Elena's story is a strange one. She and Carrie have spent a few days going round some restaurants to ask about waiting tables after their long days at the school. It's Friday night and they've only been to a couple of places but they're already tired. These first few weeks have been full on. They find a wine bar, sit down and kick off their shoes.
Elena puts the bottle on the table and hands Carrie a glass. "So what about you? What do your parents do?"
Carrie's still not ready to paint a picture of her life as a rural hick, knit your own yoghourt, kind of upbringing, so she settles for predictable Westcountry. "My mum teaches piano at a little school, and at home, and we live in a proper little Cornish cottage next door to my gran." She hesitates, unsure yet how much trust to place in Elena, but decides she can. "I don't know about my dad. I haven't seen him since I was eight."
Elena's eyes widen. "No shit. Where'd he go?" Elena's voice is beautifully modulated and she swears with an upper class drawl that sounds almost American. Carrie wonders if she's grown up somewhere chic that she should talk like that.
"He's up here somewhere."
"Are you gonna go find him?"
Carrie is surprised. "I hadn't thought about it; I don't know." She drinks some of her wine. "It would be weird after this long, don't you think?"
Elena looks at Carrie as though she's wondering whether to trust her too. She narrows her eyes slightly. "I've got a dad, but ..." She puts her wine glass on the table, fishes around in her bag, and takes out some cigarettes. She looks at Carrie again. "I've got a dad but he doesn't want to know me." She pauses, either for dramatic effect, or to see what Carrie's reaction might be before she goes on.
Carrie hardly knows what to say. "Weird. What kind of a coincidence is that? Mine doesn't want to know me either."
Elena gets up to smoke outside in the pretty paved terrace. Carrie brings the glasses and they go where they won't be overheard. "Did yours run out on you all or what?"
Carrie nods. It hadn't occurred to her to lie about her family life. If she'd been better prepared she should have thought up a story to say he had died, but she takes a risk. She likes Elena; there's more to her than some of the others, more depth. She tells her the truth. "He's a Londoner. He married my mum and visited us down in Cornwall but he didn't really live there, not in the week anyway. He disappeared when I was eight, like I said. We never heard from him again."
"How d'you know he's still alive even?"
"I never think about it." Carrie knows she is lying to herself as well as to Elena. "Well, what I mean is I don't give it a lot of thought. It's sort of in the background, like any memory."
Elena blows out smoke slowly and rather elegantly Carrie thinks, and she repeats her question. "So, are you gonna go find him, now you're here?" Elena speaks as though this is the most normal thing to do.
Carrie's not sure. "Did you find yours then?" she asks.
Elena takes a huge pull on the last of her cigarette and stubs it out hard in the ashtray; the butt looks screwed up, filthy, and dead. Now the cigarette is out, it smells bad.
"Yeah. I found him." She settles herself back in her chair, gazes around at some of the fabric plants that have been placed outside in big pots to give an impression of the exotic in Clapham. "He was a sperm donor." She hesitates. "You might think that's gross, but my mom went for it because she got sick of waiting to meet the right man. I don't think about the sperm part." Elena grins. "Well, it is a bit gross, but she always says she wanted me, so, needs must."
Carrie is grinning too. "Good for her. So how did she choose his sperm exactly?"
"Stop it!" Elena waves a hand to dismiss the image. "She did choose. She chose a medical student - there's loads of them - six feet tall with brown hair and blue eyes."
Carrie's eyes are huge. "Wow, so she sort of ordered you, that's pretty cool. Are you a designer baby?!"
Elena shrugs. "I guess. I got the brown hair and blue eyes didn't I? I still wanted to find out who he was though."
Carrie begins to feel uncomfortable; she knows exactly what this feels like. It's like being half a person; the other half is a mystery.
"I had to get in touch with the company she used, then I had a name to go on. I traced him and wrote him a letter."
Carrie interrupts. "What? Hello, I'm your daughter? He could have done it hundreds of times!"
"Right. So maybe there are hundreds of us who helped fund him through med school. Anyway, he's married now, a respectable member of the community, a kind of Cosmetic Surgeon actually, and he won't acknowledge me because of his other family."
Carrie's not sure who has got the worst deal here, her or Elena. She wonders how many other young people have shady backgrounds like this; two in one class seems a bit excessive. "So he can't acknowledge you at all?"
"Yeah. I know who he is; he doesn't know who I am." She has a faraway look but she focuses her eyes on Carrie and looks businesslike. "Here's the deal. My mom's from the UK but she was working in some political department in New York. She was getting old so, when she was thirty, she decided to go ahead and have a baby on her own. She thought she'd never have children otherwise. When she got pregnant with me, she thought about coming back to England but she had a pretty good salary, so she decided to stay there and raise me in Manhattan."
"So when did you come to live here?"
"Mum came back to London when I was about twelve. She works long hours so she sent me to Farringtons in Kent."
She looks far away again. "I've seen him. I've sat in an audience and listened to him speak, and he didn't know I was there."
"That must have been horrible. How did you stand it, seeing him and him not seeing you?"
Elena plays with her wine glass, rolling the wine around inside until it almost spills over the rim, and then she drinks it down in one go. "When I left boarding school, after my 'A' levels, I went out to the US and saw him giving a lecture on the finer points of facial reconstruction." She puts the glass back on the table. "It was surreal."
Carrie imagines Elena sitting staring at her own father, willing him to see her, and him being oblivious of her presence. She ventures, "How did you stand it?"
Elena shrugs again. "I sat there staring at him, like a challenge I guess. He delivered his talk, walked off the podium, and was gone. I don't know how to describe it. I felt like I didn't exist. I could feel my body, my skin, hair, everything, but I still felt like I didn't exist." Her voice sounds hollow. "I wrote to him again, but he didn't answer."
Carrie's heart is aching for Elena but then she begins to feel a white fury rushing through her, as though she could chase this man, grab his coat and tear him to pieces for being so shallow. She senses that her rage won't help, so she puts a lid on it.
Instead, she smiles gently at Elena. "He's an idiot." She says. "He's missed out on knowing you. Look at you. You're clever, you're funny, you've got your life sorted. It's his loss."
She is pleased to see Elena smile back. "Anyway, if you feel that without all the pieces you don't quite exist, it's the same for him; how can he fully exist when a bit of him is missing - you?"
"Hey, you're good aren't you?" Elena smiles at Carrie. "Will you be my counsellor?"
Carrie laughs. "I mean it. You can't go round feeling not a whole person because some guy's not got the guts to face up to the fact that he's gone out and made babies all over the place."
Elena laughs. "He was a med student, I'll bet he didn't give it any thought, it was just a way of earning some cash." Elena looks at Carrie. "So, what's the deal with you? Are you whole even though your dad's gone AWOL?"
Carrie frowns. "You've got your answer, haven't you? You know who your father is, where he is. You know why he won't admit you're his daughter. You can see the logic, even though you don't like it."
Elena nods.
"With mine, I don't know anything. Everything seemed fine, perfect. One day he didn't come back. My mother will never talk about him; she drifts about being all vague and, actually, a bit depressed I think. I used to get angry about it when I was small but I must have got used to the silence. I never ask her anything anymore. He's a mystery."
"Is she still angry with him? Is that why she won't talk about him?"
"Maybe. Or hurt I suppose. I think, mostly, she's sad; there are no pictures of him anywhere. All the photographs of the family together when I was small have disappeared. I used to think I'd imagined I ever had a father."
Elena takes out another cigarette. "But aren't you curious? Hell, I'd be curious."
Carrie thinks about this. "I am. More curious now I'm up here, and I know he can't be far away. I don't know where to start though ... if I wanted to find him that is."
"Google him." Elena nods at Carrie's unspoken question. "Yeah, everyone's on there." She waves her cigarette in the air and looks marvellously sophisticated. "What have you got to lose?"
***
Carrie walks back to the house. It's late. It's dark. She keeps to the outside edge of the pavement, avoiding the gloomy doorways and narrow walkways, and she walks like an athlete. She remembers reading that if you walk with a purpose you're less likely to be mugged. It's not something she's noticed before, but tonight, Carrie has a strong sense of feeling abandoned.
She passes a crowd of young, black guys who call out to her, "Hey, pretty lady, how you doin'?" She doesn't make eye contact but marches on, looking straight ahead.
She has to use the subway to go under Trinity Road and come out in the road next to her own. She wonders whether to climb over the barrier and run across but there are four lanes and she doesn't know which she fears more, going down into the underworld alone, or running in front of the traffic like a dazzled rabbit.
She decides she's being ridiculous and turns down the slope towards the subway. There is a light in there; it's dim but it's not completely dark. So different from home. The dark at home is dense and soothing, and the air is clean. Here, tonight, the air feels dirty, full of stale dust and traffic fumes; she feels contaminated. She wants to get back for a bath, to slip into her little bed in her room, to listen to her familiar music with her photographs and books beside her.
She becomes aware of someone nearby, someone light. There is a sense of peaceful confidence very close to Carrie. She eases up on her marching and scowling, and listens to the air. She has the mildest impression of electricity again, not enough to name. It is neither a humming or a buzzing, but a change in the current of the air; it has a different density to it. It brings her back to herself. She realizes that she had started feeling nervous and she shakes her head at her foolishness.
Her friend again. Thanks, she thinks. Thanks for being there. I don't know why I keep forgetting. She wonders if this comforting presence could be family, maybe her ancestor, here in London at the time of Jack the Ripper, way worse than some random black guys. They might even have been quite fit if she'd actually taken a second look. She is up and out of the subway in no time, out in the open, and striding towards her lodgings.
Sunita is in the kitchen clattering pots; steam and spicy smells have made their way through the whole house; she must have had people in to dinner. Carrie calls hello and goes straight upstairs; she won't stop to chat now. She runs a hot bath, scents it with Lavender and puts a big, fluffy towel on the radiator to warm.
She can use the internet in her lunch break at school on Monday. She could type in her father's name and see what comes up. Maybe nothing. If something comes up what will she do then?
She'll think about it later, no good wasting energy thinking about it now, is there? She sinks into the water. Saturday tomorrow. A lie in. Good.