he
straightened slowly, and turned, so that he was nose to nose with the drunk. ‘I’ll explain something in terms you might be able to understand, son. You’re not getting in the truck, okay? That’s it. So save your energy, go finish your night with your mates, put a bit of ice on it, and see your GP in the morning.’

‘You don’t get to tell me
nothing.
I pay your wages. My
effing nose is broke
.’

As Sam gazed steadily back at him, the boy swung out a hand and pushed at Sam’s chest. Sam looked down at it.

‘Uh-oh,’ said Donna, beside me.

Sam’s voice, when it emerged, was a growl: ‘Okay. I’m warning you now –’

‘You don’t warn me!’ The boy’s face was scornful. ‘You don’t warn me! Who do you think you are?’

Donna was out of the truck and jogging towards a cop. She murmured something in his ear and I saw them both look over. Donna’s face was pleading. The boy was still yelling and swearing, now pushing at Sam’s chest. ‘So you sort
me
out before you deal with that
wanker
.’

Sam adjusted his collar. His face had become dangerously still.

And just as I realized I was holding my breath, the policeman was there, between them. Donna’s hand was on Sam’s sleeve and she was steering him back to the young lad on the kerb. The policeman muttered something into his radio, his hand on the drunk’s shoulder. The boy swung round and spat on Sam’s jacket.
‘Fuck you.’

There was a brief, shocked silence. Sam stiffened.

‘Sam! Come on, give me a hand, yes? I need you.’ Donna propelled him forwards. When I caught sight of Sam’s face, his eyes glittered as cold and hard as diamonds.

‘Come on,’ said Donna, as they loaded the semi-comatose lad into the back of the truck. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

He drove silently, Lily and I wedged into the front seat beside him. Donna cleaned the back of his jacket as he stared ahead, stubbly jaw jutting.

‘Could be worse,’ Donna said cheerfully. ‘I had one throw up in my hair last month. And the little monster did it on purpose. Shoved his fingers down the back of his throat and ran up behind me, just because I wouldn’t take him home, like I was some kind of bloody minicab.’

She stood up and motioned for the energy drink she kept in the front. ‘It’s a waste of resources. When you think what we could be doing, instead of scooping up a load of little …’ She took a swig, then looked down at the barely conscious young boy. ‘I don’t know. You have to wonder what goes on in their heads.’

‘Not much,’ said Sam.

‘Yeah. Well, we have to keep this one on a tight leash.’ Donna patted Sam’s shoulder. ‘He got a caution last year.’

Sam glanced sideways at me, suddenly sheepish. ‘We went to pick up a girl from the top of Commercial Street. Face smashed to a pulp. Domestic. As I went to lift her onto the gurney, her boyfriend came flying out of the pub and went for her again. Couldn’t help myself.’

‘You took a swing at him?’

‘More than one,’ Donna scoffed.

‘Yeah. Well. It wasn’t a good time.’

Donna shifted to grimace at me. ‘Well, this one can’t afford to get in trouble again. Or he’s out of the service.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, as he let us out. ‘For the lift, I mean.’

‘Couldn’t leave you in that open-air asylum,’ he said.

His eyes briefly met mine. Then Donna shut the door and they were gone, heading for the hospital with their battered human cargo.

‘You totally fancy him,’ said Lily, as we watched the ambulance disappear.

I had forgotten she was even there. I sighed as I reached into my pockets for the keys. ‘He’s a shagger.’

‘So? I would totally shag that,’ Lily said, as I opened the door to let her in. ‘I mean, if I was old. And a bit desperate. Like you.’

‘I don’t think I’m ready for a relationship, Lily.’

She was walking behind me, so there was no way I could actually prove it, but I swear I could feel her pulling faces at me the whole way up the stairs.

I wrote to Mrs Traynor. I didn’t tell her about Lily, just that I hoped she was well, that I was back from my travels and would be in her area in a few weeks with a friend, and would like to say hello if possible. I sent it first class, and felt oddly excited as it plopped into the post-box.

Dad had told me over the phone that she had left Granta House within weeks of Will’s death. He said the estate workers had been shocked, but I thought back to the time I had spotted Mr Traynor out with Della, the woman he was now about to have a baby with, and I wondered how many genuinely had been. There were few secrets in a small town.

‘She took it all terrible hard,’ Dad said. ‘And once she was gone your redheaded woman there was in like Flynn. She saw her chance, all right. Nice auld fella, own hair, big house, he’s not going to be single for long, eh? Speaking of which, Lou. You – you wouldn’t have a word with your mother about her armpits, would you? She’s going to be after plaiting it if she lets it all grow any longer.’

I kept thinking about Mrs Traynor, trying to imagine how she would react to the news about Lily. I remembered the joy and disbelief on Mr Traynor’s face at their first meeting. Would Lily help to heal her pain a little? Sometimes I watched Lily laughing at something on television, or simply gazing steadily out of the window lost in thought, and I saw Will so clearly in her features – the precise angles of her nose, those almost Slavic cheekbones – that I forgot to breathe. (At this
point she would usually grumble, ‘Stop staring at me like a weirdo, Clark. You’re freaking me out.’)

Lily had come to stay for two weeks. Tanya Houghton-Miller had called to say they were off on a family holiday to Tuscany and Lily didn’t want to go with them. ‘Frankly, the way she’s behaving right now, as far as I’m concerned, that’s fine. She’s exhausting me.’

I pointed out that, given Lily was barely at home, and Tanya had changed the locks to her front door, it would be pretty hard for Lily to exhaust anyone unless she was tapping at their window and singing a lament. There was a short silence.

‘When you have your own children, Louisa, you might eventually have some idea what I’m talking about.’ Oh, the trump card of all parents.
How could I possibly understand?

She offered me money to cover Lily’s board and lodging while they were away. I took some pleasure in telling her I wouldn’t dream of taking it, even though, frankly, it was costing me more than I had anticipated to have her there. Lily, it turned out, wasn’t satisfied with my beans-on-toast or cheese-sandwich suppers. She would ask for cash, then return with artisan bread, exotic fruit, Greek yoghurt, organic chicken – the staples of a wealthy middle-class kitchen. I remembered Tanya’s house, the way Lily had stood by the oversized fridge and thoughtlessly dropped chunks of fresh pineapple into her mouth.

‘By the way,’ I said, ‘who is Martin?’

There was a short pause. ‘Martin is my former partner. Lily apparently insists on seeing him, even though she knows I don’t like it.’

‘Could I have his number? I’d just like to make sure I know where she is. You know, while you’re gone.’

‘Martin’s number? Why would I have Martin’s number?’ she squawked, and the phone went dead.

Something had changed since I’d met Lily. It wasn’t just that I’d learned to accommodate the explosion of teenage-related mess in my near-empty flat, I had actually started to quite enjoy having Lily in my life, having someone to eat with, sit side by side with on the sofa, commenting on whatever we happened to be watching on the television, or keeping a poker face when she offered me some concoction she’d made.
Well, how should I know you have to cook the potatoes in a potato salad? It’s a salad, for God’s sake.

At work I now listened to the fathers at the bar wishing their children goodnight as they flew off on business trips –
You be good for Mummy now, Luke … Did you? … You did? Aren’t you a clever boy!
– and the custody arguments conducted in hissed telephone conversations:
No, I did not say I could pick him up from school that day. I was always due in Barcelona … Yes, I was … No, no, you just don’t listen.

I couldn’t believe that you could give birth to someone, love them, nurture them, and by their sixteenth year claim that you were so exasperated that you’d change the locks of your house against them. Sixteen was still a child, surely. For all her posturing, I could see the child in Lily. It was there in the excitements and sudden enthusiasms. It was there in the sulks, the trying on of different looks in front of my bathroom mirror and the abrupt, innocent sleep.

I thought of my sister and her uncomplicated love for Thom. I thought of my parents, encouraging, worrying about and supporting Treena and me, even though we were both well into adulthood. And in those moments I felt Will’s absence in Lily’s life like I felt it in my own.
You should have been here, Will
, I told him silently.
It was you she really needed.

I booked a day’s holiday – an outrage, according to Richard. (‘You’ve only been back five weeks. I really don’t see why you
need to disappear again.’) I smiled, bobbed a curtsy in a grateful Irish-dancing-girl manner, and drove home later to find Lily painting one of the spare-room walls a particularly vivid shade of jade green. ‘You said you wanted it brightening up,’ she said, as I stood with my mouth open. ‘Don’t worry. I paid for the paint myself.’

‘Well,’ I pulled off my wig, and unlaced my shoes, ‘just make sure you’ve finished by this evening because I’ve got the day off tomorrow,’ I said, when I had changed into my jeans, ‘and I’m going to show you some of the things your dad liked.’

She stopped, dripping jade paint onto the carpet. ‘What things?’

‘You’ll see.’

We spent the day driving, our soundtrack a playlist on Lily’s iPod that provided one minute a heart-breaking dirge of love and loss, the next an ear-perforating raging anthem of hatred against all mankind. I mastered the art, while on the motorway, of mentally rising above the noise and focusing on the road, while Lily sat beside me, nodding in time to the beat and occasionally performing an impromptu drum roll on the dashboard. It was good, I thought, that she was enjoying herself. And who needed both eardrums to be working, anyway?

We started off in Stortfold, and took in the places Will and I used to sit and eat, the picnic spots in the fields above the town, his favourite benches around the grounds of the castle, and Lily had the grace to try not to look bored. To be fair, it was quite hard to work up enthusiasm about a series of fields. So I sat down and told her how, when I had first met him, Will had barely left the house, and how, through a mixture of subterfuge and bloody-mindedness, I had set about getting him out again. ‘You have to understand,’ I said, ‘that your father hated to be dependent on anyone. And us going out
didn’t just mean that he had to rely on someone else but he had to be seen to be relying on someone else.’

‘Even if it was you.’

‘Even if it was me.’

She was thoughtful for a moment. ‘I’d hate people seeing me like that. I don’t even like people seeing me with wet hair.’

We visited the gallery where he had tried to explain to me the difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ modern art (I still couldn’t tell), and she pulled a face at almost everything on its walls. We poked our heads into the wine merchant’s where he had made me taste different sorts of wine (‘No, Lily, we are
not
doing a wine-tasting today’), then walked to the tattoo shop where he had persuaded me to get my tattoo. She asked if I could lend her the money for one (I nearly wept with relief when the man told her no under-eighteens), then asked to see my little bumble bee. That was one of the few occasions when I felt I’d actually impressed her. She laughed out loud when I told her what he had chosen for himself: a Best Before date stencilled on his chest.

‘You have the same awful sense of humour,’ I said, and she tried not to look pleased.

It was then that the owner, overhearing our conversation, mentioned that he had a photograph. ‘I keep pictures of all of my tattoos,’ he said, from under a heavily waxed handlebar moustache. ‘I like to have a record. Just remind me of the date?’

We stood there silently as he flicked through his laminated binder. And there it was, from almost two years previously, a close-up of that black and white design, neatly inked onto Will’s caramel skin. I stood and stared at the photograph, its familiarity taking my breath away. The little black and white patterned block, the one I had washed with a soft cloth, which I had dried, rubbed sun cream into, rested my face against. I
would have reached out to touch it, but Lily got there first, her fingers with their bitten nails tracing gently over the image of her father’s skin. ‘I think I’ll get one,’ she said. ‘Like his, I mean. When I’m old enough.’

‘So how is he?’

Lily and I turned. The tattooist was sitting on his chair, rubbing at a heavily coloured forearm. ‘I remember him. We don’t get many quadriplegics in here.’ He grinned. ‘He’s a bit of a character, isn’t he?’

A lump rose suddenly to my throat.

‘He’s dead,’ said Lily, baldly. ‘My dad. He’s dead.’

The tattooist winced. ‘Sorry, sweetheart. I had no idea.’

‘Can I keep this?’ Lily had started to work the photograph of Will’s tattoo out of its plastic binder.

‘Sure,’ he said hurriedly. ‘If you want it, take it. Here, have the plastic cover as well. Case it rains.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, tucking it neatly under her arm, and as the man stuttered another apology, we walked out of the shop.

We had lunch – an all-day breakfast – silently in a café. Feeling the day’s mood leach away from us, I began to talk. I told Lily what I knew of Will’s romantic history, about his career, that he was the kind of man who made you long for his approval, whether just by doing something that impressed him or making him laugh with some stupid joke. I told her how he was when I met him, and how he had changed, softened, starting to find joy in small things, even if many of those small things seemed to involve making fun of me. ‘Like I wasn’t very adventurous when it came to food. My mum basically has ten set meals which she’s rotated for the past twenty-five years. And none of them involves quinoa. Or lemongrass. Or guacamole. Your dad would eat anything.’

‘And now you do too?’

‘Actually, I still try guacamole every couple of months or so. For him, really.’

‘You don’t like it?’

‘It tastes okay, I suppose. I just can’t get past the fact that it looks like something you blow out of your nose.’

I told her about his previous girlfriend, and how we had gatecrashed her wedding dance, me sitting on Will’s lap as we turned his motorized wheelchair in circles on the dance floor, and she had snorted her drink through her nose. ‘Seriously? Her wedding?’ In the overheated confines of the little café, I conjured her father for her as best I could, and perhaps it was because we were away from all the complications of home, or because her parents were in a different country, or because, just for once, someone was telling her stories about him that were uncomplicated and funny, she laughed, and asked questions, nodding often as if my answers had confirmed something she already believed.
Yes, yes, he was like this. Yes, maybe I’m like that too.

And as we talked well into the afternoon, letting our cups of tea cool in front of us, and the weary waitress offered yet again to remove the last of the toast we had taken two hours to eat, I grasped something else: for the first time, I was recalling Will without sadness.

‘What about you?’

‘What about me?’ I put the last crust into my mouth, eyeing the waitress, who looked as if this was her trigger to come back again.

‘What happened to you after Dad died? I mean, you seem to have done a lot more stuff when you were with him – even with him being stuck in a wheelchair – than you do now.’

The bread had turned claggy in my mouth. I struggled to swallow. Eventually, when the mouthful had gone down, I
said, ‘I do things. I’ve just been busy. Working. I mean, when you’re on shifts, it’s hard to make plans.’

She raised her eyebrows a fraction, but she didn’t say anything.

‘And my hip is still quite painful. I’m not really up to mountain-climbing yet.’

Lily stirred her tea idly.

‘My life is eventful. I mean, falling off a roof isn’t exactly humdrum. That’s quite a lot of excitement for one year!’

‘But it’s hardly
doing
something, is it?’

We were silent for a moment. I took a breath, trying to quell the sudden buzzing in my ears. The waitress, arriving between us, swept up our empty plates, with a faint air of triumph, and took them to the kitchen.

‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Did I tell you about the time I took your dad to the races?’

With immaculate timing, my car overheated on the motorway, forty miles from London. Lily was surprisingly sanguine about it. In fact, she was curious. ‘I’ve never been in a car that broke down. I didn’t know they even did that any more.’

At this statement my jaw dropped (my dad would regularly pray loudly to his old van, promising premium petrol, regular tyre-pressure checks, endless love, if she would make it back home again). Then she told me her parents traded up their Mercedes every year. Mostly, she added, because of the level of damage done to the leather interior by her half-brothers.

We sat by the side of the motorway, waiting for the breakdown truck to arrive, and feeling the little car judder sporadically as the lorries rumbled past. Eventually, deciding it would be safer for us to be out of the car, we scrambled up the embankment at the side of the motorway and sat on the
grass, watching as the afternoon sun lost its heat and slid down the other side of the motorway bridge.

‘So who is Martin?’ I said, when we had exhausted all breakdown-related conversation.

Lily plucked at the grass beside her. ‘Martin Steele? He’s the man I grew up with.’

‘I thought that was Francis.’

‘No. Fuckface only came into the picture when I was seven.’