There but for The (10 page)

I’m standing on time! a girl said and toed the line. How cool is that?

I’m standing on not-time! her friend said jumping backwards away from the meridian.

Someone was talking, a youngish man in a T-shirt and fleece. He was a teacher, presumably, from the words he was using: last warning, confiscate, crisps.

If you take them off her, are you going to eat them yourself, do you know what I’m trying to say sir? a girl said.

No, Melanie, because crisps are sprayed with chemicals then fried in huge vats of fat, and I like to eat healthily, the man said.

These
are
healthy, sir, the girl with her hand in the crisp packet said. It says on the packet less fat and natural ingredients in it sir innit.

The three girls standing with the crisp packet girl all burst out laughing. In it innit! they said. Innit in it!

Because we learned on Tuesday, didn’t we, the teacher said, that it’s random. And about longitude and latitude and fixed points, he said. To know where you are when you’re at sea and there are no landmarks. But who can tell me why it was decided to put it here? Jacintha, mobile off. Off. Off or confiscated. You choose. Thank you. Someone tell me why the experts at the time chose Greenwich. Rhiannon? Why Greenwich?

Because they had to put it somewhere so they could get on with the other important calculations about time and, and things like time and the sea and that, cause they needed something better than the thing called reckoning with that throwing logs tied to rope off moving ships, and on land too because like, that, Yarmouth being ten minutes ahead of Greenwich and in other places it could be noon in London and half past eleven in the place you’d just travelled to on a train, a girl said.

Thank you, Rhiannon, the teacher said. Very good. Except it’s dead reckoning.

Ow! Rhiannon said when the girl standing behind her poked her hard in the back and said the word dead. Please sir, one of the bad girls said. The earth’s wobble is what happens when Rhiannon Stoddart walks to the shops.

And Greenwich, the teacher said, was where the experts who met decided to put it because of the important work they’d already done here. Now, the meridian runs north to south and if you stand on one side of it, you’re officially in the west, and if you stand on the other it’s the what? Matthew, if you make a racially unpleasant comment like that again there’ll be serious trouble. I mean it. I’m talking exclusion, Matthew. Now apologize. Not to me, to Bijan. Okay, Bijan? Right. Where were we? On one side the west, and on the other? Come on.

The kids stood bored and hangdog, yawning and squirming, their sweatshirts knotted round their waists. Above them, the domes of the Observatory: they all looked up when they were told to. The original domes, the teacher told them, were made of papier-mâché. A murmur went round the boys about the domes resembling big and small breasts. The teacher admonished. Two girls made outraged-sounding noises. They pointed at the notice which apologized that the time ball wasn’t functioning today. One of the girls called out. Sir, when exactly did
your
time balls drop?

Nought degrees, the teacher was saying. Who can tell me about nought degrees?

If it’s not degrees you want to know about, sir—, one boy said.

Yes, Nick—? the teacher said.

Then what is it, sir? the boy said.

This made Mark laugh. The group of girls saw him laugh and stared at him, then laughed nastily themselves, but at Mark.

I don’t follow you, Nick, the teacher said.

If you follow Nick, sir, we’ll report you to the authorities, another boy who was standing far out enough on the edge of the group not to be heard by the teacher said.

His friends sniggered.

Then this same boy, while the teacher talked on about what universal day was, and how many degrees made a day, an hour, half an hour, a minute, cast an unmistakable sheep’s-eye glance at Mark. When Mark caught the stare and didn’t look away, the boy spoke with an insolence that was cutting.

That old man, look at him, he wants it.

The friends round him sniggered again.

But even well after the sniggering had died away the boy continued to hold the stare. In it there was a perfectly judged balance of rejection and invitation. The boy was an expert. He looked all of thirteen. He was far too young to be acting so knowing. Mark stilled a wild laugh in his chest. He shook his head at the boy, but to make sure the boy wasn’t offended he winked first. When he shook his head the boy looked down and away, and Mark did too, and moved off, out round the school party, back down through the gate and towards the park.

The slope down was painful to the knees, more painful than the climbing of it had been. Greenwich, the teacher was saying behind him as he went, and Greenwich, and again Greenwich.

Greenwich then: the word, white on black on the label of the 45 in his hands, Mark just thirteen years old himself: London American Recordings 1963 Then He Kissed Me (Spector, Greenwich, Barry) The Crystals.

Greenwich now: the word that had caught his eye when he was in a café skimming their copy of one of the weekend papers on Sunday, Observer, Guardian, whichever, and when he looked properly he saw the picture and recognized the woman, the one from the dinner party.

The column was the Real Life column, where real people told the paper about a real experience; usually something like Dolphins Carried My Baby To Safety or I Woke Up One Day Not Remembering Who I Was or My Life Was Ruined By An Over The Counter Cold Remedy or I Was Mugged By My Own Brother. Mark had waited till all the serving people were out of earshot and then had torn the page out, folded it and put it in his pocket next to that chap Miles’s note. That night in the bath he decided: on his next day off, Thursday, he’d go to Greenwich and slip the page under Miles’s door in case nobody else had thought to show it to him. And it would be nice, too, to spend his day off in Greenwich, see the place again, maybe visit the park.

But when he’d got to the Lees’ house and knocked on the front door this morning there’d been no one home. Well, presumably Miles was in, but
he
wasn’t about to open the front door to anyone, was he?

He had the article in his inside jacket pocket now, folded, along with Miles’s note, well, he was assuming it was from Miles, it couldn’t really be from anybody else, though it wasn’t signed. He’d found it in there, a plain piece of foolscap folded twice, when he’d got his wallet out to buy a train ticket the Sunday after the dinner party. The handwriting was new to him. It was intelligent, slightly forward-slanted, neatly spaced down the page rather like a poem might be though it wasn’t one. It was quite clear. Only one word was difficult to decipher.

He stopped on the slope. People went past him; a couple of people speaking French. Mark took both folded pieces of paper out of his pocket.

Below the words REAL LIFE: An Uninvited Stranger Lives In My Spare Room, was the picture of Mrs. Lee in profile, standing beside a door, looking rather tragically down at its handle. The caption read:
Genevieve Lee recounts what it’s like living twenty-four-seven with an uninvited stranger.

I had always loved living here

in our gracious old historic

Greenwich town house. From

practically the first day my

husband Eric and I and our

young daughter moved in, it

seemed to me to be asking to

be a really sociable space. I don’t

think it’s an exaggeration to say that

among our friends we’re renowned

for our hospitality. Until June

this year we were forever having

people round for interesting

soirées and sending them

home happy after a meal I’d

have taken great pains to cook

to perfection each time.

We had no way of knowing that

this one dinner party, however,

would turn out so dramatically

differently from the others. That

particular evening in June

I had planned a menu including

a seared scallops with chorizo

starter, a main course of lamb

tagine and a dessert of crème

brûlée with home-made

chilli-vanilla ice cream. One of

our guests brought his own

guest, a man who seemed perfectly

genial and normal and didn’t in

any way arouse our suspicions

or give any clue as to what was

about to happen. He wasn’t

poor, didn’t seem in distress,

and the fact that he was a

vegetarian, though it was a

surprise, was absolutely no