Thankfully I didn’t over-analyse his marriage proposal. It was the day after I graduated from Hendon Police College. I had been away for thirteen weeks, living in dorms, coming home on weekends. During that time, Henry had been working on the garden, planting flowers and shrubs. On the morning after my passing out parade – and the party – I woke up in his arms and he asked me to open the curtains.
‘What do you think of the garden?’
Standing in the upstairs window, I glanced down and saw a flowerbed with a message spelled out in purple pansies on a deep carpet of green. It said: Will You Marry Me? The question mark hadn’t quite worked and it looked like he wanted to marry someone called ‘Meg’， but I got the message.
‘Are you sure?’ I asked.
‘Of course.’
‘I’m very normal.’
‘I’ve lived with neurotic.’
‘And I’m bossy.’
‘In a good way.’
We went back to bed and began filling the jar – the one where you add a marble every time you make love before you marry and subtract a marble when you make love afterwards. I don’t know how long it will take to empty ours because we are going to marry with a rather big jar.
5
Early morning, trapped in a dream, I wake suddenly and seem to levitate off the bed, my heart pounding and mouth open in a soundless scream. Henry holds me, whispering, ‘You’re safe. We’re home,’ but I’m fighting his arms, desperate to escape. It’s like I’m piloting a plane that is plunging towards the ground, while a mechanical voice is bleating monotonously, ‘Whoop! Whoop! Pull up! Pull up!’
Slowly, my chest stops heaving and my breathing returns to normal.
Henry is still holding me, stroking my hair. ‘Was it the same one?’
‘No.’
I’m lying. This is the third night in a row that the nightmare has woken me. Normally, I’m wrenched awake by bombed buses and flying body parts, but this dream is different. I’m in a basement room where a young woman is hanging from the ceiling. A thin nylon washing line is looped over a lagged water pipe and wrapped around her neck. A set of aluminium steps has toppled onto the floor beneath her bare feet. In the dream, I notice her painted pink toenails and the bruises on her ankles below her skinny leg jeans are soaked with urine. I try not to look any higher but can’t stop myself.
Tempe Brown’s head is tilted slightly as the rope presses against her jaw. The pink tip of her tongue peeks from between her blue lips and her eyes are open, looking puzzled or disappointed.
Henry has fallen back to sleep. Awake now, I slip out of bed and change into my gym gear. Minutes later, I’m sitting on the front step, lacing my trainers, feeling the cold concrete under my buttocks.
‘You’re up early,’ says Mrs Ainsley, who has taken Blaine for a walk. Dog and owner are wearing matching neck scarves, a Liberty print, and she’s carrying a plastic bag of dog shit like it’s her favourite handbag.
I nod and smile, avoiding a conversation because of her deafness. Blaine sniffs at my shoes and I’m terrified he might cock his leg.
‘He made a lot of noise last night,’ I say.
‘Pardon?’ she shouts.
‘He was barking.’
‘Yes, the parking is terrible. No point having a car in London.’
‘I mean Blaine.’
‘Shame. You have a lovely day, too,’ she says as she unlocks her front door.
At least I tried.
It’s one of those smoked-glass spring days, all sky and clouds and patches of heavy sunlight. I begin jogging towards Clapham Common, waving at several local residents, including the greengrocer, who has been up since four; and the local newsagent who is unbundling the day’s papers.
At the park, I run through my drills, working on my speed, strength and flexibility. Soon I’m fighting invisible shadows beneath the trees, crouching and kicking and punching at the air. My first instructor told me that I would never be a great martial artist if I only trained alone, but the academy is closed at this hour and my usual sparring partners have jobs to go to, or beds to keep warm.
After forty minutes of drills, I pause to drink from a water fountain and check my phone. There are more messages from my stepmother about the party. Why is she so eager that I attend this one? Other birthdays and anniversaries have come and gone. Perhaps my father has learned about my engagement. Edward McCarthy wants to walk his only daughter down the aisle and give her the sort of wedding that he has always dreamed of; something suitably extravagant, with vintage cars, ice sculptures and a celebrity chef doing the catering. That’s what his birthday will be like, a celebration of his new-found respectability.
Whenever a newspaper or magazine does a profile on my father, he is portrayed as an East End barrow-boy made good. The seller of knock-off perfumes and toiletries who rose from Petticoat Lane to Mayfair, creating a property portfolio worth a hundred million pounds. Rags to riches. From the gutter to the stars. All down to hard graft, sixteen-hour days and the ‘luck of the Irish’， he tells them. But that’s not the whole story. It’s not even good fiction.
The perfumes and luxury goods weren’t cheap knock-offs from Taiwan or South Korea; and they hadn’t ‘fallen off the back of a truck’。 They were the genuine article, stolen from lorries that were hijacked at truckstop cafés or motorway service centres. During the eighties and nineties the McCarthy brothers were the most notorious criminal gang in south-east England.
From hijacking trucks, they branched out: controlling the movement of goods through ports like Harwich and Dover, collecting fees to load and unload every container. The racket was finally broken in the noughties and three of my uncles went to prison, but not my father, the oldest, the Teflon man. While the others were languishing in jail, Eddie McCarthy reinvented himself and made a fortune. London had won the bid to host the Olympics and the East End was being carved up for venues and an athletes’ village. Parlaying his connections and reputation, he bought into companies that serviced these building sites, providing concrete, scaffolding, formwork, construction workers and security guards.
Every week he’d visit Daragh, Clifton and Finbar in Wormwood Scrubs. Sometimes I’d go with him, listening to these big, hard men talking in rhyming slang and strange codes. I didn’t regard them as being bad men. They were my uncles. They were husbands and fathers. They were family.
At some point I have started running again, skirting Clapham Common and following Abbeville Road towards Brixton. The dew-covered pavement is drying under my feet and salty tidal air fills my lungs. I know my destination, but I’m not sure what I’ll say when I arrive.
A different woman answers the intercom at the house and remotely unlocks the front door. An older child is pushing a sibling on a tricycle in the entrance hall, knocking paint off the walls.
‘I’m looking for Tempe Brown,’ I say, as the woman appears from an office.
‘She’s gone.’
‘When?’
‘Yesterday.’
‘Did something happen?’
‘A policeman showed up and took her away.’
‘Did he give you a name?’
‘No. Tempe refused to leave at first, but he convinced her to go.’