The Gap of Time (20 page)

“I sing in a girl-group at home,” said Perdita. “We're called The Separations.”

“That is a great name! What do you sing?”

“Retro-classics. My dad is a fantastic pianist. I've been singing since I was born.”

“Have you?” His eyes were dark with the unsaid.

“Yes. Are you OK? Is there…?”

He interrupted her. “It's nothing. But these nothings…they…”

These nothings are nothing. But the sky is nothing, the earth is nothing, I am nothing, love is nothing, loss is nothing.

The evening was cooling into night. Perdita thanked Leo.

“We can go on somewhere if you want—show you London.”

She shook her head. He offered her a cab. “I can walk,” she said, “I like walking. I can follow the map on my phone. It isn't far.”

But it is
, he thought, watching her walk away. It might as well be the moon, the distance that separated him from a life that is good.

Leo got out of the cab at his house. His lights were on. He unlocked the door and switched them off. There was nothing to see. His games console was lit up like an aquarium.

Xeno had brought in a new player. They had been collecting feathers. Sweet. As though the world could be saved by hard work and hope. Leo opened his six wings and flew low over the city looking for feathers to set on fire. Looking for feathers to douse into Sunken Angels.

He flew up to the top of the Sorbonne. “
Sicut umbra dies nostri
,” says the Sundial Angel:
Our days flee like a shadow
.

He prefers her sister. She's ready for him—the one bared to the waist with the hard, high, round breasts. Part boy, part girl. Legs open with a book she's never read. He's erect.

One pair of wings kept him upright while he was on her. The second pair held her hard gold body against him. The third pair he pushed out behind him, an upward flag like the retractable fin on his car. It was a fuck you. To traffic. To Xeno. To himself. Fuck you, Leo. Fuck you.

He falls back, done.

Leo woke up on the sofa. He put on the light. Three a.m. The small hours when life curls in on itself like a world not ready to open. The radio had turned itself on.

There was a woman talking: “
A thousand knees ten thousand years together, naked, fasting, upon a barren mountain, and still winter in storm perpetual, could not move the gods to look the way thou wert
.”

Leo sat up, groggy, sweaty, scratchy, dry-mouthed. He went upstairs, falling over his undone trousers. He stepped out of them, and in his socks and jockeys, his shirt and noosed tie, got in the shower, stripping off as the water fell over him.

He left his clothes in a sodden heap on the shower floor. He shaved, dressed, made coffee and drank it down in one searing swig.

He got in his car. No radio. No thoughts. Only the backward pull of time.

That day…

Leo was in the queue at Passport Control. The man checking documents asked him to stand aside a moment. The next thing he knew, three policemen were checking his details and asking what he'd done with the baby.

Then it happened.

Leo arguing with the police. The police arguing with Leo. All big guys. All at the same height. The little Indian passport-checker was trying to pretend that nothing was happening as he processed other people coming through, all staring at Leo.

The police were confused because Leo had no baby. Leo said his wife had post-natal depression. He was taking their son on holiday to give her a break. The police looked at Milo's passport—is this your father? Yes.

The big guys went back to arguing—no one cared about Milo.

There was a man lived in an airport.

Milo moved steadily, quietly backwards, away from them, their backs to him in an angry circle. No one would notice.

Milo was round the corner and going towards the security lanes. There was a family over in Lane Four. He ran over to them—if anyone saw him they thought he was just catching up. He put his backpack on the metal conveyor belt. He walked through the metal detector. He looked round. He was in the airport. Maybe he could find Tony.

Milo had tagged on to a family and gone through Security. He couldn't see Tony. There were a lot of people. He heard his name announced over the Tannoy. He was to go to Information.

Milo couldn't find Information for a while, then when he saw it, his father wasn't there—only the two policemen were there. He turned back the other way.

Soon Milo was in the skytrain, which sounded exciting but wasn't. Then he was at B Gate and C Gate and then back to B Gate. Then he joined a queue for a plane and he was small and seemed to belong and only when he was through Boarding and halfway down the stairs did the woman realise he wasn't with the others and they didn't have his passport and boarding card. She called him back. He ran. She was the police. He didn't run onto the plane, he ran down the second flight of stairs and through the wide-open door where they were taking some luggage on a flat trolley. HEY! HEY! But Milo was running, round the corner of the building and into the path of a repair truck.

Superman, rewind time.

Leo parked his car near the gates of Highgate Cemetery. If there was a burial that morning someone would be there. He knew the routine. If they were there they would let him in.

He walked down the paths guarded by mourning angels. Milo was buried near the west wall. Leo had bought the plot at a charity auction before Milo was born. He had bid a fortune to get it. The cemetery was long since full and it was world-famous. The right challenge for Leo. He could have bought a studio flat for what he paid. And now Milo was in it. The bones of him by now, Leo thought. Nothing to know of him except the past.

Leo stood for a long time as the sun came up bright and clear. The past was always in front of him like a river he couldn't cross.

He went and filled the water container and picked two of the wild roses growing in the hedge. “MiMi and Milo,” he said as he put the thorny stems into the water. He got up and turned to go. The gardener was near by, working quietly with a hoe. Checked shirt, sleeves rolled up past the elbows. “Hi Tony!” called Leo.

The gardener turned. “I'm Pete.”

Leo raised a hand. Of course it wasn't Tony. Tony is dead.

Perdita and Zel were lying on the bed in the Travelodge, watching TV with the sound turned down.

“So what's he like?” said Zel.

“All I could think about was that this man gave me away.”

“To my dad! Are you going to tell him it's you?”

“I don't know. If I do, he'll be in my life. And he's pretty controlling.”

“I looked it up,” said Zel. “It doesn't usually work out.”

“What doesn't?”

“Adoption reunions. Everybody wants something they can never have. Life can't unhappen.”

“I don't want Life to unhappen. Then I wouldn't have Shep or Clo or HollyPollyMolly.”

“But you would have me,” said Zel. “How weird is that?”

Perdita rolled herself into him. “You mean it's fate?”

“I don't know. We used to discuss this all the time when I was studying philosophy. Is life just a series of accidents that from a distance look like patterns? Like when you see fields and rivers and houses from a plane window and they look beautiful and sane, whereas on the ground they're just what they are—random or even ugly.”

“Dad says things are meant to be.”

“Have you spoken to him?”

“He'll be mad at me. I should have told him we were leaving.”

“You couldn't.”

“No. I couldn't. Do you think we'll end up like Leo and Xeno?”

“Complete assholes?”

“Sad people.”

“They weren't always sad.”

“That's worse. They had a life and they destroyed it. Their own and other people's.”

“We'll do it better,” said Zel. “We'll go back home, we'll make a life, and we'll show our own kids how to be brave and true.”

“We just met!”

“Am I going too fast?”

She kissed him. “Yes. Much too fast.”

“I thought girls want boys who can commit?”

She hit him with a pillow. She felt a pulse of relaxation. She realised how tense she had been all day.

“Zel…thanks for coming with me. I'm a lot to take on right now. I know that…”

He put his arm round her. “We're here. We're doing it. Let's do it. Do you want to look for your mother too?”

“I don't know. This is harder than I thought.”

“How so?”

“Upsetting. I thought I wouldn't feel anything—I mean, I don't know Leo. I just met him today.”

Zel held her close. “But you have met your mother. You lived inside her.”

And that was true and Perdita felt it to be true and that was the part that was hardest. How can you be connected to someone with whom you have no connection?

“Do you look like Leo?” said Zel.

“I don't think so. He's old and bald and a bit fat! Same mouth maybe. I look like my mother—that is, how she used to look. But we don't know what she looks like now. There are no recent images—just someone who might be her in dark glasses and a hat.”

“It probably is her—only celebrities think dark glasses and a hat is how you blend into the crowd.”

“She's not famous now.”

“Is it weird for you that she was?”

“It's all weird. That's just one weirdness in the weird.”

Zel flipped off the TV. “Do you think you can sleep?”

“No.”

“Then let's go out.”

“It's midnight!”

“So? This is London. Come on.”

They go out. They're just kids. They find a night-bus. Then walk through to Soho. Italian ice cream. His arm round her shoulders. Her arm round his waist. They walk through Chinatown and Covent Garden and across the Aldwych down to Waterloo Bridge and stand in the middle looking west and east, and there's Big Ben telling clock time, and down below there's the Thames flowing liquid time, and in the small space they occupy their own time is real. Not the past, not the future, this now.

He doesn't take a photo or a video because he wants to remember—by which he means he wants to misremember because the moment is made up of what the camera can't capture.

And the river takes the night away and they go back to bed and sleep and the city dreams itself into another day.

In the morning, early, Perdita's phone rings. It's Leo.

“Hi, Miranda. Leo here. Meet me at the Roundhouse in an hour.”

“Where?” says Perdita. What's he talking about?

Leo wants to be impatient but isn't because he wants to see her. He softens his voice. “Northern Line. The black one. Chalk Farm. Or Camden Town and then you walk. OK? About 11 a.m.”

This time Zel comes with her. They get out of the underground at Chalk Farm. There are a lot of people waving banners that say SAVE OUR BUILDING.

Perdita and Zel make their way into the crowd. There's a guy with a megaphone. Police on horseback. Perdita asks a young woman with a placard what's going on.

“Fuckin' rich buying the whole fuckin' place.”

Then she sees Leo shouting angrily into his phone. She said to Zel, “There he is.”

“Is that him? Is that Leo?”

“You don't recognise him?”

“Not without his hair. And he wasn't fat.”

“He's seen me. You should go—I'll text.”

Perdita ran across the road. She's lovely, thought Leo, watching her, and she has no idea that she is. His current date was a Russian lingerie model who Vaped during sex.

Leo was smiling. “Good you could come, Miranda. I thought if you're going to intern with us you should see our next project. It's quite a building, isn't it?”

Just then the crowd started chanting—“OUT OUT OUT. OUT OUT OUT.”

“We'd better get inside,” said Leo. “Security can handle this.”

Leo put his hand on the small of Perdita's back and bundled her through the doors.

“Good morning, Mr. Kaiser,” said the security man. Leo relaxed. He was back in his world.

“Let me show you round, Miranda. This place was built as a turning shed for the trams. Trams can't reverse, so this is where they changed direction—by going round in a circle—in this vast theatre space here. Pretty impressive, isn't it?”

Perdita was looking at the framed posters on the bare brick walls. Circus, theatre, bands, and then she saw it—MiMi at the Roundhouse. She wasn't listening to Leo. He didn't notice.

“Underneath—directly below us—is where the machinery was kept: the cogs, chains, engines that turned the plates. For a long time it's been an entertainment venue—now it's time for a new life. Come up to the gallery.”

He put his hand on her shoulder and escorted her up the stairs. Outside she could hear police sirens.

“Why are you pulling it down?”

“The site is fantastic and there's no public money anymore for places like this. You can't subsidise everything forever—nice as that would be. Private money has to fill the gap. I'm building a small theatre space and some public housing—because I like to think I am socially aware. The centrepiece will be a pair of incredible apartment towers—some of the most beautiful lateral living in London.”

“What is everyone protesting about, then?”

“People don't like change, Miranda. It's human nature. And money has a bad press these days. None of those people outside pay tax—well, not much tax—but they hate people like me who really are the people supporting the country. What I am doing is saving this place—they can't see that. But you've got an economics degree—did you say Harvard?”