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  “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.

  FOUR

  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 windshield 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, 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 her shit 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 about 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 about 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 favorite 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 cleaners 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.

  * * *

  • • •

  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 around 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 anti-climaxed, with me in tow. Not what you’d call triumphant. Not exactly a lap of honor. 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 neighbors 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 trashcans 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 center of attention. I could feel the blood needling in my fingers, the jittering bones in my ears. I liked our old life. I liked our last apartment. 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. It had been an okay place to call home. 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 percent guaranteed to surprise you. Every time.

  FIVE

  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 favorite 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-gray walls, old floorboards the color 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 armor, she was disappointed. He was old as hell 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 gray 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, full armor, 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 herself, 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. I felt sick. 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 anymore, 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 apartment like locusts the day before dropped onto the tarmac in their matching red T-shirts and caps, trailing fat 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 the men unload. “Roll up, roll up for a show of our worldly goods.”

  Exhibits included one scrubbed table and four stained chairs. An old pavement-colored meat cupboard and the top, non-business half of an old pinball machine. Our dented fridge, ink-black with mold 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 trash 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 anymore. 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 truck and slammed the doors, and after that the paramedics wheeled Mrs. Midler out of the house opposite on a gurney 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 curb. 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 strollers 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.

  SIX

  Later, my arms were full and I was trying to navigate the landing when I went backward 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 onto 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. At the other end, a half-assed kind of kitchen, an antique fridge the color of old custard, and an angry, worn-out straw-yellow parakeet 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 center, 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 stove top 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 parakeet twitched.

  Henry Lake smiled and wiped his hands on a stained tea towel. He moved to sweep half the contents of the sofa straight onto 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 ancient fridge hummed. The bird fussed. My asthma was starting up, that wet wheeze like chunks of my breath being passed through a sieve. I am 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.”