Authors: Polly Samson
He lifts the coffee pot and winks at Mira. ‘And if all they want is mashed potato it doesn’t matter, it’s all calories.’
His hand shakes as he pours coffee into Julia’s cup and some sloshes into the saucer. ‘So clumsy,’ he says, rattling it across the table to her. ‘Comes of being so old.’
She strokes the back of his hand, the tendons blue and tough as knotted string. She looks into his reassuring eyes. ‘You never age, Heino. You’re exactly the same as when I first knew you.’
He raises an eyebrow when he smiles back. His widower’s hump makes him look more like a tortoise than ever. ‘Well, if I’m still of use to some people all is not lost.’
Ruth climbs around to his side, plants a milky kiss on his cheek, looks solemnly into his eyes: ‘Daddy’s not coming today.’
He tousles her hair and calls her ‘Ragamuffin’ and tuts when Julia tells him that Karl probably won’t manage to get away until after the weekend.
‘It’s this contraception project we’ve all been hearing endlessly about. Human trials could start next year if he can get all the data for the research admin meeting next week . . . My dad’s timing couldn’t be worse, really.’
‘Tsk!’ Heino bats his napkin at her, scattering the table with crumbs. ‘Always the same, like a dog with a bone once he’s got his teeth into something,’ he says. ‘That’s too bad, he should be at the funeral with you.’
Julia bites her lip. Her heart sinks, not at the thought of the funeral but of the two merciless days and nights with Gwen, who will not stint on insinuation. She can hear her already, tightening the wire: ‘Not here with his family? Now, what could be more important?’
The girls are argumentative as she gathers what they need for their trip to the zoo. She insists they bring their anoraks. Outside the threat of rain and surprisingly chilly gusts surge into the footwell of the car, making her shivery despite her cardigan. She hasn’t mastered all the mysterious buttons on Heino’s dashboard so she impatiently flicks switches and turns dials, trying to make the cold fan stop. This English summer isn’t doing much to court fond memories, it seems unable to make up its mind what to do. The combination of sharp winds and city dust and pollen has set Mira’s eyes streaming and Julia wonders if she should pull over at a chemist for Piriton. She checks her in the rear-view mirror. Mira, head lolling to the window, is lost in her audiobook, red headphones clamped firmly over her ears. Perhaps her eyes are a little pink, it’s never any use telling her not to rub them. Ruth, happily crunching crisps, pulls a monkey grin when she notices her mother watching her in the mirror.
Mira is dressed in an army-green top, a great favourite of hers, though Julia has tried to lose it many times. The colour is unflattering, seems to throw an unhealthy tinge to her face. It looks even worse right now because she’s scowling.
Once upon a time there had been delights at London Zoo. Julia was sure there had been animal rides, the chafe of leather against bare thighs, high up on a hump, the almost fairground thrill of the camel’s toppling gait. But now it appeared there was nothing to ride and the chimpanzees no longer threw tea parties. Nothing she promised them was materialising, not even the heart-wrenching horror of the elephants remained. She stood before the grey concrete carbuncle and grasped the girls’ hands, trying to make them see the unhappy ghosts of the elephants that had stood there. Casson’s idea of suitable housing could’ve won a prize for its cold lack of empathy: a great lump that spoke of imperialism beyond the sad lot of the elephants and rhinos imprisoned there. A couple of years before, an elephant had trampled a keeper to death, earning them all a passport to Whipsnade Park instead. The news had made the
Connecticut Post
. She mutters on about it as the girls shake themselves free of her ancient doomy memories, running off to look at some sort of bearded pigs hopelessly truffling in the mud.
Mira and Ruth regard the whole place as nothing more than a potential pet showroom. Mira can’t immediately see why they shouldn’t keep penguins in the bath. Ruth grows tearful when she says: ‘No, not even a marmoset.’ After that they trudge rather than skip and she misses Karl, who would have livened things up, taken them into the bug room that she’s just steered them right past. He wouldn’t wander around the place so listlessly, he’d have stories of evolution and arcane facts, he’d tell them about the baboons’ bottoms and make them laugh.
The tigers have ugly names: Reika and Lumpur. One has draped itself across some boards and has more in common with a moth-eaten rug than its splendidly muscled cousin they’d seen on the TV. Its mate paces up and down right in front of them along a well-worn track, barely bothering to lift the weight of its own head and tail. A little boy keeps banging on the glass and shouting ‘Lion, lion’ no matter how many times he’s corrected by his father. Every time the tiger turns, it lets out a cry of anguish, somewhere between a snarl and a groan, its white whiskers drooping. Julia feels ashamed to even be looking.
‘Is this where Daddy kissed you?’ Ruth says.
Karl had been waiting for her right here, as arranged. A grey November day almost thirteen years ago and so cold she’d been glad her coat had a collar she could turn to the wind. He sprang to his feet when he saw her, wringing his hands, not much in the way of conversational foreplay, asking her to forgive him for what he was about to say. His shoulders were painfully apologetic as he spoke. ‘You see there’s something about Julian that makes me feel protective.’
She tried to laugh off whatever was coming: ‘It’s that little-boy-lost thing he has . . .’ but Karl was looking grave.
‘He’s a sensitive soul. You do realise he’s only twenty-one, I suppose?’ She was biting her lip as he went on. Honestly, to hear him you’d have thought she was some kind of Jezebel. Why did he find it so hard to understand that age had nothing to do with it, that she and Julian were in love?
‘It’s madness for him to bail before finals. You know he’s been awarded the Milton Society scholarship? Yes? He’s worked so bloody hard. And now . . .’ He gestured at her stomach.
She glared at him, turned to walk away. ‘
He
can stay on and finish, it’s only me that
has
to get out of town.’ Karl put his hand to her shoulder and she had a momentary flash of her husband Chris, his contorted face, right close up, spittle caught in the cracks at the sides of his mouth, and felt a swelling indignation as Karl went on. She didn’t need to justify herself to this do-gooder. The stuff that was going on with her husband and the threats he’d made to her were none of his business.
‘Wherever you go Julian will follow, you know that as well as I do, and he’s worked so hard,’ Karl was saying. ‘Can’t you just wait a bit before you
get out of town
?’ He pulled a face at ‘
get out of town
’, imitating her like she was Mae West.
Her hand itched to slap him as she replied, ‘Ever heard of free will, Karl?’
‘What?’ He took a step closer and she felt herself flinch. He laid a hand on her belly, the other hard against the back of her head. Her eyes were shut as he pulled her to him, a deep and shaming pain at her groin.
It was the longest kiss she’d ever known; they might never have stopped, but when they did they groaned Julian’s name in unison. She started retreating, but immediately he came after her and pulled her back into his arms. She was shaking and he shushed her, gently stroking hair from her face, making the ache unbearable as she reached to kiss again, but he turned his face. His lips were to her ear: ‘You see, Julia, this proves it. You’re anyone’s.’
She battled herself from his grip. She was flooding with shame, had to get as far from him as she could. He was wiping his mouth with the back of his hand as she stumbled. ‘Are you even sure it’s his?’ he said. She found her feet, but he grabbed her again by the arm: ‘Don’t do this, Julia. Don’t pin a baby on him, not now.’ The tiger had come to a standstill behind him, its eye glinted at her panic. ‘Have a heart,’ Karl called after her.
She hurries the girls past the spot, almost expecting something to be different in the air, a vibration or a haunting. Karl had no science to explain it, the sudden unwarranted attraction and the force of the current that made him betray his friend. ‘The thing is, right at that moment I hated you,’ she said when they talked about it. And he always came straight back at her: ‘I hated you too.’
The route to Freda’s is relentlessly gloomy with nothing to point out to the kids who are still smarting at her refusal to buy them anything from the zoo. Brent Cross, Asda, the Colindale Retail Park, Mecca Bingo. Mira’s audiobook has ended; she pulls the headphones from her ears, has a brief spat with Ruth, rising to an indignant wail: ‘That’s not fair. She’s finished both packets of crisps.’
‘Calm down,’ Julia tells her. ‘It won’t be too long in the car before we’re at Freda’s. I’m sure she’ll feed you.’
‘Who’s Freda?’ Mira asks.
She starts to explain, for about the third time since breakfast. ‘Before we moved to America . . .’
‘Yes, when I was in your tummy,’ Ruth chimes in.
‘No, even before that, Ruthie. Here in London Freda and I used to work together making gardens. She was –
is
– my best friend and, as I keep telling you, Mira, she’s your godmother. You were with us all the time. Do you really not remember her at all?’
Mira only shrugs and yawns. Julia watches as she rootles around in her knapsack for another cassette. Mira listens to the same stories over and over. She seems to have very few memories of her life before Connecticut. Sometimes she talks about the hospital, but it’s mainly the things they’ve told her.
Mira finds the tape and slots it in, pauses with the headphones in her hand: ‘Was Freda Daddy’s friend, or just yours?’
Julia has to concentrate; a burst of rain spatters the windscreen and she edges cautiously forward, feels herself skating dangerously close to thin ice. ‘Freda and I made gardens for people in offices, we had a little white van which I’d painted with flowers,’ she says. ‘You used to come with us sometimes. There was a bench seat for you in the back with the plants, and you played in the greenhouse while we worked.’ She falters, wishes she had Karl’s steadying hand to lead her away from dangerous ground.
Giving Mira’s question a swerve has made her feel sneaky. Mira is inscrutable, headphones clamped once again on her ears, with her head to the window staring out at the grey streets.
There was never meant to be any sort of secret; she and Karl discussed it early on, imagined they’d have to arrange some sort of contact. What they hadn’t foreseen was Julian’s unbroken silence. Nor Jenna’s voice on the telephone, cold and nasty, setting her free as efficiently as surgical steel. ‘You go to Firdaws, clear out every trace. Do you hear me? You and the child. It’s what he wants.’ And then, once they got to the States, it drifted, and within the clapboard walls of their new life in Old Mystic a simpler version of the truth floated in and settled. Mira stopped asking, Ruthie was born, it was natural that both girls should call Karl Daddy. They put away Mira’s baby photographs, skated over details, decided to wait.
Julia takes a detour almost without thinking: after all, it is on the way. Burnt Oak hasn’t changed much: still the streets of halal meat, Greggs, Pennywise, the oriental supermarket where she and Julian bought mystery vegetables and food in bright packets.
‘I lived here when I first came to London,’ she tells the girls.
‘With Daddy?’ Ruth immediately wants to know.
‘No, before. Right down there, at the top of that building with the tree in front. Brrr.’ She’s shivers involuntarily. ‘It was very cold up there. The winters were snowy and we only had the one gas heater.’ And then checks herself for the ‘we’, feels herself edging ever closer to the cracking ice. ‘I used to wear my gloves indoors.’
She pulls away in the wrong gear and almost stalls. She remembers their arrival, the biting cold inside and out. They’d fled from Mrs Briggs’s in a hailstorm, with one white vanload between them. She was four months pregnant and Julian wouldn’t allow her to carry a thing. She went up to see what could be done about a cup of tea while Julian and his stepfather, lovely, wise old Michael, humped boxes from the freezing streets and up the stairs.
It was a decent-sized room, L-shaped, so they planned to put the baby’s cot in the short side and hang a curtain across. The windows looked out at the street through grubby nets at the front and to the back across some scrubby gardens towards a Nissen hut. It would all look a bit more cheerful once the trees were in leaf.
Julian had been efficient with the packing, so she quickly found everything she needed: kettle, mugs, even a fresh carton of milk and Hobnobs in one box that he’d thoughtfully – adorably – marked in red felt tip ‘EXTREMELY URGENT UNPACK FIRST’.
He came stumbling through the door with boxes falling, his arms and hair across his face so it was a wonder he could see. He dropped them on the floor, spilling books from one that had split. The kettle started to boil. He was going through stuff, muttering.
He came bounding across the floor unfurling a bolt of cloth she hadn’t seen before: blue silk, gold-spangled. ‘For our bed.’ It glittered with sequins and gold stars. He laid it at her feet. ‘I got it from Pete the hippie. You know, the guy in the head shop?’