London Belongs to Us Read online

  ‘Are you all right now?’ Emmeline asks.

  I nod. ‘Much better. Let’s not talk about it any more. Not ever again. I’m going to check my phone and see if Flick has texted me.’

  First we cross over Piccadilly. It’s deserted now; a ghost road through the centre of town. It’s hard to believe that in a few short hours it will thrum with life, carrying people in cars and buses and taxis from Piccadilly Circus to Hyde Park Corner. That Sunday shoppers and tourists will amble along the pavement, staring into shop windows and buying silly hats from souvenir stalls. Now all is still, all is quiet, apart from Charlie who says, ‘Flick is never going to text you. Those posh types always stick together.’

  She’s so negative. I’m starting to think that maybe she and Emmeline shouldn’t get together if she’s not going to be supportive of Emmeline’s best friend’s lifestyle choices, and also Charlie knows nothing because as I extricate my phone from the depths of my bag, it beeps.

  ‘Ha!’ I say. ‘See! The girl code trumps poshness every time. And … oh! It’s from Mark.’

  Just seeing his name on my phone screen has my stomach lurching all over again, but I’m a warrior who isn’t afraid of a little thing like a text.

  Everyone crowds around me to see as I open it.

  Babe! U mad at me? Don’t be. That girl Tab is cray cray. SO ARE ALL HER FRIENDS. Believe nothing they tell u.

  ‘Urgh, he is the worst,’ Emmeline mutters.

  ‘Now that he’s dumped this Tab, he’s trying to keep his bases covered, making sure he’s still got you in reserve,’ Vic says. ‘Don’t let him suspect a thing.’

  Hey! Met girl called Flick. Said some pretty shady stuff about u.

  Mark texts back immediately. For a change.

  Please say u don’t believe her.

  NO! You said nothing happened. I trust u. I love u. U know that. Where u at?

  On way home. Unless u still up for it? Literally & figuratively?

  Now I kind of wish everyone wasn’t still crowded around me so they could witness this little exchange. Emmeline snatches my phone so she can squint at the text in disbelief. ‘Unbelievable. He really thinks he’s still going to get into your pants. Come on, just dump him so we can all go home.’

  ‘I’m not dumping him over text. We agreed that was a shabby thing to do.’

  ‘No, we agreed that it was a shabby thing for him to do. Just tell him you know everything, make some mid-level threats and finish it,’ Emmeline flails her arms in a half-hearted fashion. ‘I’m so tired.’

  ‘It’s not that late,’ I say, although it is. I’ve never been up this late before but now I’m high on righteous anger and adrenalin. I snatch my phone back from Emmeline.

  There’s nothing I want less than Mark rummaging about in my pants, but I need to keep stringing him along for the time being so that when I dump him I can look him right in the eyes as I administer the fatal blow. Still, I don’t want to appear too eager and also Mark’s track record of being where he’s said he’ll be is appalling.

  Know it was nothing but still quite upset about seeing u wit other girl. Going home now. U heading north? Want 2 get bus together?

  ‘Mon dieu! Experimenting with chestnut paste would have been more thrilling than this,’ I hear Jean-Luc say, but I ignore him as Mark replies in an instant.

  Heading west. Staying with Pa. G’ma’s bday 2morrow. Sure I can’t make it up 2 u tonight? Could stay over at mine?

  Emmeline’s whining in the background. Jean-Luc is muttering in French. Charlie is flat-out demanding to go home and only Vic is being any real help.

  ‘Say that maybe he could change your mind,’ he advises me. ‘If he thinks you’re gagging for it, pardon my French, he’ll give you a location, we can go there and then the arse-kicking can commence.

  ‘You won’t kick his arse, though, Sunny,’ Emmeline says and she suddenly collapses her legs so she’s sitting on the pavement, but that’s not enough because then she lays down and flails again. ‘I want to go home! Everything hurts and I told you I had blisters from not wearing trainer socks and you promised me plasters and you never gave them to me and I want to go home.’

  I know how she feels. I’m sympathetic but resolute as I fish in my bag. ‘You want plasters? Here! Have the plasters. But I’ve come this far and I’m not going home until I’ve confronted Mark. In person. That’ll show him!’

  ‘Mais non. What exactly is it going to show him? Let’s all go home!’ Jean-Luc tries to pull me away even though I try to dig my heels in. He’s surprisingly strong. It must be all that beating eggs and creaming sugar and grinding coffee beans. For a moment, I want to sink into his arms because I am actually quite tired myself and my feet are sore too, though you don’t hear me complaining about it.

  Only for a moment, though. Then I’m standing unaided. ‘I’m going to show Mark that I won’t be ignored. He can’t treat me like this. You can’t, like, be with someone, do stuff, say stuff, for all of it to be a lie. Like, it was never real. I thought it meant something and all the time he was playing me! Can’t you understand how that makes me feel?’

  I don’t get it. I never have. Like, my parents. My mum and dad. Except, they’ve never been mum and dad because I can’t remember them being together. They’ve always been mum or dad.

  But they were together for four years. Lived together. Spent all those months and weeks and days and hours and minutes together. Told each other their secrets. Cried in front of each other (though I can’t imagine my dad ever crying). Looked after each other when one of them was sick. All the things that being a couple are and then it just ended and now they’ve never spent a single minute together where it was just the two of them.

  They only talk about me. About my university tuition fees and whose turn it is to have the pleasure of my company on birthdays or major public holidays and all the other stuff; the secrets and the looking after each other, it’s simply stopped. What happened to all those feelings they had for each other? Where do they go?

  So, yeah, I’m going to smoke Mark out because this needs to be finished on my terms. When he’s standing in front of me, sickened and ashamed, because I’ve made him acknowledge what he’s done, how he’s hurt my feelings.

  Emmeline doesn’t get it when I explain it to her. ‘Dude, you’re being ridiculous,’ she snaps.

  ‘My feelings are not ridiculous!’

  She rolls her eyes and clutches at the pavement that she’s still sprawled on. ‘God, will you stop banging on about your feelings? There is no point in all of us staying here. Anyway, even if Mark does agree to meet you, all you’ll do is burst into tears. Again.’

  ‘No, I won’t! Anyway, you’re always telling me that I should be more decisive. Well, I’ve made a decision and I’m sticking by it. I’m staying out until I find Mark and then I’m going to tell him exactly what I think about him.’

  ‘It’s a bad decision,’ Emmeline spits out as she struggles to her feet. ‘You don’t even know where he is, do you? You don’t have a plan and I can’t even believe that we’re still talking about this.’

  I’ve come too far to back down now. Me and Emmeline are nose to nose, both of us breathing hard. ‘Well, thanks for all your support, Em! It’s good to know who your friends really are.’

  ‘I am your friend, you div. I’m trying to be supportive but you’re making it really difficult. If this is the new, improved Sunny then I have to tell you that she’s a bit of a twat!’

  ‘I am not a twat.’

  ‘Yeah, you really are and I’m going home. I’ve had enough of this! Charlie! Come on! We’re going!’

  ‘Fine! Go!’ I shout after Emmeline as she storms off. Though she doesn’t so much storm as hobble. Charlie follows her, though she pauses to give me a reproachful look. ‘I don’t care!’

  Except I do care because it’s Emmeline and she’s my best friend. And though I am not a twat, maybe I’ve been a little inconsiderate of how tired Emmeline is. She gets really cranky when
she’s sleep deprived. One time, when we were in Year Three and at a sleepover, she locked herself in the toilet and refused to come out because everyone else was making too much noise and watching Hannah Montana DVDs when Emmeline wanted to sleep.

  ‘Should I go after her?’ I ask Vic, who shrugs. Emmeline isn’t moving very fast and I could easily catch her up. ‘I should go after her … Oh! I’m beeping! It’s Mark.’

  He’s sent me a snapchat and ‘Woah! What even is that?’

  It’s a photo of Mark with his hand delving into the front of his jeans and the caption: ‘Sure u won’t change your mind?’

  Jean-Luc actually says, ‘Ooh la la! ’ and Vic sniggers and says, ‘Even I wouldn’t stoop that low,’ before the picture disappears.

  In its place is a text from Flick.

  Sorry for delay. Tab in hysterics. Mark & pals in Chelsea. Club called Plebs. Will put name on door.

  She’s even included a Google Maps link.

  There’s no time to race after Emmeline now. I can already feel the adrenalin start to kick in again. Vengeance shall be mine.

  ‘OK. So we’re on?’ Vic asks.

  ‘We’re so on.’

  Jean-Luc is slightly off. ‘Chelsea is miles away,’ he moans. ‘And this could be um …’ He snaps his fingers. Not in a crisp, clicky way but in a way that suggests that even his fingers are a bit tired. ‘A double bluff?’

  ‘Double bluff. It’s the same in English,’ Vic says. ‘That Flick. How trustworthy was she?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say, doubt starting to creep in.

  It could be a double bluff. Then again, it might not be. There’s only one way to find out.

  ‘We’re going to Chelsea,’ I say firmly and I ignore Jean-Luc’s bitten-off groan and the way his lips twist in an entirely different way to Vic’s. There’s a French word for it. A moue. Yeah. Jean-Luc is moueing or pouting. Even Vic is looking a little battle weary, but he straightens his shoulders and smiles brightly and I’m starting to feel like I can never go home again.

  Anyway, Chelsea isn’t miles away. We get on the tube at Green Park, go one stop to Victoria, then change onto the Circle line, one more stop and we’re at Sloane Square. Couldn’t be simpler.

  Except the Circle line isn’t running, which is just ridiculous. What even is the point of having the tube run all night if you’re going to leave out major bits of it like the Circle line? So, we have to get the Piccadilly line to Knightsbridge and then figure it out from there. They shouldn’t call it the night tube. It’s false advertising. They should call it ‘a small part of the tube that runs all night.’

  ‘How I wish that we’d never caught up with you at Clapham North,’ Jean-Luc grumbles as we walk to the right platform.

  It’s the first time I’ve been on the tube after-hours since it started running all through the night, and it feels strange. It’s quiet. Hardly anyone about as if each station is inhabited by ghosts who keep the trains gliding along the humming tracks in the small hours. It’s as if we’re not really meant to be there, under all that harsh strip lighting so our skin looks ashen, our eyes huge, everything kind of hyperreal.

  Or maybe I’ve just been awake so long that life has got trippy.

  I’m bookended by Godards as we sit and wait for the train. ‘But we did catch up with Sunny at Clapham North and now we’re having adventures,’ Vic says and I shoot him a grateful smile because Jean-Luc has had a face like thunder ever since we travelled down the first escalator at Green Park. Not just thunder but ominous dark clouds and hail stones too. ‘Anyway, we couldn’t have left you on your own. Imagine if something had happened to you. All the free pastries and coffee in the world wouldn’t make it up to la belle Hélène.’

  I squirm a bit. My midnight curfew is shot to pieces and lying dead on the floor. Then I unsquirm. Like, she and Terry are ever going to find out. Unless … ‘You won’t tell my mum about tonight, will you? I mean, technically you’re accessories after the fact.’

  ‘I prefer to think of us as willing accomplices,’ Vic says. ‘Though it shouldn’t be this hard to track down one boy.’ Vic rests his sharp elbows on his bony knees, then rests his chin on his hands. It looks very uncomfortable. ‘Is he always this difficult to find?’

  I think about all the times I waited for Mark to call me. The many times I stood outside various North London landmarks: the Crouch End clocktower, Kenwood House on Hampstead Heath, Camden Town tube station, because he was running late. Never where he’d said he’d be at the time we decided on.

  I could think about the good bits, and there were lots of those, but there was also the endless waiting for Mark and the endless rehearsing of what I’d say to him when he finally surfaced. But as soon as I tried out the first fumbling, stumbling sentence, he’d say, ‘Babe,’ all sorrowfully and give me a flash of that grin and hold my hand and then I’d feel grateful that he’d bothered to turn up at all.

  In some ways, Mark was a bit like Emmeline. It’s hard to be around people whose star always burns brighter than yours does.

  Except, now Mark’s star had burned itself out.

  ‘I am sorry that I’ve dragged you on this mad chase. Have I been a real pain in the arse?’

  Jean-Luc and Vic don’t even have to think about it. ‘Yeah,’ they both say in unison, then stand up at the same time too as the train comes roaring out of the tunnel.

  ‘Major pain in the arse, Sunny. Just as well you’re funny and you dance a mean Charleston, otherwise we’d have left you in Camden,’ Vic says as we sit down on the train, me in the middle again. ‘And pretty too, not that I ever judge a woman based solely on her looks because that would be wrong.’

  ‘Such a pity that we didn’t leave you in Camden, Vic.’ Jean-Luc reaches around me to dig Vic in the ribs.

  They bicker quietly in French all the way to Knightsbridge and are still going at it as we emerge from the station. All this forward motion and getting on and off tube trains has been great for distracting me, but now, as we get on a bus that will take us down Sloane Street, I’m beyond nervous. There needs to be a new word for how I feel.

  If I’d found Mark as soon as I’d left the Duckie gig when my blood was up and the demands of my bladder were making everything just a little bit urgent, then I would have been devastating. Mark would have been devastated. I’m still hazy on the details of this devastation, even hazier now that we jump off the bus at the top of the King’s Road and we’re moments away from a bar called Plebs. Where I will confront Mark and try to come up with words that will put a hard, gnarly knot in his stomach too. That makes his heart hurt. That makes him look deep within himself, at the way he treats people, and for Mark to realise that he doesn’t like what he sees.

  I’m not sure that I know any words that can do all of that. Still, I’ve got to try, otherwise this night was all for nothing.

  First, I have to find Mark – and then the blue dot and the red arrow on my Google Maps matches up and we’re here.

  LONDON CALLING

  A playlist (compiled by Sunny, Terry and la belle Hélène)

  ‘Waterloo Sunset’ – The Kinks

  ‘Girl VII’ – Saint Etienne

  ‘A Rainy Night in Soho’ – The Pogues

  ‘Warwick Avenue’ – Duffy

  ‘The Underground Train’ – Lord Kitchener

  ‘London Pride’ – Noël Coward

  ‘Hey Young London’ – Bananarama

  ‘Mayfair’ – Nick Drake

  ‘London Town’ – Laura Marling

  ‘Bar Italia’ – Pulp

  ‘Galang’ – M.I.A.

  ‘Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner’ – Hubert Gregg

  ‘Hometown Glory’ – Adele

  ‘LDN’ – Lily Allen

  ‘West End Girls’ – Pet Shop Boys

  ‘London Calling’ – The Clash

  3.45 a.m.

  CHELSEA

  In 1536, Henry VIII acquired the manor of Chelsea as a good place to put Anne of Cleves, t
he wife he really wasn’t that into.

  Chelsea continued on the up and up. Its famous King’s Road began life as Charles II’s private road linking St James’s Palace to Fulham, but by Victorian times Chelsea was better known as an artist’s colony. Whistler, Sargent, Rossetti all slung paint around in SW3.

  Chelsea became popular again in the Sixties when it was home to boutiques like Granny Takes a Trip and Mary Quant’s Bazaar and its streets were packed with girls in miniskirts and men with shaggy hair. The punks moved in during the Seventies, and in the Eighties the debutantes and aristos who had always lived in Chelsea took over again. They were known as Sloane Rangers, best personified by Lady Di before she became a princess.

  These days, Chelsea is best known for the reality show Made in Chelsea, even though it’s a well-established fact that the greatest thing to ever come out of Chelsea is the Chelsea Bun.

  Plebs.

  It’s spelled out in icy-white neon letters. A bar buzzing with people. Through the window I see girls with glossy limbs artfully arranged on leather sofas, guys with hair slicked back and one too many buttons on their shirt left unbuttoned.

  This has to be a trap. There’s no way that Mark and even his poshest friends from his old life would hang out here. They might be rich but these people are beyond rich. Like they have Ferraris bought for them when they pass their driving tests and black Amex cards instead of an allowance.

  ‘I think this is a trap,’ I say.

  ‘It probably is.’ Jean-Luc isn’t exactly helping. ‘I don’t trust people who are so shiny-looking.’

  ‘Oh it will be fine.’ Vic marches up to the entrance, and the bouncer, who’s wearing a much nicer suit than he is, simply opens the door and lets Vic walk straight in.

  I have no French blood in my veins. Not one ounce of je ne sais quoi or savoir faire or anything else, so I shuffle up to the door and squeak, ‘I’m on the list, my name’s Sunny.’ I gesture at Jean-Luc who’s now slouching so hard that his neck has completely disappeared. He looks like a skinny, big-haired tortoise. ‘He’s with me.’