JUDI JAMES

Naked Angels

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Prologue

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About the Author

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE
London 1995

THE MODEL

Even when she was dying she was still counting the calories: none in the hot water toddy at breakfast, ten in the Extra Strong mint on the way to the shoot. She licked the insides of her teeth, savouring everything.

The model’s changing room was shared. Two males and herself. The sour but tasty stench of quick-tan and the sick-sweet perfume of hashish. She watched them push tissues down the front of their trunks while her stomach gnawed painfully. Too much padding? One less? Why not go for it? They laughed easily. Their pubic hair had been waxed. They looked gleamily good. She weighed less than seven stone but she still looked crap. Too fat – too much around the hips.

She listened to the male models laughing and thought they were making fun of her. Paranoia. She knew she was right, though. She gave her grave face a few little smacks to raise some colour onto it. It was six a.m. She sighed and lit her fourth cigarette of the day.

The litany continued in her head. Two dry biscuits for dinner. Three Strawberry Pop Tarts yesterday, even if she did throw them up later. Her last binge had been over a week ago: chocolate spread sandwiches on thick white bread with butter, yellow-cream rice puddings, Alpen, pink-iced cakes, and cheese triangles on warmed rolls. It had taken her an hour to be sick afterwards and she’d lain exhausted on the bathroom floor feeling the linoleum tiles cool against her cheek.

The make-up made her skin hurt. She’d studied it like a science and knew exactly what it was doing to her flesh – every liposome, every nanosphere, every trace of phytobium. She winced and the make-up artist halted.

‘The sponge – it’s a bit scratchy. Have you got a softer one?’

He smiled but his teeth formed a set line as he went to fetch a new one. She closed her eyes and relaxed a little.

The set was bare – just the model and the guys. The photographer was firing instructions at her. She had so much oil on her body she slid off the male models like an eel. They touched one another breezily between shots, swapping muscle tone.

She’d do it that evening, definitely. She didn’t want any more of this.

Back in the changing room she stared at herself in the mirror. Six feet tall. A freak, dressed in two-hundred quid fishnets and denim cut-offs with the bum sagging. And the shoes – velvet stiletto tart shoes with diamante toe-caps – she liked the shoes, they were pretty.

She was fifteen years old, yet she felt three hundred and nine. Fifteen seemed a long time to have lived. She wanted to be young again. She wanted an end to it all.

THE ILLUSIONIST

The photographer sat before his computer screen, the model’s image flickering and dancing in front of his face. The room was dark. His face was half lit and eerie. The model was perfectly reflected as a pair of tiny twins, trapped in the round orbs of his Calvin Klein wire-rimmed glasses.

‘It’s a conceptual shot,’ he told his assistant. ‘You mean it’s shit.’

‘It’s OK,’ the photographer said, ‘it doesn’t matter. It’s the concept – the concept is sound.’

‘She looks bad,’ the assistant said, studying the model’s image.

‘Bad as in good?’ the photographer asked.

‘No, bad as in bad. Really bad. I thought she was supposed to be a name. What’s the matter with her, her face looks like Emmenthal. Is she on something? I thought she was special.’

‘The client wanted her,’ the photographer told him, ‘it’s OK, I told you.’ He lit a cigarette and pushed it into the side of his mouth. Smoke billowed from his nostrils and arched around his head.

‘I’m so disappointed,’ the boy said.

‘You won’t be,’ he was told. ‘A little computer enhancement and we will have created your true goddess for you again.’

He pressed a few keys and pulled the model’s face into close-up. He felt as though he was a true artist, creating a perfect image with a few finger-flicks: less darkness under the eyes. Bleached pupils. A small mark removed from the cheek. He added warmth and tone to her pallid cheeks and widened her distressed-looking smile.

‘What d’you think?’ he asked. The boy leant forward. Both faces were lit gleaming and frog-like by the flickering colours on screen.

‘It’s cheating,’ the assistant said. He laughed, though. The model looked the way he knew her now. She looked like the face everyone saw in the magazines. Healthy. Glowing. Fuckable.

The photographer shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s art. Total empowerment via VDU. We’ve become the creative force we always yearned to be. Look at that fucking face – I created that face, just like Leonardo created the Mona Lisa.’

He sat back in his chair, scratching himself, swinging gently. ‘It’s all illusion, son, playing tricks with images. Digital imaging – fucking brilliant. Photographers have been cheating for years, only now we can do it all with a finger-twitch.

‘Did you know one of the first patentees of the photographic process was a prize illusionist?’ he asked. ‘There’s some history here, it’s a tradition – only now we’ve got it down to an art form. Don’t you like what you see?’ He turned to his assistant, the light in his glasses obscuring his eyes. ‘Don’t you like it?’ he repeated.

The boy smiled.

‘Does it matter that what you see doesn’t exist?’ the photographer whispered. ‘Do you think many of the punters have a hope in hell of meeting her in the flesh anyway? It’s trickery, son, hocus-pocus, jiggery-pokery. It’s alchemy – turning basest metals into gold. And she is gold, isn’t she? Look at her – shit, man, look at her. We got rid of all her faults. We made her perfect.’

He looked back to the screen, stroking his stubble. ‘Maybe a little more leg,’ he said. His assistant nodded his approval.

THE PAPARAZZI

Flaccid had to be the saddest word in the English language. The snapper shifted sagging weight from ossified femur to atrophied tibia. Never fuck a fashion hack – why had no one ever told him that? Or maybe they had. Maybe he just forgot.

The incense made his nose itch. When he moved again he could just glimpse the faux-snakeskin linoleum behind the post-modernist Conran headboard. She should take the Hoover round there more often, he thought – there were dustballs the size of large rats down by the marble-effect skirting. Or were they rats? Jesus!

That season the fashion hack was into Tantric Sex. She slid deftly into the Lotus position, opening her mouth and sticking her tongue out like a Maori rugby player prior to a match. He’d bought her dinner at Quaglino’s but she’d barfed it all up in the john half an hour later to balance her inner toxins.

He was so bored it hurt but she was Lavender Allcock-Hopkins, just about The Biggest Name in the Fashion Business, so he gritted his buttocks and pressed on with the Chi Gung. When the portable phone chirruped from beneath the herb-stuffed continental pillow he could have fucked that instead, he was so relieved for the interruption.

‘Where are you, you bugger?’ It was the editor of the Sunday Slimes, sizzling and shouting as though Edison Bell were just a figment of some ad-man’s imagination. The snapper held the phone near the open window so the traffic sounds fizzed down the wires.

‘Kensington Palace,’ he yelled, ‘down at the gates. There’s a bit of serious to-ing and fro-ing down here and word is out the prince …’

‘Sod the prince!’ his editor screamed. ‘Get down to Piccadilly. There’s some sort of awards night going on and Spike says they’ve just smuggled some celebs in by the tradesman’s. Are you on your bike?’

The snapper grunted. In his haste he’d shoved two feet into one leg of his Gaultiers. He scowled across at Lavender but she was into her forty-fifth inner-vaginal orgasm and so barely aware he was AWOL from the Futon.

There were hideous whale sounds playing on the CD. The flask of amyl nitrate he’d brought lay untouched atop the Jeff Koons Retrospective catalogue. That little gift had been received with all the enthusiasm of a box of Quality Streets on a first date.

“Bye, lover,’ the snapper mouthed, quickly syphoning Givenchy beneath each armpit before picking up the keys to his Harley and tossing them twice into the air. Lavender was silent but the whales hooted their eerie farewell.

THE KILL

It was raining – but then the rain always drizzled on a true paparazzo. They stank of the rain – it steamed from their anoraks and snaked through their hair gel, bubbling like mucus. Without the rain they would have lost the kudos that came with the cupped cigarettes and the serious body-hunch.

As the snapper strolled across to join the straggle they quickly banded together, staring like meerkats spoiling for a fight.

‘Who is it in there tonight?’

‘Fuck-knows.’

‘Again? We did him last night.’ ‘Very funny.’ ‘You think so?’ ‘No, actually.’

‘It’s Paul Daniels, I saw him go in.’

‘Buggeroff.’

‘Buggeroffyerself.’

Some even claimed it was the patter and camaraderie that kept them loyal to the job.

The snapper tried to shin a low wall but slipped and scuffed his trainers and grazed his palm into the bargain. He swore and scowled at the nearest of the pack, daring him to laugh. He didn’t.

There was a sudden surge around the entrance to the hotel and the heartwarming sound of a scuffle breaking out. The paparazzi moved as one beast, pressing forward, pushing, lining up for a sniff of their prey. Someone moved from the darkness out into the street-lights and a volley of silver flashes greeted their arrival. A huge meatball of a bodyguard appeared from nowhere and a small guy in a new pair of Timberlands had his nose crushed to a crimson coulis by the lens of his own Leica.

They all had stepladders ready in case it was Prince. In the event the ladders were superfluous because the man who finally stepped into the glare of the lights was tall enough to be seen in any crowd.

‘Who the …?’

‘Shit, give us some space for Christssake. I was here first you know …’

The jostling became violent as the bodyguard leant his full weight to the crush. Squeezed like lemons, the paparazzi oozed a collective odour of Key West. The snapper’s foot found someone’s calf beneath it and he used it as the lever he needed to haul himself onto the wall behind.

The man in the middle of the crowd turned full-face and he recognized him at once; the chill wind of jealousy blew throughout his vitals.

‘Mik-Mak!’ The whisper went round. The paparazzi virtually slobbered with glee. Mik Veronsky, supersnapper. Exclusive, elusive and charismatic enough to be worth a few bob in the next day’s papers. The pages of Vogue and Tatler had been liberally peppered with shots of his face for the past month but now he was about to be captured for the benefit of the nation’s chip-wrappings and cat litter-tray linings, too.

The snapper swallowed hard and his camera dropped waist-high as his colleagues moved in for the kill.

Supersnapper – what the fuck did that mean? All it meant was that Mik Veronsky charged more to do less. And got to screw all the best women. It meant he was top barker in the whole pack of snivelling hounds. It also meant he was flavour of the month with the fashion journos. Mention his name to Lavender Allcock-Hopkins and a greedy, syrupy little smile would gather across her suet-white face. He raised his camera reluctantly and faffed around with the focus instead.

Mik had lost his rag now – he was really raging. He’d grabbed a nearby journo and was trying to tear the poor sod’s epiglottis out with his bare hands.

What was it that women saw in him? He was taller than necessary with wide shoulders and a skinny, demi-starved frame. His skin was vampire-white and his hair as black as the long coat he always wore. His outfit was de rigueur supersnapper: boots, jeans, acres of ethnic jewellery, stupid fucking hand-woven hat that looked like it had been stolen from some passing Kurd or other. Hair extensions? Did normal men have hair that far down their backs? And hadn’t it been cropped short last season? Eyes like angry dark stones.

Mik wasn’t handsome in the pipe-and-knitting-pattern sort of style, but he was, in a casual way, incredibly beautiful. Arty-farty, the snapper thought. All high fucking cheekbones and flared bloody nostrils. Then, of course, there was the voice. The accent: what Lavender Allcock-Hopkins described as multiply orgasmic.

The snapper looked back through his telephoto. Mik’s eyes were so dark you could barely see the definition between pupil and iris. There was a soft dent above his top lip and a small scar near his left eyebrow.

‘I don’t know what they all bloody see in him,’ he announced to anyone within earshot. He looked back again. There was a locket hanging around Mik’s neck, a plain silver one, nestling just along the watermark where the chest hairs started. Lockets weren’t in that season – everybody knew that. Press-prattle had it that it held something dear to Mik – something even that cold-hearted bastard cherished as a memento.

A body moved in front of Mik, blocking the snapper’s view, and he swore under his breath. He looked up to see who it was. Another photographer. It looked as though the prat was going to ask for a bloody autograph. The shame of the concept turned the snapper’s face scarlet.

A car backfired. Twice. Mik’s hair seemed to explode with the shock, rising up behind his head in serene and stately slow motion. The crush of bodies parted like the Red Sea. Mik stood alone now, frozen in grey space. The thought flashed through the snapper’s mind that maybe the pack had given up at last. Maybe a sense of the injustice of it all had finally permeated their crusty skulls. Mik had no talent as a photographer. He’d screwed his way to the top. He couldn’t tell a Nikon from a Box Brownie if his life depended on it. The game was up: the pack had rejected Mik Veronsky and all his hype.

The snapper watched with glee as Mik disintegrated with the lights of the press no longer upon him. People moved further back. Mik lurched towards them. He looked startled and amazed at their apparent lack of interest. His mouth opened and he screamed a name: ‘Andreas!’ There was an echo from other empty streets. Nonsense. Crap. The guy was all to pieces. Then the word was replaced by something else – something dark that spewed out of his mouth, splattering the bystanders. People moved back quickly in disgust, checking their clothes, wiping stains off their anoraks. All you could hear now was the shuffling and squeaking of Timberlands on wet pavement. There were a couple of screams, too.

Mik seemed to trip over nothing and began to fall, crumpling onto the concrete without a sound. Silence after that, total and profound.

Then suddenly the flashes began like applause after a great performance; not a quick volley of shots this time, but a barrage. No gaps between the silver light. The snapper’s mouth fell open but his hands would not move. Something seeped from beneath Mik’s fallen frame, something thicker and darker even than the rain.

The snapper knew then that his moment had come and passed him by: that split atom of a millisecond that fate offers up to everyone at some time in their meaningless little life, the one chance we all get either to make it or not. The photographer had blown it. He could have been famous. He could have been rich.

The moment had been his. He’d had the best view, the best angle, the best picture in his viewfinder. The irony of it was exquisite. Someone cannoned into his back and his camera rolled to the ground. He felt like jumping on it. Mik Veronsky had just been shot and all he’d done was stand there like a dickhead and watch.

THE PHOTOGRAPHER

It was good watching her work in the studio. Very good for an hour or two. Then maybe not so good for a while. After ten hours it was a clear descent into hell.

The trouble was, she was a perfectionist and perfect took time. Time cost money. Clients went from mildly nervous to deeply tense to totally, frenetically, bizarrely apeshit. They knew she was slow – everyone in the business knew she was slow – she was famous for it, but very few people knew exactly how slow. That was when the torture began.

Legend had it one client went completely bankrupt by the second day of a shoot. He could have stopped her, of course. He could have stood up there and then and told her that not only had his budget run out half-way through day one, but also that his entire year’s profits were at risk – yet he didn’t, and nobody blamed him. It would have been like stopping Michelangelo mid-brushstroke to explain your cash-flow problem as he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Sometimes it was just easier to stock up on the Prozac and sweat it out.

She was rich, famous – she’d made it. Trading on past successes, maybe, but still a big name. Her studio complex was the size of an aircraft hangar and you got agoraphobic just walking round it. Like all true talents, though, she specialized in looking broke.

Watching her work you noticed the round bones of her spine that showed through her faded t-shirt like strung marbles as she hunched over the loaded camera. You saw how her long, wild sun-streaked hair got pushed dismissively back into an old rubber band she got from one of the paper boxes. When she was concentrating she would often pull a strand of hair down from the band to chew.

You heard nothing because she very rarely spoke and if she did it was in a whisper and you couldn’t hear what she said. After a while the soft puff and squeak of her sneakers as she crept almost soundlessly across the varnished floor, moving from pools of light into total darkness, would get on your nerves.

What you saw when you booked her for a shoot was a tall, youngish woman – not ugly, not plain, but not quite beautiful either – in the throes of an intense, all-consuming relationship with a handful of strobe lights and a beaten-up Rolleiflex. What you got was an illicit love affair with light that made you feel like a snoop even to be watching.

At thirty-five she had been at the top of her profession for several years, having hung there precariously owing to a mixture of driven ambition, technical perfection, and perpetual motion. Her name was legendary in the business and even photographers who trashed her work were in awe of her skill and her knowledge. She was not an instinctive worker – her pictures excited by their composition rather than their content.

She would frown all the time when she worked; it was only when she was finished that she would flash the famous grin, but by then you were too emotionally and financially drained to catch it.

The client that day was Japanese. He’d been warned about her working methods but his company was one of the largest in Japan and well up to the financial challenge. Besides, they wanted the best. The guy had foresight. He had a small roll-up bed with him, a portable TV for the Teletext and the number of an excellent local Japanese restaurant that delivered.

An hour after he’d settled behind the set the news of Mik’s shooting had flashed onto CNN and less than an hour after that he was informed his own shoot was in the can. No take-away sushi and no flies on the Futon.

His initial astonishment soon turned to anger, but when he went to speak to the photographer he found her staring into space and completely oblivious to anything around her. She looked so unwell he feared she might have had a stroke, but then the studio manager came to spirit him away and assure him that all was well and the job fairly completed. When he looked back the photographer still hadn’t moved. Maybe it was merely a display of the type of artistic behaviour the Americans were prone to. If the shots were no good he could always sue. But he still wasn’t sure she hadn’t had a stroke or a breakdown.

He bid her farewell and good luck just in case, and was extraordinarily relieved when she finally looked up and smiled and politely wished him the same in almost perfect Japanese.

1
Budapest 1981

The child was intrigued by a small speck of light that danced away somewhere deep in the heart of the darkness. He had been scared many times before but never so much that it hurt.

He wore a small plastic submarine pinned to the inside of his vest which was a medal for valour given to him by Father Janovsky for beating the shit out of Istvan Gosser, even though the boy had been armed with a knife. The trophy meant nothing today, though. Today his mouth felt like it was full of pitch and his heart was trying to punch its way out of his chest. If he had encountered Istvan Gosser down there in the dark he would have greeted him like a long-lost friend, and meant it, too.

The light squirmed some more. Perhaps it was a ghost – the soul of one of the newly dead. It might even be Andreas. The thought turned the boy’s knees to sponge. The place smelt funny. He wished he were somewhere else, somewhere with proper light. Anywhere. If he could have remembered his prayers he would have said them. Then a door opened from nowhere and he thought he would die from the shock.

The sudden glare startled him. The darkness felt almost better now. Dark was bad but that bright glare was a million times worse. Someone – not a ghost, because ghosts don’t wear rubber aprons and smell of tobacco – pushed past him and the door fell back almost shut again. The boy was quick, though, pushing his fingers between the crack and preventing the door from closing properly, even though it hurt. When the corridor was quiet he prised the door open. Then, with a quick glance around first to check he was unseen, he stepped inside.

The local mortuary was one vast, watery-smelling place that was tiled and lit like a public convenience. The bare bulbs strung in a line overhead made everyone look like a corpse whether they were dead or not. If the boy could have seen his own reflection in a mirror right then he would have made himself jump.

His face was whey-white with guilt and his hair, in contrast, looked black. The lights bleached the grime and dirt on his body so that he looked almost clean and his mouth had shrunk into a slit. It was hard for him to imagine he was above ground in that room. It was harder still for him to imagine he would ever get out of there alive.

There was a noise. There were other people in that long room. The boy fled to hide, scuttling across the floor like a rat.

Joszef Molnar farted and Laszlo Kovacs giggled. It was the echo that made it so funny. Whistling was good for that, too. The corpse that lay between them on a trolley did nothing, of course. Not that you could always rely on a corpse to play dead. Sometimes they moved, sometimes they even sat up – it was something to do with the escaping gasses as they decomposed. Joszef and Laszlo had seen it all in their time.

The corpse was covered in the regulation green rubber sheet but attached to the sheet were two pink balloons and a badly hand-written card that read: ‘Happy Birthday Lisa’.

Lisa Janus was the local pathologist, a great heifer of a woman who was, nevertheless, the nearest thing to a sex object either man was ever likely to meet. They had been courting her half-heartedly for over a decade and the smell of Lysol was now like an aphrodisiac to them both.

As they heard her galoshes squeaking down the dark labyrinth of outer corridors both men assumed appropriately sober expressions. The aprons they wore covered their police uniforms and that was a shame, but it was the rules. Molnar cleared his throat in readiness and Kovacs licked at his moustache to make it neat. Not that it needed further neatening; he’d spent fifteen minutes on it already that morning, trimming it into a straight line with his wife’s toenail clippers.

Lisa Janus was not an ugly woman, although she could have been taken for one as her face puckered with annoyance at the sight of the two policemen. Every time those two brought a body in they behaved like fishermen displaying a catch. Then her eyes moved down to the rubber sheet and she noticed the pink balloons for the first time.

‘Is this supposed to be a joke, gentlemen?’

A grin broke out on Inspector Kovacs’s face.

‘Ta-daa!’ He pulled the rubber sheet back with a flourish. The sudden movement caused the corpse’s head to roll to the side and he straightened it quickly.

Lisa Janus let out a gasp and the two men smirked.

‘We thought you’d be impressed,’ Kovacs said. ‘The doctor was keen to get his hands on this one but we saved him for you.’

The body was that of a young man, not more than twenty years old at the most. He was tall and slim but – most of all – he was extremely, outstandingly beautiful. His fair hair lay curled and plastered around his face. His skin had yellowed but it was a clear complexion, showing that he had, at least, eaten good food at some time in his upbringing.

Looking at his slender corpse was like admiring one of the white marble statues in the National Museum. Earlier on, Kovacs had tied a red ribbon around the young man’s penis but then thought he might be taking the joke too far and removed it. Molnar had been disappointed at that – he had thought the red ribbon a hilarious touch.

‘Who is he?’ Janus asked. She was impressed. Her voice had shrunk to a whisper.

Molnar shrugged. ‘Who knows? Lowlife. We found him collapsed in the street. No one has missed him – can you imagine that? What a loss to womankind, eh?’

‘Someone might miss him,’ Kovacs said. He twisted the corpse’s arm a little. ‘Look.’ The name Paulina was tattooed on the white forearm. ‘I should imagine this proves he had at least one girlfriend.’

‘It might be the name of his mother.’ Janus leant closer, fingering the tattoo gently.

‘Can you work out what he died of?’

Lisa Janus tutted softly. ‘Drugs,’ she said, ‘he died of an overdose.’ There was no question in her voice.

The two men shared a quick glance over her head.

‘No.’ Inspector Kovacs sounded equally sure. ‘No drugs, Dr Janus.’

‘How can you tell?’ She sounded tired rather than angry.

‘No syringe nearby, no needle marks. I checked. The boy is clean. He must have had a weak heart, or a fit, or something.’

The pathologist gazed at him. Her eyes were a watery shade of hazel. Brown eyes. That meant she was not a true blonde. That meant …

‘Would you be prepared to risk money on your theory, inspector?’ she asked.

Kovacs sucked in his top lip. A bet? That was different.

‘Look.’ Janus leant forward and the men leant forward too, because her overall had gaped a little at the top. There was a sweepstake back at the station over whether she wore underwear beneath her gown or not. Confident of a captive audience, she held the corpse’s upper arm with both hands and squeezed. To the policemen’s amazement a tiny teardrop of red blood appeared at the inner elbow.

‘No apparent needle marks,’ Janus said. ‘He used a sharp syringe and most likely he was not an actual junkie. I suspect I could do the same trick with the other arm. He probably injected heroin in one and cocaine in the other. I believe they call it a Speedball in the United States. I dare say the heroin was too pure. There is a batch doing the rounds at the moment. We had a similar death in here last week.’ She smiled then, for the first time that day. ‘Never take appearances for granted, inspector,’ she said, ‘they can easily be deceptive, you know.’

‘He didn’t use drugs! He wasn’t a junkie!’ Anger had overcome the young boy’s fear and guilt and he stepped out into the full glare of the light for the first time. They all turned to see who had spoken. For a second they looked shocked. He stared at the adults’ faces; for a while they appeared guilty, then they started to look angry too.

He had a round, shining face, like an angel, and his eyes were swollen with tears. His nose was running because he had not dared to move in order to wipe it. His clothes were clean enough – cleaner than him, at any rate – but they were old clothes, well out of style, and looked strange, somehow not right. The policemen tried to gauge the boy’s age. Kovacs guessed eleven and Molnar thought maybe twelve. They knew his sort straight away; the streets were running with them in parts of the city. Lisa Janus did not know his type. She thought he just looked very young and very sad.

‘What are you up to, son?’ Molnar asked. He had three kids of his own at home and they all got up to tricks but none of them would have been stupid enough to hang around a mortuary for fun. Then he noticed the boy was shaking with fear.

‘I was sent here,’ the boy said. ‘I came to identify …’ He pointed to the corpse on the trolley in front of them.

‘You know this lad?’ Kovacs asked.

The boy nodded slowly. ‘He’s my brother.’

Even in the bright lights he could see the policeman blush. Kovacs looked down at the balloons. He prayed the boy was lying.

‘How can you tell?’ he asked. Perhaps he was lying. After all, he could barely see from where he stood.

‘I can smell him,’ the boy said. ‘I can smell his cologne. I could even smell it in the corridor. That was why I came in here. I knew he was here. I found him myself. He’s my brother. I would know him from his smell. He’s dead, isn’t he?’ He tried hard but his voice broke on these last words. Until you say it you don’t have to believe it. Now he had said it. Andreas was dead.

Molnar and Kovacs looked at each other.

‘How long have you been standing there?’ Lisa Janus asked the boy.

‘A few minutes. Before you arrived.’

The pathologist tugged the balloons off the sheet and threw them in the policemen’s faces.

‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves?’ she whispered. ‘At least let him come and see if he’s right, poor little fellow.’

Kovacs motioned the boy forward. He had to stand on tiptoe to see the body properly. The policemen stood back, their faces grave. Then the boy leant across and kissed the corpse full on the mouth.

Molnar looked away with an expression of distaste.

‘Peasants!’ he muttered, and Lisa Janus gave him a stern look.

Kovacs pulled the boy away, noticing it took quite a deal of strength to do so, even though the kid felt like a sack of bones underneath his clothes.

The boy was fighting for breath. He had to get some answers out of him before the tears started in earnest.

‘What’s your brother’s name, son?’ he asked.

‘Andreas.’

‘And your name?’

The boy stared at his brother’s body. He felt dead inside himself, now. Did it matter who he was? Would they arrest him for what he had done? ‘Mikhail,’ he said, though he had not heard his full name used for years, ‘Mikhail Veronsky.’ There was no point in lying now. Andreas was dead. Nothing mattered any more.

2
Boston 1966

The day they moved the old windmill from the cowfield behind Mrs Jackson’s house to its new home looking out over Saul Peterson’s cranberry bog, the local school turned out to cheer its progress down past the wild apple trees along the high street and around Jeakes’s corner. The truck doing the towing took the corner a shade too sharp, though, dragging strips of vine down off the white clapboard walls, and a smell of sour grapejuice filled the air along with the stench of the diesel.

Summer was sweet that year. The children ran barefoot down the old dirt track, skirting vast uncut fields that were thick with golden-rod and clicking with grasshoppers, and making for the cooler air that hung around the lower marshes. They waved at the workmen and the workmen waved back, and the sound of the World Series came at them from the radio inside the truck’s cabin, mingled with plumes of grey smoke from fresh-lit roll-your-owns.

One child did all the route-planning for the others. When Evangeline Klippel grew up she grew ugly-attractive. At six, though, she was just plain ugly – but that didn’t matter so much because she was rich enough not to have to notice.

Ever since the youngest of the O’Connell boys got expelled for doing things to Chimney, the school dog, Evangeline could claim quite fairly to be able to spit further and out-wrestle any of the boys in her class.

She cut a fearsome enough sight, running wild through the emerald marshes, her shock of crinkled brown hair bouncing with each beat of her small thumping feet and the sun glinting off her gleaming silver braces as she smiled her gummy, victorious grin.

She had grass stains on her dress, which would mean trouble at home that night. Not big trouble, just a grumble or two, maybe – and if Patrick jumped up at her the minute she got in, like he usually did, she could say it came off his paws instead.

No one ever scolded Patrick because he was easily the oldest hound the town had ever known – maybe even the oldest hound alive – just like no one scolded her baby brother Lincoln, because he was too little and wouldn’t understand.

Last month Evangeline had loved Patrick the most but the sun was no friend to old dogs and made them smell pretty bad. It was this month baby Lincoln had gone and learnt how to smile, too, and so Evangeline loved him far the best for the moment. His grip was getting good, as well – she tested it each morning with her finger. The way he was growing she reckoned they would be climbing the cedar outside the nursery window together by the fall, easily.

As Evangeline stood squinting in the sun Ryan Hooley landed panting at her feet and she squished mud into his ratty hair for losing the race so badly. At that moment Miss Starmount – the crabbiest teacher with the grey-flecked moustache – caught up with them, her face as red and shiny as a rose hip.

More winded even than Ryan Hooley, she was unable to speak and could do no more than stare. Evangeline smiled her gimpy smile at her as Ryan wiped cowpat off his shorts. No one scolded Evangeline because of who she was. Her parents were famous; not world-famous, maybe, but local-famous. They had even been in the papers and on the television.

Darius and Thea Klippel were Boston’s golden couple. Both respected artists, though Darius retained the celebrity tag while Thea was an also-ran for her occasional sculptures, they were every bit as beautiful as they were talented. Darius was beautiful; Thea was beautiful; baby Lincoln was drop-dead beautiful, even Patrick the dog was beautiful – in an old kind of way – which made Evangeline the odd one out, though everyone was far too well-meaning to mention it.

Besides, the whole town knew she was not Darius’s real daughter; he had adopted her soon after he’d married her mother, so that explained things, somehow. Evangeline had never set eyes on her real father but she knew he must be double-ugly, or she would never have looked as she did.

She had to shoe-up and walk back to school hand-in-slippery-hand with Ewan Goodman, which was punishment enough for running off because his father was a butcher and he smelt of raw meat.

They got back to the school by pick-up time, which meant parents were waiting and the drive was full of cars. Evangeline searched about but there was no sign of her mother’s dusty Oldsmobile, which was odd because Thea was always on time, even when she was sculpting.

Evangeline sat on the gatepost in the shade and waited. When the last car had left she was still there, too, shooing a bluebottle and kicking whitewash onto her sandals. A small speck of fear had started to itch at the back of her throat and she had begun swallowing a lot to keep it in check. If no one came she would walk. It wasn’t so far, after all – a couple of miles, maybe. She could go past where the windmill had come to rest for the night and see if the workmen would let her have a poke around inside.

It was quiet now, in the drive. She knew the duty teacher was watching her like a sea-hawk but she felt lonely, all the same. When did it start getting dark?

‘Did your mother say she’d be late, Evangeline?’ It was the same teacher that had chased them across the marsh. Her face had cooled down now and her cheeks were back to mottled purple-white.

‘Did she have a meeting or something?’

Evangeline just looked. Why make things easy for her? She must know someone would come for her eventually. There was no point kicking up a fuss. Her mother was always there.

Miss Starmount stared down the road, looking annoyed. ‘We’ll have to phone,’ she said, after a while.

She led Evangeline into the school, clutching her hand in a grip tight enough to mash corn. Thea’s phone was engaged. Damn it. Evangeline’s mother was getting her into all sorts of deep trouble.

‘I guess that means I’ll have to drive you home myself,’ Miss Starmount said, but she didn’t sound as though she cared much for the idea.

Her car was old and the insides smelt musty – a bit like Patrick did before Darius bathed him.

‘Do you own a dog too, Miss Starmount?’ Evangeline asked. The teacher shook her head. She was having some sort of fight with the clutch. There was no air conditioning in the car and you had to wind the windows by hand if you wanted more. Evangeline felt too hot, but didn’t want to wind the window without asking.

The journey was a long one and Evangeline thought about her supper. Then she thought about her father. When he was working at home Darius would always wait by the gates to surprise her when she got back from school.

Yoo-hoo!’ he would yell like a crazy man as she and Thea drove past, and they would both yell, ‘Yoo-hoo!’ back – at the top of their lungs – then he would climb in and sometimes tickle Evangeline until she begged for mercy. Darius was red-haired and wild. One time he had Mickey Mouse ears on and Thea had gunned the car right past him, fast, and that had made them all laugh till they wept, watching him race up the drive behind them, trying to catch up with the stupid old mouse ears on his head.

They’d put the ears on Patrick later, for a photo, and then on baby Lincoln, too. Evangeline had the photos of Lincoln and Patrick wearing the ears stuck in the wallet of her school bag.

No one yelled, ‘Yoo-hoo!’ today, though. The drive to Evangeline’s house was blocked with cars and the iron gates were hanging wide open. Was there a party? Miss Starmount pulled on the handbrake and got out to look. Evangeline watched her bottom wobble as she walked from the car and back again.

‘Come with me,’ she said, holding out her hand.

They squeezed past the cars and up the drive. Something was badly wrong. Patrick should have got her scent by then because he had been a hunting dog in his youth and could still smell familiar flesh a mile off. Maybe all the cars had scared him off. Miss Starmount snagged her skirt on a fender and tutted.

The big old house that was Evangeline’s home gleamed in the late afternoon sun. The summer before Saul Peterson had taken time off tending his cranberries to paint the whole place afresh and he had done it all white with black shutters, which was the old colonial style, according to Darius, who knew a thing or two about local history – maybe more than old Saul himself. You couldn’t see much gleam today, though, for all the people that were standing about outside.

The front door of the house was open, which was strange. Miss Starmount looked quickly down at Evangeline and her expression changed to one of embarrassment. There were blue lights everywhere and blue ribbons around the porch. They pushed on closer but a policeman stopped them. Miss Starmount whispered something into the man’s ear and they had a conversation, and then she let go of Evangeline’s hand and gave her an odd sort of look. So did the policeman.

People had begun to turn and stare. Someone held a camera out and a flash went off in Evangeline’s face, then everyone started pushing.

Things were wrong – really wrong. It was then that the small speck of fear in Evangeline’s throat started to grow out suddenly until it was choking her and, without knowing what she was doing or worrying whether it would scare anyone, Evangeline Klippel threw back her head and howled her longest, loudest-ever howl.

3
Cape Cod

Grandma Klippel made Miss Starmount look like the Sugar Plum Fairy. It wasn’t that she was bigger, exactly – or that she was uglier, either – but if it had come to a frowning and squinting competition then Grandma Klippel’s expression would have won the cup hands down every time.

The first thing Evangeline had to learn about her grandma was that she was rich – richer than Croesus – and then some. Grandma Klippel was so rich she’d even had holes put in her ears so she could hang her diamonds from them. She was nothing like her son Darius, who would wear baggy-kneed trousers and washed-out t-shirts. Darius had money, even Evangeline knew that, but Grandma Klippel was something else again.

She was smart, with perfect stockings and a buttoned-up cardigan, and she looked taller than she was. She had pale powdery skin on her face and freckled skin on her arms. Her teeth looked false but good, like a row of cultured pearls.

Evangeline had been Lincoln’s age when her grandmother last paid a visit, so there was no way she could recognize the old lady who arrived at the house and insisted on taking her off. Nor did she realize exactly how far away ‘off’ was. If she had done she would have fought to the death to stay right there in Boston until her parents got home and explained the joke.

It had to be a joke. They would never have left her there otherwise. It had taken her a while to realize – at first she had even been frightened – but once she cottoned on to the prank she had laughed until her eyes watered. It was a hoot, all right. They were hiding from her, waiting for her to find them.

Darius loved playing tricks and he’d fooled her many times in the past. This was a good one, though – the best. She just wanted him to get on with it and jump out from where he was hiding. She didn’t mind losing, just this once, but she wished they’d come out, that was all.

Evangeline had supposed they’d all be lurking somewhere in the house. She’d wandered off to hunt for them but a policeman had stopped her and taken her downstairs.

‘Where are you off to?’ he’d used the sort of kind tone people who have no kids of their own use when they talk to children. Evangeline had stared at him. It was her house. She had no need to explain. Thea never stopped her if she wanted a wander. She hadn’t been stopped since she was three years old and unsteady on the stairs.

‘I’m hunting for my parents,’ she told him. ‘They’re hiding here somewhere. It’s a game.’

The policeman’s expression changed. ‘Aren’t you the Klippel girl?’ he asked.

Evangeline nodded. The man looked sick suddenly, taking off his cap and running a white handkerchief over his forehead.

‘You’d better run on downstairs, honey,’ he said in a funny voice, ‘your mommy and daddy aren’t hiding here.’

It was not long after that that the Bentley arrived and Darius’s mother climbed out of the back with her tight little smile and her leather high-heeled shoes that matched her handbag, and stole Evangeline back to her house in Cape Cod. She had nipped her up like a pinch of snuff and stolen her away right from under Miss Starmount’s nose and the teacher had not said a word, just sobbed and waved a hankie as the car had driven off. Evangeline had always thought teachers were there to look after you until your mother arrived. She hoped Thea would give the woman a good hiding as soon as she got back and discovered what she had done.

‘I can’t stay long,’ she told her grandma as they drove off. ‘I have to get back for my tea.’

The old lady said nothing. She was sitting so straight her back never touched the seat and her eyes were runny-looking, as though she was trying hard not to laugh. Every so often her body gave a little shake, as though a snigger had finally leaked its way out, but when Evangeline looked she was never actually smiling.

‘You may eat your tea at my house.’ The answer had been so long coming Evangeline had forgotten the question. Grandma Klippel’s voice sounded thin and scratchy, like wire wool.

Evangeline looked troubled. ‘Do you have banana cake?’ she asked.

‘Thea allows you to eat cake?’ The old woman sounded surprised.

‘Every day.’ Evangeline needed to clear these points up. She’d heard about kids who only ate cake and sweets as a treat. She had never been one of them.

‘Anything,’ she added, for safety. ‘I’m allowed to eat anything. Whatever I like. So is Lincoln.’ She didn’t want her brother going short, either.

She expected an argument but Grandma Klippel was looking out of the window and had some sort of lace material pressed against her mouth. Maybe she got travel sick, like Patrick.

‘Evangeline, you’re going to have to learn to be good – very good,’ was all she said, and it came out in a whisper.

‘OK, Grandma.’

‘I can’t abide lying, Evangeline. You must always be truthful, dear. Whatever else you do you tell the truth at all times, do you hear?’

Evangeline nodded. She studied the boils on the back of the chauffeur’s neck for a while. Perhaps it was the sight of them that made the old lady queasy. She’d better not hang around Patrick in the winter, then, because the old dog would get lazy in the cold and mooch about the house all day, and that brought on boils that made the chauffeur’s look like mere pimples in comparison.

They drove on in silence past the bleak-looking sand flats, and the sky turned to slabs of slate, so that Evangeline wondered if it was night coming or a storm. A black crow circled the car for a while, making her shiver. She wasn’t scared of crows, not unless they got too near, but she was a bit scared of storms. She began to dig in her school bag.

‘What are you doing?’ Grandma Klippel perked up a bit, though her voice still sounded as though it came from far away.

‘Looking for my lucky picture.’ She pulled out the shot of Lincoln in the mouse ears. ‘Look.’ It just had to make the old lady laugh. That picture made everyone laugh, guaranteed.

Grandma Klippel took the photo from Evangeline. Her arm smelt of perfume, which was strange, because Thea only wore perfume when she was going somewhere special. She watched the old woman’s face. It was a while before she could turn her eyes towards the shot and when she did she didn’t laugh, she looked as though she’d been kicked. A bit of her mouth sort of crumpled away and her eyes got thinner, like stick-beans.

‘He doesn’t mind people laughing,’ Evangeline told her, in case she thought it was rude or something.

The old woman raised a finger and touched it to the part of the photo that had Lincoln’s face on it. The crow swooped so close its wing touched the window. Evangeline cried out and when she looked back the photo was back on her lap and her grandmother was gazing out at the sea again. Only this time the hankie was stuffed harder against her mouth.

Evangeline was asleep by the time they reached the house and she only woke up as the chauffeur tried to lift her out of the car seat. She wriggled a lot. She didn’t want to be lifted. She wasn’t a baby. Then she took one look at the house and she knew more than anything that she wanted to go home.

They were absolutely in the middle of nowhere. There was the house and the car and there was them and then – nothing, just the sand and the sea and a handful of gulls overhead who screamed as though they were being gutted alive. Evangeline hated the sea. She turned to look up at her grandmother. This couldn’t be true. This couldn’t be her home.

‘You live here?’ she asked. She didn’t mean to be rude, she just wanted to check the facts.

Grandma Klippel nodded. ‘Will you come inside? It’ll get chilly out here soon.’

Evangeline swallowed. ‘I think I ought to be getting back.’ No wonder they’d never had the grandmother to visit – she’d have melted away in all the noise and doggy racket of the house in Boston.

The old lady looked down at her then, looked her right in the eye for the very first time: ‘This is your home now, dear,’ she said. ‘You must live here, with me.’

Evangeline looked back at the house. The place was huge. There must have been over a hundred windows staring back at her. She could see the sky reflected in those windows – flat and grey, like curtains that needed a rinse. Saul Peterson would have needed a whole month off tending the cranberries to paint a place that size.

It was made of clapboard that was painted a dirty blue colour, like the sea should have been, with white around the windows and the doorway. Someone had made an ugly garland around the porch by pressing clamshells into cement. In front of the house were sand dunes and behind the house was the sea. It looked as though the house had turned its back on the ocean altogether because there were no windows on the lower floors on that side. The view from everywhere but upstairs would be of the grass-spiked dunes out front.

‘Patrick won’t like it here,’ Evangeline said. The sand would blow into his eyes and between his paws. They’d taken him onto the beach last year and he’d come back whining with sores between his pads. There were no trees to climb, either. She’d promised Lincoln they’d be climbing trees before the fall. What were her parents thinking of, moving out here?

Her grandmother was going into the house anyway. Evangeline picked up her school bag and ran after her.

4

By the fifth day the joke was wearing thin. Evangeline’s family was not hiding in the house; the place was huge but she’d checked it all over and anyway she would have heard Lincoln yelling at night, the rooms were so quiet. Which meant they were on their way, coming for her.

Maybe the clue was in the bit about being so good and truthful. Her grandma had said she had to be good and tell the truth, always. Good children always got their reward; she’d been told that at school often enough. Maybe they were seeing just how good she could be before they came back and surprised her. Being good would be hard, then, because she didn’t feel good, she felt mad that they’d gone at all.

Grandma Klippel lived mainly on her own, apart from a handful of staff. As well as the chauffeur, who lived in, there was Mrs O’Reilly, an elderly Irish woman bent up with arthritis who nevertheless hobbled the length of the beach each day with a bag full of half-dead flowers for the house, to cook and serve the meals. The flowers were always anemones. Grandma Klippel liked vases full of them all around the place. By the first day their heads would start to droop and by the next they were powdering tables and mantelpieces with their pollen. Mrs O’Reilly was a good person, even though she’d once been bad. Mrs O’Reilly had been good for many many years now, according to Grandma Klippel, and she didn’t seem to have that much to show for it.

Then there was the woman’s son, Evan. Evan was simple, like a child, but he could polish like a demon and came up for an hour each morning, just to clean the place. When he cleaned he made a racket with his breathing, like an old man. Evangeline wondered whether he was allergic to all the pollen he dusted.

Evangeline waited for her parents, watching at the window of her room, where she could see for miles. Few cars came by, though, and none ever stopped, apart from the vans with deliveries.

Twice a day a small plane flew by and either buzzed over the house or trawled along the shoreline like a lazy fly. Mrs O’Reilly swore it was Evan’s father flying the plane and Evan himself waved at it sometimes and did a mad frenzied sort of hopping dance along the beach after it. But Grandma Klippel told Evangeline it had nothing to do with Mrs O’Reilly or her son. She said Evan had no father, which was why he was simple.

The waiting made Evangeline cry a lot. She wasn’t scared, exactly, but she was tired and impatient and her head ached because it was full of so many questions.

The house was mainly hollow inside and a lot of the rooms stood empty. The ones that didn’t were filled with old things – dangerous things that broke if you only looked at them. Darius had brought home a few antiques once but these rooms were crammed with them. They were mostly too fancy for Evangeline’s taste; she liked new things you could play with. Grandma Klippel’s belongings made her feel jumpy and nervous. She wondered how Evan, who was fat and hopped about almost as much as Patrick, ever got by without breaking much as he polished. Then she discovered that Grandma Klippel stuck the ornaments down with tape each morning before he came.

The sea made her twitchy, too. Sometimes she would wake up frightened that it had come right up to the house. It might seep in through the doors and flood the cellar. She could hear it in the dark like a whispering, and often she thought she could make out whole words.

‘They’re not coming back,’ the sea whispered one night.

‘What?’ It woke her. She stood shivering at the window and watched it heaving. Her eyes were popping and her ears almost fell off her head, they were straining so hard.

‘They’re not coming back.’ Did she hear right or was she dreaming? What did it know? She listened till her ears actually ached with the effort. When you listened so hard to silence you thought you could hear anything. She even thought she heard her grandmother crying away in her bedroom.

‘They’re not coming back.’ The idea was ridiculous. Parents didn’t just leave their kids – not responsible parents, like hers. Besides, she’d been good for weeks and she’d even picked a spot on the bed for Patrick to sleep on. Sleeping on the bed at night might make up for all the sand.

Grandma Klippel was difficult company. Despite living alone she still carried on as though she had a house full of people, minding all her manners and dressing properly for dinner. Maybe she did it for Mrs O’Reilly and Evan. Evangeline had never dressed up for dinner before, except at Christmas and Thanksgiving. Now she did, though, because Grandma Klippel insisted on it. She also insisted Evangeline sit up straight all the time and she corrected her grammar when she said something wrong.

They said prayers before they ate and more prayers at night. Mrs O’Reilly told Evangeline her grandmother had been a regular at the church along the coast for many many years. That was how they met, Mrs O’Reilly said; she tended the flowers there and Grandma Klippel played the organ on Sundays and did good works during the week. She’d stopped going since Evangeline came to live with them, though. The day before she’d left for Boston was the last day they’d seen her there for prayers. The priest came to the house several times for visits, but Grandma Klippel had never once set foot in that church again.

Evangeline began to wonder how Darius ever grew up so normal.

‘Did Darius live here when he was a child?’ she asked her grandmother over breakfast.

The old lady always looked surprised when she spoke, as though she’d forgotten she was there, and she always paused a long while before answering, too.

‘He most certainly did,’ she told Evangeline.

‘Did he mind the sea?’

‘Mind it? He loved it. It was his passion – sailing, swimming, fishing for crabs down by the old rocks.’

She touched Evangeline on the arm. ‘Darius was a very special child, dear. Very talented. Very beautiful. So was your mother. You have a lot to live up to, you know. You have to be special too, Evangeline. Better than all the other children. It would please me so much. Do you understand?’

Evangeline looked thoughtful.

‘Is that why Darius wants us to move back out here again?’ she asked. ‘Because he misses the sea?’

The old lady sniffed. She had blue veins and brown spots on the backs of her hands and sometimes you could see her wrinkles through her make-up.

‘Darius is not coming back here, Evangeline,’ she said slowly. ‘They have gone, dear, all of them. My son, your mother. The baby. Even the dog. I’m sorry.’

‘Gone where?’ Evangeline looked at her boiled egg and the toast that Mrs O’Reilly had cut into strips. The egg was hard in the middle and dented when she poked the bread into it. Also there was no salt, there never was. For some reason Grandma Klippel would not have the stuff in the house. If you wanted salt you got it outside all right: salt on your face that the sea-spray spat up, salt on your mouth if you forgot to keep it closed, and salt caked onto just about everything that lay in the sea’s path.

There was a long silence before Evangeline looked up.

‘Gone where?’ she repeated.

Her grandmother dyed her hair, she was sure of it. When you dyed white hair chestnut what you got was orange. False teeth and dyed hair. The old lady’s hair was the colour of pine pollen.

‘Gone … away,’ Grandma Klippel replied. Her mouth was tugging at the corners again. Evangeline just stared, even though she wasn’t allowed to. The tickle of fear had started in the back of her throat. She wanted to go on eating egg but the tickle wouldn’t let her.

‘How long for?’

Grandma Klippel sighed. ‘For ever. I’m sorry.’ Evangeline nodded. A sliver of yolk managed its way down the back of her throat after all.

‘Are they on holiday?’ she asked.

The old lady shook her head.

‘They just went, dear. You must understand that they are not coming back. Ever. They just had to go away, that was all.’

‘Without me?’ It had to be asked. The yolk was slipping back up again, like snot. ‘Without you.’ ‘I won’t see them again?’ ‘No.’

‘But I was good!’ It came out choked, like a wail.

Grandma Klippel closed her eyes. ‘Then you’ll just have to be better,’ she whispered.

Then all the egg and all the tears and all the snot seemed to well up and ooze in Evangeline’s throat at once, so that she didn’t know if she wanted to cry or be sick, and she choked and hiccuped but she could suddenly neither breathe nor see.

Her grandmother stood up.

‘No tears at the table,’ was what Evangeline thought she heard her say. Maybe she was scared she’d make a mess on the white linen tablecloth.

The fog came down the following night and it stayed for a week or more, rolling mournfully around the house and making the sunsets look as though the whole sky was on fire.

When Evangeline stood on the back porch in the evening the sea’s voice was muffled, though its smell was sharper than ever. It smelt of decay, despite all the salt. She imagined it heaving with dead fish, wood from sunken boats, empty quahog shells and a gull’s corpse that floated on the tide with one filmy eye turned towards the sky that it could no longer soar about in.

The fog was so heavy her hair got wet just standing there and she had to dry it by the fire when she got inside again.

She was going to look for her parents once the fog lifted. There was no doubt about it, Grandma Klippel was wrong and the sea was wrong. Nobody went away like that. Nobody left little girls alone, it just didn’t happen. Someone had made a terrible mistake and it was up to her to sort things out. Maybe her teachers could help if she could just get back to her school. Or a policeman. Darius had always taught her to go to the police if she ever got lost while she was out.

She didn’t go to her own school any more. Grandma Klippel said it was too far away and sent her to a small private place a mile up the coast instead. She missed her friends – even Ewan Raw-meat Goodman. The new kids acted almost as though they’d been told not to speak to her. Her grandmother had her booked in under a different name, too. Evangeline Cooper – it had been her grandmother’s surname before she’d married Mr Klippel, the owner of the local bank. Walter Klippel had died so long ago there were no pictures of him in the house, just a chair Evangeline’s grandmother never used because he’d sat in it a lot.

Then one night, when the fog was at its thickest, Evangeline heard a noise like a dog howling and she knew it had to be Patrick. The waiting was over; they’d come back at last. She felt mad with her parents as well as pleased they were back. She opened her window full out and the howling grew louder, and even though it sounded as though it came from miles away – from another country, almost – she just knew he was telling her they were on their way and she would not have to wait much longer.

Excited to the point where she was leaping on the spot, she decided to go down and meet them. Pulling a big warm jumper on over her nightgown and an old pair of boots onto her feet Evangeline ran out of her room and down the landing, yelling to her grandma as she went.

‘They’re here! Grandma Klippel, they’re here, they’re outside somewhere, I heard them, I heard Patrick howling, they’re here!’

Everything was right all of a sudden. The world stopped tipping crooked and straightened out at last. She didn’t care who she woke with her shouting, she was just relieved that the waiting was over. Her legs worked like pistons and she took off down the stairs without once needing to grip on to the banister.

‘They’re here, I heard them!’ Opening the front door was a problem but it was her time at last and she knew she was on a roll, so the catches slipped back without too much fumbling and then the cold wet air hit her face and made her laugh with relief.

‘Patrick! Mommy! Daddy! Lincoln!’ She knew they’d never left her really and she was too pleased to be mad with them for disappearing like that.

‘Evangeline!’ So she’d woken her grandmother after all. ‘Evangeline!’ The old girl could holler louder than she’d thought. Her voice had a high, rasping quality that made it more like a scream than just a yell.

Evangeline took off down the sand flats, towards the sound of Patrick’s howls, her brown frizzed hair streaming out behind her like a banner.

‘Evangeline!’ She wished her grandmother would be quiet so she could hear the dog instead. She’d forgotten where the sound was coming from and she couldn’t see further than a few feet in the fog.

The sand was wet and sucked at her feet. She ran until her legs were tired and then she ran some more with them aching. Her feet got heavy with the sand and then suddenly they were heavy with water. She stopped. ‘Patrick!’

There was water on her legs. It hit the top of her boots and then – colder even than ice – it fell inside the boots with a rush.

‘Oh my.’ It was all she could think of to say and it came out in one word, like a sigh. She looked back, but there was no back any more, it had all gone in the fog. The smell of the sea overwhelmed her and the hiss of the surf was all around. Her bones began to ache from the cold but she wasn’t scared yet.

Yoo-hoo!’ she hollered, so Darius would know it was her, and at that moment there was a sharp tugging at her legs as the cross-current came to take her away.

It was the chauffeur who snatched her back, as naked as nature intended, because Grandma Klippel had not given him the option of dressing after she tipped him out of his bed. The man had plunged into the surf like an athlete and wrenched Evangeline up just as the boots were being pulled off her legs by the current.

She popped straight up like a cork from a bottle, unable to differentiate between dark and light and the sea and the shore. He carried her off roughly, hurting her arms.

Her grandmother was waiting on the dunes, her hair as wild as the marsh grass. Her teeth were missing. She carried a storm-torch in her hands and she shone it full into Evangeline’s face.

‘What in God’s name were you up to, child?’ Her voice sounded spitty and stretched out and thin with anger and concern.

‘I heard them, Grandma, they’re coming back. I went to look for them in case they missed me.’ ‘You heard them?’

Evangeline was suddenly short of air. ‘I heard Patrick, Grandma, he’s barking out there somewhere in the dark. I think he smelt me, you know. He used to be a hunting hound and he can smell…’

Her grandmother dropped the torch suddenly and seized Evangeline’s face in her white hands. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Listen to what you heard.’

There was a noise, a noise somewhere out at sea. A lonely noise. The noise Evangeline had taken for Patrick’s howls.

‘It was a foghorn,’ Grandma Klippel said angrily, ‘just a foghorn. They’re not coming back. Now why won’t you believe me?’ Her voice sounded like the sea’s voice; whispery and tired and dull. ‘Evangeline, I told you you had to be good,’ she said, sadly. ‘I thought you understood.’

The chauffeur shook water off himself like a dog and droplets flew out from his body.

On the slow walk back to the house Evangeline looked out across the beach. ‘I know you’re out there somewhere, waiting for me,’ she whispered to her parents under her breath, ‘I know you’re just lost, that’s all. I’ll be good and I know I’ll find you, don’t worry. I promise.’

5
Budapest 1981

The first metro train of the morning rattled slowly out of the terminal at Vorosmarty ter, waking the boy up. His nose was running and his bones felt as though they had been cemented in the night. Andreas was dead. It was the first thought of the day every day. It came followed closely by self-pity and then, as he woke properly, by unbearable, crushing guilt. The guilt was like a large balloon in his chest that got inflated every morning. What had he done? Why was he alive? He had no right, no right at all, now that his brother was dead.

He saw Andreas every day. His brother was haunting him. The thought made him shake, but he knew it to be true. His brother never came close – he was always hiding in crowds and dodging round corners – but he’d confront him one day, Mikhail was sure of it.

He had no one else. His mother was gone. Once he had thought about her a lot, but now he no longer knew what it was he should be thinking. Andreas had been his only parent and he had loved him all the more for that. Then he had done the terrible thing, and now he was scared of him.

Someone was watching. Maybe it was the police at last. He knew they would come for him. He wanted to pee but instead he stood up slowly, shoving his hands deep inside his trouser pockets, and mooched off casually. His black hair looked wet with grease and his face was so pale you could see veins through the skin. He walked quickly but he didn’t run. If you ran you looked as though you were up to no good. Walking with your hands in your pockets looked like you were just on your way to somewhere else.

He could hear music playing – a violin or a cello. The sound came from the railwaymen’s huts nearby. There was a smell of fresh coffee, too. Mikhail felt his stomach begin to contract with hunger. The men in there would be shaving. He thought he could smell the soap – lavender, maybe. It was as though the balloon in his chest had burst. Beads of angry sweat appeared on his forehead, even though it was winter and well below zero outside. He sobbed out loud and kicked at the wall as he passed it, and a lump of china tile fell off onto the ground.

The metro was old. The place was crumbling. The smell of the coffee wouldn’t go away, even though he had passed the last of the huts now.

The station was not a deep one and there were only a few steps to the pavement. The air that hit him was so cold he almost urinated where he stood. He set off for the old fruit market to steal some food.

They had made him go to a hostel at first, after Andreas’s death. The place was warm and the food first-rate, but he had found he couldn’t stand the fear of waiting all the time to be arrested. They would have come for him before long, he was sure of that. The two policemen at the mortuary had looked at him as though they’d known something was up. He couldn’t just wait for them; he’d had to run away.

He’d gone back to the room he’d shared with his brother, but the locks had been changed, which didn’t surprise him. He’d tried with his penknife, just in case, but the padlock held firm. Maybe it was just as well – they would have come for him there too, sooner or later. He’d wanted to get inside for a little while, though, just to check; to make sure things had really happened as they had.

So now he was living on the street. Andreas would have been mad with him – it was the one thing they’d always avoided. He pushed off down Vaci utca and past all the old pastry shops. The wind was cold but he wore his brother’s coat and it was a good one; it kept him almost warm.

He had always envied Andreas’s heavy coat and now it belonged to him. It had been lying around at the mortuary and he’d taken it, just like that. It was too big but that was all the better because it kept his legs warm, too. That was the other thing about the hostel: they had made all the boys wear short pants and he had felt stupid in them, like a child. He was twelve years old, nearly thirteen. No one of his age should be made to wear short pants, it was ridiculous.

He pulled one of Andreas’s cigarettes out of the breast pocket of Andreas’s coat and lit it with a match from Andreas’s box. The smoke kept his mouth warm. He cupped his hands over his face and inhaled as deeply as he could.

6
Cape Cod 1966

The Bentley was a pretty good drive – maybe even better than the Oldsmobile. Evangeline had made quite fair friends with the chauffeur on the school run and she knew the car had power steering and a sixteen horse-power engine – which meant that even if you had sixteen real horses harnessed to the front of the chassis the car wouldn’t have gone any faster than it did.

Grandma Klippel had paid good money to get her into that school. She could tell from the other grand cars in the drive and from the way the kids spoke without moving their lips much, but despite all that money they still had sneers and secrets leaking out of those mean little mouths.

Evangeline knew something else, too – a secret not even the know-all-miss-snotty kids knew. A secret even her grandmother wasn’t aware of. A terrible thing. She knew that her parents were dead.

They were all dead: Thea, Darius, baby Lincoln – maybe even Patrick, too, though she wasn’t sure about that. The chauffeur had told her by sheer mean mistake. He hadn’t meant to, she knew that. It had sort of slipped out while they were talking one day. It wasn’t his fault and she never found out how he knew, because Grandma Klippel had no idea – she knew that for sure.

‘My grandmother told me they’d gone away,’ she’d said. Grandma never lied; it just wasn’t possible.

The back of the chauffeur’s neck had glowed strawberry-patch red.

‘Maybe that’s what she thinks,’ he’d told her after a while. It had been difficult for him to say it at all. The words seemed caught somewhere in his throat.

‘Maybe she’s right.’ Evangeline didn’t know what was worse: that they’d gone away or that they’d died. There didn’t seem a whole mess of difference if they were never coming back. Dead sounded worse, though. She felt that snot in the back of her throat again, distorting all her words when she tried to speak.

‘Maybe,’ the chauffeur echoed.

‘But they are dead.’

‘Yeah. I’m sorry. Don’t tell your grandmother. Please.’

It was a while before Evangeline could talk at all. Dead: like the fish and the seagull, and empty, like the quahog shells. Floating on the oily surface of the water with their eyes all white like pearls, and blind.

‘Did they drown?’ she asked.

‘I doubt it.’ So he didn’t know either.

‘Why doesn’t my grandmother know?’ she asked.

The chauffeur shrugged. She could see his eyes in the rear-view mirror. He looked scared.

‘Maybe because she’s old. Maybe the shock …’ his voice faded away. Evangeline nodded. The shock would make her ill. The thing was to keep it from her. It sounded like a useful plan. Darius would be proud of her when he got back. She was confused, or was she? She still felt they were all coming back, that was the problem. She still felt it as much as when she knew they were gone. It just didn’t happen. Nobody left their kids alone for too long.

The good thing was she hadn’t cried properly – not in front of the chauffeur and not in front of the other kids, anyway. The chauffeur would have been embarrassed about telling her all over again if she had. She didn’t want him feeling awkward over such a stupid mistake. It could have happened to anybody. And she definitely didn’t cry in front of her grandmother. Keeping it secret was important; if she’d cried as much as she wanted to the old lady would have known something was up and maybe even have died herself.

She’d known the other kids were watching her at school, she could feel their squinting eyes on her back throughout each and every class. Did they know too? She always sat up straight as a post, just like her grandmother had been teaching her, and she never let anything show on her face. She knew they felt cheated, somehow, and she was glad. The secret made her special; important, even. She had to be special, Grandma Klippel said that over and over. Make Darius proud of her. Make Thea proud of her. It was something to do. It was a way of working to get them all back.

Evangeline watched the coastline go by as they drove back to the house. The sea looked so different with a slick of sun on it. It didn’t scare her when it looked like that. She didn’t think her parents were on the other side of the sea any more, either.

‘Do you know if Patrick died too?’ she asked.

‘Who?’ the chauffeur’s voice started to sound queer again.

‘The dog. Patrick.’

The chauffeur cleared a frog from his throat. ‘Maybe. I don’t really know. Sorry.’

Evangeline nodded again. That made sense. If they were all gone then Patrick would have gone with them. Otherwise he’d have sniffed her out by now. It was worth asking, though. He might just have been roaming the grounds of their old house somewhere, howling and looking for her. At least he wasn’t lost somewhere, starving. A sudden thought came to her.

‘Old Mr Carstairs’s heart gave out when they told him his wife had died,’ she said. ‘I think maybe that’s why Grandma’s been told they’re all away on holiday somewhere. I wouldn’t want her to be sick too.’

If the chauffeur said anything in reply then Evangeline missed it. His neck was getting hotter by the minute, though. She could fry eggs on that neck now, she thought, with all that grease there, too. You could see the grease in a line on his collar. She wanted to pull her photo of Lincoln out of her school bag to look at but she didn’t dare because she didn’t want to cry in front of him.

When they got home Grandma Klippel was outside waiting for them. At certain times it was hard to imagine how tough the old lady could be, and this was one of those times. With her linen skirt flapping about her knees and her skinny, saggy-fleshed arms hanging out of her cardigan sleeves, she looked almost frail. The light was going and her expression was hard to gauge. There was a smell of beach plum blossoms and Evangeline remembered it was nearly spring.

There were circles of dark skin around her grandmother’s eyes, as though she’d been rubbing, or reading without her glasses, or something.

‘Hello, dear. And how was school?’ she asked.

Evangeline looked back at the chauffeur. ‘Fine.’

Grandma Klippel smiled. ‘Do you know you are at the same school that my son went to? Darius was at that school for four years and he adored every minute of his time there. I used to wait for him to come home each afternoon just like I am standing here waiting for you. Isn’t that wonderful?’

She was the only person Evangeline knew who could smile without looking happy. She tried to smile back but the right look just wouldn’t come. When she started to shiver she pretended to her grandmother it was the wind making her cold, even though they both knew there wasn’t any more than a breeze blowing that afternoon.

She fell ill on that day; the fever lasted a week or more and she was off school for a month. When she got up again it was almost summer and her grandmother took her on a berry hunt just as though nothing had ever happened.

On her first day back at the school Evangeline got sent home early for fighting. She’d got angry over nothing much other than her unhappy life and she’d jumped on the girl with the most know-all face in the class for little more than the fact that the girl had a father and she did not. When she jumped the girl went down like a pile of old paper, instead of fighting back. So the car had been summoned to pick her up.

The chauffeur’s name was Cecil. It was a strange name and she didn’t know if she dared use it. He came from Manchester in England, which was why he talked so funny. He had a colour photo of his family in his glove compartment. She wondered if he missed them as much as she missed her own.

This time Cecil stopped the car. Not quickly, but just slowing down onto a verge as though stopping to point out some tern that dotted the sky overhead. The windows came down automatically and they both sat there a while, listening to the wind cutting through the dune grass. There was a rock nearby that was covered in creamy-white shells dropped by the gulls. Beyond the rock was a lonely-looking yellow sandbar that the tide was busy trying to cover up.

Evangeline’s nose caught the smell of fresh smoke and when she looked around Cecil was drawing on a weedy-looking roll-your-own.

‘Do you mind?’ he asked, and she shook her head, flattered by his manners. He had lowered the glass between them so that his voice didn’t sound so funny. It was nice, sitting there quietly. After a while Evangeline started to cry but he didn’t make a fuss, or try to stop her. He just let her cry until her eyes were empty of tears and then he took his own hankie down to the water and brought it back wet, so she could wash her face with it.

‘She might know, you know,’ he said, meaning Grandma Klippel. Evangeline shook her head.

‘If she knew she’d have said. She never lies, she told me so. She wouldn’t say anything unless she believed it. Why do people die?’

‘God knows.’ Cecil spat a fleck of tobacco. He was not a philosopher. Evangeline thought the answer was fair enough. She never asked the question that was really troubling her, though: why did they die without her? Why hadn’t she gone as well? Didn’t they want her with them? Thea, Darius, Lincoln and Patrick. All together. Without Evangeline. The thought came into her head that they had hated her. Why? Was it her school grades? Was it because she was so ugly? It just didn’t make sense unless you looked at it that way.

Maybe they did hate her, after all. She would never have considered doing anything without them.

‘Why don’t you take a run on the beach for a bit?’ Cecil asked. ‘Your grandmother’s not expecting you back yet. Get a bit of colour into your cheeks.’

She took Cecil’s advice, running wild till her legs ached, and the air did feel good. Then they drove back to the house.

‘We have whole baby chickens for supper, Evangeline, with herby gravy,’ her grandmother said. ‘Go and wash up, there’s a good girl.’ She was wearing a lilac-flowered dress and a matching duster coat, as though she’d been out. She never told lies. She would have said.

7

Nothing was spoken, then, and as Evangeline grew a little older the question ‘Why?’ hung constantly in her head, like a small bird on a perch in an empty cage, pecking away all the time. When she got a little wiser she asked Cecil how he knew and he said he’d just known, that was all, which seemed to her a stupid kind of an answer.

Then she thought about it properly and she started feeling better. If Cecil had ‘just known’ they were dead then maybe she knew that they just weren’t. Maybe you could sense these things and Cecil was wrong. She tried not to think about it too much. It had made her ill the first time and she didn’t want to be ill again.

It was as though a fog slowly settled around the whole affair and as time pushed an ever-widening space between herself and her parents she began to despair of ever finding out the truth.

And just as Evangeline grew older, so Grandma Klippel seemed to grow younger. She was not such an old lady, after all. When she had first come to the house Evangeline had thought her grandmother to be about ninety years old, but now she knew she was nearer fifty. Maybe Darius’s disappearance had made her younger because she spoke a lot about when he was a boy and acted half the time as though she were just a young mother again.

Shock over the deaths created some sort of malfunction between Evangeline and her grandmother. She needed the old lady’s sympathy and pity, but she knew she could never seek it because that would have meant giving away the secret that was so important to hide.

They lived in the same house, then, and her grandmother was kind, but that was all. Each of them was too empty inside to nurture any real affection. Grandma Klippel would not allow crying in public, though Evangeline heard her grief at night sometimes, when she was alone in her room. She wanted to please her grandmother. Most of all she wanted to please her parents, wherever they were. It was as though they were always there somewhere, watching and waiting; holding their breath until she did something they could be proud of at last. Darius and Thea: beautiful and talented. All of them, some place special, some place she couldn’t reach because she wasn’t special enough.

Evangeline felt like a ghost. She grew to realize that wishing she were with her family was the same as wishing she were dead too, but that was all she could think about. It was impossible not to imagine that they were having fun somewhere without her. Every bone in her body ached to join them.

When Cecil left to get married, another man took his place. The new man was older and Evangeline imagined out of boredom that he was in love with her grandmother. Unlike Cecil the new man knew nothing about her parents. He spoke little English and he went home at night. They would be all alone in that house then, with just the sea for company.

Evangeline thought about Darius as a small boy, playing happily in the surf. She even tried it herself a few times. The beach was OK in the summer. The sand would be warm on top, though it got colder and wetter the further your feet sunk. She liked the white driftwood and even took a few pieces home, which pleased Grandma Klippel for some reason. She remembered Cecil telling her he’d seen a whale swimming off the coast and that the next day it had been dead and washed up on the beach. Maybe that was how she’d find them one day – Darius, Thea and Lincoln, lying in a row on the sand, bleached and blistered by the sun and the salt in the water. She became afraid to go down onto the sand at all after that fancy.

For Evangeline’s eighth birthday Grandma Klippel had organized something extraordinary, though she refused to say what. Things stirred in the old house at last. Two rooms were decorated, which meant there was some life in the place as local handymen arrived along with radios, kettles and twenty cans of apricot-coloured paint. Even when the rooms were finished the smell of paint lingered for a couple of weeks.

On the morning of her birthday Evangeline went to school as usual, but when she got back there was someone waiting on the porch with her grandmother. The woman was small with wiry black hair, and dressed in clothes that reminded Evangeline of her mother.

Grandma Klippel was beaming.

‘Today is a special day, Evangeline,’ she said. ‘This is Miss Clayburg and she’s to be your tutor, stopping with us for the whole of the summer.’ She bent down closer, to be on Evangeline’s level. ‘You remember what a famous artist your father was, Evangeline?’ Her breath smelt of violets. ‘And your mother, of course. They had great talent, both of them. I told you. Never forget that.’

The small plane buzzed overhead, drowning out some of her words, but Grandma Klippel ignored the noise. It was almost as though the plane was eavesdropping. Evangeline looked upward. The sun had caught the plane’s wings. There was a white trail winding behind it, like a long smokey cloud.

‘I know Darius was not your father by blood but I believe somehow you may have inherited his talent. I have seen the green shoots in you already and I want to nurture those shoots. You are to learn to paint, Evangeline. Miss Clayburg is an art tutor from one of the greatest schools in New York. We can thank God she has been kind enough to come all this way out here and take you under her wing.’

Miss Clayburg smiled. She had crooked teeth but they were white, like the driftwood.

‘It was no kindness, Evangeline,’ she said. ‘When I received your grandmother’s letter and read who your father was I felt honoured to have been asked at all. I was Darius Klippel’s greatest devotee. If he has passed on half his talent you will be a very special little girl indeed.’

Grandma Klippel had more in store. ‘Close your eyes,’ she told Evangeline.

Evangeline closed her eyes and felt herself being led inside the house. They laughed as they took her up the stairs, counting each step out loud and warning her to take care on the last one. Then they went up again and again, towards the attic.

Evangeline had never been to the top of the house before, Grandma Klippel always kept those doors locked. She could hear the key turning now and then she felt the sun on her face and a greasy smell of oil in her nostrils.

‘Open!’ Grandma Klippel exclaimed.

The sun was dazzling, blinding. Evangeline squinted, trying to make out the shapes in the room. Miss Clayburg took her by the arms and turned her about slowly. They were in an artist’s studio, much like the room Darius had worked in at home, only bigger. The light came from the roof, which was all windows, and the smell came from the tubes of paint, which were lined up in their hundreds, ready for use. There were canvases and easels and several unfinished paintings of Darius’s, piled up along the walls.

Grandma Klippel clapped her hands together.

‘Well, Evangeline?’

Evangeline had stopped breathing. The smell of the oil paints was like a knife cutting into her soul. Every time she breathed in she was back in the studio in Boston and Darius was fooling around and making her laugh.

Sometimes he put paint on his face. Or he would do lightning scribbles with charcoal and draw funny pictures of Lincoln with his eyes crossed. Once he let Patrick loose with a paintbrush between his teeth and framed the result. Her mother used to joke it was the best work of art in the house.

Not breathing was difficult but she didn’t want to know that smell any more, it hurt too much. ‘What do you think, dear?’

It wasn’t Grandma Klippel’s fault, she wasn’t to know. She was looking happier than Evangeline had ever seen her. Miss Clayburg looked as though she was in the throes of ecstasy.

Evangeline smiled. ‘It’s an artist’s studio,’ she said.

‘It was Darius’s studio, dear, when he was at home,’ her grandmother told her. Her eyes looked pale and filmy with excitement and memories. ‘Now you are to use it.’

‘But I don’t paint.’ It seemed like a simple truth.

Grandma Klippel was busy looking round. ‘We’ll see, we’ll see,’ she whispered. ‘I know you have the flair, Evangeline. Look at the driftwood you bring home, just like my son did when he was your age. He used to spend hours gazing at the shapes. You have an eye for beauty and that is an important start. Miss Clayburg can teach you the rest.

‘Knowing that this place will be used again has made me happier than I can imagine.’ She was speaking to Miss Clayburg now, above Evangeline’s head.

Miss Clayburg must have seen her expression, though, because she smiled down at her.

‘Don’t worry, Evangeline,’ she said, ‘we’ll treat it as a game at first – just have some fun messing around with all the colours and things. Look,’ she took Evangeline across to a table covered with paintboxes, ‘did you ever see a rainbow? Yes? Maybe we could create one on this sheet of paper here, using these colours. Do you remember how it looked? Draw the shape.’ She pressed a pencil into Evangeline’s hands.

Evangeline reached across the vast expanse of white paper. It was important to do well. It was important not to make a mistake. She had to be good. She had to be careful. People were watching. Live people. Dead people. She leant across and slowly drew a neat but teeny arch in the middle of all the white, being more careful than she had ever been before in her life. Miss Clayburg’s smile became a little more squeezed.

‘Good,’ she said, ‘but wouldn’t you like to make it bigger? How about filling the whole page?’

Evangeline reached for the rubber and erased the first arch, making sure all the marks were gone and the page was clean as a whistle again before drawing a slightly larger second one in its place. She used her elbow to make sure the arch was perfect in shape. She was careful again and took a long time about it. Any bits that went wrong would be rubbed out right away. In the end Miss Clayburg took the eraser away from her altogether. Evangeline was aghast. The picture would never be perfect now.

She watched the tutor wet a brush and sloosh paint all over the arch. Nothing looked right now. The colours ran into one another. Warm tears welled in the back of her eyes. Miss Clayburg should have known better – anyone could see she’d made a mess. Evangeline began to cry more but she kept the tears balanced inside her eyes, so they didn’t spill.

‘What do you think?’ Miss Clayburg said.

‘It’s very messy,’ Evangeline told her in a small voice. She tried to sound polite. Miss Clayburg smiled.

‘Look,’ she said, pointing to some of Darius’s paintings. The paint was all over the canvas. Colours clashed. Edges had been blurred. Nothing looked like anything. ‘You don’t have to be neat to be an artist.’

‘Maybe,’ Evangeline replied, but she didn’t sound convinced. She wanted to be neat. She wanted to be perfect. Then her parents could be proud of her and Grandma Klippel would go on smiling the way she was now.

8
Budapest 1983

Mikhail had decisions to make. He had lived on the streets for over a year and the truth was he was not a natural survivor. Lots of boys were. He thought of them as corks, floating along on the surface of all deprivation while he was sinking, slowly but consistently going under.

He ate but he was still starving. In the winter he froze and in the summer he was ill. He felt unwell all the time. Sometimes he even thought he was dying. The idea terrified him, but after a while things got so bad that he thought it was what he wanted, after all.

He had not spoken to anyone properly since Andreas’s death, although sometimes he addressed himself to Andreas personally. At first the lack of companionship was the hardest thing to suffer but before long he almost relished it. He was a dark shadow on the streets; in a way it was rather romantic.

He had grown a lot in the last couple of years, despite the lack of proper food, and his brother’s coat was no longer too big for him. Although he was still only fourteen people had stopped reacting to him as though he was a child, which made him feel safer. A child alone got relentless hassle from the police. A young man, though, was largely ignored, as long as he broke none of the laws.

Despite his deprivations, Mikhail was methodical about reading a newspaper. Sometimes he stole them and often he just took them from litter bins, but always he read as many as he could lay his hands on, as they were his only link with the proper world. When you stopped knowing what was happening in the world you were no longer a part of it. Andreas had read a lot. It was he who had taught Mikhail that.

Mikhail was doubly pleased if he could get the Daily News since he could still read a little English as well as Hungarian. Andreas had learnt English at school and he had taught Mikhail too, for he said it was the language of America, where he was bound when he became famous. These things were important, Mikhail could see that. Keeping in touch was important and so was speaking another language. Their mother had made Andreas learn English and, although Mikhail spoke it badly, he needed to remember what it was he had learnt, otherwise he would know he had given up. Giving up was like waiting to die.

When he caught sight of himself in mirrors he was always shocked. His hair was longer and darker. He asked one of the other boys he met to cut it with his knife but the boy turned on him and stole fifty filler from him instead.

Sometimes he did make friends of a kind. There was a boy with the nickname of Tincan he sometimes met down in the metro. Tincan had given him useful advice about where to sleep without being bothered too much. And then there were the men.

Mikhail was approached on average twice a week in winter and as much as three times a day in the summer. They all wanted to help him and they all wanted to be friends. It was Tincan who told him to be careful. The religious ones were the worst, he said, the ones who said they’d pray for you and show you a warm hostel where you could sleep the night for nothing.

‘Nothing is for nothing,’ Tincan told him, though even he had a couple of regular men friends he would disappear with now and again.

There was one man Mikhail saw a lot, around and about the city streets. Sometimes he would find Mikhail on a bench in the park and just sit chatting, and sometimes he would pass him in the street and nod his head as though they were old acquaintances. The man seemed pleasant enough and even Tincan appeared to like the look of him. He was shortish and middle-aged but smart and well-dressed, like an ordinary businessman.

The man’s worst fault was that he appeared to be a little shy, which made him rather boring at times. Mikhail felt safe enough with him, though – the man had never tried propositioning him. The most he had ever done was to share his sandwiches one day when Mikhail was too hungry to refuse them.

Tincan told him the man was wealthy.

‘How can you tell?’ Mikhail asked.

Tincan shrugged. ‘His haircut. The cologne he wears. And did you see his watch? Tell me it’s not real gold and then let me tell you you’re a fool.’

‘I wonder where he lives?’ Mikhail asked.

‘Dunno,’ Tincan said. ‘Why don’t you follow him if you’re so interested?’

That winter the sleeve of Andreas’s coat split open and Mikhail grew still more depressed. Too dispirited even to steal food or new clothing, he would often mooch up to Castle Hill and look down on the city and its river and dream of hot pork stew and chocolate and nut pancakes.

Tincan grew desperate at the state he was in.

‘You must get money, Mikhail, or you’ll starve! Look at you – you don’t wash, you don’t eat. What’s the matter, don’t you want to live?’

Mikhail did not have the words to explain how he felt. To Tincan existence was all; the good life lay in the future, and if he could just get through the winter then things would pick up by spring. He told Mikhail he was going to become a famous actor and he never voiced any doubts over the possibility of a sparkling career.

‘Take money where you can get it, Mikhail,’ he said. ‘Don’t be a fool. Stupid men die, you know – it’s the clever ones that survive.’

Tincan survived by meeting men under the iron bridge in the park.

‘You just have to wait there, that’s all. They give you money, Mikhail, it’s OK. Some give a lot – look.’ He held some notes out for Mikhail’s perusal.

‘I don’t want to get money like that,’ Mikhail said.

‘But you don’t argue when I offer you food it has paid for,’ Tincan said.

‘I don’t need your food.’

‘Don’t be stupid!’ Tincan grabbed him by the arm. He had hair the colour of linen and a line of matching fuzz across his pale top lip. His eyelashes were nearly white. ‘Look, Mikhail,’ he said, ‘it’s not that bad, you know, what I do. What do you think? You don’t have to like it, you just have to do it. Tell me, do you masturbate? Ever? Eh? Of course you do. Well, do you hate yourself so much for that? No. Well think of this as being similar, only with someone else, that’s all. I do it only to live, Mikhail. It’s not so important – life is what counts. One day I’ll be working in the film studios in Hollywood and I’ll look back at all this and laugh and be glad I was so crafty. Then I’ll remember my poor stupid friend Mikhail who died of cold and starvation because he was so foolish and stubborn. That’s how it is, you know, that’s what will happen.’

Tincan took Mikhail to the park the following evening. At first it was half-light and there were children around, so they smoked a cigarette and shared stale cake until it got darker, and then the children were gone and the whole park fell silent.

Tincan went off for a piss and Mikhail almost bolted. There was a wind hissing through the trees and the branches creaked overhead. He was afraid of ghosts and glad when Tincan got back. Then he saw that his friend was followed and his heart leapt with a greater fear.

The man kept his head down. He wore a knitted cap and his hands were firmly stuffed into the pockets of a greatcoat. He cleared his throat a lot but didn’t speak.

‘This is Pepe,’ Tincan whispered, ‘I call him that because of the moustache. He’s a policeman but I’m not supposed to know that. He comes here once a week when his wife visits her mother. He’s a bit shy of the bathroom so try not to breathe in too much, but apart from that he’s not bad. He won’t speak in case anyone recognizes his voice.’

Mikhail stared across at the man, who was hopping from one foot to the other in the cold. White breath rose in a plume from his nostrils. His head nodded once. OK.

Tincan had evaporated, though Mikhail could hear his rasping breaths from behind one of the metal posts. The thought that his friend was within earshot made him feel even more awkward.

He walked across to the man. Tincan was right, he smelt of stale fish and cabbages. He was chewing something – tobacco maybe – and he spat it out as Mikhail arrived.

‘Have you got the money?’ Tincan had told Mikhail to ask first. The man held his hand out; there were coins in his palm, glinting in the lamplight.

It was the clumsy attempts at tenderness that appalled Mikhail more than the lust. The man pulled his face closer beneath the lights, and tried to kiss him on the cheek, but Mikhail turned away. The man’s eyes looked regretful. He sighed a deep sigh and unzipped his flies, exposing a thick white cock. He gripped Mikhail’s shoulders as he was masturbated and Mikhail worried that Andreas’s coat might tear.

Tincan was right; it was nothing, really. The man came quickly, with a grunt, and his knees buckled heavily, which meant he almost pulled Mikhail over. He looked different when he had finished – the sadness had gone from his eyes to be replaced by a cold look of disgust. He pushed the coins into Mikhail’s hand in a business-like way and pressed his cock back into his trousers.

There was a splash of white semen on Andreas’s coat. He walked quietly down to a small pond and washed it off with his handkerchief. He thought he saw Andreas’s face reflected in the dark water, smiling back at him, and he almost screamed. The water was ice-cold. He took a mouthful without caring how dirty it might be, rinsed his gums, and spat it out. It made his teeth begin to ache.

The man stayed in his mind; his sad eyes, his smell, the grunting he had made. He wanted to wash the memory away, too. He wanted to cry for his mother, even though he had never really known her. When Tincan came over, though, he stood up and laughed instead, flicking one of the coins into the air.

‘What did you have to do?’ Tincan asked. He looked cold through from the waiting.

‘Nothing much,’ Mikhail told him.

Tincan grinned. ‘See? I told you it was easy money. OK?’

‘OK,’ Mikhail said.

Andreas had told him about the parties their mother used to have after the last stage show on a Saturday night, when there would be huge plates of gleaming salami and cold sausage and bottles of Bull’s Blood to wash it all down. Mikhail had never tasted wine but he thought it sounded wonderful.

Sometimes he would stand alone on the ridge of Castle Hill for hours, until it grew dark. He liked watching the floodlights come on along the bridges because they looked like diamonds strung across black velvet and this, for some reason, also reminded him of his mother.

He had never seen his mother dressed up, though, except in his imagination. The one thing he wanted was what he knew he could never have, which was to go back in time and live happily with his mother and Andreas, in the days when she was a successful club act and not living in prison, which was all he could recall of her.

Tincan still worried about him.

‘You look ill, Mikhail. You should take care. I saw you yesterday, just wandering about in the cold. Now that sort of thing will kill you, don’t you know that? Stay where it’s warm, Mikhail. Eat plenty. Beg if you have to; the money is good in this weather because the people feel their consciences prick when they see us standing there, blue with the cold. I got fifty forint in half an hour yesterday, did I tell you?’ He grabbed Mikhail by the shoulders and stared him full in the face. ‘Do well, Mikhail,’ he whispered, ‘we are going places, you and I. We’re special. We have been marked out for importance. Take it how you can and when you can and don’t worry how you get there. Just do it, OK? You think too much. Thinking can kill you.’

But Mikhail was no longer interested. When Tincan tried to cut him into his drug dealing schemes he left the shelter of the metro altogether and never went back.

The businessman approached him just as he was sure he would die of it all. At first they just chatted as usual but then the man leant across closer and Mikhail could smell the expensive cologne Tincan had noticed.

‘You look a little unwell,’ the man said quietly. ‘May I offer you a bed for the night?’

Mikhail looked at him. The man’s face had turned pink with embarrassment and his eyes looked comically mournful. How could he turn him down? He had no choice. It was either go with him or die out here.

The man talked nervously and cleared his throat a lot as they walked. His name was Claude and he came from Switzerland, though his Hungarian was almost perfect. He was not enormously wealthy – Mikhail saw that the minute they entered the building he lived in, which was in a small shabby street off a modern square behind a synagogue in Obuda. He had three locks on his wooden door and once they were inside the apartment he reached up to close a large bolt on the inside.

Claude did not live alone in the apartment. His father, a bedridden invalid, lived in a room at the far end of the passage. The old man was deaf but not so deaf that they could afford to talk in anything above a whisper. All the curtains were drawn because the old man was allergic to prying neighbours. Mikhail didn’t mind this so much, though, because it meant the place was warm. He felt as though he had never been so warm before in his life and he took Andreas’s coat off for the first time that winter.

Claude made them tea and then talked about his job. He worked in a bank – nothing important, just mundane stuff – but he also worked as a photographer, which excited him, and which he said prevented him from going insane with boredom. He had converted a bedroom in the apartment into a studio and took his shots there, some of which had been subsequently published in various magazines. He was proud of his work, Mikhail could tell by his eyes when he spoke about it.

‘I would enjoy doing some shots of you some time,’ Claude said. He wore nail varnish on his fingernails. The warmth of the room had overcome Mikhail; he was struggling to keep his eyes open. ‘If you don’t object, of course,’ Claude added.

He cooked Mikhail a meal and ran him a scented bath before showing him where he could sleep. The softness of the bed filled Mikhail with melancholy and he went off to sleep with tears running down his cheeks.

The first morning went well. Claude showed Mikhail proudly around his ‘studio’ and then he brought out some shots he had taken previously. The walls of the room were painted dark and there was a stained sheet hanging in one corner, as a backdrop. In front of the sheet was a white umbrella on a stand and Claude’s camera on a tripod.

The photos were innocent enough: soft-focus shots of a woman with too much lipstick on her mouth, a couple of black-and-whites taken at a railway station, and a shot of a boy a bit older than Mikhail, sitting on a stool and smiling at the camera. The boy was wearing old-fashioned-looking clothes: a cream-coloured nylon shirt and the sort of jumper Mikhail had worn to school as a kid, but he looked pleased enough.

Claude had gone into the kitchen to cook breakfast and the smell of the bacon made Mikhail’s stomach start to complain. He mooched around the studio. There was a cupboard with the door half open. Inside the cupboard was a pile of cardboard boxes. He pulled the top one open and there were shots in there of the same boy, only this time he didn’t have his cheap shirt and jumper on. This time he didn’t have anything on.

Claude was whistling in a dreary style. Mikhail replaced the box and crept out of the studio and along the corridor to the old man’s room.

Claude was still whistling. Mikhail listened at the door for a second before pushing it open. He wasn’t scared of making a noise; he had developed a talent for moving about silently. The room was dark, apart from a dull light that seeped through the holes in the brown lace curtains. There was a warm smell of sickness and urine and disinfectant.

The old man lay on a large wood-framed bed, his head lolling back onto a couple of white pillows. It was a moment before Mikhail realized his watery eyes were open and looking directly at him. A spasm of fear ran through his gut, even though he knew the old man could do nothing to harm him.

‘Fuck off.’ The old man’s voice wheezed out of a thousand bellows.

Mikhail shut the door quickly and crept back into the studio. Claude arrived a few minutes later with a jug of fresh coffee.

‘Did you like the photos?’ he asked. ‘What do you think?’

Mikhail shrugged, ‘I don’t know. I wouldn’t know good from bad. They look nice enough.’

Claude took the photos from him.

‘Do you think you could do better? I could pay you to model for me.’

The coffee was too sweet on an empty stomach. Mikhail took the bacon sandwich Claude offered him and grease ran down his chin as he bit into it. Claude had fed his father first – he still smelt of the sickroom. No wonder he wore such expensive colognes; the stench of illness clung like wet fog. It reminded Mikhail of the mortuary.

‘Did you pay that other boy?’ he asked. Claude looked down at the shot.

‘That one? No. He is a relative. My nephew.’

‘How much?’ Mikhail asked.

‘What?’ Claude looked surprised.

‘How much will you pay me? For artistic shots?’

Claude pulled a face. ‘Twenty forint? You have a roof over your head too now, you know.’

‘Twenty-five, or I tell your father.’ Mikhail looked him straight in the eye.

Claude looked disappointed. OK,’ he said, ‘if you like.’

9
Cape Cod

Miss Clayburg tried her best and so did Evangeline. They painted rainbows and they painted castles and they even painted the sea, but nothing Evangeline created showed any flair whatsoever.

They went down to the beach together to collect driftwood and then returned to the studio to draw it.

‘Your grandmother said you brought driftwood home before,’ Miss Clayburg said. ‘She told me it was something your stepfather used to do when he was young. Would you like to draw it, Evangeline? Find a nice big stick of charcoal and see what you can do.’

But Evangeline did not use the charcoal because she had found it made the paper messy. She picked a pencil out instead and spent a long time sharpening it. Then she made a few small marks on the paper but proceeded to rub them out. Miss Clayburg smiled but her eyes went narrow.

‘I thought I told you not to use the eraser, Evangeline,’ she said. ‘What is that you are drawing?’

Evangeline turned the page round. It was a tiny detail of a piece of bark.

‘What about the shape of the whole thing?’ Miss Clayburg asked.

‘I’ll get to it,’ Evangeline told her, leaning over the paper again before she caught the look of exasperation in the tutor’s eye. It was no good. They both knew it was no good. Only Grandma Klippel wouldn’t be told, and so Miss Clayburg stayed on – for her sake as much as anybody else’s. Evangeline looked down. Her sleeve had dipped into some paint and the paint had made a crimson smear across her clean white paper. The smear would never clean off. She began to cry silent tears.

10

Mikhail stood self-consciously on the backdrop, staring at his fingernails. The nails were dirty. The rest of him, on the other hand, was scrupulously clean. Claude had suggested he go for a scrub before the session and he’d spent an hour in the tub, wasting time, trying to delay things.

Claude was whistling again, busying himself behind the camera and pottering excitedly. He’d put Mikhail in a black kimono. Then he’d covered some wooden crates with a sheet and told him to drape himself over them. Draping yourself was more difficult than Mikhail had thought. He felt awkward and stupid, like an upturned insect that can’t right itself again.

‘What is that song?’ he asked Claude. Claude stopped pottering and looked up, surprised.

‘What song?’ he asked.

‘The one you are whistling.’ It was getting on Mikhail’s nerves. He felt anxious and he hated himself for it. Claude had insisted on having a three-bar electric fire in the small room and Mikhail could feel the sweat running down his back. The lead from the fire was plugged into a lamp socket in the hall and he kept wishing Claude would forget and trip over it.

Suddenly Claude seemed ready. He pushed his glasses to the top of his head and beamed at Mikhail.

‘Is everything all right?’ he asked. Mikhail nodded. Twenty-five forint. It was all he allowed himself to think of. Living in the apartment meant he could save some of the money, too. How long would it be before he had enough to get away from Budapest? A flash went off and he jumped, squinting.

‘Try to relax,’ Claude crooned. He waited until Mikhail was still again and then took another picture.

‘Why are you nervous?’ Claude asked.

‘I feel stupid,’ Mikhail replied.

Claude smiled. Mikhail had never seen him smile so much. ‘You look terrific,’ he told him. ‘I wish you could see how good you look. If you did you wouldn’t worry. Here – this is what you look like.’ He held a book out to Mikhail. The book was an old one, the pages yellow at the edges. Mikhail supposed the pictures were works of art. Most of them were etchings of young boys in togas. Their faces were beautiful. Mikhail closed the book and put it down carefully.

Claude took some more shots before suggesting Mikhail have a break. The cooler air in the passage felt good. Claude went into the kitchen to make them some tea. Mikhail followed him.

‘What happens next?’ he asked.

Claude looked alarmed. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Is this when you fuck me?’ Mikhail had never used the word before but Tincan used it all the time.

Claude dropped a teacup onto the floor. As he bent to pick it up Mikhail noticed that the seam of his trousers had split. Claude reached out for the cup but his hand missed and he stayed there where he was, as though frozen to the spot. Mikhail could not see his face but, when his shoulders started heaving, he assumed the older man was crying.

‘Shit!’ Mikhail whispered. It was another Tincan word.

Claude moved across the floor on his knees, his glasses misted with his tears. When he reached Mikhail’s feet he bent double and kissed them. His mouth felt wet. Mikhail kicked him away and he rolled like a dog.

‘Don’t hate me!’ Claude said. He was sobbing properly now, his belly rising and falling like a child’s. He would wake his father. Mikhail put his hand out to stop him and Claude grabbed it.

‘Please don’t hate me,’ he whispered, pressing his lips against the centre of the palm.

‘I can’t afford to hate you,’ Mikhail said quietly. ‘If I don’t live here I’ll die.’ He knew that. He had no option. That was the way things were in his life. If you wanted to stay alive there were certain things you had to do: steal; sell drugs; pose for pictures; get fucked by old men. That was how it was, he understood that. Nothing was for nothing – it was a fact of his life.

Claude was groaning at his feet, soft little whelps, like an animal in pain. Mikhail undid his robe and the moans grew more intense. Mikhail blocked out what was happening and thought about the money.

Twenty-five forint. It seemed like a fortune. He would save it all for a plane ticket and then he would fly off somewhere where there was no snow. America was a good place, Andreas had told him that. You could get everything there; everything you wanted. Andreas had planned to go to America to get a record deal for his group. Maybe Mikhail could go there in his place. How much and how long would it take, though?

Claude was kissing his feet again and he kicked him harder, this time in the belly. Claude let out a cry of pleasure. ‘Again!’ he called. Mikhail watched him squirm on the floor.

Too long, was the answer that came into his head, much, much too long.

It was a whole year after Miss Clayburg had left the house at Cape Cod, and nothing much more had happened other than Evangeline growing another inch and her grandmother having her heart broken for the second time.

The old lady never said a word, but Evangeline knew she had pinned great hopes on her being artistically gifted. She still went up to the studio to try long after her tutor was gone, but one day the door was just locked and that was obviously an end to it. Evangeline would have been relieved, but her disappointment stung like salt on a scratch.

She wanted to do well so badly that it hurt. If Grandma Klippel was searching for another Darius, then she was looking, too, for some special talent to make her worthy of her parents’ love, even though she knew they were dead now. Sometimes she got angry rather than sad and wished she had a flair so that they might have realized too late what they’d missed and regret not taking her with them. She even wrote small scripts in her workbook:

DARIUS: Did you reelize Evangeline had flair as an artist too, dear?

THEA: No i never new that. she was always such a plain child that i never held out much hope for her. Perhaps we made a misstake, Darius. Perhaps she shuld be here with us now, after all.

When she had finished writing she would always tear the pages out and screw them up into small balls, just in case. She didn’t think Grandma Klippel ever came snooping but if she did Evangeline didn’t want her finding out her son and his family were all dead. Sometimes she wished Cecil was still there so she could discuss things with someone. She even asked her grandmother if she had his address, but was told he was back in Britain and wouldn’t want to be bothered by letters from little girls he hardly knew.

Then something strange happened.

Evangeline was called out of class one wet September day and sent home early. All the way back in the car she worked over what might have occurred but nothing came to mind – apart from the extreme long shot that Patrick might have found his way back.

When they got to the house Grandma Klippel was not on the porch as usual but waiting in the best lounge beside a tray of tea. Evangeline had not been in the room much before. Someone had taken the sheets off the chairs and there was a fire burning and spitting in the hearth; they had put pine logs on the fire and the smoke smelt sweet. Mrs O’Reilly must have been up earlier than usual because there was the biggest bunch of anemones ever in a porcelain bowl on the centre table.

The room itself was mainly reds and rose pinks, and would have looked jolly enough had it not been for the expression on Grandma Kippel’s face. Her nose was as crimson as the wallpaper and she looked like she had a cold. Her eyes were swollen and her hands looked fidgety. When she picked up her cup it danced noisily in its saucer.

There was a man in the room. Evangeline thought he must be the new chauffeur, even though she had no idea the old one was leaving. The man was no taller than her grandmother but he had thick hands that were making heavy work of the bone china. His dark hair was cut short and greased back and he wore a suit that looked wrong for his body. He smelt faintly of frying, as though he had stopped off at the diner on the journey down from wherever he lived.

‘Evangeline,’ her grandmother said, ‘… dear, this is Mr Castelli.’

He had a good-looking face, even though he was nervous. Evangeline stepped forward to take his hand, wondering why it was so important for her to meet the new chauffeur.

‘Mr Castelli is your father, Evangeline, your real father.’

She stopped before their hands touched. The man gave her grandmother what looked like an angry glance before turning back to stare at her. It made her itchy-uncomfortable.

‘Darius is my father.’ She knew she’d used the wrong tense but anything else would have hurt her too much to say it.

Grandma Klippel’s face looked funny, as though she wanted to sneeze and was trying not to.

‘Darius was only your father because he married your mother, Evangeline. When he adopted you he took you for his own, I know that. But Mr Castelli is your father by blood. Do you understand? He was married to your mother before she met my son.

‘I know she told you about him. Darius was always insistent about discussing things frankly. Do you remember?’

Evangeline nodded. She had always known she had two fathers but she’d thought this one didn’t matter because she had never even seen him. He had a wide neck, like a boxer. His tie was done up, but the top button of his collar was left undone. Evangeline wished he hadn’t done that because she knew her grandmother would not approve. She liked men to look properly smart, it was something she often remarked on. A person’s dress was a strong guide to their character, as far as Grandma Klippel was concerned. Mr Castelli would have been tested and found wanting. He had sallow-looking skin and a strong, beefy nose.

‘You look just like your mother, Evangeline,’ he said.

‘No,’ Evangeline told him wisely, ‘I look just like you.’

Mikhail waited until Claude was at work before ransacking the apartment. Things had got out of hand. Tincan had been right: you had to get on. Nothing else mattered – it was stupid to pretend that it did. He threw things from cupboards and broke plates and glasses against the walls. He found Claude’s savings beneath the mattress on his father’s bed. The old man had said nothing as he took it, just stared at him with an evil glint in his eye. Maybe he had known Mikhail was living there. Maybe other boys had done the same thing.

Claude’s payments had never materialized after the first week. Mikhail had reminded him many times but Claude always came up with an excuse. For a man who worked in a bank he seemed strangely forgetful when it came to cash.

Mikhail counted out the exact amount he was owed and then sat staring at the rest. Put yourself first. Nothing else matters. He took a few notes more, then he put them back. Then he stuffed the whole wad into his pocket. Then he pulled it out again. Was he a thief or not? He couldn’t decide.

The long winter was over. As the snow cleared Mikhail had started cleaning the windows of Claude’s apartment of all their dust and grime, so that he could look out onto the small square below. He went out so little that his skin was unnaturally pale. He was a little fatter now, and Claude had bought him new clothes.

When Claude went out he would read or sleep and when he came back they would talk or he would pose for more photos. He also liked to take baths – lots of them – because he always felt dirty.

There was a smear on the glass. He licked his sleeve and wiped the smear off with spit. The more the sun shone the more oppressive the apartment had become. Claude would never turn the heating down because he said it was bad for his father’s health. When he came home he would take off his suit and wear a cotton kimono instead.

Watching other children in the square below was the most painful thing of all. There were boys of his age down there, playing football and messing about. He used to look at himself in the mirror sometimes, asking himself why he had deserved such a fate.

Claude liked to pose as much as he liked taking photos. Mikhail had discovered this fact while rooting out some photos of him in a suitcase under the bed.

‘Show me what to do and I’ll photograph you,’ he told Claude the next time they did some shots together. Claude had been selling the shots of him now, he was sure of it – not paying Mikhail for the posing, while he was getting paid well himself. He had tried not to think of all the men who must have looked at them.

Claude had looked pleased with Mikhail’s suggestion. He had shown Mikhail all the basics: how to set the lights, how to focus, and how to frame a shot. Then he’d sat coyly in front of the camera, beaming, while Mikhail clicked away.

Printing the photographs had been less fun, but Mikhail had persisted. Claude used the bathroom as a darkroom and, with two of them in there, it became over-crowded. He placed planks over the bath to use as a table and there was a red bulb in the socket that gave an eerie glow in the darkness. Claude apologized every time they got squeezed together and Mikhail didn’t know what was worse, the touching or the bleating apologies. There was a certain magic in the printing process that enthralled him every time, though. You put paper into a tank of fluid and faces appeared on that paper. He saw Claude’s face, weak and beaming, appearing slowly as he slooshed the stuff around.

He could almost stand Claude’s simpering smiles since he had come to the decision about leaving. He was not going back onto the streets, though. That much he knew for sure. He looked at the money again. Half of it, that was fair for all he’d been through. Half of it would be enough to teach Claude a lesson. He counted the notes into two piles and then worked out how long he could live on the money. He would need a job when it ran out; or he would need a job straight away if he was to spend the cash on a plane ticket. He stood up and padded into the studio. Claude’s camera was still on its tripod.

Mikhail unscrewed the camera carefully and wrapped it in a sheet before stuffing it inside his jacket and pulling up the zip. As he did so he heard Claude’s key in the lock.

‘Guess what,’ he heard Claude holler, ‘a robbery at the bank!’ He sounded happy. ‘Thieves broke in last night, and once we had been interviewed by the police they said we should have the rest of the day off while they cleared up—’ He saw the carnage inside his precious apartment and froze in the doorway.

‘Holy shit…’ Mikhail had never heard him swear before. It sounded funny and made him want to laugh. ‘Mikhail?’ Claude’s voice dropped. Mikhail heard him creeping around, looking for burglars. Two robberies in one day! He would spend the rest of his life telling the story.

He reached the studio and Mikhail hid behind the door. Claude’s head appeared first, low down, as though he were crouching. ‘Mikhail?’ he whispered. He sounded genuinely scared.

‘Claude.’ Mikhail stepped out suddenly. Claude’s eyes bulged with the shock and he looked as though he might have a seizure.

‘Jesus! Oh Christ, Mikhail, I thought you were … what happened? Did someone break in?’

Mikhail smiled. ‘No,’ he told Claude, ‘I’m leaving, that’s all. I’ve taken some money – all you owe me for posing – and I’ve borrowed a few of your things to see me through. You wouldn’t want me to starve, would you?’

Claude’s eyes were perfect circles. You could see the red veins all around them. His mouth drooped at the corners like a clown’s.

‘Leaving?’ he asked.

Mikhail nodded.

Claude stared around the room in disbelief. ‘You can’t leave me, Mikhail,’ he whispered, ‘not like this!’ ‘How, then?’ Mikhail asked him.

‘I don’t know.’ Claude looked desperate. ‘Sit down with me first. Have some coffee. We can talk. I’ll pay in future, I swear. I love you, Mikhail. Don’t leave me.’

He was on his knees again. Mikhail watched in disgust as he crawled across the floor and grabbed at his legs.

‘Please, Mikhail.’

Mikhail nearly lost his balance. ‘Stop it, you crazy bastard, you almost had me over!’

Claude looked up at him and his tearful eyes focused on the bulge in Mikhail’s jacket. His expression changed suddenly and he reached up towards it.

‘What have you got there?’ he asked. He ripped the jacket open. ‘My camera! No, Mikhail! Drop it, you little bastard! Give it back!’ He tried to wrest the camera from Mikhail but the boy was too quick for him. Mikhail walked towards the door to leave. When he turned Claude was behind him, an iron poker in his shaking hands and his face distorted by anger.

‘Give it to me, you bastard!’ he screamed. He lifted the poker above his head to strike but Mikhail moved first, ducking out of the way as the thing whistled past his ear.

‘Stop it, Claude!’ he shouted. ‘Are you mad, or something?’

‘My camera!’ Claude’s voice was completely unrecognizable. He lifted the poker again but Mikhail punched him in the face before he could strike. There was a sickening sound of bone being crushed and then a blinding pain in Mikhail’s knuckles. The pain doubled him up, and he thought his hand was broken. He shoved it between his legs and let out a howl.

Claude stood very still for a moment and then crumpled to the floor with blood spurting from his nose. The blood seemed endless, it flecked the walls and even reached the ceiling, where it speckled crimson against the white paint. Claude was silent. He sat propped against the hatstand, his eyes open but not moving. Mikhail thought he was watching him but when he stepped out of the way, the eyes stared straight ahead. The blood was bubbling now, making Mikhail feel sick.

‘Oh, Jesus, Claude, are you dead?’ he whispered to himself. He didn’t care so much, except for the fact that it would be another thing the police would come hunting him for.

Claude let out a moan and Mikhail let out a sigh of relief.

‘Don’t go, Mikhail,’ Claude gargled. Blood cascaded from his nose into his open mouth as he spoke. He spat the blood out and some of it peppered Mikhail’s jacket.

‘You stupid bastard!’ Mikhail said. The door opened at the far end of the hall. They both looked round at the same time. Claude’s father was standing in the doorway, clutching the wooden surround for support.

‘Fuck off!’ he said. There was no strength in his voice; it sounded as though he was already dead.

Mikhail looked at the old man and then he looked down at Claude.

Then he left.

Evangeline’s real father stayed at the house for a few days, until things got so bad between him and her grandmother that you could see sparks in the air. Grandma Klippel went through the motions of playing hostess but anyone could see it was as though a nasty smell she couldn’t quite place was hanging about the house. Evangeline’s father, on the other hand, acted as though he couldn’t wait to be away, however hard he tried not to show it. Grandma Klippel’s wealth seemed too much for him. He didn’t sit up straight at dinner and he ate with the wrong fork.

He tried to be friends with Evangeline in an edgy sort of way.

‘Don’t call me Mr Castelli,’ he said the first time they were alone, ‘call me Nico – everyone else does.’

‘My grandmother doesn’t,’ Evangeline pointed out.

Nico pulled a face. ‘Your grandmother is a very special kind of lady,’ was all he would say.

‘Are you poor or something, Nico?’ Evangeline asked.

He laughed, but he didn’t look as though he found her comment funny. ‘No, I’m not poor. I might look it next to your grandmother, but then so would fifty per cent of the population, come to that. I just live differently, Evangeline. I have a different style of life.’

He ran out of conversation after that; it was obvious he wasn’t used to being around children. Evangeline wanted to help him out but she didn’t know how. She didn’t know what he was there for, either, though she heard him and her grandmother arguing about money a couple of times. She didn’t understand what all the arguments could be about. Grandma Klippel had enough money for all of them.

She got called into the lounge again. Her father’s face was red and he looked angry and embarrassed at the same time. Her grandmother was sitting down, staring at her hands so that Evangeline could not see the look in her eyes.

‘Evangeline,’ she began, ‘dear, your father wants to take you back to New York with him …’

So it was the painting. Evangeline had shown no talent for art and now her grandmother, too, was fed up with her. She had been one long disappointment to everyone. She sucked in her bottom lip. She hated them all for rejecting her; only she didn’t, she loved them, and she hated herself most for loving them and disappointing them.

She was ugly and stupid. There was nothing about her that anyone would want to latch on to. She was disposable, she knew that. She wondered if you could learn not to be, because all this rejection was very hurtful.

Her grandmother was looking at her now. She searched the old woman’s eyes for a sign of regret over giving her up. Grandma Klippel looked sad, but not desperate. If someone had come to take her beloved Patrick away when Evangeline was younger she would have fought to the death to keep him.

‘You don’t have to come, Evangeline,’ Nico was saying. She barely heard him at first, she was thinking so hard.

‘Do you want me to go?’ she asked her grandmother.

The old woman sighed. ‘I’ve got no rights, dear,’ she said softly, ‘whereas you and Mr Castelli are related by blood. I’m just the mother of your stepfather. I can’t keep you here …’

‘She can stay if she wants to.’ Nico’s face had become redder. So he didn’t want her, either.

Grandma Klippel stood up and faced him. A handkerchief fell from her lap onto the floor.

‘You told me that was why you came here, Mr Castelli,’ she said. Her voice sounded polite enough but tight, as though she was coiled up like a spring inside.

Nico ran a hand through his hair. ‘She doesn’t have to,’ he repeated.

‘Why?’ Grandma Klippel asked. ‘How else would you get at all the money you think is owing to her?’

‘Jesus!’ Nico looked angry. ‘In front of the kid, Mrs Klippel, have a little charity! Evangeline, honey, go and play outside or something for a little while, will you?’ he asked.

But Grandma Klippel was too quick for him. She grasped Evangeline by the shoulders and her hands were shaking hard. ‘Do you want to go to New York with your father, Evangeline?’ she asked. Her voice softened, ‘You know you have a home here for as long as you want.’

Evangeline didn’t care any more. New York sounded as bad as Cape Cod. Anywhere was bad without her mother and Darius and Lincoln and Patrick. She felt funny. She didn’t want them to know they had hurt her so much. She wanted to cling onto her grandmother and make her love her properly, somehow, but then she wanted to hurt her back, too.

‘I don’t mind,’ she whispered. The little girl inside her was hoping that her grandmother might fight over her. Then she thought suddenly and stupidly that her family might be waiting in New York, that they might have been there all this time; but she wasn’t a little girl now, she was nine years old, and she knew better.

‘You don’t mind.’ Her grandmother sounded upset.

Nico looked uneasy. ‘Do you know what New York’s like?’ he asked. He bent down so that he was the same height. He smelt of soap and she could see where he had cut himself shaving. He had big dark eyes. She could even see her own reflection in his pupils, and that was something she had never seen happen before. Perhaps it only happened with people you were related to by blood. She tried to remember if she had seen herself in her mother’s eyes, but she couldn’t.

‘There’s no sea there, you know,’ he said.

That was it, then. New York it was.

11
New York 1969

Nico called the place home but even Evangeline could see it was just an hotel. It turned out Grandma Klippel was paying for them to stay there because Nico’s real home – his apartment – was not deemed appropriate for a nine-year-old to live in. Nico didn’t agree with that opinion but he liked the hotel life. He smoked fat cigars and ordered from room service with a golden grin on his face. He told Evangeline they’d be moving somewhere better anyway, just as soon as her money came through.

Being sad in Cape Cod was easy but being sad in New York was a deal more tricky, with no sea to gaze out at and no fog to make you think you were the last person alive on the earth. In Cape Cod Evangeline had felt her parents were everywhere, watching her. In New York, though, she had to carry them in a little pocket in her head, just like she carried Lincoln’s picture in a pocket in her bag. Did they know where she was? Had they lost her too, now? The place was full of people but she felt lonelier than ever before in her life.

The loneliness didn’t scare her, though; in a way it almost felt good. She didn’t want Nico to love her like she’d wanted Grandma Klippel to. There would be no more disappointments or distractions. All she had to do now was work at being herself. Maybe if she tried hard enough she could find something there; maybe if she worked at it there would be something to make people want her.

She wasn’t getting any prettier but she wasn’t growing uglier, either. Her teeth were big, but straighter since she had worn braces. Her nose was a funny shape but seeing the same nose on Nico’s face every day made it better somehow, because he didn’t look too bad.

Grandma Klippel seemed to think she’d forget about Darius and Thea in New York, because she wrote all the time reminding her how they had been and what they were like. The letters hurt badly but she still went on reading them, even when Nico got mad.

Thea and Darius – was she really Thea’s child? They were so talented, so successful, so special, and so beautiful to look at. Her grandmother sent photographs of Darius as a child. She wrote:

You came from good stock, dear, don’t ever forget it. Thea was a wonderful, talented woman. You were blessed to have her as a mother. Darius thought of you as his own, too – just as much as little Lincoln. Make them proud of you, dear. Don’t waste your life. Darius lived each day as though it were his last … make sure you do the same.

The letters chilled Evangeline. Make them proud of her – how? Was she wasting her life? What was it she was meant to do?

Something else began to trouble her. When she had discovered that her family was dead she had been too sad to wonder why. Maybe she believed things like that just happened. As she grew older, though, she realized they did not. Yet nobody had told her how they had died. Perhaps nobody knew. Nico just looked awkward when she asked him, which she did straight away, on the drive from Cape Cod to New York.

‘What happened to my mother?’ she asked. He had been married to her, so someone must have told him.

Nico was silent for a long while. Then he cleared his throat. Evangeline wondered if he smoked a lot, to get a cough that bad. ‘She died,’ he said, after a while.

‘I know she died,’ Evangeline told him. She didn’t want to sound impolite but she wanted this thing cleared up. ‘Nobody told me how, though.’

Nico coughed again. ‘What did the old lady say?’ he asked.

Evangeline sighed. ‘Grandma? Oh, I don’t think she knows, you know. She still thinks they’ve just gone away. She’s old – too old. The shock could make her ill.’

‘Who told you then?’ Nico sounded genuinely interested now.

‘The chauffeur.’

‘The chauffeur?’ Nico punched the steering wheel, ‘Fuck!’ She had never heard anyone she knew say that word before. He apologized straight away.

‘Did this chauffeur tell you what happened?’ Nico asked.

Evangeline shook her head. ‘I don’t think he knew. I don’t think he knew anything more than he told me.’

‘Jesus.’ Nico pulled a cigarette out of a packet in his pocket and flipped it in the air once before catching it in his mouth. Evangeline would have enjoyed that, had they not been discussing what they were. She had a bad feeling she was going to need to pee pretty soon but she realized she didn’t know her father well enough to ask him to stop. She crossed her legs instead. She watched him light the cigarette with a Zippo and smelt the petrol before he snapped the lid shut again.

‘What do you think happened to them?’ he asked her.

‘I don’t know.’ Her voice sounded small. She was trying so hard to think like an adult, but it wouldn’t happen.

The car hit a rabbit; it bounced straight up over the bonnet like a tumbler in a circus act and onto the windscreen. Nico didn’t swerve once; it was as though the accident hadn’t happened. Evangeline saw the rabbit’s squashed face before it took off again. There was a red splashy mark where it had hit the glass. She almost wet herself with the shock but Nico didn’t mention it.

‘Do you know?’ she asked him after a while. Nico shrugged and said nothing. The shrug told her she wasn’t to ask again. She could see the question made him uncomfortable so she looked out of the window instead. ‘What do I call you?’ she asked after a while.

‘What?’ She could tell from his voice that he had been thinking hard enough to be miles away.

‘Do I call you Mr Castelli?’

Nico made a noise like a snort. ‘Of course not,’ he said, ‘I’m your father.’ ‘What, then?’

He took both hands off the wheel and stretched as though he were tired. She had never seen anyone drive without using their hands.

‘Father?’ he asked. Evangeline bit her lip. ‘I told you – Nico, then – hell, I don’t care.’ Nico looked round at her. ‘What’s that you’re doing? Stop that. How long have you done that for?’ Evangeline was biting her nails. She didn’t stop because it made her feel better. ‘I used to do that,’ Nico added, after a pause. ‘It makes people think you’re scared of them.’

Evangeline stopped.

She thought the hotel looked good from the outside and she preferred the noise of the traffic compared to the constant whispering of the sea. She wondered if Nico would be funny, like Darius. Grandma Klippel hadn’t a funny bone in her body. Darius must have got his talent for clowning from some other branch of the family. All Nico ever did was look worried.

After a while Evangeline began to imagine she was living in a palace. She felt wrapped in tissue, like a doll. It was strange, ordering all your food by phone. Nico told Evangeline to ring for whatever she wanted. She thought at first that no one would take notice of a little girl on the phone, but the food arrived, just as she’d asked for it. No one questioned her when she wanted ice-cream at every meal and no one told her to sit up straight at the table – mainly because she usually ate alone.

Sometimes Nico sat with her but when he did he would just sit and smoke.

‘You shouldn’t do that,’ Evangeline told him.

‘Do what?’ he looked surprised.

‘Smoke cigarettes. It’s bad for my lungs, especially when I’m eating,’ Evangeline told him. She sounded just like her grandmother, even to her own ears.

‘Don’t worry about your lungs,’ Nico said.

‘Someone has to,’ Evangeline replied.

‘Then you quit biting your nails,’ Nico stubbed out his cigarette.

‘Chewing nails won’t kill me,’ Evangeline said. ‘Smoking can.’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ Nico folded his arms and stared at her. Evangeline almost smiled at that. So did Nico.

She used to cry at night; it was part of her routine. ‘Never cry in front of people, always cry in your room,’ Grandma Klippel had taught her. She would climb into bed and close her eyes and the tears would always come, whether she was feeling sad or not. Bedtime was a sad time. Thea used to read to her when she was small, or Darius would sing. Patrick used to sleep on her bed. It was difficult to get rid of memories like that. One night Nico walked past her room and he must have heard her crying, because his footsteps stopped. She knew he was listening so she held her breath and he walked on after a while.

The next morning she could feel him looking at her.

‘Do you miss your grandmother?’ he asked.

Evangeline kept her head down. ‘No,’ was all she would say. It was just about the truth, too. Grandma Klippel always meant well but she wasn’t the sort of woman you could admit to missing much.

‘Maybe you should go back to her,’ Nico sounded almost hopeful.

‘I don’t think so,’ Evangeline told him. She wouldn’t look at his face. She was scared she might see his disappointment. He didn’t want her there, she knew that. She wasn’t going back to live with the sea again, though, not for anyone’s sake.

‘Did my money arrive yet?’ she asked carefully.

‘What money?’ Nico sounded cagey.

‘My inheritance.’

Nico sighed. ‘What did your grandmother tell you?’ he asked.

‘Nothing,’ Evangeline whispered, ‘I overheard. You want me here so you can get my money, isn’t that right? I don’t mind.’ Nico was blood, after all.

Nico sat down at the table. He tapped her hand until she looked at him. ‘It’s your money by rights, Evangeline,’ he said. ‘Your mother would have wanted you to have it. Your grandmother says there isn’t any. I know there is. Your parents had plenty; everyone knew that. It’s only right that you have it.’

‘Why don’t you sue her, then?’ Evangeline asked.

‘Sue who?’

‘My grandmother. You think she’s keeping it, don’t you?’

Nico ran a hand through his hair. ‘Jesus, how old are you? Fifty? What do you know about suing? It costs money, Evangeline – money I haven’t got. Do you know how much it takes to bring a court case? No, neither do I, but I know it’s more than I have, that’s for sure. I mentioned suing – as you’ve asked – and your grandmother laughed at me.’

‘Were you in prison some time?’ Evangeline asked him.

He started coughing again. ‘Jesus!’

‘Only I wondered why you never came to see me when I was small.’ She sat up straight now, as her grandmother had taught her.

Nico pursed his lips. ‘No, I wasn’t in prison, Evangeline. I just … kept out of the way, that was all. Your mother had a new life. You had a new father. What was I supposed to be hanging around for? Did you want me to turn up every Sunday and take you out to the zoo or something?’

Evangeline shook her head.

‘No, well, there you are. I didn’t want that either. Neither did Thea, though she never said as much.’

‘Where are they buried?’ Evangeline asked. Nico did not have to ask who she meant. He stared at her. A nerve in the side of his face started to twitch.

‘You want to know where they’re buried?’

Evangeline nodded – yes.

‘Why?’

‘To visit,’ she whispered. ‘I think I must have rights.’

Nico nodded slowly. ‘OK,’ he replied. He didn’t say where they were or when they would go, though.

‘Did you love my mother?’ Evangeline asked.

‘Everyone loved your mother,’ Nico told her. End of conversation.

Nico worked at night quite often and Evangeline was left alone, which was fine because no one was ever really alone in an hotel. Then Grandma Klippel found out and said things had to change. She phoned one night while Nico was out and when he came back she phoned again and Evangeline watched his face go red as he listened to her. ‘OK,’ he kept saying, ‘OK.’

A girl turned up the following night – a big, fair-haired girl with a funny voice, called Nettie, whom Evangeline didn’t care for much. Nettie smiled a lot but she was also a mess-maker, which Evangeline didn’t like as she had to follow the girl around the place, plumping up cushions and picking lint up off the carpet.

Nettie had her own smell, too – not unpleasant, but different. When she started taking Evangeline to school she would make her wait round the corner where the other kids couldn’t see her, just in case. Then Nico was out more and Nettie just sort of moved into the hotel with them. Evangeline found her sitting there one morning, ordering juice from room service.

‘I don’t know that my grandmother would want to pay for a stranger in here, too,’ Evangeline said, but Nettie just laughed. She wasn’t fat but she had a small double chin that was pink, like the rest of her.

Her clothes arrived the following day and Evangeline had to crush up in the closet to give her some space. Her clothes were strange, not useful things at all, just cropped-off trousers and a few little tops, like a kid would wear.

Nico told Nettie to teach Evangeline the facts of life but Nettie had her own way of dealing with little things like that. One night when Evangeline got up for water Nico’s bedroom door was pushed wide open and the light was on. Evangeline walked past and saw Nico on the bed with his back towards the door and Nettie sitting naked on top of him, riding back and forward like a cowboy at the rodeo. She waved when Evangeline tiptoed past and that must have been the first Nico knew of it because she heard her father swear loudly and Nettie was gone the next day.

‘You didn’t have to get rid of her,’ Evangeline told Nico over breakfast.

Nico kept staring at the newspaper, though she could tell he wasn’t reading. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘it was what I wanted.’

Evangeline squirted syrup over the top of her boiled egg. It tasted quite good, if you didn’t mind the feel on your tongue. No one stopped her, and so she did it.

‘She smelt funny,’ Evangeline said.

‘How would you know?’ Nico was looking at her now. ‘You had the place filled with air fresheners.’

Evangeline nodded, ‘Because of her smell.’

‘Don’t be rude,’ Nico told her, ‘and stop cleaning the place up. Housekeeping is paid to do things like that.’

‘They don’t get all the dirt,’ Evangeline said. It was important to her. Grandma Klippel didn’t have dirt in her house. Evangeline wanted the place nice for Nico.

‘Stop biting your nails,’ Nico said. He said it even when she wasn’t. She let her hair flop over her face and chewed that, instead.

So Nico had to take Evangeline out to work with him. She could see how little he liked the idea but she was overcome with excitement. He wouldn’t tell her what he did. When he finally told her she didn’t even understand the word.

Paparazzi. It sounded strange, like an Italian ice-cream flavour. It wasn’t the only job he did, but it was one way he earned money. The other ways were more boring, like chauffeuring local businessmen to and from their offices. Nico was half-Italian and most of the businessmen were, too. Evangeline looked his job up in the dictionary but what she read didn’t seem to fit. Nico just photographed people in a club – ordinary sorts of people. Most of them looked pretty much like Nico himself; dark-haired and itchily nervous in their suits. They stood next to their wives and friends in groups and they all smiled warily as Nico counted to three. When the pictures were over they looked relieved and started laughing.

Evangeline wasn’t allowed inside the clubs but Nico got her in anyway. She was proud of him for being able to do that. She would wait by the door while he discussed the matter with a few men in the entrance and then he would grin and wink at her and she’d run in after him. They were never inside for long; just long enough to smell the new carpets and the alcohol, though, and to catch a glimpse of the bands that played on stage in their white tuxedos and orange toupées.

Evangeline loved it all. She loved the noise and the pushing crowds and the perfumes and the heat but most of all she loved it because she knew Grandma Klippel would have a seizure if she knew she were there.

People spoke to her. She became known as Nico’s daughter. One man gave her a fifty-dollar note and a pat on the head, and a woman in an expensive satin dress gave her the paper umbrella from her cocktail, which Evangeline liked even more than the money. Nico watched her like a hawk all the time, except when he took the photographs. Then he would sit her on a bar stool and tell the barman to check she didn’t move. The barman would wink at her and send a glass of cola spinning down the bar towards her, just like he did with the beers. Sometimes he put a small plastic stick in the glass with two cherries speared on it.

Nico would always be late up the next morning so Evangeline would order breakfast and get out the small paintbox Grandma Klippel had packed with her things. She tried to paint something every day, just as her tutor had told her to. Nothing looked like anything much, they were all small pale shapes in the middle of the page; sometimes she couldn’t even remember what it was she was painting.

One morning Nico caught her at work. He began a laugh that turned into a cough and when he had finished coughing he turned the pad around and gazed down at the smudge of pale colour in the middle of the page.

‘What’s this?’ he asked. Evangeline chewed at her hair.

‘Is it some fruit, is that what it is?’ He held it up to one eye at a time, as though he needed glasses, then he turned the picture around slowly. ‘I didn’t know you were trying to paint,’ he said quietly. Evangeline’s hair smelt of cigarette smoke.

‘Did your mother teach you?’ Nico asked.

‘No.’

His eyes looked dark, like the coffee he was drinking.

‘Who, then? Darius?’ It was the first time she had heard him say the name. It sounded strange. He pronounced it wrong: ‘Dar-i-us'. She longed to correct him but thought it might have been deliberate, like the way he was always calling Grandma Klippel ‘the old lady’.

‘My grandmother hired a tutor,’ Evangeline told him. She washed her brush in the water-pot and cleaned it carefully on a tissue. She couldn’t work with him watching.

‘You had proper lessons?’ Nico sounded surprised, ‘For how long?’ ‘Months.’ ‘Months?’

Evangeline nodded. She could feel her eyes filling up but she didn’t want to look a child in front of her father, in case he was laughing at her.

‘She wanted you to be like your mother.’

‘And Darius.’

An angry muscle twitched on Nico’s cheek.

‘And what did you want?’ he asked. Evangeline pushed more hair into her mouth. ‘Did you want this?’

‘I didn’t mind.’ Her voice sounded small. Nico was staring at her.

‘Why not, Evangeline? You mind everything else! You mind when there is dust on the table, you mind when I smoke, you mind when the coffee’s not warm, you mind when I dent the couch – why didn’t you mind something as important as this? Do you enjoy it?’

She nodded. Then she thought. Then she shook her head.

‘Then you should stop. Don’t be Thea. Be yourself.’

‘I want her to be proud of me.’ It came out in a small stupid whisper.

‘Your grandmother?’

‘No. My mother.’

Nico sighed and lit a cigarette. Evangeline wished he had done the trick where he threw it into his mouth, it might have lightened the atmosphere a little. He ran his hands through his thick dark hair. She could tell that he was thinking.

‘Come with me,’ he said at last. Evangeline got up. ‘Do I need my coat?’ ‘Bring it,’ Nico said, ‘bring your whole wardrobe if you like. Only hurry up.’

12

They went round to Nico’s apartment. Evangeline had never been there before and she liked it twice as much as the hotel. It was in a converted warehouse down a small side street and they had to use a service elevator to get to Nico’s floor. The building was old and huge and wonderfully empty. You could have got a whole car into the elevator and the thing was open so you could watch each floor as it slid by. One floor was just empty space and a bird flew out when the elevator went by. Its wings made a whirring sound.

The main door was covered with locks. Nico undid each one slowly, cursing under his breath when he got the wrong key.

‘I like it here,’ Evangeline told him.

‘You’d like to live here?’ he asked, and he laughed when she said that she would.

‘Just you and a few moth-eaten pigeons, eh? Now how do you suppose the old lady would like that one?’

Evangeline pulled a face. ‘If you got my money we could live just about anywhere we wanted,’ she said.

‘I told you, I tried.’ End of story. Non-negotiable.

The door fell back, emitting a distinctive smell. It was an empty smell, a smell of nobody having been home for a very long time. It was unpleasant at first but after a while you didn’t notice it so much. Eventually you didn’t notice it at all. The apartment was warm and there was condensation on the windows. Nico cursed and went off to see about the heating. Evangeline snooped around each room and Nico didn’t stop her, which was nice.

‘It’s OK,’ she told him when she’d finished. ‘You should clean it up, though.’

‘I don’t live here now,’ Nico said, ‘I just come here when I need to.’

Evangeline shrugged. ‘It would still be nicer clean,’ she told him. ‘You never know, after all.’

‘You never know what?’

‘You just never know, that’s all. You might get rats or something. Somebody might break in and see all the mess. I don’t know.’

Nico shook his head, tapping his finger against his forehead. ‘You know you are a little crazy, don’t you?’ he laughed. He didn’t look comfortable, not even in his own home. He picked up a handful of mail from the mat and began sifting through it quickly.

‘There’s a room locked,’ Evangeline said.

‘I know. That’s where we’re working.’

‘Today?’

‘Yes, today.’

He made coffee, which drove Evangeline mad with impatience.

‘We just had coffee!’

‘I know, but I always drink coffee when I work. It’s kind of a rule. Black, too. You’d better get used to that yourself.’ They drank black coffee that made her shudder. She washed up and dried before he could pour a second cup.

There was another unlocking ritual and then she was inside her father’s workroom. It was small, no bigger than a bathroom, and dark, because the windows had been boarded over.

‘What is this?’ she asked.

‘Why are you whispering?’

Because it was like being in church, she thought: weird, silent. Darkness made your voice sound funny, so it was better to whisper. Nico clicked a switch and a bare red bulb bathed the room in an eerie light.

‘You OK?’ Nico asked. He didn’t know if she was scared of the dark. ‘Uh-huh.’ He heard her swallow.

There were tables and a sink and some washing lines overhead with metal pegs hanging from them. Evangeline held her hand to her face to see what it looked like in the red light. Nico tossed something into the air a couple of times and then threw it at her. She caught it, which was good. It was a film.

‘They’re the shots from last night,’ he said. ‘We’re going to print them up. This is my darkroom, Evangeline. This is where I work.’

She rolled the film around in her fingers. ‘You work in the clubs,’ she said.

‘No,’ Nico told her. ‘I take shots in the clubs. This is where I work. This is where the magic is done. Did you take a look at the people I photograph? Eh?’

Evangeline nodded.

‘Pretty? Yes or no? No. Right. You know that they’re ugly. I know that they’re ugly. But what do you think they know about it, eh? Well I’ll tell you. They think they look great. They think they look so good it’s a wonder the mirror doesn’t pay them to look into it.

‘What they see when they look into the mirror is not what you and I see, Evangeline. They see Tony Curtis and Gina Lollobrigida; what we see when we look at them is a baboon’s arse, if you’ll pardon my French. Now, they pay me to take their photo. What do you think they want to see when they get those shots back? Curtis and Lollo? Or a monkey’s arse?’

Evangeline laughed.

‘Right,’ Nico said, ‘so therefore the magic. Anyone can take a photograph, Evangeline. It’s making that photograph look good that counts.’ He bent his head closer towards hers, ‘The old lady wanted to teach you how to paint pictures, Evangeline. She wanted you to be like her son and your mother. Well, you’re not, so don’t bust your whole life trying. Maybe you have talent, maybe you don’t. You’re not happy with paint and paint isn’t happy with you, that much is obvious.

‘But there’s more than one way to create pictures, Evangeline. You see an image and you record it for others to see. Then you dress it up a little, make it look better than it already is. That is true of great artists, but it is also true of great photographers.

‘Photographers and artists see exactly what we all see, Evangeline, but it’s how they translate those pictures that makes them good – understand? Right, let’s see what we can do with a group of baboons’ arses, shall we?’

She had never heard her father say so much before and she would never hear him speak so eloquently again.

She watched enthralled as he took the lid off one of three large tanks and stuck a thermometer into the liquid inside.

‘Twenty degrees.’ He spoke to himself but she knew he was teaching her, too. He leant across and switched the light out and the room became the darkest darkness she had ever sat in before. There were a couple of cracking noises as he took the film out of its canister and then he described how he was loading it onto a metal spool.

The spool went into the first tank and she heard a watery sound as he dunked it up and down. Then he put the lid back onto the tank and switched the dull red light back on again.

‘I have a timer, see? Like an alarm clock. It all has to be timed, like baking a loaf. Six minutes, maybe more – you get the feel of it after a while, but you still time it, right?’ The timer went off as he spoke and Evangeline nearly jumped out of her socks.

The light went off again.

‘Right. Now it goes into the wash. Now I drain it and then it goes into the fix – see?’ Evangeline nodded even though she could see nothing. ‘In the fix for two minutes,’ Nico continued, ‘then I take a look at it – you learn what to look for – then I wash the film for twenty minutes or so. A bit of wetting agent and then we can hang it out to dry.’

The film strips were hung onto the small washing line. ‘I hang them over the radiator here so that they dry more quickly – just enough time for another coffee and some cheesecake.’

‘Fruit,’ Evangeline said, ‘or you’ll get fat.’

‘Photographers don’t get fat, Evangeline,’ Nico said, ‘we’re lean, mean fighting machines. We eat what we will – it’s one of the rules of the job.’

After more black coffee Nico showed Evangeline how to work the enlarger. She hopped with impatience while he did a test strip and then finally he came up with a proper print on paper.

‘See this?’ he asked. She bent over the sheet, chewing her hair. She recognized the faces in front of her. It was a man from the night before and the woman in satin who had given her the paper umbrella from her drink. ‘Baboons’ arses,’ Nico said. They looked gormless and ugly. Nico held up a lady’s stocking. ‘This is where the magic begins,’ he continued. He stretched a piece of the stocking over the lens of the enlarger. ‘Or I could blow on the lens to mist it,’ he told Evangeline. This time the print came up softer and more film star-like. Nico held the shot up to the light. ‘I think she needs a smaller nose and less of a gap between the front teeth,’ he said. ‘He could do with a couple less chins.’

He took the print into the kitchen and sat down with a small box of pens and inks and razor blades. He worked quickly, bending so low his nose almost touched the paper, dabbing, dotting and gently scraping until the shot was finished.

‘There you go.’ He held the photograph up for Evangeline’s inspection. ‘Well?’ he asked.

He was right – it was magic. He had made the couple look like film stars. Evangeline was speechless.

‘You don’t like?’ Nico looked confused.

‘How did you do this?’ Evangeline asked. Nico’s expression relaxed into a smile.

‘You saw how I did it. I showed you.’

‘But this is special. This is perfect. You made things perfect, Nico.’

‘No, Evangeline, it’s just hard work. If you know what you’re doing it’s not difficult. And I’m not that good – there are many more tricks than I’ll ever bother to learn. Look.’ He pulled a book out from under a pile of photographic paper boxes. The book was a large one and full of photographs. Nico sat and drank coffee while Evangeline looked through it.

‘You like?’ he asked. The book was full of shots of old movie stars. Evangeline studied each one closely.

‘You think they’d look like that if you passed them in the street?’ Nico asked. He was smiling at her. He leant forward, pointing: ‘This photographer who did these shots, he was an artist, Evangeline,’ he said. ‘He took the photograph, yes, but then the true work was done. Retouch, retouch, retouch. The man was a genius. I see him sitting over his desk at night, a box of paints and a few blades, just as I have here, scraping, gently, bleaching, eliminating. He created these stars, Evangeline, he did it himself.’

Nico threw another book down in front of her. ‘Never believe what you see in pictures, Evangeline,’ he said. ‘They say the camera never lies, but that is one of the greatest lies of all time. Famous war photographs – look at them. How many do you think were staged, eh? You see a so-so shot and you turn it into something special with a little staging.

‘Do you think Dino Foretti wanted a business portrait of himself squatting in that old cane chair with the holes in it that he works from most days? No. That chair is the truth, but I sat him on a real leather chair, Evangeline, the sort with studs and everything. I draped some satin in the background – red, like presidents use. The result? Not Foretti as he is, but Foretti as he wants to be. Foretti the business tycoon. He was happy, he loved it. Trade in falsehoods, Evangeline, and you have a business. Try to sell the truth, and you end up bankrupt within the month.’

He pointed out one of the movie stars in the first book. ‘You like her nose?’ he asked. He leant forward and his voice dropped. ‘That lady has an invisible wire set up, which is stretched across the set before she is photographed. She leans her nose against the wire and suddenly it isn’t so long. Suddenly it turns up at the end, instead of down. Suddenly she looks like the movie queen she is supposed to be. Now that’s a class act, Evangeline, take my word for it.’

‘It’s great,’ Evangeline said.

‘Good,’ Nico sounded as though he approved. ‘Now, do you think you’re ready to have a go at printing the next batch?’

Evangeline swallowed. ‘Sure.’ She had never felt so unsure about anything in her life before, but she was prepared to drop down dead before she let her father know that.

For an impatient man, Nico was a surprisingly good teacher. He talked Evangeline through the process and he didn’t shout or swear when she made bad mistakes. By the end of the day they were both exhausted and Evangeline had a small print on the table in front of her that was all her own work. The picture was crooked and a little too dark and that made her mad with herself but Nico insisted it didn’t matter – it was the best trophy possible for all the effort she’d put in.

‘You did well,’ Nico told her. He had been surprised to see her so driven and quietly worried by her perfectionism. She was only a kid. Perfection shouldn’t matter so much to a kid of her age. It was like the cleaning and the clearing up she was always at. It was as though she wanted everything right. He wished she enjoyed mess more, like most normal kids.

She didn’t look up, she just sat chewing her hair, but she was more pleased than she was showing.

‘Maybe you’d like to learn how to take shots, too.’ She could hear her father smiling at her and she thought she might burst with pride.

‘You deserve cheesecake now – proper cheesecake from an Italian deli, not the sugary crap that hotel serves up.’ Nico actually put a hand out and ruffled her hair, like she used to ruffle Patrick’s coat when he’d done something extra wonderful. Evangeline didn’t argue this time. Even cheesecake sounded good. When they’d finished eating he let her cut the end of a cigar for him. The other men in the deli laughed at that and she laughed along with them.

When Evangeline woke the next morning there was a large envelope propped on her bedside table, next to the hotel phone. She wiped her eyes and picked it up. Her name was written on the front in Nico’s handwriting. When she opened the envelope a photograph fell out and, when she turned the shot the right way up, she cried out loud as though someone had pinched her.

The shot was the one of Lincoln with the mouse ears, only much, much bigger and much, much fresher. Nico must have done it, he must have taken the shot from her bag and got all the creases out and then copied it just for her. She ran her finger down the baby’s nose and a tear landed bang on the back of her hand. Nico was right; photography was magic. Evangeline knew she was smitten.

13
Budapest 1985

Mikhail stood in the middle of Kapisztran ter, beneath the statue of the monk the square had been named after, and studied the tourists. It was a few degrees below zero that morning but the weather was no longer such a problem. He had a new coat around his shoulders and three pairs of good socks on his feet. In exactly seventeen minutes, when the church clock chimed the half-hour, he would go into the coffee house in National Assembly Street and sit amongst the old women with their white hair and pearls and order a hot chocolate with whipped cream and a slice of sweet pancake with nuts on top.

An American couple walked up to the statue he was standing in front of and paused. Mikhail could spot the nationality from the clothes the tourists wore. Furs for the Italians, and always good quality shoes. Trousers for American women and the men always wore a hat. The British wore inappropriate shoes and carried umbrellas, even in summer. Mikhail waited until this couple were busy reading the inscription on the statue before crossing to speak to them.

‘Good morning,’ he said in English. So polite, so formal.

The couple smiled at him. ‘Hi there.’

Mikhail pointed at the statue. ‘John Capistranus,’ he said, ‘saint, Franciscan monk and fighter of the Turk.’

The couple’s smiles widened.

‘He led the armies into the battle of Belgrade. It was a great victory. American?’ he asked. The couple nodded. ‘Would you like a photograph of the two of you in front of the statue? Both together?’ he held his hand out for the expensive camera the American was carrying. The man went to hand it over but his wife dug him discreetly in the ribs. Keep your camera at your side, the guide book told them, Don’t let a thief run off with it. The man was in a quandary. He didn’t want to look as though he was accusing the young man of thieving …

‘I can use my own camera if you like,’ Mikhail said, smiling. ‘Give me your address and I can have the shot sent to your room by tonight. Cheap, too – not much money.’

The American smiled with relief. ‘OK,’ he said. They posed nervously for a shot, then paid a very large sum in cash. Mikhail chatted to them a little longer, then stood waving as they walked away. Claude’s camera had come in handy. Maybe one day he would even put a film in it and learn how to take some proper photographs.

Tincan was sitting on a bench a few feet away, his hair plastered flat with gel and an ill-fitting jacket around his beefy shoulders. Mikhail sauntered over and passed him the couple’s name and hotel address. ‘Room 171,’ he said. ‘They’re at the opera between seven and ten thirty tonight.’ Tincan would rob the room later and pay Mikhail a little from his takings. Life was almost sweet as long as you forgot the past and tried not to consider the future. As long as you ignored the ghosts, too. Andreas didn’t visit so often now and when he did it was only in dreams.

He looked at the camera. Sometimes he thought he could still smell Claude’s scent on the plastic. Tincan had suggested he sell it and buy a cheaper one. After all, what did it matter what type he used since it was all a scam anyway? But Mikhail had wanted to keep it. Not for sentimental purposes; his only thoughts of Claude were of anger and disgust. No, Mikhail still had plans to leave Hungary one day for somewhere better and he thought the camera might help to find him a job. He had told Tincan, but the boy had only laughed.

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