“Where did you say your flat was, John?” he asked me when he had settled.
“Castle Bridge, Andy. A good central point for the whole region.”
“Castle Bridge,” he repeated thoughtfully. “Expensive, surely?”
“It is.”
“Mortgaged?”
“Yes.”
“How can you afford if off what Sears pays you?” he inquired, sounding surprised.
I hesitated. This was a possible juncture in my relationship with them. Since Karen had gone to the ladies, I wondered if should tell him about my plight.
“The truth is, Andy, right now I can’t pay for it,” I told him, smiling awkwardly, and wishing I hadn’t said it.
“You mean …”
“Things are bit tight,” I said, trying to sound as if the matter was under control, and hoping I hadn’t already given the game away.
“To what extent, John?”
“I’m running a few months behind, I suppose.”
“How much do you need?”, he asked, counting off some notes from a long brown envelope he had taken out of his inside jacket pocket.
“Two hundred pounds,” I gasped. “Andy, you’re joking?”
“It isn’t a problem, John . Go on, take it.” he coaxed “or do you need a bit more?”
“Two hundred pounds, Andy,” I repeated, running the notes through my hand.
“John, I’m into good money right now, very good money. You can pay me back when things improve. Go on. Don’t worry about it,” he said, grinning, as if it didn’t matter, and winking at me as Karen rejoined us.
Andy and his girlfriend were both having a profound effect on me. They were spontaneous and sincere, people I could respect. Everything about them was stimulating, so different from what I had had to put up with recently, so different from the overall set of circumstances which was almost bringing me to my knees. Andy was for me, when everything else seemed to be against me, and Karen was putting the spring back in my step, or something like that.
And so was Liz, I thought, as the slim, dark-haired girl joined us.
“I suppose you’ll all be coming back to my place tonight?” she asked as Karen and Andy smiled and raised their glasses in assent.
“What about you, John?” she asked.
“You mean a party of some sort?”
*
Liz’s flat would be around half the price of my own, I calculated as we turned into the street. Although the tenement building was solid-looking, the name plates at the entrance had the residents’ names written in biro and stuck on with tape in typical down-market fashion.
“Oh no, not him again,” Liz said, as we walked ahead of the others, pointing to a figure outlined in the doorway.
“Someone you know?” I asked her.
“No, I don’t,” she said irritably. “That’s the trouble with city centre living, people like him are always hanging about, which can be worrying, especially when the security door is left unlocked.
The man moved to one side to let us pass and stared at us insolently. Unshaven and unwashed, with crumpled clothing, he looked the part.
As the security door clicked shut behind us I felt I should have challenged the man, although an encounter of this kind wasn’t something I felt happy about. With my quite respectable and educated appearance, it would be only too obvious that I wasn’t an expert in the martial arts. Soon, however, I felt that such a passive response wouldn’t do. It didn’t feel or look good.
“Do you want me to say something to him?” I ventured.
“No. What’s the use,” Liz lamented, glancing back down the stairs with a disapproving look on her face. “The problem is we’re far too near the city centre,” she repeated. “What happens is, you contact the police, spend half an hour waiting on them to arrive and a further half hour giving them your name and address, even your age believe it or not, and end up wishing you hadn’t bothered phoning them.”
I thought of my own quiet estate and the likelihood of having to move from it, probably into a district not unlike this one, even worse. It would be hard to take.
“Besides,” Liz went on, “you don’t really know who you’re dealing with. Most of these people are harmless, even in need of help, but you can never tell.”
“I’ll shift him,” I found myself saying. She called my name several times, disapproving of my action, as I went back down to the entrance. Pulling open the security door apprehensively, but with a flourish, I stepped outside.
The man had moved away from the doorway, just as Big Tom and Steve were arriving, followed by Andy a few yards behind.
“Going home already John?” Steve asked good-humouredly. I pointed at the bedraggled figure now moving slowly away from us down the street.
“He’s annoying Liz,” I explained boldly, still determined to save face. “Always hanging about.”
Big Tom took his hands out of his pocket and stared in the man’s direction, his eyes narrowing and the expression on his face becoming deadly serious.
“Let me do it, Tom” Steve said, catching his arm. “I need the exercise.”
“What’s the problem?” Andy asked as he came up.
“Him. He’s been annoying Liz. Always hanging about,” Steve told him, pointing down the street. “I’m going to have a word with him.”
“OK, but take it easy. Remember, we’re going to a party.”
I watched Steve saunter up to the man as if he was about to ask for directions.
“Piss off,” I heard him say, indicating an attitude not in keeping with what I considered to be the received wisdom in such matters. But whether the man was harmless or dangerous, homeless, or on drugs, or fluctuated between these, were things that Steve didn’t seem to think were relevant.
“Go on. Piss off,” I heard him say again.
The man was half a head taller than Steve and looked much heavier. He pulled himself up to his full height and glowered down at him.
In one dynamic movement, as if pushing a boulder over a cliff, Steve drove his shoulder into the man’s chest, driving him back against the wall of the building.
The man stood there for an instant, his eyes bulging, glaring at Steve, and then, without retaliating or even uttering a word of protest, he made off down the street.
“Don’t come back,” Steve shouted after him.
I wondered what would have happened if the others hadn’t come along when they had. Steve had certainly got me off the hook. He had taken the complexity out of the situation in a way that I could never have done.
It wasn’t just that I was filled with admiration for what he had done although, from an immediate practical point of view, I certainly was. My exhilaration was more expansive than that. I realised that being in their company was doing me the world of good. It was revitalizing my depleted outlook on life. It was boosting my morale to see that there were other ways of solving problems than the ones I was used to. Maybe it was only some trivial gap in my knowledge or understanding that was holding me back. Maybe it wasn’t too late to put things right. In the light of all this, maybe going to see Aunt Bethea wasn’t such a bad idea. I had to look at all the angles, didn’t I?
“Now let’s get to this party,” Steve said, as he rejoined us.
He looked as unruffled as Big Tom who stood beside me, his hands in his pockets, the taut look gone from his face. It seemed that I was the only one who would need to calm down.
*
Among the guests, Liz told me as we went in, were the couple who lived downstairs. As the amplified music from the CD player blared its accompaniment to the raised voices of the partygoers, I hoped, for their own sake, that the other neighbours had been invited too.
I could see that the first room we came to had been rearranged, with most of the furniture pressed against the walls to make space for the d
ancing. The other public room, into which I was taken by Liz, had been converted into a lounge bar, with various kinds of tables dotted about in it. A dining-room table, loaded with bottles and glasses, stood at the far end.
Spotting a vacant corner table, I poured myself a lager and made my way over to watch the guests arriving. Most of them were couples, who smiled and nodded at me as they went past and I could see that Liz’s friends were, just like she herself was, not too sophisticated, but friendly and respectable, and that the party would reflect this, although noisily so.
The lager settled nicely on top of what I had drunk in the pub and I responded enthusiastically when Liz placed a hand on each of my shoulders and pushed and steered me down the hall into the other room, where she soon had me wiggling and jerking my body in unison with her own.
When the music changed she broke away from me for an instant, returning to encourage me into more energetic movements, by pulling and pushing my arms and body.
The effort I made to succeed in this taxed me, but I persevered, anxious to gain her approval. When at last the music stopped I collapsed breathless onto a chair, feeling that I had acquitted myself well.
“You’re quite good at this,” she said to me, confirming that my efforts had been successful.
At all costs I wanted to be accepted, and I was beginning to feel that I was succeeding in this.
What I liked about Liz I knew others would like too, and she was soon snatched away from me by Big Tom, whose huge frame she seemed just as anxious to control. They looked good together and it occurred to me I might have to be just as careful with them, in this respect, as I was with Karen and Andy. Discreetly deciding to get out of the way I went through to the other room and sat at a table behind the door, basking in my success at this kind of dancing. I felt relaxed and in good spirits, glad that the universal cry of “let’s have a party’ had such a sound psychological basis. I thought it a great pity that, just like listening to Chopin, the therapeutic content of party-going dealt with effects, rather than causes.
I wondered what Linda would think if she could see me now, or the Pastor for that matter. Social events of this kind would be disapproved of in the Church, where forbidden practices seemed to grow in number, so that gradually the combined force they exerted became greater than the ability required to fully understand their significance, and even when they were fully understood, to get emotionally adjusted to them.
I thought once more of the services I had attended, singing hymns that had expressed ideas I couldn’t appreciate, while the sound of the church organ had made me thankful for the existence of Chopin. His music was written for people like myself. The church music wasn’t. I wasn’t sure about the sounds coming from the amplifier.
My light-heartedness began to slip away and I felt annoyed at myself for letting thoughts like this intrude into my party-going. I didn’t need reminding that the Food Importers wasn’t all I had been troubled by before coming here.
But I was now facing a set of circumstances that were proving to be just as bad. Up to my eyes in debt and in danger of losing the flat, my ability to sell fire extinguishers seemed to equate with my ability to survive.
“Thought you had run away,” Andy said, poking his head round the door, just in time to pull my thoughts out of their downward spiral.
“From what?”
“I saw you dancing with Liz.”
There was something about Andy that didn’t add up, I couldn’t help thinking, as I remembered the wad of notes I had seen bulging out of the envelope. But it wasn’t only that. Telling people they needed another fire extinguisher when they didn’t, or that the one they owned was the wrong kind when it wasn’t, didn’t seem to be an occupation that was worthy of him. He didn’t seem to belong in Bartons any more than I did myself.
“Liz’s great company, isn’t she?” he commented.
“Hard to keep up with.”
“Karen can be great too, but she takes longer to get to know,” he told me.
“She was telling me about her job.”
“Oh yes. At the Casino. I sometimes work for them too,” he said ponderously.
“Doing what, Andy?” I asked, puzzled.
“A driver of sorts. Would you be interested in that kind of thing?” he asked me.
“In being a driver?”
“A courier, actually,” he said, looking at me questioningly. “Part-time, of course, usually in the evenings or at weekends, but it pays very well. Very well indeed.”
So I had been right. Andy was more than a fire extinguisher salesman. But what was he?
“All you do is deliver things,” he explained, “packages for the most part. Quite often to caravans, which are dotted about here and there.”
“Packages of what Andy?”
“They won’t be radioactive, if that’s what you mean,” he said, grinning good-naturedly.
Andy was doing me another favour. He was inviting me further into his world, whatever that was. And anyway, didn’t postmen deliver packages without knowing what was in them?
“Sounds interesting, Andy,” I replied in an understatement. “Could I give it a try?” How could I say anything else? Hadn’t I decided to look at all the angles? “I’ll fill you in on the details later on,” he said. “There’s always work of this kind in the offing.”
chapter ten
Aunt Bethea’s house had three storeys and looked as big as several two-bedroom semis. It had windows in the attic and basement, too, the ones on the ground floor being huge, with those on the two upper storeys looking only a little less imposing. I was glad there was a sturdy big hedge at the foot of the driveway. This would prevent anyone in the house seeing me parked there, peering up at the house.
I sat for a while looking about me, surprised that a district like this still existed so near the centre of the city. The houses were all in good repair and the gardens well kept. In many other cities big, old houses such as these would probably have been converted into flats, offices, or small hotels but here residents with private means or big salaries had obviously found it congenial to stay on.
I felt ashamed that I was making this visit basically because she was rich and I was poor. The fact that I was only a year or so away from a family kitty in which I might have had a share didn’t give me a right to be here.
I had finally got as far as I had by acting on impulse, without phoning my Great Aunt to tell her I was coming. I had no idea what kind of reception awaited me.
In spite of the reason for my visit, I cared about the impression I would make on her. I wanted her to think that I was a worthy bearer of the family name – a quality, I remembered from the Book Collection, that had once been wished prayerfully on his children, not without some success, by the father of Bernard Montgomery one of the most famous British Field Marshals in the Second World War. I supposed it was even possible that my own father had wished something like this on me and I wondered if this was why I wasn’t finding it easy to play the part of the poor relation looking for a hand-out.
But that’s what I was here for, so what was the best way to go about it? I asked myself. ‘I was wondering if there was any possibility that you might be able to lend me some money’, didn’t sound too good, although it came right to the point. Needless to say, I wished at that moment, from the bottom of my heart, that I could get the loan somewhere else.
Tidying my hair in the car mirror and straightening my tie, I got out and made my way up the driveway.
“Is Miss Grant at home?” I asked the robust looking, elderly woman who confronted me in the doorway.
“Is it something personal, or …?”
“I’m a relative. Could you tell her a John Grant has called to see her?”
“Oh, a Mr Grant. Could you wait for just a minute?” the woman asked me, her scrutinising glare becoming a polite look of curiosity.
Alone in the doorway, I felt my nervousness subside. The name on the door was my name. I had a kind of right to be here, I told myself foolishly, almost believing it.
On the other hand, I reflected pessimistically, Aunt Bethea might not see me as a Grant at all. She might think I was more of a McCutcheon, which was my mother’s maiden name, and of course Grace’s too. I felt my nervousness return.
My mind went blank as the woman led me down a broad well-carpeted hallway and ushered me into a room at the far end where a thin-faced old woman was sitting at a window with some knitting on her lap. She looked up as I went in, motioning me to a nearby chair, while the other woman left the room, closing the door gently behind her.
The old lady, my Great Aunt, put her knitting down and looked across at me.
“So you’re George’s boy,” she said thoughtfully. “Yes, you look like him,” she added, a kindly smile appearing on a face that I thought I had seen before. Her features were heavily wrinkled and topped by thick, quite long, grey hair. She looked very much as I had imagined her – ladylike, and her high cheekbones and long face were features I then remembered seeing in photographs of my father.
“This is a lovely house,” I commented politely.
“You like it, then?” she said, smiling with her eyes too now.
“I certainly do.”
“But you’ve been here before,” she told me.
“I have?” I was genuinely unsure if I should remember.
“Of course you have,” she said gently.
“I’ve absolutely no recollection of it.”
“No. You’d be too young to remember, but you used to come here often when you were a toddler,” she informed me.
She was the kind of old woman I liked, petite and with a dignified posture apparent in the way she was sitting. Her voice, although soft, was still quite firm and clear. The passage of time had deftly etched the many wrinkles on her forehead and cheeks making it easy to see that she would have been very pleasant to look at in her younger days. It felt good to be related to someone like her.
Am I Being Followed? Page 8