be rude,’ Nico told her, ‘and stop cleaning the place up. Housekeeping is paid to do things like that.’
‘They don’t get all the dirt,’ Evangeline said. It was important to her. Grandma Klippel didn’t have dirt in her house. Evangeline wanted the place nice for Nico.
‘Stop biting your nails,’ Nico said. He said it even when she wasn’t. She let her hair flop over her face and chewed that, instead.
So Nico had to take Evangeline out to work with him. She could see how little he liked the idea but she was overcome with excitement. He wouldn’t tell her what he did. When he finally told her she didn’t even understand the word.
Paparazzi. It sounded strange, like an Italian ice-cream flavour. It wasn’t the only job he did, but it was one way he earned money. The other ways were more boring, like chauffeuring local businessmen to and from their offices. Nico was half-Italian and most of the businessmen were, too. Evangeline looked his job up in the dictionary but what she read didn’t seem to fit. Nico just photographed people in a club – ordinary sorts of people. Most of them looked pretty much like Nico himself; dark-haired and itchily nervous in their suits. They stood next to their wives and friends in groups and they all smiled warily as Nico counted to three. When the pictures were over they looked relieved and started laughing.
Evangeline wasn’t allowed inside the clubs but Nico got her in anyway. She was proud of him for being able to do that. She would wait by the door while he discussed the matter with a few men in the entrance and then he would grin and wink at her and she’d run in after him. They were never inside for long; just long enough to smell the new carpets and the alcohol, though, and to catch a glimpse of the bands that played on stage in their white tuxedos and orange toupées.
Evangeline loved it all. She loved the noise and the pushing crowds and the perfumes and the heat but most of all she loved it because she knew Grandma Klippel would have a seizure if she knew she were there.
People spoke to her. She became known as Nico’s daughter. One man gave her a fifty-dollar note and a pat on the head, and a woman in an expensive satin dress gave her the paper umbrella from her cocktail, which Evangeline liked even more than the money. Nico watched her like a hawk all the time, except when he took the photographs. Then he would sit her on a bar stool and tell the barman to check she didn’t move. The barman would wink at her and send a glass of cola spinning down the bar towards her, just like he did with the beers. Sometimes he put a small plastic stick in the glass with two cherries speared on it.
Nico would always be late up the next morning so Evangeline would order breakfast and get out the small paintbox Grandma Klippel had packed with her things. She tried to paint something every day, just as her tutor had told her to. Nothing looked like anything much, they were all small pale shapes in the middle of the page; sometimes she couldn’t even remember what it was she was painting.
One morning Nico caught her at work. He began a laugh that turned into a cough and when he had finished coughing he turned the pad around and gazed down at the smudge of pale colour in the middle of the page.
‘What’s this?’ he asked. Evangeline chewed at her hair.
‘Is it some fruit, is that what it is?’ He held it up to one eye at a time, as though he needed glasses, then he turned the picture around slowly. ‘I didn’t know you were trying to paint,’ he said quietly. Evangeline’s hair smelt of cigarette smoke.
‘Did your mother teach you?’ Nico asked.
‘No.’
His eyes looked dark, like the coffee he was drinking.
‘Who, then? Darius?’ It was the first time she had heard him say the name. It sounded strange. He pronounced it wrong: ‘Dar-i-us'. She longed to correct him but thought it might have been deliberate, like the way he was always calling Grandma Klippel ‘the old lady’.
‘My grandmother hired a tutor,’ Evangeline told him. She washed her brush in the water-pot and cleaned it carefully on a tissue. She couldn’t work with him watching.
‘You had proper lessons?’ Nico sounded surprised, ‘For how long?’ ‘Months.’ ‘Months?’
Evangeline nodded. She could feel her eyes filling up but she didn’t want to look a child in front of her father, in case he was laughing at her.
‘She wanted you to be like your mother.’
‘And Darius.’
An angry muscle twitched on Nico’s cheek.
‘And what did you want?’ he asked. Evangeline pushed more hair into her mouth. ‘Did you want this?’
‘I didn’t mind.’ Her voice sounded small. Nico was staring at her.
‘Why not, Evangeline? You mind everything else! You mind when there is dust on the table, you mind when I smoke, you mind when the coffee’s not warm, you mind when I dent the couch – why didn’t you mind something as important as this? Do you enjoy it?’
She nodded. Then she thought. Then she shook her head.
‘Then you should stop. Don’t be Thea. Be yourself.’
‘I want her to be proud of me.’ It came out in a small stupid whisper.
‘Your grandmother?’
‘No. My mother.’
Nico sighed and lit a cigarette. Evangeline wished he had done the trick where he threw it into his mouth, it might have lightened the atmosphere a little. He ran his hands through his thick dark hair. She could tell that he was thinking.
‘Come with me,’ he said at last. Evangeline got up. ‘Do I need my coat?’ ‘Bring it,’ Nico said, ‘bring your whole wardrobe if you like. Only hurry up.’
They went round to Nico’s apartment. Evangeline had never been there before and she liked it twice as much as the hotel. It was in a converted warehouse down a small side street and they had to use a service elevator to get to Nico’s floor. The building was old and huge and wonderfully empty. You could have got a whole car into the elevator and the thing was open so you could watch each floor as it slid by. One floor was just empty space and a bird flew out when the elevator went by. Its wings made a whirring sound.
The main door was covered with locks. Nico undid each one slowly, cursing under his breath when he got the wrong key.
‘I like it here,’ Evangeline told him.
‘You’d like to live here?’ he asked, and he laughed when she said that she would.
‘Just you and a few moth-eaten pigeons, eh? Now how do you suppose the old lady would like that one?’
Evangeline pulled a face. ‘If you got my money we could live just about anywhere we wanted,’ she said.
‘I told you, I tried.’ End of story. Non-negotiable.
The
