Jog On Fat Barry (21 page)

It was odd seeing the pram on top of the skip outside the flats; odd not hearing Janelle break the still of the night with her shrieks, and odd Dad not being at the funeral. I prayed every night for a month for God to send him back. Hoped I’d see the car parked in its usual spot just outside my window when I looked in the morning. But I never did.

Mum stopped going out. More often than not, she just sat in the lounge room and forgot to turn the lights on when it got dark. Then one day Gran was outside Gospel Oak Primary waiting for me. She said Mum had suffered a bad spell, and that people had come to take her away.

“But it’ll be all right,” she said. “Mark my words. Everything will be just fine.”

And it was. I went to stay with my gran in Beech House on the Maitland Park Estate, and she turned on all the lights when I asked her to. She told me I only started wetting the bed because my dad had left us, and promised the nightmares I had most nights would stop. And stop they did, when the stranger who had been standing at the foot of my bed went away. And, with him gone, the sheets stayed dry.

Mum finally came back three years later. Her hair had turned grey and she asked my gran to help her put a rinse through it. I can remember thinking, when they’d finished, that Mum looked just like Jean Simmons. I asked her to come watch me play football, I was the youngest player on the school team, but she couldn’t leave the flat because of all the drugs she was taking—two white and brown pills in the morning, two white and yellow pills at night.

“She’s trying to mend a broken heart,” Gran told the woman from the dry cleaners in Queens Crescent. “But some things can’t be patched up. And all you get when you fall in love, are lies, pain, and sorrow.”

Sulina is a port town in the Danube Delta on the Black Sea in Eastern Romania near the border with Ukraine, and more people lived there at the beginning of the 20th century than did at the end. For years, Agne watched the waters of the Danube flow out into the Black Sea and wished that she too could float away from the muddy banks of her dreary little town. Like countless other teenagers living in the town, she convinced herself Sulina was a shit-hole, and told her mum she was going to leave it the first chance she got. Then, as fate would have it, she ran into the woman from London who owned the modelling agency. The woman said she could get Agne out of Romania. It was the chance Agne had been waiting for and she grabbed it. But now Agne missed the town she’d run away from, and whiled away her time thinking about it: her beautiful Danube Delta, with its sand dunes, and wetlands, and birds.

In the beginning, Agne tried everything she could to stop men in the massage parlour having sex with her. She had tried to escape the first week, and to kill herself a week after that. But Bashkim was as ruthless as he was determined, and didn’t let up until he’d beaten all the fight out of her. Agne was broken and did as Bashkim said, fucking six to seven men every day. Straight sex cost thirty pounds; anal was forty, and the money was shared equally between Bashkim and the owner of the parlour, a rough looking woman from Tottenham. Autumn turned to winter turned to spring and there was no let-up. Agne worked every day of the month regardless of her menstrual cycle. And Bashkim warned her that if she made a fuss when some men refused to wear condoms, she’d only have herself to blame for what Bashkim might do.

The first time I ever saw Agne was on Kentish Town High Road. It was a Tuesday, sometime in March, and had been raining. Ronald Taylor and me had sold 4,000 Silk Cut to an Indian shopkeeper. Jimmy King was waiting for us in a van full of stolen cigarettes. When we walked out of the shop, Jimmy was getting a parking ticket. But instead of just letting it go, Jimmy started taunting the traffic warden, pulling faces and chattering like an ape. The traffic warden watched him for a moment. Then she placed the parking ticket behind the windscreen wiper and walked on.

“Fuck off back to Africa,” Jimmy hissed as he snatched the ticket off the windscreen and tossed it into the road.

Ronny had waited outside the shop until the traffic warden moved on. Then he stormed across the pavement and steamed into Jimmy.

“You fucking liability,” he barked. “Always off your head on puff and never paying any attention to where you put the fucking van. Well, I tell you what, you fucking sigh, you’ll have no one to blame but yourself when it all turns pear.”

“And how’s it all going to turn pear?” Jimmy asked.

“What if she’s got a photographic memory?” Ronny asked back. “Not likely to forget the egit jumping up and down in front of her like a fucking monkey when the police tell her the van she ticketed was stolen, is she?”

Jimmy thought about what Ronny had said to him for a moment, and then he started laughing.

“Who ever heard of a Nigerian traffic warden with a photographic memory?” he asked.

And it was then, while Jimmy was still laughing, and Ronny was pulling him out of the van, saying he’d never let him drive again, that I saw Agne walk out of the massage parlour and stand right in front of me. And everything stopped, from the moment she looked at me and I looked back at her, everything just stopped: the traffic, the people, the rain, everything. There was nothing else: just me, and her, and that look on her face.

Bashkim had been standing behind her and saw me staring at her, and her staring at me. His face twisted with anger as he stepped toward me and asked what I was doing, but I didn’t hear a word because I was staring at a ghost. Bashkim threw a punch that knocked me down, and Ronny leapt out of the van with a
Fuck-off, Ivan
and a ten-inch carving knife. Bashkim grabbed Agne’s hand, hissing something about the “fucking English” and he whisked her away while Jimmy helped me up with a
what-the-fuck-was-that-all-about
look.

The Kilburn Battalion of the Irish Republican Army blew up the Post Office tower on 31 October 1971. It was Sunday and the blast went off at 04:30 in the morning. Later that same day, my gran went to rouse my mum when she failed to get up for breakfast and found her dead. I didn’t find out until I got home that afternoon. I’d been fishing: the pike were biting up the Red Arches and I’d used the new rod that Gran had got me from Sharps.

“Have any luck, son?” the rozzer standing inside the flat asked.

“She was hoarding pills,” my gran cried, ignoring the policeman. “Hoarding them for months. And took the blinking lot in one go.”

Mum got cremated and Gran put her ashes in the cupboard. When Gran turned poorly, she made me promise that I’d mix Mum’s ashes with hers when she went, and then scatter them in the English Channel. For years Gran blamed herself for what Mum had done. Just like Mum had blamed herself for Janelle. But what the woman in the dry cleaners told Gran was true, it wasn’t always possible to see what was in front of you, especially when you got too close to it. Mum didn’t notice the changes in Janelle, or take her to see the doctor until it was too late. She wasn’t to blame. But the only way she could make sense of it all was to do just that. She tried to make sense of things that made no sense and got put away because of it.

“She began to vanish when Janelle died,” Gran always said. “And disappeared completely when your dad left.”

So when Ronny asked me how I knew Agne was going to kill herself, I told him. I knew the face Agne had on. Had seen it on a regular basis when I was a boy. It was the face of a person who was already dead. They just didn’t know it yet.

Whoever it was knocking at my door didn’t know me, because anyone who did, knew I never answered the door to anyone that knocked on it. I heard the letterbox open. Moments later someone yelled through the flap. It was a man, and he had an American accent. I glanced at the alarm clock; it was 7:23 a.m. A pigeon stood on the window ledge, and the glass was frosted even though it was April. The man said his name was Jake Day. He had come from Newport Beach in California. He said he would’ve called to say he was coming, but wanted to surprise me, like he’d been surprised when the executor of his father’s will told him he had a brother. And it was sort of strange opening the door and seeing Jake, a dead ringer for my dad, and looking exactly as I’d remembered him. I asked Jake how old he was. He said twenty-eight, the same age my dad was when he left. I put the kettle on, explaining I only had the one bedroom.

“But you’re more than welcome to it,” I said.

He said thanks all the same but he was flying back to the US in a few hours. He’d just flown in on impulse: wanted to see me. He glanced at his watch before he’d finished his tea and said he had to go.

“I’ll take you to the airport,” I said.

“No need,” he said back. “I’ve got the cab that brought me here waiting outside.”

“You must be bloody barmy,” I said. “It’ll cost you a fortune.”

He laughed and gave me an envelope. Then he left. I heard the taxi start up outside. A moment later it drove away. I thought Yanks had no idea when it came to money, because that taxi ride would probably end up costing the brother I never knew I even had about £100, but he had acted like he couldn’t care less.

Sticky tape ran around the rim of a biscuit tin sitting on the back seat of the car. When I looked for something to mix my gran and Mum’s ashes in, that old biscuit tin was the only thing I could find. Gran had passed away six months ago, and when I got out of bed that morning, I thought today was as good a day as any to do what she’d asked me to. It was Ronny Taylor who suggested Margate when I told him I was going to scatter their ashes in the Channel. He said there was this lovely little beach called Palm Bay that he once went to. He said he’d only been six at the time, but knew Mum and Gran would like it.

I drove to the end of Parkhill Road, turned left and carried on to the bottom of Haverstock Hill. I paused outside Marine Ices and looked in through the window. I could picture Mum sitting in there thirty-three years ago wading through her knickerbocker glory, and beaming every time she glanced at the engagement ring on her finger. I thought it might be nice to let her sit in there for a few minutes. Maybe some part of her remained in the ether, some of the happiness she had felt when her whole life was still ahead of her: a blank canvas waiting to be filled in.