Lost River

‘All right. Well, I know you might be feeling isolated and vulnerable at the moment. But don’t forget, you’re not alone in this. We’re all on your side. Any support you need is available, twenty-four hours a day. Anything you want to talk about is fine. Don’t hold it back. Call me, any time.’

‘Thank you. That’s very kind.’

‘Don’t worry, Diane. It’s my job.’

Fry winced, wondering if she had just received the hand-off, the subtle reminder that this wasn’t a personal relationship but a professional one. She supposed that counsellors, like psychiatrists, had to be wary of relationships with their clients, and draw firm boundaries. Some of the people Murchison dealt with must be very needy.

Below her, the yellow front end of a London Midland City train whirred into the Birmingham platform of the station.

‘There’s a lot of noise in the background,’ said Murchison. ‘Where are you?’

‘Perry Barr.’

Murchison was silent for a moment. Fry thought she had shocked her in some way. But Perry Barr wasn’t that bad, was it?

‘Diane, is there a particular reason you’re in Perry Barr?’

‘Yes, a personal one.’

She thought she could hear Murchison shuffling papers.

‘May I ask…?’

‘I’m visiting someone. Family.’

‘Oh. That would be…your foster parents?’

‘Well done.’

‘That’s all right.’

‘I know it’s all right. I don’t need your permission to visit them.’

‘No, no. Of course not.’

Tm just calling in for a cup of tea. So you can tell Gareth Blake I’m behaving myself.’

Murchison laughed. Fry thought she heard relief in her voice.

‘I’ll tell him. And we’ll see you later, yes?’

‘Of course. After I’ve checked into my hotel.’

Fry watched people hurrying down the concrete steps to the platform and getting on to the train. She thought about following them, getting on the train and riding past Aston, past Duddeston and right into New Street. As if she could ride by everything, without even a glance out of the window, and start all over again.

But she stood for too long at the top of the steps, and the train pulled out, the noise of its motor dying as an echo on the brick walls.

‘Diane,’ said Murchison finally, ‘everything will be all right.’

Fry ended the call, and looked around. Opposite her stood three tower blocks surviving from an early 1960s attempt at low-cost housing. A number 11 bus emerged from Wellington Road in a burst of exhaust fumes. A strong smell of burning rubber hung on the air from the plastics factory on Aston Lane.

She walked under the flyover and emerged on the Birchfield Road side. Kashmir Supermarkets and Haroun’s mobile phones. Money-transfer services and lettings agencies for student flats. Outside Amir Baz & Sons boxes of vegetables were stacked on the pavement. Fry stopped to look at some of the labels. Bullet Chilli. Surti Ravaiya.

Now she felt lost. Nothing seemed to be recognizable. The street signs still pointed to UCE, but there was no point in following them. When you got there, you would find it had ceased to exist. Its name had been consigned to history.

The disappearance of so many landmarks gave her a strange sense of dislocation. Birmingham had been changing behind her back while she’d been away. This was no longer the place that she’d known. The Brum she saw around her was a different city from the one that she’d left. It was as if someone had broken into her previous life when she wasn’t looking and tried to wipe out her memories with a wrecking ball and a bulldozer.

But then, it was probably true the other way round. She wasn’t the same person who’d left Birmingham, either.

The Bowskills were the family she’d lived with the longest. She’d spent years in the back bedroom of their red-brick detached house in Warley. She’d been there when Angie ran away and disappeared. And she’d stayed with the Bowskills after her sister had gone. She’d needed them more than ever when she no longer had Angie to cling to.

And those times in Warley had been happy, in a way. Fry clearly remembered window shopping with her friends at Merry Hill, touring the Birmingham clubs, and drinking lager while she listened to the boys talking about West Bromwich Albion. Jim and Alice Bowskill had done their best, and she would forever be grateful to them. There had always been that hole in her life, though. Always.

There had been other homes, of course. Some of them she remembered quite well. She particularly recalled a spell with a foster family who’d run a small-scale plant nursery in Halesowen, and another placement near the canal in Primrose Hill, where the house always seemed to be full of children. But those families were further back in her past, too far upstream to re-visit.

Jim and Alice Bowskill now lived in a semi-detached house with a vague hint of half-timbering, located on the Birchfield side of Perry Barr, the close-packed streets in a triangle bounded by Birchfield Road and Aston Lane. As she drove towards it along Normandy Road, Fry had a good view of the Trinity Road stand at Villa Park, reminding her that Aston was only a stone’s throw from this part of Perry Barr. Here, everyone was a Villa fan.

There seemed to be home improvements going on everywhere in these streets. She saw an old armchair standing by the side of the road, bags of garden rubbish lined up at the kerb.

Most of these houses had been built at a time when the people who lived in them weren’t expected to own cars. So there were very few garages and hardly any off-street parking. It took her a few minutes to find somewhere to leave her Audi.

Jim Bowskill was wearing his Harrington jacket. Well, surely not the original Harrington – the one she always remembered seeing him in. It would have been worn out by now. But he was a man who had never been without a Harrington. He once told her he’d started wearing one as a mod in the 1960s, and just found that he never grew out of them. When he reached his mid fifties, he’d thought for a while about having a change. But then he’d seen Thierry Henry wearing one in the Renault adverts, and that was it. The current Harrington was a classic tan colour, with the Fraser tartan lining and elasticated cuffs. Seeing it made Fry feel an intense burst of affection for him. It was probably just nostalgia – a vague memory of hugging a coat just like that.

He was a lot greyer than she remembered him. Slightly stooped now, too.

‘Hello, love. It’s good to see you. We haven’t seen much of you since you left to go to Derbyshire. Having a good time away from us, I suppose?’

He said it teasingly, but Fry felt sure there was more than a hint of genuine reproach. She immediately felt guilty. She thought of all the reasons she’d given herself over the past few years for not keeping in touch with her foster parents, and all of them seemed petty and contrived. Fry supposed she’d only been trying to justify her reluctance to herself. But she shouldn’t have made Jim and Alice the victims of her self-justification.

‘No, I’m sorry. I’ve been so busy.’

‘We understand.’

Fry knew from the tone of his voice that he saw the lie, and forgave her. And that just made her feel even more guilty.

Jim Bowskill had been sorting out his blue recycling box for the weekly refuse collection.

‘How do you like it here?’ asked Fry.

‘Oh, it suits me. The house isn’t too big, so it’s easy to maintain. And there are lots of shops. We didn’t have the One-Stop shopping centre when you were here before, did we?’

‘Yes, Dad. It’s been there for fifteen years.’

He nodded. ‘And there are plenty of bus routes, if I need to go anywhere. So, all in all, it’s very handy.’

The Bowskills moved from Warley to Perry Barr some time after she left home to live on her own. She wasn’t sure why – though Alice’s family was originally from this part of North Birmingham, so maybe it was another case of nostalgia, a woman drawn back to the past by those lingering memories.

In a way, this part of Perry Barr had come full circle. When the indigenous white community had first started selling their houses, the Indians had moved in. As the Indians became more prosperous, they’d moved on to other areas, and Pakistanis had come in. When the Pakistanis sold their houses, the Bengalis had replaced them. And now here was Jim Bowskill, living in his double-fronted semi off Canterbury Road, explaining that it was easy to maintain and handy for the shops, and close to a bus route, if he needed it. And it was in the heart of Perry Barr’s Bengali area.