I heard David mumble under his breath.
The temporary stupefaction had been slightly too temporary and I wasn’t sure I’d ever persuade them to drink a special ‘new tea’ again. This could be my one and only opportunity to uncover the secrets buried away in this room.
I found a packet of paracetamol. A packet of cough sweets. A packet of condoms. And I found, buried underneath all of this, a pile of cash. I ran my fingers down the sides. It riffled satisfyingly, suggesting a good amount. A thousand, I estimated. Maybe more? I pulled a few ten-pound notes from the top of the pile and folded them into the paperwork held inside my elasticated waistband.
Birdie groaned.
David groaned.
I got to my feet, my father’s will, my pencil case and five ten-pound notes clutched tightly against my stomach.
I left the room on tiptoe, shutting the door silently behind me.
52
Lucy’s mind is spinning. The man’s features come in and out of focus. For a moment he looks like one person, the next, another. She asks him who he is.
‘You know who I am,’ he says.
The voice is both familiar yet strange.
Stella has crossed the room and is clinging on to Lucy’s leg with her arms.
Lucy can see Marco standing tall and strong beside her.
The dog accepts the man’s affection happily, rolling now on to his back to allow him to tickle his belly.
‘Who’s a good boy,’ says the man. ‘Who’s a very, very good boy.’
He glances up at Lucy and pushes his glasses up his nose with tip of his index finger. ‘I would so love a dog,’ he says. ‘But you know, it’s not fair, is it, leaving them at home all day when you’re working. So, I make do with cats instead.’ He sighs and then he stands up straight and looks her up and down. ‘I love your look, by the way. I would never have thought you’d turn out so, you know, bohemian.’
‘Are you …？’ she squints at him.
‘I’m not going to tell you,’ says the man playfully. ‘You have to guess.’
Lucy sighs. She is so tired. She has travelled so far. Her life has been so long and so hard and nothing has ever, ever been easy. Not for one second. She has made terrible decisions and ended up in bad places with bad people. She is, as she has so often felt, a ghost, the merest outline of a person who might one day have existed but had been erased by life.
And now here she is: a mother, a killer, an illegal immigrant who has broken and entered into a property that does not belong to her. All she wants is to see the baby and to close the circle of her existence. But now there is a man here and she thinks he might be her brother, but how can he both be her brother and yet not be her brother? And why is she scared of him?
She glances up at the man, sees the shadow of his long eyelashes against his cheekbones. Phin, she thinks. This is Phin. But then she glances down at his hands: small and delicate, with narrow wrists.
‘You’re Henry,’ she says, ‘aren’t you?’
53
CHELSEA, 1992
I went to my mother after the announcement and said, ‘You let your daughter have sex with a man the same age as you. That is just sick.’
She merely responded, ‘It was nothing to do with me. All I know is that a baby is coming and that we should all be very happy.’
I had never and still to this day have never felt so entirely alone. I no longer had a mother nor a father. We had no visitors to the house. The doorbell never rang. The phone had been disconnected many months before. There was a time, in the days after my mother lost her baby, when someone came to our house and banged on the door, solidly, for half an hour every day for nearly a week. We were kept in our rooms while the person banged on the door. Afterwards my mother said it was her brother, my uncle Karl. I liked Uncle Karl, he was the type of boisterous young uncle who would throw children into swimming pools and tell off-colour jokes that would make all the adults tut. The last time we’d seen him was at his wedding in Hamburg when I was about ten years old. He’d worn a floral three-piece suit. The idea that he’d been at our door and that we had not let him in broke another small part of my heart. ‘Why, though?’ I asked my mother. ‘Why didn’t we let him in?’