Out past the M25, I told her about my (about to be ex) friend Roma’s grandad telling us out of the blue that he’d been an extra in the original Star Wars. And about this film I’d seen online about how the advertising industry got inside everyone’s heads in the 1950s thanks to some pioneering PR guy who was related to Freud. And about a book I’d started reading about the history of the atmosphere. All perfect openers, in my opinion, and there was a time they’d have worked like a charm, but this wasn’t one of them. Mum wasn’t biting, so I got desperate and asked her who her favorite Simpson was. That’s when she breathed out through her mouth like a cross horse and told me to be quiet for just one minute if that was at all possible, so she could think.
Rude.
Most of the known world says that people my age are hard to communicate with, but really? They should try getting through to my mother when she’s driving. The silence that descended was familiar, well-worn, the wonder-what-(insert name here)-is-doing-now-and-who-with silence. I looked the other way out of the window after that, kept my mouth shut out of principle, missing home—the phone shops and the flower stall, the dry cleaners and the tube station and the fried chicken place whose window was always broken, never fixed, not for long anyway. The view from the road felt spare and oddly empty. There wasn’t much else to look at on the way down but fields and other cars and clouds and sky.
* * *
• • •
It didn’t rain, and the car got us there in one piece, and even though I wasn’t grateful, I could see straight off that the street was way tidier than we were used to, another level—quiet and wide and tree-lined, high up in the town with a view of the sea, pure blue that day, same as the sky. No traffic jams. No autopsied mopeds or abandoned fridges, no weatherproof all-season dog shit or stained mattresses or boarded-up windows. A sharp salt smell and this strong bright light and palm trees. Palm trees. The wind leaned hard against the car like it didn’t want us to get out, knew right away that we didn’t belong. Turn back, it said, big mistake, don’t even think about stopping, and I still wonder sometimes what life would be like if Mum had heard it, if she’d turned the car around and just obeyed. I let out a low whistle and watched her force the dark back down in her eyes. I know she felt it suddenly, the impact of her decision, right then, middle-aged and anti-climaxed, with me in tow. Not what you’d call triumphant. Not exactly a lap of honor. If I’d known what to say to her then, what would have helped, I like to think I might have said it. But then again, maybe not. We should all be given a manual at birth for that sort of thing.
I started fishing around under my seat for the steering wheel lock, and she said, “I wouldn’t bother, Jude. No one’s going to pick on our heap-of-crap car in this ocean of high-quality metal,” and she had a point. The low-budget new neighbors had definitely arrived.
We got out. The wind whipped my hair into my mouth and back out again, turned Mum’s jacket into an airbag. The house with Henry Lake in it stood out as much as we did, a stain on the neat white terrace like a rotten tooth. All manner of crap was crammed in the trashcans and stuffed in the uncut hedges. The roof was pockmarked with moss and weeds and bird shit. Some clever kind of tree had taken root up there, getting a head start on all the others, and I had some respect for that. Henry Lake’s elongated shadow scuttled across an upstairs window. A gull on the chimney pot opened its throat and cried, launching itself into the air above our heads. I heard the sail-crack of its wings, saw its rain-cloud underside as it circled, head tilted, gimlet-eyed, watching. I hate being the center of attention. I could feel the blood needling in my fingers, the jittering bones in my ears. I liked our old life. I liked our last apartment. I knew how to get there from my friends’ houses, from all the places we went out. I knew where every single thing was kept. Me and Mum and Mark were happy there, sort of, until we weren’t. It had been an okay place to call home. And it didn’t have an old stranger curled up in the middle of it, like a maggot in a peach.
“I hate this,” I told her.
“Me too,” she said, and she tried to put her arm round me, mark the occasion like we were in it together, but I dodged out of range and left her hanging, because in that moment I felt like my eight-year-old self with that ball of string, and that feeling made me angry.
If we were back there, arriving at Henry’s again, if it was happening now, I would do so much better than that. I would remember that sometimes, the thing you’ve dreaded the most can be the actual making of you, the thing you would never end up trading for all the money or fame or love or good fortune in the world. I would take my old self to one side and tell them straight out that one of the best things about the unknown is that it’s 100 percent guaranteed to surprise you. Every time.
FIVE
Mum rang the bell and knocked on the front door, even though we had our own key. She said it was the right thing to do, but when Henry Lake didn’t answer, she gave up on the right thing pretty quickly and we let ourselves in. Her favorite mug has a Groucho Marx quote on it: These are my principles, and if you don’t like them . . . well, I have others. I shoplifted it for her one Christmas (using the principle of common ownership) and she has no idea, but that’s a whole different can of worms. This can of worms was Henry Lake, who must have felt rather than heard the key in the lock and the mortise rolling open and us standing there underneath him in the empty hall, waiting for the next great big chapter in our lives to begin.
Inside, the house was quiet and full of echoes, kind of dank, like a cave. High ceilings and low lighting. Room after room, full of nothing. Dark, bad-weather-gray walls, old floorboards the color of pricey honey. The hallway alone was bigger than the whole downstairs of our old flat. In a room at the back, a slice of window filled with nothing but the petrol-blue sea, churning and hypnotic, oddly silent behind the glass. Henry Lake came out of his room and stood over us at the top of the staircase, a man steeling himself to make any kind of entrance. If Mum was hoping for shining armor, she was disappointed. He was old as hell and oddball perfect. Stooped over, kind of tall, apologetic almost, bone thin. His jeans hung from his hips like they were empty on a peg, like half of him had already given up and started disappearing. Sunglasses, even in that gloom, and a faded black baseball cap pulled down low as it would go over the bridge of his nose. Out of its shadow, the rest of his face was just gray beard. There was a rhythm to the way he took the stairs, a deliberate thump that bounced off the walls and made the light fixtures tremble. Over that, I could hear the music still playing in his ears, distant and tinny, a dropped box of pins on repeat, headphones the size of ear defenders over the top of his cap. He didn’t turn it down or take any of it off, just stood there in full disguise, full armor, insulated against our normal, whatever that was. There was no way of telling who he was under there. It occurred to me for a second that he might be wildly famous, because only a proper celebrity would meet someone for the first time and try to get away with a look as batshit as that.