for hours on end, even though I needed him too. Even when I started to get suspicious, when her lies built up around her, I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt. But before the Christmas storms – over the top, like the crappy clichéd ones they teach you about at school – before the rain and the branches and the roof could fall on the four of us, she was dead.
She is dead.
Now only I am left to love him and it’s all my fault.
FRIDAY, 24 JUNE 2016
I ran. Ribcage, feet and thoughts pounding, I ran and ran and kept on running.
What had we done? Why had we?
Blue, blue, blue, blue, yellow, yellow, a whole buggeration of blue: on and on the results had flashed up, all the live-long night, and now we were out.
Fuck it. Brexit.
Now I needed a fag, I needed my dead mum and I needed a new passport, in that order. The latter two were out of the question, so I had bolted to the supermarket for cigarettes.
When I reached the doors, I eyed myself in the glass. My lips were mud red. I was puffy, my eyes salt-stained and dry; worst of all I was panting in public. Over-exercised, out-voted, thwarted and screwed, but alive and still here, wherever here was now.
On the bright side, nothing made you appreciate a fag like a good sprint.
Two people had arrived before me. There was an old lady wrapped in thick, well-cut mustard – years of knowing that summer mornings could be chilly in this corner of the European Union – tying up her spicy little terrier. And him.
The woman blanked our smiles but he and I met each other’s eye. I was ready:
‘Not long now …’
He was too:
‘Here’s hoping …’ His first words.
A pause; we were taking our time. I could see up close those cuffs that commanded a second look, the sun-starved wrists, the moon rising from each cuticle. The hair, organised, showed more salt than pepper in that still-shocked light. But these were unimportant details. All I could feel was the pressure, building in the nothing between us. With pressure like that you just knew that the universe, or the Almighty, or whatever the hell, was getting ready to give one mother of a push.
6.58 a.m. Friday 24 June 2016.
‘I’m here for my daughter,’ he began at last. ‘She’s turning sixteen and wants me to get “a tonne of good stuff”, whatever that might mean …’
‘It’s her party?’
‘Only the sleepover tonight, the main party next week, but I have no—’
‘Oi-oi!’
Just as he was about to tell me what he did not have, we heard it: the unmistakable cadence of trouble. A heap of a man was arriving, belly first; lumping his way down from the high street, prickled scalp tilted high. From where we stood you could see he was a meeting of both triumph and disaster.
‘Out! Out!’
The red face, the glittering glare: joy gone bad. He was coming closer.
‘Enger-lurrnd!’ he sang, as three more prickleheads straggled around the corner behind him. ‘En! Ga! Lund!’
More fat than muscle but still, he was big.
Then he was nearly upon me, blue marble eyes swivelling, ready to bash at this other thing, this other thing, this dark blot on his brand-new swept street, his clean sheet. A black woman wearing rushed make-up and a look of contempt for his playground punch-up politics.
He spoke:
‘We voted Leave, love. Outcha go!’
I gaped, eye-level with the chest of this sweaty fiasco. Tattoos all over his thick neck.
‘I don’t think there’s any call for that.’
A voice as dark as my skin, it flowed with a current to it. It was him. This man beside me, feet fight-distance apart but fists at his sides, a heat in that count-to-ten stare.
All I could think of was the blood spurting on to that pretty suit.
Then the big man inflated his cheeks and chest, became whale-big. Big of body was a thing for him, you could bet on it, but he liked his ideas small and hard.
‘Wotchoo, er fackin’ ’usband?’
‘Yes,’ said the suited man, moving closer to my side.
The eyes swivelled wilder, the disgust too great. A torrent of blood was surely coming – and then the stragglers caught up.
‘Trev!’ They swept him along, shambled away, a colourous bobbling of orange and dark red-pink T-shirts. As they rumbled on, with the man-mound clasped in their loving headlock, one mate rubbed his knuckles into the headstubble, and the smallest man pressed a lager can up to Trev’s lips. The meaty fist punched out, now into only air, into no one.
‘Whoa,’ I said.
‘Indeed,’ he said. The laughter lines, the rivulets of skin that danced at each idea that rose behind the eyes, eyes that shone. Yes, he was appalled to the core and embarrassed, but above all relieved he was not them. To make sure I knew it, he offered his smile; one warm poultice for our wound.
‘That was scary.’ I stopped short of patting my chest. ‘I have never, ever had that said to me. I was born here—’
‘Idiot,’ he said.
‘Big mad angry violent idiot.’
‘So dumb.’
‘As in “referendumb”.’
‘Ha, precisely. Don’t worry, though. He’s just one nutter.’
‘But he’s clearly swallowed at least two others.’
He laughed, shook his head. ‘They feel emboldened, they were always going to. It’ll pass.’
‘Or get worse.’
‘It’ll be fine. We’re all better than that.’
‘Well … Thank you.’
‘Pleasure.’
‘No, seriously.’ It had to be now. ‘How can I ever thank you?’
‘Actually …’ he said.
‘I always buy them and she pretends not to mind, but she does. I’d be so grateful—’
‘I’m not actually going to bake you one, you know!’
We walked on through the aisles and, laughing, stopped.
‘Here we are,’ I said. ‘Look.’
‘Great.’ He reached for the nearest factory sponge.
‘No, listen.’ I surprised myself with that flirty-bossy tone, me trying to take over his senses so soon. Look … listen … ‘You don’t want a big-brand one with loads of E numbers. Think cricket wife. Wonky, homemade.’
‘Oh, but I—’
‘Hang on.’ There I went again. ‘This one, with apricot jam. Ah, organic. Perfect.’
‘Hold your horses,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit … you know.’
‘What?’ I scanned it for flaws.
‘A bit …’ He