Gillian Slovo - Ten Days

‘Shift up.’ Cathy used a foot to nudge Lyndall, who was sprawled out on sofa cushions. ‘And take this, will you?’ She passed down the plate she’d just fetched from the kitchen.

‘Mmm.’ The cake was a soggy mess surrounded by a sticky puddle of icing. ‘That looks… umm… good?’

‘No need to lie.’ Cathy lowered herself down ‘It’s my worst ever. Chocolate wasn’t the best choice in this weather, especially with the fridge on the blink. But it’s Jayden’s favourite, and it may taste better than it looks.’

‘And Jayden is where exactly?’

‘He’s never been the most punctual of boys. Give him a knock, will you?’

Lyndall, who was in one of her more cooperative moods, sprung up, her gazelle legs making short shrift of the distance between their front door and Jayden’s. She beat a tattoo against the board that had been nailed in over a broken pane. No answer. She knocked again, and harder. A long pause before the door opened a crack. Lyndall spoke into it, and whoever was behind the crack said something before banging the door shut.

Lyndall shrugged and came back. Standing in front of Cathy, she lowered her head and raised her shoulders in a perfect imitation of Jayden’s mother’s slump: ‘She doesn’t know.’ She also had Jayden’s mother’s monotone pitch perfect. ‘Never sees him. Doesn’t know what he’s up to,’ and now an escalation in pitch, ‘doesn’t care. He should be protecting her, but he’s a bastard. Like his father. End of.’ Lyndall smiled. Having ditched Jayden’s mother’s sour expression, she now looked so pretty, especially given that the lowering sun added a golden lustre to her coffee-coloured skin. ‘Who’s Jayden meant to be protecting her from?’

‘Her enemies, I guess.’ Cathy sighed. ‘Of which she makes many. She’s going to be at the bottom of every list when they close the Lovelace.’ She sighed again. ‘Poor Jayden.’

‘At least he knows who his bastard of a father is.’

‘Lyndall!’ Cathy had to shield her eyes against the lowering sun in order to see her daughter. ‘You promised.’

‘Yeah, okay.’ Lyndall’s hands raised high in mock surrender. ‘I won’t ask for another week.’ She dropped her hands, slapping them for emphasis against her bare legs. She gave a quick smile, her way of showing that she didn’t bear a grudge, before she walked the few paces to the low wall that overlooked the estate.

The sun was just now dipping behind the furthest building, and the black of the intertwining walkways had taken on a silver sheen. ‘There’s another meeting at the centre,’ Lyndall said.

‘I didn’t hear of any meeting.’ Cathy went over to stand next to Lyndall. She saw the doors to the community centre open and a handful of people filing in. ‘I wonder what it’s about.’

‘Scouts against the Bomb? Mothers for Rap?’ Lyndall smiled. ‘Oh no, if that had been it, you’d be there, wouldn’t you, Mum? How about Rastafarians for a Better Quality of Puff?’

Next to the community centre was another low-brick building that had started out life as a launderette. After it closed, a series of deluded optimists had tried and failed to turn it variously into a functioning chippie, a newsagent and, for a few mad months, a soft furnishings shop. Each reinvention had failed more spectacularly than the previous one. Now, with the Lovelace coming down, the council had given up trying to rent the space and had, instead, boarded up the building, but badly, so someone soon prised open a hole big enough for a person to get in and out. As they stood looking down, a woman climbed through this hole.

‘Hold on to your wallets,’ Lyndall said. The woman straightened up, tugged down her tiny skirt, put the sunglasses that had been embedded in her straw-coloured hair on her nose and then, teetering on high heels, sashayed in a generally forward direction. ‘The pop-up brothel’s on the move.’

‘Just because she uses,’ Cathy said, ‘doesn’t make her a prostitute.’

‘Oh, Mum,’ Lyndall said. ‘You’re such an innocent.’

‘Well, it doesn’t.’

‘Yeah, yeah, and you’re the one who landed us in an estate named after a porn star and didn’t even realise it.’

‘I keep telling you, Richard Lovelace was a seventeenth-century poet.’

‘So you do,’ Lyndall said, ‘and I bet you also think the mistresses he writes about are all allegories.’ But she said it without much emphasis, because her attention had been caught by something else. ‘Looks like Ruben’s off on one,’ she said.

As the tottering woman neared the edge of a building, Ruben had rounded the corner. He was holding something that, when Cathy looked harder, turned out to be a long stick. Coming abreast of the woman, he lifted the stick. She held up two fingers and flicked them, then kept on going. It was a gesture that, if Ruben saw it, he ignored. He thwacked the stick down against his palm. His lips were moving, although he was too far away for Cathy to hear what he was saying, as he continued, rhythmically, to hit his palm.

‘I better go down,’ she said.

‘No need.’ This from Lyndall, whose eyes were keener than her mother’s. ‘Banji’s on the case.’

Cathy saw that Lyndall was right and that Banji had also rounded the corner. As Ruben made slow progress, Banji made no effort to catch up with him, instead matching his pace to the other man’s so he wouldn’t be seen. At one point Ruben wheeled round to stand stock-still, peering into the rapidly descending dark as if he knew someone was following him. But by then Banji had melted back against a wall so Ruben didn’t spot him.

Banji’s such a contradiction, Cathy thought: first he steers clear of any involvement, and then, just as I decide he’s a complete waste of space, here he is, quite clearly following Ruben to make sure he stays safe.

The door to the community centre was still open. When Ruben came abreast of it he stopped. Banji stopped behind him. Someone must have been standing near the door because, although Cathy couldn’t make out who it was, they came to the threshold and spoke to Ruben, who raised his stick arm. The someone must have talked some more because although Ruben kept the arm up he neither stepped away nor raised it further.

‘Must be somebody who knows him.’ Cathy felt herself relax.

The door was opened wider, and Ruben stepped in.

‘They’ll talk him down,’ Cathy said. ‘They’ll keep him safe. I’m going to make some tea.’

9.10 p.m.

There was so much to catch up with and so much to put right that Joshua Yares would have stayed on if Downing Street hadn’t called. It was for the best: if he’d kept going, others in the senior management team might have felt obliged to do the same. Probably wiser not to stretch their patience so early on.

The secretary who’d called had made it clear that this was a private visit, so Joshua circled round to Horse Guards Parade in order to go in through the back.

‘The Prime Minister’s expecting you, sir.’ A man led him up the narrow service stairs to the third-floor flat and rapped smartly on the door. Without waiting for a response, he opened the door, saying, ‘Please do go in. And help yourself to a drink. The PM will be with you in a jiffy,’ before he went away.

Joshua hadn’t been in the living room for a while, and now he admired afresh how successful Marianne had been in her project to stamp out all the tasteful traces of the previous occupants. The room was in fact such a riot of colour the tabloids had nicknamed it Dizzy Street.

None of this was much to Joshua’s taste, but when Marianne was in residence there was a crazy logic that seemed to work. Now, however, everything looked to be out of place and clashing with everything else. Marianne must be in the country, leaving the room to the mercy of the whirlwind that was Teddy, who was bound to be the source of the loud rock music issuing from deeper in the flat.