Chapter 36
36
Liv grew up in New York, and Andre in London, so I was the only one among us with a driver’s license, even if it was an American one and not strictly legal. Liv’s set designer flatmate lent us his work van for the move and made me promise to drive on the left side of the road. He helped Liv and me carry our bags and boxes down the stairs from her room. There really wasn’t that much. No furniture—most flats on the low end of the London price range came furnished—and not a lot of personal effects, since I’d been living out of suitcases for so long.
Our new flat was only a short drive from the house in Finsbury Park, in the same borough but a little farther north, farther from the city center. I’d found the listing online, a week before I started at the British Library, and printed out two color copies at an internet café. I picked out two cheesy, touristy greeting cards at the library gift shop and wrote one to Andre, one to Liv. I put in it how grateful I was that they’d been there, willing to pick me up after everything fell apart. And then I folded up the listing, Sharpied a question mark on the final fold, and tucked one into each card.
Andre pulled up in a minicab two minutes after Liv and I arrived at the new place. “Give me a hand, will you?” he called to us, nodding back at the cab full of boxes. “He’ll charge for making him wait around.”
Liv unlocked the door, and we carried everything down the hall to a small white dine-in kitchen. Andre took out the electric kettle, filled it at the sink, and plugged it in. “First things first,” he said.
It was a three-bedroom ground-floor flat in what locals called the Harringay Ladder, because the streets made that shape: two long north-south roads with small residential streets like rungs between them. Liv’s flatmates had described the area as “only a bit dodgy,” but our rung was quiet, the brick houses crowded together.
While the water in the kettle considered boiling, we explored. Every room smelled like fresh paint, sharp and clean. Like most London houses, the living room was in the front, floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on the street. All three bedrooms branched off a hallway beyond the kitchen, each furnished with mismatched essentials: bookshelf, desk, wardrobe, dresser, double bed. No closets, but also no bedbugs.
We brought in the bags from the van, dropped them in our rooms, and returned to the kitchen. This wasn’t a pristine, glistening granite-and-marble kitchen like I’d seen in Highgate, or France. It was just a normal one—bare white cupboards and counters, a small table under the window, four wobbly chairs—but I liked it more than any kitchen I’d ever been in. I could imagine Andre at the stove, making his paper-thin pancakes, or Liv steaming the red bean bao buns from Chinatown she was obsessed with. Endless cups of tea.
“We’ll have to do a big shop to get the kitchen outfitted properly,” Liv said. “Milk for tea, cooking oil, cleaning supplies.”
“Disco ball, bead curtains, leopard-skin carpet,” Andre said deadpan, nodding thoughtfully. “Just the essentials.” He dropped three tea bags into three mugs and poured the water in. “But first, we have to have a proper housewarming toast.”
Andre raised his mug, and Liv and I mirrored him.
“What should we toast to?” I asked him.
“Our beautiful new flat, you numpty.”
I wanted to laugh, but my throat was doing something funny to the sound. Squeezing it into a thin nothing. “To a real home,” I managed. Andre and Liv laughed at me for being a huge sap, of course, and then we were all laughing.
We separated to our rooms to get settled. I stood for a while, wondering where I should put the jam jar of Mom’s ashes. Where would feel right. Finally, I tried it on the bookshelf. It was good, but a little lonely, so I put my old favorites on either side, the dog-eared ones that had come in the suitcase from Massachusetts: the Jane Austen novels I’d read and reread since middle school, the ones that had taught me that girls who tried their luck sometimes did get their happy endings. Then I added the stack of maps and brochures I had from every touristy stop I’d made: every church and cathedral, museum, bell tower, castle, restored historic home. I would keep adding to the pile. Whatever these next years would be, wherever I traveled, Mom would still be part of it. Running her scarred fingertips over the rivers and roads and flight paths of my future.
I longed to call her. And what would she say, if I could? I knew: she’d want me to call my father. Let him know I would be okay, housed and steadily employed. Staying.
I could do that. Even if he didn’t say much, even if we were never going to be that kind of family again, I knew him. I knew that for him, the strain of money incoming and outgoing was a constant, churning storm cloud over everything. It shrouded good days, blackened bad ones. And I knew that even here, whether we kept in touch or not, I was still somewhere within that cloud for him, gray and unresolved and worrying. I couldn’t settle all his worry, I never would, but I could alleviate the small part of it that was for me.
The buzzer rang, and I ran to get it. On the way, little flurries of happy nerves—the feeling I got anytime I was about to see Callum. Thinking of how his dark eyes would smile, then flutter closed when he tipped his head down to kiss me.
“How’re you settling in?” he said after the kiss, after I’d stepped back to let him in.
“Unpacked a little. Ready for a walk, I think.” I looked out at the street before shutting the door, assessing the November weather. Dry, miraculously, and not too cold, the sun in and out behind clouds.
I followed him into the kitchen. “They’ve been asking me all week what you’re cooking for us. I told them it’s a surprise but Portuguese was a good bet.”
Callum laughed. “So predictable, aren’t I? Piri-piri chicken,” he said, unpacking a shopping bag onto the bare fridge shelves. “Martim’s recipe, you’ll love it.”
We’d been taking turns cooking dinners for each other on Saturdays, usually after a day of exploring around London. Last weekend we’d gone to Brick Lane, a street often mentioned in my East End writing class. The mosque there used to be a synagogue, and the synagogue used to be a church, which the Huguenots built when they fled France. My favorite thing: the seams of London’s history, overlapping. Then I’d made us cheeseburgers with proper American bacon. And, of course, pancakes in the morning.
“You’ll spoil us, Chef,” Andre said, coming into the kitchen. He and Callum hugged in greeting, and I pretended the sight of it—this man and my friends, now friends themselves—didn’t completely delight me.
I stuck my head into Liv’s room and told her it was time to go up the hill, if we wanted to catch the sunset.
Alexandra Palace Park was our new local green space with a view, complete with a pond and paddle boats, sprawled over the top of Muswell Hill. The crowning jewel was the palace itself, affectionately known as Ally Pally, a giant, cavernous brick-and-glass building and pavilion built in the late 1800s as a public center of recreation.
It was a half-hour walk. When we turned onto the path, off Turnpike Lane, the slope began to steepen. My bag tapped against my hip as we climbed. Finally, we emerged from the wooded path, breathless, onto the top of the hill. I resisted the urge to look back behind us. At what I knew must be a very beautiful view of my city, spreading below, south.
The palace was enormous, almost as big as a city block. Andre steered us past the skating rink to a pair of benches, just below the pavilion. We sat, and I opened my bag and took out the four cans of gin and tonic I’d grabbed from the fridge, purchased just for this moment.
“Least I can do,” I said.
Liv shook her head. “You’ve done plenty.” I’d made them both let me cover the apartment security deposit. I owed Andre at least that for the stress of the council tax disaster, and Liv for the months I’d spent on her couch, my bags stacked along the wall of her shoebox bedroom.
Callum put his arm out, around my shoulders, and I leaned into him on the bench. Liv and Andre did the same, making fun of us, giggling into each other. The city spread out below us, stretching, disappearing into a hazy horizon as the sun set. We were farther east here, so the banking district dominated the skyline, glass towers silver and reflective. And past them, the newer and sharper skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, trying to establish itself as the new financial district. There was even another tower going up across the river, by London Bridge, designed to look like a shard of glass. Right now it just looked like scaffolding and cranes. Between us and them stretched a sloping green park, and then all of Central London—a million homes, apartment blocks, parks, schools, universities. Libraries, museums, mosques, pubs, stadiums, cathedrals, theaters, department stores, kebab shops. Every shade of brick and stone, every stripe of rich and poor.
“How does it compare to your spot on Parliament Hill?” Callum said to us, nodding at the view.
I tipped my head onto his shoulder, looking up at him with a teasing smile. “Fewer creepy blokes watching me, making plans to sweep me off my feet with legal advice twelve to fourteen months down the road.”
Everyone laughed. Callum squeezed me into his side. “Can you blame me?”
“You have to respect the long game, seriously,” Liv said.
I nodded. “I needed that time to settle in here, anyway.”
“Don’t think you’re assimilated yet,” Andre said. “I’ve heard you and Liv talking. You still say Bucking- ham Palace like it’s made of deli meat.”
Liv elbowed him. “We do not, you troll.”
I just laughed. “We don’t have to be British to be Londoners.”
“How long’s it been?” Callum asked. “Since you got here?”
“Coming up to a year and a half now.” I took a sip from my can. “You could say it’s been eventful, if you wanted to put it kindly.”
Andre waved this away. “Nah, it’s like Chelsea Made, isn’t it? Just good TV. You gave us a few twists and turns, some double crosses, a few big blowout party scenes to chew on.”
I smiled, thinking of how much Pippa and Andre would get along. Their sardonic, cheeky humor. She and I had started texting again, now that everything was settled, now that she was working on her early-decision application to NYU and was full of questions for me. It made me happy that I could still help her, even from a distance.
“Well, all in all,” I said, finishing the last sip of my drink, “I think I’d be pretty happy if my life made for boring TV for a long while, after all this.”
“Probably it will,” Liv said, smiling over at me and Callum. “That’s what being happy looks like.”
It was something I’d been thinking about at work, putting together an exhibit on my favorite authors: not just what a happy ending looked like, but what made you deserving of it. Later, at home, I found myself flipping through the journal I’d kept since the day I arrived, where I wrote down all the new and exciting London things I’d seen and done. These days, I didn’t always have much to report. But I also didn’t feel the need to fill the pages, as I once had. No one was keeping score; no one was going to check to see what kind of life I’d made for myself here. Whether it was good enough, exciting enough, glamorous enough.
The air was starting to get cold, now that the sun had dipped behind the horizon of West London. But its pearly pink flares still lit that corner of sky, mirrored in the glass ceilings and windows of Alexandra Palace. To the east and south, our direction homeward, the sky was a darker blue, the clouds there reflecting the glow of the city lights below.
Liv stood and stretched and nodded to the path. “Shall we?”
I didn’t want to leave—warm against Callum, enjoying the scene, enjoying being in it with them. But I also wanted to see if piri-piri chicken was as good as everything else Callum had cooked for me.
Andre collected the empty cans for me and shouldered the bag himself. “Thanks for bringing the drinks. But next time, maybe some baklava, too?”
I laughed. “Hey, I didn’t want to ruin dinner. For all we know, Chef’s making dessert, too.” I grinned up at Callum.
“Oh no, you never said anything about dessert. I don’t do sweets.”
I stood up and took his hand, pulling him off the bench. “That’s okay,” I said cheerfully. “I have just the thing. Made sure to pack it.”
He groaned audibly, and Andre and Liv laughed. They’d already heard all about my huge tub of marshmallow fluff. And been made to try it. Andre had never heard of it, and it certainly hadn’t been a staple food in Liv’s South Indian family. But neither was a fan, we could now officially say. I still hadn’t persuaded Callum to try it, but I knew he would. I knew we had time, for everything. For meals and dancing and fireworks and traveling, but also for staying home and lying in bed and reheating leftovers. We’d have time for all of it.
Two by two, we headed down the hill into the growing dark. As we went, we talked again about the loose plan we’d been forming: to go to Vienna for the Christmas markets in December, as soon as Andre, Liv, and Callum were on break from their programs. We were going to look at the lights, and eat all the food, and drink hot glühwein. Slip into the back of glowing churches and cathedrals to hear the choir sing, and not understand a single word of it. I couldn’t wait. Even Callum had never been. The low-cost airlines flew there, Ryanair and EasyJet, so we could all afford to go, together. You just had to travel light, since they’d charge you more for a bag than for the seat itself. I could do that; I’d been learning how to travel light all year. What could a person really need? I needed nothing.