by Francis King
‘Fine.’
The hand on the banister ahead of Luke was white and bony, the fingers unusually long with nails curving over them, in urgent need of cutting. At random, the umbrella dripped water now on to one step and now on to another. The man began to wheeze as they started on the flight up to the third floor. He must be asthmatic, Luke decided. ‘Nothing bloody works in this block. And do the landlords care? Of course not. But I’m a statutory tenant and so I can’t complain. I pay about a third of what almost everyone else does.’
They stopped outside the front door and the man fumbled in a pocket of his unusually long and voluminous black raincoat and pulled out his keys. The door open, he turned to allow Luke to enter ahead of him. He gave a little bow. ‘Welcome to my humble abode.’
The sitting-room, frowsty, as dimly lit as the downstairs hall and crowded with pieces of Victorian and Edwardian furniture too large for it, reminded Luke of visits to his mother’s widowed mother, during his childhood. Then two totally incongruous objects caught his eye. One was a pinball machine, standing in one corner. The other was a juke-box. standing in another. Oddly, both were garishly lit up.
The man smiled and, throwing out an arm, said: ‘ This – with one or two exceptions – is all my dear, deceased mother’s taste. I was too lazy – and too broke – to do anything about it after she had gone.’ He surveyed the room, turning his head from side to side, as though in a first appraisal. Then he urged: ‘Now sit down – there – or there – or anywhere you like – and let me fix you a drink. What would you fancy?’
Luke had noticed a bottle labelled Oloroso Sherry on a sideboard. ‘Some sherry?’
‘Why not? I think sherry wine would be just the thing on a miserable night like this.’
The man poured out a glass of sherry and handed it to Luke. ‘I hope that’s not too sweet for you. That’s my vulgar taste, I’m afraid, not my mother’s.’
Luke sipped. ‘Fine.’
The man put down his glass and walked across to a desk. He pulled open a drawer and took out a photograph.
‘That may amuse you.’ He crossed over to Luke and held it out.
With reluctant foreboding, Luke slowly took it and looked down. Executed with a professionalism similar to the one on which he prided himself, it showed a tall, broad-shouldered man with close-cropped hair holding an ancient Leica up to his face. Behind him were three elder trees. In front of him there was the wide curve of a river, glittering in the sunlight. The unseen photographer had clearly used a powerful telescopic lens.
‘Good, don’t you think? It was difficult to be sure of getting that contrast between the bareness of the trees and all that foliage on the bank. I’m pleased with it.’
‘You were the person who …’ Luke spoke in wonder. ‘I remember … a man in a dark suit.’
‘Yes, I’d come on from a funeral. My mother’s in fact. I was dreadfully hot. Wasn’t that a beautiful day?’ The man lowered himself into the vast, over-upholstered, chintz-covered armchair that faced the identical one in which Luke was still gazing down at the photograph with a mixture of amazement and dread. ‘You know, I recognised you at once when I saw you at the Town Hall. I lied to you just now. I’d entered three photographs. But – no luck. When I recognised you I at once took that chair behind you. Then I heard that man greet you. An extraordinary coincidence, I thought. But it’s not really all that extraordinary, is it? We have things in common. We’re both amateur photographers for one. We’re both about the same age. We look so much like each other that we might almost pass for brothers. And then’ – he smiled, revealing small, irregular teeth – ‘we have our other interest. I don’t mean photography. I mean that more, er, esoteric one. Our hobby’
Luke stared at him, as though trying to remember where, many, many years ago, he had met this character.
‘I feel terrible about it now,’ the man said. ‘ I don’t know what came over me. There is something that one both cherishes and hates in oneself. One wants to safeguard it and yet kill it. You know what I mean? You must do. You must know the experience.’
‘I have no idea what you mean.’
‘Of course you do. Why can’t we be frank with each other?’ The man tilted his head on one side. He looked at Luke with what was all too clearly understanding and affection. ‘As I say – I can’t think what got into me. What I did to you was, I suppose, what I really wanted to do to myself. Revelation, punishment. It was crazy, of course. Unforgiveable. I must have put you through hell. It was really quite a relief to me when I learned that the fuzz had decided to take things no further.’ He laughed. ‘It must have been one hell of a relief to you too.’
‘You bastard! God – you bastard!’
‘Yes. You’re right. Absolutely right. One hundred percent. I apologise. I grovel. It was odd – as soon as I saw you – photographing, photographing, in that same spot – with those two little ones … I knew, I just knew!’
Luke lunged forward and grabbed the man by the lapels of his jacket. In a frenzy he dragged him to his feet and then punched him repeatedly – on the chin, on the mouth, cutting his knuckles on those small, irregular teeth, on the nose, causing a snake of blood to wriggle slowly out of a nostril. Then something stopped him. It was the maniacal glee glittering from the man’s previously dull, sad eyes, and the way that he kept whispering, ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ in an endless crescendo.
Luke pushed the man so that he toppled back into the arm-chair. Then the man was laughing as the words jerked out of him: ‘You don’t mean to say …? Did I get it all wrong? … Is that what you’re trying – rather too brutally – to tell me?’
Luke kicked out, the toe-cap of this shoe catching the other’s kneecap. There was a dry sound at the impact, like a rifle shot heard from far away. Then he rushed to the front door, pulled it open and strode out. Having descended three steps at what was almost a run, he returned and pulled the door shut.
He raced down the staircase into the darkness and rain. Head lowered, he ran down the almost totally deserted street. By the municipal library, only two of its windows, high up in the façade, still lit, he took his usual short-cut across its triangular courtyard. Usually, even as late as this, there would be skate-boarders rattling and thudding over its paving. But now there was no one. A street-lamp illuminated miniature lakes of water, between which he zigzagged. Then, all at once, he slackened his pace, approached one of the benches in front of the building, and sank down on to it, gasping for breath. God, what a shit! What a shit! He ought to have killed him. Suddenly he thought of the cleaner (‘quickly digests organic matter such as hair, paper, grease, rice, pasta, soap, fabric, fat, slime etc.’) bought at the request of his charming, fat, inefficient Colombian char, mother of five children, for the bathrom basin only the day before. Quickly digests slime … CAUTION. Contains sulphuric acid. That would do the trick.
Then, abruptly, that fantasy died. All at once tiredness overwhelmed him. Despite the savage downpour, he stretched himself out on the bench and stared for several seconds up at the livid, lowering sky. He closed his eyes. He felt the water trickling through his hair and sidling under his collar on to the flesh beneath it. He tasted it, cool and faintly metallic, on his lips. It was in his nostrils, even in his ears. It was wonderfully cleansing, wonderfully soothing, wonderfully consoling.
He had the illusion that he was now lying not on a hard bench, its struts digging into his shoulder blades and haunches, but on a quiet stream, drifting on and on under a velvety, star-studded sky to total oblivion.
Then a dog barked. Barked again. He jerked up, swung down his feet. An old, bowed, hooded man, with a dripping black-and-white mongrel on a long lead, was passing. ‘Shurrup! Shurrup!’ the man shouted at the dog. Then: ‘Sorry about that,’ he said in a hoarse voice to Luke. ‘He’s a real idiot. Always barking, barking, barking at nothing.’
Luke got to his feet and began to trudge on through the darkness and downpour.
The Appeal
She st
epped over one puddle. She stepped over a larger one. She winced on the second occasion, as though she had twisted her ankle. But in fact she had merely landed on one side of her shoe. The new laptop that they had just given her seemed heavier than the old one. They had said that she would find it much more convenient, but it was certainly not more convenient now. She had thought at the time that they had given it to her as a reward for always refusing, unlike some of the other adjudicators, to be bamboozled by a succession of shifty, shameless appellants. But at this moment it felt more like a punishment.
She had just spoken to Jake on her mobile.
‘Oh, Maddy wait a mo. I’ve got gunge all over my fingers. Let me wipe them. Sorry! I’ve been throwing a pot.’
‘I’d like to throw a pot at you, you bastard!’ She laughed, to indicate that she was joking. But she was not joking, and he knew that.
‘Oh, Maddy, don’t get mad at me!’ Had she really once thought his feeble word-play funny? Had she really once thought his American accent attractive? ‘What’s the matter? What have I done?’
‘The car. Didn’t you notice the petrol gauge?’ In her hurry that morning she had also failed to notice it.
‘What’s the matter with it?’
‘What’s usually the matter with a petrol gauge?
‘Oh, you don’t mean …?’
‘I’m stranded. And I’ve got to be in that bloody court in another ten minutes.’
‘Oh, Maddy!’
‘I want you to get to that car a.s.a.p. Have it filled up. Then leave it outside the court by three o’clock at the latest. I’m taking a bus – now – if there is a bus. But I don’t intend to take a bus to pick up the kids. So get the car to the court. Got it?’
‘Yeah. Sorry, Maddy. Don’t get mad at me.’
The repetition of the pun maddened her even more. ‘Now listen carefully. This is where I left it.’ She told him, and then repeated the instructions. ‘And remember to take the keys.’
‘Of course I’ll take them. Oh, Maddy …’
Decisively, she cut him off.
Maddy stepped over another puddle. She saw the bus stop and, standing at the far back of the shelter, a bowed old woman in scuffed, low-heeled brogues, a plastic macintosh and a beret. Her face was as grey and shiny as the macintosh and her watery eyes were of the same washed-out blue as the beret’s. The woman jerked her head up as Maddy approached, frowned and then gave a lop-sided, anxious smile.
‘Excuse me. Do you know anything about these buses?’ She had her right arm in a sling and the right side of her face was frozen. A stroke, Maddy thought. That would explain the smile
‘Very little.’
‘What I want to know is whether the 119 passes Budgen’s. I think my brother told me the 119 was the one I had to take. But I may have got it wrong. Perhaps he said the 111. Both seem to stop here.’
Maddy shifted her weight from one long, lithe leg to the other and the laptop from under her left arm to under her right. ‘Budgen’s?’
‘My brother told me to get out at Budgen’s. It’s a supermarket.’
Maddy knew that Budgen’s was a supermarket, but she had never entered this particular Budgen’s or any other Budgen’s. ‘If I’ve seen a Budgen’s on this route, I don’t remember it.’
‘What I want is the – the – Appellate Court. Is that what it’s called? I think so.’
‘Well, the 119 is the bus for the Appellate Court.’ Maddy did not add that she was going there herself.
The woman’s whole body slumped in relief. ‘ Oh, that’s good. I’m so worried that I may be late. Not that we know what time our case will be heard.’
Maddy perched herself on the red, backless plastic rail that now did uncomfortable service for the often-vandalised wooden bench that had once stood in its place. Her laptop rested on her lap. She took a handkerchief out of her coat pocket and raised it to the tip of her nose. She turned her head away from the woman. She did not want to prolong the conversation.
‘My brother told me that he and his friend would fetch me. But it would have meant crossing the whole of London. My little house is in Kennington, you, see, and they’re in Highgate. So I told him I could easily find my own way. I’m used to the buses. I have my pass. I always say the only advantage of getting old is to have a travel pass. My latest is one of these Oyster things. At first I couldn’t get used it but now I find it much more convenient. You don’t even have to take it out of its wallet. With my disabilities, that’s always difficult for me.’
Maddy said nothing. She wondered if the bus were going to be delayed much longer. She wondered if the old woman would go on and on with this inane chatter. She wondered if Jake would remember to take his keys when he went to deal with the car. It was lucky that today she had only the one case. The day before she had had an extra one in addition to the two already allotted to her, because one of the adjudicators had been ill. He was constantly falling ill. And he was a dead loss anyway. It was time, she often thought, that they gave him the push.
At last the bus arrived. Maddy stood aside for the old woman as, crablike, she grasped the handle and after two heaves, managed to struggle aboard with an ‘Oops!’ and then a deep sigh. Maddy had had a brief impulse to help her, then had decided not to do so. She now made a point of sitting as far away from her as possible. Why was the poor old thing going to the court? It must be as a witness.
When the bus arrived at the stop just beyond Budgen’s, Maddy jumped off, without looking round to see what had happened to the old woman, and hurried away. People were going to talk enough nonsense for the rest of the day without having to put up with more of it now.
Maddy was efficient. She had scrupulously read every word of her two bundles for the day. She also remembered everything in them. They had told her what they expected her to do. Then the Home Office bundle had told her exactly how she was to do it. Her appellant’s bundle had been far larger than the Home Office one. That was usually the case. Desperate asylum-seekers tended to jeopardise their appeals by going on and on and on, whereas employees of the Home Office, secure and confident in their lives, knew precisely when to stop.
When Maddy entered the office in which the adjudicators all gathered before going their separate ways to their courtrooms, she was glad to see that the colleague who had been absent yesterday had now returned. His complexion was muddy and his eyes dull. His jowls seemed to hang more loosely and fronds of his grey hair stuck to his scalp.
‘Thank you for standing in for me.’
‘Always happy to be of help.’
‘I still feel absolutely ghastly.’
‘You look absolutely ghastly’
As, high heels clicking on the parquet, Maddy approached her court, she glimpsed the old woman outside it, sitting on a bench with an elderly, elongated man in a dark-blue pinstripe suit, the jacket sagging at the narrow shoulders and the trousers straining over a little paunch. There was a vague resemblance between the two – the same watery, washed-out blue eyes, the same bony hands, the same beaky noses. He must be the partner of the appellant, she decided, and she the sister whose name was on the order paper as the only other witness. The two of them could not enter the court to give their evidence until the appellant had been heard. The woman looked up at Maddy and gave that twitchy, lop-sided smile of hers. Maddy at once turned her head away.
Sometimes appellants imagined that it would help their cases if friends and relatives of theirs crowded the court. As far as Maddy was concerned, they were wrong about that, particularly if some of these supporters were children. Fortunately, today the court contained only herself, the appellant and the appellant’s whiskery, grey-haired female barrister.
As Maddy entered, the barrister lurched to her feet and the appellant then did likewise. Maddy merely nodded as she took her place on the dais. She opened her laptop. As she listened to what, with patient assiduity, the gruff-voiced barrister was attempting to elicit from her seemingly reluctant client, Maddy also typed away, r
ecording every sentence. But as her crimson-nailed fingers flicked at the keys, she was irritated that, after her previous laptop, this supposedly far superior replacement was putting up what she described later to Jake as ‘a kind of passive resistance’. She prided herself on her speed and accuracy as a typist.
The appellant, a Moroccan, was a fleshy youth, his heavily oiled hair cut close to his skull. In his sulky, somnolent way, he was handsome. The Home Office had already decided that he was not a homosexual and she herself now at once also decided, with satisfaction, that they had been absolutely right. She had dealt with other such individuals – a Jamaican only last week, an Algerian a few weeks before – who claimed firstly that they were in long-term partnerships with British men and secondly that, as homosexuals, their lives would be in danger if they were deported back to their homelands.
Maddy knew, partly from experience and partly from what the Home Office bundle had told her, precisely what to ask the man. In no time at all, he became confused, contradicted himself repeatedly, and kept dawdling to silence while desperately searching for an answer. When at one moment she was needling him with particular finesse, he shouted, his voice suddenly hoarse and strangulated, ‘Your question is racist!’ The barrister jerked her head up and rolled her eyes, like a frightened horse. Maddy merely laughed and said: ‘I don’t think that’s a helpful line for you to take.’ But secretly she was furious. These days it was less offensive to be called a bitch than a racist.
The appellant’s ‘partner’ – in her mind Maddy put the word in inverted commas – followed the Moroccan. He walked stiffly, one hand grasping a bony thigh as though he feared that it might snap under the pressure put on it by each footfall. Whenever he answered a question, he made a point of calling Maddy ‘ Madam’. On the first occasion she had thought, with momentary outrage, that he was using her first name. Usually it pleased her to be addressed as ‘Madam’ in court. But this old boy reminded her too much of a camp shop assistant for it to please her now.