Chapter 3: A beginning, an end... and a middle

A November Morning 2011

If you looked closely you could see the dark colouration under the left eye in her passport photograph. She had done her best to cover it up and she hadn’t made a bad job if it. It had taken three goes in the booth to get it right. It wasn’t perfect but she had run out of money so the final effort would have to do. Maybe people would think it was just heavy eye shadow or the way the light fell across her face. 

    She hadn’t seen the bastard for three weeks. With any luck he was lying at the bottom of the Valta with that horrible laptop case wrapped around his neck. Three weeks was enough. It was time to get out. 

    She threw the envelope in the bin and put the new passport in the kitchen drawer. She flipped through the other letters: A heating bill, yet another circular, which were beginning to appear more often in her post, and something for the last occupant of the little flat. Nothing from her sister. Three weeks there as well. It was time to go. 

    She went through to the freezing bathroom and looked at herself in the grimy little mirror. She looked like her passport photograph. Washed out at this time of the morning, pasty faced and a fading bruise under the left eye. But this left eye was in the mirror. Different eye. Different bruise. 

    Why hadn’t Maria written. No email she said. The bastard would get there first.  Just a postcard with a nice London Scene. That would be enough. But still there was nothing. 

    Time to get the hell out. 

    She would go to the internet café on the corner. Sasha would let her do it there and he would never tell. Sasha would allow her to break through the firewall into the West and to a deal with EasyJet. Thanks Sasha. He was in love with her. He had been since they were at school together. Poor Sasha. He never understood that what he wanted was real. For all the others it was make believe. In truth no one would have her. Even the bastard. He just thought he did. That was her only weapon against him. 

    She looked at her watch. Cheap, Russian, but working; Her Father’s. Not much of a reminder. 

    6am. Everything was already packed. It all fitted into a small rucksack. Karimoor. But she had nothing else to carry. There was underwear – not the stuff for work. She had burned that in the little fireplace last night. So, no going back; she could never afford underwear like that on her own. 

    There was a pair of nice shoes – that would go well with interviews.  And an outfit, which went OK with the shoes, which she had used when she had the day job in the insurance office. It was smart and a little dated but she had lost weight so it fitted her still. It was a two piece trouser suit, made from cheap polyester. It looked cheap but she did not know this. Everybody wore clothes like this in offices in Prague. No jeans, she would get some  in London.

    A few toiletries; Tampax, American perfume, No lipstick. Never again. 

    6.01. The edge of the dank carpet came away easily. Had he been there before her – found it? She pulled the floor board up. No it was there. Wrapped in plastic. Not fresh but functional. It was enough to get out. She didn’t bother to put the floorboard back. 

    6:02: One last look around this horrible little flat. Horrible little life. Goodbye to all that. Goodbye to lipstick and wide smiles. Goodbye to the cubicle and his fucking little magic eye. Goodbye to seventy to me thirty to you. Goodbye to the beat of the music and the beating from that bastard. So long old Jana.

    She went back through into the kitchen and gulped the  last dregs of the cold coffee. She’d made it the night before but had been too tired to drink it. She opened the kitchen drawer  again and took out the passport. She hitched up her skirt and slipped it into the back of her panties – just in case. 

    Finally. The back door. She decided to lock it behind her but not pop the key through the letter box at the front. As she turned the key in the lock the wooden staircase, which zigzagged down the outside of the building, moved under her feet. She hadn’t heard his car; hadn’t smelled his aftershave; hadn’t felt fear. Not now. Not after three weeks. Please not now. I have to go. 

Chapter 2: Swings and Roundabouts

An October Evening 2012

There was a beginning, middle and an end to Steven Pyke’s days as a retired newspaper reporter and child minder in South London. The weekends were a little different and we will come on to that later. But it was the weekdays he looked forward too. Not that he was ever very keen to let his daughter, Katie (she preferred and often insisted upon: Katherine) know that. 

    Most evenings when she got home from work in the city she would flomp into the large beanbag in Daisy’s ‘Rumpus Room’, watch her father preparing dinner through the hatch, feel he was overdoing it and say: 

    ‘I should get a nanny. I can afford it.’

    ‘No point Katie,’ was always his answer. 

    Truth be known, once Daisy was in bed and the storm of looking after her for the day had abated he would miss her. If Katie was going to be very late in he was so often tempted to wake Daisy, take her downstairs and bung on a Tweenies DVD with her. He never did. He was a good grandfather – but it was always there in his mind. Tweenies with Daisy was far more preferable to anything Channel four ever had to offer.   

    ‘She was so smart today’ 

    ‘Hmmm.” (This from behind a copy of ‘In Style magazine’ and sunken into the depths of the huge leather poof thing). 

    ‘She notices everything. And she remembers everything we say’ 

     He could hear the pages of the glossy turning slowly as one silly, Dolce and Cabana American celebrity was turned onto her face and another one exposed to the glare of the flashlight.  “Olga Spleen at the Armani after show fundraiser in Gucci” Stephen had flicked through those magazines whilst Daisy took her nap and shivered. They weren’t even sexy. He preferred Sarah Jane and the darker one with big teeth on ‘Tum Tum Tells a Tale’ any day. Kids TV was great…for grown ups. 

    He tried again.

    ‘Sharp as button, that one.’

     No response from Katie. Did she have no interest in her children? What was the point of working so hard if you didn’t even get home in time to tuck them into bed at least? 

    ‘She has an amazingly mature grasp on ‘woman things’ she pointed out the Feminine Hygiene section to me very kindly in the chemist today. Did you tell her about it? (no you didn’t did you) 

    Stephen carried on pottering about the kitchen, Mixing the salad and putting it on the table. 

    ‘Wine?’

    ‘Katie? Wine? It’s Tuna steak. 

     Stephen poked his slightly greying mop of hair followed by his face through the hatch. At first he thought his daughters eyesight must be deteriorating rapidly as she had In Style very unstylishly  pressed against her nose. She was asleep. 

    Stephen sighed. Poured himself a glass of Nottage Hill from Waitrose and placed it on the table. He then placed daisy’s ‘drag about’ quilt over his gently snoring daughter and returned to the table to eat. 

    As he ate he read the local paper which he had picked up as he came though the front door with Daisy earlier. There was a story on the front page with a huge headline. Nanny finds her Billy. It was hardly the lead story he would have worked on in his day – even in those far off days on the local rag in the north. He read the first paragraph. Clearly written by some aspiring reporter with an eye on moving to the nationals. 

   

Life is looking up for Eva. The 23 year old nanny who escaped her own war torn country to start a new life in Britain has married the man who’s children she looks after. 

    Single Father William Hopkins...blah blah…   

    Stephen didn’t bother with the rest. That was about as much local colour as he could take. Those stories were only fluff to fill up the parts of the paper where the property classifieds didn’t reach. 

     The Big story on The Today Programme when he had tuned in earlier in the week was the threat of rocketing interests rates and a housing market collapse. That little item he noticed had been dismissed in two lines as a filler on page 4. Of course, there were no houses for sale on page 4, just a huge half page devoted to rock bottom priced MP3 players from Dixons. (now known as Dixons Digital) Not mush use to Stephen; Katie had given him an MP3 player for Christmas and he had even managed to get a USB 2 connection fitted into his PC to download stuff forty times faster than if he hadn’t fitted a USB 2.  Either way Matt Munro sounded the same. 

    Katie groaned. He turned. Her big eyes were looking at him from under the child sized blanket.

    ‘ I must have dropped off, How long have a I been asleep?’

    ’15 years, but don’t worry I have managed to get Katie up to read chemical engineering at Cambridge.’

     Katie smiled. 15 years – aren’t you dead then?’

     ‘ No I decided to take some little pills which were invented for old people to annoy their children. Now come and eat, you look like you are about to fade away.’

    Katie dragged herself to the table patting her father on the head as she passed him. 

    ‘Did you have lunch’

    ‘No, I was in meetings back to back – there were sandwiches but I never got to them.’

    ‘Well Katie, you are wasting away and working too hard...’ he stopped. His daughter was gripping her knife and fork tightly and staring at the pattern on the John Lewis table cloth. Stephen had learned when to stop. 

     ‘I’ll get your supper.’ 

      They finished their meal in silence. This was the way it went. Often Stephen or Katie would suggest a decaf coffee afterwards. It was like a sign... an invitation to chat about the day, about Daisy, work or whatever. Lately Katie had been turning the coffee down and going off to bed or to her computer leaving Stephen to clear the dishes away and have the house tidy for the next day. He didn’t mind. He knew how much his daughter loved her work and how hard she worked at it.. PR, Marketing, Online media something… Whatever it was there were a lot of meetings with men who still had pony tails at 50. 

     Stephen, on the other hand had it easy and without Katie he would have been stuck without a roof over his head. 

     As Stephen made his way up to the top of the house where he occupied the Mansard extension he passed his daughter’s study. He thought he could hear her muffled voice. Speaking on the Phone to New York no doubt. He could also hear the bleep of her computer. Stephen hesitated for a moment, tempted to knock and say goodnight. He was worried about her. She had always been an aloof person – even as a child. She took after him. But just recently he had become worried. Was work going badly? Did she have money worries? Hardly. She needed a man in her life. someone to share the precious moments away from the hard slog of a career. Ever since Richard had walked out she had appeared self contained, content.  It had taken him weeks to get her to talk about it.

     ‘Good God Dad, you have no idea how glad I am to be out of all that. I have my work I have this house, the cottage. What else could I need.’ 

    She had forgotten to mention Daisy, who was 15 months old at the time, but Stephen had let it go, wished her goodnight and put the phone down.  

    ‘She’ll be fine’  This to Eleanor, his anxious wife who was finding her daughters marriage break-up very hard to deal with.  She never really warmed to Richard but this on top of her own troubles was not what her doctor had ordered. 

    Three months later Stephen was a widower. He was also broke. 

    By the new year after long discussions with Katie he had moved to London and occupied the top floor of their Five bedroom House in SW11. 

   It was supposed to be temporary and that’s how they both treated the arrangement. But somehow neither of them quite believed that. 

    He crept on down the corridor and looked in on Daisy who was in a contorted position with the quilt thrown off and her Pyjamas riding up her little chest. He gently put the covers back and closed the door. 

    He went on up avoiding the one creaky step in an otherwise solidly built extension. 

    Stephen was tired. He didn’t bother to clean his teeth. He just threw off his clothes, switched on his digital radio and got into bed. He usually read before turning out the light. Tonight be would put his head down straight away and drift off to the sometimes bizarre sounds of Late Junction on radio 3. It would be better that way. Things had felt wrong all day. All out of Synch. Don’t dwell on it. Go to sleep. It would be better in the morning when daisy would burst through his bedroom door leap on his stomach and demand breakfast. 

    He drifted off to sleep in the relative silence of an evening in South London, washed away on a sea of distant police sirens, screaming motorbikes and the chink chink clink of the swings in the park at the back of the house. 

Chapter 1: Afterbirth and Latte

An October Morning 2012 

‘They’re fine provided you keep feeding them.’

He smiled.  It was meant as a joke, a typical comment between two people who understood all there was to know about young children.  But the woman, who had jumped the queue for coffee at Starbucks, affected that disapproving air she normally reserved for her Nanny.  ‘Hers’ note!  Not her children’s.

   She turned her plump little face back to the counter and ordered a double decaf skinny cup of Glug.  The Polish Coffee Barista trainee operative passed her order down the line to his spotty Latvian trainee girlfriend. The woman plunged her hand into a jar of lollipops, extracting two which looked exactly the same (she had two children and a fear of them fighting in public).  The coffee machine made plughole gurgles and across the room her young offspring were testing the old rusty springs of the worn out yellow leather sofa by climbing on the arms and smearing their runny noses on its broken, arthritic back.  No one batted an eyelid. 

     Stephen Pyke, tall, slim, aloof, sixty – but looking fifty - rose above the rabble and glanced at his own charge who was sitting placidly in her pushchair reading a book about something called a Garuffalo. 

    As far as Stephen was concerned half the place was full of mothers talking in twos and threes about their afterbirth.  The other half was full of nannies from eastern Europe talking about their English boyfriends.

      Stephen hated Starbucks.  He hated the Northcote Road and he hated SW11. Still.  It was probably better than Chingford.  Not that he’d ever been anywhere near Chingford.  In fact it was almost the same as Chingford except for the dress sense.  Ok he didn’t hate SW11 exactly, but he did hate the people here.  But that was ok.  He liked to hate them.

   He ordered his tea and smiled at the very idea of an American chain producing anything resembling tea.  To be fair to the Americans they were pretty much ok if they produced something with the word ‘Iced’ in front of it; but Starbucks tea left him cold even when it wasn’t iced.  He needed to sit down and Daisy was hungry. 

    ‘And a sunrise muffin please.’ 

     It was like this every weekday.  And would be like this every weekday until Daisy started nursery, which would be soon.   Then he could slip to the pub in the morning and sit outside until it opened sucking his pipe or doing the crossword.  Stephen had never done a crossword in his life, except once when he was commuting into the city.  He didn’t look at the clues, just filled the silly little squares up with the first words he could make fit. He finished the Telegraph crossword in record time and started on the Times (ok he had almost done two crosswords). No one else in the serious little compartment seemed very impressed.  Stephen never felt the need to impress other people and he hated crosswords.

   As Stephen picked his way across the heaving mess of coffee shop, gently negotiating triplets, sprawled on the floor and covered in green coffee beans, he thought to himself: 

    I probably won’t come here when she starts school. 

    He squeezed himself into the solitary chair in the unfashionable corner of the mighty conglomerate’s outer southwestern arm.  Daisy reached up for the muffin and said:

    ‘Thank you, Grandpa’

    He stroked her blonde head.  On reflection he would probably still come to Starbuck even when he had nothing to do in the mornings. 

    Daisy delicately levered the little sugary roof of the muffin from its soft spongy body.  That was the best bit.  Grandpa could eat the yucky bit.  Again.  

    The fat, queue jumping, mother was being bossy and talking in a loud, silly, affected, posh voice to her hapless, fat four-year-old son. 

    ‘You’ll have to behave better than that at Sputnik’s, Igor.’

She pronounced it Eye-gore (Like Marty Feldman in Young Frankenstein) In fact, she looked a bit like Marty Feldman in Young Frankenstein.  Sputnik’s was the latest private pre-pre prep school to get in on the ritual extraction of money from the locals.  These were locals who spent their weekends in the country where they also looked upon themselves as locals. 

    Stephen sneered inwardly at the woman.  It dawned on him that she had asked him something about Daisy without listening to the answer just to push in front of him.  He calmed his anger by deciding that she had no other interest in her life but her children and her husband had no other interest but her nanny.  So, Whose nanny? He imagined her slipping down to the kitchen at night and reheating a cold curry on the Aga and washing it down with a hot chocolate, No! He was being spiteful.  So what. 

    Stephen held his dislike of this woman and her kind behind his expression. He would not wish her any harm; just lower cholesterol, less of a lifestyle and a more meaningful life. 

   What he could not have guessed at that very moment as he sipped on his tea was the part the Mrs Bossy queue jumper was about to play in his life. He would be seeing a lot of her over the coming week - something that neither of them would particularly enjoy. But when Stephen got his teeth into something he couldn’t let go until the fat lady sang.