The Family Upstairs(8)
‘It’s the middle of July. All the UK and German schools will be breaking up about now. There’ll be twice as many tourists. It shouldn’t take long to make enough to get to the UK.’
‘Why can’t you ask Dad to pay for us to go? Then we can just go. I really want to go to London. I want to get away from here. Just ask Dad to pay. Why can’t you?’
‘Because I don’t want him to know we’re going. No one can know we’re going. Not even Mémé. OK?’
He nods. ‘OK.’
His chin falls against his chest and she sees the clumps of matted hair that have formed at the back of his head in the week that they’ve been homeless. Her heart aches and she cups her hand around the back of his slender boy neck, squeezes it gently. ‘I’m so sorry, my lovely boy,’ she says, ‘I’m so sorry about everything. Tomorrow we’ll see your father and then everything will start getting better, I swear.’
‘Yes,’ he snaps, ‘but nothing will ever be normal, will it?’
No, she thinks to herself. No. It probably won’t.
6
CHELSEA, 1988
Birdie came first. Birdie Dunlop-Evers.
My mother had met her somewhere or other. At a do. Birdie played the fiddle in a pop band called the Original Version and was, I suppose, vaguely famous. There’d been a jangly single that had almost got to number one and they’d been on Top of the Pops twice. Not that I cared much about such things. I never really liked pop music and the deification of celebrities slightly disgusts me.
She was sitting in our kitchen drinking tea out of one of our brown mugs. I jumped slightly when I saw her there. A woman with long thin hair down to her waist, men’s trousers tied round with a belt, a striped shirt and braces, a long grey overcoat and green fingerless gloves. She looked so wrong in our house, I thought. The only people who came to our house wore hand-stitched suits and bias-cut satin; they smelled of Christian Dior aftershave and l’Air du Temps.
Birdie glanced up at me as I walked in, small blue eyes with thin pencil lines of eyebrow above, a hard mouth which didn’t close quite properly over a row of small teeth, a rather weak chin that appeared to have buckled under the joylessness of her face. I thought she might smile, but she didn’t.
‘Henry,’ said my mother, ‘this is Birdie! The lady I was telling you about, from the pop group.’
‘Hello,’ I said.
‘Hello,’ she replied. I couldn’t make sense of her. She sounded like my headmistress but looked like a tramp.
‘Birdie’s group want to use the house to film a pop video!’ said my mother.
I admit, at this point I did have to feign disinterest somewhat. I held my features straight and said nothing, heading silently to the biscuit barrel on the counter for my daily back-from-school snack. I selected two Malted Milks and poured myself a glass of milk. Then and only then did I say, ‘When?’
‘Next week,’ said Birdie. ‘We had a location chosen, but they had a flood or some such disaster. Bouf. Cancelled.’
‘So I said, come and look at our house, see what you think,’ my mother continued.
‘And here I am.’
‘And here she is.’
I nodded casually. I wanted to ask when they were coming and could I take the day off school and could I help but I was not then, and never have been, a person to show enthusiasm for anything. So I dipped my Malted Milk biscuit in my milk, the exact way I always did, just to the T in ‘Malted’, where the end of the standing cow meets the end of the lying down cow, and ate it silently.
‘I think it’s brilliant,’ said Birdie, gesturing around her. ‘Better than the other place in fact. Just perfect. I think there’d be things to sign.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘You know, waivers, etc. In case we set fire to your house. Or one of your moose heads lands on one of us and kills us. That sort of thing.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said my mother as if she had to sign waivers for accidental moose-head fatalities all the time. ‘That makes sense. And obviously I’d need to discuss it with my husband first. But I know he’ll be happy. He loves your music.’
This I suspected was untrue. My father liked rugby songs and bawdy opera. But he did like fuss and attention and he did like his house and anyone who liked his house was always going to go down well with him.
Birdie left a few minutes later. I noticed a small pile of dry skin pickings on the table by her mug and felt a bit sick.
The shoot for the video lasted two days and was much more boring than I’d thought it would be. There was endless time spent finessing light readings and getting the scruffy band members to repeat actions over and over again. They were all dressed alike in brownish clothes that looked like they might smell, but didn’t because a lady with a clothes rail had brought them along in clear plastic bags. By the end of the day the song was embedded inside my head like a trapped fly. It was a terrible song but it went to number one and stayed there for nine long, dreadful weeks. The video was on every TV screen you passed, our house, there, on view to millions.
It was a good video. I’ll give it that. And I got a minor thrill from telling people that it was my house in the video. But the thrill faded as the weeks passed, because long after the film crew had left, long after the single had dropped out of the charts, long after their next single dropped out of the charts, Birdie Dunlop-Evers, with her bead eyes and her tiny teeth, was still in our house.