скачать книгу бесплатно
The problem is, Daniel’s family is expecting those shoestrings to lace up a fancy pair of Manolos. I’ve got the sinking feeling that a curry and a can of lager isn’t going to cut it for them.
‘There is another place closer to home,’ she says as our bus pulls up. ‘It’s the library at Queen Mary. You could even walk there on your wedding day. Save a few bob on bus fare.’
‘That one pound fifty will come in handy, but it doesn’t really make a dent in the hire fee, does it?’
There has to be another option that’s within our budget and, since I can be as stubborn as my dad, I’ll just have to find it.
Chapter 3 (#u4c1739ff-4846-53d6-9289-083debf61373)
Kell and I did go see the library at Queen Mary’s, but my heart wasn’t really in it. Or at least, my wallet wasn’t. It would have been perfect, grand and Victorian and stuffed with books – two soaring balconies surrounding the huge and airy octagon-shaped room with sunshine streaming through enormous windows to light the elegant vaulted dome high above. It was slightly less expensive than Stationer’s Hall, in the way that sirloin steak is slightly less expensive than a fillet. No matter how many places we’ve visited, and it seems to be all we’ve done for the last two weeks, Kell and I can’t find a nice, cheap burger of a venue. At this rate we really are going to end up under the arches. Won’t Daniel’s mother just love that?
This is turning out to be so much harder than I imagined. I can’t concentrate on my coursework with the wedding hanging over me. I’ve been rereading the same page for the last twenty minutes. Anti-social behaviour, looting, blah blah blah.
But my final exams start in two weeks and I haven’t gone to uni for the past five years to bungle it now. It’s been hard enough getting this far.
Just try telling everyone you know that you’re studying criminology when everyone you know has at least second-hand experience with the Old Bill. The mistrust of authority round here won’t go away just because one of their own has enrolled at the Open University.
People only tolerate our neighbour, PC Billy Bramble, because he gets them out of scrapes and drinks in the Cock and Crown.
Dad still suspects I’m going to end up working for the Met like Billy, that one day he’ll see me walking the beat in a Kevlar stab vest and one of those hats with the checkerboard bands. And Mum wishes I would for the pension, as long as I find a nice, safe desk job.
Dad doesn’t have to worry, though, and Mum shouldn’t hope. I don’t want to be the one catching or punishing the kids who go off the rails. I’d rather be the one making sure they don’t derail in the first place. I’m not exactly sure yet where I’ll work, but I can imagine what the job will look like. It’ll be something that keeps kids in school and out of prison or gives them interesting things to do so they don’t feel so hopeless.
A couple of do-gooders, that’s what Kell calls Daniel and me. She’s right. Daniel’s kids walk miles for clean water and, once I find my job, I’ll have to keep mine from nicking stuff.
I knew all about Daniel’s kindness streak by the time we had our first date, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when he took me to a fundraising gig that his charity was doing. I was tempted to ring Kell when we walked into the venue and I saw who was playing. She’d headlined at Glastonbury and won Grammies. And there she was sitting on a stool, in a jumper and jeans, with her voice floating over the piano that accompanied her. I’d never been that close to someone so famous.
‘We don’t need to stay long,’ he’d said into my ear. ‘I’ve just promised my boss I’d stop by, that’s all.’
‘You didn’t tell me your job was so glamorous.’ As far as I knew, he was just a lowly staffer at a water charity.
He’d laughed and grabbed my hand, shifting our month-long flirtation up a gear. My tummy flipped. ‘It’s usually very unglamorous. I talk about drilling and well specifications with engineers a lot,’ he’d said. ‘This fundraiser has been a treat. She even came into the offices to see what we do. I was completely tongue-tied when I met her.’
‘You met her?! Wait, are you trying to impress me by basking in reflected celeb glory?’
‘Yah. Is it helping at all?’
I’d nodded. What I didn’t add was that even without the eye-wateringly famous connection I already knew I was nuts about Daniel.
Auntie Rose stirs. ‘You’re up with the birds,’ she says.
‘Just revising before work.’ I close my book. There’s no chance of getting anything done once the house starts to wake. ‘I’ll do more later.’
She sits up with a grunt. ‘I don’t know where you came from,’ she says, not for the first time.
I play dumb. She loves having this conversation. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I couldn’t abide school, neither could your mother or your Gran. Your mum bunked off every chance she got. And there’s no Einstein on your father’s side, either. Must be some rogue gene making you so bookish. I’ve never seen another like you.’ I can hear the pride in her voice, like I always do.
‘That’s good,’ she continues as I pack away my books. ‘Look at you, about to graduate from university! You’re the only one of us who didn’t quit by sixteen. You’re going to do good things, Emma.’ She smiles. ‘You might even get out of here.’
‘I don’t want to get out of here!’ I say.
‘But you will, and there ain’t nothing wrong with that.’
Her words echo in my head as I make my way to work. I know every single shop, school and business along the route, and quite a few of the people too. Some of them wave when they see me – there aren’t that many powder blue Vespas about. The rhythms of the street and its characters are as familiar to me as those in a little village would be to someone from the countryside. There might be more buildings and pollution and graffiti and crime, but this is home. Why would I ever want to leave?
My colleague pulls up at the same time as me. ‘All right?’ Zane asks. I’ll smooth out his accent for you, which is Jamaican courtesy of Hackney Wick. If I were to spell it out, it’d have only vowels. He likes to lean and gurn when he talks too. He thinks it’s street.
I pull up the shutters on the Vespa dealership while Zane starts wheeling the bikes out front. ‘Where’s the golden boy?’ he asks as he brings out my favourite scooter so I can motorhead all over it. It’s the Vespa of my dreams, the one they’ve put out for their seventieth anniversary. It’s top of the range with a 300cc engine, front and rear disc brakes and all the glamour of the old bikes.
I don’t bother answering Zane’s question. It’s not really a question anyway. It’s an accusation aimed at our boss, Marco. The golden boy is his son, Ant – it’s short for Anthony, but he hates when anyone uses his full name.
Our boss has a few scooter shops so he doesn’t spend much time at ours. Neither does his son, even though he’s paid to.
I don’t mind that much. We’re not usually very busy anyway, and since the scooter sales are commissioned, the less competition the better. It bothers Zane, though. Which is why he asks every morning.
I crack open my criminology book and Zane pulls a tattered paperback from his bag. This is the perfect job for me, really. It’s steady money – not much but steady – and I can do it with my eyes closed. I should be able to by now. I’ve worked here since just after my sixteenth birthday. It was either work in a shop or start The Knowledge to get my taxi badge. And Dad really didn’t want me doing that.
‘Why not?’ I’d asked. ‘Because I’m a girl?’
He’d shaken his head. ‘Don’t be daft. It’s because I want more for you.’
‘Dad, I hate to break it to you, but working at the scooter shop isn’t exactly climbing the corporate ladder.’
‘No, but you won’t work there forever. It takes years to do The Knowledge. Once you do it, you’re not gonna want to change to something better.’
I hadn’t known what to say to that. Dad never complained about being a cab driver. He had lots of friends in the business and it kept the roof over our heads.
Now I know what he meant. Cab driving would have made me just comfortable enough to be stuck. Why give up a bit of comfort to start all over?
Dad was right. As usual.
I try to study, but it’s no use; I can’t concentrate. And Zane’s frustrating disinterest in my wedding plans means I have to wedge it awkwardly into conversation myself. Lucky him. He’s stuck with me till we clock off at five.
‘Zane, your sister got married, didn’t she?’
‘Both of them did,’ he says, sucking his teeth. Tall and slender with baby-smooth warm brown skin and cheekbones that are wasted on a guy, he’s good-looking when he’s not pulling faces. He’s got a tattoo all up his neck that I know for a fact made him cry when they did it, but maybe people who don’t know him are impressed when they see it.
‘Where’d they have their receptions?’
Teeth suck. ‘Eyeono.’
‘How can you not know? Didn’t you go to them?’
‘Aw, yeah.’ He thinks, nodding his head, which is covered in little braids that stick up in all directions. ‘We had a party at the Jam Club, in the room at the back.’
I know the place. It’s a reggae bar that makes Uncle Colin’s pub look like Hampton Court Palace. Imagine Daniel’s family toasting our nuptials with cans of Red Stripe while everyone twerks to Bob Marley on the sound system.
Daniel is outside the Overground station after work, watching the market’s ebb and flow as he waits for me.
The fish traders are starting to clear up, emptying their styrofoam crates of ice and water and stacking them. If it swims, they sell it. Technically they’re Kelly’s competitors, but in reality they’re not. Everyone’s got their place in the market. They know their customers, and there’s an unwritten rule that nobody steps on toes, so everyone has enough custom.
That’s not to say that tempers don’t flare with everyone living cheek by jowl here. But the shouting today is just the vendors trying to draw the punters’ attention, especially now it’s nearly the end of the day and they want to flog the perishables before going home.
If I change my point of view, I can just about see what Daniel is seeing, though it’s not easy. Everything is so familiar to me. I see my neighbours in the veiled faces of the Asian women and old schoolmates in the lairy hoodies out-boasting each other next to the camera and phone stall.
Daniel isn’t sticking out too badly in his navy V-neck jumper and jeans. The guys around here do wear V-necks, though not usually over button-down collared work shirts. And definitely not tied over their shoulders. For his own good I had to put a stop to that the first time Daniel tried it here.
It’s the rest of the area that doesn’t quite fit with Daniel. The market isn’t neat and neutral like where he’s from in Chelsea. There you know you’ll see manicured trees and grass, shiny black railings and white-fronted houses, well-dressed people, clean cars and designer shops. The sounds will be of traffic and, in quiet corners, birdsong.
Just as Daniel sees me, two of our neighbourhood junkies reel by with their cans of Strongbow. Daniel jams his hands in his jeans pockets.
‘Don’t worry, they won’t nick your wallet,’ I call as I approach for a kiss. ‘They never bother anyone.’
He drapes his arm round my shoulder. ‘Yah, I wasn’t worried.’
‘Then stop looking like you’re about to face a firing squad. We’re only going for a walk before the pub. It’s perfectly safe.’
He’s already worked out that this is Jack the Ripper territory, though he doesn’t know that one of the murders happened right behind the train station he just came from. The less grim local history that he and his family know, the better, I think.
‘Am I that obvious? It’s not rahly my milieu, is it?’
Who says milieu in normal conversation? ‘Not if you talk like that, it’s not. You know, Chelsea is just as hard for me to get used to as this is for you.’ I look round at the older women in colourful sarees and young ones in trendy hijabs. Two Caribbean women sweep by in brightly embroidered caftans and matching head wraps. This is my milieu, as long as we’re being poncey about it. ‘It’s intimidating seeing all those people walking around your neighbourhood wearing expensive clothes.’ I’m only half joking as I lead him away from the station.
‘East End girl meets West End boy,’ he says.
‘There’s a song in that.’
He laughs. ‘The Pet Shop Boys beat you to it.’ His humming is so off-key that at first I think he’s joking. I only know the song because he’s just said what it was.
‘Wow,’ I say. ‘I’ve never heard you sing before.’
‘Rahly? I’m sure you have. I love to sing.’ Off he goes again. Cats up the road start mewling in protest.
‘No, I’d have remembered.’
But really, who am I to tell him his voice qualifies as torture under the Geneva Convention when he clearly loves it? I don’t always see him being this unselfconscious. Daniel is one of those people who never seems to put a foot wrong – jumpers tied round his shoulders notwithstanding, although in his world everyone does that, so maybe it’s not a good example. My point is that I feel like I’m special when I get to see him totally at ease. Though I know he works hard to look that way all the time.
We take a turn off Whitechapel Road, leaving the hustle, bustle, noise and fumes of the main thoroughfare behind. ‘Here’s what I wanted to show you,’ I tell him proudly as we turn into the narrow cobbled road. ‘Welcome to Stepney Green.’
‘Gosh, this is unexpected. It looks a bit like Hampstead. Do you remember?’
‘How could I forget?’ We both smile.
A few days after the charity gig date we met again in Hampstead village and made our way to the swimming ponds on the Heath. Before Daniel, my dates invariably involved drinks in a pub somewhere or, at a stretch, a film before drinks in a pub somewhere. This felt different, and not just because there were no beer mats. We already had that comfortable certainty about each other that usually comes after months of going out. We got a running start at it during our course together.
I’d been at the Open University four years by the time I took our architecture class, up to my back teeth in criminology courses, so it felt pretty decadent to take something so unrelated. But that was the point of Kell and my family giving me the City Lit voucher for Christmas.
Daniel signed up for the same reason. On the other side of London he’d been up to his back teeth in the water charity where he worked. So we were both branching out. It just so happened that our branches intertwined perfectly, first as study friends and then as something a lot more exciting.
That didn’t mean I was crazy about the idea of swimming with Daniel in a duck turd-filled pond, though. It’s hard to be alluring when you’re trying not to drown.
For the record, I can swim. I just don’t like putting my head underwater. But with Daniel going on about how much he loved the weekend swims he’d done there with his dad since he was a teen, I couldn’t very well tell him that the only time my swimsuit came out of the drawer was to sun myself in the back garden.
I sneaked glances at his lean torso and muscular just-hairy-enough legs as we made our way to the dock. ‘Jump straight in?’ he asked, reaching for my hand.
‘Or go down the ladder?’ I said, snatching it back.
‘Yah, of course, if you’re more comfortable that way. Do you mind if I jump in?’
He sliced easily through the water with hardly a splash, emerging several yards away to grin at me. ‘It’s lovely!’
Slowly I lowered myself down the ladder, not showing Daniel my best side.
I managed to swim with him to the other side of the pond, all the while imagining what might be living in the murky water. The more I imagined, the more I was sure there were things, live things, dangerous things, swimming just out of sight under the water.
So nobody should have been surprised when Daniel’s fingers on my leg unleashed such blood-curdling screams. I stopped swimming, naturally, and dove for my date.
Reader, I climbed him.
‘Emma, it’s okay!’ he said, between gasps as I pushed him underwater. ‘You’re all right, just relax. What’s wrong? Here, hold on to my shoulders. That’s it. I’ll swim us in.’
As I floated on Daniel’s back to reach the ladder, he calmly suggested that we dry off in the sunshine and then have a picnic on the Heath. My hysteria hadn’t fazed him.
Daniel found my attempt on his life perfectly understandable. That’s a sign of true love. Though we haven’t swum together since.
We walk over the blue cobbles of Stepney Green to peer through some imposing wrought-iron gates at the tall red-brick house. ‘It was built in the late sixteen hundreds.’
Daniel nods. ‘Yah, Queen Anne style. As you know.’
‘I do know.’ We grin at each other. I’m not just showing him this to prove it’s not all market stalls and junkies round here. It’s a nostalgia trip. And actually, we nearly didn’t meet. I would have taken an art history course instead if it hadn’t started during my exam week. ‘Imagine if one of us hadn’t signed up for that course.’
‘My life would be quite literally unbearable,’ he says, ‘without you.’
‘You are such a kiss-arse.’ I love when he says things like this. ‘You wouldn’t know about me, so you wouldn’t know what you’re missing.’
‘Right, but I do know. Unbearable.’ He turns me to face him and plants a soft kiss on my lips. ‘I know I tell you this all the time, but you’re rahly not like anyone I’ve ever met, Emma. You never take anything for granted. It’s so rare and I love you for it.’
I squeeze his hand. ‘You don’t take things for granted, either.’ There isn’t a silver spoon anywhere near Daniel’s mouth. It’s not even hidden in his cutlery drawer.
‘I do try not to,’ he says, ‘but sometimes I catch myself. Then I’ve got to remember that I’m where I am because of everything my parents gave me. This charmed life of mine is an accident of birth. People love to say they’re self-made when that’s bullshit. Excuse the expression, but when you’re born into a family that has the time to read to you instead of working day and night jobs to make ends meet, or that can afford to send you to a good school or even just properly feed and clothe you and put a roof that doesn’t leak over your head, then you’re not rahly self-made, are you? People congratulate themselves when they’ve benefitted from small classes and motivated teachers and tutors to help with revision, when they haven’t had to worry about paying tuition or working through uni or parents who can’t pay their bills. That’s why I admire you so, Emma. You haven’t had any of the privilege that I’ve been handed and yet here you are, about to graduate from university.’
‘I see what you mean, but that’s not really true, Daniel. I had most of those things too. I’ve had the supportive family who read to me, despite working multiple jobs, and teachers who believed in me and I had enough money to go to uni. We might have had to work for those things, but I’ve had a lot of help too.’
He shakes his head. ‘You’re right, I’m being too literal. Privilege can mean more than one thing. So we’re both wealthy.’
I do feel pretty rich as we walk hand in hand from Stepney Green to Uncle Colin’s pub where I know everyone is waiting. It’s best not to tell him what I suspect: that it’s probably not just my family inside. ‘Just remember not to mention Uber. My dad’ll go spare.’
