Warlight(26)

“Something I read in a book. Some old man’s wish. I still remember it. I say it to myself every night.” Agnes’s head on my shoulder, her eyes looking at me through the dark. “Tell me something,” she whispered. “Something you remember…like that.”

“I…I can’t think of anything.”

“Anything. Who you like. What you like.”

“I suppose my sister.”

“What do you like about her?”

I shrugged and she could feel that. “I don’t know. I barely see her now. I suppose we felt safe around each other.”

“You mean you don’t feel safe, not usually?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you feel safe? Don’t just shrug.”

I looked up into the dark of the large empty room we were sleeping in.

“What are your parents like, Nathaniel?”

“They’re all right. He works in the city.”

“Perhaps you can ask me over to your house?”

“Okay.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think you will like them.”

“So they’re all right, but I won’t like them?”

I laughed. “They’re just not interesting,” I said.

“Like me?”

“No. You’re interesting.”

“In what way?”

“I’m not sure.”

She was silent.

I said, “I feel anything can happen with you.”

“I’m a working girl. I got an accent. You probably don’t want me meeting your parents.”

“You don’t understand, it’s a strange household now. Really strange.”

“Why?”

“There are always these people there. Strange people.”

“So I’ll fit in.” More silence, waiting for me to answer her. “Will you come over to my flat? Meet my parents?”

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes. I’d like that.”

“That’s surprising. You don’t want me in your house, but you’ll come to mine.”

I said nothing. Then, “I love your voice.”

“Fuck you.” Her head moved away in the darkness.

—

Where were we that night? Which house? What part of London? It could have been anywhere. There was no one I liked as much to have beside me. And at the same moment there was a relief in us being possibly finished. Because even if I felt most at ease with this girl who had pulled me through, into, and out of those houses, with all the questioning that came so naturally to her, it was becoming too difficult to explain my double life. In a way I liked it that I knew nothing about her. I did not know her parents’ names. I had never asked her what they did. I was curious only about her, even if Agnes Street was not her name but simply the location of the first house we went to in some borough I’ve now forgotten. She had once grudgingly told me her real name as we worked side by side in the restaurant. She did not like it, she’d said, and wanted a better one, especially after hearing mine. She’d mocked the poshness of “Nathaniel” at first, its pretentiousness, dragging it out even to four syllables. And then, after mocking my name in front of the others, she’d come across me silent during a lunch break and asked if she could “borrow” that piece of ham out of my sandwich. And I had not known what to say.

I never did with her. She was the talker, but I knew she longed to be the listener as well, in the way she wanted to embrace everything that was taking place around her. Just as she had insisted the greyhounds come into the house when I turned up that night in The Darter’s car, so they had bounded in between her legs and later bent and focused their arrow-like faces towards the sound of our breathing when we were in each other’s arms.

I did eventually have a dinner with her parents. I had to turn up at her restaurant and go back into the kitchens several times before she actually believed me. She must have felt I was just attempting politeness. We had not been alone since the night she had proposed it in the dark. They lived in a one-and-a-half-room council flat, so she moved her mattress into the living room at night. I watched her gentleness with her quiet parents, how she calmed their awkwardness around me. The wildness and sense of adventure I knew in Agnes from work and in those houses we met in did not exist here. Instead I became aware of her determination to escape her world, working eight hours a day, lying about her age so she could take the night shifts whenever possible.

She was inhaling the world around her. She wanted to understand every skill, everything people spoke about. With my silence I was probably a nightmare to her. She must have thought I was born with distance in me, secretive about what I feared, secretive about my family. Then one day she ran into me with The Darter and so I introduced him to her as my father.

—

The Darter was the only one of that cobbled-together group haunting Ruvigny Gardens whom Agnes was to meet. I needed to invent a situation where my mother travelled a great deal. I had become a liar not so much to confuse her as to remove the hurt she felt because I kept the inexplicable situation in my life from her—and perhaps from myself as well. But meeting The Darter was enough for Agnes to feel accepted. Now I had made my life clearer to her, if more confusing to myself.