‘I’m not going mental. Look at me. Totally not mental. Totally just sitting here on the hard, wet ground under a flyover with nowhere to sleep while your father is a mile up the road living in the lap of luxury. Why would I go mental?’
‘Sor-ry.’ He tuts. ‘You said you never wanted to see him again.’
‘That was when I wasn’t sleeping under a motorway.’
‘So you do want to see him again?’
‘I don’t want to see him. But I need a way out of this mess. And he’s the only option. At the very least he can pay to get my fiddle back.’
‘Oh, yeah, cos then we’ll be really rich, won’t we?’
Lucy clenches her hands into fists. Her son always puts the unpalatable bottom line into words, then slaps her round the face with it.
‘It’s the middle of July. All the UK and German schools will be breaking up about now. There’ll be twice as many tourists. It shouldn’t take long to make enough to get to the UK.’
‘Why can’t you ask Dad to pay for us to go? Then we can just go. I really want to go to London. I want to get away from here. Just ask Dad to pay. Why can’t you?’
‘Because I don’t want him to know we’re going. No one can know we’re going. Not even Mémé. OK?’
He nods. ‘OK.’
His chin falls against his chest and she sees the clumps of matted hair that have formed at the back of his head in the week that they’ve been homeless. Her heart aches and she cups her hand around the back of his slender boy neck, squeezes it gently. ‘I’m so sorry, my lovely boy,’ she says, ‘I’m so sorry about everything. Tomorrow we’ll see your father and then everything will start getting better, I swear.’
‘Yes,’ he snaps, ‘but nothing will ever be normal, will it?’
No, she thinks to herself. No. It probably won’t.
6
CHELSEA, 1988
Birdie came first. Birdie Dunlop-Evers.
My mother had met her somewhere or other. At a do. Birdie played the fiddle in a pop band called the Original Version and was, I suppose, vaguely famous. There’d been a jangly single that had almost got to number one and they’d been on Top of the Pops twice. Not that I cared much about such things. I never really liked pop music and the deification of celebrities slightly disgusts me.
She was sitting in our kitchen drinking tea out of one of our brown mugs. I jumped slightly when I saw her there. A woman with long thin hair down to her waist, men’s trousers tied round with a belt, a striped shirt and braces, a long grey overcoat and green fingerless gloves. She looked so wrong in our house, I thought. The only people who came to our house wore hand-stitched suits and bias-cut satin; they smelled of Christian Dior aftershave and l’Air du Temps.
Birdie glanced up at me as I walked in, small blue eyes with thin pencil lines of eyebrow above, a hard mouth which didn’t close quite properly over a row of small teeth, a rather weak chin that appeared to have buckled under the joylessness of her face. I thought she might smile, but she didn’t.
‘Henry,’ said my mother, ‘this is Birdie! The lady I was telling you about, from the pop group.’
‘Hello,’ I said.
‘Hello,’ she replied. I couldn’t make sense of her. She sounded like my headmistress but looked like a tramp.
‘Birdie’s group want to use the house to film a pop video!’ said my mother.
I admit, at this point I did have to feign disinterest somewhat. I held my features straight and said nothing, heading silently to the biscuit barrel on the counter for my daily back-from-school snack. I selected two Malted Milks and poured myself a glass of milk. Then and only then did I say, ‘When?’