Exposure Read online

  'So, all done with the surveyor,' Alistair said. The paperwork was spread out on the kitchen table and they both glanced at it.

  'Well, that's good,' said Luke.

  'Yes, that's out of the way, at least.'

  'So, just the packing up to be done now.'

  'Yes. I'll give most of it to charity. There are one or two things she'd have wanted the Gilberts to have, though. Mementoes—photos and things. Nothing valuable.'

  'You'll keep a few things yourself, won't you?'

  'I—I haven't really decided.'

  'No. Right. Well, we'd better get on with it, hadn't we? I'll get the boxes out of the car, shall I?'

  Luke smiled good-naturedly at him and Alistair felt a rush of pity for his son, who must be struggling to comprehend so much. 'Luke?'

  'Yes?'

  'Listen, there's truly no need for you to do this with me, you know. It's not as if there's anything to lift and carry. It's just sorting through old things. I've been thinking,' he said, although it had only just occurred to him, 'if you like, you could leave me here for the night and come back for me tomorrow afternoon. I'll have it all done by then and you can get it into the car for me and drive us back and so on.'

  Luke's heart raced with joy.

  Alistair held back his smile: his son's feelings were as transparent as his grandmother's had been.

  'Are you sure? I mean, will you be OK?'

  'Of course I'll be OK. This is a depressing business for you.'

  'No, no—it's been ... fine.'

  'Well, even so, I'm sure you'd rather be out with your friends.'

  'OK. Yes,' Luke said, thinking there was nothing he would like less—other than staying here with his father—than to go out with his friends. His friends, a few of whom had called him from a bar to tempt him out, had appeared to be high on some appalling stimulant, which rendered them emotionally tone deaf. They would not even hear the subtle range of his longing for Arianne and sitting beside them, listening to the percussive jangle of their one-night-stands talk, their promotions talk, their parties and flat-hunting and new-car talk, would be torture. At least his mother's sadness had musicality.

  'Will you explain to Mummy?' Alistair said.

  'Yes, I will.'

  'Of course I'll call later tonight but, well, she doesn't need me phoning all the time. Best if you just say I'll be staying here and then I'll ring later and just say goodnight.'

  'I'll explain.'

  'Thank you.'

  Alistair felt an intense nervousness—half excitement, half dread—about the idea of being alone with his mother's things, at liberty to look through them with a clear conscience, as one can with the possessions of the dead.

  Luke drove away quickly. As he got to the end of the road, he saw two figures sitting on the wall by the hedge. It was the Serbian couple to whom he had given cigarettes just half an hour before. Again, he was overwhelmed with curiosity about them. He slowed the car and ran the window down. 'Hello again. Is everything OK?'

  'Yes, we are OK. We must wait here because of the—' Goran shook his fist in the air and twisted his face into a grimace.

  'Because of the demonstration? The people down there?'

  'Yes. They throw a bottle at Mila.'

  ' What?'

  The girl had a hand over her left eye, and when she lowered it, Luke could see it was slightly inflamed.

  'Yes. In her face.'

  'My God. I'm so sorry.'

  'It is not your fault,' Goran said.

  'Look, can I take you anywhere? I'm going to London. Would that help you at all?'

  'Yes,' Mila said, looking up at Goran imploringly.

  'We will find work in London,' Goran explained.

  'Well, perfect. Why don't I take you there? I can drop you at your friends' house or wherever you're staying. Listen, it'll save you the train fare—and it's no trouble.'

  'Trouble?'

  'It's easy, I mean. Not a problem.'

  The man and the girl looked at each other and gradually Goran's face took on the hopeful expression she radiated at him. 'You are certain?' he said.

  'Yes, of course. Where have you been staying? Shall we collect your luggage?'

  'This is what we have. This is all.'

  Luke took in the half-filled black bin-bags at their feet. Then he got out of the car with the keys in his hand. 'Well, let's get it in. The central locking's broken, I'm afraid.'

  'We can put it in the trunk,' Goran said excitedly.

  'The trunk? Yes.' Luke smiled as he undid the lock.

  'What is funny?' Goran said.

  'Oh, nothing. Just you saying "trunk". In England we say "boot". Trunk's American, I think. But it really doesn't matter at all.'

  'Yes, it matters.'

  'Oh, no, really—no one cares about things like that.'

  Goran looked at Luke straight on for a second. 'In this way you will lose your language.'

  'Oh, I'd never really thought about it,' said Luke. He opened the back door.

  Mila slipped in silently, her hand still held against her eye. 'Thank you,' she said.

  'It's nothing. Really nothing,' Luke told her.

  Goran was obviously worried about Mila and said he would sit with her in the back. As they drove out of Dover they passed two TV news vans. The chanting was louder now and constant: 'Out! Out!' In the rear-view mirror, Luke could see Mila peering out of the window at the crowd with their daubed bed-sheets and cardboard placards, their savage misspellings:

  'ASILUM BACK TO FRANCE!'

  'BOWGUS SCROUNGERS! OUT!'

  Luke noticed that Goran paid no attention, he kept his eyes straight ahead and put his arm firmly round Mila.

  Chapter 13

  They had been on the motorway for about forty minutes before anyone spoke. The enclosed space had heightened their strangeness to each other. In the rear-view mirror, Luke watched Goran staring out of the window at the flashing fields, trees and cars; Mila was asleep on his shoulder. Eventually Luke said, 'You must both be very tired.'

  Goran met his eyes in the mirror and smiled. 'Yes, it was long, bad journey.'

  'And then you had all that shouting—the bottle and everything—when you got here. How terrible.' Luke glanced at his hands on the steering-wheel. 'D'you want another cigarette?'

  'Thank you, Luke—I would love, but no. I will wake her. She must sleep. Mila is ill.'

  Hastily Luke put the cigarettes back into his shirt pocket, 'Oh, no! Poor thing! What's wrong?'

  'She gets a bad fever. For three days now. You see she is very thin.'

  'Goran, you must take her to a doctor. You really should, you know.' There was no reply. Luke said, 'Listen, you know you won't have to pay or anything. Just so you know that's not an issue. It's not like in some countries where it costs a fortune if you haven't got holiday insurance or whatever. I mean—not that you're on holiday. You know what I mean.'

  Goran looked down for a second, and then, speaking gently, he said, 'Luke, do you understand we are illegal? We have no passports. You know this?'

  Luke bit his lip. 'I—I wasn't sure.'

  Goran nodded. 'Now you are sure. Do you want us to get out of this car?'

  'No! God, no. Not at all. No! It's not as if anyone can tell by looking at you. I mean—is it?'

  'No,' Goran said, laughing. 'Thank you, Luke.'

  An enormous truck towered beside them for a moment. Through the narrow slats an improbable number of wet animal snouts sucked at the air. Were they cows? Small horses? Then it overtook, sending out tufts of straw, which caught and spun in the turbulence behind the exhaust.

  'Goran?' said Luke.

  'Yes?'

  'When we get to London, have you actually got a friend to stay with?'

  'No.' Goran watched a motorbike pass and strained to see what model it was.

  'I just assumed ... Where will you sleep?'

  'I don't know. But we will be in London.'

  Luke found himself smiling with pride at Go
ran's excitement. But this feeling was quickly followed by vague shame. 'Yes, but you can't sleep on the street,' he said.

  'Ah—it is better than many places where we sleep. It is more safe than in my bed at home in Pristina.'

  Luke observed the tense, melancholy face.

  Then Goran waved the back of his hand at the sky. 'And also it is warm now in England.'

  'Well, it's really not that warm at night, Goran. And Mila's ill.'

  'I think she will be OK,' he said, stroking her hair. 'The worst time is finished for us now. Now we can begin.'

  Luke stared ahead at the road. He had never slept outside before—other than on school camping trips—except once, for a couple of hours, when he had forgotten his keys and was too stoned to handle waking his parents and communicating with them. He had bunched his jacket up under his head and passed out. His mother had spotted him slumped on the doorstep when she came down for the Sunday papers. She had made him a big cooked breakfast, he remembered, and he had allowed her to become almost tearful at the thought that he had slept outside solely because he could not bear to disturb his mother's sleep. She said he smelt 'funny'—it was Ludo's skunk—and he told her he had been in a horrible smoky pub and had just wanted to come home all evening. She kept kissing his head and ruffling his hair. His father and Sophie must have been out somewhere. It had been lovely, actually. He loved his mother very much.

  Luke overtook a car pulling a trailer with a small powerboat on it. A man with spiked blue hair was driving, drinking from a can of beer.

  The radio was doing the top ten: 'And in at number eight, with a cracking new entry from Heather de Wayne, it's 'U ... R ... my ... world...' There was an audio-waterfall of sickly notes.

  Luke switched it off. 'Look, you can't sleep on the street,' he said. 'You just can't'. For a moment, he imagined letting them use his flat for a couple of nights, but it was impossible. The flat was a time-capsule, an inviolable shrine to himself and Arianne. It was this, rather than the thought that he had no idea if he could trust them, that stopped him suggesting it. No. His stomach lurched with nausea at the thought of other people—any other people—being there. Even he could not go back into that flat without her. It had to be them together or he would sell the place. It felt right to think in this apocalyptic way—it contained all the force he had lacked while they had been together.

  Suddenly he felt a surge of excitement. 'Look, I've got an idea,' he said. 'There's this annexe, like a little flat, at the bottom of my parents' garden. We've never really used it. It's not beautiful or anything. I mean, it's full of old garden furniture and stuff, but at least it's got a roof and a shower and a loo—and I know they work because we use the loo when we have our garden party. Anyway, I'm just thinking you could stay there for a night or two. You know, if—'

  'Luke, I...'

  'If it would help. But, listen, we couldn't tell my parents.'

  Luke knew it would be impossible to ask Rosalind and Alistair to agree to have total strangers sleeping under their roof. Perhaps they might have agreed ten years ago, if he had said this exhausted couple were friends of a friend, but now they would be frightened, shocked, disoriented by the question. Luke was aware that his own perspective was unusual. Arianne had made him reckless in happiness and she was making him reckless in unhappiness, too. But it was all very well for him to be reckless: his parents were a different matter. Apart from the strain of recent events, they had long been acquiring a new vulnerability.

  With a kind of sad curiosity Luke had noticed his parents were less and less resilient to the unexpected impact of humanity: the phone call during lunch, the spontaneous visitor on a Sunday afternoon, could knock them breathless, leave them searching each other's faces in a kind of panic or mutual pleading. How could he bring this about deliberately—especially now? Unlike Sophie, whom this 'neurosis' deeply exasperated, he understood. Instinctively, in his guts, he knew it was just another sign of ageing. He knew by feeling what might have been explained more cerebrally. What he had noticed was his parents' need to keep the stars, the seasons, each other in place by little efforts of will, little acts of obduracy, now that convention was losing its precedence to death.

  Luke shook his head firmly. 'It's just that my father and mother—well, they're going through a lot at the ... Basically it's just simpler, that's all. We would just have to keep it quiet—not put the lights on and stuff when it gets dark. Would that help at all?'

  Goran squeezed his eyes shut. 'It helps! Yes, it helps very much. Luke— thank you.'

  Luke felt his heart swell with satisfaction. He flicked the indicator switch and slowed down as he moved into the left-hand lane. 'Come on,' he said. 'Let's get you something to eat at this service station. I need a coffee and you're probably hungry, aren't you?'

  Goran lowered his head, but when he looked up, it was with a smile of open gratitude and a sigh of relief. 'Yes,' he said. 'We do not eat for two days.'

  'My God. Well, here we are. I'm going to buy you a welcome-to-England lunch. We can do better than that awful demonstration. I can't believe people do things like that.'

  'They are just scared,' Goran said. 'All people are the same.'

  The service station opened out in front of them in a vast arc of futuristic optimism. It promised, on first sight, that it had an answer to every possible human need. Enormous up-lit billboards announced brand names in ecstatic lists, as if they were famous actors in starring roles. There was a chemist, a petrol station, a bookshop; there were two fast-food counters, a video-games parlour, a sunglasses shop, a newsagent, a coffee bar, a miniature pub and an Easy-Dine Cafeteria, which was a chain in which Ludo's family had a large stake. (The two of them had had a lot of laughs on what Ludo referred to as 'Easy Money'.)

  Luke drove around, hunting for a space. The car park was crowded with a mixture of cars, the odd motorbike or caravan and huge tour coaches, which were mobile advertisements for themselves: 'www.splendorofeurope.com'; 'www.twilight-tours.co.uk '; 'www.Bestyears.com', they read.

  There appeared to be hundreds of old people helping each other across the tarmac, between the cars, around the wing-mirrors. By two of the coaches, Luke spotted bizarrely similar tense-faced women wearing bright lipstick and slacks. They were each waving a stick with a coloured rosette on it, one green and one yellow. White-haired men and women in beige and pale lilac and dove grey made their way towards the brighter colours.

  As Luke pulled into a parking space, a small child's voice shouted, 'Daddy! Daddy!' right beside him and made him jump. At first he couldn't see the child. A man was locking the next-door car; then he leant down and lifted a litde boy of three or four on to his shoulders. The child had on shorts and a white T-shirt with green stains on it. The man was about the same age as Luke. Among Luke's affluent, educated, procrastinating friends in London, it was possible for him to forget that people were fathers at his age. The little boy said, 'Ride, Dad? Go on a fire engine?'

  The father noticed he was being observed and he grinned, adult to adult. 'Always an expensive stop at one of these places,' he said.

  Luke got out of the car and casually slammed the door. 'Total rip-off,' he said, then blew air up at his forehead and rolled his eyes as if he was a father too: a father who faced tough money worries just like this man, not someone whose parents still took him on holiday and said he could bring a friend. Not someone who had spent five thousand pounds on a suede sofa.

  A heavy pulse of shame beat through him as he watched them walk away. The loss of Arianne was making him relate to the world with a new humility. He realized he did not feel immune, he did not feel special, any more. Almost immediately, this was unbearably poignant.

  Goran and Mila got out of the car. Mila stretched and Luke noticed how thin her arms were—curiously thin. She was as thin as Sophie sometimes made herself with all the crazy dieting. Mila's fragility was a wonder: it made her sacred somehow. She was miraculous after her journey, like a tiny artefact in an archaeologist's knaps
ack.

  'Right. Let's go to the cafeteria,' he said firmly. 'We can get some hot food and sit down.'

  As they set off, Goran stumbled and reached for the side of the car. His face had become very pale and the stubbly beard was pitiful against it. The dark hair grew in sparse quantities over his prominent cheekbones and reminded Luke of the patches of weeds you sometimes saw in the middle of French or Italian motorways. It had once struck him that it was as if those plants sprouted there, in the parched tarmac and the double rush of traffic, solely to remind you that nature is strong. Mila put her shoulder under Goran's arm.

  'Nema problema, Mila. Ja sam OK,' Goran said. 'I am so sorry, Luke.'

  'Don't be silly. Please. You're both exhausted. Come on, let's get you in there,' he said. As he spoke, he thought how much he liked the good-natured insistence in his voice, the gentle authority. 'Listen, you must eat as much as you like,' he said, and spread his arms wide. 'You must eat the whole restaurant, if you like.' He put his hand on Goran's shoulder and Mila smiled at him with deep gratitude. This unexpected opportunity for largesse had made Luke feel purposeful and elated. What an amazing thing it was to be able to help two good young people! How very much more pleasant it was than wondering who had their hands on Arianne, whose lower lip she was biting in her excitement.

  He had not eaten in a self-service restaurant since he was at university and even then it had been on only a few occasions when, on one of their road trips, he and his friends were ravenous with 'the munchies' after smoking comical quantities of dope. Since then the food had improved immeasurably. He remembered gorging helplessly on solid fried eggs and baked beans dried out under the lamps, on brutally stunted frozen waffles, waxy chocices, flat Coke and bitter instant coffee with little packets of dried milk. But England did not seem to produce food like that any more. Jessica said it had given up its defiant stand against Continental sensuality.

  Now there appeared to be a little something on offer from selected corners of the world: Irish stew, coq au vin, couscous, steak and kidney pie, chicken tikka, mushroom risotto, Swedish meatballs. The dishes were listed on a printed faux-blackboard in a novelty 'handwriting' font.