17
CHELSEA, 1988
It was almost two weeks before Phineas Thomsen deigned to talk to me. Or maybe it was the other way round, who knows. I’m sure he’d have his own take on it. But in my recollection (and this is of course entirely my recollection) it was him.
I was, as ever, hanging around the kitchen with my mother, eavesdropping on her conversation with the women who now seemed to live in our house. I’d subliminally determined at this point that the only way to really know what was going on in the world was to listen to women talk. Anyone who ignores the chatter of women is poorer by any measure.
By now Birdie and Justin had been living with us for almost five months, the Thomsens for nearly two weeks. The conversation in the kitchen on this particular day was one that operated on a kind of forty-eight-hour rotating cycle: the vexing matter of where Sally and David were going to live. At this point I was still clinging pathetically to the fallacy that Sally and David were only staying for a short while. Every few days a possibility would appear on the horizon and be talked about at length and the feeling that Sally and David were about to move on would hang briefly, tantalisingly in the air until, pop, the ‘possibility’ would be found to have an inherent flaw and they’d be back to the drawing board. Right now the ‘possibility’ was a houseboat in Chiswick. It belonged to a patient of David’s who was going backpacking for a year and needed someone to look after her bearded dragons.
‘Only one bedroom, though,’ Sally was saying to my mother and Birdie. ‘And a tiny bedroom at that. Obviously David and I could sleep on the berths in the living room, but it’s a bit cramped because of the vivariums.’
‘Gosh,’ said Birdie, picking, picking at the dry skin around her nails, the flakes landing on the cat’s back. ‘How many are there?’
‘Vivariums?’
‘Whatever. Yes.’
‘No idea. Six or so. We might have to find a way to pile them up.’
‘But what about the children?’ my mother asked. ‘Will they want to share? Especially a double bed. I mean, Phin’s going to be a teenager …’
‘Oh God, it would only be short term. Just until we find somewhere permanent.’
I glanced up. This was the point where the plan usually fell apart. The moment it became clear that it was in fact a stupid plan, Sally would say, stoically, ‘Oh, well, it’s not permanent,’ and my mother would say, ‘Well, that’s ridiculous, we have so much space here. Don’t feel you have to rush into anything.’ And Sally’s body language would soften and she’d smile and touch my mother’s arm and say, ‘I don’t want to stretch your hospitality.’ And my beautiful mother would say, in her beautiful German accent, ‘Nonsense, Sally. Nonsense. Just you take your time. Something will come up. Something perfect.’
And so it came to pass, that afternoon in late September. The houseboat plan was mooted and dispatched within a cool, possibly record-breaking, eight minutes.
I was torn, it must be said, by the presence of the Thomsens. On the one hand they were cluttering up my house. Not with objects, per se, but just with themselves, their human forms, their sounds, their smells, their otherness. My sister and Clemency had come together like an unholy union of loud and louder. They careered about the house from morning to bedtime ensconced in strange games of make-believe that all seemed to involve making as much noise as possible. Not only that, but Birdie was teaching them both to play the fiddle, which was utterly excruciating.
Then, of course, there was David Thomsen, whose charismatic presence seemed to permeate every stratum of our house. As well as his bedroom upstairs he had also somehow commandeered our front room, which housed my father’s bar, as a sort of exercise room where I had once observed him through a crack in the door attempting to raise his entire body from the floor using just his fingertips.
And at the other end of everything was Phin. Phin who refused even to look at me, let alone talk to me; Phin who acted as though I was not even there. And the more he acted as though I was not there, the more I felt like I might die of him refusing to see me.
And then, finally, that day, it happened. I’d left the kitchen after it had been established that Sally and David would be staying and had almost bumped into Phin coming the other way. He wore a faded sweatshirt with lettering on it and jeans with tears in the knees. He stopped when he saw me and for the first time his eyes met mine. I caught my breath. I searched my tangled thoughts for something to say, but found nothing there. I moved to the left; he moved to his right. I said sorry and moved to my right. I thought he’d pass silently onwards, but then he said, ‘You know we’re here to stay, don’t you?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Just ignore anything my parents say about moving out. We’re not going anywhere. You know,’ he continued, ‘we ended up in that house in Brittany for two years. We were only supposed to be there for a holiday.’ He paused and cocked an eyebrow.
I was clearly supposed to be responding in some way, but I was stupefied. I had never stood so close to someone so beautiful before. His breath smelled of spearmint.
He stared at me and I saw disappointment flicker across his face, or not even disappointment but resignation, as though I was simply confirming what he’d already suspected of me, that I was boring and pointless, not worth his attention.
‘Why don’t you have your own house?’ I asked finally.
He shrugged. ‘Because my dad’s too tight to pay rent.’
‘Have you never had your own house?’
‘Yes. Once. He sold it so we could go travelling.’
‘But what about school?’
‘What about school?’
‘When do you go to school?’
‘Haven’t been to school since I was six. Mum teaches me.’