The Family Upstairs(18)
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.