26
Chelsea, 1990
Shortly after my mother told me that David was making us give all our money to charity and that he was going to be living with us forever, I saw him kissing Birdie.
It was sickening to me at the time, on so many levels.
First, as you know, I found Birdie physically repellent. The thought of her hard little lips against David’s big generous mouth, his hands on her bony hips, her gross tongue chasing his around inside the dank cave made from their mouths.
Oof.
Second, I was something of a traditionalist and found the sight of adultery shocking to my core.
And third: well, the third awful thing didn’t strike me immediately. It couldn’t have really, because the implications of what I’d unwittingly seen were not entirely obvious. But I certainly felt something like dread pass through me at the sight of David and Birdie coming together, an innate sense that they might bring things out of each other that were better left buried away.
It happened on a Saturday morning. Sally was away taking photos on a film set somewhere. Justin had gone to set up a stall at a market to sell his herbal remedies.
My mother and father were sitting in the garden in their dressing gowns reading the papers and drinking tea out of mugs. I’d slept until eight thirty, late for me.
I’ve always been an early riser; I rarely slept later than nine even during my teenage years. I’d barely rubbed the sleep from my eyes as I emerged from my room when
I saw them, clinging to each other in the doorway. She wore a muslin nightdress.
He wore a black cotton robe with a belted waist. Her leg was jammed between his knees. Their groins were forced together. He had a hand to her pale, moley throat.
She had a hand on his left buttock.
I immediately retreated into my bedroom, my heart pumping hard, my stomach well and truly turned. I put both my hands to my throat, trying to quell the nausea and the horror. I said the word fuck silently under my breath. Then I said it again, properly. I opened my door a crack a moment later and they had gone. I didn’t know what to do. I needed to tell someone; I needed to tell Phin.
Phin flicked his blond curtains away from his face. He was, ludicrously, growing even more handsome as he passed through puberty. He was only fourteen and already six foot tall. He had never, as far as I was aware, had so much as a pimple.
And if he’d had one, I would have noticed it, as studying Phin’s face was virtually my hobby.
“I need to talk to you,” I hissed urgently into his ear. “It’s really, really important.”
We walked to the end of the garden where a curved bench caught the morning sun. With the trees in blossom and full leaf we could not be seen from the house.
We sat down on the bench and turned to face each other.
“I just saw something,” I said. “Something really, really bad.”
Phin narrowed his eyes at me. I could tell he thought I was going to say that I’d seen the cat eating out of the butter dish or something equally babyish and banal.
I could tell he had no faith in my ability to impart genuinely shocking news.
“I saw your dad. And Birdie…”
The expression of indulgent impatience shifted, and he looked at me in alarm.
“They were coming out of Birdie and Justin’s room. And they were kissing.”
He jolted slightly at these words. I’d made my impact. Finally, after two years, Phin was really looking at me.
I saw a muscle in Phin’s jaw twitch. “Are you fucking lying to me?” he asked, almost growling.
I shook my head. “I swear,” I said. “I saw it. Just now. About twenty minutes ago. I swear.”
I saw Phin’s eyes fill very quickly with tears and then I saw him trying very hard to force them to go away. Some people tell me I lack empathy. This might be true.
It hadn’t occurred to me for a moment that Phin might be upset. Shocked. Yes.
Scandalized. Disgusted. But not upset.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just…”
He shook his head. His beautiful blond hair fell across his face and then parted again to reveal an expression of grim, heartbreaking bravery. “It’s fine,” he said.
“I’m glad you told me.”
There was a beat of silence. I couldn’t work out what to do. I had Phin’s full attention. But I’d hurt him. I looked at his big, suntanned hands twisted together in his lap and I wanted to pick them up, caress them, hold them to my lips, kiss the pain away. I felt a terrible surge of physical desire rising through me, from the very roots of me, an agonizing longing. I turned my gaze quickly from his hands to the ground between my bare feet.
“Will you tell your mum?” I said eventually.
He shook his head. The hair fell again and hid his face from me.
“It would kill her,” he said very simply.
I nodded, as though I knew what he meant. But really, I didn’t. I was only thirteen. And I was a young thirteen. I knew that I’d found the sight of Birdie and David kissing passionately in their nightclothes disgusting. I knew that it was wrong that a married man should be kissing a woman who was not his wife. But I couldn’t quite extrapolate those feelings beyond me. I could not imagine how that might make another person feel. I did not really understand why Sally would want to die because her husband had kissed Birdie.
“Will you tell your sister?”
“I’m not fucking telling anybody,” he snapped. “Christ. And you mustn’t either. Seriously. Don’t tell anyone. Don’t do anything unless I tell you to. OK?”
I nodded again. I was out of my depth and glad to follow Phin’s lead.
The moment was falling away from me; I could feel it. I could tell Phin was about to stand up and go indoors and that he wasn’t going to invite me to go in with him and that I would be left here on the bench staring at the back of the
house with it all still blowing about inside me, all the wanting and the needing and the red raw desiring. And I knew that despite what had just happened, we’d go back to normal, back to the place of mutual polite reserve.
“Let’s go out today,” I said breathlessly. “Let’s do something.”
He turned to look at me. He said, “Have you got any money?”
“No. But I can get some.”
“I’ll get some, too,” he said. “I’ll meet you in the hall at ten.”
He stood then and he left. I watched him go, watched the shape of his spine under his T-shirt, the breadth of his shoulders, his big feet hitting the ground, the tragic hang of his beautiful head.
I found a handful of coins in the pockets of my father’s Barbour. I took two pounds from my mother’s purse. I combed my fringe and put on a jersey zip-up jacket that my mother had bought for me a few weeks before from a cheap shop on Oxford Street, which was about a hundred times nicer than anything I ever got from Harrods or Peter Jones.
Phin sat in his throne at the foot of the staircase with a paperback book in his hand. To this day, this is how I always picture Phin—except in my fantasies he lowers the book and he looks up at me and his eyes light up at the sight of me and he smiles. In reality he barely acknowledged my arrival.
He stood, slowly, then glanced around the house furtively. “Coast clear.” He gestured for me to follow him through the front door.
“Where are we going?” I asked, chasing after him breathlessly.
I watched him raise his arm into a salute and move toward the curb. A taxi pulled over and we got in.
I said, “I can’t afford to pay for taxis. I’ve only got two pounds fifty.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said coolly. He pulled a roll of ten-pound notes from his jacket pocket and cocked an eyebrow at me.
“Jesus! Where did you get that from?”
“My dad’s secret stash.”
“Your dad has a secret stash?”
“Yup. He thinks no one knows about it. But I know everything.”
“Won’t he notice?”
“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not. Either way there’s no way of proving who took it.”
The taxi dropped us on Kensington High Street. I looked up at the building in front of us: a long façade, a dozen arched windows above, the words “KENSINGTON MARKET” in chrome letters. I could hear music coming from the main entrance, something metallic, pounding, disturbing. I followed Phin inside and found myself in a terrifying rabbit warren of winding corridors, each home to multiple tiny shops, fronted by blank-faced men and women with rainbow hair, black-rimmed eyes, ripped leather, white lips, shredded chiffon, fishnets, studs, platforms, nose piercings, face piercings, dog collars, quiffs, drapes, net petticoats, peroxide, pink gingham, PVC thigh-high boots, pixie boots, baseball jackets, sideburns, beehives, ballgowns, black lips, red lips, chewing gum, eating a bacon roll, drinking tea from a floral teacup with a black-painted pinkie fingernail held aloft, holding a ferret wearing a studded leather lead.
Each shop played its own music; thus the experience was of switching through channels on the radio as we walked. Phin touched things as we passed: a vintage baseball jacket, a silky bowling shirt with the word Billy embroidered on the back, a rack of LPs, a studded leather belt.
I didn’t touch anything. I was terrified. Incense billowed from the next little shop we passed. A woman sitting outside on a stool with white hair and white skin looked up at me briefly with icy blue eyes and I clutched my heart.
In the next stall a woman sat with a baby on her lap. I could not imagine that this was a good place for a baby to be.
We wandered the corridors of this strange place for an hour. We bought bacon rolls and very strong tea from a weird café on the top floor and watched people.
Phin bought himself a black-and-white printed scarf of the type worn by men in the Sahara, and some seven-inch singles of music I’d never heard of. He tried to persuade me to let him buy me a black T-shirt with illustrations of snakes and swords on it. I declined, although part of me rather liked it. He tried on a pair of blue suede shoes with crêpey soles which he referred to as brothel creepers. He looked at himself in a full-length mirror, pulled his curtained hair away from his
face, and turned it into a quiff, rendering him suddenly a beautiful 1950s heartthrob, Montgomery Clift crossed with James Dean.
I bought myself a bootlace tie with a silver ram’s head. It was two pounds. It was slid into a paper bag by a man who looked like a punk cowboy.
We emerged an hour later into the normality of a Saturday morning, of families shopping, people getting on and off buses.
We walked for a mile into Hyde Park, where we sat on a bench.
“Look,” said Phin, unfurling the fingers of his right hand.
I looked down at a small crumpled clear bag. Inside the small bag were two tiny
squares of paper.
“What is that?” I asked.
“It’s acid,” he replied.
I didn’t understand.
“LSD,” he said.
I had heard of LSD. It was a drug, something to do with hippies and
hallucinating.
My eyes widened. “What? But how…? Why?”
“The guy in the record shop. He just sort of told me he had it. I didn’t ask. I think he thought I was older than I am.”
I stared at the tiny squares of paper in the tiny bag. My mind swam with the implications. “You’re not going to…?”
“No. At least, not today. But some other time, maybe? When we’re at home?
You up for it?”
I nodded. I was up for anything that meant I could spend time with him.
Phin bought us sandwiches in a posh hotel overlooking the park. They came on plates with silver rims, and a knife and fork. We sat by a tall window and I wondered how we appeared: the tall, handsome man-boy, his tiny baby-faced friend in a scruffy jersey jacket.
“What do you think the grown-ups are doing now?” I asked.
“I couldn’t give a shit,” said Phin.
“They might have called the police.”
“I left a note.”
“Oh,” I said, surprised by this act of conformity. “What did it say?”
“It said ‘Me and Henry are going out, we’ll be back later.’”
Me and Henry. My heart leapt.
“Tell me what happened in Brittany?” I asked. “Why did you all leave?”
He shook his head. “You don’t want to know.”
“No, I do want to know. What happened?”
He sighed. “It was my dad. He took something that wasn’t his. Then he said, oh, you know, I thought we were all supposed to be sharing everything, but this was, like, a family heirloom. It was worth about a thousand pounds. He just took it into town, sold it, then pretended he’d seen ‘someone’ break into the house and steal it. Kept the money hidden away. The father found out through the grapevine. All hell let loose. We were turfed out the next day.” He shrugged. “And other stuff too. But that was the main thing.”
I suddenly understood his lack of guilt about taking his father’s money.
David claimed to be making a lot of money running his exercise classes, but really, how much money could you make out of a handful of hippies in a church hall twice a week? Could he have sold something of ours from under our noses?
He’d already brainwashed my mother into letting him handle our family finances.
Maybe he was taking money directly out of our bank account. Or maybe this was the money that my mother thought was going to charity to help poor people.
All my vague misgivings about David Thomsen began to coalesce into something hard and real.
“Do you like your dad?” I asked, fiddling with the cress on the side of my plate.
“No,” he said simply. “I despise him.”
I nodded, reassured.
“How about you?” he said. “Do you like your dad?”
“My dad is weak,” I replied, knowing with a burning clarity that this was true.
“All men are weak,” said Phin. “That’s the whole bloody trouble with the world. Too weak to love properly. Too weak to be wrong.”
My breath caught at the power of this statement. I immediately knew it to be the truest thing I’d ever heard. The weakness of men lay at the root of every bad
thing that had ever happened.
I watched Phin peel two ten-pound notes from his wad to pay for the expensive sandwiches. “I’m really sorry I can’t pay you back,” I said.
He shook his head. “My father’s going to take everything you own and then break your life. It’s the least I can bloody do.”
