‘Aren’t you coming?’
‘No.’ She shrugs off my hand and I feel a sharp slap of rejection. ‘Go home,’ she says. ‘I’m staying here.’ And she moves away, to where he’s waiting for her. For a moment I watch her go before I turn back through the crowds alone.
The floorboards are bare except for a large, colourful rug, the shelves full of paperback books. Somewhere, down the hall, a crackling record plays a song by a man with a scratchy, rasping voice. I sit on the sofa alone, twisting my fingers together, wishing I hadn’t come. Above my head, occasional thumps and dragging sounds are interrupted by intermittent swearing: the man who had opened the door to me three minutes ago had clearly forgotten I was coming. ‘Won’t be long,’ he shouts, and I go to the bay window to look out at the street.
This part of New Cross is different from mine. The neat terraced houses have freshly painted front doors in muted shades of green or blue or grey; little olive trees stand neatly outside them in terracotta pots. Down the road a pub that had once been dilapidated for years has tables and hanging baskets out front, where couples drink beer in the sunshine, their babies asleep in expensive buggies. I turn back to the room and look around me, taking in the books, the prints on the walls, the stylish furniture and rugs – the sort of place I’d once imagined myself living, in fact. And I think about that old me as if of a stranger, so certain I’d been that the world would be mine for the taking one day.
At that moment a boy of about five walks into the room. He’s mixed race and very lovely looking with a cloud of light brown Afro hair and deep blue eyes. He’s gazing at me very seriously, as if unsure whether I’m real or not. ‘Hi there,’ I say after a silence, just as the man returns, carrying with effort a cot.
‘Here you go,’ he says, smiling. ‘Sorry about that.’ He puts his hand on the boy’s head and they watch me scrabble about in my bag for my purse.
‘Thirty, was it?’ I ask.
He nods and takes the money I hand him. ‘Cheers. You want me to dismantle it to put in your car, or do you have a van or something?’ It’s only then that I realize – and the stupidity of it leaves me gaping at him with embarrassment – I had entirely forgotten to think about how I’d get it home.
The child and his father look back at me expectantly. Down the hall, the record comes to an end. ‘I don’t have a car,’ I admit.
He looks at me in surprise, his gaze dropping to my seven-month bump. ‘Were you going to carry it home on your back?’
And so, several minutes later, despite my many protestations, I find myself sat between the boy, whose name I learn is Stan, and the man who tells me he’s called James, in the front seat of a battered pickup truck, being driven home with the cot sliding and rattling behind us. I’m overcome with embarrassment.
‘Stop apologizing,’ James says. ‘It’s no trouble, really.’
I glance sideways at him. He’s nice enough looking, with very black skin and an attractive, open face, but though he’s in his thirties and well spoken, he’s wearing a bizarre assortment of clothes: a neon orange jumper with army trousers and paint-splattered boots, his hair cut in peroxide blond tufts. He looks like a student, or a homeless person, I think. During the short drive he’s never quiet or still, whistling between his teeth, commenting on other people’s driving, asking me questions about when I’m due, what I do, where I’m from, all the while ruffling his son’s hair, thumping the horn or drumming his fingers against the steering wheel. I can’t think of anything to say to him. He’s exhausting and I’m relieved when we reach my building at last.
He jumps out and starts unloading the cot on to the pavement. ‘You got someone to help you carry it in?’ he asks. ‘Which floor do you live on?’
I shrug. ‘It’s OK. I can manage.’
He looks at me and I see it dawn on him that there’s no one to help. ‘Don’t be silly,’ he says. ‘I’ll give you a hand.’
And I feel hemmed in by his persistence, his insistence on helping me. I wish he would leave the cot and me alone here on the street. But up the three flights of stairs he follows me, carrying the cot awkwardly, swearing under his breath each time he bangs it against his shin, the little boy trailing after us.
When I open the door to my flat, the threadbare carpet, the old, ugly furniture and the dirty paintwork look suddenly much worse than they did half an hour before. ‘Put it anywhere,’ I say. He hoists it through into the lounge, knocking a shelf and sending its contents scattering, magazines and old bills and a dozen or so loose pages of drawings falling at our feet. I kneel down, hurriedly grabbing at the pictures and stuffing them back into the folder. But it’s too late: he plucks one from where it landed on his foot and begins examining it. ‘These yours?’ he asks, and I feel my face begin to burn, so painful is it to have this stranger – anyone at all – look at my sketches; my inky landscapes peopled by their spindly ghosts.
I hold out my hand to take it from him, but he’s still engrossed. ‘This is actually really good,’ he says slowly, and then he looks at me, his expression different now, curious, reassessing. ‘Do you paint too, or just draw?’ he asks, ‘Because I—’
But I snatch the drawing from his hand. ‘No, I don’t do anything,’ I say, stuffing it back into the folder and moving away.
There’s a brief, surprised silence. I look at the door.
‘Right,’ he says stiffly. ‘Sorry,’ and he takes his son’s hand and starts to leave.
‘Thanks for the cot,’ I manage to mumble when they reach the door, and he smiles again his easy smile.
‘No problem.’ It’s a nice smile, and for a second or two I allow myself to return it, until Connor’s face flashes across my mind and I turn away with a thumping heart, busying myself with the scattered papers while they let themselves out, closing the door behind them.
As my belly grows I find myself thinking increasingly of my mum. I wonder what she felt like being pregnant with me, whether she felt as scared as I do, whether she loved me right away. She was only seventeen when I was born and for as long as I can remember we fought and bickered like sisters. I was six when my dad walked out and I blamed her for his leaving. And yet, in my heart, I always knew we loved each other, a part of me understanding that the passion with which we hurt each other came from something strong enough to withstand the blows we inflicted. Looking back, I guess I always felt that we would have time to work things out eventually, not imagining what was to come; that we would one day have to cut all ties and never speak again.
When I first came to London and lived with Uncle Geoff I would hear him sometimes on the phone to her, passing on news of how I was doing. Sometimes, when he thought I was out of earshot, I would hear him asking her to talk to me, but she never would and I never picked up the phone myself. I don’t blame her for cutting me off, because I left her no choice, not really. If I’d stayed she would have had to have done something, told someone about what happened that night, so by turning her back she was protecting me in a way. And I think, now, that by confessing to her, I was looking for her to force an end to it all – to put a stop to Connor and me.
And still I dream about Heather. Night after night my sleeping mind replays what happened between us in Fremton. I see us at the quarry, all of us: Heather and me, Connor and Niall, Rabbit and Boyo and Tully and the rest. Even the same music is playing on the car stereo and I see again the sinking sun as it stains the quarry’s water red and gold. In the small hours when I wake, breathless and panicky after reliving it all again, I try to make sense of Heather’s behaviour when she visited me. How she’d acted as though nothing had happened back then, as though we were just old