Putting the glasses on, she turns slightly and catches a glimpse of herself in the reflection of the boulangerie, and she is struck for a moment by the image of a woman she no longer recognises. Standing straighter, hardening herself against any doubts, she follows the familiar route, down Lichfield Road, past the perfectly manicured privet hedges, the pristine gravel and obligatory plantation blinds, turning right into an unsigned side street. A moment later she reaches into her bag, pulling out the keys and pressing the button to unlock the door. With a flash of the headlights, the Range Rover clicks open and she steps into it, breathing in the smell of fresh leather.
As she turns the key in the ignition, the radio blares a song she knows and the shock of the unexpected noise makes her cry out. It takes a moment to compose herself, palms pressed against the steering wheel, before she looks over her shoulder and reverses, taking her usual route along the wide open streets of South-West London, towards Richmond. It’s a different world here and she feels not so much safe as anonymous. These are not her people, and in this car with its tinted windows and hyper-clean paintwork she is almost certainly unrecognisable.
On Richmond Road, she turns into the Waitrose car park and pulls into a space. There is silence as the engine cuts out, apart from the sound of her breath rising and falling in shallow bursts in her chest. Stepping out onto the pavement, she helps herself to a trolley, working her way through the aisles, selecting the sort of basics you might buy for a picnic. As she turns into the baby and toddler aisle, she gives a cursory glance over her shoulder. Once she is sure she is alone, she continues walking, picking out a selection of organic purees she would never have dreamt of buying for Sadie and Callum.
It takes several minutes to gather all that she needs, making her way to the till as she pulls out the phone and dials. When Polina answers, she speaks more quietly than usual, unable to keep the relief of this contact out of her voice.
‘How are you?’ Gabriela asks, affecting her brightest intonation, giving a polite wave of recognition to the cashier and an apologetic smile at the rudeness of talking into the phone while the woman begins to scan the items on the belt.
‘How are you?’ Polina’s voice asks on the end of the line and she replies, ‘I’m good. I’ve had a change of plan with work so I’m on my way back now – I’m just at the supermarket picking up some supplies. Is there anything we need?’
Before Polina can answer, Gabriela adds quickly, ‘How’s Layla?’
‘I’ll put the phone to her ear,’ Polina says.
Reaching into her bag for her purse, Gabriela stops as she hears the child’s breath. The lump that has been rising in her throat softens into something thick and expansive, so that she can only stand stock-still, drinking in the broken inflections of her daughter’s voice.
Gabriela’s voice breaks. ‘Oh baby … My baby, I’ve missed you. Mummy will be home in a minute, OK?’
Chapter 2
Gabriela
The sky was full of movement the night she and Tom met, or maybe it had just been so long since she’d last looked up.
The queue outside the Jazz Cafe ran behind a shabby blue velvet rope so that she was pressed against the building on Parkway while Saoirse tucked the laces into the side of her trainers. It was Saoirse who had bought the tickets, turning up at Gabriela’s house and making her dad let her in even though she’d told him she wasn’t in the mood for visitors. But what could she expect? He was always so bloody weak.
She had just returned from her year abroad, in Paris, as part of her degree, and was back for good this time – or until she could find a way out. The last time she’d been home was an overnight return to London for her mother’s funeral, earlier in the year. In Paris, she could almost forget that she was gone, but here in London the memory followed her so that it felt safer to keep still.
‘Please, Saoirse, I just don’t fancy it. Take someone else, yeah?’ she had protested but Saoirse wouldn’t back down.
‘It’s been four months – you have to come out sometime.’
Gabriela had wanted to scream at her, to take her face in her hands and tell her that her mother was dead and that she had hated her and she didn’t know how to live without her and that she was terrified.
But instead, she said, ‘Lee Scratch Perry? Never heard of him.’
‘He’s a complete nutter,’ Saoirse grinned. ‘If you’re lucky he’ll be wearing a disco ball on his head …’
Inside the club, the room was dark and thick with cigarette smoke and dry ice as they moved through the crowd towards the bar.
‘What you drinking?’ Saoirse asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Gabriela shrugged, as if what she wanted no longer counted for anything.
As Saoirse leaned in to order, Gabriela turned away and that’s when she saw him, across the bar, watching her.
‘Here you go …’ Saoirse handed her a shot of tequila and Gabriela winced, licking the line of salt from her hand, the granules rough against her tongue, feeling the burn of the alcohol in her throat as she tossed back her head, sinking her teeth into the flesh of the lemon, her eyes squeezing together, pushing against the pain.
‘Shit!’
‘Right, another one!’ Saoirse lined up two more shots. This time when Gabriela looked up she felt someone next to her and as she turned she saw him there, an inch or so away. Saoirse raised her eyebrows and grinned as if she were about to say something, but then she turned and started speaking to someone standing next to her, and then she was dancing on the other side of the room.
‘Same again?’ Gabriela lip-read his words through the smoke machine, his voice straining above the clash of the keyboards.
She shook her head, shuddering, and a moment later he passed her a beer.
Pausing briefly, she took the drink and clinked the base of her bottle against his.
‘Thanks.’
He nodded and smiled, as if he was considering something.
‘What?’ She couldn’t help but smile back at him.
He shook his head, still holding her eyes. ‘Nothing.’
The walk from the Jazz Cafe to his flat, in the basement of one of the tall smog-stained terraces that clung to one another on a short stretch of Prince of Wales Road, was surprisingly warm even at this time of night. The fact of the onset of summer, when she thought of it, knocked her sideways. If there had been a spring to speak of that year, it had completely passed her by.
In her mind, winter still enveloped London, her brain hovering over the funeral back in March, the scene flickering like a paused film: a small group of friends and family wrapped in black coats and colourful scarves lining the edges of the plot in Paddington Old Cemetery, their heads bowed against the wind; her dad’s face ashen amongst them.
The immediacy of the memory stung at the corners of her eyes, but then she felt Tom’s hand brush against hers as he worked the key in the front door, and the image fell away.
‘It’s a bit damp, hence the smell,’ he said without a hint of apology. Away from the noise of the bar, she noticed the trace of a Scottish accent.
He moved ahead of her, making no attempt to kick away the coats that lay strewn on the floor, as if he’d left in a rush, cups scattered across every surface of the studio flat. Beneath the clutter, there was a certain order to the space: the guitar propped up on a stand in the corner, music stacked beside a small Yamaha keyboard. The table was rounded at the corners with A-line legs.
It occurred to her then that she had no idea what he did, this man whose flat she was suddenly inside. She had no idea how she had even come to be here.
‘I’m a student,’ he said as if reading her mind, and she squinted in disbelief.
‘Really? How old are you?’
‘Forty-two,’ he shrugged and noting the faint look of alarm on her face, tilted his head. ‘Oh, come on. Really? I’m twenty-four. But I’m studying architecture which takes about ninety-seven years, so … How about you?’
She yawned. ‘Younger than that … just.’
It can’t have been much later than midnight but any energy she’d felt in the bar had faded so that all she wanted was to lie down and close her eyes.
‘Would you like a drink?’
She shook her head.
He moved towards her slowly, so sure of himself and yet unimposing.
‘You look knackered.’
She nodded.
‘You can have my bed.’ He pointed towards a single mattress in the corner.
‘Come with me,’ she held out her hand to him. They passed out sometime later, his arm pulling her towards the warmth of his body, pinning her there in a way that was both suffocating and yet so comforting that she had to wait until he was asleep before pushing him away.
Chapter 3
Isobel
I look up through squinted eyelids, German techno beats sliding around my head. From here, above the outline of people’s limbs, I can see it is dark outside. Around me, the party is still heaving so that I can only just make out a vague impression of Jess a few feet away on the sofa talking to a man, her lips moving in slow motion.
As if pushing through a brick wall, I manage to draw the strength to sit up, willing my eyelids to follow suit. My cheeks, the inside of which I’ve chewed raw, feel like they are sinking away from my face towards the floor.
‘Jess?’ My voice is unexpectedly loud, though no one else seems to hear it. I try again but the effect is a slosh of vowels.
Across the room, the man Jess is talking to inches forward and they both laugh, she stretching her head back as he nuzzles her neck.
Jess?
This time my voice sticks in my throat and I give up, succumbing to the weight of the exhaustion that has taken hold from the inside out, the chemicals prowling through my bloodstream, squeezing the life out of me. Letting my eyes drift shut, I feel the leather sofa swallow me whole. As my brain shuts down, I picture myself standing, taking my friend’s hand and running down the stairs, out of the front door; the two of us tearing down the street at Chalk Farm, screaming at the top of our lungs.
By the time I open my eyes again the music has descended into a low ambient throb; bodies, half-dressed, are scattered across a wooden floor; a man in jeans and a cowboy hat leans precariously against a yucca plant. The sky through the window has started to lighten, signalling it is time to leave. Slowly, as if bound in clingfilm, I turn to where Jess had been but now there is no one there.
Letting my eyes open and shut several times, I feel for my bag and fumble for my phone before realising the battery is dead.
Shit.
Taking a minute to unpeel my legs from my seat, I step across a sea of semi-comatose bodies into the hall.
In each room, different beats fall over one another, the same stale smell of smoke and spilt beer following me through the house. Finally I find Jess’s boss slumped at a table, a black Amex card in his hand.
‘Hugh,’ I say, but he ignores me, a smirk impressed across his features.
‘Oi!’ I say, louder this time, and his head twists to look up at me.
‘Is-o-bel,’ he rolls each syllable of my name on his tongue, and I feel my stomach turn. ‘The roving reporter returns … Listen, when are you going to give up that local paper shite and come work for me? Tell you what: wash your hair every so often and you’d have a face for TV.’
‘Have you seen Jess?’ I ask, focusing on the smudge of dye that has leaked from his newly chestnut locks into the peak of his receding hairline. Christ, if I’m still rolling around in shit-holes like this when I’m his age I only hope someone slits my throat. With that fleeting image, I remember the spate of stabbings in Somers Town I’m planning to dig into next week, focusing on the circulation of weapons across our part of the city. If I can pitch it around the ongoing tensions in Camden, I’m pretty sure I can spin a legitimate local interest angle.
‘Yeah but what’s the angle?’ I picture my news editor, Ben, pre-empting the words of the editor, tucked away in his cheap glass box at the back of the room. ‘We’re a local paper, Isobel, not the New York fucking Times.’
Hugh’s face contorts, as if he is trying to place Jess’s name – the name of the woman who has been his assistant for the past six years … Assistant Producer, actually, I can hear her voice correcting me in my head.
‘Sit down,’ he slurs. ‘Want a line?’
He returns his attention to the table, haphazardly scraping and crushing white powder with his card.
‘Have you seen her?’ I repeat and he looks up again.
‘Who?’
‘I’m all right for shit K, thanks, Hugh,’ I say, not bothering to answer, and he puckers his face into a grin, attempting a South American drawl.
‘Issy, darling, this is pure cocaine straight from the streets of Ecuador!’
Is it fuck. ‘Can I use your phone?’ I ask and he slides it across to me before returning his attention to the pile of powder.
Jess’s number goes straight to voicemail.
‘Where are you?’ I whisper into the handset before tossing the receiver back at him.
‘Go on then,’ I say, snatching the rolled £20 from his fingers, hoovering up both lines, wincing as the chemical hits the back of my throat.
Grateful for the instant burst of energy, I stand.
‘Wait, where are you going?’ I hear his voice fade into the distance as I move across the kitchen, through the doorway and towards the stairs, without looking back.
Walking out onto the street, my whole body seems to move as if by remote control. Sunglasses on, though autumn has long set in, I drift along Chalk Farm Road. Ordinarily I’d have walked through Camden Lock, past the tube station and onto the high street where my shoebox of a flat awaits me above the newsagent’s. But this morning, the coke rushing through my veins, I need a horizon – the prospect of main roads, of roaring traffic, of crackheads and knowing shopkeepers making my chest tighten.
Moving towards the estate, I weave instinctively through a warren of concrete alleys, the streets I have walked so many times that I no longer see the dog-ends or the piss stains on the walls.
I have no idea how long it takes, moving on autopilot down Prince of Wales Road towards South End Green, where the air has a certain clarity. Flinching, I step back as an ambulance swings past the curry house; the steel shutters clamped to the floor, the body of a man slumped in front of it.
My feet keep moving and soon I pass the old cinema which has been transformed into a chain food hall, towards Hampstead Heath overground, past the Magdala pub, and up past the terrace of big stucco-fronted houses. A woman leans out of the front door of the most beautiful building on this stretch, with tiled steps and wisteria hanging precariously over the top. She is stooped over as if shielding herself from the outside world, collecting the morning papers from the step, her pale blonde hair falling in front of her face. When she looks up and sees me, there is a flash of fear and for a moment I see myself through her eyes.
The image haunts me as I move, more quickly now, drawn onto the Heathland I know so well. Instinctively, I drift away from the path. It must be sometime around 6.15 a.m. and yet I cannot face the prospect of bed, knowing there will be hours of tossing from one side to another before sleep finally comes. For now, the Heath is calm and familiar: safe until the hordes descend with their flat whites and Bugaboos.
Steering across the hill towards the pond, I reach down and slip off my trainers, enjoying the sensation of the dewy grass against my toes; above me, the sky lingers somewhere between night and day. When I reach the bench overlooking Kite Hill, I sit, pulling my knees up under my chin, aware of the smell of mould and earth seeping up through the slats of wood. As a wave of cognisance strikes, I push it away, trying not to think about the press conference with the local council I am due to cover on Monday. It’s the kind of painfully provincial story that makes me remember that I was approached by one of the nationals, just before everything fell apart. Would I even have taken it? Either way, there is no point thinking about that now.
My mouth is dry, my eyelids heavy and at the same time bolted open as if held in place with a match. Fumbling in my bag, I pull out a tiny block of hash and a lighter, enjoying the burning sensation at the tip of my thumb as I crumble it into a Rizla. The first drag burns the back of my throat.
Some time later, I feel a welcome wave of exhaustion float in from behind. The new day is sneaking in and soon London will be ablaze with sirens and the clinking of coffee cups. The park bench has started to embed itself into my bare thighs; suddenly drawn by the prospect of a pillow and fresh sheets, I stand, feeling in the pocket of my denim shorts for my front-door key and my phone, my trainers protruding from the top of my bag as I start the final walk home.
As the path splits, I veer slowly towards a forested patch of parkland. Pulling out a bottle of water from beneath my shoes, I take a sip. The pressure against my bladder is almost instant.
Above, I hear the distant calling of a crow as I lower myself beneath a thick canopy of trees. Pulling my hoodie closer around me, I shiver, the air cold and dank as I weave beneath the branches; by now my head is throbbing, the silence no longer comforting.
Finding a spot, I squat down in the shade of the tree, trying not to pee on my bare feet. Just as the relief comes, a warm trickle forming a pool beneath me, I feel my skin scratch against something sharp, a twig or a piece of glass.
The unexpected sharpness of it makes me jump and I glance down, a sliver of dark red blood trickling down my ankle.
‘Shit,’ I mutter, unsteady as I balance my weight on just one foot, lowering myself into a dark patch of moss and rummaging through my bag for anything that vaguely resembles a tissue. As my fingers comb the contents of my bag, I forget about the tissue, distracted by a more pressing realisation. Patting with increasing desperation amidst the crumbs and the loose tobacco lining the bottom of my bag, waiting for the tell-tale brushing of my skin against the small plastic baggy containing the hash. I can’t have lost it, but I have. My fingernails dig into the palms of my hand at the memory of how much I had paid Tariq for that quarter.
Briefly I consider turning back, retracing my steps to the bench, but the thought fills me with fear, imagining the morning runners and the early-bird mothers with their toddlers who by now could well be roaming the pathway.
What I need is to get home, back to a safe space in which to let my mind melt into perfect nothingness. Slowly I stretch my legs back to standing position, ready to retreat to the safety of my flat with its four solid walls to fester behind. One moment I am standing, feeling my shorts brushing against my thighs; the next I hear a scream, which at first it might be another crow circling in the distance. And then I hear voices, unmistakably human, like a wall clattering down around me, fixing me to the ground.
For a moment in my disorientated state, I wonder if I have imagined it. It wouldn’t be the first time, after all. But then they are there again, close enough that I can almost smell their breath. Taking a slow step forward, a twig quietly crunching beneath my foot, I hear a man’s voice again, this time followed by a name: Eva. Amidst a distorted mush of syllables, a language I cannot understand, I hear the girl speak; I don’t know the words but the meaning is clear. Stop, she is saying. Please stop!
The man’s presence hangs in the air like an omen. Willing my body not to move, I feel my weight shift involuntarily below me as the air struggles for space in my chest. Any second now one of the twigs beneath my feet will crack under the pressure.
I am like an animal under attack, each of my senses amplified so that every smell, every sound, every taste rushes through my body all at once. And then I hear it, the snap as a tiny shard of wood gives way beneath the heel of my bare foot.
I feel the girl’s face before I see it, turning slowly towards me. Time seems to slow down as the image is scored onto my memory: the dark unblinking brown eyes, pupils frozen in horror. For just a second our gazes lock, a bolt running down my spine, and then, without another thought, I feel my body rise.
No longer aware of the blood gathered in clots at my toes, I lunge towards my escape route, a tunnel of light spilling through the clearing; I manage two giant steps, my feet guiding me through a rotten knot of roots and bark. And then it comes, the scream, chasing me down the hill. I know it instantly: the sound of a life being torn out by the roots.
Chapter 4
Gabriela
That first summer with Tom passed by in a haze of picnics on the Heath, and evenings spent with her dad at the house watching TV in easy silence while Tom attended rehearsals with his band – an anachronistic jazz four-piece that at least explained the terrible dress sense. The nights he was around, and she wasn’t working at the pub on Arlington Road where she did four shifts a week behind the bar, they spent at his place, her skimming through textbooks for the final year of her degree. He cooked and washed up, helping her sort through the endless paperwork relating to her mother’s estate, finding ways to care for her when she was incapable of caring for herself.
Unable to deal with it personally, Gabriela had handed the task of clearing her mother’s house to a company in the West Country which Tom had found – recommended through a friend of a friend. She had visited just once, refusing his offer to accompany her, and collected a single box of photo albums and books before renting the place out through a local estate agent. She had always hated that house – or rather what it represented: the choice her mother had made to move out of London; her decision to abandon her only child wrapped up in the guise of selflessness, a refusal to uproot her at such a pivotal time in her life. I couldn’t do that to her, she would overhear her mother tell her friends. Not that she’d ever asked Gabriela if she’d wanted to stay.
‘So you were abroad when your mum …’ Tom mustered the courage to ask one night as they sat at his table, poring over papers.
‘How do you know that?’ Gabriela asked.
‘Saoirse mentioned it. Sorry, if you don’t want to talk about it—’
‘It’s fine,’ she cut in. ‘I was in Paris, finishing off my placement.’ She swallowed as she formed the words, her gaze held steadfast to the page.
Paris had pulled her in like the warm embrace she longed for, that year at the Sorbonne. Arriving in the July and staying until the following summer, with intermittent trips back to London, wafting between her tiny apartment above the bric-a-brac store on the Rue Galande and the university. With every step, she felt herself becoming someone new: the sort of person who sat in the grounds of the Greek church overlooking Notre Dame, sketching the spires that rose above the scaffolding; the sort of person who would go to the cinema at the end of her street, alone, to watch art-house films; the sort of person she and Saoirse would have called a cunt. But Saoirse wasn’t there and she was, and for as long as her sojourn lasted, London, and everything that it entailed, simply didn’t exist. And for that, she could not have been more grateful.
Within a couple of weeks in the city, Gabriela found a job at one of the cafés on the Place de la Sorbonne, serving overpriced coffee and stale croissants to tourists and overworked professors; the convenience of the location made up for the pitiful wage and the wandering hands of the maître d’. It was here that she met Pierre, as genuinely pretentious as the version of herself she had created, but so good-looking and so French, his opinion of himself so robust that it was difficult not to believe he was the god his body language told you he was.
