by M. H. Baylis
They went back into the living room. The conversation faltered. It was late. They were both very tired. He started to make stretching gestures. She got the point, though not in the way he’d expected.
‘I don’t want to go back there,’ she blurted suddenly. ‘I’m afraid. I know there’s nothing to be afraid of now, but…’
‘You can stay,’ Rex said, adding quickly. ‘Down here. This turns into a bed. Or… or you could have mine and I’ll… No.’
Deep in the night, he heard her cry out. He guessed it was a bad dream. Some time passed, he might even have fallen asleep again, but then he woke up at exactly 4.11 am, to hear her sobbing and repeating, ‘No, no, no’ in a muted, throaty way that sounded as if she was still asleep. It didn’t stop.
He was aware of the great taboo surrounding her. A married Hasidic woman, in bed, in his house. He could almost feel the forbidding electricity as he went down the stairs towards her. His shadow loomed in the orange light that came through the glass in the front door from the lamp-post outside. It made him feel like an attacker.
He looked around for a way to make a noise. Something to wake her out of her dream. He hit the door with the flat of his hand. She became silent.
‘Rex?’
He cleared his throat. ‘Are you all right?’
There was no reply. She switched the light on and opened the door. She was fully clothed, grey in the face, hair sticking to her forehead.
‘Every time I close my eyes I see them. The children. The poor children…’ She more or less collapsed into his arms, and he folded them round her. She stayed like that for some time. He started to pat her back, but she winced and pulled away.
‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to –’
‘No… It’s just that… He hurt me there.’ He thought of all the times he’d seen Rescha wincing and standing awkwardly, shuffling her upper garments about as if they hurt her. Now he knew why.
He made tea, and they sat in the living room, she on the folded down bed, he in the armchair. They looked out as the synthetic hues of the London night ebbed away into a grey, still dawn.
‘I used to love this time when I was a girl,’ she said. ‘I could be completely alone. I felt as if the world was mine.’
‘I guess you didn’t get much time on your own in a Hasidic household.’
‘Actually I had a lot. It was just me – and my father and my grandfather. My mother died when I was eight. I had to do all the things that a woman does, without any help. And there was never any money.’
‘What were your father and grandfather like?’
‘My father was just weak,’ she said. ‘Just like a little mouse. My grandfather stank. He stank of tobacco and vodka and pickles-vinegar, and he never washed properly. He sat in a chair in the kitchen, with the Hebrew newspaper, swearing at things he read, or laughing when there was an obituary, and it was somebody he knew. And when he’d finished the paper, he got drunk and he swore about the Kaliker.’
‘The what?’
‘The Kaliker. It means, a disabled person. I never knew what he meant. He just used to get drunk and say that the Kaliker had ruined us all, he’d made mamzers of us all. There was a man with a bad leg who lived down the road, a Jew like us, a butcher, and when I was very small I used to think my grandfather meant him. But he didn’t. He meant someone a long time ago. I mean – I’m not sure, but I think he did. And that man, the butcher was a nice man. One of the few people who would smile at me.’
‘You must have had friends.’
She gave a hollow laugh. ‘I see the girls walking past from the Beis Rochel sometimes. Those good little Satmarer girls with their modest uniforms and their quiet voices and all their study-books. You think that’s what they’re like all the time? You think they don’t whisper, before the lesson, about fat little Malkah, and Brachele with the spots and Rescha who smells like an ashtray with the holes in her stockings? No. I didn’t have friends. I just had books. Not Jewish books. Jane Austen. Georgette Heyer. The Brontë sisters. There was a lady who ran a kind of junk shop, near to Church Street, and she’d get boxes of books, and if they were falling apart she’d give them to me for nothing. And I’d read them through the night and the pages would come out and I’d hide them in this little… gap in the skirting board. They’re still there. In the wall of our bedroom.’ She laughed. ‘All those heroes and heroines. All that love. In a hole in a wall. Like the prayers people write and put in the Wailing Wall. I never thought about that before. I was praying for a rescue, I guess. It never occurred to me to do what Micah did.’
Rex frowned. ‘Micah Walther? What did he do?’
‘He ran away. Everybody knows it. Nobody will say it. Every few years, it’s what one or two boys do. The parents don’t want to face up to it, they would rather say their boys have been stolen from the street. But it’s what happens. They run away.’
‘Why?’
‘Because they look at their big brothers, and their fathers, and they see how their lives are going to go, year after year, without any change or difference. Like being stuck on a bus, going up and down the same street forever. Get up. Morning blessing. Wash hands. Blessing for washing hands. Eat. Blessing for food. Friday – Sabbath. Sunday – back to work. Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Simchas Torah, Hanukah… It’s a timetable for your whole life, that never stops. Never changes. Then they look, out of the bus windows, at the goyishe boys the same age, all the things they do, all the places they go. Looking into a future that can be anything. How can they not want the same?’
‘Where do they go?’
She shrugged. They fell silent. Rex wondered if she was thinking what he was thinking. Of the sadness of it all. The lives she’d described. The grief of the Walther family, still sweetly faithful, tortured by the hope that what they knew, at heart, wasn’t true. And her, Rescha, a lonely child, hiding all that longing in a wall, waiting for better times, yet receiving only the next instalment in some endless ancestral curse.
She sipped her tea. ‘I don’t know anything about you, Mr Tracey… Rex.’
Rex shrugged. ‘Not much to tell. My life was a bit like yours maybe. We didn’t have much money. It was just me and my mum. She was very religious. Catholic. She was trying to make up for the great sin in her life, which was having me. She wasn’t married, you see. She wouldn’t tell me who my father was. A bit like your Kaliker, I guess. A mystery man who ruined us.’
‘Was it unhappy?’
He thought for a moment. ‘Not really. We got on. We were close, in a way. I always felt I was missing something, though. A father, maybe. Or God. When I was young I was always trying to be more religious, joining the catechism class, going on retreats…’ He stopped. ‘I don’t suppose you know what those are, do you?’
‘I can guess,’ she said. ‘Religious things.’
He nodded. ‘It didn’t make any difference. I always felt like He was there for everyone else, but He’d left us alone.’
‘That’s what I felt,’ she said, quietly. ‘But why did you stay alone? Why aren’t you married?’
‘I am,’ he said.
She didn’t say anything. The silence between them felt like noise. She seemed to wobble and shimmer in the half-light. He needed more sleep.
So they parted again and he lay upstairs, as the first cars of the day fired up. Distantly, he could hear the lorries beginning to drop off their stock at the big shops on the High Street. Sleep didn’t come. He had too many thoughts, about Terry and this sad, gentle, woman downstairs, so exotic she might have been a bird from Java. His foot throbbed, and he thought about being crippled. And cripples in general. The Kaliker in Rescha’s grandfather’s rants. Vulcan, the lame god, after whom the terrorist seemed to have been codenamed. Then there was Terry, and himself. And Yitzie – certainly crippled in some emotional, psychological sense, if not by his health. Yitzie stayed in his mind as he drifted off to sleep, an image of the big man, his mouth open, grappling with the birthmarked Toyve Walther in t
he doorway of the old house on Bruce Grove. Why couldn’t he get that out of his head?
* * *
Through the strong, hallucinatory sleep that finally took hold of him, he became aware of Rescha talking to someone. A one-sided conversation. She must be on the phone. Did she have her own phone? He forced himself awake and went downstairs, only to find that she’d tidied the bed away, unloaded the dishwasher, opened a window to air the place and left him a note. There was a twenty pence piece on top of the note.
I made a call with your telephone. Here is some money to pay for it. YITZIE was attacked in the prison last night. I am going to see him. Thank you.
He sat at the table in his T-shirt and boxer shorts, and thought about the note. She must have called the prison. Now she was going to visit him. It seemed a strange thing to do, for a woman who’d expressed relief that her husband was gone, a woman who’d spent years in fear of the man’s rages and his fists. But feelings were complicated. Maybe there was some loyalty still there. Maybe that was why she’d written his name in capitals.
He rang Susan. In the old days Monday conferences had always been at 9.30 am sharp. Now, they were a bit of a movable feast. She took a long time to answer, and when she did, her voice sounded as if she was dragging every last syllable out with pliers.
‘I can’t really see the point in having one this morning,’ she said. ‘Maybe things will be a bit clearer by this afternoon.’
‘What things?’
‘You might look into this freak going round pushing women into the road,’ she said, ignoring his question. ‘See if there’s anything worth putting on the site.’ She hung up.
As he stood in the shower, he felt Rescha’s presence. Perhaps it was just because the toilet seat was down. It hadn’t been down for a long time. He remembered her talking about the butcher who smiled at her. A Jew like us. Somehow it seemed rude to use that word. Jewish was okay. But Jew? Who else had he heard recently, using that word?
The sermon… He rushed downstairs, naked and still half-covered in soap. With trembling hands, he pressed play, then rewind. In his haste he missed the right bit, and had to scan forward again. Then it came. Push a Jew under a bus… Stab one kuffar…
He knelt in front of the screen, the soap drying on his body. Someone was pushing people into the traffic. D.S. Brenard had mentioned it. Now Susan. People had listened to that sermon, and were following its loathsome recommendations.
What the hell had Terry been doing there?
He dressed in a hurry and almost ran through the tiny alleyway that connected his road to the main streets leading south from the station. People – sober commuter types who had little to do with the wild, unmoneyed Haringey of the daytime – glanced nervously at the agitated, unshaven man limping swiftly down the road.
He reached Terry’s door and pressed on the bell. No one came. He tried again. Then he lifted the letterbox flap and called through. He reached in his pocket for his phone, but he’d left it in his house. He pressed the bell again.
‘He left in a cab,’ said a voice behind him. He turned. It was Miss Martell, the red-headed Kiwi next door. Flushed and tracksuit-clad, she was carrying milk and newspapers. Her pleasant face hardened when she recognised him..
‘Gone to Riga has he?’ Rex asked.
‘He said Gateshead…’ She took her keys out and opened her own front door. ‘By the way – there’s no point ringing the bell. I was mates with the girls who lived there before. It’s never worked.’
She slammed the door shut. Rex stayed where he was. Had Terry lied? Changed his mind? Or had Rex, or the neighbour, got the wrong end of the stick?
He pressed the doorbell button again. Sometimes, in London, you didn’t hear the doorbell go if you were outside, because of the racket. But it was quiet on Langerhans Road at this hour. Miss Martell was right. The doorbell didn’t work. It had never worked.
In which case, Rex suddenly realised, Sam Greenhill couldn’t have rung Terry’s bell by mistake, as he’d told Brenard. Dr Kovacs’ son had known what Terry looked like, but he’d lied to the police about how he’d found out. Why would he do that, unless he had something to hide?
Chapter Nine
As a student, Rex had shared a small terraced house in Manchester with three other young men. They’d all been studying anthropology, which was somehow fitting, given that, on the domestic front, they had more or less competed with one another in savagery. All were from respectable backgrounds; it was as if Rex and his co-tenants were engaged in a collective attempt to strip away the last traces of decency and reinvent themselves as abominations. During one party, someone had drained the toilet and put plants stolen from the nearby town hall gardens inside it. They’d kept it that way until the end of the year, pissing in the bath, and shitting at the pub. No girls ever stayed the night, unless they were unconscious. He had known Sybille back then. Loved her and pretended unconvincingly not to. She had never gone near the place.
He’d imagined art students at the rented end of Palmer’s Green would be living a similarly dehumanised home life, possibly even wilder, turbocharged by those new, synthetic drugs that were apparently so easy to purchase on the internet. But Sam Greenhill’s residence was bright and neat. As the young man showed Rex in, he noted the obligatory Nepalese and Peruvian textiles, a Bob Marley poster, and what looked like the top of a shisha pipe poking out from behind the sofa. But the place was orderly and clean. In the kitchen, two ponytailed girls were making cupcakes with the aid of a cookbook. Sam himself, facial adornments trimmed down to a modest goatee, appeared to have been studying hefty textbooks at a table.
‘Glanville Williams?’ Rex queried, lifting up the nearest book. ‘I didn’t know he’d written much about art.’
‘How do you know him?’
‘I did a year of law,’ Rex lied, putting the famous handbook back on the table. Sybille had been a lawyer.
Sam Greenhill nodded glumly. ‘Well, I did a year of art. I’m switching to law next year.’
‘Why the switch?’
‘Because if I carry on pissing about pretending to be an artist, then I’m going to carry on being dependent on my Mum. And I want to pay her back. I know she’s selling her business but that won’t leave her with much when she’s paid everyone off. She deserves a better life.’
Sam seemed to mean it. There was only one problem. ‘A murder conviction isn’t going to help your career at the bar, Sam.’
Sam’s eyes widened. He scurried across the room and shut the kitchen door. ‘I never murdered anyone! What are you on about?’
‘Terry Younger’s bell doesn’t work. It never has. So when you said you’d gone round, a few months before your father’s death, and rung the wrong doorbell, you were lying. I’m guessing, however, that you did go there, and you rang your father’s doorbell – the one you’d intended to ring. Am I right?’
The boy paled, and nodded. ‘I’d plucked up my courage to go and see him. Well, it was Lou,’ he added, gesturing vaguely towards the kitchen. ‘My girlfriend. She encouraged me. So I went, and rang his bell, and he wasn’t there.’
‘But you saw Terry?’
He made a face. ‘Well, that would have been a better explanation than the one I came up with. But still not true. I went back another time. On the day he… The day my father was murdered. Very shortly before, from what I can gather. It was just a coincidence. I needed some lino blocks, like desperately, for this assignment, which I’d left and left because I’m… basically, I’m better off doing Law because I’m shit at art anyway. So I rang round everywhere, and the only place that had them was this art shop in Muswell Hill. So I went. Louise lent me her Oystercard because I was broke.’
‘Which was why the police found your first visit in October on your Oystercard history, but nothing to say you’d gone back a second time.’
Sam nodded. ‘So I was up on the hill, and it’s nowhere near a tube, and I got on a bus down toward Turnpike Lane, and I realised I was back near w
here my dad lived. So I got off at the bus station, and I had another go.’
‘And he was in this time?’
Sam’s face flushed. ‘It was about eleven. He was in. And…’
In the pained silence that followed, Rex supplied the words. ‘He slammed the door on you?’
Sam Greenhill shook his head. ‘No. He invited me in. Offered me a cup of tea. It was like… Like the way I’d sort of fantasised it might be. For years, I’d imagined my mum might be wrong and maybe he might have changed and he’d be an all right bloke and… Whenever I was angry at her, I’d pretend, like, there was this cool dad out there and he’d understand and…’
‘I did that, too.’
‘Thing was – when I met him, he seemed like he was for a bit. Okay, I mean. He wasn’t warm or emotional or anything like that – basically, he just seemed really nervous. Really on edge. But so was I.’
Not nervous because he was meeting his son, though. Kovacs would have just seen the Bettelheims dead in the park. Had he called Yitzie by that stage?
‘So we talked a bit. He said one thing that was weird. I was already thinking about swapping to Law so I told him and he laughed and said, “I don’t think they’d let you in with your ancestry.”’
‘What did that mean?’
‘I don’t know. I asked him what he meant, but he didn’t say. He just looked at his watch and he said, “Well you’ve seen me and I’ve seen you so, let’s leave it there. And don’t come round again. It’s not safe.” And that was it. Bastard.’ Sam’s voice wobbled.
‘That’s what he said – it’s not safe?’
‘I guessed he just meant – well, Tottenham can be a bit dodgy, can’t it?’
Rex said nothing. Perhaps Kovacs had been trying to protect him. He’d seen the Bettelheims dead in the park. Had he already made his call to Yitzie? Had he been expecting Yitzie at the door, found Sam and invited him in? That seemed unlikely. It was more probable that he’d come home, and had been pondering what to do, when his long-lost son suddenly appeared at the door. What had he meant about Sam’s ancestry, though? Presumably it was Kovacs’ ancestry as well.