This Must Be the Place (47 page)

LC
: Well—

TL: You think I will do that? Tell it to a complete stranger?

LC
: I don’t know, I—

TL: This is ridiculous.

[
Pause
.]

LC
: Do you think she will ever come back? Do you think you’ll ever work together again? Timou? Will Claudette ever come back?

[
Silence. TL reaches over and pulls out the microphone. He walks away. Interview ends
.]

To Hang On, To Never Let Go

Lucas, London, 2014

L
ucas taps with his knuckles on the door of the flat, once, twice, three times.

Nothing, just the roiling swell of television noise, coming from behind him, and the whirring sound of the lift, ascending in its shaft elsewhere in the building.

He knocks again, louder. ‘Daniel? It’s me. Lucas. Are you in there?’

He emailed Daniel a week earlier to say that he’d be in London and would like to meet; he’d suggested a café around the corner from the flat where Daniel was now living, in a brick mansion block near Chalk Farm tube station. He’d got no reply, but from what Ari had told him about Daniel’s current state, this wasn’t exactly a surprise.

Lucas steps back and leans against the wall. What should he do? Stay or go? He could try Daniel’s mobile but Ari said that Daniel never answers it or never keeps it charged. One of the two.

He should go, he decides, but then just as swiftly is sure that he should stick it out.

The corridor of the mansion block has a distracting hum. Either the lighting or the heating has a defect somewhere, a loose connection, which is vibrating at wasp-pitch. Lucas is examining the ceiling out of habit, looking for an ailing light-bulb, a fuse about to blow, a short-circuiting security camera, when something about Daniel’s door catches his eye.

At the pinhole centre of the tiny spyhole drilled through the door, Lucas detects a movement. A flicker, nothing more, a heartbeat of motion in the stillness beyond.

Lucas pushes himself off the wall and taps his knuckles against the thickly painted door. ‘Daniel, I’d really like to talk to you. Could you open the door?’

Still nothing, but Lucas is sure he hears the soft scrape of a footsole against floor.

‘We could go out for coffee, if you’d rather not invite me in. I found a good place around the corner. I’m sure you know it.’

Lucas puts both hands against the door frame and leans into it.

‘Daniel, I just want to talk. Nothing more. Claudette says—’

‘Is she with you?’

The voice, muffled, still distinctly Brooklyn, comes through the cracks at the edges. Lucas allows himself a small smile. From the years in his former job as a social worker, he knows that any kind of dialogue is the first step to communication, to establishing trust. Or re-establishing, in this case.

‘Is she here?’ Daniel is asking from behind the door.

Lucas shuffles rapidly through possible replies, trying to calibrate the least-damaging response. Would Daniel want her to be here? Or not want her? Hard to say.

‘She’s with the children, in Ireland,’ he says eventually.

Lucas hears Daniel sigh. ‘So,’ comes the laconic voice, ‘I’ve got the monkey, not the organ-grinder.’

Lucas puts his hand in his pocket, feels the sharp corners of the papers Claudette gave him. ‘I suppose we could look at it like that,’ he says. ‘Do you fancy a coffee with this particular monkey?’

There is a silence from behind the door. Lucas sees the spyhole darken, the bright dot at its centre become eclipsed, and he knows that Daniel is looking out at him. He tries to arrange his features into a friendly, unthreatening expression.

‘What did you …’ Daniel begins indistinctly, and the rest of the sentence is inaudible.

‘What was that?’ Lucas leans close to the door. ‘I didn’t hear you.’

‘I said, what in God’s name did you do to your hair?’

‘My hair?’ Lucas puts up a hand to his head. ‘Nothing, I think.’

‘Was it always so … long?’

‘Maybe not,’ Lucas says. ‘I don’t remember. Perhaps it’s time for a cut.’

‘I’ll say.’

The spyhole returns to its bright pinprick and Lucas hears the sliding, clunking sound of locks. The door swings open.

The light in the mansion-block corridor is so glaring that, for a moment, Daniel is just a dark silhouette, swaying slightly in his doorway.

‘You want to go out,’ Lucas says, ‘or …?’

Daniel steps back and Lucas sees his face for the first time. He is careful not to betray any kind of shock but Daniel’s appearance is rather worse than he’d been expecting. A grey pallor to the skin, several days’ worth of unshaven beard, eyes carrying a yellowish tinge, a frame several pounds lighter than it ought to be, a bathrobe worn over some crumpled clothes. Lucas sees it all. Hair standing on end. Fingertips stained ochre. The skin around his lips chapped and split.

The two men consider each other for a moment, then Daniel turns and disappears into his flat.

‘I’ll come in, then,’ Lucas says to the retreating figure.

Daniel doesn’t answer and, after a moment, Lucas steps over the threshold and follows him down a short passageway into a room, where Daniel has thrown himself onto a sofa.

The living room of Daniel’s flat is strewn with papers, a desiccated potplant or two, discarded clothing, and books – books, everywhere. Lined up on shelves, stacked on the floor, tipping sideways on the windowsill, splayed face-down on the coffee-table. No sign of bottles, empty or otherwise, Lucas finds himself noting, no drug paraphernalia. A roll-up cigarette smoulders in an ashtray, a line of smoke rising in such a straight line that, for a moment, it seems to Lucas to be performing some kind of optical illusion, as if the cigarette is suspended from the ceiling by a thread of smoke.

‘So,’ Daniel’s voice interrupts his reverie, ‘what’s the verdict?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I saw you,’ Daniel points the edge of a book in Lucas’s direction, ‘casting your professional eye over the place. Casing the joint. I was just wondering what conclusion you’d come to. Drug den? Alcoholic’s lair? Depressive’s hangout?’

Lucas shakes his head. ‘Daniel, come on, I just wanted to see how you were doing, how—’

Daniel waves this sentence away with a dismissive gesture. ‘Lucas,’ he says, ‘I’ve always had a lot of time for you. You and you alone remain the only in-law of mine that I have ever liked, but I would bet my last dollar that you have something intended for me in one of those zipped-up, all-weather pockets of yours.’

Lucas swallows and says nothing. He takes a step sideways and sits down in a chair opposite Daniel.

‘Am I right,’ Daniel says, folding his arms over his bathrobe, a wolfish scowl on his face, ‘or am I right?’

Lucas crosses his legs, leans on the arm of his chair. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Sure you do.’ Daniel nods at him. ‘Take a look. Go on. Open up your pockets, empty them out. What will we find? Could it be a set of divorce papers, just for me?’

‘I came because I was in London and I wanted to see you, OK? Don’t try and twist this. I thought we could—’

Daniel holds up a finger. ‘Cut the crap. Tell me yes or no. Do you have divorce papers on you?’

‘Daniel, when did you last eat? Have you—’

‘Yes or no, Lucas.’

Lucas sighs. ‘Yes.’

There is a short silence in the room. Daniel sits back, tightens the fold of his arms. A muscle to the side of his jaw clenches and something like a shiver runs over him. Lucas finds he himself is barely breathing. He tries and tries to meet Daniel’s eyes but he can’t. Why, he wants to yell, did he accept this mission? What was he thinking? He had told Claudette it was a terrible idea, him delivering these horrible papers, but she had begged and pleaded until he had given in; Maeve had left the room, shaking her head.

Daniel scrubs at his face with his sleeve, scuffs a foot against a stack of newspapers on the floor. ‘So,’ he says, ‘she’s decided to go the whole hog, has she? Nice of her to let me know. I mean, she could have discussed this with me, at the very least, or—’

‘She’s tried,’ Lucas says. ‘You must know that. I think she just needs some closure on this. She says she’s emailed you several times and written you a letter. We even asked our lawyer to get in touch. But you didn’t respond, you didn’t—’

‘Well,’ Daniel snaps, ‘I’ve kind of had a lot on my mind.’

Another silence. Lucas thinks he should probably just go. This is not working. He had pictured himself and Daniel going out for coffee, sitting opposite each other in a bright, noisy café somewhere. He would hand over the papers, sliding them across the table towards his brother-in-law, and Daniel would take them quickly, wordlessly, tucking them away without discussion. But, then, has Daniel ever done anything without discussion? How did Lucas forget that about him?

Lucas will leave. He would almost rather be anywhere than this dim, airless room. How can Daniel stand it, day after day? How can he live like this? The debris all over the table, the laurel leaves pressing themselves in at the windows, the fug of cigarette smoke. He will get up and leave the papers on this table right here. He could tell Claudette that he did as she’d requested and that she can never, ever ask such a thing of him again.

Daniel is speaking. ‘Well, I guess now we know where we stand. Now we’ve established why you’re really here.’

‘Can I say one thing?’ Lucas asks, standing up.

‘I don’t know.’ Daniel squints up at him. ‘Is it more lies, more dissembling, or is it something that resembles the truth?’

‘I was coming to London and I told her I would be seeing you. Or that I would at least try. And she asked me to bring the papers. So the seeing-you came first, do you understand? I’m going now but I want you to know that I came here with good intentions. It was always—’

‘Here’s a question,’ Daniel says, ignoring his imminent departure, sounding for all the world like the professor he so recently was. ‘Don’t you ever get tired of being her messenger boy?’

Lucas leans one hand against the wall. ‘I’m not sure I know what you mean.’

‘I often used to wonder,’ Daniel says, his gaze directed out of the window to the communal garden with uneven paving and overgrown shrubs, ‘how you stood it.’

‘Stood what?’

Daniel swings his head around and looks him right in the eye. Lucas has forgotten the penetration of that blue gaze. ‘Lucas, buy this house for me. Lucas, call my lawyer for me. Lucas, get in touch with my ex. Lucas, go to Ari’s sports day. Lucas, get Daniel to sign these divorce papers. Lucas, enable my whole insane lifestyle.’

Lucas clears his throat. ‘You know, you do a pretty good imitation of her voice. I never knew you could—’

Daniel leans forward and jabs his finger at him. ‘Aren’t you ever tempted to tell her to just fuck off?’

‘Well, I—’

‘Not even once? Not ever? You realise, don’t you, that her whole existence is entirely predicated on your assistance, your collusion? Without you, her cover would be—’ Daniel makes a gesture like a firework going off. ‘She’d be outed. She’d be rumbled. She wouldn’t last a week without you. You know that? She’d have to come down off that mountain and face the bloody music. And yet she treats you like shit, like a PA, like an unpaid lackey, like a bodyguard, like a—’

‘Daniel.’ Lucas cuts him off in a steady voice, he is not going to let this get to him, he is not, ‘you need to stop. You’re out of line, OK?’

‘I am? But who else is going to tell you this, Lucas? I worry about you, I really do. I kept my counsel while I was married to your sister – well, I guess I still am married to her, until I sign those papers in your pocket, which, by the way, will be never, you can tell her from me – but no one should have to put up with the amount of crap she heaps on you. No one. It’s not fair, it’s not right, it’s—’

‘Look,’ Lucas interjects, ‘I don’t want to get into this but we both know that Claudette’s is a pretty unusual situation. I can assure you that I am not being taken advantage of. That just doesn’t come into it. She’s my sister. I’d do anything for her and I know she’d do anything for me. She has, in fact, many times, and—’

‘Oh, yeah, I forgot.’ Daniel places first one foot then the other on the littered coffee-table. ‘She paid for your whole fertility roller-coaster, didn’t she?’

Lucas narrows his eyes. After a moment, he nods. ‘That’s right.’

‘And she footed the bill for the adoption.’

He nods, once more. ‘She did.’ He refuses to let Daniel rile him; he will not give him the satisfaction.

‘So, in effect, she bought you off by procuring you a child. Your own little orphan from China, in exchange for a lifetime of servitude. Wasn’t that nice of her?’

‘Fuck you, Daniel.’ The words have flown from his mouth before he is even aware of thinking them. His hand is slamming itself against the wall and he is shouting. ‘How dare you? I don’t want to hear you speak of my family in that way again, ever.’ Lucas feels himself shaking, feels adrenalin firing through him. ‘That’s my daughter you’re talking about. My child. I know you’re going through a really hard time at the moment – we all know – but to bring Zhilan into this is low. Lower than low. I will not have it.’

Lucas reaches the end of this speech. His throat feels raw and scraped. He has no idea what will happen next. Will Daniel yell back? Or worse? How, he is asking himself, will he explain to Claudette and Maeve that he managed to get into a brawl with Daniel?

But as Lucas is readying himself, steeling himself, curling his hands into fists, Daniel does nothing. He seems to be contemplating the lacing of his shoes. Lucas is wondering whether the best thing now would be for him to just turn around and leave, when Daniel says something so quiet Lucas can’t make it out.

‘What was that?’ Lucas says, straining forward.