In the car park at Kenwood House, Shelley prayed the sun would be strong enough to break through and soothe her aching bones. But it didn’t look likely. The sky over Hampstead Heath was covered with thick layers of clouds, rolling like hills, like a reflection of the landscape below.
When Nicole arrived – dressed for tea at the Ritz rather than a walk through the Heath – they set off down a muddy track. They came out into a sprawling field scattered with hawthorn trees. Apart from the birdsong and the sound of the wind striking the long grass, they walked in silence, in the direction of Highgate Ponds.
Shelley was conscious that she and Nicole were yet to have their chat about what happened at The Lanesborough. Nicole hadn’t brought it up since the conversation last week. Strangely, Tara and Hugo hadn’t spoken about it either. She wondered whether the conversation had taken place at all. Crack psychosis confused what was real and what wasn’t, and she knew that night it had taken her. Tara was generally one to tease, as was Hugo. So if they knew about The Lanesborough, it was odd for them not to mention it. “Lanesboroughgate,” Hugo had called it that night. How could he resist taunting her with that again? If that’s what he’d said.
“Are you all right, love? You look tired.” Nicole looked concerned.
“I’ve not been sleeping too well.” Shelley couldn’t tell her the truth: that she was trying to quit heroin. And what she’d said wasn’t a lie. She hadn’t slept well in years, not since the nightmares began.
***
She had considered cancelling her walk with Nicole, which had been arranged pre-cold turkey, but she didn’t like to let people down. And now it was too late. However hard, she’d have to walk with withdrawal symptoms. Nicole was managing perfectly well in her court shoes.
As they wandered through a third field and climbed up another slope of a hill, Shelley felt a thin layer of sweat forming under her clothes. The wind whispered down the low neckline of her sweater and the coolness of the air against her wet skin caused her to shiver. She hoped Nicole didn’t notice.
They left the openness of a meadow and followed a path into a section dense with white-barked, silver birches. Shelley’s nose itched and she started to sneeze.
“Bless you, most precious. Maybe you’re coming down with something,” Nicole said.
“Maybe,” Shelley replied, scratching her arm. Although heroin-free, she was itching all over as if she’d had a fix.
***
On reaching Highgate Ponds, Shelley saw the regular ice cream van parked up. She took the opportunity to rest her tired bones by buying an ice cream for herself and Nicole.
Sitting on a mound of unruly grass, they ate their 99s. A loud cry disturbed Shelley and she turned her eyes away from the bare trees surrounding her and toward the source of the noise. On the footpath by the pond, a glaring swan was parading with a biscuit in its mouth. Nearby, in a red pushchair, a crying toddler was being consoled by his mother.
Shelley watched the child. Her baby would have been about that age by now. Purposefully, she turned away, and as she did, the white swan flew past her and returned to the murky water.
“Do you think that swan might eat the chicks?” Shelley asked worriedly, as the swan made a beeline for a brown mallard and its ducklings at the other side of the pond.
“A Resident Killer Swan? I wouldn’t think so, love. They all live here together.”
Shelley didn’t think Nicole sounded too certain and as the swan was now chasing the mallard out of the water, separating it from its ducklings, she dropped the remainder of her ice cream cone and ran over to help.
By the time she reached the other side of the pond, the ducklings were teetering in a line along the footpath, following a large duck waddling up front. She noticed a stranded duckling stuck in the pond, trying to jump out. Instinctively, she grabbed it by the neck and pulled it from the water. She released it onto the footpath and her rescued duckling doddered along and joined the others at the end of the line.
Nicole was on the grass verge on the other side of the footpath. She was stamping her feet near the swan that was still harassing the mallard it had forcibly removed from the water. Shelley went over and together they shooed it away. She watched the freed mallard rejoin its ducklings in the pond before she and Nicole walked on towards Parliament Hill.
***
Shelley tried to concentrate on breathing in the air, which was the purest she was exposed to in London. She thought about the goodness it would be doing for her nicotine-lined lungs.
By the time she’d made it halfway up the steep – and what felt like never-ending – incline to the top of Parliament Hill, she was gasping for breath and lagging behind Nicole. Nicole encouraged her to keep going, but it didn’t help. Shelley’s legs felt as weak as a pair of twigs. Weakening her further was the wind, so powerful that it was driving the clouds at speed in an anti-clockwise circle in the sky. Whenever she looked up, it felt as though the world was spinning as fast as a waltzer.
On reaching the top of the hill, she joined Nicole on a weather-beaten bench that must have been there for time immemorial. From where they sat, she could usually see right across London, from the tall buildings in the City and beyond to the South. Today, however, the view – from what she called the top of the world – was restricted.
“How’s your mum?” Nicole asked. She always asked after Shelley’s mother, even though by now she was surely aware there were only ever two answers: she was ill at home or ill in hospital.
Shelley waited for her panting to subside before replying, “She’s at home, still the same.” She took the box of Benson and Hedges from her handbag. “Has anything happened with the trial? Do you know when you’ll be called?”
“Anytime in the next few weeks.” Nicole turned her head away, in the direction of the kite-flyers who had congregated at the bench next to them.
“What if they bring up working? Do you know what you’re gonna say?”
“I don’t think it’s gonna make any difference.” She turned back to face Shelley. “There’s so many others giving evidence as well. And my lawyer says it’s really common – most working girls were abused as kids. Not exactly a surprise, I mean, look at everyone we know.”
“You’re handling it so well, much better than I did.” Shelley blinked in an effort to dispel the tears that had surfaced in her eyes. Fuck off, she told the stream of intrusive images running in her head.
“Shell, you were much younger than me and I’ve got Doctor Fielding. I don’t think I’d be able to do it if it wasn’t for her.”
Shelley was pleased therapy was working for Nicole, but it hadn’t worked for her. Dr Anne Fielding, the clinical psychologist Nicole had recently started seeing, was the same lady Shelley had seen at the Praed Street Project up until the end of last year. She’d decided therapy wasn’t helping her. Although she admitted to herself the fact she’d never been totally honest was most likely a contributing factor.
“She’s made me see things differently. It’s like I’ve been wearing the wrong glasses all my life and now I’ve taken them off.”
Shelley nodded as if she understood, but she didn’t have a clue what Nicole was talking about.
“I’ve gotta deal with what happened, go back there again, talk through it, work through it. Somehow I’m gonna move on. I have to.”
Shelley took Nicole’s hand. She’d never got that far in therapy herself. She’d found out that she suppressed her memories and her feelings with heroin. It didn’t stop her. Heroin’s what helped her, what made life bearable. This cold turkey business was pointless. She couldn’t do life without a buffer. “You’re amazingly brave,” she told Nicole.
“I’m not, I don’t have a choice. I have to do something. The memories are coming up ’cos they weren’t buried properly.” Nicole flicked open her silver Zippo and lit her cigarette. “Dr Fielding says you can’t bury something ’til it’s been dealt with. The coke and the drinking, that just pushes everything down – and the working, God it’s more fucked up than I ever thought.”
“What do you mean?”
“The trial’s made it all come back, but it’s even worse ’cos I never dealt with it before. I just tried to bury it.” Nicole exhaled and sent a puff of smoke into the air. “It’s like someone being buried in a shallow grave; it’ll only take a dog or something small sniffing around to dig up a bone and then the whole body could be out in the open.”
“How’s working more fucked up?” Shelley asked her unanswered question a second time while the image of a decomposed corpse occupied her mind.
“I can see why I do it, what’s led me into this life. But now that I know, working’s so hard I don’t shut down like I used to, not unless I’m out of it. And I don’t wanna be out of it all the damn time.”
Shelley remembered what she’d been told by one of her ex-therapists. That she was a plaster collector, collecting plasters to cover over her pain. The plasters weren’t large enough or strong enough to cover the deep wounds she had, which kept her on a journey collecting more. Apparently, she couldn’t be helped – or perhaps it was said that she couldn’t help herself – until she stopped collecting plasters and removed the ones she’d already accrued.
A hole opened up in the grey and white sky and from a gap of clear blue, a pillar of light beamed down in front of Shelley. The brightly coloured kites that were being expertly flown seemed more alive with the light streaming through them as they bobbed and weaved in the air.
***
Late afternoon, Shelley was still sitting with Nicole on the old bench, watching the kites. The rolling-hill clouds that earlier had dominated the entire sky had transformed into thin ribbons encircling only the perimeter. Though the sun could now warm her, the pain in her bones wasn’t touched. The rays weren’t strong enough to reach that deep.
Shelley asked Nicole if she wanted to go to a pub. Although her intention for using the lavatory was of far more importance than what she intended to drink. They set off walking down the other side of Parliament Hill in the direction of The Magdala, which was a short walk through the Heath.
With their cars at Kenwood House, Shelley suggested they share a taxi back later. She was too tired to hike back. Frustratingly for her, they were now far nearer her flat than her car.
Parliament Hill was a favourite place. Somewhere she went frequently, but always from her flat. Because Nicole had wanted to see inside Kenwood House, they’d arranged to meet there – only to find it closed, due to a private function.
Shelley felt strange having been on the top of the world and not been on gear. She either went there after a fix or brought one with her to shoot up discreetly in the nearby bushes. She’d sit on an aeons-old bench and switch between looking over London, watching the kites, staring at the sky, and talking to her brother in her head.
“Do you mind if I ask Tara to meet us there?” Nicole asked as they neared the road.
“I thought we were having a quick drink? She’ll be ages.” Shelley didn’t want Tara sharing her time with Nicole, nor did she want to wait for her to arrive in North West London from the West.
“She won’t be long. She’s staying at Hugo’s. They’ll probably be in The Freemasons.”
While Nicole spoke to Tara on the phone, Shelley wondered why she might be staying at Hugo’s. They weren’t a couple. She didn’t think Hugo liked her that much. And even though Shelley didn’t like her that much either, she felt left out that she hadn’t been informed Tara was staying in her part of London.