Tideline (13 page)

‘You’ll be able to put the car in there when you’ve got rid of all that junk,’ she says. ‘Your mother always kept hers in there – it’s safer than the
street.’

I smile. I’ve always kept the car on the road and I know it’s one of Betty’s bugbears, though I’ve never been able to understand why it bothers her so much. After all,
it’s my problem if it gets stolen. It won’t affect her. She trundles towards the corner and I’m relieved to see she’s about to disappear. Then she turns and says,

‘It’s a good job it’s secure. There’s all sorts of frightful goings-on around here these days. I hardly feel safe in my own home.’

‘That’s what people have always said about this area,’ I say. ‘Nothing’s really changed Betty. We’re lucky to live next to the river. I shall never
leave.’

The garage is cold and damp. It’s not my choice to move Jez from his lovely music room with its light pouring in where he can sit in comfort playing his guitar. I
don’t want to entomb him like a corpse. I think of veal then, the way the flesh of young calves is kept pure, remains tender in the dark. A kind of preservation after all. And it’ll
only be for two days, it can’t do my boy any harm. Might even do him good. The important thing is that he’ll be safe here. Nothing can happen to him while he’s in my care.

I shift some of the old stuff in the garage into the car boot and drive to the tip. Other bits and pieces I carry along to the River House. I put Greg’s step ladder, the hoe, and other
gardening implements in the corner of the courtyard against the back wall. The jump leads, the jack and tools I put in the cupboard under the stairs. I need to complete the preparation before I
take Jez his supper. Then I can relax and spend time with him before we have to make our move.

When I’ve cleared the garage I return to the house. I rummage through the airing cupboard. A waft of freshly laundered air embraces me, sends me whirring back in time so that I stand for a
few seconds, my nose buried in cloth. The cupboard is full of piles of folded linen that have been in the house for as long as I can remember, the texture crisp and smooth, conjuring childhood
bedtimes tucked tightly between two crisp sheets. A feeling of deep security you rarely experience again in life.

Then I see him at one end of the iron bed. Late winter, like now. An imperceptible tilt in the earth, the smell of stirrings in the air, the beginnings of new growth, and
although it was not daylight, and the room was in shadow, there was a luminous quality to the dark sky even at six o’clock. We were exhilarated from some earlier exertions. Where had we been?
Out on the river maybe? My face glowed. My skin tingled. Seb’s feet were caked in mud, so we must have been down on the shore. Mudlarking. He went into the shower room and I heard the gush of
water as he scrubbed his feet. I was on the bed, knowing what was about to come, filled with anticipation, afraid of the power of it.

The click of the shower-room door, and the pad of bare feet on floorboards. The squish of the mattress as he lay opposite me, his head against the foot board whilst mine was against the pillow
in its crisp linen cover.

He pressed his big toe into my mouth. I could taste soap, and the faint residue of the river mud he’d tried to scrub away. It was intriguing, the taste, and the sensation, his toenail
scraping the roof of my mouth. I sucked at his big toe and he lay back, his hands behind his head and made happy grunting noises until something interrupted us. What was it? I can’t remember
now. I only have the vaguest recollection that something sudden, a bang or a crash, intruded on our privacy so that we stopped, startled, abandoned our game. Seb got up and turned on me.

‘You’re a toe-sucking weirdo,’ he said, and I stuck my tongue out at him, not knowing how else to defend myself.

I draw in a deep breath, gather myself. I put two sheets, a single duvet, and two pillows into a bin liner. Jez is going to need more than this to keep warm. I don’t have
a heater since we had central heating installed in the River House. I’ll have to buy an old-fashioned paraffin thing tomorrow, if there’s time before Greg arrives. For now, I add an old
green and white checked blanket that we used to take camping with us. Packing for Jez’s move is a bit like preparing for a camping trip. It arouses in me a fizz of anticipation. What
I’d really like to do is to plan this
with
him, the way Seb and I planned our adventures. We could compose a list together, enjoy the excitement that precedes a holiday under the stars.
We’d unearth big cook’s boxes of matches, plastic plates, tinned food. Cans of butane gas for the one-ring gas stove. Little pans that stack one inside the other. But of course this is
impossible. Jez would get upset if I told him he was camping in a garage. He’d do something impulsive.

For now I must work alone. I gather tea lights, candles (things my parents must’ve kept in the kitchen drawer since those regular winter power cuts in the seventies), toilet paper, a
bucket with a lid we used for compost at one stage in our lives, before we gave up trying to be green. I secrete a pack of my mother’s incontinence pads into a bag; they may be necessary. I
unearth the groundsheet that still retains its smell of warm grass, even after being aired and stored for years.

I smile as I think of the tupperware containers of tea bread, the torches, and the windshield we used to stuff into the back of the car when Kit was a little girl. In those days our holidays
were taken on the chilly Norfolk coast in campsites full of earnest families. They were always better equipped for the outdoor life than we were. Kit refused to use the communal toilets, because of
the daddy-long-legs that coated every surface. Then at night she wouldn’t sleep in her own little separate tent. She’d lie tucked between us, wrapped in this very same green and white
checked blanket. Who was more relieved that she lay next to us, her or me? At any rate, I ensured she was snuggled up in the middle, a welcome buffer between Greg and me. How old was she in those
camping years? Five? Six? We stopped them once Greg was earning serious money, began to go to villas in Italy, Spain or France.

Kit’s childhood has become a blur to me. As if it were not me, but some other woman who breastfed her for nearly two years, eased her passage into the outside world. Some other, better
woman who smoothed Sudocrem onto her nappy rash, put plasters on her knees, Calpol into her mouth, nit combs through her hair. Who was that woman who attended toddler groups, baked cakes? Later,
when we were back at the River House, the person who traipsed with her around the gigantic Top Shop at Oxford Circus? When did I change? Was it a step-by-step process? When she ran to a friend
instead of me at playgroup, and I realized I was no longer the centre of her universe? When she went out on her bike alone so I no longer knew where she was every second of the day? The first time
I accidentally saw her kiss a boy and knew with a pang she was no longer a child?

Or was it a sweeping catastrophic change? Did it happen suddenly, during the lonely car journey home after leaving her at university? When the terrible realization hit me that everyone we love
only comes into our lives to leave us again?

Just before I return to the garage, I take a hot-water bottle and fill it, so that Jez’s bed will be warm when he gets in. I drag the bin liner along the alley to the
garage. It’s almost dark and there’s a fine, spitting, icy rain. I could do with a torch after all. It’s pitch black inside the garage. I can’t leave the door open while I
work, in case a passer-by becomes suspicious, takes more interest than they should. But even with the door shut, there’s a draft from a crack in the window that keeps blowing out the candles.
I manage to get some tea lights lit eventually; they give off a gentle yellow light that’s welcoming, even cosy.

Once the bed’s made up I begin to feel nervous. How am I going to get Jez into the garage without being seen? Obviously, I’ll have to leave it until late, after the pub’s shut,
after the last drinkers have gone. And I’ll need to use the last of my mother’s tablets. Enough to keep him compliant, but not too many or he won’t be able to walk
independently.

There’s no guarantee even then that Betty, or some insomniac or late-night reveller, won’t see us as we come along the alley. I’ll make him wear an anorak with a hood.
There’s one that Greg bought hanging in the hallway on a hook, probably for one of those long-ago camping holidays. With the hood up no one’ll look twice at him. I’ll work quickly
and keep every sense peeled, alert.

I ram a strip of scarf into the crack under the window to stop the draft, and place a group of tea lights on one of the filing cabinets and light them too. Cars are drawing up outside now, the
swift gleam of headlights through the narrow crack between the doors as they sweep round the corner looking for parking spaces. People tramp past on foot to go to the pub, their voices raised,
excited. The mattress feels damp, but I cover it in the ground sheet and make up the bed with the clean sheets. I pile the blanket and old eiderdowns on top of the duvet. The smell of earthy walls
and chalk is pungent in the darkness. How much more exquisite things will be after he’s been deprived of light for a few days. He’ll only have to stay here until Greg and Kit have left
again. Then how luminous the music room will appear to him.

‘What shall I tell people?’ Jez asks, looking at me with such trust, such innocence that I feel a tiny glimmer of remorse about what is going to happen.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, I can’t say I’ve been locked in your house, can I? It’ll sound odd to people, even if it was because of this surprise thing. I don’t want you or Helen to get
into trouble for this. And what am I going to tell Alicia?’

‘Tell her the truth. That you wanted to stay, to get some music contacts, and I let you.’

‘But not getting in touch?’

‘Jez! Stop worrying. You needed time to yourself. It’s simple.’

He takes an enormous slurp of the tea I’ve brought him.

‘I’m sorry I’ve been rude at times. It was ungrateful.’

‘There’s no need to apologize,’ I say.

‘That first night when we got wasted, I actually hoped you might say you’d rent me a room here. When I come over for college.’

‘Really?’

‘Well, yeah! Helen’d had a go at me that afternoon so I thought well she doesn’t want me living with them. I thought it’d be good to live here, but I didn’t think
you’d want me. Then, the being trapped freaked me out a bit. I got the wrong end of the stick and I’ve been ungrateful, so you know, I’m sorry.’ He’s taken on that
self-assured voice again, the one he first used as he sat and drank wine in the kitchen nearly a week ago. It’s good to see the more relaxed side of him. Over the last few days he’s
been too quiet. Too cowed.

‘So if I were to say you could stay . . .’ It feels as if my heart has had a power surge and I’m zooming forward into another reality entirely.

Jez’s mouth widens into a smile and in the corners are two tiny lines, though I can perceive a nerviness, an uncertainty in the way the creases flicker.

‘Well, obviously I’d like to get home today. It’s my birthday. And it’s already almost over. When are we going?’

‘Soon.’

‘Not now?’

‘There are a few more things to get ready.’ I try not to sound hurt that he’s so eager, after all, to leave me. ‘Patience, Jez.’

When I return to the high windows I see that the drug’s taking effect. He’s on the bed, writhing a little as if trying to fight the sleep that overwhelms him. I
plan to wait until it begins to wear off, when he’ll be able to limp as far as the garage, but won’t be so alert as to work out exactly what’s going on. I open the door quietly
and go into the music room. I sit down on the bed beside him.

‘Shall I tell you a story?’

‘Is it time to go?’

‘A little longer. A story would pass the time.’

‘OK then. Alright. ’

I lie beside him on the bed, he moves over a little, making room for me.

‘It’s called
Mudlarks
,’ I tell him. I put my hand up and stoke his hair. He nestles his head into me. I stroke the tender skin on his throat. He’s giving in at last.
It’s growing dark outside as I speak, and still raining hard. It’s cold in the music room. I pull the duvet over us both and speak slowly, soothingly.

‘There was once a fifteen-year-old boy. He lived, as I do, by the Thames, but he was homeless. So poor he had to scavenge for rubbish washed up by the tide. Twice a day he went, at low
tide, down to the shore to collect whatever he could find. The bones of the drowned and decomposed, pieces of wood, scrap metal. Occasionally he found a coin, or a jewel, but those things were
rare. He had friends who worked with him, but many of these so-called mudlarkers drowned. Stuck on a mudbank when the tide came in, they’d become marooned and then swept away by the
relentless tides.’

I pause for a second. I can see he’s almost asleep but I want to finish the tale. It’s brought tears to my eyes. I swallow, wipe my eyes on the back of my hand and continue.
‘This boy, Edmund, he struck lucky. He found a little medallion with Queen Victoria’s face on it and he believed it must be hers, her own medallion. That he should give it back to
her.

‘He made his way to the palace but the guards refused him. He was a ragamuffin, dressed in muddy clothes and ill-fitting shoes that he’d picked up on the shore. But Edmund was not a
boy to give up easily, and he was agile. He shinned up a wall outside the palace and broke in through a window. He found Queen Victoria lying in her bed. It was as if she’d been waiting for
him. Edmund handed the medallion to Queen Victoria who was still in mourning for Prince Albert and had barely left her room for months. She asked him to sit on her bed and to tell her all about
himself. She was so impressed by his story, and his devotion to her, that for the first time in months, years even, she came out of mourning. She saw beyond the rags and the mud to the soul of the
boy. His courage and his selflessness enabled her to see that life was worth living again.’