Читать книгу Constance - Rosie Thomas - Страница 10

‘Nearly there,’ Bill said unnecessarily, but in any case Jeanette’s head was turned away from him. She seemed to be admiring the bitter green of the hawthorn hedge and the froth of cow parsley standing up from the verge. It had rained earlier in the day but now the sky was washed clear, and bars of sunshine striped the tarmac where field gates broke the line of the hedge. ‘Nearly there,’ he repeated. Conscious of the bumps in the road, he tried to drive as smoothly as he could so she wouldn’t be jarred with pain.

Their house was at the end of a lane, behind a coppice of tall trees. Jeanette had found it, two years after Noah was born, and insisted that they buy it. Bill would have preferred to be closer to town but in the end he had given way to her, and he had to concede that she had been right. They had lived there for more than twenty years. Noah had grown up in the house, had finally left for university and then gone to live in London; Jeanette and he were still there. It would be their last home together. Lately they had talked about moving, maybe into town, to a minimalist apartment with a view of the river, but it had been just talk.

He swung the car past the gateposts and stopped as close as he could to the front door. Jeanette did turn her head now, staring past him and up at the house. It had a steep tiled roof with mansard windows that had always made him think of eyes under heavy lids. A purple-flowered clematis and a cream climbing rose grew beside the front door, the colours harmonising with the dusty red brick of the house. Bill didn’t know the names of the varieties, but Jeanette would. She was a passionate gardener.

He turned off the ignition and the silence enveloped them. He took his wife’s hand and held it. He wanted to crush it, to rub his mouth against the thin skin, somehow revitalising her with his own heat, but he didn’t. He just let her fingers rest in his.

Jeanette’s eyes were on him now.

‘Are you ready to go inside?’ he asked.

She nodded.

He helped her out of the car and she leaned on his arm as they made their way. Once they were in the hallway she indicated that she wanted to stop. The parquet floor was warmed by the late sun, the long-case barometer indicated Fair, there was a pile of unopened post on the oak table next to the big pot of African violets.

‘Good to be home?’ Bill asked.

– Yes, Jeanette said. – Thank you.

But he could feel the rigidity of her arm, and her neck and her spine. Her fingers dug into his wrist. Gently he urged her forwards, thinking that he would establish her in her chair beside the French windows so that she could look out into the garden while he made her a cup of tea. She let him lead her but instead of sinking into her chair she stood and gazed at the room. It looked as it always did.

Her sudden movement startled him.

Jeanette broke away and snatched up a stone paperweight that stood on the glass-topped table. She raised her thin arm above her head and brought it down. There was a crack like a rifle-shot as the glass shattered. She lifted the paperweight once more and smashed it down again, this time catching the rim of a porcelain bowl and sending it spinning to the floor. Jeanette swung the paperweight a third and a fourth time and the tabletop shivered into a crystalline sheet. She kept on and on, her arm pumping in a series of diminishing arcs until she had no strength left.

Appalled, and with a shaft of pain in his own chest that left him breathless, Bill tried to catch her wrists. She threw the paperweight away from her and it thudded and then rolled harmlessly on the rug. She clenched her fists instead and pounded them against Bill’s chest. Her mouth gaped and her head wagged and gusts of ragged sobbing shook her body.

Jeanette had been deaf since birth. The sounds she was making now were shapeless bellows of anguish.

He managed to catch her flailing arms and pin them to her sides.

‘I know,’ he crooned. ‘I know, I know.’

She was gasping for breath, tears pouring down her face and dripping from her chin. She was too weak to sustain the paroxysm of rage. It subsided as quickly as it had come, leaving her shuddering in his arms. Bill stood still and held her, smoothing the tufts of her pale hair. When he thought she could bear it he took out his handkerchief and dried her cheeks. At length he was able to steer her towards the chair and she sank down. He brought up the footstool and sat close against her knees.

Her wrists and fingers were limp now. It cost her a huge effort to speak.

– I don’t want to die.

Her words came as loose, blurted outbursts. Bill was the only person she trusted to decipher what she said. Even with her son, she preferred to use sign language for almost everything.

‘I know,’ he told her. ‘You aren’t going to die yet.’

Jeanette gazed into his face, searching for the truth.

She had always told him, from when they first knew one another, that he was easy to lip-read because he had a generous face. Some people were costive, keeping their lips pinched in and biting their words in half as if they were coins they were unwilling to spend, but not Bill Bunting.

– No?

‘No, you are not,’ he said firmly.

The oncologist had told them that she might have six months. It could be rather less, just conceivably more, but six months was what he thought they should allow.

Her head drooped.

– I’m sorry, she said.

‘It doesn’t matter. It’s a table.’ He smiled at her. If he could have changed places with her, he would have done it gladly.

– For being ill. Leaving you and Noah.

‘You haven’t left us,’ he said. His hands cupped her knees.

The first time he saw Jeanette Thorne was at a student union party. She was with someone else, a mathematician he knew only slightly. The room was crowded and there was barely enough space for leaping up and down to the punk band. Through a thicket of legs he caught a flicker of her red shoes, platform-soled with a strap across the instep. Then she jumped in the air and the hem of her skirt flipped up to reveal the tender pallor of her bare thighs. He had elbowed his way through the sweaty crowd so he could stand behind her to watch, and ever since that moment he had loved the long blade of her shins and the bluish hollow behind her knees.

That was when they were both twenty-one.

Later that evening he had found himself next to her, packed in a wedge of people between the wall and an angle of the bar. He had studied her pale, abstracted profile against the surging crowd. She looked as if she was deep in thought and he had longed to talk to her. In the end he had positioned himself at her shoulder and had murmured something into the bell of blonde hair that swung to her shoulders, some banal question about what she thought of the band. She ignored him, and he had been about to creep away, abashed. Then a girl he knew pressed her elbow into his ribs.

‘That’s Jeanette Thorne. She’s in Biological Sciences. She’s completely deaf, you know. She does everything, just the same. Amazing, really.’

At that moment Jeanette turned her head and for the first time looked straight into his eyes. It was as if she could see into his head, and read the sexual stirring in him before he had even registered it properly himself. Words would have been entirely superfluous. Jeanette’s mouth merely curved in a smile that transformed the dingy bar into some antechamber to Paradise.

‘I am Bill,’ he said.

She placed the flat of her right hand over her breastbone and gently inclined her head. A lock of hair fell forwards and revealed the thick plastic aid that curved behind her ear. Bill wanted nothing more than to lean forward and kiss that faulty ear and tuck her hair back into place.

It was only when he came to know Jeanette much better that he understood that her voluptuous body and her mass of blonde hair were at odds with her personality. Jeanette looked wanton, but she was not. She was too determined to be more than just a deaf girl to let even sex distract her for long.

He fell in love with that contradiction.

– When’s Noah coming?

‘He’ll be here for dinner.’

– Will you tell him?

‘I don’t exactly know yet.’

Noah would have to be told that his mother’s cancer was terminal.

It was a terrible word, that.

They sat with the overturned bowl and the hurled paperweight on the rug beside them, holding on to each other and looking out into the garden as the sun drifted behind the trees. Permanence had turned into fragility. What had been certain was now a series of questions, neither spoken nor answered.

Later, after Jeanette had gone to bed, Bill and Noah sat in the small, cluttered downstairs room that Bill used as his study. They had eaten dinner together, or rather the two men had eaten and Jeanette had made a flattened mound of her food and then placed her knife and fork on top of it.

– I’m tired, she had confessed. Noah made the slow journey upstairs with her, and then came down again to join his father.

Bill poured himself a whisky. ‘The news about Mum isn’t good,’ he began tentatively.

‘What? What do you mean?’ The aggressive edge to Noah’s voice suggested that on some level he had feared this and was now intending to contest the information.

‘The surgeon who did the operation told us this morning. They found when they reached the tumour site that there was only a part of it they could remove.’

The television in the corner was on with the sound muted. Familiar newscaster faces floated between footage of soldiers in Afghanistan and the highlights of a football match. Bill kept his eyes on the screen as he talked because he was as yet unable to look at Noah without the risk of weeping.

‘So there was another part of it that they couldn’t remove? What does that mean? Is she going to die? Is that what you’re trying to say?’ Noah’s voice rose.

With an effort, Bill kept his steady.

‘They think it’s likely to be about six months.’

Noah had a bottle of beer. He rotated it on the arm of his chair, staring as if he hoped each time the label came into sight it might read differently.

‘I don’t understand. Wait a minute. Are they sure? They can’t be certain, can they? I mean, you hear of people who’ve been given a certain amount of time to live and who get better against all the odds?’

The surgeon had been quite precise. Bill did not think he would ever forget the way the man’s hands had rested on the buff folder of Jeanette’s notes, the neutral odour of the room that seemed to have had all the air sucked out of it, and Jeanette sitting upright in her chair intently lip-reading as the doctor delivered his news. She had turned only once or twice to Bill for confirmation.

Bill said, ‘You do hear of that. I don’t want to give you false grounds for optimism, but if you can believe that she will get better, maybe that’s how it will turn out. I don’t know. All I do know is what the specialist told us today. He didn’t leave any room for doubt in my mind. I wish he had done. I wish I could say something different to you.’

There was no rejecting this, after all. Noah was beginning to take in what his father’s words really meant.

He said at length, ‘It doesn’t seem right. Poor Mum.’

The weather man materialised in front of his bands of cloud and clear sunny intervals. They watched the sweep of his arm as he indicated the movement of a front. Weather seemed just as irrelevant as politics or football. Bill drank some of his whisky and the rim of his glass slipped and clinked against his teeth.

‘I can’t get my head round it,’ Noah muttered. ‘It’s not fair, is it?’

Life had a tendency not to be strictly fair, Bill reflected, although Noah was still too young to appreciate precisely how unfair, how meticulously and even poetically unjust it could be.

Noah said after a while, ‘Dad? I’m glad you didn’t decide, you know, that you were going to try and keep it from me. Thanks for telling me straight away. I’d much rather hear than have to guess.’

‘It was your mother who asked me to tell you tonight,’ Bill scrupulously pointed out. He didn’t believe he should take the credit for courageous honesty when most of his instincts had been to keep the truth from his child for as long as possible.

He was used to being the speaking intermediary between Jeanette and Noah, but he had long been aware that he was only valuable on the median level. The simple exchanges, relating to mealtimes or rooms to be tidied or homework to be completed before television was to be watched, those they had easily and naturally dealt with between themselves through a mixture of sign language and lip-reading and a range of facial expressions. It had fallen to Bill to put into words for Noah the more mundane but complex facts – timetables, instructions and information connected with day-to-day living. This responsibility had occasionally, he thought, made him appear duller and more pedestrian in his son’s eyes than he really was. On the deepest level, for those communications that involved the most intense emotions, any intervention from him would have been superfluous. Mother and son had always understood each other and conveyed their responses to one another with a level of fluency that Bill didn’t feel he possessed.

And now, cruelly, there was this. The relaying of more information, tactfully delivered by a concerned doctor, that was nonetheless savage.

Noah didn’t ask about how Jeanette had taken the news, or what her state of mind now appeared to be. This he would find out directly from his mother: Bill understood that.

There was one more piece of information he felt he should convey.

‘Mum’s afraid that she’s letting you down.’

‘Me? How come?’

‘By dying before you are grown up. Before her job’s done, is the way she put it.’

‘But I am grown up,’ Noah said quietly.

At last, Bill’s gaze slid from the television screen to his son’s profile. Noah’s chin was tipped to his chest. Through the mask of adulthood Bill could quite clearly see the child’s underlying features, even the soft curves of babyhood. Was the job ever done? he wondered. Probably not. Jeanette wasn’t quite fifty. No wonder she felt that she was leaving too much undone.

‘What happens now?’ Noah asked.

‘Once she recovers from the hospital and the operation, she won’t be too bad for a while. She may feel almost herself. I was thinking, perhaps we could go on a holiday. Somewhere we’ve never been, so there aren’t comparisons and memories waiting round every corner. Jeanette will have to decide about that, though.’

A holiday? It would be hard to plan a trip to the Loire Valley or Turkey, Noah thought, with the prospect of death so close at hand. But he had no real idea; he had hardly ever thought about death.

‘That sounds like a good idea. And what about you, Dad?’

Bill hadn’t yet had time to put the question to himself. Or perhaps had chosen to evade it.

‘I want to try to make it as easy as I can for her. Whatever’s coming.’

Noah only nodded.

‘I need to ask your advice,’ Bill continued.

‘Go ahead.’

‘Should I tell Constance?’

As soon as he uttered her name it seemed to take on a weight of its own, as if it occupied a physical space between them. Noah shifted a little sideways, away from his father, to make room for it. He rocked the beer bottle on the arm of his chair, still studying it with apparent attention.

‘Tell her that Mum’s ill, you mean? Doesn’t she know?’

‘I haven’t told her.’

And Jeanette certainly would not have done.

Noah considered further. ‘It’s going to be a shock for Connie, if she doesn’t even know that much. I mean, it’s bad enough for us, and we’ve kind of been in on it all along.’

‘The later it’s left, then the worse it will be.’

‘But it’s for Mum to decide. It’s their relationship, isn’t it?’

‘Exactly. It’s Connie’s as well as Mum’s. Don’t you think we should – I should – let her know? Jeanette, you and I, we’re her only family.’

Noah shrugged. Here at last, in this raw new dimension, was a place where he could direct a jet of anger. ‘I don’t care. I only care about Mum. If she doesn’t want Auntie Connie around her, then she doesn’t. Simple as.’ He grabbed the bottle by the neck and tipped it to his mouth.

‘Maybe you’re right,’ Bill said. Half-truths and evasions and unspoken confessions crowded out of history and squeezed into the room with them. Their shadows cut him off from Noah at the moment when he wanted to feel closest to him. Neither of them spoke until Noah sighed and pushed himself to the edge of his chair.

‘Dad, I think I’ll go up. Unless you want me to stay with you? I could make a cup of tea, if you like.’

‘No. Go on up to bed. Get some sleep, if you can. Do you need anything?’

‘No, thanks. I’ll see you in the morning.’

They both stood up. They hesitated, up until now not having had the kind of adult relationship that involved conspicuous hugging or shedding of tears. Noah rested his arm awkwardly round his father’s shoulders and Bill put his hand to the back of the boy’s neck. Noah was the taller by an inch. He inclined his head until their foreheads touched and they shuffled together, a rough two-step of grief. It was Noah who broke away first.

‘We’ll manage, Dad,’ he said.

‘Of course we will.’

Noah hugged him briefly then dashed out of the room.

Bill stood for a moment, then took the empty beer bottle off the arm of the chair and looked round for somewhere to put it. In the end he replaced it on the tray of drinks. He picked up his own glass, sloshed whisky into it and drank it down in one.

In his room, his childhood bedroom, Noah took his mobile phone out of his pocket and studied the display for a moment. Then he laid it on the table next to his bed. He unlaced his trainers and placed them side by side on the floor beneath the table, undid his belt and took off his jeans. He had always been tidy, Jeanette had insisted on that and even after he had left home he had somehow been unable to cure himself of the habit. There was a row of his old paperbacks on a shelf, a couple of posters and some club flyers pasted to the wall. Noah clenched his fist and thumped the wall beside his bed, just once, but hard enough to make him wince. The silence of the house was undisturbed.

Noah lay down in the remainder of his clothes and locked his hands behind his head. The geography of the ceiling, laid out like an enigmatic map, reminded him of being a child. He screwed his eyes shut and then opened them wide, stretching the orbits, but the reality was still there. At length, bringing faint relief, tears rolled out of the corners of his eyes and ran down his temples to soak into his hair.

Roxana was on the stage. She had been nervous when she first started at The Cosmos, but she learned quickly. The two Brazilian girls were the best dancers, which meant that they earned the most money from giving private dances, so she had watched very carefully to see what they did. And then she had copied their best tricks into her own routine.

She slid her body up the pole, slowly winding one leg around it, then tipped her head back and arched her spine until only her heel kept her anchored. Then she whipped herself upright again, raised her chin and slid her hands up the pole to stretch further upwards, up on tiptoe, to her full height. This, she knew from having checked it in the mirrors, made her look hard-bodied and imperious. So next she softened all her muscles and sank onto her heels, bending her neck so that her head nodded like a flower on its stalk. From this vulnerable pose she raised her eyes, as if coming out of a dream, and stared straight into the wall of men who lined the bar. Her gaze would connect with one of them, and stay fixed while she rotated around her pole.

She would play a game with herself, to see if she could compel the customer to walk down to the front of the club and take a private dance.

Roxana caught her bottom lip between her teeth and smiled at the man she had chosen. When she looked away from him, unhooking the front of her black bodice with deliberate twists of her fingers, and then flicked her glance back again, he was still grinning at her.

This one was almost too easy.

She rotated on her pole again, then detached herself for long enough to peel off the bodice. She stood with her naked back to the audience, braced on her high heels, swaying gently to the music. Then she crossed her arms across her front before turning back again, her face lit up with a teasing smile. This dance was almost over.

The girls stripped to their pants on the pole and no further, that was the routine. Nakedness was reserved for the private customers. The spot would blink off and come up on one of the other dancers while Roxana slipped off the stage.

It wasn’t difficult work. The nights were long and the other girls were bitchy, especially the two Brazilians, but Roxana had done worse jobs. It was quite safe, for one thing. Mr Shane’s rule was absolute, customers were never allowed to touch the girls. The law for himself was different, but in the week that she had worked at The Cosmos he had hardly tried anything with her. His preference was for the dark-haired voluptuous girls, not ‘skinny-arsed Russian tarts’, as one of the English dancers had called her backstage, well within her hearing.

‘I am from Uzbekistan,’ Roxana told her flatly, but the girl had only stared though a pall of cigarette smoke and then turned away to laugh.

With her clothes on again, a short black top over a lace bra, she worked her way through the crowd to the bar. Her customer was one of a group of men in suits with ties pulled open at the neck. They had flushed faces, hair that was either shaved to the skull or fixed in little spikes, and they drank beer from bottles that they slapped down on the bar.

She went straight up to him and said, ‘Hello. I am Roxana.’

The other men jostled, grinning and showing their teeth. Heat seemed to rise off the mass of them.

One said, ‘Oi Dave, yer in, mate.’

‘Hello darlin’. Give us a special dance, then.’

She took Dave’s hand and wound past the tables to the chairs at the front in their partially screened alcoves. Only Mr Shane, up in his room behind the one-way mirrors, could see everything that went on in the booths.

‘That will be twenty-five, please,’ she murmured in Dave’s ear before the dance. Her lips almost touched his skin. He took a note out of his wallet and waved it in the air before tucking it inside her garter. It was fifty pounds. Quite often, the men liked to demonstrate to each other how much money they could spend. Roxana thought that was funny, but it worked to her advantage.

She gave him his dance, a really good one. It brought small beads of sweat out on his crimson forehead. The folded note crackled minutely against her skin.

And after Dave, two of his friends wanted private dances too. It was a successful night. When it finally ended, Roxana had earned over three hundred pounds.

Most of the girls took taxis home, but Roxana preferred to save her money. A small wad of notes had already accumulated, wrapped in an old T-shirt that she kept under her mattress. She walked towards the night-bus stop with the hood of her outdoor coat pulled over her head.

Once she was outside the club, the elation brought on by dancing and making men appear to do what she wanted quickly faded.

Tonight she felt hungry and thirsty, and at the same time faintly sick. She hadn’t eaten anything since before work, and then only a banana and some slices of white bread. With a customer she had drunk some of the sweet fizzy wine that passed for champagne, but that had only made her more thirsty. Close to the bus stop there was a twenty-four-hour supermarket so she turned towards it. Through the murky glass the lights showed drained blue or dull orange that made the goods on sale look as if they were coated with a sticky film.

A boy and a girl came out of the shop. They were her age, perhaps younger. The boy was carrying a bag of groceries under one arm and the girl had a round sweet on a stick that she licked and then offered to the boy. They balanced against each other for a second while he closed his mouth on the sweet, making a pop-eyed look at her, and then they danced apart again. They brushed past Roxana and hurried away.

There were few other people in sight, but they all seemed to be couples hurrying home to burrow together in a warm bed.

Loneliness descended like a black bag dropping over her head. Through the shop window she could see shelves stacked with packets and tins but she couldn’t imagine what she was going to buy. Not even the thought of the night’s money zipped against her ribs offered any comfort. She hesitated, then turned away from the shop and walked heavily towards the bus stop.

The house was silent when she let herself in. It was very late; the running feet and slamming doors, even the music, had all subsided. Roxana pressed the timed switch next to the front door and walked quickly up the stairs because the light only stayed on for a few seconds.

Dylan’s door was closed. Then she looked at her own and her breath caught.

The wood was splintered round the lock. There were splits in the panels where someone had kicked them.

She put out her hand and reluctantly pushed, and the door swung open.

Her bed had been tipped over, the mattress now lay beneath the frame and the pillow had been slashed. Her clothes lay scattered and little shards of blue plastic and metal from her transistor radio glinted among them. Her packets of rice and biscuits had been upended and the debris lay on the floor in a swamp of soured milk.

Roxana knelt beside the mattress and felt for the folded T-shirt. She recovered that, but the envelope of money was gone.

She backed out onto the landing. It was hard to work out which felt less safe now: her ripped-apart room, the shadowed stairwell with its stained walls and scrawled graffiti, or the streets outside. Then the light blinked off and left her in darkness.

Roxana shuddered but she made herself keep steady. She felt her way across the landing to Dylan’s door and knocked. Softly at first, and then when there was no response she banged with her clenched first. At last he opened the door and a crack of yellow light shone through.

‘Did you do this?’ Roxana hissed.

She saw at once that he had not. Dylan looked too thin in his holey vest, too scared and fragile himself. His black hair stood up where he had slept on it.

‘Jesus, no. I did not. What d’ye take me for?’

‘Who did, then?’

Dylan shook his head. ‘Dunno.’

She could have gone back into her room and cleared up the mess and found a way to wedge the door shut, but she knew that however much effort she made it wouldn’t be enough to keep the house at bay. Not in her head, anyway.

One thing at a time. Get through this night, first of all.

‘All right. Can I sleep with you tonight?’

A flash of eagerness lit up Dylan’s face. ‘Sure ye can.’ He was already reaching for her as she stepped back.

‘Not like that. Just let me put my stuff on your floor.’

‘Eh? Oh. Right. Well, yeah, I suppose.’

‘Help me with my mattress.’

They dragged it into his room and squeezed it into the small floor space. Carefully Roxana unstuck the beach postcard from her wall and brought it with her, placing it next to her torn pillow. When Dylan turned the light off she lay in the darkness, her fingers resting on sand and palm trees.

‘They stole my money,’ she whispered.

‘Did they so?’

‘Was it Kemal?’

‘Dunno,’ he repeated. He probably did, but he wasn’t going to risk telling her. ‘Animals, they are.’

Roxana closed her eyes. Her body buzzed with adrenalin. Sleep, she ordered herself. Sleep now, and tomorrow find somewhere else to live.

Within touching distance, Dylan scratched and fidgeted. ‘Don’t ye want to come in here with me?’

It would be a comfort to feel the warmth of another body. To concentrate on sex might be to forget everything else.

‘No,’ Roxana said. She turned her back on him and pulled the blanket over her shoulders.

In his flat in Hammersmith Noah was yawning and making coffee and playing one of Andy’s mixes. Normally at this time on a Sunday morning he would be asleep, but today he was planning to go home again to see Jeanette and Bill. He glanced at the number when his mobile rang, but didn’t recognise it.

He knew her voice, though, as soon as she spoke.

‘Hello. Is this Noah?’

‘Roxana. How are you? Where are you?’ Now it was happening, he realised how often he had imagined this exchange. Mild fantasies had provided an escape route from worrying about his mother.

‘I am…I am in a telephone box, near to where I used to be living.’

‘Used to be?’

‘There is some trouble.’

‘Tell me about it.’

An hour later, he was waiting for her at the entrance to the tube station.

Roxana came up the escalator and struggled through the ticket barrier with a cheap tartan suitcase. She looked bruised today, not surprisingly after what she had told him about the break-in. There were circles under her eyes and her hair was greasy and flat, but her mouth was lovelier than he remembered.

They walked through mild summer sunshine back to the flat. Noah carried the suitcase. It wasn’t heavy.

‘Is this everything, or have you got more luggage?’

She looked surprised.

‘This is all.’

He was briefly wondering, now that it was too late, whether he had been over-hasty in asking a girl he hardly knew to stay in his flat while she searched for somewhere else to live. Even a girl who looked like Roxana. But his flatmate Andy had just gone to Barcelona for a week. There was plenty of room, for the next few days at least. Was he really going to say to her, no, I’m afraid I can’t help you?

Apparently reading his mind, she said, ‘Thank you, Noah. You are kind to do this. I am not going back to that house. It is a really bad place.’

‘Are you going to tell the police about your money being stolen?’

‘Police? No. I don’t like to deal with the police.’

She would have her reasons for that, Noah realised. Probably to do with her immigration status. He glanced at her as they walked. He did have a suspicion that he had just invited into his life someone who would not disappear as quickly as she had materialised, but the thought didn’t bother him too much. On the contrary, new beginnings might be just that, and they would be welcome. Elsewhere in his life he was hobbled either by anxiety or routine.

‘How’s the dance job working out?’ he asked cautiously.

‘It is okay.’

When they reached the house she followed him up the communal stairs and stood silently while he fumbled with his keys. Once they were inside she glanced round then her shoulders slumped with relief.

He apologised automatically. ‘It might look a bit of a mess. You know, two blokes sharing. But it’s all right underneath.’

‘It is beautiful,’ Roxana said.

Noah knew that it wasn’t anything of the kind, but the word gave him a dim picture of what she must have left behind.

‘Here’s the kitchen, and that’s the living room. Bathroom there. This is Andy’s room, and this one’s mine.’ He opened the door. ‘You can sleep in here. I’ll just dig out some clean sheets and stuff.’

He’d better not put her in Andy’s room, he thought. She could sleep in his bed, and he’d camp out in Andy’s.

‘Thank you,’ Roxana said again. She dragged her suitcase towards her and sat down on the edge of his chair. ‘I am not sure what to have done if you couldn’t help me.’

Her accent was thicker than he remembered, and although her English was competent she sometimes constructed her sentences oddly or was at a loss for a word. She seemed less enigmatic than when they had met by the river and more fleshed-out, now she was in his flat, a proper person with a history and problems to solve. He was drawn to her even more strongly.

Noah fetched a clean sheet and a duvet cover. He bundled up his own linen, relieved that it didn’t look too bad. She helped him to make up the bed, and this domestic collaboration made him smile and remember Lauren, his most recent girlfriend, who had gone travelling two months ago. Before she went she told him that she thought they should have a year’s break from each other, but when she got back, well – you never knew. He had found this degree of uncertainty disconcerting and inhibiting. Until now, at least.

The room was right at the top of the house, under the roof. There were no proper windows, only a skylight over the bed. Roxana looked up into the rectangle of blue.

‘I like this. It feels safe here.’

‘You’re safe. No one’s going to break in. There are four giant Kiwis living downstairs, anyone tries to get in the house they’ll be kicked straight into touch.’

Roxana’s eyes travelled to him.

‘Rugby,’ he explained lamely. She laughed for the first time that day. For Noah, it was like a firework going off in his chest.

‘Now, what are we going to do?’ she asked.

‘I have to go in a minute. I’m late already.’

Her eyes widened. ‘That is a shame. Where are you going?’

‘Home, to see my parents. My mother’s out of hospital now, but the news isn’t very good. She’s only got about six months to live.’

‘I am sorry for that. But I thought you said before that she would get better?’

‘I was wrong. I didn’t know, then. Are your parents in Uzbekistan?’

‘My father and mother are both dead. I have a stepfather still alive, but I don’t care for him. He is a bad man.’ Roxana shrugged, dismissing this as a topic.

‘Brothers and sisters?’

‘No.’

‘Nor me.’

‘I had one brother but he was killed,’ she said without expression.

Noah looked harder at her. He didn’t know anything about her and he was becoming aware of how much there was to find out. With Lauren and with other girls, he had been starting from the same place: eighty per cent, he reckoned, of their experiences were comparable with his own even if not strictly in common. Not so with Roxana.

‘That’s really very sad. I’m sorry. Was it some kind of accident?’

‘In my country there was an uprising, in Andijan, and he was shot by soldiers. Niki came to see me one week before this and told me that there would be violent times, and I told him to be careful because we only had him and me, the two of us, against the whole world. After that I did not see him again.’

As an only child Noah had longed for brothers and sisters. He had envied those of his friends who had the shoehorned-in, day-and-night constant narrative of close siblings, even though they quarrelled and fought with each other. He could barely imagine the pain of having had a brother and then losing him.

He would have liked to offer Roxana some protection, maybe to tell her that he would be her defender from now on, if she would like it, but he couldn’t think of a way of saying it that didn’t sound either comical or entirely fake, as if he was trying to set himself up as some kind of hero. He was also quite conscious of his own inadequacy. Whatever he offered, he would be unlikely to be able to actually deliver it satisfactorily. He knew this because Lauren had often told him that he meant well, but meaning and doing were two different things as far as she was concerned, right?

Instead of any of this he put his hand awkwardly on her arm, above the elbow, where the short sleeve of her strange top protected her pale skin.

He said as simply as he could, ‘I’m very sorry, Roxana. It must have been terrible for you. And you must be lonely without him.’

Noah knew that he had been sheltered. Popular at school and university, good at games, adequate at academic work, he had never been without protection and had never felt significantly lonely in his whole life. Bill and Jeanette had seen to that.

Roxana’s eyes had acquired the red-rimmed look that preceded tears.

‘Why are you here, in England?’ he asked.

She rubbed her nose with the back of her hand and at the same time moved out of his grasp. Noah let his hand fall to his side.

‘I am working, earning good money, saving it up when I do not get robbed. I am going to be an English girl.’

She said it with such fervour that he had to laugh.

‘Really? Are you sure that’s what you want?’

She blinked at him. ‘Why not? Where I came from there is no work, people are poor, ignorance is everywhere.’

Noah collected his thoughts. He said, ‘I suppose, wait a minute – Uzbekistan is your home, the culture is yours, the language and traditions. All that has made you what you are, as well as your family, and everything that’s happened to you since you were born. Why do you want to turn your back on it? I mean, by making yourself English you’ll only be a replica, whereas what you are already is the real thing.’

Roxana unzipped her suitcase. She took out a few clothes and laid them on the bed, then propped a picture postcard of a beach beside the magazines and piled CDs on Noah’s table.

In a tone that denied the possibility of contradiction she said, ‘I believe that you can be whatever you want.’

Yes, Noah had to concede, Roxana probably could be. He had the impression there was determination in her, strong as a rib of steel.

He checked his watch.

‘I’ve really got to go,’ he sighed. ‘I promised my dad I’d be home for Sunday lunch. But I’ll be back here this evening, we could maybe go out for a pizza or a drink, and we can talk some more. Shall we do that?’

‘I have to go to work this evening.’

‘Really? You do a performance on a Sunday night?’

He was envisaging a contemporary dance ensemble, something very avant-garde with dancers in white face-paint and stylised costumes. The image loosely connected in his mind with Roxana’s interest in the robot beside the river.

Roxana frowned and hesitated, obviously trying to come to a decision. Then she said flatly, ‘I work in a club, I think I had better tell you. It’s called The Cosmos. It opens every night of the week. You live here in this very nice apartment, you have a good job, a nice family I’m sure. Perhaps you don’t like to have someone doing this type of work staying with you?’

‘Cosmos? I’ve never heard of it.’ Noah believed that he had a good working knowledge of London clubs. ‘What do you do there?’

‘I am what is called a lap dancer.’ Roxana tilted her chin up as she announced this. She looked even more like a primitive carving. ‘Do you know what this is?’

‘Of course I do.’ Noah was assailed by a series of images. For a moment he thought it best not to say anything more.

‘You are shocked?’

‘No,’ he managed to say. Shocked wasn’t it at all.

‘So?’

‘I bet you’re really good at it.’

Roxana began to laugh. Soon Noah was laughing as well. They laughed until they were both breathless.

‘So I’ll definitely be coming to see you.’

She turned serious at once. ‘No, please, don’t do that. I would find it very embarrassing if you were there.’

‘Embarrassing? Would you?’

‘Of course. It doesn’t matter when I dance for men I don’t know, it doesn’t mean anything. But with you, because I like you, it would be different.’

Noah was disarmed. There was such a contradiction in the idea of this girl doing a lap-dance routine in a room full of punters, and at the same time being shy enough not to know where to look as she paid him a mild compliment.

He tried to think what Lauren or one or two of her friends might say if they were included in this conversation.

Almost certainly it would be something correct about how places like this Cosmos club were degrading to women. This judgement didn’t quite connect, though, with what he had already learned about Roxana. She needed the money, yes, but it was quite likely that she went about getting it in a way that didn’t damage her too much. She would probably wield more power in the transaction than the men did.

Noah admired her.

She was also beautiful, she was like no other girl he had ever met, and now they were looking at each other in the equivocal aftermath of her confession and their shared laughter.

‘Will you be all right here while I’m out?’ he asked. ‘I’ll give you the spare set of keys.’

She beamed back at him, suddenly full of confidence.

‘I am safe here with the men downstairs who play rugby. You told me. All I will do is lie in your bed and go to sleep.’

Noah swallowed hard. ‘Good. I’ll see you later, then.’

After he had gone, Roxana put her clothes neatly aside. Noah’s room was tidy, she liked that. She curled up under the crisp bedcover and fell asleep.

The garden looked to be at its summer peak, to Noah’s uncritical eyes. There were the roses, and tall pale-blue spikes of flowers, some other round shaggy pink ones, and metallic clumps of silvery leaves spilling on the mown grass. But Jeanette was shaking her head as they made a slow circuit after lunch.

He told her, ‘Mum. It looks beautiful. Don’t sweat it.’

– There is so much to do.

‘Like pruning the effing roses?’

Her hand touched his arm. The skin on the back of her hand looked thin, and as finely crinkled as an old leaf. Noah thought that she was ageing and fading before his eyes. He wanted to reach inside her and tear out the black tumour and crush it in his fists, and the fierceness of the impulse balled up in his chest like terrible anger.

She signed again – You don’t prune this time of year.

‘Whatever.’

– It’s dead-heading. Chopping off dead blooms. Like me.

‘Is that what you are thinking?’

– I’m still getting used to no next year. But there will be for you and Dad. I think of that. I love you both very much. Do you know?

They had turned back towards the house. Bill was sitting on a patio chair reading the Sunday newspapers and Jeanette’s eyes rested on him. Noah had always been aware that Jeanette loved his father unequivocally and possessively. His friends’ mothers didn’t do the ironing and suddenly press their faces blindly against a shirt or a pair of gardening trousers, the way he had seen his mother do, for example. His childish suspicion was that Bill didn’t know she did things like that.

For himself, Noah knew that Jeanette loved him and he accepted it without question. Mothers always did love their children, didn’t they?

‘I do know,’ he said.

– Good. Will you remember?

‘I promise. But I don’t want to talk like this. We’re still here, the three of us. Now is what matters, here, today, this sunshine, not next year or next month.’

Jeanette nodded.

– You are right. But I can’t pretend not to have cancer.

‘I didn’t mean that.’

– I know. Tell me about your week?

‘Let’s think. Work’s okay. Andy’s in Barcelona. Oh, and I met a girl.’

– Did you?

Her face flowered in an eager smile. But Noah was wondering what possibility there was of any conversation about anything that wouldn’t bring them straight up against a blank wall that had six months painted on it in letters higher than a house.

Jeanette wouldn’t live to see his wedding. She wasn’t going to know her own grandchildren.

Her head was cocked towards him, her eyes on his.

‘Her name’s Roxana.’

– Unusual.

He talked, and they made another slow circuit of the lawn. There were wood pigeons calling in the coppice trees. He told her about Roxana being robbed, and how she was staying with him while she looked for another place. He kept any mention of her job to a minimum, and then said that her brother had been killed in Andijan. He only vaguely remembered the news stories of the time about the brief popular uprising against a virtual dictatorship.

Jeanette nodded. She was interested now and she signed rapidly, occasionally adding a word that came out of her mouth like a bubble bursting.

– Yes. A massacre. Their government claimed it was only a few. The international human rights organisations accepted that in the end. President Karimov was supported by the West, until he turned the Americans off their bases out there. Bush needs his allies in Central Asia.

Noah was impressed, but not surprised that his mother knew so much. Jeanette always read everything that came her way, storing up news and comment, fiction and history like bulwarks against her deafness. She had been an early adopter of the internet as a source of yet more information, and her email connections and correspondences were more numerous than his own.

– Your Roxana’s brother was one of the rebels?

‘I think so. She’s not “mine”. Not yet, anyway, although I’m working on it. Her parents are both dead, she told me. Her brother was all she had. How sad is that, to lose your only sibling? The person you grew up with. It must mean Roxana hasn’t got any reference left to the little girl she was.’

Jeanette waited.

– Go on?

Noah faltered. ‘I wasn’t trying to say anything else, Mum. Not consciously. It must be in my mind, though. You and Connie.’

– Yes. I know. Me and Connie.

Here we are again, he thought. Six months.

He faced her. It meant she could lip-read more easily.

‘Dad and I were thinking, Connie would want to know that you’re ill.’

– You and Dad?

‘Well, yes.’

– Please. Don’t.

‘I’m sorry. It was only a brief mention.’

Jeanette looked towards Bill. Some instinct had made him lower his newspaper and he was watching them over the top of it. She moved close to Noah’s side again and they resumed their slow walk. Jeanette’s face was suffused with sadness.

– She is my sister.

‘Yes.’

– I should decide what to tell her. And when. Shouldn’t I?

‘Of course, Mum, if that’s what you want.’

Bill strolled across the grass towards them.

‘What are you two talking about?’

Noah hesitated. Auntie Connie was rarely mentioned in the family. Or never, now he thought about it.

– Uzbekistan, Jeanette indicated.

‘Really?’

– Noah has a new girlfriend who comes from there.

‘She’s not my girlfriend yet. I’ve only met her twice.’

Bill smiled easily at him. ‘I’ll look forward to hearing about her. If and when. Now, does anyone want a cup of tea?’

Noah washed up the lunch dishes and Bill made tea. They sat out in the sun until it sank behind the trees and the garden receded into shadow. The pale roses began to glimmer against the depths of green. Noah said that he thought he would head back to town. In his mind was the thought and the hope that maybe Roxana wouldn’t have gone off to her club quite this early.

He kissed the top of his mother’s head and noted the pink channels of scalp visible through her hair.

‘I’ll talk to you tomorrow, Mum.’ Talk was by email.

Bill walked him to the front door and leaned on the open door of Noah’s rusted Golf.

‘You haven’t told me about the girl.’

‘Nothing to tell. Let me know if anything happens here, Dad.’

Bill stood back. ‘We’re all right.’ He waved until Noah pulled out of sight.

Jeanette went upstairs to her study and turned on the computer.

Back at the flat, Noah found nothing but darkness and silence. Roxana had correctly double-locked the flat door and the street door. He looked into his bedroom, and saw that she had smoothed the duvet and plumped up the pillow after her sleep.

He drifted back into the living room and stretched himself out on the sofa. He thought he would wait up for her, to make sure that she came back safely.