We have spent a disheartening morning trudging around various markets in London. Even Michael’s internet skills couldn’t come up with a name for the Something Irish and Sons company that Ewan suggested, and Ewan himself has texted to say that he has drawn a blank. This shouldn’t be surprising—it was twelve years ago. A lot has changed in everyone’s world.
One elderly porter at Spitalfields recalled a firm called O’Donoghue and Sons, but said it had gone under a decade ago. There weren’t actually any sons, he explained, the owner just thought it sounded better—and when he retired, he’d sold it on.
We’ve talked to what feels like hundreds of people, and bought way too many apples and artisan candles, and drunk a dozen coffees in a dozen open-air cafés, watching the world of the markets flow around us.
What we haven’t managed to do is find any lead on Joe, or any new way forward. Now we are sitting together under the soaring glass ceilings and metal archways of Borough Market in Southwark, near London Bridge.
It’s a beautiful place, and its stalls are vibrant with fruits of every shade, with fresh produce, with cheese and confectionaries and gardens full of flowers. The sounds and the smells are stirring, and under any other circumstances we might be enjoying ourselves.
Instead, we all seem wrung out, physically exhausted and emotionally drained. Michael, in particular, is out of sorts, poking his pain au chocolat with one disgruntled finger, sighing.
“What’s up, Bette Davis?” says Belinda, poking him in the same way he’s poking his pastry. “I can’t stand the melodrama anymore.”
He slaps her hand away, and replies: “I don’t get your outdated cultural references, so please stop trying to be funny. You’re not.”
“Yes, I am.”
“OK, well, sometimes you are—but I’m just not in the mood. This has all been very depressing. Homeless people and letters from emotionally repressed dead mothers and the hunt for Red October.”
“Now who’s using outdated cultural references?”
“Fair point. I’m just . . . feeling blue, I suppose. About Joe. About everything else it’s making me feel. I don’t like . . . feeling. It makes me uncomfortable.”
Michael, it seems, really is his mother’s son—much as he doesn’t like that fact.
“OK,” says Belinda, surprisingly taking him seriously rather than continuing to mock. “I see that. But I suspect it’s not too much feeling that’s the problem—it’s what those feelings are. You seem thoroughly pissed off with yourself.”
“I am!” he bleats, eyes wide. “I really am! It feels like I’m at some terrible crossroads, with drudgery and boredom and living a lie down one path, and becoming a social pariah down the other. I thought I’d live happily in a permanent closet as far as my parents were concerned, and now I don’t think I can. Plus my dad is expecting me to join his law firm, and I don’t think I can do that either. It’s all stupidly vexing.”
“What kind of law does he do? Your dad?” she asks, stealing his pain au chocolat and tearing a chunk off.
“Mainly conveyancing. It’s not what I dreamed of becoming when I grew up.”
She pulls a face and replies: “That sounds shit. What did you dream of becoming when you grew up?”
“I don’t know—maybe an eccentric billionaire?”
“Well, that’s a good goal—but if that fails, just do something different. You don’t have to accept a life of conveyancing. I could use some help at my place. You could be part of the googly-eye gang.”
“Gang? Isn’t it just you?”
“Yeah, but like the late, lamented O’Donoghue and his mythical sons, I think it sounds better to imply I have associates. You could be one.”
He stares at her, taking in her nose piercing and the T-shirt that says “Moss Pride” and the flakes of pastry stuck on her chin, and says: “Really? You’re serious? What do you even do there, anyway?”
“Corporate takeovers and FTSE 100 mergers.”
“Ha ha.”
“You’ve seen through my clever ruse! To be honest it’s mainly small stuff—disputes with landlords, some benefits appeals, the odd immigration case, unfair dismissals. I don’t do criminal, because as you’ve pointed out so glowingly, I am a social justice warrior. I’m never going to retire to the South of France, or have a corner office and a secretary who wears a pencil skirt, but I earn a living and it keeps me busy. Plus, you know, it’s satisfying, and that’s important to me. I can’t offer you much in terms of wages, but there’ll be some good experience, and there’s a flat above the office. Up to you, but think about it.”
Michael mulls it over, arms crossed over his chest, then replies: “Maybe I could wear the pencil skirt . . .”
“Yeah, then invite your parents around to see your new workplace—that’d kill two birds with one stone.”
“That,” I add in, “would kill two parents with one stone. They’d both have heart attacks.”
We all share a smile, and it feels good. This strange journey of ours is bearing unexpected fruit, a cross-pollination of relationships that could change at least one destiny.
“Thank you,” he says. “I’ll think about it. And other stuff. I met someone recently. Nothing serious—we’re just talking to each other.”
“Isn’t that what everyone does?” asks Belinda.
“Stop pretending to be so old. You have a teenager, I’m sure you know what it means. Anyway—like I said, nothing serious. But it could be, one day, maybe. He’s out and proud, and I’m neither, and . . . well, our pilgrimage has been thought-provoking, to say the least, ladies. I think I might need to make some changes.”
“And that’s scary,” replies Belinda, passing him back half of the pastry.
“It is. Anyway. I feel better now I’ve had a moan, and been headhunted by a legal giant . . . So, what do we do next, girl detectives? What other clues can we put beneath our communal magnifying glass?”
I sigh, and put the Dora the Explorer backpack on the table. I keep Joe’s letters and cards and the photos in there, along with the precious hairbrush and the last tangible remains of my baby girl.
I know we scattered her ashes in the park, me and Joe, on a bone-bitingly cold day at the start of February. We chose there because she loved the place so much, and we had so many Dora-style adventures there.
But in all honesty I can’t really remember it—I was physically OK by then, but my mental state was far from robust. I can’t even really recall the funeral my mother mentioned in that letter. I just have a strange vision, a frozen tableau, of that tiny white coffin with its gold handles. I don’t remember the agony I must have felt, or the tears I must have shed, or the anguish that Joe must have experienced.
I suspect my psyche had already started to collapse in on itself by that stage, setting up defense systems that would ultimately eat me alive. Belinda, in fact, probably knows more about that day than I do—and maybe, when the time is right, she’ll tell me about it.
I feel a stirring of raw loss deep inside me as my fingers collide with the smooth lilac handle of the brush, as I recall it being held in Gracie’s chubby hand, doing her hair “like a princess” before bed, sitting on my lap in her pink polka-dot onesie. I can almost feel the shape of her, the softness of her skin, the comforting weight of my plump baby girl in my arms. She always smelled so perfect—of bubble bath and sunshine.
I let the moment wash over me, and carry on, retrieving the relevant items with hands I try to hold steady.
There is the postcard that came with the gum, from September 2008, the one that said he’d settle for me being happy. That one is a killer, and I see Belinda cringe as I lay it facedown on the table. The picture is of the Tower of London, a Beefeater at the forefront.
Then we have Grace’s ninth birthday card, signed by Daddy Joe Joe, a smudged stamp showing a north London postmark and a date in October.
Next is another card for her, a year later, with nothing in between.
I know how much has happened to me in a matter of weeks, so I can only imagine what might have changed in his life in a whole year.
This one, I note from the date stamp, was actually posted the day after her birthday, so it would have arrived late. I can picture my mother, waiting for that card so she could hide it away with the others, fraught with anxiety when it didn’t land as planned. I wonder if she was relieved when they finally stopped—or if the other part of her, the part she showed me in that unbearably sad letter, regretted it.
I will simply never know, so instead I join the others in our forensics.
The date is clear, but the place of origin is smeared. There is, though, an extra pointer on this one—a stamp that’s been banged down onto the envelope that proudly announces the seventy-fifth anniversary of a place, or organization, called Pinefirth.
None of us has ever heard of Pinefirth, so Michael gets busy on his phone, while Belinda absently echoes what I have been doing ever since I found these cards—strokes the handwriting of Daddy Joe Joe.
“Well, Pinefirth is a village-slash-town, in Middlesex,” he announces, after a few moments. “Wikipedia tells me—so it must be true—that it has two churches, a parish council, and a cheese factory. It has a train station, and good road links, and not much else, apart from . . . Oh! Oh my!”
“What?” Belinda and I say at the same time, leaning toward him.
He waves us off, and carries on reading, taking an infuriating amount of time before looking up at us sheepishly.
“It does have one other place of note,” he announces, chewing his lip after speaking. “A prison.”