Her music case was her father’s, a sturdy Edwardian job with serious locks and stitching. She put Michel’s letters into it, together with her money and passport and plenty of music. She took it downstairs with the guitar.
‘This lot’s for Cindy,’ she told the chef, and the chef burst into a fit of giggles and put them in the Ladies with the Hoover and the empties.
She returned upstairs, switched on the light, pulled the curtains, and dressed herself in her full warpaint because it was Peckham night and not all the coppers on earth, and not all her dead lovers, were going to stop her rehearsing her kids for their pantomime. She got home soon after eleven; the pavement was clear; Cindy had taken her music case and guitar. She rang Al because suddenly she wanted a man desperately. No answer. Bastard’s out screwing again. She tried a couple of other old stand-bys without success. Her phone sounded funny to her, but the way she was feeling, it could have been her ears. About to go to bed, she took a last look out of the window and there were her two guardians back in position on the pavement.
The next day nothing happened, except that when she called on Lucy, half expecting to find Al there, Lucy said Al had vanished from the earth, she’d phoned the police and the hospitals and everyone.
‘Try Battersea Dogs’ Home,’ Charlie advised her. But when she got back to her own flat, there was her old awful Al on the phone in a state of alcoholic hysteria.
‘Come round now, woman. Don’t talk, just bloody well come now.’
She went, knowing it was more of the same. Knowing there was no corner of her life any more that was not occupied by danger.
Al had parked himself on Willy and Pauly, who weren’t breaking up after all. She arrived there to find that he had convened a whole supporters’ club. Robert had brought a new girlfriend, an idiot in white lipstick and mauve hair called Samantha. But it was Al, as usual, who held the stage.
‘And you can tell me what you like, you can!’ he was yelling as she entered. ‘This is it! This is war! Oh yes, it is, and total war at that!’
He raged on till Charlie screamed at him: just shut up and tell her what had happened.
‘Happened, girl? Happened? What has happened is that the counter-revolution has fired its first salvo is what’s happened, and the target was Joe Soap here!’
‘Let’s have it in bleeding English!’ Charlie screamed back, but she still went nearly mad before she dragged the plain facts out of him.
Al was coming out of this pub when these three gorillas just fell on him, he said. One, even two, he could have managed, but they were three and hard as bloody Brighton Rock, and they worked him over as a team. But it wasn’t till they’d got him in the police car, half castrated, that he realised they were pigs pulling him in on a trumped-up indecency charge.
‘And you know what they wanted to talk about really, don’t you?’ He struck out an arm at her. ‘You, girl! You and me and our bloody politics, oh yes! And did we count any friendly Palestinian activists among our acquaintance, by any chance? Meanwhile they’re telling me I flashed my dick at some fetching copper-boy in the Gents at the Rising Sun and made movements of the right hand of a masturbatory nature. And when they’re not telling me that, they’re telling me they’ll pull out my fingernails one by one and get me ten years in Sing Sing for hatching anarchist plots with my faggy little radical friends on Greek islands, such as Willy and Pauly here. I mean this is it, girl! This is day one and we, in this room, are the front line.’
They had smacked his ear so hard he couldn’t hear himself speak, he said; his balls were like ostrich eggs, and look at the bloody bruise on his arm. They’d kept him twenty-four hours in the can, questioned him for six. They’d offered him the phone but no small change, and when he wanted a phone book they’d lost it so he couldn’t even ring his agent. Then unaccountably they had dropped the indecency charge and let him go with a caution.
There was a boy called Matthew among the party, a tubby-chinned articled accountant looking for life’s alternatives; and he had a flat. To his surprise, Charlie went back there and slept with him. Next day there was no rehearsal and she had been meaning to visit her mother, but at lunchtime when she woke in Matthew’s bed she hadn’t the stomach, so she rang and cancelled, which was probably what threw the police, because when she arrived outside the Goanese café that evening she found a squad car parked on the kerb, and a uniformed Sergeant standing in the open doorway, and the chef beside him, grinning at her with Asian embarrassment.
It’s happened, she thought calmly. High time too. They’ve come out of the woodwork at last.
The Sergeant was the angry-eyed, close-cropped type who hates the whole world, but Indians and pretty women most. Perhaps it was this hatred which blinded him to who Charlie might be at that crucial moment in the drama.
‘Café’s temporarily closed,’ he snapped at her. ‘Find somewhere else.’
Bereavement engenders its own responses. ‘Has someone died?’ she asked fearfully.
‘If they have, they haven’t told me. There’s a suspected burglar been seen on the premises. Our officers are investigating. Now hop it.’
Perhaps he had been on duty too long and was sleepy. Perhaps he did not know how fast an impulsive girl can think and duck. In any case she was under his guard and into the café in a second, slamming the doors behind her as she ran. The café was empty and the machines switched off. Her own front door was closed but she could hear men’s voices murmuring through it. Downstairs the Sergeant was yelling and hammering on the door. She heard: ‘You. Stop that. Come out.’ But only faintly. She thought, Key, and opened her handbag. She saw the white headscarf and put it on instead, a lightning change between scenes. Then she pressed the bell, two quick, confident rings. Then pushed the flap of her letter box.
‘Chas? Are you in? It’s me, Sandy.’
The voices stopped dead, she heard a footstep and a whispered, ‘Harry, quick!’ The door lurched open and she found herself staring straight into the eyes of a grey-haired, savage little man in a grey suit. Behind him, she could see her treasured relics of Michel scattered everywhere, her bed upended, her posters down, her carpet rolled back, and the floorboards open. She saw a downward-faced camera on a stand, and a second man peering through the eyepiece, and several of her mother’s letters spread beneath it. She saw chisels, pliers, and her would-be lover-boy from the cinema in his granny glasses kneeling among a heap of her expensive new clothes and she knew with one glance that she was not interrupting the investigation, but the break-in itself.
‘I’m looking for my sister Charmian,’ she said. ‘Who the hell are you?’
‘She’s not here,’ the grey-haired man replied, and she caught a whiff of the Welsh on his voice, and noticed claw marks on his jaw.
Still looking at her, he raised his voice to a bellow. ‘Sergeant Mallis! Sergeant Mallis, get this lady out of here and take her particulars!’
The door slammed in her face. From below she could hear the luckless Sergeant still yelling. She went softly down the stairs but only as far as the half-landing, where she squeezed between heaps of cardboard boxes to the courtyard door. It was bolted but not locked. The courtyard gave on to a mews and the mews on to the street where Miss Dubber lived. Passing her window, Charlie tapped on it and gave her a cheery wave hullo. How she did that, where she got the wit from, she would never know. She kept going, but no footsteps or furious voices came after her, no car screeched alongside. She reached the main road, and somewhere along the way she pulled on one leather glove, which was what Joseph had told her to do if and when they flushed her. She saw a free cab and hailed it. Well then, she thought cheerfully, here we all are. It was only much, much later in her many lives that it crossed her mind they had let her go deliberately.
Joseph had ruled her Fiat out of bounds, and reluctantly she knew he was right. So she moved by stages, nothing hasty. She was talking herself down. After the taxi, we take a bus ride, she told herself, walk a bit, then a stretch by tube.
Her mind was sharp as a flint, but she had to get her thoughts straight; her gaiety had not subsided; she knew she had to grab a firm hold on her responses before she made her next move, because if she fluffed this, she fluffed the whole show. Joseph had told her so and she believed him.
I’m on the run. They’re after me. Christ, Helg, what do I do?
You may call this number only in extreme emergency, Charlie. If you call unnecessarily, we shall be most angry, do you hear me?
Yes, Helg, I hear you.
She sat in a pub and drank one of Michel’s vodkas, remembering the rest of the gratuitous advice Helga had given her while Mesterbein was skulking in the car. Make sure you are not followed. Don’t use the telephones of friends or family. Don’t use the box on the corner or the box across the road or down the street or up the street from your flat.
Never, do you hear? They are all extremely dangerous. The pigs can tap a phone in one second, you may be certain. And never use the same telephone twice. Do you hear me, Charlie?
Helg, I hear you perfectly.
She stepped into the street and saw one man staring into an unlit shop window and a second sauntering away from him towards a parked car with an aerial. Now the terror had her, and it was so bad she wanted to lie down whimpering on the pavement and confess to everything and beg the world to take her back. The people ahead of her were as frightening as the people behind her, the ghostly lines of the kerb led to some dreadful vanishing point which was her own extinction. Helga, she prayed; oh, Helg, get me out of this. She caught a bus in the wrong direction, waited, caught another and walked again, but funked the tube because the thought of being below ground scared her. So she weakened and caught another cab and watched out of the back window. Nothing was following her. The street was empty. To hell with walking, to hell with tubes and buses.
‘Peckham,’ she said to the driver, and went right to the gates in style.
The hall they used for rehearsals was at the back of the church, a barn-like place next to an adventure playground, which the kids had smashed to pieces long ago. To reach it she had to walk down a line of yew trees. No lights burned, but she pressed the bell because of Lofty, a retired boxer. Lofty was the nightwatchman, but since the cuts he came three nights a week at most, and the bell, to her relief, produced no answering tread. She unlocked the door and stepped inside, and the cold institutional air reminded her of the Cornish church she had gone into after laying her wreath to the unknown revolutionary. She closed the door behind her and lit a match. Its flame flickered on the glossy green tiles and the high vault of the Victorian pine roof. She called out, ‘Loftee,’ humorously to keep her spirits up. The match went out, but she found the door-chain and slipped it into its housing before lighting another. Her voice, her footsteps, the rattle of the chain in the pitch darkness echoed crazily for hours.
She thought of bats and other aversions; of seaweed dragged across her face. A staircase with an iron handrail led upward to a pine gallery, known euphemistically as ‘the common room’, and, ever since her clandestine visit to the Munich duplex, reminiscent of Michel. Grabbing the rail, she followed it upstairs, then stood motionless on the gallery staring into the gloom of the hall and listening while her eyes grew accustomed to the dark. She made out the stage, then the billowing psychedelic clouds of her backdrop, then the trusses and the roof. She picked out the silver glow of their one spotlight, a headlamp converted by a Bahamian kid called Gums, who’d nicked it from a car dump. There was an old sofa on the gallery and beside it a pale plastic-topped table that caught the city’s glow from the window. On the table stood the black telephone for staff only, and the exercise book where you were supposed to enter private calls, which sparked off about six major rows a month.
Sitting on the sofa, Charlie waited till her stomach had untied itself and her pulse rate dropped below the three hundred mark. Then she lifted phone and cradle together and laid them on the floor beneath the table. There used to be a couple of household candles in the table drawer for when the wiring failed, which it often did, but somebody had nicked them too. So she twisted a page of an old parish magazine into a spill and, having propped it in a dirty teacup, lit one end to make a tallow. With the table above and the balcony to one side, the flame was as contained as it could be, but as soon as she had dialled she blew it out all the same. She had fifteen numerals to dial altogether and the first time the phone just howled at her. The second time she mis-dialled and got some mad Italian yelling at her, and the third her fingertip slipped. But on the fourth she got a pensive silence followed by the peep of a continental ringing tone. Followed a lot later by the strident voice of Helga speaking German.
‘It’s Joan,’ said Charlie. ‘Remember me?’ and got another pensive silence.
‘Where are you, Joan?’
‘Mind your own bloody business.’
‘You have a problem, Joan?’
‘Not really. I just wanted to thank you for bringing the pigs to my fucking doorstep.’
Then, to her glory, the old luxurious fury took command of her, and she let rip with an abandon she had not managed since the time she was not allowed to remember, when Joseph had taken her to see her little lover-boy before cutting him up for bait.
Helga heard her out in silence. ‘Where are you?’ she said when Charlie seemed to have finished. She spoke reluctantly, as if she were breaking her own rules.
‘Forget it,’ Charlie said.
‘Can you be reached anywhere? Tell me where you will be for the next forty-eight hours.’
‘No.’
‘Will you phone me again in one hour, please.’
‘I can’t.’
A long silence. ‘Where are the letters?’
‘Safe.’
Another silence. ‘Get paper and a pencil.’
‘I don’t need one.’
‘Get one all the same. You are not in a condition for accurate remembering. You are ready?’
Not an address, not a telephone number either. But street directions, a time, and the route by which she should approach. ‘Do exactly as I am telling you. If you cannot make it, if you have more problems, telephone to the number on Anton’s card and say you wish to contact Petra. Bring the letters. Do you hear me? Petra, and bring the letters. If you don’t bring the letters, we shall be extremely angry with you.’
Ringing off, Charlie heard the sound of one pair of hands softly clapping from the auditorium downstairs. She went to the edge of the balcony and looked over, and to her immeasurable joy saw Joseph sitting all alone in the centre of the front row. She turned and ran down the stairs to him. She reached the bottom step to find him waiting with his arms out for her. He was afraid she might lose her footing in the darkness. He kissed her, and went on kissing her; then he led her back to the gallery keeping his arm round her even on the narrowest bit of the staircase, and carrying a basket in the other hand.
He had brought smoked salmon and a bottle of wine. He had put them on the table without unwrapping them. He knew where the plates lived under the sink, and how you plugged the electric fire into the spare socket on the cooker. He had brought a thermos of coffee and a couple of rather ripe blankets from Lofty’s lair downstairs. He put the thermos down with the plates, then went round checking the big Victorian doors, putting them on the bolt from the inside. And she knew, even in the gloomy light – she could tell by the line of his back and the private deliberation of his gestures – that he was doing something outside the script, he was closing the doors on every world but their own. He sat beside her on the sofa and put a blanket over her because the cold in the hall was something that really had to be dealt with; and so was her shivering, she couldn’t stop. The phone call to Helga had frightened her stiff, so had the executioner’s eyes of the policeman in her flat, so had the accumulated days of waiting and half knowing, which was far, far worse than knowing nothing.
The only light came from the electric fire and it shone upwards on his face like a pale footlight from t
he days when theatres used them. She remembered him in Greece, telling her that the floodlighting of ancient sites was an act of modern vandalism, because the temples were built to be seen with the sun above them, not below. He had his arm round her shoulder under the blanket and it occurred to her how thin she was against him.
‘I’ve lost weight,’ she said, as a kind of warning to him.
He didn’t answer, but held her tighter to keep her trembling in check, to absorb it and make it his. It occurred to her that she had always known, despite his evasions and disguises, that he was in essence a kind man, of instinctive sympathy for everyone; in battle and in peace, a troubled man who hated causing pain. She put her hand to his face and she was pleased to find he hadn’t shaved, because tonight she didn’t want to think he had calculated anything, though it was not their first night, nor yet their fiftieth – they were old frenzied lovers with half the motels in England behind them, with Greece and Salzburg and God knew how many other lives as well; because suddenly it was clear to her that their whole shared fiction was nothing but foreplay for this night of fact.
He took her hand away and drew her into him and kissed her mouth and she responded chastely, waiting for him to light the passions they had so often spoken of. She loved his wrists, his hands. No hands had been so wise. He was touching her face, her neck, her breasts, and she held back from kissing him because she wanted her flavours separate: now he is kissing me, now he is touching me, undressing me, he is lying in my arms, we are naked, we are on the beach again, on the scratchy sand of Mykonos, we are vandalised buildings with the sun burning us from below. He laughed and, rolling away from her, moved back the electric fire. And in all her loving she had never seen anything as beautiful as his body stooped over the red glow, the fire brightest where his own body burned. He returned to her and, kneeling beside her, started again from the beginning in case she had forgotten the story this far, kissing and touching everything with a light possessiveness that slowly lost its diffidence, but always returning to her face because they needed to see and taste each other repeatedly and reassure themselves that they were who they said they were. He was the best, long before he entered her, the one incomparable lover she had never had, the distant star she had been following through all that rotten country. If she had been blind, she would have known it by his touch; if she had been dying, by his sad victorious smile that conquered terror and unbelief by being there ahead of her; by his instinctive power to know her, and to make her own knowledge more.
The Little Drummer Girl Page 43