“This is going to be massively cool,” Toby says.
Nick turns his attention from the overbearing mum to the diplomatic boy.
Toby is smiling up at him, and for a second Nick is looking in a small mirror at his small self. He has a sudden urge to hug Toby, though there is no way Rebecca would tolerate that gesture—and of course it would alarm the boy. He turns toward Toby (which means turning his back on the mum) and says, “It is going to be awesome.”
Seven
1993
For other boys, school holidays meant more time spent with family, or at least with your mum, who was usually at home in any case, doing the normal things mums did to keep the household from teetering into pandemonium. But Nick’s mum didn’t have the luxury of taking off much time except for a few weeks in the summer, when she’d find a way to take them all for a week at a cottage a friend of hers owned on the Solway Firth. Not far into their teens, Nigel and Annabelle grew increasingly resentful of spending this time away from their friends, and it was Nick who humored their mother by playing word games or reading beside her on the shingled beach. He was acutely aware that she deserved a holiday to go the way she wanted it to.
On odd days off from school, or hols when Mum was working and his much older siblings bolted from the flat, Nick was on his own. He didn’t mind awfully, because he could go in and out as he pleased, the flat entirely his. He had two mates who lived near the closest park; some afternoons they’d meet up there, kick a ball around, or rove about and spy on various characters. They looked for the suspicious ones, the oddballs and nutters, tried to follow them at a distance, dream up what crimes they might be planning. But more often Nick hung back at home, reading, watching the telly some, playing patience or, absurdly, solo games of chess.
Mum cut short any complaints of boredom. She told Nick that boredom was a luxury, to be seized on—that she would gladly take boredom over her job at the Indian carryout place. “Boredom,” she declared, “is a tunnel. Make it take you somewhere.”
They lived on the top floor of a building at the closed end of an old mews, a place of damp stone and crumbling mortar, though Mum insisted she found it romantic. (“Your mother fancies you’re living in a Pareezian garret,” Grandfather scoffed. The stairs were his excuse for meeting them elsewhere.) Despite the altitude, most of the flat’s five small rooms were dark, with low ceilings and miserly dormered windows. The exception was Mum’s bedroom, at the back, which looked over a low roof across a wide street with buildings grander than theirs. The entries were flanked by fluted columns, and the windows were not only tall but glistened from regular cleaning. On fair days, sun poured into Mum’s room during the morning hours, so Nick, when left on his own, liked to sit on her bed with his book or deck of cards. He also discovered that the window offered a slightly elevated view of another interior, the top flat in one of those grander buildings, where sometimes a woman paced to and fro in a dressing gown, talking and gesturing with feeling. He could never spot a companion and began to imagine she might be a madwoman, ranting to herself. Then one day, though she was pacing expressively, same as ever, he saw that she was reading from a book.
He went into the cupboard he shared with Nigel and poked about till he found the heavy binoculars Grandfather had given Nigel for his last birthday (as if Nigel planned to take up birding!).
Crouching low, Nick rested the binoculars on the windowsill and fiddled with the knob adjusting the focus.
The woman was younger than Mum and, from a twelve-year-old’s perspective, fairly smashing. Rarely holding still, she passed to and fro across the frame of her own window, but each time, he got a quick glimpse of her wide eyes, carefully shaped brows, and expressive mouth—and, pressing against her robe, a pair of pretty impressive breasts. That day the robe was red, and her hair was captured in a striped towel twisted turban-style.
What was the book? Its face flashed upright for fleeting seconds, never long enough for Nick to read the title. (Did it matter? Never mind. He wanted to know.)
Whom was she reading to? Or was she so lonely that she needed the sound of her own voice as company? How could anyone so beautiful be desperate for company?
Nick became obsessed with watching for her on the rare occasions he was home alone by day; most nights (when he could nip into Mum’s room for a glance), the woman’s flat was dark.
He made sure to smooth Mum’s bedcover after he finished his spying, since he wasn’t really supposed to be in her room when she was out—and then, of course, she would hardly have approved of his spying. And Nigel would have pummeled him for pinching the binoculars.
He worried that he might be turning into a Peeping Tom, though he reassured himself that he wasn’t much interested in going about on ladders at night and sneaking through shrubs. This woman was the sole object of his fascination. She was his personal mystery.
She dominated his waking dreams, and at night he thought of her as he lay in the dark trying to shut out Nigel’s snoring. In his imaginings, he gave her the name Sheba. She dropped her robe and turban for him—even her book.
Then, to his terror and delight, one autumn afternoon as he was returning home from a maths tutorial, he passed her on the street. He recognized her at once, though she was smartly dressed and her glossy butter-colored hair was plaited to the back of her head. Without hesitating, he turned right round and followed her. Dark was descending, and he could only hope she wouldn’t summon a taxi or make for the tube.
Even in slender-heeled shoes, she was a fast walker; in fifteen minutes, Nick was winded—and he realized that he was paying such keen attention to her blue-coated figure, half a block ahead through crisscrossing clumps of strangers, that he had forgotten to keep track of where they were headed—more important, of how he would find his way home.
She turned down a narrow alley and knocked on a door. He stood back, watching from the corner. Almost immediately, the door opened, and he had only a second to hear her greet the unseen doorkeeper, sounding bright and chipper, before the door closed behind her.
Nick waited a minute or two before proceeding cautiously down the alley. The buildings to either side were indifferent, factorylike, the only windows way up high. The door Sheba had entered, the only break in a long expanse of brickwork, was a dull black, unmarked—no handle or knob. How peculiar was that?
Bewildered and lost—now it was dark—Nick left the alley to inspect the front of the building: a long row of doors overhung by a lettered marquee. Had he not been so fixated on his quarry, he would have seen straightaway that it was a theater. And as he stood there, inert, dejected, the marquee blazed to life, the letters jutting forward in defiance of the night.
Henrik Ibsen’s
HEDDA GABLER
Emmelina Godine?Donal McSwain