Damascus (10 page)

Hazel is not saving herself and she loves no-one and nobody loves her right back. She doesn't care about Sam Carter or any stupid glove. The truth is that she yearns for something different and real to happen. Something dramatic and dangerous like the stories she reads in newspapers. In short, she wants life to start. She wants to meet boys more exciting than those glossed in from neighbouring private schools (including Sam Carter), who all look far too good to be true. But how is she supposed to meet anybody real and different when her mother tells her not to talk to strangers and not to give out her phone number, and never, under any circumstances, to tell anyone her address? She isn't even allowed to choose her own clothes. The simple truth is that life is unfair, and she doesn't care if she never sees another boy as long as she lives, which won't be long now because she's already close to starvation.

‘So I can throw it away then?'

‘What?'

‘The glove.'

Olive's eyes are sharp, perceptive, mischievous. Since the accident she has changed almost beyond recognition. Hazel moves a chess piece, a bishop.

‘Of course you can,' she says. ‘It's only an old glove.'

‘So I can throw it away?'

‘It's not as if it's any use to anybody.'

‘And burn it? Can I burn it first?'

‘For all I care, Olive, you can eat it choke on it and die.'

11/1/93 M
ONDAY
 09:48

The Central London Institute of Learning was the country's premier distance-learning centre for British and Cultural History. It said so in the advert. 
Also for drawing, opera, photography, cooking - and always for location
.

Henry had never been there, but he knew the address by heart because of all the punctual essays he'd sent. He knew that Miss Burns was also unlikely to be there, but he felt brightly optimistic that if he presented his most polite self in person, smile included, he could find out where she was without having to phone her up again and beg. On the whole, he'd prefer to surprise her.

‘You're making a mistake,' his father said. ‘Stay here with me.'

Henry reached for the money on the table and his father grabbed his wrist.

‘You're not yourself,' he said, squeezing hard, holding on, but Henry knew exactly how he wanted to spend his last day in Britain, so he punched his father in the arm until he let go. He let go quickly. He was a coward, scared of scenes and hurting people and being disgraced in public dining rooms. Henry gathered up his telephone and his newspaper, walked away without looking back, and now found himself outside on his own in London, strolling jauntily along, sometimes slapping his rolled-up paper against his thigh.

He had, however, forgotten his raincoat. In his shirtsleeves he was soon reminded that it was already November (eight degrees centigrade) and nearly winter. A single low cloud covered everything, even other clouds, and Henry expected rain. He therefore found a Marks & Spencer and bought himself an umbrella. It was easy. He gave the lady some of his father's money and a dazzling smile, and enjoyed the way she admired his tooth. Money was an excellent invention. It nearly always made an immediate difference. Along with the umbrella he bought a chunky powder-blue sweater, patterned in a kind of hybrid cross between Norwegian and Navajo Indian. He pulled it over his head, and delighted with his reflection in the mirror he started swinging his new umbrella, a bit like Fred Astaire. Then he put his
Times
 and his telephone in the M & S plastic bag, and set out in search of a newsagent. In another simple exchange for pounds and pence he successfully obtained a map of London. This was great: nothing could stop him now.

Consulting his new map, he rejected the possibility of the Circle Line, and instead found a route which took him through a park, at which point he nearly collided with a nice-looking girl who was shouldering her way out of a telephone box. She flushed bright red as she tried to fit a greyish phonecard back into her wallet, and remembering Dr Osawa's insistence that everyone had a life, Henry decided that this girl was Gillian Thomas, phoning for a flatshare in Wimbledon Village. Her father, and why not, was Secretary to the Bank of England. Dr Osawa would have been proud.

When he arrived at the park, Henry amused himself by correctly identifying horse chestnut trees, aspens, hornbeams and hazels. He heard more snatches of mistle thrush song, a pair this time, and was surprised by a small brown bird flying up suddenly in front of him. As it swooped away he recognised the short piping call of a meadow pipit, and even though the park was generally in a state of some disrepair, Henry could hardly remember feeling happier.

He had plenty of reasons to be cheerful. He knew the names of birds and trees. He knew that this historic urban park was a glory of Victorian design. He had money in his pocket, and a strong horse he fancied in the two-thirty at Newcastle. He had a new sweater and a portable telephone and his little plastic envelope of powder. Most important of all, he had Miss Burns, although admittedly only one safe day left in which to find her. He looked on the bright side, he put on a brave face, he said to himself: mustn't grumble. After all, one day was better than none, and he understood people were generally commended for seizing the day. He was in pursuit of a miracle and the rapture of a happy ending, and he saw nothing wrong in that. It wasn't as if he had any plans to hurt anybody.

In front of him and to his left, for example, high heels tap-tapping sharply along the concrete path, let's say Mrs Katherine Powell, founding committee member of Absent Parents Asking for Reasonable Treatment, and her small darling dog Panther. Every passer-by had a life and a connection with other lives, each one with their own habits and their own story and their own special days. Dr Osawa was right, and as long as Henry kept this in mind he remained calm and in control, glad to be a part of it all.

He checked his watch, a Piaget, another fine present from his parents. He found a bench and sat down and turned his telephone off, because only his father would try to ring him. Then he put the phone with the umbrella and the M & S bag on the bench beside him. He contemplated an unkempt moon-shaped flowerbed, and then beyond this jogging left to right Mr Peter Macarthur, part-time technical supervisor at a Batchelor's packet soup factory.

Henry's mother had once told him that Britain had the best parks in the world, but from where he was sitting Henry could see one beheaded statue and another encased in plywood. Further on there was a boarded-up pavilion, growing graffiti like a bright lichen: 
Gary 4 Laura, Elliot Sucks, Utd 0 QPR
 1, but it wasn't like this everywhere. In the last two years Henry had seen much of the Britain his mother had promised. He'd watched the end of a cricket match lounging beneath a willow in a village called Brampton Abbotts. In Biggar in Strathclyde he'd sat out a St Andrew's Day Ball, breakfast included in the price. Outside the White Hart in Spadeadam he'd seen the meeting of a hunt minutes before departure, with nervous men and women calming huge brown horses. These were not illusions, but he knew it went the other way as well. During his stay in Belfast twenty-three people had been killed in eight days. From a stalled train outside Wakefield he'd watched lines of silent police searching wasteland for the remains of a missing woman. At Aintree racetrack he'd heard the sirens of circled ambulances after ten children had been hit by fireworks, but none of this was to say that his mother was wrong. Britain was still better than anywhere else he'd lived, him and his mother, following his father from one foreign posting to the next. In Algiers their French neighbours were taken hostage by nationalist fundamentalists, while in Jerusalem Henry was perversely mistaken for an Arab and stoned outside a polling booth, Henry thought it safe to say that neither of these things could have happened in Britain.

Right to left, beyond the neglected flowerbed, Libby Gorman of Jackson-Stops and Staff, humming a recitative from
Figaro's Wedding
. Left to right James Irvine, leader of a United Nations team of weapon experts. And then Panther the small dog came rolling up to the bench, jumping up so that his front paws landed on the plastic bag. ‘Hello, Panther,'Henry said, and he let the small dog smell his fingers. Then he pulled the packet of powder from his pocket. It was the colour of dirty sand, with a slight shade of green, and he let the dog sniff around it, even lick the plastic envelope, knowing that should he feed the powder to the dog, poor darling Panther would be dead within minutes. Just then Mrs Katherine Powell, absent parent asking for reasonable treatment and owner of Panther, called him away using a false name.

No matter. Henry still had the powder, never knowing when it might come in useful. And anyway, he didn't want to kill a dog. Knowing the difference between thinking a thing and doing it was the essential trick of behaving like everyone else.

As if he was still following one of her courses, Henry turned on his phone and keyed in the number. He had until Miss Burns picked up to think of something to say, but this time the phone rang on and on, long beyond the moment when he realised that for once she wasn't going to answer. And then, just as he was about to give up, it was answered. By a man.

Henry thought quickly. He asked the man where he was, because the telephone's reception wasn't very good.

‘Sorry?'

The man sounded confused so Henry rushed him for an address, for a postcode, anything.

‘What? What are you talking about?'

‘Where in London are you?' Henry said. ‘Tell me where you are.'

‘I don't know,' the man's voice said. ‘I haven't been out yet.'

It is the first of November 1993 and somewhere in Britain, in Falmouth or Hampton Hill or Llandudno or Oxford, in Devonport or Tranmere or East Stirling or Glenavon, every boy of Spencer's age is having non-stop all-action sex all of the time. They openly admit to it, even though they're only fourteen years old. Spencer doesn't have a girlfriend, but he does have an evolving pattern of facial blemishes. He also has a father who doesn't understand him and a mother who probably takes drugs and an older brother who is about to be married.

The Kelly family has moved again because their last home was compulsory purchased and re-developed as a car park, or a superstore, or a relief road for the Ml or the M4 or the M23. In the new house the lounge is much the same, except that above the mantelpiece there is now an embroidered quotation from the bible:

Spencer's mother is responsible for this, even though Spencer often gets no further than lying in bed, evil and wicked deeds requiring far more energy than he can usually spare. He hardly ever goes out, mostly because he refuses to travel by car but also because walking is boring. Instead, he likes to stay in and watch television, looking out for men and women who might be doing it to each other on 
House of Cards
 or 
Brookside
 or 
Terror on Highway 91
. He watches until his eyes blur and he has no idea what time it is or what he's watching any more.

Today, however, is not like other days because this is the day of his brother's wedding. Spencer is wearing his good jacket, so precious and underased that he hides important objects in the inside pocket. There is a child's red-and-white-striped glove in there, as well as a personalised Christmas card sent to the Kellys by Mr and Mrs Burns and family, who they once met on holiday. Inside the card there is an address and a phone number and a hand-written message which says 
Do keep in touch
.

Spencer has never written back because Hazel has a scholarship to a private school. The possibility of phoning, though, sometimes presses in on him like a weight on the heart. The act of dialling is so quick and easy, so possible, that it almost hurts him. It could be finished within seconds, in the time it takes to say while I'm saying this I've already rung the number. There: already ringing.