Undertow (6 page)

She doesn’t let him see it. Of course she can’t. Instead the Polaroid hides in her handbag
, thud thudding
away, a still beating thing, reminding her, begging to be let out every time she fumbles for change or reaches for a lipstick. Then, one morning, in a burst of belief, of faith, of wanting, she knows who she can show it to. He will understand; will smile and hold her, tell her she should be proud, that she is a beautiful baby. With a beautiful grandmother
.

She can see him through the gallery window. Sitting behind the wide wooden desk, his forehead creased, mouth drawn into an O as he studies a print held at arm’s length. Eleanor touches her gloved hand to the handle of the door. But she cannot go in. Her belief has deserted her, drained away, and instead she scuttles back up the hill, ashamed, empty. The photograph she slips into the torn leather lining of an album, where he will never think to look, or want to. She knows this is the last of Het. That there will be no more pictures, no more envelopes. So she places the album in a box and carries it up to the attic. It will be safe there, she thinks. He won’t find it. Then she lets the trapdoor slam shut, and gradually, in weeks, months, the thud of her tell-tale heart fades until all she can hear is the tick-tocking of the clock, and the screaming silence of what her world has become
.

BILLIE

I WATCH
Mum as she peels carrots at the sink. I haven’t said anything to her about the photo. Because I don’t know what words to use.

Cass used to say I wasn’t missing anything, not having a nan, seeing as hers only ever sent her kids’ stuff: kitten-covered cards and five pound book tokens. And anyway, I had Nonna. But now this is eating away at me. I wonder if he knew too. My dad. If there were three photos, three fat-faced baby Billies. If he had one, still has it maybe, taped to a fridge or hidden away.

It’s raining again. An endless murky drizzle that seems to drip into your lungs, permeates your clothing until you can feel it trickle coldly down your skin. But I can’t breathe in here any more. Need to get out. Need to start looking.

Mum looks up as I open the door. “Where are you going?”

“Just out,” I snap at her, then regret it, wish I could swallow it back. It’s not her fault, I think. She did what was best, she used to say. And I believe her.

Mum lets the words slide off her. “Be careful,” she says.

I laugh, despite myself. I’ve done sixteen years in Peckham without getting shot. Or pregnant. What can happen here?

But Mum’s not laughing. “Just. You know?”

I roll my eyes, pull my coat around me, a long wool Burberry, begged off Martha and finally relinquished in a fit of benevolence and bourbon. “I’ll watch out for wolves,” I say.

“You do that,” she says. “No wolves.”

“No wolves,” I repeat.

But I forget about the sheep’s clothing.

Seaton does what it says on the tin. The damp seems to have soaked into every surface, soaks into me as I trudge down the hill into town, collar turned up, a poor barrier against the mist of wet that runs rivulets down my neck. It has leeched the colour out of everything it has touched.

I study the pale faces that pass me, checking for … for what? My nose? My hair? I thought I’d recognize him. That there would be that light-bulb moment, that something would shift in me and I’d know that I was part of this person. But all I see are strangers. Grey-faced as the granite and pebbledash of the buildings, as the sea.

A flat, murky thing, half-hearted waves splutter onto muddy-looking sand. There are no deckchairs or donkeys here. A peeling sign on the rusting pier tells me the fairground is shuttered up until Easter. Yellow cellophane covers windows, shading out a non-existent sun, casting a sickly jaundiced glow on everything, on dead flies and Velvet Elvis pictures, china milkmaids. Only the palm trees remind me I’m in paradise: odd, airdropped things, so out of place I have to touch one to know it is real. Like me, I think. Airdropped exotica. Only I’m not: exotic, I mean. I pull my coat tighter around me, wishing I’d worn more. London got cold; colder even. And wet. But it was a different sort of rain. This kind drives into you, finds every seam; it even creeps into the lining of my boots so that my toes squeak damply with every step. I shiver and look around for somewhere warm, somewhere to wait in case the rain eases, though I know this is just wishful thinking.

I pass a row of arcades. I’ve been in places like them before. With Cass and Ash. Crowded round a fruit machine in Magic City, cheering and jeering at every nudge and hold. There they seemed like palaces, treasure troves; bright happy places, all fake crystal chandeliers and gilt-edged mirrors and the endless
chink chink
of coins clattering on metal. The promise of riches.

Here, a fat pasty-faced woman sits at a one-armed bandit, feeding coins from a plastic carrier bag while a toddler dressed as Tinkerbell leans, bored, against a pinball machine. The swirling carpet isn’t thick and lush but worn and sticky with spilt soda. Spilt dreams. This isn’t a palace. No chandeliers here. Instead neon strip lights just reveal a patina of grease and dust on the walls.

I keep walking, and next to a locked-up gallery is an Internet café, or an attempt at one. Two computers and a Coke machine squeezed into the back of a copy shop. I buy an orange Fanta and then hand another pound coin over to a greasy-haired man who points at one of the ageing Dells with nicotine-stained nail-bitten fingers. The fingers of the incurably addicted.

I check my email account and amongst the spam offers of Viagra and university degrees and hope is a single message from Cass.

Where’s my bloody postcard, beeyatch? You won’t believe what Ash has done now he’s only gone and taken Stella up the Ministry of Sound and
blah blah blah
.

No “What’s it like? How are you? Have you found him yet?”

I hit
REPLY
. Type in some stuff about the house, the rain. Saying nothing, like Cass, but taking four paragraphs to do it.

Then I click on Google.

I type in all I know. Two words and a number.
Tom
,
Seaton
and the year I was conceived.

I don’t know what I was thinking. That somehow these three magic ingredients would work like a chemistry set, conjure up a picture, a name, a person? That somewhere in the ether he would be waiting for me to uncover him. But it’s not enough. I need more clues. Need to know when he was born. Where he lived. God, I don’t even know if he came from round here. I laugh at my idiocy, at the wild-goose chase of it all. And defeated, I log out.

I stand to leave, and the greasy-haired man looks up from his
Sun
.

“You’ve only had ten minutes,” he says, his voice thick, clotted with cigarette tar, the vowels drawn out and lazy, like the cabbie’s.

I shrug. “I’m done,” I say.

He nods. “You on holiday?”

I shake my head. “No. It’s just— I’ve moved. And the computer’s not unpacked,” I tell him, needing to explain my presence somehow, this pathetic figure. What I don’t tell him is that the computer is broken after Mum threw a glass of water over the keyboard in one of her rages at Luka. And that I’ve barely got the money to pay for an hour of surfing, let alone a new hard drive.

He nods again.

I go to pull the door open, to let the wet in and myself out. But he stops me. He’s holding something out in his yellow fingers.

“Here,” he says. “Make up for the minutes you didn’t use.”

I take it from the chewed yellow fingers. It’s a postcard. From a stand next to the counter. The picture is of Seaton. But not the one outside. This one is in Technicolor. The sea an impossible blue, crowds of sunbathers in decades-old outfits on sand the colour of custard.

“’S’not always raining,” he says. “Send it home,” he adds. “Make ’em jealous.”

“This is home,” I say to myself. Whether I find him or not, this is it now. I look at the cardboard paradise in my hand. And I hope he’s right as I step out into the grey and the wet and the cold, cold town.

HET

IT IS
May and Het is back in Cambridge. The air here is soft, light; breathing spring into the honey-coloured stone and still river backs. Hundreds of miles away from the stubborn wet of Seaton, the murky tides and the endless hammer of rain on the pier as they lie beneath it, arms and legs in a sand-coated tangle, lips touching and drinking each other in, filling each other with words and wonder at the newness of it, the realness
.

Het finds the postcard in her pigeonhole outside the common room, sitting on a week’s worth of rush-printed flyers for rave nights at the Junction and marches against the poll tax. The colours are acid-bright against the faded pastels, bleeding out onto her fingers. At first she thinks it’s Will’s idea of a joke. Cheesy seventies postcard from home. “Wish you were here” and all that. Or her mother’s, perhaps. Although she knows in either case it would be a lie. But then she turns it over
.

“Wish I was there,” it reads. Four words and an
x.
A kiss, or to mark the spot
.

But the writing is neither Will’s nor Eleanor’s. And Het finds her left hand clutching at the narrow wooden slots, as her heart races and her head dizzies with the thrill of it
.

It is from him
.

BILLIE

I’LL SEND
it, I think. I’ll send it to Cass. So she can laugh at the land that time forgot I’ve been transported to. But Cass doesn’t care about stuff like that. She’d bin it like a fag packet or a screwed-up tissue. So I pick someone who does. I pick Luka.

There’s a postbox across the street and I run out into the road, dodging a white Transit van. I forget this isn’t Peckham High Street, an endless stream of buses, cars, lorries on their way to the West End and beyond. The van honks a reprimand and I mouth an apology. That would be something. Getting run over in a dead-end town.

The next post is at 11.15. I check my watch. 10.30. I don’t have time to go home and get a pen. I fumble in the deep pockets of the Burberry but the lining is ripped in the left, and the right only turns up coins and a stick of Juicy Fruit. The postcard is getting damp, threatening to turn to mush. I need somewhere to borrow a pen, to sit and write it. I could go back to the Internet place but I don’t want to talk to the nicotine man again. Besides, I need to find somewhere, a place that’s mine. Like the Crossroads on Victoria Street. This old Italian greasy spoon. Cass and me would sit there, eking out one tea for hours. Laughing with Roberto at the builders on the Trivial Pursuit machine; watching the world, or Peckham, go by.

There’s a restaurant, the Excelsior. Leatherette banquettes the colour of liver, and paper serviettes in dirty glasses. In the windows are faded photographs of food: steak and chips, a trifle, green-tinged now so they seem dusted with mould. I mentally cross it off a list, though they don’t open until twelve anyway. Half the town is shut up. For the day, or for the season. I wonder where everyone goes. If they just sit it out behind their net curtains waiting for Easter and the tourists to start trickling in. Or if they’ve gone up to London, like Dick Whittington, like Mum, looking for streets paved with gold. And I’m pricked again by the thought that I’ve come here for this. For nothing. For rain and a boarded-up pier and empty shops. Nothing on the pavements but puddles and dog shit and gum. Same as everywhere.

I’m about to turn back up the hill when, on the corner, near the front, I hear the jangle of a door open, see a triangle of light shining on to the wet tarmac. A girl comes out. Fifteen, sixteen, dressed in the grey of a school uniform. Her hair a mass of pale curls glowing in the light behind. She lights a cigarette, smoke mingling with the fog of her breath as she huddles in the porch. Like Cass outside the Wishing Well. And I feel a rush of something – excitement, or relief. I walk towards her, towards the light and the heat and the dry. As I get closer I hear some indie band blaring out, low-slung guitars leaking under the doorframe; see blue tiles and a flash of red, and a sign.
JEANIE’S
. It’s a café and it’s open.

The girl pulls hard on her cigarette and looks me up and down, as if she’s trying to add it up – the wet, lank hair, the coat, the boots. I smile, mumble a “Hi”. She says nothing, just leans back to let me past, one eyebrow arched. She smells of cigarettes and too much perfume. The cheap stuff that comes in a spray can. As I push open the door she breathes out, letting smoke curl up through her hair. She is all that. And she knows it.

She follows me in, and I think for a minute she’s going to trail me to the counter, flank me, demand to know who I am and what I want. But maybe I’m not worth it, because from the corner of my eye I see her blazered back head for a table, slump down in a plastic chair opposite a guy, older, but with the same eyes. Her brother, I guess.

The café is done out like some textbook seaside cliché. Red gingham tablecloths. Blue walls. But, like everything round here, it bears the signs of slow decay. The tiles are cracked, grime clinging to the grouting. The Formica tables propped on crumpled newspaper to keep them upright.

On top of the counter is a sponge cake; home-made. Underneath, juice cartons, Mars bars and millionaire’s shortbread. God, I used to love that stuff. Begged Mum to bring it back from Martha’s. Finn dancing around, happy that he was eating the same as a real millionaire, thinking somehow he’d be one now. The music blares from a CD system. I recognize it now. Kaiser Chiefs. It seems out of place here. Out of time.

I feel him before I see him. I’m still looking at the shortbread, wondering if I’ve got enough for a piece, for a slice of hope, when something shifts in the air and I hear someone coming out of the kitchen at the back, see a black shape appear behind the counter. Then I look up. And everything changes.

I wasn’t looking for him. I wasn’t looking for anyone like that. Mum always told me – even if I didn’t tell myself – that I didn’t need a boyfriend. Not yet. But maybe it was like the key again. Serendipity; fate. Even though I didn’t believe in it.