The Sick Rose (3 page)

‘What do you mean?’ said Paul. Carl had always told them there was no such thing as a get-out-of-jail-free card.

‘I’m going to have a word with an old friend of mine who runs community projects. She’s a youth worker, she’s helped rehabilitate young offenders and, um . . . vulnerable people for me before.’ Despite his history Paul made a small internal objection to the term ‘offender’ but had no quibble with ‘vulnerable’. He felt like a crab without a shell. ‘She’ll sort you out with some work, somewhere to live – no, not a safe house, but her current project is in Warwickshire, it’s far enough away for you to be able to make a new start. It’s some kind of gardening project, I think. It’ll be hard graft, but it will get you away from Daniel.’

Paul almost replied that he’d happily shovel shit for the rest of his life if it meant he could extricate himself from this mess and put Daniel away. Some part of him seemed to leave his body and swoop around the room, as if giving him a taste of the freedom that could be his. But first he had to make sure he knew what they were saying. He’d had enough of shades of grey, he needed them to spell it out.

‘But this is on condition that . . .’

‘You tell us exactly what you saw Daniel do.’

‘But what about my involvement in it?’

‘What involvement? You were a
witness
,’ said Woburn.

‘But I . . .’ Then he understood. Christine sat in quiet composure while Woburn tried to persuade his features into a mask of patience. She placed her palm on the table between them so that her fingertips were inches away from Paul’s and he wrestled with the impulse to hold her hand. ‘So what do you think, Paul?’ she said.

Chapter 2

April 1989

Louisa’s bedroom was at the back of the ground floor of her parents’ house, with the garage on one side and the alleyway on the other. Patio doors opened onto a barren little courtyard, giving a subterranean feel.

‘I don’t know how you can bear to sleep there,’ said Miranda, who had the room across the landing from their parents. ‘It’s so far away from the rest of us.’

‘Exactly,’ said Louisa.

It was true that in the event of an intruder scaling the mews gate, outwitting the alarm and forcing the steel front door, she would be the first to feel the blade split her skull, but it was a risk she was willing to run if it meant she could play her music loud and have the downstairs shower room to herself. The bottom bedroom had its own early warning system built in: there was always enough time between the sound of the gate dragging open, the car being reversed into the garage and the key turning in the front door to eject her guests. Hooded eyelids and high colouring gave her beauty a feverish, consumptive edge that certain boys, sensitive types on the cusp of manhood, found hard to resist. How many of them had tiptoed, shoeless, down that cobbled side alley? She could also sneak out to parties – the best of which never began until they were all in bed, anyway – and return at daybreak similarly undetected. Louisa’s parents were proud of their enlightened permissiveness, a situation she was careful to preserve by flaunting her mildest dissipations and hiding those she knew would genuinely concern them. The trick was to decide for yourself where the line was drawn, then throw in something that completely raised the bar, so that by the time they had conceded the point you were back where you wanted to be in the first place.

She still flinched to recall the threat to her position that had occurred a few months ago, around the time of her eighteenth birthday, when her father had mooted turning the bottom bedroom into a gymnasium and making the guest bedroom over to Louisa. The prospect of being moved into the heart of the house had greatly distressed her, and badly affected her sleep just when she ought to have been concentrating on her A levels. After months of wasted worry, Nick Trevelyan had spent the money on a surround-sound entertainment system from Bang and Olufsen; he and Leah had joined an expensive private gym near Olympia, where they could lift weights under the supervision of personal trainers and swim in the vaulted, saline swimming pool. It was a family membership, meaning their daughters could use the club as often as they wanted. Miranda, who followed their parents in all things, whether that was reading medicine at UCL or the
Guardian
at breakfast, was an instant convert. She called her exercise regime ‘training’, as though she were limbering up for the Barcelona Olympics. Louisa refused to join them, even though she could see the results were impressive: it was as though someone had laced Miranda into a corset and, every week, was pulling the strings a little bit tighter. It wasn’t that Louisa was against exercise per se. There was just something so unorganic and strange about running nowhere fast on a machine.

The three of them would sit at the breakfast table sprinkling bran on carefully weighed portions of muesli; she’d feel their eyes on the back of her head as she fried an egg in butter. They had even started to dress alike, all in pale grey sweats with the gym logo across the back. The clothes blended seamlessly with the colour scheme that ran throughout the house, from the front door to her father’s study in the eaves: white walls and carpet with furniture in whispered shades of chalk and pastel. It was like living in an over-exposed photograph, where Louisa, in her blacks and reds and purples, felt like an anomaly, a trick of the dark.

She wanted to paint her bedroom. On Portobello Road, she exchanged a fiver for a nearly full tin of black paint, some gold leaf and two half-rolls of velvet wallpaper in a deep plum colour, a beautiful texture with a pile deep enough to lose your fingertips in. They remained in the drawer under her bed, along with her alembic and her distillery, her meticulously labelled phials and bottles, her books and her sex toys. If she painted the walls and hung the paper while they were all out at work or the gym, how long would it be before they even noticed? No one but the daily (and, of course, her own invited guests) ever breached her threshold.

The right thing would be to do it with Leah’s blessing but she had exhausted all her powers of negotiation and persuasion in convincing them that taking the Kensington Market job had been the right thing to do. Her parents, in the wake of her failing to take up her place at university after A levels, were still at the ‘pretending to understand’ stage. It had been an uncomfortable conversation, one devoid of the usual sport. For once, Louisa was testing a boundary she knew to be inflexible. It had gone more or less as she expected it to, running the gamut from incomprehension to mockery via disapproval in under two minutes.

‘Working on a
market stall
?’ Leah had said.

‘But you said I had to do
something
with my life.’

‘Something worthwhile. We had hoped you might study, or at least travel. So far you seem to have spent most of your allowance on getting drunk.’

‘I’ve done enough studying. What I need is life experience. I’m not academic like you and Miranda. I just want . . . oh, I don’t know.’ She cast around the room for support. Miranda was curled up in the papasan chair with a giant textbook on her lap. The bamboo squeaked as she turned her head to speak. ‘Mum, I had a Saturday job when I was eighteen, working in the pharmacy, remember?’

‘That was different,’ said Leah. ‘That was
relevant
.’

Nick said, ‘But there isn’t a market in Kensington. Or do they have it in one of the squares?’

‘It’s an indoor market,’ said Miranda. ‘That big building on the corner opposite Barkers.’

‘Can’t say I’ve ever noticed. What do they sell, fruit and veg?’

‘No, Dad. It sells, like, alternative clothes and music and jewellery.’

‘
Oh
.’ He turned his attention back to Louisa. ‘And what would you be selling?’

‘Oils.’

‘Oil? As in olive?’ said Nick. ‘But I thought you said it wasn’t a food market.’

‘Oilzzzzzzzzz.’ She buzzed the plural.

‘But darling, you can’t paint,’ said her mother.

This rankled with Louisa, who liked to think of herself as a polymath creative who had yet to find her medium. ‘Essential oils,’ she said with theatrical patience. ‘Aromatherapy. Plant essences with healing powers. You know, lavender relaxes you, clary sage is a stimulant—’

‘Oh,
healing
,’ said Nick. ‘Like the crystals and their vibrations.’
They were laughing at her now; Louisa felt a bubble of rage. She wished again she had never told them about the crystals. In retrospect, her beliefs did seem rather foolish, but she had only been fourteen then and it was very unfair of them to keep referring to something that had happened four years ago. Not for the first time, she wished she had the kind of family who picked fights rather than ridiculing her; it was the one thing she couldn’t bear.

‘Oh, lay off her,’ said Miranda. ‘I think it sounds nice. Much better than an air freshener. And a lot kinder on the ozone layer.’

‘But that’s the whole point,’ said Louisa. ‘It’s not just a pretty smell. There’s real evidence—’ She bit her tongue. She shouldn’t have used the e-word.

‘I must have missed that issue of the
Lancet
,’ said Nick. ‘Or was it published in another peer-reviewed journal that I don’t subscribe to?’ Louisa thought, Before this conversation goes much further one of them is going to use the word ‘empirical’ and I am going to lose my temper. ‘Louisa, we’ve been over and over and over this. Unless there’s empirical research to back up these theories, it’s all just snake oil.’

‘You’re so quick to dismiss anything that’s even
remotely
alternative—’

‘These things are called alternative medicine because they are alternative
to
medicine. If they worked, I promise you I’d be prescribing them. I’m serious, Louisa. I’ve seen one too many patients hand their life savings over to some quack who promises to make them live forever with smells and bells.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’ shouted Louisa, and she left the room, wishing there was a door to slam, angry at them for having made her undermine her own argument.

‘It’s just a phase, like the homeopathy, or the Buddhism,’ she heard her mother say.

Nick snorted. ‘The fact that this one actually comes with a job attached should ensure it burns itself out within the month. I’m sure the culture shock of having to get up for work every morning will see the novelty wear off soon enough.’

It had been a Pyrrhic victory, her pride the casualty. She descended the stairs as silently as her boots would allow then walked the mile to the market to tell Elvira, as she had always intended to, that she could start tomorrow.

Louisa loved where she lived, the streets off Gloucester Road where looming Edwardian mansion blocks were interspersed with dinky terraces. As a small child, she had always imagined them as streets made of cake with their patisserie colours and swirls; the contrasting shades of brickwork like milk and white chocolate, the intricate scrolls of their stones like piped icing. The cottages and mews houses in the foothills of the mansions were painted in fondant sweetshop colours. Walking through her neighbourhood made her crave sugar.

Kensington Market was a five-floor maze of creeping staircases, twisting corridors and black-walled booths, part dungeon, part disco. Entering it was like going down into hell, in a good way. Elvira’s stall was on a mezzanine floor between a tattoo parlour and a shop that sold vintage clothes. At the end of the corridor, near the fire door, was a bright yellow mural showing black men in zoot suits abandoning a card game to dance; looking at it, you could almost hear the jazz.

Elvira had been in Miranda’s year at school, when she had been known as Eleanor, but she and Louisa hadn’t been friendly back then. When she’d been gone two years and Louisa was in the Upper Sixth, their paths started to cross in pubs and clubs. Even in the gallery of freaks that was the market Elvira stood out, with her waist-length hair extensions, her pierced nose and her painted veil; every day she drew a spider’s web across her eyes and nose with the same liquid liner that made her round English eyes into Egyptian almonds. She ran three stalls within the market, and the one that Louisa was going to be looking after was called Volatile Oils. It was set up like a Continental tobacconist, with a few packets of henna and joss sticks on a tiny table before her and the oils displayed in tall, cramped shelves that stretched behind her and on either side, so that people had to ask for what they wanted. Those nearest to hand were the bestsellers, the low-grade oils cut with grapeseed and quick to perish. The real treasure was on the top shelf, the expensive, rare organic oils in their dark blue phials that shone like sapphires. Within a week she could identify every one with her eyes closed: within a fortnight she had blended a concoction of lavender, neroli and patchouli that helped her achieve a sleep so deep she was late for work twice. Most of her customers were tourists. Louisa suspected that their oils would be left to fester in rucksacks or discarded in hostels, although in years to come they’d catch a trace of frankincense or rosemary and remember their London holiday. She felt an almost religious euphoria when she convinced a customer of the necessity of spending more money than they had thought possible on pure rose oil or distilled lemon balm. She loved to sell them a ceramic oil burner and show them how to float the droplets on the surface of candle-warmed water so that it smouldered but didn’t fizz.