The Uninvited by Liz Jensen

Author:Liz Jensen [Jensen, Liz]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9781608199921
Google: CPS7c1yhHi8C
Amazon: 1608199924
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2012-08-01T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

Kaitlin’s house, built in 1910, is part of a classic London terrace of faded red brick off Fulham Palace Road. The front door is the same French Grey I painted it when I moved in. But the metal containers with trailing ivy and miniature box trees are new, and the blinds have been replaced by curtains. I arrive at 11.16, fourteen minutes earlier than agreed. I’ve been staying at an airport hotel in London since my return from Dubai two nights ago, so I’ve brought my suitcase with me. It’s Wednesday 26th September. Temperature, fifteen degrees centigrade. Moderate to light winds. They’re shuffling branches, stirring up dust, making litter dance.

Freddy must have been looking out for me because I don’t even need to ring the bell: as I approach, he throws the door open wide, yells ‘Hesketh!’, launches himself at me like a monkey, and clings. ‘Freddy K, Freddy K, Freddy K,’ I laugh into his hair. He feels heavier, more substantial than last time. I get a surge in my chest, not dissimilar to pain. Wellbeing. I am bien dans ma peau. I carry him through the narrow entrance hall into the kitchen and sit him on the table to take a better look. I inhale the old-fashioned floor-polish smell of Kaitlin’s house. A brand called Pledge. My mother used it. The boy’s mop of dark curly hair is the same, but his face has altered subtly: its angles more defined, its planes cleaner, and there’s a sprinkle of freckles on his nose, the colour of muscovado sugar.

‘Hi Hesketh.’ I swing round. Stephanie’s paler than ever. ‘Kaitlin’s visiting her mum at the hospice. She’s gone all day.’ I have no idea what she has told Kaitlin about my visit. It’s an irrelevance. ‘Why don’t you guys go through to the living-room while I heat us up a pizza?’ Before I left Dubai we had a short, practical conversation about how to proceed with Freddy. The strategy we agreed on: food; Lego; questions.

‘Hey, Hesketh. Come and see what I can do,’ says Freddy. And he’s dragging me through to the living-room to show me his ‘nearly’ headstand on the sofa. He makes ten attempts, each of which requires a star-rating from me, on a scale of one to six. Then he’s perched on the back of a chair almost doing the splits and holding forth in his sparky, energetic way, flexing the power of being a boy aged seven. I’d forgotten his grasshopper mind, the eccentricity of his questions. If I had to decide between being tied to an ant’s nest and being stuck in a giant spider’s web what would I choose? Can people microwave themselves?

The Kawasaki rose I made for Kaitlin when I moved in has disappeared from the alcove by the mantelpiece. But it’s easier than I anticipated to function within the new parameters.

‘If you stuck your hand in a volcano, you’d get a ninth-degree burn,’ he’s saying a little later, through a mouthful of pepperoni pizza.

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