This Is Not Forgiveness (14 page)

‘I feel like a night in.’

She turns right, then left, then right again, screeching round corners, bouncing over traffic-calming devices following the maze of closes, slaloming through another Legoland development. It is quite a lot like ours, except the houses are bigger, posher – all detached with driveways and double, even triple, garages. The cars parked in the drives are Mercs, BMWs, a few Porsches, lots of SUVs.

The roads are named after the trees that have been ripped up to make way for all these executive houses: Oak Close, Ash Road, Beech Avenue, The Limes. She lives on Cypress Drive. She stops and the electric gates swing open. She sweeps round a little, circular drive towards the porticoed front door. Her house is called ‘The Stables’ and is set slightly apart, bigger than the rest. It’s like a cut-down stately home.

‘Nice,’ I say.

‘No, it’s not. It’s naff.’ She parks anywhere and swings her legs out of the car. ‘It’s somewhere to live. That’s all.’

I walk in behind her. Everything is in various shades of beige and oatmeal. Very tasteful. I fight an impulse to take my shoes off. She takes me into the living room: cream carpet, huge leather sofas, smoked-glass coffee table. The room is wide and long with an L-shaped dining area, where there’s another smoked-glass table with high-backed chairs drawn up to it and a bowl of fruit set in the centre. A door leads to a conservatory.

‘It looks like a show house,’ I say.

‘It is. That’s why mother bought it.’ She gestures around. ‘Furniture. Pictures. Everything.’

I stand in the middle of the room not sure what I should do. It’s like we’ve both arrived at a party and no one else has turned up.

‘Do you want a drink?’ She presses a button in the sideboard. A panel slides back to show a bank of bottles. ‘There’s everything, really. Oh, except tequila. I seem to have drunk most of that.’

‘Got any vodka?’ I don’t really like tequila. Too oily.

‘It’s in the freezer. I’ll go and get it.’

I walk over to a big cabinet which takes up one wall of the room. Inside it are lots of trophies. She comes back with a bottle of Absolut, the frost forming on it, and two glasses, misted and smoking with ice.

‘What are these?’ I tap the glass encasing the trophies. ‘They didn’t come with the house.’

‘They’re Trevor’s,’ she says as she pours two hefty shots of vodka.

‘Oh.’ I don’t ask her about her real dad. I don’t suppose she’d tell me, even if I did. Instead, I go on with the trophy conversation. ‘What did he get them for?’

‘Shooting.’

‘Shooting?’

‘Yes.’

‘With guns?’

‘No, pea-shooters. What do you think?’

‘Does he have any here? Guns, I mean.’

‘Of course.’

‘What kinds?’

‘All kinds: hunting rifles, a shotgun, a couple of handguns – a Glock 9mm and a Colt
M1911.’

‘It’s illegal to own handguns,’ I say. I know that because Grandpa had to turn his in.

She shrugs. ‘That’s why they’re kept locked up.’

‘What is he? Some kind of gangster?’

‘No, he’s an estate agent. He just likes guns, that’s all. He collects them.’

‘Can you shoot?’

‘Yes. I’m not a bad standard.’ She might have been talking about Grade 8 on the clarinet. ‘My mother doesn’t like it. That’s why I do it.’

‘Doesn’t she like guns?’

‘No, not so much.’

When she comes back, I pull out the cigarette case Cal found in a junk shop and take out a couple of joints. These are some I rolled earlier. I’ve been raiding Rob’s stash. She has no objection, rather the opposite, but we go into the conservatory. She doesn’t like the smell of smoke in the house.

I prefer it in there. The floor is shiny cream tiles and I’m not so afraid of spilling anything. It’s full of rattan furniture and plants. Some of them are big – tree size. There’s a water feature running down into a pond. I catch a flash of colour. It has fish in it.

She sets the bottle down on top of a copy of
House & Garden
.

‘Where are they, your mum and stepdad?’ I ask.

‘Gone away,’ she says, eyes narrowed as she lights a rollie, touching the lighter flame to the twisted end. She inhales, then blows out a thin stream of smoke. ‘We’ve got a place in France. They’ve gone there.’

‘Leaving you on your own?’

‘I’m eighteen, not eight. Anyway, they think I’m going away to Cornwall with friends.’

‘Like Martha and her mates?’

‘Yeah. As if. Can you see me in a caravan in Newquay? Shows how much my mother knows about me.’

She takes another toke on the spliff.

It might be the weed, it might be her mother, it might be the thought of Martha and her mates that’s making her frown and bite her lip.

‘We could go away if you want,’ I say. ‘I’ve got a tent. Well, I know where I can get one.’

Wrong thing to say.

‘I don’t actually
want
to go anywhere,’ she says, speaking slowly and very clearly, as if I’m a bit dim or hard of hearing, or possibly both. ‘I made up the story for the benefit of my mother. She doesn’t have to feel guilty then and will leave me alone. Suits her anyway, she doesn’t want “the children” there. It would cramp her style.’

‘What about your brother?’ I ask, trying to change the direction of the conversation. I don’t want to piss her off. It’s not a good thing to do if you’re hoping to have sex with someone. I know that much.

‘
Step
brother,’ she corrects. ‘She’s packed the poor little sod off to some kind of fat camp.’ She throws the spliff away and comes over to sit astride me. ‘So I’m on my own.’

The rattan proves kind of fragile. There’s a crack that sounds like the cane is splitting. We both fall about laughing and move to the living room, leaving our clothes behind us. Next we move to the kitchen.

She wants to have sex in every room in the house and it is a big house. We end up in her room, where I pretty much pass out.

When I wake up, she’s not in the bed with me. I’ve no idea what time it is. It feels very late or pretty early. It’s hard to tell. I turn the light on and look around. She must have gone through a Goth phase. Her room is very dark. The walls are painted purple and the blinds are black.

One wall is all pictures. There are faces looking down, faces I don’t recognise. They are good-looking enough to be film stars, but I don’t think they are. They look young, but the photographs are all in black and white, like they were taken a long time ago. The scenes could be contemporary: demonstrations, police on the streets; a bomb-damaged car, just wheels and twisted metal, and people climbing over rubble, bodies and carnage, like from a war zone,  but these are images from another time, not now. In the middle is a symbol that I don’t recognise with the letters RAF on it but I don’t think it’s anything to do with the Royal Air Force. Their emblem isn’t a red star and a Kalashnikov.

There’s a Palestinian flag hanging down and recent pictures taken off the Internet of people marching through the streets of Cairo, fighting in Libya and Syria, demonstrating in Gaza and on the West Bank. Propped in a corner of the room are a bunch of placards with a police riot helmet hanging like a trophy from one of them. Above that are colour photos torn from newspapers: people marching through London, smashed windows, fires in the street. In the centre is a blown-up press picture of Caro wearing the helmet, visor up, yelling, giving the finger.

She’s got lots of books. Shelves of them. There are a couple on art, some poetry, novels, and quite a few on politics and philosophy – Nietzsche, Karl Marx . . . Heavy stuff. Others I’ve never even heard of, like Bakunin, Carlos Marighella. I’ll have to check them out on the Internet. If she wants to do Politics at uni, she’s certainly getting a head start and if I’m going to stand a chance of understanding her, I’ll have to do some homework.

I scout the room for more clues. There are no personal photographs of her with her family or with friends on a night out, none of the girly knick-knacks that Martha has in her room. She must keep her make-up and stuff in the bathroom. There’s nothing on the dressing table except a bottle of Chanel perfume. On her desk is a laptop. I’m tempted. That could be more revealing. I listen out. The shower is running. I open it and power up. I don’t get past the screensaver. Red star and Kalashnikov.

‘Naughty, naughty! That’s private.’ I didn’t hear her come in and start, guilty at getting caught. ‘Not that you’d get any further. Everything is password-protected.’

‘What’s the screensaver?’

‘RAF. Stands for Red Army Faction.’

‘Who are they?’

‘
Were.
Known erroneously as the Baader-Meinhof Gang.’ She says it like she’s giving a lecture. ‘They were active in Germany in the Seventies.’

I look blank. ‘What did they do?’

‘They were urban guerrillas. They robbed banks, kidnapped, killed people, bombed buildings. Anything to disrupt the system. That’s them up there on the wall.’

I look up at the young faces in the old black-and-white photos.

‘Who’s that? The one on the left?’ She’s pretty, her dark hair cut just below chin length. ‘She looks a lot like you.’

‘That’s Petra Schelm.’ She comes over and shuts down the laptop. ‘Seriously, Jamie. It’s not OK to pry.’

‘OK. OK.’ I swing round on the chair. ‘Just curious.’ I point at the photo of her in the policeman’s helmet. ‘You are very photogenic.’

She nods, as if that is a given. ‘It was in all the papers at the time.’

‘I’m bored. Distract me.’ I make a grab for her but she pulls her bathrobe round her and she shakes her head.

‘No. Time for you to go.’

‘But you said your folks were away.’

‘They are.’

‘Then why?’

I get up and go over to her. I can’t believe she’s about to throw me out. It was not just about having sex. I want to sleep with her. Spend the whole night together. In a bed.

‘I don’t like sleeping with people,’ she says. ‘I have to sleep on my own. It’s not to do with you.’

I go over to the window and part the blinds. The sky is paling at the margins, somewhere near a bird has started to sing.

‘It’s nearly light.’

‘Time you were off, then.’

I play for time, picking up some stones I find scattered along her windowsill.

‘Leave those alone.’

I turn them over, examining the markings. ‘What are they?’

‘Rune stones.’

‘No shit!’ I shake them in my cupped hands. ‘What do you use them for?’

‘I don’t use them for anything. They’re just painted pebbles. Put them back where you found them.’

I let them fall.

I don’t know what makes me hang around. I go to the end of the road and turn back. The gates are shut. No chance of re-entry, the alarm light is blinking, and I’m facing a long walk across town, but I can’t go yet. I look through the bars. No lights in the house. No movement. I look around, suddenly nervous at the idea of CCTV cameras – this is just the kind of estate that would have them looking out for suspicious characters loitering about just like I am now. My first instinct is to throw my hood up, but that would look even more suspicious, they would be down from the station in a minute. I can’t make myself walk away. I sit on a nearby wall, light a spliff and wonder about what I’m doing and why I’m doing it. Being near her is not enough, but it is something, I guess.

I’m off, eyes closed, and drifting, thinking about her, then I hear a car starting. The mechanical click and whine of gates. My eyes snap open. I don’t want to be caught watching, by anybody, least of all by her. I hop off the wall and back into the shadows behind a tree, hoping it will be enough to hide me. I don’t want her thinking that I’m a nutter. A stalker.

She stops and looks left and right, even though there is no traffic. Where is she going? She pulls away without even looking in my direction. I’m on foot. I can hardly run after her. I have to let her go. I start walking. I hear the car accelerate then slow, then accelerate again. It’s so quiet that I hear the engine sound for a long time. Engines sound different. Grandpa taught me that. With practice, you can tell one from another. Dogs do it easily. I stand still in the middle of the street, turning, trying to track her, trying to unplait her from the other sounds around. Seems like she’s heading into town, but I can’t swear to that. Eventually, the sound fades and becomes indistinguishable, blending into the distant noise of the traffic on the bypass.

Chapter 19