The Wonder - Softcover

Diana Evans was a dancer before she became a writer and critic. Her first novel, 26a, received a Betty Trask Award, a nomination for the Guardian First Book Award, and was short­listed for the Commonwealth Best First Book and Whitbread First Novel of the Year awards. It was also the inaugural winner of the Orange Award for New Writers. She lives in London.
From the Hardcover edition.

1

When Lucas was a boy, asleep in his cabin on the Grand Union Canal, he had a recurring dream. There was the sound of galloping and a change in weather. Sudden wind shook through the sycamore trees that lined the surrounding streets, then into the room came a man dressed head to toe in black, with coat tails and a hat, and large, priestly hands. He lifted Lucas in his arms and took him out into the night.

It felt very much like flying. They sped up Ladbroke Grove and over the dividing hill and Lucas felt fast and warm in the cave between the man’s torso and the horse’s soft brown neck. The coat tails whipped in the wind. They passed through barley fields as the pigeons turned to nightingales. Everything was different, the Westway gone, the Portobello Road less travelled; on and on they went without direction or conversation until speed became home. There was not a stretch of canal for miles out here, not an absence or a cemetery stone, so when Lucas woke up, windswept, in the place he called home, in the ramshackle houseboat with its questions and sideways slant against the bank, his dis orientation was greater than before. Horseback seemed the surer place, and he’d wait earnestly for the coat-tailed stranger to return.

It came to be that whenever he thought of his father he did not think of Antoney Matheus, but a highwayman, who came for him in the depths of sleep and changed the look of the world, as only fathers can. It was easier that way.

He woke up one April morning shortly after his twenty-fifth birthday having had this dream, which had not recurred since the time of his grandmother's death nine years before. It left him with the same feeling of disorientation, the more for its impromptu arrival in his adult mind, and its poignancy increased when he opened his eyes. He was lying on the left-hand side of the queen-size bed he still shared with his sister Denise. His feet were hanging off the end of the mattress as he hadn’t stopped growing until he was six foot three. Around him were grooved wooden walls, cool to the touch, inclining on their ascent from the gunwale, masking cupboards built into every conceivable space to make up for lack of it — linen above his head, clothes in a pull-out next to him, a drawer beneath containing Denise’s handwritten accounts. The cabin was eight foot two inches wide and the ceiling at its highest point five foot nine. Lucas had a stoop in his upper back from habitually bowing his head.

Most oppressive of all was an antique cherrywood wardrobe which loomed at the end of the bed. The only piece of freestanding furniture in the room, it contained items belonging to his parents — his mother, Carla, who had died when he was a few months old, and his father, who’d allegedly drowned. According to a long-standing rule designed to quell Lucas’s childhood fears, the wardrobe was never opened, thereby preventing the vapour of the ghostly, rotting things inside it wafting into his and Denise’s nostrils as they slept, causing nightmares. Indeed on the rare occasions Lucas had peeped inside out of curiosity, a bitter tree smell had slunk out from the darkness within, cutting his nerve and making him step away. It was time for a different waking view, a clear, open road, the inside of a girl’s bedroom maybe. The twentieth century was drawing to a close. The Conservatives had come and gone, so had Tupac and Biggie. Sizzla Kalonji was taking over the reggae world yet here Lucas still was, staring at the same disturbing inanimate presence inches from his feet, blocking his path to the future. He had recently suggested to Denise that they empty the cupboard and decide what to do with its contents, but she’d responded curtly, saying she didn’t see a reason to tamper with things.

Denise, a florist, had left for work hours ago, having neatened her pillow precisely. It was a bright, pink-blossomed morning. Winter had clung to power, and spring had begun that year with high chill winds, lifting the blossom off the branches and bringing it down to rest at road edges, in ravishing pools at the base of the sycamore trunks. Lucas had nothing in particular to get up for other than to finish reading the latest issue of Touch magazine, so he closed his eyes and concentrated on the rocking sensation caused by a passing vessel, which always made him imagine he was on an open sea bound for Jamaica. Today it was difficult. In the receding waves of the dream he was more aware than usual of the wardrobe’s oxidising brass handle rattling with the movements of the boat, a sound, like the ticking of the bedside clock or the creaks in the walls, he’d become used to not hearing. He turned onto his back, venturing with his long skinny leg across the delicate centre divide that Denise was so astute in maintaining. The bed was a wide warm country when it was all his own. They’d shared it ever since their grandmother had gone (when Lucas was twelve, Denise sixteen), in the beginning as a kind of comfort, especially during thunderstorms, now in the hold of a fossilised, seasick habit. However much he spread out this morning, though, he couldn’t shake the feeling of being stifled. Coat tails whipped in the wind. The wardrobe rattled. He got to thinking about Edwin Starr, whom he’d met the day before yesterday in St Albans. In this crowded state of mind, as the Friday traffic passed along Ladbroke Grove outside, he was relieved to feel himself slowly but surely becoming aware of something else — something soothing, a sweet distraction, that thing you can always rely on to take you elsewhere. A lazy, yet willing, matutinal arousal.

Lucas always hesitated at these moments. He was afraid of leaving traces and lethargic at the thought of washing sheets if he did. For a time his hand rested coyly on his inner thigh, but then he decided to go with it, a quick, six-minute ride, to start the day, to settle his head. He’d developed a clever technique over the years that involved throwing off the sheets just before the point of emission and aiming himself upwards towards his chest so that the spray was restricted to that area. For this reason he always removed his T-shirt beforehand. He set out cautiously, with a picture in his mind of Lauryn Hill, whom Denise had refused to let him put on the wall. He wasn’t expecting much, not fully committed to the prospect of clean-up, so he was taken by surprise by a sudden shooting, generous charge that made him yelp, necessitating a particularly urgent clearance of linen so that one of his feet got twisted in the sheets. This meant that he missed the best bit. He lay there afterwards, chest-sprayed, cheated, exhausted, wondering as he often did whether it had really been worth it, and whether Denise, somewhere in flower world, had sensed it.
If you passed that spot back then you might have seen it. If you walked eastwards from Harlesden along the towpath almost to the Ladbroke Grove crossing, perhaps sat down on one of the benches there and looked across to the opposite bank, you might have seen a fifty-foot narrowboat of faded green leaning slightly to its left (this was because of the wardrobe). Her name was Silver, written in sloping letters on one side by the previous owner. There were portholes along the saloon. A handrail lined the bow. A pair of corroded ornamental dragons glared out from either side of the dwarfish cabin doors. It was a relic of a thing, with paint peeling off the steel and a useless, rusted tiller at the stern. It looked, in fact, despite the fresh flowers at the windows, as if it might be sinking, it had been there for such a long time. Lucas and Denise did not know what it was to live on land or to have a front door that could be accessed without first stepping onto a deck, and rocking a little. They didn’t know what it felt like to open that front door to an Avon lady or a British Gas salesman or a Jehovah’s Witness, because the Avon ladies and the British Gas salesmen and the Jehovah’s Witnesses did not have the key. Only if you were a water gypsy with licence to moor at that particular spot, or a friend of one of the water gypsies, were you allowed through the high black gate that separated the towpath from the street.

There were obvious advantages to the situation (hardly any junk mail, less exposure to the impertinences of capitalism) but Lucas often wondered what it would be like to talk about gas prices, or the existence of hell, to a chatty stranger on solid ground. He was unlike most boat-dwellers in this respect. The majority of boat-dwellers have one belief in common — water is freedom. When you’ve tired of a view or you do not wish to be found, when you long to nestle at the shoulder of another urban shore, you simply untether yourself and sail away. You take the murky liquid road at four miles an hour and do a left into Camden, or Bethnal Green, or you go further out, towards the country, and discover new kinds of silence. You go, you go, you disappear. What better way to become invisible than to erase your home, to leave no trace of yourself in sight? What a joy it is to live with just the possibility of such a thing.

This was not how it was for Lucas. This was a permanent, inadvertent mooring with no comparison to a concrete past. He was born on the water, and raised by his grandmother on the same spot. He used to think that all children who’d lost their parents lived on boats, that it was part of the experience of being an orphan — either that or you went to a children’s home, where there were probably fewer spiders but no grandmothers or other advantages. Toreth was a caring, garrulous woman of Welsh descent and had helped Lucas through thunderstorms with her dream-inducing story of Peterjohn the highwayman, who’d had nine children and belonged to the bygone age when Portobello Road was just a rough country lane. She and Lucas used to sit on the bow together in fine weather while Denise was absorbed in some kind of gardening activity on the bank. When Toreth was in deep storytelling mode, and if there was a good sunset, she’d sometimes tell another enduring tale, the one about how the boat had got there in the first place, the only story she ever told that featured Lucas’s dad. It took place in 1969, in October, on a day whose evening had also seen a remarkable sunset.

Antoney, Toreth would explain, was a man given to ‘suspicious’ disappearances. On that day, during one such disappearance, he bought Silver from a musician friend of his in Greenford for two hundred pounds, then sailed her down the Grand Union at maximum speed having never driven a boat in his life. He waved at passers-by en route, drinking white rum at intervals from a flask given to him by one of his ‘silly little groupies’. Choosing this spot, diagonally opposite the Kensal Green gasworks, he introduced Carla — Toreth’s daughter — to her new home with a bleary triumphant look in his eye. ‘You want property?’ he said. ‘Here’s property. How about it?’ Carla was heavily pregnant with Denise at the time, on the lip of labour. She was hot and dizzy and dangerously in love. She stepped onto the sleepy sunstruck deck and sat down on a metal chair. ‘Antoney,’ she said, ‘you’ll be the death of me.’

That was the day Denise was born, in fact, which was what this story was actually about, for Toreth thought that Denise, with her precocious interest in flowers, could be the reincar nation of a much-loved florist of the time called Emily Kirk, whose funeral Toreth had attended that very same day in 1969. Emily, or Em as she was known, had been selling flowers in Portobello Market for more than sixty years (‘All fresh, sixpence a bunch!’ Toreth would demonstrate) so the funeral was a local event. In the traditional stallholder custom the long and winding cortège travelled down Portobello Road at round about the same time as Antoney was sailing the boat from Greenford. As it passed, the stallholders stopped their work and bowed their heads in respect. Later, as the sun set remarkably and Em drifted into history, Carla was helped up the towpath slope by Antoney in the early agony of dilation. They made it to the hospital just in time. Death had left possibility in the air. There were flower thoughts in the night wind, memories of foliage and further work to be done, and in a miracle of concurrence, Denise pushed her way out into the world with a certain resolve.

‘Is that really true, Gran?’ Lucas would ask when she’d finished telling the story. ‘Of course it’s true!’ she’d say. ‘I’d never lie to a child.’

Those were happier times. Toreth saw out her last years in a nursing home in Hanwell after suffering two strokes, seven months apart. The day she moved in, she gave Lucas a wistful wet kiss and said to him from her crumpled lips, her voice slower than it had once been, ‘It’s hard for you, sweetheart, all alone in being a boy. Keep your eyes on a straight place.’ He hugged her for a while, revising the smell of aniseed off her neck, then he and Denise had returned to the boat alone. Lucas was bereft. Denise was stoical. She closed the cabin doors, leaned against them with her fingertips joined at the small of her back, and accepted her fate with dignity.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘It’s just us now.’

‘Are we staying here?’ Lucas asked.

‘Of course we are. Where else?’

They were forgotten, it seemed, like the steps of a dance by people who don’t dance. Survival was paramount, and Denise set with increased ferocity to her work. Pretty trips along the summer canal did not come into it. Water was not freedom. The boat had not been sailed in a long time.
They lived on board with approximately two thousand spiders, who wove webs in the window frames and raised children of their own. Lucas was three inches taller than his father had been and of a vastly different physique. His legs and arms were lanky and pole-like, his knees were sharp — in his school years he was known as ‘Longboy’, ‘Highrise’, and ‘Spoon-in-mug’. He was a bad eater. He liked late-night nachos and sherbet pips. Where his father’s sinewy forearms had deemed him irresistible in a short-sleeved shirt, Lucas had thin wrists and elongated hands and, with his large flat feet, dancing did nothing for him. However, he took after Antoney in the eyes, which were brown and birdlike and tended to linger with intensity. He wore his hair close-shaved, bringing out a humble, greasy-nosed prettiness that retreated when the hair grew out. His smile was uncertain. A fleeting girlfriend had once told him he had nice ears.

On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons he worked for no pay at West, a local music magazine, but on Fridays adhered to his routine timeless drift, which always began with Scarface. After tidying up the bed he had a complicated bath in the half-size tub and applied Lynx deodorant. Then he entered the saloon through a tattered wine-coloured curtain and went over to the stereo, where Scarface waited with his deep, macabre voice. He was Lucas’s favourite rapper of all time. Hailing from Houston, Texas, he was the first one, the only one, to explore the four dark walls of the mind while keeping a hold on the mellow East Coast cool. Lucas had often discussed this summation with Jake, his long-time spar, a friend of a water gypsy, but Jake was wary of showering an American rapper with too much praise, committed as he was to the advancement of the UK scene, which was currently being eclipsed by garage. Listening to Scarface was for Lucas a private glory he never got tired of. Over the years he’d compiled multitudes of tapes with his songs arranged in different orders, different progressions of rhythm and thought, sometimes combining the solo work with the earlier Geto Boys tunes as well as those of other artists, to see how they rolled together. The tapes were labelled in various colou...