‘Just out, innit, change of plan. One-off, promise.’
‘Is it a woman?’ I did not smile but I felt no anger either. The spices and simmering had soothed me, and I had missed my baby.
‘What women? Don’t know no women.’
I smiled then, an easy reflex; this was our usual banter, our stock exchange. We were cool with each other, Demarcus and I. He was always a good dad, at least for a dad who couldn’t keep it anything like in his pants. His pants flew off weekly and landed in a different time zone without ever fulfilling their cotton destiny of keeping anything in them. However, when I got pregnant he stuck around, unlike some – unlike many – and we had talked about a flat-pack future, living together, even a wedding at the town hall where his brother could DJ, crack out the old-school ragga. I had been serious and so had he; we were not tripping off down any bumpy babyfather route, I did not want some cartoon of a bruvva cliché. I wanted a real husband, to be a father and son and mum, an all-together family like the one I grew up in.
Our truest story, to be fair: he was no stereotype spat out by potty-mouthed politicians – those whom Mum had christened battymouts – and nor was I. We were just not ready for each other. He liked having a boy but did not rate the stink of nappies. He had liked my milk-heavy breasts but had not wanted to miss Amsterdam to watch me push our son out of that same swollen body. He liked to stroke his son’s cheek goodnight but never woke for him. Or he would already be out. Then my Stevie was diagnosed and Dem, still my anti-husband, would stay out longer, later and longer, until I noticed that I had not seen him for three days and he hadn’t left his best jeans for me to wash and soon he wasn’t even calling me any more to tell me, ‘Don’t know no women.’
Game over, then. But only because I had been ready anyway.
So that night Dem stood there breathing in the peppery tang of another man’s dinner for two and I closed him out with a calm click, and brought Stevie in to meet my new friend, Thomas, and my boy was too drowsy to ask questions, and Thomas was fantastically uncool and kind – with a proper sleep-tight voice, that very first night – and it was enough.
Dem deh two gwan be like bench an’ batty.
As I turned to take Stevie to his bed, my phone went. I stooped to answer it, arms full of son.
‘Oh, I really can’t be arsed to—’
‘Easy, turn it off,’ said Thomas, rising to make us coffee.
I turned it off.
My man, his back to me, waved a silver pouch high. He had sought out some Jamaica Blue Mountain to make for us in my home, perhaps his way of telling me something about how he got me even though he didn’t know me.
Later, in that same kitchen, I was taken aback by just how much he knew me. We went together. He got me.
Stevie was pulling at my hand so hard I nearly sloshed coffee on to the floor.
‘Don’t go out, Mum.’
‘I won’t, poppet, not until much later.’
‘Cuddles!’
‘I’ve told you, darling.’ I bent to hug him. ‘The big lorry was far away, not here.’
He had been clingy ever since that morning, when a new terrorist atrocity had driven a hole through his innocence. He had sensed my alarm at the rolling news. Unable to find the controls I had stared too long, wearing the fear for both of us. My Stevie knew, despite my efforts, and now he did not want me to go out tonight.
‘Are you crying, Mummy?’
‘No, sweetness.’
‘I can stay here, with you. I won’t go to Ange.’
I could not stay. We had awoken to brutality, and to more wrong to come, to every shade of evil directed to extremes. And to change.
But you had to run. Run towards what they hoped you would hate.
‘Ange would miss you too much, my precious. You need to go see her. First though, cornflakes.’
We left the TV off all day and before I could think twice, I was there.
Littleton Lodge, in High Desford Old Town. From my house, it was across the main park and along a bit, on the corner of a lane so green it felt like the gateway to another country. I had walked past it often, this house: set right back, three storeys high and wide, really bloody wide, and white, with wisteria swagged across it. A great fat wodge of Tinkerbell’s wedding cake, it even had the nerve to stand at the end of a muesli-crunch driveway.
Walking up to the house I had noticed a scuff on my black court shoes – bloody gravel – but the door opened before I knocked and – blouse an skirts! Mi neva si huh dere – there she stood, the happy fairy or nymph or sprite, shifting her weight from foot to foot in a pink playsuit. The girl, his girl, with her father coming close up behind her. As I neared them I could see they shared the same welcoming gaze but hers shone from grey, almost metallic eyes, eyes that you knew would not look away first. Her face was warm cream, her shoulders bare, no wings. Lola.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ we said.
I stepped in, Thomas stepped back, there was a hefty ker-chunk of the door and before I had stepped off the doormat Lola had moved forward to wrap me in a surprise: a free and fluid hug. Then she stepped back and smiled up at her father. The dance of greeting, done.
Father and daughter were both barefoot. Burnished floorboards stretched back into hard acres behind them.
The air was so harmonious I was afraid to disturb it:
‘Should I take my shoes off?’
Thomas parted his lips.
‘If you don’t mind, thanks,’ said Lola.
I felt their eyes on me and my marked heels. I should have worn tights: my surprised toenails were unpolished. My toes were silly, stubby and two were considering corns; I had always hated my feet. I was wondering how to work gravel damage and hours spent standing on wards into the conversation as she took my hand and said:
‘Come, I’ll show you around.’
Another easy glance; and yet such ripening wisdom in those silver disc eyes. I put down my handbag. I was dazzled. Truly, I could not take her in.
‘Good girl.’ Thomas was nervous too. ‘I’ll potter off and get on with our dinner. You’re in for a treat! We’re having my special pasta sauce. A real family fave, is it not, Lollapalooza?’
Lola took me from room to room, looking back at me now and then with a certain intensity as if to check that I was missing nothing, noticing it all. How could I not? This was Thomas himself in brick: a home that challenged you not to find it charming and well appointed. It was the generous but cosy, life’s-goshdarn-rosy nest of an architect who had been born with that true American optimism in his blood and still felt he was coming into his greatest powers. As I walked his hallways I believed in him more than ever. Later on he might provoke, or dissemble, or build sustainable grass-roofed mansions, or fool around with the conventions of loft apartment chic, or offer answers to clients’ most difficult prayers in cathedrals of black brick and zinc cladding; later, there was time. For now he lived somewhere that suited him. Clever, with a heart. I was inside what he called his ‘three-dimensional canvas’, in which walls would have been moved, spaces taken up and down and outwards. Lola was formal and proud, but I understood that. I followed her and paused to admire, followed and paused as she padded with unsettling poise – ballet? – around her home. I shuffled through the full tour on my ugly bare feet. We stood caught in our unblinking double glare, the light sting of her scrutinising my back as I wheeled, toes resting to hide for a moment in the pile of a rug, in slow humiliation through the study and the snug, through the whole of her too-lovely world.
Lola beckoned me to the next stop on the tour with a steel-tipped wave. (Her nails and toes were both painted,