Tree of Pearls

‘Because it’s out of our hands, anyway – we’re the regional crime squad. Witness protection is nothing to do with us. Oliver’s just keeping track of it. It’s bureaucracy. And pride. No one can quite let go of a catch like Eddie. And resentment. It was a fucking insult when he got cut this deal, actually. Those who knew – Oliver, and me – were insulted on behalf of the other lads, too, because a lot of work went into this, as well as a lot of taxpayers’ money. Though of course I shouldn’t know anyway. So I can’t complain, or have an opinion. Except to Oliver.’

‘But why is he cutting you out?’

‘That I don’t know. That I don’t know.’

We sat in silence for a moment.

Big bony hands wrapped round the beer bottle. I spend half my life round this table.

‘Does he … does he think that you’re too closely involved with me, and I’m too closely involved with it, if you see what I mean?’

‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Could be.’

I would be sorry if that were the case. I don’t like to see Harry feeling sidelined; I wouldn’t want it to be because of me. And I want to be uninvolved. I was becoming uninvolved. I thought I had done so well. But now it’s back, but it’s all so intangible, I don’t know what to do. Live with it? Is that the moral of the story? Learn to live with it?

‘I rang Sarah,’ I said.

‘I thought you weren’t going to,’ he said. Not unkindly.

‘I wasn’t.’

‘What did she say?’

‘That everyone’s fine and the police have gone. But she didn’t want to talk to me.’

‘Do you mind?’

‘No. I don’t need to talk to her. She says they’re OK, Oliver says they’re ok, so I don’t need to worry. It’s only them I felt bad about.’

So why do I still feel bad?

Because I’m disappointed. Because if Sa’id had been in trouble I could have gone and rescued him and …

Oh shut up.

And because I can feel Eddie tweaking. He may not be tweaking me directly, the chain may not be round my neck, but it’s on the floor beside me, I can hear it tripping up people I love. He’s still out there.

‘Chrissie rang me,’ I said.

‘Yikes,’ said Harry. ‘The mad lady. How is she?’

I told him. He laughed. ‘Oliver did that too. But he’s too proud to admit that that’s what he was doing. Just went round saying to everybody: “I haven’t always been very … well anyway sorry.”’

‘She was kind of sweet,’ I said.

‘Well, off the booze, away from Eddie, who knows.’

‘Still mad though. Wanted me to confide in her.’

He laughed and laughed. ‘Doesn’t know you very well then,’ he said.

‘What’s that meant to mean?’

‘Oh, you know.’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Mrs Do-it-Yourself,’ he said.

‘Well who the hell else is going to do it?’ I said, crossly. It pisses me off, when people castigate my naturally independent cast of mind, when they should know full well that I have nothing else to depend on anyway.

‘Yeah. Anyway you’re getting better.’

Then I got a bit crosser, because I don’t like to be judged, specially not by an emotional fuck-up like Harry (though actually he is getting better too). But we cheered up again, then it was time for him to go, and as he stood up he put an envelope on the table, and looked at it, and looked up at me.

‘What’s that?’ I said.

‘Five hundred quid,’ he said.

I raised an eyebrow.

‘I’m getting it estimated properly – there’s a proportion of my salary that is, umm, the proper amount. But in the meantime.’

I hadn’t even thought about money. Jesus, he’s going to support us. Well, her.

Ha ha. I’m being helped.

‘Thanks,’ I said. There was a tiny voice inside that said, ‘What, you think I can’t do it alone? I’ve done it without you for years and I don’t need your bloody money thank you very much …’ but that was some other voice, nothing to do with anything. ‘Do you want to back-date it?’

For a moment he looked worried. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Yeah. I mean – I don’t want to barge in. But whatever you need. Do you need more? Have you got debts? Because I can, absolutely. I mean, up to a point.’

‘Fuck off,’ I said, kindly. ‘I’m not telling you about my financial situation.’

‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘But I mean it.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. And meant it.

If I’d ever imagined this scene I would have imagined that Harry would look sheepish. But he didn’t, not in the slightest. He looked everything a man should under such circumstances. Courteous, firm, a little proud. Decent. But the word made me laugh, because I remembered very clearly how very indecent he can be when he wants.

FIVE (#ulink_4a54bbf6-1cfc-5772-82bf-bfcff3c9c136)

Kicking (#ulink_4a54bbf6-1cfc-5772-82bf-bfcff3c9c136)

I was kicking a rotten cauliflower in the middle of Portobello Road, shopping bags on one hand and Lily on the other, feeling weak, trying to get through the crowd to go down to Ladbroke Grove and catch the tube home. Serve me right for coming out on the Saturday before Christmas. Should’ve gone to Shepherd’s Bush Market, but Lily said she was bored of Shepherd’s Bush and wanted to eat prawns at the tapas bar on Golborne Road, so after I gave her a swift and sweet lecture on what a useless word (indeed concept) boring was, and feeling flush with child support, we came up here, even though I don’t really like to any more. Because before there was Agnès B and Paul Smith on Westbourne Grove, when the pubs were still called the Elgin and the Rose, not Tuscany or the Ferret and Foreskin or Phoney McPaddy’s, when the Italian restaurants were run by Italians, not by people called Alastair who charge ten quid for a plate of pasta and pesto in a room which ten years ago was a squat … before all that, I lived here.

A gust of incense came from a shopfront hung about with paper lanterns. Indeed they all seemed to be hung about with paper lanterns, star-shaped with holes cut in like a child’s paper snowflakes, cut from white A4 on a rainy afternoon. Except that on rainy afternoons when I was a child I used to come up here and hang around with Fred the Flowerman (his name wasn’t Fred), who had a faceful of florescent broken veins, and let me think I was helping out on the stall. ‘Oh no, here comes trouble,’ he’d say when I appeared, and pretend to hide from me. I’d learn the prices of all the bunches and tell the customers, and I’d roll up what they bought in cheap printed paper. Five salmon-pink tulips in cellophane; daffs, the powdered yellowness of their petals, no leaves, milky stickiness from their short-cut stems. Rain or shine, when I was about eight. His son was a cabbie, and sometimes he would appear in his cab on the corner of Blenheim Crescent and yell down to his dad.

The groovy stalls crawl further up into the vegetable market every year. Well, I don’t know, I haven’t lived around here for years now. I’ve been priced out of my childhood neighbourhood, like so many Londoners, by people who think they can buy what my neighbourhood was, and who, by their very arrival, change it. My neighbourhood was mixed, funny, bohemian, black, Irish, liberal intellectual, Greek, Polish, hippy, posh, full of cherry blossom and rotten cauliflowers; now it is full of bankers who go round moaning about the Carnival and congratulating each other on how mixed, liberal, intellectual, bohemian, funny etc. they are. But they’re not. It’s gone. It’s too fucking expensive for those things to survive.