The Tryst

11

Steve walked home slowly, pushing against a strengthening wind which was breaking up the cloud cover. Well, he would have told it differently, that was all he could say. He’d have had hidden treasure, a big chest stuffed with gold and jewels which the old man had taken from the place in the country after the brothers got killed and kept in a room somewhere at the top of the house, where no one ever went. Hazchem would have been the son of Maurice and the woman on the lawn, so the treasure belonged to him, or at least he reckoned it did, which was why he kept watching Matthews’s house. That sounded much more likely than all the stuff about ghosts and devils. The boy’s doubts about Ernest Matthews had been proved too right. Houses under the sea and rich people living in cemeteries had turned out to be the least of it, in the end. Matthews’s fear itself was fake. The danger and mystery which had haunted these streets for weeks, lending drama to Steve’s life, stood revealed as nothing more than the pathetic delusions of an old man who’d lost his mind somewhere along the way.

Even decorating a garage door and a pillar-box with EAT SHIT DIE BOX didn’t help. It wasn’t until Steve reached Trenchant Road that he forgot all about his disappointment and the old man. It was at once obvious that something out of the ordinary had happened: the corrugated iron fence that surrounded the house had been torn down and the garden churned into a slurry of mud in the midst of which lay piles of wooden hoarding and bundles of barbed wire. At the side of the house nearest the corner stood a large skip covered with a tarpaulin, and a yellow bulldozer. There was no one about. Whoever had done all this had gone away again, for the moment. The boy walked round the corner, then doubled back across the end of the ruined wilderness, thankful that it was starting to get dark by now. He paused in a patch of undergrowth which the bulldozer had missed, crouching down and sniffing the dense rank odour of the nettles, listening intently. All was quiet. He scurried over the open ground, skidding on the slippery gashes of bare clay, to the back door. He wriggled past the plywood screen, inside the house.

The passageway was dark, but a glow up ahead showed that a light was on in the living room. The boy picked his way along the exposed floor joists and odd patches of floorboard that hadn’t gone into the fire. Dave’s ravages had left a gap of almost a yard between a joist at the door and the beginning of the flooring, making it impossible to come into the room gradually. Steve stood there for several minutes, craning his neck and trying to make sense of the faint noises he could hear. It was a mumbling sound, rather like a baby. In the end he took a deep breath and jumped.

On one of the mattresses lay Tracy, the earphones of the Walkman almost lost in her hair. She was wearing a pink skirt over black tights and a white T-shirt printed with a cartoon of a leering orange cat and the words ‘Stick with me, kid — we’ll go places’. A bottle of Drambuie was balanced on her stomach, rising and falling with each breath she took. Her little feet twitched in time to the inaudible music and she was half-singing the words. She waved to Steve and pulled the earphones off.

‘Here, have a listen.’

He knelt down and took the flimsy hoop, still warm from the girl’s head. Tracy raised the bottle of Drambuie to her mouth. A bubble of air slipped between her lips and the glass rim and rose slowly through the dense brown liquid. She held the bottle out to Steve. The boy shook his head.

‘Go on! You got to start sometime.’

He took the bottle and their fingers touched for a moment. He tilted it to his mouth, as she had done. The rim was wet, and when the liqueur trickled down his throat, sweet and hot and perfumed, he imagined that he was tasting her saliva. Her body was terrifyingly close to his. All he had to do was reach out and touch her.

‘Where are the others?’ he asked, handing back the bottle.

‘Out looking for a place to stay. Can’t stop here now, can we?’

Tracy’s was not a successful face, which was one reason why Steve liked it. Some faces were like television; there was nothing to do except sit and look at them. But Tracy’s was a d-i-y face. You needed to spend time on it, but it gave you a great sense of satisfaction and achievement. Without make-up, her features looked as raw, vulnerable and unglamorous to Steve as his own. He had never looked at her from so close before. He knew at once that it would be useless to try to hide anything from her. This came as a great relief.

Tracy pressed a button on the Walkman and music abruptly exploded inside Steve’s head. He watched as she started packing her clothes into crumpled plastic bags. The music made her every gesture seem special and significant, like a film. When the song was over, Steve took the earphones off.

‘When we leaving?’ he asked.

‘Later on. This place’ll be gone tomorrow. Funny, isn’t it?’

Although she was only a few yards away, Steve had the feeling that they were separated by an enormous distance.

‘Can I have a bit more of that stuff?’ he asked, to bring her back.

Tracy turned to him, grinning.

‘Can’t get enough once you get started, can you?’

She came and knelt beside him and they both drank. When Tracy started to get up again, she lost her balance and reached for the boy’s shoulder to steady herself. That pushed him over too, and they fell over together on the mattress. The next moment something wet and warm happened to Steve’s face. By the time he realized that Tracy was kissing him, she had finished. She leaned back, staring up at the ceiling. Her face was still only inches from his, yet this distance seemed even more achingly unbridgeable than the one which had separated them earlier. Miniature music leaked from the earphones abandoned on the mattress beside them, mixed in with the hollow booming of the wind in the chimney. Tracy’s hair had started to grow out from the roots again in its natural mousy colour, as though the spell that had temporarily transformed her into a glamorous witch was slowly wearing off.

‘So anyway, what’s this you’ve been getting up to?’ she asked.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Shopping for some old fucker and that.’

She groped for the bottle and had another swig.

‘Well, he can’t get out of the house,’ Steve explained.

‘What, crippled, is he?’

Steve shook his head, then tapped it with two fingers. ‘Bit mental. He lives in this big house, in this one room downstairs, all full of stuff. But he won’t go outside, see? Thinks somebody’s going to do him.’

‘Fuck.’

Tracy sounded impressed.

‘He won’t even open the door, only to me,’ Steve bragged. ‘I got to ring the bell in a special way, otherwise he won’t come.’

‘How do you mean, special?’

‘Like this.’

He tapped out the rhythm on the floor. Tracy yawned.

‘Sounds a right loony.’

She lay staring up at the ceiling for a while. Then she rolled up and leaned over the boy, flicking her tongue around the whorls of his ear. Steve started and quivered in her grasp, moaning with surprise and pleasure. His throat was dry and his heart pounding. He wished that this had never started, and that it would never end. He twisted round to face her, reached out and placed his hands on her ribs. He could feel the underside of her breasts pressing against the base of his thumbs. This was just as he had imagined it in the stories he used to tell himself: the stotters gone, Tracy come to him, the warmth and the cuddles. Was it possible to make things happen by imagining them, by telling stories about them?

‘So where does he keep it all?’ Tracy asked, putting the earphones back on her head and adjusting the volume. Steve blinked at her.

‘What?’

There was a long pause before she answered.

‘The money he gives you for the shopping and that. If he don’t ever go out, he must have it stashed away somewhere.’

Steve felt it would be a shame to ruin the good impression he seemed to be making by admitting that he didn’t know the answer to this question.

‘It’s in this big trunk upstairs,’ he said, remembering his improved version of the old man’s story.

‘Get out,’ Tracy murmured.

Oddly enough, the fact that Steve knew his story wasn’t true only increased his resentment at not being believed.

‘It is! I’ve been up there! I’ve seen it! There’s this old trunk full of gold and jewels and stuff, in a big room up at the top of the house.’

Tracy said nothing. Her eyes were closed and her body twitched in time to a music only she could hear. Steve assumed that she had already forgotten what they had been talking about. He had grown used to the fact that the stotters’ attention span lasted only a few moments.

‘Where the fuck those wankers got to?’ she remarked at last, turning off the Walkman. ‘We got to get out of here, find somewhere to live! They’ll pull this place down around us if we stay.’

Mistaking this for a joke, Steve laughed. Tracy twisted indignantly out of his grasp and sat up.

‘They fucking will!’ she shouted. ‘Bastards, that’s all they are! Fucking bastards.’

Steve felt as though half his body had been torn away. He had lost her. But how could he have guessed that she would still be worrying about things like that after what had just happened? Couldn’t she feel the amazing power generated by their closeness, the energy that set the air between them humming and crackling like high-voltage electricity? This stuff too, he sensed, could light and heat your life, and kill you.

‘Here, what about this old geezer?’ Tracy demanded suddenly. ‘We could stay there! Where’s he live?’

Steve didn’t know what to say. What she was suggesting was unthinkable, of course, out of the question. But how could he explain that?

‘Where’s he live?’ Tracy repeated urgently.

Steve shrugged.

‘Long way off.’

‘Where?’

‘Other side of the main road.’

‘By the Esso?’

‘Other way.’

‘What, by Tesco’s?’

‘You know the park? Round there.’

‘That’s where Debbie lives!’ the girl exclaimed triumphantly. ‘She’d be just round the corner.’

‘Who’s Debbie?’

‘Paxton Grove, that’s where Debbie lives, her and the baby. It’s all council, most of it. Is that it?’

‘Sort of.’

‘What do you mean, sort of? Don’t you even know the name of the street?’

‘It’s on the corner, isn’t it?’ Steve replied with a touch of irritation.

‘Which corner? By the park?’

‘No, the other end. Grafton Avenue. But look, it’s no good. He won’t let us in.’

‘If you ring that special way …’

‘He’s frightened of strangers — ’

‘We’re not strangers!’ Tracy shouted angrily. ‘We’re friends, aren’t we? Friends of yours.’

Steve fell silent. He just couldn’t get across to her the impossibility of what she was proposing. Tracy had another drink and offered him the bottle, but Steve shook his head, which felt quite muddled enough already. The girl thrust the bottle in his face.

‘Goon!’

It was more a threat than an offer. Steve raised the bottle to his lips, but kept them closed to prevent any of the liquid entering his mouth. Tracy snuggled down beside him, her left hand ruffling his hair. Steve lay there as stiff as a corpse. Something that could only be the girl’s other hand was prowling about on his jeans, smoothing and squeezing the material over his penis.

‘We could just go,’ she murmured in his ear. ‘You and me. He wouldn’t be frightened of me, would he? Not of a girl.’

For the first time, Steve began to think that maybe there was some point to what the stotters got up to in the evening. If it felt anything like this, that would explain a lot, even the stories in the lavatory. He had often done it to himself, of course, what Tracy was doing to him, but he’d never realized the difference when someone else did it to you. He wondered what he could do to her in return, to make her feel what he was feeling.

‘What number is it?’

Her voice seemed to come from very far away. Steve had no idea what she was talking about.

‘The house,’ she prompted.

‘Number two.’

He was going on to explain that it wouldn’t work, not even just the two of them, because old Matthews was so far gone that he was quite capable of thinking that Tracy was the devil in drag. But there was no one to explain to, for the girl had taken her hand away, got up and walked out of the room. The floor seemed to be shaking beneath him, as though the wind was making the whole house shudder. It made him feel slightly sick. It was the booze, of course. He was just drunk, fucked up, out of it. He couldn’t understand where Tracy had gone so suddenly, unless she’d had to pee. He lay there, waiting patiently for her to come back.

But she didn’t. Instead, wee Alex appeared in the doorway.

‘Come on,’ he said.

As the epithet that invariably accompanied his name suggested, Alex looked as though he’d been conceived on the cheap. There was a low-budget, no frills air about him which perhaps explained why Steve had never been frightened of Alex in the way he was of Dave or Jimmy. What had happened the week before had made no difference. The boy knew that Alex had just been trying to keep in good with Dave. He would have done the same himself in the circumstances.

‘Where we going?’ he asked as he got to his feet.

‘Ask no questions, you’ll be told no lies,’ Alex recited mechanically.

Steve looked round the room at the mattresses and the plastic bags full of Tracy’s things.

‘Shall I take something?’

Then Dave’s voice, outside the room, roared, ‘Just hurry the fuck up!’

Steve got moving. He had learned the hard way never to make Dave say things twice, because that wound him up. So when they got to the hallway, he was relieved to see that Dave looked quite calm. Tracy was there too, putting on her black and white make-up. Alex pointed to the stairs, wiggling his forefinger back and forth.

‘Upstairs?’ Steve frowned. ‘Why, what’s up there?’

Dave laughed.

‘ “What’s up there?” ’ he mimicked several times.

Each time the question made him laugh afresh. Alex and Tracy joined in the laughter, but Steve sensed that their hearts weren’t in it. They were just trying to keep on the right side of Dave, as usual. This seemed sensible, so Steve laughed as well.

‘What’s so funny?’ Dave demanded aggressively. There was no trace of humour in his voice or on his face. Alex punched Steve on the shoulder. The boy felt totally confused. It was as if they had all changed parts: Tracy had treated him like one of the stotters, while Alex was coming on tough like Dave. Steve couldn’t think who Dave was acting like, but certainly not himself.

‘Get the fuck upstairs!’ Alex told him.

This was easier said than done. The lower flight had been so extensively quarried for firewood that nothing remained but the framework, like a ladder without rungs. Steve and Alex clambered up, followed more slowly by Dave. When they reached the landing, Alex pushed Steve forward into one of the two bedrooms at the rear of the property. There was no electricity upstairs, but a faint glimmer from the next street showed an extent of bare boards and peeling wallpaper. Dave inspected the lock with a look of disgust that reminded Steve of Jimmy. Was that whose part Dave had taken? But then where did that leave Jimmy?

‘Might have known it,’ he complained. ‘No fucking key.’

Alex gave the lock a brief glance.

‘If I had another of them hangers …’

He nodded at the cupboard built into one corner of the room.

‘What’s the matter?’ Dave sneered. ‘You scared?’

He walked over to the cupboard and disappeared inside. A moment later he reappeared holding a wire clothes-hanger. Alex straightened out the loop at the top, stuck it into the lock and twiddled it back and forth, bending it against the edge of the keyhole. The bolt emerged with a sharp click.

‘Fucking brilliant,’ said Dave.

He and Alex turned to go out. Steve made to go with them, but Dave pushed him back.

‘Where you think you’re going?’

‘Thus far and no further,’ Alex supplied.

Steve looked from one of them to the other in bewilderment.

‘But those men, they’ll be back in the morning! They’ll find me here! I’ll get into trouble!’

Dave shook his head.

‘No, no, no, no, no,’ he said firmly, pronouncing each negative with great care and weight. ‘No, don’t you worry about that. They won’t find you, old son. They’ll just tear down the whole fucking place with you inside, that’s what they’ll do.’

‘What goes up must come down,’ mused Alex.

‘They’ll just ram that bulldozer at the wall, again and again and again and again,’ Dave went on with mounting enthusiasm, ‘until the whole fucking lot comes down, hundreds and hundreds of tons of it crushing you slowly to a bleeding pulp, your eyes popping out and your balls exploding and the blood gushing out of your ears. Pity we can’t be here to watch.’

Steve’s dash to the door was swift and sudden, but Alex threw himself at the boy’s ankles and dragged him down.

‘A match-winning tackle from the man they said was over the hill,’ he crowed. ‘The old skills still there.’

They put the boot in a few times and then flung Steve back into the bedroom.

‘Let me go!’ the boy pleaded. ‘Just let me run off! You won’t see me no more, I promise. I won’t bother you. Just don’t leave me here alone!’

An internal pain seemed to wrench Dave’s features out of joint. Steve was so unused to seeing any expression at all on that pallid face that it was several moments before he realized that Dave was grinning.

‘But you’re not alone!’ he said.

The two stotters burst out laughing. The door slammed behind them and there was a rattling as the wire turned in the lock. Then there was silence, broken only by a murmur of voices outside the house. Steve rushed to the window, but there was nothing to be seen but the vandalized garden, bright in the moonlight. He ran back to the door and pulled and twisted and shook the handle for a uselessly long time. Would the demolition men search the house before starting work? Why would they bother? He could try screaming for help, but would they hear his cries above the roar of their machinery? If only he had a rope, he could smash the window and climb down. For a moment he thought of using electric wiring ripped from the light fixture or from under the floor. But he couldn’t reach the ceiling, and the floorboards in the bedrooms were all intact, owing to the difficulty of access once Dave had shortsightedly demolished the stairs. Which left only the cupboard.

Steve’s first impression on opening the door was that the confined space inside was full of clothes. Since the stotters didn’t go in for extensive wardrobes, he supposed that these must have been left there by the previous occupiers. Remembering an escape film they’d watched one night, he wondered if he could rip the clothes into strips and make them into a rope. Then he noticed the shoes. They were ordinary enough, grubby blue and white trainers worn at the heel. What was unusual was that they were not resting on the floor but hovering in the air several inches above it.

By now the boy’s eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and it was becoming clear that a lot of what he had taken for clothes was in fact just shadow. The cupboard actually contained only one set of garments, bulked out to look like more. It took a little longer to work out just what it was that was filling out the dirty jeans, pullover and jacket, and supporting the shoes in mid-air. The wire hanger fastened to one of the brass wall-hooks had been twisted so tightly that the chubby face had broken out in blood as though it had been skinned. Despite this, Steve had no difficulty in recognizing Jimmy.

The boy’s second assault on the door left his hands ringing like bells and his throat raw from howling out the forbidden word.

‘Mum! Mum! Help! Let me out, Mum!’

He only stopped when he thought he heard the corpse coming at him from behind, the head like a boiled beetroot and the feet not touching the floor. Before he could look round and make sure, darkness took over the room, setting everything free. Steve panicked. He ran for his life, hitting the wall so hard he saw flashes inside his head. He dropped to the floor, writhing madly about in pain and despair, flailing around with his fists and kicking out with both feet, raging and screaming in the dark.

By the time the moon came out again, the boy had collapsed into a whimpering huddle. He staggered to the window and looked out. The cloud had passed, but there were others about. He strained at the casement without effect: the window was sealed shut with paint. Steve removed one of his shoes and hit the glass repeatedly until it broke and the wind poured in. He cleared away most of the fragments and leaned out. Some way below the window a waste-pipe from the bathroom ran across to the corner of the house. The moonlight made everything curiously two-dimensional and it was difficult to estimate how far below the window the pipe was. But it didn’t really matter. He had to get out of the room before another cloud crossed the moon, and there was no other way.

Steve put his shoe back on again and carefully picked the remaining fragments of glass out of the frame. Then he got on to the window sill, turned over to lie on his stomach and lowered himself out until his chest was resting on the ledge outside. This was the point of no return. If he let himself go any further, he wouldn’t be able to pull himself back in again. He still couldn’t feel the pipe under his feet, but it couldn’t be far. To clinch the matter, the boy reminded himself of what was in that room, allowing himself a mental glimpse inside the cupboard as though he were switching a torch on and off. That was enough. He let himself slip out a bit more, and then a bit more, and then he no longer had a choice. He dropped, hanging full-length from the window frame, the wind flapping his trousers. But his feet, like those of the corpse, were still swinging in mid-air.

He had another brief fit of sobbing and pleading, but it didn’t last long. He had to strain for breath as it was, with his chest stretched tight by his raised arms. Besides, his fingers, already bruised from his assault on the door and now slippery with sweat as well, were gradually losing their grip on the glossy paint. He beat his feet wildly against the wall, trying vainly to find a purchase, but he soon realized how useless it was. There was nothing whatever he could do. When the moment came he was calm and still, although his eyes were screwed tightly shut so that he wouldn’t have to see what was going to happen. Then his fingers let go and he fell. Almost at once he felt a steady pressure on the soles of his shoes. The waste-pipe must have been just below his feet as he hung from the window frame, and because he had not struggled he had been able to keep his balance as he dropped on to it. But he couldn’t continue to do so for long. His arms, still outstretched above his head, were already shaking, and an uncontrollable trembling was breaking out all over his body. The pipe he was standing on was narrow and coated in shiny black paint that felt slippery, and it ran at quite a steep angle from the bathroom outlet to its junction with the downpipe. Gusts of wind tugged and pulled at his clothes. Then everything disappeared again as another cloud covered the moon.

Steve hugged the wall, pressing himself up against it as though it were a warm firm body, and suddenly the memory of what had happened with Tracy came back to him with triumphant force. That had happened, he thought. It wasn’t just a story, even though it had started off as one. It was real, it was true. Nothing could alter the fact that he had held Tracy in his arms, that she had kissed him and put her tongue in his ear and he had touched her breasts. The trembling left him, as though by magic, and he was no longer bothered by the darkness. He edged his way up the pipe until he felt his hands touch the ledge outside the bathroom window. This one wouldn’t budge either, so he took off his shoe again, clinging on to the ledge one-handed, then stretched as high as he could and beat the heel against the glass. It had no effect, and when the light returned he saw that the window was made of tough frosted glass. Because he was standing so close to it, he could only hit it feebly. Then a gust of wind caught him off balance and for a moment he seemed to hang in mid-air, sustained by nothing but his fear. Grabbing the ledge again, he renewed his assault on the window. By the time the glass finally cracked he was shaking uncontrollably and mouthing futile pleas. There was no question of removing all the pieces of broken glass this time. He knocked out the largest and sharpest ones, threw his shoe inside and leapt after it. His hands flailed for purchase against the sides of the frame, slashing themselves on the jagged edges. He hung there for a long time, wriggling and twisting. Gradually his spasms moved him forward over the frame until his centre of gravity was once again inside the house. After that it was just a matter of slithering head first to the floor, where he lay sobbing among the fragments of broken glass until he remembered where he was and realized that the stotters might come back if they failed to find anywhere else to spend the night. The house was dark and silent. He negotiated the stairs, pushed back the plywood screen on the back door and left.

It was a shock at first to be back in the familiar streets and find them unchanged, to see cars passing by and people walking their dogs. ‘Don’t you wankers understand where you are yet?’ he felt like screaming at them. ‘Haven’t you realized that there’s only one way out of this place?’ But soon it was his own experience that came to seem bizarre, dubious and exaggerated. Things like that don’t happen, he thought, not really. By the time he reached Paxton Grove, the whole episode had come to seem like one of the stories he made up to tell himself or other people. Then he saw Hazchem striding along the pavement towards him, his arms swinging back and forth like a mad soldier, his lips fixed in the usual rictus.

Steve stepped into the gateway of the house he was passing and looked round for cover. A car with no wheels was parked in the concreted-over front garden, its axles supported on piles of breeze-blocks, and the boy crouched down behind it. It was as well to be cautious, even though he was no longer seriously afraid of Hazchem. He knew now that the man’s mocking grin expressed exactly what he himself had felt as he watched the dozy householders shuffling round the block behind their obese pampered pets. Steve had travelled a long way that evening. Hazchem must have made that journey too, only he had somehow got lost and been unable to find his way back. When he got to the house he would tell the old man all this. He would explain to him that there was really no reason to be afraid. Steve’s cuts were starting to smart badly now, and he had just noticed that his clothes were heavily stained with blood. The rapid tattoo of footsteps suddenly ceased, quite close by. For a moment Steve thought that he’d been spotted and Hazchem was going to come up and ask him if he knew what time it was. Then he heard a door slam, and realized what should have been obvious to him all along. No wonder he’d seen the grinning man around there so many times! The boy straightened up, smiling to himself at the thought of what Ernest Matthews would say when he told him that the man he went in such terror of lived just round the corner, that they were practically neighbours!

The house in Grafton Avenue looked reassuringly the same as ever. Its end wall still towered blindly over the adjacent property as though disdaining to take any notice of what went on there, its deeply bayed front still sought to dominate the street with a pompous pretension that was rather pathetic. Steve pushed open the gate and followed the winding path into the lean-to porch. He didn’t have the slightest doubt that the old man would take him in. He would have to. He needed him.

As he reached the top step, the boy stopped dead. The front door stood wide open and a cold draught streamed past, scattering the familiar smells that usually greeted Steve like eager pets. He stood there for a long time before realizing that further resistance was pointless. Then he let the current carry him forward the way he had to go, over the threshold, into the house.