Portobello

'I remember everything about that day. Except the bit when I was asleep.'

'You went to sleep? A sixteen-year-old?' She said it for something to say because she could tell now what was coming and she wanted to stop it or at least postpone it.

'I've always slept a lot,' he said. 'My mother says I was a very good baby. I slept the whole night through from the time I was born. I can sleep now – I only have to lie down and close my eyes and I'm asleep.'

This time she didn't say, 'Go on.'

He was full of food and it was very warm. He lay down on a blanket, meaning just to lie there and stare up at the blue sky, and he told Amy not to go into the water. It was too soon anyway. It was bad for you to go swimming straight after you'd eaten. She was to wait for him, lie down and have a rest and wait for him. They should give it half an hour. When he woke up she was gone. Her clothes were still there in a heap but she was gone.

'I'd slept too long, you see, Ella.' It was the first time he had called her by her given name. 'She must have got tired of waiting. I was so frightened, Ella. I was in a panic. I ran up and down, calling her. I picked up her clothes and looked underneath them – mad, wasn't it? As if she could have been hiding underneath her clothes. I was afraid to go into the water – I don't mean I was afraid of the water – I was afraid of what I'd find. And I did find it. I went into the water, I looked for her and I did find her. In the end I did. I found her dead body. It was bleached so white like she was made of bone, soft bone. And she was all caught up in the weed and the reeds. I couldn't pull her out, not on my own I couldn't. I went back to the house and told my parents. I had to, though it was terrible. At first my father wouldn't believe she was dead, he said I'd made a mistake, she couldn't be dead. We all went down to the lake and he and my mother managed to pull her out. When Pa knew she was dead I thought he was going to kill me. My mother had to hold him back. She put her arms round his waist and held on to him and told me to run away, to go into the house.'

Ella was shaking her head, murmuring, 'How dreadful, how dreadful.'

'I'll tell you the rest of it next time. He never spoke to me again. I'll tell you about that next time I come here or you come to me. You will come to me, won't you? I want to tell you the rest of it. I can't tell you now. I'm so tired. There's nothing tires me so much as talking about it.'

CHAPTER ELEVEN

While he was in the hospital Uncle Gib never came near him. Lance didn't expect it, he'd have been so surprised to see him he'd have thought he was having a nightmare. It was amazing enough when his mum came. He was all over bruises, he had something wrong with one of his elbows and two broken ribs. It was touch and go whether they removed his spleen, or so he thought he'd overheard them saying but this might have been something he remembered from watching ER. He didn't know where his spleen was or what was the use of it but he was relieved they weren't going to take it out.

The day before they discharged him something wonderful happened. It was the last thing he'd have thought possible but the only thing he really wanted. The ward was full of visitors except round his bed. He had no one, which was normal, and when Gemma came in he thought he was seeing things because all that kicking and punching had done his head in. She was looking more beautiful than ever, like Paris Hilton, in a sleeveless yellow dress and silver sandals with four-inch cork wedges. He couldn't speak, he just stared.

'I left Abelard with Mum,' she said. Abelard was the baby. 'How're you doing?'

'I'm good. Going home tomorrow.You're the last person I thought I'd see but it's great to see you.' He said it again. 'It's great.'

'Yeah, well, they hadn't no call to do what they did. I mean, that Ian don't know his own strength. He gets carried away. I thought, you know, I'll go over there and see Lance, it's the least I can do, I mean, tell him I'm sorry and they'd no call to do that.'

'He don't know you're here, that Fize?'

'Do me a favour. You was jealous but Fize is an animal. He reckons I'm round at Michelle's place and Mum won't say a word.'

'Gemma?'

'What?'

'Did they – I mean, that lot, did they get enough dosh from all that stuff they took off me – I mean, the necklace and stuff – like to pay for your tooth?'

For answer, she inserted one long white finger, the nail lacquered lemon yellow, into her mouth, pulled back a gleaming peachcoloured lip and showed him her flawless incisors and molars. 'It's a temporary for now but Mr Ahmed'll be putting the permanent one on soon as it's been made.'

'That's good,' Lance said. 'I'm really glad. That's all I nicked that stuff for. It wasn't for myself.'

Gemma smiled at him quite fondly. 'Oh, you. You was my tooth fairy, Lance, only you don't want to be so free with your fists. Specially round women. Now I've got to get over to Mum's and pick up Abelard. Shall I come and see you when you're back in that dump with old what's-his-name?'

It was a strange part of the world, the edge of Kensal, where the Portobello Road squeezed under the train line and the Westway and, wandering on, passed the Spanish convent before coming close to the suburban line and turning sharp right to become Wornington Road; a street of stalls and shops and stalls in front of shops, and especially on Saturdays, that space between was crammed full of people. American visitors, tourists from India and Japan, white-skinned white-haired housewives who lived in the old council flats and had done since they were girls, and had always shopped down the Portobello, hippies from the sixties, old now but still wearing robes and strings of beads, their long grey hair tied back in a pony tail, and the young, hundreds and thousands of the young, wearing a different uniform from their flower power grandparents but still a uniform, jeans and T-shirts and boots, unisex gear, distinguishable only because the girls had breasts and the boys carotid cartilages.

The shops sold meat and fish and cheese and bread and flowers, and junk of every possible provenance and description. The stalls sold junk too and plenty of things that weren't junk, prints and watercolours, good jewellery and bad, umbrellas, handbags, hats, leather jackets, lampshades, masks, fishnet tights and miniskirts, mirrors and fire screens and cigarette cases and long white gloves. The young ones could buy things unknown to their flower power grandparents: star fruit and custard apples, amaranth flakes, wild rice, aubergines striped like dahlias, samphire, chorizo and Chinese cabbage. The hallucinogenic fungi had been banned a couple of years before but certain herbs in innocuous-looking cellophane packs did the job just as well.

Some of the stallholders kept up a running commentary on what they had for sale, kept it up for hours, the street cries of the twentyfirst century, and their voices never grew hoarse. One of them was shouting the virtues of a cigarette substitute with a battery inside it which produced a red light and tasted of cloves but could be used – hardly smoked – in any pub or restaurant or enclosed space. As the Portobello climbed and dipped northwards and passed the old Electric Cinema, the decoration of shops and adornment of stalls became more colourful and bizarre, as if an army of graffitists or students of Banksy had been called in to make this the brightest market in London. One or two of them had painted whole sides of buildings with Caribbean festivals or medieval ladies with unicorns and knights on gold-caparisoned white chargers. Bright green and scarlet and acid yellow, orange and turquoise and, more than anything, a rich violet.

When the houses were built around the top of the Portobello, 'road' was a classier name than 'street'. And the houses are becoming classy again, tall ones divided into flats, smaller ones, the size of Uncle Gib's, smartened in ways that would be unrecognisable to their early owners. New front doors, new windows, discreet cladding, window boxes, bay trees in tubs – anchored down because this place is rich in crime – driveways off the street for cars. Curtains are gone; these windows have blinds and when these are raised you can see right through the house to the rear garden beyond. All the front rooms and dining rooms have been knocked into one through-room and the garden revealed has gum trees and spiraea and fremontodendrons – for this is twenty-first-century Britain where everyone has luxury and no one has any money. They have spent it on their homes and their holidays as it comes in, and keep on spending it. All except Uncle Gib. His house is almost in a state of nature, a unique original Victorian dwelling, circa 1880. If they had any sense, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, on whose northern border this is, would buy it off him, titivate it a bit and open it as a nineteenth-century museum.

But all they had done was send a Pest Control officer round to deal with the vermin. Far from all wanting a rat of their own, as Uncle Gib had suggested to Lance, the neighbours had complained. The Pest Control officer sniffed,