Paradise City (34 page)

‘Question Time.
’

‘Yes! That’s the one. Well, anyway, darling, I was just calling to check you’d remembered about Dominic.’

Esme flicks through all her recent conversations with her mother in a desperate attempt to fish the name out from a sea of pure blankness. She normally has a good memory but whenever she speaks to her mother, something numbs her synapses and makes Esme consistently incapable of remembering any of the salient details.

‘Errrm . . . remind me . . .’

‘Honestly, darling. You’ve got a brain like a sieve.’

‘I don’t actually, I’ve just had other things—’

‘You know, Hattie’s son. He’s just moved to London, wants to get into media . . .’

Who doesn’t, Esme thinks with silent resentment. Idiots. The only people who stood a chance in newspapers nowadays were fifteen-year-old bloggers who wore ironic spectacles and wrote ungrammatically about the postmodern semiotics of American sitcoms. They were also expected to work for free. The chances of bagging a staff job, with an actual, real-life salary, were roughly equivalent to the chances of winning the lottery without buying a ticket.

‘. . . and so I told her, “But he must meet Esme. She’s sure to be able to introduce him to all sorts of people who might help.” And Hattie was thrilled to bits and told Dominic to call me, which he did and I must say, Esme, he’s a terribly polite young man, really quite charming. He went to Oxford, you know? Read PPE like all the top-level people do these days . . .’

Esme lets her mother burble on. It’s a talent, really, how Lilian manages to imbue absolutely everything she says with a sense of disappointment in her own daughter’s life choices.

‘. . . and of course Hattie’s never got over it, not really.’

‘Over what?’

‘Don’t you listen to
anything
I say, Esme? She’s never got over her eldest marrying—’ Lilian dips her voice to a low, suggestive whisper. ‘A black woman.’

‘
Mum!
’

‘
I know, I know, darling. I dare say you think I’m very fuddy-duddy. You can’t say anything these days without someone accusing you of racism.’

Esme closes her eyes. She’s passed the point of upbraiding her mother for her casually discriminatory comments. She used to challenge Lilian all the time when she was still living at home, believing with the naïve optimism of an idealistic teenager that these were attitudes that needed to be railed against and that it was only by getting people to change how they thought, by rebelling against their inherent ignorance, that the world would eventually spin on a more equitable axis.

She’d studied the civil rights movement for History A level and had never forgotten the picture of a bespectacled black girl, back straight, dressed in a spotlessly pressed white dress, walking to school on the first day of non-segregated education, pursued by angry-faced women shouting abuse in her wake.

When she first saw the photo, Esme had been struck by the quiet dignity of the girl at the centre. She had looked at the flat straight line of the girl’s mouth and the shielded quality of her eyes and Esme had wondered if the resignation on her face reflected the fact that the girl had grown to accept the fundamental ugliness of life so that it simply didn’t surprise her any more. For Esme, the fact that this girl was so stoic, walking to school in her white dress, her books held close to her chest, had somehow been more upsetting than if the camera had caught her face twisted in furious retaliation, giving back as good as she got.

She wonders, briefly, what has happened to the subjects of that photo. It might be interesting to track them down for a ‘Where are they now?’ type feature, she thinks, and she makes a mental note to speak to Dave about it.

On the other end of the line, her mother is still talking.

‘. . . so we thought Daylesford Organic would be most convenient.’

‘Daylesford?’

‘Yes, darling. He’s staying with his godmother near Sloane Square and I thought he might not know his way around London—’

A snaking rope of irritation wraps itself around Esme’s chest. Why on earth would a grown man not be able to find his way around London? Was he mentally deficient? Why should she be the one who has to go out of her way on a Sunday morning, giving up a precious portion of her weekend to traipse across the city, to do a favour for some posh dimwit she’d never even met before? But she doesn’t say anything. This is the way conversations with her mother tend to go – unspoken resentments flowing into each other until they pollute every sentiment like a pool of spreading petrol.

‘Right. Yes. I remember.’ Esme glances at her alarm clock. It is nearly 11 a.m. ‘What time . . . ?’

‘Lunchtime.’ A pointed pause. ‘1p.m. Try not to be late. Hattie says he’s terribly busy . . .’

‘If he’s so busy why does he want a job in media?’ Esme mutters under her breath.

‘Sorry, I didn’t quite catch . . .’

‘Don’t worry. Nothing important. I’d better get going then.’

‘Yes, darling, of course. I hope you have fun. Let me know how you get on.’

‘OK, Mum. Bye.’

She can hear the clipped tone of her voice as she ends the call and hates herself for it. She pushes back the duvet, gets out of bed and tramples across the detritus of half-folded newsprint on the carpet. In the shower, she wonders if it is finally warm enough for her to wear a skirt without the black opaque tights that have been her faithful friend throughout winter and spring. She decides it probably is if she takes a woollen jumper along with her. It’s meant to be summer, but you wouldn’t know it. The magazines are constantly talking about the necessity of ‘layering’ and Esme has never got the knack of it without looking mismatched. The cardigans she flung over her shoulders in an attempt to embody a nonchalant Parisian style ended up looking lumpen and threadbare. The scarves she wanted to drape round her neck with casual abandon never seemed to sit in the right way and the flowery tea dresses teamed with chunky-knit leggings that were meant to be charmingly kooky were, instead, ill-fitting and old-ladyish.

She thinks she should risk the skirt. She has an entirely illogical theory that, if you dress for summer, it will eventually come. She reaches for the disposable razor in the soap dish and tries to shave her legs while standing up, doing a precarious flamingo-style balancing act to reach her ankles. The water starts to run cool before she finishes the second knee-cap. Oh well, Esme thinks as she turns the shower off, it’s not as if anyone will notice.

By the time she puts on a denim skirt, looks at her pale legs sprayed with goose-bumps in the full-length mirror, scowls, decides against it and tries to cobble together an entirely different outfit where everything goes together and doesn’t make it look like she’s tried too hard while simultaneously trying just hard enough, Esme is running twenty minutes late.

She takes the stairs two at a time, closes the front door without double-locking – this in spite of the stringent terms of her contents insurance policy which she had gone for purely because it had been the cheapest available according to a price comparison website that advertised itself using a charmless puppet meerkat speaking in an Eastern European accent for undisclosed reasons.

It is one of those London days when the grimy ribcage of the city seems to lift and expand. The drizzle-dampened morning has given way to a spot of blue sky and the half-hearted promise of sunshine. Shallow puddles have formed in the gaps created by irregular paving stones. The smeary windows of double-decker buses reflect an unspooling of green-leaved trees. There is a sense of a collective pent-up breath being let out, of Londoners tentatively allowing themselves to believe the weather is changing for the better. Esme walks briskly, looking up at the tops of buildings, to the unexpected details found where brickwork meets cloud: carved pillars, delicate balconies, circular windows and stained glass. She is caught between enjoying the gentle beauty of the moment and guiltily wondering if she should take a picture to post on social networks, thereby upping her follower count and branding herself more effectively. When exactly had real experience been trumped by fabricated identity? When did savouring the moment become secondary to capturing it? Why did the present’s natural light need to be stained by the application of computer-generated filters designed to evoke nostalgia? It all seemed so two-dimensional, so tritely self-conscious. A friend of Esme’s had once compared a beautiful view to a screensaver. Now everyone was doing it.

She gets the tube from Goldhawk Road and attempts to read the paper as the train judders hesitantly along the track, stopping and starting as if it can’t make up its mind whether it wants to go forwards or backwards. Eventually, it eases into Hammersmith and Esme stuffs the
Tribune
into her handbag and crosses over the giant roundabout to the District Line, ducking to avoid the pigeons who fly straight at her head, pointy beaks aimed directly at her eye-level.

She is aware of a rising level of stress – at her lateness, at the fact that she’d rather be doing almost anything else with her weekend than this, at the realisation that she should have just said no rather than allowing her mother to browbeat her into things as usual. She has to stop herself muttering under her breath at the mindless pedestrians lumbering like oxen and not seeming to realise she’s in a hurry. By the time she is safely ensconced in a tube that will take her directly to Sloane Square, she is breaking out in a sweat. It is warmer than she had thought after all. She takes off her jacket, unwittingly elbowing a man with a pierced lip who grunts loudly. Esme shoots him a look, puts her handbag on her lap and then takes out the paper, feeling a wash of calm as she sees her name again in black-and-white on the page in front of her. The byline restores her equilibrium. It is confirmation that she exists. It is the reason Hattie’s son – whatever his name is – wants to meet her. In his eyes, she is someone important. She has made it, in some small way. Despite her mother never believing in her, despite her father being a drunk, despite all of that, she has achieved something of her own and, secretly, this makes her proud.

At secondary school, which Esme hated, there had been a girl called Natalie Kerrins who had taken an instant and unexplained dislike to her. Natalie wore her glossy brown hair in a high ponytail, the centre parting perfectly straight. She had pierced ears and wore small gold studs in each lobe and she would twiddle with them coquettishly during lessons, breaking off now and then to flick her ponytail round her shoulder, pinch the tip of it between her thumb and finger and lift it up to eye-level so that she could better examine her split ends. At the age of twelve, this had struck Esme as the height of sophistication. It was the kind of thing you’d imagine a cheerleader doing in those Sweet Valley High paperbacks, the ones with the sickly-sweet bubblegum-pink covers and the broken spines, which were the only books any girl ever read from the school library.

Natalie was the first girl in her class to get a perm and her lovely straight hair turned into a morass of crisp curls overnight. She thought she looked like Kylie Minogue, but no one was brave enough to tell her she didn’t. Esme never spoke to her – she wouldn’t dare. Esme, who was bad at games and who wore her rucksack strapped over two shoulders on the first day of school because she didn’t know any better, was intuitively aware that she existed on the bottom rung of the adolescent pecking order. Natalie, with her permed hair and gold studs, was at the top.

Esme was adept at staying out of Natalie’s way. As the years went by, Esme treated her with a mixture of apprehension and disdain, because it was easy to mask how much you wanted to be like someone if you pretended they were beneath your contempt. They might quite easily never have spoken, were it not for the GCSE art exhibition in which Esme’s self-portrait in a Cubist style had been hung prominently on the walls in the corridor leading up to the assembly hall. The painting, executed painstakingly by Esme in shades of brown as a homage to Georges Braque, had been gratifyingly singled out by her art teacher for its ‘texture and depth’.

But when Natalie saw it hanging on the wall on her way to assembly one morning, she laughed and turned to her gaggle of friends.

‘Is that meant to be Esme Reade?’ she asked, loud enough for everyone going into assembly to hear, including Esme, who happened to be walking past. ‘She fancies herself, doesn’t she?’

And Esme, seized with an unfamiliar courage, had stopped and asked her what she meant by that. Natalie, surprised that this meek, inconsequential person had stood up to her, took a moment to respond. Then she said the words that Esme had never forgotten in all the years that followed: ‘No offence, yeah? But you should take a good, hard look at yourself. You think you’re so much better than everyone else. You’re not.’

Natalie flicked her ponytail to one side, sending a spray of Impulse into the surrounding atmosphere. Esme watched helplessly as Natalie turned to walk towards the assembly hall, clutching her pink lever-arch file close to the pert breasts that were the envy of half the school. As she strutted away, followed by her coterie, Esme heard her parting shot: ‘You’re nothing.’

She hadn’t gone to assembly that day. Instead, Esme had spent it in the girls’ toilets, sobbing silently into a balled-up piece of tissue. She remembers it so clearly because the only way she had been able to stop crying was by telling herself that she would become so hugely successful that her very existence on the planet would show Natalie Kerrins how wrong she had been. It sounds silly now, but sometimes Esme honestly believes that the entirety of her ambition, the motivation for all her hard work and effort thus far, has stemmed from that single, pinpricked moment in time.