Читать книгу Agency Blue - Alex Smith - Страница 5

What happened when Joe Blue’s reggae

playlist ticked over to “Not Until” as he drew

Cape Town and Kitty’s eccentric friends Tallulah,

Grace and Angel, who had received

a very odd postcard which turned out to

be a clue in the grand adventure

PSSSST! “Hey, Kitty …”

On the way out of the office, Kitty, camcorder in hand as usual, was spotted by Citron van der Bijl. Kitty tried to pretend she hadn’t heard her.

Three apartments were crammed into the upper floor of number sixty-four Church Street, a building in the old heart of Cape Town which Joe Blue always coloured in Sun No.5, Sun On Wheat. It stood between a Kurdish restaurant and an antique shop. On the ground floor, behind a metal gate and a cluster of forest ferns, delicious monsters and other leafy plants, was an entrance hall with a marble checkerboard-pattern floor which housed a hat shop, La Chapelline. The building and a few others in the street were still the property of the Central Methodist Church.

The smallest apartment on the upper floor consisted of only one room and a shower cubicle and was occupied by the office of Agency Blue. To the left, and accessible from the office through an interleading door, was the three-roomed apartment which was home to Felix, Elsa and Kitty. To the right of Agency Blue lived Professor Loïc van der Bijl and his granddaughter, Citron.

A life history for Loïc bubbled up in Joe Blue’s imagination, and though he thought it all, he didn’t draw it all into his comic. That was the difficult part of being a comic artist and a writer – choosing what to put in and what to leave out. In the end, more got left out than put in, but Joe Blue relished imagining worlds and people, and making up back stories was part of the fun.

Loïc, an Afrikaans geologist and physicist, had once worked for a mining corporation in the DRC. Now the old white man was master of a reggae universe called Child of a King. He dealt in reggae CDs and ran a small shop out of his apartment. He was the person who vouched for Kitty’s dad Felix when Felix was still an illegal immigrant and was trying to rent an apartment in Church Street.

PSSSST! “Kitty, I’ve been wondering,” said the kid who sat perched on the balustrade outside her granddad’s apartment. “Was Felix’s body all blown up after he died? Was he blue?” Hidden beneath Citron’s quizzical expression was a smile that tweaked at the corners of her small lips stained Sky No.11, Blue Before Dark, by a berry-flavoured lollipop.

“Jeez, Citron, have you got zero EQ?” As far as Kitty knew, the kid was no more than ten, but whenever Kitty saw her, Citron was engrossed in books on advanced science or works of literary fiction that a person three times her age might struggle to comprehend. “You can’t ask—”

CREEAK! The door to the van der Bijl’s apartment opened a sliver and Loïc peered out. He confronted the emptiness outside his door with a furtive grimace as if expecting hostile presences in that dim wooden passage. Kitty greeted him to dodge any further discussion of Citron’s insensitive question. Loïc cleared his throat and dabbed sweat from his cheeks with a hanky shaded Edible Green No.4, Green Pepper.

“Mad Professor. ‘Dub Me Crazy’,” he said of the track just started up inside his shop, which had been closed for the past few days. He laughed for a while, then stopped when his lungs seized. Breathing with asthmatic difficulty, he said, “Kitty, where’s Elsa? There is something I need to—”

Knowing that van der Bijl was also one of Felix’s clients and dreading that she might hear another request for information, Kitty interrupted him. “I’m so sorry, Professor, I’m in a terrible hurry. I’ll be back very soon. I’ll speak to my mother, and we – I mean she – can schedule a meeting for tomorrow and in the meantime I’ll – I mean she’ll – go through your file.”

The professor cocked his head and blinked, curious. Before he could say more, Kitty hastened down the stairs. She’d pressed the “on” button and filmed the moving tips of her cowboy boots filled in with Sky No.4, Violet Before Moonrise, as if they contained toes other than her own. Usually they did; they were her mother’s boots. Kitty liked wearing them, though. They made her feel older and more powerful. The stairs ended, the pointed shoes moved from wood to marbled floor.

TIP-CLIP-TIP-CLIP-TIP-CLIP-PLASH THUD! “Oh, la la!” said a woman’s voice.

In the entrance hall Kitty and her camera had collided with a bunch of moving flowers. Behind the bunch was Mrs Gumede, once an opera singer and now the owner of the hat shop.

Mrs Gumede was carrying a stone vase of white lilies. After skirting around Kitty, Mrs Gumede set the arrangement on a column at the entrance to her shop. Kitty had not seen her since Felix’s death.

“Haven’t seen your mother all week,” Mrs Gumede said. She tried to dodge the relentless lens of Kitty’s camcorder as it zoomed in on her lips. It was true, Elsa had not left the upper floor of number sixty-four since Chief Detective Dupeer of the Caledon Square Police Station had delivered the grim news. She had not even attended the service for Felix’s cremation. Kitty had to keep the urn with her dad’s ashes in her bedroom because when her mother first saw it, she broke down in a fit of screaming. After a doctor had come to tranquillise her, Elsa had instructed Kitty: “Keep those ashes out of my sight. Ashes are of no use to me: I want my husband alive, not in a jar.”

Mrs Gumede covered her mouth with her hand and shook her head. Her countenance contrived a death-mask horror.

She must know, thought Kitty, wishing she hadn’t agreed to emerge from her safe haven. Kitty kept walking, hoping to glide by the inquisitive old harridan.

HISS! “Sso.” Two Mrs Gumedes uttering a sibilant “s” clutched crucifixes hanging from their necklaces, crossed themselves and shook their heads. “It is a terrible thing your father has done, Kitty. I am very sorry for you,” they said. One was flesh and smelled of musty bdellium, the other was glass, a reflection of Mrs Gumedes in a gilded mirror that stood against a wall. “I want to know everything,” they said in a whisper, as if it was all too sinful to say out loud. “How did it happen? Tell me.”

In the viewfinder, Kitty could see herself nodding in the mirror, and the self she saw was focusing on the self she saw to infinity and all of those selves were certain that there must be a mistake. What happened couldn’t have happened. It couldn’t be real, it couldn’t be. No, it was impossible.

Joe Blue knew how it felt to feel like Kitty felt, to wonder how on earth a thing that happened had happened and why. He knew how it felt to be confounded and perplexed by one of life’s bad turns, to think it must be impossible, surely. Surely?

His mom and dad had been killed in a taxi accident. His mom had been pregnant at the time; it would have been another girl, some doctor had said, and if it had been just a few weeks later, maybe that girl would have survived. It all took place on just another rainy day along the N2 to Khayelitsha, and it was just another accident like the many in the news that most people say shame and how horrible about, but in truth can’t spare a care over because they’re maxed to the limit with their own worries.

But Joe Blue couldn’t believe it: one day his parents were there telling stories, giving hugs, eating dinner, smiling, there, there to speak to about things of consequence and things of no consequence, and in the tiniest instant, on account of the smallest of mistakes, a bad decision, carelessness, on account of a driver being too much in a hurry, the next day his parents and his unborn sister were forever gone. Joe Blue often thought of that kid, hurried from this life; his sister, the angel.

Outside Kitty’s window, December was bereft of its summer. A few days before, the temperature had been close on forty degrees, and then the south-easter came up and after that winter seemed to have returned.

Joe Blue drew a confused heaven in colours of Sky No.10, Summer Noon, and Sky No.12, Dirty Cumulonimbus. Earlier there had been rain. Chairs and paving glistened with water drops the size of tears. It was rush hour at the market. Stalls with tables of oddments and antiques bustled with shoppers.

THWIPPP! A waiter from Café Mozart tossed starched gingham cloths over tables beneath umbrellas. Another put bunches of orange and pink silk tiger lilies into the rope fence that cordoned off the eatery from the street. Kitty shivered as she walked by a table piled with vintage summer dresses, shoes and clutch bags. The stall proprietor was busy with a customer and didn’t notice her, a relief; she had escaped another pair of sorrowful eyes telling her how awful the situation was.

CLINK-SUCK-MMMM. “That’s so good.”

It distressed Kitty to see a pair of lovers sharing a malva pudding with custard in the Africa Image café’s outside enclosure: her parents used to do that, and she realised they never would again. Umojah’s music floated from the café with striped walls (Sky No.5, Evening Pink; Edible Green No.6, Lime Skins; and Sun No.4, Sunset Orange), multi-printed Congolese table cloths and Zambia Lili coffee percolating. Jolly coloured strings of plastic bottle tops hung like bead curtains around the enclosure and fluttered in spasmodic breaths from the wind known as the Cape Doctor. The bright café with its flamingo caged in papier mâché was unbearably happy for Kitty, whose mood teetered between disbelief and devastation.

At the antiquarian book stall outside Bukhara, the Indian restaurant, she made the mistake of stopping to look, as was her usual habit, at the leather-bound poetry books with gilt-panelled spines and foxed endpapers. Browsing through these old books had been one of Felix’s cherished pastimes.

“Poor Elsa,” said the white mama tending the stall. She looked like Joe Blue’s art teacher at the University of Cape Town and was dressed in a sleeveless chiffon ball gown which showed her arms, plump enough to jiggle. The mama bustled between her table and that of the neighbouring silver-and-linen seller, and came to give Kitty a hug. “Poor, Kitty, I’m so sorry. It’s horrible. I just don’t understand. How did it happen?”

Instead of answering the question, Kitty held up her camcorder, superzoomed to the dried lipstick flesh of that woman’s mouth, and said: “Ask me again. I’m making a documentary called How Horrible.”

The manager at Café Mozart spotted Kitty too. She came running over and would have hugged Kitty if the camera hadn’t got in the way. “You’ll be okay, Kitty.” The manager at Café Mozart in the comic looked a lot like the real manager at Joe Blue’s Café Mozart where he often went to play cards with his patron, Ellis, his brother Ebenezer and his girlfriend. “Shame, Kitty,” the manager of Café Mozart said. “Tell me, what happened?”

Didn’t they realise that the last thing Kitty felt like doing was talk about it? People had been phoning and they all asked the same questions. At first she had wanted to talk about it to process what she couldn’t believe, but now her brain did not want to go through it all again. “Mrs Gumede was asking about it too.”

The manager of Café Mozart tried to look over the lens and at Kitty, but Kitty didn’t want to face her and held the camera higher, so the manager said on the screen: “Your dad was a prince of a man. Don’t you worry what that gossip with her head in the hats says.”

The bookstall mama nodded. “She’s a snoop, that woman. For five years Felix bought books from me and I know he was a good man.”

Kitty supposed that by now everyone at the market must know the circumstances of Felix’s death, no doubt due to Mrs Gumede’s big mouth. Floors and walls were thin in their Victorian apartment block. That’s why Kitty knew quite a bit about her dad’s business, and that’s why at night they used to fall asleep to the sound of reggae on the left and belly-dancing music on the right, and the smells of shish kebab and nan bread cooking in the restaurant in the next block. Mrs Gumede must have overheard the discussion with Detective Dupeer. On more than one occasion, Felix had remarked that he never conducted meetings at the Agency Blue office because he’d once caught Mrs Gumede eavesdropping.

“Here,” said the bookstall mama. She brought out a bag of chocolate brownies. “I made them to cheer you up.”

Kitty lowered the camera. “That was very sweet. Thanks.”

Kitty moved on from the bookseller. She turned left into Burg Street and walked, staring down at the camera’s screen, towards Greenmarket Square. In better times she’d relished strolling around the cobblestoned square between the drum-sellers and she’d always enjoyed the smells of the place too. But that day they were cloying and made her queasy: the market’s teak menagerie of carved elephants, rhinos, giraffes, leopards and hippos, the stink of Nugget – the boot polish used to shine them up – and the strawy reek of the appendages around worm-eaten tribal masks, musty kente cloth, frangipani incense and then samoosas and hotdogs with cheap ketchup and oily bunny-chow-filling – onions and stockfish and curry – being fried over a Cadac stove at a makeshift take-away stand. That day, the sheer life of it all was suffocating.

Joe Blue drew Kitty gasping in a cloud of wafting scents and sadness as she looked up at the Central Methodist Church. He made its High Victorian arches and spires especially jagged, almost claw-like and capable of slashing open the clouds.

CLIP-CLOP-CLIP-CLOP. Two mounted police officers trotted past her on chestnut horses. As she walked towards Shortmarket Street, the owner of the Pannekoek Paleis pancake box waved to catch her attention, but Kitty was consumed with her cowboy boots moving over the old stones, striding through the frames of How Horrible. The icing-sugar smell of the Pannekoek Paleis stuck in Kitty’s throat and she thought she might be sick.

Kitty forced her way through stall after stall, not daring to look up at anyone. Outside the Africa Wax and Locks hairdressing salon she climbed into a minibus taxi called Summer Lovin with a Green Point destination sign in its window. Two other men got into the taxi and when they’d paid, the driver revved Summer’s engine and pulled away.

CHUK VRRRRRRMMM! Joe filled a frame with the taxi’s sounds.

PAARP PAARP! SKREEE.

ZOOOM!

VRRRRMMM! Without indicating, the driver veered across a lane of traffic. TOOT! TOOT! SCREETCH! He stopped beneath a no-stopping sign. “There you go, beautiful.”

“Cool.” Kitty got out and walked up the steep and chilly road towards the awnings of La Petite Tarte coloured a notable shade of Sky No.7, Deep Blue Of Night. Unseasonable December rain seemed imminent. Through the glass front door she saw three familiar faces: the AKs, the members of the African Kids’ Comic Club, were sitting at the restaurant’s alcove table with velvet cushions and French toile wall-cladding behind them. Other walls were covered in paintings and photographs of dancers and families and historic architecture. Kitty turned off her camera. The AKs would not tell Kitty how sorry they were or ask for details about how it all happened.

The owner of the establishment was pulling a tray of warm apple tartlets from the oven. Above her were shelves of tea caddies; candles flickered in a white metal chandelier.

Inside the place smelled of double cappuccinos, chocolate spread, marzipan, spices and the polished parquet floor. Billie Holiday was crooning about moons that “ain’t got no time for blueing”.

“Allo, Kitty,” said the owner, a one-time Paris catwalk model, who wore a heart on her sleeve. In the middle of the heart Joe Blue wrote a name: Ebenezer. His brother Ebenezer was smitten with the real owner of the real patisserie.

“Mwah, mwah!” She blew Kitty many kisses as she arranged her tarts on a cooling tray. “Oh, la, la, Kitty. Your boots are beautiful! So sexy, eh!”

“Over here,” called Angelique Mashamba, Angel for short, self-proclaimed leader of the AKCC.

Angel. Joe Blue thought again of that kid sister, gone from his life before she even came into his life; he wondered what she’d be like: what would be her idea of perfect happiness, what would be her favourite food, her favourite film, her favourite journey, what living person would she most admire. One thing was sure, she’d be a beauty, no matter what she looked like, and of course, she’d be a graphic novel addict.

As usual, Angel had raided her mother’s safe and wardrobe. Angel’s gold bracelets, glossy curls and diamond rings glimmered in the yellow warmth of the patisserie as she beckoned Kitty to join them at the table. Her gold was bright, heavenly – Joe Blue coloured it Sun No.2, February Rays of Illumination – and her skin was rich – Earth No.2, Paradise Valley Brown.

Kitty wasn’t surprised to see fellow Comic Club member Grace Vuma swathed in her black, floor-length riding coat in the unusually chilly summer weather. Grace was the eldest; she’d recently celebrated her eighteenth birthday, and started a degree in Media Studies at the University of Cape Town. It was the same degree Kitty planned to do, but unlike Kitty, who wanted to make documentaries, Grace wanted to write films with adventure, love, horror and drama; all the things that a young woman craves, films with stories that would make a person happy and sad at the same time, tales into which to escape.

In a page-high, skinny block outlined with bones and spines, and entitled “Back Story”, Joe wrote about how Grace planned to write a film based on the true life story of an Irish girl pirate called Grace O’Malley who was brave and beautiful and mysterious, independent and witty: an iconoclast. Grace had come from a dysfunctional home – her father was richer than Croesus and her mother, a TV producer, spent most nights snorting coke at parties in Joburg. Grace preferred to live in their apartment in Cape Town.

As Kitty approached the table, Grace lit a cigarette. The café owner wagged her finger at Grace. After kissing Kitty hello and rolling her eyes at the copy of Twilight sticking out of Kitty’s bag, Grace slunk outside and relit her cigarette. Even in the cool weather, the little café’s glass doors were folded back, so Grace wasn’t cut off from the conversation.

“For goodness’ sake, Grace,” Tallulah Ruby called to the eighteen-year-old glamour-puss loitering with the cigarette at the café’s roadside tables. “You’re going to get cancer.” The two puppies nestling in Tallulah’s lap growled in agreement.

“Kid, you sound like my grandmother. She’s always saying that.”

“Well then, stop smoking.” Vegas and Sinatra agreed again.

“There’s no point in living, kid, if you can’t have fun.” Grace had heard that often enough; it was her mother’s anthem. Grace’s mom phoned her often, but Grace couldn’t remember when last she’d actually seen her.

“Great boots,” said Angel to Kitty as they kissed each other on both cheeks.

Until Grace had moved on to university, the four girls of AKCC had all attended the same school in Cape Town. They were all comic-lovers and aficionados of the graphic novel.

“Say hello to my new puppies,” Tallulah said, tickling Vegas and Sinatra under their chins. “Aren’t they sweetie-pies?”

“I’m in love,” said Angel, not about the dogs though: she was inspecting a feature on the stars of Twilight in the latest edition of Teen Vogue.

Grace rolled her eyes again and sucked on her cigarette. “What’s with all this Twilight, huh? You girls are supposed to be cool; how come you like it so much? They’re not even proper vampires. If you’re going to be into vampires and not zombies – who are obviously a kazillion times cooler – at the very least read True Blood … But frankly vampires suck, unless they’re with Rosario, or …”

The others ignored Grace’s rant; it was no good trying to win her over to Twilight, and she could never in a zillion years convince them of the direness of vampires in general and that Edward fellow in particular.

Grace muttered on: “Ja, or that chick from Let the Right One In – now there’s a vampire worth her teeth.”

“Mother’s giving me the Twilight graphic novel for Christmas,” Angel said, knowing this would irk Grace.

“Blegh! That thing doesn’t even deserve to be called a graphic novel. It’s a travesty – the illustrator’s too damn lazy to even draw grass, just photoshops in some real grass.”

“What sort of dogs are they?” Kitty rubbed one pup’s nose.

“Pavement specials.” Tallulah smiled up at Kitty from under her suede peak cap. “The little girl has rickets, but I’ll get her right.”

“Can I hold one?” Kitty gathered up a caramel-and-white puppy with the square face of a Boxer and the body of a Bull Mastiff.

Trying not to be weird about Kitty’s “situation”, trying to pretend like things were the same as before, Angel and Tallulah continued a conversation they’d been having about age. It was prompted by Grace’s most recent heartbreak: a handsome, arrogant, thirty-something director friend of her mother’s who’d told her when she confessed her love for him via SMS with several x’s worth of kisses that she was a cute kid, but too young for his taste.

“I can’t believe how old my mother is,” Tallulah said. “She always hides her age, but I saw her passport today. She’s ancient.”

Barely listening, Kitty held Vegas close to her chest and kissed the puppy on her head. She smelled of Johnson’s No More Tears shampoo.

“Do you know that she’ll be forty-nine next year?” Tallulah said, amazed a person could live to be that old. She ruffled Sinatra’s ears.

“Crabby old loser.” Grace muttered, thinking of the heartless, gorgeous, sexy director again. One last time, she imagined kissing him, then dropped her cigarette in an abandoned cappuccino cup and came inside.

“Please,” Angel said. “Your mom’s a spring chicken. Look at Madonna – she’s about a hundred and she’s still famous.”

Grace snorted. “Famous-schmamous. Her music’s a drag. I’ve been listening to some super cool Indie stuff lately.” She sat down and dished out a choice selection of manga comics – First Girl, Aflame Inferno, Full Metal Alchemist and Rosario+Vampire from her exhaustive stash.

She said, “Kids, we have to celebrate New Year in style this year. I think we should splurge: hire a limo, go clubbing or eat king crabs and drink champagne. Or maybe do one of those sunset cruises …”

Evidently, Sinatra agreed; he woofed and licked Tallulah’s face.

A petite waitress approached the kids with her notepad. “What can I get you ladies?”

“The usual for all,” Angel said.

“No, not for me.” Kitty still felt nauseous. She gave Vegas one last kiss on the head and returned the pup to Tallulah’s lap. “I can’t eat a chocolate croissa—”

“Ignore her,” Grace told the waitress. “Kitty, always remember what the narrator said in X-Files#7: ‘And all the while, the computers dreamed of zeros and ones – unable to imagine a two’.”

“Huh? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means of course you can eat a chocolate croissant.”

Joe Blue paused to tickle Sinatra. He couldn’t resist putting them in, like he couldn’t resist writing his friends and relatives into his stories, and playing Robin Hood when he did: making them super-rich, super-beautiful and somehow solving all their problems. He chuckled as he wrote in the next bit of dialogue.

“We should do Christmas dinner and New Year dinner on a yacht,” Grace said. “Why not? And then we’ll hit the clubs after dinner, in time for midnight, and play high-stakes blackjack before dawn at the secret casino in Long Street.” She held out her hand. “Let me see.” She examined the picture of the Twilight stars with disdain. “So, are you all up for clubbing? And maybe a big dinner at your Mount Nelson Hotel …”

Kitty felt worse than bad, not because she wasn’t allowed to go clubbing, but because it was her dad who had forbidden it. How could things have gone so wrong? Kitty stared at the puppies. What did I do wrong?, she wondered. Everything was going so well. Only a few days before she’d overheard her parents discussing the possibility of having another baby; Kitty would have loved to have a sister.

“Another tragedy,” Angel was reading about the divorce of a glittery Hollywood couple. “There are so many these days, I’m losing count.”

There was a knock on Joe’s studio door and the real Beatrice came in. “Lunchtime, Joe.” She put a plate in front of him.

“Wow, that sandwich looks epic, Beatrice. Thanks.”

As he bit into the award-winning sandwich, Joe thought it deserved a place in his story …

A hot sweet smell drifted on the breeze and Vegas turned her head towards its source. Three chairs down at their communal table, a man bit into a slice of egg toast loaded with honey, banana, farm cream and sprinkled with nuts. A cheap burger would be a zillion times more tasty than that delicious-looking creation if only Felix were there too, thought Kitty, closing her eyes. Her dad had been so magical. He was so wise and funny, and he always had the answers, and his answers were always so unexpected because he saw more of the world than most people ever noticed. She loved him so much, she just couldn’t believe it was all over and he would never tell her another story again. Please come back, Dad. Her last memory of him was going up in the elevator in their apartment block, and she’d been very sleepy and had rested her head against his chest, and he’d stroked her hair and told her a story.

When the sandwich was gone, Joe wiped the cream and honey from his fingers, picked up a pen, decided it would be better not to include his lunch in the story and set about drawing Kitty instead.

“I’m not going anywhere on New Year’s Eve,” Kitty said. “And I definitely don’t want to eat crab!”

“When my mother’s second husband, Angus, died,” said Tallulah, “all she wanted to do was to stay in that hotel room and never ever leave it again.” Tallulah’s hands rested thoughtfully in mid-caress under the belly of Vegas and on Sinatra’s shoulders.

“Which is precisely what she did,” said Grace with a droll smile. “The two of you have been living at the Mount Nelson ever since the old pangolin’s heart gave in. What is it, four years now?”

“Yes, but this is about Kitty. Girl, you can’t stay in and evanesce; you must seize life.”

“Quite right,” Grace said. “Clubbing on New Year and a banquet it is then.”

“Hear, hear,” said Tallulah, and Sinatra barked his agreement too. “I don’t think you’ll be allowed there, Frankie,” she said to Sinatra. “It’s too fancy for a mutt like you.”

From the tips of her toes crushed into her cowboy boots an unexpected rage surged through Kitty. “NO! Are you crazy? There’s no way I can ask my mother for a thousand rand to spend on a dinner. Is this the emergency you called me here for? You lot have no idea, you’re so spoiled … How can you think about New Year’s Eve? Is that all there is? Just food, clothes, clubbing and … and boys.” GASP SNIFF! Kitty covered her face to hide her tears. “Do you have any idea how much work Felix has left behind? My mother can’t do it, she’s turned into some kind of tranquilliser addict. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“Now, now!” Grace wrapped her long arms around Kitty’s shoulders and held her tight. She almost said everything will be okay but didn’t because everything wasn’t okay and she had no idea whether it would be. “Kid, you know my grandma on my father’s side was originally from the Cape Verde islands before she moved to London? Just like the barefoot diva Cesaria Evora – and Cesaria says ‘Work is work and cognac is cognac.’ There has to be a balance. Confucius agrees.”

“What are you on about, Grace?” Tallulah said as the waitress set bowls of hot chocolate and a basket of croissants between the girls.

Grace unwrapped her arms from around Kitty, who took one look at all the food and thought she might throw up. “I’m sorry,” Kitty said to the waitress. “Could I rather just have mint tea, please?”

Vegas tried her luck. “Bad girl, Vegas!” Tallulah pulled the puppy down from the table.

After the waitress had gone, Grace patted Kitty’s hand. “Christmas and New Year are my treat, Kitty, my gift to the Comic Club if you like. Of course there’s more to life than clubbing and four-star chefs. We just want to cheer you up.”

“You should see a head-shrinker, a counsellor,” Grace continued to Kitty. “I’m not going to nag on about it, but I’ve spoken to people who’ve been through all kinds of violence and if you don’t see anyone now, it’ll come back. Post-traumatic stress disorder is very real; as real as this chocolate croissant. But I won’t say another word, I know you don’t want to talk about it.”

Seizing his opportunity, Sinatra attempted to launch an attack on the basket of chocolate croissants. “Sinatra!” Tallulah caught him by the scruff.

“One last thing, kid,” Grace said to Kitty. “Please, please, don’t feel responsible. When a person commits suici—”

“He didn’t!” shouted Kitty. “I don’t believe it. It doesn’t make sense.”

Trying to sound soothing but firm, Tallulah said, “But you have a suicide note. Didn’t that police detective give you a note from your father?”

Earlier Kitty hadn’t wanted to talk, but now it came out in a flood. “Yes, a poem, by one of my mother’s favourite poets, Léopold Sédar Senghor – ‘Et nous baignerons, mon amie … And we shall be bathed, my friend’. Why write that? There is something wrong. I know it! Why would he kill himself? We were so happy. Wouldn’t I know if my dad was unhappy?”

“Don’t blame yourself, kid,” said Grace. “It’s not your fault.”

“In fact, Kitty, I think you’re right.” Angel reached into her mother’s designer python-skin handbag. “Look at the date stamp.” Angel handed Kitty a postcard. “I received it this morning. Your dad must have posted it to me on the day he died.”