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.
12
‘Well then, it’s about bloody time you got your act together, isn’t it?’
The slow rhythmic throbbing sound from next door continued. It sounded rather like someone trying to start a car with a flat battery.
‘Because it’s your
She slammed the receiver down. For a moment the throbbing sound seemed to have faded, then it returned, peaking and dying as though carried from a distance on gusts of wind. Brushing a few stray crumbs off her leotard, Jenny went over and opened the door to Aileen’s office.
‘Christ, what’s wrong?’
Aileen sat slumped over her desk, head lowered, shoulders trembling. When she lifted her head, her face looked blurred and soft, like pottery which had lost its glaze and was gradually unbaking itself, returning to the damp clay.
‘He waited for her to wake up,’ she murmured.
‘Who?’
‘He just sat there beside the bed, waiting for her to wake up.’
‘Who? Where? When?’
Despite Jenny’s real concern, there was a note of irritation in her voice. Aileen sucked in enough air to stem her sobs and justify her emotion.
‘It’s Steven. I’ve been to the police. They told me …’
‘The police?’
The younger woman’s evident disapproval brought Aileen round like a whiff of ammonia.
‘It’s a police matter,’ she replied flatly, scrabbling in her bag for Kleenex and cigarettes. ‘They showed me the photographs. Everything thrown about, ripped up, smashed, destroyed, the old man beaten to death. Steven was covered in blood from the cuts he got escaping from the other house, so when one of the neighbours saw him leaving they phoned the police. A patrol car picked him up just a few streets away. Naturally they thought he’d done it.’
Jenny tilted her head experimentally in various directions.
‘Just unblocking my synapses,’ she explained. ‘I got embroiled in a slanging match with the area organizer about this planned day of action. Now then, what were you saying? I don’t really understand what this has to do with someone waiting for someone to wake up.’
‘It’s my fault, Jenny, I’m not explaining it well. I’ll tell you some other time.’
‘No, tell me now.’
Aileen would have much preferred not to do so, but after letting Jenny see her break down she felt a need to demonstrate control.
‘All right. Well, let’s begin at the beginning. The police had no difficulty in tracing Steven’s background once they knew his real name. His life is exceptionally well documented, in fact. He’s been in and out of one file or another since the day he was born. That happened in Holloway, where his mother was doing eighteen months for her part in a dope-smuggling operation. Once she got out of prison, things went from bad to worse. Petty theft, a bit of prostitution, then a heroin habit. She ended up in council emergency housing in a bed-and-breakfast in Bayswater. It sounds like an urban concentration camp. One room, one bed, one toilet and kitchen between thirty people.’
‘I hear some councils are thinking of moving their homeless to pre-fab settlements on the outskirts of the city,’ Jenny commented. ‘Sort of a township concept. We’ve a lot to learn from the South Africans in this respect, I always say.’
‘One day Steven’s mother took an overdose, by accident or on purpose. The room was kept bolted from the inside, for protection. Those places are pretty rough, the police said. People get raped and beaten up on the stairs. But Steven was only seven years old. He wasn’t strong enough to open the bolts by himself, even after he realized that his mother wasn’t going to wake up. In the end someone heard his hammering on the door, but it took a long time. No one paid much attention to screams or banging in that place. When they broke down the door the body was starting to decompose. She’d been dead almost a week. Steven had been with her all that time, waiting for her to wake up.’
Aileen grabbed a deep breath and tried to ride the wave of emotion that threatened her. In the end it rolled by without breaking.
‘I must go,’ she said, glancing at her watch. ‘Steven’s social worker is coming to pick him up at three, and I have to try and explain things to him first. What are you doing this evening, Jenny? Douglas is away, and I was wondering if — ’
‘Jon and I have to go to a do at LWT, unfortunately. The usual rent-a-celebrity crowd will be there and it’s important for him to get out and network-build. Did I tell you that he’s in this big new series on famine they’re planning? Off-camera, but you’ll hear him interviewing the victims. He’s quite high profile in Third World disasters, apparently.’
Catching Aileen’s eye, Jenny covered herself by laughing cynically. ‘We’re having a few people over tomorrow for fondue bourguignonne,’ she said as she turned to go. ‘Drop by if you like. I expect we can find an extra fork.’
‘I’m going away, actually,’ Aileen lied.
She stubbed out her cigarette and walked over to the window, with floorboards flexing beneath her. The glass was flecked with drops of rain so fine they seemed to hang motionless in the air, as though the clouds had collapsed under their own weight like an old ceiling. She stood there thinking how clever she’d been, explaining away her emotion without mentioning its real cause. For Aileen hadn’t told Jenny everything she’d learned from the police, not by a long chalk. She hadn’t told her that one reason why Steven and his mother had been living in squalor was that the woman’s lover, who was also the courier who brought the cannabis in from the Continent, had absconded with her savings, which she’d given him to buy them tickets to safety. By then she knew that she was pregnant, and she’d also begun to suspect that her house in south London, which was used to store the drugs, was under surveillance. When the police finally moved in, a few weeks later, her lover was the only one to escape arrest. Steven’s mother told the police that he’d arranged to meet her at Heathrow with the tickets, but didn’t turn up. It was later established that he had flown from Gatwick to Holland and then back to his native America. The case was relatively insignificant by US standards, and it hadn’t been thought worthwhile to apply for extradition, even though the man’s name and address were known to the police, as indeed they were to Aileen.
That explained a lot, she thought. It explained the likeness between Steven and Raymond, which had so disturbed her. It explained Raymond’s frequent unexplained absences from Brighton, and the fact that he always had plenty of money even though his father proved to be neither rich nor generous. It explained why a man so attractive to women had taken up with a girl like Aileen, plain and shy but so ‘typically English and straight’ that her presence on the pillion of his motorbike ensured that he was always waved through Customs after their brief trips across the Channel. It explained why he had flown back to America so unexpectedly, supposedly to visit a mother who later turned out to have been dead for years, and why he hadn’t bothered to answer Aileen’s passionate letters or seemed particularly overjoyed when she turned up on his doorstep that summer. She should have felt relieved, she supposed. Her instincts had been justified; she wasn’t crazy after all. Raymond really was the boy’s father. That should have made her feel better, but it didn’t. In fact she didn’t feel anything very much, not yet. Her tears had been for the boy. As for herself, she was like a character in a cartoon film who has walked off the edge of a cliff without realizing it and strolls blithely on in defiance of the laws of gravity, protected by his blissful ignorance. Sooner or later, she knew, the reality of what had happened would come home to her and she would drop like a
