The Assistant by S. K. Tremayne

Author:S. K. Tremayne [Tremayne, S. K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2019-08-28T17:00:00+00:00

26

Jo

The expected snow has arrived. With thunder and lightning in the middle of it all, making black and yellow cracks in the white sky. Silent, muffled people walk the streets of Camden. My beloved four-year-old nephew is calling me on Skype. His happy, sunny face shines at me, from happy, balmy California. A big light-filled house fills the screen, behind his blond-haired smile. I can see a birthday cake on a shiny glass table.

‘Thank you, Auntie Jo! Thank you very much for the birthday present toys. Love you very much all the time!’

‘I love you too, Caleb. Really.’

‘The cuddly bear is ace fink I am going to throw one at Daddy he likes that.’

My little nephew’s accent is broadly American. I hear my brother’s sardonic British laughter, right behind. Just off screen.

‘No, Caleb, Daddy doesn’t like that. And we already had a pillow fight. Now say goodbye to Auntie Jo. Ya got friends coming over.’

‘Bye bye bye bye bye bye bye JO JO JO!’

He waves at me and grins. And giggles. I remember Electra repeating that giggle and I ignore the icy memory.

I wave back.

‘LOVE YOU!’

The screen goes dead. For a moment my heart is resurgent with the feeling that, yes, I DO want my own child. The only time I get this feeling is when I talk to Caleb, or meet him, or interact with him. I suppose it is genetic. My genes are in him. But it is also love, real love. Caleb is easy to love. My brother is lucky, out there.

Lucky that he’s not here.

Even if I don’t have Californian sunshine, I can have fresh air. So I wrap my scarf so tight around my head I look like I am a First World War soldier bandaged from a terrible head wound. Perhaps, in a sense, I am.

Softly I tread to the door. I sense Electra’s screen watching me. Silently. Checking. As I leave. Like a cruel yet assiduous mother.

The day is cold. My scrunching boots take me along the top of Parkway and past the cast-iron Grecian spears of Gloucester Gate, each with their tiny flake of snow on the point, and into deserted Regent’s Park. White and black is the world. Crows and snow, ice and iron. The creamy white pillars of the Nash Terraces look Russian, like palaces from a fevered dream of St Petersburg, in this profound wintriness, gazing at the fresh white snow that blankets the playgrounds, the vast bleached football pitches, those sweeping grassy flatlands where young Londoners play happy drunken softball on sweet summer evenings. Now empty. And whitened.

No birds sing. One old, solitary man walks his dog, a long long way away, almost invisible in this air that is so cold it has a kind of glassy mistiness; the dog-walker, it seems, is heading towards the Inner Circle. Disappearing around the parade of skeletal cherry trees.

No one else is here. The desolate park is mine.

Twilight is coming; very soon they will lock the gates to the park, and

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