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Entanglement
Katy Mahood


‘Dexterously structured … wise debut’ Observer‘A hugely impressive debut’ Stella Duffy‘Beautifully written’ Hannah Beckerman‘A really accomplished debut’ Red MagazineOn a hot October day in a London park, Stella sits in her red wedding dress opposite John. Pregnant and lost in thoughts of the future, she has no idea that lying in the grass, a stone’s throw away, is a man called Charlie. From this moment, Stella and Charlie’s lives are bound together in ways they could never imagine. But all they have is a shared glance and a feeling: have we met before?Entanglement is a bewitching novel of love and sacrifice which explore show our choices can reverberate across the generations, and the sparks of hope they can ignite.























Copyright (#u4c5dda64-b6cf-55ff-8adc-d7a9d1e02ec4)


The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Katy Mahood asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Excerpt from ‘Love After Love’ by Derek Walcott reprinted from Collected Poems, 1948-1984 (1986) by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd and Farrar, Strauss & Giroux

Excerpts from ‘Sea Fever’ by John Masefield reprinted by permission of The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of John Masefield

Excerpt from ‘Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802’ by William Wordsworth

Copyright © Katy Mahood 2018

Cover design by Ellie Game © HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Cover photograph © ITAR-TASS/TopFoto

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.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

Source ISBN: 9780008245658

Ebook Edition © November 2017 ISBN: 9780008245672

Version: 2018-09-25




Praise for Entanglement (#u4c5dda64-b6cf-55ff-8adc-d7a9d1e02ec4)


‘Dexterously structured . . . [a] wise debut’

Observer

‘A beautifully deceptive novel that gently entraps the reader with the lightest-touch characters and a slowly gripping story, studded with glittering moments. It is about how we arrive at who we are now, thinking we were heading along one route and only finding our true paths in retrospect. A hugely impressive debut’

STELLA DUFFY

‘Beautifully written and sensitively observed’

HANNAH BECKERMAN

‘A really accomplished debut novel about how life is a series of connections, coincidences and chance’

Red Magazine




Dedication (#u4c5dda64-b6cf-55ff-8adc-d7a9d1e02ec4)


For my parents, Tess and Jim




Epigraph (#u4c5dda64-b6cf-55ff-8adc-d7a9d1e02ec4)


When two systems enter into temporary physical interaction due to known forces between them, and when after a time of mutual influence the systems separate again, then they can no longer be described in the same way as before … I would call that the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics, the one that enforces its entire departure from classical lines of thought. Because of their interaction these two quantum states have become entangled.

‘The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics’ by Erwin Schrödinger, 1935


Contents

Cover (#u0450a708-1711-5bb1-a9a8-433631238fed)

Title Page (#ud5daac58-ec73-58c2-a467-d7d1dd06522b)

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Epigraph

Prelude

1. Collision

Chapter 1.1

Chapter 1.2

Chapter 1.3

Chapter 1.4

Chapter 1.5

2. Duality

Chapter 2.1

Chapter 2.2

Chapter 2.3

3. Superposition

Chapter 3.1

Chapter 3.2

Chapter 3.3

Chapter 3.4

Chapter 3.5

Chapter 3.6

Chapter 3.7

4. Non-Locality

Chapter 4.1

Chapter 4.2

Chapter 4.3

Chapter 4.4

Chapter 4.5

Chapter 4.6

Chapter 4.7

Chapter 4.8

Chapter 4.9

Chapter 4.10

Chapter 4.11

Chapter 4.12

Chapter 4.13

Interlude

5. Decoherence

Chapter 5.1

Chapter 5.2

Chapter 5.3

Chapter 5.4

Chapter 5.5

Chapter 5.6

Chapter 5.7

Chapter 5.8

Reprise

Acknowledgements

About the Author (#u3a9b5560-b630-5bfa-8bce-acbee4bc9400)

About the Publisher



PRELUDE (#u4c5dda64-b6cf-55ff-8adc-d7a9d1e02ec4)


4 August 1977

At first she thinks it is a cloud, or smoke. But its undulations are too regular, too melodic. As the train closes the distance, the movements become more granular, a lace-like pattern of dark and sky, curving rhythmically in waves and turns above the countryside, and Stella sees it is a group of fast-flying birds. Wingtips almost touching, they move in perfect motion, against the evening sky.

Murmuration. There is magic to it, this seamless dance of small birds weaving a form that exists only in their togetherness. The tree on the horizon, the church, the hill: these things stand still as time moves around them. But this is something more; a new dimension forged in time and motion.

The train arrives. From above, the arches of the roof of Paddington Station curve and roll, ripple marks made by the tide of progress. The concourse teems with life, eddying across the mica-flecked floor. A fresh flood flows from a newly halted train and somewhere within the throng is Stella, returned early from her summer break. She struggles with a heavy bag, nervous for the tiny life pulsing within her, a secret that at this moment is hers alone. In the summer heat the station air is hazy. Specks of smut rise and glisten, and she looks for the face of the man who will meet her, but for now sees only the fuzz of people and particles pushed by the waves of warm air and urgency.

And then, there he is. He moves stop-start through the throb of the crowd, long limbs that don’t quite know where to be, long hair falling in his face. John is thinking, she can see, not at that moment of her, but a thought scored through with formulae that could unlock this tangle of bodies, noise and motion. He lifts his head, eyes narrow in the glare of the dipping sun, and sees her silhouette with its halo of gold-lit hair, her shoulders stooped beneath the heavy bag. And though he knows the physical impossibility of it, time for him is suddenly slowed, revealing gaps he’d not discerned before, through which he moves to claim this fresh-skinned girl. They press together and the world around them speeds up once more, gusting fumes and breath and microscopic fragments of life, up, up and into the spiralling dance overhead.


4 August 2007

From below, the arches of Paddington Station reach towards the night sky. Stella sits, silent in her wedding clothes, sipping tea from a paper cup, waiting for the call to the sleeper train. Beside her, John leans back on his chair, his arm resting on their luggage. On the other side of the station, on a bench near a darkened shop front, Stella notices a man in a hat. He looks up and their gaze meets across the concourse. When he nods, Stella smiles in return.

John looks up at the arches of the roof. He knows that they are moving through time and space, spinning on a planet that is orbiting a star – and yet the late-night station seems quite still. A moment later, a clutch of pigeons bursts upwards; his knee knocks the table; hot tea spills. Stella leaps to her feet, skidding in her high heels as John reaches out to catch her a fraction too late. She lands with a gasp on the floor and looks down at her expensive cream skirt, where a murky stain blooms along the thigh. Her ankle hurts. She swallows hard and looks up. For a fraction of a second she sees his face as it once was: wide-eyed and taut with longing. A fine trail shimmers in the light above them and she turns towards the roof, searching for a tiny piece of the young woman who stepped from a train and the young man who was once there to meet her – but all she can see now is dust.

Scalar time passes. The hands on the large clock move. The man in the hat stands and leaves. On Platform 1, Stella takes John’s hand as they climb aboard the train and her eyes travel once more around the station, seeking out fragments of her past. She sees herself at twenty-one at the beginning of an academic career. Her violin case balanced on top of a suitcase weighted with books, a knot tightening from her stomach to her throat, her mother and father trotting to keep up as she pushes the trolley through the thronging travellers. They had bundled into a taxi, a sudden rainstorm blurring the windows of the cab as they’d watched commuters and tourists rush for cover beneath the dripping black awnings of Praed Street.

When, later that day, she’d arrived in the pub just off Gower Street with a straggling group of postgraduates, she’d noticed an angular man with sandy-coloured hair and hands that moved with quick precision as he talked. Bell-bottomed brown cords and a murky green T-shirt. Scientist, she’d thought, and turned to go. But her bag had clipped a glass and knocked a pint of bitter into his lap and, to her shame, Stella’s eyes had filled with unwanted tears. And then he’d smiled. It was a generous, lopsided smile that made it easy to laugh an apology and offer to buy him a drink. His hand had brushed her arm as they spoke and at his touch she’d felt something pass over her like light. With John the world had felt infused with colour and, as they walked together through the broad white streets of Bloomsbury, she’d had the sense that London was bursting to life beneath her feet.

More than thirty years on, the station feels the same, despite the screens and signs that jostle for attention. It is, she thinks, as it has always been, a threshold place of beginnings and farewells. Stella looks again at John, who raises her hand to his lips. She finds her thoughts are flying back and forth across the years; moments forgotten for decades rising to the surface, casting ripples that gather and collide, so that everything around her seems coated in a mismatched layer of the past. She can almost smell it as it teeters on the edges of her memory, that nameless musk of youth and sex and hope.

Outside the station, night buses rumble. A rowdy group of students stumbles past St Mary’s Hospital. The late-night shops have drawn down their shutters as the man walks past, his hat now in his hand. He sits for a moment on a low wall and wonders, not for the first time, what might have happened that day had he not descended the cellar steps. There’s no use in thinking like that, Charlie, he says aloud, and after a minute he stands up again and continues to walk.

The students are gone now and Charlie moves quietly in the dark streets, down Sussex Gardens and towards the park. Far away over Oxford Street the city-glow lightens the sky, but the dawn is still a good way off. In the inky still of Hyde Park, the dew has begun to fall. It clings to his heavy shoes and to the cuffs of his suit trousers, which grow thick and cold with the damp. He walks on to the middle of the park, where there is only a suggestion of the city beyond. Here, at the centre, there is almost solitude and except for the orange nub of the tall hotel to the east all is dark. Tired suddenly, he lies in the damp grass and the memories begin, as he knew that they would. But this time they start earlier, in the daylight, in a spot not far from here. He sees it as he saw it then: a young girl running in a thin red dress, the flash of her thigh as the fabric billows in the wind, her hand upon the curve of her belly, a tall man running back towards her. A name. Stella. As he closes his eyes, he feels a brief and unexpected peace pass through him and into the earth below.

And then, as they always do, the scenes behind his eyes grow dark. He feels the familiar lurch within and holds tight to his legs to make himself tiny and hard, but the images run through his mind as if on a loop: a smoke-filled silence, the blue-black glitter of lights on shattered glass, a white hand in the dark. In the chill night he hears his ragged breath and the creak of his clothes as he rocks back and forth in the grass. He knows this will pass. He remembers how it goes. And yet, it always feels as if this might be the big one, the point of no return. The thought is like a shriek, an involuntary gasp, rushing out of him unchecked.

Is this how it feels to be dying?

A dark chasm of fear looms before him, blank as a dialling tone, and he screws his eyes shut and hums to draw himself back from its infinite, terrifying space.




1. (#u4c5dda64-b6cf-55ff-8adc-d7a9d1e02ec4)

COLLISION (#u4c5dda64-b6cf-55ff-8adc-d7a9d1e02ec4)


8 October 1977


To become entangled the two particles must first interact.

McKearnan, L. Quantum Entanglement.

Paradox Publishing, 1982 (p. 2)




1.1 (#u4c5dda64-b6cf-55ff-8adc-d7a9d1e02ec4)


Charlie listened to the angry burr of the dialling tone before slamming the phone back into its cradle. Pushing the hair from his eyes he stood up, took a tie from the wardrobe and lifted a brown corduroy jacket from the back of the door. He shrugged it on, checking the elbows for holes. A yellow crust of egg clung to his cuff and he scrubbed at it with his fingernails, but the stubborn glaze stayed fast to the fabric, so he lit a cigarette instead.

The problem with the same old story is that you’ve heard it once too many times: a drama that leads always to the bottom of a bottle of vodka. When the phone had rung just after seven, he’d known it would be her. No one else would have rung reverse-charges in such a slurring stupor of obscenities and tears on his sister’s wedding day. It wasn’t as if you could blame Annie for not inviting the woman. She had been almost unintelligible with rage and drink, and when he tried to calm her she’d turned her venom to him: more swearing, more incoherent keening, something about being just like his father. She’d hung up before he’d had the chance to cut her off, his finger still hovering above the phone’s switchhook as he listened to the echo of the open line against his ear.

In the living room, dust floated in the shards of morning light. Outside, a milk float was whirring its tin-pot way along the street, empties clinking, and some time soon, he guessed, the post would arrive. Since Beth had been in France, his weeks were shaped by the post: a day could be transformed by the sight of a handwritten envelope, a foreign stamp. Beth’s letters sustained him in a way that a phone call could not, as if the ink held part of her, the deft strokes on the page inseparable from the slim fingers that had made them. Even the envelope could tug his desire as he imagined her tongue passing over its gummed edge.

He heard the creak of a floorboard and the rattle of a pipe from above. Other people were stirring around him, their days easing into the simplicity of this October Saturday. They had not been woken by the phone and the shrieks of his mother. They were lucky.

For a moment he allowed himself to picture what Beth would be doing now, in her flat above the sand-coloured streets of Montpellier. He imagined her asleep, soft tanned limbs curled about one another, dark hair falling across the curve of her cheek as her lips shaped semi-silent words. He closed his eyes, trying to hold onto the image, and a hollow bloomed between his heart and his stomach, a space so tender with longing that he imagined it had actually been carved from his flesh.

The first time Charlie had seen Beth she was sitting by the canal in Camden swinging her legs against the warm stone. She had been luxuriant beneath the early evening sunlight, her taut skin glossy as a ripe plum. As she’d swept her dark hair from her face, he’d noticed her eyes, green with a golden aura around each pupil, a pair of sunflowers floating on the sea. A Jewish princess she’d called herself, laughing over her beer in a pub garden on Haverstock Hill and telling him of a childhood in Hampstead, school days at Haberdashers’ and high days and holidays with an extended family that ran into hundreds. ‘Though we were not,’ she’d said, ‘all together at once.’ Exotic words and festivals with their own exotic foodstuffs. Honey cake, rich and cloying. The crass heat of horseradish offset by watery-sweet sugared apple. Her body, too, he came to discover was a rare indulgence; the firm heaviness of her breasts, the silken curve of her back, the salty tang of her soft thighs.

On that first evening he had walked her home.

‘How gallant of you,’ she’d deadpanned as they’d stood in the doorway of her flat, her face half hidden by shadow, a faint gleam of sweat on her forehead. She had turned her eyes up towards him and pulled his hands around her waist. Charlie had longed to say something that wouldn’t make him feel like he was speaking from a script shaped by bad films and second-rate novels. But how could he explain the hunger wrestling with fear, the unscratchable itch of his desire? The words that he reached for felt empty and sordid, a cheap imitation of the purity of his feelings. In those eyes and that body he saw his world transformed by a force as elemental as fire. When she’d pressed her mouth to his he’d breathed coconut oil and cigarette smoke and felt his hands shake as they ran the length of her back. She had smiled, her face patrician in the dim light as she’d opened the door and led him to her bedroom where, for a time, Charlie hadn’t thought in words at all.

There was a crash from the kitchen and Charlie pulled his hand from his trousers where he’d been rearranging himself. A lean man with a cloud of brown hair appeared in the doorway, naked beneath an open dressing gown.

‘Sorry, man, I smashed a mug.’

‘Limpet! What are you …? Shit! Do your fucking dressing gown up, man!’

Limpet tied his belt, put a cigarette between his lips and stood, thin arm outstretched until Charlie slapped a lighter onto his palm.

‘Thanks, Chaz.’

‘Don’t mention it.’

Like Charlie, Limpet had graduated from Edinburgh University three years ago. But unlike Charlie, who was slogging away in the menial backrooms of a literary agency, Limpet slept late, worked evenings in the pub down the road, and played his guitar for most of the time in between.

They sat together, smoking. After a while, Limpet rubbed his eyes and looked at Charlie.

‘What’s with the suit?’

Charlie scratched at the egg stain. ‘It’s Annie’s wedding today. You’re coming, right?’

Limpet drew hard on his cigarette. ‘You want a lift?’ he asked without looking up.

When Limpet had turned up with his mother’s Hillman Imp last month, Charlie had wondered how the old car had made it down the M1. It was so rusty around the door frames and the fender, he was surprised that nothing had fallen off. But the car seemed to be indestructible and Limpet, to Charlie’s surprise, turned out to be a keen mechanic, tinkering away with the engine when he wasn’t playing his guitar. Still, Charlie was certain that the car was an accident just waiting to happen.

‘Hm, thanks mate, but I’m going to take the Tube.’

Charlie liked the Tube. He liked to imagine that all of London flowed through its tunnels: past, present and future. He loved the descent into its warmth and the way he could emerge a short time later in another part of the city. It had taken him years to match the spread of the city above ground to Harry Beck’s inspired but misleading Tube map and, like any seasoned Londoner he loved his insider’s knowledge of the short cuts and the simplest changes. He adored the smell and the pace of that world underground, the warm blast of air when the train was about to arrive and the giddy rush of the carriages as they drew in just inches from your face. Down below the surface, Charlie found clues of the city’s past everywhere: at Marylebone, where the old station name ‘Great Central’ was tiled along the platform wall; at Charing Cross, where torn layers of posters dated back a quarter century to the Festival of Britain. In the constant motion of the Tube trains and commuters Charlie saw a cascade of lives and times: the tight-lipped Edwardian lady, the bowler-hatted Metrolander, the demobbed Tommy, the East End families sheltering on the platforms, the Mods and Rockers picking fights with each other, the punks picking fights with everyone. The Tube, he thought, was the keeper of the city’s secret history, written in the footfalls of the people who’d passed through it.

The jangle of the phone made them jump. Shaking his head, Limpet lifted it from its cradle. His eyes widening as he passed it to Charlie.

‘Hello?’

There was a hiss and muffled breathing. Then his sister’s voice. ‘Charlie?’

‘Annie – you OK? – what’s up?’

‘I – it’s – I’m—’

Charlie could picture her holding her hand over the receiver, trying to compose herself.

‘Annie, it’s OK.’

‘I’m frightened, Charlie.’

She was scared that their mother would turn up uninvited to the wedding.

‘She might get it into her head to get on the Tube and it’s only an hour from home –’

(How can she call it home? thought Charlie. It’s never been a home to us.) ‘– and then she might just show up and Ben will be furious. He’s already stormed off God knows where and we’ve only got a few hours and …’

Her voice was growing louder and beginning to race, trying to outrun the tears that were creeping up at the end of her words.

‘Annie, Annie. Slow down, shhh.’

Her voice became clearer. ‘Charlie?’

There was a cadence to her voice that he recognised from their childhood; the unfailing faith she had in him to find the answer, to fix things when they went wrong. And why wouldn’t she have faith? Charlie had been the one who’d taken care of her when their mother hadn’t or couldn’t. It was he who’d balanced on a chair to cook eggs and beans while Annie played on the kitchen floor, knees grey with cigarette ash, nappy heavy with piss. And later, it had been Charlie who had stood between their mother and angry boyfriends, he who’d run things when she’d left them for days on end. When Annie’s periods had started, it was Charlie she’d asked for the money to buy her first box of Dr Whites. And now, he could hear in her voice, she needed him again.

‘Annie do you want me to come over?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Please, Charlie, will you come?’

Lying on the sofa, his eyes fixed on a smudge on the ceiling, Limpet seemed to have fallen into a trance. Charlie poked him on the arm.

‘Mate, don’t you think you ought to go back to bed? You look like shit.’

Limpet bolted upright, his eyes locked on his flatmate. ‘When’s the wedding then?’

‘Eleven. I’ll see you there, right?’

‘Yeah man, see you later.’

‘And Limpet?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Go back to bed, for fuck’s sake.’

The front door opened onto a tiny triangle of green. On a bench in the far corner a sparrow was hopping back and forth, but otherwise the street was empty. In the quiet of the early morning, West End Lane was spacious and peaceful, the windows of the red-brick flats above blanked by curtains as Charlie walked towards Kilburn. Annie and Ben lived above the High Road, down an alley beside the fishmongers and up a geriatric zigzag of rusting iron steps. From outside their front door, Charlie could see a clutch of lime trees peeking out from a garden on the street behind, their leaves sticky in the watery sunshine. He banged the door with the flat of his hand and Annie answered wearing a floral housecoat and clogs. To his relief, she was smiling, a wide grin that showed a dimple in her left cheek. Charlie pulled her into a hug and kissed the top of her head.

‘Aren’t you supposed to be having a crisis or something?’

She pulled away and laughed, a surprisingly low chuckle for someone so slight. ‘Look!’ she gestured inside to the kitchenette, her sleeve riding up to reveal a livid bruise on her wrist. She tugged at her cuff and Charlie looked away.

‘Ben,’ he said.

‘He came back!’ Annie exclaimed with a shrillness that made her brother’s jaw tighten.

A great coal-haired sprawl of a man, Ben dwarfed the chair he sat on, limbs splayed out in all directions.

‘Hi Chaz,’ he said, ‘bit early for a social call, isn’t it?’

Charlie glanced at the clock – it had just gone 8 – and grimaced. ‘Bit early for anything, mate.’

Annie held the kettle up, brow furrowed but her mouth set in a smile, her spare hand fluttering about her face.

‘Tea, dear boys?’ she asked. ‘Got a bit of a busy day ahead of us.’

Annie’s father had left before she was born, just as Charlie’s father had done. One morning when Charlie was four, their mother had leaned across the dirty breakfast table, scarlet dressing gown gaping open across her leaking breasts, and said to him, ‘You’re the man round here now.’ Eating his Weetabix, he had looked with intrigue at the baggy skin of the mewling creature she was holding and said nothing. From then on, though, he’d known this baby would be his responsibility; that he would need to protect her from the tidal waves of fury and despair and the many drunken boyfriends that passed through their mother’s life.

They had moved with their mother from place to place, the oniony smell of dirty linen and glasses ringed with whisky residue the only constant. And yet there had always been good days. Those were the days when their mother blazed with light, turning on her heel on the way to school and pulling them aboard the number 19 bus, climbing with them up the stairs to the seats at the front where they would see their friends below walking in the opposite direction. They knew better than to question her, for fear that they might lose this moment of brightness, her tinkling laugh. They would go to the zoo or to the cinema, where they’d watch as many showings in a row as they could, legs hooked over the plush of the seats in front. The problem was that there were always more bad days than good. The dark days, she had called them once when she’d tried to explain, ‘It’s as though all the colour’s drained out of the world, Charlie,’she’d slurred from where she lay, ‘like it’s all made out of tracing paper.’ He had learned early on that she was lost to them on those tracing-paper days and so, whenever the darkness fell, he’d taken charge, looking after Annie as best as he knew how.

Charlie swigged his tea while Ben drummed his fingers on the side of his chair. Annie leaned back against the work surface, the tendons in her neck flicking, her hands still fluttering. Charlie noticed the stale odour of dirty clothes; the rumpled bed with a greying corner of the mattress exposed; the sink full of dishes smeared with ketchup and hardening grease. Annie clasped her fingers around her wrist as she spoke.

‘What happened there, anyway?’ Charlie asked, nodding towards her wrist, trying to keep his tone light.

Ben’s face darkened. He stood up. ‘Right. I need a piss. We’ve got to start getting ourselves scrubbed up, Chaz, so perhaps you could – y’know—?’

Charlie looked at his sister’s fiancé and gave a faint smile, though he felt his hands tighten into fists. ‘What’s that now, Ben?’

But Annie interrupted and changed the subject before he could answer, her eyes widening at Charlie as she spoke. For a moment he considered what would happen if he just spoke the words out loud. What are you doing to my sister? But her eyes were fixed on his and he could see what she was asking him to do, so he drained his cup, said goodbye and pulled the stiff door open. From the bottom of the steps he looked up to see his sister’s head peering over the railings, her pale hair streaming loose.

‘Don’t forget to be there at eleven!’ she shouted.

Raising his arm in a wave, Charlie walked out of the alleyway, swallowing the sudden urge to run back up the steps and take Annie away with him.




1.2 (#u4c5dda64-b6cf-55ff-8adc-d7a9d1e02ec4)


It was the morning of their wedding and fat green lime leaves were swaying by the window, a blue October sky behind them. Stella spoke in hurried whispers, though she could have been as loud as she wanted, since there was no one but John there to hear her. But her voice stayed soft as she pressed her hand against the glass and looked out, misting the pane with her words: This day is the beginning of a whole new life.

Outside, Kilburn had woken up. Cars and buses jostled along the High Road. Old women pushing baskets and young mothers pushing prams walked as if still asleep, their eyes cast down, unaware of the rumbling traffic or the loose stride of the young man side-stepping past them. And he in turn did not see them; the old and the baby-laden had no place yet in Charlie’s world. Guitar music spilled from Woolworth’s and he found himself stepping in time until the sound faded into the noise of the busy street. He looked up as he walked, passing under the striped awning of the butcher’s, the red and white swirl of a barber’s pole, a line of stone composers’ heads above the door of the music shop, their features softened with muck and time.

At Maida Vale, between the strange coupling of high-rise flats and grand houses, he moved south. Traffic fumes caught in his throat and moisture gathered in the curve of his back. A bus honked as he ran across the road towards the Tube station, the driver shouting from behind his cab window. In the heat of the Underground, Charlie waited on the platform, staring into the dark mouth of the tunnel. A soot-black mouse darted between the rails, but otherwise he was alone. He studied the poster on the wall behind the track, an advert for the extended line out to the airport. Fly the Tube! it said, and Charlie sighed. As if he could even afford the fare to Heathrow these days. Around him the air lifted, billowing a warm rush of soot and stale cigarettes as the rails shivered in anticipation. The train clattered into view and squealed to a stop, its doors yawning open. No one got off. Charlie stepped into the smoking carriage and dropped onto the blue and red seat, pulling out his packet of Chesterfields as the train drew out of the station.

At Oxford Circus he emerged, buffeted by Saturday shoppers, a rip-tide that threatened to pull him along the swarming pavement. Eyes fixed ahead and hands wedged in his pockets, he pushed against the crowds until he reached the right turn into Denmark Street – musician’s paradise, he thought, remembering the first time he had walked down here with Limpet. His friend, who rarely seemed impressed by anything, had gazed at the guitars in window after window, taking in with greedy eyes the smooth curves of wood and wire. Most of the shops were yet to open, but outside of Trihorn Music a man was smoking, a silk scarf tied around the puff of his Afro. Charlie recognised him as Al, the bassist in Limpet’s latest band, and they nodded to one another as he passed. Alright, man? Yeah, alright. A few doors down, a sign in the steamed-up window of a café read: Bacon Rolls – 10p and feeling in his pocket for change, Charlie pushed the door and walked into the smell of smoke and frying fat.

A few miles north, Limpet was waiting on the platform of West Hampstead station for the train to Brondesbury. It would be a brief stop at his dealer’s – a small bag of weed for after the wedding – and then he would head into town. A short way down the track a train was approaching at high speed, not scheduled to stop. Inside the train, a young boy was playing with his new rubber ball. Back and forth against the wall he threw it, catch and release: a gentle game for a well-behaved boy. But when the ball rebounded at an angle and flew from the open window, it entered the air at the speed of the train, colliding with Limpet’s outstretched hand with enough force to break his metacarpal. Clipped around the head by his outraged mother, the young boy clutched his ear and wailed as the train sped on, his cry unheard by Limpet, who had fainted on the platform.

In Paddington, Stella sat in the hospital waiting room with John, watching swollen-bellied women and stern-faced midwives as they came and went. Eventually, she stood and spoke to the lady at the desk, who eyed her middle, still soft and flat. She wasn’t being difficult, Stella said in a quiet voice, but she had to get married that afternoon, so would her scan be much longer? The older woman laughed, loud and joyous, and led them to a corner office where a dark-haired sonographer was waiting.

Their little swimmer was loop-the-looping, that was what John said, though from where Stella lay the screen was just a fuzz of green blobs. A good baby, the woman said, you’ve got a good baby there, and Stella was shocked by a sudden understanding that it was actually a person somersaulting inside her. Through a crack in the blind she could see a needle’s width of sky, the loose clouds passing, a tiny bird darting by. Then she was wiping jelly from her stomach and tugging her T-shirt and they were walking past the laughing nurse, who wished them luck, and out into the noisy brightness of Praed Street, where people swooped by as she leaned against John’s chest, his hand tucked in the back pocket of her jeans.

At the register office, Annie and Ben stood in front of a wooden desk, a crowd of twenty or so family and friends gathered behind them. The brown carpet tiles rasped and Annie’s dress strained against the sharp blades of her shoulders as she wrapped her arms about herself. At the swish of the door, she turned to see Charlie, waving as he slid into a seat just as the registrar began to speak. He’d never understood what she saw in Ben. From the first time Annie had introduced them, he’d known he’d never like the man. Hadn’t trusted him then and didn’t trust him now. After the vows were said, Ben’s hand pressed down on Annie’s shoulder as they kissed and Charlie felt again the urge to pull his sister away from that man’s grasp. With a shout of ‘She’s mine!’ Ben flung Annie over his shoulder and ran along the aisle between the plastic chairs. As he watched, Charlie felt the growing chatter of the guests recede and in the ringing distance of his mind he heard the words as clearly as if he’d spoken them himself: it’s too late to change things now.

Afterwards, they stood for photos on the steps, as the Saturday traffic roared down the Euston Road. There wouldn’t be any symmetry in those pictures, thought Charlie as he stood alone beside his sister, wishing that Beth could have come back this weekend. Ben’s family gathered on the other side. They were big and loud and, judging by the reek of alcohol coming from the two cousins standing closest, more than a little drunk already.

The pub on Marylebone High Street was still quiet as the rowdy party piled in, but soon the cousins were bellowing rugby songs and the room screeched with laughter and chat. It was fun for a while, to be carried on all that noise, and Charlie drank three pints before he started to wonder why Limpet still wasn’t there. He apologised his way between a group of older women who were deep in outraged conversation – Did you hear about the undertaker’s strike? Poor Bessie’s still waiting for her Albie to be buried. Can you imagine? –moving towards the payphone by the bar. He dialled, ready with his two-pence piece for when the pips went, but no one picked up. He pushed the coin back in his pocket, noticing how hot the pub had become. It was time he left. Behind him, someone thrust another pint into Ben’s hand, who roared with approval, peppering Charlie with spittle-spots as he passed. Wiping his face with his sleeve, Charlie kissed Annie on the cheek and squeezed her wrist. Seeing her grimace, he remembered the purple spread of bruise across her skin underneath, but she waved away his worried look.

‘It’s nothing, Charlie, honestly.’

Surprised by the daylight, he was blinking back the sunshine when Annie burst out of the pub and caught him by his arm, laughing. ‘But where are you going, Charlie?’

‘Going to find Limpet – he was supposed to be here, but he didn’t show. I’m going up to Biddy’s to see if he made it to work.’

‘Ah, Limpet, my long-lost love. He’s a fine man, that one.’

‘Annie, are you maybe a little bit drunk?’

She grinned and wound her arm through his, resting her cheek on his shoulder. He turned his head to kiss her hair and then gave her a gentle shove.

‘Go on now, off you go.’

She giggled, swaying slightly as she walked back through the door, the beery breeze from the pub buffeting her dress, its filmy whiteness clinging to her like a shroud.




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