Don't Get Me Wrong (4 page)

“At least she's stopped drinking,” said Izzie. “Have you noticed? Eva hasn't touched a drop all night.”

•  •  •

Even though it was late, the streets of Edinburgh were still crowded. The air was warm. Walking back to the hotel where Izzie's parents were staying, the six of them had arranged themselves into pairs—Eva and Harry leading the way, Kim and Izzie following, with Izzie's parents bringing up the rear.

From time to time, they all stopped to let gangs of rowdy students take over the pavement. The whole city seemed to be one huge party.

Kim felt as if she was floating on a sea of alcohol. It wasn't pleasant. She was worried she might sink. Ahead of her, Harry and Eva were arm in arm, their bodies moving to the same rhythm. He was bending right down to listen to her, their heads close together, one dark, one fair. No one knows, thought Kim, what I know. What he's really like. And I can't tell anyone, in case Eva gets hurt.

Kim closed her eyes for a second, trying to ward off the sudden rush of memories. Eva's eighteenth birthday. She'd made her friends dress up as hippies. A re-creation of 1967 and the Summer of Love. God knows what their unremarkable suburb thought of all the headbands, caftans, and brown leather sandals trailing down the high street.

But then Nunhead was good at looking the other way.

Oh, thought Kim, I hated that time of our lives. I felt like a policeman, trying to stop Eva from self-destructing. After Dad walked out, Eva just lost it for a while. Drink, drugs—anything to blot out reality. She was in her last year of school but didn't turn up half the time. Not even for exams in the end. Mum wasn't any help. She was off on her own mission of self-discovery, trying to live it up before it was all too late. So it was left to me to protect Eva. Little sister looking after big sister.

Like the night of her eighteenth birthday. May 1999. Way past closing time, but Eva still wasn't home. So I went to find her. I had to bang on the door of the pub for a long time. They'd turned it into a lock-in—a private party. Inside I pushed through a wall of bodies. Jefferson Airplane, Grace Slick, White Rabbit. Sandalwood, vanilla, patchouli, skunk.

And then I saw her, sitting on a wooden stool right at the end of the bar, a purple patchwork dress falling around her in great velvet folds—cheeks flushed, eyes glazed, like a child who's been kept up way beyond bedtime.

I couldn't stop it. Seconds before I reached her, she leant towards the bar—her bangles jangling in a crash like someone had dropped a tambourine—and lost her balance. She fell through the air, arms outstretched, smashing through empty glasses and
beer bottles. Someone screamed. Or maybe it was me. And then I was on my knees in the well of split beer and broken glass on the floor. She reached out and touched my face. “Where were you?”

She had cut her hand—a bloody gash at the base of her thumb.

I was fourteen. I shouldn't even have been there.

Someone was leaning down to help her, pulling her up so she could stand. Noise and heat and people all around us. The crunch of glass beneath our feet.

“I fell off,” she said wonderingly. “I fell off the stool.”

Harry was holding her. He had his arm round her waist. She rested against him, tucking her head into the crook of his shoulder. He lifted her hand and turned it over. He put his mouth against her palm, sucking away the blood. It was an act of such dirty intimacy that I felt sick.

“Is it Dusty?” I thought, for a moment, that Eva was talking about her hand. But she was listening to the music. Eyes closed. Drifting off again

I glared at him. “Why didn't you stop her?”

“ ‘The Look of Love,' ” said Eva. “Dusty Springfield.”

“Stop her falling?” Harry was smiling, as if it was all a joke.

“Stop her drinking so much.”

“As if I had any influence over what your sister does.”

Liar, I thought. Liar, liar.

“She died, you know,” said Eva. “A few weeks ago. Breast cancer.”

I wanted to get Eva home. I wanted to find some antiseptic and bandage her hand. I wanted to make a cup of tea and sit
with her as she sobered up. I said, “Is it time to go? Time to get back?”

She opened her eyes wide. Even in the dingy light of the bar, you could see how blue they were. “It's too early. You haven't met all my friends yet.”

“I can meet them another time.”

“But I don't want to go.”

“You've had an accident.”

Eva pouted. “Only a little one. Harry will look after me.”

“Like he has already?”

“I promise,” said Harry, “that from now on I won't leave her side.”

“You think I trust you?”

Dusty disappeared. A new voice rose above the noise in the bar—urgent, insistent soul.

“Try a little tenderness,” said Harry, grinning.

I wanted to hit him. Turning Otis Redding into a joke.

He hid behind that smile all the time. Kind Harry. Nice Harry, Charming Harry.
Romeo and Juliet. So devoted. And comes from such a good family. Old money. Eton, I think. Or Harrow. And you know, he'll always be able to support her, working in the City. Such a relief for a mother to know her daughter will be financially secure.
Everyone was taken in by it. They all loved him. I was the only one who saw through it. And because of that, he tried to poison Eva against me. After every argument about how I wanted a different kind of world, how I wanted justice and fairness and equality, he'd mock me, belittle me, make me sound stupid.

“Has she always been like this?”

Sunday morning. Eva's door wasn't quite shut. I stood outside
on the landing, listening to the whispers, imagining them in bed together.

“Ssshhh, Harry. She'll hear.”

“She's a complete fantasist.”

“It's just the way she is.”

“She's insane.”

It hurt so much. Not just what he said, but hearing Eva laugh. Because it meant she was on his side.

I found out the truth one Friday night. We were in a pub in New Cross. A whole load of us from school. Damaris, of course. And the usual gang of nerdy boys with thin wrists and soft stubble. None of us eighteen yet, so we shouldn't have been drinking at all. But the landlord turned a blind eye if we stuck to beer. That's what comes of going to the local neighborhood school. You blend into your surroundings. You become invisible.

And I looked up, and there was Harry. Sitting at a little table right in the corner. With someone who wasn't Eva. A girl with long black hair.

Of course you can have a drink with a friend. Why not?

And then he leant forward and kissed her very slowly on the mouth.

It was like an electric shock.

“Kim? Are you OK?” Damaris must have seen my face.

I felt sick. I wanted to rush over and scream at him. But I was too dizzy to move.

He should have seen me when they left. He walked right past our table. But he had his arm round her waist and was looking down into her face, laughing. He didn't have eyes for anyone else but her.

The next day, I shut myself in my room. I didn't come out once. Eva said, through the door, “Kim, are you all right?”

I couldn't face her. “I'm studying.”

She said, “Harry and I are going to see a band tonight. Do you want to come?”

I felt like curdled milk—sour and rotten. Guilty, as if I was the one doing the cheating.

And so it went on. Southeast London is huge. It sprawls for miles. But somehow I kept seeing Harry and the girl with black hair all the time. Whenever I was out, there they were. It was like fate was rubbing my nose in it.

She was very pretty. Dark brown skin, gold earrings, red lipstick. When she looked up at Harry, it was like they were sharing a secret.

I wanted to tell Eva.

But I couldn't bring myself to do it. Because Eva loved him.

I said to Damaris, “If you knew that someone was being cheated on, would you tell them?”

“Who?”

I shook my head. “I can't say.”

Damaris thought about this. “I read somewhere that you tell just to make yourself feel better. You don't do it for the person you're telling. Because they'd rather not know. So I don't think you should, no.”

So I didn't. Eva was too fragile for reality. It pushed her too close to the edge.

And so we'd spend evenings together in our parentless house in Nunhead—Eva, Harry, and I—with all the secrets hanging between us, and I would look at him with hatred, and he would
look back, questioning, his eyes amused. Sometimes he'd say, “Got a boyfriend yet, Kim?”

Back then, I didn't have the words. So I just glared at him.

He smiled. “I could give you a few pointers. A bit of advice on what boys like.”

“Oh leave her alone, Harry,” Eva would say, pushing his shoulder.

He opened his eyes wide. “Just trying to be helpful. It's a big, scary world out there.”

I would sit there, hot and confused, looking at his shiny curls and dark skin and huge white smile, and think of him with the girl with long black hair.

And I wanted to curl up and die.

•  •  •

It was seven a.m. Already, even at this hour of the morning, the heat was rising up from the pavement. The sun glanced off a silver necklace, the buckle of a leather briefcase, bright blond hair. Once, in a crush of City workers, Harry thought he saw Kim. He knew she was back in London now, her Edinburgh life packed away. But then the woman stopped to let him pass, giving him a quick flirtatious look from under her lashes, and he realized his mistake. Kim, fists clenched, frowning furiously, would have elbowed him out of the way.

People look for patterns all the time, thought Harry. It's a natural impulse. Because patterns save time. You try to recognize what you already know so that you don't have to analyze every piece of information that comes your way. Otherwise life would be exhausting. You'd be living in a blur of constant panic.

But sometimes, he thought, pushed forward in a surge of commuters, patterns break down. Here the sequence is just as you expected. But here it falls apart. Why? Human error? A calculated change? Or just some random occurrence that no one could possibly have predicted? As Donald Rumsfeld once said, there are known knowns. There are known unknowns. And there are also unknown unknowns.

Sometimes, when it all cracks apart, you find the secret that no one wants you to see.

Harry liked the early mornings, walking to the office from the tube. You had your head to yourself, before the day filled it with rubbish. They called him the Iceman at the bank. They said he never panicked. He never rushed or shouted or swore. It wasn't intentional, this coolness. It was just the way he'd learned to behave. Look relaxed. Look calm. Smile. Keep the sludge of insecurity secret. Don't show anyone what you really feel.

Life's a lot easier if you keep emotion out of it.

“You're not like the others,” Syed said to him once. “You don't talk down to anyone.”

“How could I? I'm at the bottom looking up.”

Syed laughed. But Harry wasn't joking. He'd worked his way through the ranks, from desk assistant to a trial position with the health care team. By the time he was twenty-four, he'd been promoted to associate and was on the same footing as the university graduates. But he never felt secure. It could all disappear in an instant. He felt like an imposter, waiting to be found out.

Syed tapped the side of his nose. “You stick with me, my friend, and we will rise together. We're a team.”

“Ant and Dec.”

“Batman and Robin.”

“Itchy and Scratchy.”

“The thing about me,” said Syed, “is that I was born lucky. Money loves me. I can't fail.”

Syed was a trader. He didn't see the point of the analysis that went on in Harry's part of the bank. It made him uneasy. Trading, he said, was about gut feeling. The market was a wild animal that could suddenly turn and rip you to shreds. “Trust your instincts. When she's not happy, you feel it.”

Harry liked the picture. But he preferred to rely on spreadsheets.

Sometimes, when Syed was drunk, he became almost angry. “How many analysts does it take to change a lightbulb?”

“I don't know. How many analysts does it take to change a lightbulb?”

“Who knows? They're all in the dark.”

Harry smiled. “Very funny.”

“You know fuck all, you lot.” It was Friday night, and the bar was heaving with bankers. Syed, his eyes half-closed, had already drunk two bottles of champagne and was beginning to slur his words. “You didn't even exist before Big Bang. But then the US arrived. And now we can't move for analysts.” Syed leant forward, his breath hot on Harry's face. “It's meaningless. Charts and graphs and models and forecasts. You just make it up as you go along. Come up with a little theory and find the facts to fit.”

“So you don't want facts.”

“No.”

“You don't want investment advice based on a sound analysis of a company's prospects?”

“Couldn't give a fuck.” Syed shrugged. “I don't care what a company does. I don't care what it makes. I don't care whether it's run by Mickey Mouse or Mother Teresa. The only thing I care about is when to sell. When to buy. And how to make myself a fuck of a lot of money.”

Harry laughed. “You're the evil face of capitalism.”

But Syed wasn't listening. He had caught sight of a very pretty woman in a tight blue dress at the end of the bar.

Harry smiled at the memory. Maybe Syed is right, he thought, as the lift reached his floor and he walked past the banks of desks to reach his own. We like to pretend we can predict the market with computer models and analysis of variables and risk. But maybe it's all an illusion. Maybe we're not in control at all.

Harry caught sight of the headline on his screen. Shit.