Us (21 page)

There were other changes, too. Connie was, in those days, ferociously untidy. She isn't like that now and I suppose it's one of the ways in which I've managed to change her, but in those days she used to leave a trail of pen lids, sweet-wrappers, hair slides and grips and pins, elastic bands, pieces of costume jewellery, the backs of earrings, packets of tissues, a single piece of gum wrapped in foil, small change from around the world. It was not unusual for her to reach into the pocket of a capacious coat for keys and to pull out a small wrench, a stolen ashtray, a desiccated apple-core or the stone of a mango. Books were left face down on the toilet cistern, discarded clothes were pushed into a corner like fallen leaves. She liked to ‘leave dishes to soak', an act of self-deception that I've always abhorred.

But, for the most part, I didn't mind. Light travels differently in a room that contains another person; it reflects and refracts so that even when she was silent or sleeping I knew that she was there. I loved the evidence of her past presence, and the promise of her return, the way she changed the smell of that gloomy little flat. I had been unhappy there, but that was in the past. It felt like being cured of some debilitating disease, and I was jubilant. ‘Domestic bliss' – the pairing of those words made perfect sense to me. I don't mean to strike an inappropriate note, but few things have ever made me happier in my life than the sight of Connie's underwear drying on my radiator.

London changed, too. The city that had always seemed somewhat mean and grey, ineptly conceived, impractical and dour, became renewed. Connie was a Londoner and knew it like a cabbie. Street markets and drinking dens, Chinese, Turkish, Thai shops and restaurants and greasy spoons. It was like discovering that the somewhat dreary house in which you've grown up has one hundred further rooms, each leading off the other, each full of strangeness or beauty or noise. The city where I lived made sense because Connie Moore was in it.

After eighteen months together we sold my Balham flat, scraped our savings into a pile, somehow acquired a joint mortgage and bought a place that would feel like ours. North of the river this time, a top-floor flat in Kilburn, larger, lighter, better for parties – not criteria that had ever troubled me before – with a small but pleasant spare room. The purpose of this room was vague. Perhaps people could stay over, or perhaps Connie could start painting again – she had not painted for a while, despite my encouragement, but had given up her share of the studio and was working full time in the St James gallery. Artists, she said, had a few years after college in which to make an impression and she felt this hadn't happened. She still sold paintings, but less frequently, and she did not replace them with new work. Well, never mind, perhaps now she would have the space she needed. ‘And this …' said Connie to Fran, swinging open the door, ‘is the nursery!' and they both laughed for some time.

We pulled up the carpets there too, and threw a housewarming party, the first party I had ever thrown. My friends from the lab eyed her friends from the arts like rival gangs at a teenage disco, but there were cocktails, and one of Connie's musician friends DJ-ed and soon there was dancing – dancing, in my own home! – the two clans emulsifying after a vigorous shake. At midnight the neighbours came up to complain. Connie pressed drinks into their hands and told them to change out of their pyjamas and soon they were dancing too. ‘You see this?' said my sister Karen, drunk and self-satisfied, her arms tight around the necks of Connie and me. ‘This was my idea!' She squeezed a little tighter. ‘Just imagine, D, if you'd stayed at home that night. Imagine!'

When the last guest had finally left we made strong coffee and stood at the sink washing glasses together in the late-summer dawn, the windows wide open onto the roofs of north-west London. Begrudgingly, I had to admit there was a great deal to thank my sister for. Though not my field, I was familiar with the notion of alternative realities, but was not used to occupying the one I liked the best.

So much changed during those years that it became impossible to conceal the truth from my parents, and so one Easter we drove east. Connie was an undeservedly confident driver and owned a battle-scarred old Volvo with moss growing in the window frames and a forest floor of crisp packets, cracked cassette cases and old A-to-Zs. She drove with a kind of belligerent sloppiness, changing the music more often than she changed gear, so that tensions were already quite high as we pulled up outside my family home, Victorian red-brick, lawn neat, gravel raked.

I had met Connie's family many times. It was impossible not to, given their closeness, and generally we got on very well. Her half-brothers would gather around me at family events, calling me ‘Professor' and urging me to visit various north-east London takeaways, insisting, ‘Anything you want, on the house.' Kemal, her step-father, thought me ‘a true gent', and a far better proposition than the hooligans she usually brought home. Only Shirley, Connie's mother, remained sceptical. ‘How's Angelo?' she would ask. ‘What's Angelo up to? Have you seen Angelo?' ‘It's because Angelo used to flirt with her,' Connie explained. It was never suggested that I should flirt, too.

Arriving at my parents', I wondered whether Connie might flirt with my father and perhaps draw him out of his spiked shell. Was that worth a try? Curtains twitched as we pulled up. My father's hand raised at the window, my mother at the front door. Hello, would you mind taking your shoes off?

Connie was completely charming, of course, but I'd always been led to believe that one talked to parents in the same polite, over-enunciated tone used for customs officials and police officers, conversation kept within tight parameters. What a lovely home, we've brought you some flowers, no more wine for me! Connie, however, made a great show of not altering her tone at all, simply talking to them like normal people.

But they weren't normal people, they were my parents. Connie was charming and bright, but my father smelt the artiness on her and it made him anxious. My mother was bemused. Who was this attractive, glamorous, outspoken creature, holding hands with her son? ‘She's very vivacious,' she whispered as the kettle boiled. It was as if I'd turned up wearing an immense fur coat. Separate rooms would have been too draconian, but despite there being a perfectly good double bed, we were shown into the spare room with two singles, my mother holding open the door as if to say, ‘Here it is, your den of filth and shame.' Connie was never one to shy away from a fight, and I imagined my parents in the dining room below, staring at the ceiling, cigarettes suspended halfway to their mouths at the sound of Connie and me pushing the beds together, giggling. Teenage rebellion, at the age of thirty-three.

The revolution continued at dinner. Despite smoking like a pair of burning tyres, my parents were rather reserved about alcohol and kept their sparse selection of ancient bottles in the garden shed with the spiders. Sherry was for trifles; brandy was for shock. Alcohol loosened inhibitions, and inhibitions were worn tight here. When it became clear that my parents were not going to open the bottle we had brought with us, that it would join the miniature of whisky and the curdled advocaat at the end of the garden, Connie made a great show of ‘popping out for some more wine', returning in the car with two bottles and, it transpired later, a small bottle of vodka concealed in her coat.

I wish I could say the alcohol made things go with a swing. Over a dinner of fatty pork, talk somehow turned to immigration policy because, famously, nothing brings people together like the subject of immigration. We had all been drinking now, Connie and my father in particular, and my mother had asked a question about the relative racial mix of Kilburn in comparison with Balham. Were there still a lot of Irish there, as opposed to West Indians or Pakistanis? The implication being, I suppose, that the Irish were in some way ‘not so bad'. Connie had replied, in moderate tones, that there were all kinds of communities there, that often when people said Pakistani they meant Bangladeshi, which was like confusing Italy with Spain, and that the racial mix was part of the excitement and pleasure of living in London. But did she feel safe at night? asked my father.

It is probably not necessary to transcribe the argument that followed. In their defence, my parents' views were widely held, but they were expressed with inappropriate anger, my father's curled finger tapping an invisible window pane with every spurious ‘fact!', and soon Connie was shouting, ‘My step-father is Turkish Cypriot, should he go home? My half-brothers, they're half English, half Cypriot. What about my mum, she's English, Irish, French, but she's married to one of them – should she have to go, too?'

‘Maybe we should change the subject?' I suggested.

‘No, we will not!' said Connie emphatically. ‘Why do you always want to change the subject?'

And so we went on. The insinuation on Connie's part – perhaps she even stated it outright – was that my parents were provincial bigots. The contention on my parents' part was that Connie was ‘not in the real world', that she was not waiting for a council house with her three kids, that she was unlikely to lose her job in some swanky art gallery to somebody who had just got off the boat from Poland. ‘You don't get the boat from Poland,' said Connie, petulantly, ‘you
fly
.'

There was a pause, and we all looked at our congealed dinner.

‘You're very quiet,' said my mother, in hurt tones.

‘Well,' I said, ‘I agree with Connie.'

For the most part I did agree with Connie. But if Connie had been arguing for a moon made entirely of cheese, I would have agreed with her too. I was going to be on her side from now on, and my parents saw this, and were saddened by it, I think. But what choice did I have? In a fight you side with the people you love. That is just how it is.

The three gentlemen at breakfast were large and self-confident: a Dutchman, an American and a Russian. They were well-dressed, teak-tanned, expense-account men, reeking of cologne, the kind of men who let other people shave them, the kind of men you find on yachts. With their immense wristwatches, they were a different breed, and our party of four seemed rather grey and muted in comparison. Connie and I had slept badly, Cat and Albie not at all, and they were still drunk or stoned or some combination of the two. If they reeked of beer and spirits, I reeked of disapproval. A reckoning was due between Albie and me. There had been complaints from the hotel staff about last night's party, and I was waiting for an opportunity to announce that no, I would not be paying for the contents of the mini-bar and no, I was not happy that we had missed the best part of our final morning in Amsterdam due to hangovers. And so the seven of us sat in the gloomy subterranean breakfast room, at tables too close together, consuming acrid coffee and the kind of croissants that come in cellophane wrappers while the businessmen boomed away.

‘People talk about manufacturing costs,' the handsome American was saying, ‘and we're not stupid, we see that as a factor, but where's the benefit if we're left with a shitty product?' He was no older than thirty, blue-chinned, muscular beneath a tailored shirt. ‘Our current manufacturers, we're sending 10 to 15 per cent back as faulty or under par.'

‘It is a false economy,' said the nodding Dutchman, slighter and less confident, some sort of middle-man or facilitator. Perhaps there was a business conference in town, a trade fair of some kind.

‘Precisely. A false economy. What you offer us, and this is why we're pursuing this so hard, is consistency, efficiency, transportation links …'

‘Reliability …' said the Russian.

‘It is a win-win situation,' said the Dutchman, who seemed to have a business idiom for every circumstance. They continued in that rather brash tone, and I attempted to bring our own conversation back to check-out times, the storage of luggage, the importance of intelligent packing. We were heading to Munich by sleeper train that evening, then across the Alps to Verona, Vicenza, Padua and Venice, a journey that had seemed rich with romance when I had made the reservations, but now seemed fraught with danger.

Yet Albie and Cat seemed transfixed by the men to our right, exchanging eye-rolls and little shakes of the head and derisive little huffs and tuts at all this talk of timescales and profit margins and brands. ‘Take this model …' said the American, and a glossy brochure made its way across the table, close enough for us to see.

The brochure illustrated a gun, some sort of assault rifle, and it was one of many glossy documents among the coffee cups. We were close enough to reach across and grab one, and for a moment I thought Albie might do just that. Here was the gun in loving close-up, here was the gun dismantled, cradled in a mercenary's arms. I'm no expert on combat weapons, but it looked like rather an absurd object to me. Embellished with telescopic sights and spare magazine clips and jumper-snagging bayonets, it looked like the kind of gun a teenage boy would draw – a space rifle. Indeed, there was discussion about the specialised leisure and hunting sectors, the accessories they'd buy, the gadgets and gizmos.
That's interesting
, I thought,
they're weapons manufacturers
, and I drank the last of my coffee. ‘Well, Cat,' I said, ‘I'm afraid it's time to say goodbye!'

But nobody was listening to me. They were too busy staring, doing their best to radiate disapproval. Cat was craning her neck towards them, shoulders thrown back, eyes wide, street-theatre style. Bad enough that these men were capitalists, but to be discussing such a trade in public, in daylight, in voices loud enough to make our coffee cups shake?

‘Well, the museum opens at ten!' I said, and began to stand.