That was another thing Kit wondered. When he would stop breaking things.
She was watching him. He was afraid she would ask about Shaft or the strange burning smell that was still wafting from the shrink-wrap machine, so instead he made a wild grab at the nearest subject to hand.
‘How is your fiancé today?’
She blushed. Then she sighed. She sighed so hard it was a wonder she had any air left in her.
‘Oh dear God,’ she murmured. ‘Ich wünschte, ich hätte es nicht gesagt.’
He had no earthly idea what she was talking about – his German lessons had not progressed beyond useful introductions, and my day at the hospital – but how beautiful she looked, the sleeves of her coat pushed partway up her arms, a strand of hair dangling loose. He gazed at her and even as he gazed, Kit knew something else, something about Ilse Brauchmann that was bigger than words. It was soft. Melodious. He felt a flush of adrenalin and then the giddiness of a fall. It was like being nothing.
‘Kit?’ she said. ‘Are you all right?’
He got it. He could hear the song inside her and it was the saddest, loneliest violin.
She was in love with Frank. That was her secret.
32
Raindrop
IT WAS COMING gently; not the winter sort that gets into your clothes and chills your bones, but a steady curtain of rain, plashing on the rooftops and cobbled stones. It was so warm that everything would dry again as soon as it stopped, and there would be that sweet, fresh smell in the city of leaves and grass, even when you couldn’t actually see them.
‘Tell me again,’ said Ilse Brauchmann at their table in the Singing Teapot. ‘It’s such a good story.’
So Frank told her the story of Chopin and the Prelude No. 15 in D flat major for a second time, and as he did, she sat with her face cupped in her hands, watching the rain at the window. He told her about Chopin going to Majorca with his lover because he was ill and needed sun; he told her about the miserable weather they met there, and the monastery where they rented a cell that looked over the olive groves, and how Chopin waited weeks for the arrival of his piano, feeling more and more lonely. He explained that for him, Prelude No. 15 was another of those pieces of music that told a story – when he listened he saw rain falling on rooftops, and olive groves, and a little garden with lemon trees; he heard the kind of rain that comes soft at first, pitter patter, and then so insistently it is everywhere you look, and in everything you hear, until once again it is nothing except one small drop following another, right up to the last one that lands so surely and so kindly it is hard to imagine anything falling ever again. But it was a love song too, he said. ‘At least I think so.’
‘Why, Frank?’
‘Because it’s about waiting. It’s about staying in one little dark place.’
‘Would you wait for the person you loved?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Would you?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I would.’
And all the time they spoke, the rain fell, just like the Chopin prelude, hitting the window in beads that ran the length of the glass and then disappeared.
Afterwards they walked to the park and down to the lake. There was barely anyone else. She paid the boatman, and Frank untied a pleasure boat in the shape of a swan. He stepped into the boat without losing his balance this time and held out his hand for Ilse and she stepped in too. She leant back as she sat, and he leant forward, so that their weight was perfectly distributed in the little boat; then he took one oar, she took the other, and together they rowed the boat to the middle of the water, without a single word passing between them. The water was blue-grey with the day’s reflection and trees, and dimpled as far as they could see with the falling rain. They sat for a long time, just watching the rain and smiling, her with one oar, him with the other. By now their hair was so wet it stuck to their heads, and the shoulders of her coat were more black than green, but they stayed out there in the middle of the lake, until the cloud shifted and the evening sun came out, and everything around them, every leaf, every blade of grass, every rooftop in the distance, shone like a piece of jewellery.
‘Do you remember?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ he said.
He laughed.
She laughed.
‘Wouldn’t it be good,’ she said, ‘if it was like this for ever?’
33
Get Up, Stand Up
FUCK YOU. GO home. NF.
One Tuesday morning in early May, there was more graffiti. The people of Unity Street opened their curtains, and it was everywhere. Big slogans daubed on the pavements, walls, the billboard by the bombsite, as well as the shop windows. They had even sprayed Irish Scum on Father Anthony’s door, and swastikas outside several houses. A neighbour said he’d heard a noise and rushed out, but saw nothing apart from a gang of kids in hoodies running in the direction of Castlegate. It could have been anyone. The shopkeepers called an emergency meeting in England’s Glory.
So here they all were: the Williams brothers, Mrs Roussos and her chihuahua, Frank, Kit, Maud and Father Anthony. The regular line of old men were up at the bar, the man with three teeth sang about a dog, while the woman with curlers smoked an imaginary cigarette. Frank had been out all day, washing off the graffiti. He was very tired. Besides, he hadn’t seen Ilse for three days. He assumed she was busy with her fiancé, but he couldn’t sit still.
‘Who are these kids?’ asked Mrs Roussos. ‘Why do they do this to our street?’
Father Anthony shrugged. This was what happened, he said, when the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. It wasn’t just Unity Street; it was happening all over the city. The more people lost, the more they would fight against one another; this was human nature, he said.
‘Maggie should bring back conscription,’ said Pete the barman. ‘That would sort these kids out. She should bring back corporal punishment as well.’
‘Oh great,’ said Maud. ‘Pack them off to war and then hang them ’cos they’re all fucked up. That’s really going to put the world straight.’
‘It’s got so bad,’ said one of the Williams brothers, ‘we daren’t go out at night.’
‘Do you think we should all invest in iron shutters, Frank?’
‘None of us can afford iron shutters,’ pointed out Maud. ‘I can’t afford the central heating.’
‘They might try to break in next time. They might have knives and things.’
Kit suggested they should fit a series of alarms in each shop so that they could contact one another if there was an emergency. Maud pointed out they already had such a system, and it was called a telephone. Meanwhile Pete the barman said what about setting up a vigilante group? They could take matters into their own hands, patrol Unity Street at night, keep an eye on things. They wouldn’t do any serious damage, but they could carry baseball bats, maybe wear some kind of uniform. He asked if there were any volunteers?
The shopkeepers stared at him as if he had just dropped through a hole in the ceiling.
The Williams brothers held hands. Mrs Roussos pointed out this was Unity Street, not Harlem, while Father Anthony began to laugh. Kit alone shot up his arm. ‘I could volunteer, Pete!’
After that, the barman went pretty quiet about the vigilante thing. ‘But who would put Irish Scum on Father Anthony’s door? He comes from Kent.’
‘It’s a common mistake,’ said Father Anthony. ‘People assume all priests are Irish.’
‘Jesus was Irish,’ said Kit.
He seemed to have landed the conversation in an altogether different landscape. There was nothing to do but wait for the air to clear and then start off on a fresh one.
‘Let’s face it,’ said Maud. ‘Unity Street has gone down the toilet. Someone should pull the chain and have done with it. That florist was right to get out.’
‘If the florist had stayed put, we wouldn’t be in this mess,’ said Pete the barman. ‘Once one person goes, there’s no stopping. It’s like a pack of cards. We should
have seen it coming when the baker went.’
Frank was impatient. ‘I don’t know why you’re all talking as if everything is over. I have staked my flat on the refurbishment. Give it a few weeks, we’ll have loads of new customers. Besides, we’re important. We offer things people can’t buy on Castlegate. We give our customers a chance to find something that they might actually need. We’re a community—’
The shopkeepers stared at him bravely. Silently. Politely.
‘Anyway, I should head off,’ he said.
‘Head off?’ barked Maud. ‘Where exactly do you think you’re going?’
Sometimes Frank got the feeling that Maud was removing floorboards, even while he was balancing on them.
‘It’s nearly half five. I’m giving a music lesson—’
Maud watched with a face like a bee sting. ‘But it’s the meeting with Fort Development. It starts here in an hour.’
‘I thought no one was interested?’
‘After what happened last night,’ said one of the Williams brothers, ‘people feel differently. We’re scared, Frank. We need to hear what they have to say.’
‘You’ll have to cancel your lesson,’ said Maud.
‘She’s expecting me.’
‘Ring her.’
Frank did his best to appear airy and self-possessed but his voice lost all control of itself, and just came out squeaky. ‘Matter of fact, I don’t have her number.’
‘I thought you and Greensleeves were friends.’ Maud raised her eyebrows so high it was hard to remember what she looked like with them at a normal level. Then she muttered something that appeared to be entirely for the benefit of herself. ‘Why’s she so mysterious? What’s she trying to hide?’
At this point Kit began to squeal as if he had been gagged. He held tight to his seat and went alarmingly red, presumably with the effort of keeping himself silent. ‘Mm mm mm,’ he went.
It was very nearly half past five. Inconclusive and bewildering as this conversation was, Frank now had four minutes to cover a distance that took him nine on a day with a strong wind behind him, fifteen on a more gentle one. He explained that all he was going to do was run to the café and tell Ilse what was going on. He would be back by six thirty.
Running was not something that came entirely naturally to Frank. There was a lot of him to shift. No matter how fast he went, legs chugging, arms swinging like pistons, the pavement slapping the undersides of his plimsolls, he didn’t seem to be going as fast as normal people did when they made the exact same movements. Several times, he was overtaken by joggers in the new Lycra gear. He limped past the row of market stalls – a trader had set up selling cheap CDs, and people crowded round it like children. Drunken voices sang down an alley; police sirens wailed. All he needed was to check Ilse Brauchmann was OK, and explain about the meeting.
When you witness a person before they have spotted you, it allows you to observe them in a pure way, without the extra complications of yourself. As Frank hurtled down the little cobbled alleyway that led to the Singing Teapot, head reeling, eyes swimmy, breath heaving, as he finally reached the glass door with the Closed sign already at the window, he saw Ilse Brauchmann as if for the first time. She was waiting at their table by the window, one knee over the other, her chin resting in the V of her hands. Even if he hadn’t been running for nine minutes, he would still have felt winded.
The moment she caught sight of him, she sprang to her feet. ‘I was worried you weren’t coming—’
It took a while to breathe normally again. He explained about the new graffiti and the meeting with Fort Development, while the waitress laid the table. She proudly informed them she had been planning their meal all day.
‘Look, I am really sorry,’ Frank told her, ‘but tonight I can’t.’
‘But she has bad news,’ replied the waitress. ‘And this dish takes no time.’
Even though he fully intended to be five minutes, ten at the most, something happened in the café. Time didn’t so much jump as give up altogether. It was like being with Ilse on the lake – the outside world was a distant shore of lights, and the two of them existed in a place entirely of their own, untouched and untouchable.
She said, ‘My father’s taken a turn for the worse. My mother wants me to go home.’ Enormous tears clung to her enormous eyes.
‘When?’
‘I hope to stay here for another few weeks.’
‘You’d come back?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But what about—?’
‘What?’
‘Our music lessons. The shrink-wrap machine.’ He laughed to show that was a joke but she only sighed.
‘I don’t know, Frank. It depends—’
Here she was interrupted. The saloon doors whammed open, and with them a violent hissing accompanied by a cloud of smoke. It swallowed the café in seconds.
‘Sizzling hot plate!’ shouted the cloud of smoke, sounding uncannily like the waitress. Even Ilse Brauchmann seemed to have vanished.
‘Is it meant to do this?’ Frank yelled.
The cloud shouted back that the recipe hadn’t specified. It also shouted, ‘Bon appétit!’
It required only a glass of water to put out the sizzling dish – whatever it was, it was charred to the point of disintegration – but now here he was, with a wet hot plate, the woman he loved talking about leaving, a distressed waitress with a potentially lethal passion for amateur cookery, while on the other side of Castlegate Fort Development would be setting up their banners and posters and repeating their offer to buy Unity Street. Frank glanced at the clock and said the first thing that came into his head.
‘Run.’
‘Run?’ repeated both Ilse and the waitress. ‘Us?’
‘Yes,’ he shouted. ‘Now.’
Maud was smoking outside England’s Glory. She looked both tense and frightened. She wasn’t so much inhaling her cigarette as chewing it. ‘What the hell kept you?’ She raked Ilse up and down. ‘It’s packed. You’d better do something, Frank. And who’s the chick with the cap?’
‘I’m a waitress.’ (Said the waitress.)
Inside the bar, the crowd was so thick no one could move and there was a high buzz of conversation. Frank had no idea how such a down-at-heel cul-de-sac had suddenly produced all these outfits he had never seen before; everyone was dressed as if they were off to a cocktail party. There were men in velvet jackets, women in dresses, students with combed hair, and several dogs on leads. The woman in curlers had covered them with a silk headscarf. Even the man with three teeth had borrowed a tie.
Everyone was talking about the graffiti in the night, and how there was no respect any more. Tables had been pushed aside and chairs were arranged in lines. Pete was clearly having his best night since the Royal Wedding. At the front, a table had been set up with a large screen for a slide presentation. There were big banners with the Fort Development logo, as well as the large posters showing all those happy people drinking coffee and pointing at brand-new houses.
Frank tried to push through the crowd but did not get far. The Williams brothers had seats on the front row; Father Anthony was sharing a chair with Kit, and old Mrs Roussos sat a little apart because her chihuahua had taken a dislike to a poodle on the other side of the room and was snarling. The line of old men at the bar offered their stools to Ilse and the waitress.
So Fort Development was not simply a van full of men in bomber jackets who turned up to empty premises and boarded them up, it was also a team of men with matching grey suits and differing degrees of facial hair – one had a beard, another was bald but holding a clipboard, another had a moustache and a baton, the last was growing sideburns. They walked to the table at the front with their heads bowed, and because it was very warm they removed their jackets to hang them over the backs of their chairs. Then one of them – the one with the most hair, in fact – stood and asked for everyone to listen. He sounded nervous and it took a good few minutes for people to realize the
meeting had started. First off, he wanted to thank everyone for the amazing turnout. Really they’d only been expecting a few people. They felt humble. (He made a humble prayer shape.) The meeting would be quick, he said apologetically. This was just Fort Development wanting to say hello. (The man with sideburns waved his hand. Hello.) There’d be time for free drinks at the bar afterwards, courtesy of Fort Development.
Pete gave a shout from the bar. ‘We’re only here for the beer.’ People laughed.
Fort Development wanted to begin by explaining who they were. They were a development company (‘Boo!’ shouted a student with his dreadlocks tied into a hairband) but they were one with a difference; they were interested in people. They focused on improvements in inner-city housing. They would like to give an example – here the man with a baton clicked a switch and images flashed as if by magic on the screen behind them of a) a housing estate, b) a woman smiling in a housing estate, c) a fitted avocado bathroom in a housing estate, and d) an upside-down group of men in a housing estate.
‘Sorry,’ said Baton Man. ‘I put the slide in the wrong way round.’
The crowd politely tipped their heads to one side to get the general picture.
Now it was Clipboard Man’s turn to speak. He behaved like one of the crowd; a jolly geezer. He said he too had grown up in a street like this. He too had played on a bombsite, and fetched groceries from the shop on the corner. He knew how hard this was for the locals.
People nodded and said, ‘Hear hear.’ Kit was nodding so much he looked in danger of giving himself whiplash.
Clipboard Man explained that there was no future in Unity Street. The council had it earmarked for demolition. A few people expressed their shock – this was the first they’d heard of it – but he quickly moved on. Fort Development were offering above the market rate for their houses and shops.
The Williams brothers put up their hands and rose simultaneously to their feet. They spoke falteringly about the generations of their family that had lived in the parade on Unity Street. People listened. Yes, they agreed, the two old men were right. People loved this street. Some had been here since they were children. Then a woman representing the homeless also stood and spoke about the housing crisis in the city. It was a small street, but there were flats here, bedsits, rooms to let. You couldn’t throw all these people out. She talked earnestly about teenage prostitution, and drug abuse. Then another man stood and told a funny story about the six children he and his wife had proudly raised in their terraced house, even though they only had two bedrooms. The man with three teeth broke into a ballad. It wasn’t really about a street, it was about a train, but he had a nice voice, and only three teeth, of course, so everyone listened anyway.