babies.
Suzy took out her own mobile and finally did what she had been putting off doing all day. She dialed a number.
9
Callie
“If I do this, it feels like I’m in an airplane.”
Rae stands on a bollard in the ice-rink car park, her arms spread wide, pushing her face into the wind.
From this angle, we could be standing on a cliff edge. Below us lies London, six miles away, the London Eye and Gherkin tiny miniatures from this distance.
It was Rae’s idea to come up to Ally Pally this evening. It’s her favorite place. She almost squeals with delight as she does her carefully paced half run that I have taught her, along the stone terrace in front of the palace. I worry that it’s a little late to be up here. Saturday night is when families visiting the ice rink and duck pond go home and groups of kids take their place in the empty car park, leaning with their dogs against the gerbil-cage runs of fire escapes that cover the side of the palace, eyeing up anyone who walks past, with loud music bursting from battered cars. But it is still light enough to feel safe. A pretty silver sky hovers above.
I walk behind Rae, watching her, as always. She dashes in and out of the Victorian lampposts and walkways that run along the front of the palace’s honeyed-brick facade, counting the lion gargoyles on its walls. At a pair of blue doors, tall enough for a giant, she begs me to lift her up to look through the portal windows at the Great Hall that lies empty behind. In some places there is nothing behind. The great arched windows stand alone, like a film set, birds fluttering through them, the palace’s innards long ago ravaged by fire. All front, with nothing behind. Everything behind destroyed by one catastrophic event.
“Can I look through that, Mum?” she shouts, pointing at a telescope.
Normally, she knows we can’t afford to waste fifty pence on such trivia, but today is special. I sit on the wall beside her and look around.
Children go skidding by on scooters, screaming, followed by their parents. A black crow flies off the steps and soars over the parkland below.
My wall. Our wall that we have sat on a hundred times.
As Rae turns the telescope one way, then the other, that month when we moved here from Tufnell Park comes back to me.
It’s funny. I didn’t even know the palace existed then. I stumbled upon it by accident at first, of course, not realizing it was actually a building, not just a park. After an afternoon of following steep pavements uphill with Rae’s stroller, trying to walk off the pain of splitting with Tom, I gasped my way up to the top—and there it was. This beautiful old shell of a palace, overlooking the city below. From then on, each day I’d wait as long as I could before the walls of my flat closed in on me and then I’d burst out of the door like a free-diver coming up for air. I’d push the stroller up here and sit for an hour, Rae wrapped upwarmly. Not that it took away the loneliness. Even when training athletes sprinted up the near-vertical hills toward me, blowing hard through shiny cheeks, and large groups in turbans and veils strolled past me showing their visiting families this view of the city, I felt more by myself than I ever had in my life, up here. I’d look out at the famous landmark buildings, so far in the distance I might as well be back on the farm in Lincolnshire dreaming about them.
“Mum?”
I look up to see Rae struggling with the weight of the telescope, blinking hard to focus.
“Here,” I say, standing up to help.
“You see that building that looks like a big rod,” I say, moving the telescope toward the west and holding it for her. “That’s the Post Office Tower.”
“Mmm . . .”
“That’s near where I’ll be on Monday, so not far away.”
I say it to reassure her, but the truth is, I can’t quite believe it myself: that on Monday, I will be back in the city.
Rae shrugs. She jumps down and we sit back on the wall.
“Hannah
Suzy took out her own mobile and finally did what she had been putting off doing all day. She dialed a number.
9
Callie
“If I do this, it feels like I’m in an airplane.”
Rae stands on a bollard in the ice-rink car park, her arms spread wide, pushing her face into the wind.
From this angle, we could be standing on a cliff edge. Below us lies London, six miles away, the London Eye and Gherkin tiny miniatures from this distance.
It was Rae’s idea to come up to Ally Pally this evening. It’s her favorite place. She almost squeals with delight as she does her carefully paced half run that I have taught her, along the stone terrace in front of the palace. I worry that it’s a little late to be up here. Saturday night is when families visiting the ice rink and duck pond go home and groups of kids take their place in the empty car park, leaning with their dogs against the gerbil-cage runs of fire escapes that cover the side of the palace, eyeing up anyone who walks past, with loud music bursting from battered cars. But it is still light enough to feel safe. A pretty silver sky hovers above.
I walk behind Rae, watching her, as always. She dashes in and out of the Victorian lampposts and walkways that run along the front of the palace’s honeyed-brick facade, counting the lion gargoyles on its walls. At a pair of blue doors, tall enough for a giant, she begs me to lift her up to look through the portal windows at the Great Hall that lies empty behind. In some places there is nothing behind. The great arched windows stand alone, like a film set, birds fluttering through them, the palace’s innards long ago ravaged by fire. All front, with nothing behind. Everything behind destroyed by one catastrophic event.
“Can I look through that, Mum?” she shouts, pointing at a telescope.
Normally, she knows we can’t afford to waste fifty pence on such trivia, but today is special. I sit on the wall beside her and look around.
Children go skidding by on scooters, screaming, followed by their parents. A black crow flies off the steps and soars over the parkland below.
My wall. Our wall that we have sat on a hundred times.
As Rae turns the telescope one way, then the other, that month when we moved here from Tufnell Park comes back to me.
It’s funny. I didn’t even know the palace existed then. I stumbled upon it by accident at first, of course, not realizing it was actually a building, not just a park. After an afternoon of following steep pavements uphill with Rae’s stroller, trying to walk off the pain of splitting with Tom, I gasped my way up to the top—and there it was. This beautiful old shell of a palace, overlooking the city below. From then on, each day I’d wait as long as I could before the walls of my flat closed in on me and then I’d burst out of the door like a free-diver coming up for air. I’d push the stroller up here and sit for an hour, Rae wrapped upwarmly. Not that it took away the loneliness. Even when training athletes sprinted up the near-vertical hills toward me, blowing hard through shiny cheeks, and large groups in turbans and veils strolled past me showing their visiting families this view of the city, I felt more by myself than I ever had in my life, up here. I’d look out at the famous landmark buildings, so far in the distance I might as well be back on the farm in Lincolnshire dreaming about them.
“Mum?”
I look up to see Rae struggling with the weight of the telescope, blinking hard to focus.
“Here,” I say, standing up to help.
“You see that building that looks like a big rod,” I say, moving the telescope toward the west and holding it for her. “That’s the Post Office Tower.”
“Mmm . . .”
“That’s near where I’ll be on Monday, so not far away.”
I say it to reassure her, but the truth is, I can’t quite believe it myself: that on Monday, I will be back in the city.
Rae shrugs. She jumps down and we sit back on the wall.
“Hannah
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