The Family Upstairs(38)

I bought myself a bootlace tie with a silver ram’s head. It was two pounds. It was slid into a paper bag by a man who looked like a punk cowboy.

We emerged an hour later into the normality of a Saturday morning, of families shopping, people getting on and off buses.

We walked for a mile into Hyde Park where we sat on a bench.

‘Look,’ said Phin, unfurling the fingers of his right hand.

I looked down at a small crumpled clear bag. Inside the small bag were two tiny squares of paper.

‘What is that?’ I asked.

‘It’s acid,’ he replied.

I didn’t understand.

‘LSD,’ he said.

I had heard of LSD. It was a drug, something to do with hippies and hallucinating.

My eyes widened. ‘What. But how …? Why?’

‘The guy in the record shop. He just sort of told me he had it. I didn’t ask. I think he thought I was older than I am.’

I stared at the tiny squares of paper in the tiny bag. My mind swam with the implications. ‘You’re not going to …?’

‘No. At least, not today. But some other time, maybe? When we’re at home? You up for it?’

I nodded. I was up for anything that meant I could spend time with him.

Phin bought us sandwiches in a posh hotel overlooking the park. They came on plates with silver rims, and a knife and fork. We sat by a tall window and I wondered how we appeared: the tall, handsome man-boy, his tiny baby-faced friend in a scruffy jersey jacket.

‘What do you think the grown-ups are doing now?’ I asked.

‘I couldn’t give a shit,’ said Phin.

‘They might have called the police.’

‘I left a note.’

‘Oh,’ I said, surprised by this act of conformity. ‘What did it say?’

‘It said me and Henry are going out, we’ll be back later.’

Me and Henry. My heart leapt.

‘Tell me what happened in Brittany?’ I asked. ‘Why did you all leave?’

He shook his head. ‘You don’t want to know.’

‘No, I do want to know. What happened?’

He sighed. ‘It was my dad. He took something that wasn’t his. Then he said, oh, you know, I thought we were all supposed to be sharing everything, but this was like a family heirloom. It was worth about a thousand pounds. He just took it into town, sold it, then pretended he’d seen “someone” break into the house and steal it. Kept the money hidden away. The father found out through the grapevine. All hell let loose. We were turfed out the next day.’ He shrugged. ‘And other stuff too. But that was the main thing.’

I suddenly understood his lack of guilt about taking his father’s money.

David claimed to be making a lot of money running his exercise classes, but really, how much money could you make out of a handful of hippies in a church hall twice a week? Could he have sold something of ours from under our noses? He’d already brainwashed my mother into letting him handle our family finances. Maybe he was taking money directly out of our bank account. Or maybe this was the money that my mother thought was going to charity to help poor people.

All my vague misgivings about David Thomsen began to coalesce into something hard and real.

‘Do you like your dad?’ I asked, fiddling with the cress on the side of my plate.

‘No,’ he said simply. ‘I despise him.’

I nodded, reassured.

‘How about you?’ he said. ‘Do you like your dad?’

‘My dad is weak,’ I replied, knowing with a burning clarity that this was true.

‘All men are weak,’ said Phin. ‘That’s the whole bloody trouble with the world. Too weak to love properly. Too weak to be wrong.’

My breath caught at the power of this statement. I immediately knew it to be the truest thing I’d ever heard. The weakness of men lay at the root of every bad thing that had ever happened.

I watched Phin peel two ten-pound notes from his wad to pay for the expensive sandwiches. ‘I’m really sorry I can’t pay you back,’ I said.

He shook his head. ‘My father’s going to take everything you own and then break your life. It’s the least I can bloody do.’





27


Libby, Dido and Miller lock the house up behind them and go to the pub. It’s the pub Libby saw from the roof of the house. It’s heaving but they find a high table in the beer garden and drag stools across from other tables.

‘Who do you think it is?’ says Dido, stirring her gin and tonic with her straw.

Miller replies, ‘It’s not someone homeless. There’s not enough stuff. You know. If he was actually living there, there would be lots more things.’

‘So you think it’s someone who just comes occasionally?’ says Libby.

‘That would be my guess.’

‘And so there was someone up there when I was here on Saturday?’

‘That would also be my guess.’

Libby shudders.

‘Look,’ says Miller, ‘here’s what I think. You were born around June 1993?’

‘June the nineteenth.’ A chill goes through her as she says the date. How does anyone know? Maybe it was just made up. By the social services? By her adoptive mother? She feels her grasp on the certainty of herself start to slip and slide.