31 Dream Street (24 page)

‘Daisy,’ she said, touching her knee, ‘look who’s here. It’s your friend Connor.’

Daisy was held up by a thick wedge of pillows and had a tube coming out of her chest, attached to a jar of water. She was clutching an oxygen mask in her right hand which was attached to a tank. Her skin was very blue and her hair was lying in lank strands on her pillow. She smiled wanly at him. ‘Sexy, huh?’ she said.

He rested the roses on the bed and smiled at her. ‘You look lovely,’ he said. ‘A bit pale…’

‘You mean a bit blue,’ she croaked. ‘Not to mention a bit tubey and a bit ill.’

‘Here.’ Daisy’s mother moved her plastic chair towards him. ‘Sit down, Connor.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘No, honestly.’

‘No. I insist. I’ve been sitting down for so long my bum’s gone totally numb. I think I might just go and stretch my legs, actually. Meems – are you coming?’

‘Yes,’ said Mimi, getting to her feet. ‘I could do with a wander. See you in a minute.’

Con waited until the two women had left the ward, then he kissed Daisy on the lips. ‘Your mum’s really nice,’ he said.

‘Yes. I told you I had fantastic parents, didn’t I?’

‘I brought you some sandwiches,’ he said, showing her the bag.

‘Ooh, yum. What have we got today?’

‘Tuna and capers.’

‘Ooh, lovely. I love capers.’

He unwrapped the sandwiches for her and passed her a square. Then he poured some water for her, from a clear plastic jug into a plastic cup.

‘So,’ he said, ‘what’s this pneumo… pneumo…?’

‘Pneumothorax. It’s air around the lungs. It’s horrible. I’ve had it before, but not this badly. I thought I was dying, I really did.’

‘And is it to do with your cystic fibrosis?’

‘Of course. Isn’t everything? Yes, so, I’ve got to lie here with this thing sticking into my ribs for at least three days…’

‘And then what – then you can come home?’

‘Then I can come home.’

‘So it’s not, you know, not something that might…’

‘No. It’s not going to kill me. Just ruin my social life for a few days.’

‘Oh,’ said Con, ‘oh, that’s good, then, that’s… oh… God…’ And then Con felt all the pent-up anxiety he’d been carrying round all day suddenly leave his body in an enormous
whoosh
of emotion and he started to cry. ‘Oh, God,’ he sniffed, ‘I’m really sorry. Shit. I just thought… when your dad said you were in the hospital I just panicked. And then he wouldn’t tell me if you were going to be OK and I just thought that you were going to… that you might… and I couldn’t, I really couldn’t handle it if anything happened. I couldn’t deal with it…’

Con pressed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, trying to stem the flow of tears. Daisy passed him a paper tissue from a box on her trolley. He took it silently and breathed in deeply, in and out, in and out, trying to bring himself under control. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I’m being really pathetic. You must think I’m psycho.’

‘Of course I don’t,’ said Daisy, clutching his fisted-up hands with hers. ‘I think it’s really sweet.’

‘Oh, God,’ he laughed, and wiped his face with the tissue, ‘that’s even worse.’

‘I can’t believe you were that worried about me.’

‘Of course! I mean, I know we’ve only known each other a few weeks, but you’re really important to me. You’re, you know, special.’ He gulped.

Daisy squeezed his hand. ‘You’re very special to me, too.’

‘I am?’

‘Of course you are. You’re up there, you know, up there with my mother and my father, my sisters, my best friend. You really matter to me. You…’ She stopped and tried to catch her breath. She brought the oxygen mask to her mouth and took a few deep breaths. Her blue eyes peered at him from over the mask, pale and scared and young. ‘Sorry,’ she said, a moment later. ‘I should stop talking for a while… it’s… hard…’

‘No. Don’t talk. You don’t have to say anything. Look – here. I’ve got you something else.’ He pulled the poem from his jacket pocket and handed it to her.

She unfolded it and started to read. Con watched her
intently as she read, trying to gauge her reaction. She folded up the poem, rested it on her lap and smiled.

‘Con?’ she said.

‘Yes?’

‘I love you, too.’

Mimi and Helen came back a few minutes later with plastic cups of coffee and a packet of Fruit Pastilles. Then Daisy’s father returned and shook Con warmly and firmly by the hand. They were a noisy family, talkative and open and full of swearwords and booming laughter. They wanted to know all about Con and acted as if many of their friends were teenage boys from Tottenham. They didn’t seem at all fazed or desperate about Daisy’s situation or about the fact that she was dating someone like him. They weren’t like anyone Con had ever met before. They were so confident in themselves, in their unity, in their
themness
, that there was no room for doubt or fear or awkwardness.

There was talk of Daisy taking some time off work, of Daisy spending a week at home recuperating. ‘And of course,’ said Helen, touching Con’s knee with her birdlike hand, ‘you must come to visit. You must come to stay, for as long as you like.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Daisy’s father. ‘We’ve already got one fellow in the house.’

Con looked at him questioningly.

‘Camellia’s at home at the moment and of course her fellow couldn’t bear to be separated from her for a minute, so he’s staying at the house. Nice chap. He’s
a bassoonist, plays with the LPO. I think you’d like him…’

Con left the hospital at eight o’clock that night, letting the cold night air swallow him up. He walked quickly through the streets of Paddington, following signs to the Tube station. His breathing was hard and fast, his heart full of the euphoria of escape. He’d just seen reality, the very basic truth of Daisy and him, of what they were doing and where they were going. And he couldn’t handle any of it. He couldn’t handle her close-knit family, their talk of ‘the house’, of bassoon-playing boyfriends and invitations to stay. He couldn’t handle their unquestioning acceptance of him because he knew it was borne out of nothing more than middle-class politesse. But more than anything, he couldn’t handle the fact that the first woman he’d ever loved was going to keep getting ill and that one day she was going to die and that there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.

48

Toby spent the whole of Thursday looking out of the window. He saw Amitabh leaving Leah’s flat at two o’clock, wrapped against the cold in his cosy parka and a knitted hat. He saw the builders passing in and out of the house, taking stuff out of their van, putting stuff back in their van, throwing things onto the skip, sitting on the wall eating sandwiches. He saw people, dozens of people, coming and going, children being piled in and out of cars, estate agents doing viewings, cats patrolling their territory. He saw a Tesco delivery van unloading, a woman across the street throwing a sack of rubbish into her wheelie bin, a man with a fluorescent bag dropping restaurant leaflets through people’s front doors. He saw the sun start to fall and the moon start to rise and he watched the two of them share the indigo sky for half an hour as they changed shifts. He saw Melinda park her car and climb the front steps, chatting to someone on her mobile phone. He saw Ruby going out with her guitar. And, at eight o’clock, he saw Leah come home. He watched her open her front door, lean down to pick up some letters, then disappear. He saw her switch on her lights, draw her curtains. He wondered if she’d seen his note yet. He wondered what she’d think of his jauntily worded little message,
expressing his desire to join her at Crouch End Public Swimming Baths one day this week (if he promised not to try out his butterfly stroke). He wondered if Amitabh would be coming back tonight.

He was about to go downstairs, to get himself something to eat, when he saw something else through his window. He saw Joanne, looking flustered and panicky in dungarees and a leather flying jacket. She was walking very fast and kept looking behind her. Toby saw a man, following behind. He was tall and slim with fine shoulder-length hair. He was shouting to her. Toby couldn’t hear what he was saying. He saw Joanne turn to the man and shout something back. And then he saw Joanne start to run towards the house. He heard her footsteps up the front stairs and he saw the man chase after her. He heard the front door slam shut and he heard the man’s fist beating against the door. He got to his feet and ran down the stairs, two at a time. Joanne was standing breathlessly at the foot of the stairs.

‘Jesus. Joanne. What’s going on? Are you OK?’

‘I’m fine,’ she said, pushing past him to get up the stairs.

‘But who’s that man at the door. Why is he following you?’

The man beat at the door again. Toby could hear his muted shouts from the entrance hall.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘He’s no one.’

‘My God. Shall I call the police?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘don’t do anything. He’s just mad, that’s all. He’ll go in a minute.’

‘But, Joanne. He looks really dangerous. What shall I do?’

‘Nothing,’ she said, disappearing up the stairs, ‘don’t do anything.’

Toby glanced round the empty hallway. The man was still banging on the door. He fell to his hands and knees, and crawled to the entrance hall. He slowly lifted the letterbox and brought his mouth to it. ‘Go away,’ he said, ‘or I’ll call the police.’

A pair of eyes peered at him through the letterbox and Toby let it slam shut. He stood up straight. ‘Go away,’ he shouted through the door. ‘Go away. I’m calling the police.’

‘I want to see Joanne.’

‘Well, she doesn’t want to see you. You’re scaring her.’

‘I just want to talk to her.’

‘I told you. Whoever you are, she doesn’t want to talk to you.’

‘Please,’ said the man, ‘please. Just let me see her. I have to see her.’

The man’s voice had softened now and it sounded to Toby as if he might even be about to cry.

‘Who are you? What do you want?’

‘My name’s Nick,’ he said. ‘I’m Joanne’s husband.’

49

The third week of February dawned clear-skied and sunny, and a few degrees warmer than it had been. Toby no longer needed to wear a hat while he prepared his dough in the early morning and he didn’t wince when he sat down on the loo.

Things were progressing. The house was growing up. The bathrooms were tiled and the lights were fitted. Toby had taken one look at the finished bathrooms and immediately gone out and spent
£
300 on fat bath towels in shades of taupe and chocolate. There were tilers on the roof and a plumber had replaced the water tank and all the radiators. A clearance firm had taken the last of Gus’s furniture and his carpet had been ripped out, rolled up and thrown on the skip. Boris now lived in Toby’s room, where he pined and moped and refused to eat, slowly mutating into a small black skeleton.

The decorators were starting next week and Toby had been staring at colour cards for days on end, trying to decide between a hundred different shades of beige and grey. His room was full of test pots and his walls were covered in brushstrokes with pencilled annotations:
Labrador Sands 12
. He had a box of carpet swatches under his desk (Sisal or seagrass? Or should he just strip the floorboards?). Two young men called
Liam and Guy were currently replacing the kitchen, so the fridge was in the hallway and everyone was using a two-ring electric hob in the dining room. There were boxes stacked along the walls, filled with food and crockery and pots and pans. The place was a mess, but it was being transformed.

By the time Toby’s father arrived at the end of March, the house would be complete and on the market. But it would still be full of people. The velvet-gloved eviction of Toby’s tenants had come to a grinding halt.

Ruby was still sleeping with her married man and surviving on handouts and the occasional poorly paid gig. The wheels appeared to have come off Con’s fledgling love affair with the posh girl from
Vogue
. Melinda was revelling in the luxurious transformation of the house and more determined than ever to stay. And Joanne had disappeared. Literally. She’d left for work the morning after her ‘husband’ had followed her home and not been seen since. She’d put an envelope under Toby’s door containing a cheque for the next month’s rent and a note suggesting that she’d gone on holiday.

And Leah – Leah was cohabiting once more with her nurse.

She never did respond to Toby’s note about the swimming baths and their paths hadn’t crossed since. She was, once more, simply the woman across the road with the Asian nurse boyfriend. And without Leah, Toby was lost. He couldn’t deal with the nuances and foibles of his tenants’ emotional lives. He couldn’t organize fortuitous meetings and think about what they
needed. The list taped onto the inside of his wardrobe remained untouched, paused at number 10, like a freeze-framed video. So he sat, in his room, in his window, pretending to write poems and waiting for something to happen again. Toby was back at square one.

50

Leah felt all wrong. Amitabh had moved back in and she really didn’t know why. It had been nice at first having him there, where he belonged, on their sofa, in their bed; being able to walk past a pub and not have to worry about whether he was in there with another woman, just to know where he was and what he was doing. That had been the worst thing about him moving out – losing track of him. Having to invent scenarios and imagine situations. But two weeks on and the novelty of knowing where Amitabh was all the time had already worn off and now Leah was just left with a big list of questions: What are we doing? Where are we going? Are you going to go against your family and marry me? Do you love me? Do I love you?
Is this what I want?
It had been exactly what she wanted for so long that the possibility that maybe it actually wasn’t hadn’t ever really crossed her mind before, and it was an unsettling realization. If she didn’t want Amitabh, then what exactly did she want? She was thirty-five. Surely she should know by now.

She pondered her situation during a quiet morning in the shop. They’d just had a big delivery of alphabet cookie cutters and she was unpacking them in the stockroom, wondering at the concept of having either the
time or the inclination to bake biscuits in the shape of names.