The Tryst

around, no really, that’s the one thing, I mean, that’s …’

Dave’s voice mumbled to a standstill.

‘We can’t let him go now,’ Jimmy mused. ‘He knows too much.’

‘No one leaves the organization alive,’ Alex said in his Ulster accent, as thick and bitter as a gob of phlegm. ‘If you’re not for us, you’re against us.’

‘You know the free papers?’ Steve said.

Jimmy glared at him.

‘Which three papers?’ he demanded suspiciously.

‘They need people to deliver them. They’ll take anyone. It doesn’t pay much, but it would be something, for now.’

They all sat staring at the boy for a long time. At last Jimmy nodded slowly.

‘Worth a try.’

After that everyone relaxed again. Dave put on the new video, about a disfigured ghoul which tracked down everyone who had ever lived in a certain house and killed them in a variety of colourful ways. As usual, there were wanky patches where character was established and plot developed, and during these Steve’s idea gradually took off. By midnight, Jimmy had mapped out a scheme for establishing a distribution empire monopolizing the delivery of free newspapers throughout the country, the work being farmed out to an army of underpaid kids while the real money came straight to him.

‘Anyone who wants their fucking newspaper delivered, we’re the boys they’ll have to talk to!’ he enthused, finger stabbing the air to emphasize his point. ‘We can name our price! We’ll have the whole of England under our thumb!’

‘What about Ulster?’ Alex put in. ‘We gave our blood at the Somme too, you know.’

But his comment was lost in the shrieks of a young woman who was being spectacularly dismembered by the video ghoul.

As is their wont, things looked rather different the next morning. It was Tracy who brought the matter up again. She had a bone to pick with Jimmy, who had urinated in her mouth while she was trying to fellate him the night before. She relieved her feelings somewhat with a number of sarky remarks about the future empire builder, who was slumped in front of the TV watching Play School. Sensing a storm brewing, Steve said he would go and phone the Capital Advertiser. He returned with the news that there were no distribution vacancies available, which appeared to put paid to that idea. But Jimmy now felt that his credibility was at stake, and so the following Friday the two old-age pensioners who delivered the Advertiser to homes in the area were set upon and beaten up and the pram containing their stock of papers dumped off a railway bridge. When Steve phoned again he was told that a vacancy had unexpectedly become available.

Since it was a double round, Alex volunteered to help out. Unfortunately, the only way Alex could face the work was by getting fucked up first, and after he did, one house looked much the same as another. The result was that the residents of one street were each treated to over forty copies of the Advertiser dropping through their letter-boxes at five-minute intervals. Some of them phoned to complain, and Alex’s brief career in newspaper distribution came to an end. Steve was transferred to another round, further away but short enough for him to do alone. His only worry was that the money had turned out to be so rubbishy — less than a penny per paper — that it wouldn’t be enough to keep Jimmy satisfied. Jimmy, however, had more important things on his mind. One of the OAPs he and Dave had put the frighteners on had cashed a couple of pension cheques earlier in the day and was carrying over seventy quid. Jimmy was so impressed by this that he forgot all about Steve’s contributions to the housekeeping. Doors were opening up, possibilities beckoning, a whole new lifestyle awaited. Unlike the clueless wankers he lived with, Jimmy had always known that there was more to life than glue and cider and condemned houses. There was heroin and Bacardi and B and Bs on the south coast, to say nothing of souped-up BMWs, designer threads and 250-watt-per-channel stereo rigs. All you needed was cash. Getting it had turned out to be a lot easier than he had imagined.

Meanwhile, Steve carried on distributing the Capital Advertiser to 230 homes every week. He liked the job. He saw himself as a sort of postman. He himself never received any post, of course, but he knew that people looked forward to the postman’s visits. In a way Steve was even more welcome. The postman brings bad news as well as good, but the bad news Steve brought always happened to other people. There was a lot of it — brave kiddies, tragic mums, heartless conmen, abandoned pets, ravished grannies and torched tramps — but since it all happened to other people, it was actually good news, Steve reckoned. The more bad things happened to other people, the less likely they were to happen to you. Like a postman, Steve had little contact with his clients. As the weeks passed, however, he got to know his route, and came to notice the difference in the doors through which he delivered the paper. They were all roughly the same size and shape, but the closer you looked, the more you realized that each was an individual. A few had clear glass panels, so that you could see right into the hallway, but this was rare, and anyway the hallway was usually so carefully cleaned and tidied that it amounted to another door. The real house — messy, intimate, full of secrets — began further on. More common were panels of frosted glass. Sometimes the glass was only slightly cloudy, with vertical streaks that were almost clear, through which you could catch glimpses of the interior. Steve never saw anything very interesting going on, but he approached these doors with special excitement, for you never knew. But mostly the glass was completely opaque, giving the door an air of false sincerity, like someone making a show of having nothing to hide. Steve preferred the solid wooden doors that shut you out and made no bones about it. They ranged from drab plywood slabs to complex layered jobs with an antique air. Most conformed to a type and must have been identical at one time, but wind and rain, scrapes and scratches, coats of paint, numbers, names, knockers and bells — to say nothing of letter-boxes at any level from Steve’s shoulder to his foot — combined to make each a distinct presence which the boy gradually came to know. He found his new acquaintances restful and reassuring. Unlike the stotters, they had no moods. Come rain or shine, they were there, lined up in their places, waiting their turn. Steve fed them one after another, taking his time, pacing himself. It all seemed very safe and satisfying, until one day early in March.

Grafton Avenue was towards the end of Steve’s round. One side had been swept away to make room for a council estate, but since this formed part of the adjoining delivery zone Steve was conscious of it only as scenery. His side of Grafton Avenue started off as a terrace of three-storey semi-detached houses with pillared bay windows and steps leading up to an imposing portico where he left a pile of papers, one for each of the flats into which the houses had been divided. Further along these gave way to bijou villas, heavy in architectural extras such as moulded cornices and decorative brickwork. They reminded Steve of the elderly Asian who ran the OOD S ORE: at once plain and exotic, other-worldly and grasping, like a prince in disguise or a magician fallen on hard times. The last house in the road was quite different from all the others. It was so high and narrow that it looked likely to fall over at any moment. The end walls were windowless expanses of mortar, as though the existing house was a remnant of a much larger building. The main floors were set in a bay, giving the house a thrusting, aggressive air. At first sight there was no way in or out, but in fact a path of quarry tiles led into a lean-to porch at the side of the house. Here a short set of steps continued up to an enclosed area where leaves and litter had collected over the years. Once your eyes adjusted to the gloom, you could just make out the front door, four massive panels of unpainted wood separated by strips of heavy scrolling. A large, dull, brass letter-box was inset in the horizontal strip between the upper and lower panels. On the doorpost, at about the same level, was an ivory bell-push in a circular brass surround.

Steve had learned that letter-boxes were as individual as the doors themselves. Some opened as flaccidly as a toothless mouth, others clamped their jaws on the rolled newspaper like playful dogs. But what happened that afternoon in Grafton Avenue was something Steve had never seen before: when he inserted the folded copy of the Capital Advertiser into the letter-box, instead of either lying there, wedged and inert, or falling limply through, the paper was plucked from his fingers and pulled smoothly inside, like a video-tape when you put it into the machine.

Steve snatched his hand away before the door had that too. After a moment, the letter-box opened again and an envelope emerged. It tipped over the rim and fluttered to the doorstep as the letter-box closed with a definitive bang. Steve picked up the envelope and ran down the steps and along the path as fast as he could go. Safe in the street again, he set down his orange sling and looked at the envelope. There was no name or address written on it. He tore it open. Inside there was a five-pound note and a pencilled list.

Tin corned beef (Fray Bentos or other reliable brand)