The Family Upstairs(11)

‘Really get into the hair at the back of your neck, Marco,’ she says. ‘It’s all clumpy there. And armpits. Really do your armpits.’

After, they sit side by side on a wooden bench, wrapped in towels. They can see people passing by on the other side through gaps in the wood, see slices of shimmering blue sky, smell sun-warmed wood and fried garlic. Lucy sighs. She feels unburdened, almost, but still not quite ready to do the next thing.

They put on clean clothes and deodorant and Lucy rubs moisturiser into her face and gives the children sun cream for theirs. She has a small bottle of perfume in the bottom of her toiletry bag which she sprays behind her ears and into her cleavage. She twists her damp hair into a roll at the back of her head and clips it with a plastic claw. She looks at herself in the mirror. Nearly forty years old. Homeless. Single. Penniless. Not even who she says she is. Even her name is fake. She is a ghost. A living, breathing ghost.

She puts on some mascara, some lip gloss, adjusts the pendant of her golden necklace so that it sits in her sun-burnished cleavage. She looks at her children: they are beautiful. The dog looks nice. Everyone smells good. They have eaten. This is as good as things have been in days.

‘Right,’ she says to Marco, shoving her dirty clothes back into her rucksack and pulling it closed. ‘Let’s go and see your dad.’





9




CHELSEA, 1988


I’d been watching from the stairs, so I already knew. A man with dark curls, a hat with a brim, a donkey jacket, tweed trousers tucked into big lace-up boots. Old suitcases that looked like props from an olden-days movie and a wickerwork cat box held together with a worn leather strap. And Birdie standing by his side, in a dress that looked like a nightie.

‘Darling!’ I heard my mother call out to my father. ‘Come and meet Justin!’

I watched my father appear from the drawing room. He had a cigar clenched between his teeth and was wearing a hairy green jumper.

‘So,’ he said, squeezing the man’s hand too hard, ‘you’re Birdie’s boyfriend?’

‘Partner,’ Birdie interjected. ‘Justin is my partner.’

My father looked at her in that way he had when he thought someone was deliberately making him look a fool, as though he was considering violence. But the look passed quickly and I saw him push through it with a smile. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Of course. That’s the modern way, isn’t it?’

Birdie had told my mother that she and her partner needed somewhere to stay for a few days. Their landlord had kicked them out because they’d got a cat – what sort of idiot gets a cat without checking the terms of their lease? I was not even eleven years old and had never lived in a rental and I knew that much – and Birdie hadn’t known whom else to turn to. As an adult man now of forty-one years old I have often used this refrain to get people to do what I want them to do. I didn’t know who else to turn to. It gives the person you’re trying to manipulate nowhere to go. Their only option is to capitulate. Which is exactly what my mother had done.

‘But we have so many rooms,’ she’d said when I complained about the upcoming arrangement. ‘And it’s only for a few days.’

My mother, in my opinion, just wanted a pop star living in her house.

My sister passed me on the stairs and stopped with a small intake of breath when she saw the cat basket in the hall. ‘What’s it called?’ she said, dropping to her knees to peer through the grille.

‘It’s a girl. She’s called Suki,’ said Birdie.

‘Suki,’ she said, tucking the knuckles of her fingers between the bars. The cat pushed itself against her hand and purred loudly.

The man called Justin picked up his stage prop suitcase and said, ‘Where shall we put our things, Martina?’

‘We’ve got a lovely room for you at the top of the house. Children, show our guests to the yellow room, will you?’

My sister led the way. She was by far the more gregarious of the two of us. I found grown-ups relatively terrifying whereas she seemed to quite like them. She was wearing green pyjamas. I was wearing a tartan dressing gown and blue felt slippers. It was nearly nine and we’d been on a countdown to bedtime.

‘Oh,’ said Birdie as my sister pushed open the hidden door in the wood panelling that led to the stairs to the top floor. ‘Where on earth are you taking us?’

‘It’s the back stairs,’ my sister said. ‘To the yellow room.’

‘You mean the servants’ entrance?’ Birdie replied sniffily.

‘Yes,’ my sister replied brightly because although she was only a year and a half younger than me she was too young to understand that not everyone thought sleeping in secret rooms at the top of secret staircases was an adventure; that some people might think they deserved proper big bedrooms and would be offended.

At the top of the secret staircase there was a wooden door leading to a long thin corridor where the walls were sort of wonky and lumpy and the floorboards warped and bouncy and it felt a bit like walking along a moving train. The yellow room was the nicest of the four up there. It had three windows in the ceiling and a big bed with a yellow duvet cover to match the yellow Laura Ashley wallpaper and modern table lamps with blue glass shades. Our mother had arranged yellow and red tulips in a vase. I watched Birdie’s face as she took it all in, a sort of grudging tilt of her chin as if it to say: I suppose it will do.