The Kindness (34 page)

‘I’m going to talk you through this, OK? We should repeat this procedure tomorrow as well, if you can get here, but in the meantime we need to optimise your chances. I will have everything in place for when I come back. You know about the speculum?’ He held it up in its package.

‘Yes, awful. I dread every smear.’ Julia tried to repeat a joke, some old comedian or other who described it as like having a Ford Cortina driven up your fanny, which frankly had never been a helpful image.

He ignored her, turning her attention to the remaining items. ‘Once I’ve got this speculum in place it will be easy to guide this catheter to the cervix and then I’ll go to the bathroom with this cup . . .’

There was a sharp rap at the door. Karl put down the packet containing the plastic cup and scooted from the bed to answer it. She heard a woman with a throaty voice cry his name, saw the pointy tip of a shoe, an ankle. He was blocking the door, in the end he walked right around to the other side. Still, Julia could hear them.

‘No, Sofie, I said I’d meet you at the restaurant. I can’t see you now, I have something to do.’

The woman objected with a blast of scorned laughter: ‘I can see her on the bed through the door behind you, you must think I’m really stupid.’ Karl shushed her further: ‘Really, Sofie. You have to go. I have an old friend in here who has had a bit of a shock.’

Karl looked as cheerful as a man heading for his own execution as he returned to the bed. Before he picked up the cup she caught him glancing once again at his watch, and fury hit her quick as the snap of a hypnotist’s fingers. She sat bolt upright, kicking away his cushions. She was reaching beneath the pillow for her pants. He stopped tearing open the package. ‘Julia, wait. What’s up?’

She didn’t care what he saw as she pulled her pants on, turned around, tossing her hair from her face.

‘I don’t want to make you late for . . .’ she couldn’t help but sound childish as she said the name, ‘Sofie.’ She was wrestling with her cardigan, her fingers shaking, uncooperative, as she buttoned it stiffly over her dress. He sank with his head in his hands. She waited for him to speak and when he didn’t, swept past him. She turned to look at him from the door, the detritus of their venture scattered across the bed.

‘I can’t do this, Karl. Not like this.’

Her eyes stung as she headed out into the hazy street, the sea obscured by clouds.

She descended deeper into the mist, sliding her hand down the iron railings of the steep steps, her feet strangely noiseless on the concrete, the fret rolling in to greet her. She couldn’t see any distance at all, but there were streetlights. They appeared one by one, beacons in a sulphurous haze. The sea was muffled, she could barely hear it meet the shore and it gave no clues as to whether it was near or far. A foghorn sounded somewhere out there, the most baleful noise she’d ever heard. Her face and hair quickly became wet on the side turned to the sea. It had grown chilly and she realised, cursing, that she’d left her mac in Karl’s hotel room.

She tried to make herself think ahead, to bring on a cheering lurch of excitement. She’d be in Paris with Julian in time for his birthday. Just two more days. She made a mental note to ring around a few antiquarian booksellers to see how interesting an edition of
Paradise Lost
she might be able to afford. She thought about lingerie, of his voice on the phone telling her the bed in the hotel had black sheets.

She thought too of the first time they met: Julian a windswept boy lolloping towards her across the Downs with his trouser leg tucked into his sock. Up close his breath was last night’s party: not a boy after all. He was tall and lanky with the widest grin she’d ever seen – it didn’t seem possible that one face could contain it. His skin, hair and eyes had a unifying metallic gleam, a fine dusting of gold, his irises more golden than brown, his pupils pinholed by the sun. Even his hangover didn’t spoil his looks. His eyelashes were a gift from the desert, as long as a girl’s and so thick it appeared he was wearing kohl.

She couldn’t imagine that such a beautiful boy would fall for someone like her, nor that in the arms of this ‘boy’ she would feel safe and comforted for the only time in her life.

She put a hand to her crown, remembered the touch of his fingers as he parted her hair to swab the patch of scalp that Chris had left bare and bleeding. She’d buried herself in his pillow, even the smell of him gentle, and he’d eased her out of her ripped shirt, peeled away her filthy jeans, her torn pants. He had a bowl of warm water, a sponge. He dried her with a clean towel, covered the dirty fingerprints of her bruises with calendula cream. He pressed coins into the meter to keep the gas fire burning, gave her hot milk with brandy, wrapped his softest jumper around her to stop her teeth from chattering.

On the radio Billie Holiday cracking her heart into pieces while he danced her slowly.
What do I care how much it may storm. I’ve got my love to keep me warm.
Her head to his shoulder and his breath at the patch of her crown where the hair would grow back.

People loomed out of the mist along the promenade, voices muted and sudden, some pushing bicycles, others with bottles of beer in their hands, everyone a little startled to find someone coming towards them, emerging first as silhouettes, faces only visible for a moment. An Alsatian dog appeared and disappeared, looping back wraithlike, and emerged with its owner, a man with a proud belly, the fur around the hood of his parka glittering with moisture.

After a while the foghorn becomes the only noise, she can’t even hear the fall of her own feet. There are no more people, she’s lost track of how far it is to her car. She misses Julian so acutely that tears run down her cheeks. That’s something she’d like him to know.

She hears footsteps, running, her name being shouted. Karl is coming to get her. Karl is beside her, bent over, grasping his thighs to catch his breath. He stands up and wraps her mackintosh around her shoulders, using its lapels to pull her towards him, she can feel the rapid rise and fall of his chest, his arms holding her as if he might never let her go. He bends to kiss her.

‘I love Julian,’ she says, kissing him back.

‘Me too,’ he says, breaking the kiss and spinning her around. A lone rollerblader curves out of the mist, graceful as a needle trailing black silk, and is gone. They follow him, catching sight of him once more on the glide of a turn, and then disappear into the mist as into the pages of a book, their arms entwined.

FIRDAWS

August 2012

She arrived at Firdaws on an August day beneath a sky of airmail blue. It was Jenna’s birthday, as it happened, that one day of the year when the sun wouldn’t dare not shine.

She was dressed in many layers, her long hair was wispy, neither up nor down. A loopy grey vest hung over a T-shirt on top of a thin jumper worn with the sleeves rolled up. Her arms were skinny as saplings, her eyes the same surprising blue as her mother’s and ringed by the black smudges of her make-up, her nose a freckled snub. She had bitten nails and many silver rings, beaded cords around her neck, amber, turquoise, Eliana’s gold sun on its fine chain. Beneath her short denim skirt her legs were comical in black and white hooped leggings; she carried her stuff in a brown school satchel, fiddling constantly with its buckles as she stood at the end of the lane where the minicab had left her.

The sun was high in the sky, blinding, as she squinted across the unknown meadow to a house of warm terracotta bricks. The dog-daisies, buttercups and various weeds of the meadow had been trodden into a path where people cut straight through to its wonky front door. It was as strange to her as a dream: no fences, just this wide-open view. The trees and shrubs and tough little flowers surrounding the house simply dissolved into the landscape, and, though she could commit to no memory of having been there before, she could sense there was water nearby.

She closed her eyes: the idea of a river shimmered tantalisingly, a hazy sky buzzing with insects. As hard as willing a dream. She thought of his book, almost stamped her foot with fury. The dark flowing water with floating lillies of Japanese porcelain had been put in her memory by him.

Dr Wiseman, the first shrink they took her to, stared out of his window, tapping his teeth with his specs while she answered his questions. He told her it was unusual to have no memory at all of a long stay in hospital, or something as traumatic as a head-on collision. Unlike Ruth, she told him, she did not recall the stiff black linen dresses that their mother had made them wear on the day of the crash.

Ruth was able to re-create the whole thing in sensuous detail, she whispered its horrors to her pillow: the screech and boom, exploding glass, the smell of burning rubber and the final sickening swerve that went on for ever. Their mother being pulled from the wreckage with blood all over her face, the snipping of scissors through black linen, even the names of the ambulance men. Their mother calling, ‘Ruthie, Ruthie . . .’

It was Ruth who told her that the airline had lost the trunk containing all of their toys when they left Connecticut. When it seemed their tears might never stop, Grandfather Heino had taken them to Hamley’s. ‘Remember Heino? With his hump and his cane with the snake carved on it?’ Ruth embroiders her memories with other things: a cat called Marcel who only liked Ruth and hissed whenever Mira came too close, a bad-tempered Mira who peed in her knickers at school and took things from Ruth that weren’t hers to take. Sometimes, Mira told Dr Wiseman, she felt she existed only in second-hand memories. As if to compensate, Mira’s dream life was unusually vivid. She drifted back and forth in the rich tide, was always slow to rise and late for school. Ruth had given up waiting for her even when she was still young enough to find the long bus ride frightening on her own.

Nothing had been kept from Mira. In fact, with all this talk of childhood amnesia, people around her seemed all too happy to fill in the blanks: the hospital, her kidney, the brightly painted flat in North London. All elaborately described but not remembered. The stuff about Julian had been mildly intriguing the first time they explained, but it was really not such a big deal that they had to keep going on about him. Julian’s photograph was in a review of one of his books in the
Guardian
. He looked tanned and friendly, with dark hair and sombre eyes. He didn’t look like anyone she knew.

Her amnesia was the root of her problem, Dr Wiseman said, whatever her problem was supposed to be. Some sessions with a child psychotherapist might help to unblock things. Sofie arranged things, efficient as bleach, though was careful to stand back and allow Karl to do the talking.

Mira didn’t mind seeing Mr Gabriel Rubin, Gabriel, Gabe. He was actually quite cool. His room was peaceful, the couch she lay on every Friday at four was perfectly comfortable, with a velvet cushion for her head. He made no demands, she didn’t even have to look at him. It was a nuisance that he wouldn’t let her smoke, but you can’t have everything. Mostly they just talked about whatever she’d been reading on the bus over.

Apart from sticking around in Lamb’s Conduit Street to let in Sofie’s decorators, Mira was at a loose end. Even Gabe had cancelled their appointment. Her dad and Sofie might just as well have let her join the rest of them in Marrakesh for all she had to do here.

She was supposed to be going through the listings on UCAS. ‘See if something will raise even a flicker of interest,’ her dad had said. ‘Failing that, you can bloody well find a job.’ So that was it. Right up until the day they left, she couldn’t believe he would go through with it and she cried like a baby in her room while they packed. She was saved by her little brothers fighting in their bedroom; she could feel their thuds against the wall, the screaming of insults and was at that moment struck by a sudden joy: oh, let Ruth be the unpaid babysitter this time. She was even thinking of helpfully gathering a few books together for the boys’ backpacks, when she heard Sofie, sotto voce on the stairs. ‘It’s good that you stuck to your guns and made her stay here. Much better she keep her appointments with Gabriel Rubin,’ she said. As usual Karl didn’t do a thing to stand up for her, barely a sigh. ‘I’m not taking someone with an eating disorder on our holidays again and that’s final,’ Sofie hissed and Mira’s stomach clenched with rage.

Mira had been standing across the meadow for a while when Dolly arrived. The little girl was pretty, the sun threw bright dots on to her face through the holes in the brim of her hat, she had the same double dimple when she smiled as her mother. A dog with a white ruff and springy haunches ran around her in circles. She grasped a corkscrew in one hand and in the other a stick that she threw for the dog. The throw wasn’t good and the stick didn’t go far. The dog picked it up and bounded across the grass to Mira, dropping it at her feet. It sat thumping its tail, looking longingly from the stick to her face and back again. The little girl trotted across the meadow, grumpy with the dog, who didn’t come when she called.

‘Is that her name? Muriel?’ Mira handed over the stick. ‘No, not
Muriel
, he’s a boy,’ the girl giggled. ‘His name’s Uriel, but I call him Uri and Uri-bear, but not when he’s naughty.’

Mira held out her hand. ‘I’m Mira. What’s your name?’

The girl stalled for a moment. ‘Dolly.’ From her voice Mira knew she was weighing up the dangers of talking to a stranger. She felt a stab of unearned guilt.

‘Dolly. Hello,’ Mira smiled to reassure her and Dolly dropped her stick into the jaws of the dog. ‘I like your dress,’ Mira said and Dolly decided to trust her enough for a twirl. ‘It’s new,’ she said. ‘Daddy bought it for me and I have growed into it now.’