‘Huxnjjd ehsuihf hsdrh efhuhu.’
‘I can’t hear you!’
‘HUXNJJD EHSUIHF HSDRH EFHUHU.’
‘I can’t hear you, where are you?’
‘Can you hear me now?’
‘Yes I can hear you now.’
‘I’m outside the National Gallery. You have to get here now. Huxnjjd ehsuihf hsdrh efhuhu.’
The line went dead. Rain waited, staring at her mobile. Harry rang back.
‘Sorry about that. You have to come to the National Gallery now. I’ve FOUND THE PROOF.’
‘What proof? How do I get there?’
‘Take a 23 bus.’
‘What sort of proof? Do my ears look like the Mona Lisa’s?’ Rain laughed at her own joke.
‘The Mona Lisa’s in the Louvre, you fool. You’re going to see it, and you’re going to be amazed and you’re going to apologise!’
‘But it’s seven o’clock, when does it close?’
‘It’s Wednesday, it’s open late tonight. Till at least eight, maybe nine, when can you get here? Oh, I suppose you’ll be eating supper soon.’
‘I don’t think Gran’d mind, we were only going to have the rest of the deli salads she left you for lunch today, she isn’t cooking.’
‘Then get on the bus! I’ll go and wait in the Pret over the road, call me when you get close.’
Rain had given Harry her mum’s diary and she wasn’t sure why; she couldn’t think of a good reason now. In fact, she could think of a few bad reasons: she’d started worrying he thought it was weird of her, because he hadn’t got back to her, until now. She hadn’t seen him on his own for a couple of days. Vivienne had been taking her out in the daytime to her favourite places in London – today it had been Soho, where her gran had once had a flat (!) and where they made their way past little market stalls and XXX-rated bars with neon naked-woman-shaped signs outside, and then ate delicious, tiny dim sum in a super-trendy restaurant. In their absence, Madrigal and Harry had been dutifully stripping the huge, high ground-floor walls on their own. Rain knew how hard the work was, and felt bad about it when she and her gran came in late and the two students looked totally flat-out exhausted, sitting at the bottom of the ladder with massive piles of torn grey wallpaper pieces around them. Still, it was a summer job, and they had both wanted to do it. Probably, in fact, they’d spent half the day snogging, so Rain had nothing to feel bad about. Actually, she admitted to herself, it was precisely that, the probable-snogging, that she felt bad about.
But Harry hadn’t said anything about the diary, and, although Rain wasn’t surprised, she’d been disappointed when he came to work and didn’t take a detour past her room and excitedly explain his latest theory. Had he got something to tell her now?
Rain found her granny eating olives and reading a magazine at the kitchen table, and told her that Harry had asked if she wanted to go and meet him.
‘I think he suddenly got last minute tickets to something or something like that,’ Rain said, realising this was a lie that was only going to get more complicated later, but she couldn’t come up with anything else. She took an olive so she’d have thinking time while she chewed.
‘How are you getting on with Harry?’ Vivienne said. ‘He must fancy you tons, I think.’
Rain almost inhaled the olive. She started coughing. ‘Oh, Gran, he doesn’t, what about Madrigal?’
‘They’re totally girlfriend and boyfriend!’
‘Oh, she wishes,’ her granny said.
‘Really? You think they’re not a couple? Do you know that?’
‘Well they haven’t talked about it, but it seems obvious to me.’
‘But it seems obvious to me that they are,’ Rain said. ‘They kept holding hands when we went out for dinner.’
‘She kept holding his hand.’
‘I didn’t notice him objecting.’
‘He was probably being polite. I just can’t see him with someone like Madrigal,’ Vivienne said. ‘She’s really not very funny, she’s just … pretty. That’s so boring.’
‘Yeah sure,’ Rain thought, ‘gorgeous blondes probably aren’t his “type”, he’d rather have a good old-fashioned belly-laugh.’ There were some things grandmothers just weren’t going to understand, even very hip ones like Vivienne.
‘So is it okay if I go?’ Rain asked.
‘Yes, go! But look, I’m telling you, I still think Harry fancies you. So if you don’t fancy him, be warned.’
‘Right, Gran,’ Rain said and, even though she knew it was completely impossible and stupid for her to even think about, she smiled all the way to the bus stop, and only stopped smiling because a weird-looking man with lots of laundry bags on the other side of the road noticed and smiled back at her.
Rain was just a touch more nervous about going on the bus alone in the evening, but as soon as she got aboard, she realised it was just the same as the daytime bus – packed with the same mix of people: two elderly Arab men reading the same foreign paper together, a crazy old lady filling out both sides of her seat with knotted carrier bags, people of all ages and all races ignoring each other. And it smelt faintly of sick. She asked the nice-looking Chinese girl next to her if she could tell her when the National Gallery stop was coming up and the girl said she was getting off before then. Rain didn’t dare ask anyone else, and kept her eyes fixed to the road, nervous that she’d miss it, but a few minutes after the Chinese girl had got off, a little old man two seats away turned around and said to Rain, ‘Excuse me, love, were you asking about the National Gallery? It’s the next stop. This is Trafalgar Square.’
She thanked him and rang the bell. As she hopped over the massive gap between bus and pavement, she was already punching Harry’s number into her phone. She waved at the old man from outside the bus.
‘Okay, I’m at Trafalgar Square,’ Rain said.
‘Fantastic!’ Harry said. ‘Stay right where you are!’
She looked around her, trying to see across the still-crowded Trafalgar Square, feeling a little lost. They’d gone past it before on the bus, but now she was there she realised she should have made Harry tell her exactly where they were meeting. The roads around the square were jammed with fuming traffic. The buildings on all sides were very tall and white and she wasn’t even sure which direction she’d come from, or where she should be going, or how Harry would find her, everything was too big. She stood still for a moment, watching kids climbing all over the big lions at the foot of Nelson’s Column, and little toddlers getting out of their buggies to chase the pigeons, screaming with laughter. There were loads of pigeons and when they flew up away from the toddlers in frightened clouds, Rain ducked and let out a little scream, holding her hands over her face, feeling the sweep of dusty wings against them.
Then she saw Harry, breaking into a little skippy run every three or four steps, brushing his hair back and, when he saw her, smiling.
‘This had better be worth it,’ she warned him.
‘This,’ Harry said, ‘could be dynamite.’
It was funny how they could both talk quite lightly now about Rain’s terrible bombshell discovery, and Harry didn’t worry about hurting her feelings, and Rain didn’t worry, as she initially had, about the fact that her feelings should be hurt when Harry was flippant about it. But moments like this didn’t really feel much to do with anything real, they just felt like the crazy thing she was doing this summer.
‘This is going to prove that “Colin” is my dad, is it?’
‘You’re making fun of me,’ Harry said, raising an eyebrow and smiling. ‘But get ready to take me seriously.’
‘It could be dynamite,’ Rain said.
Harry held her hand and pulled her arm. ‘This way.’
He opened the door for her, and, going straight past the reception desk, led her through lots of dark, woody rooms with warm red wallpaper. The gallery was still quite full, with groups of students sitting on the floor, some of them sketching paintings. The floors creaked as Harry and Rain walked behind them. Finally they came to a much bigger room with soothing green wallpaper, bright with natural light. Harry took a step back, and flamboyantly waved his arm towards a picture. It was one of the smallest pictures in the room. It showed a plump androgynous young man with a pink rose in his hair holding his hands up in weedy horror and pain as a little reptile hung from his finger.
‘What am I looking at?’ Rain said. ‘A fat boy playing with a newt?’
‘Maybe you could read the title?’ Harry said, failing to hide how much Rain had amused him.
‘Boy Bitten By A Lizard… ?’ Rain read. ‘BITTEN BY A LIZARD! That’s a Lavender Sandcastles song! It’s on Belinda’s Destiny!’
‘Aha,’ Harry said.
‘But that’s … ‘ Rain took a step closer to the picture and stared at it. It was a very beautiful picture, with a crystal-clear vase of water and glossy succulent fruit in front of the boy. ‘But actually … what’s that got to do with anything? “Colin” named a song after a picture, so what?’
‘Did you see who painted it?’
Rain leaned forward again. ‘Caravaggio?’ Her eyes widened. ‘Caravaggio, it’s in the diary, it’s, er … ‘ She couldn’t remember why her mum had mentioned it.
‘And this one too?’
Rain leaned across to the next painting, which was much bigger, and looked familiar, she felt it must be quite a famous one. ‘The Supper at Emmaus … Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da.’ She read it slowly, trying to remember.
‘Let’s sit down.’ Harry was carrying a newspaper, and he carefully opened it and took Sarah’s diary out of its folds. There was a paper bookmark in its pages, and Harry turned to the marked page and gave Rain the book.
So … the fact is, he kissed me.
In the National Gallery!
We were in the room with the Caravaggios – the best room – sitting on one of the curvy leather seats looking at QV’s favourite, and the place was totally empty.
‘It’s this room? It’s this room!’ Rain said.
‘Boom,’ Harry whispered.
‘But even so,’ Rain said. ‘Where does it say this is his favourite picture? It just says favourite picture.’
‘You’re a tough crowd,’ Harry said. ‘His initials are a not very common QV. We know this bloke plays in a band. He takes her to fancy gallery openings. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of Sixties music – the influence of which some might say can be heard in the retro-Sixties melodies of the two-hit wonder band Lavender Sandcastles, who recorded the song “Not My Baby”. And his favourite picture is in this very room which doesn’t have many pictures, but one of them has the same weird name as a Lavender Sandcastles track. Seriously, what more do you want?’
Rain pushed her lower lip out in an unconscious pout. ‘My mum to tell me it’s him … ‘ she mumbled. ‘
How about if he tells you?’
‘What?’
‘I told you I found out Quentin Vienna’s real name. I think we can track him down and we can go and have a chat, and if he knew your mum then … ‘
‘But how? Oh, Madrigal, I suppose.’
‘Yeah, yeah, Madrigal’ll help, of course she will!’
Rain remembered with a jolt that she’d been angry with Harry for sharing the story with Madrigal. She wasn’t angry any more, not when Harry was doing so much for her. He was being lovely. But she still felt sick to the stomach that Madrigal was involved, and this could never be more than a larky summer mystery to Harry. If he could get his girlfriend to help him play detective, it would be even more fun for him.
‘Well, I suppose we could … talk to him … about … ‘ Rain tried to find the words. ‘No, this is just insane! We can’t go hassling some stranger who’s also sort of famous, he’ll think we’re complete nutters. He probably still has groupies camped outside his house.’
‘I have to say, that’s incredibly unlikely. Seventeen-year-old groupies even more incredibly unlikely. They weren’t a massive band. Most people haven’t heard of them.’
‘But he’s still not going to see us.’
‘At this point,’ Harry said, ‘he’s just some bloke who was in a band when he was a kid. There are thousands of old pop stars alive today, and they don’t go around acting like Elton John. So we just don’t know. He might.’
Rain breathed out loudly, half-laugh, half-exasperation. She was sitting in the seat where her real parents first kissed, with a boy she wanted to kiss her. Instead of kissing her, he was talking crazy talk to her that seemed to drift in and out of making sense.
Harry gave her a little smile. ‘What’s the harm in asking?’
Downstairs in the café, Rain had managed to come up with a more competent list of questions.
‘He must have known, she must have told him, and he didn’t stay with her. Why bring back what must have been an awful time in his life? What if he has a wife now, and he has to tell her and they can never be the same again? And if I find something out, how can I not tell my dad? I would never be able to keep something like that from him.’ Rain looked into her cup because she knew she’d cry if she had to face Harry when she said the next thing. ‘Last week, no one hurt at all. What gives me the right to hurt other people this week?’
Harry tilted his head on one side. His dark brown eyes were warm, but she felt herself shiver. ‘You’re not trying to hurt anyone,’ he said. ‘You’re just trying to make sense of things.’
6 August
I can’t sleep. It’s 4.22 a.m. and I haven’t slept yet. I flopped around in bed until the restlessness made me want to kick my legs until they couldn’t kick any more. Then I started looking out the window, which was a mistake; the street is empty and lonely and dark with strange shadows, it just makes me even more scared and I feel scared anyway. Harry only told me this evening that we were on for tomorrow. There were a few days where he didn’t have any news at all: I was disappointed, but relieved too, because part of me didn’t want to go any further, wanted it to be so hard I just gave up.
What if tomorrow changes me? It’s bad enough today, not knowing anything – yet knowing there’s more to know. Now that it’s happening, I’ve started thinking about it seriously and the questions I keep coming back to feel like stones in my stomach. Does he know? If he knew, why did he let me go? If he knows, he doesn’t want to see me – so what will happen when he’s forced to?
And if he isn’t the one, how long do I have to keep looking?
I keep thinking, I can’t stop my head thinking. I know that in all this the one person I don’t want to be hurt is my dad, my proper dad, Sam Lindsay. Does he know? If he doesn’t, do I have to tell him? Or can I only find out he knows by asking him, by which point it will be too late? When I think of him being sad because he’s found out, or because he knows I’ve found out, I almost can’t hold everything I feel in my head at once, it’s a junkyard of shame and regret, I’m aching all over at the thought of doing something that’s going to cause him pain. He is the person I love most in the world, and whatever train of events threw us together, he’s the biggest part of me, what makes me me. It’s his sense of honour and sense of humour that I’ve absorbed, his amazing kindness that I’ve always seen as the sort to try for. Yes, he’s a brilliant scientist and I got a C at GCSE chemistry, but you know what? I am also virtually tone deaf and can’t play an instrument to save my life, so I don’t have anything of the other bloke either, and I know that genes aren’t what made me and my dad so close.
Even as I write this, I’m terrified that opening up the past will somehow let my dad stop loving me. I know it’s stupid, but it’s such a big fear, the worst and biggest, that the tiny odds don’t matter – God, there aren’t even any odds! I have to stop thinking that way! But I can’t … I don’t want the other man, not for a second, if it’ll risk what I have with my dad. So why am I doing this, and why is Harry involved? It’s not his life.
And Harry, who’s responsible for tomorrow, who has pestered Madrigal’s posh dad and somehow talked a former pop star into spending his Saturday evening talking to a teenage girl, God, what do I do about Harry? It feels a lot like I’m falling in love with him. I once read an old saying in a romance book:
To love is nothing
To be loved is something
To love and be loved is everything.
What I have right now is the beginning of nothing. When I’m not thinking about my dad and bloody Quentin Vienna, I am playing back in my head all the things Harry has ever said to me, every smile, every look, every accidental or friendly touch. It’s partly to obsessively analyse it and try to work out how he feels and what he meant by it, and partly because, when I replay the smiles, the looks, the touches, I start glowing all over again and can’t feel my feet … and I want to laugh out loud.
Gah, it’s stupid! He’s got a girlfriend! But I can’t help that he makes me happy. I sound like a tired person now. I’m writing like someone who is stupid with tired and doesn’t even know what the words mean. I need to sleep or I’ll talk like this tomorrow. If I just sleep through tomorrow, will Harry come and tell me how it went and who I’m supposed to be now?