The Family Remains(68)
‘Yes. That’s right.’
‘So you know where he’s staying?’
‘Well, I know which building he’s staying in but it’s a pretty big building. I don’t know which apartment it is. And it’s funny because I’ve sent him a message or two myself these past few days, wondering if we were going to get together again before he goes back to Africa, but he didn’t reply, and I just thought maybe, you know, he was busy doing whatever that boy does. He’s a bit of a riddle, as I’m sure you know. Hard to get a handle on, except when he’s taking care of animals. His lifestyle never made much sense to me, so I didn’t push it.’
‘Would you be able to tell me where the apartment block is? Maybe we could go round now and see if we can rouse him. Make sure that everything’s OK?’
Peter Lilley nods. ‘Sure,’ he says. ‘Though I can’t remember the street number, just the location.’ He gives them a street name and tells them that it’s opposite a ‘brasserie kind of place with a one-syllable name, tables on the sidewalk’ and a few doors down from an organic supermarket called Organic Delightful.
Marco sucks in his breath but doesn’t say anything. Organic Delightful! The same shop that he and Alf had noticed Henry had googled when they were searching his browsing history. His skin flushes with the thrill of the connection.
‘Let me know if you find him, won’t you? You’ve got me a little worried about him now too!’
‘Yes,’ says Lucy. ‘Yes, of course I will.’ She takes a piece of paper from Peter Lilley with his phone number on it and tucks it in her bag. Then they get ice creams and sit in the sun for a while, waiting for an Uber to arrive to take them to their next destination.
The building that Peter Lilley directed them to straddles four shop fronts. It’s got an old-fashioned wooden front door with stained-glass windows and curly brass bits and a panel to the left of the doorway with about fifty brass buttons on it and for a moment they all stand there staring at the brass panel in silence.
‘Now what?’ says Marco.
Lucy casts her eyes upwards towards the four floors above them.
But just as she is about to reply there is a shadow of movement on the stairway and a young mother appears carrying a toddler in her arms. As she comes to the door Lucy moves out of her way and then, as she opens it she says, ‘Excuse me, I’m looking for someone who’s staying in this building. In an Airbnb? You don’t happen to know which apartment that might be?’
‘Sorry. No clue. Half of them are probably set up that way, I reckon. You should just check the site.’
She brushes past them then, and boards herself and her toddler into the Uber that’s just pulled over on the street outside. Lucy holds the door in her wake, and they slip inside. The floors are grey granite with sparkly bits and the stairs are made of stone with a metal handrail. There’s a lift with a gate that pulls across and floral mosaic panels around it. They climb the stone stairs to the first floor where the landing spreads left and right with rows of identical doors on both sides. The walls are clad in dark wood carved to look like curtains.
‘Such a beautiful building,’ says Lucy, running her fingertips along the wooden folds, but Marco, who prefers his buildings white and modern and well lit, does not particularly agree.
‘What shall we do?’ he asks.
‘I mean, I suppose we could just start randomly knocking on doors.’
Stella looks up at Lucy and shakes her head. ‘No,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to do that. It’s scary.’
‘Why is it scary?’ says Lucy, leaning down to meet Stella’s face.
‘People might get angry. People might shout. And look,’ Stella says, trailing her right arm in both directions. ‘Look how many there are. And he might not even be here.’
Lucy breathes in and stands upright. She glances at Marco and nods. ‘She’s right. We could spend an hour knocking on every door and it could turn out Phin’s not even here. We need to find out which apartment he’s in some other way.’
Marco nods back, his gaze firmly on his phone as he scrolls through Airbnb rentals advertised on this street. And then he stops scrolling and turns his phone to his mum and says, ‘Look. There are two in this building on here. They’re both booked at the moment, one of them for another week, the other for another ten days.’
His mum tries to take his phone from his hand, but he pulls it back. ‘You don’t need to touch my phone, Mother!’ he says. ‘Just let me hold it.’
He scrolls through the pictures of the first apartment. It’s kind of bland: cream sofas, wooden coffee table, a divan bed dressed with pale floral bedding, a shiny gold chandelier. It has a view from the bedroom window of a wall with metal fire escapes attached to it. Then he clicks on the second apartment. This one is much nicer, lots of bright colours and pretty furnishings and a view from the living room across the street. He scrolls and he scrolls looking for something to identify the apartment somehow and then stops and holds his breath. A photograph of a front door painted a kind of greeny-blue with a doorknocker in the shape of a fox’s head.
‘Come on,’ he says. ‘let’s find the fox.’
49
February 2018
Rachel dropped her sunglasses from her head to her nose and grabbed the handle of her pull-along case. The winter sun was noticeably warmer here in Nice, with its extra few degrees of proximity to Africa, than in London. She held her face up to it and closed her eyes for a moment, soaking it in. Then she turned and headed into her hotel. The time was 10 a.m.; Michael’s son’s school day ended at 4.30 p.m. She had all day to meander, to shop, to eat, to relax.