Jack cradled it on his lap while he ate his veggie burger with one hand, Kate trying to be relaxed at the sight of the ketchup threatening to drip at any moment. The bloody robot was nearly as big as her son and now they were going to have to lug it round with them. What had she been thinking? She’d let her guilt get the better of her.
‘I’m going to call him Billy,’ Jack announced solemnly. ‘Billy, this is my mum.’
The robot bleeped on cue.
‘Pleased to meet you, Billy,’ Kate said, forking a piece of tomato.
‘Mum, where does the Queen live?’
‘Nearby, in Buckingham Palace.’
‘Billy and I would like to visit her.’
‘I’m sure she’d be fascinated to meet Billy, but I don’t think the Queen allows visitors.’
Jack thought about this. ‘Is it because I’m American?’
‘You’re half British.’
‘Which half ?’
‘The best half.’
‘Daddy said that most British people are stuck up and have dirty teeth, like that man over there.’
The man Jack was referring to, who did indeed have teeth that looked like they’d fall out in shock if a toothbrush ever went near them, looked angrily over, and Kate shrunk down in her plastic seat.
‘Jack, shush.’ Most British people were stuck up? That was the most hypocritical thing Vernon had ever come out with – he was the bloody snob in the family. He was the one who refused to fly economy because of the hoi polloi. He was the one who didn’t have a single acquaintance without an Ivy League education.
‘Are my teeth American?’
‘Yes.’
‘What about Billy’s?’
‘I don’t think he’s got teeth. But if he did, they’d be made in China like the rest of him.’
‘Mum, what do robots eat?’
She grabbed one of his french fries and held it up. ‘Microchips?’
They both giggled, and the man with the mossy teeth gave them an equally dirty look.
‘Come on, we ought to get going. I’m tired and I need a bath.’
‘Are we going back to the hotel?’
‘Yup.’
‘Mum.’
‘Yes?’
‘I don’t have to have a bath, do I?’
‘It depends how good you are between now and bedtime.’
They left the restaurant and joined the throng outside. With Kate holding her son’s hand, they edged their way through a crowd gathered around a juggler.
As they reached the kerb, she stuck her arm in the air as she spotted a taxi with its orange light on, but another man, a businessman with a phone stapled to his ear grabbed it first. The cab crawled away – traffic didn’t speed in this part of London, where gridlock had become something else for tourists to write home about – and she cursed under her breath. She looked around for another cab.
And saw a ghost.
‘Stephen!’
Life is full of moments like this – snap decisions, taken unconsciously, and when people ask, later, ‘Why did you do that?’ the only honest reply is, ‘I don’t know.’ The sole explanation she could think of was that, in that moment, she was flung back in time to a night when she thought she’d died and gone to Hell. When she’d walked in despair through the grounds of the Cold Research Unit and searched for her lover.
And if she’d seen him then, she would have called out his name, like she did now.
But he didn’t react.
The man on the other side of the road didn’t flinch or alter his expression. He just stood there, drinking from a Starbucks cup, staring into the middle-distance and frowning. He wore a grey pinstriped jacket and faded blue jeans. His hair needed a cut and flopped over the rim of his glasses. Staring at him, she recognised the same traces of age she’d noticed in the mirror: the crow’s feet, the lines at the side of the mouth that held a history of smiles, the lines on the forehead that mapped a legacy of sadness. When the wind ruffled his hair she noticed that it was receding, just a little. But it was definitely him. Even though it couldn’t have been.
Kate felt as if she’d just been punched in the solar plexus; as breathless as the night the Centre caught fire. The people and the traffic around her blurred. Only Stephen stayed in focus. He began to walk away, dropping his coffee cup into a rubbish bin, and moving off quickly.
‘Mum, are we looking for a taxi?’
‘Yes. I . . . come on.’
‘Where are we going?’
She didn’t answer. She escorted Jack across the road and followed the man who looked so like Stephen, but who couldn’t be Stephen, because he had been killed in the fire that night. He made his way up a quieter street towards Shaftesbury Avenue.
‘Mum, why are you walking so quickly?’
‘I’m in a hurry.’
Jack whined. ‘But I’m tired. My legs hurt.’
She should have stopped then, stuck to her original plan – a taxi back to the hotel, a hot bath, let Jack watch the kids’ channel on the hotel TV. This was insane. Stephen was dead. He’d been dead for sixteen years. This was just a guy who looked like him, a doppelgänger. Isn’t everyone supposed to have a double somewhere? Or maybe she was just imagining the likeness, fulfilling a fantasy that Stephen was still alive. She hadn’t seen him for sixteen years, so how could she say this man looked just like him?
But he did. She had carried Stephen’s face locked in her memory for a decade and a half. Whatever else she’d forgotten, she had never forgotten him. This guy did look exactly like him, and that was weird and worth investigating.
She felt compelled to follow him, despite her son’s complaints.
He turned the corner onto Shaftesbury Avenue. The faces of famous Hollywood actors gazed down at her from theatre billboards; Jack made some comment about ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’. The ghost, or lookalike, or whatever he was, turned right. Luckily, the crowds slowed him down so he didn’t get too far ahead even though she was having to drag along her son, plus his robot. He turned another corner, then another, and they found themselves on a quieter street lined with Chinese restaurants and shops flogging cheap bags and faux-silk.
‘Mum, Billy’s tired too,’ Jack said, waving his robot in the air, and just as she was about to respond, the man stopped and turned around.
He looked straight at her. ‘Why are you following me?’ he asked.
Kate felt like an idiot. This was an act of madness, the kind of thing Vernon accused her of. You need help. Some pills. You should see someone. Let me call Doctor Mackenzie. And she’d cry, get angry, protest – I’m sane. There’s nothing wrong with me. I don’t want any drugs. I don’t need them. It was the way he looked at her. It made her believe she was losing her mind.
God only knew what Vernon would have said about this.
The ghost/lookalike took a few wary steps towards her. He gazed curiously at her, then down at Jack and back at her.
‘Stephen?’ she said, holding her breath.
He shook his head. ‘You’ve