by Sam Lock
Having put pen to paper in this way and having at last begun to release what there is locked away inside me – boxed up and parcelled away in my mind – I realise how much there is that I need to set down. I suddenly think of Charlie, for instance. I’ve said nothing as yet about him; yet he’s been a part of my life – or he was for a short while. I have spoken of Rufus, at least, but as yet not said what a good friend he proved to be when I went to stay with him in Battersea, in his roomy garden flat that was just a few streets south of the Dogs’ Home, where it seemed that all the strays of London were gathered, waiting for their owners to collect them. And in a way, Rufus’s flat was a miniature version of that place; for not only did he walk dogs each day for a living – ten or twelve of them at a time – he also owned quite a number of dogs himself. Some of them were strays; some he had owned since they were puppies – and they seemed more attached to him than the rest. And it was into this canine world that he brought me after the long drive from Taunton the morning I left home.
I can remember it so well: arriving in London in the half-light, then driving south across the river into Battersea; where Rufus turned into a short driveway and parked his van at the side of the building in which he lived, close to an enormous, dark-green holly bush that was already showing some berries. At the first sound of his motor his dogs began to bark and yelp from inside the house, and to paw at the french windows facing the garden – which were then opened by someone who allowed the dogs to come racing out, jumping up against Rufus as he locked the doors of his van.
‘Everything all right?’ Rufus asked, as a big, burly man of about fifty appeared. ‘Been any trouble?’
‘None,’ the man answered. ‘Just that old fart across the way – that’s all. She’s been round complaining about the dogs again. I told her to piss off, and she did.’
This was Charlie – Charlie Garrett – and I noticed that, as he peered at me from beneath the brim of the thick tweed cap he was wearing, his eyes seemed quickly to sum me up.
‘Who’s this, then?’ he asked Rufus, with a sharp nod towards myself.
‘His name’s Eddie,’ Rufus replied. ‘That’s right, isn’t it, son? And I’ve brought him back with me from Taunton … Left home, he has, on account of his father; so I’ve told him he can stay here.’
Charlie gave a grunt, then looked at me a second time. ‘What’s wrong with ’ees father?’ he asked.
‘Bit of a bastard, it seems,’ said Rufus. ‘I’ve told him he can stay here until he’s sure of what to do … I’ll get him work, if I can – with Len, perhaps … You can wash dishes, can’t you, son? … You ever washed ’em? In a restaurant, I mean?’
I don’t know how I responded to this; probably by saying that I hadn’t done so before, but that I was ready to try anything. For in less than a week, I think it must have been, I was doing just that – washing dishes in a small restaurant run by a man called Leonard Rillington – who, I was to learn later, was Thelma Rillington’s husband, and was to become one of my greatest friends.
‘’Ee looks green to me,’ Charlie then said to Rufus, again peering at me from beneath the brim of his cap. ‘Been bashed about a bit, too, by the looks of him,’ he added. ‘Your old man beat you, did he? Your dad, I mean. Did he? Did he beat you?’
I hesitated before replying to this, and I recall wondering why it was that Charlie had so many keys attached to his belt; and also why a large, silver whistle hung on an ochre-coloured cord against his chest. And why it was too that the untidy hairs of his beard seemed to be bothering me.
‘I think he did,’ Rufus said, guessing that I couldn’t cope with Charlie’s question. ‘Isn’t that so, son?’
I nodded to this, feeling, as I did so, that I had in some way betrayed my father.
‘Mine beat me,’ Charlie then said, in a rather sober tone of voice, ‘but you’ll get over it in time, lad – don’t worry. He can’t get at you now. Not here. That’s the main thing. Rufus’ll see to that.’
I remember just smiling at this in reply, as Rufus played with his troupe of dogs, who were still excited by his arrival. Charlie stood watching him and then turned to me and said, ‘Takes some lookin’ after – that lot.’ (By which I presumed he meant the dogs.) ‘Aye, it does,’ he said, as I smiled nervously, uncertain of how I was meant to relate to him. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘It takes a lot.’
And when Charlie said that and tugged at the peak of his cap, and rubbed one hand over his beard and his moustache, while Rufus bounced about the garden with his dogs, I sensed that I was safe: that I had found somewhere where I could settle for a while. I had no great liking for dogs, but as they raced around the garden in a ring and leapt into the air and barked, I felt that they and Rufus – and Charlie too (if he lived with Rufus, that is, which I can recall thinking that he might do) – would all act as my protectors. Not once did I imagine that they might mean danger of any kind – or harm – odd though the relationship between the two of them seemed to be. Charlie did make me nervous, as I have said, but I sensed that this was only due to the strangeness of his personality, which was something totally new to me; and which, as yet, I was finding it difficult to understand.
‘Shall I take the lad in?’ Charlie then called out to Rufus. ‘Get him some tea?’
‘We’ll all have tea,’ Rufus replied, as he began to settle his dogs, rubbing their ears and patting their heads. ‘Won’t we, fellas? Eh? … We’ll all go in, eh? We’ll all have tea.’ With which, Rufus picked up my suitcase, which had been left standing beside his van, and we followed Charlie into the house.
‘Newspaper’s down,’ said Charlie, with a quick nod towards the floor as he stepped across the threshold of the garden window. ‘Scrubbed the place out this morning,’ he said to Rufus.
‘It’s to take the mud from the garden,’ he said to me, indicating a path of folded newspapers that crossed the room’s linoleumed floor.
What next? Well, I seem to be quite good at describing things, so I’ll try to describe Rufus’s flat. It was roomy, as I have said – by which I really mean that the few rooms there were were large – and on the ground floor of an old Victorian house. There were two bedrooms, one of which was given to me; and Charlie and Rufus (as I discovered later that first night) slept in separate beds in the other. There was a huge kitchen, a kind of dining room next to it, and then an enormous room at the back – the one that looked out upon the garden. The place was sparsely furnished, mostly with second-hand, scrubbed-wood tables and chairs; and just a few dumpy armchairs covered in a heavy, tufted fabric that had abstract patterns woven into it – probably bought in the 1930s, I should think, or perhaps during the war. The flat was clean – kept so by Charlie, I realised, who used to go from room to room each day with a mop and a pail of steaming water into which he had plunged a bar of carbolic soap. The shiny, linoleumed floors were also patterned – mostly in browns and oranges and the occasional line of blue – and there was always a slight smell of disinfectant in the air. This, I believe, was intended to offset the smell of Rufus’s dogs, which, in spite of the regularity of Charlie’s moppings, tended to predominate. It wasn’t an unpleasant smell, however. In fact, in the mornings, when I got up and made my way to the lavatory (there was no bathroom, by the way, and we all washed at the kitchen sink) I used to think what a pleasant atmosphere this mixture of smells created: one of cleanliness and care. Even the sheets on the beds smelled slightly of carbolic, for on Mondays Charlie would always strip the beds, boil up great saucepans full of water and fill the huge porcelain sink in the kitchen, where he would wash the sheets with his soap. Then wring them with his hands before hanging them out to dry.
I can see him so well: how he would carry the wet sheets with him in a large wicker basket; then stretch to peg them out carefully on clothes-lines in the garden. Then, once he had done that, how he would collect a few wooden clothes-props that were kept at the side of the house, and use them to push the sheets higher into the air.
He wa
s in no way self-conscious about what he was doing. Sometimes, he would sing a wartime song; occasionally, one from an earlier period, such as ‘Goodbye Dolly Gray’ (he taught me the words of that), or ‘I’m in Love with Two Sweethearts’, which was a rather sloppy song about a man’s love for the two women in his life – his mother and his wife. Rufus never – or certainly hardly ever – helped Charlie with these chores, but eventually I helped a little, and I enjoyed it; and I could see – or I could guess, at least – that Charlie was pleased to have my company.
‘Can you bring out a few more clothes-pegs, Eddie?’ he would sometimes call out to me from the garden; or he would ask me to help him move a bed, or a cupboard, perhaps, so that he could more easily mop beneath them.
Each morning, immediately after breakfast and a long time before I had to go off to work in the restaurant, Rufus would leave in his van, his dogs barking and yelping after him from behind the ironwork gates at the side of the house. And he hardly ever came back until close to teatime, when I, of course, wasn’t there. For I had to leave for work at about four in the afternoon; which meant that I saw very little of him – just for the hour or so at breakfast-time, and during most of the day on Sundays, which was looked upon by all three of us as being a day of rest. Then, the dome-shaped Bakelite radio would be switched on and the flat would be alive with the sound of music – mostly light-classical pieces; or things such as Victor Sylvester’s dance band, which I enjoyed.
‘You dance?’ Rufus once asked me; which I had to answer by saying no, since I had never been taught to dance, or allowed to go to the local dances at home. ‘You should,’ Rufus replied. ‘It’s good for you. Shakes your bones up – don’t it, Charlie?’ To which Charlie answered with a laugh and a jerky nod of the head.
I often thought that the two of them were wanting to get up and dance together in front of me and that I was perhaps inhibiting them.
‘Does Charlie dance?’ I asked Rufus one day, thinking that my saying this might make things easier.
‘Oh, yes, Charlie dances – don’t you, Charlie?’ Rufus said, with a wicked twinkle in his eye. ‘You should see him dance the tango … Here,’ he said, suddenly grabbing hold of me and pulling me to my feet, ‘I’ll show you.’
The sharp rhythms of a tango could be heard on the radio, and he then tried to teach me the steps of the dance – how to bend and occasionally swoop – laughing excitedly all the time, as Charlie tapped his feet.
But that only happened once; and for most of the time that the three of us were together, Rufus and I would read and Charlie would clean and cook; and sometimes (I never knew what prompted it) would suddenly race out into the garden to blow a sharp blast upon his whistle; to which, almost in chorus, the dogs seemed to reply, with a series of noisy snaps and barks.
‘Bloody hell,’ Charlie might say, as he returned; or ‘Pumping fuckin’ thunder’; or ‘The bloody bastards’ – for what reason, I didn’t understand; but it did show me that his mind was in some way unbalanced and that he was preoccupied by something: something that rose at times to the surface, and which, for a while, the sound of his whistle appeared to release.
It does seem strange, as I write of it now, to think that I lived with these two men, and that I so quickly fitted in with them and their habits. I was then still very young, as I have said, and many things that I know now I had no knowledge of at that time. It never occurred to me, for instance, that Charlie and Rufus might have been lovers. I did know – vaguely – that men lived together, and, I presumed, had a sexual relationship of some kind; but as yet my experience was far too limited for me to be able to embrace such an idea, and because of that, I probably blotted it from my mind. What I do know is that I was happy: that despite the general emptiness of the flat, despite the scrubbed-wood furniture and the patterned linoleum floors, I felt that I was somewhere where I belonged – and both Rufus and Charlie helped me to believe that too. Without any words being said about our relationship, or about the change it must have meant for them to have me living there in the flat, they allowed me to fit in, and for all three of us to feel comfortable there together.
Perhaps, in a way, I came to think of them as parents, and they in turn to think of me as their child. Whatever, we were a happy family of sorts; and when I eventually moved here, to where I am now (just north of the river in Chelsea), I felt sad.
‘Come and see us some time,’ Charlie had mumbled, as I had climbed into Rufus’s van.
‘Oh, he won’t do that,’ Rufus had answered, catching hold of one of my ears and giving it a quick, affectionate tug.
And that, alas, is what happened; for fond of them though I was, and attached to them though I had become, when I set off in Rufus’s van, with his dogs barking noisily behind us, I knew as I turned to see Charlie staring at us, with no smile at all on his face, nor wave of the hand to say goodbye, that I would not be able to return: that that part of my life was over; that it had served as a means for me of my breaking free of the past, and that it was now something I could not re-enter.
That sounds selfish of me, no doubt, and perhaps unkind. But I know that neither Charlie nor Rufus really expected to see me again. Just once since then, when I was taking an afternoon stroll in Hyde Park, have I seen Rufus. He was in the distance, walking his dogs. Not his own dogs, but the ones that he collected from different houses and took for walks each day. And I wanted to call out to him and ask him how he was, and how Charlie was as well. But something forced me to hold back, and I strolled on, noticing as I did so that a man who was sitting close to me on a park bench had a packet of cigarettes lying beside him with a silver lighter perched on top of it. And then (as, with me, it so often can) my mind began to toy with the idea of how I might make the lighter mine.
Sometimes, when I am walking along, of an afternoon, perhaps, when the sun has gone around to the west and there are deep shadows lining the Embankment, I think to myself that if I had to make a choice, then of all the places in the world in which I could live, this would be the one I would prefer – here in Chelsea, just a stone’s throw from the river. I’ve been here so long – for almost twenty years, it must be – and I feel that this is where I belong. Not that the flat itself is very attractive. It has no outlook; no garden – just a small, enclosed patio that never gets the sun; a largish living room that also serves as a bedroom; quite a decent-sized kitchen, beyond which there is a bathroom and a toilet; and then just one smallish lumber room, as I call it, at the back, in which I store a lot of my ‘things’ – to use Thelma’s name for them – mainly packed in boxes that stretch from floor to ceiling. None of what I think of as my ‘collection’ bears any trace of the original owner, by the way, for I have been meticulous about that; so that if, by chance, someday, someone gets to know of my compulsion, there will be no means of their discovering to whom the objects belonged.
It is a strange form of illness, it seems to me, in that I can hardly call myself a kleptomaniac. For instance, I have never felt a need to steal from people’s houses – when I am visiting them, that is. I don’t go around picking up people’s ashtrays, or pieces of jewellery that are left lying around in living rooms and such. It has to be in a public place; on a bus, for instance, or a train; or in a shop or a store – or even on a park bench. Why I suffer from this I do not know. Analysts would tell me, I am sure, that it has to do with insecurity of some kind, and with the fact that my father’s beatings had been so sadistic that they had robbed me of my confidence and had fuelled my obsession. But I don’t know that I agree too much with that sort of idea. Certainly, it has nothing to do with monetary gain, for I have never sold any of the things that I have stolen. And even when there have been notes – banknotes, that is – in a wallet, I’ve usually left them where they were; so that they too, in time, become part of the beauty of my collection.
Occasionally, when I am alone (and this tends to be late at night, when my mind is inclined to wander), I enter, by way of my fantasy, this treasure-house of m
ementoes: not by actually looking at them, or by handling them physically (I rarely do that), but by recalling them mentally, which I am able to do, and remembering, because I always can, the different excitements that became attached to them through the acts of making them mine.
I regret to say that I seldom think of the people I have robbed, or of the pain it must have caused. I appear to have built some kind of defensive screen in my mind against doing that; which obviously makes me not a nice person – or not a very moral one, at least. However, that is me – who I am and how I am made. Nor will I attempt to excuse myself by saying that the things I stole were always small – such as books, purses, wallets, etc. (just once, quite a valuable watch) – all of which, I have to say, had been left lying unattended. None the less, I do sometimes wish that I had kept the names and the addresses of some of the objects’ owners. For just occasionally, in an odd flight of the imagination, I see myself returning some of my trophies through the post, with no letter of explanation attached to them; so that I can then picture in my mind the looks of puzzlement this would engender – having things that had been lost and perhaps forgotten, arriving through the letter box.
However, that is enough of that; there are more pressing things I need to write about: such as my parents’ deaths, which occurred just over a year ago, each within a few weeks of the other.
Their deaths upset me a lot and caused me a great deal of inner turbulence – and they still do; so it’s not going to be easy for me to describe the experience in words. But it has now suddenly occurred to me that their having left this world could possibly be a reason for my having begun to release these thoughts. Certainly, had they still been alive, had they still been here, I know that I would never have spoken – written (not even secretly, as I am doing now) – about my private life. Not just about my thieving, I mean, but about other things as well: my experience with Tom in the woods, for example; or about how, when she came to see me the other day, I spoke to Thelma about Mark, saying he might have been here – with me; and about which she was rather dismissive, I thought.