Demo Read online

  The fancy one, the clover leaf, was the one she tried first. She fitted the key into the left-hand lock. There was some movement, but rusty, a scraping sound; it didn’t give. Not even when she wiggled it minutely, ear to the trunk like a safe breaker. Plangent notes rained down on her. She took out the key, looked at it, fitted it in the other lock. The same. It moved, but only slightly, a scratchy noise. Turning harder could break it. The mechanism might be freed by some WD40, if there was any in the house. Or olive oil, faute de mieux. But this would mean getting tied up with Mother again. The Gordian knot.

  She sat back on her heels and let the cello work her over like a Swedish massage. Her hair-shirt irritation was gone but the back of her neck had grown stiff. She rolled her head in time to the Allemande. Reached round and palpated her neck when the Courante took off; played the top of her spine like a piano. Did some stretches to the slow Sarabande, sat back down on her heels. Breathed.

  The other key. The plain one. Dangling at the moment from the right-hand lock. She removed the clover key, inserted the plain round one. The mechanism gave in one smooth click and the catch flew open. Was this some fairy-tale test of character? Deep curtsies from Bach’s music, and the quick, light steps ran rings round her. She put the key in the other lock; its catch gave way too, with a mousetrap spring. You dancer! As Danny Kilkenny was wont to say. Jiggety jig! The plain one does it. The hard-working, plain girl, dressed in grey, kind to her father and the crone at the door. The fancy girl, haughty and vain, a bodkin in her poor father’s heart. Laetitia pulled out the key, hooked her forefinger through the ring, held it up and examined the two keys hanging together. They looked identical at the business end. No discernible difference. She let them drop with a noisy jingle onto the desk beside the laptop. A mystery.

  OK. The lid ought to open now. So what was stopping her? Her hands were resting on the leather top on either side of the letters. L. G. L. She traced it with her finger. G. The letters were old-fashioned as well as faded, a defunct typeface. Like nineteenth-century newspapers. Like The Times reporting on the Boer War, or some such distant event, when the metal letters came from a compositor’s tray and were set in rows to make up the words for printing. L. G. Laetitia. Laetitia what? Garbo, Gulbenkian, Gardenia? Gilgamesh, Gilfeather, Ghirlandaio? Gabriel, Golightly, Gaddafi? Geranium, Geronimo, Guerlain? Maybe just plain George? Laetitia George. Gordon, Godard, Grant. Gramsci… That would certainly consign her to black sheep status in the family. Laetitia Gramsci. No, not Gramsci. It lacked euphony. Letisha Gramshee. Sounded slurred. As if a drunk were saying it. Her mother after a session with the decanter. Aunt Laetitia would certainly have a more harmonious name. Bound to. She moved her hands down to the released catches; pinged them twice; pulled them down till they almost clicked home again. Almost.

  Her thumbs could just about squeeze in under the edge of the lid. Slowly she eased it up. It was heavy. Heavier than it ought to be if it were only leather. The inside of the lid felt soft. Velvet? She peered in through the crack. It was dark in there. But there was nothing shaped like a severed head or mutilated limbs, as far as she could see. No bones. She breathed in deeply. A smell of old leather and older paper hit her. No rotting flesh. She opened the lid fully till it leant against the back of the futon.

  Oh.

  There was hardly anything there at all. A few papers. So how come it felt so heavy? She put her hand in and riffled through the things at the bottom. Just some old papers, fragile and yellowing. A small piece stuck to her nail with static electricity. She peered at it, sat up on the futon beside the trunk. Nothing. There was nothing on it. Fly away, Peter. She waved her hand and the fragment fluttered down behind the bed. There was a small book with a leather cover, smooth to touch. She took it out and set it on the seat beside her. Some envelopes. She picked one up and felt inside. A letter in this one. In them all, by the looks of things. Some quite fat.

  Oh, well.

  The leather book was intriguing, at least. She took it onto her lap and sat back in the seat. No L. G. on the cover of this. Plain brown leather. Soft. Calfskin, perhaps. Kid. The cover extended beyond the pages and formed a kind of protective lip for the deckle-edged sheets. Tiny stitches ran round it, so close in colour as to be barely visible. She opened the book. The spine creaked slightly and a dry papery smell pricked her nose. Crimson. Oh. The endpapers were deep, deep crimson. Unmarked. They looked new. Vivid. She turned to the first cream-coloured page. It was rather fine, despite the deckling. Not tissue-fine like old bibles, but clearly good-quality paper. It was blank. She turned to the next page. There were a few lines of writing here, a small, neat hand, ink faded to sepia, some words barely legible. It said… it said…

  ‘Sweet joy befall thee!’

  To my darling, darling,

  only love, my joy,

  my Titia, from your

  very own Harry.

  Florence, April 1915

  Laetitia felt the hairs rise on the back of her neck. Aunt Laetitia had a lover. Or a husband. They knew Blake. And they were in Florence! Or at least Harry was, when he dedicated the book. Nineteen fifteen. During the First World War. Nineteen fifteen? But wouldn’t travel in Europe have been restricted then? A soldier. He must have been a soldier. In Italy, though? Maybe he was a foreign correspondent for a newspaper. War correspondent for the Daily Telegraph. A diplomat, possibly.

  Or a poet. A wandering minstrel, granted poetic licence to roam freely.

  She eased her thumb under the next sheet and turned it. The handwriting was different here, a full page of it, bigger, bolder, looping across from the stitching near the spine right to the outer edge. Aunt Laetitia!

  My first entry in the book H.

  has sewn for me. It is a beautiful

  thing – the paper, the kidskin

  cover, the blood-red endpapers;

  presented to me a few moments

  ago, wrapped in green satin, tied

  with a lilac bow, while we sat in

  the shade on the edge of the sunny

  Piazza della Signoria, where now I

  write, as Harry reads…

  Hand sewn?

  A dun-coloured pigeon has landed

  on the replica of Michelangelo’s

  David – the fate of all outdoor statuary

  – though the sculpture is no less

  magnificent for that…

  Aunt Laetitia’s journal! This was too spooky. Written in Florence with her lover Harry at her side, at the time of the First World War. Her own neglected journal was still in her rucksack; she’d written nothing in it since they’d got on the bus home. The bag was on the floor on the other side of the desk. She unzipped the front pocket and took out the book. Black, cloth-covered, A5 size, in contrast to her aunt’s delicately handmade notebook. The last page she’d written in was marked by one of Danny’s leaflets, folded in half, a photo montage of Bush with Tony Blair as a ventriloquist’s dummy on his knee, hand up his back. Crude, but effective. Bush’s lips were slightly open, teeth closed, in what could easily be a gottle of geer expression; Blair was grinning inanely. Danny had drawn in a speech balloon in the white space above Blair’s head: If you do as Dubya asks, you’ll get a good one up the ass! She set it aside and picked up her notebook. There were only a few lines on the page it had marked, written before they left to get the bus:

  Sunday, 10 November 2002

  Glad to be going back. Too much tension here. Getting used to J. without his dreads. Don’t know if he is. Hope we can get onto the bus the Ks aren’t on…

  Bit of a contrast to Aunt Laetitia’s musings! She put her journal on the desk, picked up her aunt’s book and leafed through the rest of it. There were perhaps a hundred pages and some had been torn out; near the stitching in certain places were ragged edges with traces of ink, the beginnings of letters, trailing their coats, the little tails that lead you in. How annoying! Aunt Laetitia had secrets, things she had written and didn’t want read.

  She closed the bo
ok. This was something to savour, to take her time with. She’d get to know this Laetitia gradually. If she were able to with the evident censorship. The book felt warm in her hands now. Julian would adore it. He’d be dying to see it when she told him about it. Why had her father never mentioned anything about Aunt Laetitia? Something to ask when he next phoned. She set the notebook on the desk side by side with her own journal and turned to the trunk.

  OK. Why are you so heavy? The lid and the bottom were lined with what looked like suede: soft, unpolished hide, a shade lighter than the tanned leather on the outside. She looked more closely at the inside. In one corner of the lid, a few of the stitches had come away, leaving a small gap. She pushed her finger into it. Cold. Something cold and hard. She shifted the trunk round so that the light shone directly onto the inner lid. Her finger eased open the hole again and she tapped with her nail at the surface underneath. Metal. Lead? A lead-lined trunk. Bit strange. But possible, definitely possible. Surely she hadn’t carted it to Italy with her; it weighed a ton! Hardly practical for travelling. Another mystery.

  The handful of letters and papers at the bottom of the trunk didn’t look that inviting; she shuffled them to one side and closed the lid, clicked the catches into the slots, reached behind her for the keys and used the roundhead to lock it again. It didn’t feel as heavy when she lifted it back into the corner, restored the lamp and the trunk’s function as a bedside table. Perhaps Aunt Laetitia’s memoirs were a weight off its mind. She slipped the keys into the pocket of her jeans and went to find her bedding.

  It must have been a good ten hours she’d been asleep by the time the smell of coffee reached her, and the little scratchy noises her mother made in the kitchen downstairs resolved themselves into something vaguely recognizable. She didn’t know where she was at first; opened her eyes expecting the layout of her room in the pensione, Italian voices outside in the street. A trick of the daylight, strained through the yellow blind, gave the illusion of sunshine, but she could hear the thrum of heavy rain. At the back of the desk a shimmering silver oblong, the reflection of a strip of window, strung with raindrops, was visible at the bottom of the blind. Glass beads flung on glass. Who said that? She closed her eyes again. The oblong stayed, pale green now, moving behind her eyelids.

  Light rippled over her face; the room was warm. Beside her Julian stirred, his dreadlocks spilling onto her arm, ropey, comforting. He groaned in his sleep, turned and, in one smooth movement was on top of her and inside her, moving in her. His breath was warm on her cheek and he groaned again when he came and kept moving in her until she came and she

  woke

  the waves of her orgasm receding

  fuck me fuck me fuck me

  woke in a strange room to the sound of rain on the window, November outside, masquerading as summer, London pretending to be Florence.

  Not Florence. Somewhere else. Where? It had the feel of another time. A different place. Funny she should dream of Julian with his dreads and not his new velvet scalp. Which she preferred really. A flash of his head between her legs, her hands stroking the short fuzz prickling her inner thighs, sandgold against her dark pubic hair, her fingers convulsing and nothing to hold on to, her nails digging into his scalp, drawing blood, as his tongue brought her to orgasm. But it wasn’t then. When was it? The mood of the dream belonged to a moment suspended, a time outside time. When she had no desire to be anywhere else in the world with anyone else. Ever. That was it. And you think the moment will last but it doesn’t. Someone has to get up to pee. Or a dog barks outside. Or a phone goes off in somebody’s pocket, in the heap of clothes on the floor. It doesn’t last. You revisit it occasionally. Unexpectedly. Like in this dream. As if it’s still there, a little pocket of time you can dip into. If you’re lucky. If you happen to be wearing the proper coat.

  Her mother was at the kitchen table with the Telegraph, her glasses low on the bridge of her nose, coffee mug in both hands, the smell of Colombian dark roast like the possibility of warmth between them.

  Morning, Mother.

  She brought her head up slowly from the paper and regarded Laetitia over the top of her glasses. Did you sleep well? Is the futon comfortable? She said the word with an exaggerated French accent, her mouth pursed for the first syllable, releasing the second, the almost — ong, so that the effect was more comic Japanese.

  Yes. Très confortable.

  Her mother smiled. Bon, she said, très bien. She set her glasses on the paper and got up. Voulez-vous du café, ma chérie?

  Oui. S’il vous plaît. There was no sign of a hangover. Nothing that looked like the splitting headache she deserved. She could obviously hold her drink. Only her eyes were a little red-rimmed. Laetitia sat down and squinted at the paper. One lens of the glasses magnified the middle of a paragraph; it bulged towards her.

  … bogus asylum claims…

  … swampingthe town of…

  Fucking typical! Her mother set an espresso cup beside her, white china with a silver rim, half an inch of thick black liquid in the bottom.

  There you are, bunny. She sat down, put her glasses on again. Laetitia waited, but she didn’t deliver her usual line: This coffee is like tar, darling; it can’t be good for one. Unsaid, it buzzed like a fly between them. Her mother waved her hand, swatting it away. A truce then. They would steer clear of politics, religion, addiction. Don’t mention the whisky. Don’t mention the war.

  The demo was fantastic, since you ask, she said. Seven hundred thousand at least. Some reports said around a million. She took a sip of the espresso and eyed her mother over the cup. The atmosphere was terrific. So many like-minded people together. Fabulous.

  Her mother lifted hurt eyes, underlined by frameless glasses, held Laetitia’s own eyes past the point of discomfort, bit her top lip and got up, gathering the pages of the paper.

  I’ll leave you to your espresso, darling. And she went out of the kitchen, closed the door with deliberate gentleness behind her.

  Fuck!

  Laetitia looked at the window. Rain was streaming down it. Grey, grey, grey. The wet black branches of the plum tree at the end of the garden swayed and scattered droplets across the sodden lawn. No Daddy, no Julian. Just grey and the prospect of greyer. She swilled the treacly liquid round in the bottom of the cup, upended it against her lip, let the thick drops slide onto her tongue and down her throat. It was like tar. She set the cup on its saucer and decided.

  The big, square suspended clock was easy to locate. She looked for him underneath it, as she came down the platform and, sure enough, there he was, the hood of his parka pulled forward over his head against the Glasgow cold. Instantly recognizable, even so. Julian. Even sans dreads. He saw her and came quickly towards her, pushing through the stream of passengers that poured off the London train.

  Tish! God, you’re laden. Give me that. He had one hand on her shoulder and reached for the case with the other, a frown of concern on his face.

  No, this is the laptop my father gave me; I’ll carry it. You take this, if you like.

  She set the black case on its edge between her feet, while she shrugged her rucksack off. Her hands were shaking. Julian grabbed her by the shoulders, her elbows pinned to her sides by the straps of the bag, drew her to him and kissed her on the mouth. She could smell him. His tobacco breath, his sweat rising from underneath the parka. She could smell him. He grabbed his hood off his face, pressed his lips hard against hers and pushed his salty tongue between her teeth. He held her there in the middle of the concourse, with people going round them, giving them a wide berth, looking at them sideways.

  When he pulled away, their breath merged in one cloud, her rucksack slid off her arms and dropped to the tiles behind her. His face was white and the pale fuzz on his head had regrown a little in the two weeks since she’d seen him. She reached out to touch it, the soft bristle of it, and ran her hand down his face. He hadn’t shaved either; there was the makings of a beard straggling through. Four days’ growth.
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br />   Your hands are cold. He unzipped his parka to his waist, took her hands in his and put first one, then the other inside, crushed them to his ribs under his arms. She could feel the heat of his thin body through wool, the rickety beat of his heart. When she looked at his face again, his eyes were fixed on her, darker than usual, a funny colour in the artificial light. He knew her. That’s what it was. That was what she—

  Scuse me, pal. Could you spare some change?

  The old man was standing right beside them before she noticed him. There were only a few other people scattered about in the station and the crowd off the train had disappeared. He held out an empty cardboard coffee cup; there was still a faint coffee smell off it. Grey synthetic stuffing poked from a hole above the pocket of his black anorak. He was staring at Julian. She wondered what Julian would do and she tried to move her hands from his armpits. He squeezed them tighter, ignored the old man and his cup.

  Scuse me, pal, any spare change? He thrust the cup closer to Julian. She could smell some kind of cheap, sweet alcohol. And worse. She tried not to breathe in.

  Fuck off, mate, Julian said. Go and rummage in a bin.

  With all due respect, sir, there nay bins. That’s the point. He turned big watery eyes on Laetitia. Beggin your pardon, hen. No since Nine Eleven. She thought at first he said, nine a love in.

  He switched his attention back to Julian. Bombs, see. Could be members a the al-Qaeda network anywhere. Even here in the dear green place, dear old Glesga toon. He waved his cup in big arcs. There was a drip of clear mucus on the end of his nose, ready to fall next time he turned his head.

  Give him something, Julian. Just give him something.

  The old man bowed towards her, kept his rheumy eyes on her face, smiled a little smile. His chin was silver with rough stubble; the drip on his nose quivered. He straightened and turned back to Julian.

  And all they would have to do, sir, is pap a few dods a Semtex, tied tay an alarm clock, intay the aforementioned bins and, Bob’s your uncle. Central Station blown tay bits. Hunners a casualties.