All the Beggars Riding Read online

  It’s been a while since I came here – perhaps even years, I don’t remember – but the place never changes. Just as we did when we were little, I have it almost to myself, on this anonymous Tuesday morning. Apart from the gay men cruising – mostly foreigners, Italian-looking, in mirrored sunglasses and their tightest shiny shirts. I’m sure there weren’t so many of them in those days, or they were more furtive, or perhaps we just didn’t notice them. The worlds of adults and children, coexisting, overlapping and overlaid, but impervious to each other.

  Brompton Cemetery: we used to come here to play, Alfie and I, summer evenings and Saturdays and during school holidays. Dad would fly back on a Thursday morning, not every Thursday, but at least every fortnight, and he’d usually have the weekend, until Sunday lunchtime, although sometimes things were so bad in Northern Ireland that he’d be needed straight back, on the early Saturday flight. Thursday was his consultation day, I think, and Fridays were usually surgery. I wish I knew more of the details: but when you’re a child, you’re only vaguely interested in what your father does. If there were complications – something not healing properly, or something needing an eye kept on – he’d stay on a few extra days, and we longed for this, though it rarely happened. The complicated procedures, the ones that required him to be there for aftercare and that couldn’t be handed over to the clinic’s nurses and permanent staff, he did in August, or over Easter, times when he’d stay home for a fortnight or more. His clinic was one of the best on Harley Street and it was stuffed with surgeons and private nurses. A lot of them, like him, worked part of the week elsewhere and took private clients at the clinic on a part-time basis. I remember my mother saying, once, that Belfast surgeons were regarded as the best in the world. It was on account of the practice they had, with gunshot and baseball-bat and bomb-blast victims, though of course we didn’t know this then. But we did know that if you needed private cosmetic work done – your nose straightened or thinned, your brow tightened, the new face-lifting techniques – you came to Harley Street and asked for a Belfast surgeon.

  In the midst of all this – shuttling between Belfast and London, the Troubles, the pressures of private practice – it’s only understandable that he craved time alone with our mother. So he’d give us some money, enough for the bus fare and the cinema if it was rainy, or else for a king’s ransom of sweets and comics at Mr Patel’s. That’s what he always called it, ‘a king’s ransom’. He had an eloquent way of talking, our father: like something out of a story. The gift of the gab. On dry days we’d pile our pockets with Refresher bars – those were Alfie’s favourites – and Curly Wurlys (mine) and walk the short distance from our flat to the North Gate of the Cemetery, where Eardley Crescent meets the Old Brompton Road. It may sound strange, if you don’t know the place, to think of children being sent off to play in a cemetery. We loved it. This was our playground, the set for our elaborate adventures, inspiration for the ghost stories I used to make up for Alfie. There were endless games to be played: racing along these colonnades, hiding behind the tombstones and mausoleums, trying to tame a robin or a squirrel. Searching for the grave of the famous Red Indian Chief Long Wolf, who died here when he was taking part in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Competitions to find the oldest person, or the youngest. Alice McKenzie, who lived to be one hundred and one, from 1852 to 1953. Little Rose Eliza Gray, who lasted less than six months in 1897. I remember them without even having to look for the graves. The legions of young men killed in the Charge of the Light Brigade, the sorrowful memorials for those ‘Killed in Action’, whose bodies lie unmarked in Lempire or the Somme. We were fascinated by those. I think that the only way Alfie learned to read at all – because he was so slow at school, always – was by my helping him to pick out names and dates on the tombstones.

  It wasn’t morbid, is what I suppose I’m trying to say. We were happy here. On home-game Saturdays we used to sit under the East Stand of Stamford Bridge, which rises like a metal spider up behind the catacombs and mock Basilica, and try to guess the score by the roars of the crowd and the songs they were singing. I’d make bets with Alfie on which player had scored, or almost scored, and I used to tease him until he was tormented. Poor Alfie: it was the closest he ever got to seeing his team play. Our mother despised football, and Dad followed Man United. That was always an agony for Alfie, being torn between the team all his friends supported – the team whose stadium he could almost see from our flat – and the club his father followed. They weren’t then the arch-rivals they are now, but even so. Dad bought him a Man Utd football shirt once, for a birthday, I think. It had George Best on the back. Alfie never wore it out, apart from that one time he put it on to show Dad, just after he’d unwrapped it. To make things even worse than the fact it was a Man U shirt, George Best had gone on to play for Fulham, our hated rivals. Alfie used to worry that Dad would realise he never wore it – he was an awful worrier, Alfie – but Dad never did. After he died, Alfie wore it in bed instead of his pyjamas until our mother said it was unhygienic. After that it disappeared.

  So many memories, spilling back, cramming in on top of each other, sparking each other, jostling. And now. Coming up for midday, and the same dappled sunlight and flittering shadows, the same overgrowth of nettles, dandelion clocks and long lush grasses, the same lacy reek of cow parsley, sweet smell of clover. Sitting here at the end of the colonnade, my back against the warm stone, listening to the grass ticking with insects and to the birdsong, it could almost be then, worlds overlaid again. The same blackbird I’m watching hop from gravestone to sinking gravestone, the same fluffed-up preening wood pigeons splashing in the puddle under the water fountain’s tap. If I don’t turn around, it suddenly seems I might feel myself run past, the wake of me, plimsolled feet slapping and skidding along the flagstones, breathless and laughing as I turn at the end and hurtle back.

  Words are treacherous. I see why people have always feared them and feared those who could use them; in ages past seen their use as a black art. Writing about the Chernobyl documentary filled me with a strange, wild fear – and power. Writing about Fuengirola called all sorts of things, not all of them happy, few of them welcome, into being. As I wrote those sentences above, as I read them back to myself, it feels as if I have the power to be summoning myself back. I know there’s nothing, nobody, in the archway behind me but I am half-afraid to turn around to see. Afraid that my ten-year-old self will be there, afraid again that she won’t.

  If I was a witch or a shaman, used to travelling between worlds – last night’s late-night TV – I would have talismans, tokens, things to attach me to the real world, to bring me back if I got lost. Stones or beads or amulets, feathers or figurines. What I have is a cup of Starbucks, empty but for the foamy dregs, a crumpled greasy bag from Greggs that held my cheese-and-tomato croissant, the cheap blue biro that ran dry after only a sentence. I write them in, I make myself write them in, to anchor myself. To tell a story is to travel between worlds, to open up portals between past and present, and I mustn’t get lost there: get distracted by phantoms and lose the way back. Portals between worlds: it seems an over-the-top way of putting it, but that’s what it’s felt like these past few weeks, as I’ve been plagued by memories. I’ve started – I’ve opened the gates – and so I’ll have to finish. I’m going to go back to my flat, now, and sit down with my laptop and plunge straight into the second part of the holiday in Fuengirola, and I’m not going to stop until it’s all told, done.

  The aqua park

  It was the fifth day of our week-long holiday. The days had passed, longer and slower than holiday days should, because we were in such a state of suspension; waiting; worry. We made friends with some of the other children and roamed around the complex with them, playing games and causing low-level havoc. We desperately wanted to go to the beach, which was only a short bus ride away, but didn’t dare, for fear of missing our father if he phoned, or arrived. So we hung around the complex, and our days took on a routine. There was a li
ttle shop on site selling blow-up lilos, suntan lotion, ice creams and soft drinks, day-old Daily Mails that I flipped through for news of Northern Ireland, and bread and croissants each morning. Alfie and I would go down each day to buy breakfast and we’d all eat together, then the two of us would get changed into our costumes and our mother would rub us with sun cream and we’d splash about in the pool until the midday sun grew too strong. Lunch was sandwiches or omelette and chips from the bar; afternoons spent back in the pool. In the evening there were kids’ discos and karaoke, themed entertainment nights. Our mother joined in with none of it. She lay on a lounger on the patch of coarse grass in front of our apartment and sunbathed there, sometimes reading her book, sometimes just lying. She rarely spoke to us, even at mealtimes. We spent as little time near her as possible, I’m ashamed to admit. I think we were scared of her, then, the big brown circles under her eyes; the way she’d crumble her croissant with her fingers into piles of greasy flakes.

  And still no Dad.

  Every morning at nine o’clock our mother spoke to our father, and every day he said he was hopeful of coming the following day. It was coming up to the Twelfth of July in Ireland, marching season. People rioted, threw stones and broken bottles and petrol bombs; doctors in hospitals, and surgeons in particular, were needed on standby. There was a television in the club house and Alfie and I sneaked in often to watch the news and see if things were really as bad as we feared, but it showed nothing but football and Spanish game shows on a loop. On the third morning I went with my mother to the phone in reception and she passed over the receiver and I begged my father to come in time for my birthday. His voice cracked on the other end of the telephone and he promised, he promised he’d try. I was desperate to ask him how bad things really were there, but my mother was hovering right behind me, ready to take back the phone, and so I didn’t dare. She hated, loathed, all talk of the ‘Troubles’ as it was so grotesquely, euphemistically called. If you didn’t know the place except through the news it was impossible to believe that people actually lived there – went about their daily routines of making their sandwiches for lunch and rinsing out their cereal bowls and mopping the floors and going for haircuts and checking the weather forecast for the weekend. I often used to think about that. Children lived there – children like me and Alfie – going to school, not wanting to go to school. Slinging their uniforms on the floor when they came home and being shouted at to pick them up. Eating jam on toast and watching SuperTed and Bananaman. Pound Puppies and Transformers and Cabbage Patch Kids: they had them, too. The sounds of their parents watching Blind Date. Growing cress eggmen on the windowsill. All you ever saw on the news were snarling dogs and faceless policemen in riot gear, the blackened, mangled remains of a bus or shop or a car, the balaclavas and guns, the loose-faced, glazed-eyed families of the victims. But behind it was a whole layer of other lives, lives like ours. We mentioned none of it in our house, ever, and so I thought about it for days on end, sometimes.

  I passed the phone slowly back to my mother and she took it in both hands like something precious and pressed it to her ear, then flapped her hand at me to shoo me away. Before I was out of earshot I could hear her voice cracking, just as my dad’s had, just as I knew mine had, as she too begged him to come for my birthday.

  We’d finished breakfast and were getting ready to go to the pool. It must have been half past eight or so, quarter to nine – not yet time for the daily phone call. Our mother had sun-creamed Alfie and now it was my turn: I was standing in my pink and yellow bikini, holding my straggly ponytail out of the way with one hand and gripping the top of the sofa with the other, trying not to hop about at each cold gloop of cream. Our apartment, as I’ve said, was on the ground floor. Its doors opened right out onto a little terracotta patio and the lawn. Alfie was squatting down watching a lizard in the bougainvillea by the low stone wall and suddenly he leapt to his feet and froze for a moment, then hurled himself forward out of sight. I twisted round to see what was happening and my mother told me to keep still and at the same time Alfie started shouting, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy! For a moment, my mother and I looked at each other. But this time was different: before I knew it, I was hurtling out of the flat, too, still slick with sun cream, the coarse grass and stony path below my bare feet immaterial, and there he was. Alfie was already clinging to him, legs wrapped around his waist, and I flung myself at him, too, and we were all three of us tangled up and breathless with laughter. I was so excited, so relieved to finally see him that I didn’t notice when our mother came around the corner, or that she’d stopped a little distance off and was just standing there in her kimono, messy-haired and un-made-up.

  ‘Patrick,’ she said, and then again, ‘Patrick?’

  We stopped our crowing and our hooting and Dad prised Alfie’s legs loose and slid him down to the ground. Then he cleared his throat and took a step forwards.

  ‘Hello, Jane,’ he said.

  A moment later, they too were in each other’s arms. Our father was a huge bear of a man, well over six feet tall and broad with it, and our mother was a little bird of a creature. He swamped her – engulfed her – lifted her off her feet with the force of his embrace. Then Alfie and I rushed back to them, too, sucked in by their force field. We must have looked like such a happy family.

  The embrace loosened. We made our way back to the apartment, Alfie and I chattering at Dad about the swimming pool and the lizards and had he noticed how brown we were, tugging down the edges of our costumes to show our tan lines. Inside, we swooped with glee on the canvas holdall he’d been carrying, bore it ceremoniously to the kitchen table and almost broke the zip in our haste to get inside. Our father always brought us presents when he came back from Ireland. He had brought us a pair of tacky toy donkeys wearing sombreros and two fluorescent T-shirts – one pink, one green – with Welcome to Marbella! printed on them. For our mother, there was a bottle of almond liqueur wrapped in straw, fake peasant-style. They were the sort of things we’d seen in the complex’s gift shop, the sort of things you could buy in any of the eight, ten shops lining the road opposite. They were the sort of things we’d coveted on our first day and our mother had said weren’t worth wasting money on. We tried not to show our disappointment but our father sensed it. The presents hadn’t even been wrapped. When we tried them on, the pink T-shirt was tight on me, while Alfie’s green one swamped him.

  ‘There were all I could manage,’ he said, glancing at our mother.

  She said nothing.

  ‘Here, wee love,’ he said, turning to me. ‘I’ll say this now and I’ll say it right away. I’ve not got your birthday present with me. It’ll have to wait – OK? Until we’re back at home.’

  I nodded, and smiled.

  ‘It’s just nice to see you, Daddy,’ I said. I meant it: and I thought saying it would make things better, but instead it caused an odd and sudden silence.

  Our father was the one who rallied. ‘Well now,’ he said. ‘What are we going to do today, eh? I thought – how’s this for a plan, yousens? – that we’d go to . . .’ – he paused for effect – ‘an aqua park. How’s about it?’

  With that, of course, everything else was forgotten and we capered at him, jumping up and down and squealing.

  ‘There’s one just up the coast,’ he said to our mother. She said something back but I heard no more of the conversation because Alfie and I were rushing into our bedrooms to get our T-shirts and shorts and sandals and goggles.

  When we came out, our parents were kissing and our mother was crying.

  ‘Are you crying, Mum? Why are you crying?’ Alfie said.

  ‘I’m not crying,’ she said, but she was: our father had been holding her face in his hands and flicking away the tears with his thumbs, as you might do with a child.

  ‘Come on, Mum,’ I said – cruelly, it seems now, but I think it came from a sudden lurch of the same fear I’d felt on the plane, or when she made me promise never to say to Dad we’d been to Ireland. ‘Yo
u’re the only one we’re waiting for. You’re holding things up.’

  The aqua park was the most exciting place we’d ever seen. The high blue tubes of the coiled covered flumes were visible from half a mile away, and as we drove into the car park you could hear the shrieks and the music and smell the bleached tang of the chlorine.

  My memory slows at this point. I want to remember these moments and hold every one of them, hold us, in my mind’s eye, for as long as possible. Cast my net of words around us and draw it tight. The cool, dank changing rooms and the slimy feel of the concrete underneath. Bundling my clothes into Mum’s and my locker, jumping from foot to foot as she unbuckled each of her sandals and folded her kaftan, unnecessarily methodical, unnecessarily precise. Slamming the tinny door and wriggling out the key on its thick, faded elastic band. The greenish footbaths, warm and viscous as saliva, and the lukewarm spray of the obligatory showers. Dad and Alfie already waiting, the hairy animal man and the birdlike boy – a sudden jolt of shyness, because my father was so male, the tight coils of black hair on his chest, oiled down but springing loose, and the whorls of hair on his upper arms and back. I’d never seen him, could not remember seeing him, so fleshy, so naked. A gust of breeze made me shiver and I hugged my towel across my tight, not-quite-budding breasts, suddenly shy, self-conscious. Dad reached for Mum’s hand and we made our way, the four of us, along the rough red path and down to the snack bar area, where palm trees and rattan umbrellas gave some shade, past the shallow kiddie pool where man-sized penguins and elephants spouted water from their trunks and beaks, to where white-bright loungers lay in rows. We staked our spot, dragging four loungers together, and laid out our beach towels. Our parents, it seemed, weren’t going to rush to go on the rubber-ring rides and log flumes. They wanted to have a coffee, sunbathe, talk. Alfie and I were torn, then, between wanting to be with them – to be with our father – and the call of the rides. Alfie was too small for some of the rides and others had warnings up saying that under-twelves had to be accompanied by an adult. But we could go on the slides and in the pool with the wave machine. Our mother, I could tell, was impatient for us to go. She ushered us on, told us to stay together, for me to look after Alfie; promised that if we came back in an hour, she and our father would take us on the adult rides – the ones with names like ‘Black Hole’ and ‘Kamikaze’.