Stories We Could Tell (30 page)

Man had entered the forest.

Ruby was still sleeping by his side, a thin arm thrown across his waist. Leon shook her, unzipped the bag and was on his feet, the bare floorboards like sandpaper beneath his toes, pulling on his clothes. The other couple in the room were already half-dressed
and stuffing meagre belongings into rucksacks. It still looked dark outside, but the room was bright, lit by moonlight and the headlights of a dozen cars.

‘Get up now,’ he said, ducking as a half-brick smashed through the window. There were voices in the street. Men shouting about dossers, stirring themselves for the fight, pumping themselves up. ‘They’re coming in.’

Except they were not coming in.

It was worse than that.

From downstairs Leon could hear nails being pounded into wood. Voices from inside the house being raised in anger. Curses and threats and cries of fear. He went to the window and saw burly shadows carrying thick planks of wood to the house.

‘The bastards,’ Leon said. ‘They’re sealing us in.’

He had known that one day the bailiffs would come, but he had always imagined it would be to throw them into the street. Many times Leon had envisaged the final battle for the squat to be a glorious siege – Leon standing shoulder to shoulder with veterans of the barricades of Paris in hand-to-hand combat with hired thugs and the boys in blue. Room to room fighting – like the battle for Stalingrad. Now he was faced with the choice of staying inside a boarded-up squat until the landlord decided they’d had enough, or legging it. If he had been alone, it would have been different. But he didn’t want anything bad ever to happen to Ruby.

He took her arm and they fled for the bedroom door, still pulling on their clothes. At the top of the stairs he glimpsed her long pale legs in a wash of moonlight and it made him catch his breath. He stopped her, and gave her a chance to pull on her dress. He even zipped her up, allowing his fingers to rest on her shoulder blades for just a moment. His hands were shaking. She patted him reassuringly and gave him a smile. Her hand was cool and still.

One floor below he could hear the sounds of scuffles and the staccato pounding of hammers. Most of the downstairs windows
were already boarded up, and slashes of headlights came through the slats in the wood. But the front door was half-open and either side of it a scrum of heaving bodies fought for control. Leon and Ruby headed in the opposite direction, to the back of the house, where they had just started sealing the kitchen door.

Leon cursed them and threw himself at the door, shoulder first, and a plank flew away and caught a bailiff flush in the face. Then they were out into the garden and into the night, tripping over the step, obscenities being screamed behind them, something heavy thrown at their heads, maybe a hammer, but whistling past and lost in the grass. They were not followed, but Leon helped her over a dozen garden fences before they stopped, sprawling exhausted on a manicured lawn and panting for breath next to an ornamental pond and a garden gnome with a fishing pole. You could still hear the voices and the hammering and the fighting in the distance. It made him shudder. Squatting was all right when you were young and on your own. But what about later? What about when you found someone?

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t expect them to come tonight.’

‘Now you really are homeless,’ said Ruby, and it made him laugh, and his mouth was on her mouth again, and the dew was soaking his knees, and she was laughing too, his hands on her fabulous face, and he was mad for her, alive for her, for she was all that he ever wanted.

The first tube train was still hours away.

They held hands and started walking west down the Marylebone Road, with the early birds singing in Regent’s Park to their right, and the sky behind them just beginning to smudge with the dawn. He was going to walk her to her door. That was the plan, although they didn’t feel the need to discuss it much. Leon was going to make sure she got there. Home and dry. Safe and sound.

He wished he had money for a hotel. Wouldn’t it be great to
have money for a hotel and just crawl into bed and stay there all day long? To kiss and cuddle and fuck until their strength was gone? Wouldn’t it be great to have some money for a change? Still, if he couldn’t get back into bed with her, at least he could take her home.

But a Ford Cortina full of boys pulled up alongside them just beyond the great dome of Madame Tussaud’s. Leon looked at them with distaste. They were the kind who were always threatening to kick his head in.

‘Darling, do you want a lift?’

‘Where you going, love? Acton? Ealing? Greenford?’

Ruby looked at Leon, almost apologetically. Greenford, yes. She was going to Greenford and back to her real life.

They were depressingly familiar – capped-sleeve T-shirts showing off pale, meaty biceps, hair still worn in sub-Rod Stewart feather cuts, short leather jackets that seemed one size too small. But they didn’t seem particularly drunk. And Leon couldn’t deny that they were going her way. He couldn’t deny that.

‘It’s okay,’ Ruby said, touching his arm. She sounded a little sad and very tired. ‘They’re not going to do anything to me. Just drive me home and ask me for my phone number. And I’ll give them a fake one. Okay, baby?’

He nodded, not risking words.

The sun peeped over the dome of Madame Tussauds. After the storms of the night before it was a shock to see the blinding light of an August dawn, to be reminded that it was still summer. Sunlight glinted on Leon’s newly blond locks. She touched his hair – proud of what she had done, and he had to smile. For the very first time in his life, he felt he looked just about okay. Maybe even more than okay.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Sorry about – you know. Everything.’ ‘No, I had fun,’ she said. There was a real warmth and sweetness in her, Leon thought. She was beautiful, and she was tough,
but it was that warmth and sweetness that had him hooked. She laughed, and Leon thought – the beautiful ones. They have it so easy. ‘It was…different,’ she smiled. The boys waited patiently in the car.

‘I had fun too,’ Leon said. He couldn’t describe what the night had meant to him – how he had been lost in her, and the music, and the sex. He couldn’t put that into words. For the first time in his life, words failed him.

‘And you’re a good dancer,’ she said.

‘Come on,’ he said.

‘Sure you are,’ she insisted. ‘You just need to – I don’t know. Relax a little.’

Then the sky was full of sound, and at first it seemed like another storm, but it was louder than any noise Leon had ever heard, louder than any storm, and it grew louder still until suddenly it was directly overhead and he looked up to see the new plane, the one that resembled a giant white bird, Concorde, just one year old and slim as a rocket and gleaming white and gold in the dawn, losing altitude as it prepared for landing west of the city, not far from her home. It was beautiful.

When he looked back, the Ford Cortina was pulling away and Ruby was waving from the rear window. He waved in return, knowing he had meant what he said in bed, what he had said in the middle of the heat and madness, when the words were meant to be just for the moment. Leon loved her.

He really loved her, it wasn’t just the sex talking. He loved her although he didn’t even know her. How did he manage that? How can you love someone who you don’t even know?

He was twenty years old, and it was easy.

‘You should leave him,’ Ray told her.

This wasn’t his way. His way was to be cool. Three years at
The Paper
had taught him that it was the only way to be. You were cool when you didn’t care, and you were cool when you did care. But this was different. He couldn’t be cool with her.

‘Your bloody husband,’ he said. ‘Mr Love Muscle.’

She smiled politely and he knew it was hopeless. Where would she go? With him? In a few hours he wouldn’t even have a job. He saw himself through her eyes – a dumb kid still living with his parents, smitten after one night of good sex. But you don’t walk away from the kind of life she had. Even Ray knew that much.

She looked from his face to the lightening sky, smiling slightly. ‘It doesn’t feel like there was a storm last night, does it?’ she said.

They were sitting in her Lotus Elan in Hyde Park, by the curve in the lake where the Serpentine meets the Long Water. The sun poured through the great trees and coated the water with a sheen of molten gold. On the far side of the Serpentine there was a small wooden jetty with blue-and-white boats clustered around it.

‘We should go rowing sometime,’ she said. ‘I haven’t been rowing for years.’

They watched twenty horses from the barracks of the Household Cavalry lazily clop down a wide sandy track, their riders in full
uniform, gleaming breastplates and red Spartan cloaks, the white horsehair tails swishing on their white-and-gold helmets, and yet the soldiers were clearly off duty, carelessly yawning and rubbing the sleep from their eyes and talking among themselves. It was a good moment. But something in Ray seemed bound to spoil it.

‘I mean,’ he said, ‘if you’re really so unhappy, if you’re really as unhappy as you say, then why don’t you just get a divorce?’

‘Are you going to bang on about this?’ she said, not smiling now.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m going to bang on and on about it. I’m not even talking about you and me. I’m talking about saving yourself. Getting the fuck out of that loveless place.’

She was silent, still considering the lake, and for a while he didn’t know if she was thinking about getting divorced or going rowing. He wasn’t just frustrated with her. He was angry with himself. He was meant to be with John Lennon, not some married woman whose husband was too rich to leave.

‘It’s not so easy,’ she said finally. ‘You sort of get stuck with each other. I don’t know how to explain it.’ She stifled a yawn, and he could see she was very tired. She shook her head. ‘It’s hard to make the break. Hard to face all the changes. You’re scared of the unknown, I guess. Scared of being alone.’

He didn’t know what to say. Everything he knew about marriage he had learned from his parents. Which possibly meant that he knew nothing. He tried to imagine why his father and mother had once loved each other, and why it had changed. Impossible to ever really know, Ray thought, but although he had grown to hate his father, he could understand how his mother would have been attracted to the old man’s strength, his physical certainty, that manly bearing. Women seemed to love that crap.

And how could his mother ever have known that his strength would curdle into shouting and bullying and violence? That the things she loved about him would be the weapons he turned on her and their children? Who could have seen that coming? This
woman beside him, the woman he was urging to leave her husband – they must have loved each other once, they must have been mad for each other at the start. People changed. He saw that now. They changed in ways that you could never imagine.

It was not difficult for Ray to see why his father had fallen in love with his mother. All the evidence was there in the smiling black-and-white photograph of their wedding day, the fair, delicate beauty of his mother’s youth, and that heartbreaking gentleness she had about her, an almost child-like vulnerability, guaranteed to bring out the protective instincts in a man like his father, who was so old fashioned that he considered combing hair effeminate (you were meant to just use your fingers until it all fell out).

But his mother had also changed with the years, and the changes had been accelerated and soured by the death of Ray’s older brother. The girlish softness had turned into a kind of timidity, a net curtain-twitching, kitchen-dwelling neurosis, a fear of life. A love of home had degenerated into a form of agoraphobia. It seemed to Ray that the reasons his parents had fallen for each other were the same reasons that they now drove each other insane. Perhaps every marriage was like that. It wasn’t true that you killed the things you loved. It was far more likely that they would kill you. And could he imagine his mother walking out on his dad? Of course not. Where would she go?

‘But you don’t love him,’ Ray said, sounding outraged now, and unable to do anything about it. ‘And he can’t love you, can he? I don’t see how he can love you and give you that…thing.’

He couldn’t speak of the birthday present. The idea of it appalled him.

‘I told you – I’m too old for bedsits and grotty one-bedroom flats,’ she said. ‘Someone stealing your milk from the fridge. Arguments about who does the washing up. The sound of shagging in the next room. Someone playing bloody Wishbone Ash upstairs. I’ve done all that. Ten years ago.’

Ray hadn’t done any of that. ‘How old are you anyway?’ he said.

‘Twenty-eight today.’ A knowing smile. ‘Too old for you.’

His heart sank. It was all hopeless. ‘But too young for what you’ve got,’ he said bitterly.

He was upset, working himself up for an argument, loathing the thought of her going back to that life – the big house, the flash car, the husband with a wallet where his heart should be. He felt as though he could only stand to say goodbye to her if harsh words had been exchanged. But she was not going to let the night end that way.

‘Don’t be so angry with him,’ she said gently. ‘Who do you think pays for everything? Who bought my clothes, this car, the bed you slept in last night? Besides – he likes you. He told me so.’

He thought of her husband’s band. The packed basketball arenas of the Mid West going ape shit –
‘Whooh! Rock and roll!’ –
for their souped-up R&B. They were all right, Ray thought. Nothing special. A good bar band, writ large, pub rock to fill stadiums. Nothing more. And Ray thought of their manager, her husband, who had always been pleasant enough to him, but who in the end was just another record industry lifer who happened to be standing in the right club when the right band came by. He would never get married, Ray decided. It robbed you of yourself.

‘You think you’re nothing,’ Ray told her. ‘But I think you’re terrific’

She looked at him for a while, and then she kissed him quickly on the mouth.