Left of the Bang

Copyright

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thestate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2015

Copyright © Claire Lowdon 2015

Cover photographs © Christoph Hetzmannseder / Getty Images (woman); Phil Portus Photography (train). Design © Kate Gaughran.

Song lyrics quoted from: ‘Hey Jude’ by John Lennon and Paul McCartney (Sony/ATV); ‘The Nearness of You’, music by Hoagy Carmichael, lyrics by Ned Washington (Sony/ATV); ‘Only Girl (In The World)’, by Crystal Johnson, Mikkel S. Eriksen, Tor Erik Hermansen, Sandy Wilhelm (Sony/ATV); ‘S&M’, by Ester Dean, Mikkel S. Eriksen, Tor Erik Hermansen, Sandy Wilhelm (Sony/ATV); ‘We Are the Champions’, by Freddie Mercury (Sony/ATV); ‘You’re Not the Only Oyster in the Stew’, music by Harold Spina, lyrics by Johnny Burke (Warner/Chappell Music)

Claire Lowdon 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

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

Source ISBN: 9780008102166

Ebook Edition © April 2015 ISBN: 9780008102180

Version: 2016-03-15

Praise for Left of the Bang

‘Clear-eyed, audacious and disarmingly honest’ William Boyd

‘A disarming and affecting debut … Lowdon has an acute ability to paint exquisite pictures of ordinary life and capture what is extraordinary about it. It is social observation at its very best with characters that are both painfully honest but also hilarious in their satirical humour … Tamsin Jarvis will resonate long after the final page is turned’ Stylist, *****

‘In refreshingly flourish-free prose, Lowdon picks apart the cloaks that these millennial Londoners use to disguise their true selves, uncovering the startling disconnects underlying their friendships. The characters of this remarkable debut are neatly drawn and sharply skewered, the satirical observations crack like a whip and, most impressive of all, even the denouement arrives with the bang of the title’ Sunday Times

‘While [Lowdon’s] cast are hardly sympathetic, they’re too credible – and also too damaged – to be mere one-dimensional grotesques. The upshot is that they get uncomfortably under your skin, making Lowdon’s incendiary denouement real read-between-your-fingers stuff’ Daily Mail

‘In her deeply impressive and accomplished first novel, Left of the Bang, Claire Lowdon charts the lives of a group of twentysomethings in London with sharpness and precision, with humour and insight, and with generous helpings of humanity … There are shades of Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children and hints of Lena Dunham’s Girls, too, in the book’s depictions of sex and in how it so flawlessly captures these twentysomethings’ expectations of what the world owes them, and the disappointments that flow from these misapprehensions … The writing is razor-sharp, excruciating in its honesty … It takes stylistic risks with voice, tense and point of view. These pay off, absolutely, and tempted this reader, upon finishing, to begin again from page one … A piece of fiction that is flawless, beautifully paced and expertly judged. At age 30, Lowdon has the flair, polish and insight of a firmly established novelist … A gifted and perceptive writer’ Sarah Bannan, Irish Times

‘Write what you know, they say. Yet it’s a clever author who does just that and succeeds in offering insight. Claire Lowdon spins this tale about twentysomethings living in London as only someone who knows the drill well could do: it’s full of references to real pubs, nights out and the very particular emotional angst that comes from that post-university period in a thrilling but indifferent metropolis … The characters are well-drawn and sympathetic … Lowdon flits deftly between the perspective of each character … She takes time with the hopes and fears of each one, conjuring up a tension that builds painfully slowly … Lowdon uses sex to show the characters’ real selves, their hidden wants and desires … A smart and sober pronouncement on consequence’ Francesca Steele, The Times

‘Claire Lowdon’s serious-minded but nevertheless sparky debut novel can be seen as an extended rebuttal of the secret but abiding anxiety – especially among the youth – that everybody is having more, or better, sex than they are. What if, she asks, nobody is?… Lowdon is unobtrusively good on the non-glamour of London life … Left of the Bang is not a didactic novel, but its story certainly mutates from social comedy into something far more disturbing’ Alex Clark, Spectator

‘Claire Lowdon has written the definitive novel of a generation of Londoners. So involved did I become in their lives, so closely did I feel I knew them, that the note of disquiet that carries through the pages like the eerie mewl of a tuning fork absolutely levelled me when finally it reached its full glass-shattering resonance three-quarters of the way through’ Gavin Corbett

‘Attuned to the nuances of social interaction that lie above the threshold of awareness and elude articulation, Lowdon observes interpersonal relationships with a satirist’s sharp eye. Her narrator pierces façades and parses hybrid, often contradictory, cocktails of emotion with an efficiency reminiscent of Alan Hollinghurst’s early novels … Peeling the layers of her characters’ drives and desires demands a precision that, as the subtlety of these observations attests, Lowdon possesses’ Lindsay Gail Gibson, Times Literary Supplement

‘A startlingly assured debut, chronicling the lives of twentysomethings in contemporary London. (I read it in the same fevered excitement as I read Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children.) It’s a social commentary, a page-turner and it’s packed with beautiful sentences’ Sunday Business Post

‘All the way through what is essentially a realist novel about young Londoners runs an edge of tension, of suppressed panic. You await the explosion, never quite knowing what form it will take … Minor events all seem to take place in the shadow of the loaded gun we know must be about to go off, in “those vacuum-packed, suspended seconds” before the obscure but inevitable bang … The characters’ moral wranglings and the machinery of the plot spiral inexorably inwards, into the bedroom. It’s there that everything will eventually go bang’ Lidija Haas, Guardian

‘Lowdon has Evelyn Waugh’s willingness to inflict gruesome plot twists on her Bright Young Things’ Literary Review

‘A fresh and sharp-minded writer’ Blake Morrison, Observer

‘Razor-sharp satire of millennial Londoners and their pretentions in this promising debut’ Sunday Times

‘Lowdon deftly maps the tangled love life of failed concert pianist Tamsin Jarvis … She writes with an admirable honesty’ Claire Allfree, Metro

‘Deftly plotted and evocatively written. Left of the Bang’s characters are believable and their interactions ironically, wince-inducingly familiar’ Sasha Garwood, Marylebone Journal

Dedication

For my grandmothers, D.E.M. and G.M.M.L.

Epigraph

Left of the bang: a military term for the build-up to an explosion. On a left–right time line, preparation and prevention are left of the bang; right of the bang refers to the aftermath.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for Left of the Bang

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Thank You

About the Author

About the Publisher

One

Her father’s arms around her. His voice vibrating through his chest and into hers.

‘I’m here, tinker. I’m here.’

Her bleeding toenail, open like a birthday card.

Two

When Tamsin Jarvis was twelve, she saw her father kissing another woman.

The whole family was up in Manchester to hear him conduct a celebration of British music at the Bridgewater Hall. It was a treat, at the end of the concert, for Tamsin to go to his dressing room all by herself. Her mother had to put ten-year-old Serena to bed in the Jurys Inn Hotel across the road. ‘Tell Daddy not to hang around chatting, the restaurant’s booked for nine forty-five.’

Backstage, everything was hushed. All the doors had leather quilting. The carpet was very thick. A stagehand with his radio earpiece hooked round his neck pointed her towards the end of the corridor. Tamsin pushed her father’s door open, enjoying its weight and the smooth, silent swing of the hinges.

Three seconds later she closed it again, just as silently. The lovers had been kissing with their eyes shut. Neither of them knew they’d been seen.

The woman was Valery Fischer, the mezzo from the concert. Val and her husband Patrick were old friends of the Jarvises. Their only son, a stocky, sporty eleven-year-old called Alex, played viola in the same youth orchestra as Serena. Last summer, the two families had even spent a long weekend together in a rented cottage in Suffolk.

Tamsin walked slowly back up the corridor, seeing it all over again. Bertrand’s left hand gripping Val’s bottom through the stiff satin of her turquoise strapless dress. His right hand crushing her loosely permed curls. A large raised mole in the middle of Val’s back, pale, like a Rice Krispie. The kiss itself: muscular, forceful, almost angry, as if they were fighting one another with their mouths.

In the foyer, she sat down on the floor next to the ice-cream stand and tried to think. When she closed her eyes, she could hear the sound of her own blood. She could feel it, too, each pulse a tight squirting sensation. Around her, adult chatter thinned to a trickle as the concert-goers left the building. Tamsin stayed where she was, eyes still closed. A Hoover began its melancholy drone.

‘Tamsin?’

It was her father. He was still wearing his black trousers, but he’d swapped his tux and dress shirt for a loose grey tunic. He held out one of his big hands for Tamsin to haul herself up with.

‘What are you doing down there?’

‘We have to go,’ said Tamsin. ‘We’ll be late for supper.’

* * *

For five years she told no one.

Tamsin was frightened: of the pain that disclosure would cause her mother, of the possibility of divorce (a condition that ranked, in her twelve-year-old mind, as second only to cancer). Most of all she was frightened of her father’s anger – which, she realised, would no longer be the familiar, beneficent anger of grown-up to child, father to daughter, but real, unbounded, adult anger.

She hated being alone with him. Car journeys were the worst: prisoner in the passenger seat on the way home from school, her father asking about her day, trying to make her laugh. He was his usual garrulous, ebullient self, fond of hyperbole, susceptible to sentiment, domineering, opinionated, funny, warm. Tamsin could see nothing in his demeanour to suggest that here was a man with a terrible secret. And this was what made him truly monstrous.

Bertrand wasn’t as relaxed as he appeared. He was worried – by Tamsin, about Tamsin. Before, the two of them had been a team. Now she was nervy and skittish, slow in conversation, unwilling to meet his eye. If he hugged her, she hugged back, but she no longer initiated contact between them. On more than one occasion, he had the impression that his touch was actually unpleasant to her.

Before – but before what? Bertrand didn’t know; he couldn’t even really say when the change had occurred. He wondered if some male authority figure had behaved inappropriately towards her – a teacher, or perhaps one of the gap-year students who helped out at her summer music school. When he suggested this to his wife, however, she dismissed it as a typical piece of melodrama. ‘She’s growing up, that’s all. She can’t be your little girl for ever.’ They were in the bedroom, getting ready to go out for the evening. Roz spritzed perfume onto her left wrist, then drew her right wrist across her left in a sawing motion. ‘She’ll be thirteen soon. It’s just hormones,’ she said decisively, meeting her husband’s doubtful frown with a brisk, case-closed sort of look.

Bertrand also wondered whether Tamsin knew about his affair. Somehow, it seemed to him that she might. No matter how firmly he told himself that his anxiety was unfounded, he felt increasingly uneasy in his daughter’s presence; and in time, he found he was unable to prevent unease from translating into mild aversion. He was ashamed of this feeling, and did everything he could to conceal it – to the point where he appeared, if anything, even more affectionate and indulgent towards Tamsin than before.

As far as her mother was concerned, Tamsin was a textbook teenager: surly and non-responsive at home, perpetually in trouble at school. She collected detentions, missed curfews, got a tattoo. At fourteen she spent a night in A&E with a stomach full of vodka and caffeine tablets. At fifteen she pierced her own bellybutton. ‘Hormones’ became Roz’s buzzword, mouthed unsubtly over Tamsin’s head to sympathetic friends. Secretly, she was a little frightened of her eldest daughter. Tamsin at sixteen was a good six inches taller than her mother and almost ethereally thin, with angular shoulders and no hips or breasts to speak of. Cropped halterneck tops exposed the bejewelled bellybutton, elongated by the tautness of her stomach and embellished, more often than not, with a purplish crust of infection.

On the rare occasions that her parents argued, Tamsin lay awake in bed, monitoring the muffled sounds coming up from the kitchen for any change in register that might signal the end. The end: expected and dreaded yet also, in a small, hard way, longed for. But the rapid cadences of blame and recrimination always rallentandoed into a truce, followed, a few minutes later, by her mother’s face at the bedroom door, flushed with guilt and tenderness.

‘Darling. All couples argue. There’s nothing to worry about, I promise. Your father and I love each other. And we love you. Love you love you love you.’

Roz perched her small frame on the edge of the bed. Her daughter’s large-lidded eyes – Bertrand’s eyes – were round and wide, a precious glimpse of the little girl who had long since morphed into this difficult, untouchable half-woman.

And so the silence continued, as if it might go on for ever. But later, when Tamsin looked back at that time, she would recall very clearly a sense of anticipation. A firework mutely blossoming, Concorde ripping noiselessly across the sky: those vacuum-packed, suspended seconds before the bang.

Three

Five fifteen on a Tuesday evening in late November: the crowded southbound Bakerloo line. Tamsin Jarvis, now seventeen, still very skinny, had a seat. Even better, she had the end seat. This meant she could lean right away from the woman on her left and press her hot cheek onto the pane of glass dividing the seats from the standing section. She had shrugged off her parka at Marylebone to reveal a faded black Nirvana T-shirt bearing the slogan ‘flower sniffin kitty pettin baby kissin corporate rock whore’. In her lap, a book of Beethoven piano sonatas, open at No. 21. Tamsin had been tracing the melody with a chewed-down fingernail, pleasantly conscious of the incongruity: a grungy-looking teenage girl absorbed in classical music, performing the indisputable miracle of turning black marks on the page into sounds in her head.

She didn’t notice the suitcase until the train was pulling out of Piccadilly Circus. It was a pine-green, hard-shelled case with wheels and an extendable handle, pushed up against the other side of the glass panel. How long had it been there? At Charing Cross, she looked to see if somebody claimed it. People jostled past it on their way out, irritated by the obstacle. A small woman with a scrappy high ponytail banged her knee on it and let out a bleat of pain. The woman scowled around for the owner, but no one came forward.

Almost as soon as the train had left the station, it stopped. Tamsin looked at the suitcase. Then through the window behind her at the tunnel blackness with its dirty arcana of wires and pipes. Then back at the suitcase. Someone was watching her: a tall boy about her own age, with broad shoulders and something slightly Asian, Chinese or Japanese maybe, about the eyes. He was standing in the middle of the carriage, holding the handrail with both hands, elbows flexed as if about to do a chin-up.

The boy nodded towards the suitcase.

‘Is that yours?’

Tamsin shook her head. ‘Is it yours?’ she asked, stupidly.

‘No.’ The boy leaned forward and tapped the shoulder of an older man in a pale grey trench coat. ‘Excuse me, sir: does that case belong to you?’ His voice was respectful and refined, the accent upper class without a hint of arrogance.

The man frowned, shook a no, turned back to his paper.

Tamsin and the boy each read the same thoughts in the other’s face. When the train jolted, they both jumped. But it was just a false start; another jerk and they were moving again. Tamsin looked away, suddenly sheepish. No one else seemed concerned about the case; surely they were both being paranoid.

But her gaze was drawn back. Tamsin’s mind played forward to the blast, the train carriage crumpled like a Coke can. Though of course, she wouldn’t see that. She was sitting next to the suitcase; she would be killed outright. Tamsin Jarvis, daughter of the conductor Bertrand Jarvis, was killed outright in the attacks of 25 November. Unless the pane of glass was thick enough to protect her, just to begin with. Maybe it would shatter, or melt down onto her, sticking her clothes to her skin…

At Embankment, the same thing again: one lot of passengers shuffling off, the next lot starting to push their way on prematurely. And all the time the suitcase squatting there, unclaimed. At the last minute, Tamsin stood up and burrowed to the exit. Two seconds later the tall boy followed her out. Neither of them said anything.

In the bustle of the platform, Tamsin felt their fears start to shrink into silliness. The boy headed decisively for the help-point phone, only to find it was broken. As they discussed what to do, their convictions gave way to embarrassment. At last Tamsin said, quite firmly, that she thought they had both overreacted.

The boy laughed nervously. ‘Right. Bloody hell. Don’t know about you, but I could really do with a drink.’

‘I was meant to be meeting friends in Camberwell…’ She looked up at him. There was a charming, improbable smattering of freckles across the bridge of his very straight nose. ‘But yes, a drink would be lovely, yes.’

He held out his hand, smiling for the first time. ‘I’m Chris.’

On the escalator, Tamsin felt the elation she associated with playing truant, but there was something else, too: an intimacy thrown over them first by fear and now, increasingly, foolishness. Yet at the entrance to the station, they both paused and breathed in deeply, tasting concrete in the damp November air. The world was newly sweet.

Chris took her to Gordon’s Wine Bar on Villiers Street. ‘A real gem of a place,’ he said loudly, as they made their way down the little stone staircase. The bar had low-vaulted ceilings and red candles stuck into old wine bottles, each with a dusty ruff of stalactites. The clientele was mostly male and middle-aged; but there were also some groups of younger drinkers playing for sophistication, and a fair-haired couple with matching hiking boots and a Rough Guide. Tamsin was nervous about her fake ID – thus far, she’d done most of her underage drinking in Camden pubs – so Chris, already eighteen, went up to buy the drinks. As she waited, she gazed round at the framed newspaper clippings, the cobwebs (evidently encouraged), the line-up of bottles behind the bar.

Tamsin was indulging in an old, childish game of deciding which instrument each wine bottle would be – some were square-shouldered like violins, others sloped gently from the neck like double basses – when the fear she’d felt in the tube rose up again. What if, at this very moment, people were dying because she and Chris had been too – too what? too selfish? too shy? – to act?

‘How will we know what’s happened?’ she asked Chris, as he placed a little carafe of red and two glasses on the table in front of her.

Chris shrugged. He started to pour out their wine, still standing, not meeting her eyes.

‘It was definitely nothing.’ He sat down opposite her, tucking his long legs under the table with difficulty. Tamsin waited for him to settle, then lifted her wine glass and tipped her head to one side.

‘Cheers.’

The clink of their glasses registered as a punctuation mark. Somehow, it had been agreed that neither of them would mention the suitcase again.

Their conversation was unremarkable: where they lived, what A-levels, how many siblings. Hearing in each other’s voices the same expensive educations, he confessed, a little shyly, to Rugby (‘but on a bursary, you know’), she to St Paul’s. They ascertained that, aged fourteen, they had both been to the same teenage charity ball, where a friend of Tamsin’s had kissed a record twenty-five boys in the space of two hours. Perhaps Chris had been one of them? Tamsin described her friend: tallish, dyed blonde hair, heavy eyeliner? Chris didn’t think so; the girl he had kissed that night – the first girl he had ever kissed – was a brunette with traintracks. And so to kisses, first kisses, bad kisses, aborted kisses, swapping horror stories with that world-weariness peculiar to late adolescence, dismissive and vaunting at the same time. Tamsin referenced a one-night stand, ever-so-casually, and watched Chris’s eyes widen briefly, telling against his knowing nod.