40
Patrick Kamo had a secret. It was a secret he kept from everyone, but especially from his son, and the secret was this: Patrick hated London. He hated England, he hated the life he was living while he kept Freddy company. He hated the weather, he hated the English language, he hated the year-round cold and rain and the way it made him feel old, he hated the extra layers of clothing he had to wear to fight the weather, and he hated the way central heating made him feel sweaty and cold and dried out all at the same time. He had looked forward to the spring, to the time when, he was told, everything would start getting warmer, but the English spring was ridiculous, grey and not just cold but damply cold. He hated people’s unfriendliness, and he hated the way he had gone from being a respected and important man in his own right to being an accessory of his son’s life. He hated the way he was invisible in the streets. He hated the fact that nobody knew who he was; he had never been a man with many close friends, he was too guarded for that, but he had many acquaintances, people who looked at him with regard; in London, he had none, except the people who were paid to be polite to him because he was Freddy’s father. He hated the house in Pepys Road, its horrible narrowness, its unexpansive tallness, the expensive toys which he found he couldn’t operate properly. He was a man who had always worked, but here his job was Being Freddy’s Father, which wasn’t a job at all. A man should be a father, but a man should be a worker too. Here, because his job was nothing but to be with Freddy, he felt as if both things were being taken away from him. More than he would have thought possible, he hated being away from his wife and daughters. He expected to miss them in a way he could manage, a small pain, like a muscle ache. Instead he thought about them all the time. The agreement was that they wouldn’t be coming to visit until the autumn, but Patrick had no idea how he was going to wait that long for the smell of Adede’s hair, for the feel of his youngest daughters Male and Tina crushed and squealing with laughter in his arms. In London, of course, all they would want to do was shop – but that would be good to see. It would sink in with his daughters what their half-brother had done, what he now was. And maybe Patrick would even get some pleasure from showing them this horrible city, this place he hated so much. Whenever the cursed postcards and DVDs arrived, the ones talking about how people wanted what he had, he wanted to scream and shout and swear and hit somebody. There was nothing in his new life that he liked.
He kept all these feelings to himself. It was a point of honour and principle for Patrick not to complain about things, that was one reason; the other was because it would be unfair to Freddy. To fulfil his dream, to live his talent to the full, to be paid more than anyone could imagine, to be a hero, to do the thing he loved and wanted more than any other – and to be greeted by his father with all this whining negativity: that would be crushing. Freddy was a good boy whose strongest motivation in life, apart from his love of football, was his wish to please his father. He should not have to deal with the fact that his happiness was bringing his father misery. So Patrick kept his misery to himself. Perhaps he could have talked to Mickey, who had become so fond of Freddy that Patrick had started to trust him; but there again, Patrick felt that telling him about his unhappiness would have been unmanly. He liked Mickey but he did not want to show him any weakness.
This week was particularly difficult because Freddy had gone to the Azores for a training break with the club. Patrick had talked things over with Mickey – when the matter touched on Freddy’s interests, Mickey was a good person to talk to – and had decided not to go to the training camp with him. For one thing, they had been in London for five months now, and it would be good for Freddy to travel on his own for the first time – given that ‘on his own’ meant that he would be going in a party of fifty people, all of whom he already knew. For another, there was nothing at all to do at the camp except train, watch the training, then eat and take baths and watch training films and maybe a DVD in the evening. There were no temptations for Freddy to give in to (not that he was that kind of boy) and there was by the same token nothing for Patrick to do. So he chose to stay in London. He could be miserable on his own for a change. They were so rich now that he could have flown home to see his wife and daughters for a week, but that, again, felt unmanly to Patrick. It would be too like a child running to its mother to seek comfort.
So Patrick had the best part of a week on his own. The housekeeper prepared meals and left instructions on how to reheat them; the meals were in plastic containers in the fridge, the instructions, in printed handwriting, were on a notepad next to the cooker. Patrick followed the instructions, then added extra chilli sauce to make the food palatable. For the first two days, Mickey called him up to ask how he was doing. Patrick was grateful for his concern, but hid his gratitude behind a gruff manner because he didn’t want to seem gushing. He did that so effectively that Mickey thought he was annoying Patrick by fussing over him, and so stopped ringing. Freddy rang in the evenings, usually with music playing or someone laughing in the background. Freddy was happy. He liked having lots of people around him. Patrick Kamo, on his own in the London house in the rainy non-existent English summer, was as lonely and as bored and as underemployed as he had ever been in his life.
He took to going for walks. Up to now, most of the city he had seen had been out of a car window, and usually while travelling to or from somewhere with Freddy and Mickey. He had occasionally taken walks around the block, to the shops or just to get out of the house for a few minutes, but since it was hard for Freddy to go out in public now without being recognised, his time was mainly spent in cars or buildings. Patrick, left to his own devices, decided to change that. On Tuesday he went across the Common to the south, down past Balham and Tooting, and understood for the first time the alternation between the clusters of shops in old high streets followed by long stretches, block after block after street after street, of identical houses, all tightly squeezed in, and then the open stretches of the various commons. On that walk, he began to head eastwards towards Streatham, then tired and looped back and found his own way home after hitting the South Circular and following it around. The traffic had come to a complete halt, and he must have overtaken hundreds, perhaps thousands, of cars at his easy strolling pace. When he got to King’s Avenue he discovered the reason: a helicopter was parked in the middle of the road, with two police cars to either side of it, lights flashing. He had heard of this but never seen it, the Air Ambulance. An Asian police officer stood behind a cordon and allowed pedestrians past. There was a white van, askew across two lanes of the road, and a glimpse of something wedged under its front wheels; from the stoops and frowns of the men around it, something was caught up in something else. A bicycle. Its rider could not have survived. Patrick felt pity but also incomprehension: this was a rich country, why would anyone choose to ride a bicycle?
The next day he went north-east, towards Stockwell, past people speaking a language he took time to realise was Portuguese, past busy roads and housing estates which looked like places he would not want to live, all the way to the river and a sudden, unexpected view of the Houses of Parliament. He stopped to look at the broad grey river and the handsome old buildings, and as he did so a woman came up to ask him to take a photograph of her and her friend. It was the first time anyone had spoken to him since Mickey had stopped ringing him. He blinked to clear his sight, looked through the viewfinder, and took a photograph of the two middle-aged women in anoraks with their arms linked together, and the Houses of Parliament out of focus in the background behind them. Then he walked home.
The effect of his long solo foot trips through the city wasn’t to make him suddenly love London, but he began to feel that he understood it a little better – understood where things were, understood the rhythm of the city. Patrick realised that what was disconcerting for him was the impression of everybody being busy all the time. People always seemed to be doing things. Even when they weren’t doing anything, they were walking dogs, or going to betting shops, or reading newspapers at bus stops, or listening to music through headphones, or skateboarding along the pavement, or eating fast food as they walked along the street – so even when they weren’t doing things, they were doing things.
On the third morning Patrick woke late; the building noises which were never absent on a Pepys Road morning had for some reason not broken through into his sleep. He ate toast and an entirely flavourless banana and instead of struggling with the coffee-maker – which had a French-language instruction manual but was still impossible to work out – brewed strong stewed coffee in a jug. He shuffled around the house a little bit, dressed, and left when the housekeeper arrived at about half past ten.
Patrick’s third walk took him north, towards the river. He went down a local street which he’d never visited even though it was just around the corner: it had, it turned out, a delicatessen, a shoe shop, and a gym where an outstandingly fat man was fighting his own shortness of breath as he tried to chain up a bicycle. A minicab office, a pub, a pizza restaurant which might not yet be open for the day, or which might have gone out of business, it was hard to tell. Down the hill, past a greengrocer’s shop with a sign in the window saying ‘African Vegetables’. Under a railway bridge, past a huge poster with a close-up photo of a man’s crotch dressed in Y-fronts. Past a bus stop with the usual cast of Londoners smoking, playing electronic games, listening to music, staring into space, all as if those activities were jobs in themselves. Past the gasholder, through the park, past joggers and cyclists, down to the
