It was all going so well at first (although we all know what happens in stories that start like that). Grace seemed excited when we went to pick her up. She wanted us to stay at her door, however, while she got her camera and so on together.
‘You can’t come in,’ she said, practically shutting the door in Joe’s face. ‘Don’t let him into my flat, Robyn, it’s disgusting in here.’
‘Believe me, Grace,’ Joe spoke through the crack in her door (behind it, we could hear her clattering around), ‘nothing shocks me. Nothing.’ I looked at him, so tall, at his intelligent, open face. I still found him beautiful, even when I was annoyed with him – and contemplated whether anything would really shock him.
When Grace finally emerged she looked like a different person. She had this swagger. She pointed the camera in Joe’s face and took a shot and I had a glimpse of the woman Grace used to be. And then she put the camera down and did her nervous little geisha shuffle across the scrubland, where kids were playing football in the sun – and she was gone again.
We found our way across the confusing maze of underground burrows that is the Elephant subway, and arrived at the market. Grace knew everyone, everyone knew Grace:
‘All right, Gracie?’
I love a London market, full of life, full of colour. I was glad we’d chosen here for the job. A man, wearing a cap that said bling, held out a diamond-encrusted watch in the palm of his hand. ‘This’d cost ya easy two hundred nicker in Debenhams.’ It glittered and flashed in the sun. The dark head of a man dipped and rose as he prayed on the prayer mat laid out behind his stall, on which stood shiny brogues in boxes. A couple in love – him wearing a kilt, her with turquoise hair and earrings that had stretched her lobes so that they hung like chewing gum – kissed in front of a stall selling large-size ladies’ knickers. A man wearing a belt that said
DEATH BEFORE DISHONOUR
ate fried chicken from a box, and danced behind his stall to reggae. His colleague had a new pair of trainers – the new Converse All Stars. ‘Brown leather, box-fresh,’ he said. ‘Delivered to the Oxford Street Branch only yesterday.’
‘Doze are nice, man, nice …!’
said his friend with the
DEATH BEFORE DISHONOUR
belt. I wondered if he knew what that meant.
‘Can I take your photo, Ron?’
‘Course you can, Gracie. Do I look pretty if I do this?’ Ron was maybe fifty, but looked a decade older in the way that people from round here often do. He owned a stall that sold Hawaiian shirts and shorts, but didn’t look like he’d been further than the Dartford Tunnel. When he smiled, all his teeth were yellow and several were missing and yet he had the bluest eyes you’d ever seen. ‘I’d bet he was a hit down the Palace Bingo when he was a lad,’ Joe said, as we stepped back while Grace composed the perfect portrait. The Palace Bingo stood pride of place at the top of the Elephant Shopping Centre. Grace, Yolanda and I had been there on a few occasions, on a rainy afternoon. Yolanda in her glittery hot pants and her Stetson.
Grace was clicking like a pro.
‘That is beaudiful, Ron, beaudiful! You got the golden triangle right there!’ Grace had explained to me once about the ‘golden triangle’ rule of photography: that if you looked at anything of natural beauty – flowers, butterfly wings, beautiful faces – they all had this ‘golden triangle’ within them, this natural symmetry.
‘Look at you with yer golden triangle, Ron,’ Grace said again, clicking away.
‘Golden balls more like!’ shouted the guy with the new trainers. The man on the stall next to him, selling Calvin Klein boxers and the like, laughed wheezily.
To look at Grace with her camera, you’d never think she was mentally ill and on the cusp of a crisis, but I knew the telltale signs. She was paranoid and making connections that weren’t there. Putting two and two together and getting five, like a child might do. We went to a Polish café in the shopping precinct for lunch. I could see Grace eyeing up Joe suspiciously. She’d not looked at him like that on the previous time they’d met.
‘Where d’you live then?’ she said.
‘Manchester, remember?’ Joe smiled.
‘Oh,’ she said, going back to her plate, but I saw her face darken. She watched him like a hawk as he ate. I knew what was coming next. ‘Did you know Larry Gates?’ she said. ‘He was from Manchester.’ Grace had told me this once, in one of her detailed monologues about her past – he was a long-distance lorry driver from Manchester. He and her mum had met when he’d come to stay at the hotel.
‘Manchester’s a big old place, Grace,’ I said. ‘I doubt it.’ I didn’t want to get onto Larry Gates today. I didn’t want to feed her paranoia. Today was about moving forward.
‘Who’s Larry Gates?’ said Joe. I gave him a look that told him to drop it.
‘He’s a nasty piece of work,’ said Grace. ‘That’s what he is, Joe. He did things to—’
‘Grace…’ I said gently. ‘Let’s not get into that at the moment, shall we? I don’t want you to get yourself upset.’
She dug a fork into her Polish sausage. ‘I’m gonna snap his neck if I ever see him again.’ She said, and I winced. Perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea to ask Joe to come too. Still, you could tell he worked with people who’d fallen through the gaps of society, because he didn’t bat an eyelid.
Even though it was a connection she’d made up in her head, I could tell that the Manchester thing had thrown Grace a bit. We ate the rest of our lunch in silence, Grace eyeballing Joe, watching every lift of his fork to his mouth, every self-conscious clearing of his throat, every reach for the salt, and Joe doing his best to ignore it and make conversation – about Poland. Had I been to Poland? Would I like to go to Poland? Did I like this Polish sausage? I was looking at him and thinking how mind-blowing our story so far had been, how far we’d come, at the same time as about the flashback I’d had that morning, and the fact that I didn’t know if I could do this any more. And I was angry with Joe. It’s wrong, but I was, because I’d always known I couldn’t do this, deep down, and yet he wouldn’t have it. He trusted me and I now couldn’t see it through.
Joe was amazing, he could have any girl he wanted and yet he wanted me, who was clearly too damaged to be able to give him that. And now the fallout was going to be huge. I was going to hurt him so badly, again, and this could have been prevented if I’d just not weakened, if I’d just stuck to my guns.
My mind might have been racing, but Grace seemed to recover herself for a while after lunch, completely absorbed in her photography. She still had all the charm of a professional and people were queuing up to have their picture taken. It was so good, for once, to see her in control of something. She taught Joe and I a few things about composition that day: the rule of thirds, F-stops and shutter speeds. It stopped us actually having to have a conversation with each other. In the afternoon, she and Joe went off, taking photos together for half an hour, while I made some work calls.
I was still on the phone when I saw Joe waving me over. There seemed to be a problem. Grace was standing in front of a stall that sold Bibles, religious pamphlets and books called things like
Living in the Light of Eternity
and
Come, Let’s Teach the World About Jesus
. The woman in charge of the stall was a large black woman wearing traditional African robes and a blue turban. There was a small black-and-white TV on the front table of the stall, playing the film,
The Crucifixion
, with the scene of the actual crucifixion on a loop.
‘I see she’s going for a subtle approach,’ deadpanned Joe. Grace was transfixed by the film; she wanted to take the stall owner’s portrait in front of it, but the woman wasn’t keen; she was having a heated debate with a man about God, while flicking her hand away at Grace like she was an annoying fly. ‘Miss, miss,’ Grace was saying brightly (slightly manically, but brightly), ‘let me take your picture next to Jesus. Poor old Jesus on his cross, it’d cheer him up,’ she added with dazzling understatement. But the woman was too busy ramming her thoughts about God down the man’s throat. She was shouting. I could tell it was making Grace stressed.
‘He needed to die to relieve the sin! We are born sinners,’ she was yodelling, arms outstretched to Him Almighty. ‘Accept God as your leader and saviour and he will forgive your sins.’
Grace was holding her camera up, ready to shoot. I tried to move her away, distract her, but she wouldn’t have it, and I didn’t want her to cause a scene. She caused a scene anyway: the woman finally stopped talking, turned to Grace and, in a rather un-Christian fashion and a very thick accent, snapped, ‘Stop that! Stop that now, wo-man. You get away from my stall.’
I stepped forward. This was all we needed.
‘The photos aren’t to sell or go in a newspaper or anything,’ I said. ‘She’s just practising. Could she just take your picture …?’
‘No.’ She was wagging her finger, talking very loudly now. ‘No, I do not want my photo taken.’ She made a whistling sound, as if to shoo Grace off like a dog. After everyone had been so nice and accommodating, Grace was taken aback. She might have made a little ‘tsk’ sound through her teeth – nothing more – but the woman in the turban started shouting about madness and sin and the devil. Grace shouted back even louder:
‘You say all this about God forgiving our sins. You call yourself a Christian, darlin’, but I think there are some sins that should not be forgiven. Is he going to forgive Larry his sins? My stepfather his sins? Do you wanna know what he did to me, that dirty bastard? And then he just queues up at the gates of fucking Paradise, does he? And it’s all all right ’cause God will forgive him?’
I had my hands on Grace’s shoulders, trying to move her gently away. ‘Grace, stop it. Come on, you can’t shout at people in a public place like that.’
‘She’s shouting at me!’ she protested, and part of me agreed with the essence of what she’d said about Larry: I was thinking about how one terrible event, one evil act – not even a series of them like Grace had endured – could ruin your life forever.
‘She blaspheme!’ The woman’s eyes were bulging out of her face as she jabbed a finger in Grace’s direction. ‘She blaspheme in the face of God. Have you no shame, woman? God have mercy on you!’
I wondered who was more mad, Grace or her.
‘Oh, fuck off,’ Grace said. Both Joe and I sort of made a lunge for Grace – an attempt to get her away from the drama as the next few seconds unfolded – but neither of us moved fast enough. Grace took an orange from a stall nearby, hurled it at the TV – at Christ on the Cross (thankfully, it narrowly missed and bounced off the TV set instead), and ran off. I ran after her – as fast as a woman with a twenty-four-week bump can run – but Joe was close behind. Turned out I couldn’t run to save my life, anyway, because he caught up with me almost immediately. ‘Robbie, stop,’ he cried, grabbing me by the shoulder and swinging me around. It was the first time since that day outside the museum that I’d seen Joe look properly angry, livid actually. ‘For God’s sake. What are you doing, running after her? You’re six months pregnant.’
I knew he was right, at the same time as feeling this overwhelming responsibility: Grace was in crisis, she needed me, the woman on the Bible stall was threatening to call the police. If the police were called, Grace would undoubtedly be sectioned. She’d end up in hospital. The very thing I could not let happen.
I tried to argue with him – ‘I can’t just let her run off, Joe, you don’t understand—’
but he cut in:
‘No,
you
don’t understand,’ he shouted, and I stopped. ‘You don’t understand, Robyn.’
I stopped then, saw him as if for the first time. Oh, God. He looked so stressed, so pale.
‘Look, sorry,’ he said, more quietly this time. ‘But please? Will you just sit down?’ Before I could do anything, he’d gestured to the man on the fruit stall to give up his seat, who brought it round for me. ‘I’ll deal with it,’ Joe said.
The panic attack came on in the five minutes that Joe was gone talking to the woman who owned the Bible stall, presumably to make sure she didn’t call the police. (I’d no idea how Joe knew how vital this was, but he did.) I suddenly felt that feeling of detachment again, like I was underwater, or walking along at night in the dark; the blood in my ears, my chest tight. By the time Joe came back, I was hyperventilating, my fists already curled in, shaking and sweating like someone in the grips of a fever. A small audience had gathered (talk about Grace, I didn’t half know how to make a scene), and the man on the fruit stall had given me a brown paper bag to breathe into.
‘Robyn?’ Joe dropped to his knees in front of me. He looked waxen, poor bloke, terrified. ‘What’s wrong? What the hell’s going on?’
I would have told him but I couldn’t catch my breath enough to speak.
‘Someone help me,’ he called to the people behind. ‘Someone help!’ he shouted. ‘My girlfriend’s in labour! ‘We need an ambulance, over here, please!’
I remembered another weakness of Joe’s, as well as the impulsiveness: he wasn’t always calm in a crisis.
‘Joe, it’s ok, I’m not …’ If I could have got my breath, I could have talked to him.
‘Where’s Grace?’ I managed to say.
‘Fuck Grace, Robyn … Jesus!’
He could see that I needed to know about Grace.
‘Look, Grace is okay, Robbie, okay?’ He was kneeling up, his hands either side of my thighs, as if to stop me keeling sideways. ‘Grace is streetwise. She’s hard as nails and from Elephant and Castle. You’re the one we’re all worried about – where’s the pain?’
I didn’t blame him for thinking I was in labour, because I was breathing like I was – or how they depict it in the soap operas, anyway: panting like a dog.
‘There is no pain,’ I managed.
‘Can you feel the baby?’ he said. ‘We have to get you to the day assessment unit. Dr Love said any worries at all and we had to get you to the day assessment unit.’
‘
Joe
…’ All I could do was to hold my head in my hands, keep my eyes closed until the wave of terror passed. ‘We don’t need an ambulance. We don’t need to go to the assessment unit.’ For some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to admit to Joe I was having a panic attack, it felt ridiculous.