One day he took me to one side and said that, while it was possibly a little premature, Head Office had told him they were looking to elevate one of the permanent staff to an assistant managerial position and if things carried on as they were he felt very much inclined to put my name forward. (‘I can’t risk promoting Vera. She’d put floor cleaner in my tea to get my job.’) I thanked him and tried to look more delighted than I felt.
Lily, meanwhile, asked Samir for a job, and he said he would take her for a half-day’s trial if she would do it for free. I handed her a coffee at seven thirty, and made sure she left the flat dressed and ready in time for her eight o’clock start. When I returned home that evening, she had apparently got the job, albeit on ￡2.73 an hour, which I discovered was the lowest rate he could legally pay her. She had spent most of the day moving crates in the back storeroom and putting prices on tins with an ancient sticker gun, while Samir and his cousin watched football on his iPad. She was filthy and exhausted, but curiously happy. ‘If I last a month he says he’ll consider putting me on the till.’
I had a shift change, so on Thursday afternoon we drove to Lily’s parents’ house in St John’s Wood, and I waited in the car while Lily went in and collected some more clothes and the Kandinsky print that she had promised would look good in my flat. She emerged twenty minutes later, her face furious and closed. Tanya walked out into the porch, her arms folded, watching silently as Lily opened the boot and threw in an overstuffed holdall and, more carefully, the print. Then she climbed into the front seat and gazed straight ahead at the empty road. As Tanya closed the door behind her, there was a small possibility that she was wiping her eyes.
I put my key into the ignition.
‘When I grow up,’ Lily said, and perhaps only I could have detected the faint tremor in her voice, ‘I am not going to be anything like my mother.’
I waited a moment, then started the car and we drove in silence back to my flat.
Fancy the pictures tonight? I could do with some escapism.
I don’t think I should leave Lily.
Bring her?
I’d better not. Sorry, Sam x
That evening I found Lily out on the fire escape. She looked up at the sound of the window opening and waved a cigarette. ‘Thought it was a bit mean to keep smoking in your flat, given that you don’t.’
I wedged the window open, climbed out carefully, and sat down on the iron steps beside her. Below us the car park simmered in the August heat, the scent of hot tarmac rising into the still air. A car with the bonnet up thumped bass from its sound system. The metal of the steps retained the warmth of a month of sunny afternoons and I leaned back, closing my eyes.
‘I thought it would all work out,’ Lily said.
I opened them.
‘I thought if I could just get Peter to go away all my problems would be solved. I thought if I could find my dad I would feel like I belonged somewhere. And now Peter’s gone, and Garside’s gone, and I know about my dad and I have you. But nothing feels like I expected.’
I was about to tell her not to be silly. I was about to point out that she had come such a long way in a short time, that she had her first job, prospects, a bright future – the standard adult responses. But they sounded trite and patronizing.
At the end of the road a bunch of office workers huddled round a metal table by the pub’s rear door. Later tonight it would be packed with hipsters and strays from the City, spilling out with drinks across the pavement, their raucous calls filtering in through my open window. ‘I know what you mean,’ I said. ‘I’ve been waiting to feel normal again since your dad died. I feel like I’m basically going through the motions. I’m still in a crappy job. I still live in this flat, which I don’t think is ever going to feel like home. I had a near-death experience, but I can’t say it gave me wisdom or gratitude for life or anything. I go to a grief-counselling group full of people who are as stuck as I am. But I haven’t really done anything.’
Lily thought about this. ‘You helped me.’
‘That’s pretty much the one thing I hang onto most days.’
‘And you have a boyfriend.’
‘He’s not my boyfriend.’
‘Sure, Louisa.’
We watched the traffic crawl down towards the City. Lily took a final drag of her cigarette, and stubbed it out on the metal step.
‘That’s my next thing,’ I said.
She had the grace to look slightly guilty. ‘I know. I will stop. I promise.’
Across the rooftops the sun had started to slide, its orange glow diffused by the lead-grey air of the City evening.
‘You know, Lily, perhaps some things just take longer than others. I think we’ll get there, though.’
She linked her arm through mine and let her head rest on my shoulder. We watched the sun’s gentle fall, and the lengthening shadows creeping towards us, and I thought about the New York skyline and that nobody was truly free. Perhaps all freedom – physical, personal – only came at the cost of somebody or something else.
The sun vanished, and the orange sky began to turn petrol-blue. When we stood up, Lily smoothed her skirt, then gazed at the packet in her hand. She pulled the remaining cigarettes abruptly from the wrapper and snapped them in half, then flung them into the air, a confetti of tobacco and white paper. She looked at me triumphantly and held up her hand. ‘There. I am officially a smoke-free zone.’