‘Since I was a child.’

She’d trusted him then, the tall, genial American with the winning smile. Back then he’d been her hero, the man who’d come to watch her play every single night for almost a month, who’d told her she was the most beautiful fiddler he’d ever seen, who’d brought her to his elegant rose-pink house and handed her soft towels to dry herself with after half an hour in a shower cubicle tiled with gold mosaic, who’d combed out the wet strands of her hair and made her shudder when his fingertips brushed against her bare shoulders, who’d handed her grimy clothes to his maid to be washed and pressed and returned to her in an origami fan upon the counterpane of her bed in the guest suite. Back then he’d been nothing but soft touches and awe and gentleness. Of course she’d trusted him.

So she’d told him everything, the whole story, and he’d looked at her with shining hazel eyes and said, ‘It’s OK, you’re safe now. You’re safe now.’ And then he’d got her a passport. She had no idea how or from whom. The information on it was not entirely accurate: it was not her correct name, nor was it her correct date of birth or her correct place of birth. But it was a good passport, a passport that had got her to the Maldives and back, that had got her to Barbados and back, to Italy and Spain and New York and back without anyone ever asking any questions.

And now it has expired and she has no means of getting another one and no means of getting back to England. Not to mention the fact that there are no passports for the children nor a pet passport for the dog.

She closes her passport and sighs. There are two ways around this obstacle and one of them is dangerous and illegal and the other is just plain dangerous. Her only other alternative is not to go at all.

At this thought her mind fills with images of leaving England twenty-four years ago. She replays those last moments as she’s replayed them a thousand times: the sound of the door clicking behind her for the very last time, whispering, I’ll be back soon, I promise you, I promise you, I promise you, under her breath a dozen times as she ran down Cheyne Walk in the dark of the middle of the night, her heart pounding, her breath catching, her nightmare both ending, and beginning.

17

CHELSEA, 1988

It was almost two weeks before Phineas Thomsen deigned to talk to me. Or maybe it was the other way round, who knows. I’m sure he’d have his own take on it. But in my recollection (and this is of course entirely my recollection) it was him.

I was, as ever, hanging around the kitchen with my mother, eavesdropping on her conversation with the women who now seemed to live in our house. I’d subliminally determined at this point that the only way to really know what was going on in the world was to listen to women talk. Anyone who ignores the chatter of women is poorer by any measure.

By now Birdie and Justin had been living with us for almost five months, the Thomsens for nearly two weeks. The conversation in the kitchen on this particular day was one that operated on a kind of forty-eight-hour rotating cycle: the vexing matter of where Sally and David were going to live. At this point I was still clinging pathetically to the fallacy that Sally and David were only staying for a short while. Every few days a possibility would appear on the horizon and be talked about at length and the feeling that Sally and David were about to move on would hang briefly, tantalisingly in the air until, pop, the ‘possibility’ would be found to have an inherent flaw and they’d be back to the drawing board. Right now the ‘possibility’ was a houseboat in Chiswick. It belonged to a patient of David’s who was going backpacking for a year and needed someone to look after her bearded dragons.

‘Only one bedroom, though,’ Sally was saying to my mother and Birdie. ‘And a tiny bedroom at that. Obviously David and I could sleep on the berths in the living room, but it’s a bit cramped because of the vivariums.’

‘Gosh,’ said Birdie, picking, picking at the dry skin around her nails, the flakes landing on the cat’s back. ‘How many are there?’

‘Vivariums?’

‘Whatever. Yes.’

‘No idea. Six or so. We might have to find a way to pile them up.’

‘But what about the children?’ my mother asked. ‘Will they want to share? Especially a double bed. I mean, Phin’s going to be a teenager …’

‘Oh God, it would only be short term. Just until we find somewhere permanent.’

I glanced up. This was the point where the plan usually fell apart. The moment it became clear that it was in fact a stupid plan, Sally would say, stoically, ‘Oh, well, it’s not permanent,’ and my mother would say, ‘Well, that’s ridiculous, we have so much space here. Don’t feel you have to rush into anything.’ And Sally’s body language would soften and she’d smile and touch my mother’s arm and say, ‘I don’t want to stretch your hospitality.’ And my beautiful mother would say, in her beautiful German accent, ‘Nonsense, Sally. Nonsense. Just you take your time. Something will come up. Something perfect.’

And so it came to pass, that afternoon in late September. The houseboat plan was mooted and dispatched within a cool, possibly record-breaking, eight minutes.

I was torn, it must be said, by the presence of the Thomsens. On the one hand they were cluttering up my house. Not with objects, per se, but just with themselves, their human forms, their sounds, their smells, their otherness. My sister and Clemency had come together like an unholy union of loud and louder. They careered about the house from morning to bedtime ensconced in strange games of make-believe that all seemed to involve making as much noise as possible. Not only that, but Birdie was teaching them both to play the fiddle, which was utterly excruciating.

Then, of course, there was David Thomsen, whose charismatic presence seemed to permeate every stratum of our house. As well as his bedroom upstairs he had also somehow commandeered our front room, which housed my father’s bar, as a sort of exercise room where I had once observed him through a crack in the door attempting to raise his entire body from the floor using just his fingertips.

And at the other end of everything was Phin. Phin who refused even to look at me, let alone talk to me; Phin who acted as though I was not even there. And the more he acted as though I was not there, the more I felt like I might die of him refusing to see me.

And then, finally, that day, it happened. I’d left the kitchen after it had been established that Sally and David would be staying and had almost bumped into Phin coming the other way. He wore a faded sweatshirt with lettering on it and jeans with tears in the knees. He stopped when he saw me and for the first time his eyes met mine. I caught my breath. I searched my tangled thoughts for something to say, but found nothing there. I moved to the left; he moved to his right. I said sorry and moved to my right. I thought he’d pass silently onwards, but then he said, ‘You know we’re here to stay, don’t you?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Just ignore anything my parents say about moving out. We’re not going anywhere. You know,’ he continued, ‘we ended up in that house in Brittany for two years. We were only supposed to be there for a holiday.’ He paused and cocked an eyebrow.

I was clearly supposed to be responding in some way, but I was stupefied. I had never stood so close to someone so beautiful before. His breath smelled of spearmint.

He stared at me and I saw disappointment flicker across his face, or not even disappointment but resignation, as though I was simply confirming what he’d already suspected of me, that I was boring and pointless, not worth his attention.

‘Why don’t you have your own house?’ I asked finally.

He shrugged. ‘Because my dad’s too tight to pay rent.’

‘Have you never had your own house?’

‘Yes. Once. He sold it so we could go travelling.’

‘But what about school?’

‘What about school?’

‘When do you go to school?’

‘Haven’t been to school since I was six. Mum teaches me.’

‘Wow,’ I said. ‘But what about friends?’

He looked at me askance.

‘Don’t you miss having friends?’

He narrowed his eyes. ‘No,’ he said simply. ‘Not even slightly.’

He looked as though he was about to leave. I did not want him to leave. I wanted to smell his spearmint breath and find out more about him. My eyes dropped to the book in his hand. ‘What are you reading?’ I asked.

He glanced down and turned the book upwards. It was The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart, a novel I had not heard of at the time, but which I have since read roughly thirty times. ‘Is it good?’

‘All books are good,’ he said.