My bedroom was at the end of the hall, next to the bathroom. I am eleven again, suddenly. My body is small, flat-chested, my stomach a smooth round closing bracket in shape. My legs are thick and strong, my toes are gnarled and ugly out of ballet shoes, my arms want to constantly reach up – into position, into a gesture of wanting someone to lift me out of the life I am living.
‘We redecorated,’ my mother says.
I used to have so much crammed in here: furniture and clothes, shoes and books, make-up and jewellery, notepads and pens. Stuff; I used to have so much stuff. I place my suitcase – the same red one I left with – on the floor beside me and stand in the middle of the room that was once mine and turn slowly. The bed was there, by the wall, my pillow against the wooden footboard so I could stare out of the window at the houses over the back, instead of watching and waiting to see who would come into my room with or without knocking first. My dark-wood wardrobe with its brass flower-shaped handles was there, by the door. My rickety white desk with its uncomfortable white chair was there, by the window, beneath the huge poster of Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gregory Hines in White Nights. At the window, I can see the full-length blue velvet curtain drawn to one side, while the white net curtain, strung halfway up the window, hooked on each side of the frame by a white-covered wire on nails, moves gently from the breeze of the not-quite-airtight window. The top part of the window is bare so full daylight enters the room. I turn back to my bed from all those years ago: my pink duvet cover with darker pink spots, and don’t forget the matching pillows. Above the bed, my nearly life-size poster of Sylvie Guillem, pressed into place first with Blu-tack, then taped over each corner and the exact middle of each side to make sure it stayed in place, where I could see it from every part of the room. A smile moves up my face as I look at that poster, gone, of course, but forever there to me. I was going to be Sylvie. She had started at the Paris Opera Ballet at age eleven – so three years after I had started dancing – but she was everything I wanted to be. Her poise, her body, the almost perfect straight line she managed to achieve en pointe.
I was going to dance in Swan Lake, and I was going to be famous, so famous Sylvie would come and see me dance. She would come to me after the performance, would open her arms to me, tears in her eyes—
‘Do you like it?’ Mum asks and inadvertently shakes me out of my eleven-year-old self. Silly girl that I am, silly girl that I was. Fantasy and silliness, that was what I was all about.
‘It’s lovely,’ I tell my mother about her rose-pink walls with their tiny rose band around the room’s middle and cream Roman-blind-covered window, pale beige carpet, circular pink rug, and chest of drawers in the corner where the wardrobe used to be. There is a metal-framed fold-out bed (possibly borrowed, possibly reclaimed from the attic), and the duvet is too big for its tiny metal frame. ‘You’ve obviously spent so much care and attention making it a calming space to be.’
‘We weren’t sure how long you would be staying with us,’ she says. ‘If it’s more than a couple of weeks we’ll maybe think about getting you a proper bed instead of this one. Although it’s perfectly good to sleep on. Not one person who has slept on it has complained.’
‘I’m sure it’s wonderful,’ I say with a smile.
My mother returns what is probably a mirror image of my smile without actually looking at me. She’s very good at that still: directing attention at me without making any kind of eye contact. ‘I’ll give you a few minutes to settle in. Dinner is at six-thirty. If that is all right for you?’
‘It’s perfect.’
A cross between a smile and a frown flitters repeatedly across Mum’s face as she hovers uncertainly by the door for a few seconds, her right hand moving between the handle and her left hand, not sure what to do with itself – whether to open the door, or clasp itself with its mirror twin.
Ask her, just ask her, she’s probably telling herself. Just ask her how long she’s staying. It’s your house, your home, your sewing room that she’s moved into, ask her how long you’ll have to be on your best behaviour and mind everything you say. Ask her, just ask her.
She opens her mouth and I prepare myself. ‘It’s nice to see you,’ she says.
‘You too,’ I say, and I mean it. It is nice to see her after all these years. The last time I physically saw her was when I had special dispensation to attend my eldest brother’s wedding about five years ago.
She nods, fixes the smile on her face and leaves, shutting the door firmly behind her.
The tension escapes my body in one heavy sigh as she exits and I fall heavily on the bed. It creaks menacingly under my weight, promising me a night of torture I can’t even begin to imagine, but I’m glad to have something semi solid under me.
I should have known she wouldn’t ask. That could result in a fuss being made, and that would never do. If she had broken with tradition and asked, ‘Veronica, why did you leave your convent and decide to stop being a nun?’
‘At this moment in time, I don’t know, Mum, I honestly do not know,’ I would have had to say. I wouldn’t have added: ‘I think it had something to do with finding and making things right with the other Veronika Harper.’
Nika
London, 2016
The whole way down here, in between attempts to sleep on the overnight coach with my rucksack as a pillow and my coat as a cover, I have been turning over what the policeman said to me while he tried to get me to leave. Not the stuff about me testifying being dangerous to everyone I knew, the other things he said: the other stuff about the life I was meant to live. That is what has been swirling through my mind since I hastily packed my rucksack, small cloth bag I’d got free at a book festival, and my battered black guitar case. Have I lived the life I was meant to? The path to how I got to this part of my life is clear, I can look back and see every turn, every step, every decision that has led to here. What has been strung across my mind like intricate worry beads are these thoughts about whether this was the path I was meant to have taken. Was there another option for me? And am I too far along this path to make a change, and relive my life?
London, 2002
I know there are photographers somewhere in this restaurant, I think for the umpteenth time.
I couldn’t completely relax because of it: out there somewhere, there was someone behind a lens waiting for me to mess up so they could press the button, capture my slip with one treacherous click. They’d stopped following us as much now that I refused to go out to clubs and very often I didn’t leave the flat unless necessary. With nothing new to take photos of, I was literally yesterday’s news story. Other people were taking over the front covers, other people were having more public rows, break-ups and reunions.
There were still photographers out there, though. I could feel them.
Todd still went out, but never touched anything more illicit than booze in public. At home, every couple of weeks, when he wanted to properly chill out, he would invite only a trusted handful of his friends over. (They were trusted because they had as much to lose as he did if anyone found out what they got up to.) They would spend their time alternating between downing shots of expensive whisky, drawing deep on real Cuban cigars, sniffing up white line after white line after white line. Sometimes they’d throw speed into the mix, and would become wild-eyed, talkative and dangerous – dangling off the edge of the balcony, trying knife tricks, arm-wrestling and often full wrestling if they lost. Then they’d collapse on to the sofas in the small hours to skin up and then smoke copious amounts of skunk to calm themselves down. By the end of the night the flat would be heavy with the smell of skunk, booze and sweat; when I left the bedroom in the morning, everything would smell stale and rancid, all of them would be sullen, pale and rude.
I hated those parties. Apart from the drugs and the out-of-control drinking, the disrespect shown by his friends to me … it constantly made my stomach churn. Todd would think it funny when one of his friends would run his hand over my bum, or another wou
ld tweak my breast, or would ‘beg’ me to get down on my knees to ‘sort me out, real quick’. He thought it was hilarious – and a compliment – that his friends treated me like a sex object because it meant they thought I was hot.
Todd had had one of his parties last week, and to make up for it (one of his friends had gone too far with his groping), he brought me out to this lovely restaurant for dinner. And I couldn’t relax because I knew there was a photographer out there somewhere.
‘You look incredible,’ Todd said to me. The restaurant had sedate music, lighting set up to emulate candlelight, black leather booths that gave instant privacy, crystal glassware, fine bone china crockery, heavy silver cutlery. Everything about this place was classy.
‘Thank you,’ I replied. I stared down at my manicured fingers, a metallic grey that matched my long silver dress Todd had bought me for the occasion. I was fluttery inside – not in the way I used to be when I saw him, talked to him. This was about the photographers, about the waiting staff and what snippets of our conversation would be passed on, about perfect strangers recognising me and judging me for things I hadn’t done.
Even when I was at home, I worried. Yes, I worried less, but I often had the blinds closed, shutting out the views of the river and the city skyline, in case someone used a long-range lens to take snaps of me. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Todd had said when I’d confessed that was what I did. ‘No one cares any more that you used to take drugs. You’re not that important.’
‘I didn’t used to take drugs, Todd,’ I’d said, ‘I’ve never taken drugs in my life. I let you tell people I did to protect you.’
‘You know what I mean,’ he’d said dismissively. He’d seen the hurt on my face and had pulled me into his arms. ‘I’m sorry, baby, it was an amazing thing you did for me. But don’t let it make you into one of those paranoid freaks who sits around in a foil hat cos they think people can read their thoughts. If they were going to use long lenses to watch you, it’d only be when I was here. You mean the world to me but no one else really cares. Just live your life, OK?’
‘We’ve been through a hard time lately,’ Todd told me. He leant forwards, lowered his voice to a whisper – obviously the paranoia wasn’t only mine. ‘You’ve really stuck by me and helped me out when I needed you most.’
I smiled at him, but kept my eyes lowered to make it harder for anyone to take a photo of me. I hadn’t wanted to wear sunglasses when Todd first mentioned it, but now, I felt naked and exposed without them. As it was, I was only half listening to Todd since I knew from the way he’d lowered his voice that he had concerns that information about us would be leaked somehow.
‘You’re so beautiful and loyal, and I can’t imagine my life without you.’
I couldn’t imagine my life without him, either. Some days, he felt like my whole world; some days, he was the only person I saw in real life if I hadn’t left the flat in a few days. My life wasn’t meant to be like that, I knew that, but it was a good life, and I had a great guy. How many other twenty-two-year-olds lived in a flat overlooking the River Thames and had a boyfriend who bought her things, took her to places and, most importantly, knew some of her most disturbing secrets but loved her anyway? My life was about Todd, and there was nothing wrong with that.
I was aware that he was moving, and raised my head. Are we leaving? I wondered. Todd tugged slightly on his right trouser leg before he got down on that knee. The music lowered, and a group of wait staff appeared around our table. One holding a mist-covered champagne bucket with a bottle of champagne on ice, another holding an armful of roses, another still with a white cloth over his arm, obviously ready to pour. I looked back at my boyfriend, and he slowly uncurled his hand and showed me a pink velvet box.
I gasped, drew my hands up to my lips and gasped again.
‘Nikky Harper, will you marry me,’ he said. It wasn’t a real question. Why would he even need to ask? Of course I would marry him. I would have married him three years ago when we met, I would have married him yesterday, I would marry him tomorrow. He was the love of my life. I loved him so much – the thought that he felt the same, he wanted to always be with me, was so amazing. SO AMAZING. I could have jumped up and screamed! Yelled to the world that he was my man and I loved him so much.
I nodded, my fingers still covering my lips.
‘I’m going to need a proper reply,’ he said with a laugh.
‘Yes! Of course, yes,’ I said. I leapt up and threw my arms around his neck.
One of his arms wrapped itself around my waist as he held me close and laughed happily into my hair. Around us the air erupted with the sound of other diners clapping their approval. And over my happiness, his laughter, and the loud clapping, I could still hear the click-click-click of someone taking photographs.
Roni
London, 2016
There’s a knock on my bedroom door. I have been staring at my suitcase and trying to remember what it was that I packed. I don’t actually have that much ‘stuff’, so I’m wondering what I folded inside and then shut the lid on because I’ll be blessed if I can remember. I don’t want to just open up the case, that would be cheating. That would be admitting that I was completely absent for the whole of the packing process and facing up to that would be like accepting defeat in the fight against the noise in my head. It would be saying to myself that I was so busy trying to find moments of silence I had completely checked out of reality. I did not like to admit to things like that.
Mum is on the other side of the door. She has a silver tray with a teapot, one cup and saucer, a milk jug, a sugar bowl, a large slice of Victoria sponge, and a silver cake fork resting on the plate.
‘I thought you might like tea,’ she says.
‘Thank you,’ I say and attempt to take the tray from her. She brushes me aside and walks into the room and places it on the surface of what is probably usually her sewing table. She didn’t actually think I might like some tea – she wants to talk to me again before Dad comes back from work. She wants to know my plans, how long she has to put up with me for.
The thing about Mum is that more than anything in the world she hates ‘a fuss’. She thinks we should put up with all sorts of things to stop a fuss being made. I don’t know what her fear of ‘fusses’ is about, really, or what she thinks might happen if one was caused, but that’s what my brothers – Damian (the eldest by five years), Brian (three years older) – and I grew up with: a mother who disengaged the second she saw anything that might cause upset in her world.
London, 1988
During the summer holidays when I was eight, our favourite uncle, Uncle Warren, would often come over and take one or both of my brothers out. He’d never take me out because he didn’t know what to do with a girl, he kept saying. It didn’t matter, really, I adored him. Whenever I saw him coming up the garden path I would fly to the door, ready to be scooped up by him and swung round and round until I felt sick and dizzy. When he wasn’t taking the boys out, he would sit and read with me, do jigsaw puzzles, sit still while I drew him, and watch me pretend to be a ballerina.
This day was the kind of hot that made everything seem hazy and sleepy. I’d been lying on the living room floor, reading a book about famous ballerinas, and jumped when there was a loud banging on the front door. When Mum opened it, Damian came limping in.
‘What happened?’ Mum asked. Damian continued across the hallway, aiming for the stairs where I was standing, dragging his right foot along the floor as though it didn’t work any more. Uncle Warren was right behind, trying to wheel Damian’s bike. He couldn’t move it very fast, though, because the frame was bent and twisted, as if someone very big (probably a giant) had picked it up and twisted it into a new shape.
I stared at the bicycle frame: its blue and red paint was scraped away in huge chunks, showing the silvery metal underneath. My mother opened her mouth in shock then slammed her hand over it when she saw the state of the bicycle. ‘What happened?’ she asked again.
Uncle Warren handed the bike to Mum and chuckled. ‘Our boy here thinks he’s a stuntman. Had a bit of an accident, didn’t you, mate?’ he explained. ‘Don’t know how, but he skidded and fell off, his bike went out from under him and under the wheels of a car.’
I went to my brother, took his hand and helped him limp towards the stairs so he could sit down. Mum was stunned by the state of the bike, more than by Damian’s pain. His right jeans leg was almost shredded at the knee and dripping in blood. His right elbow and the top of his arm were also scraped, scored with lots of black marks, bits of gravel still sticking out of the chunks of red below where his T-shirt ended.
‘You’re all right, aren’t you, mate?’ Uncle Warren called at him.
Damian nodded, and didn’t speak. He looked like he’d been crying but had been told to shut up and be a man, like Uncle Warren always said whenever one of my brothers fell over. He only ever said that when my dad wasn’t around, I noticed. I was only eight, but that was one thing I noticed. When Dad was around, Uncle Warren didn’t say half of the sometimes not very nice things he said.
‘He’ll be all right,’ Uncle Warren said to my mother. She was worrying over the bike. She hadn’t even looked at Damian – she was running her fingers over the scratches on the bicycle frame, her mouth still open with surprise and shock. Whenever we hurt ourselves, Mum would react like that – she’d stare and stare at whatever we’d hurt ourselves on, like it was her child and not one of us.
‘Are you all right?’ I whispered to Damian quietly. I didn’t want to get him in trouble with Uncle Warren.