The Family Upstairs(37)

There was a beat of silence. I couldn’t work out what to do. I had Phin’s full attention. But I’d hurt him. I looked at his big, suntanned hands twisted together in his lap and I wanted to pick them up, caress them, hold them to my lips, kiss the pain away. I felt a terrible surge of physical desire rising through me, from the very roots of me, an agonising longing. I turned my gaze quickly from his hands to the ground between my bare feet.

‘Will you tell your mum?’ I said eventually.

He shook his head. The hair fell again and hid his face from me.

‘It would kill her,’ he said very simply.

I nodded, as though I knew what he meant. But really, I didn’t. I was only thirteen. And I was a young thirteen. I knew that I’d found the sight of Birdie and David kissing passionately in their nightclothes disgusting. I knew that it was wrong that a married man should be kissing a woman who was not his wife. But I couldn’t quite extrapolate those feelings beyond me. I could not imagine how that might make another person feel. I did not really understand why Sally would want to die because her husband had kissed Birdie.

‘Will you tell your sister?’

‘I’m not fucking telling anybody,’ he snapped. ‘Christ. And you mustn’t either. Seriously. Don’t tell anyone. Don’t do anything unless I tell you to. OK?’

I nodded again. I was out of my depth and glad to follow Phin’s lead.

The moment was falling away from me; I could feel it. I could tell Phin was about to stand up and go indoors and that he wasn’t going to invite me to go in with him and that I would be left here on the bench staring at the back of the house with it all still blowing about inside me, all the wanting and the needing and the red raw desiring. And I knew that despite what had just happened, we’d go back to normal, back to the place of mutual polite reserve.

‘Let’s go out today,’ I said breathlessly. ‘Let’s do something.’

He turned to look at me. He said, ‘Have you got any money?’

‘No. But I can get some.’

‘I’ll get some too,’ he said. ‘I’ll meet you in the hall at ten.’

He stood then and he left. I watched him go, watched the shape of his spine under his T-shirt, the breadth of his shoulders, his big feet hitting the ground, the tragic hang of his beautiful head.

I found a handful of coins in the pockets of my father’s Barbour. I took two pounds from my mother’s purse. I combed my fringe and put on a jersey zip-up jacket that my mother had bought for me a few weeks before from a cheap shop on Oxford Street, which was about a hundred times nicer than anything I ever got bought from Harrods or Peter Jones.

Phin sat in his throne at the foot of the staircase with a paperback book in his hand. To this day, this is how I always picture Phin – except in my fantasies he lowers the book and he looks up at me and his eyes light up at the sight of me and he smiles. In reality he barely acknowledged my arrival.

He stood, slowly, then glanced around the house furtively. ‘Coast clear.’ He gestured for me to follow him through the front door.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked, chasing after him breathlessly.

I watched him raise his arm into a salute and move towards the kerb. A taxi pulled over and we got in.

I said, ‘I can’t afford to pay for taxis. I’ve only got two pounds fifty.’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said coolly. He pulled a roll of ten-pound notes from his jacket pocket and cocked an eyebrow at me.

‘Jesus! Where did you get that from?’

‘My dad’s secret stash.’

‘Your dad has a secret stash?’

‘Yup. He thinks no one knows about it. But I know everything.’

‘Won’t he notice?’

‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Maybe not. Either way there’s no way of proving who took it.’

The taxi dropped us on Kensington High Street. I looked up at the building in front of us: a long fa?ade, a dozen arched windows above, the words ‘KENSINGTON MARKET’ in chrome letters. I could hear music coming from the main entrance, something metallic, pounding, disturbing. I followed Phin inside and found myself in a terrifying rabbit warren of winding corridors, each home to multiple tiny shops, fronted by blank-faced men and women with rainbow hair, black rimmed eyes, ripped leather, white lips, shredded chiffon, fishnets, studs, platforms, nose piercings, face piercings, dog collars, quiffs, drapes, net petticoats, peroxide, pink gingham, PVC thigh-high boots, pixie boots, baseball jackets, sideburns, beehives, ballgowns, black lips, red lips, chewing gum, eating a bacon roll, drinking tea from a floral teacup with a black-painted pinkie fingernail held aloft, holding a ferret wearing a studded leather lead.

Each shop played its own music; thus the experience was of switching through channels on the radio as we walked. Phin touched things as we passed: a vintage baseball jacket, a silky bowling shirt with the word ‘Billy’ embroidered on the back, a rack of LPs, a studded leather belt.

I didn’t touch anything. I was terrified. Incense billowed from the next little shop we passed. A woman sitting outside on a stool with white hair and white skin looked up at me briefly with icy blue eyes and I clutched my heart.

On the next stall a woman sat with a baby on her lap. I could not imagine that this was a good place for a baby to be.

We wandered the corridors of this strange place for an hour. We bought bacon rolls and very strong tea from a weird café on the top floor and watched people. Phin bought himself a black and white printed scarf of the type worn by men in the Sahara, and some seven-inch singles of music I’d never heard of. He tried to persuade me to let him buy me a black T-shirt with illustrations of snakes and swords on it. I declined, although part of me rather liked it. He tried on a pair of blue suede shoes with crêpey soles which he referred to as brothel creepers. He looked at himself in a full-length mirror, pulled his curtained hair away from his face and turned it into a quiff, rendering him suddenly into a beautiful 1950s heartthrob, Montgomery Clift crossed with James Dean.