Entanglement. Katy Mahood
and dirt; the kind of freedom you only feel in a place where you know you belong. He was a child of North London: Archway and Finsbury Park and a few places in between, but as an adult he felt as if the whole of the city was his. He tipped his head back and looked at the sky. When the sun shone like this, there was nowhere more full of possibility than London, he thought, rising for a moment on a wave of hope. Perhaps everything really would be alright.
By the time he reached Speakers’ Corner, the high from the beer had dissolved and he found himself heavy with fatigue. He weaved his way through the crowd gathered around a man on an upturned box who was shouting about class war and revolution, walking on into the park until he came to a huddle of trees, where the long grass brushed his legs. He lay down, listening to the swill of distant traffic, the hum of planes and the occasional shriek of a bird. He closed his eyes and for a short time he slept.
All across the skyline the swaying leaves shimmered, unsheltered by clouds, unnerved by the sudden, unexpected heat. Stella squinted into the brightness. October wasn’t supposed to be hot like this, and yet somehow in the early part of the month, it always was. The amber warmth of a low-slung autumn sun enveloped her as she touched the softness of her belly. So this is what it means to be entangled. She thought of the theory John had explained many times before: a collision of particles, an existence transformed so that even far apart they respond to one another. It was barely three months since that evening when they’d sat somewhere not far from here, cap and gown tossed to one side, kisses pungent with cheap red wine. Perhaps it had been the wine, or the heat, or simply the sweet musk of one another. How they had unleashed a need more urgent than their usual caution neither of them could say. But from that collision, their path was set.
Charlie woke with a jolt from a dream-state of falling. Glinting in the grass was a pile of change from his pocket, and tangled among it the chain of a silver St Christopher medal. Annie had given it to him when he left for university – a talisman, she’d said, though it was her, truly, who’d needed protection. And right enough she’d come to stay with him in Edinburgh the first moment she could, climbing onto the train at Kings Cross the morning after she’d finished her last O level. Charlie sat up and rubbed his face, trying to forget about the bruise on Annie’s wrist.
John knotted a tie around his neck and lay down next to Stella, watching the flimsy city clouds scudding in the high blue, pressing his palm to hers.
‘She’s going to look like you, I’ll bet.’
‘She?’
He laughed again and shrugged. ‘Fifty-fifty chance.’
Stella leaned up on her elbow, studying his face as he stared at the sky. Then, with a jerk, John checked his watch and leapt to his feet, all at once in a hurry. Stella clambered after him, but she couldn’t keep up. The fabric of her dress bunched between her legs as she ran and her heart was pounding as it tried, with difficulty, to meet the competing demands of her own body and the tiny but hungry one growing within. Panting for breath, she stopped and pressed her hand to her belly. John turned and called out. Stella! He ran back towards her, not noticing the dark-haired man lying on the grass a little way off.
Charlie raised his head to see two people running. A tall, angular man dashing ahead of a flush-cheeked girl in a red dress. She stopped a little way past Charlie, her palm pressed to her middle, but the tall man didn’t notice. The young woman looked quite out of breath and Charlie wondered if he should help, but as he began to move, the man turned and called her name and started to run back. Charlie watched them as they leaned in close, the girl’s face softening as the tall man took her hand. They walked away together and he gazed after them, feeling a stark aloneness and an ache for Beth that lodged in his chest.
At Marble Arch, John helped Stella onto the back platform of a bus as it was pulling away. As they rumbled along the Edgware Road, with its hookah pipes and coffee shops, Stella looked out at the jostling crowds of Saturday shoppers, while John glanced at his watch and jiggled his long legs. Sitting in a drift of old confetti between the columns of the register office was Liam McKearnan, John’s research partner and best friend, and Niamh, his heavily pregnant wife.
Niamh hauled herself to her feet and held out a posy of purple flowers. ‘You ready?’ she said.
Stella swapped her sandals for a pair of electric blue high heels and grinned. ‘Now, I’m ready.’
John held out his hand the wrong way up, so Stella had to turn it over to put on the ring they had bought in Hatton Garden. His skin felt warm and the smooth rounds of his fingernails slid against the flat of her palm as she pressed the gold band into its place on the left. Then Niamh and Liam clapped and Stella and John kissed – and the heels on her blue shoes clacked as they trotted down the stairs and out into the golden blast of October sunshine and traffic noise, clutching the papers of the life that lay before them.
Later, as they walked home beneath the dirty sky of the street-lit inner city, John looked at Stella, his face softened with drink and smiled. ‘Mrs Greenwood,’ he said, ‘I love you.’
Stella pressed her lips against his cheek. ‘I love you too.’
John frowned. ‘For better or worse?’
Stella nodded. ‘Yup. In sickness and in health. All that stuff.’
They both laughed, unable then to imagine their life together as being anything less than golden and fearless.
Notting Hill Gate was an upended bag of people and buses, cars and bikes, beggars and hustlers. Outside the Tube station Charlie sidestepped a pale and ragged-looking man peddling discarded day tickets. There was another man further down with greasy hair, a jerry can and a story about his broken-down car and a stolen wallet. How Charlie wanted it to be true – to give the man the money and send him home to a wife and his dinner. But that was the romantic in him, always wanting a happy ending. He knew that the only place that man would be going to was a room somewhere with a mattress on the floor, an old belt, a dirty needle. He walked on as the concrete shop fronts became the grand white façades and tall trees of Holland Park Avenue.
A group of teenagers with egg-white hardened hair pushed past him, ‘Out the way, hippy!’ A skinny boy with a studded collar and army boots sneered and hawked onto the pavement. Charlie sighed and stepped over the globule of phlegm, waiting by the marbled front of an undertakers for the group to move on. Without meaning to, he found himself reading a discreet notice in the window, written in a tight and tidy hand. It is with regret that due to industrial action we are unable to assist with funerals at this time. Bloody hell, even the undertakers are striking, Charlie thought. Something must be really wrong with our country if we can’t even bury the dead. He watched the punks recede and wondered when this bleakness had set in. In the months since Beth had been in France, he’d seen it worsen, a desperation that was beginning to boil over. Battles were brewing across London, as recession and frustration turned to despair and hate. Skinheads with swastika tattoos, stop-and-search, racial tensions reaching breaking point. But Charlie, Beth had written in her last letter, how could we have forgotten so soon where hate like this can take us?
Across the street from a green-tiled pub, Charlie heard the sound of fiddle music, a scratched tune that ran like a river, pulsing with his blood and beating with his heart as he waited at the bus stop. In the darkening sky above, he could see the pinpricks of two faint stars and an outline of the brightening moon. The pub opposite glowed warm and he felt a sudden urge to go in, to hear the music, to have another drink – but he needed to go. Limpet should be at work in the pub by now and he wanted to find him. The sound of the violin blew in gusts and he stood quite still and listened until his bus arrived.
Fifteen minutes later, he stepped off the backboard of the bus and onto Kilburn High Road. The street was in its evening half-life; shops shutting up as the pubs began to blink and rouse themselves. Saturday’s detritus was littered across the pavement: stray pages of newspaper, fallen fruit from the greengrocer’s, dog-ends and dog shit. Pinching his cigarette tight in his fingers, Charlie