‘Stop staring at me,’ he said.
I stared at him harder.
‘I mean it,’ he said. ‘Stop staring.’
But I stared harder still.
And then he pushed me, with both his hands, pushed me hard and into the black water and then I was under and my ears filled with echoing bubbles, and my clothes became heavy and attached themselves to my skin and I tried to scream but swallowed instead and my hands felt for the river wall and my legs kicked against thick, gloopy nothing. And then my eyes opened and I saw faces: a constellation of blackened faces circling mine and I tried to talk to them, tried to ask them to help me but they all turned away and then I was coming up, a pain around my wrist, Phin’s face above, dragging me up the stone steps and on to the bank.
‘You bloody loony,’ he said and laughed, as though I was the one who had chosen to fall into the Thames, as though it was all just high jinks.
I shoved him. ‘You fucking bastard!’ I screamed, my not-yet-broken voice sounding shrill and unbearable. ‘You absolute fucking bastard!’
I stormed past him, across four lanes of traffic, causing someone to hoot their horn at me, and to the front door of the house.
Phin chased me and approached me at the front door, breathlessly.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’
I should have stopped there and then, I really should. I should have taken a deep breath and evaluated the situation and made a different decision. But I was so engorged with rage, not born just of being pushed into the freezing, filthy Thames, but of years of Phin blowing hot and cold at me, of giving me titbits of attention when it was in his interests to do so and totally ignoring me when it wasn’t. And I looked at him, and he was dry and beautiful and I was wet and ugly, and I turned and very firmly pressed my fingertip into the doorbell.
He stared at me. I could see him deciding whether to stay or to run. But a second later the door opened and it was David and he looked from me to Phin and back again and his shoulders rose up and his mouth tightened and he looked like a caged animal about to pounce. Very slowly and thunderously he said, ‘Get inside now.’
Phin turned then and began to run, but his father was taller than him, fitter than him; he caught up with him before Phin had even made it to the corner of the street and felled him to the pavement. I watched with my chin tipped up defensively, my teeth chattering inside my child skull, my arms wrapped around my body.
My mother appeared at the door. ‘What the hell is going on?’ she asked, peering over the top of my head. ‘What on earth have you been doing?’
‘Phin pushed me in the river,’ I stuttered through my chattering teeth.
‘Dear Jesus,’ she said, pulling me into the house. ‘Dear Jesus. Get in. Take off those clothes. What the hell …’
I didn’t go in and take my clothes off. I stood and watched David drag his fully grown son across the pavement, like a fresh kill.
That’s it then, I thought to myself, that’s it.
38
On Wednesday morning, after two nights in a rather basic B & B, and a choppy crossing over the remainder of the English Channel, Lucy hires a car at Portsmouth and they begin the drive to London.
It was winter when she’d left England and in her mind it is always cold there, the trees are always bare, the people always wrapped up against inclement weather. But England is in the grip of a long hot summer and the streets are full of tanned, happy people in shorts and sunglasses, the pavements are covered in tables, there are fountains full of children and deckchairs outside shops.
Stella stares out of the window in the back of the car with Fitz on her lap. She’s never left France before. She’s never left the C?te d’Azur before. Her short life has been lived entirely on the streets of Nice, between the Blue House, Mémé’s flat and her nursery school.