Theres 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 wasnt that bad, was it?
Diane, is there a particular reason youre in Perry Barr?
Yes, a personal one.
She thought she could hear Murchison shuffling papers.
May I ask?
Im visiting someone. Family.
Oh. That would beyour foster parents?
Well done.
Thats all right.
I know its all right. I dont need your permission to visit them.
No, no. Of course not.
Thats all right.
I know its all right. I dont 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 Im behaving myself.
Murchison laughed. Fry thought she heard relief in her voice.
Ill tell him. And well see you later, yes?
Of course. After Ive 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 Harouns mobile phones. Money-transfer services and lettings agencies for student flats. Outside Amir Baz amp; 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 shed been away. This was no longer the place that shed known. The Brum she saw around her was a different city from the one that shed left. It was as if someone had broken into her previous life when she wasnt 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 wasnt the same person whod left Birmingham, either.
The Bowskills were the family shed lived with the longest. Shed spent years in the back bedroom of their red-brick detached house in Warley. Shed been there when Angie ran away and disappeared. And shed stayed with the Bowskills after her sister had gone. Shed 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 whod 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 stones 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 werent 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 hed 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, hed thought for a while about having a change. But then hed 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. Its good to see you. We havent 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 shed 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 shed only been trying to justify her reluctance to herself. But she shouldnt have made Jim and Alice the victims of her self-justification.
No, Im sorry. Ive 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 isnt too big, so its easy to maintain. And there are lots of shops. We didnt have the One-Stop shopping centre when you were here before, did we?
Yes, Dad. Its been there for fifteen years.
He nodded. And there are plenty of bus routes, if I need to go anywhere. So, all in all, its very handy.
The Bowskills moved from Warley to Perry Barr some time after she left home to live on her own. She wasnt sure why though Alices 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, theyd 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 Barrs Bengali area.
Fry knew better than to talk about the Asian community round here. If you looked for an Asian community, you wouldnt find it. Instead youd see a whole series of Asian communities Pakistanis, Bengalis, Hindus. And even within the nationalities, the complexities of caste and locality were impossible for an outsider to sort out. In some parts of the country, there were entire populations who had come from a handful of villages in one small region of Pakistan. The more you learned, the more you realized how undiscriminating the very word Asian was. It was a pretty big continent, after all. And she knew that no one around here would readily call themselves Asian. It was an outsiders term.
And everyone knew there was a pecking order among the different ethnic groups. The cycle that had played itself out in Perry Barr over the years was repeated in other parts of Birmingham. Newly arrived immigrants lived in the poorest streets, until they could to move on to better areas and bigger houses. These days, the leafy avenues of Solihull were full of Hindu millionaires.
Once an Asian parent had explained it to her:
In the old days, we thought we would come here, send some money back and eventually go home. But the new generation dont see it that way. A lot of people dont consider this the host country any more, they consider it their home.
But sometimes the old country is home, too, isnt it?
He smiled. Yes. Sometimes when people say home you have to ask which home theyre talking about.
Alice Bowskill looked frail. She wasnt that old, really. But time hadnt been kind to her. Nor had the years spent worrying over other peoples children.
Fry hugged her.
Mum.
Jim smiled at them both, delighted to see them together.
Do you still support West Brom, Diane? he said.
Me? said Fry. I never did, not really.
It was just because the boys did, said Alice with a sly grin. Fry almost felt like blushing.
Not the Blues, surely? said Jim, missing the significance of his wifes comment.
Of course, Jim Bowskill was another Villa fan. She wondered if that was part of the reason for the Bowskills moving to Perry Bar, so close to Villa Park? There were pubs round here where a Blue Nose would be torn apart at first sight.
But she wasnt a Birmingham City fan. She wasnt actually from Birmingham. She wondered how long it would be before some Brummie looked at her sideways and uttered the immortal phrase: A yam-yam, aint you?
There was no point in trying to deny it. People in these parts were acutely sensitive to the differences in accent that marked you out as Black Country. In a way, she was as much of a foreigner in Brum as she was back in Derbyshire. Not from round here might as well be permanently tattood on her forehead.
The Black Country was the name given to the urban sprawl west of the city of Birmingham. It encompassed old industrial towns like Wolverhampton, West Bromwich, Dudley, Sandwell and Walsall. And many smaller communities, too like Warley, where Fry had lived with her foster parents, and which was nothing but a string of housing estates tucked between Birmingham and the M5 motorway.