HELLO NOW
Jenny Valentine

First published in the United States of America by Philomel, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC in 2020

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2020

Published in this ebook edition in 2020

HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,

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Copyright © Jenny Valentine 2020

Cover photos courtesy of Stocksy.com

Cover design by Dana Li

Cover design copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

All rights reserved.

Jenny Valentine asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Source ISBN: 9780007466498

Ebook Edition © April 2020 ISBN: 9780008382360

Version: 2020-03-09

For Jeff

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Novo

Chapter 1: Jude

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Novo

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Novo

Books by Jenny Valentine

About the Publisher

NOVO

WHEN IT HAPPENS, I DON’T FEEL IT. I NEVER feel it. I just sleep. And they wash away, the things I’ve held on to, all of them. I let them go, leave them unchanged, and they are clean and new and nothing and then I am back. Never the same place – sometimes the cut and pulse of human traffic, sometimes a vast empty space. Anywhere and Always. The hot bite of dust, a blanket of snow. Soft opening of a morning or deep, sharp night. Sometimes before Now, and during, and also after, just the land holding bodies and the birds rising up over the sea. Square one, in all its different disguises. Always moving. Always alone.

I never forget what I am looking for, over and over, somewhere in that black-hole sleep. The one that keeps me. The one I can keep. My hook. A face at a window, the air in a bubble, a bird in a cage. Consequence. Purpose. Belonging.

A street. Here. Now.

Will it be this time? Will it be never? I get out of the car, know my name and my age, my own hands, all my histories, same as ever. Quiet facts come to me like old finger drawings on glass, only traces. These trees. This house. This beginning. I stand at the side of the road, taking it all in, hoping and hoping. And I wonder, not for the first time, if it has some kind of start, this life, and who’s controlling it, and if it is ever, ever going to stop.

***

1
JUDE

I’VE NEVER BEEN INTO LOVE STORIES. TOO MUCH sugar, too much gloop, same reasons I don’t like candyfloss or fondue. Only so many sunsets and hand-holds and ever-afters I can stomach, honestly. Seven words for it in Greek. Twenty-seven in Tamil. All those subtleties, like Eskimos and snow, and we just have this one four-letter word and expect everyone to make a religion out of it.

I’ve never been into magic either, not the made-up miracle kind. Not when there’s the miracle of actually existing to deal with, the magic of infinitely small particles, the exact same particles, coming together to make a human being or a seashell or the Earth’s atmosphere or a cup of tea or just a log. There’s magic in putting one foot in front of the other, isn’t there? There’s magic in a foot, come to think of it. It’s everywhere. Even to be here is so much.

That’s what I knew about love before, when it was still just a spectator sport for me. Here’s what I learned by osmosis. That people spend their time wishing so hard to be with someone else they forget how to be a proper version of themselves. That we are all too ready to give up our independence, ache to hand it over gladly like it’s nothing, and make someone else responsible for our happiness, someone way less invested, way less qualified than us.

That kind of love is a selfish thing, transactional, an exalted kind of laziness, and that’s why nobody says ‘I love you’ without wanting it said back.

But love is not a transaction. Four-letter love is a big black hole and that’s why you fall into it. The finest bubble, the best dream, where you don’t want to wake up, not for a second, not ever, because you know you have to, you know you will, and that then, nothing else will come close. It makes all the everyday miracles duller and more ordinary, just from having been there, from having gone. That kind of love and magic feel the same. I know that now, for a fact. I’m an expert on the things I used to say didn’t exist.

Other loves aren’t a difficult ask for me. I love my mother. That goes without saying, even when I don’t like her. I love London, and my old house and all the days of my childhood, all my friends. I love the sea, and walking on its edges, and the taste of salt and vinegar on a hot chip. I love dancing in dark rooms and getting lost in a long book, and you’ve got to love laughing, everybody loves a decent joke. I love strangers and the internet and I love snow and sand and new places. I love obvious signs of loneliness, for some reason, and old people and young people and most dogs and the things we say to each other and singing and all types of fire and the underdog and a lot of movies, even bad ones, and marmalade on dry brown toast and clean sheets and ginger tea and I am really only just getting started.

Love is everywhere too.

I could fill this whole page with the things I love. I could carry on thinking of new ones without stopping, twenty-four hours a day, until I die. But all of them, standing together, armed to the teeth and in organised ranks with me leading the charge, still couldn’t have prepared me for Novo. Of having him. Of having him with me, alone, the great weight of his arm. And then not.

When I think about that, I feel the impact in my chest, the air pushed from my lungs, the clean sharp break of all the bones in my body. It hurts. It’s a violent equation, love plus loss. I don’t want that to be true. But I don’t know how else I’m supposed to put it.

Look how hard it hit me. I’m bleeding love story all over the place.

***

2

IN THE BEGINNING, BEFORE I KNEW THAT I DIDN’T know much about anything, my mum and I moved into a house with a stranger in it. It was a big house in the small town she grew up in (and then left, by the way, swearing never to return) on a street where fat-knuckled trees pulled at the pavements with their roots, and the average age was well over fifty, and nobody said very much.

The stranger wasn’t hiding in the attic or lurking under the floorboards. He wasn’t a blind purchase. His name was Henry Lake, and he came with the sale, refusing to budge. A sitting tenant, Mum said. A fly in the freeholder’s ointment. A stick in the capitalist mud. ‘Something we can both get behind,’ she said, which I told her was optimistic, and, at the time, frankly, pushing it.

She remembered the street from her childhood, sort of, and that the houses were beautiful. And massive. And had gardens that sloped right down to the sea. This meant less than nothing to me – five hours’ drive from my current definition of home – and I told her that too. But because of this stranger still living in it, this house on the sole of the boot of the country was a whole lot cheaper than anything else she’d managed to find. Thanks to Henry Lake being there, it was the one she could afford, so it was happening, we were going, end of discussion, and that was that. It’s thanks to him and because of him that so much other stuff happened too, and is still happening, but I’m getting ahead of myself, and when I started writing this down, that’s one of the things I swore I wouldn’t do. This particular love story is bewildering enough as it is without me helping.

We didn’t have a separate front door or anything. Henry Lake’s rooms were on the middle floor, and we were just meant to move in and live around him like the white surrounds the yolk of an egg. I said that was flat-out ridiculous, and when Mum told me to get used to it, every cell in my body screamed never.

‘Seriously?’ I said. ‘No locks on the doors? What are you thinking? What if he’s unhinged? For all we know he could be a killer,’ and, while I was saying it, something dark scuttled down an alley in my stomach, this idea that I might be right, that this was my fate, set already, bound to happen. Game over. Job done.

‘Plus it’s miles away,’ I said again, into the void Mum left by not responding. ‘No joke, Mum. You’ve lost your actual mind.’

‘No, Jude,’ she said, folding into her chair like a dropped flag. ‘I’ve lost everything else.’

Everything else translated loosely as Mark, her boyfriend for just under a year, her latest Holy Grail, her answer to just about every question under the sun. Mark wasn’t all that, but he was all right. He was pretty nice to her and he didn’t act like I was the unwanted guest or the icing on the cake, unlike some previous boyfriends I could mention. He worked in insurance and you’d think from the way she batted her eyelashes at him when he droned on about assets and premiums that a man in insurance was all she’d ever wanted, the sum total of her heart’s desires. My mum is a very good actor. She couldn’t give a shit about insurance. What she wants is not to be alone.

Anyway, Mark had taken his assets and premiums elsewhere, and because he was also our landlord, while we’d lived with him, that included the roof over our heads. Mum was still in phase one, acting like it was the end of the world, which it blatantly wasn’t. She was doing that thing she does where she just takes for granted that it’s me and her against the world, without even asking if I was on her side for this one. She said, ‘Can you believe this is even happening to us?’ and when I pointed out it was actually her decision to drop everything and drag me to a sad-sounding, pensioner-dense, end-of-the-road, far-as-the-eye-could-see whites-only seaside town from her distant past, she welled up and went all defenceless wounded puppy on me, because it works every time and she knows it. Takes the sting right out of my fight.

‘A new start,’ she called it, without asking me if I even wanted one, because it was obvious I didn’t, and I said, ‘Haven’t we had our share of those?’ One for every Mark that turned out not to be God’s gift after all. Such an over-investor. She might as well have invented the concept of eggs in one basket. Eight full new starts, and three or four half-hearted versions, where I didn’t have to move schools at least, just took way longer to get there and was always late for everything, always left behind. It was always like that, since my dad, I guess, who was the first but who came and went just like the others. A link in a chain, and a stranger now. If I saw him in the street I wouldn’t know him. Sad but true. I’ve made my peace with that.

This time, phase-one Mum was really shaking things up. Maybe I should have been more positive. She was doing it by herself, after all. Declaring independence. But at the time, she knew how I felt about it. I reminded her it had taken work to make even the few friends I had. I said we both knew there was no way I’d be able to keep them, not at that distance. I wanted that to count for something. I was looking for mercy, but that well was dry.

‘You’ll get new friends,’ she said, like I could just pick some out in a gift shop, like that was how easy it was, and it stunned me, the ignorance, the carelessness of that.

‘Ouch,’ I said. ‘Blunt.’

‘What?’ she said. ‘You’re good at it.’

‘Yeah? Because I’ve had to be.’

‘Well, life teaches us the skills we need,’ she said, trying to make a virtue out of throwing me in at the social deep end every time a new Prince Charming withered on the vine.

When I was eight and we were moving for the third time in a year (a real bad patch – Jim, I think, then Danny, then Joe) I tried to stop the move from happening by tying everything in my room down with string. I got a ball of it and I cat’s-cradled the hell out of my bed and my radiator and my toy cupboard and my bookshelf and then I waited like Charlotte in the middle of her web to see what I’d spelled. Mum used to tell that story to people like it was funny. I’ve heard it a hundred times over the years, and I’ve smiled and nodded and put up with being laughed at. She even laughed at me when it happened. She opened the door and she opened her mouth and threw her head back and I could see the undersides of her teeth, the biting edges, and I remember thinking, How could she? because it was the opposite of funny to me. I was dead scared of losing something. I didn’t want things to change. Not again. But they did, and they do, and I guess I started learning way back then that you can’t stop your world from turning, however tight you tie it down, however hard you try.

So. Here we were again. Move number thirteen. Mum was on her own, not counting me. She was acting out and we were packing up and I was all set to repeat, all set to be brand new in another place. I could feel it coming – the unknown, the sudden onset of lonely. First-world problems, sure, but still. Problems all the same.

***

3

THE ESTATE AGENTS AND LAWYERS WEREN’T beneath making the prospect of this Henry Lake’s death a kind of sweetener on the deal. Our sitting tenant was old, apparently, and not in great shape, and I heard one of them tell Mum on the phone that she wouldn’t have too long to wait to get the whole house to herself. A euphemism if ever I heard one. ‘Health problems,’ he said, the same way he probably said, ‘detached garage’ and ‘en-suite bathroom.’ I listened and I sat on my hands and tried to laugh, which is the only way to deal with outrage sometimes, the only safe way to breathe out and be gentle and just watch it pass.

When she hung up I said, ‘Isn’t it a hundred different kinds of not right that a real-life, living person would make a place worth less money instead of more? Don’t you think?’ but Mum was still in high drama, post-break-up crisis mode. She said, ‘I’ve got other things to think about, Jude, more immediate and pressing things, like finding a real place to live.’ And I suppose I’ve got more immediate and pressing things to say now, and that’s part of the trouble, and why the value of a human life ends up having to wait for later.

Last Supper time in the flat, she pushed spaghetti hoops around on her plate instead of eating them, one of those new role-reversal moments that made me want to tell her to sit up properly and stop playing with her food.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said, without commitment, kind of absent behind the eyes, like she had been for a while. ‘Everything’s going to be fine. Mr Lake is a nice man on a nice street.’

‘Yeah. So was Crippin,’ I said, and for a second I thought she might crack a smile, but she didn’t, just scowled, like I was trying to trick her into it.

She stood up to scrape the rest of her spaghetti hoops into the bin, the back of her head more expressive of her feelings than you’d think possible. Just a nudge and the whole lot slid off the plate in one slimy clump, a colony of something, half reluctant, half alive, which put me right off finishing mine. I watched her grip on the fork, waited for her knuckles to go from bone-light back to skin, and then I asked her again why a house was worth less money with another human being inside it, how that could ever be allowed to happen. On a good day that might have been the start of a proper conversation about plutocracies and trickle-down economics and the politics of homeownership and the poverty gap, and I would have learned something. But we weren’t back to good days yet. No such luck.

‘Oh, you know,’ she said without turning round. ‘It’s the way of the world. People don’t like to share.’ Like that nailed it, like it was all that needed to be said.

‘Is that it?’ I said, and she said, ‘Pick your side, Jude. Is he a human being or an unhinged killer?’

‘Or both,’ I said, and she glared at me and the angry pulse in her jaw ticked.

‘This is the last time, Mum. I’m not doing this with you again, I swear.’

‘Fine with me,’ she said on her way out of the room, but neither of us meant it, not really, and that was another one of our new-style low-quality splinter-family mealtimes over and done with.

***

4

ON THE DRIVE DOWN I’D HAD LESS THAN TWO hours of sleep, and no breakfast. The air conditioning in the car had been broken since forever and the stereo was playing up. Mum said, ‘If it rains, we’re screwed,’ because the windscreen wipers were worn out and basically useless. She wasn’t even sure if the car was going to start, or keep it together long enough to get us there, so on top of not wanting to go, there was the stress of not knowing if we’d actually arrive.

‘Yay,’ I said. ‘Road trip.’

I can’t read in a moving car because it makes me want to throw up. In fact, it’s just about the only place on the planet where a good book does nothing for me, my own special version of hell. I’d dropped my phone the week before, third time in as many months, and it was properly smashed, no real hope of repair, tiny hidden cogs and chips exposed like so much guts, so close to useless in terms of in-car entertainment. I’d tried wrapping it up with tape to hold all its innards together, and the camera still worked, on and off, but it was like looking at everything through a shattered glass eye and half the time it just froze and stared me out like it was annoyed with me, which it probably was. Mum said she wasn’t paying for another one because I was (quote) pathologically incapable of looking after it, and she was twenty-four hours a day losing the plot about money anyway, so, job done.

Out past the M25, I told her about my (about to be ex) friend Roma’s grandad telling us out of the blue that he’d been an extra in the original Star Wars. And this film I’d seen online about how the advertising industry got inside everyone’s heads in the 1950s thanks to some pioneering PR guy who was related to Freud. And a book I’d started reading about the history of the atmosphere. All perfect openers, in my opinion, and there was a time they’d have worked like a charm, but this wasn’t one of them. Mum wasn’t biting, so I got desperate and asked her who her favourite Simpson was. That’s when she breathed out through her mouth like a cross horse and told me to be quiet for just one minute, if that was at all possible, so she could think.

Rude.

Most of the known world says that people my age are hard to communicate with, but really? They should try getting through to my mother when she’s driving. The silence that descended was familiar, well worn, the wonder-what-(insert name here)-is-doing-now-and-who-with silence. I looked the other way out of the window after that, kept my mouth shut out of principle, missing home – the phone shops and the flower stall, the dry cleaner’s and the tube station and the fried chicken place whose window was always broken, never fixed, not for long anyway. The view from the road felt spare and oddly empty. There wasn’t much else to look at on the way down but fields and other cars and clouds and sky.

***

5

IT DIDN’T RAIN, AND THE CAR GOT US THERE IN one piece, and even though I wasn’t grateful, I could see straight off that the street was way tidier than we were used to, another level – quiet and wide and tree-lined, high up in the town with a view of the sea, pure blue that day, same as the sky. No traffic jams. No autopsied mopeds or abandoned fridges, no weatherproof all-season dog shit or stained mattresses or boarded-up windows. A sharp salt smell and this strong bright light and palm trees. Palm trees. The wind leaned hard against the car like it didn’t want us to get out, knew right away that we didn’t belong. Turn back, it said, big mistake, don’t even think about stopping, and I still wonder sometimes what life would be like if Mum had heard it, if she’d turned the car round and just obeyed. I let out a low whistle and watched her force the dark back down in her eyes. I know she felt it suddenly, the impact of her decision, right then, middle-aged and defeated, with me in tow. Not what you’d call triumphant. Not exactly a lap of honour. If I’d known what to say to her then, what would have helped, I like to think I might have said it. But then again, maybe not. We should all be given a manual at birth for that sort of thing.

I started fishing around under my seat for the steering wheel lock, and she said, ‘I wouldn’t bother, Jude. No one’s going to pick on our heap-of-crap car in this ocean of high-quality metal,’ and she had a point. The low-budget new neighbours had definitely arrived.

We got out. The wind whipped my hair into my mouth and back out again, turned Mum’s jacket into an airbag. The house with Henry Lake in it stood out as much as we did, a stain on the neat white terrace like a rotten tooth. All manner of crap was crammed in the dustbins and stuffed in the uncut hedges. The roof was pockmarked with moss and weeds and bird shit. Some clever kind of tree had taken root up there, getting a head start on all the others, and I had some respect for that. Henry Lake’s elongated shadow scuttled across an upstairs window. A gull on the chimney pot opened its throat and cried, launching itself into the air above our heads. I heard the sail-crack of its wings, saw its rain-cloud underside as it circled, head tilted, gimlet-eyed, watching. I hate being the centre of attention. I wondered how many other pairs of eyes there were on us right then, sizing us up, passing judgement. I could feel the blood needling in my fingers, the jittering bones in my ears. I liked our old life. I liked our last flat. I knew how to get there from my friends’ houses, from all the places we went out. I knew where every single thing was kept. Me and Mum and Mark were happy there, sort of, until we weren’t. And it didn’t have an old stranger curled up in the middle of it, like a maggot in a peach.

‘I hate this,’ I told her.

‘Me too,’ she said, and she tried to put her arm round me, mark the occasion like we were in it together, but I dodged out of range and left her hanging, because in that moment I felt like my eight-year-old self with that ball of string, and that feeling made me angry.

If we were back there, arriving at Henry’s again, if it was happening now, I would do so much better than that. I would remember that sometimes, the thing you’ve dreaded the most can be the actual making of you, the thing you would never end up trading for all the money or fame or love or good fortune in the world. I would take my old self to one side and tell them straight out that one of the best things about the unknown is that it’s 100 per cent guaranteed to surprise you. Every time.

***

6

MUM RANG THE BELL AND KNOCKED ON THE front door, even though we had our own key. She said it was the right thing to do, but when Henry Lake didn’t answer, she gave up on the right thing pretty quickly and we let ourselves in. Her favourite mug has a Groucho Marx quote on it: These are my principles, and if you don’t like them … well, I have others. I shoplifted it for her one Christmas (using the principle of common ownership) and she has no idea, but that’s a whole different can of worms. This can of worms was Henry Lake, who must have felt rather than heard the key in the lock and the mortise rolling open and us standing there underneath him in the empty hall, waiting for the next great big chapter in our lives to begin.

Inside, the house was quiet and full of echoes, kind of dank, like a cave. High ceilings and low lighting. Room after room, full of nothing. Dark, bad-weather-grey walls, old floorboards the colour of pricey honey. The hallway alone was bigger than the whole downstairs of our old flat. In a room at the back, a slice of window filled with nothing but the petrol-blue sea, churning and hypnotic, oddly silent behind the glass. Henry Lake came out of his room and stood over us at the top of the staircase, a man steeling himself to make any kind of entrance. If Mum was hoping for shining armour, she was disappointed. He was old like Methuselah and oddball perfect. Stooped over, kind of tall, apologetic almost, bone thin. His jeans hung from his hips like they were empty on a peg, like half of him had already given up and started disappearing. Sunglasses, even in that gloom, and a faded black baseball cap pulled down low as it would go over the bridge of his nose. Out of its shadow, the rest of his face was just grey beard. There was a rhythm to the way he took the stairs, a deliberate thump that bounced off the walls and made the light fixtures tremble. Over that, I could hear the music still playing in his ears, distant and tinny, a dropped box of pins on repeat, headphones the size of ear defenders over the top of his cap. He didn’t turn it down or take any of it off, just stood there in full disguise, insulated against our normal, whatever that was. There was no way of telling who he was under there. It occurred to me for a second that he might be wildly famous, because only a proper celebrity would meet someone for the first time and try to get away with a look as batshit as that.

‘You’re here,’ he said, and Mum said, ‘Yes.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Welcome. I’ve been waiting.’

Surrounded by all that sober wood, the dust thick and dancing in pockets of sunlight, Mum introduced me, and I scowled and waved like some dumb teenager from central casting, and Henry Lake smiled. At least I think he did. Something moved under that beard anyway. I could hear him chewing, the regular, elastic squelch of his gum, the pulse in his forehead going like a metronome. He made a break-ice comment about the weather, and it was obvious he’d rehearsed it, for something to say, and that he had nothing else to follow it with, nothing prepared. It’s a terrible thing when some people make small talk – like seeing a wild animal in a sweater. Mum said something back, something optimistic about the quality of the light, and when that died a death, we just stood there in silence and it was pure tumbleweed – pure, undiluted awkward. My hangover was a stealth one. The kind that wakes you up fine, lulls you into a false sense of security, and then waits till you’re fully immersed in your day before it decides to pin you down and kick you in the teeth. I wanted to go to my room and get into bed, but neither of those things existed any more, not in the same way, and that just made me want them even more.

Look at us in that Now. Mum and Henry Lake radiating strangeness and dashed hopes, trying to dredge up something to say to each other, and me with the sudden homesick cold sweats, malfunction-malfunction.

A bell rang upstairs somewhere, and Henry said, ‘Must go,’ and I was like, Where? as he bowed to both of us, shallow and quick, like a butler, and went back up the stairs. I heard his door open and shut and Mum closed her eyes and breathed out.

‘Well, that went well,’ she said, and I said, ‘Yeah. I don’t know what I’ve been worrying about all this time,’ and I went outside and sat on the doorstep, hoping someone from my old life would drive by and save me.

Across the road, an ambulance arrived, sirens off, no great hurry, and a nurse came out of the house opposite and stood on the doorstep in the swaying shade of a rose and ushered the paramedics in.

‘Mrs Midler,’ Henry said from his place at the window above me, leaning, elbows on the sill. ‘She’s the last of them.’

I looked up. ‘Last of who?’ I said.

The nurse shut the front door and Henry said, ‘The old guard. All new here now. All change,’ and he was already moving back in, already pulling on the sash window with his stick-thin arms, the skin on them rippled and half-see-through like a forgotten balloon.

Not long after that, the moving van rumbled up to meet our car nose to nose. ‘Mum,’ I said. ‘The Freak Brothers are here,’ and the men who’d stripped our flat like locusts the day before dropped on to the tarmac in their matching red T-shirts and caps, trailing fat clouds of indolence, fatter clouds of weed. They opened the back and it made this gunshot noise in the quiet street that ricocheted off the housefronts and upset the seagulls.

‘Welcome to our Family Museum,’ I told them as they wheeled and cawed in the blue, watching them unload our old life. ‘Roll up, roll up for a show of our worldly goods.’

Exhibits included one scrubbed table and four stained chairs. An old pavement-coloured meat cupboard and the top, non-business half of an old pinball machine. Our dented fridge, ink-black with mould in certain places and still stuck somehow with a sea of alphabet magnets that pooled together to spell jUDe!*?! and BY m0Re M1Lk FfS and then broke apart again into chaos. Two cheap flattened beds and Mum’s high-backed armchair, a plan chest, an invasion of bin bags (clothes, basically), boxes of books, and some stuff in bubble wrap – that one mirror, that one canvas, that one I couldn’t even remember any more. The men in red walked everything up the path, tendons straining, teeth gritted, and in through the stale, narrow mouth of our new front door. It wasn’t nearly enough to make a dent on a house that size. The things we owned sat marooned in each sea of room, washed up and adrift, just like wreckage. Just like us.

Out on the street, the movers climbed back into the van and slammed the doors, and after that the paramedics wheeled Mrs Midler out of the house opposite on a stretcher with the blanket pulled up over her head. Everything was dead quiet, apart from the blunt sound of her rattling down the front path and off the kerb. It took them three tries to get the ambulance doors shut, and the noise spun the gulls off the roofs, kick-started a dog-barking relay two streets away, woke up a couple of babies in their pushchairs somewhere, and life began again, just like that.

Henry Lake dropped something upstairs and it broke and he swore, and the scrape and rustle of him clearing it up above me was like a haunting. Less sitting tenant somehow, more housebound ghost. I wondered how long he had lived there, and what he’d meant, exactly, by the old guard, and how he felt about us just moving right in, and how many other people he’d watched come and go from his place in the middle of that house. The way of things, I know, the ebb and flow, but still, relentless.

***

7

LATER, MY ARMS WERE FULL AND I WAS TRYING to navigate the landing when I went backwards through the wrong door into Henry’s private territory. Two airless rooms divided by frosted-glass doors, the shapes of unmade bed and heaped-up chair on one side, and, when I turned, a skeletal chandelier listing from the ceiling, a table that looked like someone had emptied a filing cabinet and about a month’s worth of dishes on to it. A portrait of a dark-haired woman, just her naked back and her long neck, her face about to turn to show her profile, but just out of reach, and that forever-not-quite caught my attention. I looked at her for a long time. At the other end, a half-arsed kind of kitchen, an antique fridge the colour of old custard, and an angry, worn-out, straw-yellow budgerigar in a cage. Things that might have enjoyed some spread in the rest of the house were sardined into this one cramped, chaotic space. I had this sense of Henry and all his stuff gathered there, in the centre, the way the pupil of your eye retracts in bright light. Three huge wardrobes stood side by side, giants waiting for a bus. A sofa suffocated under piles of old maps and notebooks, no space left on it to sit, a lidless pen bleeding ink into its grubby cushions. Above that was the biggest map of the world I’ve ever seen, stuck with hundreds of tiny pins. The paintwork was a lumpy, tobacco-stain kind of white, and the floorboards were covered with newspaper and boot prints and bird shit. Something on the hob smelled like boiled chicken, rich and strong and kind of everywhere. I wondered how the caged bird felt about that. It stared at me, and so did Henry Lake. Two pairs of eyes. One quick-black bird-lacquer, the other, without sunglasses this time, mind-bendingly tired. I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone look more exhausted. I didn’t want to look at him for too long, in case it was catching.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Wrong door,’ and the budgie twitched. Henry Lake smiled and wiped his hands on a stained tea towel. He moved to sweep half the contents of the sofa straight on to the floor. ‘No, come in. Excuse the mess. It’s been ages since I had a visitor.’

Out of politeness more than anything, I put the stuff I’d been carrying down by the door, setting off an epic cloudburst of dust, and I sat on the edge of the sofa while the little bird shivered in its cage and Henry searched for something in the kitchen.

‘Do you like olives?’ he said, not exactly hanging on an answer. ‘I’ve got a jar somewhere.’

‘I’m all right,’ I said.

‘Tea? Soup? I’m making soup.’

‘I don’t need anything. I’m fine.’

‘Hungry work, I’d have thought,’ he said, ‘moving.’

‘I’m used to it.’

‘Lucky you,’ he said, and I rolled my eyes.

‘If you say so.’

‘Are you furious?’ he asked me, and I wasn’t expecting that question, so I was honest. I didn’t have time to hide my answer behind anything, to cover it up.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I am, sort of. I hate change.’

In the silence that followed he went back to poking at the keyboard of a clunky old laptop. The razor-clam fridge hummed. The bird fussed. My asthma was starting up, that wet wheeze like chunks of my breath being passed through a sieve. I’m allergic to dust. It makes my eyes burn and my nose run and my lungs block all the exits, and it is everywhere, I know, but that old house was the Mothership, the source of its Nile. I used my inhaler and concentrated on breathing, and I had another look around while Henry tapped away. The back wall was covered in clocks, different shapes and sizes, not one of them set to the same time. All that ticking sounded like rain dripping somewhere on a roof.

‘Change,’ Henry Lake said, ‘is unavoidable. Essential. It’s the engine of everything.’

‘I know,’ I said, because I hadn’t meant it at an atomic level, I’d just meant the my-mum, emotional-rebound kind of change.

‘Imagine life without it,’ he said. ‘A rock in a stream.’

‘Rocks change,’ I said. ‘The water changes them,’ and Henry smiled.

‘You’re a smart one, aren’t you? I can see we are going to be friends.’

‘Friends are a bit of a sore topic for me,’ I said.

‘It’ll pass,’ said Henry. ‘Life will provide.’

‘You reckon?’

‘I’m an unspeakably old man,’ he said.

‘So?’

‘So I’ve seen it enough times to know.’

‘I haven’t,’ I said.

‘But you will.’

It was quiet then, and I looked at the woman’s portrait again, the smooth skin of her back, her turning head.

‘I do like that painting,’ I said, and he smiled.

‘Lifetimes since I did that.’

‘You did it?’

‘I used to love to paint,’ he said. ‘A very long time ago. And then a very long time ago, I gave it up.’

Some tiny part of me believed the woman in the portrait might actually turn round. I remember thinking how silly that was, that I felt like that, even in that moment. ‘She’s very lovely.’

‘Yes.’ Henry frowned and carried on typing. ‘She was.’

He turned the laptop screen towards me, some kind of aerial view. Wild dust, scrubby trees, a shrunken river. A pack of dogs crossed the picture from bottom corner to top. Tall slanted shadows, left to right. ‘Look at this,’ he said. ‘Today, we’re on the savannah.’

‘Today?’

‘Yes. See?’ He got up and pointed to the giant wall map. ‘Sub-Saharan Africa. About here.’ He put a pin in it.

‘Have you been to all of those places?’ I said. ‘With all of those pins?’

The estate agent’s had called Henry Lake a recluse. They hadn’t mentioned anything about world travel.

‘In a manner of speaking,’ he said.

‘What manner?’

He didn’t answer me. Not directly. He said, ‘Have you ever seen these dogs in the wild?’

‘Me? Nope. Never been anywhere. Not like that. I don’t even know what kind of dogs they are.’

‘Well,’ he said, flourishing his hands like a magician at the end of a trick. ‘There. Painted dogs. You’ve seen them now.’

‘Yes, but we’re not in the wild, are we? We’re not actually there.’

Henry reached out a hand to touch the screen. ‘We work with what we have,’ he said. ‘There’s more than one way to see the world these days.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘If you say so.’

The look on his face was kind of pleading. He so wanted to be right. ‘This is really happening, Jude. Those dogs are moving across that ground right now. Right this minute. Look. Isn’t that something? Isn’t that good enough?’

He typed something into the filthy keyboard and the picture zoomed, close up, a dog moving on its haunches, ears turning like satellite dishes, mouth dripping chewed foam and a grin. I remember the stark strong shadows and the dogs’ tongues lolling, and I might have heard the ragged sounds of their breath. I can’t have felt the blunt heat of the air, the greasy nap of their fur. Still, my memory fills in those blanks for me anyway, and those dogs seem hyper-real now to me.

‘How does it work?’ I said. ‘Do you just shut your eyes and stick a pin in the wall?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Right.’

‘Modern technology. It’s a tremendous help for someone like me.’

‘Someone like you?’

‘I can’t get out,’ Henry Lake said.

‘What, ever?’

He shook his head. ‘It’s more trouble than it’s worth.’

‘Really?’

I wanted to know how he lived like that. Where did his food come from? What happened if he got sick? And I wanted to know why too, more than anything, but I’d only just met him, so I was nervous to ask. Mum started calling me from downstairs, fifth-gear annoyed with me already – something about a chest of drawers, something about my skateboard being a death trap, something else about me lifting a finger to help.

‘You’d better go,’ he said, and I picked up my boxes from where I’d left them by the door, and our conversation was over.

Henry hunched down closer at his table, a world traveller under house arrest, with his elbow in a plate of dried sauce, his gnarled, papery hand scratching at the roots of his beard. One foot in the savannah, the other trapped in the yolk of an egg.

***

8

I HELPED MUM DO A FEW THINGS, AND THEN I got away as soon as I could, on my own for the first time all day. Upstairs, my new room in the attic was a mixed bag, two parts brilliant, two parts the opposite of that. It was the place where all the flies came to die. I watched them flitting and buzzing at the windows like crowds at the turnstiles, leaving their weightless corpses across the sills and along the very edges of the floor. Henry Lake’s boiled-soup smell was strong up there too, but the space was massive, the whole width of that massive house. I’d never had so much space in my life. I explored a bit, poked around in its dark corners, tried to picture it all cleaned up and perfect, but the dust in there was threatening to kill me, so I took my book, made my exit, and climbed up through the skylight and down on to the flat roof below.

I was shielded by trees up there, kind of hidden, with a view of the street in front and the sea behind. I sat with my back against the wall. Warm bricks, salt breeze, sunshine. I took some pictures of the sky on my half-dead phone. Through the cracked screen it looked like someone had taken a hammer to the clouds. The sun was bleeding rainbows round their edges. Way above all the mess and the action, the world is forever a beautiful place. I read for a bit but my head was too crowded so I shut my eyes and let the light push through my eyelids, coral and warm. Henry’s open window offered up some weird record, grown men singing through their noses, moaning all together like ten types of wind trapped down a well. There was a cricket match playing on someone’s radio, the low bellow of the docks, the muted crash and roll of all that water, and above me, when I opened my eyes again and looked up, the long straight out-breath of a passing plane in the blue.

The breeze dropped. I looked down sideways over the edge of my roof to the floor below. The straw-yellow bird was dancing about on Henry’s window ledge, the gulls on next-door’s roof sizing it up, deciding just how and when to rip it to pieces and fight over the spoils. I waved my arms at them, international bird-speak for leave the little one alone, and they stood up, flapped and shifted, flinging their eyes at me like stones.

‘Parker?’ Henry said. ‘Charlie Parker, come inside at once,’ and it struck me, because the bird I’d always imagined Charlie Parker to be was something sleek and soaring like his music, not a fluffed-up, clapped-out old budgie in a cage. I wondered if this Charlie Parker was even a tiny bit tempted to risk it, take its chances with the big world, and just fly. But birds like that don’t survive in the wild. Not here anyway. Maybe it travelled like Henry Lake did, not for real, just in its own head. Henry’s hand came out then and the bird hopped straight on to the bowl of his crumpled, ancient palm, and there was my answer. The window rumbled shut and I thought, Oh well, we’re here now, let’s see what happens. I bet it’s nothing at all.

Just how wrong can a person be?

***

NOVO

YOU ARE THE PLACE I RETURN TO, IN between times. My fulcrum, the point at my centre, round which all of me turns. You are my chance at stillness. The rock in my water. I know you.

I wait for you to see me. I hope for it, that pin drop in my infinities. I know to hope, but not to be certain. It is never guaranteed.

I would show you all the magic there is if you asked me. I would bring you the universe on a plate, take you out from under the rules that apply, so that anything was possible. You could slip between layers of sky and count the atoms. You could reflect light like the moon. You could hear all the languages of the world, all their words and all the wordless ones too, and you would know them. You could fly in water and swim in air. You could spend a whole life’s worth of time in the moments it takes you to blink.

I would give you anything you asked for, in exchange for one of your looks.

***

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