The Sick Rose (13 page)

‘Why don’t we get them up here for a site visit?’ she ventured. ‘We could do a better job of convincing them that way.’

‘Listen, dear,’ said Ingram. ‘When the HGT says jump, you say, “How high?” You don’t say, “I’ll jump on my terms.” ’

‘I think it’s a
good
idea,’ she said, but she could not change his mind without telling him the truth. At three o’clock she faked a headache and left for the caravan, knowing that she would have to go the long way round, up to the gatehouse, out of the perimeter wall followed by a careful trespass through the farm.

Paul was in her way, like he always seemed to be. This time he was clearing litter from around the gatehouse, gloves on and a bag at his hip. It was as though the same invisible hand that had delivered him to Kelstice was deliberately plucking him away from other parts of the site and setting him down in her path. Could the summons to Warwick Gardens really be a coincidence, so hot on the heels of his arrival? She chided herself for letting superstition sweep her away again. He set down his bag and blew a curl out of his eyes, the way Adam used to do.

‘Knackered,’ he said.

‘That’s a good sign. Are you getting on all right?’

‘Yeah, it’s good,’ he said. ‘I’m getting quite into it now.’ The smile he gave her looked like the kind reserved for friends of his mother’s and his friends’ mothers, which made the little charges of electricity it set off in her pelvis feel even more inappropriate.

‘Well. I’d better go.’

‘See you later.’

How could such a banal exchange make her feel desire so strong that she could not believe that he did not feel an answering tug of it?

Back at home, she locked the door. She found an unopened bottle of wine among the clinking empties, uncorked it, poured a glass and chased oblivion.

Chapter 16

May 1989

Elvira had discovered acid house and switched tribes overnight. Her new uniform consisted of white cycling shorts and a white hooded T-shirt, and around her neck hung a CND symbol the size of a small plate. Hooped earrings almost as large brushed her shoulders and she had pulled the tongues out of her trainers so that they lapped against her shins. She had stopped going to gigs and clubs in London and started going to raves in Essex. Essex! Elvira used to complain if she had to venture further east than Tottenham Court Road. The friendship had been based on shared passions; it was hard not to take Elvira’s rejection of their old lifestyle personally. She had even reverted to her old nickname, Ellie; Louisa refused to use it. She looked with dismay at the day-glo badges that littered her countertop like radioactive pebbles on black sand. Two dozen fluorescent smiley faces laughed back at her. She was trying to be open-minded but she couldn’t see what they had to do with essential oils.

‘Don’t you think this rather compromises the integrity of what we’re doing here?’

‘It’s a market stall, not an altar,’ Elvira said. ‘They’ll sell, that’s all I give a shit about. What’s up with you, anyway? Trouble in paradise?’

She couldn’t resist the opportunity to talk about Adam. ‘Not trouble, not as such; it’s just all so intense. It’s
consuming
me. I feel like he’s taking me over.’

‘Yeah, that’s what Trina was like,’ Elvira said carelessly.

‘Trina?’ Louisa tried to keep her voice light.

‘She had a thing with him over Christmas. I thought you knew? Didn’t I tell you that night at the Borderline?’

Louisa shook her head.

‘I can’t believe I didn’t tell you this. God, she was a nightmare when she was going out with him. It was like she’d had a personality transplant, she turned into this little mouse running all over London after him. One day she was all happy because he’d rung her, and the next day he hadn’t called or he was being all distant and she’d be going on about how miserable she was and just when I’d talked some sense into her and she’d ended it, he’d come back with his tail between his legs and we’d be back to square one.’ Elvira was telling the story with relish, like she was relating the plot of a soap opera. ‘Well,
obviously
he was shagging around.’ She saw Louisa’s face and assumed a patronising air that suggested she was two decades rather than two years older than Louisa. ‘What? I’d want to know if it was me. Anyway, I hope you’re using protection. You don’t know where he’s been, you know, with AIDS and everything.’

They had been relying on the pill. Still, automatically, she leapt to his defence. ‘He’s changed,’ she said. Hadn’t he told her that? Hadn’t they both agreed that what they had was new to both of them?

Elvira finished pinning the badges on to the soft cloth backdrop. ‘Let me tell you something about men. They’re congenitally incapable of change. All of them. Well, you can’t say I didn’t warn you. Just don’t come crying to me when it all goes wrong.’ She pulled a white and silver bandana out of her waistband and held it tight against Louisa’s hairline. ‘Do you know what, you’d look great like this. Aren’t you sick of mooching around looking like a goth? It’s 1989, for fuck’s sake. And summer’s coming, you look like you’re going to melt. Go on, let me give you a makeover.’

Adam loved the way she dressed, loved the fusty femininity of what he called her widow’s weeds.

‘He might not like it,’ she said without thinking. Elvira’s eyebrows seemed to float above her head.

‘Since when did
you
let a man dictate what you wore?’

‘What’s wrong with wanting to look nice for him?’

Elvira stood back with her arms folded, looked Louisa up and down.

‘What’s happened to the old Louisa who got any bloke she wanted and didn’t take any bullshit? Don’t let him do this to you.’

‘Do what, make me happy?’

‘If this is you happy, I’d hate to see you sad.’

The pavements were crowded and sticky, but Louisa and Adam were six storeys above street level and up there noon was crisp and pale. They both had a free day – Ciaran had cancelled rehearsals in order to go and show his support to the striking dockers down at the Port of London – and they were drinking champagne in the art deco sweep of the Roof Gardens bar. Adam had said it was a shame to come there so often and not to get drunk. The other diners were men in suits and ladies who lunched; Louisa and Adam fed off their disapproving looks. She knew how they must look, she with her black lace and blue hair, him dressed like the rock star he already was, keeping his sunglasses on even indoors. He spent like a rock star, too, ordering by the glass and paying their bill with cash. They ordered no food.

Afterwards they wandered through the gardens. She picked the purple heads from the lavender and showed him how crushing the flowers between her fingers released their pungent oil; he did the same.

‘There’s a theory about why smells are so evocative. They say that because we don’t need scent for survival any more, like our ancestors did, it’s become a kind of luxury sense, associated with emotions rather than life or death stuff. That’s why nothing brings back a memory as sharply as smell.’

If she had said anything like this at home, she would have been asked to name this authoritative ‘they’ and laughed out of the room, but Adam was always up for discussions like this; he took her ideas and ran with them.

‘What, more than music?’ he said, playfully, then grew serious. ‘I think music affects us in ways we can’t even begin to understand yet. D.H. Lawrence called it “the insidious mastery of song”. D’you know that poem? It’s about a man who listens to a woman playing the piano and he’s transported back in time until he’s a little boy again, listening to his mother play. It’s beautiful, it makes me cry. I wanted us to set it to music, but Ciaran wasn’t up for it. I hate having to depend on him to write.’

Louisa made a note to find the poem, read it, memorise it.

‘Does your mum play the piano, then?’

‘I believe she did, before I was born,’ he said. ‘But I only ever knew her to play a church organ.’

Flamingos looked on, unimpressed. From the balcony Louisa’s London shimmered in the early summer heat. The sky was huge.

‘This is what the human eye was meant to see,’ she said. ‘A proper horizon, not that bloody courtyard outside my bedroom window.’

‘Well, I’d better get rich and famous so that I can buy us a nice big penthouse to live in,’ he said. ‘We’ll have a house in the countryside too; I’ll have a recording studio there and you can have a herb garden and grow all the lavender you want.’ It was the first intimation he had given of a future beyond their next meeting. Her heart turned cartwheels. Elvira could say what she liked; this was real.

Two Japanese teens, effortfully styled in crepe-soled shoes and red rubber catsuits, were mucking about with Polaroid cameras, pretending to push each other over the edge. The railings were too high for anyone to topple over and were in any case crowned with spikes. After an exchange of mime, Adam took their photograph, the girls giggling at him. Louisa and Adam posed for their own snapshot; he had gone on to photoshoot autopilot, pouting at the camera. She was looking up at him in adoration. She waved the Polaroid dry between her fingertips.

Adam took her face in his hands and kissed her. It was a perfect moment so she sabotaged it by asking the question that had been swelling her throat.

‘I didn’t know you used to have a thing with Trina.’ He pulled away from her so quickly that it felt like a slap.

‘Why should you?’

‘I just think it’s weird that you didn’t tell me, that’s all.’

‘I didn’t tell you because I never think about her. Your past doesn’t matter to me, and don’t look at me like that, I know you’ve been around the block. That’s the whole
point
of us, isn’t it? That’s why we work, because we’re equals. What matters is that we’re together now.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Louisa, I hope you’re not going to get all clingy and possessive on me. It kills love, all that stuff. It
chokes
it.’

His mood had jackknifed. His eyes remained on the skyline. She took a step towards him; he shrugged her off. She felt like impaling herself on the railings.

‘Right, I’m off,’ he said. ‘You stay here and finish your drink.’

‘But I thought we—’

‘I’ve got to meet someone.’

‘
Where
?’

Did she imagine the micro-pause before he spoke? ‘Not that it’s any of your business, but I’m going to rehearse.’

She retreated into the Tudor garden and waited until she was sure that he really wasn’t coming back to her. His departure had been so abrupt that it took her a while to spot his inconsistency. They couldn’t have a rehearsal if Ciaran wasn’t there, could they? With no evidence other than the memory of a spill of red hair, she knew at once that he was with
her
. No wonder he kept Louisa at arm’s length. He was everything to her, and she was sharing him with someone else. The walls of the garden seemed to draw in and tilt. Something cold unfurled in her stomach. She was not yet ready to name this tentative green shoot as jealousy, but the tendril curled out and it grew and it grew until it was strangling her from the inside.

Chapter 17

March 2007

‘I don’t know why you have to have your hair like that,’ said his mother, pushing his fringe out of his face. ‘It’s like a mop, I can’t see your lovely face. You look like something out of the seventies. In my day all the boys had proper, sharp haircuts. Your father had his hair cut Up West every six weeks, without fail.’ Paul reached for the thin wire band he’d bought to keep his hair out of his eyes. Mum flicked her eyebrows. ‘And I’m not sure about the girl’s hairband.’

‘But blow-drying with a girl’s hairbrush and a girl’s hairdryer is OK?’ This was deliberate: Troy began every day in front of the mirror working on his own hair, a rock-solid wave that broke abruptly in a thick wedge three inches above the nape of his neck. Troy and his mother had started going out eighteen months ago, when Paul was fourteen, and he had been living with them for half that time. He had his own business cleaning ovens (domestic and industrial, no job too large or too small) and wore baggy shirts tucked into tight jeans which emphasised his skinny limbs and soft belly. It was hard to imagine a less Trojan figure.

‘Stop it, you,’ said his mum, with a smile. She sat at the head of the kitchen table, where the surface had been swabbed so many times that the walnut veneer had gone white. All the accoutrements of her fertility treatment were laid before her: a row of rubber-sealed ampoules, needles in their sterile plastic, the needle gun and two cotton balls ready-steeped in antiseptic solution. She rolled up the leg of her tracksuit bottoms, grabbing the flesh to locate the muscle on the front of her thigh. Paul turned away: he knew that he would not see the needle go in and that no blood would flow but sometimes there would be a pinhead of scarlet and that was enough. He would never, ever get used to the idea of his mother puncturing her flesh. He heard her suck her teeth as she gave herself a shot of hope.

‘What you up to this weekend, anyway?’ she said. ‘You seeing Daniel?’

‘We haven’t made plans,’ said Paul. In over two years of knowing Daniel the two had never made plans to see each other, and still they met up almost every day. He had made good on his promise to leave school on his sixteenth birthday, or so near to it that the teachers were happy to turn a blind eye. The friendship had naturally changed but not in the way Paul had imagined; he had supposed that Daniel would be absorbed into the adult world, Carl’s world, the world of work and drinking and women, and would have better things to do than hang around with a schoolboy. Now seventeen, Daniel could pass for much older, old enough to get served in any of the bars in Southend with an over 21s policy. He caught the odd day’s work – Carl always knew someone who knew someone who wanted muscle – but his social life didn’t extend beyond the occasional pint with his dad in the Warrant Officer. Paul was uncomfortably aware that this was not normal, that while the rest of the boys in his year were out getting high and catching chlamydia, he and Daniel were still in their bubble of computer games and bike rides.