4

Whatever the stotters’ other shortcomings, a morbid sensitivity to each others’ moods was not among them. Steve was perhaps told to stop wanking about rather more often than usual during the week that followed, but the nearest that anyone came to asking him to account for his behaviour was when Jimmy demanded, ‘You been at the glue or what?’ They were sitting around on what remained of the living-room floor, trying to eat the pizza which Tracy had lifted down Tesco’s, not realizing that it only looked like on the cover after being baked in an oven. A few rounds of paint thinner had dulled their disappointment, however, and most of Jimmy’s brain was now locked up in the kind of circular activity which will paralyse a computer asked to calculate the square root of minus one. Jimmy’s thoughts were less abstruse — he was trying to decide between the relative merits of an indoor or outdoor jacuzzi for the Spanish villa from which he planned to mastermind the drug-smuggling operation he was going to set up as soon as he’d solved his immediate cash-flow problems — but they overloaded his brain so effectively that the mechanism which normally handles swallowing suddenly cut out, leaving Jimmy with a throat full of half-chewed dough going nowhere. Which was all to the good from Steve’s point of view, because by the time Jimmy had stopped choking on curses and gobs of uncooked pizza and Alex had observed darkly that it wasn’t the coughing that carried you off but the coffin they carried you off in, the boy’s state of mind and its causes had been completely forgotten.

In a sense, though, Jimmy’s guess had not been so far from the truth. Steve was right out of it that week, though this was not down to secret Evostik binges but the prospect of what would happen when he returned to the house in Grafton Avenue the following Friday. The future is a drug to which most people have developed such a tolerance that it requires some quite massive event looming up for their everyday life to be seriously affected, but Steve had spent his fifteen years in a shadowless present where the sun stood always at midday. Now, for the first time, he had something to look forward to, and the effect on his life was like atmospheric lighting in a film: a powerful lateral glare throwing up dramatic shadows, making the ordinary seem strange and exciting. He asked himself the same questions again and again. Who had written the note? Why hadn’t he shown himself? Why had he trusted Steve with the fiver? Why couldn’t he do his own shopping? At first Steve had thought he might be a cripple or an invalid, but in that case surely he’d be fixed up with the council or whoever it was kept people going till they died. Had he just had an accident, fallen downstairs or something? But in that case why hadn’t he asked for help? If Steve hadn’t had to go back there the following week he would probably just have forgotten it. As it was, he spent the time wondering and fearing, scheming and dreaming, savouring the bizarre certainty that in a few days he would know the answer.

That Friday was blustery and wet. The protective outer layer of papers was already soaked before Steve could free the cord tying them together and get them into the waterproof orange sling. He had made himself a primitive cape out of a piece of plastic sheeting he’d found in a skip, but the sharp edges scratched his chilled skin and the wind tossed it around so much that it was useless, and he soon threw it away. To keep warm, and in anticipation, he moved briskly from house to house. By the time he turned into Grafton Avenue the street-lamps were beginning to glow very faintly, a deep pinkish shade quite unlike the umber glare that showed once the darkness had firmed up. Steve made short work of the three-storey semis, running up the flights of steps and dumping a pile of papers headlined ‘Brave Little Gary Loses His Fight For Life’. The bijou villas got equally short shrift that day, at least until Steve reached the last pair. There he abruptly slowed down, dragging his heels and taking an exaggerated amount of care over the detailed folding and insertion of the paper, for now that he could see his destination it seemed much too near.

The house looked neither more nor less strange than before; an outcast, a relic, a misconception. Despite his delaying tactics, it was no time at all before Steve stood at the wrought-iron gate, in whose bars a potato crisp packet was trapped by the wind like rubbish in a weir. Somewhere nearby an empty beer can rattled noisily about in the gutter. Steve set off up the path of small tiles that curved past an anonymous shrub to the covered entrance where the steps began. Inside, in the hushed darkness, it already felt warmer. Steve climbed the steps one by one, making as little noise as he could. He felt as though anything at all might happen in the next few moments. It was therefore a slight disappointment as well as a relief when nothing did. The folded newspaper he placed in the letter-box just lay there. He pushed it all the way through and heard it flutter to the floor inside. The letter-box snapped shut again. That was all. He turned away, feeling tricked and cheated. Could he have imagined the incident a week before? Sometimes it was hard to tell where his dreams ended and his life began, what had really happened to him and what had occurred in one of those gaps where the normal rules are suspended and someone you think is asleep turns out to be dead on the bed in front of you, in the room you can’t get out of no matter how hard you try.

Behind him there was a jarring shudder, as though the whole wall had opened. When he turned, a faint line of light was visible at the edge of the front door. Steve could just make out a figure standing inside. Something white appeared in the opening, fluttering in the darkness like a flag of truce. It was an envelope. Steve reached out and gingerly gripped the corner. The other end was instantly released. He could make out nothing of the figure within except for the eyes, brilliant and restless, busily at work, running over the boy’s face and clothing like a pair of scavenging mice, speedy and discreet but missing nothing. Then the door snapped shut. The next moment it looked as though it had not been opened for years.

The list was a lot longer this time, and two five-pound notes were enclosed. It added up to quite a fair weight, too. By now Steve was used to the heavy slingful of papers, but by the time he had finished his round the strap had worn a welt across his shoulder that made it quite painful to carry this additional load, so he decided to stop for a rest. On the way back from the supermarket there was a small park, a triangle of grass intersected by an asphalt path where elderly people stood looking airily around while their panicky-eyed dogs laboured to expel sausage-like turds. Just inside the railings at the entrance to the park was a building providing similar facilities for MEN and OMEN, and Steve had discovered that this was a good place for a rest. You were sheltered from the wind and the rain, and one of the cubicles had a broken window which let in a bit of fresh air to dilute the stink of disinfectant and stale pee. Here Steve would settle down and read through the stories. The walls were covered in them, rambling, repetitive, unpunctuated tales about soiled panties and schoolboys’ bums. By now he’d read them all at least once, but knowing what happened and how it all ended just made them more reassuring and relaxing. Surprise, in Steve’s experience, was an overrated quality.

When he came out, the wind was stronger than ever. His sodden clothes hung stiffly from his body. He suddenly felt tired and hungry and cold, no longer interested in what was going to happen when he got to the house. He turned into Paxton Grove, the street before Grafton Avenue, and trudged the last few hundred yards to the corner. He was still only half-way up the covered steps when he noticed that the front door of the house was open again. Just a crack at first, but as Steve got nearer the gap started to widen. A wave of warmth reached out and enfolded the boy. There were odours in it, intimate and familiar as the smell of his own body. Half-hidden behind the door was a man wrinkled beyond measure, crumpled and shrunk, fabulously old. His skin was dark and blotchy, ridged and troughed with blood vessels and tendons. Only the eyes looked more or less ordinary, which gave them a freakish, alien appearance in that ruined face, as though he had stolen them.

‘Come in,’ he urged, beckoning with a hand which resembled one of the bits of chicken that Steve had sometimes found in rubbish bins but learned to reject as inedible. The boy hesitated. The warmth was still flowing out of the open doorway, as though from a limitless reservoir. Its swirling embrace made him feel light-headed and confused.

‘Tea’s made,’ the old man said.

His eyes never ceased their radar-like sweeps, and in their restless movement Steve read an anxiety even greater than his own. What worried him was the idea that this old man might not really be an old man at all, that once the front door was closed he would start laughing maniacally and then pull off his face and head to reveal the blood-streaked features of the demon beneath, like in Dave’s fave video. But there seemed to be no signs that anything of that sort was likely to happen. The man looked no different from any of the other old people Steve had seen making their slow, painful, lonely way along the streets, as though doing penance for some crime. And although he wasn’t aware of it, the smells and the warmth of the house were whispering to him all the time, telling him that no harm could come to him there. Hoisting the orange sling with a certain professional flair, the boy stepped over the threshold.

Like the house itself, the hallway was tall and narrow. It was lit by a single bulb enveloped in a large bowl of milky glass, which muffled the light so effectively that Steve could only just make out a flight of stairs reaching up to the invisible ceiling and a door standing open into a large front room whose windows were smothered in velvet curtaining. When the old man had finished locking and bolting the front door, he turned the other way, down a long corridor with brass-handled doors opening off it to either side. The walls were covered in discoloured paper decorated with a design of small flowers in diagonal rows. Floorboards creaked beneath the thin runner of threadbare red carpeting. Steve’s fear was still there, but dreamily distanced, like pain by a partial anaesthetic. He had an absurd feeling that they had already walked further than the length of the house. It was no use looking back to correct this illusion, for the old man had already paused to switch off the light behind them.

The corridor came to an end in a cramped alcove with a ceiling that Steve could almost touch. A set of narrow steps ran down to the basement as steeply as a ladder.

‘Nearly there,’ the old man muttered, starting down.

Steve followed, his dreamlike lack of anxiety still intact. As they descended, it got darker and warmer. At the bottom, Steve actually bumped into the old man, who had stopped, groping for a switch, and this first physical contact between them shocked him almost as much as the time he had touched Tracy’s arm accidentally on purpose. Then everything went black as the old man switched off the light at the head of the stairs.

‘Bulb’s gone down here,’ he explained.

Oddly, crazily really, Steve remained unafraid, following the old man forward into a darkness that revealed itself, once he grew used to it, as not quite solid. The leakage of light from somewhere up ahead was just sufficient to reveal the outlines of the old man’s figure and the doorways and openings of passages to either side. At last they reached the source of the glimmer, a door standing slightly ajar. Inside, the heat was overpowering. The smells whose tendrils had crept out of the front door were rooted in it, rank and exotic as tropical foliage.

The old man pointed out a large table in the centre of the room. It was draped in a dark red oilskin on which lay a bottle half full of milk, a shiny brown porcelain teapot, a pair of trousers, two chipped mugs with spoons in them, a bag of sugar and a grimy towel. Steve dumped the orange sling on the table and started to unpack the plastic bags of groceries.

‘They didn’t have Fry’s cocoa,’ he said.

‘Never mind,’ the old man said. ‘We’ll just have to make do, somehow.’

Two drying racks suspended on pulleys from the ceiling supported an assortment of shirts, underclothes and bedlinen, which formed a canopy over the centre of the room. An enormous armchair was drawn up before the cast-iron kitchen range which occupied one entire wall. Both walls and woodwork were covered in thick glossy paint of a creamy yellow shade, the floor in a sheet of dull red linoleum, which was starting to crack and blister and break away from its backing in places.

‘And you are?’ the old man demanded abruptly.

Steve unpacked a tin of Spam.

‘What?’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Steve.’

The old man poured tea into the two mugs.

‘Ernest Matthews,’ he said. ‘How do you like it?’

Steve looked round the room. On the wall opposite stood an enormous sideboard in whose nooks and crannies were lodged shirtstuds, a leadless pencil, stamp edging, several keys, a large seashell, a stuffed weasel, overflowing ashtrays, a magnifying glass, a selection of dried-up fountain pens, buttons, endless scraps of paper, drawing pins, pipecleaners, a cut-throat razor, empty jam jars, coins, pieces of bone, and half a hundred things whose name and purpose, if they had either, Steve did not know. Every single object was covered, as if by protective cotton wool, in a thick even layer of dust. The corner opposite the door was occupied by a bed consisting of a metal frame with a wire mesh to support the mattress. The blankets were thrown back to reveal unclean wrinkled sheets. The pillow still bore the imprint of a sleeping head.

Ernest Matthews glanced at him.

‘Eh? Speak up, lad!’ he said sharply. ‘My ears aren’t what they were. How do you like it?’

‘It’s all right.’

He hoped that this, high praise to the stotters, would do.

What’s all right?’ the old man asked with a bemused expression.

Steve shrugged.

‘Everything.’

‘Well I’m very pleased to hear it, I’m sure!’ the old man snapped. ‘However, I wasn’t asking about everything, I was asking about the tea. How do you like it? Weak? Strong? With or without? Just a dash? One lump or two?’

After a pause, Steve said he didn’t know.

‘Don’t know!’ Matthews exclaimed, with a laugh that sounded like a crumpled sheet of plastic film unwrapping itself. ‘Well, bless my soul, I’d never thought I’d live to hear a British lad say such a thing.’

He added milk and sugar to both mugs.

‘You are British, I take it?’

‘I can’t stay long,’ Steve replied.

‘Mum and Dad expecting you back, are they? Time for a cup of tea, though. Was there any change from that tenner, by the by?’

Steve laid a handful of coins on the oilcloth. The old man separated fifty pence from the rest.

‘That’s for you. Have a cake and drink your tea before it stews.’

Matthews took a mug of tea and walked over to the armchair by the stove. When he was settled, he unrolled a tobacco pouch of waxed cloth and started to fill a pipe which he dug out of the creases of the chair.

‘You’re dripping all over the lino,’ he remarked to Steve. ‘Haven’t you got a proper coat? You’ll catch your death, you mark my words.’

Steve sat down on one of the straight-backed dining chairs drawn up to the table and started to sip his tea. Meanwhile the old man took a large brass lighter from another crevice of the armchair and produced a flame of impressive dimensions with which he proceeded to scorch the uppermost layer of tobacco in his pipe.

‘Hot in here,’ Steve ventured, to break the silence.

Ernest Matthews nodded.

‘And do you know the beauty of it? They don’t have to come in the house. There’s a coal-hole round the side, drops straight down into a bunker next door to the scullery.’

He turned his attention to his pipe again. Between puffs the smoke rose from the bowl in an enigmatic curl, like a lock of hair. Steve took one of the cakes out of the box and carefully peeled away its silver case, which was pleated like an old lady’s skirt. Matthews opened a door in the stove and prodded the glowing coals with a brass-handled poker.

‘The milkman does eggs and bread and potatoes and butter and cheese,’ he went on, ‘but everything else I’ve had to do without. My legs are not what they were, you see. Fifty pence a week and tea thrown in, with a cake or some biscuits, whatever’s going. What do you say?’

Steve gulped down the rest of his tea and picked the crumbs of the cake off the table with a moistened forefinger.

‘I got to be going,’ he said, standing up.

The way back along the basement passage, up the stairs and along the corridor seemed much shorter. Almost too soon, Steve found himself back in the chilly hallway. Before opening the front door, Matthews knelt down, lifted the flap of the letter-box and looked out for a long time.

‘Can’t be too careful,’ he remarked. ‘Times being what they are.’

Outside it was really cold. Steve told the old man he’d see him the following week and then ran off quickly. His thoughts, as he walked back to Trencham Road, were about money. The change which he had been told to keep the previous week had come to only a few pence in the end, and Steve had spent it on sweets, which he’d eaten on the way home. But if the old man was going to give him fifty pence every week that posed a problem. There was nowhere he could hide the money that the stotters might not look, nothing he could spend it on that they would not see. He didn’t even want to think about what they might do if they found out that he’d been cheating them. The fate of his predecessors on the delivery round had been widely reported in the local media. One of the pensioners had sustained a dislocated hip, the other several fractured ribs. Dave admitted that once he got going he found it hard to stop. So the only course open to Steve really was to hand over the extra money, but it was going to be hard to explain this unexpected 25 per cent increase in the money he got for doing the paper round. He was still trying to think up a suitable story when he came to the main road he had to cross to get home. The traffic was heavy, as usual at this hour. It was while he was standing there, looking for an opening and worrying about what he was going to tell the stotters, that the grinning man appeared for the second time, bearing down on Steve like a demented soldier marching to destruction.

‘Hey!’ he called, his expression mocking and exultant. ‘Hey, do you know what time it is?’

As he spoke, the vicious pent-up laughter that glittered in his eyes and twisted the muscles of his sweating face to breaking-point burst out, mutilating the words almost beyond recognition. He stood there, jerking and twitching all over, staring at the boy with such intensity it seemed he might be about to explode. Steve shook his head. The man’s face screwed itself into a fierce grimace of contemptuous hostility, as if the boy was only pretending not to know, just to spite him. The sarcastic grin became bitterer than ever. ‘What’s the point in keeping up this pathetic farce?’ it seemed to say. ‘You don’t think you fool me, do you?’ A gap opened in the traffic and Steve took off, just beating a van that appeared out of nowhere. By the time he reached the other side and looked back, the man had gone.

Jimmy, Dave, Alex and Tracy were watching TV, the floor around them littered with cans of lager and take-out trays of chips with curry sauce. While he was wondering how they’d been able to pay for these luxuries, Steve realized that he hadn’t come up with a story to explain the extra money. To his surprise however, Jimmy — usually stingily suspicious where money was concerned — didn’t even bother to count the coins Steve gave him.

‘What’s this?’ he jeered. ‘You rob someone?’

For some reason this comment made Dave laugh, which effectively put an end to everything else for a while. Dave was not easily amused, but on the occasions when he did indulge he went all the way, whooping and yelping and howling, clutching his gut, drumming his heels on the floor and banging his forehead against the wall. But they were all in form that night, the stotters, for although the old woman Jimmy had selected as their target had been carrying less than he’d hoped, the hit itself had been a complete success and the take was still enough to pay for this modest celebration. The idea of using Tracy as bait had been fucking brill, if Jimmy did say so himself. People were always more trustful of girls, whatever they looked like. With attention focused on her, Dave was able to move in and get to work without any bother, while Alex and Jimmy kept look-out. No sweat! Jimmy couldn’t see any reason why they shouldn’t regularly supplement their income in the same way. Sooner or later they were bound to pick on someone who was carrying serious money, like that first time or even better. Then Jimmy would be off so fast these wankers wouldn’t see him for dust. In keeping with the stotters’ general policy towards the boy, Steve was kept out of this. All he knew was that everyone was in a good mood, that everything seemed to be going right. When Tracy passed out with one leg resting against his, warming him with a gentle radiance that penetrated his damp jeans like sunlight, the boy’s happiness was complete.

The tasks which Ernest Matthews asked Steve to do for him became increasingly various as the weeks went by. As well as the supermarket, Steve visited the chemist, the newsagent, the stationer, the ironmonger, and the tobacconist’s, where he passed as eighteen without any problem. He also went into the library and applied for a reader’s ticket in order to keep the old man supplied with books.

‘What do you want to read all these for?’ Steve asked with a touch of resentment one day, after carrying back a particularly bulky load.

‘They’re all about the war,’ Ernest Matthews replied. ‘Written by famous historians.’

Steve wondered what a storian was. Someone who told stories, presumably.

The ultimate accolade came when he was sent to the post office to cash a countersigned pension cheque. By then almost a month had passed, and Steve had become thoroughly at home in the house in Grafton Avenue, where Ernest Matthews lived all alone in one room in the basement. He had even been taught a special way of ringing the doorbell so that the old man would know it was him. He wasn’t quite sure why this was so important, and the question interested him the more in that he suspected that the answer might also explain why Matthews refused ever to venture outside the house itself. The old man’s attempts to account for this no longer satisfied Steve.

‘It’s my legs, you see. They’re not what they were. I find it hard to get about these days. Still, that’s the way it goes, isn’t it? Have you ever thought what it would be like if it went the other way, eh? If we were all born like I am now and then grew younger and healthier every day? And not just us, but everything around us too. Just imagine that! If every day a block of buildings disappeared and there was a green field there in its place. If there were fewer people around with every year that passed, so you’d get to know them better, of course, and every new face would be a great event. If the roads gradually shrank down to lanes where children could play the day away, and we all knew that tomorrow would be better still, and we’d be fresher and keener yet to enjoy it. Eh? Just imagine that!’

Steve nodded, although he couldn’t see the attraction himself. He knew that his problems would all be solved once he ceased to be a child. But in any case, that was beside the point, a deliberate attempt by Matthews to distract attention from his initial statement. Steve wasn’t fooled by the old man’s claims about the state of his legs. He moved about the house with no sign of awkwardness or discomfort whatsoever. Steve didn’t point this out, however, or demand to know the truth of the matter. In the end it emerged of its own accord one day as the boy was leaving.

‘You haven’t ever noticed anybody hanging about outside, I suppose?’ Matthews asked before opening the front door. His tone was casual, but the intensity of his eyes gave him away. ‘Anybody watching the house, following you when you leave, that sort of thing?’

Steve immediately thought of the grinning man, although he hadn’t really been watching the house or following him. Ernest Matthews had noticed the boy’s hesitation.

‘You have?’

Steve nodded.

‘When? Where?’

‘The first time. And after that, when I was going back.’

Something had happened deep inside the old man’s eyes, as if a blind had been drawn down.

‘What did he look like?’

The boy considered for a moment.

‘He walks funny, like he wants to pee. He smiles all the time too, only it’s not really a smile.’

The old man was trembling with agitation.

‘And he was watching this house, you say?’

In the end Steve nodded again. It was too late to correct himself now. He would have to stick to the story he’d told. It might well be true, anyway. The old man seemed to have been expecting something of the sort.

‘Do you know him, then?’ the boy asked.

The old man sighed deeply.

‘Oh yes, I know him all right. It’s a long story, lad. A long sad story. But I suppose you must hear it. It wouldn’t be fair otherwise, asking you to come here and help me. It wouldn’t be right, not if — ’

He broke off, looking deeply troubled.

‘But how can it be right? What if your mum and dad found out? What would they think of me?’

‘That’s all right,’ Steve assured him. ‘The people I live with, they don’t care what happens to me.’

His only fear was that the old man might tell him to stop coming to the house every week. Matthews looked at him for a moment, as though considering what to do.

‘I’ll have to tell you the whole story,’ he said finally, nodding to himself. ‘Once you’ve heard it, you can decide whether you want to carry on coming or not.’

‘I do!’ the boy cried.

‘You can’t say that now. Not till you know what happened and who he is, that man you’ve seen. For now, just keep out of his way, if you can!’

He unbolted the front door and opened it cautiously.

‘Keep out of his way!’ he repeated as Steve scampered down the steps.

It was a clear freezing night. The sky seemed to be full of eyes.

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