The Predictions (10 page)

“I know.”

“We should go home.”

“Back to New Zealand?” I couldn’t believe it. “You’re going to give up?”

“It’s time to face reality.”

“But you haven’t even tried to start a band.”

Lukas sighed, utterly defeated. “What’s the point? London already has thousands of them. I don’t have a guitar. And I can’t afford to buy one.”

“Not now you don’t. But if you get a job . . .”

“Why don’t
you
get a job?”

This was the worst thing he could have said. I had been looking nonstop for a salaried job but so far had only been able to pick up casual work in restaurants, washing dishes and waiting tables, which I was spectacularly bad at. Most Kiwis who came to London got work in pubs, living upstairs as part of their wage, but Lukas had decided early on that we weren’t going to do anything that would lump us together with other New Zealanders, otherwise we would never assimilate. We were not allowed, for the same reason, to go and live in one of those flats in Finchley, with eight or ten Kiwis in each room, one couple dossing on the couch and another behind it, bodies in sleeping bags everywhere, splitting the rent seventeen ways. Lukas would rather have lived with Scottish and English junkies, he would rather have starved than pull pints, and so, after six months in London, that’s exactly what we were doing.

“We can’t just leave,” I said. “We came here to follow your dream.”

“That isn’t why
you
came to London.”

He had never expressed this before, and because he hadn’t, I had assumed he didn’t know. But the truth was, I had deceived him. When I did not immediately respond, Lukas laughed bitterly and said, “You can’t even admit it to yourself,” which had been true up until that moment.

I turned away.

Lukas stood and brushed the rice off his trousers, then buttoned up his coat. “Don’t you have anything to say?”

I shook my head. I wanted to say something that would give me another chance, but I also knew that I didn’t deserve one.

Lukas walked out of the alley, and I watched him go, crying tears of hopeless frustration. I stood up; shook out my cold, cramped legs; and assumed the rest of the evening would unfold the way it had after other quarrels: later, back at the squat, when we had both cooled down, there would be an opportunity to make amends, to grovel or beg or do whatever it would take.

When I arrived back at the squat my hands were dirty after rummaging in the alley and I turned on the tap to wash them. Freezing water poured out but my fingers were so numb with cold that it felt almost warm. I went to our room. No Lukas. I was disappointed, and sat down on the bed to rest and to wait for him. I fell asleep, and woke in the middle of the night when I sensed movement on the mattress.
Thank heavens he’s back.
I rolled toward him and opened my eyes, then recoiled in horror. Someone was lying next to me but it wasn’t Lukas, or anyone I knew. It was a shivering, blue-skinned bag of bones and it was trying to climb under my coat.

I couldn’t pack fast enough, gathering up our meager belongings with a single sweep of my arm. We had shared our room with two or three other people, sometimes four, but no one had ever crossed over to our corner, to our bed, not while Lukas was there.

With the temperature dropping and nowhere to go, I thought it best to keep on the move and found myself head
ing in the direction of Regent’s Park, where the surrounding houses were bigger and more expensive. I felt a little safer there, however wrongheaded that was. Walking past the stucco facades of mansions, past the private driveways ringed with glossy black palings, I had the sensation of leaving behind my squalid life and crossing over into a fairy tale. There were, I realized, two versions of London: the one we had been living in, down below, grimy and impoverished, and another one, up above, that was glittering and rich.

The gates to the park were locked, but I found a section of the fence that was hidden by bushes and managed to climb it. Within the park grounds, surrounded by trees, under an open sky, I felt protected, at home. I had grown up in nature, and though this version had been clipped and tamed and the stars above were dimmer, it was comforting all the same. I wandered about, careful to stay in the shadows, and tried to make sense of the last six months. How had we sunk so low? The task of each day had become to get to the end of it without starving or getting mugged. We had lost sight of the future, of why we had come to London in the first place. For my part, I had been in denial, unable to admit the part my prediction had played in my leaving New Zealand. Not only had I deceived Lukas, but I had brought bad luck upon us by defying my fate. We weren’t meant to be together, and nothing good would come of resisting what had been forecast.

But without Lukas by my side, I wasn’t sure how to proceed. I had been carried along by his ambition, living his life, not mine, and before that, I had lived the life of the com
mune, a life that was shared with eight adults and six other kids. I had never made a decision for myself, and that night in Regent’s Park was the very first I had ever spent entirely on my own. In two decades of life, I had never once gone to sleep without another person in the room.

To be suddenly independent was as terrifying as it was exhilarating, and with so many options, and no one to please but myself, I felt paralyzed.

White puffs of breath ballooned out in front of me, and a chill crept into my lungs. One minute I was fine, not even shivering, and the next, the ice of that February night had breached the perimeter of my heavy winter coat and every thin layer underneath. I felt my skin constrict with goose bumps and my teeth began to rattle. How long had I had been sitting under this tree, fatally still? I stood and stamped my feet, but the cold was inside me, in my blood.

A smooth grass table the size of a cricket pitch stretched out before me, the edges of it bordered by four neat rows of plane trees, bare but dignified. In front of my eyes, the grass turned silver, as though a wave was passing over, and I looked up and saw the moon was out. The lake rippled, drawing my gaze to the far side, where something between the plane trees moved. I thought it was an animal at first, a dog or a deer. But the movements were all wrong. It was a human, on the small side—a boy. He was very thin, wearing shorts, and running so fast his legs were cycling. He ran from one tree to another, hiding behind it for a moment before peeping out and sprinting on to the next. When he reached the end of the stand of trees, he hugged the last one,
then peered out from behind the trunk—staring straight at me, daring me to stare back. He was playing a game.

The boy stepped out from behind the last tree and stood in front of it, staring in my direction for a moment before pushing off and sprinting diagonally across the field and straight toward me. He covered the distance quickly, almost gliding, his feet barely touching the ground.

I was already frozen, too numb to move, but as the boy got closer—so close that I could almost make out the expression on his darling familiar face—my heartbeat rose to a scattershot hammering. I didn’t need to look twice to know who it was. I had known from his oddly galloping gait: one leg crooked, the other straight. But Fritz was dead—and he had died on the other side of the world. I had never been more certain that he wasn’t alive, and even as I tried to lift my arms to embrace his ghost, my heart burst with grief. When he was less than six feet away, my eyelids grew heavy and then finally pitched shut. For a blissful few seconds, the image of my brother burned on my retinas, then it was gone.

London

1984

I
WOKE UP IN
a hospital wrapped in stiff white sheets, a drip winding into my arm. No pain, just a heavy feeling, as though I had sunk to the bottom of a lake. Somewhere above me was the surface, but I couldn’t swim to it, I could only wait in the depths where it was quiet and still.

The green curtains of my cubicle whisked open, and a nurse appeared. “Welcome back,” she said, reaching for the clipboard at the end of the bed. “How do you feel?”

“Terrible,” I wheezed. “What’s wrong with me?”

“Pneumonia.” She moved to the foot of the bed, lifted the sheet, and wiggled my toes, one after the other. “But no frostbite. You’re lucky they found you when they did. It was minus five in the park. You were minutes away from hypothermia.”

I assumed Lukas had found me and felt a surge of hope. “Is my boyfriend still here?”

The nurse shook her head. “You’ve not had any visitors. Would you like me to contact someone?”

The urge to see him was like a craving. “I don’t know how to. I don’t know where he is.”

“Your accent,” she said. “You’re a long way from home, aren’t you?”

My eyes welled up. “Yes.”

The nurse smoothed down the sheet and tucked me in. “Well, if you work out how to contact him, or anyone else, let me know.”

Her smile was caring but detached, reminding me of the way the mothers on the commune had tended to us, kindly and patiently but with something missing. I hated those memories, the way their faces blended to form the idea of a mother instead of a real one.

“There’s no one else,” I said, and the nurse patted my shoulder.

“I’m sorry, love.”

I didn’t want to leave the hospital. It was shabby, sure, with paint peeling off the walls, and they ran out of clean towels and syringes. But cooked meals of rubbery roast beef and mushy peas and stale Yorkshire pudding appeared on a tray in front of me, and I inhaled them and asked for more. I’d been hungry for so long that I’d forgotten what it was like to be full. But after six days, I was on the mend, getting plump, and the fluid had gone from my lungs. I was discharged. As I got dressed into the unclean clothes that had been folded and placed in a cupboard by the bed, the duty nurse took pity and gave me a plastic bag filled with stale bread rolls. “There’s butter, too,” she said. “I stole it from the canteen.” In the bottom was the address of a women’s shelter run by Catholic nuns.

On the steps outside the hospital, I wondered which way to go. Men and women scurried past, weaving around one another, so certain of their destination, and in such a hurry to get there. I set off in what I hoped was the direction of the squat, reluctant to go back but eager to find Lukas. I wasn’t sure what I would say to him, only that I needed to see him.

The squat teemed with more lowlifes than ever, but Lukas wasn’t there. Someone else had moved into our old corner, and all our belongings were gone. When I asked after Lukas, someone told me he had moved out. I felt hurt that he had abandoned me, even though I had no right to, and reminded myself, with a heavy heart, that no good could come of our staying together.

That night, I slept in the women’s shelter. I took my allotted gray army blankets edged with red stitching to the basement and watched the stretchers around me fill up. In the morning, there was porridge for breakfast, just like on the commune. We had an hour’s grace period to fold blankets and wash our faces before the nuns kindly but firmly kicked everyone out onto the street. It was nine
A.M
.

To keep warm and stay occupied, I went exploring. I walked toward Queensway and Notting Hill, then Shepherd’s Bush, thinking all the time of Lukas, and then expending even more energy trying
not
to think about him. Still though, my loneliness was broken by small, unexpected waves of delight. The whole of London was mine to discover, and not just the parts where there might be bands playing. We had spent all our time in Camden because that’s where we heard the happening music scene was, but I was never
quite sure if we had found the up-and-coming bands or the ones that were on their way out. It always seemed to me that anything too easily found in London was for tourists, and the genuinely hip stuff was hidden from view.

No longer having to worry about any of that was bliss, especially since in the last few weeks, Lukas’s commentary of other bands had become vicious. Not just “I could do better than that” but also “Those bands are so shit they deserve to die.”

After a few solitary nights at the Catholic women’s shelter, I met Fran. She had wobbled in late, sometime after midnight, gulped down four glasses of water, then claimed a vacant stretcher near mine. She was about my age and didn’t look homeless, just wasted. There was a good reason why her stretcher, and mine, had been empty. The woman on the stretcher in between us smelled like she was decomposing, a stench so putrid that neither of us could sleep. We stood up at the same time to look for another spot. When there wasn’t one, we ended up in the dining room, smoking cigarettes under a table. Fran told me she had often spent the night at the shelter after going out in the West End and missing the last train home. She thought I must be there for the same reason and was taken aback to hear I was genuinely homeless.

“Tomorrow,” she said, “you’re coming home with me to Tooting.”

We hit it off immediately. Fran was bolshie, bold—an English version of Nelly—and not standoffish like most Londoners I had met. True to her word, the next day she took me
home to Tooting. She lived with her mother, her stepfather, and his two sons from a previous marriage. It all struck me as outrageously exotic.

It was my first time in the suburbs. Fran lived on a long street of terraced houses that curved together like train tracks, each with a single bay window in the front. Some houses had been butchered, sprayed with pebbledash or had their windows ripped out and boarded over, but the gate Fran went through led to one that was perfectly preserved, very neat. At the front door, I hesitated. I was a long way from the city, in a place where Lukas wouldn’t be able to find me. Then I remembered that he wasn’t supposed to. This hadn’t stopped me from keeping up a silent dialogue with him, telling him all day about my new friend and the novel things I was seeing, as if we were still together. The habit would be hard to break.

“This is my mum, Eileen,” said Fran, introducing me to a short, round woman who was soft, like a pudding.

“Would you girls like a cuppa?” said Eileen. “I could heat up some leftovers.” She didn’t seem at all fazed that Fran had brought home a stray.

“Yes, please,” I said, quite sure that even if I ate continuously for a whole week, it wouldn’t make up for the months of living off scraps.

In the afternoon, we went to the pub. Fran liked to drink and took great pleasure in introducing me to her favorite concoction: cider and black.

“I can’t believe you never had one,” she said when I asked her what it was.

“Where I come from, there’s beer or plonk, and I never drank much of either.”

“Well, I’ve never left England,” said Fran. “So we’re even.” She laughed. “My family tried to go to Scotland once but the car broke down so we ended up in Skegness—a big fat hole, in case you were wondering.” Fran told me she was studying for a diploma in accounting at a polytechnic in the West End and worked a few shifts in a “posh caff” near there, but she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do after her studies. “I know I don’t want to be no one’s secretary,” she said. “Opening envelopes and typing bloody letters all day long.”

“You’re smart,” I told her. “You could do anything.”

“Nah,” said Fran. “I didn’t go to a toff university. Maybe where you come from that’s possible but not here.” She looked around the pub, then clinked her glass against mine, whispering conspiratorially. “But one thing I do want is to make loads of dosh.”

I slept on a foldout trundle at the end of Fran’s bed, hoping the thing wouldn’t bounce shut while I was lying on it. Once or twice I woke in the night, heard breathing and thought for a moment I was back in our shared room on the commune. After I had been staying with Fran for a week, she came home one night excited because she had found me a temping job. It wasn’t much more than a girl Friday position, but it was something. She had pestered one of the regular customers who came into her café, an elderly gentleman who worked for Beauchamp, Beauchamp & Beazley, a firm of chartered surveyors in Mayfair, and he had agreed to take me on. I started the next day, catching the rush-
hour Tube from Tooting to Mayfair in a skirt and blouse borrowed from Fran.

The temporary job became a permanent one, and I was promoted from filing and tea making to the bottom of the secretarial pool. Fran, who had finished her studies and didn’t want to work full time in the café, reluctantly took my old job, and the two of us moved into a bedsit in Fulham. Fran hated the tedious, repetitive tasks we were expected to do, but I loved the propriety of it all, the rituals and manners that ensured everything ran as inefficiently as possible. In the morning, we typed formal letters from scrawled notes or Dictaphone tapes. Then all afternoon, these letters went back and forth between the typing pool girls and the quantity surveyor men until they were absolutely perfect. A single mistake meant the entire letter had to be retyped. At a quarter past four, all completed letters were sealed in envelopes, stamped, and trotted down to the letterbox on the corner by one of us “gals.” At five on the dot, and not a minute after, we abandoned our desks and filed out of the building to join hundreds of thousands of others on the long commute home. Months and months went by in this fashion before it occurred to me that I was contentedly working for “the man”—the very thing I’d been so vehemently warned against doing.

The summer of ’84 was a riot. For the first time my life, I had money. Not a lot, but enough to keep Fran and me in hairspray and stilettos, and to be able to go out more nights than we stayed in. We went out to clubs to see up-and-coming bands, real ones, and it was so much more fun with Fran
than it ever had been with Lukas. Once we had pulled apart the band’s musical merits, and given them marks out of ten, we each had to say which band members we would most and least like to shag. Then Fran would set about trying to make it happen, while I diligently played the part of her wingman. Fran had decided that she wanted to one day manage a band and chalked all her conquests up to “research.” She enjoyed the challenge, not minding if she failed or made a tit of herself. One night, after she had tried, and very nearly succeeded, in seducing the good-looking half of Deja Venus, a synth-pop duo from Putney, Fran finally asked me why I never went after anyone. “You only ever help me get laid.”

“My ex-boyfriend was in a band,” I told her. “I guess it put me off.”

“How come you never told me about him?” asked Fran.

“Things ended badly.”

“How badly?”

“He went back to New Zealand. We haven’t spoken since.” Talking about Lukas still felt raw, especially talking about him in the past tense, and even though Fran wanted to know more, I changed the subject.

No new surveyors had joined Beauchamp, Beauchamp & Beazley since the midseventies, but the property market was starting to boom, and with a great deal of self-importance, the company began to hire new staff. The first of these to start was Gavin Crawley, and he had been at work less than an hour before half the typing pool was after him, myself not included. They all fantasized about marrying him, after a short engagement, and settling down in a semi in the sub
urbs to breed. He was nothing special to look at, but he was at least twenty years younger than any of the other men who worked at B, B & B, and, it had been quickly noted from his bare ring finger, unmarried. These weren’t the only things that set him apart, though. The older men had Etonian accents, wore pinstripe suits, and conducted business in an unhurried, jovial way, as though work was nothing more than a leisurely distraction. But Gavin walked into the office like a terrier let off its leash. He did twice as much work as the other partners, ten times as quickly, and still looked around for more. When the older men went off to the pub for a long boozy lunch, returning to the office shiny cheeked and red nosed, he stayed behind to make phone calls, send telexes, and pace up and down importantly. He never allowed letters to go through more than two drafts, and if correspondence was ready to be mailed by midmorning, he took it downstairs himself to make the midday post collection.

I enjoyed the spectacle of the other girls vying for his attention, and I was looking forward to seeing who would try to snog him at the office Christmas party. Fran had even started a sweepstakes in the weeks leading up to the event. It was a costume party, themed “Rule Britannia,” a choice made by one of the partners, an old-fashioned patriotic bore.

On the appointed night, a flurry of sailors, wenches, and admirals made their way down steep limestone steps to a basement wine bar off Piccadilly. I had halfheartedly donned a pirate hat with my usual black taffeta dress and patent stilettos, and Fran went as Maggie Thatcher in a blue suit from a charity shop, her permed hair swept hideously back.
Her prop was a stiff black handbag, which she went around thumping people with.

The company hired a mobile disco—a fellow in a black tuxedo who came with dry ice, glitter ball, and strobe—and the DJ pumped out tunes to the empty room. Without enough of us to fill the space, we stood around the edges, nodding, smiling, drinking punch, the music too loud to have a conversation. At a quarter past seven, out of desperation, the DJ tried Frankie Goes to Hollywood, “Relax,” but it was too early, and the randy lyrics, sent us further back into the shadows.

Fran and I were on the verge of leaving when, in a matter of sixty seconds, alcohol consumption reached a tipping point, and the party went from stiff and sober to a state of slurring, lurching snog-your-boss-under-the-mistletoe abandon. Roger, from accounts, was break-dancing to Michael Jackson, and a huddle of secretaries actually screamed when the Human League came on. “Jesus,” said Fran, surveying the destruction. “It’s barely eight o’clock.” The only thing for it was to join in. “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” “99 Red Balloons.” We sang and bopped to all the chart hits Lukas despised, and then, when a slow song came on, we rushed to the toilet to have a wee and change the Band-Aids on our stiletto-blistered feet.