The Sick Rose (8 page)

‘Where did you learn to sing like that?’ she said.

‘I was a choirboy,’ he said. ‘My father’s a vicar.’

‘
Really
?’ said Louisa. Leah and Nick, born Jewish and Catholic respectively, took their daughters’ atheism for granted. Consequently, Louisa found churches agonisingly sexy.

They cut through Hyde Park and then, when it was dark and the gates shut them out, along Kensington Gore, between the Royal Albert Hall and the Albert Memorial, twin monuments to an infinite love. Cherry blossom was sleeting from the trees: it was embarrassingly romantic. Louisa had the notion that everyone involved in the architecture of Kensington, from Queen Victoria onwards, had contrived the streets to facilitate a first kiss.

But Adam didn’t kiss her: he talked. He told her that the band used to be called Void Void, and that his first significant contribution to musical history was renaming it, thus ridding the world of the worst-named band in the history of music. That he was an only child born to ageing parents already twenty years into their marriage. ‘They thought I was a miracle baby,’ he said. ‘Mum still does. That’s part of the problem; she still thinks I’m about seven. She’d still be tucking me into bed every night if I let her. I had to leave home just to get away from her.’

‘And him?’

‘He was glad to see the back of me. He’s hated my guts since the day my balls dropped and I left the choir. He still doesn’t understand why he didn’t produce a clone of himself, another theologian, but I
hate
organised religion. Some of the things he’s said in the name of God, it’s hateful.’

‘Like what?’

‘Can we talk about something else?

‘Oh, OK . . .’ she said, although she was reluctant to abandon this vein and resolved to steer the conversation back in this direction at the first opportunity. ‘So, what’s on your Walkman?’

His musical influences included the usual suspects like The Smiths and The Cure but also Wagner and Britten and Tallis. She learned that he couldn’t drive and that, one day, he wanted to live in Germany. That he thought astrology was a load of bollocks, but then most Scorpios did. That he cut his own hair. That he lived in a shared house in Shepherd’s Bush with the rest of the band, and wished he didn’t. That he only ever felt really alive when he was onstage. (We’ll soon see about
that
, thought Louisa.) That he had been to seven schools between his fifth and sixteenth birthdays. That he had an IQ of 172 but no qualifications because having something to fall back on would be to admit the failure of his musical career before it had begun. That was also why he couldn’t take a job. These last were just two of the many reasons why he hadn’t seen his parents for over four years.

‘Do you miss them?’

‘I miss her, I suppose,’ he said. ‘Or I think I do, and then I talk to her and she’s all in my face and I cant wait to get rid of her. Anyway, he’s made it quite clear that I’m not welcome until I clean up my act, and the only person she worships more than me is him, so . . .’

Louisa wondered what was dirty about his act and hoped she wouldn’t remain in ignorance for long.

‘Four years is a long time not to see your mother. I see mine every day, I still live with her.’

‘Does that mean I can’t take you home?’ he said. It was the only change of subject she wanted; she felt like punching the air.

‘No, they’re cool.’ She parted the bangles on her wrist, found the watch face. It was half past eleven. ‘Anyway, if we go now, they won’t even know you’re there.’

They passed no one. After ten, these streets were as deserted as any suburban close. Even though she was the one who knew the way, she got the impression that he was leading her. When she opened the gate to the mews, he actually whistled.

‘I suppose I’m used to it,’ she said.

The daily had been and there was a clean white sheet on her bed like a blank canvas. The light stayed on. They undressed with neither kissing nor inhibition. She noticed that he wore a silver ring on his left thumb, a four-piece, three-dimensional puzzle. He saw her looking at it.

‘I only take it off when I’m in bed with someone,’ he said. It fell onto her bedside table with a chime. Seeing his naked thumb was almost more intimate than seeing the rest of him. Suddenly, from nowhere, she was nervous.

‘I’ve seen these before, Elvira sells them. It’s a Turkish wedding ring. If you take it off, it falls apart, and there’s a secret way of putting it back together again, so the men knew if their wives had been unfaithful while they were away because they wouldn’t be wearing their ring any more.’ She was prattling; he wasn’t laughing at her yet but he would if she continued. ‘Stage fright,’ she admitted. She wrung her hands, wishing that she had a ring of her own to twist. Adam backed away and sat down on her bed.

‘Louisa, I had no idea,’ he said. ‘God, I’m so sorry, I thought you’d done this before.’

Her laughter broke the ice. ‘Oh, once or twice,’ she said, and came towards him.

It was like throwing petrol over fire. In the first ten seconds they managed to strip the bed of the sheets, move it two feet across the room and upend a jug of water. The sun was rising by the time he rolled away from her, begging for mercy and sleep. She gave him neither.

‘Listen, the other day . . . at the Borderline. You were with a girl.’

He opened his eyes halfway. ‘Mmn.’

‘Who is she? What’s her name?’

‘No one.’

‘Because I just wanted to let you know . . . I won’t be someone’s . . .’ She searched for words that didn’t make her sound prim. ‘Mistress’ was formal and Victorian, ‘bit on the side’ too Ealing comedy. ‘I’m not the kind of girl to be the
other woman
.’ Immediately she wished she could take it back. It was supposed to have been ironic but she just came over as desperate.

‘She’s history,’ said Adam. Did that mean he was ending a relationship or that he had never intended to see the other girl again? Either way, she had won. A shiver of triumph overrode a twinge of misgiving at a man who could dismiss any woman so coolly.

While Adam slept, she inhaled the thick oily skin between his shoulder blades where he smelt most like himself. If you could distil and bottle the essence of a human being, if you could crush skin like petals, then she would do this with Adam Glasslake. The vetiver scent was faint now but his neck still bore the visible traces of the oil he had anointed himself with earlier. It was a faint dark green. Below this, on his clavicle, she had marked him for herself, a vivid red circle, half-kiss, half-bite. She felt intensely female and powerful, like a witch.

Chapter 9

July 2002

They couldn’t stay in their house. Dad’s life insurance policy was invalid because Mum had secretly cancelled the direct debit six weeks before his death, along with the Sky, the Christmas Club, Slimming World and all her magazine subscriptions. She had been saving up for fertility treatment. No one told Paul this: he found out by listening at doors when she was on the telephone and thought that he was asleep. ‘There’s no way I can cover this mortgage,’ she told an unidentified friend. ‘On what I earn? Are you having a laugh? If I sell up here and rent somewhere crappy I can live off the equity until Paul finishes school. It’s not like I’ve got a choice, is it?’ Paul would have looked up the word ‘equity’ on the internet, but that had been cancelled, too.

‘Are you sure you don’t mind leaving?’ she asked him as they were packing up his room. His books never had been put on shelves.

‘I
promise
you I don’t mind.’ He would have had to say this whatever his feelings because he knew she didn’t have a choice, but it was not a lie. In fact, he couldn’t wait to get away. His bedroom window looked out onto the garden and he had nightmares where blood-soaked wires were thrashing at the glass like the tentacles of some terrible alien octopus.

Mum had always looked down on the Grays Reach Estate, even though Dad had grown up there and she hadn’t exactly been born in a stately home herself. When they argued, he used to call her a snob and Lady Muck. Grays Reach was literally a sink estate, the grey buildings scattered like dregs in the shallow bowl of an old quarry in the part of the estuary where the tunnels and the suspension bridge loosely stitch Essex to Kent and the river starts to smell of the sea. The town planners who had commissioned the estate in the middle of the last century had had an uncanny prescience of, and sympathy for, the requirements of petty drug dealers in the twenty-first century; it was almost entirely pedestrianised, with no conventional streets but clusters of houses that backed onto little courtyards which were in turn linked by paths and alleyways. An offshoot of the A13 divided Grays Reach from its flanking towns of Grays and Tilbury, and an underpass beneath the railway line that carried the trains between London and Southend led to the High School and the shopping precinct. The precinct housed the estate’s only pub, the Warrant Officer, bracketed by two burnt-out shop shells. Paul’s new home was in the heart of the estate, the end of a staggered terrace that faced another and backed onto a concrete quad. The day they moved in, Natalie said to herself, ‘How the mighty have fallen,’ and looked out of the window that faced a brick wall. She was acting as though they were living in a shanty town.

That first summer, Paul quite liked Grays Reach. Being miles from the main road meant that his mother was happy for him to spend all day on his bike. On two wheels he mapped the place for himself. There was plenty of land, wasteland and wild fields, to explore. Unlike most of the estuary estates, which had become absorbed into the surrounding towns, Grays Reach remained surrounded by its own scrubby green belt, like the kid at school who can’t shake off rumours of fleas and who no one ever comes close enough to touch. Although the new house was only five miles from the old one it was in a different catchment area, which meant that he wouldn’t be going to St Neot’s but to the Grays Reach High School. His mother was worried that he wouldn’t know anyone there. As far as Paul was concerned, this was good. He was sick of being the boy with the dead dad; sick of the staring; sick of the way people were really nice to him in front of the teachers but had stopped playing with him at break times because of how he’d stop without warning and stare into nowhere, bypassed by the football and ambushed by tears.

On his first day he wore a blazer that cracked at the elbows like dry skin. With his little frame in the big coat he felt like he was wearing a suit of armour. At the gates to Grays Reach High, which incorporated a metal detector and were patrolled by Community Support Officers, he wondered very seriously if he might need one. He had never seen so many people in the same place all at once. For one bewildering second he thought that the staff were wearing school uniform too and then as one of the ‘teachers’ burst a bubble of gum over his tongue and slung a schoolbag over his shoulder it dawned on him these six-foot creatures, these
men
, were schoolboys like him.

The other Year 7s’ main concern was coming to terms with the concept of a timetable and the constant shifting from room to room, but Paul had another fear uppermost in his mind. From week one it was horribly apparent that at Grays Reach there were opportunities for blood to escape everywhere. His junior school had presented nothing more hazardous than round plastic scissors and the odd grazed knee: this building was one big flesh wound waiting to happen. The school knew that the kids carried knives and they were good at spot checks, but confiscating the blades didn’t mean he was safe. There were design and technology classes with lathes and craft knives, food technology classes with huge steel blades and science laboratories full of glass jars and test tubes, any one of which might splinter into a dozen lethal shards. The compasses in their brand new geometry sets had points sharp enough to break the skin and if you snapped one of those protractors or set squares in half they would have a jagged edge like a sheet of glass.

Paul knew that he was only of average ability – he worked hard for his B-grades – but at Grays Reach he was considered the class intellectual. Despite this handicap, he was assimilated into a loose posse of boys in his form. None of them shared his passion for reading fantasy novels, but you couldn’t have everything. He had people to walk home with and people to eat lunch with and until he found a kindred spirit (in books, you always found your kindred spirit eventually, after a long and arduous journey), they would do. He’d once gone to a lunchtime chess club meeting hoping to find some like-minded people – he couldn’t play, but he liked the idea of the game with its antiquity and mystery – but it had been just him and Mr Bradley, his history teacher, who didn’t bother to hide his disappointment when nobody else turned up but had taught Paul the basic moves nevertheless. After three weeks Mr Bradley’s dejection was more than he could bear, and although he was getting into the game, he felt that it would be kinder to release the teacher from his commitment.

He survived most of his first year intact and then, at the beginning of the summer term, they studied genetics in biology. All of them were sticking out their tongues, trying to see if they could roll them into a pipe or not. Miss Grewal, who always wore a white coat like a doctor, couldn’t roll her tongue. Paul could do it: the boy next to him was a double roller, making a sort of wavy pattern like the letter W that no one else on their table could do. Miss Grewal had explained that tongue rollers inherited this ability from their parents: if neither of your parents could do it, you would never be able to, no matter how hard you tried, and if they both could, it would come easily to you. If one parent was a tongue roller and the other one wasn’t, you had a fifty-fifty chance of inheriting it. Their homework was to find out how many people in their families could roll their tongues and plot it on a family tree diagram and see if there was a pattern.