Time to Die

10

Kathy cleared up the remains of the breakfast from the table in the living room. Peter had left for school some twenty minutes before. The ground-floor flat that Clarissa had found them was perfectly located for Peter’s secondary school, which was about a quarter of an hour’s walk away down (relatively, she thought ruefully) safe streets.

This part of North London, Finchley, was actually where Kathy was from. She’d been born at the Whittington Hospital down the road in Archway, some forty years earlier. She’d always lived in London and couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. There is a saying in German: the air of a city makes you free — ‘Die Luft einer Stadt macht frei’. That more or less summed up her attitude about the capital. London always seemed to her a city of infinite possibilities. After her husband’s death, she had sold the house in Barnes, needing to downsize. It was bought, to her amusement, by some French people. She wondered if maybe there was a Gallic equivalent of A Year in Provence — Une Année en SW13 — a nostalgic French look at the charming, rustic English Barnes, peopled by amusingly stereotypical English people, and it was almost with a sense of relief, of coming home, that she had decided virtually immediately to return to Finchley. There was no question in Kathy’s mind of leaving London.

The narrow streets of Finchley, with their small, pale-grey houses, seemed to welcome her back. And look, Peter, she had said, there’s the archer outside East Finchley tube station. The archer waited, as he had always waited, his bow perpetually readied as he knelt to defend East Finchley from its foes. It was where she belonged. Barnes was where Dan belonged. Dan had been quite posh. He’d been taken to the theatre a lot by his parents as a treat, he had gone to a private school, and his mother had a tagine and an Aga before anyone had heard of things like that.

Without Dan, life in Barnes was pointless. Not so Finchley. She remembered how she had always felt as if she were on an island in the borough. It was an island bordered by Mill Hill on the periphery of London, Muswell Hill, isolated without an underground, gateway to Ally Pally and poor relation of now cool, hip, Crouch End. Then to the south, Highgate with its cemetery and vampire and Karl Marx, and Jewish Golders Green. To the north, the countrified Totteridge and Whetstone. Coming back was coming home. She knew she’d made the right decision when she saw the statue of the archer again, her old friend, frozen in time and space, kneeling as he endlessly fired his arrow from his bent bow.

There had been the odd occasion walking the streets that she had grown up in, when the sense of the past had almost overwhelmed her, when she was momentarily not Kathy Reynolds, aged forty, mother of Peter and Overseas Business Development Manager for PFK Plastics, but Kathy Markham, aged fifteen, in her tartan school uniform skirt, hair in pigtails, school shirt a dazzling white and with creases ironed into it that could almost cut you they were so sharp, living where Margaret Thatcher, the milk snatcher, was the local MP. Who could have ever imagined her first senile, now dead, or that Meryl Streep would play her in a film? Her mother, now in a home, senile too, had been a champion ironer. Anything that could be ironed was ironed — socks, pants, you name it, everything.

Now she had a laptop; then she would have had pictures of Adam and the Ants and Duran Duran, cut from Smash Hits, painstakingly glued on to her schoolwork folder.

Sometimes her current self seemed insubstantial and ghost-like, as if she were haunting East Finchley like a time-travelling spirit, as if her younger avatar was more real. Some afternoons it wouldn’t have surprised her to see her younger self coming home from school, laughing, with a satchel on her back, while she stood, a wraith, looking wistfully on from the other side of the road.

Life was so much more fun then. It certainly wasn’t fun at the moment; it was bloody hard work, coloured with problems and bordered with tragedy. Fun had upped sticks and left a long time ago. The death of her husband had coincided with her mother losing her mind to dementia. She gritted her teeth and got on with things. What else can you do? Whatever her younger self had imagined, it wasn’t this. This life wasn’t in the script. What, she often wondered, would have been the reaction of her younger self to the older woman she had become, had she been able to see her? Bemused, thought Kathy. I always wanted to be self-confident when I was young, she thought. I am now. I always wanted to be a success. I am now. And I used to fret about my looks. I’m the wrong side of forty and I can still turn heads. I should be grateful really, but I’m tired. I wish I could go back to when Dallas was on the telly and me and Karen Jenkins would go to the wine bar. Wine bars were new then. She fancied Bobby Ewing but I kind of liked Ray, in his tight jeans and checked shirt, even though he walked in a funny way, almost bent double — perhaps it was the cowboy boots.

Her friend Karen would take the piss out of him sometimes and say, ‘Hey, Kat, who’s this?’ and do a Ray walk and imitate his accent, which used to have her in fits. Well, Dallas is back, she thought, but I’m not going to watch it now. I don’t want to see them all old, or dead. I’d rather remember them as they were. And sometimes we’d go to Cinderella Rockefeller’s in North Finchley and lie about our age, and dance to Donna Summer and Kajagoogoo and Gloria Gaynor and Sylvester. Later, of course, it would have been Wham!

I wish I could practise our dances like we used to in her living room. Her parents had a Bang amp; Olufsen stereo which Dad said cost as much as his car. Everyone had rubbish cars then and we didn’t care. We didn’t care about brands. It was a lot more egalitarian. She lived in Canada now, Karen did, in Vancouver. She’d married a doctor. Far away. They still exchanged Christmas cards but that was as far as it went. You can never go back, can you. She returned her thoughts to the present.

She looked at the diary in front of her where she’d written down the day’s to-do list. She’d got the morning off work because Peter’s diabetic nurse was due round and they were to review his blood-sugar levels, carb-counting, diet and exercise. She knew the nurse would be pleased with his performance. Her son was very diligent. The diabetes was not a problem but it was a persistent and ever-present issue that had to be dealt with. She sometimes had nightmares that Peter would be away somewhere inaccessible without his insulin. She was determined she would never become overprotective.

She looked at the photo of Peter on the mantelpiece, absurdly handsome in his school uniform. He was taller than she was now, and he had the same loose-limbed, muscular grace that he had inherited from his father. Peter’s restricted diet because of his type-one diabetes had also trimmed any puppy fat away from his frame, so that his long muscles stood out like anatomical drawings. Even his stomach was ridged with muscle. He’s got a six-pack, she had thought wonderingly.

She was glad that Peter was going to be so powerfully built for reasons other than a parent’s simple delight at their child’s attainments. Peter was a frighteningly pleasant boy, considerate, kind. Sometimes she worried that he was too nice for his own good. It wasn’t just her who felt that way. Several of her friends had made the same comment. He would be a sucker for a girl with some hard-luck story.

On Saturdays he worked as a volunteer for the local branch of the North London Canine Defence League, helping to exercise and care for maltreated dogs. He desperately wanted a dog of his own but Kathy had been adamant. She travelled too much for it to be really practical. It was often hard enough to find a friend who could look after Peter let alone Peter plus dog. That was one of the benefits of living in rented accommodation. The no-animal policy meant the question would not even get raised. His school reports were straight A’s for effort, because, as he explained, ‘I want Daddy to be proud of me and I want to make you happy now he’s gone.’ She was frightened that because of Dan’s death, she might be overly protective, let alone because of the diabetes issue. She felt her eyes fill with tears and blew her nose loudly on a tissue. Oh, for heaven’s sake, she thought, pull yourself together, and straightened some papers on her work table.

She picked the phone up and tapped out the number for the Siemens office in Stuttgart, where she was bidding for a seven million euro contract for her company. The negotiations were going smoothly. PFK’s product had been approved on a technical level and now it was simply a question of persuading the industrial giant of their own commitment, their own ability. She knew that it was going well and she also knew that it was mainly down to her.

‘Ja, guten Morgen. Ich heisse Frau Reynolds, ja, stimt, mitt ein “R”, nein jetzt.’ She paused, listening to the woman on the other end of the line. ‘Ja, Max Brucker bitte.’ She waited to be put through, then she was speaking to the Siemens procurement manager, ‘Max! Wie geht’s? Wie ist das Wetter in Stuttgart?’ The conversation continued for a few minutes and she pictured Max’s calm, intelligent face, his short-cut, thinning, dark hair, his elegant, muscular body, as they discussed the technical questions that she could have answered in her sleep. She was always formidably well prepared. Then, ‘Also, am Freitag um zwölf Uhr. Auf wiederhören, Max.’

‘Auf wiederhören, Kathy.’

She put the phone down with quiet satisfaction. Max wanted her out in Stuttgart in three days’ time for a Friday twelve o’clock meeting, to make a last, formal, presentation. It would be the clincher. She smiled at Max’s pronunciation of Freitag. Freidag. It was so stereotypically Schwäbische Deutsche. Kathy really fancied Max, even down to his Swabian Stuttgart accent. She’d have to arrange some kind of childcare for Peter. He was used to her travelling around the world at short notice. She’d ask Annette. She was irritatingly scatty but Peter liked both her and her son Sam, and of course he adored her dog.

Just then her front doorbell rang and she raised her head in surprise. She looked through the front-room window and there, outside the front door, with her habitual, charming smile, was Clarissa from the agency.

Kathy got up and let her in. It was always good to see Clarissa. Presumably she was here to finalize the arrangements for the cable installation. Maybe today, once they’d finished discussing that, she’d tell her to start looking for a permanent house in the area for her and Peter. But first they could have a good old talk about what they were both up to.