Chapter 21
The next day, the tube issues were still ongoing, so she’d driven in again. Gayle must have seen her park up, because as soon as she poked her head round the office door, Gayle asked her to take Tasha to see a flat she’d been offered. There had been no sign of Jasper.
Now the girl was sat next to her, a human-shaped black blot on the cream leather interior of her Mini. She would ordinarily put the roof down in this weather, but it seemed ostentatious; an affront to the girl’s situation; a slap in her pale made-up face. Instead she put the air-con on, its gentle hum drawing attention to the wedge of silence between them. The girl didn’t attempt to fill it; she just stared out at the city as it crawled by, clutching the piece of paper on which the address of her potential new home was written. It was going to be a long way to not talk. But what did you chat to an eighteen-year-old about? Simone was out of the loop on music. She was culturally inoperative. The only trend she kept up with nowadays was fashion. When she first came to London, she enjoyed what the city had to offer: afternoons at the Tate; the Barbican; Royal Festival Hall. Wandering down the South Bank, she would imagine people watching her, a star in the movie of her own imagination. She was a modern-day Edie Sedgwick or Mary Quant, ready to be part of a scene in no time. As it transpired, she never was adopted by bohemians. Sure, she’d been an artist’s muse for a brief time, but not in the way she’d hoped.
They were headed to Dagenham, an outpost of London recently named the capital’s unhappiest place to live, eleven miles east from here; she’d have to find something to say.
‘So, where are you from originally?’ It was a shit opener, like a speed-dating question offered up by the terminally uninteresting.
‘Luton,’ said Tasha.
‘Really?’
‘Why would I lie about that?’
‘It’s just I’m from Biscot.’ It was only a ten-minute drive away from Luton. ‘What school did you go to?’
‘Dutfield.’
‘I was Lea Park.’
‘The performing one?’ said Tasha.
‘Yep.’
‘We thought the people from your school were dickheads.’
They’d stopped at a traffic light and Tasha glanced across to observe the effect of her words.
‘I thought the people from my school were dickheads too,’ said Simone.
The girl didn’t react. She was ice.
‘You’re a long way from home.’
‘Not far enough,’ said Tasha.
The girl – was it even appropriate to call her a girl? – stared out the window once more. They were coming up to a carriageway, intersected by a roundabout, and there was a tent encampment under the overpass. Tasha rubbernecked as they passed, as if expecting to see something notable, but to Simone it looked like all the other shanty encampments that had sprung up around the city.
Ordinarily she found it easy to make small talk. It wasn’t something she enjoyed necessarily, but it was a skill she’d perfected by being in PR, giving off the fa?ade of an easy conversationalist, fluidly recalling clients’ kids’ names, suppliers’ wearisome anecdotes, where people went on holiday, what kind of pets they had. The interest she took was invariably false – an actor reading lines without emotional investment – but with Tasha it wasn’t so easy. She might not know much about her, but she still felt she had some understanding of her situation, and that she probably wouldn’t enjoy hearing more.
A car stopped suddenly ahead of them, its red rear lights perforating her reverie. She pumped the brakes, the ABS kicking in, and the car juddered as it tried to slow without locking the wheels. She reflexively put her arm across the girl, like her father used to, somehow imagining that his fallible bone and sinew could be more effective than a specially engineered belt. When the car finally stopped, just inches from the other’s bumper, they bounced back into their seats. The girl rubbed at her abdomen under the lap strap.
‘Are you okay?’ asked Simone.
‘Uh-huh.’
The car up ahead moved off, taking a wide arc around a pigeon that was pecking at some chips on the road. She’d nearly totalled her car so some vermin could have a snack.
She opened the window, shouted ‘Wanker!’ at it.
The pigeon looked up, unperturbed, still not moving even when the car behind them beeped impatiently.
Tasha popped her head out of her window. ‘Wanker!’ she shouted at its driver.
As the car swerved round them, finally sending the pigeon fluttering off in alarm, they exchanged the briefest of smiles.
* * *
The landlady, one aptly named Mrs Grimshaw, had a head like a skinless watermelon, her bright red face peppered with dark pockmarks. Tiny teeth like a toddler’s leered out from her bulbous skull. She was unsettling, but not as unsettling as the flat.
The portents hadn’t been good from the outside. It was part of a large red brick tenement with the datestone so crumbled it was hard to tell when it had been erected, but judging by the decay, around the time of the Pyramids. Litter gathered like snowdrifts against its walls. The interior was an insult to habitation. There were two rooms, although that was far too generous a description for what was essentially a single space, dissected by a partition that didn’t even extend the full height of the ceiling. The smell was like wet soil in her nostrils, and damp crept like chromatography across paper that clung desperately to the walls and ceiling. Tasha’s shoulders drooped as she took it all in.
‘And this has been approved by the council?’ asked Simone.
Gayle had told her people needing social housing in London outstripped property availability by three hundred to one. This particular flat was a private rental to be paid for by the local authority.
Grimshaw didn’t respond, and instead proceeded to show them round like she was a tour guide for the National Trust.
‘This is the bedsitting room. As you can observe, it offers a generous living area, complete with solid pine wooden wardrobe and small oak drawer unit. There’s an abundance of light that comes in through the original sash window, which offers a view of the shared courtyard.’
She went to take in the view. The ‘courtyard’ was a grey slabbed area that housed huge rotund skips for collective waste.
‘There’s a capacious, comfortable full-sized double bed.’
The bed was a cheap divan, bedecked in bright blue patterned fabric to hide the stains, and with a flimsy hollow base in which you could hide bodies. In the centre of the mattress was a patch that had defied the camouflage.
‘There’s blood on the mattress,’ she pointed out.
‘It’s coffee,’ said Grimshaw.
‘That doesn’t make it better.’
The woman shrugged.
‘What’s behind that?’ asked Tasha. She pointed to a grubby curtain hanging on a piece of stretched washing line that further divided the truncated room.
Grimshaw pulled it aside with a flourish. She regarded them expectantly, as if anticipating a round of applause. Behind it was the tiniest of shower cubicles, no bigger than a public phone box – and in no better shape than one – its glass frosted with limescale, and its sealant peeling off like ribbons of dirt.
‘Where’s the toilet?’ asked Simone. The shower looked like it might have been used as one.
‘There’s one along the corridor.’
‘And how many have access to that?’
Grimshaw didn’t answer. ‘If you’d care to step through into the annex, there’s a fully fitted kitchen.’
She went in. There was no window, only the light coming in from over the partition wall. A single bulb hung from a wire that had grown furry from accumulated dust.
‘It has all the modern conveniences you might expect. Fridge with freezer compartment, electric four ring cooker and oven, hot running water between the hours of ten and three.’
She opened her mouth, but the landlady cut across her.
‘It’s a pressure thing. You’d need to take it up with the appropriate water authority.’
With her snivelling voice, peculiar parlance and artful manner, the woman might have been a Dickensian character. Simone went to look inside the cooker. Quick as a flash, Grimshaw inserted herself between her and the appliance.
‘Granted, the stove requires a little spruce up. The previous tenants left in a rather, shall we say, precipitous fashion.’
‘Did they die suddenly in that bed?’
The woman continued to lean against the hob, a human in Chupa Chups form. A patch of black mould bloomed like a Rorschach test on the wall behind her. She thought of Jasper. What do you see? Asthma. Fungal infections. Bronchitis. She pointed it out to Grimshaw.
‘Just a soup?on of condensation. It’s imperative that the air be allowed to circulate in these old buildings to prevent such predicaments.’ She glanced over Simone’s shoulder. ‘Now where’s your acquaintance got to?’
‘Let’s face it, she can’t be that far away.’
The woman ignored the barb.
They stepped back around the divide into the bedroom. Tasha was gazing up at the ceiling with intense concentration. Both Simone and the landlady fell silent. Something was scurrying around in the cavity above them, making an urgent tapping and scratching sound.
‘What is that?’ asked Tasha.
‘Let’s hope it’s rats, or the cockroaches are going to be frigging gargantuan.’ Simone pretended to listen more intently. ‘Hang on. I think they’re communicating in morse code. What’s that you’re saying?Run away. Run away.’
But far from being disconcerted, Grimshaw redoubled her efforts. ‘It’s just these old houses. Pipes and things. Always lots of unusual noises. It’s part of their charm.’
Simone peered squarely at her. Seeing how horribly she’d turned out as an adult, she was glad she’d had such bad acne as a teenager.
Tasha continued to examine the ceiling. ‘There aren’t any smoke alarms. What if there was a fire?’
‘It might improve the place,’ said Simone.
But the girl wasn’t listening; she was calculating. Grimshaw sandwiched herself between the two of them; she sensed prey and was preparing to pounce.
‘I suppose I could see my way clear to installing one, if that offered you the reassurances you required.’
She was like Fagin, snaffling an orphan and putting it on the pathway to bad deeds.
‘You’re not actually considering this place, are you? The council can’t possibly know it’s in this state.’
‘It certainly represents excellent value for money,’ said Grimshaw. ‘It’s half the price of most other flats in these environs.’
‘Because it’s literally half a flat!’
‘The plain fact is, there are a multitude of individuals who’ve already expressed an interest.’
‘Who? Fumigators? Vermin exterminators? Showrunners for Britain’s Next Top Hovel?’
Grimshaw’s perpetual red face darkened, and her tiny teeth set into a contemptuous grin. She quickly rallied. ‘It seems to me that your acquaintance is, perchance, facing a shortage of alternatives. But’—she made a sweeping gesture and half-bow—‘I’m not an ungenerous woman. I am cognisant of the difficulties of finding accommodation in this fair city, which is why, out of the goodness of my heart, I have agreed to consider renting this particular abode to someone of her unemployed persuasion.’
If she played join-the-dots on the woman’s face, and created a picture of another face, it would still be ugly.
‘How very generous of you. Come on, Tasha, let’s go.’
But Tasha didn’t move. In fact, she very much seemed to be actively weighing up the place’s non-existent merits.
‘You can’t be serious. There’s condensation. In Summer!’
‘As I think I intimated before, it merely requires the frequent throughput of air.’
‘Come on! There’s so much damp in here, we could have ditched the satnav and used a divining rod to find the place!’
‘Could you fit an extractor fan?’ asked Tasha.
Grimshaw opened her arms. ‘Why increase the burden on the electricity, and your coffers, when opening a window whilst preparing the evening’s repast would suffice?’
‘The window that’s been taped up to hide the gaping holes in the frame?’
‘A common problem with sash windows in these historical properties. It would be a crime to replace them.’
‘This isn’t a listed building; it’s a grade-one shithole!’
Grimshaw’s mask of affability slipped. ‘Have you heard the expression beggars can’t be choosers?’
She had. To her shame, she’d been close to using it during her run-in with Street Pete.
‘Simone,’ said Tasha. ‘It’s okay.’
‘Tasha, you can’t let this walking wankstain persuade you that this is anything other than a hovel.’
Grimshaw threw her hands up in the air. ‘That’s it. You can’t have it!’
‘But—’ said Tasha.
‘I’ve decided. Sorry, little lady. Your … whatever she is … has just fucked your chances of getting your own place.’ All pretence of poncy language had gone now. ‘Good luck finding anywhere better than this.’
‘But I barely know her,’ said Tasha.
‘I don’t give a shit.’ She ushered them out the door. ‘Go on. Get out, the pair of you. You try and do something nice, something charitable, and this is the thanks you get.’
She attempted to slam the door in their faces, but she’d left it on the latch and it banged against its wooden surround, instantly creating a crack in the plasterboard fascia within which it was housed. Simone was about to throw in a final rejoinder, but Tasha had stormed off down the corridor.
* * *
All the way back, Tasha gave her the silent treatment, staring straight ahead with her arms folded across her chest. It was perplexing; she’d imagined Tasha might be the type to appreciate her having put the landlady in her place, but perhaps the goth exterior hid a much more emo interior. It was only when they passed the tent encampment again that the girl’s gaze shifted, once more lingering on the tents that sat incongruously in their urban surroundings.
When she finally pulled into the car park (thankfully not next to Hozan’s car) and switched off the engine, Tasha aggressively yanked her seatbelt off, sent it flying behind her, and opened the door.
Simone stayed her with a hand on her arm. ‘I’m sorry if I did something wrong back there.’
‘Finally, you apologise!’
‘I was doing you a favour. That place was terrible. You need to wait for something better.’
‘Oh, yeah, because I am overflowing with options.’
‘It wasn’t fit to live in.’
‘Neither is the doorway of a KFC.’
Ouch.
‘I know you must be keen to get somewhere.’
Tasha turned in her seat. ‘What? You work in a shelter for a few days and now you know everything? You know what’s best for me?’
‘I only meant?—’
‘What the hell do you know? Do you know I got kicked out of home at the age of fifteen? Do you know I slept on friends’ sofas for six months so that I could do my GCSEs? Six As and two Bs if you’re interested, not that it’ll do me any good. Do you know what it’s like to walk the streets all night for fear of what might happen if you stop walking? To be called a lazy bitch every day? To be spat at? To have food thrown at you? To be picking rice out of your hair and not know where your next shower is coming from?’
Simone shrank back in her chair.
‘What’s that? You don’t know?’ Tasha shook her head in contempt. ‘You don’t know shit about what is, or isn’t, good for me.’
‘But you have the shelter for now, right? Until something else turns up?’
‘I can’t stay here.’
‘I know it’s not ideal, but at least it’s not crawling with mould.’
‘I can’t stay here.’
‘Gayle isn’t going to throw you out.’
‘Listen to the words I am saying. I. Can’t. Stay. Here.’
‘Is it because Steve might talk you to death?’
The joke didn’t land.
‘Because I’m pregnant, okay! I’m fucking pregnant. And when you’re homeless and you have a baby, you go to a women and baby shelter. And I don’t want to raise my kid in a fucking women and baby shelter.’
‘Oh.’
‘Oh.’ Tasha rubbed her abdomen in the same spot where the belt had dug into her. ‘Not so talkative now, are you?’
Whilst Simone was processing this latest development, Tasha swung her legs out of the car and stormed off.
* * *
‘How’s it going?’
Jasper had seen events unfold from the patch of grass next to the car park.
‘Really badly, thanks for asking.’
He was wearing a pair of Wayfarer knockoffs and, despite the accompanying naff Gap top, looked exceedingly cool.
‘Want to talk about it?’
‘I don’t believe that a problem shared is a problem halved. I’m more of a problem shared is still a problem, but now you have someone giving you unsolicited advice that you almost certainly don’t intend to take – and a problem.’
‘You’re very passive aggressive.’
‘That’s hurtful. I was aiming for aggressive.’
He smiled, his cheekbones infuriatingly augmented by the sunglasses.
‘Advice is like the clap,’ she continued. ‘No one wants it, but there’s plenty of folk out there prepared to give it to you.’
‘Advice is like a sexually transmitted disease.’ He nodded. ‘Got it.’
He was too calm for her liking. Too in control of his emotional thermostat. She took a tin of lip balm from her pocket, smeared some on, and offered it to him.
He shook his head. ‘Not if you’ve got gonorrhoea.’
He was also too verbally deft.
‘Not smoking today?’ he asked.
Christ no. If she had a cigarette for every time she got stressed in this place, she’d end up with a mouth like a Shar Pei’s butthole.
‘Did you know?’ she asked.
‘About the pregnancy?’
‘So you did.’
‘We talk. She’s a great kid, despite everything she’s been through.’
‘But she’s just a kid.’
‘She’s got her head screwed on.’
‘That’s not the only thing that got screwed.’ She gazed heavenward. ‘It’s the preventability of it. What is wrong with these people? Why can’t they see what a mess they’re making of everything and pedal back a bit on the catastrophic life decisions?’
‘You think it’s just a question of choice?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And you think you’re in complete control of your actions?’
‘Yeah.’
‘So you never get angry?’
‘Yeah, but?—’
‘Or excited?’
‘Yeah, but?—’
‘Or frustrated?’
‘I’m getting frustrated now.’
‘Precisely,’ he said, pleased to have illustrated his point. ‘You don’t have complete control over your emotions. And if you don’t have control over your emotions, how do you imagine that you have control over your decisions, especially if they’re emotionally motivated?’
‘You’re talking bollocks.’
‘That’s not a robust enough rebuttal. I expect better of you.’
It surprised her to imagine that he had any expectation of her at all.
‘I’m just pointing out that changes in brain chemistry alter our behaviour,’ he said. ‘But how much control do you have over your brain chemistry?’
She had to admit probably very little.
‘The brain is a physical system like any other,’ he continued. ‘You can no more will it to operate than you can will your heart to beat.’
‘But your job is to try and change how it works, no? Are you saying you can’t? Are we back to you being shit at your job again?’
‘I’m not saying I can’t have a marginal impact. Flick a small switch that leads to better decision-making, that might lead to further better decisions. But I am saying that some people are, through life, luck, whatever, predisposed to being bad decision-makers. Therefore, we need to cut them some slack for their bad choices.’
‘But they still have choice, right? They could still decide to not make shitty decisions.’
‘That depends on how you view it,’ he said. ‘I believe we have a lot less control than we imagine. If any.’
‘Are you saying you don’t believe in free will? David Hume would be most disappointed.’
‘You know about free will? I’m impressed.’
‘Yeah, it was a movie about some orphan befriending a killer whale, wasn’t it?’
‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to patronise you.’
But she wasn’t letting him off the hook that easily.
‘Why be impressed in the first place? If you reject free will for determinism, there is no being impressed, right? I was always destined to know about David Hume because I was always destined to do philosophy GCSE.’
‘Touché.’
‘Besides, it’s too convenient an excuse. Oh, I can’t stop drinking, I have no free will. I was bound to end up on the streets. That’s too depressing.’
‘Really?’ he said. ‘Isn’t there something quite freeing about the notion of the unfolding of the inevitable. You just have to wait and see what happens.’
‘But I’ve worked hard to get to where I am. Are you saying it’s all luck?’
People like Ollie were lucky. She’d pulled herself up by her bootstraps.
‘It’s funny,’ he said. ‘People who are doing badly will put it down to luck, but people who are doing well will always say it’s their own doing.’
‘But you make your own luck.’
‘How can that be when you consider all the stimulus acting on you? You can never truly be independent of the influence of other people, no matter how much you tell yourself you are, or how much you might like to be.’ He pulled his glasses down and peered over the top of them at her. ‘Can I give you some advice?’
‘Are you kidding me? After what I said before.’
He chuckled.
‘What are you going to say? That we should be fine with her throwing her life away? That the whole thing should be allowed to play out because it’s just some inevitable consequence of the Big Bang?’
‘I was going to tell you that a wasp has landed on your hair. You might want to shake it off.’
‘Shit!’ She waved her head around in an ungainly fashion until it flew away.
‘You’re welcome.’ He leaned back on his elbows, more relaxed than ever. ‘For someone who claims not to care about anything, you’re getting very worked up.’
‘I don’t want to get stung!’
He gave her a lazy you know exactly what I mean eyeroll and pushed his glasses back up his nose.
‘Come on. How hard can it be to not get pregnant?’ she said. ‘How difficult is it to have a coil, or wear a condom, or get the morning after pill? It’s her decision if she wants to screw her life up. I don’t care.’
‘You don’t care. If you say so.’
He said it in a way that made her want to rip the glasses off his face and shove them up his arse.
‘Try and cut them some slack, though. Choice isn’t black or white. It happens in tiny increments, and under the influence of a gazillion things out of our control. And undoing that programming, that soup of interference, that myriad of mental molecular movements, is far from easy. Understanding that makes it easier to have empathy.’
‘I have empathy.’
‘I didn’t say you didn’t. But this isn’t about you.’
‘I just find it frustrating when people are idiots.’
He pushed himself back upright. ‘I should be getting back to work. But out of interest, how much can you forgive yourself for your actions?’
‘This isn’t about me, remember.’
He smiled.
‘How do you think it’s going to turn out for her though?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know. I’m a psychologist, not a psychic.’
‘That flat we went to see, it was genuinely horrific. It’s hard not to be concerned.’
‘There are six billion people in the world, six million in this city. Perhaps something, or someone, comes along and changes things for the better?’
He rubbed some dirt from his palms. They had a crosshatch pattern on them from where he’d been leaning against the heat-scorched grass.
‘I’m offsite this afternoon,’ he said. ‘You’ll probably be gone before I get back, so have a good weekend.’
Disappointment nibbled at her as he walked away, his languid stride emphasising the topography of his bottom. She’d forgotten how much she enjoyed a philosophical chinwag, and it would have been fun to pick it up again later. She consoled herself with uncharitable thoughts of what charitable deeds he probably got up to at weekends. Litter picking in the grounds of a children’s hospital. Volunteering at a shelter for depressed donkeys. Crocheting socks for Syrian refugees.
Nothing that she’d ever be into, that was for sure.