The Tottenham Outrage

by M. H. Baylis

  Yet the man with the birthmark hadn’t seemed angry in a general way. He’d behaved with violence towards someone in a wheelchair. Why?

  ‘Do you know why Dr Kovacs might have been interested in Micah Walther?’

  Yitzie shook his head. ‘He had a lot of interests. A great mind.’

  Rex asked for the Walther family’s address. Yitzie wrote it down, silent and hesitant, as if he thought he was doing the wrong thing.

  Rex considered the bulky, odd man before him, who’d known everyone who was either dead or missing, and kept a row of dangerous poisons up here in his attic.

  ‘The police were thinking the same thing as you,’ Yitzie said, following Rex’s gaze. ‘I have just put this place back in order after they searched it.’ He returned a bottle of clear fluid to the shelf. ‘I have not been charged with any crimes.’

  ‘Yitzl, voss machst?’

  They turned in alarm at the high voice in the doorway. Rescha stood there in her vintage raincoat, holding a carrier bag with a Hebrew logo. Rex smiled. She didn’t smile back. Yitzie growled something in Yiddish, his wife snapped a response, and with a sulky, chastened look the big man lumbered off, wheezing, down the stairs.

  ‘Sorry to intrude,’ Rex said. ‘But your husband offered to show me the workshop.’

  ‘Is there anything else you’d like to see?’ she asked awkwardly.

  It was clear that Rescha wanted him gone. Rex walked slowly to the doorway. ‘I was wondering why Dr Kovacs was looking into your family history. Rosa Brandt, who became Rosa Feigenbaum, and moved here? What was she – your great-grandmother?’

  ‘Great-great. He was looking because I asked him to.’

  ‘Oh.’

  The answer was so simple, so obvious. Rex didn’t know what else to say. He stared at the blue bag in Rescha’s hands. He couldn’t read Hebrew, but he recognised the shapes of the letters from somewhere on his travels around Stamford Hill. Two words of three letters. Both starting with the same rather beautiful character, somewhere between a ‘W’ and a crown.

  Then Rex remembered something from his recent talk with Yitzie. ‘But your husband said Dr Kovacs came here, asking questions and you didn’t like it.’

  ‘Yitzie’s got you in a muddle. They met at the hospital. Started talking Yiddish together. Then he started to come here a few months later. And I guess it was just his way. To ask a lot of questions about people. You know, not like they are people, but something he has to find out about. I mean – at the hospital, he saw a Hasid so he thought, ‘Right – you can teach me Yiddish.’ Why else would he have been interested in Yitzie? He just wanted something. To help him with his book he was writing, or… I don’t know. Yitzie is right, I didn’t like it. Especially not at first, because I hardly knew the man. But later, as it went on, I thought, okay, if he wants to stick his nose in, maybe he can help. I never knew much about my family. I was curious.’

  It made sense. And it was backed up by what Tim, the historian, had said. Kovacs had wanted information about terrorists. Having failed to get any, and having already engaged the researcher’s services, he simply put him on to tracing Rescha’s family.

  They went down the stairs in silence, Rex aware of her supervisory presence just behind him. As she opened the door to let him out, he asked, ‘Did you ask him to find out about Micah Walther as well?’

  Like Yitzie, she seemed genuinely baffled by his question. ‘Micah? No.’ Then, as a lorry thundered by on the road, she suddenly leaned in close and asked, in a very different tone of voice. ‘Did you go? On Friday?’

  Rex was surprised. He’d have thought Yitzie would have told his wife. But perhaps they didn’t share much. ‘I did. I saw Micah’s father.’

  She seemed to nod, a gesture so faint, so tightly controlled, it was if she had a gun to her back. Then the hand-bell sounded from within, and she shut the door on him without another glance.

  Waiting for a bus, he tried the number Yitzie had given him for Toyve Walther. There was no reply. The bus came – and it was empty. Or at least, the bottom deck was, because a young man with a cut-up face and no socks was sitting right at the front, his gaunt frame giving off the odour of rotting cheese. Rex discovered it too late, and stayed put, breathing through his mouth as the bus drove westwards through the quiet streets. His trip had answered many questions. Kovacs had started making this trek over to Stamford Hill to learn Yiddish from Yitzie Schild, presumably to help him with his research for his book. Rescha had asked for something in return – some information on her family background. He’d set his researcher on the task. End of story. Or it would have been, if he hadn’t had a file on Micah Walther, the missing boy.

  * * *

  The Sisters of St Veronica of Jumièges had outposts in Krakow, Sydney and Santa Monica. However far-flung the locations, they all fulfilled the same function as the house tucked away in a patch of woodland at the edge of Alexandra Palace. Nuns lived there, along with a handful of people who needed to be cared for in quiet, humble seclusion.

  Rex knew that some people went there to live out their final weeks. The nuns – many of whom apparently dwelt in a sort of limbo world between the supernatural and the real – never seemed to attach much importance to this. Perhaps it was because they thought dying wasn’t really dying. But sometimes Rex would arrive to see scary, yellow oxygen cylinders in the damp, earth-smelling porch. And on the narrow wooded path leading from the convent’s front door, he occasionally came across red-eyed, bewildered visitors trying to find their way back to Muswell Hill.

  As for the long-term residents who shared the premises with his wife, Rex saw little of them: the handles of a wheelchair here, an outline shrouded in blankets in front of a window there. He supposed a better man would involve himself in the life of the place, get to know the others and their families, participate in tea-parties and fun runs, and send the nuns religious cards on their name-days. He’d never been able to. Partly this was due to his innate aversion to joining in. But mostly it was because he tried, when he wasn’t sitting in a chair right next to his wife, to pretend that she wasn’t there, and that it wasn’t his fault that she was. He preferred to scuttle in and out at specific times, greeting the familiar nun who’d always open the door to him, and then proceeding by the swiftest route to the room where Sybille always spent her evenings, in front of crime shows on the TV.

  So he was alarmed, this Sunday evening, when the door wasn’t opened by the usual, tiny, brisk Belgian nun called Sister Florence, but a little girl in a red velvet dress. ‘Where’s my daddy?’ said the little girl, as if Rex had done something with him.

  ‘Erm,’ said Rex. Before he could say anything better, Sister Florence came bustling through the doors.

  ‘It’s okay, your daddy will be back in a minute,’ she said in a soothing sing-song, before guiding Rex away down the corridor with the cobwebs and the forever peeling paint. Once they were some distance away, she said, in a low, pastille-scented whisper, ‘Her brother is with us. So young. The family would do anything, but… Very sad.’ She paused in front of the door to the TV room. The corridor was warm and damp, as always. In his dreams the walls of the place ran with water, like a cave. ‘Tonight, a surprise.’

  She opened the door. He went in. Surprise was a wild understatement. His wife was standing by the window.

  She turned, and her face was as beautiful as it had ever been – smooth and pale, with its exquisite sweep from cheekbone down to jaw. She saw him.

  ‘Hello Rex,’ she said. She’d been in a wheelchair since 2003, but now she walked across to him, the scent of Mitsouko, her perfume, in his nostrils. His heart thumped. His mind seemed to have been squeezed into a funnel, to have risen several feet above his head, so that he had a clear vision of himself, in that shabby little convent room, embracing his wife, his miraculously healed wife, for the first time in years. How could it have happened?

  ‘It’s been too long,’ she murmured. He felt the warmth of her next to him – the silk
of her blouse, the brush of her thighs beneath her skirt. Blood rushed to and from his thundering heart, he became hard as he thrust his lips towards hers. She was his again. He remembered what the Narpal, the sick young Rebbe had told him at the tish. You will see a miracle. He wanted to laugh. But it was true. Miracles were true.

  Two firm hands pushed against his chest. ‘Rex? Are you ok?’

  Something, a change in the light, a tiny movement of her body, was like a key turning. It turned and the whole picture broke up and dissolved. Flushing with horror, he realised the mistake he’d made.

  ‘Aurelie, I…’ He faced his sister-in-law and swallowed. She smoothed her skirt down. ‘You look so…’

  Last time he’d seen her, she’d been bloated and red-faced, forever having emergency haircuts to hide the self-loathing chop-jobs she did on herself with nail scissors when she was drunk. Now he saw his wife’s elder sister as she’d always been meant to be. Beautiful. And just like his wife.

  ‘I got some help,’ she said, smiling, a faint flush on her cheekbones. ‘I don’t drink now.’

  ‘Where’s Sybille?’

  ‘She is in her room, getting changed. I wanted to talk to you alone before she comes in.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said warily, pulling up a chair.

  She did the same, sitting neatly, legs folded to one side. Unzipping her neat, maroon-coloured handbag, she took out a photograph and passed it to him. It showed a fat, beaming man outside an ornate but semi-derelict villa. ‘He is a Captain in the Sûreté,’ Aurelie said. ‘We are getting married in August, in Corsica, because he comes from there. This is the house we are going to live in. St-Aubin. Just outside Paris.’

  ‘Congratulations. That’s great news. Lovely house.’ He still felt desperately embarrassed.

  ‘I want Sybille to live there with us.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Rex – allow me to talk.’

  He was reminded again of his wife. Though it was never intentional, he’d often interrupted Sybille: her jokes, her stories, her questions. Her life.

  ‘I know you don’t have any reason to listen to me. I was crazy for years.’ Aurelie went on. ‘But not now. It’s a new life. A different life. And I can make a good life for Sybille as well.’

  ‘She has a good life.’

  ‘You don’t come to see her for weeks. The nuns tell me. You come, once a month maybe, you stay half an hour and you go. She’s in this place, which is falling down the hillside, onto a shitty part of London, only because it is near to you but you don’t even come any more.’

  Anger replaced bewilderment in his veins. ‘How often did you come, when you were doing a bottle of Grey Goose every day before lunch? How involved were you then in Sybille’s life?’

  Aurelie blinked, as if absorbing a series of light blows. ‘You are right to say that. And I am not saying that it’s your fault.’

  No one needed to say it was his fault. The obvious never needed saying.

  ‘You can’t make her well again, Aurelie.’

  ‘And you can’t repair things by keeping her here. She might live twenty, thirty, forty more years, just like us, no one knows. How should she spend them? Here, in front of TV shows, with some old nuns? Or with her family?’

  The bright, high-pitched chuntering of Sister Florence could now be heard as she wheeled Sybille into the room. ‘They haven’t switched it on yet, Sybille. I don’t know why.’ The door swung open. ‘With these “Foyle’s War” we cannot follow the story if we miss the beginning! Will you switch it on ITV please?’

  Aurelie said a few, short, incomprehensible words in French to Sister Florence. The nun reddened slightly and left the room.

  ‘Ask her,’ Aurelie said. ‘Ask Sybille what she wants.’

  He turned to his wife, and took hold of a cool, slim hand. It felt slighter and bonier than the last time he’d seen her. He cleared his throat, which seemed to tighten up in the dusty micro-climate of the convent, and asked her where she wanted to go.

  She didn’t answer. She’d lost an eye, and the one remaining had had no sight in it since a scaffolding pole shot through the passenger side of the windscreen into her head. Still, as he did every time he came here, he found himself gazing into it, peering into the sightless well in search of something lost.

  ‘You have to understand the start,’ she said at last. She said it very quietly. As he and Aurelie craned forward, he was reminded of the Narpal, and how desperate everyone had been to hear his utterances. ‘They show you all these things to lead you astray. But in the beginning is where the answers are.’

  Aurelie glanced at Rex for clarification. Rex sighed. ‘She’s talking about Foyle’s War,’ he said. He leant forward to switch on the TV. The glum, wartime detective had already started on his mystery. ‘Can you get this in Paris?’ he asked harshly. ‘Because that’s what’ll probably decide it.’

  ‘Rex,’ his wife said reproachfully. She did this, sometimes. Echoed the words and the gestures of her old self – squeezed his hand or giggled, as if she was still there. He found those moments, those ghosts of an old, normal life, especially hard to bear. Harder than her silences or her weird utterances.

  Later Aurelie walked with him back up the path to the bus-stop. It was a light, spring evening, fresh and full of a kind of promise. He felt irritated by it. He wanted it to be dark and icy, something to give him an excuse to go home with a bottle of raki and shut himself away.

  ‘For now anyway it’s still just talking,’ she said. ‘The house won’t be finished until next year.’

  ‘What does Inspector Clouseau think of your plan?’

  She smiled and touched his arm. She was taller than his wife, he realised. Or maybe it was just shoes. ‘His name is Eric. He wants me to be happy. And I… you might not believe it, but I want you to be happy, too, Rex. I want you to have a chance of it. I don’t think you will allow yourself, and Sybille is the way you prevent it from happening.’

  It wasn’t the first time someone had said that to him. Not even the first time a beautiful woman had said it to him, standing on this very hill. And they’d all been right, at the same time as all being wrong.

  They fell into silence, gazing down at the flat valley-floor of Tottenham below. He wondered where in that blue-grey confusion Rescha and Yitzie’s shop was, and where the Bettelheims had lived, and if all those separate lives were, or had been, as complicated as his. He supposed they must have been. Perhaps more so.

  ‘You really thought I was her?’ Aurelie said suddenly. He nodded, and as awkward as he felt, he admired Aurelie for bringing it up. Most people would have been too embarrassed to mention the fact that their brother-in-law had just shoved a semi-erect cock at their midriffs. Maybe it was because she was French. Or maybe ex-alcoholics just had no embarrassment left.

  ‘You see how we are made to repeat our mistakes,’ she said, as the 144 bus approached. ‘Unless we do something to stop it.’

  He thought about that, as he sailed down Muswell Hill on a virtually empty bus. It wasn’t just her comment that struck a chord, but his wife’s. You have to understand the start. Because if he traced the roots of the accident that had shattered so many lives, he came to an event a few weeks before it.

  It was mid November, 2003. He’d been ill, with tonsillitis, and he’d made a bad patient. Rex’s mother had never really mothered him that much; and lacking a father, he’d had to play the man of the house from a young age. Consequently he was uncomfortable whenever circumstances rendered him needy. Over the years, some of his girlfriends had accepted this and withdrawn, but the one who became his wife never had. The kinder Sybille was, the fouler her patient behaved, until, on the evening his voice returned, the resentments of the past week spilled over into an argument.

  He’d returned to work the next day and come home late that evening to find Aurelie passed out on the sofa. He’d lugged a spare duvet over his sister-in-law and gone to bed himself, waking some hours later to the sensation of his wife’s cool f
ingers dancing up his thigh. Half-conscious, he’d rolled onto his back and given himself over to the reconciliation, before realising, just on the threshold of pleasure, that it couldn’t be his wife, because his wife was away for the night.

  He’d sprung away, hints of semen and saliva and stale booze in his nostrils, and Aurelie had staggered out of the room like a shot fox. The next day everything had seemed almost normal when his wife returned from her conference in Leicester. But something had been said, or perhaps only divined. Whatever it was, it was enough to ensure that the coolness between Rex and his wife lengthened and deepened. Ensuring that, a full fortnight after Aurelie had gone, they were still not entirely reconciled.

  At the end of that fortnight was a Press Awards dinner, where he’d had too much drink and had driven them home. In the car their bickering teetered on the edge of some bigger quarrel which had never come, because he’d crashed the car. The breathalyser said he wasn’t drunk. What could explain that other than God, intervening to show that He could? To show that only He knew the numbers and the natures of everybody’s sins.

  Chapter Six

  Rex dreamt of the past and thought he was still there when the alarm went off. The radio was playing some irritating jokey single of years gone by, and warm sunlight was streaming through the bedroom windows. Downstairs, someone was frying bacon. All these things made him wonder briefly if he was still living in a basement flat in Camden with his wife, or perhaps even at the place he still sometimes thought of as home, his mum’s council house overlooking the pea-fields.

  It was Terry, he discovered, at the hob with a spatula, his bad leg kneeled up on a folding chair, humming as he flipped curling pink rashers in the pan.

  ‘Bacon sarnie?’

  ‘Ta,’ Rex said, as he poured a coffee from the pot. His new housemate had underestimated the properties of the Turkish coffee Rex bought from the nearby shop, and created a brew with the consistency of French onion soup. But it was good to see Terry up and about.