Now – 18th March
The first steels for the new building arrived this morning. Within a couple of hours the skeleton of Rise 2 was going up, men swarming all over the huge red beams, craning them into position, checking their lie with laser levels before bolting them into place, firmly, irrevocably. A twenty-four-storey building put together like a child’s toy.
I watched from the balcony until I couldn’t bear to watch any more.
So I went down to the Embankment with some vague idea of getting the mudlark’s attention, even if it meant braving the slippery steps and meeting him on his own territory. I wanted to photograph him, but not from a distance. I wanted to take his portrait and hear his story. Spirit him away to a dim and rowdy old boozer and excavate his secrets.
But the water was sitting high when I reached the river wall and he was somewhere else, turning over different stones and finding other treasures.
Now afternoon is wearing on into evening and I don’t want to go home, because I know how much higher the tower’s bones will have climbed into the darkening sky and how the view I’ve loved for thirty years will be disrupted, taken away from me in strips. Before very long, the gaps will be filled with grey blocks and huge sheets of glass and wooden cladding, until all I’ll see when I stand on my balcony is another wedge of empty rooms and the neighbours who couldn’t afford to buy on the river side of the development looking back at me with disgust.
If I’m still there.
The young Polish barman with the neck tattoo comes and clears my empty glass, gestures at my cup, which is still a third full, the coffee cold and filmed over.
‘I’m still working on that one.’
He takes pity on me, leaves me to my table even though I’m dead money sitting here as the bar fills up. A couple of those lingering suits stopping in after work could claim it, the small group of women drinking Prosecco. The suits are eyeing me up, weighing the ease of bullying a pensioner against the social stigma of doing so.
Fuck them, they’ve claimed everything else around here. If I won’t leave my home for £185,000, I’m not going to move from this padded-leather banquette for free, am I?
The letter arrived this morning and I guessed what it was by the quality of the envelope, thick and slightly textured, an expensive bone white. I’ve seen hundreds of them now, all from the Clerkenwell legal firm that represents the developers. It’s in my pocket, read once, folded in half, dismissed. I’ll throw it in a bin on the way home.
Another £5,000 on the offer. Maybe because Stacey Frears is leaving and has gone cheaper than they expected, the owners feel like they can splash the cash. Maybe they think an old woman like me will be getting concerned for her safety now I’m going to be alone there with just Callum and Derek, and his Jenny bedbound.
We are vulnerable, but we have been since the site was sold five years ago.
This offer won’t get me out.
I’ll be the last to leave on principle. Even if the price has dropped by then. The money they’re offering won’t allow me to build a new life in London. I could have a few years of high living in a nice rented flat, then step in front of a Tube train, perhaps. It’s a grimly appealing option compared to the alternative; moving out to the sticks, finding a bedsit or a place in some over-sixties facility with alarms in every room in case I fall off the toilet, surrounded by geriatrics talking about the grandkids who never visit and how everything was better back in their day.
I know there are good lives to be lived outside London, I’m not such a snob. But I just can’t see me in them. Suddenly alone and having to begin again, make new friends and acquaintances, stoke them up from a dead start. The thought is excruciating. When you’re young you can do that. Drink helps and drugs and sex. All of that common ground. What does a lone sixty-year-old woman do when she enters a new community? Join a book club and hope for the best? A choir? Am I supposed to bingo?
I can’t do it.
I can’t face the prospect of getting old like that. The terms forced on me by the state of my finances.
When I bought my flat, back in the eighties, I didn’t think about the future.
I’d had a choice between Nine Elms or Islington and if I’d gone north rather than south I’d be sitting on close to half a million, thanks to the unpredictable ways of the London property market. Not that I care about the money. The real difference is I would have owned my home outright. I can still remember viewing the Islington flat, a small mews place: one bedroom, a kitchen little more than a cupboard and inter-war plumbing. I remember the estate agent smiling his cheap smile and saying ‘some remodelling might be in order’.
Freehold.
I didn’t stop to consider how important that one little word might become.
I had other things on my mind. Work and protests and the man I was fucking. I can still remember his name but not much else about him. If I passed him on the street now I probably wouldn’t recognise him, but that afternoon in Islington I skittered along the cobbled mews, thinking about him when I should have been thinking of myself.
None of us believed we’d get old. That’s been the curse of my generation. We were the first to be teenagers, the ones who tore up the rule book, did whatever and whoever we wanted. Didn’t stop at thirty or forty, didn’t see why we should grow up, refused to become our parents.
And that was fine for those of us who bought in Islington but not those who plumped for the spacious and well-situated ex-council flats freed up under Right to Buy in Nine Elms.
Would my life have been different if I’d stayed north of the river? Would Islington have tamed me? Maybe I’d have settled down with the bloke I was screwing back then and become the kind of woman he wanted me to be, instead of running in fear from the possibility of getting trapped in a second bad marriage less than a year after I escaped the first. Maybe we’d have kids now and grandkids and be living in a cottage in Cornwall with a lovingly restored trullo for wintering in Puglia, all nicely set up for a civilised retirement because on a different day I might have made a better choice.
I laugh quietly to myself and it isn’t funny, because my life has been shaped by bad choices, but what happens if you don’t laugh?
You weep, that’s what. And who wants to be the old woman crying in the corner of a perfectly nice pub on a weekday early evening?
When I look up from the polished-mahogany tabletop I notice that the suits have left and decide I might as well haul myself off home too.
Work has ceased on-site by the time I get back; only the security team are left behind and they’re in the middle of their handover as I walk past their Portakabin, one lot heading home to wherever on the margins of the city their wages allow them to live, the fresh ones coming in from the second job they probably have to do to keep a family here. They look tired, all three of them, but the sympathy I feel doesn’t go very deep.
You can’t have sympathy for foot soldiers, even when they seem nice enough, even when they’re suffering their own privations.
Back at Greenham some of the women would talk to the troops on the other side of the wire fence – the English ones, not the Americans – and I remember how Carol ordered them to stop. Told them they were like the French women who collaborated with the Nazis. And maybe it was hyperbole, but I think she was right to pick them up on it even if I didn’t agree at the time.
You only get to choose your side once and those young men, likely economically conscripted, likely bullied on a daily basis, had chosen to serve their own oppressors rather than admit they were victims of the same system we were.
At the main doors I force myself to turn and look properly at the new structure.
Four floors high, two hundred feet wide. Its sudden rise, the sheer scale of it, disorientates me and I feel the ground lurch under me. I surely must have been away longer than one day for all of this new metal to have sprung up.
It’s like some dark alchemy has been worked.
Tomorrow it will be twice as tall and two days after it will have doubled again. It will loom over us and I’ll fear it falling but welcome it too, just as I did when the first tower went up and I’d dream of the metal buckling and twisting, hear it screaming as it sheared, the bolts popping like cannon fire. Those mornings I would wake up feeling so sure of my dreams that I wouldn’t believe the building was still standing until I went out on to my balcony and saw it for myself.
One of the security guards has come out of his hut. He holds his radio to his mouth but doesn’t speak. He just watches me and I wish I was dangerous enough to justify his suspicion, but I’m not. Not these days.
I go inside and walk past the lifts without pausing, still thinking about the steel skeleton and how much I don’t want to look at it any more tonight.
There’s no escaping it, though.
I go up to Callum’s flat. He’s on the other side of the building and his views are safer and even if they weren’t, he always draws his curtains as soon as it begins to get dark.
When I get there I have to knock three times before he answers the door and he looks like crap, all sunken-cheeked and squinty-eyed. Behind him the flat is lit only by the light from the television, which he has turned down so low I can’t hear it.
‘What’s up with you?’ I ask, closing the door behind me, watching him return to the nest he’s made on the sofa; cushions and pillows and the wash-faded peach floral duvet that might have been his mum’s.
He burrows down. ‘I’ve got the flu.’
I place my palm on his forehead and feel clammy heat there. ‘Have you taken anything for it?’
‘Just let me sleep.’
He closes his eyes and for a moment I look at him, this big man felled and fragile, and decide I shouldn’t leave him on his own.
In the bathroom I check the cabinet over the sink for anything that might be vaguely helpful. He doesn’t have much, but I’ve not seen him ill in the three years I’ve known him so I’m not surprised. There’s an empty packet of ibuprofen and some paracetamol, cough mixture two years past good and, on the top shelf, a collection of medications, which I think were his father’s.
The names of the drugs are long and unfamiliar to me and the dates stamped on the side of them are from the last century. I don’t know if it’s sentimentality or laziness that has stopped him from throwing them away, but I suspect the former.
Callum’s flat is inherited from his parents and he’s never troubled to redecorate it, although there are places where items are obviously missing; family photos removed because they’re too painful to look at, empty shelves in the old teak unit where other people might display trophies. There will be evidence of Callum’s military service somewhere, I think; parents of soldiers always create altars in readiness for the worst. I wonder how soon after his father’s death Callum chose to put everything away and how differently I would feel about him if I hunted it out. Could our friendship survive me seeing him in uniform? Holding a gun? Smiling as he stands in the ruins of some torn-apart city with the rest of his men?
I close the cabinet door and meet my expression in the mirror.
Who am I to judge him?
After what I’ve done.
Callum is asleep now, curled up with his back to the television, snoring and snorting like a bull.
I go into the kitchen and put the kettle on to make myself a coffee. It’s been a long day and I’ve not eaten since breakfast. In the cupboard I find some rice pudding and have it cold from the tin, sitting in the armchair near the TV, watching a soap opera play out soundlessly.
All drama becomes comedy when you strip away the words.
I think about Callum, coming home from Iraq or Afghanistan – he’s never said which war he was ‘only a cook’ in – and wonder if his father found him changed from when he left. If he still felt like his son. Callum has never spoken much about his parents, only said enough that I know his mother died while he was away and his father soon after he returned.
They lived here as long as me but I never met them. I didn’t have much to do with any of my neighbours before the developers moved in and forced us to become the community we’ve been invoking to protect our homes. Maybe we lost because it was a lie. A real community might not have rolled over so easily.
My phone pings as a text message comes in. Martin Sinclair, on at me again about finding a good time for a chat. He wants an interview for his new book. He’s already spoken to some of the other women from Greenham and I know Carol has turned him down, not trusting we’ll get a sympathetic hearing from any man. Even him. I like Martin well enough; yes, he’s a sell-out and he wants to put himself above the story, but at heart I think he genuinely believes in the power of protest. If anyone’s going to write about it, he’s the best of a bad lot.
The soap opera gives way to a nature documentary and I doze off in the chair for a while, wake up feeling like I’ve been asleep for hours but discover it’s been less than forty minutes. I go into the bathroom for a pee and hear someone knock at the door.
It’s probably Derek with another rat he’ll need Callum’s help disposing of. I’m relieved when I hear him go to answer it, knowing I’d be no use to Derek.
‘What the fuck is this?’ Callum growls.
I rush back to the living room in time to see DC Gull snapping a pair of handcuffs around Callum’s wrists while DC Wazir finishes giving out the caution.
Callum shoots me a desperate look, tries to come towards me, but Gull pulls him back. When I start towards them Wazir tells me not to move and something in Callum’s eyes stops me in a way her command wouldn’t.
‘Mol, I’m sorry.’ His face is red and clenched the way it goes when he wakes up crying. ‘I’m so sorry.’
Wazir is smiling thinly, already opening the door.
‘He didn’t do anything,’ I say and immediately know how useless the statement is. ‘What are you charging him with?’
‘It isn’t really any of your business, is it?’ Wazir says, stepping aside to let the men through.
I follow them, feeling like a terrier nipping at the copper’s heels as he walks Callum out, one big hand on his shoulder, the other holding the rigid black cuffs. It’s heartbreaking to see him so completely cowed and I want to say something to make him feel better, let him know I’m here for him, but I can’t find the right words and instead I say, ‘Don’t talk to them without a solicitor present. No matter what they do, insist on a solicitor.’
Callum won’t look at me, keeps his eyes fixed on his feet as they shuffle across the floor, wearing a pair of old brown moccasins lined with matted fur. I wish I’d found his shoes, made him change them before they took him. I can’t stand to think of him being walked into a police station in his worn-down slippers.
‘You haven’t done anything wrong,’ I say, out in the corridor with them now, following them to the stairwell, hoping he’ll turn and look at me again, but he doesn’t. ‘Twenty-four hours, Cal. That’s all they can keep you in for.’
When Gull shoves the door open, Wazir moves to block me off.
‘We’ll have your toy boy with us a lot longer than twenty-four hours.’
The stairwell door slams home with bone-shaking finality.