It Could Have Been Her(63)
“How are things?” asks Drew. “You look… I mean, you look well, but maybe… have you lost weight?”
I smile. “Probably,” I say. “I’ve got myself in a bit of a complicated situation with a complicated woman. Life is very…”
“Complicated?” suggests Drew’s girlfriend.
“Yeah.” I laugh wryly. “Yeah.”
When I leave, I walk toward Camden Town and meander for a while through the incessant crowds, the wide-eyed tourists. I take the towpath down the side of the canal all the way to King’s Cross and stroll around Granary Square for a while, which is virtually deserted on this fresh February morning. I wander around the bohemian designer shops, looking for something weird and beautiful for Blaise, and buy her a beautiful steel ring set with a black crystal rose. Something small that won’t take up too much room in her rucksack.
I buy a sandwich and a cup of tea at a coffee shop in the station and then, and only then, do I dare to look at my phone. It shows twenty-three missed calls. It shows eighteen new text messages. I have notifications for numerous voicemails. I turn the phone face down on the table and breathe in hard, trying to control my heart, but I can feel panic gnawing at the edges of my consciousness. I pull myself back from it. Fuck no, I think. Fuck no. This is my day. This is for me. When I am an old man and I look back on my life, I want today to shine in my memory like a burnished star, I want to remember this precious day with my one and only daughter, this remarkable young woman who I have spent a total of less than ten days with over the nineteen years of her life, and I want to think of a beautiful walk through London, the pleasure of handing over my card to pay for that ring, the sun just blotting through the cloud overhead as I, younger now in this moment then I ever will be again, head through this remarkable city, free, joyful, and fully fucking alive.
No, I think to myself, fuck you, Jessamine Black. Fuck you.
This day is for me.
chapter fifty
Blaise eyes me across the table of the super-cool restaurant on the top floor of the Standard hotel where I’ve brought her for dinner. Her eyes have been on stalks all night soaking up the beautiful young male waiters, and she loves the food. I chose well. She has told me about her life, about the university course she’s starting when she gets back to Sydney next week, about her Bondi lifestyle of evenings on the beach, surfing on Sundays, and, God, I envy her life. I try not to show it as she speaks. To be nineteen again, I think, to be this beautiful, this young, this free. My God, I’d give a kidney.
But I’ve just done the thing I told myself I wouldn’t do. I’ve shared the car crash of my life with my daughter.
“Stay with me,” she says now, her eyes wide with horror. “Seriously, there’s, like, a sofa-bed thing in my hotel room. Please. Don’t go back there.”
“I have to,” I say. “The dog needs feeding. Daisy needs me. They all just need me.”
“Please,” she says. “I hate this for you. They’ll live without you. Just for one night.”
But every time I start to give the idea genuine thought, bam, there, like a dropped cinder block in my consciousness, is Daisy. I picture her in the kitchen tomorrow morning, running late because nobody woke her, leaving without the packed lunch that she never eats, entombed in the terrible rage of her mother, who will not have me to take it out on, and therefore will take it out on her, and I shake my head and say, “You are so sweet, but no.” And then I say, “I promise you, by the next time I see you, I will be out of that mess. I swear. I just need to get Daisy out of that house. Make sure she’s safe.”
Blaise looks at me then, half-affectionately, half-skeptical. “OK, dude,” she says. “If you say so.”
We leave at 9 p.m.; I catch a taxi to get me home quicker. My earlier resolve has diluted, and my head keeps filling up with pictures of Daisy dealing with her drunk, insane mother. The taxi drops me off into the tawny darkness that exists almost uniquely at the bottom end of the Vale of Health.
“Don’t think I’ve ever dropped anyone down this end before,” the driver says, looking around him. “Didn’t even know the road went this far.”
I pay and get out and I eye the house in front of me: the aged jeep, still not fixed, still a work in progress, the lights on in three windows, the air all around of encroaching rage.
I hear Hugo barking and then go quiet again when I call out, “It’s me, mate,” into the darkness.
I take out my keys, unlock the front door, and pull it open, and then the darkness that has been chasing me all day fully descends with the weight and agony of something heavy against my skull that makes my brain feel as if it is loose in my head for a moment, and then, a second later, I am gone.
chapter fifty-one
JASPER
Claire is allowed to keep her name. She is allowed to keep her hair and her spirits. Unlike the other girls, she is treated almost as one of the family. She eats with us. She watches TV with us. We laugh together at Ali G and Catherine Tate. She loads the dishwasher after meals and sings along to music on the radio. She plays the guitar with Jessamine and practices clowning with me. In many ways she is our first true au pair girl, but of course, we all know that she is not, and I can see the dark shadows under her eyes, the way she flinches, even when she’s smiling, when Daddy goes anywhere near her. I can see the machinations of her mind, the way her eyes dart around the room, looking, I know, for her way out of here. And I want her to escape, more than anything I want her to go, because she does not belong here with us. She really, really does not.