The Family Upstairs Page 6

  Then she thinks again of her friend April’s neat lawn, her spicy couscous, the neon orange of an Aperol Spritz, her sticky feet in an icy paddling pool. She thinks of hot Danny and the potential babies they might have when she is thirty. Or earlier. Yes, why not earlier? Why put it off? She can sell this house with its bleak, dreadful legacy, its mouldy fridge and dead garden, its throat-clearing, thumping person in the attic. She can sell it now and be rich and marry Danny and have his babies. She doesn’t care any more about what happened here. She doesn’t want to know.

  She fiddles for the door keys in her handbag and she locks up the big wooden front door and the padlocked hoarding and she emerges with relief on to the hot pavement and pulls her phone from her bag.

  Save some couscous for me. I’ll be there in an hour.

  13

  Lucy turns her fiddle this way and that in the muted light of the music repair shop.

  She places it under her chin and quickly plays a three-octave A major scale and arpeggio, checking for evenness of sound quality and for wolf notes or whistles.

  She beams at Monsieur Vincent.

  ‘It’s amazing,’ she says, in French. ‘It’s better than it was before.’

  Her heart softens in her chest. She hadn’t realised, in the dreadfulness of sleeping on beaches and under motorway flyovers, just how hard she’d found it to be parted from her instrument and how much anger she’d been harbouring towards the drunken dickheads who’d broken it. But more than that, she hadn’t realised just how much she’d missed playing it.

  She counts out the twenty-euro notes on to the counter and Monsieur Vincent writes her out a receipt, tears it from a pad, hands it to her. Then he pulls two Chupa Chups lollipops from a display on his counter and hands one to each of the children.

  ‘Look after your mother,’ he says to Marco. ‘And your sister.’

  In the just-cooling evening air outside the shop, Lucy untwists the cellophane wrapper from Stella’s lollipop and hands it to her. Then they walk towards the touristic centre, her children sucking their sweets, the dog snuffling at the hot pavement looking for discarded chicken bones or spilt ice creams. Lucy still has no appetite. The meeting with Michael killed it off completely.

  The early diners have just arrived: older holidaymakers or ones with small children. This is a tougher crowd than the later one. The later crowd has been drinking; they’re not embarrassed to approach the lady in the floaty voile skirt and strappy vest, with the tanned sinewy arms, the large breasts, the nose stud and ankle bracelet, with the two beautiful, tired-looking children sitting on a yoga mat behind her in the shade, the scruffy Jack Russell with its head on its paws. They’re not distracted by irritable toddlers up past their bedtimes. Or cynically wondering if she’ll spend the money on drugs or booze, if the children and the dog are just for show, if she’ll beat them when they get home if she hasn’t made enough money. She’s heard everything over the years. She’s been accused of it all. She’s grown a very thick skin.

  She takes the hat from her rucksack, the one that Marco used to call the ‘money hat’; now he calls it the ‘begging hat’. He hates that hat.

  She places it on the ground in front of her and she unclips her fiddle case. She checks behind her that her children are settled. Marco has a book to read. Stella is colouring in. Marco looks up at her wearily. ‘How long are we going to be here?’

  So much teenage attitude, so many months yet to go before he turns thirteen.

  ‘Until I’ve made enough money for a week at the Blue House.’

  ‘How much is that?’

  ‘Fifteen euros a night.’

  ‘I don’t know why you didn’t just ask my dad for some more money. He could have spared it. He could have given you another hundred. So easily.’

  ‘Marco. You know why. Now please, just let me get on with it.’

  Marco tuts and raises his eyebrows; then he lets his gaze drop to his book.

  Lucy lifts her fiddle to her chin, points her right foot away from her body, closes her eyes, breathes in deep, and plays.

  It is a good night; the passing of the storm last night has calmed the ether, it’s not quite so hot and people are more relaxed. Lots of people stop tonight to stand and watch Lucy play her fiddle. She plays Pogues songs and Dexys Midnight Runners’ songs; during her rendition of ‘Come On Eileen’ alone she calculates roughly fifteen euros being thrown into her hat. People dance and smile; one couple in their thirties give her a ten-euro note because they just got engaged. An older woman gives her five because her father used to play the fiddle and it reminded her of a happy childhood. By nine thirty Lucy has played in three locations and has nearly seventy euros.

  She gathers the children, the dog, their bags. Stella can barely keep her eyes open and Lucy feels nostalgic for the days of the buggy when she could just scoop Stella into it at the end of the night and then scoop her out and straight into bed. But now she has to wake her hard, force her to walk, try not to shout when she whines that she’s too tired.

  The Blue House is a ten-minute walk away, halfway up the hill to Castle Park. It’s a long thin house, originally painted baby blue, a once elegant townhouse, constructed for its views across the Mediterranean, now peeling and grey and weather-beaten with cracked windowpanes and ivy clinging to drainpipes. A man called Giuseppe bought it in the 1960s, let it go to rack and ruin and then sold it to a landlord who filled it up with itinerants, a family to a room, shared bathrooms, cockroaches, no facilities, cash only. The landlord lets Giuseppe stay on in a studio apartment on the ground floor in return for maintenance and management and a small rent.

  Giuseppe loves Lucy. ‘If I had had a daughter,’ he always says, ‘she would have been like you. I swear it.’

  For a few weeks after her fiddle was broken Lucy had not paid any rent and had been waiting, waiting for the landlord to kick her out. Then another tenant had told her that Giuseppe had been paying her rent for her. She’d packed a bag that same day and left without saying goodbye.

  Lucy feels nervous now as they reach the turning for the Blue House; she starts to panic. What if Giuseppe doesn’t have a room for her? What if he is angry that she left without saying goodbye and slams the door in her face? What if he’s gone? Died? The house has burned down?

  But he comes to the door, peers through the gap left by the security chain and he smiles, a wall of brown teeth glimpsed through a bush of salt and pepper beard. He spies her fiddle in its case and smiles wider still. ‘My girl,’ he says, unclipping the chain and opening the door. ‘My children. My dog! Come in!’

  The dog goes mad with joy, jumps into Giuseppe’s arms and nearly knocks him backwards. Stella wraps her arms around his legs and Marco pushes himself against Giuseppe and lets him kiss the top of his head.

  ‘I have seventy euros,’ she says. ‘Enough for a few nights.’

  ‘You have your fiddle. You stay as long as you like. You look thin. You all look thin. I only have bread. And some ham. It’s not good ham though, but I have good butter, so …’

  They follow him into his apartment on the ground floor. The dog immediately jumps on to the sofa and curls himself into a ball, looks at Lucy as if to say, Finally. Giuseppe goes to his tiny kitchenette and returns with bread and ham and three tiny dimpled glass bottles of Orangina. Lucy sits next to the dog and strokes his neck and breathes out, feels her insides untwist and unfurl and settle into place. And then she puts her hand into her rucksack to feel for her phone. The battery died some time during the night. She finds her charger and says to Giovanni, ‘Is it OK if I charge my phone?’

  ‘Of course, my love. There’s an empty socket here.’

  She plugs it in and holds the on button down, waiting for it to spring into life.

  The notification is still there.

  The baby is 25.

  She sits with the children over the coffee table and watches them eat the bread and ham. The humiliations of the last week start to wash away, like footprints on the
shore. Her children are safe. There is food. She has her fiddle. She has a bed to sleep in. She has money in her purse.

  Giuseppe watches the children eat too. He glances at her and smiles. ‘I was so worried about you all. Where have you been?’

  ‘Oh,’ she says lightly, ‘staying with a friend.’

  ‘N—’ Marco begins.

  She prods him with her elbow and turns to Giuseppe. ‘A little bird told me what you’d been doing, you naughty man. And I couldn’t have that. I just couldn’t. And I knew if I told you I was going you’d have persuaded me to stay. So I had to sneak off and, honestly, we’ve been fine. We’ve been absolutely fine. I mean, look at us! We’re all fine.’ She pulls the dog on to her lap and squeezes him.

  ‘And you have your fiddle back?’

  ‘Yes, I have my fiddle back. So … is there a room? It doesn’t have to be our usual room. It can be any room. Any room at all.’

  ‘There is a room. It’s at the back though, so no view. And a little dark. And the shower is broken, just a tap. You can have it for twelve euros a night.’

  ‘Yes,’ Lucy says, ‘yes please!’ She puts the dog down and gets to her feet and hugs Giuseppe. He smells dusty and old, a little dirty, but she doesn’t care. ‘Thank you,’ she says, ‘thank you so much.’

  That night the three of them sleep in a tiny double bed in the dark room at the back of the house where the sound of tyres hissing on the hot tarmac outside competes with the creaking of a crappy plastic fan as it oscillates across the room, the television of the people in the room next door and a fly caught somewhere in between the curtains and the window. Stella has her fist in Lucy’s face, Marco is moaning gently in his sleep and the dog is snoring. But Lucy sleeps hard and deep and long for the first time in over a week.

  14

  CHELSEA, 1988

  That day, 8 September 1988, should have been my second day at big school, but you’ve probably already guessed by now that I did not get to go to my long-anticipated big school that year, the school where I would meet my soulmates, my lifelong friends, my people. At intervals that summer I would ask my mother, ‘When are we going to Harrods to buy my uniform?’ And she would say, ‘Let’s wait until the end of the holidays, in case you have a growth spurt.’ And then the end of the holidays approached and still we had not been to Harrods.

  Neither had we been to Germany. We usually went for a week or two to stay with my grandmother in her big airy house in the Black Forest with its dank above-ground swimming pool and silken pine needles underfoot. But this summer we could not afford it, apparently, and if we couldn’t afford to fly to Germany then how on earth, I wondered, were we going to be able to afford school fees?

  By the beginning of September my parents were making applications to local state schools and putting our names on to waiting lists. They never specifically said that we had financial problems, but it was obvious that we did. I had a stomach ache for days, worrying about being bullied at a rough comprehensive.

  Oh, such petty, tiny concerns. Such trifling worries. I look back at eleven-year-old me: a slightly odd boy of average height, skinny build, my mother’s blue eyes, my father’s chestnut hair, knees like potatoes wedged on to sticks, a disapproving tightness to my narrow lips, a slightly haughty demeanour, a spoiled boy convinced that the chapters of his life had already been neatly written out and would follow accordingly; I look back at him and I want to slap his stupid, supercilious, starry-eyed little face.

  Justin was crouched in the garden fingering the plants he’d been growing out there.

  ‘Apothecarial herbs; the planting of, growing of and use of,’ he explained to me in his almost comatose drawl. ‘The big pharmaceutical companies are out to corrupt the planet. In twenty years’ time we’ll be a nation of prescription drug addicts and the NHS will be on its knees trying to pay for a sick nation’s candy. I want to turn back the clock and use what the soil provides to treat everyday ailments. You don’t need eight different types of chemical to cure a headache. Your mother says she wants to stop using pills and start using my tinctures.’

  I gazed at him. We were a family of pill takers. Pills for hay fever, pills for colds, pills for tummy aches and headaches and growing pains and hangovers. My mum even had some pills for what she called her ‘sad feelings’. My dad had pills for his heart and pills to stop his hair falling out. Pills everywhere. And now we were, apparently, to grow herbs and make our own medicine. It beggared belief.

  My father had had a small stroke during the summer holidays. It left him with a limp and a slight slur and no longer himself in some kind of barely definable way. To see him diminished in this way made me feel strangely unprotected, as though there was now a small but significant gap in the family’s defences.

  His physician, a dry-as-they-come man of indeterminate age called Dr Broughton who lived and ran his practice in a six-storey house around the corner, came to visit after my father got back from an overnight stay in hospital. He and my father smoked cigars in the garden and talked about his prognosis. ‘I’d say, Henry, that what you need are the services of a really good rehabilitation physiotherapist. Unfortunately, all the rehabilitation physiotherapists I know are bloody awful.’

  They laughed and my father said, ‘I’m not sure, any more, I’m not sure about anything. But I’d happily try it. Try anything really, just to get myself back to myself.’

  Birdie was tending Justin’s herb garden. It was hot and she was wearing a muslin top through which her nipples were plainly visible. She took off a floppy canvas hat and stood in front of my father and his doctor.

  ‘I know someone,’ she said, her hands on her hips. ‘I know someone amazing. He’s a miracle worker. He uses energy. He can move chi around people’s bodies. He’s cured people I know of bad backs. Of migraines. I’ll get him to come and visit.’

  I heard my father begin to protest. But Birdie just said, ‘No. Honestly, Henry. It’s the least I can do. The very least. I’ll call him right now. His name’s David. David Thomsen.’

  I was in the kitchen with my mother watching her make cheese scones when the doorbell chimed that morning. My mother wiped her hands on her apron, nervously adjusted the ends of her permed and scrunch-dried bob and said, ‘Ah, that must be the Thomsens.’

  ‘Who’, I asked, not remembering Birdie’s recommendation of the week before, ‘are the Thomsens?’

  ‘Friends,’ she said brightly. ‘Of Birdie and Justin. The husband is a physiotherapist. He’s going to work with your father, try and get him back into shape. And the mother is a trained teacher. She’s going to home school you both, just for a short while. Isn’t that good?’

  I had no chance to ask my mother to expand on this rapidly introduced and rather shocking development before she’d pulled open the door.

  With my jaw slightly ajar, I watched them troop in.

  First, a girl, around nine or ten. Black hair cut into a bob, cut-off dungarees, scratched-up knees, a blob of chocolate swept across her cheek, a faint air of pent-up energy. Her name, apparently, was Clemency.

  And then a boy, my age, maybe older, blond, tall, dark feathered lashes that swept the edges of steel-cut cheekbones, hands in the pockets of smart blue shorts, a fringe flicked out of his eyes effortlessly and with more than a little attitude. His name was Phineas. Phin, we were told, for short.

  Their mother followed next. Big-boned, pale, flat-chested, with long blond hair and a slightly nervous demeanour. This, I was to discover, was Sally Thomsen.

  And behind them all, tall, broad-shouldered, slim, tanned, with short black hair, intense blue eyes and a full mouth, was the father. David Thomsen. He gripped my hand hard inside his and cupped it with the other. ‘Good to meet you, young man,’ he said in a low, smooth voice.

  Then he let my hand go and held his arms aloft.

  He smiled at each of us in turn and said, ‘Good to meet you all.’

  David insisted on taking us all out for dinner that night. It was a Thursday, sti
ll warm around the edges. I spent quite some time that night finessing my appearance, not merely in the way I usually did of ensuring my clothes were clean and my parting sharp and my cuffs straight, but more foppishly; the boy called Phineas was fascinating to me, not only in terms of his great beauty, but also in terms of his style of dressing. Along with the casual blue shorts, he’d worn a red polo shirt with white stripes down the collars and bright white Adidas sports shoes with white ankle socks. I searched my wardrobe that evening for something equally effortless. All my socks reached my calves; only my sister had ankle socks. All my shorts were made out of wool and all my shirts had buttons. I even considered my old PE kit for a moment, but quickly dismissed the idea when I realised it was still bunched up in my PE bag from my very last PE lesson. Eventually I settled on a plain blue T-shirt and jeans, with my plimsolls. I tried to make the lick of hair that grew from my hairline fall upon my brow, as Phineas’s did, but it stubbornly refused to move out of place. I stared at myself for a full twenty seconds before I left the room, hating the awfulness of my stupid face, the plainness of my T-shirt, the sad cut of my John Lewis for Boys jeans. I made a strangulated noise under my breath, kicked the wall and then headed downstairs.

  Phin was there, in the hallway, sitting on one of the two huge wooden chairs that sat either side of the staircase. He was reading a book. I stared at him through the balustrade for a moment before making my entrance. He really was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life. I felt my cheeks flush red as I took in the lines of him: the delicate outline of a mouth that looked like it had been moulded out of the softest reddest clay, as if a fingertip would leave an imprint in it. His skin was like chamois pulled across cheekbones that looked as though they might tear through it. He even had the thrilling suggestion of a moustache.