Magpie Read online

  When her parents had emailed Marisa the photos of the twins, she had printed them all out as she normally did. But this particular image, she had blown up to double its original size. She was drawn to it – to her, rather. What must it feel like to be so calmly confident about one’s place in the world? To not have to try to make people love you?

  It is difficult to translate all of this into a series of brushstrokes. Marisa can get the physical attributes down – she finds the other twin, Serena, much easier – but she knows there is something missing, some vital intimation of Petra’s character that remains lacking, so the paintings remain flat and lifeless.

  She tries with a different flesh colour, mixing in a dab of orange to the pink, and then she tries putting her in skirts rather than dresses, and then shorts rather than skirts, but nothing works. She has been in here since six this morning, sneaking out of bed before Jake was awake and before Kate left for the office. She had barely slept and her dreams had been scattered and fragmentary. At one point, she had sat bolt upright in bed, convinced that Kate was bending over her, closely examining her face.

  She didn’t want to see her this morning, not after the awkwardness at the yoga class. She would tell Jake about it later. But for now, she needs to concentrate on getting this commission done. Telling Tales has no orders lined up for the next few months. Summer always tends to be quiet before the annual Christmas rush and although Marisa knows to expect this, and usually puts money aside to see her through, this year she has had to use her savings for moving costs and is anxious about there being no regular income. When they moved in together, Jake’s salary was more than enough for both of them to live on, but now finances are more precarious and every outgoing has to be carefully monitored. Lately, he has been stressed and distracted, even less affectionate than normal. It worries Marisa, but she tells herself not to be stupid. She reminds herself that he loves her, that their love is strong enough that it does not need daily reassurance to bolster it.

  Whenever she recognises the gradual slow-motion descent into her usual panic, she reminds herself to focus on things as they actually are. She counts off the points on her fingers. He wants to have a baby with her. He has encouraged her to download an app on her phone in which she keeps track of her cycle. He is so happy he met her. They are living together. These are the facts. And beneath all of it is another, unassailable truth that Marisa keeps buried deep within her, plucking it out from the earth only when she needs to hold it and feel the certain weight of it in her hands, and it is this: Jake is not her mother. Jake will not abandon her.

  When she was seventeen, Marisa had run away from her boarding school for the weekend. She had typed a letter, forged her father’s signature and informed her housemistress that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer and that he wanted her to come home for the weekend.

  ‘We’re trying to stay positive,’ she said to her housemistress Mrs Carnegie, when she was called into her office. ‘I’ve looked into it and I think it’s quite normal for men his age. There are good recovery rates.’

  Marisa was pleased with herself for this flourish of detail. She had decided that the most convincing attitude would be one of hard-won courage. Tears would be too much, although she knew how to cry on demand. But with Mrs Carnegie, she wanted to imply that she was shocked by the news, yet coping with it in a practical way and not allowing herself to imagine the worst. Mrs Carnegie, a jolly-hockey-sticks type, would appreciate that.

  ‘Quite right, Marisa,’ her housemistress said, right on cue. ‘It’s good to keep positive.’

  She took off her glasses and let them hang across her generous chest on a colourful plastic chain.

  ‘Will someone be picking you up?’ Mrs Carnegie asked.

  ‘Well, it would normally be my dad,’ Marisa said. ‘There’s just the two of us, as you know, but …’ and here, Marisa allowed her voice to falter slightly. ‘He’s not really in a fit state so I’m going to get the train.’

  Mrs Carnegie nodded and said, ‘Very good, very good,’ and signed the permission slip.

  Her father had been fine, of course. He never knew that Marisa had claimed a terminal illness on his behalf and when he appeared at the end of term, seemingly healthy, if a touch absent-minded, Marisa had told her housemistress that their prayers had been answered and her father had made a full recovery.

  ‘He doesn’t like to talk about it though,’ she had said. Mrs Carnegie had smiled and placed a supportive hand on Marisa’s shoulder.

  ‘Of course not, dear. I won’t breathe a word.’

  With Mrs Carnegie’s permission slip in her blazer pocket, Marisa was granted magical access to the outside world. Her school, a neo-gothic edifice complete with gargoyles and a tower that was said to be haunted, had been built right next to the town’s railway station, so it was a short walk to catch the train to London and once she had found a seat, she took off her blazer and replaced it with a denim jacket from her bag. She rolled up the waistband of her navy school skirt four times until the hem lay a couple of inches above her knees. She untucked her white blouse and tied it in a knot by her belly button and then she unclipped her hair, shaking it out over her shoulders. She did her make-up in the train toilet and had to reapply her eyeliner when the carriage juddered and her hand slid across her face, leaving a smudged kohl mark across the top of one cheek.

  Marisa had learned how to do make-up by reading girls’ magazines. There had been a cut-out-and-keep guide to ‘Make-up For Your School Prom’ in one of them, and she had bought or shoplifted all of the products suggested. Now, in the blurry mirror, she brushed her lashes with two coats of Maybelline mascara: ‘Heavy lashes are totally having a moment!’ the magazine had informed her, confidently. She dabbed cream blush on her cheeks at an angle, underlining them with sweeps of bronzer. She slicked her lips with pearlescent gloss and then stood back, assessing her reflection. She looked older than she had thought she would and her face seemed detached from the rest of her, briefly unrecognisable as her own. But then she got used to it and she began to smile. She looked sexy, she thought, and mussed up. A bit like Britney Spears in that video or an old photo of Brigitte Bardot her dad had once shown her.

  When the train drew in to Paddington station three hours later, it was already mid-afternoon. She had a carefully mapped-out plan and she knew she needed to get the Circle Line tube from Paddington to King’s Cross, and then change to the Northern Line on the High Barnet branch. There were two branches to the Northern Line, she knew, so she would have to be careful to get the right one. Although apparently you could always change at Camden Town if you made a mistake. Her destination was Kentish Town.

  A few months after her mother had left, Marisa overheard her father on the phone, talking to an unknown person. It had been late at night and she was meant to be asleep, but Marisa could tell from the lowered, urgent sound of her father’s voice that the matter being discussed was important. As a child, she had been finely attuned to the gradations of every conversation, and had become expert at discerning the importance of what wasn’t being said in between the gaps of what was.

  ‘No idea,’ her father was saying as Marisa crept out of bed and crouched by the upstairs banisters in her nightdress, kneeling quietly so as not to make any of the floorboards creak and pressing one ear between the varnished wood roundels.

  ‘As I say, she never left an address.’

  There was a long gap as the person on the other end of the line spoke. Marisa knew, without needing to hear any other details, that he was discussing her mother.

  ‘It’s so fucking irresponsible, you’re right. But what did I expect, really?’

  Marisa had never heard her father swear before. His words were slurring. He sounded angry. She wondered if he had been drinking whisky.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Last I heard it was Kentish Town.’

  The name slotted into a gap in Marisa’s mind an
d locked itself away for her to take out later and examine more closely.

  ‘Ha! Quite. Yes. Well, quite.’

  Another long silence.

  ‘All right then. Yes. You are kind to call, I do appreciate it. Sorry if I’ve been maudlin, it’s just …’

  Marisa started tiptoeing back to her bed, aware that the call was about to end and that her father would probably come up and check on her.

  ‘Marisa?’ He sounded surprised to be asked. ‘Oh, she’s fine, fine. Taken it like a trouper. No trouble at all.’

  She felt proud, then, that she had been no trouble. It was only years later that she came to realise she should have caused a lot more of it.

  She arrived at Kentish Town tube shortly after 4 p.m. It was autumn, and the evenings were starting to draw in and dusk was already edging into the sky. It was only as Marisa got to the top of the escalator and tapped her Oyster card at the turnstile to exit that she realised this was as far as her plan went. Kentish Town was the sum total of her knowledge. There had been no other clues as to her mother’s whereabouts over the intervening years, no matter how many phone conversations she had strained to overhear or how many drawers she had rifled through at home, hoping to find meaningful scraps of paper and only ever coming across old shopping lists or stray paper clips or unrecognisable keys, the locks to which they’d once belonged also long forgotten.

  She had imagined Kentish Town as a small country village, of the kind she used to see in old Postman Pat episodes. There would be a green and a timber-beamed pub and pretty cottages with rose trellises and everyone would know everyone else, so it wouldn’t be too challenging to find her mother. It would, she had thought, simply be a question of waiting and keeping her eyes open and perhaps asking at the local shop if they knew anyone by the name of Harriet Grover.

  But there was no village green or pub and not a single pretty cottage. When she emerged from the tube, she found herself standing on a grimy pavement, next to a rush of traffic separated from her by only a thin grey railing. A man in a red tabard selling the Big Issue leaned forward and thrust his arm out, putting a copy of the magazine into her hand before she noticed what was happening.

  ‘No, no thank you,’ she said, handing it back.

  ‘Sod off then,’ the man said, turning away from her.

  A bus screeched past, burping exhaust fumes into the air. She felt acutely aware of her not belonging, of the purposeful rudeness of everyone who strode past her knowing where they were going while she did not. A woman in a red trouser suit. A man with a small dog on a leash. A girl pushing a buggy that contained a glass-eyed doll, pulled by her mother’s hands to move more quickly. A teenage boy on his mobile phone – a Nokia, the same one she had – shouting at someone that he didn’t want to do the fucking interview and could she stop going on about it, please. They were all half walking, half running, these people, and she noticed them looking at her with impatience for standing there without understanding what she had to do next, as if being lost were an oddity; as if she could at least have had the grace to pretend otherwise.

  And still, she had faith. A peculiar, illogical sense that if she only walked around a bit, she would eventually see her mother. It had been ten years, but she knew she would recognise her immediately, that she would turn a corner and see a familiar silhouette, shoulders pressed back, raggedy hair, a slight heaviness around the hips, and it would be her. She would be able to smell her, the trail of vanilla and the undertone of the single Silk Cut cigarette her mother allowed herself every day. The soap she used, which came in patterned packets, the paper stuck together by a gold disc that looked like a medal. Yes, Marisa thought, she would know her mother anywhere.

  Anna she was less sure about. It would be harder to imagine what kind of ten-year-old her baby sister would have grown into, but she would probably look like Marisa had at that age. It stood to reason, she told herself. They were siblings, even if they had been apart for so long.

  She walked up the pavement from the tube station, the street turning into a gentle hill. There was a pub on the corner and when she glanced in through the windows it looked warm and inviting, the beer taps shiny in the buttery light. Although she was still only seventeen, Marisa had been to pubs plenty of times before. Being at boarding school gave you a remarkable amount of freedom. They were allowed to frequent one bar in town, as long as they only drank non-alcoholic drinks, which was a rule broken so often it stopped being a rule at all. At weekends, Marisa and a group of her friends would sign out and tell Mrs Carnegie they were going to the sanctioned bar, and instead they would catch the train to Worcester and present their fake IDs to the bouncers at Cargo’s, which was a trashy nightclub that played something the DJ called ‘club classics’ every Saturday night. They would drink rum and Cokes and dance and Marisa would throw her head back and forward in time with the beat and dance a little bit closer to the boy she fancied at any given moment. She was a good dancer, and picked up moves quickly from studying music videos. She knew that, while she might not have been the prettiest girl in her year, the dancefloor was her element. In the prismatic glare of a strobe light, with a shuddering bassline reverberating against her ribcage, she knew she could have anyone she wanted.

  In the pub in Kentish Town, she was immediately nervous. There were only four other customers: two men sitting at the bar and a couple at a table holding hands, nudging the salt and pepper shakers to the edge with their arms. She was reassured by the couple and held her head high, pushing her shoulders back the way she had been taught in a one-off deportment class the school had arranged to help leavers with job interviews.

  ‘What’ll you be having?’ The barman looked at her with a smile.

  ‘Rum and Coke, please.’

  She watched the barman’s back as he prepared her drink. He was younger than she had imagined, looking in from the outside, and she could see the ripple of his shoulder-blades underneath his checked shirt. The sleeves were rolled up, and he had a strip of muscle running down each forearm, the indent of it catching the overhead lights.

  ‘There you go,’ he said, presenting her with a glass that looked fuller than it should.

  ‘Thanks.’ She detected an Australian twang to his voice. ‘How much is it?’

  He flipped a towel he had been using to wipe down the bar over his right shoulder.

  ‘On the house.’

  ‘What? But …’

  ‘It’s a mid-week offer. First drink free.’ He winked at her. She reddened.

  ‘OK,’ she mumbled. ‘Thanks.’

  She sat at a table by the loos because she knew no one else would bother her here, in the least desirable part of the pub, and she wanted to be alone. She took a sip of her drink, feeling the bite of the alcohol and the sweetness of the Coca-Cola jostle for space on the back of her tongue until finally the Coke won out and it stopped tasting like rum at all. She took a gulp. Then another. Soon, half of it was gone and she could feel the incipient haze of light-headedness that she craved. She took out her phone and began, half-heartedly, to play a game of Snake. She just needed to sit here for a few more minutes, finish her drink, and then she’d go and find her mother. She knocked back the rest of the rum and Coke.

  ‘Another?’

  The barman was beside her. She jumped at the sound of his voice.

  ‘Oh. I thought I had to order at the bar,’ she said, immediately hating how pathetic it sounded. If she were truly a grown-up, she would know exactly how to behave, Marisa thought. Play it cool, for fuck’s sake.

  The barman winked again. Previously, Marisa had never thought anyone actually winked unless they were actors in soap operas or characters in bad spy novels. But this guy kept doing it.

  ‘For special customers, I come out from my cage.’

  The way he said ‘cage’ made her shiver.

  He patted her back.

  ‘Only kidding. What’l
l it be? Another rum ’n’ Coke, yeah?’

  She nodded. One more couldn’t hurt. She would just have one more, she told herself, just to take the edge off her nerves, and then she would stand up and leave and it would all be fine.

  But the barman, who she soon learned was called Kevin, kept bringing her drinks and Marisa worried it would be rude to say no. Her anxiety was mounting that she wouldn’t be able to pay the bill but then she remembered her dad’s credit card, which he had given her for emergencies and to pay for her driving lessons, and she relaxed. After the fourth rum and Coke, she began to feel very relaxed indeed. She started laughing at something Kevin had said, something involving a horse with a long face who’d ordered a drink and there was an ostrich in the joke because he started talking about a bird with legs all the way up to her arse, and Marisa found it so funny that she couldn’t stop laughing for a full minute.

  At some point the older couple and the two men left the bar, she couldn’t remember seeing them go, and then it was just her and Kevin, who had now drawn up a seat to sit next to her, and when she asked him whether he should be working, he shrugged and said, ‘Shift’s almost over, anyway,’ and she saw that he had brought the bottle of rum with him, or maybe it had been there all along, she couldn’t recall, but he kept filling up her glass so that it was all rum and no Coke and she kept drinking it, not because she was anxious now, but because she wasn’t and she wanted to preserve the precious sensation of having nothing to worry about. She would have one more drink and then she would leave. One more, and then pay the bill and then walk out and go and do what she came here to do which was … what was it exactly? There was something important … and yet … why couldn’t she remember? It eluded her, slipping out of her grasp like a heavy necklace spiralling to the bottom of the sea. Oh yes, that was it. She was here to find her mother.

  ‘I’m here to find my mother,’ she said to Kevin, and when the words came out they were oddly cheerful.