I saw a film once about an alien who landed on earth in a human body in a mental hospital. He had all this amazing stuff to teach everyone and he kept telling the doctors who he was and where he was from and what he had to offer in the way of secrets of the universe and stuff, but they just thought he was mad and pumped him full of drugs and he stayed there until he died. Maybe something like that happened to my dad. He wants more than anything to call us and it’s been five years, and wherever he’s locked up he’s not allowed to phone and he’s just waiting for us to find him. This sort of thought, and other variations, occur to me at least once every day.
Like I said, it’s the not knowing that’s hard.
Ali dropped me off in his cab and even though everyone was about to get up at home I went straight to bed. Mum walked past my room a couple of times in her pyjamas, giving me her special “You stayed out too late” look, but I pretended not to notice.
I lay there for ages but I couldn’t sleep. Jed had Saturday morning telly on too loud. Mum was joining in with something really lame on the radio. Mercy had found my coat on the stairs and was slamming doors and ranting about the money I spent getting home, but it wasn’t them keeping me awake. All that’s quite normal for a Saturday and I usually sleep right through. Every time I closed my eyes, the urn was there on its crappy shelf, glaring at me, which was unsettling and made me open my eyes again. It was the strangest feeling, being reproached by an urn.
I got out of bed and put my clothes back on and went for a walk on the heath. It was a beautiful day, all vast blue sky and autumn colours and a clean breeze that made me forget I’d had no sleep, but I couldn’t relax into it. That part of the heath is covered with enormous crows. They’ve got massive feet and they walk around staring at their massive feet like they can’t believe how big they are. They all look like actors with their hands behind their backs, rehearsing the bit in that play when the king says “Now is the winter of our discontent …”
I watched them for a while and then I walked up to the top of kite hill and ate an apple. You can see the whole of London from up there pretty much: St Paul’s, the Telecom tower, the buildings at Canary Wharf and the docks. There were a few runners on the athletics track just below me and plenty of dog walkers and little kids, but not many old ladies and that set me wondering what all the old people who live in London got up to with their time.
What did the old lady in the cab office do before she did nothing all day in that urn?
Did she get up really, really early in the morning like most old people? Mum says that’s their work ethic, the same reason old men wear suits and ties instead of tracksuit bottoms, and old ladies queue up outside the post office half an hour before it even opens and have really clean curtains and stuff. But doesn’t getting up that early just mean there are more hours to fill with being old?
Before then I’d never thought what it was actually like to be a pensioner. I’d just weaved in and out of them on the pavement, and smirked with my friends at their funny hair and high-waisted trousers, and the way they make paying for something at a checkout last for ages just to have someone to talk to. One minute the thought never crossed my mind, the next I was really and truly concerned about what it was like to be old and stuck in London, where everyone moved faster than you and even the simplest thing could end up taking all day.
It was her. I know it was. It was my old lady, the dead one in the urn.
I remember sitting there on the hill with kites whipping through the air behind me and the thought occurring to me that she and I might actually be having some kind of conversation. A dead old lady was trying to educate me about the over-sixties from her place on the shelf. It was a good feeling, a hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck feeling, like when you hear a wicked bit of music, or when you’re high and someone you’re really into is sitting next to you. I suspected I was making it up but that hardly mattered. I make a lot of things up that are important to me, like being irresistible to girls, or being moody and mysterious like my dad, or what my dad might be up to at any moment, even this one.
I walked home the long way so I could watch what was going on. The street we live on is a good place, I think. It’s a market street, fruit and veg every day, and then other things on Thursdays and Saturdays, like fresh fish and feather dusters and crap clothes and other stuff Mercy reckons is all nicked. One time, one of the blokes from the market fell in the road and nearly got hit by his own van, and Mercy went, “Oh look, he’s fallen off the back of a lorry,” and I laughed so hard.
The market end of the street is what my mum and her friends call the “dodgy” end. I don’t know when my mum became such a snob about the dodgy and not dodgy ends of life. We’re only here because Dad’s mum and dad took pity on us when he disappeared and let us move in, and then they went into sheltered housing round the corner. Before that we lived in a dump and she wasn’t snobby about stuff then.
The other interesting thing about our street is that it’s called a crescent, but as far as I can make out it’s actually dead straight.
We live in a whole house, which is rare nowadays in this part of London. More and more people are fitting into smaller and smaller spaces, like in New York. Mum talks a lot about selling up and moving out of London where she could get loads more for her money. Grown-ups spend a lot of time talking about the price of houses and how much they could add to the price of a house if they painted the kitchen terracotta and fitted a power shower. It’s like they’re never happy with the way things are and they think they’ll be happier if the bathroom looks different. I don’t know why Mum bothers with all that when she’s not going anywhere.
Here’s how I know.
For a start, Mum would go mad in the country in about five minutes. Even when we went to Bath for the day to see all the Roman stuff, she kept commenting on how small minded and provincial people were and how nobody in the countryside has any “spatial awareness”.
Also Jed would miss his friends, and Mercy would throw a total tantrum and leave home to live in sin in a damp bedsit with her boyfriend, and I wouldn’t go either without a fight.
You probably can’t even get that much more for your money elsewhere; that’s just something estate agents tell you because they want to get their hands on the family home.
Plus when Dad comes back we have to be here or he’ll never find us.
That’s what happens when someone disappears. They trap you in time. You can’t change anything, not drastically, because it’s the same as giving up hope. I’ve changed loads since he left, I’ve grown maybe about a metre and I shave almost every two days, and my hair is way longer too. He might not even recognise me if he did knock on the door and I answered it, but I can’t help that and I’m definitely against changing anything else just in case.
My dad was a pretty cool guy. In all the photos I’ve seen of him he looked good. There’s no evidence of him wearing high-heeled shoes or jackets that were two sizes too small or ridiculous sideburns, like other people’s dads. He seemed to stand alone for effortless cool in a room full of serious fashion errors.
Now I wear my dad’s suits and shirts and stuff because they just about
