he didn’t embrace London’s vastness, preferring, instead, to survive in tiny pockets of the place that were familiar and safe. He didn’t like clubs or any kind of music that didn’t involve a guitar, and he certainly didn’t like city tours. He was swallowed up by the city, in many respects, softly anonymous among the flash and the tittup. Not lonely exactly, or independent, but not unhappy either.
The visit to the Palace was one of her attempts to broaden Vic’s world.
‘I thought you were a man of education,’ she said, as if that was the trammel to catch him.
‘I’ve no interest.’
‘You don’t have to curtsy to Her Majesty on the way through or anything,’ she gibed.
As they walked along Constitutional Hill, flanked on the right by Buckingham Palace Gardens and on the left by Green Park, Vic began honing in on the core of his disgruntlement. ‘It’s the false reverence of the term. That bowed-head kind of paying homage . . . I mean what has she ever done? You pay for all her privilege with your taxes. With my bloody taxes! And just because somebody decided that they were a special family hundreds of years ago, or because they killed off some other family that thought they were special. I don’t get it. It infuriates me. The French had the right idea – lynch the bastards!’ he finished, bringing his loosely conceived republican tirade to an end as they came to the gates of the palace.
‘That’s beautiful, Vic,’ she said, a little impatiently. ‘Now, come on.’
The frisky argumentativeness, characteristic of what they seemed to be developing into, emboldened Vic’s trust in Lali. His initial fear that their relationship lacked commonality was allayed by the feeling that their differences might turn out to be as capable of sustaining them as any illusive commonality. This promise stripped her unpredictability of its foreboding, freed him to invest everything in her honed aesthetic.
The extravagance and decadence of the palace confirmed for him the righteousness of his indignation. ‘A gold effing coach!’ he hissed into her ear, as they toured the Royal Mews. The royal collection held not a single painting he recognized but he enjoyed the hour of culture he would otherwise have ignored. The horses, pronounced in their muscularity and bay colouring, were less contentiously impressive; naturally awesome, dignified, and calm as they trotted past. But beyond the horses and the art, there was only what they dismissed as the royal shrubbery and pigeons, and Lali wasn’t for pretence. Her anarchical impatience had them through the gardens and on their way down Buckingham Palace Road, towards Victoria Station, before Vic could voice his own disinterest.
They stopped for cigarettes and Lali grinned at him as she lit up.
‘You see, I could be good for you.’
To Vic, this was further encouragement. It indicated that she had a future, for starters, and that she considered him a part of it. It suggested that he wasn’t out there alone, laid bare; she was too. For the first time, his conception of her existing in a state of perpetual certainty fell away, and she stood before him like anyone else – self-doubting, reliant on nothing more substantial than hope, or a gut feeling for the decency of the person you chose to be with. It was as if she wanted to let Vic in, as if there was an in.
On the Underground home there was only standing room and the noise of the rickety carriages meant they didn’t try to speak. Lali just hung her arms around his waist and plunged her hands into the back pockets of his jeans, as he held them steady on an overhead rail. Another gesture. Meaningless, perhaps, but not lost on him. She leaned against him for a few minutes; almost but not quite a perfect metaphor for love. It was enough to convince him of what he wanted to believe. Then, on the train to Deptford, they managed to get seats and they both closed their eyes.
During the first months Lali was more or less the girl she seemed from the outset – fleetingly mean with a turn of phrase, but confident, unpredictable and breathtaking. They attended informal dinner parties, visited all the naff tourist attractions that Vic had never bothered with, picnicked in Hyde Park on roasting summer days, went pubbing and clubbing, went to concerts, and took long weekends away in Cornwall and Southampton.
Lali revealed herself by degrees. Information, a story, a memory would emerge from her, and he was allowed a few quick questions before she shut the lid on it again. The purposefully obscured depths of her, and the false impression of intimacy, were illuminated by her discretional revelations.
Lali’s uncloaking of her grandmother was the most notable of the early disclosures. Vic was shocked, first by the discovery that Lali had a family, and only then by the fact that it had taken him that long to notice she’d never spoken of them. What was it about her that precluded those questions? he later wondered. How was it that she could stand before him in all her beauty without ever prompting him to ask, Where have you come from? What forces of human fusion created you?
‘Gail used to do this to me,’ she told him, raking her fingers through a matted clump of his hair as they lay in bed. His head was tilted back and lay on her breast bone. Her fine, toothy fingers glided through his hair, as if she were mapping the potted and lumped landscape of his skull. She smoothed it back, first into a quiff and then flattening it further with each stroke; long, weaving movements across his cranium. ‘To relax me.’
‘And who’s Gail?’
‘My grandmother.’
Having quickly established that Gail was not long dead, as was natural for him to have assumed, given the months they had been together and this was Lali’s first mention of her, he sat up in the bed. ‘I can’t believe I never asked any of this,’ he said, aloud and to himself. ‘Are there others?’
‘No. Just Gail.’ There was nothing in Lali’s voice, not pain or resolve, just an impervious matter of fact. ‘I’m up early in the morning, by the way. Stock-take.’
She rolled away from him and turned on the bedside lamp, rupturing the moment. In the dull glow her remarkable symmetry was enhanced, but the moment had been quashed. The conversation was over. She took some nail varnish from the bedside locker and began painting her toes.
Then there were the stories that recurred. He heard many times about how, as a child, she had escaped Gail’s watchful eye and hid among the bushes and trees that lined the path through the park. She watched the people as they passed and read a million stories into their facial expressions, gestures and mannerisms; a formidable capacity to unearth the lugubrious in the mundane, finding its beginning. He didn’t know how old she would have been but he could imagine her, observing and questioning. Couples, small families, old people, even children – ‘They all made me feel hopeless,’ she told him. Though what she meant was sad, or melancholy. It wasn’t what they did or how they acted, she said. ‘It was their state of . . . What awaits whoever. The inevitability.’
‘Being human,’ he sometimes put to her. ‘To wonder what it’s all for.’
‘I hate it. I fucking hate it,’ she repeated, as if his interjection had gone unheard. And then she was back – strong, defensive, unforgiving. As before. Without sympathy, even for herself.
The first seismic shift in her came unannounced. They had been in Marlowe’s, in Catford, the night before. A karaoke night experiment.
Vic saw the DJ warming up – peach shirt tucked into his jeans, beer gut, hair slicked back, running through a few lines of his favourite crooner classics – and he thought, Oh no, this isn’t going to work out.
There was Lali and Donna, and a few of their staff from Rococo’s, and Vic had
