Dried peas
Small pot sardine and tomato paste
Marmite (Large size)
Jam, strawberry for preference
Sugar cubes
Two tins of prunes
Packet of tea
Please leave by door. Keep change.
Steve felt slightly disappointed. He had been hoping for something less ordinary. But when he had finished his round, he went to the Tesco nearby, bought the items on the list and carried them back to Grafton Avenue. When he had almost reached the house again, he noticed a man striding purposefully towards him. He was young, with sharp angular features, all glistening planes of sweaty skin and greasy hair. His face was split in two by a grin like an unhealed wound and his eyes glittered fiercely. His clothes were filthy and threadbare. The trousers were ridiculously short and his socks did not match.
‘Do you know what time it is?’ he demanded as he reached Steve, who shook his head. The man laughed contemptuously and walked on.
When he reached the house, the boy stood in the street staring at it for a long time. The curtains were all tightly closed and no light showed in any of the rooms. Finally he took a deep breath and scampered rapidly up the path, into the dry sheltered darkness of the porch. He climbed the steps, set the bag down and ran quickly back to the street. He stood and watched for some time, but no one emerged. There was no sound, no movement. The house might have been empty for years. After a while it came on to a drizzle, and Steve turned up his collar and started to walk home through the darkening streets.
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
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.
