To Dare Read online

  “If it was Sinatra or Fitzgerald, it wouldn’t be so awful,” Veronica mused at one point, and George laughed gratefully at her attempt at humour, reaching his hand in a rare gesture of affection across the bed. As their fingers intertwined, Veronica felt a sudden surge of tears rushing to her eyes, but she resisted the heaving in her chest, and in the dimness, George didn’t seem to notice.

  Nor did he notice Veronica slipping into recollection of another night, many years ago, when she had steadied her breath and gripped the edge of another bed in much the same way. She had been sixteen, at her parents’ house in Oman. There was a party to mark their imminent departure for Nairobi and a friend of her father’s had been gallantly swinging her from room to room. He was much younger than her father, perhaps thirty or thirty-five, and she’d had a crush on him for years. That night he talked on and on about how mature she was, how beautiful she’d become. When he led her to her bedroom, it had seemed inevitable almost, natural…

  Cutting into her own musings, Veronica wondered why she was suddenly remembering this now.

  Brushing the thought aside, she laid a hand on top of her empty stomach. George didn’t notice this either, and it no longer surprised her to catch herself this way, but familiarity didn’t stop the sadness. With her other hand, gently, she squeezed George’s still intertwined fingers, and he squeezed back, but she didn’t feel bolstered. The intimacy of skin seemed only to illuminate its more usual absence, and without intention, tears threatened again – hot, burning, laced this time with a feint fury directed squarely at the man next to her. Because it was him, after all, who had made her feel this way. It was his doing – he with his cool, constant composure, his pulling away from vulnerability, his pulling away from her. It was his fault that she had become so pathetically grateful for the fleeting touch of skin, for these scraps he threw to her.

  Veronica glanced at the clock. It was 4.13am. “I can’t believe he’s still going,” she said. “It’s getting light out.”

  “I can’t do anything else.”

  A slight curtness had appeared in George’s tone and he withdrew his hand from hers. She moved her head to study him. They hadn’t spoken in many minutes now and she wondered what he had been thinking about to shift his mood. Had he somehow sensed her tear-tipped anger? Something in his mind had quite plainly hardened, like clay left too long unattended. It was a pattern that seemed to be growing increasingly frequent between them. What had once been malleable and soft and waiting for the tender imprint of the other, was all at once brittle and breakable and cold to touch. Often now, they found themselves this way, slipping without warning between alliance and combat, unspoken thoughts erecting themselves between them, and once begun, neither of them could stop the hardening in the air.

  “Do you think they’ve been yet?” Veronica attempted to sidestep, ignoring George’s edginess. “The noise unit?”

  “No idea.”

  “Well,” she started carefully, “will you call them?”

  George exhaled loudly and turned towards the wall.

  “George, don’t be like that. I’m only asking if you’ll call them.” Veronica’s own voice was edged now, fringed with frustration.

  “They told me before they only work till four.”

  “So what are we meant to do?”

  He sat up. “Why are you having a go at me?”

  “I’m not. I’m just… exhausted. Can you please just try them again?”

  “Why don’t you call them?” George demanded, flapping his hand toward her.

  “Because you spoke to them before.”

  He didn’t move.

  “Why is it so hard to make a phone call?”

  Theatrically, George picked up his phone and dialled the number, then with a great show of action, dialled the number again. “Answerphone,” he declared eventually.

  She rolled her eyes, and huffed, and found herself wondering in a way that was also new but also increasingly frequent, how she hadn’t seen this aggressive, petulant side of her husband before. He wasn’t loving – he was insensitive, and stubborn, and emotionally stunted. Within the space of the following minute, she shortcut the more and more familiar spiral of internal rumination, and she was on to divorce, and how that might work, and how she would declare it to George, imagining herself empowered and liberated and bold again. Secure in the reliability of impermanence. But then, as always happened, her mind caught a glimpse of it, and the thought of waking up without him flooded from mind to gut, choking her with the dark, suffocating, unbearable notion of his absence.

  Lying back in bed this time, George switched off the bedside lights and turned again towards the wall. Veronica did the same. The space between them felt cold and barbed, uncrossed by outstretched palms, not even softened by the smooth cream waffle.

  In the darkness, the music continued. And the coarse singing continued. It seeped through the wall onto the clean slate of their bedroom. And then, at 4.48am, from the other side of the wall, a baby started crying, a baby just like the one they longed for, and its wails carried on way past five, and long after the music was finally turned off, and far beyond the time when, Veronica imagined, everybody in Primrose Hill, except for her, and George, and this poor, unheeded baby, were asleep.

  Simone

  The remnants of Jasmine’s crisps are squashed between the floor and her cheek, though Simone is not sure if the stickiness is from them. She imagines hot, cleansing water rushing over her, washing her clean. But the dirt is caked thick. The grime. It was always the grime that struck her most, at the beginning, seeping into her, clinging to her clothes, as though it knew that this time she was there for good, conjoined, no longer a thing to be brushed off at the end of the day.

  She had been to the estate often. She’d been staying at Noah’s, preferring his warmer smaller rooms, and his richer poorer parents. The estate was where they played, hanging off the wall outside the bet shop with a cig and a beer, waiting to score something better. She’d swished her arms with the pride of the enlightened as she walked the familiar route to his family flat, hauling her suitcase behind her. There was a garden on the east side, where she often paused to admire the carefully dotted colour of the bedding, and she stopped then. She chatted to the old woman pruning. The woman asked about school, about her friends, about her romance with Noah, as though they were not separated by walls, or five decades. Three floors above them, the confident smells of home cooking wafted out of the rooms of an Iranian family bustling in sing-song tones, and Simone glanced up, breathing it in. A little further along, there was a wall plastered with posters – for a church meeting, a bingo night, a local art exhibit. Simone had not yet attended any of these events, but they wrapped themselves around her, plumping the imaginary nest she was building.

  Until that first evening in their real, own flat (blagged by way of her expanding belly), unpacking a suitcase of stuff she’d pulled from neat cupboards and squashing them into a single broken drawer, she saw everything differently, as if for the first time: the dirt and the darkness; the way the stairs smelled of piss; how rubbish littered doorways; how pairs of random, dishevelled people were always loitering.

  After a while, months or maybe years, these were quirks she stopped noticing, or else she began to blend in with them, became like them too, even if some people still called her a posho.

  Until Noah died, and she started giving out hand jobs in exchange for a hit, and then nobody thought her posh at all.

  There were whole days, afterwards, when she sat on the wall in the Concourse and stared at the families unlike her own. The ones wrapped up tight in determination. Sometimes they were English, but as often Romanian, Syrian, Afghani, Somali, indiscernible from each other in the way they kept to themselves, focussed, and then moved on. She could not focus. She could not move on. She wasn’t sure she wanted to.

  She clasped her cig and her beer, and something better.

  Time blurred.

  There were others. Some o
ld granny banged with her shopping trolley up the stairwell every day at exactly 11am. Her hair was always immaculate, her shoes polished, and she would stop to tell loitering kids not to litter the corridors. They waited respectfully till she had reached her flat, till she had closed her door, then chucked their crisp wrappers on the floor.

  Sometimes Simone was approached by the estate’s do-gooders, people intent on rallying, improving, starting up resident groups, handing out petitions, talking about the ‘community’. They made pains to notice her sitting there. They said hello, they asked how she was, they cooed at Dominic crying in his pram, or perhaps it was Jasmine. They invited her to things. And into their flats, only a floor up, or down, or across from her own. Often these people were local councillors, or teachers, or NHS workers, or churchgoers, professions of care, pretending they cared, pretending like they wanted to know. But they didn’t know her. Because in the daytime they went to work, and in the evenings they made dinner for their kids, and okay, maybe their salaries didn’t stretch to the end of the month, same as Simone’s benefits, and maybe the rubbish in their hallway wasn’t cleared either, and maybe their kids had been mugged too; but still they lived a world apart. They weren’t like the people Simone knew, the people she had come to know, since Noah. Since Terry. They didn’t even see them.

  No, she and Dominic, and Jasmine, lived separately, in the shadows, in invisible cracks. Though there were enough others who occupied those dark spaces with them. Equally unseen.

  Like the family where the mum was always in jail for shoplifting. Or another family, two doors down, where the step-dad fiddled with the three daughters, and nobody blinked when one of the girls got pregnant. Then there were Terry’s brothers, two of them anyway, who everybody said for sure had a hand in things when their mum OD’d. And there was Dominic’s little friend Lacey, whose mum threw herself off a bridge.

  These were the people that Simone knew, that Simone saw. More and more she saw them. Illuminated in Dominic’s gaze. Because these were the people he was growing up with – united not by money, or lack of it, not by ethnicity or religion, not by the estate, but by just one thing: the way they hurt each other, generation after generation, round and around. They kept each other bound by that, like an inescapable magnet. Hurt people hurt people, don’t they?

  Veronica

  George had already left for work when from the window of their new kitchen-come-living room, Veronica spotted a boy emerging from the house next door. It had been exactly two hours and six minutes since the music had finally stopped. She had been listening intently ever since, hoping for reassuring kitchen clatters or other proofs of life; but she had not yet heard the voice of the woman, nor the sound of a baby. Still, here was a boy. A scrawny thing like his mother, she would have guessed he was eight or nine from the height of him, but his gait suggested otherwise, all self-consciousness and measure, far more befitting of a pre-teen. Most adults blundered at attempts to estimate the age of children, forgetting, in the stretch between now and their own childhoods, the minute, invisible, colossal developments that separate a Reception child from a Year 1, and an eight-year-old from a boy knocking on eleven. But at her last school, Veronica had taught ten- and eleven-year-olds, so she was familiar with the gradual creep of adolescence into the frame. At her new school, the youngest in the class would still be six.

  Veronica watched as, on the other side of the road now, the boy pulled a packet of crisps from his bag and ate the first few while staring up at the top floors of his house. Veronica wondered what he was looking for. A wave from his mother perhaps. A sign of something. She followed his line of sight, but didn’t have the angle, and after a moment, the boy turned and scurried along the road, a peculiar mixture of anxiety and machismo. Veronica wondered where he was going. Glancing at her watch, she saw that it was only seven-thirty – too early for school, and besides, no reason to make him so shifty – yet every few steps he glanced around. Nobody crossed his path, however, and soon, he was round the corner and gone. Veronica stopped munching her toast and listened again. The downstairs neighbour next door had left even earlier than George. He seemed to run some sort of roofing company and had loaded up his van a full thirteen minutes before their alarm was set to wake them. She had been watching the street, first from the bedroom and now from here, ever since. If the woman had left, it was improbable that she would have missed seeing her. But why then was the house next door so quiet? Even if the adults were asleep, surely the baby would have stirred. While pressing her head against the window for a better view, it occurred to Veronica that she need not be so invested. The neighbours had most likely existed at their abode long before she and George had arrived on the street, and for all she knew, the noises they had made were normal, or consensual at least. Perhaps then she should be less concerned with their internal dynamic and more with the impact of their noise upon them – her and George.

  Neither had yet dared to voice it, but the horrific noise of the previous night had been a devastating disappointment: the idyllic home far from idyllic, George’s hard-earned savings invested foolishly, the new start tainted already. Yes, this is what should be occupying Veronica’s mind. But as she sipped her coffee and picked again at her toast, she couldn’t stop picturing the visuals that might have accompanied the sounds – the woman against their adjoining wall, the baby unattended. Why was the child not crying now? Where was its mother? Veronica looked at her watch again and tapped her fingers impatiently against the window, subconsciously scratching her thigh. She would have to leave for her new job soon. It might not be possible for her to determine what had happened after the sounds had ceased.

  Moving her plate and mug to the sink, Veronica gave them a quick rinse before loading them into the new Miele dishwasher. There was something acutely satisfying about these tiny gestures of homeliness. She and George had lived together for almost four years now in various rented flats, and before that she had house-shared in a lovely maisonette in Chelsea. All were sufficiently homely, but all were launch pads rather than bases, and she’d rarely stayed inside any of them long enough to make a meal, let alone do the washing up. She couldn’t remember ever seeing her own mother do the dishes. This isn’t to say that she didn’t do them – her father would never have found himself in the kitchen and they didn’t have a maid in every country they lived in, so her mother must have washed up sometimes. But Veronica didn’t have a visual memory of this. She couldn’t picture her at the sink. She couldn’t conjure images of a roast cooking in the oven, or potato peelings littering the counter, or her mother letting her taste the bubbling Bolognese straight from the pan on a metal spoon that burned her tongue. Those were experiences she’d collected from other mothers, the mothers of friends who invited her sometimes for a bank holiday weekend, or Easter lunch, or for a three-week stint the last summer before everything altered.

  Glancing again at her watch, Veronica flipped the dishwasher closed with her foot, and sprinted up the stairs to the bedroom where she planted herself in front of her newly filled wardrobe. There hung the red and the blue, but now she couldn’t seem to make a decision. Neither could she decide whether to tie her blonde hair into a proficient bun, or let it hang soft and loose. Or whether to invite the new parents she would be meeting into the classroom at the end of the day so that she could say a few words to the group, or stick to individual hellos and handshakes at the classroom door. The itching of her legs was incessant.

  Veronica closed her eyes and pushed her hand towards the competing materials. Red. She switched to blue.

  Veronica had chosen to cycle to her new job. Boarding in Kent, she had biked into the nearby village upright, without holding onto the handlebars, and pretended to her friends that this skill came naturally, but really it was from two formative years during primary school spent in Holland. Today’s cycle was an easy two miles away in St John’s Wood. She knew the route already, though not as well as her mother supposed. Veronica still wrote, and received, a weekly l
etter from her mother. In the last one, her mother had mused that now Veronica was living back in North London, she would of course remember the old house in Hampstead Garden Suburb, and the walks on the Heath, and did she know that the school she was teaching at was just a road away from the music academy they’d driven to every Saturday for violin lessons? Veronica didn’t remember any of this. They’d lived in the Hampstead house for little over a year. But she’d been to the school three times now – two interviews, and one lengthy induction day at which she’d been thoroughly introduced to the campus. It was not hyperbole to call it a campus. Despite being a stone’s throw from Central London, the school boasted its own playing field, a swimming pool, and grand old buildings that reminded Veronica of the similarly grand institutions of her own childhood, filling her with the immediate sense of greeting a long lost relative. Familiarity, however, did not provide her with the easy confidence she might have presumed.

  As she pushed away the unsteadiness in her stomach and unlocked her bike, Veronica considered this. There was a time when she would have swept into a new position, charming the men, captivating the women. She should, now, have been sweeping through the pretty Primrose streets. But at the first traffic light she stopped too abruptly and almost came off over the handlebars, and she physically felt her legs wobbling. As she arrived, she saw already a small group of elbows-out parents huddled together many minutes before the ringing of the bell. One of them spotted her, and pointed.