‘Who’s this shit for? Where you get the money, you little fucker?’
‘Robbing Peter to pay Paul,’ muttered Alex.
‘It’s for this old bloke,’ Steve explained. ‘He can’t get out. He’s crippled.’
‘
At that moment the security guard intervened. A huge West Indian who never stopped smiling, he looked like a black Santa Claus.
‘Now then, lads, let’s calm down,’ he said in a voice that seemed to come from somewhere beneath the floor. He was still smiling merrily. Dave backed away, scowling.
‘They giving you any trouble?’ the guard asked Steve.
‘No, it’s all right. I know them.’
The guard moved away, but not very far. He kept an eye on the trio while Steve unloaded his basket and paid, under Dave’s and Alex’s hostile scrutiny. When he had packed the shopping into the orange sling, the boy walked quickly to the door without looking back. Once outside he started to run. His plan was to make it as far as the public lavatory by the park and hide in the cubicle with the broken window. It was only a temporary respite, of course. They’d get him when he came home. But at least it would give Dave a chance to cool down a little. The shopping was heavy and awkward to run with, but Steve hurried on as best he could. When he reached the lavatory, he stopped and looked round. There was no sign of Dave and Alex. They probably hadn’t even bothered to try to catch him. Steve always tended to overestimate the stotters’ energy. He slipped inside and sat down in his favourite cublicle.
The story on which his eye usually fell first, because of its position, was so squeezed in that the final words of each line had been pushed up on to the door frame. The story itself Steve found particularly obscure, since it lacked the usual terms for the parts of the body and the things people did with them. It began ‘THIS SCHOOLGIRL ASKED ME TO EAT HER OUT FIRST I LICKED HER LITTLE BUSH IT FELT SO GOOD I THOUGHT I WOULD DIE SO SHE BEGGED ME TO STICK MY TONGUE DEEP IN HER BOX AND I DID IT TASTED LIKE HEAVEN’, after which the writing became increasingly vertical and eventually slipped off the wall altogether in a rather pedestrian ending including such details as the fact that the schoolgirl in question was only thirteen and came there every week looking for older men. Steve leant back, the downpipe of the toilet pressing against his back like a second spinal column, trying to work out what the story was about. It seemed to involve a meal the writer had had with someone he loved, but the details escaped him.
When Steve came out of the lavatory it had started to drizzle. He hurried on along Paxton Grove, half-walking and half-running over the cracked uneven slabs. The house in Grafton Avenue seemed cosier and safer and more welcoming than ever that day. Ernest Matthews’s high tea the week before had been such a success that the old man had decided to make it a regular event. The water was already bubbling in an enamel saucepan on the stove, and while Steve unpacked and put away the rest of the shopping Matthews lowered the eggs in one by one, tut- tutting when one of them cracked, releasing a milky cloud. He stood in front of the stove, watch in hand like a station-master, until the statutory three minutes had elapsed. Then the eggs were promptly rushed to the table, where Steve demonstrated that he had mastered the art of opening them correctly. Then they ate, soaking up the runny yolk with strips of buttered bread before taking up their spoons to excavate the white.
Afterwards, as Steve sat looking round at the sideboard laden with nameless oddities, he realized for the first time what made this room feel so special, so different from any other: you couldn’t have won anything in it on that television game show. Steve had always assumed that everything had a price the same way it had a name. But the old man’s room was full of things that had neither. They seemed to have sprung magically out of nowhere, their very existence a scandal.
‘Where you get all this stuff?’ the boy demanded finally.
‘It was here before I came. All in different rooms, scattered throughout the house. I brought it all in here, what I wanted. Some of it was my mother’s, you see.’
But for some reason Steve didn’t want to see.
‘When you going to get on with the story?’ he asked, glancing pointedly at the clock.
‘My, but we’re impatient today!’ Matthews remarked. ‘Very well, then. Where were we?’
‘Hiding behind the hedge listening to the man telling his friend about the woman he’d seen,’ the boy promptly replied. The fact that he didn’t believe the old man’s tale actually made it easier for him to remember, just as the things that he and the stotters watched on TV always seemed more real than what happened in between.
Ernest Matthews nodded and smiled, pleased that the boy had not forgotten.
‘Good lad! That’s it. That’s it exactly. Well, as I said, Maurice Jeffries went on and on about this young woman he claimed to have seen on the lawn in the middle of the night, how she was the woman of his dreams, the woman he’d been hoping to meet one day. In fact he started getting so carried away that I began to wonder whether he was quite right in the head. Nor was I the only one, for Aubrey Deville, the friend to whom he was telling all this, started chaffing him about it. But Maurice refused to make a joke of it. He became more and more impassioned, until Deville hastily assured him that he believed every word he said and would watch with him that night, prepared to follow the woman if she should appear. That’s as much as I heard, for just then the head gardener appeared and started giving me what for. But though I went back to work hoeing the flowers, it wasn’t
He paused, giving Steve a sideways glance.
The boy thought about Tracy. Sometimes at night, to help get to sleep, he would tell himself a story in which he and Tracy were alone in the house, the stotters having conveniently disappeared. In the story, he heard footsteps, soft and quiet, bare feet coming towards him across the floorboards. Then the mattress would dip unexpectedly and it was her, Tracy, lying down beside him, explaining that she felt cold and lonely and afraid too. Close together, their bodies made heat instead of losing it. She turned around so that her fine smooth back fitted snugly into the hollow of his chest, his knees pressed into the sockets at the back of hers, and he would lick that supple hollow where shoulder moulded into neck. ‘You’re more beautiful than Hammersmith Bridge,’ he would murmur.
Sensing that he had lost his audience, the old man gave a theatrical cough.
‘Well, that’s neither here nor there,’ he said. ‘But it so happens that at the time of which I’m speaking, I had got friendly with one of the housemaids, name of Elsie. The female staff slept in the attic rooms, where they were locked in at night. But love will ever find a way, and I’d soon found mine up through a trapdoor on to the roof, which was almost flat. Once there, I had the run of the whole length of the Hall, and it was no great difficulty for an agile lad like myself to shin down a drainpipe and in through Elsie’s window. Anyway, that afternoon, thinking over what Maurice had said, it occurred to me that I too could stay up and watch for the woman he had described. I even wondered if I might not be able to solve the riddle that so perplexed Maurice. “Who is she?” he’d asked Aubrey Deville. “Who can she be?” Well, I knew the area better than the young master, and everyone who lived there was familiar to me. If the woman came, I thought, then I would recognize her.
‘As soon as the house was quiet that night I made my way up through the trapdoor and out on to the leads of the roof. It was a mild summer night. The sky was hazy, and the moon sat behind it as plump as a lantern. I made my way carefully along the roof to the west wing, from which I had a good view over the lawn and the main part of the house, where Maurice had his rooms. All the windows were dark. To my right, the lawn lay as smooth as a billiard table, with the two beech trees that rose taller than the house itself. Behind them I could just make out the fence where the park began, and the dark swell of the hillside beyond. On the other side lay the river and the railway, while up the valley to the west I could make out the roofs of the village, all silvery in the moonlight. Now you mustn’t suppose that anything happened right away. It never does, you know, except in stories. To pass the time, and maybe to steady myself, for it was a little spooky up there all alone on the roof at night, I started to go the rounds of each house in the village, in my thoughts I mean, flitting from one cottage to the next like a ghost. I knew them all, you see. I made my way from one to the next, opening doors and moving from room to room, pausing to gaze down at the people asleep in bed. I felt solemn and sad, although at the time I didn’t understand why. The only sound throughout was the hushing of the river, and after I had finished with the village, I began to follow it downstream in my thoughts, past the farms and meadows I’d grown up with, then to the local market town
