His mind was a fog sometimes. You put him somewhere, he would stay there. He could not think. He was not stupid but it was like he was not fully there. It was like he was wrapped in a duvet in his mind.
He dozed a little sometimes after lunch. As the day got on. He slowed down. He was aware. Ronnie also was aware. A couple of times he’d clapped his hands loud beside Pigeon, or shouted his name, made him jump. Usually it was when he was waiting for Ronnie to get to the end of some complex reconsideration of the plan, poring over his pieces of paper. And he wouldn’t have music playing, Ronnie wouldn’t. Said either it was shit music and that would soften their brains, or it was good music, and that would distract, and either way they would not do a good job and would not prosper.
— You have a girl?
— What?
— A girl. Girlfriend.
— Not at the moment.
— Ever?
This was new.
— Ever? What you mean ever? You know I’ve had girlfriends. You met some of them.
— I did?
— Yes.
— Ok ok.
— You met Lorna.
— I don’t remember.
— From Lewisham. You met her in The Arms. You told me she was too pretty for me.
Ronnie grinned.
— Oh I remember. She was pretty. What happened?
Pigeon hadn’t wanted to go away with her the previous August, to Spain. Her and her sister and her sister’s friend and all of their boyfriends. So she’d dumped him.
— She was too pretty for me.
Ronnie laughed.
— She leave?
— Yeah.
— You chase her?
— Nah.
— That’s good. Don’t make a bad situation stupid. She leave for someone better looking? Someone more money?
— More money.
Ronnie laughed some more.
— Well you need to prosper. Prosper into pussy.
Ronnie thought this was hilarious. He rocked back and forth and wiped his eyes.
Pigeon nodded, smiled. Laura’s sister’s boyfriend had once sucked him off in the bathroom at a party somewhere in Elephant and then threatened to kill him if he mentioned it to anyone. I swear bruv. I fucking swear. Tears in his eyes. Pigeon had told him to chill. Relax. Gave him a hug. So the guy calmed down and a couple of weeks later he wanted some more and Pigeon knew this was not an ideal situation and he didn’t want to spend too much time with this lot any more. There was a little frenzy under their friendships.
Was that complicated? Unusual? He didn’t know. So many people doing things on the quiet, taking what they thought were chances, but they were only chances because they thought they were. No one talking. He just didn’t think it was much of a deal. He didn’t know how weird he was, if at all. Sometimes he thought he was going to hell via his mother’s broken heart. Sometimes he would have a glimpse into someone else’s something and think . . . nah, everyone is at least as weird as me. I’m fine.
— Time.
— Ok.
— You pack up. I write the note.
Every day Ronnie wrote her a note to say what they’d done. It always seemed to take exactly as long to write as it took Pigeon to carry everything out to the van.
Daniel was surprised when Pigeon told him he was going to do some work for Ronnie.
— Shame.
— Why?
— You like Ronnie.
— Yeah.
— Yeah I’m just saying. Like, you’re friends?
— Yeah.
— And now he’s your boss. So. Changes. What happened his cousin? Or whatever. Gary.
— They fell out. He’s not my boss.
— He’s paying. He fixed the rate. Yeah?
— Yeah.
— He’s your boss.
— Yeah. But he respects me. He’s not, you know. He’s not an asshole about it.
— No, I’m not saying that, as such. But. Do you know how much he charges people for the whole job, whatever it is?
Pigeon sighed with a sheesh. He didn’t know what he was doing defending Ronnie. Guy was an asshole.
— No.
Daniel laughed.
— Yeah. He’s the boss. I like Ronnie. But he’s . . . I bet he’s a prick of a boss.
Pigeon looked at his brother. Just an expression.
— He has that cranky thing. Fun in the pub when it’s politics or something. But, yeah. I can see that he’d fall out with Gary. I like Gary. Haven’t seen him since ever. I like Ronnie too. But no. Don’t take any shit. What’s he paying you?
— You want me to work or not? You always telling me to snap out of it, do something, take initiative. So I went to Ronnie and I persuaded him and now he’s paying me and I have a job.
— I know.
— Now it’s not good enough for you.
— I’m not saying that.
— You are though.
They went through it.
Daniel had liked it best when Pigeon was doing call-centre work out in Croydon and going to the library and thinking about university. He liked it because he could nag him about joining a union, about organising. He could talk about courses that Pigeon might be interested in, do well in. Business studies or something. But Pigeon hated going to Croydon. Hated talking to the other people there. Call-centre chairs and library chairs had the same sweated grime to them, the same stink, they sat in the same dead air, and all he heard on the phone was just garbage people, and he wasn’t going to the library at all, he was just saying he was to his mother to account for various hours in which he was doing other things, and he wasn’t thinking about university he was thinking about Patagonia and Kashmir and the mountains of Chile and Colombia. All those peaks. There is a world.
Daniel apologised. Said he was proud, that he loved him, and that Pigeon was right to be annoyed. They hugged, and that was that.
The lady worked in TV, they thought. There were letters lying around the kitchen from the BBC. There was a folder usually on the kitchen counter with the logo on the front. In the hallway there was a framed picture of her all dressed up with Graham Norton. He had his arm around her shoulder and they were both smiling at the camera. And there was another picture of her with Laura Kuenssberg and the lady was talking and wearing a lanyard and carrying a notebook and Kuenssberg was listening to her, arms crossed, as if it was important, as if they were working. And there were pictures of her with other people too, people they didn’t recognise. Ronnie thought one of them might be Stephen Fry, but he wasn’t confident.
— Another of those kind. They everywhere.
In the downstairs toilet there was a digital radio on the windowsill. In the living room they could see a huge television, and lots of boxes and bookshelves filled with DVDs, as well as some books. It was all a nice cosy clutter of things. She lived on her own. There was no sign of a man, no sign of kids. She’d found Ronnie through another job he’d done in Battersea for a friend of hers. Another bathroom. Not with Pigeon though, he’d done it on his own. Tiles. He liked doing the tiles himself. He liked precision. He liked doing the finishing touches. Pigeon had never been around for the end of any job.
He dreamed he had his own volcano. Even in his sleep he thought this was stupid. But there it was. A huge mountain that seemed to be outside his mother’s house. Or maybe his mother’s house was instead now to be found on the slopes on a large smouldering mountain where the air was fresh and you could see the cities down by the coast where people killed each other. It was his. In the sense that it did his bidding. He destroyed an entire version of London with a glance. He swept away an approaching boat with a pyroclastic flow. He flattened the homes of the people he didn’t like, and Ronnie as well. Ronnie running from a collapsing fiery approximation of his block on C
hampion Hill. Naked for some reason. At which Pigeon woke. Woke up and wondered what that was about. Did he not like Ronnie? Ronnie was a boss. That was that. A prick of a boss.
Ronnie had disappeared. Pigeon called his name, loudly. House was quiet, bright, the sun a little lower. He’d left his phone somewhere. He had fallen asleep on the bathroom floor. Waiting for Ronnie to figure out what they’d done wrong this time. Looking at the dust, lying down at first to follow what Ronnie was doing with the pipes for the bidet, and then just staying there, sinking his head onto his arm when Ronnie left the room. For what? To pee downstairs probably. If it was to get something he’d have sent Pigeon. So he closed his eyes, just for a second. There’d been a wide desert and a mirage of a complicated temple in the distance and he’d walked towards it with the sun on his face knowing it was a mirage but it was beautiful anyway, and then he recognised it as the copper of the bathroom piping and he was awake again and Ronnie was gone. He lay there a minute or two. He lay there expecting Ronnie to come back, thinking that he’d dropped off for a few seconds. Maybe he dropped off again. But at some stage the fact that he’d been there a while became a possibility. He might have fallen asleep. His shoulder and his hip hurt from the floorboards. Might have. Fucks sake.
He got up and his bones all snapped but the place was quiet. He got up and went to the stairs and listened and the place was quiet and he called Ronnie’s name loudly and the place was quiet. Downstairs the kitchen was tidied up, their mugs and plates put away. The back door closed and locked. Ronnie’s workbench gone from the garden — all his stuff gone. Pigeon walked to the front door and it was locked. He stood there looking at it like it had said something to him. Tried it again. The bottom lock was locked. The bottom lock which the lady had been so particular about. You have two front-door keys. The Yale lock but also this bottom one. You don’t leave the door open ever ok? In and out while you’re here, the Yale is fine. When you leave you lock the bottom one as well ok? He tried it again. He bent over and looked through the keyhole. He crouched and opened the letter flap. Couldn’t see much, the skip with boards up the side, a length of cracked plastic pipe against the sky, but he was pretty sure that he was able to see where the van had been parked and it wasn’t parked there any more.
Fucking hell.
He went back to the kitchen. The note was on the counter by the kettle.
Radiator done and working. Bidet piping done. Bidet and toilet arrive Monday. Tomorrow is sink and bidet to finish. R.
Then he couldn’t find his phone.
There was a dismantled bed in the corner but no mattress, a box of Christmas decorations, parts of at least two bicycles, a mirror, two kitchen chairs, an armchair piled high with boardgames, CDs, books, porn magazines, a kettle, a lampshade, video cassettes, documents, photographs. Clothes. It was hot. Lots of clothes. In black bags, in boxes, and on a rack down at the end. It was gloomy but he could see fine. Light came through the eaves. By the water tanks there was an old torch but it was dead. He was sweating. But it was not . . . he was not . . . he was ok.
What are you doing?
He looked at his hand in the gloom. He was properly locked in.
He’d assumed Ronnie had taken his phone. The phone was gone. It would have been either on the new ledge they’d stuck over the new radiator in the new bathroom, or it would be in the kitchen, and it was in neither place, and in no place in between. In the kitchen there was no sign of the back-door key. It hung usually in a cupboard but it wasn’t there. Pigeon was pretty sure that he wouldn’t have been able to get out over the walls at the back anyway. No side passages in these terraces. Just a tangle of tiny gardens hemmed in. And him clambering around out there was going to get the cops down in less than no time. A neighbourhood like this. They’d probably shoot him.
All of the ground-floor windows were locked. No sign of keys. He didn’t know if that was Ronnie or just the way they always were. Probably the way they always were. He could squeeze through a front one upstairs and drop to the street. He didn’t want to do that. It was too high. And he would be seen. They would gather and drag him to a cliff edge or a police station and he would hang there until they let him go.
He looked at the mirror, not into it. It showed him the lines of the roof beams at a broken angle. He thought for a moment that it was sweating, but it was just mottled, old.
He was sweating. He could smell it.
He’d assumed that Ronnie would drive around for a while and then come back and get him, all no prospering bullshit from ear to ear all the way home, and Pigeon just raging in the passenger seat. He’d have a proper go at Ronnie, he fucking would . . . but he knew he couldn’t keep it up. He didn’t have the fury. Nothing but a sleepy child. Maybe he needed a little lock in, needed his nose rubbed in it. Stay in your dreams. Stay in your scratchy dreams. In a stranger’s house. Used up for nothing much and left behind with the cut offs and the shavings, with his hands between his thighs and his dribbling mouth and his lazy, empty head. Little lesson for you Pigeon. What did Ronnie hate in him? Softness. You not much more than a boy and you still asleep. Not laziness. Ronnie was lazy as. He hated the softness. The quietness. The hint of something. You must be awake Pigeon. You must be awake in the world or you are not in the world at all. Such a crock of stupid bullshit.
After a while he’d decided that Ronnie wasn’t coming back. Why would he? You must not relent. Ronnie the sulk. Ronnie the Walk Out. Furious Ronnie. All humankind is scum.
His hand in the gloom was a ghost. He could smell it.
Oh man. What was he doing? He had rolled into a slow panic that had taken him room to room looking for a way out and then for a hiding place because here he was, in a house that wasn’t his with no way of relenting, stuck, waiting to face a woman he had said three words to, hello, goodbye, thanks, ever, in total, and he was supposed to explain that he had fallen asleep and been abandoned.
Something in him had decided to hide. In the attic.
Oh man.
He shifted things off the armchair thinking he’d sit on it. But there was too much. Why has she a pile of porn magazines in her attic? For fuck’s sake. Instead he got a heap of musty old coats and jumpers and put them in the front corner. Over the front door, roughly. Somewhere about there. Laid them out and sat down. Put his back against the plain board that divided her attic from next door. It was hot. He should use the toilet. He had no idea what time it was. But there was a radio down there . . .
He lowered himself down through the hatch and swung his leg for the bannister and put his weight there and let his arms fall towards the wall over the front-bedroom door and hopped down. It was noisy. No way he could do that when there was someone in the house. Downstairs he looked at the radio and it was 17:22. They’d never stayed later than four. He pissed and tried to shit. He had no idea what time she came back. So he would just . . .
He couldn’t shit. He didn’t know even why he was trying, he’d had one earlier, he never had a shit around now. He went to the kitchen and found a plastic jug, quite big, and he filled it two thirds with water. He looked in cupboards for some sort of snack food that wouldn’t be missed. He was thinking energy bars or something, but there was nothing but crisps and they were noisy, and oranges, smelly, and he left it. He wasn’t hungry.
What was he doing?
For a second he thought it was Friday. That he would need to stay hidden until Monday. But it wasn’t. It was Thursday. He went back and looked at the radio. It was Thursday.
He could just wait for her in the kitchen and she would be a little baffled maybe but she would just let him out and that would be that. He had his Oyster card. He had some money. He’d get home, eventually. Then he’d go over to Ronnie’s. Knock on the door. Phone, please. Take the phone. Then maybe he’d punch Ronnie. Or maybe he’d not say another word. Just look at him like he was human scum and walk away and never say another word to him as long as he liv
ed. Go back to the call centre or do Deliveroo for the summer and then go up to Manchester and do something near his brother. Study. Snap out of it. Get out of London. Which is only a fraction of the world. You know? A tiny dense little fraction. It is not the full extent of things. There is fresh air. There is a cold drink of water.
He looked at the front door. The thought of it opening made him sick.
She might not even recognise him.
He took his jug back up and took his time climbing with it but he made it without spilling any and he lowered the square of wood back into the hatch and let his eyes adjust and then he felt suddenly emotional, as if he was going to cry.
This was something.
He knew he wasn’t dreaming but he knew that he had learned how to do this by dreaming. How to be beside things. Out of them. How to find a solitary space. How to hide in the roof. How to stay where he was until the coast was clear.
He set the jug down carefully and went and got some more clothes to sit on and he sat on them. He took off his shoes.
He was doing this.
He got up. Ridiculous.
What if she comes through the door just as he’s dangling through the hatch. So what? Maybe he had to check the water tank. What’s he doing with a jug? So maybe he had to test the water. Take some water. Put some back. Who the fuck cares, she’s not going to care, he’s just the plumber’s boy still in her house she won’t give a shit she’ll just let him out and away. She won’t even look at him.
Even if she doesn’t recognise him. Just. I’m Ronnie’s . . . I work with Ronnie. We met. Hello. Goodbye. Thanks.
He sat down.
It would serve Ronnie right if he was discovered camping out in the attic. What are you doing locking people into my house? You’re fired. Then all that public trouble. All that talk.
He was doing the right thing. He was comfortable enough. He could be quiet. He could think things through. Sleep a light little sleep. Make it to the morning and she’d be gone and Ronnie would arrive and that would be it.
He was in the eaves. Pigeon in the eaves. Near the eaves. He thought that if he could make himself as small as possible that he could perhaps make himself smaller still. That something would take over and he would be transformed, down, and down again, into something tiny like a bird. He could strut. Stick his head through the holes and coo at the street.
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