She was halfway down Wilton Way, thrilled, before she remembered Zora.
“Yes?” Dan answered the phone in a pretend impatient way.
“Yes, Dan, okay! How’s Zora?”
“Tell her I want to sleep over,” she heard Zora say in the background.
“I’ll say no if it’s too much,” Coralie said quietly. “I don’t mind being the bad guy.”
“I want her to stay, and she wants to stay!”
“Then I’ll get her in the morning.”
“What about work?”
“I can’t say strongly enough: Fuck work.”
“Okay!”
“I’ve got to do something after the nursery run. I’ll see you at eleven.”
One crazy thing about where they lived was that, despite Hackney being miles from the sea, flocks of seagulls regularly flew over, shrieking. It was Ridley Road Market, all the fish laid out on ice at the stalls. The birds couldn’t resist. With the warmth on her face, the seagulls screaming, Zora in safe hands, her boy gently kicking inside her—everything felt like it could be okay.
•••
At home,dinner wasn’t made. Adam was full of apologies. He’d done Florence’s pickup, and givenherdinner, obviously!Andput herto bed! But then he’d got a call from the journalist Boris Johnson had once planned to kneecap.
“Hang on,” Coralie said. “What?”
“But I can go on my bike and get Turkish?”
It was already after eight. Having a mixed grill was begging for a sleepless night. She found herself near tears.
“Ah, the reflux thing,” Adam said.
“It’s the reflux thing, the tiredness thing, starvation, and being let down. You don’t even know what my day was like!”
“I’ll make toast,” he said. “Right now.”
•••
Darius Guppy(seemingly his real name) was an Eton-educated ne’er-do-well, at one point—could this be right?—jailed for insurance fraud. He’d been caught on tape asking his school friend Boris Johnson for the address of a journalist he wanted to bash. As she ate her toast at the kitchen table, Adam read out the transcript of a secretly recorded phone call.
Johnson:How badly hurt will he be?
Guppy:He will not have a broken limb or broken arm, and he will not be put into intensive care or anything like that. He will probably get a couple of black eyes and a cracked rib.
Johnson:A cracked rib.
Guppy:Nothing which you didn’t suffer in rugby, okay? But he’ll get scared and that’s what I want him to do. I want him to get scared.
(They went on in this vein for a bit longer.)
Johnson:Okay, Darry, I’ve said I’ll do it. I’ll do it, don’t worry.
Guppy:Boris, I really mean it, I love you and I will owe you this.
“That’s mental,” Coralie said. “Did the journalist get bashed?”
