Now we are forgiven, p.1
Now We Are Forgiven, page 1
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For Esme, Lydia, Cissy and Ruby
‘He maketh his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.’
Matthew 5:45
PART ONE Immunity
Chapter One
December 2019: Brighton, Sussex
The seafront on the south coast in winter is not a hospitable place. A few hours after dawn, a frail but clearly determined teenage girl wearing Lycra tights, a red long-sleeved tech shirt and running gloves makes steady progress along the front, her face dashed by the wind and punctured by needles of sharp cold. Her wavy brown hair is not fully restrained by an elasticated headband, so scraps blow occasionally into her eyes, which are watering. The headband has imprinted in large white letters the breezy legend ‘I’m Fine!’.
One of the dog walkers she occasionally passes might conclude that she is crying, but it is hard to tell, since the sea spray spits at her eyes, her cheeks, her mouth. She has three silver studs in her left ear – a star, a flower and a simple pearl pin. Her teeth, when she grimaces, show a single gold tooth with the letter ‘C’ hollowed out. On her back, just above the waistline, a fresh tattoo is visible of a small tree, very dark blue, almost black, bare but for one leaf falling. The surrounding skin is still livid from the needle. The tat shows a single bird taking flight from the top branch as the leaf falls towards the ground. Beneath her waistline, delicate roots coiling into earth are etched.
She is on the return leg of her route, making her way from Roedean, east of Brighton, towards the shuttered entrance of the Palace Pier. She barely notices the pavilion roofs, towers and flags that decorate the boardwalk. Concentrating on her breathing and the music that seeps from her earbuds – a loop of Little Mix – her thoughts are as scattered as the distant clouds born out of the night, gathering on the horizon. Her eyes, although open, might as well be closed for all that they register.
Half dreaming, trancing to the music, she senses invisible forces around her. The pull of the moon that drags at the waves. The unheard whisper of the wind scattering detritus along Marine Parade. The secret rhythms of her own body, the movement of blood in artery, vein and synapse.
She passes a seafood stall, smells a trace of mussels and whelks, then a whiff of burned doughnuts. There is tar and ozone. Then salt, though she can’t say for sure what salt smells like. Perhaps nothing.
She has a sense that she can detect particles penetrating her skin. Neutrinos? Photons? Scanning half-remembered shadows of her science lessons, fading now that she has finished school for ever, she can barely call to mind the details. She knows that whatever they are, they perpetually crash into Earth at near light speed. Little bits of almost nothing, falling as endless rain on the planet. She feels, momentarily, utterly transparent, entirely permeable.
She accelerates her pace – running, in her mind, away from something she hates, towards something she fears. The cold air singes her lungs. She passes what appears to be a woman – the sleeper is nested under some thick reflective fabric so thoroughly it is hard to tell – prone on a bench. A large bright blue nylon laundry bag is stuffed underneath the seat. The sleeper’s hand is tangled with one of the handles of the bag, as if to protect it from thieves.
The running girl notices flaked traces of purple varnish on two of the fingernails. Unmoved at first by the sight of the prostrate figure – rough sleepers are an everyday sight on this part of the south coast – the remnants of decoration on the nails skewer her with unexpected pity. She slows, almost stops. Then, assessing her own helplessness – she isn’t even carrying any money to offer – she picks up her pace again, mood curdled with a faint vinegar of guilt.
Turning at her designated point – the doughnut-on-a-stick of the British Airways observation tower facing the burned-out West Pier – she makes her way towards home. She prefers the carbon skeleton of the West Pier to the gaudy, inescapable there-ness of the Palace Pier. The West Pier seems to her more essentially honest in its tragedy, blackened stumps which appear at high tide as a hesitant semicircle spiking out from beneath the grey-green torpor of the English Channel. They stand in sober reproach to the Carry On knockabout of the pier’s younger counterpart, a pocket-picking carnival of funhouse mirrors, pulsing slot machines, slides, wheels and dodgems.
Minutes later she arrives home, a marshmallow-pink three-bedroom terrace near the North Laines. Making her way up the short garden path chequered with black and white tiles, she lets herself in through the heavy panelled front door with its frowning brass lion door knocker.
Entering, she continues jogging on the spot in the hallway, then continues upstairs to her bedroom with its hand-lettered sign on the door:
‘Tips for Entering My Bedroom Properly: 1. Do Not.’
Inside the room there are traces that suggest the occupant is some years younger than her height, piercings and unapologetic tattoo might suggest. The bed is draped with curtains of white muslin on all four sides, supported by horizontal metal struts which connect four upright vertical poles. There is a picture of a pony imprinted on the pillow, although she has never so much as sat on a pony, and, resting upon it, a ragged and puzzled toy monkey. To the right of the bed, there is an orange egg chair suspended on a chain from the ceiling – her favourite item in the otherwise sparsely furnished but persistently cluttered room.
On the egg chair squats Kardashian – Kardy – her stepfather’s obese black cat. Not bothering to undress or shower, she tosses Kardashian out of the chair and throws herself into the womblike space. Here, she weeps – unmistakeably this time. She doesn’t know if the tears come because of the previous night’s election result or because of the painted fingernails of the sleeping woman. Or then again, perhaps it is because during the course of her run she feels she has cemented a long-deferred decision into place.
Kardashian has made no noise of protest. Pragmatically, the cat has resumed her sleep on the girl’s cloistered single bed. Restless, the girl pulls herself out of the egg chair, as if burdened not by gravity but the future.
She doesn’t know when she will put her decision into effect, but the trigger – she feels in her gut – must come soon. With Christmas so close, the stresses building within this house will coalesce and, somehow or other, force her hand. Of this, China Blue is sure.
December 2019: London
A woman’s voice floats up like vapour from the pillow next to where Frankie Blue is vainly trying to pursue some final, scattered wisps of sleep. The interior of his skull feels musty and vague, while the exterior is braided around the crown with thin pepper-and-salt hair and the features below tarpaulined with sallow skin. His mind is hung with cobwebs that sag with the toiling flies he imagines his thoughts to resemble. This sense of malaise, as well as the appearance of sallowness, is the consequence of staying up the previous night, until 4 a.m., watching the coverage of the general election.
‘Hosh. The bears are. The beers ARE. They’re not? Ok then. You stupid.’
Roxy, his girlfriend of six months, is talking in her sleep again. Most of the mumblings are indistinct, but Frankie’s brain automatically converts the sounds into words. The outpouring of nonsense is bookended with a random giggle.
Still muttering, Roxy turns over to face him, eyes still closed, eyeballs visibly roaming under the powdered skin. Other traces of makeup blur her features. Frankie, who has given up on sleep now, idly examines them, with the sudden, uncomfortable feeling that he is seeing the face of an alien species. He senses the weirdness of the slope of a human nose, of the bizarrely comic protrusion of ears, of the slow exhalation of hair from the minutely perforated scalp.
‘Sofa it’s coming and I’m chuffed. Isn’t it? Same, mate.’
Outside, on the Golborne Road, North Kensington, the street traders are busy at their stalls. Moroccans, Tunisians, cockneys, Ethiopians, Somalis – just to name a few of the patchwork of creeds and nationalities Frankie is able to make a stab at identifying. Food, furniture, junk and second-hand clothes are laid out for inspection. He finds the buzz of shoppers and the calls of the traders briefly comforting. His affection for London’s perpetual chaos surges over him in a wave, then crests and disappears into light froth. It finally settles into a vague, contradictory trough of resentment at what he suddenly experiences as mere cacophony.
He reaches to the bedside table on his left. His fingers – the nails clean and manicured – feel their way towards two gelatinous pink lumps resting on the glass top of a scratched walnut 1930 nightstand, picked up from a stall outside a month ago for £50, a figure reached by an epic bout of haggling with the dealer. Frankie, taking pride in his skills as an estate agent, was not prepared to let himself be bested in a negotiation and felt sure that he had walked away with a bargain. But the door of the nightstand is now falling off while the cupboard catch is faulty and refuses to keep the door closed.
The lumps his fingers eventually discover are wax earplugs, with which he tries to block out not only the sleep talking but Roxanne’s persistent, unmaidenly snoring. He works them like putty deeper and deeper into the auditory canal, wondering, not for the first time, if his relations hip with Roxy has any future. He suspects that he is only with her because he is lonely. Perhaps that was a good enough reason. Why was anyone with anyone? Not for fun, surely.
‘Blurgh, hff, sngl.’
The plugs are effective to the extent that he can no longer make out Roxy’s words. But enough vibration penetrates the wax to confirm that she is still babbling. He wonders what kind of dreams she has. As dreams go, they seem – when later and inevitably related to Frankie – mundane, often focusing on expensive consumer goods, missed buses and public exposure to mild embarrassment rather than the realms of the truly fantastical. But then – he reflects – it is probably unfair to judge others for their dreams.
He rests his hand on her bare hip. Her skin is hot. How many relationships, he wonders, are founded on this simple desire for skin to touch skin, the fundamental urge for physical connection? He thinks of the places this urge has led him, the bodies it has thrown him up against, human flotsam crashing into one another on a relentless wave of need.
It is a deeper form of connection that Frankie craves. Checking his phone for the third time that morning – it is already 11 a.m. – to see if his daughter has replied to his texts, he feels a soft stab of disappointment. Ten years divorced now, his parents are long dead, and his relationship with Roxy is fledgling and unpromising. His father substitute, old mentor and erstwhile employer Ralph Gwynne is also gone, taken by heart disease. Apart from Jon – ‘Nodge’ – Drysdale, his best friend since schooldays, his daughter is his only real potential remaining link to intimacy, the intimacy that he feels sure should properly and naturally exist between a father and his child.
The trouble being – he reflects bitterly – that his daughter hates him. Sometimes, shamefully, he can’t help but hate her back for it, even though he knows it isn’t her fault. The children of divorce are always hurt, brutally, savagely. Sooner or later, they exact their revenge.
Frankie feels muddy layers of still more unwelcome thoughts and questions accrue inside him. What does his life amount to? The answers torment him with their banality. Work. Five-a-side football on a Sunday. Occasional sex, usually mediocre. A drink out with Nodge. Hard to get proper bitter nowadays. Work. Cycling in Lycra on the latest fancy bike before it gets stolen. Nine holes of golf on a municipal golf course. TV. Work. Brief, unsatisfying masturbation. A Diavolo pizza, extra chillies. Work. Shopping for clothes he can’t afford and artwork he doesn’t like but which makes his sparse, dull flat seem more distinguished, more aesthetic. Work. A fortnight’s holiday abroad once a year, a weekend city break now and then.
Sleep. Work. Sleep. Work. Sleep… With this incantation still ticking over, Frankie becomes aware of a distant voice as if heard through veils of cotton wool.
‘Frankie! It’s nearly midday.’
Frankie reluctantly surfaces into consciousness. He prises the earplugs out of their gristly caves and balances them in his palm. They are ranged there, coated now with traces of brown earwax.
‘Disgusting,’ says Roxy mildly. ‘Like giant hamster droppings.’
She is propped up on her pillow holding a cup of tea. Given the missing frame of time, Frankie realises he must have drifted asleep without registering the fact.
‘I’m sorry you have to witness the distressing fact of their existence,’ he says, replacing the earplugs delicately on the bedside table, as if they still carried precious remnants of his inner life. ‘But you talk even more when you’re asleep than when you’re awake.’ Sometimes I wish I could wear them then as well, he adds, silently to himself.
He pulls his own pillow up behind him to bring him level with Roxy, who is naked apart from an oversized ‘Make America Great Again’ T-shirt. She wears it, she insists, as a joke, a windup. ‘Anything for a laugh’ is her one-time motto that has evolved somehow into what passes for a life philosophy. But Frankie isn’t so sure it’s a joke at all. After all, she had voted for Brexit – made no bones about it, told everyone who cared to listen. Frankie stretches out, hands above his head, feeling a slight crick of protest in his neck.
‘Did you make me a cup?’
‘You were asleep.’
‘You knew I was going to wake up.’
‘Sooner or later.’
‘I could have done with a cup. Anyway, you woke me deliberately.’
‘I’ll go and make you one now if you like.’
‘I don’t want one now.’
‘You just said you did.’
‘Now I don’t.’
‘Stop being a martyr.’
Roxy puts the cup down on her side table, then leans over and rests her head gently on his bare shoulder. Her straight chestnut hair, interrupted with irrepressible grey strands, trails of winding mist, continues halfway down her back. It is too long now for Frankie’s liking – she is too old for it in his uncharitable view – and it now carpets his chest like a dry flannel.
Her brown eyes, soft when Frankie first met her at a Millennium night party in the West End, have hardened into a corona of darkness at the edges while seeming to devolve into sticky caramel at the centre. It was at that Millennium celebration she had met her tragic husband. Tragic, thought Frankie, long before he was scattered across the Piccadilly Line by the detonation of a home-made brew of hydrogen peroxide and liquid oxygen.
‘Don’t be mean to me, Frankie. Don’t be a wanky, Frankie.’
She delivers this plea in a baby voice, which darkens Frankie’s mood afresh. He drapes his arm round her shoulders but says nothing.
‘Do you still love me?’ she whispers.
‘I’ve still got wax in my ears.’
He digs into his ear to remove fictional remnants of the plugs. His responding to Roxy’s drunken announcement a few weeks previously that she was in love with him with a reciprocal tribute – largely uttered through courtesy and drunkenness – seems to have resulted in the unspoken signing of an unspecified yet binding contract.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ says Roxy.
‘Shall we have some breakfast?’
‘Why are you in such a bad mood?’
‘What makes you think I’m in a bad mood?’
Roxy shrugs, picks up her phone and starts scrolling. Frankie closes his eyes. Immediately drifting off, he tries to force his thoughts to straighten out, but whatever it is within him that does the thinking isn’t listening to whatever does the willing. His mind chatters like a radio trying to find a signal. He has never really succeeded in making peace with what Veronica, his therapist ex-wife, would call his ‘internal narrator’. Instead, the unseen voice badgers him, mocks him, criticizes him, rebukes him. As he sinks further towards sleep, images and memories are mixed with the scattered words chasing one another around inside his skull, mongrels pursuing their own tails. They are random, with no narrative glue to hold them together.
Roxy, ten years younger, dressed as a bowl of popcorn when she opened her short-lived gourmet popcorn shop in Portobello Road.
A ghostly bulletin seeps into the dreamworld from the office: Would the contract on Coningham Road go through?
Cue music.
My girlfriend’s name is Senora.
Had he made the follow-up call to the vendor? He can’t remember.
I tell you friends, I adore her.
In an unconscious response to a physical hunger pang, a preview of that day’s intended breakfast manifests – rashers of bacon, sausages, fried bread.
China, grown up now, the face she makes when she criticizes him for continuing to eat meat.
‘It’s a corpse dad. A corpse.’
Shake, shake, shake, Senora.
Harry Belafonte?
China’s voice, five years old: bungalow, bung bung a low.
An image of Colin Burden, his childhood friend as well as Roxy’s former husband, exploding into a thick mist of blood and bone.
Would he have baked beans?
My hands are high my feet are low and this is how I bungalow…
Probably, if they had a tin left. Didn’t Roxy finish them for supp—
He is woken by the awareness of a faint sensation of movement to the side of his face. Opening his eyes, he sees that Roxy is gazing at Frankie’s phone which had been resting in the space between their pillows.
