Concrete as far as the eye can see.’
Her mother’s face fell. ‘Oh. Well, at least you’ve got a roof over your head.’
They’d left it at that. Jane knew her mother well enough to know that she wouldn’t want the truth–that Jane had so few qualifying points that the only accommodation the council was going to offer her was exactly the sort of place she’d ended up with. A hard-to-let box on a run-down East End estate where almost nobody had any form of legitimate employment, where kids ran wild day and night, and where there were more used condoms and hypodermic needles than blades of grass. No, Judy Gresham definitely wouldn’t like to think of her daughter living somewhere like that. Apart from anything else, it would seriously impair her ability to boast about how well their Jane was doing.
She’d told her brother Matthew, however. Anything to blunt the edge of the resentment he carried because she was the one who had got away while he’d been left, in his words, to rot in the back of beyond because somebody had to stay for the sake of their parents. It didn’t matter that, as the elder, he’d been the first to fly the nest for university and that he’d chosen to come back to the job he’d always wanted. Matthew, Jane thought, had been born aggrieved.
The irony, of course, was that Jane would have swapped London for Fellhead in the blink of an eye if it had held the faintest possibility of doing the work she loved. But there were no jobs for academics in the Lakes, not even for a Wordsworth specialist like her. Not unless she wanted to swap intellectual rigour and research for lecturing to schoolkids about the Lakeland poets. Nothing would kill her passion for the words faster than that, she knew. So instead, she was stuck in the worst kind of urban hell. Jane tucked her head into her chest as she walked along the galleried balcony to the stairs. By what she could only believe to be the evil whim of the architect, her block had been constructed so that the prevailing wind was funnelled down the walkways, rendering even a gentle summer breeze blustery and uncomfortable. On a showery autumn day, it drove the rain into every nook and cranny of the building as well as the clothes of any inhabitants who bothered to emerge from their flats.
Jane turned into the stairwell and gained a brief respite. No point in even trying the lift. Ignoring the badly spelled graffiti, the unsavoury collections of rubbish blown into the corners and the stink of decay and piss, she trotted downwards. At the first turn of the stairs, her stomach flipped over. It was a sight she’d seen so often she knew she should have been inured to it, but every time she saw the tiny frame perched precariously in the lotus position on the narrow concrete banister three floors up, Jane’s knees trembled.
‘Hey, Jane,’ the slight figure called softly.
‘Hey, Tenille,’ Jane replied, forcing a smile through her fear.
With what felt like death-defying casualness, Tenille unfolded her legs and dropped down to the dank concrete next to Jane. ‘Whatchu know?’ the thirteen-year-old demanded as she fell into step beside her.
‘I know I’m going to be late for work if I don’t get a move on,’ Jane said, letting gravity give her momentum as she took the stairs at a faster pace. Tenille kept stride with her, her long dreads bouncing on her narrow shoulders.
‘I’ll walk wi’chu,’ Tenille said, her attempt at a swagger a pathetic parody of the wannabe gangstas that hung around the dismal maze of the estate learning their trade from older brothers, cousins and anyone else who managed to stay out of custody for long enough to teach them.
‘I hate to sound like a middle-aged, middle-class pain in the arse, Tenille, but shouldn’t you be in school?’ It was an old line and Jane mentally predicted the response.
‘Teachers got nothin’ to say to me,’ Tenille said mechanically, lengthening her stride to catch up with Jane as they hit street level. ‘What they know about my livin’?’
Jane sighed. ‘I get so tired of hearing the same old, same old from you, Tenille. You’re way too smart to settle for the crap that’s coming your way unless you get enough of an education to sidestep it.’
Tenille stuffed her hands into the pockets of her skinny fake leather jacket and raised her narrow shoulders defensively. ‘Fuck dat,’ she said. ‘I ain’t gonna be no mo’fo’s incubator. None of that baby mamma drama for Tenille.’
They cut through a walkway under the block of flats and emerged beside a stretch of dual carriageway where cars surged past, their drivers rejoicing at finally getting out of second gear, their tyres hissing on the wet tarmac. ‘Hard to see how you’re going to avoid it unless you harness your brain,’ Jane said drily, keeping well away from the kerb and the spray of the passing vehicles.
‘I wanna be like you, Jane.’ It was a plaintive cry that Jane had heard from Tenille more times than she could count.
‘So go to school,’ she said, trying not to let her exasperation show.
‘I hate the useless stuff they make us do,’ Tenille said, a lip-curling sneer transforming her unselfconscious attractiveness into a mask of scorn. ‘It’s not like what you give me to read.’ Her speech had shifted from street to standard English, as if leaving the confines of the estate allowed her to slip from persona to person.
‘I’m sure it isn’t. But I’m not where I want to be yet, you know. Working part-time in bars and seminar rooms while I get my book finished so I can land a proper job is not what I had in mind when I started out. But I still had to go through the same crap to get even this far. And yes, mostly I did think it was crap,’ she continued, drowning whatever Tenille had been about to add. She wished there was something she could offer apart from platitudes, but she didn’t know what else to say to a thirteen-year-old mixed-race orphan who not only adored but also seemed to grasp the significance of the writings of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and De Quincey with an ease that had taken Jane herself a decade of close study to achieve.
Tenille sidestepped to avoid a buggy containing a moon-faced toddler, chocolate smeared across its cheeks, a dummy jammed in its mouth like a stopper designed to keep the chubby child inflated. The pram pusher didn’t look that much older than Tenille herself. ‘I’m not going to make it that way, Jane,’ Tenille said despondently. ‘Maybe I could use the poetry another way. Be a rapper like Ms Dynamite,’ she added without conviction.
They both knew it was never going to happen. Not unless someone invented a self-esteem drug that Jane could pump into Tenille’s veins ahead of the heroin that kept what seemed like half the estate sedated. Jane halted at the bus stop, turning to face Tenille. ‘Nobody can ever take the words out of your head,’ she said.
Tenille picked at a chewed fingernail and stared at the pavement. ‘You think I don’t know that?’ she almost shouted. ‘How the fuck else do you think I survive?’ Suddenly she spun round on the balls of her feet and she was off, scudding down the uneven pavement like a gazelle, long limbs surprisingly elegant in motion. She disappeared into an alley and Jane felt the familiar mixture of affection and frustration. It stayed with her on the ten-minute bus ride and it still nagged her as she pushed open the door of the wine bar.
Five minutes before noon, the Viking Bar and Grill felt hollow with emptiness. The blond wood, chrome and glass still gleamed in the halogen spots, evidence that nobody had been in since the cleaner finished her shift. Harry had put Michael Nyman’s music from The End of the Affair on the CD player, and the strings seemed almost to shimmer visibly in the calm air. In twenty minutes’ time, the Viking would be transformed as the city slickers piled in, desperate to cram as much food and drink into their short lunch breaks as they could. The air would thicken with conversation, body heat and smoke, and Jane wouldn’t have a second to think about anything other than the
