Beside the street-door release button in Margaret Rossiter’s office in Front Street was a small screen which showed, in fish-eye distortion, the face of the person speaking into the intercom. Margaret had had the screen installed to reassure Glenda, who, in the early days of her employment at the agency, had been convinced that she might, inadvertently, let someone into the premises whom she did not recognize, and who had no business to be there. Even with the screen, Glenda was inclined, when alone in the office, to go down to the street door to let visitors in in person, rather than risk them coming in unsupervised, and failing to secure the door behind them. It also seemed to Glenda that the casualness of buzzing someone into a building electronically from the first floor was rude, especially when, to her considerable alarm, she saw that the face on the screen, his mouth looming cartoon-large, belonged to Bernie Harrison. ‘One moment, Mr Harrison,’ Glenda said, and fled downstairs to the street door, wishing that she had, at six-thirty that morning, obeyed a fri volous impulse to put on her new cardigan. Bernie Harrison was smiling. He looked entirely unsurprised to see Glenda. ‘Bet you didn’t expect to see me?’ Glenda held the door a little wider. Bernie Harrison wore grey flannels and a soft
82 tweed jacket and a tie. When she left home that morning, Barry was engaged in his usual angry ind ependent battle to get dressed, in tracksuit bottoms and a sweatshirt and a fleece gilet, none of them in coordinating colours. ‘No, Mr Harrison,’ Glenda said. ‘May I come in?’ Glenda stood back against the wall of the narrow hallway to let him pass. ‘Mrs Rossiter isn’t here—’ Bernie began to climb the stairs with a purposeful tread. ‘Glenda, I know Mrs Rossiter isn’t here. I know Mrs Rossiter has a meeting in the city this morning. I have come to see you.’ Glenda closed the street door in silence. Then she followed Bernie Harrison up the stairs and into the main office, where he was already standing, and looking about him with an air that Glenda felt was improperly assessing. She folded her hands in front of her. ‘Can I get you anything, Mr Harrison? Tea? Or coffee?’ ‘Nothing, thank you.’ He beamed at her. ‘You don’t think I should be here, Glenda, do you?’ She raised her chin a little. She said primly, ‘I’m not in the habit of doing anything behind Mrs Rossiter’s back.’ He laughed. Glenda did not join in. He crossed the room and sat down in the chair by the window that Margaret used when she had papers to read for a meeting, because the light was good. ‘Won’t you sit down?’ ‘No, thank you, Mr Harrison.’ ‘I shan’t stay long,’ Bernie said. ‘I can see you won’t let me stay long, anyway.’ He leaned forward. ‘I think you know pretty much everything that goes on in this office.’ Glenda said nothing. She stood where she had halted, a few feet inside the door, with her hands clasped in front of her. ‘You will therefore know,’ Bernie Harrison said, ‘that I made Mrs Rossiter an offer recently.’ Glenda gave the most imperc eptible of nods. ‘Which she turned down.’ Glenda raised her chin a little further, so that she could look past Bernie Harrison and out through the venetian blinds to parallel slits of cloudstreaked sky above the roofs of the buildings opposite. ‘Have you,’ Bernie said, ‘any idea why she turned me down?’ Glenda took a breath. Margaret would expect her to be discreet, but she would not expect her to be either dumb or insolent. ‘I think it didn’t suit her, Mr Harrison. I think what she has here suits her very well.’ ‘And does it suit you?’ Glenda said in a rush, ‘I couldn’t wish for better.’ ‘Are you sure?’ Glenda nodded vehemently. ‘So you’d turn down more money and better working conditions and more variety and responsibility in your job?’ ‘I’d turn anything down,’ Glenda said fiercely, ‘that didn’t in volve working for Mrs Rossiter.’ Bernie spread his hands and put on an expression of mock amazement. ‘Who said anything about not working for Mrs Rossiter?’ ‘Mr Harrison, you were hinting—’ ‘Glenda, whatever I was suggesting to you was in the context of still working for Mrs Rossiter.’ Glenda found that her hands had unclasped themselves and were now gripping her elbows, crossed over her body. ‘I don’t follow you—’ ‘Mrs Rossiter turned me down,’ Bernie said, ‘but that doesn’t mean I acc epted her refusal. I didn’t. I don’t. It makes every bit of sense for me to buy up this agency, making Mrs Rossiter my partner with you remaining as her assistant. I’m not giving up. I’m not a man to give up, especially when what I want happens to be good for all concerned into the bargain.’ ‘So—’ ‘So I came here to tell you that your job is safe as long as you want it. That your pay would go up – something of a rarity in these dark days, wouldn’t you say? – and you’d work in proper offices in Eldon Square with enough colleagues to give you a better social working life.’ Glenda let go of her elbows. ‘Couldn’t you say all this in front of Mrs Rossiter?’ Bernie Harrison got to his feet. ‘Not at the moment. She won’t listen to me at the moment. But I think she will in time – I intend she will in time. And when she does—’ He
83 stopped and directed another smile right at Glenda, like a spotlight. ‘I want you to remember this conversation.’ ‘Very well, Mr Harrison.’ ‘I’ll see myself out, then.’ ‘No,’ Glenda said, ‘I’ll see you out. That way, I can make sure the street door is really shut.’ Bernie leaned forward. He gave Glenda a wink. ‘Behind me?’ he said. Margaret took the metro back to Tynemouth from Monument station. She had walked from her meeting to Monument through the Central Arcade because she always liked, for professional as well as sentimental reasons, to pause by J. G. Windows to check out the sheet music, and the instruments. The instruments never failed to excite her, never had, since that first day she and Richie had gone in as teenagers and had stood in front of the guitar that he longed for, and couldn’t afford, and he’d said daft teenage things like, ‘One day, I’ll be able to afford all the guitars I want,’ and she’d said, ‘Course you will,’ because when you’re fifteen the promise of the future has as much reality as the present. Then there’d been a time when Richie had had his own section there, his own bin of sheet music, his racks of records, then tapes, then CDs. Even now, some of the assistants still knew her, even if now they knew her more because of her local clients than because of Richie. Going into J. G. Windows always gave Margaret a visceral jolt, as if reminding her of the fundamental reason that she did what she did instead of working, as she had for so many years, for a solicitor whose clients all lived within ten miles of his practice. On her way out of the instrument d epartment, she passed a tall, cylindrical glass display case. It was a case she had passed hundreds of times before but which was noticeable on this occasion because a mother and daughter were having an argument in front of it. The case was full of flutes, displayed upright, on perspex stands, and in the centre was a pink Yamaha flute with a price ticket attached to it which read ‘£469’. ‘Then I won’t frigging play at all!’ The daughter was shouting. Margaret looked at the mother. She did not appear to be the kind of mother to give in, or to be embarrassed by the ranting going on beside her. ‘There’s that new Trevor James,’ the mother said, ‘Three hundred and ninety-nine pounds. Or the Buffet at three hundred and forty-nine pounds. I’m not going above four hundred.’ The daughter collapsed against the display case. She said aggrievedly, ‘I want a pink one.’ ‘Why?’ Margaret said. Neither mother nor daughter seemed at all disconcerted at the intervention. The daughter squirmed slightly. ‘I like pink—’ ‘How old are you?’ ‘Twelve.’ ‘What grade?’ The daughter said nothing. The mother said, ‘Answer the lady, Lorraine.’ ‘Four,’ Lorraine said sulkily. ‘I’ve been in the music business,’ Margaret said, ‘for three times as long as you’ve been alive. And I can tell you that the Buffet is good value and all you need for grade four.’ ‘There,’ the mother said. ‘It’s a lovely instrument, the flute,’ Margaret said. ‘You should be proud to play it. Not everyone can. You need a good sound, not a colour. It isn’t a handbag.’ She glanced at the mother. ‘You stand firm, pet.’ The mother was looking back at the case of flutes. ‘It’s my life’s work, trying to be firm,’ she said. Later, on the train, speeding home through Byker and Walker and Wallsend, Margaret thought about the episode with the flute, and how Scott would have told her that, even if she was the generation she was and proud to be a plain-speaking Northerner, she shouldn’t have interfered. And thinking of Scott made her think, in turn, of the piano, and then the piano led to thoughts of the family who had had the piano and how they must be feeling, and of the girl in that family, that foreign London family, who
84 played the flute and who had said to Scott – boldly, in Margaret’s view – that one day she would like to hear him play. That girl, that Amy, would be grade seven or eight by now, eight if she’d inherited anything of Richie’s aptitude, she’d be playing the Bach Sonatas, and Vivaldi, she wouldn’t be whining on about wanting a flute the colour of candyfloss. And yet it was good that Lorraine was playing anything at all, even if it was only because her mother made her, just as Margaret’s mother, hardened by never knowing any indulgence in her own childhood, had made Margaret and her sister learn the survival skills that would mean they would never be doomed for lack of a basic competence. Margaret hadn’t filleted a fish in years, but she could still do it, in her sle ep. At Tynemouth metro station, Margaret helped a girl, struggling with a baby in a buggy, out of the train. The girl was luscious, with long blonde hair pinned carelessly up and a T-shirt which read, ‘Your boyfriend wants me.’ The baby was neatly dressed and was clutching a plastic Spiderman and a packet of crisps. ‘Ta,’ the girl said. She slid a hand inside the neck of her T-shirt to adjust a bra strap, and Margaret, recalling the little episode by the case of flutes, refrained from saying that she’d have been happier to see the baby with a banana. When she was that girl’s age, she thought, she and Richie were going to the Rex Cinema together, where what went on in the back row wasn’t something you’d have told your mother about, but equally wasn’t what would have resulted in a baby. ‘You take care,’ Margaret said. The girl laughed. She had wonderful teeth too, as well as the skin and the hair. She couldn’t have been much more than eighteen. She gestured at the baby. ‘Bit late for that!’ At Porter’s Coffee House at the back of the station, Margaret bought a cup of coffee, and took it to a table by the wall, below a poster advertising the Greek God Cabaret Show, ‘£29 a head, girls’ night out, to include hunky male hen party attendant and the country’s most exciting drag queens’. She felt no disapproval. In North Shields, when she was growing up, there’d been ninety-six pubs within a single mile, and for every miner killed in the local coal mines, four fisher men were lost at sea. ‘These a has no conscience,’ people used to say, in that world of her childhood when it seemed impossible that the seas would ever run out of fish and that women like Margaret’s mother would look to a life other than that spent stooped on the windsw ept quays, gutting and salting the herrings and packing them into the wooden casks that Margaret still saw now, occasionally, in people’s front gardens, planted up with lobelias. There was a statue of a fishwife in North Shields, outside the library, but Margaret didn’t like it. It seemed to her folksy and patronizing. Her mother, she was sure, would have wanted to take an axe to it. She finished her coffee and stood up. She was lucky to have Glenda in the office, she was lucky to have someone so reliable and conscientious who was not averse to detail and r epetition. All the same she knew that, when she was out of the office, Glenda was waiting for her in a way she never felt that Dawson troubled to at home, and the knowledge chafed at her very slightly and drove her to linger on her way back in a manner her rational self could neither admire nor condone. If only, she thought suddenly and urgently, if only I had something new to go back to, something energetic, something that gave me a bit of a lift, if only Scott would do something like – like, find a girl and have a baby. In the office, Glenda was standing by the open metal filing cabinet where the clients’ contracts were k ept, rifling through files. ‘I was beginning to worry,’ Glenda said. ‘You said you’d be back by eleven-fifteen and it’s after twelve.’ ‘I stopped for coffee,’ Margaret said. ‘I’d have made you coffee—’ Margaret took no notice. She moved behind her desk to look at
85 her computer screen. ‘Any calls? ’ Glenda said nonchalantly, ‘Mr Harrison came.’ ‘Did he now.’ ‘To see me.’ ‘Has he offered you a job?’ Margaret said, still looking at her screen. Glenda allowed a small offended silence to settle between them. ‘Or did he,’ Margaret said, ‘encourage you to work on changing my mind?’ Glenda slammed the filing drawer shut. ‘It’s a good offer.’ Margaret looked up. She watched Glenda walk back to her desk, and sit down, and open the folder she had taken from the filing cabinet. Then she said, ‘Do you want me to take it?’ Glenda said crossly, ‘It’s not up to me and well you know it.’ Margaret moved out from behind her desk and came to stand in the line of Glenda’s vision. ‘What is it, dear?’ Glenda shook her head and made an angry, incoherent little sound. ‘What?’ Margaret said. Glenda said, still crossly, ‘He unsettled me—’ ‘In what way?’ ‘Well,’ Glenda said, ‘while he was here, I just thought what cheek, coming here when he knew you were out, and chatting me up, telling me what I could have if we worked with him, the money and the chances and things, and then after he’d gone I just felt flat, I just felt he’d taken something away with him and I could have cried, really I could. The thing is—’ She stopped. ‘The thing is?’ ‘I don’t want to moan,’ Glenda said, ‘you know I don’t. You know how I feel about my family. The children are lovely. And Barry ... well, Barry does his best, I don’t know how I’d be, stuck in a wheelchair all my life. But after Mr Harrison had gone, I felt something had gone with him. I can’t explain it, I just felt I’d let a chance go, and I wouldn’t get it back again.’ Margaret waited a few seconds, and then she said, ‘What chance?’ Glenda looked at the contract file on her desk. ‘You’ll think me silly—’ ‘I won’t—’ ‘You—’ ‘What chance, Glenda?’ Glenda didn’t raise her eyes. She said quietly, ‘The chance for something to happen.’ Margaret said nothing. Then she came round Glenda’s desk, and touched her shoulder briefly. ‘Me too,’ Margaret said. Scott had started to ask people from work back to his flat, to hear him play the piano. Once a week or so, he’d say casually to Henry or Adrian, ‘Fancy a singsong at mine Friday?’ and the word would get round, and eight or ten people would gather in his flat and order in pizzas, and sometimes they’d sing – Henry did a brilliant version of Noël Coward – and sometimes Scott would play something classical, and they’d pile on the sofa or lie about on the floor and just listen, and after they’d gone, Scott would be conscious of having made a brief connection, through the music, which left him feeling curiously isolated and empty when it was over. And it was in one of those post-playing moods, closing the piano lid, picking up the pizza boxes, carrying the ashtrays – disdainfully – to the bin, that an impulse to ring Amy came upon him. It was not a new impulse. He had, when the piano first arrived, thought he might ring to say that it was safely in Newcastle. Then he had thought that texting would be better – polite, but more casual. So he had composed a text, and deleted it, and then a second, less brief one, and deleted that, and realized that he would rather like to hear her vocal response to his description of where the piano now was. But his nerve had failed him. There was no real reason, if he was honest, to ring her – unless, of course, he admitted to the real reason, which was that he didn’t want the piano’s arrival in Newcastle to mean that there was no further excuse for them to be in touch with one another. She was only his half-sister, after all, and there wasn’t any comfortable shared history between them, but even the scrappy communications that they’d had had given him a sense of how much better furnished he felt to know that there was a sister there – even, potentially, three sisters – and how very much he did not want to return
86 to the state of being the only son of a single mother; he did not, emphatically, want his human lands cape to shrink again. He dialled Amy’s number with quick, jabbing movements, not stopping to think what he was going to say. She didn’t answer, and he listened to her rapid, awkward little message and then he said, with a flash of inspiration, ‘Hi, it’s Scott, just ringing to wish you luck,’ and, as an afterthought, before this burst of courage failed him, ‘Ring me.’ Then he put his phone on the piano, and sat down on the stool and began to play the theme from The Lion King, which someone had asked for earlier that evening, and which was running in his head with an insistence that was, he knew, the mark of a successful show tune. His phone rang. Amy. ‘Amy,’ he said. ‘Hi.’ ‘Sorry to ring so late—’ ‘I wasn’t asle ep,’ she said. ‘I was doing stuff.’ ‘I’m sitting at the piano,’ Scott said. ‘Are you? ’ He shifted the phone to his left ear and hunched his shoulder to hold it in place. ‘Playing this.’ He played a few bars. ‘Recognize it?’ ‘The Lion King,’ Amy said. Scott was smiling. ‘Yes. The Lion King. I rang to wish you luck.’ ‘What for?’ ‘Your exams. Aren’t you about to start your exams?’ ‘No,’ Amy said. ‘Oh, I thought—’ ‘The exams are starting,’ Amy said, ‘but I’m not doing them.’ Scott waited. He took his right hand off the keyboard and retrieved his phone. Then he cleared his throat. ‘Come again?’ ‘A levels start this week,’ Amy said. ‘Spanish literature and music theory. But I shan’t be doing them.’ ‘Why not?’ There was a silence. ‘Why not?’ Scott said again. ‘Because,’ Amy said, ‘I need to get a job.’ ‘Do you?’ ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to stop being a kid, a schoolgirl, I’ve got to get out there and do something and earn some money, because—’ She stopped. ‘Because?’ ‘Doesn’t matter.’ ‘Maybe I can guess—’ ‘Because,’ Amy said angrily, ‘it’s all in meltdown here, and I can’t go on pretending anything is how it was and that I can be sort of protected from it. I’ve got to do something.’ ‘Like not sit your exams.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Have you told your teachers?’ ‘I haven’t told anyone,’ Amy said, ‘I just won’t turn up. I’ll pretend I’m going to school, but I won’t. I’ll be finding a job instead.’ ‘What kind of job?’ ‘Anything,’ Amy said. ‘Waiting tables, putting leaflets through letterboxes, I don’t care.’ Scott stood up. He walked to the window and looked at his dark and glittering view. ‘Amy? ’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Are you listening to me?’ ‘Yes—’ ‘Do not,’ Scott said, ‘be so bloody stupid.’ ‘I didn’t ask for your opinion—’ ‘This isn’t an opinion,’ Scott said. He found he had straightened his shoulders. ‘This is an order. I am telling you not to be such a complete and utter idiot. I am telling you to get into that school and do those exams to the best of your ability and to do yourself and all of us proud. I am telling you.’ There was a pause, and then Amy said, ‘Oh.’ ‘Did you hear me? Did you actually hear what I said?’ Amy made a small unintelligible noise. ‘You’re a clever girl,’ Scott said. ‘You’re a talented girl. You are eighteen years old with your life before you, and you may not give up just because there are some short-term problems you don’t like the look of. I won’t have it. I won’t have you throwing your chances away, wasting your opportunities. Is that clear?’ Amy said faintly, ‘You’ve no right—’ ‘I have!’ Scott shouted. ‘I have! I’m your brother! I’m your older brother.’ ‘Wow,’ Amy said. There was a hint of admiration in her voice. ‘Any more of this,’ Scott said, slightly more calmly, ‘and I shall come down to London and frogmarch you into that school personally.’ ‘I haven’t done enough revision—’ ‘Nobody’s ever done enough revision.’ Amy sounded imminently tearful. She said, ‘I can’t change now, I’ve made up my mind, I can’t—’ ‘Don’t
87 snivel,’ Scott said. ‘You can. You will.’ ‘There isn’t enough money—’ ‘There isn’t enough money for you to bugger up your own chances.’ Amy said in a whisper, sniffing, ‘It’s awful here.’ ‘And you think it’s a good idea to make it worse?’ ‘I wouldn’t—’ ‘You think your mother would thank you giving up your future for a minimum-wage job washing pots in a café?’ ‘She—’ ‘Don’t be daft,’ Scott said, interrupting. ‘Don’t fool yourself. Giving up’s never the best way out of anything. I should know.’ ‘I wish I hadn’t told you,’ Amy said. Scott laughed. ‘Do you?’ ‘I’m scared—’ ‘Course you are. Exams are hideous.’ ‘I wish,’ Amy said suddenly, ‘I wish I had something to look forward to, I wish it wasn’t just all this unravelling, all this uncertainty.’ Scott’s gaze was resting on the great gleaming curve of the Sage Centre, across the river, its shining flank visible through the girders of the Tyne Bridge. He said thoughtfully, ‘I’ll give you something.’ ‘What?’ ‘I’ll give you something to look forward to. Well, maybe looking forward is a bit strong, but something to think about, something a bit different.’ ‘What?’ Amy said again. ‘When your exams are done,’ Scott said, ‘when you’re in that time after exams and you’re waiting for the results and trying not to think about them, why don’t you come up here?’ ‘Come—’ ‘Yes,’ Scott said. ‘Pack your flute and I’ll give you the train ticket, and you come to Newcastle. I’ll show you where Dad lived, when he was a kid. I’ll show you where he came from. Tell your mother, so it’s all above board, and come up to Newcastle next month.’ There was a silence. Scott wondered if he could hear Amy breathing, or whether he just imagined he could. He pressed the phone to his ear and began to count. When he got to ten, he would say her name again. One, two, three, four— ‘OK,’ Amy said.