Don't Get Me Wrong (14 page)

Sometimes when her mother was ranting down the phone from the South of France, Kim had fantasies of pretending the flat was on fire, or there was a burst water main, or a tiger had escaped from London Zoo and was roaming Peckham Rye looking for lunch. Of course, being an independent twenty-two-year-old with a job and a shared bedsit in New Cross (even if she wasn't living there and was, instead, spending the majority of her time in a flat paid for by Harry), it should have been easy to say to her mother, Look, I'm not enjoying this conversation, it's not getting us anywhere, and I think the time has come for us to talk to each other in a more rational and grown-up manner. Instead, because Grace always made her feel about five years old, Kim gripped the receiver tightly and prayed for it all to be over as quickly as possible. “Otis is fine, Mum.”

“Poor little Otis is not fine. He doesn't have a father. I know it's very modern to pretend that women can manage all on their own, but there's nothing wrong with a bit of financial support. I should know. The
years
I had to manage on a pittance.”

“But Harry is—”

“If I can't be there myself, and I can't—I simply can't—I am relying on you to get this situation under control. As I've said before, they clearly adore each other. They have a child together. There really is no reason why this whole unsatisfactory situation shouldn't be cleared up as quickly as possible. All it needs, Kim, is a little imagination. A little finesse. A little creative thought. And I should have imagined, if only for your sister's sake, that you would have wanted to put just a tiny bit of effort into thinking how this could be achieved.”

“But, Mum, I can't—”

“There's no such word as ‘can't.' That's just negative thinking. All the great men in the world had dreams that people said were impossible. Martin Luther King. Laurence Olivier. Marlon Brando. Hitchcock himself. Focus on the goal, and go for it. If I were in London, I'd do it myself. I'd ring Harry. I'd say to him, Look, this has to stop. We can't all carry on like this. Enough is enough. But my hands are tied. I'm here, with Jean-Marc, in a Mediterranean villa miles from England. There's nothing I can do. So it has to be you, Kim. It has to be you.”

“But—”

“You can't just sit around hoping this nightmare situation will resolve itself. Because what you'll discover, as you get older, is that men are very shallow. They lose interest. Something to do with testosterone. Believe me, I've seen it happen many times.
One minute they're excited, and the next it's all disappeared. So act now before it's too late. If you don't, you'll wake up one day and find he's got a job in New York or decided he's in love with another woman. That's what happens. Men are like kites. You think you've got them under control, and then suddenly they've flown off and there's no way you're ever going to catch them. Kim? Kim? Are you listening?”

•  •  •

Jake, with his wide-ranging knowledge on a huge number of subjects, was able to explain anything she didn't understand. It could be Mayan art, Miles Davis, or the offside rule—Jake had the facts at his fingertips.

He liked teaching her. Now that they were finally living together in Jake's flat, he seemed less diffident. You could almost say, thought Kim, that he's quite domineering.

But then, she thought, I have so much to learn.

One evening in September, Kim was watching the TV news. Long queues had formed outside branches of Northern Rock all over the UK. Since hearing about an emergency loan from the Bank of England, customers were frightened the bank was going under. They wanted their money back.

“So should they be worried?” said Kim. Jake was sitting on a hard dining room chair, texting. Sometimes, up against a publication deadline, he wore a silver earpiece so that he never missed a call. It gave him a slightly robotic air, like a bouncer or a Cyberman.

“What?” he said, thumbs busy.

“All those people queuing for their money.”

Jake gave his usual secretive smile. “Not according to the chairman of the Treasury Select Committee.”

“And is he right?”

“The British Bankers' Association says that Northern Rock is sound.”

Kim, feeling increasingly like a small child whose ice lolly is melting, said, “But why is it happening?”

Jake looked thoughtful. “I'm not sure how much you know.”

“Nothing, really.”

Jake nodded. “It's the global money markets.”

Kim waited for more.

“The international perspective,” said Jake. “Quite complicated, really.”

“Oh,” said Kim.

•  •  •

“Sometimes I worry my standards are too high.”

Damaris looked exhausted. She'd had a new haircut, a close crop that showed off the beautiful shape of her head. But it had also left her looking naked and defenseless. Christine was even more anxious than usual. When Kim called round to the house in Nunhead for a cup of tea—ending up staying for roast chicken and a trifle—Christine kept asking if she thought Damaris was working too hard.

“I think medics have to.”

Christine shook her head. “She's nothing but bones. When are you next seeing her? I've made her bread pudding and ginger cake.”

Kim had a horrible suspicion that Christine's food parcels
ended up in a communal kitchen at the hospital, torn open by anyone who happened to be passing and reduced to a pile of crumbs in a single night shift.

It was Sunday afternoon, and they were sitting on a patch of grass in the ornamental gardens on Peckham Rye. All around them was a random jumble of Londoners—mothers with buggies, dog walkers, joggers, a man dressed in white practicing Tai Chi, and an elderly woman in Wellington boots and a woolly hat chatting to herself while she picked up litter. Kim was always faintly astonished to find formal avenues and pergolas in the middle of a wild expanse of common land in southeast London. But then Peckham Rye was full of secrets. The poet William Blake saw angels there.

“There's nothing wrong with high standards.”

Damaris looked woebegone. “But it's almost like I feel someone has to be perfect before I'll even go out for a drink with him. And perfect people don't exist.”

Jake's pretty perfect, thought Kim, leaning back on her hands, feeling the warmth of the late September sun on her face. Busy, obviously. Sometimes I feel I have to make an appointment to see him. But this is what happens when you choose a partner whose career is a vocation. “What about that tall one? The one I met in the pub on your friend's birthday?”

Damaris pulled a face. “He's got hairy earlobes. I keep wondering if all his other smooth bits are hairy, too. And nobody wants pictures like that in their head.”

“You just haven't met the right person yet.”

“Or maybe I have and I didn't realize it. You know, some people end up with boys they were at school with.”

Kim pulled a face. “Not the boys we were at school with.”

“Just imagine—your ideal man right under your nose but you're too stupid to see it.” Damaris sighed and lay down, closing her eyes. “There's only one solution. Lonely hearts online.”

“Or you could go to the South of France,” said Kim, “and trail up and down the promenade looking for anyone who looks rich enough to take you out to lunch.”

Damaris laughed. Kim lay down next to her, and for a while they were silent, listening to the sounds of Sunday on the Rye. Damaris said, “What about Eva?”

“What about her?”

“Is she going out with anyone?”

Kim frowned. “She doesn't seem to need anyone. She's got a lot of friends, but no one special. She says she's got Otis now. He's the love of her life.”

“Do you think she misses Harry?”

Kim felt a little tug of guilt. It seemed all wrong, Eva and Otis in a flat in south London, Harry on the other side of the world in an apartment in Manhattan. He'd been gone for six months now. A snap decision, Eva had said. A good career move. But sometimes Kim wondered if it was all her fault. Perhaps, in the end, all her carping and criticism had driven him away. And while she was still convinced that Eva was too good for Harry, did she really have the right to control her sister's life? “She never mentions him.”

Damaris turned her head and opened her eyes. “Really?”

Kim nodded.

“I always thought they'd end up together.”

I know, thought Kim. We all did.

Damaris turned back to the sun. “This is fatal, lying here. I'm going to end up falling asleep.”

“I think you're allowed to, the hours you work.”

Damaris smiled. “Why don't we go and visit him in New York? See what he's getting up to?”

Kim screwed up her eyes very tight. No, she thought. I don't want to do that at all.

•  •  •

“One minute you're enjoying Saturday night with your girlfriend—someone you've known for years, and you've always had a laugh, told each other everything, felt exactly the same way about
Eat, Pray, Love
, and talked about whether you can ever be truly comfortable in a thong. And then suddenly there he is. Her new boyfriend. He's what my nan would call a gowk. A dork. A complete idiot. You know what I mean, don't you, pet? The woman in the front row. I bet your best friend's going out with someone just like that. She is? The woman sitting next to you? But you hadn't told her. Ah. Oh dear. You're in for a fun night. So she introduces you to this man, and he's not even good-looking—hair sticking out all over his head and mad, staring eyes like a trendy owl—and you're meant to simper and say, Oh, how nice to meet you. But inside you're thinking, He looks like Gollum in a wig. Have you no standards? The weeks pass. He's still there on a Saturday night. But it gets worse. Now she's ringing you all times of the day and night so she can go on and on about how wonderful he is. And you think, My friend has turned into an alien. Then it hits you. She thinks he's the One. Oh shit. You can't let that happen. You just can't. So you do what
anyone does in a crisis. You google it. And there it is. ‘Twenty ways to get rid of your best friend's boyfriend.' One to five are quite straightforward. Lying about her past. Herpes. That kind of thing. But number six is extraordinary. And you think, Why not? Why not have a go? All you need is a chopstick and a maraschino cherry . . .”

•  •  •

At ten months, Otis had a huge enthusiasm for food. He always grabbed the spoon. Because of this, mealtimes usually ended up in a sticky chaos of puréed carrot and mashed banana halfway up the walls.

But Otis never looked round and cuddly, like other babies. He had long limbs, like a sprinter.

“I suppose he's going to be tall like your father,” said Grace to Eva on one of her brief, unwilling visits from the South of France. “He was always banging into chandeliers.”

No one mentioned Harry's height.

Otis had light brown skin, dark hair, and serious brown eyes. He seemed to analyze every new experience with the same thoughtful care. You could sit him on the floor with a toy he hadn't seen before, and he would turn it round and round in his hands, looking at it from different angles before testing its capabilities on the carpet. He seemed to experience the world as interesting but excessive. Loud noises, extreme weather, and extravagant displays of affection all made him frown, like an elderly colonel who catches sight of a young woman in a very short skirt and isn't sure whether to complain or applaud.

He very rarely cried. Most of the time, if there was something
he wanted, he just looked at Eva. They talked with their eyes.

“How did you know he was thirsty?” said Kim.

“I don't know. I just did.”

The atmosphere in the flat in Peckham Rye was calm and purposeful. Sunlight flooded through the great big windows. Kim, now living with Jake in the appalling chaos of his junk-shop flat, would visit at weekends and feel as if she'd blundered into a country church halfway through a service. She was welcome, of course. But she didn't quite fit in. She was the idiot in the wrong pew with the hymn book upside down.

But she loved spending time with her nephew. One Saturday afternoon in October, while Eva went out shopping, Kim and Izzie took Otis to a children's party—the first birthday of his little friend Ruby. In the street outside, they hesitated. Noise rushed out from behind the closed front door like a howling wind—screaming, crying, bashing and banging, squeaking toys, singing frogs, and battery-operated sirens. Ushered in by a harassed woman with a dribble of sick on her shoulder, they stood in the hallway, stunned. It was like all seven floors of a West End toy shop crammed into one tiny space.

Otis, still in his buggy, stared. When he looked up, Kim burst out laughing. You could see it, written all over his face. WTF?

“I didn't realize babies were so funny,” said Kim later as she and Izzie waited at the bus stop. Kim was heading for Stockwell. Izzie was going back to the dingy bedsit in New Cross. Kim, as usual, felt guilty. Izzie had been lured to London under false pretenses. She had imagined
Friends—
Rachel and Monica in Manhattan. What she'd got instead was solitude in south London.

“I don't think all babies are funny,” said Izzie. “I think Otis is a star.”

Kim beamed. “Eva always says that babies are complete souls. You guide them through life, but you can't change their characters. I used to think it was all hippie nonsense.” Or, she thought, a way of making sure that no one spent too much time thinking about Otis's father. “But now I wonder if she's right. Otis has always been analytical. It's just the way he's made.” She was about to explain that she thought Otis was probably very musical, too, which explained his sensitivity to anything being played out of tune, when she realized that Izzie was staring into the middle distance with an expression of extreme anxiety. For a moment, she wondered if Izzie was transfixed by the Rottweiler with a studded collar that was leering at them from the opposite side of the road. But Izzie wasn't looking at anything in particular. She was lost in thought. “I've got something to tell you.”