Close Relations (19 page)

Karl drove her back to Wingham Wallace. He fiddled with the knobs on the radio – lucky knobs! – and found The Doors singing
Come on baby light my fire
. She liked it because the guitar solo went on for ever, not breaking the spell. The chip bag lay in her lap. Karl reached into it, took chips out one by one and put them into his mouth. This seemed more thrillingly personal than any amount of kissing. At the church he dropped her off. No kiss, he just ruffled her hair and said, ‘Be seeing you then. Take care.'

Twenty miles away, in Clapham, Prudence lay awake. She had consumed a whole bottle of Bulgarian cabernet sauvignon but it hadn't put her to sleep. She hadn't heard from Stephen since their break-up the week before. No phone call, nothing.

Her cat, Cedric, lay on her stomach. Even at this hour, cars still swished past on the one-way system; Titchmere Road was always busy. If all the parking spaces were full, which was usually the case, anyone who wanted to stop had to double-park, forcing the traffic to slow down and squeeze
past. Only the fearless dared stay parked there for long.

Stephen was not of their number. He had only visited her life, his indicators winking. For a year he had been poised, his hand on the gear-stick, ready to drive off. He hadn't wanted commitment – a ghastly but appropriate word. He hadn't bothered to search for a parking meter, let alone apply for a resident's permit.

Prudence was laughing – hard, dry hiccups. The cat rocked up and down on her stomach. She thought: all this time he's kept his engine running, the bastard. And now he's safely back in his fucking garage in Dulwich.

She wasn't laughing, she was crying. Dry, wrenching sobs. Finally, the cat could stand it no longer and jumped off the bed.

Maddy spoke into the darkness. ‘My father hated me because I was different. I didn't do the things normal little girls did. I didn't try to please him.'

‘He sounds a deeply conventional man,' said Erin, lying beside her. ‘Nothing's going to shake him up. He lives an unexamined life and your mother colludes in that, she's got the role down to a T. Good little wifey making his dinner, helping him with his work.' She yawned, and nuzzled Maddy's neck. ‘He'll never break out. Sad, isn't it?'

Maddy suspected she was too old to moan about her parents; it was an adolescent thing to do. But Erin encouraged it. Besides, it drew her and Erin closer, it was a mild kind of aphrodisiac. She twined her feet around Erin's. Down in the street a car alarm wailed; in Erin's neighbourhood cars were regularly vandalised.

‘I always seem to rub men up the wrong way. That's why I left Nigeria.' Maddy paused. She had told nobody, not even her sisters, what had happened. ‘This man, Pierre, who ran our project, he was a pig. God, he fancied himself. He hated me because his charm didn't work on me. He was a crook. He was screwing this Ibo woman, she was the daughter of some
general or something, and he used to get Ibrahim, that was our driver, to take him to the local hotel to have it off with her. And some money we'd been given, for a consignment of powdered milk, he bought her an air-conditioner with it.' She paused. ‘Then one day I discovered that he'd been using the workmen, who were supposed to be building our baby clinic, he'd got them to build him and his wife this veranda on the back of their house. I told my colleagues but they didn't believe me, they thought I just didn't like him. They all ganged up on me. Pierre got me sacked. I could have fought it, I suppose, but suddenly I felt too bloody exhausted.' She lay there, gazing into the blackness. Something in Africa, in the very air, had seeped into her bones. The inertia, the corruption. After a lifetime of speaking up and battling against the odds she had given up – brave, fearless Maddy. ‘So I packed up and left. He's still there. Oh, I despised him all right, but I despised myself more for doing bugger all. Do you understand?'

The body in her arms had grown heavy. Erin had fallen asleep.

SOME THINGS ARE
easily sorted out. Tyres, for instance. They were sorted out by ten-thirty Monday morning and paid for in cash. A transaction was completed and Gordon – showered, though still wearing Sunday's clothes – drove along to the Dawlish Road site where Frank stood stony-faced beside a skip.

‘We should've been out of here by the end of the week,' Frank said. ‘More like the end of the bloody year. Bob's not here, Len's taken it into his mind not to turn up, I've got nobody to do the plastering. And what were you supposed to be doing at my place last night?'

‘Look Frank, I'm sorry –'

Suddenly, Frank grinned. He was a volatile man, his moods changed at the throw of a switch. ‘Just hope she was worth it.'

‘It's not like that –'

‘It's okay. Your secret's safe with me.' Frank turned and went into the house.

‘It's not –'

‘You old devil. Who'd have believed it?'

It's stupendous, the effort we make when we are trying to avoid the truth. There is something heroic about it. All that energy we expend, the excuses we create for ourselves, if we plugged them into the national grid we could light up a city with our self-delusion. What did Gordon persuade himself?
That April needed help of the practical nature that only he could supply. That he was only doing a job – unpaid, of course, but if you cannot bring yourself to help out a nurse what sort of human being are you? That it wouldn't take long anyway, five days maximum. That if the jobs weren't done now conditions would only get worse – that leaking connection under the sink, for instance, the water was seeping under the lino, if they waited any longer April would have wet rot to contend with. He told himself that he needed to use up some half-finished buckets of trade emulsion – yes, he even told himself that. He told himself he was doing nothing wrong.

He also told himself, edging nearer danger, that April had been treated so badly by her brute of a boyfriend – and indeed by the boyfriend who had preceded him – that she deserved a little kindness to restore her faith in the male sex. Her father had deserted her; Gordon himself had been deserted by his daughters through the natural process of their growing-up. The lives of two of them were virtually incomprehensible to him and even Louise, the closest to him emotionally, was geographically distant and was sealed into a lifestyle that made him feel clumsy and inadequate. After his visits to her he felt exhausted, as if he had had to spend a day in the wrong, tightly fitting clothes.

Edging into even more dangerous territory, he told himself that it was invigorating to develop a friendship with somebody who liked him for himself, or who seemed to; someone in whose company he felt utterly himself, yet somehow renewed – a better Gordon, whom he himself recognised but nobody else seemed to. What an adventure: to be admitted into somebody else's life, to start afresh with somebody who laughed at his jokes, even for the limited period – five days, a week, maximum – that he told himself it would take.

He told himself this, not at home – for some reason he didn't want to think about April when Dorothy was in the room – but when he was in the car, driving from one job to another. He was supposed to be taking it easy, he was
forbidden to lift any heavy weights, and this gave him the excuse never to stay anywhere long. Besides, he was restless and could only feel at ease when he was alone in the traffic.

And, of course, when he switched off his phone nobody knew where he was. The boss of a building firm is always somewhere else. On the road, out and about. That is what they're like, isn't it?

‘Where is he?' Dorothy asked Frank on the phone. It was Wednesday.

‘He's with Jeremy Dawson, I reckon.' Dawson and Associates were the architects at Elephant and Castle.

‘I've rung them. I've been trying to get hold of him all day.'

‘Said he had some errands to run. You know Gordon.'

‘I've got to talk to him about the planning permission refusal. I've had the Simmondses on the phone all morning.'

‘Haven't seen him all day. Maybe he's gone to Sidcup.' There was a timber yard there.

‘I spoke to Mavis. He hasn't been.'

‘I'm sure he's fine.'

Later, when he looked back on it, that week had the weightlessness of a spell. Someone else had set it in motion; he floated helplessly, blown like thistle-down by a powerful force. He felt disconnected from the outside world, from the clamouring tasks and responsibilities, as if he were sealed away in hospital, but this time without the pain.

The sun shone, warm for November. It glowed above the turreted roof-tops of the shops opposite; it blessed him as he stroked the creamy-yellow paint onto April's walls. There was a fairy-tale innocence about those days. In the next room April lay sleeping. She was working nights, that week, and had given him the key. He unlocked the door to find her tucked up in bed, her uniform hung over the chair like the empty skin of a chrysalis. During the hours of darkness,
when he had slept, she had guarded a wardful of souls and dreamed about her father. She was Gordon's own daughter, polished brown, made strange and strangely familiar, returned to him.

That was how he felt about her; that was allowed, wasn't it? That was why he had tiptoed into her bedroom to check if she was still breathing, to see the miracle of her, as he had tiptoed into his daughters' rooms when they were little. April's possessions, as she lay there unconscious of them, grew dear to him – her Van Gogh poster, her fluffy toys, the blue-glass bottles she had brought back from a holiday in Venice. (She had gone there on a weekend package with a group of Geordies who had drunk themselves into a stupor. She said,
‘I wish I'd been in love.'
) In the bathroom her tights lay over the towel-rail; in the kitchen her jars, filled with tea-bags and sugar, each according to its label, brought tears to his eyes.

The lounge, on the other hand, was stripped of her personality. He had moved the furniture into the middle of the room and covered it with dust-sheets. It smelled of paint, the aroma of his working life, and of renewal. Her past had been stripped away like the blistered gloss on the window-frames. He had filled the cracks; he was painting her a bright new future where anything was possible, creamy-yellow emulsion (Hint of Buttercup) over the terracotta of her former life.

It was Thursday morning. There was only one wall left to paint. Gordon dipped his brush into the pot. His hand moved, it had a life of its own. It wrote
I LOVE YOU
.

Gordon gazed at the letters. They were large and lopsided, trailing off at the end. A drop slid down from the O, down the wall to the skirting-board. Outside, a bus passed. The sounds in the street were suddenly distinct – a shout of laughter, the rattle of a delivery to the off-licence nearby. He stood there weightlessly, hearing the life of the city beyond the street, beyond the streets beyond. In the room he heard the floorboards sighing, or maybe the sound came from within his own body.

Gordon plunged his brush into the paint-pot. When April
woke up – the creak of the bedroom door, the flush of the toilet – when she came into the room the words had long since been obliterated.

‘Where have you been all day?'

‘Just out and about.'

‘There're about ten messages here. If you'd phoned in I could have dealt with them.'

‘I'm sorry, love. The traffic was terrible.'

‘Frank's livid. You were supposed to meet the surveyor at three.'

‘I was?'

‘Where
were
you?'

‘Went down the Tottenham Court Road. Looked at some office systems. You said that printer's driving you round the bend.'

‘Are you all right, Gordon? Is anything the matter?'

‘I'm fine.'

On Friday afternoon Gordon had finished. The room looked larger and more gracious. Classy, they agreed. April helped him rearrange the furniture.

‘It looks great,' she said. ‘Ever thought of taking it up professionally?'

He wiped his hands on his overalls. ‘Someone did suggest it once. I said I'd stick with the brain surgery.'

She laughed, and pointed to the window. ‘You've showed me up. Have to get new curtains now. Don't those look grungy?'

‘There's this bloke I know, can get them for you at cost –'

‘Gordon! You've done enough. Aren't they saying things at work?'

He looked up at the ceiling. ‘There's a bit there I've missed –'

‘Stop it!' She took his arm. ‘Sit down.'

She went into the kitchen and came back with a bottle and two glasses.

‘It's only sparkling Australian,' she said.

‘They're the worst, the sparkling ones. You stay away from them.'

She chuckled. He loved her chuckle, it was deep and surprisingly rude. He untwisted the wire and pushed out the cork with his thumbs.

They drank. The sun, a red disk, slid below the buildings opposite. Down in the street the rush-hour traffic swelled murmurously. Over decades of Friday afternoons he had fought his way through it, alternately blaring his horn or lavishly beckoning out cars from the side streets – as a driver he had always had an emotional relationship with the other vehicles on the road. He had struggled home to Purley, exhausted, only to gather himself together at seven a.m. on Monday morning to start the whole thing again.

‘I'm dying for a cigarette,' she said.

‘Ssh.'

‘How long's it going to last?' she asked.

He looked at her. She wore a navy-blue tracksuit. In the past, he hadn't found tracksuits appealing. ‘That's up to you,' he replied.

‘It's up to both of us.'

Did she mean the smoking? She drained her glass, got up and went to the window. ‘I look at people sometimes,' she said. ‘Out there, I look at them and think – don't they know what's going on inside them, what a miracle it is? It doesn't matter what an idiot someone is, how stupid or selfish, still their bodies go on digesting, pumping . . . the aortic valves, the gut, the lungs, working like the clappers. However wicked we are, our bodies still go on sterilising and cleaning, balancing fluids and electrolytes, defending us from infection . . . however bad we've been our bodies will always forgive us . . . Heart-breaking, isn't it?' She turned round. ‘You look after yourself, see?'