The Family Upstairs Read online

  ‘I’m calling an ambulance,’ she says to Michael whose eyes are staring blindly into nothingness. ‘Just keep breathing. Keep breathing. I’m calling them.’

  She pulls her phone from her bag with shaking fingers, switches it on and is about to press the first digit when she realises this: she may well be believed, but she will not be released. She will have to stay in France, answer questions; she will have to reveal that she is here illegally, that she does not exist, and her children will be taken away from her and everything, absolutely everything will unravel, horribly, quickly, nightmarishly.

  Her finger still rests on the screen of her phone. She glances down at Michael. He is trembling. Blood still flows from his side. She feels sick and turns to face the sink, breathing hard.

  ‘Oh God oh God oh God. Oh God oh God oh God.’

  She turns back, looks at her phone, looks at Michael. She does not know what to do. And then she sees it; she sees the life pass from Michael’s body. She has seen it before. She knows what it looks like. Michael is dead.

  ‘Oh God. Oh God, oh God.’ She drops to her haunches and feels for his pulse. There is nothing.

  She begins to talk to herself.

  ‘OK,’ she says, standing up. ‘OK. Now. Who knows you were here? Joy, he might have told Joy. But he would have told her that Lucy Smith was coming. Yes. Lucy Smith. But that is not my real name and now I am not even Lucy Smith. I am …’ Her shaking hands find the little felt bag and she pulls out the passports. She flicks to the back and reads the text. ‘I am Marie Valerie Caron. Good. Good. I am Marie Caron. Yes. And Lucy Smith does not exist. Joy does not know where I live. But …

  ‘School!’ she says. ‘Michael knew where Marco went to school. But would he have told Joy? No. he would not have told Joy. Of course not. And even if he did, they only know Lucy Smith, not Marie Caron. And Stella is at a different school to Marco and no one apart from me and Samia knows where that is. So, what about the passport people? No. They would be somewhere so deeply buried away in the criminal underworld that no one would even think to look. The children: they knew I was here, but they would not tell anyone. Good. OK.’

  She paces as she speaks. Then she looks down at Michael’s body. Should she leave it? Leave it for Joy to find tomorrow morning. Or should she move him, clean everything? Hide his body? He is a big man. Where would she hide him? She would not be able to hide him completely, but maybe for just long enough for her and the children to get to London.

  Yes, she decides, yes. She will clean everything. She will pull his body down into his wine cellar. She will cover it up with something. Joy will come tomorrow and think he has gone somewhere. She won’t know he’s missing until his body starts to smell. By which time Lucy and the children will be long gone. And everyone will just assume he was killed by someone from the shadier parts of his life.

  She pulls open the cupboard beneath the sink. She takes out bleach. She opens a new roll of super-absorbent kitchen towel.

  She starts to clean.

  29

  CHELSEA, 1990

  Phin and I sat on the roof of the house. Phin had found the roof. I had no idea it existed. To access the roof, one had to push open a trapdoor in the ceiling of the attic hallway, climb up into a low-roofed tunnel and then push open another trapdoor which opened out on to a flat roof with the most remarkable views across the river.

  We were not, it seemed, the first to discover the secret roof terrace. There was already a pair of scruffy plastic chairs up there, some dead plants in pots, a little table.

  I could barely believe that my father did not know about this space. He always complained about having a north-facing garden, that he could not enjoy the evening sun. Yet up here was a private oasis which caught the sun all day long.

  The tiny squares of paper that Phin had been given at Kensington Market the week before turned out to be comprised of four even smaller squares of paper joined together. Each tiny segment had a picture of a smiling face on it.

  ‘What if we have a bad trip?’ I asked, feeling unutterably foolish using such language.

  ‘We should just have half each,’ said Phin. ‘To start off with.’

  I nodded effusively. I’d have preferred to take none at all. I really wasn’t that type of person. But it was Phin and I would, to use the parental cliché, have followed him off a cliff if he’d asked me to.

  I watched him swallow down the tiny shred and then he watched as I did the same. The sky was watercolour blue. The sun was weak but up here, in this trap, it felt warm against our skin. We felt nothing for quite some time. We talked about what we could see: the people sitting in their gardens, the boats idling down the Thames, the view of the power station on the other side of the river. After half an hour or so I relaxed, thinking that the acid was clearly fake, that nothing was going to happen, that I’d got away with it. But then I felt my blood begin to warm beneath my skin; I glanced upwards into the sky and saw that it was filled with pulsing white veins that became luminous and multi-toned, like mother of pearl, the longer I stared at them. I realised that the sky was not blue at all but that it was a million different colours all conspiring together to create a pale blue and that the sky was conniving and lying, that the sky was in fact much cleverer than us and that maybe everything we considered to be insentient was in fact cleverer than us and laughing at us. I looked at the leaves in the trees and questioned their greenness. Are you really green? I asked myself. Or are you actually tiny little particles of purple and red and yellow and gold all having a party and laughing, laughing, laughing. I glanced at Phin. I said, ‘Is your skin really white?’

  He looked at his skin. He said, ‘No. It’s …’ He looked at me and laughed out loud. ‘I have scales! Look! I have scales. And you!’ He pointed at me with great hilarity. ‘You have feathers! Oh God,’ he said, ‘what have we become? We’re creatures!’

  We chased each other round the roof for a minute, making animal noises. I stroked my feathers. Phin unfurled his tongue. We both expressed shock and awe at the length of it. ‘You have the longest tongue I have ever seen.’

  ‘That’s because I am a lizard.’ He rolled it back in and then out again. I watched it keenly. And when it came out again, I leaned in and trapped it between my teeth.

  ‘Ow!’ said Phin, grabbing his tongue between his fingers and laughing at me.

  ‘Sorry!’ I said. ‘I’m just a stupid bird. I thought it was a worm.’

  And then we stopped laughing and sat in the plastic deckchairs and stared, stared, stared into the whirling aurora borealis above and our hands hung down side by side, our knuckles brushing every now and then, and each time I felt Phin’s skin touch mine I felt as though his very being was penetrating my epidermis and bits of his essence were swirling into my essence, making a soup of me and him and it was too too tantalising, I needed to plug myself into him so that I could capture all of his essence and my fingers wrapped themselves around his fingers and he let me, he let me hold his hand, and I felt him pour into me like when we went on a canal boat once and the man opened the lock and we watched the water flow from one place to another.

  ‘There,’ I said, turning to look at Phin. ‘There. You and me. We’re the same person now.’

  ‘We are?’ said Phin, looking at me with wide eyes.

  ‘Yes, look.’ I pointed at our hands. ‘We’re the same.’

  Phin nodded and we sat then for some time, I don’t know how long, it might have been five minutes, it might have been an hour, our hands held together, staring into the sky and lost in our own strange chemically induced reveries.

  ‘We’re not having a bad trip, are we?’ I said eventually.

  ‘No,’ said Phin. ‘We’re having a good trip.’

  ‘The best trip,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘The best trip.’

  ‘We should live up here,’ I said. ‘Bring our beds up here and live up here.’

  ‘We should. We should do that. Right now!’

>   We both leapt to our feet and jumped down through the trapdoor into the tunnel above the attic. I saw the walls of the tunnel throbbing, like the inside of a body; I felt we were in a throat, maybe, or an oesophagus. We almost fell through the trapdoor into the hallway, and suddenly it felt like we were in the wrong place, like in Doctor Who when he opens the door to the Tardis and doesn’t know where he is.

  ‘Where are we?’ I said.

  ‘We’re down,’ said Phin. ‘In down world.’

  ‘I want to go back up.’

  ‘Let’s get the pillows,’ said Phin. ‘Quick.’ He pulled me by the hand into his bedroom and we grabbed the pillows and we were about to climb back up into the tunnel when David appeared in front of us.

  He was wet from the shower, his bottom half wrapped in a towel, his chest bare. I stared at his nipples. They were dark and leathery.

  ‘What are you two up to?’ he asked, his eyes switching forensically from Phin to me and back again. His voice was like a low rumble of thunder. He was tall and absolutely hard, like a statue. I felt my blood turn cold in his presence.

  ‘We’re taking pillows,’ said Phin. ‘To up.’

  ‘Up?’

  ‘Up,’ repeated Phin. ‘This is down.’

  ‘Down.’

  ‘Down,’ said Phin.

  ‘What the hell is wrong with you two?’ said David. ‘Look at me.’ He grabbed Phin’s jaw hard with his hand and stared into his eyes. ‘Are you high?’ he asked, turning his gaze to me. ‘God, both of you. What the hell have you taken? What is it? Hash? Acid? What?’

  Soon we were being ordered downstairs and my parents were being summonsed, and Phin’s mum, and David was still in his towel and I still stared at his leathery nipples and felt my breakfast start to roil inside my gut. We were in the drawing room surrounded by staring oil portraits, looming dead animals nailed to the wall, four adults asking questions, questions, questions.

  How? What? Where from? How did you pay for it? Did they know how old you are? You could have died. You’re too young. What the hell were you thinking?

  And it was at that precise moment that Birdie walked into the room.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, go away,’ said Phin, ‘this is nothing to do with you.’

  ‘Don’t you dare talk to a grown-up like that,’ said David.

  ‘That’, said Phin, pointing at Birdie, ‘is not a grown-up.’

  ‘Phin!’

  ‘She is not a grown-up. She is not even a human. She is a pig. Look. Look at her pink skin, her tiny eyes. She is a pig.’

  A gasp went around the room. I stared at Birdie and tried to picture her as a pig. But she looked more like a very old cat to me, one of those bony cats with patchy fur and rheumy eyes.

  Then I looked at Phin and saw that he was staring at his father and I saw him open his mouth wide and laugh and then I heard him say, ‘So, that makes you a pig-kisser!’

  He laughed uproariously.

  ‘She’s a pig and you are a kisser of pigs. Did you know that, when you kissed her, did you know she was a pig?’

  ‘Phin!’ Sally grimaced.

  ‘Henry saw Dad kissing Birdie. Last week. That’s why we took all Dad’s money and went out without asking. Because I was cross with Dad. But now I know why he kissed her. Because …’ Phin was now laughing so hard he could barely speak. ‘… he wanted to kiss a pig!’

  I wanted to laugh too because Phin and I were the same person, but I couldn’t feel it any more, that intense connection had gone, and now all I could feel was cold, hard horror.

  Sally ran from the room; Phin followed her, then David, still in his bath towel. I looked at Birdie awkwardly.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, for some strange reason.

  She just gawped at me, before leaving the room too.

  Then it was just me and my mother and my father.

  My father got to his feet. ‘Whose idea was it?’ he said. ‘The drugs?’

  I shrugged. I could feel the trip passing from my being. I could feel myself drifting back to reality. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It was him, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I repeated.

  He sighed. ‘There will be repercussions, young man,’ he said gruffly. ‘We will need to discuss them. But for now, let’s get you a glass of water and something to eat. Something stodgy. Some toast, Martina?’

  My mother nodded, and I followed her sheepishly to the kitchen.

  I could hear voices raised overhead: Sally’s glassy vowels, David’s boom, Birdie’s whining. I could hear footsteps, doors opening and closing. My mother and I exchanged a glance as she posted bread into the toaster for me.

  ‘Is that true?’ asked my mother. ‘What Phin said about David and Birdie?’

  I nodded.

  She cleared her throat but said nothing.

  A moment later we heard the front door bang shut. I peered into the hallway and saw Justin, his hands filled with hessian bags, returning from his Saturday market stall. Soon enough his voice was added to the symphony of shouting coming from above.

  My mother passed me the toast and I ate it silently. I remembered the strange dread I’d felt seeing Birdie and David kissing the week before, the sense of something putrid being unleashed into the world, as though they were keys and they’d unlocked each other. And then I thought of the feeling of Phin’s hand in my hand on the roof, and thought that we were also keys unlocking each other, but letting out something remarkable and good.

  ‘What’s going to happen?’ I asked.

  ‘I have no idea,’ said my mother. ‘But it’s not good. It’s not good at all.’

  30

  Michael is in the cellar and Lucy has cleaned for over an hour. She collects a bin bag from the front door; it’s filled with blood-sodden paper towels, a pair of Joy’s latex gloves and every last trace of their meal: empty wine bottles, beer bottles, napkins, uneaten panzanella. She has dressed the cuts on her back with plasters from Michael’s en suite and in her bag are three thousand euros taken from a drawer in his bedside cabinet.

  She glances at the Maserati as she passes it on the driveway. She feels a strange wave of sadness pass over her: Michael will never drive another performance car. Michael will never book another spontaneous flight to Martinique, never pop the cork on another bottle of vintage champagne, never write his stupid book, never jump in his pool in all his clothes, never give a woman a hundred red roses, never fuck anyone, never kiss anyone …

  Never hurt anyone.

  The feeling passes. She drops the bin bag in a huge municipal bin by the beach. Adrenaline courses through her, keeping her centred and strong. She buys two bags full of snacks and drinks for the children. Marco texts her at 5 p.m. Where are you?

  At the shops, she replies. Be home soon.

  The children are cooperative. They look in the bag of snacks and treats with disbelief. ‘We’re going to England,’ she tells them, mustering a light and whimsical tone. ‘We’re going to meet my friend’s daughter, to celebrate her birthday.’

  ‘The baby!’ says Marco.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘The baby. And we’re going to stay in a house I once lived in when I was a child. But first we’re going on an adventure! First of all we’re going to Paris! On the train! Then we’re getting another train, to Cherbourg. Then we’re going to get on a little boat to a little island called Guernsey and we’re going to stay in a sweet little cottage for a night or two. Then we’re getting another boat to England and driving to London.’

  ‘All of us?’ asks Stella. ‘Even Fitz?’

  ‘Even Fitz. But we need to pack, OK? And we need to get some sleep because we have to be at the station at five o’clock tomorrow morning! OK! So let’s have something to eat, let’s get nice and clean, let’s pack and let’s go to bed.’

  She leaves the children packing and eating and goes to Giuseppe’s room. The dog jumps up at her and she lets him lick her face. She looks at Giuseppe and wonders w
hat to tell him. He is loyal, but he is old and can get confused sometimes. She decides to tell him a lie.

  ‘I’m taking the children for a holiday tomorrow,’ she says. ‘We’re going to Malta. I have friends there.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Giuseppe. ‘Malta is a magical place.’

  ‘Yes,’ she agrees, feeling sad that she is misleading one of the kindest people she knows.

  ‘But hot,’ he says, ‘at this time of year. So hot.’ He looks down at the dog. ‘You want me to look after him for you?’

  The dog. She hadn’t thought about the bloody dog. She panics momentarily and then she rallies and says, ‘I’m bringing him. As an assistance dog. For my anxiety.’

  ‘You have anxiety?’

  ‘No. But I told them I did and they said I could bring my dog.’

  Giuseppe won’t question this. He doesn’t entirely know how the modern world works. It is roughly 1987 in Giuseppe’s world.

  ‘That’s nice,’ he says, touching the dog’s head. ‘You get a holiday, boy! A nice holiday! How long will you be gone?’

  ‘Two weeks,’ she replies. ‘Maybe three. You can rent out our room, if you need to.’

  He smiles. ‘But I will make sure it’s here when you get back.’

  She takes his hand in hers. ‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘Thank you so much.’ She hugs him hard; she has no idea, no idea at all if she will ever see him again. She leaves his room before he can see her tears.

  31

  ‘I’m going to stay at the house tonight,’ says Miller, placing his empty pint glass on the table. ‘If that’s OK with you?’