A Kind of Vanishing (17 page)

O
ver time the Old Kent Road had become no more than a stretch of the busy A2, lined with boarded up shops, forgotten patches of scrubland, supermarket car parks, generic takeaways and fly-by-night outlets flogging tired and tawdry goods. The flyover was a brief escape for drivers from the barren road beneath it, which was fogged with choking fumes and overshadowed by high-rise flats whose rows of doors opened on to balconies meant to copy the communal streets they had replaced. Young municipal trees with their spindle trunks encased in protective mesh were planted along the kerbside. Most of the saplings had been twisted and broken, while others had simply died. Many of their cages were crammed to the top with litter; the colourful columns making a pithy statement about inner-city decay.

Far away up in the sky, intermittently blotted by the blazing sun, a passing aeroplane left a white trail of exhaust. There were no clouds, no birds. The noise was continuous: heavy traffic, horns, and the snarl of motorbikes revving off from the pelican lights. The road was busy with people with grim demeanours, their shoulders dragged down by heavy bags or the cares of life. A warm breeze lazily lifted and dropped sweet wrappers and torn sheets of newspaper collecting in the gutters, and brushed hot skin without relief.

A figure was moving in the no-man’s land under the flyover: a young woman running fast, unhampered by the rucksack on her back. She ran without apology, her arms pelting the air for balance and speed, as she jumped over a discarded exhaust pipe and swerved out of the way of broken glass. She was dressed in jeans, blue Converse boots and a grey shirt patterned with skyscrapers against a background of wavy lines. Her clothes betrayed an alternative taste, and ensured that she stood out from those around her. In contrast to her dress her hair was conventional, parted at the side and just touching her shoulders. It was soberly immaculate, though thin strands soaked in sweat stuck to her forehead. She was clearly someone who could toe the line if required to.

She vaulted over the central barrier, and hop-hopped with one foot on the kerb and the other on the camber, waiting for a gap in the traffic; then she dashed across the path of a
double-decker
bus and leapt on to the opposite pavement. By the time the bus shuddered to a halt at the stop twenty yards further on, the young woman had veered off left under the archway of a block of Victorian flats and disappeared.

Chris was eighteen in 1999 and everyone said what a marvellous age it was. She was so lucky to be in the right place at the right time – the turn of the century – with her life before her. Just now, as she sidestepped a wheelie bin that kids had taken for a walk, and tried to catch her breath without inhaling the sour stench of refuse, this luck seemed a long time coming.

She was late and she had to go to the launderette.

Her Mum would say she should have rung if she was going to be late just as Alice had always called her mother. Other times her Mum talked of how the family didn’t have a phone so she had to get home on time. Chris usually tolerated these inconsistencies, content to listen to her Mum’s bedtime stories of loving relatives, long dead, particularly of the
Postman-Dad
who let Alice stand on his feet while he took big strides across the living room. As a young child Chris had demanded with gory relish that her Mum tell the tale of the car accident in which her grandparents had died. Alice had been nine. She would say that her life had ended then too. She had only come alive when Chris was born; a point in the story Chris looked forward to. As a young teenager, this tragic incident gave her extra cachet with her friends. No one else had a fatal car crash in their family. During breaks, in response to repeated requests and in a suitably elegiac tone, she would retell her version of the event to a thrilled audience of thirteen-year-olds huddled by the school kitchens.

It had happened outside the Fuller’s brewery on the Chiswick Roundabout. Her Mum told her this was ironic because Fuller’s brewed London Pride, which was her father’s favourite tipple – her mother’s word – so he would have enjoyed the coincidence if he had lived. Chris was hungry to learn more about her grandparents, but much to her frustration, her Mum had lost all the photographs or documents just as she lost or forgot many things. Alice would declare that her parents’ dying had freed her to carve out her own life without being hampered by the past. This was putting a brave face on it; really all it had done was to make her Mum too frightened to step outside and take part in such a cruel world.

Today had proved her Mum right. Chris wouldn’t tell her what had happened; it would only worry her.

Half an hour earlier Chris had squeezed out of a packed tube train at Elephant and Castle. Although it wasn’t yet five o’clock, the rush hour was underway and she had filed at the rate of a shuffle along the subway to the exit. Halfway up the passage she heard shouting. She was wedged between two city-suited men, and could see nothing. They wore identical black-framed spectacles and made her think of Gilbert and George. Chris did not exist as they chatted to one another over her head:

‘It’s some West Indian bloke causing a fracas.’

‘What’s new?’

‘It’s all we need.’

The crowd became more congested as people edged across to the left side of the tunnel. By staying on the right Chris was able to break free of Gilbert and George and soon reached the source of the commotion.

A tall black man, a few years older than her, perhaps in his early twenties, was heading in the same direction as herself. He was dressed in jeans, with a loose silk bomber jacket over his tee-shirt, and wore a red baseball cap pulled low over his forehead. Dogging him a few paces behind was a decrepit old man in a filthy parka, the fur around his hood mangled and greasy and his tracksuit trousers ripped and stained. He shambled after the young man with a drunken swaying that was surprisingly efficient. Chris cupped her hand over her nose. He stank of sweaty, unwashed skin laced with alcohol fumes and rotting teeth. His yellowed hair straggled around a swollen face that was the colour and texture of a ripe strawberry. He intoned an incantation of abuse:

‘I know your sort. What you looking at? Hey nigger, stop while I’m talking to…’

Chris assumed the young man had decided to tough it out because he could have run away. He repeatedly reached up and adjusted his cap, tipping it down over his eyes and then raising it: a giveaway that he wasn’t cool about it. Chris gave a little skip to keep up with him. To her left the crocodile of commuters processed slowly, their eyes firmly elsewhere with the absolute accord of film extras whose role is to be the mute, unseeing crowd.

Chris despised them.

She was trying to come up with the most effective insult, when without warning the black guy whirled around and confronted his chaotic abuser.

The stream of invective and abuse from the depths of the parka ascended to a plaintive whine:

‘You can’t touch me. I’m a blind old man. You filthy…’

Chris was at one with the man, as with a graceful upward sweep of his leg he hefted a kick at the blind man’s chest sending him toppling backwards, his arms raised in clumsy surrender. Chris heard his body thump against the tunnel wall. He slid down to the ground where he sat lifeless, with his head resting against a ripped and peeling poster for the film
A Bug’s Life
.

The disembodied litany rambled on without pause:

‘Piss off Monkey-man, picking on a defenceless old gentleman minding his own business. Your sort belong in…I said piss off Mo…’

The young man tilted his cap and closed in. He kicked him again, this time hard in the thigh; the impact pushed the tramp a few inches to the right. The voice persisted:

‘I’m blind. Help. I’m blind…’

Chris grabbed the young man by the arm. She took him by surprise and so was able to pull him away.

Behind her commuters tensed, terrified of being forced to intervene in a violent situation because of some girl’s reckless heroics. She could be knifed; she might get them all killed.

The man was taller than Chris, who at five foot six was not short. Her slight and wiry figure was diminutive against his larger, stronger frame. He could have snapped her ribs like wish bones. She rubbed his arm and leaned against him, pressing her cheek to his chest. She had little time to weave a spell of her own:

‘He’s scum. Don’t get nicked for rubbish like him. He’s dog shit on our shoes. He’s scum...’

She held her body against his, and made herself a dead weight and in an awkward dance they inched crabwise towards the exit. All the while she repeated the same phrases to let him know that she was on his side. As they reached the foot of the steps, she dared to relax. She turned the man around and keeping behind him talked in a lighter tone now that they were out of earshot of the tramp, as they trudged up the last flight to the street.

‘You’re worth ten of him…’

When they were on the pavement, without looking back the man broke away from her and darted across the road towards Newington Butts and out of sight. Chris wasn’t offended. There was nothing he could have said or done.

Despite the heat, she shivered and a dribble of cold sweat like melting ice ran down between her shoulder blades. She was still holding the copy of the
Evening Standard
she had bought earlier. At some point she had rolled it tightly into a baton and the ink had stained her palm and fingers. She took off her rucksack and stuffed the paper into a side pocket. Then shrugging the bag back on to her shoulders and oblivious of the heat, she too started to run.

As she neared home, keeping under the shadow of the flyover, it occurred to her that if the old man was blind, how had he known the other guy was black?

That morning Alice had announced that Chris must go to the launderette after supper. Chris hated doing the washing there and the chore had grown more onerous over the day so that now, fizzing with adrenalin from the encounter in the underground, she imagined killing her Mum. Not quickly with a gun, but slowly, giving time to explain to her exactly why.

She would tell her in measured tones that she could not forgive Alice for not asking the full name of the Renault car mechanic who Alice had said was Chris’s father, so that one day, when Chris wanted a new and better parent, she could find him. All she had to go on was that he was called Gary and specialised in fitting automatic gearboxes. Most days Chris didn’t need Gary. She got on with her life, but at night as she clarified her ambitions and formed resolutions it was Gary she told them to.

Chris had left the house that morning without kissing Alice and had run to the bus stop, chased by her mother’s snapping hounds. Once in the street, a wet sheet of misery assailed her as she saw her Mum pottering around all day with nothing to do but clean and wait. If a bus hadn’t come, Chris would have gone back to her.

She had stared out at Elephant and Castle from the top deck. A man in cycling shorts and a black vest kept pace on a racing bike. The veins on his legs and arms were like thick string. She tried to forget her Mum, but all she could think was that the bus was taking her far away from the woman she loved more than anyone else in the world.

The last time she had been to the launderette was a month ago, when her mother had taken it into her head to do all the bedding and needed two machines; Chris had taken
Pride and Prejudice
with her to read. For once she had done everything correctly, tipped the soap into the right compartment, and she had even found a rogue tee-shirt tangled in a duvet that would have stained the cotton pale blue.

Only when she had settled into a bucket seat and prepared to read, did she realise Jane Austen had gone in with the washing and was now well into the ‘agitate’ section of the cycle. She cupped her hands to see through the glass. The book was there. Every now and then the spine made a dull thump as it hit the drum.

All week they had picked out snatched words and sentences from their clothes.

‘…“How strange!” cried Elizabeth. “How abominable!”’

‘Next time do the washing yourself!’

‘Her mother only scolded her for being nonsen…’

This was the worst thing Chris could have said. Both of them knew her Mum couldn’t do it herself. Chris believed it must now be years since she had left the flat and had only dim memories of seeing Alice in the open air. Her Mum could get muddled between her dreams and what had really happened. Chris too, would wonder if her memories of being in the park with her Mum were just wishful thinking.

She wanted to go out with her Mum. Perhaps to the park, or they could take a train to the seaside. She might wander around the supermarket picking out treats with her Mum, like other girls did. Some nights she lay awake horrified by the prospect of her Mum dying alone in the pokey flat on the Old Kent Road. If Chris was to see her own dreams of becoming a forensic scientist come true she had to rescue the Alice of the bedtime stories from her rabbit hole and return her to the safety of the riverbank. At other times Chris would be in dread of her mother’s hidden self. The sexy monster had had nothing to do with being a Mum.

Chris had seen this monster a few months earlier when she had come home unexpectedly right after lunch. A teacher had been ill and her chemistry lesson was cancelled. She had heard the music from the landing, and assumed it was the people in the flat above with whom Alice had regular run-ins. Chris sighed. Her Mum would have scribbled an embarrassing note and expect her to take it upstairs and wait for a response. Chris had called out in a cheery voice as she shut the front door.

The music was coming from the living room. It was so loud her greeting was drowned out. The door was open three inches and she saw movement in the full-length mirror on the wall in the living room. Her mother had fixed it there to make her feel she had company when she walked towards it. Now it gave Chris a view of the whole room and she was brought up short. Keeping back in the gloom of the darkened hallway, she gaped dumbfounded. Her mother had kicked back the rug, cleared aside furniture and was dancing. Not the sort of dancing Chris would have expected: the clumsy clumping back and forth accompanied by contorted air guitar playing, but proper dancing. Her body was moving in perfect time to ‘Rebel Rebel’ by David Bowie, a song Chris did not imagine Alice had heard of.