And then I go.
It’s like a dull metallic ringing sound all day in the back of my head, the reality of what I have done. My phone is on silent, but I keep imagining it to buzz or trill. I have to resist the urge to pull it out of my pocket and look at it. I head over to the squat and have a cup of coffee with Drew and his current girlfriend. I feel the rawest ache of nostalgia as I look around the once familiar kitchen, feel the echoes of the happy times I spent here, see the shadows of the person I was when I lived here, a person who had options, who laughed, who sang. I was the freest person I knew. I mean, I used to pity my brother for having to go to work every day and go home to the same house and see the same people. I thought that was a prison. And now, God, I would give anything for that benign imprisonment. Absolutely anything.
“How are things?” asks Drew. “You look… I mean, you look well, but maybe… have you lost weight?”
I smile. “Probably,” I say. “I’ve got myself in a bit of a complicated situation with a complicated woman. Life is very…”
“Complicated?” suggests Drew’s girlfriend.
“Yeah.” I laugh wryly. “Yeah.”
When I leave, I walk toward Camden Town and meander for a while through the incessant crowds, the wide-eyed tourists. I take the towpath down the side of the canal all the way to King’s Cross and stroll aroundGranary Square for a while, which is virtually deserted on this fresh February morning. I wander around the bohemian designer shops, looking for something weird and beautiful for Blaise, and buy her a beautiful steel ring set with a black crystal rose. Something small that won’t take up too much room in her rucksack.
I buy a sandwich and a cup of tea at a coffee shop in the station and then, and only then, do I dare to look at my phone. It shows twenty-three missed calls. It shows eighteen new text messages. I have notifications for numerous voicemails. I turn the phone face down on the table and breathe in hard, trying to control my heart, but I can feel panic gnawing at the edges of my consciousness. I pull myself back from it. Fuck no, I think. Fuckno. This is my day. This is for me. When I am an old man and I look back on my life, I want today to shine in my memory like a burnished star, I want to remember this precious day with my one and only daughter, this remarkable young woman who I have spent a total of less than ten days with over the nineteen years of her life, and I want to think of a beautiful walk through London, the pleasure of handing over my card to pay for that ring, the sun just blotting through the cloud overhead as I, younger now in this moment then I ever will be again, head through this remarkable city, free, joyful, and fully fuckingalive.
No, I think to myself, fuck you, Jessamine Black. Fuck you.
This day is for me.
chapter fifty
Blaise eyes me across the table of the super-cool restaurant on the top floor of the Standard hotel where I’ve brought her for dinner. Her eyes have been on stalks all night soaking up the beautiful young male waiters, and she loves the food. I chose well. She has told me about her life, about the university course she’s starting when she gets back to Sydney next week, about her Bondi lifestyle of evenings on the beach, surfing on Sundays, and, God, I envy her life. I try not to show it as she speaks. To be nineteen again, I think, to be this beautiful, this young, this free. My God, I’d give a kidney.
But I’ve just done the thing I told myself I wouldn’t do. I’ve shared the car crash of my life with my daughter.
“Stay with me,” she says now, her eyes wide with horror. “Seriously, there’s, like, a sofa-bed thing in my hotel room. Please. Don’t go back there.”
“I have to,” I say. “The dog needs feeding. Daisy needs me. They all just need me.”
“Please,” she says. “I hate this for you. They’ll live without you. Just for one night.”
But every time I start to give the idea genuine thought, bam, there, likea dropped cinder block in my consciousness, is Daisy. I picture her in the kitchen tomorrow morning, running late because nobody woke her, leaving without the packed lunch that she never eats, entombed in the terrible rage of her mother, who will not have me to take it out on, and therefore will take it out on her, and I shake my head and say, “You are so sweet, but no.” And then I say, “I promise you, by the next time I see you, I will be out of that mess. I swear. I just need to get Daisy out of that house. Make sure she’s safe.”
Blaise looks at me then, half-affectionately, half-skeptical. “OK, dude,” she says. “If you say so.”
We leave at 9 p.m.; I catch a taxi to get me home quicker. My earlier resolve has diluted, and my head keeps filling up with pictures of Daisy dealing with her drunk, insane mother. The taxi drops me off into the tawny darkness that exists almost uniquely at the bottom end of the Vale of Health.
“Don’t think I’ve ever dropped anyone down this end before,” the driver says, looking around him. “Didn’t even know the road went this far.”
I pay and get out and I eye the house in front of me: the aged jeep, still not fixed, still a work in progress, the lights on in three windows, the air all around of encroaching rage.
I hear Hugo barking and then go quiet again when I call out, “It’s me, mate,” into the darkness.
I take out my keys, unlock the front door, and pull it open, and then the darkness that has been chasing me all day fully descends with the weight and agony of something heavy against my skull that makes my brain feel as if it is loose in my head for a moment, and then, a second later, I am gone.
chapter fifty-one
JASPER
Claire is allowed to keep her name. She is allowed to keep her hair and her spirits. Unlike the other girls, she is treated almost as one of the family. She eats with us. She watches TV with us. We laugh together at Ali G and Catherine Tate. She loads the dishwasher after meals and sings along to music on the radio. She plays the guitar with Jessamine and practices clowning with me. In many ways she is our first true au pair girl, but of course, we all know that she is not, and I can see the dark shadows under her eyes, the way she flinches, even when she’s smiling, when Daddy goes anywhere near her. I can see the machinations of her mind, the way her eyes dart around the room, looking, I know, for her way out of here. And I want her to escape, more than anything I want her to go, because she does not belong here with us. She really, really does not.
I leave doors unlocked deliberately and will her with the force of my consciousness to go to the door, to test the handle, to run. I make guarded comments to her during the time we spend together about the fact that I would be prepared to help her. But she is scared, and I am scared. We are all so, so scared all the time and I cannot bear it. And what is so strange is how quiet the monster is that keeps us trapped in this house. It smokes cigarettes in an open-collared shirt and cuddles its cat and calls it his best,best girl. It buys us gifts and tells us we’re beautiful. It smiles and laughs and looks around its home as if it cannot believe the gifts that it has been given. This monster calls me “baby boy” and kisses the crown of my head. This monster makes his wife a cocktail every night and arranges a glacé cherry on a wooden stick as if it were a work of art. This monster sits in the bosom of its family radiating calm and love.
But it is all an illusion, smoke and mirrors, sleight of hand, like the tricks that I perform when I am being Patch the Clown. Because however quiet and peaceful we all are, however much we all laugh at Catherine Tate, all of us know, each and every one of us in this blighted, terrible house, that he could kill us in a flash.
And none of us wants to die.
After a while, something changes, and Claire is taken downstairs into Daddy’s study. I don’t see her again for nearly another year, but I hear her. All the time. Just like all the other girls.
