The Other Me (14 page)

‘You inspired me,’ he says, his face glowing. ‘It was you that gave me the courage. I’ve given up the teacher training.’ He raises his eyebrows. ‘Josh said he’d pay me to do a mural, and it seemed like it could be the beginning of something. Then I got your note, and that made up my mind. You were here. So I had to be too.’

He takes a bite of toast and mushroom. I use the opportunity to stare: I’d forgotten his bottom lip, how it curves, slightly bigger than his top one.

‘Josh asked me about the mural over the holidays. I was desperate to talk to you about it.’ He picks up his cup with both hands. ‘I’ve moved into some cheap accommodation round the corner. I didn’t want to do this part-time. It would have seemed like a hobby. Not the real thing.’ He puts his cup down and leans forward. ‘God, I’ve missed you, Eliza. I’m so happy to have found you again. As soon as I got to London I looked through the phone book, but of course you’re not listed. I didn’t know what else to do – except walk about the streets of South London and hope.’

I drop my stare to look at his hands. His skin speckled yellow and blue.

‘Hey,’ he says softly, ‘we’re together now.’ He smiles. ‘How long are you going to be here?’ He picks up a piece of toast and wipes up a puddle of egg yolk. Pops it in his mouth.

I jerk my head away. ‘I’m staying indefinitely. My uncle… he’s not well… he needs me.’

His face crumples with empathy. ‘After you’ve already lost your parents…’

I scratch the edge of my mouth. ‘I don’t really want to talk about it.’ I clear my throat.

‘Of course not.’ He looks flustered.

What the hell am I doing? My skin prickles.

‘But it seems a bit like fate, doesn’t it?’ he continues tentatively. ‘Both of us in London.’

I try and smile, but it slides away. I play with my teaspoon, chinking it against the cup.

‘I’m glad you’re doing this,’ I tell him. ‘The murals, I mean. I really am. I’m happy for you.’ The clean relief of the truth makes my voice tremble. Tears sting my eyes.

‘What about your dancing?’ His gaze is open, innocent.

My fingers pinch the teaspoon, placing it on the plastic tablecloth carefully. The clatter of the cafe fills the silence.

Cosmo pays for me, and I have no choice but to accept. I feel bad watching him put cash into the little saucer the gum-chewing waitress placed on our table with the bill. I don’t want this small kindness. This symbol of how we were before. The magnitude of my betrayal weighs me down. He doesn’t understand that everything is different. I feel as though I’m watching him from a distance, through a screen.

He reaches across the table and touches my hand. His touch burns. ‘Shall we start again?’ he says. ‘Carry on from where we left off?’

My heart slows as I stare at his fingers over mine. I feel a lurch in my stomach. Then I pull away and get up, pushing the chair back with a noisy scrape and reaching for my jacket. When I look around he’s moved to wait by the door, hands jammed in his pockets.

Two brown envelopes flutter onto the mat. Both bills. Nothing from France. It’s too soon to expect a reply. It will take a while for my letter to get to her, and then she’ll need space to think about it. I keep trying to put myself in her position – imagining how I’d react. I can’t expect her to come to terms with it in a hurry. She’ll be shocked, angry and hurt before she can even begin to think about forgiving me. But I’ve never known Meg hold a grudge.

Mum’s tweed coat and scarf hang on the peg by the front door, next to the umbrella stand. I touch a soft sleeve for comfort, and as my fingers rub the nubby texture, a small jolt of knowledge goes through me. It hadn’t occurred to me before, but if it’s hanging here, then she can’t have been wearing it when she stepped outside for the last time. This is her only winter coat. It would have been cold on that December day.

‘Wrap up, or you’ll catch your death,’ she says behind me.

I turn with an intake of breath. The hall is empty. I frown, trying to imagine her unlatching the door, leaving the house without her coat. Instead I see her standing beside me and she is tying her scarf around her neck and tucking it inside the green and cream tweed collar. A final check through her handbag – lipstick, purse, clean hanky – and then she snaps the silver clasp closed and hangs the strap over the crook of her arm. All buttoned up, she smiles at me and is gone.

She must have been in a hurry that morning. But I don’t remember my mother hurrying. She liked her routine. She was never late for anything.

Missing her is an ache in my bones. I know I’m doing the right thing by staying with my father. But neither of us can comfort the other. When I was younger, my father was the tallest man in any crowd, his head nearly brushing the tops of doorways, his shoulders wide enough to block light from a window. He is shrinking. Not just his body – bones and skin, thinning and shrivelling – his spirit too. Without my mother, he lacks a world. She admired and obeyed him, reflecting him back at himself like a faithful, flattering mirror.

It occurs to me now that she was the strong one. She must have known what he did in the war. She hid his medals for him. She forgave him. In return, he put her on a pedestal. Love somehow held their odd relationship together. I wish I could find a clue inside all of that to help me mend my relationship with Cosmo; but I can’t. My situation is twisted by the fact that I’ve lied to him since we met. And if I were brave enough to confess all my lies, if I were cruel enough to hurt him with the truth – what then? Do I also tell him that my German father murdered Jewish partisans, fought for Hitler, won medals for the Third Reich? I can’t continue seeing him. Given a choice, why would he choose to have a relationship with someone like me, the real me?

There are pictures of Mum’s family stuck into an album. Her parents are thin, tough-looking dark people staring suspiciously into the camera. There is one photo of a group with Mum aged about ten sitting on the floor. She wears white, arranged at the front of the family gathering. She’d scribbled the names on the back: aunts and uncles and cousins. All of these people were lost when she married my father.

‘You have to remember that he was German. The war was fresh in people’s minds. They couldn’t understand why I was marrying him. They wouldn’t accept it.’

‘So they just cut you off? Their own daughter. Just like that?’ I’d got angry every time I was confronted with the fact. It seemed so cruel.

‘It was the hardest decision of my life,’ she’d said. ‘But they made it clear. Him or them.’

Mum sacrificed having a family for love. Perhaps my father made sacrifices too. It makes me feel humble, when I think of the time they lived through and the choices they made.

Cosmo is waiting for me outside the club. He doesn’t smile as I approach. We look at each other, and I have to break away first, staring at the pavement mottled with cigarette butts, nubs of gum and a dusty bronze coin.

‘What’s going on?’ he says quietly.

I press my tongue against the roof of my mouth. Clench my jaw to stop myself crying. I won’t sob in front of him. He doesn’t deserve that.

I indicate that we should walk and he falls into step beside me. This time he doesn’t slide his arm around my shoulder. I think I will float away without the anchor of him holding me down, keeping me safe.

‘Things have changed since I came to London,’ I try and explain. ‘I have a lot going on. Decisions to make. My uncle is fragile. He needs me. I just can’t… can’t…’

He stops and turns to face me. ‘Are you trying to tell me that it’s over?’

I drag my gaze up to meet his. ‘Yes,’ I whisper.

He lets his shoulders rise and fall. ‘But I don’t understand. Couldn’t I help? I wouldn’t get in the way of all these things you need to do. I might even be useful. Supportive?’

My heart sits in my belly, numb, inert. I find that I’m pressing my fingers around my stomach, as if I could heave my heart back into the right position, put things back together again.

I shake my head. ‘It’s not that simple.’

He frowns. ‘Don’t treat me like a child, Eliza.’

I’ve never heard him use that tone with me, words stretched tight with compressed anger. My insides contract. I fiddle with my hat. Pull it over my forehead. He’s right. I can’t give him more lies, more pathetic excuses.

‘It’s over,’ I tell him.

I see the shock in his eyes. There’s a shift in the darkness, a deeper pooling of black. He blinks and licks his lips.

‘Eliza?’ His voice catches. ‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m sorry. Things have changed.’ I force myself to go on. ‘I don’t feel the same way.’

‘I see.’ His voice is shaking. Then he frowns. ‘Fuck it! I don’t. I just don’t see it at all. How can things change so much in such a short time?’ He straightens up and looks at me with puzzled, angry eyes. ‘But if they have, if you’ve really changed your mind, fallen out of love…’

His voice trails away when I don’t contradict him. He wipes a hand over his forehead.

I cringe, folding my arms over my chest, holding myself tightly. Otherwise I will reach out and grab his fingers, press them to my mouth. I want to encircle him with my embrace. I want to spread out like a limpet, clinging to him.

‘Thank you,’ I manage. I glance behind us, towards the entrance of the club. ‘I’m late for work.’

Can we really become strangers so quickly?

His face closes. ‘Sure. Better go then.’

Pain winds a band around my chest, crushing my ribs, sucking all the air from my lungs. I turn and force my feet to move.

‘By the way,’ he calls behind me, his voice grating, ‘I still love you.’

The club is packed. It is a relief not to have time to think. I can just manage the simple actions the job requires of me, moving like a robot. I hardly feel the bottles and glasses in my hands. One falls through the circle of my thumb and finger, smashing on the floor. I get a brush and sweep away the broken pieces. Someone makes a joke and I shape my lips into a grin, more like a snarl than a smile.

When Josh gives me the nod that I can have five minutes off, I slip out of the back door into the empty yard behind. Sitting on the chilly step, leaning against the doorframe, I take gulps of damp air. My fingers are sticky with liqueurs and the tang of disinfectant.

The noise of the club clatters out into the night: a rumble of voices punctuated by clinking glass and the slur of drunken laughter. I can hear music too, not the usual club sounds with thundering bass to make your ears roar. Josh plays things like Josephine Baker and numbers from musicals.

An uncoiling of furred energy leaps at the edge of my vision: a sudden shadow, startling me. There’s a scrabble of claws on wood and a cat appears in silhouette on the fence. The door opens, and Scarlett joins me on the doorstep, folding long legs and leaning close.

She gives me an unnecessary nudge. ‘Shit, it’s freezing out here!’ For a few minutes she struggles to light a small clay pipe. Giving up, she sighs and tucks it into her jacket. She wraps the jacket tighter. ‘Stay out here much longer and you’ll get hypothermia.’

I try to smile. ‘I’m just giving my feet a rest.’

‘Shhh… Can you hear it?’

‘What?’

‘The underground river.’ Scarlett stares intently at the cracked paving stones, the litter of cigarette butts. ‘The Effra. Josh told me about it.’

I look at Scarlett carefully. The flat monotone of her voice disguises all traces of sarcasm or irony. Gives no warning of humour.

‘Seems it runs right under here. Under Brixton. Imagine.’ Scarlett pushes her hands into her pockets. ‘Back in the Victorian days a coffin was found floating down the Thames.’ She raises brightly painted eyebrows. ‘When they prized the lid off, they found a woman inside. She’d been buried a couple of weeks before in Norwood Cemetery.’ She lowers her voice to a conspiratorial hiss. ‘Her grave was untouched.’

I wrap my arms around my knees and wait. I don’t know where she’s going with this, and Scarlett likes to emphasise her stories with plenty of pauses for dramatic effect. But I’m glad of the distraction.

‘The mystery was solved as soon as they opened the grave,’ Scarlett is continuing, unaware of the pain in my chest. ‘The woman had been buried right above the Effra. The ground had given way beneath the coffin, and it fell into the water. All rivers in London lead to the Thames, you see…’

‘Very what’s-his-name,’ I nod, struggling to think of the right name. ‘Edgar Allan Poe.’

‘I was thinking of getting a new act together based on gothic stuff. You know, vampires and mirrors,’ she says. ‘What do you think?’

She stands up, her man’s jacket falling open to reveal a glimpse of gold-fringed bra and an expanse of pale, curved stomach. She shivers theatrically, flicking red curls over her shoulder.

‘Hey, Cosmo tells me that you two know each other from before. He’s renting a room in my flat. You should come over some time, have a drink.’

She looks at her watch. ‘Whoops – on in two minutes!’

I am reeling from the unexpected sound of his name. She’s gone, leaving a trail of Old Spice. I’ve seen the way men look at her. Anxiety bubbles inside. He told me he’d found somewhere cheap. But he didn’t say it was with Scarlett. I push my knuckles against my mouth. Cosmo is renting a room from her. It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that.

I squeeze through a tightly packed throng to get to the bar. The room is small. It doesn’t take much to fill it. Elbowing a tall man to one side, I slip through the flip-top space and begin to take orders, juggling money, bumping the till closed with my hip, pouring a glass of white wine with one hand while I reach for a lager with the other.

I don’t own Cosmo. He’s free to see whomever he wants. He’s better off without me. Lies. More lies. I can’t stop them. Even to myself.

Scarlett is already into the first part of her performance on the tiny stage, languidly swinging a cane from side to side, a top hat perched on her head. I envy her confidence. I’d do anything to have such poise on stage, such command. I glance up as she twirls the cane in the air, letting it spin high above her before catching it, a wicked smile on her reddened lips.