Don't Get Me Wrong (30 page)

Kim put out her hand and touched Otis's smooth brown arm. It was hard to stay upright. So hard to keep her eyes open. She said, very slowly, the words almost too heavy to speak, “We're going to have our holiday. We're going to go on boat rides and eat ice cream and look at all the things that your mummy wanted to see. All the things she dreamed of before she died. And then we'll go home. And when we get back I'll ring Harry and ask if we can see him. OK?”

There was still a look of doubt in his eyes.

“I promise,” said Kim. “Do you hear me? I promise.”

And then, finally, Otis smiled.

2014

H
e was tall and black, maybe sixteen or seventeen, with that air of calm that athletes have. All the stress worked out. Happy in his skin. He had a sports bag slung over one shoulder. When he nodded at her, Kim smiled, but she was puzzled. Who was he? Did she know him?

“He's doing all right, you know,” he said. “Otis. I watch out for him.”

“Oh,” she said, glancing at the door of Tommy's Gym across the street. “You mean the boxing.”

“It took him a while. It was like he needed permission. But he's OK now.”

“He enjoys it,” said Kim.

“Harry said you weren't sure. To begin with.”

It gave her a shock to hear Harry's name spoken so casually. She still expected a rush of hellfire whenever he was mentioned. “I thought he'd end up with a broken nose.”

He laughed.

Kim said, “Are you Leon?”

He looked astonished. “Me? No.”

“Sorry,” said Kim. “I just heard Harry talk about someone called Leon.”

“He's fifty. Sixty. I don't know. I'm Ethan.”

“I'm Kim.”

“I know.”

Kim felt as if she'd drifted onto a film set where everyone except her knew what was going on.

Ethan smiled. “You're his aunt, right?”

Kim nodded.

“Work in a paint shop.”

She stared.

“Otis talks a lot. Tells me stuff all the time.” He grinned. “You'd better watch out. I know all your secrets.”

Kim, who had become completely unused to the kind of everyday conversations that other people have all the time, cringed with embarrassment. “I'd better go in. The kids' class must be over by now.”

“Where's Harry?”

“Working.”

“You know he saved my life,” said Ethan, shifting his bag higher onto his shoulder.

Kim waited, expecting some kind of offhand quip.

“Seriously,” said Ethan. “When I was a kid. He looked out for me.” He nodded. “That's why I'm looking out for Otis. I'll make sure he's OK. It's like karma, you know? What goes around comes around.”

Kim frowned. Harry saved his life? How? But Ethan had raised his hand in farewell and was walking away from her down the street.

•  •  •

It hadn't been easy seeing Harry again. The first meeting, soon after they got back from Monterey, was excruciating. But Otis didn't seem to notice the tension. The minute he saw Harry, his whole body came alive. His eyes shone. He fizzed, all smiles, for the next hour while Kim and Harry limped through polite conversation, gratefully stopping whenever Otis interrupted.

“How's Damaris?”

“She's fine.”

“Enjoying Melbourne?”

She has a new boyfriend, thought Kim. Called Michael—another A & E doctor, from Sydney.

“Yes.”

“Harry, can we go to the park?” Otis looked up at him, beaming.

“Maybe,” said Harry. “If Kim says we can.”

They were back in Izzie's flat in Sydenham. (She still refused to let Kim pay rent. “I'm not paying any to Hannah,” she said. “So why should you pay any to me?” Which, of course, made no sense at all.) It seemed, in some strange kind of way, as if they'd never been away, as if the year in Newcastle had never happened.

“If you want to,” said Kim.

Otis leapt to his feet.

“Let Harry finish his coffee first.”

“It's OK,” said Harry. “We can go now. I don't mind. Are you coming?”

But Kim shook her head. “I've got stuff to do.”

The minute she heard the front door slam, Kim slumped back into her chair, squashed, like a mess of roadkill. It was all so
much worse than she'd expected. Harry was different. It was as if he'd been taken over by aliens. When she first saw him, standing on the doorstep, there had been a rush of recognition. Dark skin, dark eyes, black curly hair—the years fell away, and she was thirteen again, flustered and furious. But after that nothing was the same. He was courteous, careful, and polite. No jokes. No teasing. It was as if something had sucked out all his personality and left behind a flat 2-D image, bland and glossy, like a picture in a shopping catalog. Otis still made him smile. But the rest of the time, he didn't seem like Harry at all—just a man in his midthirties with his mind elsewhere.

It's like he doesn't even see me, thought Kim. It makes me wonder if I exist. Maybe it's me who's been taken over by aliens.

“What can you expect?” said Damaris on the phone from Melbourne. “You cut off all contact for months. I don't expect he likes you very much.”

“I thought you were on my side.”

“I am,” said Damaris. “Always. But I still think you were wrong.”

Sometimes, in the early hours, Kim stared into the darkness wondering whether she should talk to Harry and try to explain. I went mad for a while. I made you the focus of my grief. I'm sorry. But as daylight returned, she lost courage. They had a fragile truce. It seemed better not to stir up the past.

Harry made it very clear that he didn't want to do anything that might disrupt Kim's normal routine. He usually came round on Saturdays. In the morning, he took Otis to the kids' class at the boxing gym. In the afternoon they went to the Science Museum, or a West End matinée, or the London Aquarium.

To begin with, Kim was grateful. Stan, who owned the hardware shop where she worked—in Peckham, sandwiched between a takeaway selling fried chicken and a small grocer's that smelt of cumin and garam masala—expected her to be there most weekends, and finding child care for Otis on a Saturday had been almost impossible.

“Paint?” said her mother. “You're selling
paint
?”

“It's as close to housing as I can get in this market,” said Kim.

That had been the deal she made with herself in Monterey, after all. Come home, back to London. Get a job that fits round school hours. Spend time with Otis. And it wasn't all bad at the hardware shop. They'd even let her mix half a liter of emulsion the other day.

But gradually, as the weeks passed, she was surprised—and irritated—to find herself feeling left out. Harry had somehow made it obvious that he didn't expect her to get involved in what he and Otis were doing. But she wished sometimes that he would suggest an outing they could all enjoy together.

Although she didn't want to go out in the Porsche. Which he still drove. Ostentatiously.

Otis, in Harry's company, became almost chatty. Sometimes Harry came round on a Sunday afternoon. If it was raining, or Otis had a cold, the two of them took over the living room—building complicated models of spaceships from Legos, or towers out of playing cards—and Kim, catching up with emails on her laptop at the kitchen table, eavesdropped as they discussed Formula 1, or how planes fly, or what kind of bees make honey. Once she heard someone picking out chords on the guitar. She thought of Eva and sat for a moment, staring into space.

Money was still an issue. Whenever Harry was around, she was tense all the time, waiting for him to seize an opportunity to show off his extreme wealth. She managed to close her eyes to the cost of theater tickets and meals out at pizza restaurants. Harry always asked her permission beforehand, and she reasoned that she couldn't really expect them to do nothing but wander round London's cold and rainy streets.

But once he went too far. Otis kept asking if it was going to snow and didn't seem happy with any of their explanations. As soon as Otis was out of earshot, Harry said, “I could always take him skiing. At Easter. Kids love it. Just a week somewhere.”

“No,” she said.

She turned her back so that he couldn't see how that panicked her, the sudden vision of Otis falling down into a crevasse, buried by an avalanche of cold, suffocating snow.

Harry never mentioned it again.

He made her uncomfortable. She could see that he was behaving with tact and consideration—sensitive to her feelings, careful not to make excessive demands—and she hated it. It was like sitting on an unexploded bomb. Were these her rules or his? Who'd made them up? What were the penalties? Most of the time, the only thing Kim could be completely sure about in Harry's company was that she would end up feeling anxious and confused. She'd waste hours after he left going over and over what he'd said and how he'd said it, as if she'd watched a complicated film in a foreign language and couldn't quite be sure of the plot.

This annoyed her. She hardly talked to him and spent no time with him. But he had somehow wound himself back into her life like Japanese knotweed.

“I think you're doing really well,” said Izzie, back from Liverpool for the weekend. She'd taken pictures on her phone—Hannah's flat, the Cavern Club where the Beatles first played, Penny Lane, Strawberry Field, Hannah herself.

“You know,” said Kim, “she could be a model.”

“Six foot one and an Afro,” said Izzie. “You can't really miss her.”

“How's the sitcom going?”

“It's gone,” said Izzie. “The BBC turned it down. They said the sit- bit was all right. But not the -com.”

“Oh, Iz,” said Kim sadly. “And you worked so hard.”

“I think it was the subject matter. People always say you should write about what you know. But I think you should write about what you don't know. There's more chance of making yourself laugh.”

“So what now?”

“There's always stand-up.” She shrugged. “I'll have just to work on some new material. Something deeply interesting so that the nation takes me to its heart. I'd quite like to be a national treasure. Like Stephen Fry. Or Judi Dench. So they write nice things about me in the
Daily Mail
.”

“It's still your flat, you know. You can chuck us out anytime.”

“Because you secretly want to live with Harry.”

Kim shot her an evil look.

Izzie laughed. “I meant what I said. I think you're doing really well. Both of you. Working really hard to make Otis happy.” She stood up, stretching her arms above her head. “You've mellowed in your old age. Just like you always wanted. You used to be all fire and brimstone. And now you're more like a radiator.”

Kim's smile was a little taut. She wasn't sure she liked being compared to central heating.

•  •  •

One Tuesday evening at the beginning of June, Kim was just settling down to watch
Working Girl—
she'd found the DVD in an Oxfam shop and had now seen it so many times that she knew most of Melanie Griffith's lines off by heart—when the doorbell rang. As usual, her heart sank. She was slightly more sociable these days. Otis—happy, outgoing, and relaxed—had made so many new friends that Kim had to grit her teeth and talk to their parents. But she still preferred an evening alone in front of the TV. Her job at the hardware store meant she had to be nice to people all day—flirtatious painters in white overalls, taciturn builders covered in a thin layer of plaster dust, anxious house owners with bruised thumbs. She had been promoted to assistant manager, so she could sometimes delegate the jobs she really hated, like serving customers. But she still got home in the evening with her face aching from the effort of smiling all day.

Clattering down the stairs to the main front door, Kim ran through the possibilities. One of the parents from school? Someone collecting for charity? Or maybe a delivery for the flat below.