Chapter 4
4
I made it halfway through the first Regeneration novel on the two-hour journey home from teaching my Saturday class at Roedean. After a morning in such a picturesque school, my classroom full of sweet, well-groomed, well-dressed girls who used thousand-dollar iPads for calculators, it was always grim returning to my flat. We lived in the first of three brick apartment buildings huddled around a courtyard of chipped and broken paving stones. Una House was on the Camden side of Kentish Town, which was not nice, which was why we could afford the rent for our three-rooms-and-a-kitchen ground-floor flat. I paid less rent than my roommates because it was my job to pay the council tax for the flat—a monthly tax funding rubbish removal and services for the local borough.
When I unlocked the door, I could hear someone clinking dishes in the kitchen sink. It was an unusual sound; microwave meals and takeout containers didn’t clink.
Andre had his back to me when I stepped into the kitchen.
“What’s happening here?”
Andre didn’t answer but turned to the side to show me: a black trash bag open at his feet, both hands full of dry, crusty, filthy dishes. He dropped them into the bag with a crash. “I told him,” he said. “I told him he could wash them, or I would bin them. They’re months old, Anna. Look at the mold.”
I held up my hands. “You think I haven’t noticed?” Tom was our other flatmate. He was rarely seen but often smelled—the musty dirty-socks odor of his room, the cologne cloud when he went out, the moldy half-eaten casserole left sitting on the counter since late August. Hating Tom was what first drew me and Andre together when I moved here in June. We also shared a petty, self-defeating stubbornness, which was why we’d refused to wash Tom’s dishes, which was why the dishes had moldered for months and why the flat now had mice. It had never been a nice place—Andre had warned me when I answered the ad he posted on gumtree.com—but it had felt homey when he showed me around. Now I knew that homey feeling was not the flat but Andre himself.
“When’d you get home last night?” I asked, prodding him in the shoulder on my way to the fridge.
“Miley Cyrus showed up at G-A-Y. They kept saying she would do a set, so I stayed and stayed. I made a friend. Took me home in his Range Rover ,” he said, waggling his eyebrows.
“I rode in a Range Rover this morning. One of the Roedean girls got her driver to drop me at the station on her way home.”
“Sending a driver for your kid is a great power move,” Andre said, tipping the last dish into the black bag. “Make all the other mums feel poor.”
I laughed. “Is it possible to sit in a Range Rover and feel poor?”
Andre spread his arms wide. “ I did it just last night.”
“Fair.” Andre and I had connected right away; he was another working-class imposter like myself, from an East London public housing estate, but clever enough to get into University College London, one of the best universities in England. He’d had about as much success as me blending in there, among the brick and ivy and white marble cloisters, but it all seemed to roll off his back. “Accents here, they give you away straight off,” he’d told me. “You, you just sound American—there’s no economics there. But the second they hear me speak, they hear the housing estate. Scholarship kid, bursary-funded. I can’t hide it, so I don’t bother trying.”
He’d graduated last year but still worked there as a postgrad research assistant. Prestigious, but it didn’t pay much more than my two part-time jobs, so being constantly “skint” was another thing we had in common. Another reason we loved leaving our reality behind when we watched the rich kids on Chelsea Made.
Andre bent over, struggling to knot the bulging trash bag. “We’ve got to get rid of Tom. Get Liv to move into the gaff, take his room, don’t you think?”
The dishes tumbled noisily together as he dragged the bag down the hall, so I had to raise my voice over the din. “Liv’s happy where she is. House full of handsome British men, who could blame her.”
“Why’s she always coming round here then?” Andre called from the door. I heard Liv’s ringing laugh in answer.
Liv, my only real friend here besides Andre, was another American grad student working for Kramer. We’d met in SAT-teacher training. Born and raised in New York, the daughter of South Indian immigrants, she was city-smart—always cool and calm in a way I tried to emulate.
“I ask myself the same thing,” Liv said, wrinkling her nose as she came into the hall. “What is that smell?”
“Our cue to leave,” I said, though the truth was I barely even noticed it anymore. “Let’s all go for a walk.”
We always walked to the same place if it was sunny; the best place to spend a few loose hours was Hampstead Heath. One of the city’s biggest parks, but not at all parklike—vast and hilly, green grass and forest, unmanicured. Big enough to bridge the divide between some of the richest and bleakest neighborhoods in London.
My shabby corner—Camden, Kentish Town, Gospel Oak—just touched the southernmost tip, but across the Heath was Hampstead to the west and Highgate to the north. They even had their own little weekly paper, the Ham I devoured it, like always. Like I could tell Mom about it later, on the phone. North London, low and tight and townhomed; then Central London, with its gray and white stone primness. Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament, and Big Ben clustered just before the Thames, the London Eye Ferris wheel just behind. The white cathedral dome of St. Paul’s buried out east, among the glass skyscrapers in London’s banking district. Even though fairytale England had been our old joke, Mom had always believed that I could really get here someday. And I’d always believed that she’d be there for me to call long-distance.
“You bloody tourists, let’s find somewhere to sit,” Andre said.
I pointed them just a little down the hill, on the south side. “How’s this?” I said, indicating the spot as if I’d just found it. “A little less crowded.” Back when I’d first moved to the city, I’d come up here to read, and to promise myself that all of London, every layer of it stretching below, would someday open itself to me.
We settled in the grass, and Liv took out three slim silver cans of gin and tonic from the shopping bag on her wrist. “My treat. Mum of my student gave me a cash tip, can you believe it?”
“How’d you manage that?” I asked. I cracked open my can, put my mouth to it when it fizzed over. The gin tasted bright and metallic.
Liv shrugged. “It was our last session. She said I was great.”
“You are great,” Andre said, raising his can to toast her. “And generous to boot. Good taste in friends. I could go on.”
“I never get tips. I just shell out for train tickets,” I said. At least this time I’d had the money to buy the full ticket from Victoria, and to repay the money I’d borrowed from Roedean’s staff room jar.
“It’s criminal, Kramer putting you on the hook for all the trains,” Liv said. She taught classes in Kramer’s London headquarters, not as desperate for the travel-bonus pay as me. “Your dad really won’t help you at all? Even for books or school stuff?”
I shrugged. I hadn’t seen or spoken to my dad since I moved here five months ago. “I would never ask him.”
Liv shot me a look. “I don’t ask my parents for it. They just want to help.”
“He wouldn’t want to help, and I wouldn’t want his help. It might be the one thing we agree on.” I said this mildly, like we just had the regular sitcom-family problems. Liv knew about Mom, and that my father and I weren’t close, but nothing more than that. I didn’t want to tell the story, not now. The afternoon was too pretty, the spot too perfect, the gin and tonic buzz too pleasant.
Not that it was a very complicated story. My mother died. Last March, a month after I’d been laid off from the small press publisher I’d worked for since graduation—the recession reaching its long fingers into even the nonprofit world. By mid-April, I was back at my old ice cream job, a part-time grief zombie. On Mother’s Day, I swirled soft serve all day for moms out with their kids. Miserable, but I dreaded going home more. Watching my dad pretend it was just another Sunday. Both of us moving around the house like we always did—like it had a crater in the middle, a still-crumbling hole, and if either of us put a toe near it, it would cleave open and suck us both down.
That night, I opened my laptop and looked up Queen Mary, the school where I had planned to study abroad when I was at Smith. Their MA program was only a year, and about $17,000—a fraction of the cost of US programs, which were two years. Easily covered with a student loan. They had rolling, rapid admissions, and if I was accepted, I would get a UK student visa and the chance to extend it for two more years to work after graduating. Maybe even snag my dream job. Maybe never have to come home.
I didn’t go to bed that night. I didn’t ask my dad what he thought. I did a FAFSA online, started my application. I couldn’t wait like Mom had, trusting that there would be more years and more money later, more chances to go. I had to go now; I knew I would not make it past that crater every day. Not for much longer. I had to hope that things could work out for me, like they did for the plucky Austen heroines I loved.
We sipped our drinks and talked as the sun sank toward the West London horizon. The city warmed through me like a blush. When we’d finished our cans, Liv surprised us by bringing out another round. “It was a pretty good tip,” she said. “Drinks on me.”
“How many tips before you can rent us a house across the Heath?” I joked, tilting my fresh, full can toward Highgate.
Andre shook his head. “Beautiful girl like you? You wouldn’t want to live there. Too many rich men wanting to buy you things, take you out, show you off.”
I grinned. “Oh, yeah, better just stick with their neglected teenagers.”
“Would be nice.” Liv nodded. “No offense to Una House.”
“I don’t need to live in Highgate. I just need to get everything sorted out—graduate, get a real job, something more secure and reliable.”
Andre looked over at me, his expression softening. “You’ve been through the wringer this year, Anna. Give yourself time.”
I shook my head. Time was the thing I had least of. I had a year to get a degree, get a visa, get the London publishing job I’d dreamed about. Really root myself in this place. The first time I’d come up here to look at the skyline, I’d promised myself that this was the right thing. London. Not just an escape; not just fleeing my mother’s absence, my father’s silence.
In the end, when I’d told him I was leaving, there’d been no argument, no official falling-out. It had felt more like a splitting open, like the dried husk of my worn-out family had finally, with one last tap, cleaved apart and released me. And still, sometimes I missed the feeling of enclosure. It was a thing I hadn’t yet found a replacement for.
When I leaned forward and grabbed the shopping bag to collect the empty cans, it was heavy. “Is there something still in here?” I asked.
“Oh, I almost forgot!” Liv said. She produced a small Styrofoam tray: four fat rolls of baklava, the flaky phyllo oozing syrup onto the cling wrap. “It’s from the corner shop by my flat. Stroud Green is all Turkish. They just slip it into your bag when you’re checking out.”
“That’s so nice,” I said.
Liv laughed, unwrapping the tray. “Well, they still charge you for it.”
The rolls of baklava were honey-sweet, nutty, crumbly heaven. We split the last one three ways, taking careful bites. The glow of sugar and gin radiated out from my stomach, up my back and into my neck. My whole body relaxed into it; here was a happiness that even we cash-strapped kids could afford. I put my sticky palms into the grass behind me and leaned back onto them, letting the last of the afternoon sun slip over my face.
Liv was often my companion on afternoons like this—our teaching done, any free hours were spent exploring London. We almost always got lost, but Liv had taught me not to mind it. That was just life in a new city, she said. And unlike Andre, we weren’t too proud to do the touristy things. Last Sunday, we’d explored Westminster: took photos with Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament behind us, studied every nook and chapel in chilly Westminster Abbey, then walked up Whitehall, past the prime minister’s residence and the Horse Guards, postcard-perfect in their red uniforms and fuzzy black hats, all the way up to Trafalgar Square, where we stood at the base of Nelson’s Column and let the black cabs and bike messengers rush around us. A torrent , I’d written in my journal that night. I tried to keep every moment there—like a receipt, like I might at some point be made to account for each moment. The simple and the grand: cold abbeys and sun-warmed baklava. As if these beautiful things would one day be measured against something I’d left behind, something lost and unrecoverable, and I needed to tip the balance.