Joe Treasure - The Book of Air

‘I don’t know.’ Penny was busy gathering things from around the room, stuffing them into a bag. ‘Cancer maybe. She stopped eating. Lost a lot of weight. She was in pain but pretended not to be. It took months.’

‘Christ. You don’t even know? What did the doctors say? Was she in hospital?’

‘They examined her afterwards, I think. I’m not sure. Caleb dealt with all that.’

‘She wasn’t seeing a doctor? No one was treating her?’

‘She was dying, Jason. What good’s a doctor when you’re dying?’

‘I don’t know! What kind of a question is that? Someone should’ve been taking care of her.’

‘Well you weren’t. You were long gone.’

‘Because Derek was a lunatic. He would have done me in if I’d stayed.’

‘You can’t talk about him like that. Not to me.’

‘Why the hell not?’

‘Because he chose me.’ She looked surprised as she said it, like someone remembering the weird part of a dream. She stopped packing and just stared at the floor. ‘Caleb chose me as his wife.’

I was stunned. It was something I hadn’t thought of, a whole other dimension of madness. ‘And that’s why you left.’

‘I married him. Mum died and we gathered next day in the lower corner of Hebron under the willows and Lloyd said the words from the book. That’s the way Caleb said it had to be done – life flowing on like the river.’

‘And you didn’t mind?’

‘I thought it’d be better, anyway, than mucking out the pigs.’

‘Jesus Christ, Penny. What did they do to you?’

‘It wasn’t their fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault but mine.’ She was on the move again. She’d found her boots and was busy putting them on, tugging at the laces. ‘I should have been stronger. I didn’t know what it would be like. I was prepared for pain. I thought I’d just lie there and it and would be over with, and then the others would treat me with respect. I didn’t know it would be worse than that. When it came to it, it was more than I could handle.’

‘So how did you get away?’

‘I went to the village with Lloyd and left him in the shop. There was a delivery van outside and I hid in the back. When the driver found me I waved down a car.’

‘I wish…’

‘What do you wish, Jase?’

‘I wish I’d come for you. As soon as I could drive. As soon as I was earning.’

‘Well I wish you’d never left and mum had never died and everything had stayed just the way it was, that’s what I wish.’

I very nearly said, come home with me then – we can’t have mum back, but you don’t have to live like this . I’ve thought since that that’s what I should have said.

Jack or Zak was on this knees in the corner, retching. Penny went over and rubbed his shoulders and told him he’d be all right.

‘Does he have to do that there?’ I said. ‘There’s a bathroom.’

‘Yeah,’ the boy said, ‘but you’ve turned the water off, haven’t you, you Tory wanker.’

‘There’s a stopcock in the street – or didn’t that occur to you?’ It made me angry. And not just because it was my house. It wasn’t about ownership. That’s what people like him never understood. It was about making things better. It was about preserving something of value. A house like this that had been constructed by skilled working men, bricklayers and plasterers and carpenters, and had stood for a hundred and fifty years, shifting and breathing like a living thing.

I gave Penny a few hundred quid, which was everything I had on me. She said she didn’t want my money but she took it anyway. And I gave her my number and told her to phone if she needed anything. I was ready to find her a job and somewhere to live, but she never called. I think I hoped she wouldn’t. Either she lost my number or she didn’t need any help or she knew me better than I knew myself.

I didn’t see her again for seven years. A lot had happened, including a recession that left us all staring into the abyss. With most of my money in London property I’d come out of it OK. Some sales had fallen through and I was stretched on a couple of projects, but I wasn’t hurting like some. I was doing up that house in Kensington. Big beautiful windows opening on to a square full of trees. The painters had covered the glass with newspapers and masking tape. It was a cold day but the afternoon sun came in low and bright, lifting the headlines and making silhouettes of the faces. I was in and out checking the work. The sky darkened and there were only the naked bulbs where the light fittings would be. And I saw Penny on the arm of this bloke. There were other faces behind them, all smiles, and another picture next to it of the same bloke with some other woman having a set-to. RANDOMESTIC the headline said. Meant nothing to me. But Penny’s face was unmistakable even with short hair.

The boys were cleaning their brushes and hammering the lids on the paint tins. There was that sharp clean smell of fresh paint that always reminded me of my dad.

‘Hey, Kevin. What paper’s this?’

Kevin shrugged.

‘Where d’you get it? Is it today’s, I mean, or what?’

Kevin was ready to defend himself, as if I’d accused him of something. I was up the stepladder peeling the page off the glass.

‘Christ, boss, it’s only a paper.’

It was the Evening Standard, two days old.

‘Who is this bloke then?’ I asked.

‘I dunno. Some twat?’

His name was Random, a South London boy, a singer. He’d made a big splash the year before with an album called Randometrix. Now he was in trouble with his live-in girlfriend because he’d been celebrating the release of Randomocracy and had been photographed coming out of a nightclub with some other bird. Band member Penny Farthing, the paper called her.

They offered a sample of his lyrics. Put them in a box in bigger print. Don’t care if she black or white, long as she right in the head, not dead from the neck up. Don’t want no girl who don’t know jack. Don’t care if she beige or pink, long as she got no smalltime rinky dink dream in her eye, no chink of a cash machine.

I read it out and asked the boys what it meant.

‘It don’t mean nothing, boss,’ Kevin said. ‘It’s a song.’

I googled Random later. Somebody called him a leading exponent of anarcho rap. There was a link to the title track of his new album. The party’s over. Get off your well-fed arses and on your feet. We’ve burst your pretty balloons. Randomocracy is in the street .

He looked like the enemy – it was the end of my party he was celebrating, the bursting of my balloon – but as a class warrior I didn’t take him seriously. We were both riding the same wave.

I was always good at pushing things out of my mind and dealing with what was in front of me. But I’d never really shaken the thought of Penny in that squat. I felt bad about her. And my life had changed since then. I was feeling more sure of you, Caro. The recession had slowed me down, but it had also given me Talgarth Hall on a plate. I had a sense that I’d arrived somewhere. And Penny was family. So I tracked down Random’s agent and emailed a message for Penny with my new number telling her I’d like her to call.

We met for a drink. I almost didn’t recognise her, walked right past her table looking for the same rat’s nest hair and refugee dress I remembered from her squatting days. She’d dyed her hair silver blond with a pink forelock. She was bubbling with excitement. I asked her where she was living and she said Random was renting a flat with a recording studio in the basement and for now she was living there with other members of the band, and Random sometimes, though he had his own place. But they had plans, her and Random. He just had to finish with his girlfriend.