Joe Treasure - The Book of Air

‘And you’re a singer now?’

‘I’ve always been a singer, Jase. It’s just no one ever noticed before. We weren’t supposed to sing in Hebron, remember. Random’s about the music but about so much more than the music. Random’s got something really important to say.’

What I’d never noticed was how good-looking she was, my kid sister. And there was something fierce about her that made you pay attention even when she was talking crap.

She wanted us to get together, the four of us. I said OK, on condition that she didn’t talk about the Jesus bus. I explained that as far as you were concerned I’d lived in Southwark until my Dad died and my mum had taken up with Derek. Penny said she’d finished with all that anyway, never thought about it. She was making her own life. Sod Caleb and sod Jesus.

So we met in that pub in Borough Market. Random was a performer and I saw how you took against him, Caro. You were kind to Penny because she was my sister and because you were a kind person. But Random pressed all the wrong buttons. ‘You so fine, Caro-line’ wasn’t the kind of flattery you were susceptible to. I watched your eyes roll and glaze over. Me he called the Argonaut, which I didn’t mind. It was a step up from Tory wanker anyway. He had a nickname for Penny too. You thought he was calling her Masha, and asked if it was Russian. He laughed. ‘Russian, that’s good. She might be Russian. She might be from Paraguay. That’s why I call her Mash-up because she come from all over, you know, bit of this, bit of that. She my mongrel queen, my riverside penthouse life-on-the-street scene, my going-some-place has-been. She a champagne and caviar backroom piss-up. Gotta get real, gotta fess up, she my hard living, feather bed, down and dirty, pristine mash-up.’ He’d do that, without asking anyone’s permission – break into words. And then he’d laugh enough for everyone. His accent was hard to place – two parts Peckham, one part Caribbean, with a dash of something more exotic – Tonbridge, maybe. I had him pegged as a fraud from the start. I couldn’t help liking him though. He was just making his way in the world. No different from me. It was just that I sold property, while he sold himself, or some version of himself. That’s what we did back then, when there was a world to make your way in. We lived on our wits. And he was being nice enough to Penny, so I liked him for that. I’d run out on her twice, which so far he hadn’t. I was happy for him to put on whatever face worked for him.

Afterwards we walked through the market to the station. You led the way, eager to get home. Random kept pace with you, knowing he’d failed to charm you, not ready to give up on an audience. Penny and I trailed behind, wandering among the iron pillars.

‘Remember,’ I said, ‘you can always come to me if you need help.’

‘Why would I need help? Random loves me. He’s excited about our baby.’

‘Jesus, Pen, you’re not pregnant are you?’

‘Why shouldn’t I be? I’m old enough.’

‘And Random’s the father?’

‘Obviously.’

‘And you think he’s going to stick around?’

She stopped walking. ‘You’re a real shit, you know that?’

‘I’m just looking out for you.’

‘I don’t see you for years and then you crap on my life, on everything I’ve got.’

‘What you’ve got is great. It’s what you’re going to have when this baby is born that worries me.’

‘He loves me, Jase. He’s my family now. He’s done more for me than you ever did.’

‘And what about his career?’

‘Our career, you mean – his and mine and the band’s. You see, we don’t think the way you do. The whole money system’s on the way out, by the way, the whole property thing. Then you’ll be the one needing help.’

‘Yeah, come the revolution. Meanwhile family values aren’t exactly an asset in his line of work, are they. It’s not like he’s a vicar or an MP. His life isn’t meant to be tidy. He doesn’t call himself Random for nothing.’

She called me a bastard and a mean-minded capitalist fuckhead and some other things I couldn’t hear for the train screeching overhead.

Later I put a cheque in the mail with a note telling her to buy something nice for the baby. I got a text saying ‘ta bro’. After that she blipped off my radar.

What have I done? I heard his bones break. Unless it was the branches breaking under him to slow his fall. There was a cracking anyway that held my heart from beating until it must race to catch up. It was a long fall and I’d never have had the strength to do it, but he stood on the edge of the road where it rises on stalks above the forest.

There are walls in perfect lines on either side, and places where the road has crumbled and the wall has fallen away, or the wall arches through the air and nothing under it.

It was a long fall. How long I don’t know with the trees in leaf, the green roof sagging under him to sway up again once he was gone.

I think he’s dead. Or I wish him dead but think the branches saved him. He may be dead whether I wish him dead or not. I hope he doesn’t lie broken for wolves and crows to find.

It was night still when I heard him on his horse come after me. I was on the high part of the road and nowhere to hide, no shadow to stand in and a staring moon. I was walking, leading Gideon by the reins. He shouted to me and said he’d ridden hard to fetch me back.

‘Ride all you want,’ I told him, ‘I won’t come.’

He dropped from his horse and came closer. I thought even then he would beg me to claim him from himself, to lead him by the hand to my father’s cottage, as if I had come that night to his calling and we’d slept, and just then woken dew-stained in the woods, blushing at muffled footsteps and laughter and the primrose petals falling from our hair.

But he said only that he’d find a cottage boy to take me, to call my child his and care for it.

I wouldn’t let myself answer I felt such bitterness, but turned my back and walked on, pulling Gideon after.

He shouted that I’d never find my way. ‘The scroungers will kill you, or worse,’ he said. He caught up with me and spoke in a softer voice. ‘Don’t judge me harshly, Agnes. I can’t choose for myself as you can.’ I turned and saw tears on his face and his arm rising roughly to smudge them.

‘You dare to cry? I was friendless and far from home and knew nothing and you took what you had no right to take. And then you stood by and let them punish me. I’ll never trust you again or like you or think you wise.’

He looked at the ground then, and let the tears come, which made me more angry.

‘And you can’t call it love, or say you didn’t know what you were doing. Because I wasn’t the first. There was Sarah before me.’

‘I did my best for Sarah.’ He wiped his face with his sleeve and lifted his eyes to meet mine. ‘If you’ve found out her secret it wasn’t me who told it.’

‘Half the village knows how you took her child from her and gave it to the scroungers.’

‘To save her from shame.’

‘To save yourself. Everything, always, for yourself. Even my poor mother.’ I’d meant never to breathe a word of what I’d learnt about Janet’s baby, born dead or smothered soon after, of the belt she’d tied around her neck, and the punishment that followed. I didn’t even want to think of it. But seeing Brendan so mawkishly sorry for himself, I found I had to speak.

He was staring at me in surprise.

‘You see,’ I said, ‘I know about that too, and I wasn’t yet born.’

‘What harm did I ever do to Janet?’

‘She was driven mad, I know that, by the death of her baby, and suffered as I did in the red room, and she was only half alive when my father married her and there was nothing left for him but your leavings.’