2109 Exeter Story Prize Winners
First Prize : Island Girl 139 by Victoria MacKenzie
2nd Prize: Mr Rathod by Manish Chauhan
Third Prize: The Hoxton Particular by Heather Johnston
First Prize : Island Girl 139 by Victoria MacKenzie
2nd Prize: Mr Rathod by Manish Chauhan
Third Prize: The Hoxton Particular by Heather Johnston
Island Girl 139 by Victoria MacKenzie
Before I was completely awake, I lay in bed imagining the other creatures waking up: the eagles and hen harriers leaving their nests to hunt; the gulls returning to the fields from the surface of the sea where they’d slept all night; the basking sharks opening their small round eyes and rising slowly to the surface. They’d drift there all day, vast mouths slung open, taking in whatever they could get.
When I got dressed and went downstairs, Gran was already tidying away her breakfast things.
‘Morning, Cathy,’ she said, passing me a cup of tea.
I kissed her cheek. ‘Morning.’
Through the window I could see the chickens pecking at the lawn, enjoying a few toast crumbs. I poured myself some cereal and checked Twitter on my phone.
‘Do you remember Nora, my old friend?’ Gran asked.
‘Who?’ I’d just noticed a new hashtag was trending, #worldwarthree.
‘She has a granddaughter, Eloise, who lives in London. Eloise is coming to stay with us for a while.’
It was okay. The hashtag referred to a new movie, not a nuclear bomb. I looked up at Gran. ‘Coming here? Why?’
‘Eloise has had a few problems lately and needs a break. I want you to make her feel welcome. She’ll be sharing your room.’
I checked the time – I had four minutes before the start of my shift at the hotel, which was a two minute sprint away. No time to argue.
‘Okay,’ I said, putting my bowl in the sink. ‘Got to run.’
‘She’ll be here before you’re back,’ she called after me. I raced down the path, hurdling Olwyn, one of the chickens. They all had Welsh names in honour of a great aunt from Aberystwyth.
As I jogged towards the hotel I could feel the sun was already hot, though it was only nine o’clock. The tourists would be happy and so would I: the warmer the weather, the better the tips.
My shift was the usual hell on earth. The hotel restaurant was frantic, we ran out of scones, and a revolting toddler squirted ketchup on my blouse. Still, I made forty pounds in tips and had tomorrow off. Perhaps I’d see Angus.
When I got home I heard voices coming from the front room – the Good Room Gran calls it – which we only use for special occasions. I peered round the door and sitting on the sofa next to Gran was a slender woman with silky blond hair.
‘Come in, Cathy. Don’t stand there like a wee gowk.’
I stepped into the room and stared at our visitor.
‘Cathy, this is Eloise, Eloise, this is my granddaughter Cathy.’
Eloise smiled at me. ‘Hey.’
‘Eloise is a sculptor,’ said Gran.
My idea of a sculptor was a craggy old man, looking like he’d been hewn out of a chunk of rock himself. Not a willowy woman, with heavy eyelids and red lipstick.
‘Hi,’ I said, feeling self-conscious in my ketchup-stained blouse and polyester skirt. My face was pink and sweaty and I could feel my ponytail coming loose. Eloise was wearing skinny black jeans and a grey-blue jumper that looked like cashmere. Her face was not remotely sweaty.
‘Sit down, pet,’ said Gran.
I sat on the armchair opposite. On the polished coffee table were tea things and an iced fruitcake. You’d have thought it was Christmas.
‘Can I have some cake?’ I asked. ‘I’m starving.’
Gran cut me a slice. ‘Eloise has been telling me all about Peckham, where she lives. You must tell Cathy about it. She’s hoping to go to London.’
Gran’s always on at me about moving to London. She thinks the island’s too small, that I should see some of the world.
‘We-elll,’ Eloise began. ‘Some people say Peckham’s the new Shoreditch, but it hasn’t been ruined by hipsters yet. There’s a cool bookshop, and some really nice cafés. Oh, and there’s an art car park with a Campari bar at the top, and Anthony Gormley designed the bollards.’
‘I used to love Campari,’ said Gran. ‘Must be thirty years since I had one. Fancy it being back in fashion. Sounds great doesn’t it, Cathy?’
We had a nice café here and don’t even need bollards. Nevermind the bollards. I snorted and then realised Gran was giving me a look.
‘Yeah, amazing.’
Gran asked me to show Eloise round after tea. The cottage took about ten seconds. Downstairs was the kitchen, the sitting room, the Good Room and the loo. Upstairs was Gran’s room, my room, and the bathroom. It used to be the harbour master’s cottage. If you lay in the bath you could look out the window and only see water, though when you sat on the loo the mainland was visible, a dark smudge on the horizon. The old harbour wall had crumbled away – they’d built a bigger one on the other side of the island in the eighties. The ferry came three times a week and brought everything we needed: food, post, building supplies. Even the livestock went on the ferry.
In my room I eyed my things self-consciously, wondering if they’d seem babyish to Eloise. On the walls I had my drawings torn from my notebook: pen and ink sketches of mosses, twigs with small buds, a gull’s wing. My windowsill was crammed with shells and pebbles, some that I’d found on the beach, some that Angus had given me. Eloise ooh-ed and ahh-ed and ducked her head in the low doorway. ‘It’s so bijou!’ she said. I didn’t know what ‘bijou’ meant so I just smiled.
Gran had put the camp bed in my room and Eloise put her suitcase on my bed. I couldn’t expect her to sleep on the saggy camp bed but still, it would have been nice to be asked. I changed out of my waitressing uniform while Eloise ‘freshened up’ in the bathroom. I didn’t know what she needed to freshen, she smelt like cut grass and newly-ironed laundry rolled into one. I put on my newest jeans and a jumper the colour of yellow lichen. I re-tied my ponytail and nabbed a bit of Gran’s face powder for my forehead. The overall effect was disappointing.
‘Are you old enough to drive?’ asked Eloise, as we walked out to the garage.
‘I’m seventeen,’ I said.
‘And you’ve passed your test already? Wow. I’ve still not learnt.’
‘You only need a provisional on the island. There’s not exactly a lot of traffic.’
I started the engine and revved it a few times, enjoying feeling the power surge beneath my foot. Eloise struggled to buckle her seatbelt.
‘The passenger one’s broken, soz,’ I said.
She pulled a packet of cigarettes from a slim leather handbag and lit one. ‘Want one?’ she offered.
‘No, thanks. Grim city habit.’
She wound down her window and blew the smoke out.
‘You don’t have to do that,’ I said. ‘I was only teasing.’
I put the car into gear and we sped along the track. Grass sprouted down the middle in a wide strip and there were potholes you could bury your dead in. Either side of the road fat sheep grazed the fields.
‘So what do you do all day?’ Eloise was looking around her as if there was nothing to see, when in fact, just ahead, was a pristine beach, the sand tinged pink from the local red sandstone.
‘Mostly I go down to Mermaid Beach and collect kelp. We sell it as fertiliser to the mainland. And then I collect wool from barbed wire and spin it into yarn for Gran to make jumpers.’
‘Really?’
‘No.’ I slowed the Landy for a couple of lambs that were grazing the centre of the road. ‘I finished school a couple of months ago and since then I’ve been working in the hotel. I’m a waitress.’
‘Oh.’ She sounded disappointed. ‘Do you like it?’
‘My job?’
‘The island.’
‘I love it. It’s my home.’ The lambs moved and I edged the car past them.
Today the sea was streaked turquoise and aquamarine, dotted with small white waves. Sometimes orcas came to feed and there were often basking sharks. I often lay on the cliffs and looked down on the sharks’ dark shapes below the water. It made me feel giddy, as if I was plunging down into the water with them.
‘How long have you lived here?’
‘Always.’
‘You’ve never lived anywhere else?’
‘Nope. But Gran’s obsessed with me going to London. She thinks your life’s not complete unless you go there.’
To tell the truth, I felt a constant pressure to leave. No one young ever stayed – they all went to uni or found jobs on the mainland; some went to New Zealand or Canada. The hotel where I waitressed would close for winter and I had no idea what I’d do then.
‘You must like London?’ I said.
Eloise blew out a lungful of smoke. ‘London’s the best place in the world. But it’s also expensive and busy. There’s no space to think.’
I pulled the car into a passing place. There was a group of three hills ahead. They were snow-tipped in winter, but now the heather and gorse were in bloom and the whole island was a blanket of pink and yellow flowers. Why would anyone leave?
‘See those hills?’ I said. ‘They’re known as The Islanders’ Larder.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s where the deer live. People stalk them – tourists mostly.’
‘Ugh. I’m vegetarian.’
‘It’s a kindness,’ I said. ‘There are too many. The estate keeps the numbers high for the tourists. If they weren’t shot they’d starve. There are about two thousand up there now.’
‘Two thousand! I can’t see a single one.’
‘They can see you,’ I said. ‘They’re up high at the moment. In winter they’re easier to spot against the snow.’
I started the car again and pulled away. As we got closer to home I had a thought.
‘Have you told Gran you’re veggie?’
‘I can’t remember. It won’t be a problem, will it?’
‘Gran’s idea of vegetarian cooking is putting extra mushrooms in the steak pie.’
‘God, I’ll tell her as soon as we’re back.’
We turned a corner and the land dipped into a valley. In the distance a loch shimmered in the sunshine.
‘Who’s that?’ Eloise asked.
I looked to see where she meant. Someone was fishing at the loch.
‘That’s just Angus,’ I said.
‘Who’s “just Angus”?’
‘He lives here.’
She raised her eyebrows.
‘His family has the farm on the east of the island, they own all the cattle. His gran, Betty, runs the shop.’
‘He’s good looking,’ she said.
‘Eloise, he’s at least two miles away! How can you possibly know that?’
‘I can tell by the way you’re looking at him,’ she said, laughing.
It was impossible not to blush so I turned away from her. ‘You’re wrong,’ I said. ‘He has one eye and a wart on his nose the size of a turnip.’
‘Yeah, right.’
She carried on gazing at him. ‘Do you think he’d take us fishing?’
‘I thought you were vegetarian?’
‘We could throw the fish back.’
When we got back to the cottage, Eloise broke the news about her vegetarianism. Gran took it very well.
‘I’ll make a vegetable ragu tonight,’ she said. ‘That’ll keep us all happy.’
Later the three of us chopped tomatoes, aubergines and courgettes.
‘Cathy grew all these herself,’ Gran told Eloise.
‘Gran!’ I didn’t need Eloise thinking I was any more of a freak than she did already.
‘I’m involved in a community allotment at home,’ said Eloise. ‘It’s so satisfying, taking home a bag of your own veg.’
‘It doesn’t seem very London,’ I said.
‘It’s not all twats in suits!’ she snapped.
Gran put the veg in the oven and pretended not to hear.
After dinner Gran said she was going over to Betty’s for bridge night.
‘Oh, I love bridge,’ said Eloise.
‘Bridge?’ I sneered. ‘Don’t tell me that’s trendy in Peckham too?’
‘You must come along one night,’ said Gran. ‘We’d appreciate some young blood.’ She stood up. ‘You girls excuse me while I get ready.’
I cleared the table and started laying it for breakfast tomorrow. It was strange setting three places, it made everything look unbalanced.
‘What do you usually do in the evening?’ Eloise asked.
I shrugged. ‘Netflix.’
‘Netflix! Wow, I forgot you have internet and everything. I keep feeling like I’ve gone back in time.’ She paused. ‘Sorry, I must seem awful.’
‘You’re all right,’ I said, neatening the spoons. I wondered how long she was going to stay for.
‘How many people actually live on the island?’ she asked.
‘About 150. I was the 139th person born on the island. Everyone knows their number, it’s a tradition.’
‘That’s pretty cool. Imagine being person 100.’
‘That’s Betty.’ I said.
‘What number’s Angus?’ she asked.
‘136.’
‘You should start a blog. Island Girl 139. Loads of people fantasise about living on a desert island. You could tell them what it’s really like.’
‘It’s not a desert island.’
‘You know what I mean.’
I messaged Angus about fishing, though I wasn’t sure if Eloise was serious. He said he’d take us tomorrow if we wanted, late afternoon. Eloise seemed pleased. I hoped she wouldn’t be looking too gorgeous.
The next day Gran made us a picnic so we had lunch in the hills. I took my notebook and sketched a sprig of gorse. Each flower was exquisite – a canary yellow slipper, coconut-scented and surrounded by thorns like tiny daggers. There must have been more than a million of them on this hillside alone. Eloise wandered off for a bit. When she came back I wondered if she’d been crying. She smiled at me and asked to see my drawing.
‘You’ve a good eye,’ she said. ‘Have you thought about art school?’
I shook my head. Art school meant leaving the island.
We met Angus at the small bay. He was sitting on an upturned bait bucket mending a creel, his brown hair almost blond in the sun.
‘All right, Cathy?’ he said, looking up.
I nodded. ‘This is Eloise,’ I said. ‘She’s staying with us.’
‘Pleased to meet you, Angus.’ Eloise put her hand out. Angus gave me a bemused look but took her hand.
‘Aye, nice to meet you, right enough. Well, hop in.’
‘No wart!’ Eloise whispered to me. ‘And he seems to have both eyes!’
I concentrated on getting into the boat whilst Angus held it steady. There was no jetty at this end of the island so we had to get our feet wet. The boat was scarcely big enough for three, especially with the rods and the Tupperware box of bait. When we were sitting down Angus pulled the throttle and the boat spluttered into life.
Eloise tried to seem interested in fishing and asked Angus loads of questions about rods and floats. ‘And what do you use for bait?’
‘Mackerel.’
Eloise looked confused. ‘I thought that was what we were trying to catch.’
‘We are. We use mackerel to catch mackerel. They like it.’
The sea was choppy, the green water slapping at the sides of the boat, but it wasn’t too bad – there were other islands ahead which protected us from the full force of the Atlantic. We chugged out for half a mile and then Angus cut the engine. The screeching of the gulls became the loudest sound again. Angus opened the bait box and push a chunk of dead fish onto each hook.
‘You’re lucky you’re here in summer,’ he said to Eloise.
‘Why’s that?’
‘In spring the mackerel are blind and they can’t see the bait – there’s no mackerel fishing until July.’
‘They’re blind? How do they feed and… do whatever fish do?’ she asked.
‘They manage as best they can. Lots don’t survive, of course. But then in the summer the scales fall from their eyes and they can see. That’s where the expression comes from.’
‘No way! Incredible!’
Angus winked at me. I shook my head at him ever so slightly.
As he was showing Eloise how to hold the rod, a large brown and white bird appeared, hovering directly above our heads.
‘Cathy, use your boot,’ said Angus.
I stood up and threw my boot at it but not high enough to make contact.
‘Don’t hurt it!’ called Eloise.
I caught my boot and threw it harder this time, making the boat rock. I missed again and the bird swooped around our heads.
‘Eeek!’
I thought it was the bird, but it was Eloise.
‘I’m being attacked! Make that eagle thing go away!’
I laughed. ‘It’s just a bonxie.’ I threw my boot again.
‘A what?’
The bird rose effortlessly out of the boot’s trajectory, but it had got the message. With a few powerful wingbeats it veered away.
‘A bonxie. A great skua.’ I flapped my arms at her. ‘They’re just big bullies. They steal fish from other seabirds and even kill other birds; they’ve decimated the kittiwakes.’
‘I thought it was going to take my head off!’
‘You were fine,’ said Angus. ‘Cathy’s an experienced bonxie scarer.’ He smiled at me.
We stayed out in the water for another hour but the mackerel weren’t biting.
‘Perhaps they’re still blind,’ Eloise suggested, and Angus and I had to look away to avoid laughing.
Eloise cooked dinner that evening – fried potatoes, tomatoes and eggs. Afterwards Gran went to Betty’s again. We washed up and then Eloise taught me Gin Rummy and Crazy Eights. Just before it got dark, dozens of gulls went past, heading out to sea for the night. We watched them go by, the sun setting into the sea behind them. I got up and went to Gran’s dresser. At the back of one of the cupboards was a three-quarters full bottle of Laphroaig.
‘Beautiful hollow by the broad bay,’ I said.
‘What?’ Eloise asked. We hadn’t spoken for a while and our voices sounded strange in the darkening kitchen. I switched on a lamp.
‘Beautiful hollow by the broad bay. It’s what Laphroaig means. Do you drink whisky?’
‘I usually have it with coke,’ she said.
‘Heathen.’ I poured two large drams and set a small jug of water on the table. ‘Gran has it with a sprinkle of water, she says it’s like a garden after a shower of rain. The smells are more intense.’
We sat quietly for a bit, listening to the crashing of the waves against the cliff. I enjoyed the heat of the whisky at the back of my throat, and then the warmth of it going through me. I wondered what Eloise was doing here on the island, but didn’t know how to ask. ‘So, you’re a sculptor?’ I said.
She took a gulp of whisky. ‘Yes, but I haven’t made anything for months.’
‘Why not?’
‘God, I don’t know. If I knew that, maybe I could do something about it. It’s really hard to be creative in London, it’s so full-on. And then… other things.’
‘What other things?’
‘Can I have another whisky?’
I poured us both another. ‘Let’s go outside,’ I said.
We stood on the grass sipping our whiskies. It was dark, but there were still stripes of blue in the sky, it was never pitch black in summer.
‘I loved someone and he died,’ Eloise said suddenly.
I couldn’t see her face but I could tell she was crying.
‘I wasn’t supposed to love him,’ she said.
‘You don’t have to tell me.’
‘It’s a relief to say it out loud. He was thirty years older than me. Married, of course. A famous artist. My parents were appalled by the relationship. They’re being kind, but I know they’re relieved. Granny Nora suggested I come up here, to get away. Oh god, it’s been so awful.’
I tried to hug her, but it was tricky with us both holding our glasses. We stood there until she calmed down and then I whispered, ‘Eloise, look.’
A doe and her fawn were standing on the lawn, watching us.
‘In Gaelic, the deer are known as fairy cattle,’ I told her.
‘They’re magical,’ she breathed.
‘Sometimes I wish I was a deer,’ I said. ‘Then no one would go on about jobs and careers and seeing the world. I could just live here, on the hill, hefted to the land, no questions asked.’
‘I can see the appeal. I’d love to sculpt those deer.’
‘You’d have to stay here a while,’ I said.
‘I’m starting to think I could stay forever.’
That night I lay on the camp bed listening to the sea, the cries of last few gulls heading out, the occasional bleat of a sheep. I was thinking about Angus and the first time he took me in his arms. His skin had been cold from the sea breeze but he held me tightly and I felt safe, like a boat in harbour.
‘How do you stand the noise?’ came a voice from my bed.
I laughed. It wasn’t ever silent here. I thought for a moment, then said, ‘Pretend the gulls are drunks heading home from the pub. The sea’s the distant traffic. The sheep – car alarms going off.’
‘Good thinking.’
After a while I could hear Eloise’s gentle snores but I still felt wide awake. I got up and went to the window. The deer had gone but I could hear the hens in their house, softly squawking to each other. The sun would rise in a few hours, the light creeping above the hills to the east, lighting up the gorse and heather so the hilltops glowed. The deer would be curled up in the bracken, the does keeping their fawns warm with the steady heat of their bodies.
I would find a way to stay on the island, no matter what. I would tell Angus tomorrow. He was just a few miles away now, sleeping too. Soon he’d rise and see to his cows, calling them by name and patting their solid flanks before leading them into the milking barn. All around us the sea was fussing at the edges of the island, sucking and hissing on the sand, hurling itself against the cliffs, never able to leave it alone, never able to leave it in peace.
When I got dressed and went downstairs, Gran was already tidying away her breakfast things.
‘Morning, Cathy,’ she said, passing me a cup of tea.
I kissed her cheek. ‘Morning.’
Through the window I could see the chickens pecking at the lawn, enjoying a few toast crumbs. I poured myself some cereal and checked Twitter on my phone.
‘Do you remember Nora, my old friend?’ Gran asked.
‘Who?’ I’d just noticed a new hashtag was trending, #worldwarthree.
‘She has a granddaughter, Eloise, who lives in London. Eloise is coming to stay with us for a while.’
It was okay. The hashtag referred to a new movie, not a nuclear bomb. I looked up at Gran. ‘Coming here? Why?’
‘Eloise has had a few problems lately and needs a break. I want you to make her feel welcome. She’ll be sharing your room.’
I checked the time – I had four minutes before the start of my shift at the hotel, which was a two minute sprint away. No time to argue.
‘Okay,’ I said, putting my bowl in the sink. ‘Got to run.’
‘She’ll be here before you’re back,’ she called after me. I raced down the path, hurdling Olwyn, one of the chickens. They all had Welsh names in honour of a great aunt from Aberystwyth.
As I jogged towards the hotel I could feel the sun was already hot, though it was only nine o’clock. The tourists would be happy and so would I: the warmer the weather, the better the tips.
My shift was the usual hell on earth. The hotel restaurant was frantic, we ran out of scones, and a revolting toddler squirted ketchup on my blouse. Still, I made forty pounds in tips and had tomorrow off. Perhaps I’d see Angus.
When I got home I heard voices coming from the front room – the Good Room Gran calls it – which we only use for special occasions. I peered round the door and sitting on the sofa next to Gran was a slender woman with silky blond hair.
‘Come in, Cathy. Don’t stand there like a wee gowk.’
I stepped into the room and stared at our visitor.
‘Cathy, this is Eloise, Eloise, this is my granddaughter Cathy.’
Eloise smiled at me. ‘Hey.’
‘Eloise is a sculptor,’ said Gran.
My idea of a sculptor was a craggy old man, looking like he’d been hewn out of a chunk of rock himself. Not a willowy woman, with heavy eyelids and red lipstick.
‘Hi,’ I said, feeling self-conscious in my ketchup-stained blouse and polyester skirt. My face was pink and sweaty and I could feel my ponytail coming loose. Eloise was wearing skinny black jeans and a grey-blue jumper that looked like cashmere. Her face was not remotely sweaty.
‘Sit down, pet,’ said Gran.
I sat on the armchair opposite. On the polished coffee table were tea things and an iced fruitcake. You’d have thought it was Christmas.
‘Can I have some cake?’ I asked. ‘I’m starving.’
Gran cut me a slice. ‘Eloise has been telling me all about Peckham, where she lives. You must tell Cathy about it. She’s hoping to go to London.’
Gran’s always on at me about moving to London. She thinks the island’s too small, that I should see some of the world.
‘We-elll,’ Eloise began. ‘Some people say Peckham’s the new Shoreditch, but it hasn’t been ruined by hipsters yet. There’s a cool bookshop, and some really nice cafés. Oh, and there’s an art car park with a Campari bar at the top, and Anthony Gormley designed the bollards.’
‘I used to love Campari,’ said Gran. ‘Must be thirty years since I had one. Fancy it being back in fashion. Sounds great doesn’t it, Cathy?’
We had a nice café here and don’t even need bollards. Nevermind the bollards. I snorted and then realised Gran was giving me a look.
‘Yeah, amazing.’
Gran asked me to show Eloise round after tea. The cottage took about ten seconds. Downstairs was the kitchen, the sitting room, the Good Room and the loo. Upstairs was Gran’s room, my room, and the bathroom. It used to be the harbour master’s cottage. If you lay in the bath you could look out the window and only see water, though when you sat on the loo the mainland was visible, a dark smudge on the horizon. The old harbour wall had crumbled away – they’d built a bigger one on the other side of the island in the eighties. The ferry came three times a week and brought everything we needed: food, post, building supplies. Even the livestock went on the ferry.
In my room I eyed my things self-consciously, wondering if they’d seem babyish to Eloise. On the walls I had my drawings torn from my notebook: pen and ink sketches of mosses, twigs with small buds, a gull’s wing. My windowsill was crammed with shells and pebbles, some that I’d found on the beach, some that Angus had given me. Eloise ooh-ed and ahh-ed and ducked her head in the low doorway. ‘It’s so bijou!’ she said. I didn’t know what ‘bijou’ meant so I just smiled.
Gran had put the camp bed in my room and Eloise put her suitcase on my bed. I couldn’t expect her to sleep on the saggy camp bed but still, it would have been nice to be asked. I changed out of my waitressing uniform while Eloise ‘freshened up’ in the bathroom. I didn’t know what she needed to freshen, she smelt like cut grass and newly-ironed laundry rolled into one. I put on my newest jeans and a jumper the colour of yellow lichen. I re-tied my ponytail and nabbed a bit of Gran’s face powder for my forehead. The overall effect was disappointing.
‘Are you old enough to drive?’ asked Eloise, as we walked out to the garage.
‘I’m seventeen,’ I said.
‘And you’ve passed your test already? Wow. I’ve still not learnt.’
‘You only need a provisional on the island. There’s not exactly a lot of traffic.’
I started the engine and revved it a few times, enjoying feeling the power surge beneath my foot. Eloise struggled to buckle her seatbelt.
‘The passenger one’s broken, soz,’ I said.
She pulled a packet of cigarettes from a slim leather handbag and lit one. ‘Want one?’ she offered.
‘No, thanks. Grim city habit.’
She wound down her window and blew the smoke out.
‘You don’t have to do that,’ I said. ‘I was only teasing.’
I put the car into gear and we sped along the track. Grass sprouted down the middle in a wide strip and there were potholes you could bury your dead in. Either side of the road fat sheep grazed the fields.
‘So what do you do all day?’ Eloise was looking around her as if there was nothing to see, when in fact, just ahead, was a pristine beach, the sand tinged pink from the local red sandstone.
‘Mostly I go down to Mermaid Beach and collect kelp. We sell it as fertiliser to the mainland. And then I collect wool from barbed wire and spin it into yarn for Gran to make jumpers.’
‘Really?’
‘No.’ I slowed the Landy for a couple of lambs that were grazing the centre of the road. ‘I finished school a couple of months ago and since then I’ve been working in the hotel. I’m a waitress.’
‘Oh.’ She sounded disappointed. ‘Do you like it?’
‘My job?’
‘The island.’
‘I love it. It’s my home.’ The lambs moved and I edged the car past them.
Today the sea was streaked turquoise and aquamarine, dotted with small white waves. Sometimes orcas came to feed and there were often basking sharks. I often lay on the cliffs and looked down on the sharks’ dark shapes below the water. It made me feel giddy, as if I was plunging down into the water with them.
‘How long have you lived here?’
‘Always.’
‘You’ve never lived anywhere else?’
‘Nope. But Gran’s obsessed with me going to London. She thinks your life’s not complete unless you go there.’
To tell the truth, I felt a constant pressure to leave. No one young ever stayed – they all went to uni or found jobs on the mainland; some went to New Zealand or Canada. The hotel where I waitressed would close for winter and I had no idea what I’d do then.
‘You must like London?’ I said.
Eloise blew out a lungful of smoke. ‘London’s the best place in the world. But it’s also expensive and busy. There’s no space to think.’
I pulled the car into a passing place. There was a group of three hills ahead. They were snow-tipped in winter, but now the heather and gorse were in bloom and the whole island was a blanket of pink and yellow flowers. Why would anyone leave?
‘See those hills?’ I said. ‘They’re known as The Islanders’ Larder.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s where the deer live. People stalk them – tourists mostly.’
‘Ugh. I’m vegetarian.’
‘It’s a kindness,’ I said. ‘There are too many. The estate keeps the numbers high for the tourists. If they weren’t shot they’d starve. There are about two thousand up there now.’
‘Two thousand! I can’t see a single one.’
‘They can see you,’ I said. ‘They’re up high at the moment. In winter they’re easier to spot against the snow.’
I started the car again and pulled away. As we got closer to home I had a thought.
‘Have you told Gran you’re veggie?’
‘I can’t remember. It won’t be a problem, will it?’
‘Gran’s idea of vegetarian cooking is putting extra mushrooms in the steak pie.’
‘God, I’ll tell her as soon as we’re back.’
We turned a corner and the land dipped into a valley. In the distance a loch shimmered in the sunshine.
‘Who’s that?’ Eloise asked.
I looked to see where she meant. Someone was fishing at the loch.
‘That’s just Angus,’ I said.
‘Who’s “just Angus”?’
‘He lives here.’
She raised her eyebrows.
‘His family has the farm on the east of the island, they own all the cattle. His gran, Betty, runs the shop.’
‘He’s good looking,’ she said.
‘Eloise, he’s at least two miles away! How can you possibly know that?’
‘I can tell by the way you’re looking at him,’ she said, laughing.
It was impossible not to blush so I turned away from her. ‘You’re wrong,’ I said. ‘He has one eye and a wart on his nose the size of a turnip.’
‘Yeah, right.’
She carried on gazing at him. ‘Do you think he’d take us fishing?’
‘I thought you were vegetarian?’
‘We could throw the fish back.’
When we got back to the cottage, Eloise broke the news about her vegetarianism. Gran took it very well.
‘I’ll make a vegetable ragu tonight,’ she said. ‘That’ll keep us all happy.’
Later the three of us chopped tomatoes, aubergines and courgettes.
‘Cathy grew all these herself,’ Gran told Eloise.
‘Gran!’ I didn’t need Eloise thinking I was any more of a freak than she did already.
‘I’m involved in a community allotment at home,’ said Eloise. ‘It’s so satisfying, taking home a bag of your own veg.’
‘It doesn’t seem very London,’ I said.
‘It’s not all twats in suits!’ she snapped.
Gran put the veg in the oven and pretended not to hear.
After dinner Gran said she was going over to Betty’s for bridge night.
‘Oh, I love bridge,’ said Eloise.
‘Bridge?’ I sneered. ‘Don’t tell me that’s trendy in Peckham too?’
‘You must come along one night,’ said Gran. ‘We’d appreciate some young blood.’ She stood up. ‘You girls excuse me while I get ready.’
I cleared the table and started laying it for breakfast tomorrow. It was strange setting three places, it made everything look unbalanced.
‘What do you usually do in the evening?’ Eloise asked.
I shrugged. ‘Netflix.’
‘Netflix! Wow, I forgot you have internet and everything. I keep feeling like I’ve gone back in time.’ She paused. ‘Sorry, I must seem awful.’
‘You’re all right,’ I said, neatening the spoons. I wondered how long she was going to stay for.
‘How many people actually live on the island?’ she asked.
‘About 150. I was the 139th person born on the island. Everyone knows their number, it’s a tradition.’
‘That’s pretty cool. Imagine being person 100.’
‘That’s Betty.’ I said.
‘What number’s Angus?’ she asked.
‘136.’
‘You should start a blog. Island Girl 139. Loads of people fantasise about living on a desert island. You could tell them what it’s really like.’
‘It’s not a desert island.’
‘You know what I mean.’
I messaged Angus about fishing, though I wasn’t sure if Eloise was serious. He said he’d take us tomorrow if we wanted, late afternoon. Eloise seemed pleased. I hoped she wouldn’t be looking too gorgeous.
The next day Gran made us a picnic so we had lunch in the hills. I took my notebook and sketched a sprig of gorse. Each flower was exquisite – a canary yellow slipper, coconut-scented and surrounded by thorns like tiny daggers. There must have been more than a million of them on this hillside alone. Eloise wandered off for a bit. When she came back I wondered if she’d been crying. She smiled at me and asked to see my drawing.
‘You’ve a good eye,’ she said. ‘Have you thought about art school?’
I shook my head. Art school meant leaving the island.
We met Angus at the small bay. He was sitting on an upturned bait bucket mending a creel, his brown hair almost blond in the sun.
‘All right, Cathy?’ he said, looking up.
I nodded. ‘This is Eloise,’ I said. ‘She’s staying with us.’
‘Pleased to meet you, Angus.’ Eloise put her hand out. Angus gave me a bemused look but took her hand.
‘Aye, nice to meet you, right enough. Well, hop in.’
‘No wart!’ Eloise whispered to me. ‘And he seems to have both eyes!’
I concentrated on getting into the boat whilst Angus held it steady. There was no jetty at this end of the island so we had to get our feet wet. The boat was scarcely big enough for three, especially with the rods and the Tupperware box of bait. When we were sitting down Angus pulled the throttle and the boat spluttered into life.
Eloise tried to seem interested in fishing and asked Angus loads of questions about rods and floats. ‘And what do you use for bait?’
‘Mackerel.’
Eloise looked confused. ‘I thought that was what we were trying to catch.’
‘We are. We use mackerel to catch mackerel. They like it.’
The sea was choppy, the green water slapping at the sides of the boat, but it wasn’t too bad – there were other islands ahead which protected us from the full force of the Atlantic. We chugged out for half a mile and then Angus cut the engine. The screeching of the gulls became the loudest sound again. Angus opened the bait box and push a chunk of dead fish onto each hook.
‘You’re lucky you’re here in summer,’ he said to Eloise.
‘Why’s that?’
‘In spring the mackerel are blind and they can’t see the bait – there’s no mackerel fishing until July.’
‘They’re blind? How do they feed and… do whatever fish do?’ she asked.
‘They manage as best they can. Lots don’t survive, of course. But then in the summer the scales fall from their eyes and they can see. That’s where the expression comes from.’
‘No way! Incredible!’
Angus winked at me. I shook my head at him ever so slightly.
As he was showing Eloise how to hold the rod, a large brown and white bird appeared, hovering directly above our heads.
‘Cathy, use your boot,’ said Angus.
I stood up and threw my boot at it but not high enough to make contact.
‘Don’t hurt it!’ called Eloise.
I caught my boot and threw it harder this time, making the boat rock. I missed again and the bird swooped around our heads.
‘Eeek!’
I thought it was the bird, but it was Eloise.
‘I’m being attacked! Make that eagle thing go away!’
I laughed. ‘It’s just a bonxie.’ I threw my boot again.
‘A what?’
The bird rose effortlessly out of the boot’s trajectory, but it had got the message. With a few powerful wingbeats it veered away.
‘A bonxie. A great skua.’ I flapped my arms at her. ‘They’re just big bullies. They steal fish from other seabirds and even kill other birds; they’ve decimated the kittiwakes.’
‘I thought it was going to take my head off!’
‘You were fine,’ said Angus. ‘Cathy’s an experienced bonxie scarer.’ He smiled at me.
We stayed out in the water for another hour but the mackerel weren’t biting.
‘Perhaps they’re still blind,’ Eloise suggested, and Angus and I had to look away to avoid laughing.
Eloise cooked dinner that evening – fried potatoes, tomatoes and eggs. Afterwards Gran went to Betty’s again. We washed up and then Eloise taught me Gin Rummy and Crazy Eights. Just before it got dark, dozens of gulls went past, heading out to sea for the night. We watched them go by, the sun setting into the sea behind them. I got up and went to Gran’s dresser. At the back of one of the cupboards was a three-quarters full bottle of Laphroaig.
‘Beautiful hollow by the broad bay,’ I said.
‘What?’ Eloise asked. We hadn’t spoken for a while and our voices sounded strange in the darkening kitchen. I switched on a lamp.
‘Beautiful hollow by the broad bay. It’s what Laphroaig means. Do you drink whisky?’
‘I usually have it with coke,’ she said.
‘Heathen.’ I poured two large drams and set a small jug of water on the table. ‘Gran has it with a sprinkle of water, she says it’s like a garden after a shower of rain. The smells are more intense.’
We sat quietly for a bit, listening to the crashing of the waves against the cliff. I enjoyed the heat of the whisky at the back of my throat, and then the warmth of it going through me. I wondered what Eloise was doing here on the island, but didn’t know how to ask. ‘So, you’re a sculptor?’ I said.
She took a gulp of whisky. ‘Yes, but I haven’t made anything for months.’
‘Why not?’
‘God, I don’t know. If I knew that, maybe I could do something about it. It’s really hard to be creative in London, it’s so full-on. And then… other things.’
‘What other things?’
‘Can I have another whisky?’
I poured us both another. ‘Let’s go outside,’ I said.
We stood on the grass sipping our whiskies. It was dark, but there were still stripes of blue in the sky, it was never pitch black in summer.
‘I loved someone and he died,’ Eloise said suddenly.
I couldn’t see her face but I could tell she was crying.
‘I wasn’t supposed to love him,’ she said.
‘You don’t have to tell me.’
‘It’s a relief to say it out loud. He was thirty years older than me. Married, of course. A famous artist. My parents were appalled by the relationship. They’re being kind, but I know they’re relieved. Granny Nora suggested I come up here, to get away. Oh god, it’s been so awful.’
I tried to hug her, but it was tricky with us both holding our glasses. We stood there until she calmed down and then I whispered, ‘Eloise, look.’
A doe and her fawn were standing on the lawn, watching us.
‘In Gaelic, the deer are known as fairy cattle,’ I told her.
‘They’re magical,’ she breathed.
‘Sometimes I wish I was a deer,’ I said. ‘Then no one would go on about jobs and careers and seeing the world. I could just live here, on the hill, hefted to the land, no questions asked.’
‘I can see the appeal. I’d love to sculpt those deer.’
‘You’d have to stay here a while,’ I said.
‘I’m starting to think I could stay forever.’
That night I lay on the camp bed listening to the sea, the cries of last few gulls heading out, the occasional bleat of a sheep. I was thinking about Angus and the first time he took me in his arms. His skin had been cold from the sea breeze but he held me tightly and I felt safe, like a boat in harbour.
‘How do you stand the noise?’ came a voice from my bed.
I laughed. It wasn’t ever silent here. I thought for a moment, then said, ‘Pretend the gulls are drunks heading home from the pub. The sea’s the distant traffic. The sheep – car alarms going off.’
‘Good thinking.’
After a while I could hear Eloise’s gentle snores but I still felt wide awake. I got up and went to the window. The deer had gone but I could hear the hens in their house, softly squawking to each other. The sun would rise in a few hours, the light creeping above the hills to the east, lighting up the gorse and heather so the hilltops glowed. The deer would be curled up in the bracken, the does keeping their fawns warm with the steady heat of their bodies.
I would find a way to stay on the island, no matter what. I would tell Angus tomorrow. He was just a few miles away now, sleeping too. Soon he’d rise and see to his cows, calling them by name and patting their solid flanks before leading them into the milking barn. All around us the sea was fussing at the edges of the island, sucking and hissing on the sand, hurling itself against the cliffs, never able to leave it alone, never able to leave it in peace.
2nd Prize: Mr Rathod by Manish Chauhan
On the morning of the funeral, Ravi stood in his old bedroom and buttoned up his shirt in silence. It was almost a year since his last visit and he was using the silence to settle into something, to invoke it.
‘Here,’ his mother said, coming into the room at just the wrong moment. ‘Help me with my sari, will you?’
Leaving his buttons undone, he helped attach the end of her sari to her blouse using a pin, careful not to pierce the skin above her shoulder.
‘We should probably get going,’ she said, and when he didn’t respond, she said ‘I still can’t understand why you had to come all the way for this.’
‘You don’t have to come,’ he said, louder than he should have, and then it was her turn to fall silent. She was stood with her back towards him. He looked at her hair, the thick grey of it far more pronounced than when he’d last seen her.
They pulled on their coats and walked six streets down towards Hunter Road, passing the temple on their way. The same temple where he and Mr Rathod had first met - the old man sat at the back, not long a widower.
‘Do you still visit?’ Ravi asked his mother.
‘It reminds me too much of Ba.’
Ba. His grandmother. She had taken Ravi with her to the temple every weekend. He thought of her now, her thin, widow’s frame, her round face, her puff of white hair.
It had not mattered to him then that he was the youngest person at the temple, often by decades. He had not yet grown possessive over his own youthfulness. He simply sat with the rest of them, knew the words to every hymn. Sometimes the priest even let him play the tambourine.
Now, as they walked past it, it felt as though the magic had somehow seeped out from the temple. Through the open windows they heard the chime of bells, the sound of voices, a reminder perhaps that not everything was lost.
Outside Mr Rathod’s house, they saw that a sign had been put up on the front door directing people to use the passageway that ran along the side. It was winter. A group of men stood along the pavement with their hands in the pockets, the fog of their breath visible in front of their faces. The house was identical to the ones on either side save the pale yellow window frames. It was exactly as Ravi remembered, except for the swell of people that were now inside it.
They joined a queue of people in the kitchen. A woman neither of them knew handed them a fistful of flower petals.
It was the third time he had seen a corpse. Mr Rathod had been dressed in a suit, the outline of his body barely visible through its grey material. A white sheet was pulled up over his legs and stomach, flower petals placed along its edges, dried coconuts placed at the feet. His face looked like a balloon somebody had only just deflated. Ravi looked at him, to see whether he still recognised him, as though suddenly that was very important.
He heard sobbing and looked up to see two women holding each other’s hands and crying. He knew they were Mr Rathod’s daughters, although he had never met them and couldn’t remember their names. They both looked more like Mr Rathod than Mr Rathod looked himself. From the corner of his eye, he saw that his mother was crying too, which surprised him.
‘Try not to cry,’ somebody said. It was the woman who had handed them the petals. ‘It’s not good for his soul.’ She spoke with a deflated urgency. Ravi wondered whether there was any truth to that. He imagined Mr Rathod’s soul, the heavy cloud of it, drifting up out of his body, hanging somewhere in the air above them. He wondered whether Mr Rathod still recognised him.
After the lid was screwed back on and the coffin carried outside and put back into the funeral car, Ravi’s mother arranged for somebody to give them a lift to the crematorium.
Many years ago he had asked Mr Rathod what happened when a person died.
‘Nothing happens, young man,’ Mr Rathod had said. ‘It just means that you have to let somebody else have their turn.’
During her eulogy, one of the daughters said ‘I know we both lived far away. I know we should have come to see you more often. I’m sorry we didn’t visit more often.’ Her gaze was fixed intently on the coffin as she spoke, as though she and her dead father were the only people in the room. Then, as though suddenly remembering something, she broke into a fresh set of sobs and was helped off the stage.
Ravi remembered that Mr Rathod’s living room used to be full of photos of his daughters, all along the mantelpiece and on small coffee tables dotted about the place. Daughters who were both married by then, who visited twice a year, who lived in Bournemouth and Edinburgh with their respective husbands. There was also a portrait of his dead wife, hung on a wall directly above the fireplace, a string of dry white flowers draped across it.
Once they were back at the house, they showered and Ravi went into his room, telling his mother he wanted a nap. Instead, he brought out a book of short stories he was in the middle of reading, and let himself be taken into them. It took the rest of the afternoon for his numbness to subside. He felt like a dry stretch of shore, waiting patiently for a wave in the distance, waiting, waiting.
When he eventually came back downstairs, his mother was on the sofa watching television. She was sat at the far end of it, neatly, with the remote in her lap. She looked liked she was in a waiting room, poised to get up, poised to leave. He tried to imagine what she might look like laying across it, her head on the arm, her feet dangling off the edge.
Their house was pristine, his mother made sure of it. As a child he had not been allowed to eat in front of the television, and his shoes had to always come off the moment he walked through the front door.
‘Is your job going well?’ his mother asked, once he was sat beside her. Her eyes didn’t leave the television.
‘Fine,’ he said, even though it wasn’t, even though just the other day he had contemplated handing in his resignation. But his mother was the sort of woman who only asked questions she didn’t need the answers to.
‘What should we eat for dinner?’ she asked.
‘Anything,’ he said.
‘Okay.’
It was nearly three years since his father had died of a heart attack, three years since his mother had become a widow, and as he looked around the house, he saw that not a single thing had changed. His father’s clothes were still in the wardrobes, his bathrobe still hung on the back of the bathroom door. His shaving cream was still on the windowsill. The house looked exactly as it must have the day he died. Three years ago.
‘I just haven’t had the time,’ his mother had said, when he had asked about it last year. He imagined her at night, reaching into those wardrobes for some company, weeping into her husband’s musty old suit jacket.
She made them both toasted sandwiches using some left over samosa filling and they ate these with a packet of ready salted crisps. He told her about something he had started watching on Netflix, and they watched an episode of that together. By the time they finished it was pitch black outside. They had forgotten to draw the curtains or switch on the light.
‘We’re thinking about buying a house,’ he said, just as he was taking their plates back into the kitchen.
‘Oh,’ she said.
‘Not too big, but we might as well get on the ladder. And it’s always easier with two people,’ he said.
‘Will you both pay equal halves? Are you sure?’
‘I think so, although I’ve probably got more savings.’
‘It should be equal,’ she said firmly.
‘We’re excited,’ he said, but she was quiet.
‘They’ve already put Mr Rathod’s house up for sale,’ she said.
‘Oh, we want to buy in Edinburgh,’ he said.
‘No, I’m not suggesting you buy it, I’m just saying that he’s only been dead five minutes and already the house is on the market.’
‘What’s the point of holding onto it?’ he asked.
After a few minutes she turned to him and said, ‘Maybe you’re right.’
*
The following morning he woke to the sound of soft thuds somewhere above him. Stepping out of his bedroom he saw that his mother had pulled a ladder up into the attic. In the bedroom, she had emptied the wardrobes of his father’s clothes and they lay in haphazard piles across the bed. He stood at the foot of the ladder and peered up into the square of light cut out from the ceiling.
‘I thought whilst you’re still here…’ she said. ‘Who knows when you’ll next visit. He caught sight of her. Something in the way she was dressed, in a tatty old t-shirt and jogging pants, her hair in disarray, worried him.
‘You don’t have to get rid of his things,’ he said.
‘Why would I want to keep them?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, and as though she hadn’t heard him, she threw a big black rubbish bag in his direction, which he caught.
It took them the best part of the day to sort though his father’s belongings, deciding what might be given to charity and what might be thrown away. The smell on the shirts, their warm fug made Ravi want to cry, as though his father was hidden in amongst them. He had not had a chance to say goodbye, his father disappearing over night, leaving behind him a swirling, terrible silence that had take them all over.
‘Ah’ his mother said, sometime later, as she opened up one of the bin liners and pulled out a cricket bat. There was a football too. He remembered both things. Both things looked the way they must have when she had first bought them. She brought them close to her chest as though they were young children.
‘You never did like sports,’ she said.
They loaded the car and his mother drove them to the charity shop. It was nearing the end of the afternoon, the moment when the sky turns from one thing into another. They drove along the main road, his mother propelling the car forward with an erratic determination that put him on edge. She drove through a red light.
‘Are you okay?’ he asked.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘It was a mistake.’
The man in the charity shop took the bags one by one into the back of the shop. They stood watching him, silently, half expecting him to emerge from the back with something, although neither knew what.
On the way back, Ravi offered to drive and took them along a different route, passing by the secondary school he had attended as a boy. He couldn’t remember the last time he had seen it, its once grey concrete walls had been painted over white, which gave it the look of something temporary. Behind the building were smaller classrooms that had been erected to create more space. And beyond those was a large field on which he had been made to play sports, sports he had hated, alongside boys who had hated him.
His mother had bought him the best football they could find, the most expensive cricket bat – the sorts of things the other boys might have been jealous of, had he taken any pride in them.
‘Why don’t you play with the other boys?’ she had said, as every week he had tried to get out of his P.E class.
‘I don’t like it. I’m not good at it,’ he’d said.
‘But that’s the whole point of playing, so that you get better.’
‘They don’t like me.’
‘Who doesn’t like you? Boys should play with other boys,’ she had said. ‘That way they’ll make friends just like them.’ He hadn’t known how to tell her that it was the girls who were his best friends at school, the girls in whose company he felt warm and alive. Perhaps she had known anyway, perhaps that was what she hadn’t liked.
She bought him whichever sports kit he needed, drove him to all of the matches, sat shivering in the cold with the other parents as he failed game after game, weak and miserable, when all he wanted to do was to be at home drawing. How many times had he looked towards his mother during a match? How many times had she not seen him?
In front of her the other boys humoured his poor performance, but during the week, whilst he was alone, Ravi found himself dreading lunchtimes, the boys having the endless capacity to weed him out.
He asked his mother whether he could come home instead.
‘How will you make friends, if you stay at home?’ she asked.
So he found himself wandering around the streets by himself at lunchtime, too scared to go to his grandmother’s house just in case she told his mother. And it was then that he saw Mr Rathod out on the main road, carrying home what looked to be a bag of food.
‘What are you doing around here, young man?’ he’d asked.
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing?’ he laughed. ‘Have you eaten? I’ve got food here. When do you have to get back to school?’
‘At two.’
‘Well you could give this old man some company,’ he said.
The house had a warm smell about it, as though it had only just been full of people even though it was quite evident that it hadn’t. The sofas were big and soft and Ravi wondered what it would be like to lie all the way across them, be swallowed up by them. In this house, the place of things was fluid. The edges were soft. At home, he was made to sit up straight on the sofa, so that he didn’t break its frame.
Mr Rathod’s house was smaller than his own, with nothing of a garden. He wondered what it might be like to live there. He’d miss being able to run around a garden in the summer.
‘You look like you’re in a museum,’ Mr Rathod laughed.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘No need for sorry.’
‘Why are there so many photos?’ Ravi asked.
‘These were all my wife’s idea,’ he said. ‘She loved her photographs. Now that she’s gone I suppose I could do whatever I….’
‘Don’t you like them?’ Ravi asked.
‘The photos? Of course I do. They’re of my daughters.’ He went and picked one up off the table, bought it close to his face. Ravi thought for a moment Mr Rathod might cry, but he didn’t.
He brought out plates from the kitchen and they shared a jacket potato. Ravi watched as the steam rose from it, the cheese oozing over the sides like lava. He watched as Mr Rathod ate his half using only his hands, pulling off bits of the skin and scooping up the insides with them.
A few days after that he found himself chased across the school field by a group of boys from his P.E class. He ran as fast as he could, tripping up over some grass until suddenly they were all on him. All he could do was to brace himself. They threw his rucksack into the stream that trickled through the grounds of the school, so he had to run after it into the water, getting his clothes wet, allowing his face to get wet so that that would hide his tears.
He found himself stood outside Mr Rathod’s front door, half expecting him not to be in, but he was, and he opened the door and without saying anything, let him in and brought out a spare towel for him to dry himself. He made him stand by the heater and helped empty his bag. The exercise books were damp at the edges, the ink had smudged across the page. Ravi stood there in silence, fighting an urge to shrink to his knees.
‘Am I like a girl?’ Ravi asked, sometime later, barely able to speak through his tears. He felt a kind of relief at his own sadness, as though he had finally opened a set of doors behind which an ocean of his own misery had long sat.
‘No,’ Mr Rathod said. ‘You’re a boy.’
‘Then why does everyone say I’m like a girl?’
‘Who says that?’
‘Everyone.’
‘Well I can only see a boy,’ Mr Rathod said. ‘A brilliant boy.’
His sobs dissolved into hiccups then and Mr Rathod handed him a tissue.
‘If you’re not popular now, you’ll be popular later,’ Mr Rathod had told him. ‘That’s sometimes how the world works.’ Ravi was almost thirty by the time he understood the truth of what Mr Rathod had said.
‘Don’t let anybody turn you into something you’re not. You are you. And that’s all you should ever be.’ He had listened as carefully to Mr Rathod as a boy his age could, wound up as he was in something he wasn’t yet able to understand.
After that, he went to Mr Rathod’s house nearly every lunchtime. The old man always had lunch ready and they sat and ate it quietly in front of the television. He got used to flinging his coat over a chair in the front room, he let himself be swallowed a little bit by the sofa in the living room. He sometimes bought a bag of penny sweets for Mr Rathod, who he knew liked them.
Mr Rathod asked him about his day and whether there’d been any more trouble.
‘Whenever you come into this house, I want you to be who you are. No pretending,’ he said. It had not made any sense to him at the time, but it had worked, miraculously, as he had begun to shed layers of himself he had not known to exist.
‘Is it true?’ his mother asked, when eventually she found out. ‘Are you seeing that old man during the day?’
He didn’t know what to say.
‘What has he said to you?’
‘Nothing.’
‘What would an old man like him do with a young boy like you?’
‘He’s a nice man.’
‘Nice?’ she grabbed Ravi by both shoulders. He thought she might hit him. ‘He hasn’t touched you has he?’ she asked. Ravi felt sick at that.
‘No.’
‘I don’t want you to go to his house ever again, do you understand? Promise me,’ she said. He had not seen her so angry, her rage blistering.
‘You should be at school, playing with boys your own age.’
‘Everybody hates me,’ he said.
‘Nobody hates you.’ Here she seemed to soften, her body suddenly slack. ‘Why can’t you just be like the others?’
In the years that followed he would think back to that moment as the one where he wanted desperately to leave her.
The very next day he went back to Mr Rathod’s house, this time with a hood pulled over his head so that nobody recognised him.
‘My mum says I can’t come here any more,’ he said.
‘Well we don’t want to upset your mother.’
He felt something bubble up inside him then, a torrent of strange feelings, rising up to the very top of him.
‘You’re going to have a brilliant life,’ Mr Rathod said, as though it had been decided. He was changing the batteries in the remote control and Ravi noticed how he didn’t look at him as he spoke. ‘But you have to be who you are. Otherwise, you’ll be in trouble.’
He had left the house feeling as though his insides had been scooped out. Not dissimilar to how he’d feel, years later, watching the old man’s coffin recede behind the curtain.
When it came to university, he went as far away from his parents as he could. And it was only once he was in Scotland that he understood how frightening the world could be without his parents in it, and some years later, just how fearless that had actually made him.
He saw Mr Rathod only a handful of times after that, mostly at the temple, where he sometimes took his grandmother. Both men usually sat towards the back. Mr Rathod asked him about his studies, but more often than not, they sat beside each other in silence, enjoying the familiar comfort of that. Years later, once he had started going out with Seth, he tried to explain to him who Mr Rathod was, but found that the more he described him, the less describable he became.
‘Did he fancy you?’ Seth asked, so casually that it felt insulting.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ Ravi had said. That had been the beginning of their first real argument.
Years later, he and Seth celebrated their fifth anniversary by having an expensive meal in a restaurant that overlooked a lake. There was a framed portrait of two women who looked to be sisters, hung up along one of the walls. They played a game in which they tried to imagine the story behind that photograph.
Shortly after they came home, Ravi went up into the study and wrote a letter to Mr Rathod. He had not thought of him in a long while and he wondered whether it was something to do with the painting in the restaurant.
He had written about what was becoming of his life, about his distressed relationship with his parents, especially his mother, who made him feel as though he had let her down in a very fundamental way, first by moving away from her, then by building his unknowable life on the peripheries of her imagination. His words had come out fast, as though the letter had already been written years ago. He thanked Mr Rathod for the freedom he had given to him, now that he understood what freedom was. He said he often wondered what might have become of his life had he stayed in Leicester.
He waited two months – checking the post everyday - but received no response. Then he worried that he may not have put a return address on the letter. And then the steady passage of time eroded something and he simply stopped waiting. About a year after he had sent the letter, Ravi found himself at back at the temple, in search of Mr Rathod. He spoke to a woman who told him she had seen him just the other day.
It was also that very weekend that he finally came out to his parents, watched as the dread of his secret cast a long shadow across their faces. He understood that that was something he had spent his whole life expecting, but something he still wasn’t prepared for. He was twenty-seven.
‘But how do you know you don’t like women?’ had been his mother’s response. He had looked at her, her body was stiff, as though somebody had stitched her up on the inside so that it was too painful to move.
‘Well how do you know that you don’t like women?’ he asked, and watched her wince.
‘What about children?’
‘I can still have children.’ He watched her scoff and turn her face away from him.
‘What will we tell everybody?’ she said, not so much to him as to his father, who simply stood up from the sofa, as though he thought that might restart something, declaring that he was going for a walk. After he left, Ravi and his mother sat opposite each other, doused in an unknowing silence, neither knowing quite what to say, as though the energy in the room had all been used up. They didn’t talk about it for another three years, and then one day he told them about Seth and they listened as though he was talking about somebody else’s life, somebody they didn’t recognise. He stopped coming home as frequently as he once had after that, and whenever he did, he found himself impatient to return to his proper life.
He and Seth didn’t particularly want children, but sometimes he thought they should have one anyways, so that he could give something to his parents. So that they might think of him in a certain way again. Occasionally he laughed at the absurdity of that thought.
The day before he went back to Edinburgh, he helped his mother clear away the last of his father’s belongings. They made a small box of them.
‘It’s like he was never here,’ his mother said. They were both sat next to each other on the sofa with the box positioned on the floor between them.
‘I can drop it somewhere on the way.’
‘It’s fine, I’ll do it when I have a moment,’ she said.
They both sat quietly, just as they were, staring at the box in the centre of the room, watching it expand with each passing moment, until it was full of all the things that were never said.
*
The sisters spent the week following their father’s funeral clearing out his belongings and opening doors to strangers who looked around the empty rooms, deciding whether or not to put in an offer. Empty, the house took on a strange presence, as though it no longer recognised them, and somewhere inside, both sisters felt that they no longer recognised it. In amongst the small jumble of their father’s possessions they found a draft of a letter.
Dear Ravi
I was very happy to receive your letter, and even happier to realise that I still make it into your thoughts. You are often in mine. I read about your life with a sense of pride, although I can’t say I was surprised by anything you said. It seems you are keeping up the promise of living your life thoughtfully and honestly and I really don’t know what more anybody could hope for. Unfortunately, as you and I both know, that won’t be enough for some people and we simply have to make peace with that.
I am happy you have found a partner - love is a very important thing to feel, and you are most deserving of this. You and your boyfriend both looked happy in the photograph you sent. I was trying to imagine the kind of life your boyfriend must have led, how different it must have been to your own.
It must be nearly a decade since I last saw you. Time moves at a frightening pace, more for me than for you I imagine. When you’re my age (nearly eighty!) months and years blend into one endless mass and before long one begins to wonder whether they are truly seeing things for the very last time.
I have a young man who helps look after me during the day. He’s from Poland. He must be your age, if slightly younger. He’s training to be a nurse. His name is Viktor. One morning I expect he’ll open the door to find me gone. Poor boy.
As you can probably tell, I’ve been thinking a lot about death. I’ve been thinking about my wife and whether I’ll ever see her again. The older I get the more I want to say to her, the more I’d wish I’d said. I want to tell her that I wish I had been a better husband whilst she was alive. I want to tell her that there were better men than me who would have loved her more completely, but perhaps she already knows this. She knew me better than I knew myself. She was the kind of woman who was never without a smile, but I can’t seem to shift this terrible feeling that behind it she might have been incredibly sad. We are so good at plastering over our own misery.
I look at her photograph now, up on the wall, as she smiles down on me, and I ask for her forgiveness. Sometimes it feels like she is the one who brought you into my life. Perhaps she was offering me a second chance at something. As I read your letter I understood that in some ways you have lived life for the both of us. You have given courage to this coward.
Sometimes I try and talk to Viktor about this, but his English isn’t very good. I watch him move about my house, cleaning up after me, hoisting up a pillow so I can sit properly. He’s a very handsome young man, Viktor. Sometimes I wonder what it might feel like to be touched by a man like him, to be kissed by somebody like him. Sometimes the mere touch of his hand sends a kind of electrical shiver all through my body and for the briefest of moments I feel like I’m young again, as though my life is just about to begin. I realise that perhaps the only thing I have ever truly wanted was to feel desired by another man in the way I have desired so many. You’ll think I’m a sorry fool no doubt, but I hope you don’t. And I hope you continue living for the both of us.
Vinod
‘Here,’ his mother said, coming into the room at just the wrong moment. ‘Help me with my sari, will you?’
Leaving his buttons undone, he helped attach the end of her sari to her blouse using a pin, careful not to pierce the skin above her shoulder.
‘We should probably get going,’ she said, and when he didn’t respond, she said ‘I still can’t understand why you had to come all the way for this.’
‘You don’t have to come,’ he said, louder than he should have, and then it was her turn to fall silent. She was stood with her back towards him. He looked at her hair, the thick grey of it far more pronounced than when he’d last seen her.
They pulled on their coats and walked six streets down towards Hunter Road, passing the temple on their way. The same temple where he and Mr Rathod had first met - the old man sat at the back, not long a widower.
‘Do you still visit?’ Ravi asked his mother.
‘It reminds me too much of Ba.’
Ba. His grandmother. She had taken Ravi with her to the temple every weekend. He thought of her now, her thin, widow’s frame, her round face, her puff of white hair.
It had not mattered to him then that he was the youngest person at the temple, often by decades. He had not yet grown possessive over his own youthfulness. He simply sat with the rest of them, knew the words to every hymn. Sometimes the priest even let him play the tambourine.
Now, as they walked past it, it felt as though the magic had somehow seeped out from the temple. Through the open windows they heard the chime of bells, the sound of voices, a reminder perhaps that not everything was lost.
Outside Mr Rathod’s house, they saw that a sign had been put up on the front door directing people to use the passageway that ran along the side. It was winter. A group of men stood along the pavement with their hands in the pockets, the fog of their breath visible in front of their faces. The house was identical to the ones on either side save the pale yellow window frames. It was exactly as Ravi remembered, except for the swell of people that were now inside it.
They joined a queue of people in the kitchen. A woman neither of them knew handed them a fistful of flower petals.
It was the third time he had seen a corpse. Mr Rathod had been dressed in a suit, the outline of his body barely visible through its grey material. A white sheet was pulled up over his legs and stomach, flower petals placed along its edges, dried coconuts placed at the feet. His face looked like a balloon somebody had only just deflated. Ravi looked at him, to see whether he still recognised him, as though suddenly that was very important.
He heard sobbing and looked up to see two women holding each other’s hands and crying. He knew they were Mr Rathod’s daughters, although he had never met them and couldn’t remember their names. They both looked more like Mr Rathod than Mr Rathod looked himself. From the corner of his eye, he saw that his mother was crying too, which surprised him.
‘Try not to cry,’ somebody said. It was the woman who had handed them the petals. ‘It’s not good for his soul.’ She spoke with a deflated urgency. Ravi wondered whether there was any truth to that. He imagined Mr Rathod’s soul, the heavy cloud of it, drifting up out of his body, hanging somewhere in the air above them. He wondered whether Mr Rathod still recognised him.
After the lid was screwed back on and the coffin carried outside and put back into the funeral car, Ravi’s mother arranged for somebody to give them a lift to the crematorium.
Many years ago he had asked Mr Rathod what happened when a person died.
‘Nothing happens, young man,’ Mr Rathod had said. ‘It just means that you have to let somebody else have their turn.’
During her eulogy, one of the daughters said ‘I know we both lived far away. I know we should have come to see you more often. I’m sorry we didn’t visit more often.’ Her gaze was fixed intently on the coffin as she spoke, as though she and her dead father were the only people in the room. Then, as though suddenly remembering something, she broke into a fresh set of sobs and was helped off the stage.
Ravi remembered that Mr Rathod’s living room used to be full of photos of his daughters, all along the mantelpiece and on small coffee tables dotted about the place. Daughters who were both married by then, who visited twice a year, who lived in Bournemouth and Edinburgh with their respective husbands. There was also a portrait of his dead wife, hung on a wall directly above the fireplace, a string of dry white flowers draped across it.
Once they were back at the house, they showered and Ravi went into his room, telling his mother he wanted a nap. Instead, he brought out a book of short stories he was in the middle of reading, and let himself be taken into them. It took the rest of the afternoon for his numbness to subside. He felt like a dry stretch of shore, waiting patiently for a wave in the distance, waiting, waiting.
When he eventually came back downstairs, his mother was on the sofa watching television. She was sat at the far end of it, neatly, with the remote in her lap. She looked liked she was in a waiting room, poised to get up, poised to leave. He tried to imagine what she might look like laying across it, her head on the arm, her feet dangling off the edge.
Their house was pristine, his mother made sure of it. As a child he had not been allowed to eat in front of the television, and his shoes had to always come off the moment he walked through the front door.
‘Is your job going well?’ his mother asked, once he was sat beside her. Her eyes didn’t leave the television.
‘Fine,’ he said, even though it wasn’t, even though just the other day he had contemplated handing in his resignation. But his mother was the sort of woman who only asked questions she didn’t need the answers to.
‘What should we eat for dinner?’ she asked.
‘Anything,’ he said.
‘Okay.’
It was nearly three years since his father had died of a heart attack, three years since his mother had become a widow, and as he looked around the house, he saw that not a single thing had changed. His father’s clothes were still in the wardrobes, his bathrobe still hung on the back of the bathroom door. His shaving cream was still on the windowsill. The house looked exactly as it must have the day he died. Three years ago.
‘I just haven’t had the time,’ his mother had said, when he had asked about it last year. He imagined her at night, reaching into those wardrobes for some company, weeping into her husband’s musty old suit jacket.
She made them both toasted sandwiches using some left over samosa filling and they ate these with a packet of ready salted crisps. He told her about something he had started watching on Netflix, and they watched an episode of that together. By the time they finished it was pitch black outside. They had forgotten to draw the curtains or switch on the light.
‘We’re thinking about buying a house,’ he said, just as he was taking their plates back into the kitchen.
‘Oh,’ she said.
‘Not too big, but we might as well get on the ladder. And it’s always easier with two people,’ he said.
‘Will you both pay equal halves? Are you sure?’
‘I think so, although I’ve probably got more savings.’
‘It should be equal,’ she said firmly.
‘We’re excited,’ he said, but she was quiet.
‘They’ve already put Mr Rathod’s house up for sale,’ she said.
‘Oh, we want to buy in Edinburgh,’ he said.
‘No, I’m not suggesting you buy it, I’m just saying that he’s only been dead five minutes and already the house is on the market.’
‘What’s the point of holding onto it?’ he asked.
After a few minutes she turned to him and said, ‘Maybe you’re right.’
*
The following morning he woke to the sound of soft thuds somewhere above him. Stepping out of his bedroom he saw that his mother had pulled a ladder up into the attic. In the bedroom, she had emptied the wardrobes of his father’s clothes and they lay in haphazard piles across the bed. He stood at the foot of the ladder and peered up into the square of light cut out from the ceiling.
‘I thought whilst you’re still here…’ she said. ‘Who knows when you’ll next visit. He caught sight of her. Something in the way she was dressed, in a tatty old t-shirt and jogging pants, her hair in disarray, worried him.
‘You don’t have to get rid of his things,’ he said.
‘Why would I want to keep them?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, and as though she hadn’t heard him, she threw a big black rubbish bag in his direction, which he caught.
It took them the best part of the day to sort though his father’s belongings, deciding what might be given to charity and what might be thrown away. The smell on the shirts, their warm fug made Ravi want to cry, as though his father was hidden in amongst them. He had not had a chance to say goodbye, his father disappearing over night, leaving behind him a swirling, terrible silence that had take them all over.
‘Ah’ his mother said, sometime later, as she opened up one of the bin liners and pulled out a cricket bat. There was a football too. He remembered both things. Both things looked the way they must have when she had first bought them. She brought them close to her chest as though they were young children.
‘You never did like sports,’ she said.
They loaded the car and his mother drove them to the charity shop. It was nearing the end of the afternoon, the moment when the sky turns from one thing into another. They drove along the main road, his mother propelling the car forward with an erratic determination that put him on edge. She drove through a red light.
‘Are you okay?’ he asked.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘It was a mistake.’
The man in the charity shop took the bags one by one into the back of the shop. They stood watching him, silently, half expecting him to emerge from the back with something, although neither knew what.
On the way back, Ravi offered to drive and took them along a different route, passing by the secondary school he had attended as a boy. He couldn’t remember the last time he had seen it, its once grey concrete walls had been painted over white, which gave it the look of something temporary. Behind the building were smaller classrooms that had been erected to create more space. And beyond those was a large field on which he had been made to play sports, sports he had hated, alongside boys who had hated him.
His mother had bought him the best football they could find, the most expensive cricket bat – the sorts of things the other boys might have been jealous of, had he taken any pride in them.
‘Why don’t you play with the other boys?’ she had said, as every week he had tried to get out of his P.E class.
‘I don’t like it. I’m not good at it,’ he’d said.
‘But that’s the whole point of playing, so that you get better.’
‘They don’t like me.’
‘Who doesn’t like you? Boys should play with other boys,’ she had said. ‘That way they’ll make friends just like them.’ He hadn’t known how to tell her that it was the girls who were his best friends at school, the girls in whose company he felt warm and alive. Perhaps she had known anyway, perhaps that was what she hadn’t liked.
She bought him whichever sports kit he needed, drove him to all of the matches, sat shivering in the cold with the other parents as he failed game after game, weak and miserable, when all he wanted to do was to be at home drawing. How many times had he looked towards his mother during a match? How many times had she not seen him?
In front of her the other boys humoured his poor performance, but during the week, whilst he was alone, Ravi found himself dreading lunchtimes, the boys having the endless capacity to weed him out.
He asked his mother whether he could come home instead.
‘How will you make friends, if you stay at home?’ she asked.
So he found himself wandering around the streets by himself at lunchtime, too scared to go to his grandmother’s house just in case she told his mother. And it was then that he saw Mr Rathod out on the main road, carrying home what looked to be a bag of food.
‘What are you doing around here, young man?’ he’d asked.
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing?’ he laughed. ‘Have you eaten? I’ve got food here. When do you have to get back to school?’
‘At two.’
‘Well you could give this old man some company,’ he said.
The house had a warm smell about it, as though it had only just been full of people even though it was quite evident that it hadn’t. The sofas were big and soft and Ravi wondered what it would be like to lie all the way across them, be swallowed up by them. In this house, the place of things was fluid. The edges were soft. At home, he was made to sit up straight on the sofa, so that he didn’t break its frame.
Mr Rathod’s house was smaller than his own, with nothing of a garden. He wondered what it might be like to live there. He’d miss being able to run around a garden in the summer.
‘You look like you’re in a museum,’ Mr Rathod laughed.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘No need for sorry.’
‘Why are there so many photos?’ Ravi asked.
‘These were all my wife’s idea,’ he said. ‘She loved her photographs. Now that she’s gone I suppose I could do whatever I….’
‘Don’t you like them?’ Ravi asked.
‘The photos? Of course I do. They’re of my daughters.’ He went and picked one up off the table, bought it close to his face. Ravi thought for a moment Mr Rathod might cry, but he didn’t.
He brought out plates from the kitchen and they shared a jacket potato. Ravi watched as the steam rose from it, the cheese oozing over the sides like lava. He watched as Mr Rathod ate his half using only his hands, pulling off bits of the skin and scooping up the insides with them.
A few days after that he found himself chased across the school field by a group of boys from his P.E class. He ran as fast as he could, tripping up over some grass until suddenly they were all on him. All he could do was to brace himself. They threw his rucksack into the stream that trickled through the grounds of the school, so he had to run after it into the water, getting his clothes wet, allowing his face to get wet so that that would hide his tears.
He found himself stood outside Mr Rathod’s front door, half expecting him not to be in, but he was, and he opened the door and without saying anything, let him in and brought out a spare towel for him to dry himself. He made him stand by the heater and helped empty his bag. The exercise books were damp at the edges, the ink had smudged across the page. Ravi stood there in silence, fighting an urge to shrink to his knees.
‘Am I like a girl?’ Ravi asked, sometime later, barely able to speak through his tears. He felt a kind of relief at his own sadness, as though he had finally opened a set of doors behind which an ocean of his own misery had long sat.
‘No,’ Mr Rathod said. ‘You’re a boy.’
‘Then why does everyone say I’m like a girl?’
‘Who says that?’
‘Everyone.’
‘Well I can only see a boy,’ Mr Rathod said. ‘A brilliant boy.’
His sobs dissolved into hiccups then and Mr Rathod handed him a tissue.
‘If you’re not popular now, you’ll be popular later,’ Mr Rathod had told him. ‘That’s sometimes how the world works.’ Ravi was almost thirty by the time he understood the truth of what Mr Rathod had said.
‘Don’t let anybody turn you into something you’re not. You are you. And that’s all you should ever be.’ He had listened as carefully to Mr Rathod as a boy his age could, wound up as he was in something he wasn’t yet able to understand.
After that, he went to Mr Rathod’s house nearly every lunchtime. The old man always had lunch ready and they sat and ate it quietly in front of the television. He got used to flinging his coat over a chair in the front room, he let himself be swallowed a little bit by the sofa in the living room. He sometimes bought a bag of penny sweets for Mr Rathod, who he knew liked them.
Mr Rathod asked him about his day and whether there’d been any more trouble.
‘Whenever you come into this house, I want you to be who you are. No pretending,’ he said. It had not made any sense to him at the time, but it had worked, miraculously, as he had begun to shed layers of himself he had not known to exist.
‘Is it true?’ his mother asked, when eventually she found out. ‘Are you seeing that old man during the day?’
He didn’t know what to say.
‘What has he said to you?’
‘Nothing.’
‘What would an old man like him do with a young boy like you?’
‘He’s a nice man.’
‘Nice?’ she grabbed Ravi by both shoulders. He thought she might hit him. ‘He hasn’t touched you has he?’ she asked. Ravi felt sick at that.
‘No.’
‘I don’t want you to go to his house ever again, do you understand? Promise me,’ she said. He had not seen her so angry, her rage blistering.
‘You should be at school, playing with boys your own age.’
‘Everybody hates me,’ he said.
‘Nobody hates you.’ Here she seemed to soften, her body suddenly slack. ‘Why can’t you just be like the others?’
In the years that followed he would think back to that moment as the one where he wanted desperately to leave her.
The very next day he went back to Mr Rathod’s house, this time with a hood pulled over his head so that nobody recognised him.
‘My mum says I can’t come here any more,’ he said.
‘Well we don’t want to upset your mother.’
He felt something bubble up inside him then, a torrent of strange feelings, rising up to the very top of him.
‘You’re going to have a brilliant life,’ Mr Rathod said, as though it had been decided. He was changing the batteries in the remote control and Ravi noticed how he didn’t look at him as he spoke. ‘But you have to be who you are. Otherwise, you’ll be in trouble.’
He had left the house feeling as though his insides had been scooped out. Not dissimilar to how he’d feel, years later, watching the old man’s coffin recede behind the curtain.
When it came to university, he went as far away from his parents as he could. And it was only once he was in Scotland that he understood how frightening the world could be without his parents in it, and some years later, just how fearless that had actually made him.
He saw Mr Rathod only a handful of times after that, mostly at the temple, where he sometimes took his grandmother. Both men usually sat towards the back. Mr Rathod asked him about his studies, but more often than not, they sat beside each other in silence, enjoying the familiar comfort of that. Years later, once he had started going out with Seth, he tried to explain to him who Mr Rathod was, but found that the more he described him, the less describable he became.
‘Did he fancy you?’ Seth asked, so casually that it felt insulting.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ Ravi had said. That had been the beginning of their first real argument.
Years later, he and Seth celebrated their fifth anniversary by having an expensive meal in a restaurant that overlooked a lake. There was a framed portrait of two women who looked to be sisters, hung up along one of the walls. They played a game in which they tried to imagine the story behind that photograph.
Shortly after they came home, Ravi went up into the study and wrote a letter to Mr Rathod. He had not thought of him in a long while and he wondered whether it was something to do with the painting in the restaurant.
He had written about what was becoming of his life, about his distressed relationship with his parents, especially his mother, who made him feel as though he had let her down in a very fundamental way, first by moving away from her, then by building his unknowable life on the peripheries of her imagination. His words had come out fast, as though the letter had already been written years ago. He thanked Mr Rathod for the freedom he had given to him, now that he understood what freedom was. He said he often wondered what might have become of his life had he stayed in Leicester.
He waited two months – checking the post everyday - but received no response. Then he worried that he may not have put a return address on the letter. And then the steady passage of time eroded something and he simply stopped waiting. About a year after he had sent the letter, Ravi found himself at back at the temple, in search of Mr Rathod. He spoke to a woman who told him she had seen him just the other day.
It was also that very weekend that he finally came out to his parents, watched as the dread of his secret cast a long shadow across their faces. He understood that that was something he had spent his whole life expecting, but something he still wasn’t prepared for. He was twenty-seven.
‘But how do you know you don’t like women?’ had been his mother’s response. He had looked at her, her body was stiff, as though somebody had stitched her up on the inside so that it was too painful to move.
‘Well how do you know that you don’t like women?’ he asked, and watched her wince.
‘What about children?’
‘I can still have children.’ He watched her scoff and turn her face away from him.
‘What will we tell everybody?’ she said, not so much to him as to his father, who simply stood up from the sofa, as though he thought that might restart something, declaring that he was going for a walk. After he left, Ravi and his mother sat opposite each other, doused in an unknowing silence, neither knowing quite what to say, as though the energy in the room had all been used up. They didn’t talk about it for another three years, and then one day he told them about Seth and they listened as though he was talking about somebody else’s life, somebody they didn’t recognise. He stopped coming home as frequently as he once had after that, and whenever he did, he found himself impatient to return to his proper life.
He and Seth didn’t particularly want children, but sometimes he thought they should have one anyways, so that he could give something to his parents. So that they might think of him in a certain way again. Occasionally he laughed at the absurdity of that thought.
The day before he went back to Edinburgh, he helped his mother clear away the last of his father’s belongings. They made a small box of them.
‘It’s like he was never here,’ his mother said. They were both sat next to each other on the sofa with the box positioned on the floor between them.
‘I can drop it somewhere on the way.’
‘It’s fine, I’ll do it when I have a moment,’ she said.
They both sat quietly, just as they were, staring at the box in the centre of the room, watching it expand with each passing moment, until it was full of all the things that were never said.
*
The sisters spent the week following their father’s funeral clearing out his belongings and opening doors to strangers who looked around the empty rooms, deciding whether or not to put in an offer. Empty, the house took on a strange presence, as though it no longer recognised them, and somewhere inside, both sisters felt that they no longer recognised it. In amongst the small jumble of their father’s possessions they found a draft of a letter.
Dear Ravi
I was very happy to receive your letter, and even happier to realise that I still make it into your thoughts. You are often in mine. I read about your life with a sense of pride, although I can’t say I was surprised by anything you said. It seems you are keeping up the promise of living your life thoughtfully and honestly and I really don’t know what more anybody could hope for. Unfortunately, as you and I both know, that won’t be enough for some people and we simply have to make peace with that.
I am happy you have found a partner - love is a very important thing to feel, and you are most deserving of this. You and your boyfriend both looked happy in the photograph you sent. I was trying to imagine the kind of life your boyfriend must have led, how different it must have been to your own.
It must be nearly a decade since I last saw you. Time moves at a frightening pace, more for me than for you I imagine. When you’re my age (nearly eighty!) months and years blend into one endless mass and before long one begins to wonder whether they are truly seeing things for the very last time.
I have a young man who helps look after me during the day. He’s from Poland. He must be your age, if slightly younger. He’s training to be a nurse. His name is Viktor. One morning I expect he’ll open the door to find me gone. Poor boy.
As you can probably tell, I’ve been thinking a lot about death. I’ve been thinking about my wife and whether I’ll ever see her again. The older I get the more I want to say to her, the more I’d wish I’d said. I want to tell her that I wish I had been a better husband whilst she was alive. I want to tell her that there were better men than me who would have loved her more completely, but perhaps she already knows this. She knew me better than I knew myself. She was the kind of woman who was never without a smile, but I can’t seem to shift this terrible feeling that behind it she might have been incredibly sad. We are so good at plastering over our own misery.
I look at her photograph now, up on the wall, as she smiles down on me, and I ask for her forgiveness. Sometimes it feels like she is the one who brought you into my life. Perhaps she was offering me a second chance at something. As I read your letter I understood that in some ways you have lived life for the both of us. You have given courage to this coward.
Sometimes I try and talk to Viktor about this, but his English isn’t very good. I watch him move about my house, cleaning up after me, hoisting up a pillow so I can sit properly. He’s a very handsome young man, Viktor. Sometimes I wonder what it might feel like to be touched by a man like him, to be kissed by somebody like him. Sometimes the mere touch of his hand sends a kind of electrical shiver all through my body and for the briefest of moments I feel like I’m young again, as though my life is just about to begin. I realise that perhaps the only thing I have ever truly wanted was to feel desired by another man in the way I have desired so many. You’ll think I’m a sorry fool no doubt, but I hope you don’t. And I hope you continue living for the both of us.
Vinod
The Hoxton Particular by Heather Johnston
You’ll have an aunt. Most people I know have one, maybe not by blood but by neighbourhood or your Gran’s bessie mate or your dad’s bit on the side. Aunts seem to be a universal condition.
You know, like death and taxes.
I’m not much of a family man. I spend my professional life looking after a Family, capital F, and running after the Schmidts is a twenty-five-eight commitment. So there’s not a lot of opportunity for quality time with those who, for some inexplicable reason, share some of my DNA. It’s an arrangement that suits both sides, to be honest: they would rather not think about me, or even know I exist, and if I never saw any of them again this side of Doomsday, I would not shed a tear.
But every now and again, I get a call from Dolores. Something on the lines of, depending on how far she is into the bottle of vodka, “You ungrateful little bastard! Get your sorry arse over here right now or I send them pictures to the papers!”
Yes, Auntie.
Dolores lives in Hoxton, which puts her at the beating metropolitan heart of fashion, these days. She moved there in the Seventies when it wasn’t, after getting chucked out of her Chelsea squat. I was never entirely sure what the arrangement at her place is - it’s bound up with what Ferdy, rich bastard, owns half of Shoreditch, told Narinder, his numbers man, at an early concert by Bowie. But according to Dolores, ‘it’s all, all right, Ronnie, honest to God.’
I am not now and never have been called Ronnie. This is Dolores’ little joke. The other half of her little joke is that I have secreted Reggie’s body somewhere and paid the other two guys to take the fall for us. Fortunately, as the years pass, the number of people to whom this could be offensive is declining.
“Hallo, darlin’.” She lurched towards me at her front door, bleach-blonde hair at all angles, false eyelashes like squashed bats, lips a ghastly, leprous shiny pink-white, and breathed Southern Comfort into my face.
“Hallo, Auntie.”
“You still in the assassination trade?” She grinned, rakishly.
She always says these things loud enough for the passing neighbour to hear, and there is always a neighbour passing at the time. However, these days, her little game is blunted by the edgy young blokes living in her street, who look me up and down and shrug. She is a ‘character’ now, they are probably casting a theatrical grande dame for her role in the coming motion picture which is undoubtedly under development in a basement round the corner. But it won’t be the same without the Smellyvision of booze, urine and marijuana haze. And you can get up and walk out of a film. Unfortunately for me, she really does have the pictures and I can’t.
“Now, now, Auntie. You know I’m in - “
“Import-export, yeah, right!” She grinned again.
We went into her living room, past the photo’s of Dolores in her prime, when the false eyelashes were under control and the pouting lips were luscious rather than cadaverous, and she poured me a whisky, in a small marmalade jar. “Chin-chin.”
“So what is it this time, Auntie?”
She twiddled her finger in her cheek, like a cute twelve year-old.
“I’m going to start calling you Baby Jane if you don’t stop that,” I said. “And we all know what happened to her.”
“Rampant over-acting,” said Dolores. “Killed her career, bang to rights, old tart. Well, it’s Mrs Mekhta.”
The social worker. I don’t know what the poor woman did in her previous life, but the karma hanging round her neck like an albatross suggests at least mass murder. How else would she have got this gig?
“What about her.”
“She was here and I can’t find her.”
“Well, ring her phone.”
“Can’t. Run out of money. Bastards.” The finger almost went back to her cheek, then stopped and twiddled a piece of bleached straw-hair instead.
“All right, I’ll ring her. On my mobile.”
“You’re such a good boy! Who’s a good boy to his old auntie!” At which point, she pinched my cheek and giggled.
I rang. No answer.
When I was a kid - and even I was in short trousers once - Dolores had briefly seemed glamorous. She was a gateway to Pop and Art and Life and Sex and all the myriad temptations that Swinging London was supposed to offer, but so rarely did round my way. She was Living the Dream and the rest of the family disowning her was the final gilt furbelow on the myth that was Dolores.
She first tried to seduce me when I was about sixteen, I suspect out of curiosity rather than lust, but of course I was terrified: had she been a schoolgirl there would have been no problem but she was - scary. The next time came a couple of years later when I was into lighter stuff like marijuana, and dependable old Auntie had a supplier. But whatever the THC content, I was never sufficiently out of it not to notice when Auntie was on the prowl.
And even then, I did not have an excessive regard for my own attractions. I am told this is very unusual. I look in the mirror and I see a guy of reasonable appearance, fit but not built, with enough of a glint in his eye to show intelligence but not extreme intellect, the sort of guy who will fulfil a mission, not try to take it over.
My concern is that this is also what Auntie sees, and she knows how carefully confected that appearance is.
She’s been around a lot longer than me, and that does mean something in the trade. An arrogant young ponce might say, she’s past it, she’s careless, nobody thinks about her any more, don’t worry about it, just get rid, but that would be an arrogant young ponce with a short life expectancy.
We know better. She’s laughed and giggled and puffed her way through who know how many meets in seedy East-End bars and doubtful snooker clubs, and Soho clip joints and Mayfair hotel lobbies, and still she stands with all her fingers and toes and apparently, in full command of her faculties. Some pharmaceutical company should patent her.
“Mrs Mekhta,” I said. “Nice woman. Husband’s a grocer down on the High Street and her boy’s training to be a brief. That one, right?”
“Yeah. Whatever. You got any good stuff?”
“Concentrate. Where did you last see her?”
“ ’S’morning. Round the bins. Maybe.”
So I trotted down to the basement and out into the yard, just to make sure Auntie had not absent-mindedly stashed the body in the coal-cellar. It’s an old Victorian town-house complete with servant’s attics and what was once a basement scullery, coal-hole and wash-house, where there would have been a big copper boiling-vat for sheets. In a burst of modernization, someone added an outside loo in the 1870’s, about the same time as gas was put in for lighting, and then some electrics were shoved in round about 1955. The sockets tend to fizz when you use them, the plugs have two pins and all the cord is dark brown.
In the rest of Hoxton, an unmodernised period property like this is name-your-own-price, and it better have plenty of noughts. But Dolores is only a tenant, and maybe not a very official one, and for some reason up to now Narinder and Ferdy, who seem to be the landlords, have not cashed in.
There were no dead bodies in the miserable damp cobbled yard and nothing behind any of the outhouse doors with their peeling green paint. So back into the house I went, and up the long, steep, dark-varnished stairs, into the face of the howling gale.
No idea where the draught comes from. It feels straight from Siberia, or perhaps the freezer at the back of Selim’s Halal Butcher and Exotic Grocery, two doors down, but I’ve tried to track it down with a lighted candle and got nowhere. Dolores says it’s Henry.
Henry was a husband, probably. Dolores is very fuzzy about official documentation. He was one of Ferdy‘s pals, landed gentry who rebelled and joined a commune just off Sloane Square, when that was not bizarrely impossible. A good-looking chap, by the photographs. Dolores still seems quite fond of him. But Henry was a drinker, and it’s not a good idea to mix half a bottle of scotch with old, steep wooden stairs, and a desperate need to go to the loo in a stone-paved yard.
“Bumpity, bumpity, bump,” said Dolores, eyes wide, “just like Winnie the Pooh.” Or in Henry’s case, bumpity-bumpity snap.
So I tug a forelock to Henry as I go up the stairs. Dolores is not the only long-term resident.
There is a kitchenette of sorts on the main floor: as it is tan and orange, I would place it in the 1970’s but don’t quote me. Dolores was making tea, which since the invention of the tea-bag is now relatively risk-free, and I have learned to drink it without milk or sugar, and therefore without added bacillus or mouse-droppings.
“You heard from Narinder recently?” I said. “He should really do something about this place. It’s not safe.”
“Rubbish. I’m fine,” she said. “If you don’t barge around like an elephant, it’s fine.”
So I went to sit on a kitchen chair and she leaped in front of me like a woman of half her years and said, “Not that one! Wonky - er - leg.”
“What about that one?”
“Back is loose.”
“Auntie, why don’t you get new ones? They don’t have to be new new, you could go on Gumtree or whatever. “
But she snorted and sniffed and muttered something about not understanding friendship, and that Sean had given them to her.
Sean being the poet. He was the sort of poet you find in a bar off Camden Town, published by a small specialist press in County Offaly, and the pride of his community in Kilcormac. He lived life LARGE and DEEP and FIERCE, and he could talk a blue streak but somehow it was hard to remember what he had said afterwards. His poems sounded terrific when he recited them, but he was the victim of a long-running feud by the Anglo-Irish nobility who had placed their agents in every publishing house and the review section of every newspaper to do down the expression of true Celtic genius, of which Sean was the pre-eminent example.
Even Dolores found him wearing, from time to time. Then Sean discovered the Druids, and became big on the worship of the Dagda and the Morrigan as expressed in ancient Irish tales. He really got into the idea of the three-fold sacrifice and how water was ‘liminal’ or a gateway to other worlds. Where the wash-copper figures in this is not so clear, although apparently cauldrons were very important to the ancient Irish, and he did have the garotte around his neck, a (self-inflicted) cut on his chest and traces of LSD in his stomach, when he was found drowned.
“Get me my inhaler, sweetie.” Dolores was puffing a little, so I took my life in my hands and went up to her bedroom.
“Fifth stair is the trick one, right?”
“Yeah.”
Wrong. It was the sixth stair, and my foot duly went through it. I had the foresight to keep a tight grip on the hand-rail which, even though it pulled away from the wall under my weight, was enough prevent me copying Henry. At the top of the flight, however, two of the treads were now totally missing.
“What do you do when you get here, Auntie?”
“Throw yourself forward, you big wimp. Honestly.”
So I did and landed on an ancient Indian rug, which skidded into the bedroom door. Now for the difficult part.
Dolores’ bedroom was a sort of nest of sheets and mattresses, all clean - Dolores was demanding about that - but not quite the way anyone else would arrange them. As each new idea struck her, from Turkish seraglio to Japanese love-hotel, the furniture and fixings would get dragged around and candles, statues, sex toys and dolls would get new positions of prestige.
She keeps her medications in a large teapot on a Victorian sideboard, and the inhalers were in the bottom layer, so I found one that looked recent, and set off back down to Planet Earth. But no - that was too easy.
“While you’re there,“ Dolores’ voice echoed up the dark stairwell, “do us a favour and check the window on the next floor at the back? I swear that sodding cat’s getting in. Stinks the place out, it does, nasty old tom.”
Which meant edging across over the skidding rug and into the lightless well that was the stair. There had once been a window high up, but someone covered it with brown paper during the Blitz and that is how it has remained.
“Any stairs missing?” I yelled down.
“Buggered if I know,“ she replied. “Maybe.”
Pausing only to rope myself to the banister rail and break out my pitons - not - I went up the stairs. Carefully. Shifting weight from side to side very gently, listening out for creaks and groans, and trying to feel for trembling or movement in the banisters as I went. The stairs complained but I did not spot any new cracks in the plaster.
The arctic air hit me at the top of the stairs like a punch.
“Well?” she yelled.
“Yeah, could be, I’ll check. “ Either that, or the Ice-Hell Dimension itself had carved a new gateway into our universe -
“Watch out for Eddie,” she yelled.
I remembered Eddie. He’d been around when I was a teenager, spliff permanently attached to his lower lip, a drummer in a minor prog-rock band. He was unpleasant but harmless and had been a sort of gopher for Dolores and her posh friends. Last I heard, he’d been on the Morocco trail, doing mountains and mind-expanding drugs.
“I thought he was dead,” I yelled.
“We all did, “ yelled Dolores. “Bastard.”
So I did pause for a second or two - no, surely not, even Dolores would not keep a mad drummer in an attic - before pushing open the door to the back room. Ice-box central, broken window, enormous fat black cat giving me a very unwelcoming glare, and a bundle of rags in the corner. Which, thank the Lord, had a thin covering of spiders’ webs and dust, as in, undisturbed for a long time. I did not inspect the rags, no good could come of it. I chucked the cat out of the window and rigged an old curtain across the broken glass.
“All fixed, Auntie.”
“Mrs Mekhta not there?”
“No, Auntie.”
“Try the top floor, She always was a nosey bitch.”
So up I went again. I don’t believe in ghosts. In my trade, although I get plenty of opportunity, I can’t say I’ve ever seen anything to change my opinion. Dolores would be dead a few times over if any of her ex-beloveds had decided to come back for revenge, but she was as spry as a flea and lived without regrets.
Nobody had ever bothered to put electricity in the attics, or even gas: this was torch and candle country. Or, in my case, mobile phone. You could have frozen the nuts off a brass monkey up there, and the plaster had almost given up on clinging to the walls, and there was a certain sea-sick rhythm to the way the ceilings sagged and the doors sloped, but the walls did not move about too much as I walked in.
No Mrs Mekhta, but I did find Ferdy.
Probably about forty years too late.
It might have been an accident. He was wearing what would have been street-smart clothes: a Ralph Lauren polo shirt, pale chino’s with a turn-up, and an oversized pale linen jacket, sleeves rolled. And of course, docksiders. I could not see blood on any of them. I knew it was Ferdy by his pony-tail, and a massive gold identity-bracelet which was conveniently engraved with his name - not a fashion I’ve ever understood, because if you can forget that - However. It had not helped him. He was well-mummified, in the cold dry air of the attic.
Which rather begged the question of where Narinder was, and who Dolores had been paying rent to, all these years.
I managed to get back down the stairs without breaking too many bits off, them or me, and remembered the trick steps and got back to the tan and orange kitchenette, where at least the floor did not move about.
“Auntie, can I ask you a question? Do you see much of Narinder these days?”
“Nah, never did, much. He goes off to the Bahamas. Golf.”
“So who have you been paying rent to? It wasn’t Ferdy -“
“Nah, he never did money, rich, you know? I mean, real rich, so rich he couldn’t count it, my God, I once had a bath in champagne at his place - real stuff, not Sainsbury’s knock-off. Not good for your skin, though.”
“I’ll bear it in mind. So Ferdy owns this place -
“Nah, you know nothing, do you! His trust-fund owns it!”
“And Narinder collects the rent?”
Dolores went quiet.
“Auntie, you do pay rent?”
Finally she snuffled. “Private arrangement. No law against it.”
And indeed, there isn’t. However - “So when you borrowed money off me because you were down to your last penny and they were going to throw you on the streets -“
She grinned, brightly. “You tough boys are all the same,” she said. “A soft touch.”
“But Auntie, you’ve been claiming rent off your social security, right? “
She gave me an expression of artfully composed confusion and shrugged. “That sounds complicated.”
“When Mr Chowdary down the road gave you a hand with your pension papers, me and my boss found him for you, just in case the council came after you, and he said there was stuff you could claim and you wasn’t, for your pension credit, right? And he found your national insurance number, and Mrs Mekhta came along from the council and we got you into the system, didn’t we. And the council pay you money.”
And that had been a tough week for all of us. Councils are big on rats and rates: Dolores might have been turfed out for not taking care of either, and she was not moving in with me. Chowdary had somehow managed to get her straight-ish, but at the price of having her on a ‘vulnerable person’ list. Yeah, I laughed when I heard that, too.
She shrugged again. “Men in suits. You’re a member of the oppressor class, you are. So’s she, nose into everything,”
“Auntie. Does Mrs Mekhta know you haven’t been paying rent?”
“What’s the big deal? None of her business. Nor the electric, neither.”
On cue, the lights flickered. Terrible thoughts floated around my head. “Auntie, where does the electricity come from? “
“The plugs, silly!”
So back I went down past the ghost of Henry, to the place under the stairs in the basement where the electricity junction box should be. And it is there. But at some point in the later Stone Age, it was bypassed and three thick brown cables ran out of the top and through a hole in the wall, into the yard and then up the brick wall to the outhouse gutter next door, along that and across to two doors down, where Mr Selim has his freezer.
I went back and ferreted about in the cupboard under the stairs, and found, as expected, a couple of old neon tubes and some ancient heaters. The source of Auntie’s ‘good stuff’ was no longer a secret.
But that was not worrying me half so much as gas. I couldn’t smell it, but it had been there, the mantles were still on the walls in the upstairs rooms, and the cooker in the kitchenette - I went to check. Gas rings, three of them, thick with grease and as black as Satan’s heart. .
“Auntie, where’s the gas meter?”
“What? You been watching too many of them programmes about tarting up your pad.”
“Humour me, Dolores.”
“Dunno. Try the washhouse.”
These days, gas pipes are thick plastic and bright yellow. In the olden days they might be cast iron or lead, or even steel, but all metal decays and over more than a century, it will deform even if it doesn’t rust or get brittle. The orange-spotted monstrosity I finally found in the corner looked as if it might do all of these at the same time, and I cannot imagine that the Hoxton and Shoreditch Gas and Light Company, who proudly branded the pipe in 1876, still exists.
Being calm, on the basis that the thing had not blown up yet and there was no reason why it should especially choose today, I went back past the site of the copper of Sean’s ritual drowning and up the dark staircase through the draught of Henry once more. God only knows where the water in the kitchen is coming from but as long as it is boiled, cholera can presumably be kept at bay.
“Don’t sit on that chair, wonky leg. Watch out for the rug, it slips.”
“Auntie, tell me about Mrs Mekhta. When she last came here. What exactly did she say?”
“Not much. Trying to get me into one of them flats.”
“Might be an idea.”
“No way! Full of old people, they are, stink of piss and death and - and you have to wear clothes all the time. Wouldn’t suit. My skin needs to breathe. Anyway, I told Ferdy I’d look after this place for him. I promised.”
“Have you heard from Ferdy at all? Or Narinder?”
“I had postcards. Not much recently, though. He always had a lot of irons in the fire, did Ferdy.”
“And Narinder?”
“He was a poisonous little turd.”
Oh, good. “How poisonous, Auntie?”
“Tried to put my rent up. Sent this bloke round and everything. “
“But Auntie - you don’t pay rent.”
“Private arrangement.” End of conversation, she nibbled a ginger snap.
Very careful, now. “So what happened to Narinder and the bloke?”
“Well, I made the bloke a cuppa and he got taken sudden in the street afterwards. Tried to blame me, bloody cheek! I said, I’ve always used disinfectant, and the way I know which one’s which is, I put it in the green bottle, and the bleach is in the blue, I can’t be bothered to keep up with all the silly brand names, I forget them! Only they’d started putting milk in those cardboard boxes and I can’t be having that, it’s not hygienic, so I put it in a spare bottle. See?” She gazed at me in wide-eyed innocence.
“And Narinder?”
“Bastard. We went for a walk.”
In Hoxton?
She saw my expression. “Well, it was a nice night. Just went out for a stroll. You know, down by the canal. He went off for a piss and stood me up, the bastard. Had to go home all alone.”
I suppose it is just about possible he isn’t dead, and if I try really hard, I might even believe that.
“This morning - Did you tell Mrs Mekhta any of this?” As in, why is there no police car with a flashing blue light sitting outside?
“Her? Old Nosey? Certainly not. My business is my own. I’m a very private person, really.”
So I get ready to send out the dogs for Mrs Mekhta, and try to work out what sort of settlement Mr Mekhta might accept, when my phone pinged. The text said, ‘Howl At The Moon. Now.’ And it was from Mrs Mekhta’s phone.
Being relatively local, I knew this was not a sign of Mrs Mekhta’s insanity, but a reference to a trendy pub up the road, and whoever had Mrs Mekhta’s phone - and there was no why it should still be her - wanted a meet, presumably to ransom it. So I pinged back, ‘ten minutes’, told Dolores to lock the door, and got the hell out.
The pub is the modern style - driftwood, raw brick, strange cocktails and vegan Tex-Mex - but they also do craft beer, which suits the bright young things who go there, and also gave me something to wash the dust from Dolores’ house out of my throat.
And standing out like a samosa among cucumber sandwiches, Mrs Mekhta was sitting in a corner, working her way through a bottle of Pinot Grigio. I patted her hand. “Good to see you,” I said.
“Mr Athlone,” she said. “I do not drink.”
“No, I understand.”
“I do not drink, and I do not play hooky. The council think very well of me, and I look after all my vulnerable clients as if they were my own parents.” She glugged another slug of wine. “These people are deserving of our respect, Mr Athlone.”
“I understand, and I thank you for your work with my aunt. Shall I get another bottle?”
“Please, do you think a Moon Fizz would be pleasant?”
“I’ll join you. Let’s get four in, saves a trip to the bar.”
The fizzy cocktails passed muster.
“Dolores is a very unusual woman,” said Mrs Mekhta. “But I think she is trying to kill me.” She slurped her Moon Fizz.
There was no point in denying, really. But maybe I could soften it. “The house is - challenging.”
“I work in worse houses,” she said, disconcertingly. “Some of my clients are hoarders. But Dolores looks at me.” She shivered. “And the tea smells strange.”
“She’s never invited you for an evening walk by the canal?”
“No, Mr Athlone, and I would not go if she did.”
“Very sensible, Mrs Mekhta.” I clinked her glass.
“There is a mystery, Mr Athlone. We - I mean, the council - cannot trace this Ferdy who is the owner, and so we cannot put in an improvement order. And this we must do, or the house will collapse and other people are at risk. I do not want to make an emergency order, that is so much of a last resort, when she has lived there so long, but you do see the danger, Mr Athlone?”
“Oh, yes, certainly do.”
“You seem a sensible man.” She patted my hand now, and sucked down the dregs of her first cocktail through the straw. “As a representative of her family, what would you like to happen?
Well, an Amityville Horror-style black hole for Dolores and her damn house had its attractions, but life is never that convenient. “She won’t go into a sheltered flat and I - I - “ I would fear for the safety of the other residents, which I did not express but I think Mrs Mekhta picked up. She smiled, squiffily, through her second cocktail.
“How about,“ I said, “we leave things alone as far as we can? I mean, let her live her life, and we - work round her a bit? I’ve got a good brief, he’ll track Ferdy down, and I’ll buy the house and do it up. No need for anyone else to get involved.”
She shook her head. “It will be very expensive, Mr Athlone. Houses like that go for over a million, even in that state. It’s a nice thought. You’re a good nephew.”
“Leave it with me. I’ll work something out. Another cocktail?”
I poured her into a taxi about an hour later, and got Chowdary and a couple of other bureaucratic types on the job, and a very swift transaction went through the legal motions the next week. Ferdy was tracked down in the Cayman Islands, and his signature made over the property, countersigned by Narinder for his trust-fund, into a little account I keep for family expenses, called London Particular. (My boss Frank suggested I open it: it’s useful for tax and things).
And then I got Tommo and some of his boys to stop the place falling down, and Mr Selim had a bonus when his electricity bills suddenly fell. Dolores appreciated having beefy young men about the place, enough not to complain too loudly about her loss of privacy. And as she was now perfectly legally paying rent to London Particular, and her expenses were met like clockwork, as displayed in Mr Chowdary’s accounts, there was no reason for Mrs Mehta to visit her so regularly; or even at all.
No need for demolition crews, no rozzers, no questions about Dolores or her family. Meaning me. And a house with spare spaces for inconvenient - evidence.
“Bloody hell,” said Tommo. “What do we do with all these bones, then?”
“Keep them,” I said. “They might come in handy. Three sets - That’s Henry, Eddie and Ferdy. They don’t take a lot of room, put them in a suitcase under the floorboards.”
“Six sets,” said Tommo. “Unless they all had two heads.”
Sometimes, you have to know when to stop asking questions.
You know, like death and taxes.
I’m not much of a family man. I spend my professional life looking after a Family, capital F, and running after the Schmidts is a twenty-five-eight commitment. So there’s not a lot of opportunity for quality time with those who, for some inexplicable reason, share some of my DNA. It’s an arrangement that suits both sides, to be honest: they would rather not think about me, or even know I exist, and if I never saw any of them again this side of Doomsday, I would not shed a tear.
But every now and again, I get a call from Dolores. Something on the lines of, depending on how far she is into the bottle of vodka, “You ungrateful little bastard! Get your sorry arse over here right now or I send them pictures to the papers!”
Yes, Auntie.
Dolores lives in Hoxton, which puts her at the beating metropolitan heart of fashion, these days. She moved there in the Seventies when it wasn’t, after getting chucked out of her Chelsea squat. I was never entirely sure what the arrangement at her place is - it’s bound up with what Ferdy, rich bastard, owns half of Shoreditch, told Narinder, his numbers man, at an early concert by Bowie. But according to Dolores, ‘it’s all, all right, Ronnie, honest to God.’
I am not now and never have been called Ronnie. This is Dolores’ little joke. The other half of her little joke is that I have secreted Reggie’s body somewhere and paid the other two guys to take the fall for us. Fortunately, as the years pass, the number of people to whom this could be offensive is declining.
“Hallo, darlin’.” She lurched towards me at her front door, bleach-blonde hair at all angles, false eyelashes like squashed bats, lips a ghastly, leprous shiny pink-white, and breathed Southern Comfort into my face.
“Hallo, Auntie.”
“You still in the assassination trade?” She grinned, rakishly.
She always says these things loud enough for the passing neighbour to hear, and there is always a neighbour passing at the time. However, these days, her little game is blunted by the edgy young blokes living in her street, who look me up and down and shrug. She is a ‘character’ now, they are probably casting a theatrical grande dame for her role in the coming motion picture which is undoubtedly under development in a basement round the corner. But it won’t be the same without the Smellyvision of booze, urine and marijuana haze. And you can get up and walk out of a film. Unfortunately for me, she really does have the pictures and I can’t.
“Now, now, Auntie. You know I’m in - “
“Import-export, yeah, right!” She grinned again.
We went into her living room, past the photo’s of Dolores in her prime, when the false eyelashes were under control and the pouting lips were luscious rather than cadaverous, and she poured me a whisky, in a small marmalade jar. “Chin-chin.”
“So what is it this time, Auntie?”
She twiddled her finger in her cheek, like a cute twelve year-old.
“I’m going to start calling you Baby Jane if you don’t stop that,” I said. “And we all know what happened to her.”
“Rampant over-acting,” said Dolores. “Killed her career, bang to rights, old tart. Well, it’s Mrs Mekhta.”
The social worker. I don’t know what the poor woman did in her previous life, but the karma hanging round her neck like an albatross suggests at least mass murder. How else would she have got this gig?
“What about her.”
“She was here and I can’t find her.”
“Well, ring her phone.”
“Can’t. Run out of money. Bastards.” The finger almost went back to her cheek, then stopped and twiddled a piece of bleached straw-hair instead.
“All right, I’ll ring her. On my mobile.”
“You’re such a good boy! Who’s a good boy to his old auntie!” At which point, she pinched my cheek and giggled.
I rang. No answer.
When I was a kid - and even I was in short trousers once - Dolores had briefly seemed glamorous. She was a gateway to Pop and Art and Life and Sex and all the myriad temptations that Swinging London was supposed to offer, but so rarely did round my way. She was Living the Dream and the rest of the family disowning her was the final gilt furbelow on the myth that was Dolores.
She first tried to seduce me when I was about sixteen, I suspect out of curiosity rather than lust, but of course I was terrified: had she been a schoolgirl there would have been no problem but she was - scary. The next time came a couple of years later when I was into lighter stuff like marijuana, and dependable old Auntie had a supplier. But whatever the THC content, I was never sufficiently out of it not to notice when Auntie was on the prowl.
And even then, I did not have an excessive regard for my own attractions. I am told this is very unusual. I look in the mirror and I see a guy of reasonable appearance, fit but not built, with enough of a glint in his eye to show intelligence but not extreme intellect, the sort of guy who will fulfil a mission, not try to take it over.
My concern is that this is also what Auntie sees, and she knows how carefully confected that appearance is.
She’s been around a lot longer than me, and that does mean something in the trade. An arrogant young ponce might say, she’s past it, she’s careless, nobody thinks about her any more, don’t worry about it, just get rid, but that would be an arrogant young ponce with a short life expectancy.
We know better. She’s laughed and giggled and puffed her way through who know how many meets in seedy East-End bars and doubtful snooker clubs, and Soho clip joints and Mayfair hotel lobbies, and still she stands with all her fingers and toes and apparently, in full command of her faculties. Some pharmaceutical company should patent her.
“Mrs Mekhta,” I said. “Nice woman. Husband’s a grocer down on the High Street and her boy’s training to be a brief. That one, right?”
“Yeah. Whatever. You got any good stuff?”
“Concentrate. Where did you last see her?”
“ ’S’morning. Round the bins. Maybe.”
So I trotted down to the basement and out into the yard, just to make sure Auntie had not absent-mindedly stashed the body in the coal-cellar. It’s an old Victorian town-house complete with servant’s attics and what was once a basement scullery, coal-hole and wash-house, where there would have been a big copper boiling-vat for sheets. In a burst of modernization, someone added an outside loo in the 1870’s, about the same time as gas was put in for lighting, and then some electrics were shoved in round about 1955. The sockets tend to fizz when you use them, the plugs have two pins and all the cord is dark brown.
In the rest of Hoxton, an unmodernised period property like this is name-your-own-price, and it better have plenty of noughts. But Dolores is only a tenant, and maybe not a very official one, and for some reason up to now Narinder and Ferdy, who seem to be the landlords, have not cashed in.
There were no dead bodies in the miserable damp cobbled yard and nothing behind any of the outhouse doors with their peeling green paint. So back into the house I went, and up the long, steep, dark-varnished stairs, into the face of the howling gale.
No idea where the draught comes from. It feels straight from Siberia, or perhaps the freezer at the back of Selim’s Halal Butcher and Exotic Grocery, two doors down, but I’ve tried to track it down with a lighted candle and got nowhere. Dolores says it’s Henry.
Henry was a husband, probably. Dolores is very fuzzy about official documentation. He was one of Ferdy‘s pals, landed gentry who rebelled and joined a commune just off Sloane Square, when that was not bizarrely impossible. A good-looking chap, by the photographs. Dolores still seems quite fond of him. But Henry was a drinker, and it’s not a good idea to mix half a bottle of scotch with old, steep wooden stairs, and a desperate need to go to the loo in a stone-paved yard.
“Bumpity, bumpity, bump,” said Dolores, eyes wide, “just like Winnie the Pooh.” Or in Henry’s case, bumpity-bumpity snap.
So I tug a forelock to Henry as I go up the stairs. Dolores is not the only long-term resident.
There is a kitchenette of sorts on the main floor: as it is tan and orange, I would place it in the 1970’s but don’t quote me. Dolores was making tea, which since the invention of the tea-bag is now relatively risk-free, and I have learned to drink it without milk or sugar, and therefore without added bacillus or mouse-droppings.
“You heard from Narinder recently?” I said. “He should really do something about this place. It’s not safe.”
“Rubbish. I’m fine,” she said. “If you don’t barge around like an elephant, it’s fine.”
So I went to sit on a kitchen chair and she leaped in front of me like a woman of half her years and said, “Not that one! Wonky - er - leg.”
“What about that one?”
“Back is loose.”
“Auntie, why don’t you get new ones? They don’t have to be new new, you could go on Gumtree or whatever. “
But she snorted and sniffed and muttered something about not understanding friendship, and that Sean had given them to her.
Sean being the poet. He was the sort of poet you find in a bar off Camden Town, published by a small specialist press in County Offaly, and the pride of his community in Kilcormac. He lived life LARGE and DEEP and FIERCE, and he could talk a blue streak but somehow it was hard to remember what he had said afterwards. His poems sounded terrific when he recited them, but he was the victim of a long-running feud by the Anglo-Irish nobility who had placed their agents in every publishing house and the review section of every newspaper to do down the expression of true Celtic genius, of which Sean was the pre-eminent example.
Even Dolores found him wearing, from time to time. Then Sean discovered the Druids, and became big on the worship of the Dagda and the Morrigan as expressed in ancient Irish tales. He really got into the idea of the three-fold sacrifice and how water was ‘liminal’ or a gateway to other worlds. Where the wash-copper figures in this is not so clear, although apparently cauldrons were very important to the ancient Irish, and he did have the garotte around his neck, a (self-inflicted) cut on his chest and traces of LSD in his stomach, when he was found drowned.
“Get me my inhaler, sweetie.” Dolores was puffing a little, so I took my life in my hands and went up to her bedroom.
“Fifth stair is the trick one, right?”
“Yeah.”
Wrong. It was the sixth stair, and my foot duly went through it. I had the foresight to keep a tight grip on the hand-rail which, even though it pulled away from the wall under my weight, was enough prevent me copying Henry. At the top of the flight, however, two of the treads were now totally missing.
“What do you do when you get here, Auntie?”
“Throw yourself forward, you big wimp. Honestly.”
So I did and landed on an ancient Indian rug, which skidded into the bedroom door. Now for the difficult part.
Dolores’ bedroom was a sort of nest of sheets and mattresses, all clean - Dolores was demanding about that - but not quite the way anyone else would arrange them. As each new idea struck her, from Turkish seraglio to Japanese love-hotel, the furniture and fixings would get dragged around and candles, statues, sex toys and dolls would get new positions of prestige.
She keeps her medications in a large teapot on a Victorian sideboard, and the inhalers were in the bottom layer, so I found one that looked recent, and set off back down to Planet Earth. But no - that was too easy.
“While you’re there,“ Dolores’ voice echoed up the dark stairwell, “do us a favour and check the window on the next floor at the back? I swear that sodding cat’s getting in. Stinks the place out, it does, nasty old tom.”
Which meant edging across over the skidding rug and into the lightless well that was the stair. There had once been a window high up, but someone covered it with brown paper during the Blitz and that is how it has remained.
“Any stairs missing?” I yelled down.
“Buggered if I know,“ she replied. “Maybe.”
Pausing only to rope myself to the banister rail and break out my pitons - not - I went up the stairs. Carefully. Shifting weight from side to side very gently, listening out for creaks and groans, and trying to feel for trembling or movement in the banisters as I went. The stairs complained but I did not spot any new cracks in the plaster.
The arctic air hit me at the top of the stairs like a punch.
“Well?” she yelled.
“Yeah, could be, I’ll check. “ Either that, or the Ice-Hell Dimension itself had carved a new gateway into our universe -
“Watch out for Eddie,” she yelled.
I remembered Eddie. He’d been around when I was a teenager, spliff permanently attached to his lower lip, a drummer in a minor prog-rock band. He was unpleasant but harmless and had been a sort of gopher for Dolores and her posh friends. Last I heard, he’d been on the Morocco trail, doing mountains and mind-expanding drugs.
“I thought he was dead,” I yelled.
“We all did, “ yelled Dolores. “Bastard.”
So I did pause for a second or two - no, surely not, even Dolores would not keep a mad drummer in an attic - before pushing open the door to the back room. Ice-box central, broken window, enormous fat black cat giving me a very unwelcoming glare, and a bundle of rags in the corner. Which, thank the Lord, had a thin covering of spiders’ webs and dust, as in, undisturbed for a long time. I did not inspect the rags, no good could come of it. I chucked the cat out of the window and rigged an old curtain across the broken glass.
“All fixed, Auntie.”
“Mrs Mekhta not there?”
“No, Auntie.”
“Try the top floor, She always was a nosey bitch.”
So up I went again. I don’t believe in ghosts. In my trade, although I get plenty of opportunity, I can’t say I’ve ever seen anything to change my opinion. Dolores would be dead a few times over if any of her ex-beloveds had decided to come back for revenge, but she was as spry as a flea and lived without regrets.
Nobody had ever bothered to put electricity in the attics, or even gas: this was torch and candle country. Or, in my case, mobile phone. You could have frozen the nuts off a brass monkey up there, and the plaster had almost given up on clinging to the walls, and there was a certain sea-sick rhythm to the way the ceilings sagged and the doors sloped, but the walls did not move about too much as I walked in.
No Mrs Mekhta, but I did find Ferdy.
Probably about forty years too late.
It might have been an accident. He was wearing what would have been street-smart clothes: a Ralph Lauren polo shirt, pale chino’s with a turn-up, and an oversized pale linen jacket, sleeves rolled. And of course, docksiders. I could not see blood on any of them. I knew it was Ferdy by his pony-tail, and a massive gold identity-bracelet which was conveniently engraved with his name - not a fashion I’ve ever understood, because if you can forget that - However. It had not helped him. He was well-mummified, in the cold dry air of the attic.
Which rather begged the question of where Narinder was, and who Dolores had been paying rent to, all these years.
I managed to get back down the stairs without breaking too many bits off, them or me, and remembered the trick steps and got back to the tan and orange kitchenette, where at least the floor did not move about.
“Auntie, can I ask you a question? Do you see much of Narinder these days?”
“Nah, never did, much. He goes off to the Bahamas. Golf.”
“So who have you been paying rent to? It wasn’t Ferdy -“
“Nah, he never did money, rich, you know? I mean, real rich, so rich he couldn’t count it, my God, I once had a bath in champagne at his place - real stuff, not Sainsbury’s knock-off. Not good for your skin, though.”
“I’ll bear it in mind. So Ferdy owns this place -
“Nah, you know nothing, do you! His trust-fund owns it!”
“And Narinder collects the rent?”
Dolores went quiet.
“Auntie, you do pay rent?”
Finally she snuffled. “Private arrangement. No law against it.”
And indeed, there isn’t. However - “So when you borrowed money off me because you were down to your last penny and they were going to throw you on the streets -“
She grinned, brightly. “You tough boys are all the same,” she said. “A soft touch.”
“But Auntie, you’ve been claiming rent off your social security, right? “
She gave me an expression of artfully composed confusion and shrugged. “That sounds complicated.”
“When Mr Chowdary down the road gave you a hand with your pension papers, me and my boss found him for you, just in case the council came after you, and he said there was stuff you could claim and you wasn’t, for your pension credit, right? And he found your national insurance number, and Mrs Mekhta came along from the council and we got you into the system, didn’t we. And the council pay you money.”
And that had been a tough week for all of us. Councils are big on rats and rates: Dolores might have been turfed out for not taking care of either, and she was not moving in with me. Chowdary had somehow managed to get her straight-ish, but at the price of having her on a ‘vulnerable person’ list. Yeah, I laughed when I heard that, too.
She shrugged again. “Men in suits. You’re a member of the oppressor class, you are. So’s she, nose into everything,”
“Auntie. Does Mrs Mekhta know you haven’t been paying rent?”
“What’s the big deal? None of her business. Nor the electric, neither.”
On cue, the lights flickered. Terrible thoughts floated around my head. “Auntie, where does the electricity come from? “
“The plugs, silly!”
So back I went down past the ghost of Henry, to the place under the stairs in the basement where the electricity junction box should be. And it is there. But at some point in the later Stone Age, it was bypassed and three thick brown cables ran out of the top and through a hole in the wall, into the yard and then up the brick wall to the outhouse gutter next door, along that and across to two doors down, where Mr Selim has his freezer.
I went back and ferreted about in the cupboard under the stairs, and found, as expected, a couple of old neon tubes and some ancient heaters. The source of Auntie’s ‘good stuff’ was no longer a secret.
But that was not worrying me half so much as gas. I couldn’t smell it, but it had been there, the mantles were still on the walls in the upstairs rooms, and the cooker in the kitchenette - I went to check. Gas rings, three of them, thick with grease and as black as Satan’s heart. .
“Auntie, where’s the gas meter?”
“What? You been watching too many of them programmes about tarting up your pad.”
“Humour me, Dolores.”
“Dunno. Try the washhouse.”
These days, gas pipes are thick plastic and bright yellow. In the olden days they might be cast iron or lead, or even steel, but all metal decays and over more than a century, it will deform even if it doesn’t rust or get brittle. The orange-spotted monstrosity I finally found in the corner looked as if it might do all of these at the same time, and I cannot imagine that the Hoxton and Shoreditch Gas and Light Company, who proudly branded the pipe in 1876, still exists.
Being calm, on the basis that the thing had not blown up yet and there was no reason why it should especially choose today, I went back past the site of the copper of Sean’s ritual drowning and up the dark staircase through the draught of Henry once more. God only knows where the water in the kitchen is coming from but as long as it is boiled, cholera can presumably be kept at bay.
“Don’t sit on that chair, wonky leg. Watch out for the rug, it slips.”
“Auntie, tell me about Mrs Mekhta. When she last came here. What exactly did she say?”
“Not much. Trying to get me into one of them flats.”
“Might be an idea.”
“No way! Full of old people, they are, stink of piss and death and - and you have to wear clothes all the time. Wouldn’t suit. My skin needs to breathe. Anyway, I told Ferdy I’d look after this place for him. I promised.”
“Have you heard from Ferdy at all? Or Narinder?”
“I had postcards. Not much recently, though. He always had a lot of irons in the fire, did Ferdy.”
“And Narinder?”
“He was a poisonous little turd.”
Oh, good. “How poisonous, Auntie?”
“Tried to put my rent up. Sent this bloke round and everything. “
“But Auntie - you don’t pay rent.”
“Private arrangement.” End of conversation, she nibbled a ginger snap.
Very careful, now. “So what happened to Narinder and the bloke?”
“Well, I made the bloke a cuppa and he got taken sudden in the street afterwards. Tried to blame me, bloody cheek! I said, I’ve always used disinfectant, and the way I know which one’s which is, I put it in the green bottle, and the bleach is in the blue, I can’t be bothered to keep up with all the silly brand names, I forget them! Only they’d started putting milk in those cardboard boxes and I can’t be having that, it’s not hygienic, so I put it in a spare bottle. See?” She gazed at me in wide-eyed innocence.
“And Narinder?”
“Bastard. We went for a walk.”
In Hoxton?
She saw my expression. “Well, it was a nice night. Just went out for a stroll. You know, down by the canal. He went off for a piss and stood me up, the bastard. Had to go home all alone.”
I suppose it is just about possible he isn’t dead, and if I try really hard, I might even believe that.
“This morning - Did you tell Mrs Mekhta any of this?” As in, why is there no police car with a flashing blue light sitting outside?
“Her? Old Nosey? Certainly not. My business is my own. I’m a very private person, really.”
So I get ready to send out the dogs for Mrs Mekhta, and try to work out what sort of settlement Mr Mekhta might accept, when my phone pinged. The text said, ‘Howl At The Moon. Now.’ And it was from Mrs Mekhta’s phone.
Being relatively local, I knew this was not a sign of Mrs Mekhta’s insanity, but a reference to a trendy pub up the road, and whoever had Mrs Mekhta’s phone - and there was no why it should still be her - wanted a meet, presumably to ransom it. So I pinged back, ‘ten minutes’, told Dolores to lock the door, and got the hell out.
The pub is the modern style - driftwood, raw brick, strange cocktails and vegan Tex-Mex - but they also do craft beer, which suits the bright young things who go there, and also gave me something to wash the dust from Dolores’ house out of my throat.
And standing out like a samosa among cucumber sandwiches, Mrs Mekhta was sitting in a corner, working her way through a bottle of Pinot Grigio. I patted her hand. “Good to see you,” I said.
“Mr Athlone,” she said. “I do not drink.”
“No, I understand.”
“I do not drink, and I do not play hooky. The council think very well of me, and I look after all my vulnerable clients as if they were my own parents.” She glugged another slug of wine. “These people are deserving of our respect, Mr Athlone.”
“I understand, and I thank you for your work with my aunt. Shall I get another bottle?”
“Please, do you think a Moon Fizz would be pleasant?”
“I’ll join you. Let’s get four in, saves a trip to the bar.”
The fizzy cocktails passed muster.
“Dolores is a very unusual woman,” said Mrs Mekhta. “But I think she is trying to kill me.” She slurped her Moon Fizz.
There was no point in denying, really. But maybe I could soften it. “The house is - challenging.”
“I work in worse houses,” she said, disconcertingly. “Some of my clients are hoarders. But Dolores looks at me.” She shivered. “And the tea smells strange.”
“She’s never invited you for an evening walk by the canal?”
“No, Mr Athlone, and I would not go if she did.”
“Very sensible, Mrs Mekhta.” I clinked her glass.
“There is a mystery, Mr Athlone. We - I mean, the council - cannot trace this Ferdy who is the owner, and so we cannot put in an improvement order. And this we must do, or the house will collapse and other people are at risk. I do not want to make an emergency order, that is so much of a last resort, when she has lived there so long, but you do see the danger, Mr Athlone?”
“Oh, yes, certainly do.”
“You seem a sensible man.” She patted my hand now, and sucked down the dregs of her first cocktail through the straw. “As a representative of her family, what would you like to happen?
Well, an Amityville Horror-style black hole for Dolores and her damn house had its attractions, but life is never that convenient. “She won’t go into a sheltered flat and I - I - “ I would fear for the safety of the other residents, which I did not express but I think Mrs Mekhta picked up. She smiled, squiffily, through her second cocktail.
“How about,“ I said, “we leave things alone as far as we can? I mean, let her live her life, and we - work round her a bit? I’ve got a good brief, he’ll track Ferdy down, and I’ll buy the house and do it up. No need for anyone else to get involved.”
She shook her head. “It will be very expensive, Mr Athlone. Houses like that go for over a million, even in that state. It’s a nice thought. You’re a good nephew.”
“Leave it with me. I’ll work something out. Another cocktail?”
I poured her into a taxi about an hour later, and got Chowdary and a couple of other bureaucratic types on the job, and a very swift transaction went through the legal motions the next week. Ferdy was tracked down in the Cayman Islands, and his signature made over the property, countersigned by Narinder for his trust-fund, into a little account I keep for family expenses, called London Particular. (My boss Frank suggested I open it: it’s useful for tax and things).
And then I got Tommo and some of his boys to stop the place falling down, and Mr Selim had a bonus when his electricity bills suddenly fell. Dolores appreciated having beefy young men about the place, enough not to complain too loudly about her loss of privacy. And as she was now perfectly legally paying rent to London Particular, and her expenses were met like clockwork, as displayed in Mr Chowdary’s accounts, there was no reason for Mrs Mehta to visit her so regularly; or even at all.
No need for demolition crews, no rozzers, no questions about Dolores or her family. Meaning me. And a house with spare spaces for inconvenient - evidence.
“Bloody hell,” said Tommo. “What do we do with all these bones, then?”
“Keep them,” I said. “They might come in handy. Three sets - That’s Henry, Eddie and Ferdy. They don’t take a lot of room, put them in a suitcase under the floorboards.”
“Six sets,” said Tommo. “Unless they all had two heads.”
Sometimes, you have to know when to stop asking questions.
