Our London Lives E-Book

Christine Dwyer Hickey

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 740

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

'Sprawling yet intimate' Guardian 'Huge of heart and soaring of soul' CLAIRE KILROY 'A profound love story...Like Barbara Kingsolver, Hickey captures the pulse of the living moment' COLUM McCANN 'A London novel that captures the living moment of the city across decades' PAUL LYNCH 1979. In the vast and often unforgiving city of London, two Irish outsiders seeking refuge find one another: Milly, a teenage runaway, and Pip, a young boxer full of anger and potential who is beginning to drink it all away. Over the decades their lives follow different paths, interweaving from time to time, often in one another's sight, always on one another's mind, yet rarely together. Forty years on, Milly is clinging onto the only home she's ever really known while Pip, haunted by T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, traipses the streets of London and wrestles with the life of the recovering alcoholic. And between them, perhaps uncrossable, lies the unspoken span of their lives. Dark and brave, this epic novel offers a rich and moving portrait of an ever-changing city, and a profound inquiry into character, loneliness and the nature of love.

Leseprobe

OUR LONDON LIVES

Also by Christine Dwyer Hickey

The Narrow Land

The Lives of Women

Snow Angels

The House on Parkgate Street and Other Dublin Stories

Cold Eye of Heaven

Last Train from Liguria

Tatty

The Gatemaker (The Dublin Trilogy 3)

The Gambler (The Dublin Trilogy 2)

The Dancer (The Dublin Trilogy 1)

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2024 byAtlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition published in 2025 byAtlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Christine Dwyer Hickey, 2024

The moral right of Christine Dwyer Hickey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

A CIP catalogue record for this bookis available from the British Library.

E-book ISBN: 978 1 80546 134 0

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

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WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Part One

1. Milly

2. Pip

3. Milly

4. Pip

Part Two

5. Milly

6. Pip

7. Milly

8. Pip

Part Three

9. Milly

10. Pip

Part Four

11. Milly

12. Pip

Part Five

13. Milly

14. Pip

Part Six

15. Milly

16. Pip

Part Seven

17. Milly / Pip

18. Milly / Pip

Part Eight

19. Pip / Milly

Acknowledgements

Landmarks

Cover

Start

To Denis, with all my love

By this, and this only, we have existed

Which is not to be found in our obituaries

Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider

Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor

In our empty rooms

T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

PART ONE

1. Milly

1979

THAT FIRST TIME, she barely saw him at all. There was a glimpse when he came through the main door, and then again later, when the girl was crawling all over him. She hadn’t been in the job all that long – two maybe three weeks in, and still finding her way around the place: the various bottles and taps, the big curved counter in the main bar, the compact lounge out the back. Beyond all that, the four flights of stairs, one darker than the next.

She’d been polishing whiskey glasses. The glasses didn’t really need polishing but Trish had told her that Mrs Oak didn’t like her barmaids to stand still or show idle hands. ‘She thinks it makes the place look like a church,’ Trish said, ‘and who wants to drink in a church?’

Mrs Oak was still in hospital at the time, recovering from her car crash, and so they hadn’t even met. But it felt like she was getting to know her anyway, because whenever Trish told her to do something, it always began with ‘Mrs Oak, she likes it done this way’ or ‘Mrs Oak, she don’t like that’.

It had been a boxing-club night – so a Tuesday or Thursday – and Trish had been standing at the end of the counter, leaning against the opened flap, talking to some man named Jackie. ‘He’s got real promise,’ the man was saying, ‘needs a bit of work, a bit of hardening up. But with the right handling . . .’

At first, she’d thought they were talking about a greyhound. The man had the look of someone who might keep greyhounds, with the sheepskin coat on him and a hat that seemed too small for his head. But then Trish had asked, ‘How old is he anyway, this young boxer of yours?’

‘Oh, he’s not mine. Not yet. Not with that Shamie flapping around like an old mother hen. He’s twenty, nearly twenty-one. Been better if I’d got hold of him a bit earlier but still, plenty of time. I mean, you just got to look at the condition he’s in.’

‘Oh, I’ve seen him, Jackie,’ Trish said. ‘Believe me, I’ve seen him.’

There was something about the way Trish had said that.

By then, it would have been about an hour before closing time. The boys from the club were starting to come in, by twos and threes. You could nearly hear the energy jangling off them and their voices seemed to electrify the room. He came in last, with Shamie. They hung back for a few minutes in the alcove just inside the main door, and his face was in shadow. Shamie, standing with his back to the room, hand on the younger man’s shoulder, appeared to be doing all the talking. She knew who Shamie was, because on her first day of work, he’d gone to the trouble of introducing himself. ‘I run the boxing club down the back lane,’ he said, ‘so you’ll be seeing a lot of me. My boys give you any trouble, you let me know.’

She’d thought he had a nice face even if it was a bit batteredlooking, and had hoped the bit about the boys giving trouble was a joke.

Within seconds, Trish was down at the till, pinging her way through the boxing-club order. She put the whiskey glass back into its little nest, folded the cloth, and followed her. The lads from the club were lined up at the counter. A whiff of aftershave and recent sweat, not at all unpleasant. On her first night here, she’d heard Trish call it a pong. ‘You boys don’t half pong,’ she’d said. ‘What happened – crate of Brut fall off the back of a lorry or something?’

She’d had to bite her lip to stop herself laughing out loud when Trish said that.

The next time she looked, the alcove was empty. She could see Shamie all right, now in the centre of the floor, his low profile and nose sitting close to his face. The lads from the club pushing around him like children looking for attention.

While she waited for a pint to settle, she scanned the room: the two leather booths to her left; the long seat under the main window to her right; the row of high stools by the shelf on the back wall. But she couldn’t see the young boxer anywhere.

And then, just before Trish called last orders, she spotted him. He was sitting in the recess behind the cigarette machine, the girl beside him blocking the view. She had noticed the girl earlier on, and had thought she was beautiful, even if she looked a bit mad. Like someone out of a circus or a presenter on a kids’ programme on the telly, maybe. Her hair, long and jagged, had bleached streaks all the way through it. She was wearing a short tartan skirt and a big red fluffy jacket; her wool tights had coloured stripes on them and her legs were long and skinny. She had felt sorry for her really, sitting there on her own for over an hour, gulping cider and smoking long cigarettes, her head going up every time the door opened. She didn’t seem too nervous now though, slobbering all over him, her two arms clamped hard around his neck.

Behind the girl’s shoulder, a dark brown crown of hair. Around the girl’s waist, a man’s large hand. One shoulder in a navy-blue jumper, one denim leg. The other hand came into view, lifted a pint from the table and for a second there was a chink of forehead, the edge of a nose. But she couldn’t see enough of his face to really know what he looked like. At the same time, she felt she would know him again.

When she came here first, it was mid-October, just as the weather was beginning to turn. London was much warmer than the village she’d left in County Louth, although the nights came on early and fast. But at least here, you could still go outside during the day wearing only a jumper, which was just as well because her coat had gone a bit snug on her since the last time she’d worn it. She had thought to try for London because it was big enough to lose herself in, and had decided on bar work after she’d heard a man down in the yard talking to her grandfather about someone he knew who had found work in a London pub. ‘They’re crying out for bar staff over there,’ was how he had put it, ‘and hasn’t he a roof over his head, at least?’

She had felt the work might suit her because she knew her way round the only pub in the village, where her grandmother worked as a cleaner. And when she was a little girl, the owner would lift her up to the Guinness pump and allow her pull the handle and then tell her to take a mineral off the shelf and open it for herself. And when she was older, he gave her a part-time job as a lounge girl, Saturday nights when a man from Dundalk came in to play guitar and on Sunday evening when the old farmers came in for their sing-song. She knew the bite of a bottle-opener in her hand anyway, the weight of a Guinness tap. And she knew how to clean out a slops tray too, and how to sweep up the sawdust.

Mrs Oak’s had been the last place she’d tried after a day of wandering in and out of pubs all over this part of London. The barman in the place up the road had tipped her off. She thought he might be from Belfast or somewhere up there.

‘Try the pub across from the tube station,’ he said. ‘Landlady’s in hospital, barman’s packed it in, and there’s poor Trish worn down to the balls of her feet with only a couple of part-timers to give her a dig-out.’

He’d given her an orange juice on the house, had taken his time with it too, holding on to the bottle for a while before finally taking the cap off and then lighting up a fag for himself. She didn’t mind really – it was a chance to sit down, her legs singing from all the traipsing around.

‘It’s a good shop,’ he said as he finally poured the orange. ‘You’ll not find better in Farringdon, nor Clerkenwell either. I drink there myself. But it does be fierce busy at times. Not like this hole. Nawthin’ doin’ here after six. But up there, you see, they go in after work, then all’s they have to do is fall over the road for the last tube home. In fact, this might be a good time to catch her.’

Then he leaned across the counter and lowered his voice. ‘One thing though – don’t let on you’re from the North.’

‘I’m not from the North,’ she said.

‘You’re not?’

She could feel the orange fizzing up like liver salts inside her belly and had to hold back a belch as she told him. ‘I’m from Louth.’

‘Aye, well, you should be fine so,’ he said, sounding a bit disappointed.

The barman’s name was Gerry. He didn’t tell her his name; she heard a customer call out to him as she pushed the door back out to the street.

A few minutes later she was edging her way through a crowded pub. Voices chattering above and below one another. Other sounds too, pings and gurgles and chinks and chimes. Like they were all inside a clockwork machine and someone was turning the handle. She waited for the room to settle. Anything like the amount of people then! Their clothes and different colours of skin. A man the spit of Bob Marley with hair like a slab of carpet underlay resting on his back; another fella wearing a turban. And a girl with hair cut like a soldier’s, eyelashes out to her nose. She tried not to stare. To keep her eyes fixed on the woman behind the counter. The woman’s face bulging with the strain, hands moving so fast you’d swear she had three of them.

‘Excuse me – are you Trish?’

‘I’ll be with you in a minute.’

‘I was just wondering if—’

‘I said—’

‘Gerry sent me, Gerry from up the road, you might be looking for staff, he said.’

‘Gerry sent you?’

‘That’s right.’

Without taking her eye off her, Trish laid a full pint on the counter, then picked up an empty glass, tilted it and began to fill it. ‘What are you, Irish?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘North or South?’

‘South.’

‘Got a reference then?’

‘A reference? Sure, yea. It’s in the end of my bag there.’

‘Can you pull a pint?’

‘Yes, yes of course I can.’

‘Pull one for me while you’re at it!’ a voice shouted out behind her.

‘And me and all, I’ve grown a beard I’m stood here that long.’

‘Well, what are you waiting for?’ Trish snapped at her. ‘Leave your stuff here under the counter, you can sort it later. Come on then. Chop-chop.’

And that was how she became a London barmaid.

She was eighteen years old and had known few people in her life so far. There had been her grandmother, her grandfather; the come-and-go farmhands who helped out on their smallholding; the occasional student at harvest time. There was a vicar until the parish church closed down and a handful of children from the small Protestant school that had also closed down, the year after she finished going there. There was a Catholic priest from a parish 12 miles away, who came into the pub to get drunk and sing songs. Once there had been a mother who still wandered into her head from time to time.

She knew the girl in the shop where she bought her grandfather’s snuff and his weekend newspapers. She knew the owner of the pub and his sour-faced sister who ran the post office. She knew the bus man who waved at her from his big green bus that brought people up to Newry or down to Dublin city where she sometimes accompanied her grandfather in case he fell off the wagon and needed someone to help him get back on the bus.

There was the main street and the river, the church spire and the dairy. There was the hairdresser in the front room of a cottage where her grandmother got permed once in a while. There was the old haybarn that sold second-hand tractor tyres. The green postbox on one corner and the cream and green phone box on the other. The big blue statue of a holy Mary on the fork in the road, a wreath of dirty plastic roses at her feet. There was the graveyard on the hill at the side of the big Catholic church. And the small graveyard behind the closed-down Protestant church where, if she turned her head sideways to look through the railings, she could see her mother’s name etched into a pale grey stone.

There was no sawdust on the floor of Mrs Oak’s pub; the ceilings were much higher, the rooms way wider and the array of labels on bottles seemed to go on forever, even in the compact back lounge. The village pub with its low ceiling and squinty windows had once been the centre of her world. Yet, no sooner had she stepped her foot in here than it began to shrink in her mind. Within a few days, hardly anything remained, apart from the memory of sound or sensation. An old man’s spit as it hit the fire, or the lazy sound of the ticking clock and the shushing of her grandmother’s sweeping brush. She could remember the feel of the owner’s big hairy arm digging into her belly when he lifted her up to the pump, and the grunt he gave when he did that, and the musty smell of him behind her. And she remembered, too, the gush of the porter as it made its way out and the lazy way it curled around the inside of the glass and how, if she stared right into it, for a few precious seconds, everything disappeared.

There was too much light in the main bar of Mrs Oak’s pub. It came at her no matter which way she turned. In the morning when she folded back the shutters from the big front windows, it fell on top of her in a great big slab. In the evening it bounced out of the backdrop mirrors and speared down from the chandelier. All day long it zipped and winked along the rows of different-shaped glasses that she polished and re-polished with her constant hands.

And there was too little light everywhere else. The further back into the house you went, the dimmer it became. By the time you went past the small lounge, the office and store room, down the long corridor to the porch that brought you out to the yard, you could hardly see a stim in front of you. The same thing with the stairs – the first flight was fine but after that the light diminished. Until the last flight when the stairs narrowed up to her room into a wedge of solid darkness. There were light switches on the walls of the landings – she had felt them with her hand – but they had all been taped over. Even in the middle of the day it rattled her nerves to go up there.

She counted the stairs and used the doors that she passed as markers. On the first floor: Trish’s bed-sitting room, the kitchen and a staff sitting room that no one seemed to bother with. On the second floor, a big empty room that used to be for club meetings and another room just for toilet rolls, buckets and brooms. On the third floor, the big junk room filled mostly with old bar furniture, tables and small stools clasped together or the dartboard with the darts still stuck into it, cracked down the middle like a broken heart. And once, when she stepped in to take a peek inside, a stand-up chef with a blackboard in his hand gave a little wobble and nearly frightened the living daylights out of her.

Mrs Oak’s flat was also on the third floor. The door to the flat was like a door you’d see outside on the street. There was a Yale lock on it and a bell to ring and a mat outside to wipe your feet and, right beside it, a tall narrow bin with a picture of a flamingo on it and inside it a man’s black umbrella leaning to one side.

At first, she’d been terrified of Trish, the questions she could ask, the things she might say. After a while, she became more used to her. She loved listening to her anyhow, the way she seemed to cut up her sentences and skim them across the counter at customers. Trish liked to do all the talking and that suited them both. Every morning, except Sunday when the pub was closed, they had breakfast together. In the kitchen everything seemed that bit too big: pots, pans, even the kettle. There was a deep fat fryer like you’d see in a chipper and a slicer for cutting ham that belonged in a grocer’s shop. And a big teapot that put her in mind of a baby elephant’s head. Just standing there made her feel like Alice after she’s eaten the mushroom.

For her, a scoop of cornflakes from a big steel container and bread from a giant sliced pan. For Trish, two cups of coffee and a fag on the side, while she put on her makeup and talked.

Mrs Oak was a widow, Trish told her. Her dead husband’s name was Terry. She’d broken her leg and cracked her pelvis in the car crash. She had a sister called Martha who lived in Hove. ‘A piece of work’ was what Trish had called her.

Mrs Oak had been on the way back from visiting the piece of work when the car skidded and went off the road. She’d been in hospital for weeks but would be discharged soon. After the hospital there would be a nursing home, and after that, she would go to stay with her sister because she had a bungalow. She’d be back for a visit in mid-January and then, all going well, she’d be back for good by the end of the month.

‘And I tell you what,’ Trish said through the mirror, one big made-up eye, one small bare one, ‘this place better shine then! Because Mrs Oak, well . . . she likes things done her way. She’s all right, really she is, so long as you’re straight with her. Just don’t try pullin’ the wool over her eyes. She can see right through you, can Mrs Oak, right into the back of your skull. Believe me, I know.’

There was a wedding photograph on the wall of the office. When the door was left open, she sometimes stopped to look in at it. Mrs Oak and her dead husband holding a long knife over a tall cake. Mr Oak had a heavy face with the jowls hanging off it. Mrs Oak looked like a clever schoolgirl, playing dress-up.

For the first few days, she fumbled her way up and down the dark stairs. Until one afternoon, when the cleaning lady, Mrs Gupti, happened to be climbing ahead of her and each flight lit up as if by command. The light only lasted a few seconds, but it allowed her to see a thick round button placed just below each defunct light switch. All she’d had to do all along was push the button, and a ration of light would be released, enough to take her safely from one flight of stairs to the next.

She could have asked someone about the dark stairwells. She could have asked a lot of other things too, but there were only so many questions she could ask without looking completely stupid.

Trish had said: if there’s anything you want to know, just shout.

But whenever she did ask Trish a question, the answer shot back at her so swiftly that she sometimes missed the half of it. She didn’t bother with the live-out staff because she knew there was no point. Silent Muriel who only came in for the lunchtime service and never looked anyone in the eye. And as for that Brenda one with the sneery mouth on her who frowned anytime she said a word as if she’d been speaking Chinese or something. ‘Sorry, what? I don’t know what you’re on about do, do I? What? What? I can’t understand a word she’s saying.’

And so mostly, she just watched and listened and at night worried herself to sleep in her bed at the top of the house, in a room that seemed way too big for her.

She worried about Mrs Oak looking inside her head. She worried about what she might see there. Day by day, the anxiety increased. She could feel it like a tightening screw inside her chest. The smallest thing began to play on her mind. A scrap of ham left in the mustard pot, an incorrect order, or a jot of blood on the crust of a cheese sandwich after she’d cut herself on yet another broken glass.

The lights in the bar were beginning to give her headaches. The headaches were giving her a sick feeling in her stomach. And there was something else, too, something she couldn’t quite put a finger on. It was there anyway, a shadow in the corner or behind her on the stairway. It was there at the end of her bed when she woke in the morning. It followed her into the toilet and stood with its back to the door, waiting.

And then she worried about the men in the bar, the love names that they called her: sweetheart, my lovely, my darling, gorgeous. Gorgeous! She nearly laughed out loud when she heard that one. Her grandmother had warned her about such men, endearments dripping off their tongues. ‘They’ll tell you anything, anything, just to get their way. Men who chew young girls up and then spit them into the sawdust.’

She was afraid that she might have been too familiar with the men in the bar, that she was coming across as someone like her mother was said to have been – flighty and a bit too free in her ways. But she hadn’t made free with anyone. She had been polite, shy even. She had hardly opened her mouth at all. The shame of her accent had seen to that – a shame she had not been expecting.

And then she was afraid that maybe that was what men liked. Someone who barely spoke and went bright red every time they were spoken to. She wondered if maybe she should try it Trish’s way, give them back answers with one lowered eyelid and a raised lip.

She practised being Trish in the mirror. She said:

‘I’ll give it to you all right, my love, across the back of your head.’

And then:

‘In your dreams, mate.’

And then:

‘Me? You’re asking me out on a date? Tell you what, love, if I ever go blind and deaf and lose my sense of smell, I’ll be sure to give you a shout.’

But even when she was alone in her room, her face turned puce and the words went limp in her mouth. Besides, the men didn’t speak to her the way they spoke to Trish with her black eyelashes and bright blue eyelids and her spongy pink lips.

Watneys, Whitbread, Worthington E, Carling Black Label. Watney Red. Best Bitter. London Pride. Draught Bass. Glenfiddich and Haig. Irish. Black Bush. Macallan, Glenlivet. John Jameson’s, John Smith’s, Johnnie Walker. Jack Daniel’s, Jim Beam and someone else.

She began to know the rhythm of the day. From the slow, lonely air of Monday to the frantic farmyard sounds of Friday night, each day had its own way of working. She knew the sewing-factory girls would come in on Friday at lunchtime and that the bingo crew were on Monday nights. The boxing-club lads came in a few times a week although some came in more often than others. Monday to Friday, the printers and market men dropped in and out. The journalists were there every morning, noon and night.

The sense of chaos began to settle down in her mind, the feeling of being trapped on a crowded platform and not knowing where the edge lay. In the moments before sleep took over, she saw it as a human jungle. She saw some bodies in shadow and some close up. Sometimes she only saw bits of them. The sleeve of a meat-market coat bruised with old bloodstains; the glint on the wrist of a Hatton Garden jeweller; the shape of old Mrs Rogers’ hat. There were lights from the jukebox and lights from the cigarette machine. There were mouths floating around in the dark, opening and closing like the mouths of fish. She saw hands shooting into the air and heard the sound of her name being called over and over.

Martini Bianco, Martini Rosso, Campari and soda. Dubonnet and white. G and T. Gin and orange. Gin and lime. Vodka and everything. Or ‘vodkar’, as some people called it over here.

The next time she saw him was about a week later, first thing on Monday morning. She couldn’t say how she knew it was him, she just did. The doors had only been open about ten minutes, and old Mrs Rogers was screwed down into her place on the long seat under the front window, sucking on her morning milk stout. There were two market men at the end of the bar, drinking coffee, hissing at each other over a pile of dockets and receipts. The place so quiet she could hear the traffic out front and a distant twang of announcements from the train station across the street. A cold morning in early November, a crust of ice on the window panes and him with no coat on his back. He walked straight by her to the far end of the counter where Trish was pouring coins into the open drawers of the till. Without stopping he put a note down on the counter and growled something. Then he sat down. He took a newspaper from under his arm and opened it out. When Trish came over and placed his drink in front of him, he didn’t lift his face, but a few minutes later she saw his head go up. She was curious to hear what his voice sounded like, to see if he had nice manners or if he’d give her a tip. She’d been bracing herself to go over and serve him. But then, he stood up and walked towards Trish, catching her attention with a single sharp rap of a coin on the counter before going straight back to his seat. Trish brought the second whiskey over to him and it seemed like only a moment later that the glass was empty and he was gone, leaving a small pile of change on the table and the newspaper thrown on the seat.

Trish turned round and looked at her. ‘A young man drinking like that on his own,’ she said, ‘Monday morning, whiskey too? A bad sign, in my experience. Good-looking bloke though, eh? We’ll give him that.’

‘I didn’t really notice.’

‘Not half, you didn’t,’ Trish said.

Over the next few weeks, she saw him often. Sometimes the girl was waiting for him when he came in from the boxing club. Sometimes he came in on his own. Nearly always he carried a gym bag on his shoulder and usually, he had a book with him. He sat in the same spot behind the cigarette machine unless it was taken, and then he sat on one of the high stools at the back wall. But he never drank at the bar. Now and then, he might go out to the hall to make a phone call or he might go the other way, out to the gents. At lunchtime, he often came in with Shamie.

One day he came in with a man she hadn’t seen before. They did and did not look like brothers. The man was shorter and his face was fuller, and he had long fairish hair, but they had a similar expression about the eyes. The man was carrying an odd-shaped case, oblong and dark brown leather with the initials ‘N. D.’ in gold on the side of it, and when he asked Trish to put it behind the bar for safekeeping, Trish said:

‘What’s in it then – a machine gun?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘a trumpet.’

‘Oh yeah – blow it yourself, do you?’ Trish said.

‘Ha ha,’ he said. ‘Like I haven’t heard that one before.’

When he came in with Shamie, he never drank; he had soup, two sandwiches and a pint of milk. When he came in with the girl, he drank pints of lager and, if they stayed till closing time, a couple of Jack Daniel’s. When he was alone, he’d sit reading his book or maybe a newspaper. When he was in company, he’d stand up.

For her, he stood out because he stood still. The rest of the lads from the club were all fidgety feet and twisting shoulders, tipping each other on the arm as they spoke. And mouth, of course, plenty of that. She thought there was a calmness about him, or a quiet strength anyhow, that belonged to a much older man.

She longed to hear what his voice sounded like, but so far this had escaped her. One evening, she got a notion to find out for herself. She hovered near to his table, emptying ashtrays and giving nearby tables a rub. But all she could hear was the voice of the girl. She felt that for such a good-looking girl, her voice let her down. It was like listening to the sounds coming out of her grandmother’s hen-house: a constant, demented rumble with an occasional squawk darting out.

She waited until they were getting ready to leave, then moved to take their glasses off the table. ‘Oh no you don’t,’ the girl screeched, hugging her glass to her chest like it was in some sort of mortal danger. ‘That’s the best bit, that is. Tell her,’ the girl said, nudging him, ‘it’s the best bit.’

He told her nothing; he just picked up his empty glass and handed it to her.

For a second their eyes caught. She felt the blood rush to her face and almost dropped the glass, she was that busy trying not to touch him as it passed from his hand to hers.

She was shaking when she got behind the bar and didn’t know what to think or why she would react that way. She was afraid of him, she decided. That must be it. And why wouldn’t she be? Someone who bashed people up for a living was bound to be dangerous. Someone like that could probably kill a man. Even if he did have very nice eyes.

By now, it was December, streels of red tinsel all over the bar, Christmas lights blinking through the mirror, and a permanent whiff of sausage rolls hanging all over the house. As soon as the doors opened in the morning, customers came tumbling in, and when they opened in the evenings, they were queuing outside. Even in the daytime there was a wildness on the air, strangers losing the run of themselves, joining one another’s company, shouting and singing and sucking the faces off each other under the plastic mistletoe. She had to give Mrs Gupti a hand with the toilets because they needed to be done out so often, and had to sluice the vomit off the path outside because the man from the brewery had complained that he’d slipped and nearly broken his snot.

By closing time, she felt as if she’d spent the day eating candy floss made out of cigarette smoke. Her eyeballs were itchy and red and there was a constant low-level heat in her head. She couldn’t get rid of the smell; it stayed on her hands, even after four or five soapy washes. She could smell it off her clothes and her hair; she could smell it off her dark yellow wee whenever she went to the loo. She found the food sickening. Too much plastic ham, she decided, too many deep-fried sausages. She longed for a proper dinner, something with parsley sauce or something with gravy. She found a truckers’ café off Charterhouse Square that did all-day service and for a while she took to eating there during the afternoon break. But the portions were huge and left her feeling sluggish and bloated. She thought her face looked like a bowl of porridge and her eyes had a piggy look to them. She was getting fat for the first time in her life, could hardly breathe when she closed her coat now and even had to buy a man’s V-neck jumper just so she could leave the button of her skirt opened at the top.

She remembered walking home from the village with her grandmother one day after they’d been to see her mother’s grave. Her grandmother crying, small tight sobs all the way down the lane that led to the house. At the gate she had pulled herself together, blown her nose and wiped her tears. ‘Consider it a blessing,’ she had said, ‘that you’re nothing to look at. It may keep you out of harm’s way.’

Oh, but the tree, at least, was beautiful.

They’d had to remove a section from the end of the long seat just to make room for it, and it had taken herself and Trish a whole Sunday afternoon to set up and decorate. All through the day, she glanced at it, but at night when the clearing-up was done and the house lights were switched off, she sat for a while in the darkened room and stared right into it. She sometimes thought of her mother then, on a wintery evening not long before her death, begging a neighbour to give them a lift into a nearby village because she’d heard there was a tree put up outside the Catholic church. She was only four years old then, but her mother had been even more enthralled by the tree than she’d been. It was a scrawny old thing, really, with a few sad lights on it and holy pictures pinned to the branches. And now here was Mrs Oak’s tree, plump and magnificent, glistening with light. She could feel a rush of love for it, as if it were a living thing. Her mother so young. More like her big sister, was what the neighbour had said as he drove them back home. ‘Your poor parents,’ he’d said to her. ‘You must have their hearts broken, you and your fatherless child.’

Her mother’s face when he’d said that.

One day, Trish said she was looking a bit peaky. ‘You need to make time for a walk every day, drag a bit of air into those lungs of yours. The pub is just one big boiling pot of germs this time of year, and Mrs Oak, she wouldn’t want you getting poorly, now would she?’

And now she felt she had to go out.

She would have preferred to do what she usually did, which was to take a leftover sandwich from the bar, bring it up to her room and see the afternoon through. She liked being in her room anyhow, the slope of the ceiling and the way she could see a good spread of London’s rooftops through her two small windows. She had an armchair where she could sit reading magazines and a small round table and a mantelpiece to lay her few bits on. She had a makeup bag stuffed with cosmetics that someone had left behind them in the ladies’ toilet.

Sometimes, she spread the contents of the bag across the mantelpiece and practised putting on makeup using a face from one of the magazines to guide her. She kept it on while she ate her lunch and tidied around, stopping now and then to look at herself in the mirror. But she always washed it off before Trish rang the bell for the evening shift.

On dog-tired days, she lay down on her bed and spent the afternoon break sleeping.

The names of the streets all around: Cowcross and St John; Briset and Benjamin. The names of the little cut-throughs that helped her to find her way home: Passing Alley, Jerusalem Passage, Turk’s Head Yard.

She had gone on a few messages for Trish already – or ran errands, as Trish would say. The post office, the dry cleaners, the chemist when Trish needed something for her dodgy stomach. And once Trish sent her to Hatton Garden to collect a bracelet Mrs Oak had left in for repair before her accident, and a jeweller with girl’s eyelashes said, ‘Hello, pretty, and what can I do for you today?’

On the street, people nodded at her. They beeped at her out of cars and rapped at her through shop windows. It was like being back in the village where she’d been reared, the way everyone seemed to know her name and who she was. But at least here, it wasn’t for any shameful reason.

Some people she recognised straight off: shopkeepers and friends of Trish who were to be found occasionally at the kitchen table, like Vera Greene whose father owned the chemist shop. There was Mr Hart, the sewing-factory owner; Mr Wells who was an accountant and who always made a point of sending Mrs Oak his special regards. She knew Maggie, who sold newspapers outside the train station, and Tony Agnesi, who ran the café. She knew Fred Darlington, who was in love with Trish and who owned the sheepskin shop on Leather Lane with the smell of death coming off it.

Even so, the neighbourhood felt too big for her. She was afraid of getting lost too and coming back late for work, or maybe straying into some dangerous place and not coming back at all.

She saw him one day, out on one of these walks. She saw him and he was coming out of Peter’s Lane with the gym bag over his shoulder. She ducked into the doorway of Agnesi’s across the street and stuck her face in front of the menu in the window. She could see a few seconds of him through the glass pane, the red and black squares of his jacket. She gave him a minute and then she stepped out of the doorway and followed. At Smithfield market, he crossed over the road and disappeared behind a line-up of trucks and vans. She didn’t follow him across but positioned herself where she had a clear view through a gap between two vans. She saw him turn and cut through the markets. It was afternoon and there was hardly anyone around so she could watch his lone figure walking through the arcade, under the butchers’ signs and past long hanging torsos of beef. She could feel the iron-hard beat of her heart. At the same time, she noticed an absence of fear inside her. She felt she could follow him all the way home and not even care if he turned around and saw her. But when she glanced at the clock over the market entrance, she saw it was time to go back to work. She waited until he had walked the length of the arcade and was pulled into the archway of light at the far end of it. She thought the jacket he wore might be called a lumberjacket, and that his legs were slightly bandy.

That night she went out to the yard during her evening break.

She sat on a beer crate, drinking her mug of tea. She could hear the sounds of the boxing club coming over the big grey wall, the grunting of men and the dull pounding of fists, like the sound of time passing. She wondered if he was in there, if his fists were helping to make that sound and what sort of clothes he was wearing and what sort of expression was on his face and if his hair was damp with sweat. When she closed her eyes, she could see his red and black jacket hanging on a hook on the wall.

You would be safe with a man like that on your side, she thought; a man like that would protect you.

A few days before Christmas, Trish said she wanted a word. She felt sick with worry as she followed her across the floor of the bar, down the corridor and into the office. There was a fur coat on the rack behind Mrs Oak’s desk, black and plush, and she stood at the door, arms folded low over her stomach and stared right into it while she waited for Trish to speak.

Trish lit up a smoke and then took a couple of drags. ‘I wanted to ask you something,’ she said, then, ‘I mean I was just wondering, you know. I was just – have you made any plans for Christmas? Were you thinking of going home or what?’

‘Home?’

‘Yeah, to Ireland, were you thinking of going home?’

‘Oh no. No, I wasn’t thinking of doing that.’

‘Oh. Well, you see, it’s just a friend of mine asked me to go away for a few days and I – I was going to ask if you’d mind keeping an eye on things here?’

‘On my own like?’

‘Oh, you wouldn’t have to work or nothing. We close the afternoon of Christmas Eve and don’t open again till the evening of the thirtieth. I’ll help you clean up a bit and lock up shop, and then all you have to do is let yourself in and out the side door and make sure the place is safe. The thing is . . . well. Look, I’d really like to go; it’s a lovely little hotel – well, according to the brochure it is, course you don’t know till you get there, do you? Some of these places, they can be very photogenic. And this friend of mine . . . well it would be nice for me, that’s all I’ll say. You’ll be all right, love – I wouldn’t ask if I thought you weren’t up to it. Any problems and you can call on Vera Greene. You got somewhere to go on Christmas Day? Relatives in London or something?’

‘Relatives? Oh yes, yes I have.’

‘Who’s that then?’

‘Well, my aunty. And, and my uncle. They live . . . Oh God, I can’t think of the name now, it’s the other side of London. My uncle is collecting me.’

‘Will you be wanting to stay with them, do you think? Because I wouldn’t like to leave the place—’

‘Oh no! I mean, they wouldn’t have room for me so I’d say I’ll be back early enough.’

Trish jabbed her cigarette into the ashtray and gave a little smile. ‘Well, that’s settled then. Great. I owe you, I do. And I’ll be putting a good word in for you with Mrs Oak anyhow. I’m sure she’ll keep you on. When I tell her how you saved my bacon and how well you’ve been doing. One thing though, love – if you don’t mind, that is. Could we keep this between ourselves? Mrs Oak – I mean, it’s no skin off her nose or anything, but she doesn’t really approve of my friend. Thinks he’s . . . Well, never mind what she thinks, eh? I’d just as soon she didn’t know. Is that okay then, can we keep it between ourselves? Thanks, Mill, thanks a lot.’

On Christmas Eve Trish sent her to help Brenda out in the back lounge. Mr Hart had left money behind the bar for the sewingfactory girls and they were all rightly langered now, even though it was only gone half past one. The room rattled with noise. Chattering, shouting, laughing voices. She could hardly hear the orders being roared across the bar at her.

On the jukebox ‘Brown Girl in the Ring’ started to play and the women had linked arms and were rocking side to side tralalalaing along to the music. And she’d been thinking that it was an odd song for this time of the year and didn’t fit with the pretend snow squirted into the corners of the window panes or the Santa hats that seemed to be plonked on top of every other eejit’s head. And she felt so happy suddenly, she had to stop herself from opening her mouth and joining in. It came as a bit of a shock to her, this feeling of joy, because she couldn’t remember ever experiencing anything quite like it before. Joyful, she supposed was the word for it. Full of joy. It must be the music, the happy faces, the fact that for the first time since coming here, she didn’t feel unwell: no headache, no sick feeling in her stomach – nothing. But then something else rushed through her. It came up from her belly and right into her chest. She could feel it going down her arms and pulsing in her neck. She had to hold on to the side of the counter for a moment to steady herself up. A surge of fear.

So that she was joyful and fearful all at once.

For the first time the words began to form themselves in her head. And now it felt as if they were screaming at her.

There’s a baby inside you. A baby. A real baby inside you.

Oh God. Oh God, what am I going to do?

She carried Trish’s bag to the taxi. Trish climbed in and the window began to roll down, bringing a half-view of her face followed by a gentle gust of gin and perfume.

‘There’s plenty to eat,’ Trish said, ‘ham and pickles, all that. Bread on the table and in the freezer, chips too. You know how to use the fryer? Course you do. And don’t bother cleaning up till Boxing Day, but do check there’s no food lying about – we don’t want no little long-tailed visitors, now do we? And here, I’ve left a few goodies for you on the table and one of those new Baileys gift-box sets for you to take to your aunt’s tomorrow. Mrs Gupti will be back Wednesday morning. I’ll be back Friday. Have a nice day tomorrow. Any problems and Vera’s on standby – and remember, if Mrs Oak rings, just say I’m gone out, you don’t know where. I’ll give her a tinkle in the morning anyhow, wish her happy Christmas and that, so she probably won’t bother. And thanks, love, I’m ever so grateful for this, I really am. Well, that’s me then. Merry Christmas!’

The window rolled up again and the cab pulled away, then looped back past her. She gave a little wave as the cab drove past, but Trish was staring straight ahead and didn’t seem to notice.

She went in through the side door, reopened the bar and plugged the Christmas tree lights back in. She stood looking at the tree for a while and then went behind the counter and helped herself to two bags of salted crisps and two bottles of fizzy orange, which she then packed into a take-out bag. She made sure everything was safely locked up before turning all the lights off again. As she passed the office, Mrs Oak’s fur coat caught her eye; she stepped in, lifted it off the rack and laid it gently over one arm.

Upstairs in the kitchen, she began her Christmas preparations. She made three ham and cheese sandwiches and wrapped them in separate foil packages. She put them into Mrs Oak’s shopping basket along with the box of Mr Kipling cakes and the Baileys gift box that Trish had left out for her invisible aunt. Next, a carton of milk, a few teabags, a cup, a plate and a knife went into the basket. She filled the electric kettle and unplugged the radio.

Nervy and breathless, she did two runs up and down the stairs and then looked into the kitchen one more time. Three Christmas cards, out of their envelopes, were thrown flat on the table. She took the cards, a box of matches and a squat red candle she had seen earlier in one of the kitchen drawers. Now ready, she switched the light off before changing her mind and switching it back on again.

On the way up to her room, she stopped off at Mrs Gupti’s cupboard and took a toilet roll and a bucket.

She locked the bedroom door behind her and waited for her heart to calm down. Then, at the side of the wardrobe, she set up her own little bathroom with the bucket and toilet roll. She set up her own little kitchen on the dressing table. She laid the Christmas cards out along one end of the mantelpiece, then lit the candle and put it on the far end. Finally, she plugged in the radio. A voice spoke out to her:

‘It’s past eight o’clock on Christmas Eve. Ahhh . . . but are all the little boys and girls tucked up in bed?’

The two electric bars glared out at her from the heater. But it was cold in the room and so she pulled Mrs Oak’s fur coat off the bed. The coat seemed to pour itself over her like cool water, chilling her skin, but that quickly passed and soon she felt embraced by it. She opened the Baileys gift box, removed one of the little glasses and the bottle. She opened the lid, sniffed into it and poured some into the small round glass.

Now sitting at the window, eating her sandwich and crisps, sipping her drink, she gave herself over to the salty bulk filling her mouth, the warm milky liquid rolling over her tongue, crawling down through her throat and spreading into her chest.

After a while she stood up and looked down through the window. She imagined how she might seem to a passer-by: a woman in a fur coat standing in a window. That’s what Gerry the barman might think, if he looked up – a woman, not a girl. And the boxer? He would be reminded of a woman in one of the books he carried around in the pocket of his lumberjacket. She turned her head and looked into the hushed railway station. Beyond the station and over the rooftops was the city of London. Parks and squares, shops and theatres, bridges and a river. A real palace. Places she hadn’t been to yet but knew them from something seen on the television, or on the picture postcard carousel outside the newsagent’s. Beyond London, a whole country lay.

Soon it would be 1980. Mrs Oak would be back; she would look at her with her all-seeing eyes and know everything there was to know about her and the baby. She might well throw her out on the street. But for now, at least, she was home. Everything she could possibly need was here with her in this room. For the next few days, all else could be put out of her mind.

She heard a car pass along Turnmill Street, and then the soft sound of bells from a distant church. Voices on the radio continued to talk; now and then, a Christmas song played, and sometimes she sang along with it.

2. Pip

2017

March

WHEN HE COMES out onto the street, he finds spring is waiting.

He had noticed it all right, these past few days, through the various windows. Or coming at him over the wall of the long back garden: buds and stretched evenings and the dawn chorus of course, adding another hour onto an already overlong day.

Earlier that morning, when the nurse told him that in two days’ time it would be April, he had said, ‘Yes, I suppose it must be.’ But still, it catches him off guard – the warm air, the light, the whole sense of renewal.

He can remember waiting for snow. There had been warnings on the news, and in the garden, that peculiar silence. He had been looking forward to viewing it anyway, from a warm, safe distance. Glancing up now and then from his ringside seat overlooking the garden. Into the feathery maze. Coming back to his book then, and turning a page with warm, moveable hands. Beauty without pain. That would have been back in January. As it happened, the snow had barely lasted the night, and since then, he has had little or no sense of the weather beyond a vague impression of grey and rain, broken with an occasional shot of milky sunlight.

‘A good time to go home,’ the nurse had said. Broad smile and small, happy eyes. He thought she might be from the Philippines. The other staff members called her Tracey, but he doubted that was her real name.

‘And where is your home?’ he had asked by way of a little conversation while they waited for Dom to arrive.

‘Oh, many, many miles away.’

‘How many?’

‘Thousands. Ten thousand.’

‘Do you get to go back much?’

She didn’t answer that one, just gave a little shrug. Her hand soothing the cover on the end of his bed. After a few seconds she flipped the question back at him. ‘What about you – where is your home?’

He wanted to tell her that he had no home, that he hadn’t had one – not a proper one anyhow – since he was ten years old.

But it had seemed a churlish thing to say to a woman who’d probably left it all behind – husband, children, even her name – just to keep the wolf from the door.

‘My home, for the moment anyway,’ he said, ‘will be my brother’s house.’

‘Ah, nice, and where?’

‘Notting Hill.’

‘Ah, very nice then.’

‘It’s a nice house, right enough,’ he had said, ‘so far as I can remember.’

Soon after that, the receptionist had appeared in the doorway and beckoned Nurse Tracey out. Low voices in the corridor and then, the nurse turning back in, nervously passing the message on. ‘Your brother, is not possible. So sorry, he says.’

‘He says or his secretary says?’ he asked.

‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ she said, handing him the receptionist’s note.

Stuck in rehearsal, quicker to meet at house, be there by 5.

‘Your brother, he is famous trumpet player? Sister Margo told me,’ she says.

‘So I believe.’

‘You want a cab now?’

He stood up, pulled the bag off the bed and said, ‘That’s all right, I can find my own way there.’

Then he’d turned his face away in case she could see the relief written all over it.

Three nurses seeing him off. He stands on the street and looks in at them waving out at him from the hallway. A blaze of white against a dark interior. One brown face, one black, one pale Irish. Already he feels it, fragments of time falling away. The life in there, the other life waiting out here. The two-way mirror that divides one from the other. Moments ago, he had been standing in the hall while they fussed over him like he was a little boy going off to school. Now he is out here in the searing light, wondering how a day in March could be so warm, and trying to decide which direction to take.

The Irish nurse had walked him to the door. Then, standing on the step for a few minutes, she laid down the law in a crisp country accent: ‘Now. Your brother said he won’t be long. There’s a café down the road from his house, he said – you can wait there if you prefer not to be standing out on the street. Eat something because you didn’t touch your lunch. Remember, don’t let yourself get hungry. Or thirsty. I put a bottle of water in the bag.’

‘You forgot to say resentful,’ he said.

‘Sorry?’

‘I’m not supposed to let myself get resentful. Hungry, thirsty, resentful. It’s one of my triggers.’