She arrived at Kentish Town tube shortly after 4 p.m. It was autumn, and the evenings were starting to draw in and dusk was already edging into the sky. It was only as Marisa got to the top of the escalator and tapped her Oyster card at the turnstile to exit that she realised this was as far as her plan went. Kentish Town was the sum total of her knowledge. There had been no other clues as to her mother’s whereabouts over the intervening years, no matter how many phone conversations she had strained to overhear or how many drawers she had rifled through at home, hoping to find meaningful scraps of paper and only ever coming across old shopping lists or stray paper clips or unrecognisable keys, the locks to which they’d once belonged also long forgotten.
She had imagined Kentish Town as a small country village, of the kind she used to see in oldPostman Patepisodes. There would be a green and a timber-beamed pub and pretty cottages with rose trellises and everyone would know everyone else, so it wouldn’t be too challenging to find her mother. It would, she had thought, simply be a question of waiting and keeping her eyes open and perhaps asking at the local shop if they knew anyone by the name of Harriet Grover.
But there was no village green or pub and not a single pretty cottage. When she emerged from the tube, she found herself standing on a grimy pavement, next to a rush of traffic separated from her by only a thin grey railing. A man in a red tabard selling theBig Issueleaned forward and thrust his arm out, putting a copy of the magazine into her hand before she noticed what was happening.
‘No, no thank you,’ she said, handing it back.
‘Sod off then,’ the man said, turning away from her.
A bus screeched past, burping exhaust fumes into the air. She felt acutely aware of her not belonging, of the purposeful rudeness of everyone who strode past her knowing where they were going while she did not. A woman in a red trouser suit. A man with a small dog on a leash. A girl pushing a buggy that contained a glass-eyed doll, pulled by her mother’s hands to move more quickly. A teenage boy on hismobile phone – a Nokia, the same one she had – shouting at someone that he didn’t want to do the fucking interview and could she stop going on about it, please. They were all half walking, half running, these people, and she noticed them looking at her with impatience for standing there without understanding what she had to do next, as if being lost were an oddity; as if she could at least have had the grace to pretend otherwise.
And still, she had faith. A peculiar, illogical sense that if she only walked around a bit, she would eventually see her mother. It had been ten years, but she knew she would recognise her immediately, that she would turn a corner and see a familiar silhouette, shoulders pressed back, raggedy hair, a slight heaviness around the hips, and it would be her. She would be able to smell her, the trail of vanilla and the undertone of the single Silk Cut cigarette her mother allowed herself every day. The soap she used, which came in patterned packets, the paper stuck together by a gold disc that looked like a medal. Yes, Marisa thought, she would know her mother anywhere.
Anna she was less sure about. It would be harder to imagine what kind of ten-year-old her baby sister would have grown into, but she would probably look like Marisa had at that age. It stood to reason, she told herself. They were siblings, even if they had been apart for so long.
She walked up the pavement from the tube station, the street turning into a gentle hill. There was a pub on the corner and when she glanced in through the windows it looked warm and inviting, the beer taps shiny in the buttery light. Although she was still only seventeen, Marisa had been to pubs plenty of times before. Being at boarding school gave you a remarkable amount of freedom. They were allowed to frequent one bar in town, as long as they only drank non-alcoholic drinks, which was a rule broken so often it stopped being a rule at all. At weekends, Marisa and a group of her friends would sign out and tell Mrs Carnegie they were going to the sanctioned bar, and instead they would catch the train to Worcester and present their fake IDs to the bouncers at Cargo’s, which was a trashy nightclub that played something the DJ called ‘club classics’ every Saturday night. They would drink rum and Cokes and dance and Marisa would throw her headback and forward in time with the beat and dance a little bit closer to the boy she fancied at any given moment. She was a good dancer, and picked up moves quickly from studying music videos. She knew that, while she might not have been the prettiest girl in her year, the dancefloor was her element. In the prismatic glare of a strobe light, with a shuddering bassline reverberating against her ribcage, she knew she could have anyone she wanted.
In the pub in Kentish Town, she was immediately nervous. There were only four other customers: two men sitting at the bar and a couple at a table holding hands, nudging the salt and pepper shakers to the edge with their arms. She was reassured by the couple and held her head high, pushing her shoulders back the way she had been taught in a one-off deportment class the school had arranged to help leavers with job interviews.
‘What’ll you be having?’ The barman looked at her with a smile.
‘Rum and Coke, please.’
She watched the barman’s back as he prepared her drink. He was younger than she had imagined, looking in from the outside, and she could see the ripple of his shoulder-blades underneath his checked shirt. The sleeves were rolled up, and he had a strip of muscle running down each forearm, the indent of it catching the overhead lights.
‘There you go,’ he said, presenting her with a glass that looked fuller than it should.
‘Thanks.’ She detected an Australian twang to his voice. ‘How much is it?’
He flipped a towel he had been using to wipe down the bar over his right shoulder.
‘On the house.’
‘What? But …’
‘It’s a mid-week offer. First drink free.’ He winked at her. She reddened.
‘OK,’ she mumbled. ‘Thanks.’
She sat at a table by the loos because she knew no one else would bother her here, in the least desirable part of the pub, and she wanted to be alone. She took a sip of her drink, feeling the bite of the alcoholand the sweetness of the Coca-Cola jostle for space on the back of her tongue until finally the Coke won out and it stopped tasting like rum at all. She took a gulp. Then another. Soon, half of it was gone and she could feel the incipient haze of light-headedness that she craved. She took out her phone and began, half-heartedly, to play a game of Snake. She just needed to sit here for a few more minutes, finish her drink, and then she’d go and find her mother. She knocked back the rest of the rum and Coke.
‘Another?’
The barman was beside her. She jumped at the sound of his voice.
‘Oh. I thought I had to order at the bar,’ she said, immediately hating how pathetic it sounded. If she were truly a grown-up, she would know exactly how to behave, Marisa thought. Play it cool, for fuck’s sake.
The barman winked again. Previously, Marisa had never thought anyone actually winked unless they were actors in soap operas or characters in bad spy novels. But this guy kept doing it.
‘For special customers, I come out from my cage.’
The way he said ‘cage’ made her shiver.
He patted her back.
‘Only kidding. What’ll it be? Another rum ’n’ Coke, yeah?’
She nodded. One more couldn’t hurt. She would just have one more, she told herself, just to take the edge off her nerves, and then she would stand up and leave and it would all be fine.
