Slip of the Knife

ELEVEN. TERRY’S EFFECTS

The gardens set the street apart. Old trees flourished in the small front gardens, high as the blocks themselves, roots escaping the gardens and bursting up through the pavements like fingers through warm butter. Some of the front gardens were chaotically overgrown, one was graveled, but the one in front of Terry’s close door was a picture book of giant flowers, bushes heavy with vibrant red and blue and yellow. A sun-bleached deck chair sat under a gnarled old tree, a book lying facedown by its side. The gardens were fenced in with functional black railings, replacements for the wrought-iron rails melted down as part of the war effort.

Pete looked out of the car window at the deck chair. “Why do we need to come here?”

“I need to sort through a friend’s things,” said Paddy, reluctant to get out of the car. She was afraid of what she might find in Terry’s flat, afraid he might have photos of her, have written her one last desperate lovelorn missive and not had time to post it.

“Why?”

Dub raised an eyebrow at her from the passenger seat.

“Just promised I would, that’s all.”

Pete looked out of the window again. “Has the friend gone away?”

“Yeah.”

Whatever questions Terry’s flat threw up, they couldn’t be more complicated than the ones in the car. Paddy opened the door and stepped out into the warm street. The high summer sun lifted the soft smell of cut grass and blossom into the air. Beyond the block, cars hurried by on the busy road, but Lawrence Street was sleepy, the warm air trapped in the shallow valley of flats.

Terry’s flat was in a classically proportioned, pedimented block of low blond sandstone. Golden summer sun picked out the dirt on the windows and the shabbiness of the cheap curtains. One of the windows on the second floor had a big dangerous crack across a pane, mended on the inside with masking tape.

The car door next to Paddy opened but she stopped it with a firm hand. “What have I told ye? Always get out on the pavement side.”

Pete mumbled an apology and bumped his bottom along the seat to the other door.

Dub was standing next to her. “Do you get to keep all this stuff?”

“I don’t really know. I think so. I get to keep it until the will’s overturned anyway.”

“Might be worth a few quid. Might be jewelry.”

“Yeah, Terry was always mad for his big gold chains, wasn’t he?”

“Well,” said Dub, reluctant to be wrong, “I saw him wearing a ruby tiara and matching sandshoes once.”

“Oh, yeah.” She smiled away from him. “I remember them. High heels?”

“High heels and a sketch of the Last Supper picked out on the toe. Judas was cross-eyed.”

“A lovely shoe.”

“Two lovely shoes.” Dub nudged her supportively. She turned to look at him and found him smiling at his feet. He was a full foot taller than her, handsome in an odd way. They had been friends for years, since before she ever spoke to Terry Hewitt, and sometimes, like today, she felt so fond of him she wanted to grab him and kiss him. She looked away. “Right, let’s do this.”

Pete waited dutifully on the pavement until Paddy walked over and took his hand, leading him along the street and up the path between the two sets of railings to Terry’s front door. She fitted the key and let them into the close.

It was dark and smelled of damp chalk. A marble-patterned rubberized floor was stained with greasy puddles. As they climbed the wide circular stairs to the top floor, Paddy trailed her hand along the curved oak handrail. Cobwebs hung between the cast-iron banisters.

The front door to the flat was unpainted plywood with a single lock, the tang of newly seasoned wood still hanging off it. On the door frame, peeling Sellotape bordered a list of six names written in biro block capitals. The doormat was filthy. They could hear the squawk of a television inside.

Dub curled his lip. “It’s a bedsit. Why was he still living in bedsits?”

Paddy shrugged and put her arm around Pete’s shoulders. “He always did. I don’t know why. The lawyer said he had a house. Should we knock or just go in?”

Dub shrugged. “Knock, probably.”

“I’ll knock,” said Pete and gave the door a loud, rude thump with the base of his fist.

“Pete! You don’t knock on a door like that-”

Steps preceded the flinging open of the door. A man in a stripy T-shirt opened the door, wiping floured hands on a tea towel tucked into the waistband of his trousers. He looked expectantly at them.

“Sorry about the banging.” Paddy nodded at Pete. “A bit eager.”

“What can I do for you?”

“Um, well, you know about Terry? I’m here to get his things.”

The man wasn’t really listening though; he was smiling at Dub’s trousers. They were made out of ticking, blue and green with a white stripe, like the covering on an old-fashioned mattress.

“I recognize those kegs. You’re Dub McKenzie. I used to see you compèring at Blackfriars Comedy Club all the time.”

“Right? Do I know you?”

“Nah.” The man shook his head. “Nah, nah, nah, just a punter. I heard you were managing George Burns.”

“Was, yeah.”

“Did you fall out and tell him to do the Variety Show?”

Dub smirked. “I told him not to do it and then he sacked me.”

“God, it’s shit.”

“Isn’t it, though?”

They grinned at each other for a moment until Pete’s patience ran out and he pushed at the door.

“Pete, don’t,” said Paddy, wishing she could open her mouth without giving him into trouble.

“Ah, come in, wee man.”

The guy opened the door and let Pete in. Seven doors led off the hallway, all of them shut tight apart from the kitchen, which was straight ahead. A red tartan carpet had been laid over a number of other fitted carpets and stood two inches off the ground. A ripped paper shade hung from a flaking ceiling. The warm smell of bacon floated out to greet them.

“Bacon sarnie?” asked Dub.

“Just, eh”-the guy looked embarrassed-“knocking up a quiche.”

“Can ye do that? I thought they were sterile.”

The guy mouthed a drumroll/cymbal clash and the two men smiled.

“Which room’s Terry’s?”

He pointed to the door next to the kitchen. It was sealed with a padlock small enough to fit on a suitcase. The key to it was on the string Fitzpatrick had given her, flimsy as paper. She fitted it in the lock and opened the door into a large room.

Two long windows at one end looked straight across the street into facing flats. The sun was shining in through them, filtered and softened by the dirty filigree on the glass. The floorboards were painted black, chipped and dusty.

Terry had pulled the wallpaper off. Small scraps were still clustered by the skirting board and powdery residue covered the walls. The paint underneath had been a dark green but it was chipped and faded, a South American wall. She could imagine markets being held in front of it, executions taking place against it, children idling at its foot.

Terry had been camping more than living there. His bed was a bare mattress with dirty crumpled sheets, his duvet coverless and gray. The room was too big for his meager belongings: a silver trunk sat by the near wall, an old ghetto blaster nearby. Next to the mattress sat a large blue duffel bag, already packed with his clothes. Paddy recognized it: he’d had that bag when she saw him off on the train to London eight years ago. Lined up along the bottom of one wall were novels, Penguin Classics mostly, the paper yellowed and battered from being lovingly read.

“I’m really sorry about Terry,” said the quiche maker. “He was only here a month or two, I didn’t really know him. Nice guy though.”

In the empty expanse of dusty black floorboards she could see footsteps picked out in the dust, a cleared muddle in the middle of the room and steps leading away and back from it.

“People have been in here,” said Paddy, pointing at the disturbances in the dust.

“Police.” The quiche maker had followed them into the room. “They went through everything. They were fucking obnoxious too, made us all leave the house for the night while they did it. As far as I can see they took nothing but his passport. And a journalist. Cross-eyed and rude as fuck.”

“Merki.” Paddy nodded. “Did he take anything?”

“No. Brought a bottle of whiskey, put it on the table and asked us about Terry for an hour, then put the bottle back in his pocket and fucked off.”

Dub laughed but Paddy didn’t. “Why did he live like this?” she said aloud. “He owned a big house in Kilmarnock.”

“Oh, was that true then?” The quiche maker was surprised. “I kind of thought that was bullshit.”

“There isn’t really that much here, is there?”

“There might have been more but we were broken into last week. That’s why we’ve got the new door. The other one was made of paper. This one’s sturdy new cardboard.” He laughed at his joke, unperturbed that no one else was joining in.

Paddy traced the pattern of the dust, looking for disturbances. A flat empty space by the trunk looked cleaner than the rest. “Did they take something from there?”

The quiche maker looked from her to the space. “No, Terry moved it. He had a portfolio there. He moved it after we got broken into.”

“Where to?”

He gestured for her to follow him out to the hall and led the way into the kitchen.

The room was moist and smelled gorgeous. A table was scattered with flour, a dusted work strip where he had been kneading the pastry. On one of the two gas cookers sitting side by side was a frying pan, with strips of prosciutto cooling in it. The cookers were fed by a gas pipe that hung loose from the ceiling. Under the window a precariously sloped unit housed the sink. Odd cupboards and a red-and-white larder from the fifties were lined up along the near wall.

In Victorian times the kitchen was the servants’ arena. It was customary to build a small wall recess for the maid to sleep in, soaking up the heat from the ever-warm cast-iron range. In bad modernizations the recess was walled in and converted into a cupboard or sometimes a windowless kitchen if it was large, but here it was being used as a communal area. A grubby settee faced away from the kitchen towards a boxy old television twittering in the corner. Above the television, hovering seven feet in the air, was a giant cupboard with sliding plywood doors.

“It’s a good wee attic thingummy but you’ll need a ladder to get up there,” he said. “Terry put stuff in the back in case we were burgled again.”

Paddy looked around. “Is there a ladder?”

“Aye, aye, we’ve got one.” He disappeared off into one of the rooms and came back with a rickety paint-splattered wooden ladder. “Chris is painting his room.” He set it open and pushed it up against the door of the cupboard.

He expected Paddy to climb up but she pointed out that she didn’t know what they were looking for. Reluctantly, the quiche maker climbed the ladder himself. With great difficulty, he bumped the sliding door to the side. The cupboard was deep and black dark, at just the wrong angle to the strip light.

He reached into the black hole, pulling down a tent and poles, two sleeping bags tightly rolled in sleeves, and a cardboard box of dusty Christmas decorations, handing them down to Dub, who set them on the floor. Next came three black binbags of bedding, old duvets and pillows. The quiche maker then climbed off the top rung of the ladder, kneeling into the cupboard, his feet sticking out as he felt towards the back.

They heard a long sliding noise and he stepped carefully back onto the ladder, his knees gray with dust, screwing up his face as if he might sneeze. He was holding a large, square yew box. Although it was dusty the wood was still gorgeously yellow and leopard spotted, the edges perfectly dovetailed. A flat brass hook on the front held it shut. He handed it down to Paddy, who flicked the hook from the eye and opened it.

Inside were photographs, mostly old, of family members. One near the top looked like it might be Terry’s parents, a couple with their arms around each other standing under an apple tree in high summer. The colors had faded to orange and yellow, the white-framed edges worn from being held. Scratched in thin biro on the back it said “Sheila and Donald ’76.” Creepily, the mother looked a bit like her.

Dub looked over her shoulder, sighed onto her neck. “I’m not saying it.”

“Me neither.”

“Hang on.” The quiche maker reached farther in. “There’s this.”

He climbed out again, dragging a large black portfolio, A3 size, just like the one Kevin had shown Paddy on Sunday night. The quiche maker looked puzzled. “Didn’t want to lose it, I suppose.”

“It’s a book Terry was writing,” said Paddy. “He’d already been paid for it.” She reached up and took it off him. “Thanks so much. It’s really kind of ye.”

“No bother,” he said, taking the camping equipment back from Dub and chucking it into the black hole. “My pastry needs to rest anyway.”

He dragged the reluctant door back across the hole and climbed down the ladder, brushing his hands clean.

“We’ll empty Terry’s room and get out of your way.”

“If you could leave the keys for the next person.” He wrestled the ladder shut and put it over his shoulder. “There’s binbags in that cupboard on the wall there if you want something to put the stuff in.”

Back in the room Pete set up a little play camp by the window, taking marbles out of his pocket and chipping at them, chatting to himself, playing the audience to his own moves. “Wow, good one. Close, very close, wee man. Superb.”

Dub grinned at Paddy as he shook a black binbag open and dropped the Penguin Classics into it. “What’s in the portfolio? Why did he hide it so carefully?”

“Dunno,” she said quietly. “Could be just because it’s work. Could be he knew whoever’d broken in was after it.”

Dub put the binbag down, said hang on, and left her to it. She found a suitcase full of papers hidden in the trunk, Terry’s own clippings mostly.

“The guy out there says Terry’s room wasn’t the focus of the break-in. They nicked a bike and a penny collection, so it doesn’t look like a master burglar.

“Maybe Terry was just paranoid about it because it was his work. He’d never had a book published, had he?”

“No.”

“You know how different that feels. It might have really mattered to him.”

“Maybe.”

She went back to stripping the bed. When she raised the duvet up to fold it into a binbag, his smell enveloped her face. She poked it into the bag, shoving it in angrily, promising herself that she’d dump it in a skip on the way home.

They made a tidy pile of binbags in the middle of the floor, filled the trunk and shut it, put the duffel bag by the door. Quiche Maker said they could leave the mattress. The next person might use it.

They were ready to go.

“Come on,” said Dub, “Mary Ann’ll be there soon.”

Paddy gave Pete the portfolio to carry while she and Dub managed everything else in two trips up and down the stairs.

At the last they stood in the doorway to the huge dusty room. The sun was low and the lights were out in Lawrence Street. When they switched off the bare bulb, the big room was lit by the windows of the facing flats.

Across the street a family had gathered to watch their television set under the window, sitting in a line along a settee as if they were looking straight into Terry’s room. In another window a woman dusted a pristine front room, lifting doilies and straightening antimacassars. In another, an elderly woman looked out of the window into the street, watching for someone.

Paddy could smell Terry in the dust, could see him sitting on his bed drinking a cup of coffee and contemplating his day. He looked small and alone as she imagined him there, a speck, helpless as a dust mote floating gently away on invisible currents.

Dub cupped her elbow. “You’re not just shocked, pet. You’re really sad about this, aren’t you?”

Ambushed, Paddy drew a deep, wavering breath. “I don’t even know why.”

“Maybe it’s really about your dad.”

“Aye, maybe,” she said, “maybe.” But she knew it wasn’t.