After You

  Natasha and I exchanged a look. Clearly, she wanted to go out dancing about as much as I did.

  I thought about Ambulance Sam and pushed the thought away.

  “And if you ever do want another penis,” William said. “I’m sure I could pencil in a—”

  “Okay, everyone. Let’s move on to wills,” said Marc. “Anyone surprised by what turned up?”

  • • •

  I got home, exhausted, at a quarter past nine, to find Lily lying on the sofa in front of the television in her pajamas. I dropped my bag. “How long have you been here?”

  “Since breakfast.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Mm.”

  Her face held a pallor that spoke of either illness or exhaustion.

  “Not feeling well?”

  She didn’t look up. She was eating popcorn out of a bowl and lazily scooped her fingers around the bottom of it, looking for crumbs. “I just didn’t feel like doing anything today.”

  Lily’s phone beeped. She stared listlessly at the message that came through, and then pushed it away from her under a sofa cushion.

  “Everything really okay?” I asked, after a minute.

  “Fine.”

  She didn’t look fine.

  “Anything I can help with?”

  “I said I was fine.”

  She did not look at me as she spoke.

  • • •

  Lily spent that night at the flat. The following day, just as I was leaving for work, Mr. Traynor rang and asked to speak to her. She was stretched across the sofa and looked blankly up at me when I told her who was on the phone, then finally, reluctantly, held out a hand for the receiver. I stood there as she listened to him speak. I couldn’t hear his words, but I could hear his tone: kind, reassuring, emollient. When he finished, she left a faint pause, and then said, “Okay. Fine.”

  “So are you going to see him again?” I asked, as she handed back the phone.

  “He wants to come to London to see me.”

  “Well, that’s nice.”

  “But he can’t be too far away from her just now in case she goes into labor.”

  “Do you want me to take you back there to see him?”

  “No.”

  She tucked her knees up underneath her chin, reached out for the remote control, and flicked through the channels.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” I said, after a minute.

  But she did not look up from the television, and after a minute or two, I realized the conversation was over.

  • • •

  On Thursday, I went into my bedroom, closed the door, and called my sister. We were speaking several times a week again. It was easier now that my estrangement from our parents no longer hung between us like a conversational minefield.

  “Do you think it’s normal?”

  “Dad told me I once didn’t speak to him for two whole weeks when I was sixteen. Only grunts. And I was actually quite happy.”

  “She’s not even grunting. She just looks miserable.”

  “All teenagers look miserable. It’s their default setting. It’s the cheerful ones you want to worry about—they’re probably hiding some massive eating disorder or stealing lipsticks from Boots.”

  “She’s spent the last three days just lying on the sofa.”

  “And your point is?”

  “I think there’s something wrong.”

  “She’s sixteen years old. Her dad never knew she existed, and popped his clogs before she could meet him. Her mother married someone she calls Fuckface, she has two little brothers who sound like trainee Reggie and Ronnie Kray, and they changed the locks to the family home. I would probably lie on a sofa for a year if I was her.”

  Treena took a noisy slurp of her tea. “Plus she’s living with someone who wears glittery green Spandex to a bar job and calls it a career.”

  “Lurex. It’s Lurex.”

  “Whatever. So when are you going to find yourself a decent job?”

  “Soon. I just need to get this situation sorted out first.”

  “This situation.”

  “She’s really down. I feel bad for her.”

  “You know what makes me feel down? The way you keep promising to live some kind of a life, then sacrifice yourself to every waif and stray who comes across your path.”

  “Will was not a waif and stray.”

  “But Lily is. You don’t even know this girl, Lou. You should be focusing on moving forward. You should be sending off your CV, talking to contacts, working out where your strengths are, not finding yet another excuse to put your own life on hold.”

  I stared outside at the city sky. In the next room, I could hear the television burbling away, then Lily getting up and walking to the fridge before flopping down again. I lowered my voice. “So what would you do, Treen? The child of the man you loved turns up on your doorstep, and everyone else seems to have pretty much handed over responsibility for her. You’d walk away too, would you?”

  My sister fell briefly silent. This was such a rare occurrence that I felt obliged to keep talking. “So if that’s Thom in eight years’ time, and he’s fallen out with you, for whatever reason, and say he was pretty much on his own and was going off the rails, you’d think it was great, would you, if the one person he asked for help decided it was altogether too much of a pain in the arse? That they should just bugger off and suit themselves?” I rested my head against the wall. “I’m trying to do the right thing here, Treen. Just cut me a break, okay?”

  Nothing.

  “It makes me feel better. Okay? It makes me feel better knowing I’m helping.”

  My sister was silent for so long I actually wondered whether she had hung up.

  “Treen?”

  “Okay. Well, I do remember reading a thing in social psychology about how teenagers find too much face-to-face contact exhausting.”

  “You want me to talk to her through a door?”

  One day I would have at least one telephone conversation with my sister that didn’t involve the weary sigh of someone explaining something to a halfwit.

  “No, doofus. What it means is that if you’re going to get her to talk, you need to be doing something together, side by side.”

  • • •

  On my way home on Friday evening I stopped off at the DIY superstore. I lugged the bags up the four flights of stairs, and let myself in. Lily was exactly where I was expecting to find her: stretched out in front of the television. She looked up.

  “What’s that?”

  “Paint.”

  She looked blankly at me.

  “This flat’s looking a bit tired. You keep telling me I need to brighten it up. I thought we could get rid of this boring old magnolia.”

  She couldn’t help herself. I pretended to be busy making myself a drink, watching out of the corner of my eye as she stretched, then walked over and examined the paint cans. “That’s hardly any less boring. It’s basically pale gray.”

  “I was told gray is the ‘in’ thing. I’ll take it back if you think it won’t work.”

  She peered at it. “No. It’s okay.”

  “I thought the spare room could have cream on two walls, and then one gray wall there. Do you think they go?”

  I busied myself with unwrapping the paintbrushes and rollers as I spoke, not looking at her. I changed into an old shirt and some shorts and asked if she could put on some music.

  “What sort?”

  “You choose.” I hauled a chair off to one side and laid some dust sheets along the wall. “Your dad said I was a musical philistine.”

  She didn’t say anything, but I had her attention. I cracked open a paint can and began to stir the paint.

  “He made me go to my first concert ever. Classical, not pop. I only agreed because it meant he would leave the house. He didn’t like going out much in the early days. He put on a nice shirt and a good jacket, and it was the first time I had seen him look like . . .” I remembered the jol
t as I had seen, suddenly, emerging from that stiff blue collar, the man he had been before his accident. I swallowed. “Anyway. I went preparing to be bored, and then cried my way through the second half like a complete loon. It was the most amazing thing I’d ever heard in my life.”

  A short silence.

  “What was it? What did you listen to?”

  “I can’t remember. Sibelius? Does that sound right?”

  She shrugged. I started painting, as she came up beside me. She picked up a brush.

  She said nothing at first, but she seemed to lose herself in the repetitive nature of the task. She was careful too, adjusting the sheet so that she didn’t spill paint, wiping her brush on the edge of the can. We didn’t speak, except for muttered requests: Can you pass me the smaller brush? Do you think that will still show through on the second coat? It took us just half an hour to do the first wall between us.

  “So what do you think?” I said, as I stood back, admiring the wall. “Think we can do another?”

  She moved a dust sheet, and started the next wall. She had put on some indie band I had never heard of; the music was lighthearted and agreeable. I started to paint again, ignoring the ache in my shoulder, the urge to yawn.

  “You should get some pictures.”

  “You’re right.”

  “I’ve got this really big print at home of a Kandinsky. It doesn’t really go in my room. You could have it if you want it.”

  “That would be great.”

  She was working faster now, speeding across the wall, carefully cutting in around the large window. I glanced at her and then I spoke.

  “So I was thinking . . . we should speak to Will’s mum. Your grandmother. Are you okay if I write to her?”

  She said nothing. She crouched down, apparently absorbed in carefully coating the wall down to the baseboard. Finally, she stood up. “Is she like him?”

  “Like who?”

  “Mrs. Traynor? Is she like Mr. Traynor?”

  I stepped down from the box I was using to stand on and wiped my brush on the edge of the can. “She’s . . . different.”

  “That’s your way of saying she’s a cow.”

  “She’s not a cow. She’s just—it takes longer to get to know her is all.”

  She looked sideways at me.

  “This is your way of telling me she’s a cow and she’s not going to like me.”

  “I’m not saying that at all, Lily. But she is someone who doesn’t show her emotions easily.”

  Lily sighed and put down her paintbrush. “I am basically the only person in the world who could discover two grandparents I didn’t know I had, then find out that neither of them even likes me.”

  We stared at each other. And suddenly, unexpectedly, we both started to laugh.

  I put the lid on the paint. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go out.”

  “Where?”

  I shrugged. “You’re the one who says I need to have some fun. You tell me.”

  • • •

  I pulled out a series of tops from one of my storage boxes until Lily finally determined which one was acceptable, and I let her take me to a tiny cavernous club in a back street near the West End where the bouncers knew her by name and nobody seemed to consider for a minute that she might be under eighteen. “It’s nineties music. Olden-days stuff!” she said cheerfully, and I tried not to think too hard about the fact that I was, in her eyes, basically geriatric.

  We danced until I stopped feeling self-conscious and sweat came through our clothes and our hair stuck in fronds to our heads and my hip hurt so much that I wondered whether I would even be able to stand up behind the bar the following week. We danced as if we had nothing else to do but dance. Lord, it felt good. I had forgotten the joy of just existing, of losing yourself in music, in a crowd of people, the sensations that came with becoming one communal, organic mass, alive only to a pulsing beat. For a few dark, thumping hours, I let go of everything, my problems floating away like helium balloons: my awful job, my picky boss, my failure to move on. I became a thing, alive, moving, joyful. I looked over the crowd at Lily, her eyes closed as her hair flew about her face, that peculiar mixture of concentration and freedom in her features that comes when someone loses herself in rhythm. Then she opened her eyes and looked straight at me and I wanted to be angry about the fact that her raised arm held a bottle that clearly wasn’t cola, but I found myself smiling back at her—a broad, euphoric grin—and all I could think was how strange it was that it was a messed-up child who barely knew herself who actually had so much to teach me about the business of living.

  • • •

  Around us London was shrill and heaving, even though it was 2 a.m. We paused for Lily to take joint selfies of us in front of a theater, a Chinese sign, and a man dressed as a large bear (apparently every event had to be marked by photographic evidence), then wove our way through crowded streets in search of a night bus, past the late-night kebab shops and the bellowing drunkards, the pimps and the gaggles of screeching girls. My hip was throbbing badly, and sweat was cooling unpleasantly under my damp clothes, but I still felt energized, as if I had been snapped back on.

  “God knows how we’re going to get home,” Lily said, cheerfully.

  And then I heard the shout.

  “Lou!” I looked across the road, and there was Sam, leaning out of the driver’s window of an ambulance. As I lifted my hand in response, he pulled the truck across the road in a giant U-turn.

  “Where you headed?” he asked.

  “Home. If we can ever find a bus.”

  “Hop in. Go on. I won’t tell if you won’t. We’re just finishing our shift.” He looked at the woman beside him. “Ah, come on, Don. She’s a patient. Broken hip. Can’t leave her to walk home.”

  Lily was delighted by this unexpected turn of events. And then the rear door opened and a woman in a paramedic’s uniform, eyes rolling, was shepherding us in.

  “You’re going to get us sacked, Sam,” she said, and motioned for us to sit down on the gurney. “Hiya. I’m Donna. Oh, no—I do remember you. The one who . . .”

  “. . . fell off a building. Yup.”

  Lily pulled me into her for an “ambulance selfie,” and I tried not to look as Donna rolled her eyes again.

  “So where have you been?” Sam called through to the rear.

  “Dancing,” said Lily. “I’ve been trying to persuade Louisa to be less of a boring old fart. Can we put the siren on?”

  “Nope. Where’d you go? That’s from another boring old fart, by the way. I won’t have a clue whatever you say.”

  “The Twenty-two,” said Lily. “Down the back of Tottenham Court Road?”

  “That’s where we had the emergency tracheotomy, Sam.”

  “I remember. You look like you’ve had a good night.” He met my eye in the mirror and I colored a little. I was suddenly glad to have been out dancing. It made me seem like I might be someone else altogether. Not just a tragic airport barmaid whose idea of a night out was falling off a roof.

  “It was great,” I said, beaming. Then he looked down at the computer screen on the dashboard.

  “Oh, marvelous. Got a Green One over at Spencer’s.”

  “But we’re headed back in,” said Donna. “Why does Lennie always do this to us? That man’s a sadist.”

  “No one else available.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “A job’s come up. I might have to drop you. It’s not far from yours, though. Okay?”

  “Spencer’s,” said Donna, and let out a deep sigh. “Hold on tight, girls.”

  The siren went on. And we were off, lurching our way through the London traffic with the blue light screaming above our head, Lily squealing with delight.

  On any given weeknight, Donna told us, as we clutched the handrails, the station would get calls from Spencer’s, summoned to fix those who hadn’t made it upright to closing time, or to stitch up the faces of young men for whom six pints in an evening
left them combative and without any accompanying sense. “These kids should be feeling great about life, but instead they’re just knocking themselves out with every spare pound they earn. Every bloody week.”

  We were there in minutes, the ambulance slowing outside to avoid the drunks spilling out onto the pavement. The signs in Spencer’s smoked windows advertised “Free drinks for girls before 10 p.m.” Despite the stag and hen nights, the catcalling and gaudy clothes, the packed streets of the drinking zone seemed less a carnival atmosphere and more something tense and explosive. I found myself gazing out of the window warily.

  Sam opened the rear doors and picked up his bag. “Stay in the rig,” he said, and climbed out.

  A police officer headed over to him, muttered something, and we watched as they walked over to a young man who was sitting in the gutter, blood streaming from a wound to his temple. Sam squatted beside him, while the officer attempted to keep back the drunken gawkers, the “helpful” friends, the wailing girlfriends. He seemed to be surrounded by a bunch of well-dressed extras from The Walking Dead, swaying mindlessly and grunting, occasionally bloodied and toppling.

  “I hate these jobs,” said Donna, checking briskly through her pack of plastic-wrapped medical supplies as we watched. “Give me a woman in labor, or a nice old granny with cardiomyopathy any day. Oh, flipping heck, he’s off.”

  Sam was tilting the young lad’s face back to examine it when another boy, his hair thick with gel and the collar of his shirt soaked in blood, grabbed at his shoulder. “Oi! I need to go in the ambulance!”

  Sam turned slowly toward the young drunk, who was spraying blood and saliva as he spoke.

  “Back away now, mate. All right? Let me do my job.”

  Drink had made the boy stupid. He glanced at his mates, then he was up in Sam’s face, snarling. “Don’t you tell me to back away.”

  Sam ignored him, and continued attending to the other boy’s face.

  “Hey! Hey you! I need to get to the hospital.” He said it again, then pushed Sam’s shoulder. “Hey!”

  Sam stayed crouched for a moment, very still. Then he straightened slowly, and turned, so that he was nose to nose with the drunk. “I’ll explain something in terms you might be able to understand, son. You’re not getting in the truck, okay? That’s it. So save your energy, go finish your night with your mates, put a bit of ice on it, and go see your GP in the morning.”

  “You don’t get to tell me nothing. I pay your wages. My effing nose is broke.”

  As Sam gazed steadily back at him, the boy swung out a hand and pushed at Sam’s chest. Sam looked down at it.

  “Uh-oh,” said Donna, beside me.

  Sam’s voice, when it emerged, was a growl: “Okay. I’m warning you now—”

  “You don’t warn me!” The boy’s face was scornful. “You don’t warn me! Who do you think you are?”

  Donna was out of the truck and jogging toward a cop. She murmured something in his ear and I saw them both look over. Donna’s face was pleading. The boy was still yelling and swearing, now pushing at Sam’s chest. “So you sort me out