The Tottenham Outrage

by M. H. Baylis

  He felt an urgent need for sugar, so he went into Istanbul Dondurma. It was a lavish, tinted-glass anomaly of a place, stuck between a famously rude, malodorous newsagents and a Pound Shop, with welcomingly soft banquettes and vintage Turkish pop playing quietly in the background. Over rocket-fuel coffee and a chewily fragrant bowl of orchid ice-cream, Rex took out his phone. He considered defying Brenard and ringing Terry again. But he didn’t know what he would say.

  He’d become more adept at using his phone, and he used it now to book himself a seat on the same train as Rescha. If he didn’t have a job, he’d need to start selling pieces freelance. Ellie had said she owed him. She could put in a word, he was sure, and for starters he could offer her boss a nice big feature on the Hasidic housewife beginning a new life for herself. It wasn’t exactly mercenary, he told himself, because Rescha plainly wasn’t able to get to Paris without him. He would help her, she would help him.

  He left a message for his sister-in-law to tell her about his trip, then, as the ice-cream parlour filled with an excitable crowd of headscarved student girls in search of a post-lecture sugar rush, headed home.

  * * *

  Passing Get-It-In, he fought and vanquished the urge to buy beers. The truth was, he felt lost and alone without a job to do. He wondered whether that might be true of all the other lost souls of the area, like Bird Curton, all the ranters and twitchers and Special Brew prophets. Maybe they’d all be fine if they just had something to do. And maybe he’d be joining them, if he didn’t.

  Back at home, he tried to ring Rescha. He didn’t have a number, though, and Vegetables was, unsurprisingly, not listed. He came up with a cunning plan to look at the shop on Google Streetview. The number, or at least a number was on the sign, he remembered.

  But on the image that appeared on his laptop screen, three tall men sporting round, high fur hats obscured the number on the shop sign. He was thinking about heading over to Stamford Hill to find her when he noticed the wad of receipts and bits of paper she’d taken out of her old bag. He sifted through them idly and saw one with an address on Stamford Hill. It was clearly a shop receipt of some kind, and its name was written in Hebrew letters. Two sets of three. Were they the same letters as on the sign at ‘Vegetables’? He went back to the computer image. Same deal: the three amigos in their huge, beaver-fur shtreimels made it impossible to tell. He rang the number anyway. No one answered.

  He went to the cupboard under the stairs where he thought there might be an old canvas holdall. He was just hauling it out when he heard his landline ringing.

  It was Rescha.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’d have left a message but you haven’t got an answer-phone.’

  ‘Yes we have,’ she said. ‘Anyway, you haven’t rung me.’

  ‘Oh, I thought…’ He trailed off into silence.

  ‘Are you still there?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, yes, I am. Actually, I’ve been trying to ring you. I’m going to come to Paris. Tomorrow. So – I might as well help you find your way around.’

  There was a pause before she said, ‘Yitzie is dead.’

  He scrabbled for some words to say. All he could find was: ‘I’m sorry. What happened?’

  ‘His heart was bad – you knew that. He had a massive heart attack in the prison.’

  ‘So… you’ll want to stay and make arrangements, I guess.’

  ‘I want to go. Yitzie wasn’t stupid. He knew he was sick, and he knew we didn’t have much money. Even after everyone else stopped, he carried on paying into the Chevra Kadisha. It’s like a funeral… association. They’ll bury him. They don’t need me there. I don’t want to be there.’

  ‘Oh. Okay. So… I can meet you at the station, if you like, or…’

  ‘I really don’t need you to come,’ she said, tersely. ‘I know how to get on a train.’

  ‘I never said you didn’t,’ he replied, puzzled by her reaction. ‘But you seemed pretty helpless when you were sitting here in my living room an hour ago. And I’ve booked a ticket. You can ignore me if you prefer but it might be a bit awkward because I got the last seat left and it’s right opposite you.’

  There was silence. ‘I don’t want you to.’ After another pause, she snorted. It sounded like a laugh. ‘I can’t stop you, though, can I?’ Her tone had softened, he thought. ‘I’ll see you at Waterloo.’

  ‘Rescha, didn’t you listen to anything I told you? It doesn’t go from Waterloo anymore. It’s St Pancras. Look – make your way to Turnpike Lane tube tomorrow morning. You know where that is – you just catch the 55 bus opposite your shop. Eight o’clock should do it.’

  She agreed and hung up. As he sponged the mould off his holdall, he found himself cringing. He’d played that badly. She might well, in some sense, have wanted his help, but a recently widowed Hasidic woman was hardly going to leap at the offer of going to Paris with a strange man. Her reaction hadn’t been strange. It was entirely reasonable.

  Hours later, though, soaking in his favourite seat at the back of The Salisbury, he found the episode still troubled him.

  * * *

  The next morning, while packing his bag, Rex tried to work out whether the feeling in his stomach was related to the beer and raki of the night before, the pine disinfectant with which he’d scoured his holdall, or pure excitement. He was going on a trip – something he hadn’t done since Cambodia.

  He felt oddly optimistic, as if this short journey would mark a break, a break with whatever he wanted to put behind him. He’d fallen into a routine of loading up his pocket with whole strips of pills every morning before he went out. Today he broke off only four pills and put the rest in the kitchen cupboard. It was a start. He had to start somewhere.

  The radio was on, and he stopped to listen to the half-hourly news round-up. There were still some things he was not ready to put behind him. He’d done the same half an hour before, and half an hour before that, as well. But there was nothing. Something about Calais. Something about the Junior Minister, now dead. But no terror in Gateshead. No arrests. No sieges. He wasn’t sure what else he could do, except wait. And hope.

  He was almost out of the door when his phone rang. It was Aurelie returning his call.

  ‘Have you booked somewhere to stay?’

  He realised he hadn’t.

  ‘You are very welcome to stay with Eric and myself,’ she said, in her musical, yet precise English. ‘I will email to you a map where we are.’

  Rex still hadn’t worked out how to open attachments on his telephone. He put down his bags and returned to the ancient laptop in the corner as he spoke to Aurelie.

  ‘I do have to tell you, though, Rex, I am now even more decided than I was before about what to do with Sybille.’

  ‘How come? I mean, has something changed?’ he asked, as he watched the screen change colour.

  ‘Sometimes, I think we underestimate her. I mean, the things she says – we think they mean nothing, but she is really trying to say something to us.’

  Rex didn’t answer. He’d spent years thinking that. Thinking that, because he’d hoped it, longed for it to be true that his wife was still his wife, communicating with him. He’d stopped, because he’d had to.

  When he didn’t answer, his sister-in-law went on. ‘When she said about understanding the beginnings. I think she meant that for me. She meant for me to understand that we must go back to the beginning of our relationship as sisters and to start again. Sybille wants to come to France to be with me.’

  He was familiar with the mental contortions, the wild leaps one had to make to believe that Sybille was speaking sense, that she cared. He was familiar with the let-down, too, the disappointment when the truth dawned. He didn’t want to shatter Aurelie’s fragile self-confidence, so he simply said that they could talk when he got there.

  The email had come through and as he waited for the machine to open the map, he wondered how he’d really feel, being in Paris. He hadn’t been since the accident. It hadn’t happ
ened there, of course, but the city was so bound up with his old life, his time with the Sybille who’d lived, rather than the Sybille who simply existed. He felt uneasy about going there with Rescha. But why? It wasn’t as if he had feelings for her.

  A strange noise shocked him out of his thoughts. A ring-tone he’d never heard before. He scanned the room, wondering if a visitor had accidentally left some device. Then he saw an icon on his laptop screen. TELBOY69 was Skyping him. Should he answer?

  Gingerly, he clicked on the green telephone icon. He’d never used it, although he remembered installing the software, at the behest of his workmates, before he’d departed for Cambodia.

  A blurry image came through. It was Terry, viewed as if through a cheese-grater.

  ‘Rexington!’

  Rex felt a flood of relief, quickly morphing into anxiety. ‘Terry. Where the fuck are you?’

  ‘Riga. I told you. Look –’

  Terry rotated the laptop and pointed it out of his window. Rex caught a glimpse of bell-towers and pinky-red roofs.

  ‘Your neighbour said Gateshead.’

  ‘I stayed the night at me mam’s and caught a flight from Newcastle the next day.’

  ‘Jesus.’ Rex let out a long sigh.

  ‘What?’

  Where would he start? ‘Nothing. What’s going on over there?’

  ‘This Professor at the university is helping me translate the diary. It’s his all right.’

  ‘Whose?’

  ‘Grigoriy Semyonovitch Kuznets,’ Terry said, sitting back, proudly. ‘Otherwise known as George Smith. Later known as Janos Kovacs.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘They’re all the same person, man. Kuznets the terrorist became George Smith the hero, and then Janos Kovacs.’

  ‘Kovacs?’

  ‘Yep. Our Kovacs – Dr Kovacs – discovered he was descended from Janos Kovacs, who was really Kuznets – the missing third man of the terrorist group.’

  The former George Kovacs. That’s what Kovacs had said to his ex-wife. Not because he’d become ill. But because he knew he wasn’t really a Kovacs. And she’d mentioned a family mystery, hadn’t she, about a diary? He just hadn’t made the connection.

  He tuned back in to Terry, who was still excitedly talking.

  ‘Anyway, look, I want you to know. I’ve packed all that crap in.’

  ‘What crap?’

  ‘The skunk. I thought it was helping with me MS, and it was, for a bit, like, but it was messing with me head. I just got so obsessed with… I had this idea, that if I could spend every minute stoned, and going through all Kovacs’ stuff, I wouldn’t get…’ He took a deep breath. ‘I tried to kill myself. I think you know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I was just so scared of going back to that, like, state of mind… Anyhow, I didn’t dare take any weed on the plane and after a couple of nights on the beers, I just feel… I feel like I was in a nightmare, but I’ve woken up. Sorry.’

  ‘You don’t have anything to be sorry for,’ Rex said, thinking that he was the one who ought to be apologising. He cringed at the thought of the goons he’d called to his house the previous day. ‘But – you’re still carrying on with the research. I mean, you haven’t given that up?’

  Terry gave a pixelated wink. ‘Well, you wanna see Professor Eglitis, man.’ He mimed something. A pair of coconuts? No, it was obvious what Terry was on about, and what gender Professor Eglitis was. Rex listened to him enthusing about her extraordinary properties, and those of Latvian women in general, and the exceptional quality of Piebalga beer, without really listening. He was just delighted to have woken from his own nightmare.

  He realised he should ring Brenard and tell him Terry had been in touch. He didn’t want the Latvian version of the goon squad kicking Terry’s hotel door down. But then he remembered why this whole thing had started. The DVD, showing Terry at the hate-sermon. There were things that still didn’t make sense.

  ‘Terry –’

  The image of Terry had turned to smudges, the audio to something reminiscent of whale-song. Then Terry returned, mid-sentence.

  ‘It’s funny, man. Even though I couldn’t stand the bloke. I’ve had this funny feeling he’s been behind me, all along, telling where to look…’

  The sound went, the pixels turned to large block of colour and then the screen went dead.

  Rex sat back in his chair, thinking over the conversation that had just taken place, searching through the shock for his own feelings. He ought to have felt relieved. He did feel relieved. But he wasn’t happy. Why wasn’t he happy?

  He got up suddenly, went to the bin and pulled out the sheaf of receipts and mint wrappers that Rescha had taken from her handbag. He found the receipt with the Hebrew on it, and rang the number. This time, a faint, scratchy voice answered, unused to the telephone, he suspected, and certainly unused to enquiries of this kind. Nevertheless, he found out what he needed to know.

  His sister-in-law was right, he thought, as he closed down his laptop, without printing out the map. Sybille did have useful things to say. The message wasn’t for Aurelie, though. It was for him. You have to understand the start. They show you a lot of things to lead you astray. It applied to the TV shows she and Sister Florence were addicted to, for sure. It applied elsewhere, too.

  He waited outside the establishment alleging itself to be a Thai Health Club. Occasionally, as on this morning, you might spot a vast, disagreeable-looking lady opening up the place who might, possibly, once have been a native of Siam. She was definitely the only Thai thing about the place, though, and it wasn’t promoting health. As he stood waiting, a car horn beeped, and kept on going. He sighed. He wished he really could get away from this place for a bit, with its macho posturing and its edginess.

  Rex looked around in irritation for whichever testoster-one-pumped numpty was currently using his car-horn as an attack weapon. To his surprise, he saw that Rescha Schild had parked her arty little silver van outside the station. It was her doing the beeping. She was waving to him, too.

  ‘Rescha,’ he said, crossing the road. ‘What are you doing? We’re getting the tube.’

  ‘You didn’t hear? There was an accident in France and there are no trains through the tunnel. It’s blocked. I thought we could drive.’

  ‘Drive to Paris? Rescha –’

  It didn’t matter, though, he guessed. He got in, fiddling with his mobile phone. He sent a text. He fiddled some more before putting it in his jacket pocket and doing up his seatbelt.

  The interior of the van smelled new, with top notes of citrus and earth. Rescha was back in Hasidic navy, he noticed, but was driving in her stockinged feet. She set off confidently, turning onto Wood Green High Street then heading north.

  ‘I hope you don’t need me to navigate,’ Rex said, ‘because I’m useless.’

  ‘I know how to get up to the M25,’ she said. ‘From there we just go round to Dartford and get on the M20 to the Kent coast. Easy.’

  ‘Right.’

  Many of his recent encounters in Stamford Hill had been like this, he thought. First he’d be entranced by the mysterious, forgotten-world character of the place: the Yiddish, the blunt shop-names, the men in their gaiters. Then he’d be pulled up sharp by the sight of someone with an iPad or a kid eating chips. Rescha, too, was both: Old Country and This Country. Hasid and Haringey. He couldn’t work her out. And she’d known it.

  By Wood Green tube there were big digital signs: Junction 25 of the M25 was closed. Everyone was being diverted east, through Tottenham. With a click of the tongue, Rescha swung the van right onto Lordship Lane.

  ‘If I’d made it over there a couple of weeks ago,’ Rex said, pointing to the Driving Test Centre, ‘I could have shared the driving.’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘The Bettelheims and Dr Kovacs got murdered.’

  She braked suddenly at a zebra crossing. A stout Caribbean lady walked over it, glaring all the way.

  ‘So
rry,’ she said under her breath, and carried on.

  He sat back, waiting, looking out of the window, as the usual sights whizzed by. A newsagents. A Turkish grocers. A bookmakers. A Polish grocers. A satellite installer. Another Polish grocers. It all looked so… London. So Tottenham. He could hardly believe it had ever looked any other way. Things could be made to look different though. Anything could look like anything else – depending not just on the skills of the deceiver, but on people’s readiness to be deceived. What had Terry said? Behind me all the way. Telling me where to look.

  ‘Where do you think Micah Walther’s gone?’ he asked. ‘You think he’d stay in a place like this? Or go right out of London?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘London is a big place.’

  ‘That was when I started to doubt you,’ Rex said. He waited for a response, but none came, so he carried on. ‘When you came to my house, and you told me what had really happened to Micah. Because you were telling me the truth. That is – what we have good reason to believe is the truth. I’ve looked up the statistics. I’ve seen how many Hasidic boys run away every year. But before that, I had this whole fantasy going, a whole dreadful story taking shape in my mind about the sect, and how it was taking healthy boys to keep its sick Rebbe alive. And I started to think that, I realised, because someone had been making me. It was you.’

  He glanced across. She still said nothing, just changed gears before a roundabout, eyes on the road.

  ‘My friend, Terry, said something to me about feeling as if he was being pointed in the direction, shown where to look. And it made me realise someone was doing that to me. And when I went back and I thought about all the times I’d seen you, I realised how you’d done it, and why you’d started. You started because I saw you outside Kovacs’ house. Didn’t I? You ran away, and I never thought it could have been you because the woman I saw had a very fashionable short hair cut. It never occurred to me that something like that could have been a wig until I talked to the people whose receipt you had in your old handbag. Sheyner Sheytel. Beautiful Wigs. They told me they’d got some quite remarkable-looking false hairdos to sell to the ladies of Stamford Hill.’