The Gap of Time Read Free Page B

Handwritten. The song says “PERDITA.”
    So that’s her name. The little lost one.
    “You’re made for life,” says Clo. “If you don’t go to jail.”
    “She’s ours, Clo. She’s your sister now. I’m her father now.”
    “What are you going to do with the money?”
    —
    We moved to a new neighbourhood where we weren’t known. I sold my apartment and I used that money and the cash in the case to buy a piano bar called the Fleece. It was a Mafia place and they needed to get out so they were fine about the cash. No questions. I put the diamonds in a bank box in her name until she turns eighteen.
    I played the song and I taught it to her. She was singing before she could talk.
    I am learning to be a father and a mother to her. She asks about her mother and I say we don’t know. I have always told her the truth—or enough of it. And she is white and we are black so she knows she was found.
    The story has to start somewhere.

There was a man lived in an airport.
    Leo and his son, Milo, were looking out of the full-length window in Leo’s London office towards City Airport and the Thames Estuary. Milo liked to watch the planes taking off. He was nine and he knew all the departure and arrival times by heart. There was a big chart on the office wall of the routes served by the airport—lines of arterial red like a body-map of the world.
    “So is this man a Wanted Man?” asked Leo.
    “Nobody wants him,” said Milo. “He’s run away and he’s on his own. That’s why he lives in the airport.”
    Leo explained that a wanted man isn’t the same as a man who is wanted. “It means the police are after him.”
    Milo thought about this. He was writing a story for school. The teacher had told them to try and write an opening line that contained all the rest of the story—like in a fairy tale that starts “A King had Three Sons” or “There was an Ogre who loved a Princess.”
    “He’s not a murderer, this man who lives in the airport,” said Milo. “But he hasn’t got a home.”
    “Why not?” asked Leo.
    “He’s poor,” said Milo.
    “Maybe he should work harder,” said Leo, “then instead of living at the airport he could afford to catch a plane. Look—British Airways to New York City via Shannon.”
    They watched the plane rise from the runway like an impossible bird.
    “When the dinosaurs became extinct,” said Leo, “they didn’t really die, they went into hiding until they could come back as aeroplanes.”
    Milo smiled. Leo ruffled his hair. Leo’s softness was here, with his son.
    “When we die, do we go into hiding until we can come back as something else?” asked Milo.
    “Your mother thinks so because she is a Buddhist. You should talk to her about that.”
    “But what do you think?” said Milo. “Look, CityFlyer to Paris.”
    “I never think about it,” said Leo. “Take my advice: don’t think about anything you don’t have to think about.”
    —
    Leo had been fired from his bank the year Milo turned four: 2008 was the year of the global crisis and Leo had helped it along, accumulating what his CEO termed “reckless losses.” Leo thought this was unfair. Everything he did with money was reckless, but no one wanted to fire him for his reckless profits.
    As he left the bank for the last time, in his chalk-stripe Hugo Boss suit and Lobb shoes, some anti-capitalist kids demonstrating outside had thrown eggs at him. Leo stood for a moment, looking down at the omelette of his suit. Then he tore off his jacket and grabbed two of the kids, throwing them down onto the pavement. He punched a third against the wall and broke his nose.
    Another of the kids was videoing the whole thing and Leo was arrested the next day. His CEO identified him from the footage.
    Leo was convicted of common assault, but his lawyer got him off a jail sentence on the grounds of diminished responsibility (being fired) and provocation (eggs). In any case, his victims were unemployed troublemakers. No one