‘I had a full head of hair when I met her – look at me now,’ he said, clutching at straws and pointing to his shiny dome. ‘She’ll do the same to you, Simon.’
But we both knew his reluctance was because he was scared I’d prefer to stay with my mysterious, occasional mother over my pedestrian, full-time, bald father. I reassured him it wasn’t the case, but I admit, I briefly considered it. Although Arthur had yet to fail me, Doreen Nicholson’s secret life held an overpowering allure.
I imagined her living in a beautifully furnished home where she spent her nights dressed up to the nines, holding glamorous parties for London’s elite. And I needed to experience first-hand just how that world took preference over mine. Eventually my father had relented and let me go, but he insisted on paying for the ticket himself – making sure it was a return.
As a grown man, I now recognised Doreen’s and my reasons for craving new lives were at odds, but our actions mimicked each other’s. I was beginning to understand her like I’d never understood anyone else before.
London
5.30 p.m.
I was sandwiched between four snoozing Yorkshire terriers in the back seat of a Morris Minor when I reached the outskirts of London. I’d approached an elderly couple by the service station’s petrol pumps and they’d agreed to deliver me to the capital. An eight-track played John Denver’s Greatest Hits on a loop while they trundled along the motorway at no more than forty-five miles an hour. I only realised the irony of my singing along to ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’ by the second chorus.
I absent-mindedly fumbled with the rotating bezel on my watch – the only gift Doreen had given me that I’d kept – and stared through the window at a train bursting out from a tunnel in the distance.
I remembered my mother standing, waiting for my train twenty years earlier, taking nervous drags from an unfiltered cigarette as it pulled into the platform. Nicotine and lavender perfume clung to my coat as she pulled me to her chest, her falling tears glistening on her cheeks and bouncing off my lapels.
‘It’s so good to see my baby,’ she cried. ‘You have no idea.’
I did, because I felt exactly the same.
We perched on the top deck of a red double-decker bus as we made our way to her home in East London’s Bromley-by-Bow. Doreen draped an arm around my shoulders and intermittently kissed the top of my head as the wind raced through my hair. I’d always had a fascination with buildings, and was as hypnotised by the architecture we passed as by the woman who held me. I sketched notable landmarks like the Houses of Parliament and St Paul’s Cathedral in my jotter to show Steven when I returned home. He shared my obsession with creatively designed, historic buildings. They had dominated the city for generations, ever-present fixtures that wouldn’t uproot themselves if a better location made itself known.
‘We’re here,’ my mother finally announced with a nervous smile, as if to encourage mine in return. But I struggled to find any enthusiasm for the cramped little terraced house on the square before me. It was squeezed in between dozens more, like a concertina, in an austere backstreet square. I knew my disappointment secretly mirrored hers. It doesn’t matter, I tried to convince myself, I’m with my mum.
She unlocked the front door, and as the sun struck her face, I saw the tears she’d wept had made her make-up drip like ink. Behind her heavily disguised eyes lay the ghost of a purple bruise.
And as she lifted up my suitcase and walked into the corridor, the sleeves of her floral dress rose a little to reveal yellow and blue circular blotches scattered randomly about her wrists. I didn’t mention them.
Inside, Doreen’s house was neat but sparsely furnished, and hadn’t seen a lick of paint since the last war. Strips of wallpaper had once made futile attempts to escape by peeling themselves from the walls, but sticky tape secured them back into place. Cigarette smoke had stained the ceiling above a blanched armchair from which stuffing leaked. A large pair of scuffed men’s boots lay tossed to the side in front of her white stilettos.
‘Whose are those?’ I asked.
‘Oh, they belong to a friend,’ she replied.
And before I could delve any further, a monster appeared.
Northampton, today
8.27 a.m.
‘Simon . . .’
She whispered his name, as though the word was trapped in her last breath and she could barely find the strength to shape her lips around it.
‘Yes, Kitty,’ came his measured reply.
She gripped the door handle like a life belt. She was terrified that if she let go, her legs would buckle beneath her and she’d drown in emotions she’d cast adrift decades ago.
In the few moments she took to regain her composure, her mind raced nineteen to the dozen. At first, she considered she might be having a stroke, and that her brain was playing tricks on her. Then she wondered if the disease they’d told her she’d beaten had returned to play one final, callous joke. She focused on the olive-green eyes before her, eyes that had once given her everything she’d ever wanted, then cruelly snatched it away.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked. He’d anticipated his reappearance would be likely to shock her, but he was concerned he might have to catch her if she fainted.
Meanwhile she was snapping out of her thoughts. No, he definitely wasn’t a figment of her imagination. He was very real. The man who’d fallen from the branches of their family tree twenty-five years ago; the man she had loved then lost; the man who had been no more than a ghost for so long was standing on her doorstep.
She cleared her throat and her voice reappeared, albeit as little more than a croak. The word she produced was one that had preceded so many of her unuttered questions, past and present.
‘Why?’ she asked.
‘May I come in?’ he replied, having faith that her answer would be yes. Instead, she said nothing and stood firm. He tried to read the expression on a face he no longer knew, until eventually she turned aside and allowed him through the porch and into the living room.
As he moved inside, her eyes looked beyond the front garden to see if anyone else had witnessed his resurrection. But, like the day he had vanished, he was invisible. She inhaled all the fresh air her lungs would allow before she breathed in that belonging to the dead.
Then she quietly closed the door.
CHAPTER THREE
SIMON
London, twenty-five years earlier
6 June, 5.20 a.m.