Chelsea, 1988
I’d been watching from the stairs, so I already knew. A man with dark curls, a hat with a brim, a donkey jacket, tweed trousers tucked into big lace-up boots. Suitcases that looked like props from an olden-days movie and a wickerwork cat box held together with a worn leather strap. And Birdie standing by his side, in a dress that looked like a nightie.
“Darling!” I heard my mother call out to my father. “Come and meet Justin!”
I watched my father appear from the drawing room. He had a cigar clenched between his teeth and was wearing a hairy green sweater.
“So,” he said, squeezing the man’s hand too hard, “you’re Birdie’s boyfriend?”
“Partner,” Birdie interjected. “Justin is my partner.”
My father looked at her in that way he had when he thought someone was deliberately making him look a fool, as though he was considering violence. But the look passed quickly and I saw him push through it with a smile. “Yes,” he said. “Of course. That’s the modern way, isn’t it?”
Birdie had told my mother that she and her partner needed somewhere to stay for a few days. Their landlord had kicked them out because they’d got a cat—what sort of idiot gets a cat without checking the terms of their lease? I was not even eleven years old and had never lived in a rental and I knew that much—and Birdie hadn’t known whom else to turn to. As an adult man now of forty-one years old I have often used this refrain to get people to do what I want them to do. I didn’t know who else to turn to. It gives the person you’re trying to manipulate nowhere to go. Their only option is to capitulate. Which is exactly what my mother did.
“But we have so many rooms,” she’d said when I complained about the upcoming arrangement. “And it’s only for a few days.”
My mother, in my opinion, just wanted a pop star living in her house.
My sister passed me on the stairs and stopped with a small intake of breath when she saw the cat basket in the hall. “What’s it called?” she said, dropping to her knees to peer through the grille.
“It’s a girl. She’s called Suki,” said Birdie.
“Suki,” she said, tucking the knuckles of her fingers between the bars. The cat pushed itself against her hand and purred loudly.
The man called Justin picked up his stage-prop suitcase and said, “Where shall we put our things, Martina?”
“We’ve got a lovely room for you at the top of the house. Children, show our guests to the yellow room, will you?”
My sister led the way. She was by far the more gregarious of the two of us. I found grown-ups relatively terrifying, whereas she seemed to quite like them. She was wearing green pajamas. I was wearing a tartan dressing gown and blue felt slippers. It was nearly nine and we’d been on a countdown to bedtime.
“Oh,” said Birdie as my sister pushed open the hidden door in the wood paneling that led to the stairs to the top floor. “Where on earth are you taking us?”
“It’s the back stairs,” my sister said. “To the yellow room.”
“You mean the servants’ entrance?” Birdie replied sniffily.
“Yes,” my sister replied brightly, because although she was only a year and a half younger than me she was too young to understand that not everyone thought sleeping in secret rooms at the top of secret staircases was an adventure, that some people might think they deserved proper big bedrooms and would be offended.
At the top of the secret staircase there was a wooden door leading to a long thin corridor where the walls were sort of wonky and lumpy and the floorboards warped and bouncy and it felt a bit like walking along a moving train. The yellow room was the nicest of the four up there. It had three windows in the ceiling and a big bed with a yellow duvet cover to match the yellow Laura Ashley wallpaper and modern table lamps with blue glass shades. Our mother had arranged yellow and red tulips in a vase. I watched Birdie’s face as she took it all in, a sort of grudging tilt of her chin as if to say: I suppose it will do.
We left them there, and I followed behind my sister as she skipped down the stairs, through the drawing room, and into the kitchen.
Dad was uncorking wine. Mum was wearing her frilled apron and tossing a salad. “How long are those people staying for?” I couldn’t help blurting out. I saw a shadow pass across my father’s face at the note of impudence I’d failed to mask.
“Oh. Not for long.” My mother pushed the cork back into a bottle of red wine vinegar and placed it to one side, smiling benignly.
“Can we stay up?” my sister asked, not looking at the bigger picture, not looking beyond the nose on her face.
“Not tonight,” my mother replied. “Tomorrow maybe, when it’s the weekend.”
“And then, will they go?” I asked, very gently nudging the line between me and my father’s patience with me. “After the weekend?”
I turned then as I sensed my mother’s gaze drift across my shoulder. Birdie was standing in the doorway with the cat in her arms. It was brown and white with a face like an Egyptian queen. Birdie looked at me and said, “We shan’t be staying long, little boy. Just until Justin and I have found a place of our own.”
“My name is Henry,” I said, hugely taken aback that a grown-up in my own home had just called me “little boy.”
“Henry,” repeated Birdie, looking at me sharply. “Yes, of course.”
My sister was staring greedily at the cat and Birdie said, “Would you like to hold her?”
She nodded and the cat was placed into her arms, where it immediately twisted itself around 180 degrees like a piece of unfurled elastic and escaped, leaving her with a terrible red scratch on the inside of her arm. I saw her eyes fill with tears and her mouth twist into a brave smile.
“It’s OK,” she said, as my mother fussed over her, dabbing at her arm with a wet cloth.
“Henry, fetch some Germolene, will you, from my bathroom cupboard.”
I threw Birdie a look as I passed, wanting her to see that I knew she hadn’t taken enough care passing the cat to my sister. She looked back at me, her eyes so small I could barely make out their color.
I was a strange boy. I can see that now. I’ve since met boys like me: slow to smile, intense, guarded, and watchful. I suspect that Birdie had probably been a very strange little girl. Maybe she recognized herself in me. But I could tell she hated me, even then. It was obvious. And it was very much mutual.
I passed Justin as I crossed the hallway. He was holding a battered box of Black Magic chocolates and looking lost. “Your parents that way?” he asked, pointing in the general direction of the kitchen.
“Yes,” I said. “In the kitchen. Through that arch.”
“Merci beaucoup,” he said, and although I was only ten I was old enough to know that he was being pretentious.
We were sent to bed shortly after that, my sister with a sticking plaster on the inside of her arm, me with the beginnings of an upset stomach. I was one of those children: my emotions made themselves felt in my gut.
I could hear them shuffling about upstairs later that night. I put a pillow over my head and went back to sleep.
The Black Magic sat unopened on the kitchen table the next morning, when I came down extra early. I was tempted to unpeel the cellophane and open them. A small act of rebellion that would have made me feel better in the short term but way, way worse in the long. I felt a movement behind me and saw the cat squeezing through the kitchen door. I thought about the scratch on my sister’s arm and remembered Birdie’s impatient tut: “It was an accident, she wasn’t holding her properly, Suki would never scratch on purpose.”
A bubble of hot red anger passed right through me at the memory and I hissed loudly at the cat and chased it out of the room.
It was almost a relief to go to school that day, to feel normal for a few hours. I’d just started my last term of primary school. I would turn eleven the following month, one of the youngest boys in my year, and then I would be moved on to a bigger school, closer to home, with no knickerbockers. I was very fixated on it at this point. I had very much outgrown the knickerbocker school and all the children I’d grown up with. I could tell I was different. Completely different. There was no one like me there and I had fantasies about going to the big school and finding myself surrounded by people like me. Everything would be better at the big school. I just had ten weeks to get through, then a long boring summer, and then it would all begin.
I had no idea, none whatsoever, how different the landscape of my life would look by the end of that summer and how all the things I’d been waiting for would soon feel like distant dreams.