Georgina has an MA in Theatre from the Royal Central School of Speech & Drama and is a professional actress. She is also a writer/performer of theatre-based training programmes, including two years overseas with the Foreign Office, which inspired her to write her second novel Floating. This richly imagined expansive story travels to four continents (travel – remember that?) juxtaposed with the brooding spectre of familial abuse. The themes of place, identity and belonging run through the core of Georgina’s work.

She lives in London and is an alumna of the Faber Academy’s Novel Writing Course.

 

Email: georginanorth@hotmail.com

Instagram: @ggnorth16

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Floating

Chapter One

Camden Town, London. December 2018

I stared between the railings into the car park. I’d never left anything here for Libby—a card, flowers, a memento: leaving something in the place where she’d been killed seemed like a memorial to her murder, not a tribute to her life. The car park was now private with a bank of electric chargers and a pacing security guard, hyper-focused on his smartphone. But seventeen years ago, an old man, picking up cigarette butts, had discovered Libby’s body here. ‘I looked through those railings and I knew it,’  he’d told the Judge, then rubbed his hand over his face as if he wanted to scrub away the memory. ‘She was just slumped there. You know? On the ground. Her blonde hair over her face.’

The only other time I’d come here was exactly a year after it had happened. That day, there were still remnants of a shrine—half a coke can with a burned-down candle stuck into it, dead chrysanthemums with RIP Elizabeth written on a card tucked under weathered cellophane. Until Libby had died, I’d never heard anyone call her Elizabeth, not even her mum. The only thing left at the shrine with any personal meaning was a teddy bear, dressed in our school colours—a navy jumper with a white B insignia for Billingham Day School for Girls on its front. Not a proper crest, just a capital B encircled in white that the local Comp school kids used to say stood for ‘bor-ing’: they weren’t wrong. The newspapers had described Libby, incorrectly, as a straight-A student. There was no mention of her failing every science exam despite my best efforts to help her. Beside the teddy bear hung a laminated cardboard heart with a cut-out newspaper picture of Libby’s final year photo at its centre, all blush-skinned and cherubic. She hated that photo. Muslims Out was graffitied in marker pen across her image – a reminder of how she’d continued to be violated after her death. I went to pull the heart from the railings when a woman across the road shouted at me. ‘Hey, what you doing moving that stuff?’ She held a beer can in one hand, a blanket draped over her shoulder. ‘That’s a shrine to some poor girl who was killed…’ I ignored her. Libby was my friend, she was my only friend and she would have hated this. As I grabbed the cardboard heart with defiance, the woman started to cross the road but stumbled back onto the kerb, swearing at a swerving car that thankfully blasted its horn, hijacking her attention. As I tore the heart from the railing, the sound ripped through the centre of me.

 

In an attempt to shield my face from the gusts that whipped and snapped from the north, I upturned my mac collar and headed for the bus stop. Leaves blew across the road, stockpiling autumnal drifts at the pavement’s edge. An electronic sign said the number 214 was due in six minutes. As I waited, I pulled my phone from my tote bag and skim read another email from management: Anthony was still pressing me for answers – would I be renewing my contract? HR was still waiting for my response… I didn’t read on but pressed the phone to silent and dropped it back into my bag.

 

One year earlier. December 2017

 

I flashed my lanyard at security and braced myself for the Brexit demonstrators, but thanks be to the British weather, most of them had cleared away. It was one of those days when London felt like the greyest place on earth; the drizzle had neither cleaned the streets nor cleared the air but just hung there like the tequila-hangover I’d had at eighteen. After mistiming the Trafalgar Square crossing again, I stood contemplating whether it was worth fishing my brolly from my bag. The numerous combinations of crossings and subways in order to get from one side of the square to the other may be efficient in herding tourists, but it was like a sick joke on Whitehall’s weary civil servants. 

The moment I’d squeezed onto the Northern Line at Charing Cross, paperback in hand, passengers from behind shunted me down the carriage. I just managed to wedge my Mulberry handbag between my shins and grab onto a handrail before the train left the station. I’d bought the handbag with overtime pay and high hopes; all the fashionable, purposeful-looking women commuters had one, but once the fresh leather smell had faded, the bag lost its appeal. Every time I strung my arm through the straps, I regretted I hadn’t spent the money on a 35mm macro lens for my SLR. Over the last few years, my drawing specimens had progressed from life-size plants using metal precision rulers to more detailed studies. My last drawing of the tip of a hydrangea leaf had taken me ten days to complete. 

I attempted to read but gave up because the rap music coming from someone’s headphones behind me was so loud, I could make out which of the lyrics were explicit. By the time we’d reached Camden Town station, I held my book to my chest and stared at golden dog hairs stuck to the back of a man’s coat in front of me, wondering which breed the hairs had once been attached to—a Spaniel? A Labrador?

‘The train will be held here for a short while to regulate the service. Sorry for the inconvenience – we’ll be on our way shortly.’

I sighed and several of the dog hairs took flight. Camden Town often had service regulations or a broken-down train up the line and one summer weekend fifteen years ago it was where everything changed forever. As the train pulled away, I felt a stab in the solar plexus: I hadn’t said a prayer for Libby. As a lapsed Parsi, I could only recite half a dozen Gathas at most and since Libby’s death, I knew there wasn’t a God. So instead, whenever I passed through Camden Town station, I would pray to the sun and the moon because both were up in the sky. I prayed for them to take care of Libby, whose eyes were bright and curious and the colour of a spring sky.

On the 14:35 from Guildford, Libby had rested her head onto my shoulder and I’d sensed her kohl-lined eyes concentrating on my brother, drafting a cigarette paper into an aeroplane. 

With his long, slim fingers, Arif creased the plane’s edges until they looked blade sharp, working in silence like I imagined a Swiss watchmaker might. How had he done that—drawn Libby in by doing something as perfunctory as fashioning a paper aeroplane out of a cigarette paper? He’d done it because everything he did was fascinating, idiosyncratic. Only Arif could make a paper plane look like an aerodynamic fighter jet. If he couldn’t excel at something, he didn’t bother with it, proclaiming it banal or ugly as he had with Scrabble and German. At Eton, Arif had dropped German A-level because he’d cited the long words as harsh and inelegant. He’d argued in an article he’d written in the student paper that in a science and technology context, German was a dying language and therefore superfluous for any student looking beyond traditional academia and towards the future. He received a commendation for that article.

Arif inspected the finished paper-plane as if it were a prototype. Should I comment? There was always a treacherous path to navigate in these situations, paved with anything from eggshells to hot coals. If I complimented Arif on his structures built from playing cards; enormous belches; tennis match victories, I would either risk ridicule—  ‘Why would you admire such a stupid thing? It’s crap and only a moron would think otherwise,’  he’d proclaim. Or, it could have the opposite effect and I would be praised for my acute observation and declared his ‘clever little sis’. Since he’d been at Imperial College, I hadn’t seen much of him, so these balancing acts were less frequent and I was out of practice.

Libby awoke from her trance and lifted her head off my shoulder. She leaned across me towards Arif and expelled an ‘Ah’.  I was uncertain if it was a how cute ‘ah’, or a that’s so clever ‘ah’. Either way, as I sat motionless between them, my breath paused in anticipation of his response. 

The paper jet passed my chest and landed on Libby’s arm, its nose stuck in her fluffy jumper.

She laughed as she pulled the plane from the jumper’s fibres. ‘That’s so sweet,’ she said and unpinned her Greenpeace badge from her canvas bag strap, pierced the pin through the plane’s wing and attached it back to the strap. ‘Thank you, Arif.’

Shut up, Lib, I thought. It’s not a present; it’s the opposite, whatever the opposite of a present is. I’d sensed Libby irritated Arif because his nostrils twitched whenever she laughed and now she wouldn’t stop. ‘Shh,’ I said and squeezed her stockinged knee as the train rumbled into Waterloo. 

Libby tapped the plane’s wing with her index finger.  ‘It’s so cool. I love it.’

Arif ignored her, pulling his backpack from the luggage rack. Mummy had packed it with laundered clothes and labelled plastic food containers to take back to Halls for his summer programme—something to do with clinical research. As the train door opened he gifted Libby a half-smile: she bit her lower lip.

I felt uneasy as Libby and I walked, arm in arm, behind Arif. Was that due to the lip-gloss now smeared across her front teeth, or because of the whole paper-plane exchange? 

        On the Northern Line, Arif sat with a rod-straight posture, eyeballing an old man opposite for an hour-long minute, until, still holding his gaze, he stood. 

The old man dropped his newspaper. ‘Shit,’ he said under his breath. 

In two brisk moves, Arif strapped on his backpack and held out his arms, palms upwards. He fixed his gaze on some imaginary object at the far end of the carriage. ‘Allah Akbar,’ he called. ‘Allah Akbar,’ he called again, only louder. He began chanting in some made-up language—although his accent was similar to Dad’s, the words were unlike the Gujarati that I’d heard our parents speak on the telephone. 

I scanned the carriage; some passengers had buried their faces in newspapers or books, others shot warning glances across the aisle. Horror danced inside me like a musical extravaganza. I tried to lock my gaze on my hands, twisting in my lap. But what if people thought I was praying too? I trapped my hands between my thighs. Not knowing what to do or where to look dizzied me. As though sensing my queasiness, Libby held my upper arm, steadying me: her palms felt clammy.

Passengers cleared the way as Arif paced the carriage, mumbling strange, guttural words which ebbed and flowed. He thrust his hands in front of him then slapped them across his chest. He seemed to have unnerved our end of the carriage enough that their reactions convinced even me that he was carrying a bomb.

Facial stubble had added authenticity to Arif’s role as the unhinged Islamic terrorist. He’d recently been coming home at weekends unshaven. Dad had asked him if he was ‘quite sure this was a wise choice’. Even Mummy had looked unsettled by his appearance; she’d cradled Arif’s face in her hands and said, ‘such a pity to hide your good looks’.

A couple sitting opposite scurried off at Warren Street, the woman’s handbag hugged to her stomach, protecting her vital organs from the explosives she imagined in Arif’s backpack. 

 ‘You’re a madman,’ a voice shouted from a group at the other end of the carriage as they exited the train at Euston. 

Arif didn’t respond; he continued the show, unperturbed. ‘Allah Akbar… Allah Akbar…’

Only two other people remained at our end of the carriage. A tall, Nordic-looking woman standing by the double doors made a poor effort at ignoring Arif while flicking through a guidebook. She kept blotting the space between her eyebrows with a tugged-down sleeve. Opposite her, a heavy-set black woman stood with a stuffed grocery bag between her legs. She had looked as if she were sleep-standing throughout Arif’s performance, but she opened one bloodshot eye and perused the scene before the train left Mornington Crescent.

Libby squeezed my bicep, but the shame paralysing me, cell by cell, prevented me from responding. Please, somebody, pull the emergency cord. I shut my eyes and willed an official to hurtle into the carriage like Harrison Ford. I would deny all knowledge of Arif, I’d protect Libby and align us with the other passengers. I’d wail with relief and recount how scared we’d been of ‘that bearded man with the backpack, pacing, twitching and chanting’.

As the train headed into Camden Town, the Tube tracks screeched, or was it the sound of everyone’s teeth grinding?

Arif strode off and as Libby and I followed, the black woman poked me in the back. ‘They’re afraid of you lot now,’ she said, ‘now you know how it feels.’ A dimple formed in the centre of both cheeks as she laughed in deep booms. The doors closed and I watched her continue to laugh as the train left the station.

     ‘Sorry,’ I said to someone’s back and moved closer to the right side of the escalator between Arif and Libby. 

‘What were you doing on the Tube, Arif?’ I asked.

He glared down from the step above. ‘I make a pretty convincing crazed terrorist, don’t you think?’

‘Someone could have pulled the emergency cord.’

‘None of them would have had the balls. Fucking cowards. All those people labelled me a Jihadi the minute I sat down. Well, if they want to condemn me with their bug-eyed stares and quaking hands – ooh, I’m so scared,’   he said while quivering a hand in my face, ‘then I’m happy to comply.’

The escalator moved at a crawl just to make this all the more agonising. 

‘What was that language you were speaking – It wasn’t Gujarati?’

‘How would you know? How often have you heard Dad speak Gujarati? And Mummy prefers to speak French. She’s Surrey’s very own Asian Marie Antoinette – the stupid cunt.’

 I felt the same sick feeling in my stomach as I did whenever Arif made a flip-of-a-switch change in his behaviour on Mummy’s entrance into a room. He was only cruel to her behind her back, never to her face. What sickened me the most was wondering how Mummy would feel on hearing him talk about her like that until I remembered that she wouldn’t hear it. She would be deaf to anything which didn’t fit her master creation: Prince Arif – the great (brown) hope of our family. 

Once we’d gone through the ticket barrier, I gestured to Libby to wait for me. She stood with her hands deep in her suede miniskirt pockets, her eyes darting with wanderlust at the swarming crowds. She’d tamed her blonde hair into a plait over her head like a punk Heidi: she was the coolest person around, even in Camden. I’d borrowed one of Libby’s striped tops, slashed at the shoulders, so that I didn’t stick out like a sore thumb—a square, awkward kind of sore thumb. Even Libby’s anticipation of this trip to celebrate our A-Level results—hers exceptional, mine predictable—had felt torturous. I’d have preferred to be at the library, copying drawings from A Curious Herbal by Elizabeth Blackwell that the librarians had specially ordered from Kew’s archives. But I hadn’t gone to the library because I wanted to be with Libby more. 

Arif grabbed my wrist, led me outside the tube station and shouted me into a corner. ‘Don’t you ever laugh at anything, Cara? That was hilarious. That woman’s expression – fucking hell, I thought she was going to hit the deck at one point.’ He looked to the side as if re-watching the action from earlier.

‘But it’s not even been a year since the Twin Towers – everyone’s still scared. I don’t mean it’s up to us to make people feel safe because we’re Asian—’

‘Us?’ Arif pushed me into a newspaper stand: a stack of Evening Standards toppled and papered the pavement.  

Over his shoulder, I noticed onlookers—some stopped to stare, others gave us a wide berth. A girl shouted, ‘Get a room.’ 

Arif grabbed my jacket collar and held his face close to mine. ‘What are you talking about – us? It’s not us. It’s me. It’s Asian men who get fucked-over – Hindus, Sikhs and yes, even Parsis,’ he said, stabbing at his chest with such force that it must have hurt. ‘We’re all thrown in with the fucking Muslims.’ His face was now only centimetres from mine. ‘It’s brown men who get stared at, pointed at, spat at, fucking interrogated. Stopped and searched. This stuff does not happen to swotty, brown girls like you.’

‘All I’m saying is, I don’t know why you did all that weird chanting and pacing up and down the carriage. And what were you doing with your hands?’

‘Oh, fuck off. I don’t have to answer to you.’ Arif let go of my collar: as I fell onto the pavement my thigh caught the edge of the newspaper stand. ‘Who do you think you are?’ Arif said and spat onto the pavement, before disappearing into the crowd.

Libby helped me up. ‘You alright?’

‘Yep, I’m fine.’ But I wasn’t. I checked to see if my jeans were ripped; they weren’t, but pain shot into my knee. I rubbed my thigh, feeling a fresh bruise blooming under the denim. ‘He gets hot-headed sometimes. Passionate about things.’

‘Well he shouldn’t let it out on you,’ Libby said and hugged me as only she could hug, rocking me from side to side in a see-saw dance that ended in giggles. 

‘Let’s go,’ I said. Despite my throbbing leg, I just wanted to get the day over with. 

‘Wait,’ Libby stopped and ripped off Arif’s paper-plane from her bag strap, crumpled it into a ball and threw it at an overflowing bin.

 

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office

 

‘Sorry I’m late, Anthony. Getting past the Brexit demo took ages.’ I hooked my damp mac onto the coat stand. ‘According to a woman wielding a European flag, I’m the person to tell  Boris Johnson that he should be ashamed of himself.’ 

Anthony tossed his cufflinks like a pair of casino dice onto his desk and began rolling up his sleeves. I’d seen him do the same thing before numerous meetings; this meant he was preparing to fight his corner.

I pointed to the chair opposite his desk and Anthony said, ‘Yes, of course, take a seat, Cara. You don’t need to ask. I’ll get straight to it.’ I pulled my notebook out of my bag. ‘Any change in your opinion on overseas work?’ 

‘Why?’ I replied.

‘Initially, your special circumstances didn’t allow you to take an overseas posting.’ My spine buckled at the mention of the term he hadn’t used in years – special circumstances. ‘However, it’s been a while since we’ve had a check-in and I wanted to see how you were doing.’ I hadn’t realised this would be a check-in; I’d presumed Anthony wanted to request my assistance for the forthcoming Hungarian delegation, as he’d done on numerous similar occasions. ‘Cara, I’ve been tardy in steering any kind of progression path for you. Remind me how long you’ve been with us now?’ His frown formed a salt and pepper unibrow, unkempt tufts that mismatched his otherwise groomed appearance. Anthony always looked as if he’d detoured via Jermyn Street on his way to the Office each morning—freshly shaved; Cologned; Windsor-knotted—so it was baffling why he didn’t trim his eyebrows once in a while. Why didn’t Susan insist on it, she seemed like a no-nonsense kind of woman? 

I cleared my throat and said, ‘Thirteen years.’ I’d never wanted to go for promotion. The Training Department suited me—on the top floor, out of the way, mine and Jacquie’s desks blessedly shoehorned into a corner. Since joining the Office, I’d made great efforts to avoid befriending anyone other than Jacquie, who I’d instinctively felt wasn’t the prying kind and primarily interested in having a good laugh. I’d spent the first few years in the job analysing my other colleagues’ tones of voice, changes of posture, or shifts in eye contact. I’d always feared one of them would recognise me, considering how high profile the case had been, but as time passed, it had felt less likely to happen and I settled into the job like a piece of standard-issue furniture.

Anthony rotated his fountain pen between his fingers, in that way he did, studying me with bemusement.

 ‘I know I haven’t pushed myself, Anthony, but I will never forget your kindness—’

‘I did what was right, nothing more.’ Anthony put down his pen, opened my Performance Report and spread his palm over the page. ‘Your service record is exemplary. You’ve stoically endured numerous changes of systems, processes, not least Governments.’ Brilliant, I thought, I’m successful at being ordinary. ‘You’re a marvellous candidate—you have all the necessary transferable skills. You speak French and Spanish—’

‘I’m a bit rusty actually.’

‘And your sense of humour will come in very useful.’

‘For what?’

Anthony interlinked his fingers. ‘I’d like to offer you a position as an A2-level Worldwide Floater. It’s not advertised yet and it doesn’t need to be if you’d like the job.’

‘A Floater?’ 

‘I’m aware that in the past Floaters were seen as just roaming temps, but things have finally moved on and what we need from our Floaters now is to inject energy and innovation into our overseas Posts – really make a difference.’

The thought of leaving the building made me clutch the chair arms as I do in an aeroplane during preparation for take-off. Floaters worked on two-year rotations, never knowing where they’ll be posted from one city to the next. 

The military call sounded and I instinctively looked to the nearest window, wishing I could draw one of the wire-meshed anti-blast curtains to one side and glare down to the Changing of the Guard below. The Old Admiralty Building was reminiscent of a Victorian prep school—red-bricked, a rabbit warren of arched stone corridors and checkerboard tiles, staff were streamed and had appraisals (instead of school reports) and the canteen food was pretty much school dinners with a gluten-free option. However, every day at eleven o’clock, I was gladly jolted from my routine to peer down at Horse Guards and the regaled marching band who from this height resembled toy soldiers who I liked to pretend were there to protect only me.

‘What the Office is trying to do is pull itself up by its bootstraps and become more relatable, as a culture. We need to show our overseas Posts how London has stepped out of the Dark Ages, shed off its colonial past and embraced diversity.’

‘Oh, I see,’ I said. 

‘Ah, that was rather clumsy.’ Anthony leaned forward. ‘This is not about your ethnicity, Cara. It’s because your talents are wasted in the Training Department. I can’t bear waste.’ He picked up a cufflink and fiddled with it as he spoke. ‘Susan’s always needling me for dismissing sell-by dates, but none of the family has contracted salmonella as yet,’ he said with a crinkly smile. I felt slightly nauseous; I kept picturing mouldy bread and curdled milk.

‘Anyway,’ he continued and dropped the cufflink. ‘You’ve been playing on my mind.’

I swallowed. Hard. ‘Can I just stop you there? Um, security clearance? Wouldn’t I have to undergo another vetting interview when applying for visas? I’d have to answer questions again about my family background—’

‘Oh, apologies, I should have said from the off. I’ve been assured by George in Clearance, sotto voce, that he’ll complete your application personally.’

I felt naked; the sotto voce reassurance didn’t feel reassuring enough. Why had Anthony talked to Clearance before I’d even turned down the job? ‘I see,’ I mumbled and glanced down to inspect why my ring finger felt sore; I’d pulled off a hangnail where there was now an angry tear in the skin.

‘And may I ask if you’re still unattached?’

‘Yes.’

‘Clever old you.’

Reliable; special circumstances; unattached. The urge to run out of Anthony’s office away from those labels brought me to my feet: I beelined for the door. ‘Thank you, but I just can’t take the position,’ I said, trying to unhook my mac from the stand in a failed attempt to make a smooth exit. ‘I do appreciate you asking me though.’ 

‘Cara?’ Anthony called. I looked back at him. ‘Before you make up your mind, please do give this some serious thought.’ There was that smile again. ‘The position starts in the New Year, so I’ll need an answer by close of play next Friday, shall we say?’

I nodded: it seemed less definite than a vocal affirmation. I needed to get home to my desk easel—where everything always felt simpler—and mull over the job offer. And I would think about it; after what Anthony had done for me, it was the least I could do for him. He’d always ‘had my back’ as the Americans say, although he had my back in a very British fashion: a brief, encouraging word; a reassuring nod; a check-in which typically ended with, ‘you know my door is always open’. Despite having never actually knocked on his door, the knowledge that it was open felt comforting. Mostly, I was grateful that he’d not once made me feel indebted to him. ‘Anthony, can we keep this conversation between the two of us?’ I asked.

‘You have my word,’ he said, tapping his finger on the side of his nose. 

Another secret. Well, I was good at keeping them…