“Excuse me…” said Perdita.
“You need to see Pauline,” said Leo.
“I told her that,” said Miss LaTrobe.
—
At 2:30 p.m. Leo returned. Perdita stood up and pushed back her heavy hair. Leo smiled at her before he realised he was smiling. Something in the way she…
“Come back tomorrow,” he said. “Pauline will be here.”
“Not according to the Diary,” said Miss LaTrobe, standing up to her full height, which was several inches above Leo.
“Oh, pardon me for having an opinion,” said Leo. Then he said, “Did Pauline hire you?”
“Yes,” said Miss LaTrobe. “Personally.”
“I am outnumbered and outmanoeuvred,” said Leo. He looked at Perdita. “Did you have an appointment today?”
“I’ve been in the States longer than expected,” said Perdita, “or I would have been here before.”
“I’ll be down at 7 p.m.,” said Leo. “Your call.”
And then he went back up to his office.
—
“Don’t get your hopes up,” said Miss LaTrobe.
“Why not?” said Perdita.
The Receptionist shrugged. Another day. Another idiot.
What am I doing here? thought Perdita. If I leave now it’s over. I’ve seen him. He didn’t want me. Why do I want him?
—
At 6 p.m. Miss LaTrobe announced her departure. Like she was a flight to Miami. “I’m afraid you will have to leave, as you can’t stay here unsupervised.”
“I won’t steal anything,” said Perdita.
“It’s the Rules,” said Miss LaTrobe. Clearly the Rules offered as much certainty as the Diary, so Perdita suggested she call Mr. Kaiser.
“I can’t interrupt him.”
“Tell him I won’t leave,” said Perdita.
The Receptionist rolled her eyes, pulled a face, tapped her (impressive) fingernails on the desk and spoke to Leo. “Thank you, Mr. Kaiser. And yes, certainly I shall let Miss Tchaikovsky know that you cannot meet her for dinner tonight as you are working late.”
—
Miss LaTrobe disappeared into the ladies’ and reappeared ten minutes later in an orange one-piece Lycra cycling suit. “You are to wait here,” she said to Perdita.
“Do you cycle home?” said Perdita, because it was something to say.
“No. I work in a fetish club,” said Miss LaTrobe and, taking her orange helmet from the desk drawer, she left the building.
—
Around 7 p.m. Leo came back down in the lift. He had taken off his tie. He needed to shave.
“So you waited?”
She nodded.
“What’s your name?”
“Miranda.”
“Miranda who?”
“Shepherd.”
“OK, Miranda Shepherd—so come and have a drink and tell me all about yourself. Patience is its own reward, or some shit I never believed in. Where did patience ever get you except to the back of the queue? But in your case…”
—
The evening was warm. Pink sky. Red buses. Black cabs. Lights coming on across the city. The evening feel of hometime. A man giving out free newspapers. STANDARD! STANDARD! Young men crowding the pavements outside the pubs. Tired faces, shirtsleeves, women in heels that hurt. The queue at the checkout for something to eat in front of the TV. The crowds flowing down into the underground.
“There’s a bar by the river,” said Leo. “We can have langoustines and vodka. It’s Thursday.”
“Does that make a difference?” said Perdita.
“I like a routine. These days.”
—
The bar was busy and noisy but the barman raised his hand to Leo and, without anything being said, there was a table just inside/outside in the long window that opened onto a narrow terrace, and a bottle of Grey Goose from the freezer in an ice bucket, and a set of tins of tonic water and fresh sliced lemons and limes.
“They know me,” said Leo.
“Can I have a mineral water with the lime?” said Perdita.
—
Perdita was talking but Leo wasn’t listening. He was nodding and meeting her eyes but he wasn’t listening. She must be twenty-one or twenty-two. What was wrong with that? Youth is so irresistible. Irreplaceable. And wasted on the young.
“Responsible capitalism,” said Leo, surprising himself that he had heard her question. “That’s Sicilia.”
“What does your wife do?” said Perdita.
“I’m divorced,” said Leo. “What about you?”
“I’m not divorced,” said Perdita. “Do you have children?”
He looked down. “No. No, I don’t have children.”
She nearly said…Instead she took another langoustine. She didn’t know how expensive they were. At home they weren’t expensive at all.
She was eating more than him. The women he took out didn’t eat. They ordered food but they didn’t eat it. She was unself-conscious. She wasn’t trying to please him. Leo liked her. She asked him why he wasn’t eating, and he didn’t say My heart is full of something that takes my mind from feasting.
He ripped into a langoustine.
“I come here because I like the river,” he said. “I like it that the Thames is older than London—that mammoths drank here once.”
“It’s so narrow,” said Perdita. “The Mississippi is like a world. Did you ever see it?”
“Yes,” said Leo. “I had a friend who lived in New Bohemia. It was a long time ago. That’s what happens as you get older; everything is a long time ago.”
“But not the present,” said Perdita. “That’s now.”
“You’re young. You have a present because you don’t have a past. When I was young I lived in Paris for a year. I was working there. I fell in love with the river—the Seine; actually I fell in love with someone. Perhaps that’s why I find water mysterious and romantic. I’m not just talking about boy meets girl, I mean something bigger—about longing, I suppose. The Germans call it verlangen. My father was German.”
“Was she French? The woman you fell in love with?”
“Yes. Petite, boyish, but feminine. Like you.”
Perdita blushed. Leo misunderstood. “It’s just a compliment. Take it.”
“Thank you,” said Perdita.
They looked out at the water. The strings of lights. The boats that came in close to the pier.
Leo felt at ease and excited. What’s happening to me? he thought, and This is ridiculous.
He tried to focus. “Miranda, we’re organising a big charity concert—it happens next weekend; maybe you would like to be part of that? To see how you do with us? It’s mostly music. A few acts.”
“I sing in a girl-group at home,” said Perdita. “We’re called The Separations.”
“That is a great name! What do you sing?”
“Retro-classics. My dad is a fantastic pianist. I’ve been singing since I was born.”
“Have you?” His eyes were dark with the unsaid.
“Yes. Are you OK? Is there…?”
He interrupted her. “It’s nothing. But these nothings…they…”
—
These nothings are nothing. But the sky is nothing, the earth is nothing, I am nothing, love is nothing, loss is nothing.
—
The evening was cooling into night. Perdita thanked Leo.
“We can go on somewhere if you want—show you London.”
She shook her head. He offered her a cab. “I can walk,” she said, “I like walking. I can follow the map on my phone. It isn’t far.”
But it is, he thought, watching her walk away. It might as well be the moon, the distance that separated him from a life that is good.
—
Leo got out of the cab at his house. His lights were on. He unlocked the door and switched them off. There was nothing to see. His games console was lit up like an aquarium.
Xeno had brought in a new player. They ha
d been collecting feathers. Sweet. As though the world could be saved by hard work and hope. Leo opened his six wings and flew low over the city looking for feathers to set on fire. Looking for feathers to douse into Sunken Angels.
He flew up to the top of the Sorbonne. “Sicut umbra dies nostri,” says the Sundial Angel: Our days flee like a shadow.
He prefers her sister. She’s ready for him—the one bared to the waist with the hard, high, round breasts. Part boy, part girl. Legs open with a book she’s never read. He’s erect.
One pair of wings kept him upright while he was on her. The second pair held her hard gold body against him. The third pair he pushed out behind him, an upward flag like the retractable fin on his car. It was a fuck you. To traffic. To Xeno. To himself. Fuck you, Leo. Fuck you.
He falls back, done.
—
Leo woke up on the sofa. He put on the light. Three a.m. The small hours when life curls in on itself like a world not ready to open. The radio had turned itself on.
There was a woman talking: “A thousand knees ten thousand years together, naked, fasting, upon a barren mountain, and still winter in storm perpetual, could not move the gods to look the way thou wert.”
—
Leo sat up, groggy, sweaty, scratchy, dry-mouthed. He went upstairs, falling over his undone trousers. He stepped out of them, and in his socks and jockeys, his shirt and noosed tie, got in the shower, stripping off as the water fell over him.
He left his clothes in a sodden heap on the shower floor. He shaved, dressed, made coffee and drank it down in one searing swig.
He got in his car. No radio. No thoughts. Only the backward pull of time.
That day…
—
Leo was in the queue at Passport Control. The man checking documents asked him to stand aside a moment. The next thing he knew, three policemen were checking his details and asking what he’d done with the baby.
Then it happened.
Leo arguing with the police. The police arguing with Leo. All big guys. All at the same height. The little Indian passport-checker was trying to pretend that nothing was happening as he processed other people coming through, all staring at Leo.
The police were confused because Leo had no baby. Leo said his wife had post-natal depression. He was taking their son on holiday to give her a break. The police looked at Milo’s passport—is this your father? Yes.
The big guys went back to arguing—no one cared about Milo.
There was a man lived in an airport.
Milo moved steadily, quietly backwards, away from them, their backs to him in an angry circle. No one would notice.
Milo was round the corner and going towards the security lanes. There was a family over in Lane Four. He ran over to them—if anyone saw him they thought he was just catching up. He put his backpack on the metal conveyor belt. He walked through the metal detector. He looked round. He was in the airport. Maybe he could find Tony.
—
Milo had tagged on to a family and gone through Security. He couldn’t see Tony. There were a lot of people. He heard his name announced over the Tannoy. He was to go to Information.
Milo couldn’t find Information for a while, then when he saw it, his father wasn’t there—only the two policemen were there. He turned back the other way.
Soon Milo was in the skytrain, which sounded exciting but wasn’t. Then he was at B Gate and C Gate and then back to B Gate. Then he joined a queue for a plane and he was small and seemed to belong and only when he was through Boarding and halfway down the stairs did the woman realise he wasn’t with the others and they didn’t have his passport and boarding card. She called him back. He ran. She was the police. He didn’t run onto the plane, he ran down the second flight of stairs and through the wide-open door where they were taking some luggage on a flat trolley. HEY! HEY! But Milo was running, round the corner of the building and into the path of a repair truck.
Superman, rewind time.
—
Leo parked his car near the gates of Highgate Cemetery. If there was a burial that morning someone would be there. He knew the routine. If they were there they would let him in.
He walked down the paths guarded by mourning angels. Milo was buried near the west wall. Leo had bought the plot at a charity auction before Milo was born. He had bid a fortune to get it. The cemetery was long since full and it was world-famous. The right challenge for Leo. He could have bought a studio flat for what he paid. And now Milo was in it. The bones of him by now, Leo thought. Nothing to know of him except the past.
Leo stood for a long time as the sun came up bright and clear. The past was always in front of him like a river he couldn’t cross.
He went and filled the water container and picked two of the wild roses growing in the hedge. “MiMi and Milo,” he said as he put the thorny stems into the water. He got up and turned to go. The gardener was near by, working quietly with a hoe. Checked shirt, sleeves rolled up past the elbows. “Hi Tony!” called Leo.
The gardener turned. “I’m Pete.”
Leo raised a hand. Of course it wasn’t Tony. Tony is dead.
—
Perdita and Zel were lying on the bed in the Travelodge, watching TV with the sound turned down.
“So what’s he like?” said Zel.
“All I could think about was that this man gave me away.”
“To my dad! Are you going to tell him it’s you?”
“I don’t know. If I do, he’ll be in my life. And he’s pretty controlling.”
“I looked it up,” said Zel. “It doesn’t usually work out.”
“What doesn’t?”
“Adoption reunions. Everybody wants something they can never have. Life can’t unhappen.”
“I don’t want Life to unhappen. Then I wouldn’t have Shep or Clo or HollyPollyMolly.”
“But you would have me,” said Zel. “How weird is that?”
Perdita rolled herself into him. “You mean it’s fate?”
“I don’t know. We used to discuss this all the time when I was studying philosophy. Is life just a series of accidents that from a distance look like patterns? Like when you see fields and rivers and houses from a plane window and they look beautiful and sane, whereas on the ground they’re just what they are—random or even ugly.”
“Dad says things are meant to be.”
“Have you spoken to him?”
“He’ll be mad at me. I should have told him we were leaving.”
“You couldn’t.”
“No. I couldn’t. Do you think we’ll end up like Leo and Xeno?”
“Complete assholes?”
“Sad people.”
“They weren’t always sad.”
“That’s worse. They had a life and they destroyed it. Their own and other people’s.”
“We’ll do it better,” said Zel. “We’ll go back home, we’ll make a life, and we’ll show our own kids how to be brave and true.”
“We just met!”
“Am I going too fast?”
She kissed him. “Yes. Much too fast.”
“I thought girls want boys who can commit?”
She hit him with a pillow. She felt a pulse of relaxation. She realised how tense she had been all day.
“Zel…thanks for coming with me. I’m a lot to take on right now. I know that…”
He put his arm round her. “We’re here. We’re doing it. Let’s do it. Do you want to look for your mother too?”
“I don’t know. This is harder than I thought.”
“How so?”
“Upsetting. I thought I wouldn’t feel anything—I mean, I don’t know Leo. I just met him today.”
Zel held her close. “But you have met your mother. You lived inside her.”
And that was true and Perdita felt it to be true and that was the part that was hardest. How can you be connected to someone with whom you have no connection?
“Do you look like Leo?” said Zel.
“I don’t think so. He’s old and bald and a bit fat! Same mouth maybe. I look like my mother—that is, how she used to look. But we don’t know what she looks like now. There are no recent images—just someone who might be her in dark glasses and a hat.”
“It probably is her—only celebrities think dark glasses and a hat is how you blend into the crowd.”
“She’s not famous now.”
“Is it weird for you that she was?”
“It’s all weird. That’s just one weirdness in the weird.”
Zel flipped off the TV. “Do you think you can sleep?”
“No.”
“Then let’s go out.”
“It’s midnight!”
“So? This is London. Come on.”
—
They go out. They’re just kids. They find a night-bus. Then walk through to Soho. Italian ice cream. His arm round her shoulders. Her arm round his waist. They walk through Chinatown and Covent Garden and across the Aldwych down to Waterloo Bridge and stand in the middle looking west and east, and there’s Big Ben telling clock time, and down below there’s the Thames flowing liquid time, and in the small space they occupy their own time is real. Not the past, not the future, this now.
He doesn’t take a photo or a video because he wants to remember—by which he means he wants to misremember because the moment is made up of what the camera can’t capture.
And the river takes the night away and they go back to bed and sleep and the city dreams itself into another day.
—
In the morning, early, Perdita’s phone rings. It’s Leo.
“Hi, Miranda. Leo here. Meet me at the Roundhouse in an hour.”
“Where?” says Perdita. What’s he talking about?
Leo wants to be impatient but isn’t because he wants to see her. He softens his voice. “Northern Line. The black one. Chalk Farm. Or Camden Town and then you walk. OK? About 11 a.m.”
—
This time Zel comes with her. They get out of the underground at Chalk Farm. There are a lot of people waving banners that say SAVE OUR BUILDING.
Perdita and Zel make their way into the crowd. There’s a guy with a megaphone. Police on horseback. Perdita asks a young woman with a placard what’s going on.
“Fuckin’ rich buying the whole fuckin’ place.”
Then she sees Leo shouting angrily into his phone. She said to Zel, “There he is.”