“What is it?” My voice came out less friendly than I intended.
“Uncle Darren phoned this morning.”
“Yeah?”
“And he needs me this evening. He says it’s important. Some travelers have got into one of the sites. They’ve got a sound system. If we don’t get them out now, it’ll be rave central. Then there’ll be no getting rid of them. You and me can do something tomorrow.”
“There is no tomorrow.”
“Come on, Andy. Don’t be—” He looked at me helplessly. He had brown eyes. They weren’t like Peter’s, which in some lights appeared almost orange. Marcus’s eyes were depthless, a hardwood brown. I never wondered what he was thinking. But he was quick to put his hand in his pocket, and didn’t count what I owed him, and he drove us about, and other girls wanted him although he acted like he didn’t know it. “We can stay here for a bit. Get some chips in town.”
I told him not to bother, and on the way back I gave one-word answers to his attempts at conversation, relenting only when we pulled up a hundred meters before the house, at the spot where he always dropped me off. I gave him a quick kiss, since it didn’t do to push Marcus too far, got out, and watched him execute a three-point turn in the lane and drive off.
Our house was on the end of a row of farmworkers’ cottages. They were tiny, with thick walls and small windows. The council owned them. In the seventies, indoor bathrooms had been added on the back, but ineptly, with minimal insulation, so that in winter it was like trying to wash in the middle of a freezing field.
Mrs. East was standing by her garden gate. A pack of B&H king size sat atop the low brick wall and as I came nearer she picked it up and shook it at me. I took one and she lit it with the lighter made out of a bullet casing that her husband had brought back from Germany after the war.
“How’s you then?”
I shrugged. Mrs. East’s hair hadn’t gone white or even gray. Peter once suggested she blacked it with shoe polish. After we’d put the slowworm through her letterbox, terrified that we’d killed her, we’d plucked and left a rose on her doorstep each day for a week. From her own front garden. While we intoned the Lord’s Prayer. We only stopped when we heard her cackling through the door.
“Have you seen her?”
“Not today. You had your tea? There’ll be cauliflower cheese in a little while. Countdown’s on in ten minutes.”
“Richard Whiteley’s a tool.”
Mrs. East let out a plume of smoke and cocked an eyebrow. It was not how I had envisioned the day panning out, but it was better than going home, and in the event, I wouldn’t have changed things, since not only did I beat Mrs. East for the first time ever, but the word I got, ABALONE, was a seven, a personal best.
Mrs. East saw me out. At the gate, she stopped a few feet ahead of me and pointed skyward. A hawk was hovering over the field opposite the cottages. The sun was setting, and in its rays Mrs. East’s ears were translucent, pink as seashells and tracked through by tiny veins. I looked up. The sky was whitening, the bird barely moving. For the briefest of moments, I felt myself disappear, had the disconcerting sensation that I was both the hawk and whatever creeping thing it was tracking, and then the feeling was gone and what remained was a sickening jolt of déjà vu and in the red phone box, the telephone started ringing as I had somehow known it would.
CHAPTER 5
TOWER
Two days after Patricia’s phone call, I arrived at work to find, on my desk, a copy of a best-selling book. It was a memoir of a middle-class white woman who finds happiness by going on a long holiday, dabbling in soft-core spirituality, and getting a man. Oliver. Six months back I’d made the mistake of getting drunk with Oliver. I’d only meant to have one or two, but the brakes had utterly failed, and at some point into the third bottle of wine I had said something to him about wanting to change.
“Change what?”
“My life.”
Now every once in a while Oliver would reference the moment. He had sent me a link to a video of an old Tampax ad in which a woman roller-skated joyously on a beach. Another time, he’d signed me up to a sponsored parachute jump. A letter had arrived at my flat thanking me for my interest in building schools in Africa. I dropped the book in the trash and opened my email.
There’d been no answer to the thirty or so calls I’d made to Peter’s phone. Nor was there a reply to the string of emails I had sent. Now I typed another: Patricia is worried. It’s time for a turn. And then, as an afterthought, I am worried too. A turn. That was what we called it when it was time for Peter, Em, or Marcus to return home and reassure various parties that they were still alive. A quick turn, I’ll be back after dinner!
Even after I sent the email, I struggled to focus. The office was open plan and from my desk I had a view over the atrium and the desk-bound gatekeepers nineteen floors below. It was a tower, a tower whose music was air filter and fan, rap of heel on polished floor, tap of fingers on keys. There was not a blade of grass or a breeze, not a creature, only a tinny fountain in the marble foyer and a few captive plants, and yet how the shoulders around me hunched over the screens, how the eyes were fixed. We worked long days. Much of the year, we hurried home in the dark and hurried back before it got light, only to find the work was no closer to completion, as though our dreaming selves had unpicked it overnight. It had no magic, but it was not unenchanted. I had come to London when I was twenty-one. Seventeen years it’d been my home. Of those, seven I’d spent here.
Before me, a cursor flickered against a bright white page, empty save for the title Compliance Initiatives in Response to New Regulatory Safeguards. It was my job to write such reports, and shout at traders, and sign off on deals, enforcing the rules of the game that accounted for 11 percent of the UK’s economy. But I did nothing, because I was harried by visions of Peter, not latter-day Peter but original Peter, ur-Peter, on the stone bench in the playground alone, jiggling a foot. Hunted down the corridors by bigger boys for wearing a homemade cape to school. I told myself that Peter was a big boy, able to look after himself, but all I saw was Peter as a small boy, Peter and I chasing raindrops down windowpanes with our fingers on wet days at school, our breath clouding the glass. On very rainy days, they sometimes gave us hot squash. We liked hot squash.
On a piece of paper I scribbled down the options. What I was left with was 1. Peter was not answering his phone or emails because he didn’t want to. 2. Peter was not answering his phone or emails because he couldn’t. This second possibility led to further options: a. Peter was dead. b. Peter was sick or injured. c. Peter was being prevented from answering his phone or emails by person or persons unknown.
I found myself wanting to tell someone. Oliver? He would be dismissive. I thought of other colleagues I was on friendly terms with, with whom I occasionally lunched or grabbed a quick drink at the end of a particularly long day. Over the years I’d been confided in. Steph’s messy divorce, James’s stint in rehab, Petra—her face entirely expressionless—telling me that she wished she’d never had children. But none of them would do. Suddenly I knew who I wanted to talk to.
Not possible. Not possible.