King Solomon's Carpet

by Barbara Vine

  Fear galvanized his body and he drew up his legs, he was on all fours, quivering there like a runner on his marks. He let out a yell and leapt. He slithered and then sprang into a mob of lifted faces, open mouths, round like Os.

  Not to hit his head or break his legs, not on top of anyone, not on to the platform, but into the hairy arms of a bear. The car whose roof he had ridden on disappeared under the green guillotine.

  12

  Later on, when Jasper was telling Bienvida about it, he said he thought he had died. He thought he was dead and the bear was one of the creatures that inhabited wherever it was you went to when you died. Sometimes he had told her stories of an afterlife and an afterworld inhabited by bears and wolves and pterodactyls.

  At the time he did not think much. He was all sensation, fear, amazement, relief and more fear. In the bear's arms he was at first terrified and no less so when he saw the grinning face between its jaws. The bear set him down and his instinct was to run away up the stairs and out into Notting Hill Gate. It was official retribution he was afraid of, of some uniformed man taking hold of him. One of those Victorian errand boys, trying to get into the false house in Leinster Gardens, would have feared being grabbed by the ear. Jasper was afraid of being taken by the shoulders and propelled along at a run. To some office, some police station, some court with a judge.

  He was grabbed, but not by a man in uniform. By an ordinary member of the public. Or so it seemed. A man who was with the bear, who had said something to the bear while Jasper was held aloft, took him by the arm in a strong squeezing grip. Jasper wriggled. The man held on. He said to Jasper, ‘I want to talk to you.’

  These words had no strange ring for Jasper. They were what a certain kind of adult said. It had not escaped his notice that whereas grown-up people have some reticence when it comes to reproving each other for bad behaviour, no such restraint affects them when children offend. You did not have to be someone's mother or father or teacher in order to tell him off. He supposed the tall man with the piercing eyes and the beard and tied-back hair intended to tell him off, to ask him if he wanted to die, if he understood the dangers inherent in sledging, and then to hand him over either to a station official or else one of those policemen who it seemed actually worked for the Underground. He wriggled again, tried a swift twisting movement.

  ‘Let me go.’

  A woman in the crowd, a crowd which had begun to lose interest now he wasn't dead, injured or meeting violent retribution, said, ‘He ought to get into serious trouble.’

  There was a murmur behind her and someone else said they didn't know what things were coming to. The man who held him said to Jasper, ‘The least you can do is say thank you to Bruin.’

  Someone laughed. Jasper said, ‘OK. Thanks. Can I go now, please?’

  The man did not slacken his grip. He had a ring on one of his fingers which dug into the flesh of Jasper's upper arm. They stood there all three of them, as if waiting for the next train. The crowd had begun to depart through the exit and a fresh lot was appearing.

  ‘I said I wanted to talk to you.’

  ‘You're hurting,’ said Jasper.

  ‘Maybe, but if I let go you'll be off and I want us to have a talk. I'm not going to tell you off about what you were doing, if that's what you're scared of.’

  ‘I'm not scared.’ Jasper wasn't going to have that. ‘I don't want the police coming, that's all.’

  ‘Neither do I,’ said the tall man, and for some reason this made him smile. ‘Neither do I one bit. I think you and I see things in much the same way. We see eye to eye.’

  ‘Three of a kind,’ said the bear.

  A train was coming in. It emptied and re-filled. The tall man told him to look as it passed under the green girder.

  ‘You'd have made it,’ he said. ‘You weren't in any danger. It just looked too low. You'd have had a good two feet.’

  Jasper, regaining his confidence, looked at the departing train and was less sure. ‘You weren't up there. How would you know?’

  This time the tall man did more than smile. He laughed. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let's go.’

  The hard hand relaxed as they mounted on the escalator. At the top it was removed altogether. Jasper, who had been struggling to run away, now no longer wished to do so. Child of a child-abusing world, he was fully aware of what people thought when they saw a man manhandling someone of his age. The tall man would be aware of it too, and that was why he had removed his hand. This made Jasper feel powerful. He swaggered a little as he came off the escalator and into the ticket hall. In the underpass, where the stairs go up to the north side of Notting Hill Gate and the beggars congregate at the foot of them, the bear went into the Men's and came out again as a man with a scarf covering his chin, a hat shading his face and carrying a plastic bag full of bearskin.

  They took Jasper into the pizza house. He had forgotten about being hungry, but he was now, voraciously. The bear who was a bear no longer queued up to get their food and Jasper and the tall man sat down at a table in the corner. It was very warm after outside and Jasper took off his jacket, placing it on the seat beside him. The tall man had a black beard and a black moustache between which his lips showed narrow and red. The ring on his finger was done in two sorts of yellow metal. He wore black jeans and a T-shirt striped black and yellow like a wasp's back and over them a wide-open black overcoat that reached nearly to the floor.

  While they waited for the food to come, he said, ‘My name is Axel Jonas. What's yours?’

  ‘Jasper.’ He hesitated a moment before giving his surname. This was because he was not always certain which it was. It had usually been Elphick but lately people called him Darne because that was the name his mother called herself by. Jasper had a brief recall of Brian in the Transport Museum, of the pocket money, of how kind he always was, and said, ‘Jasper Elphick.’

  ‘You can call me Axel. The bear's name is Ivan. He has a surname but for reasons of his own he likes to keep it dark.’

  ‘Why does he dress up like a bear?’

  ‘For his amusement,’ said Axel, ‘and mine.’

  Jasper thought his voice very cold when he said that. It reminded him of the tone of an interrogator in a spy film. But he was not in the least afraid. The pizza house was half full, there were people everywhere and it was broad daylight, a bright, cold, brisk autumn day. There was nothing to be afraid of.

  Ivan came back with a loaded tray. He was still wearing his hat and scarf. Jasper noted with some surprise that he had brought exactly the same food and drink for each of them. He could not remember this ever happening before when he had been taken out to meals by adults. They, for instance, had always wanted beer or wine as well as salads and coffee and such uneatable, undrinkable things as that. He and Ivan and Axel all had a ham and mushroom pizza each and a can of Pepsi-Cola each, and the pizzas were all equally large.

  So far Ivan had uttered no word since remarking that they were three of a kind. In order to eat he unwound his scarf and tipped back his hat. He was not only the ugliest person Jasper had ever seen, but the most peculiar-looking. His was not really a human face at all, it seemed not to have the normal human features and proportions. The eyes were small, sunk in flesh and very wide apart. The curious nose was quite straight until it came to the tip where it branched out into a kind of platform. The bit between this nose and his mouth was about twice as long as on most people and bisected by a narrow white vertical scar. It looked as if there had been a split there from nose to lip and someone had very neatly sewn the opening together. Jasper had never seen anything quite like that before. Axel's black hair was tied back with an elastic band but Ivan's, poking out under the hat brim, was loose, curly, rough and brown, not unlike the bear's pelt.

  All these details were carefully noted by Jasper the better to describe the whole scene to Bienvida later on. He had made up his mind that a request was going to be put to him. If they did not intend to reproach him they must want something from him and
Jasper, streetwise child that he was, a knowledgeable innocent who, peering into scenarios of sexual adventure and violence and drama as he had done, knew everything and knew nothing. He supposed Axel and Ivan wanted him to go home with them so that they could do something to him. Do perhaps something like what he had more or less seen Daniel Korn doing to Tina. Or take photographs of him without his clothes on. Jasper, somehow, knew about this too. But the pizza house was full of people and he was a fast runner. Only he wanted to eat his pizza first.

  Axel let him do so. He let him eat half of it and he and Ivan ate half theirs and then he said, ‘Have you done much of that? Riding on top of tube trains?’

  ‘A bit,’ said Jasper cautiously.

  ‘Where have you done it?’

  ‘What d'you mean, where?’

  Axel did not answer this. He said, ‘There are a lot of old stations in the Underground, aren't there? Stations that aren't used any more?’

  ‘Ghost stations,’ said Jasper, eating the second half of his pizza.

  ‘Is that what they call them? Have you seen them?’

  ‘You can see some of them on the long bit between Baker Street and Finchley Road. On the Metropolitan. They used to have names but I don't know what they were.’

  ‘But you've seen them? You've seen them from the top of a train?’

  Jasper had not. It was perfectly possible to see these gloomy deserted platforms from inside the cars but he decided not to tell Axel this. He said an economical, ‘Yes.’

  ‘I want you to tell me if you think it would be possible to get on to these stations. And if you got on to them, could you get out on to the street?’

  He talked like a schoolteacher. This was new. Previously, he had talked like an ordinary person, like one of Tina's friends, but now he spoke like the man whose class at school Jasper had been in last year, and whose chilly and hectoring manner had been in some part responsible for his truancy.

  ‘I don't know,’ he said.

  ‘OK. Does the train slow down when it passes these stat-ions?’

  ‘It goes very fast all the way to Finchley Road. It goes at high speed.’ Having told his lie, Jasper was in no mind to make the untruthful boast less of an achievement. ‘What d'you want to know for?’

  It was apparent at once that Axel was not going to tell him that. His face closed up. It became dead. Jasper did not particularly like that expressionlessness, that stony stare. He turned his eyes to Ivan and Ivan said in his funny whistling voice, very intensely, very penetratingly, ‘What he means is, is there a way you could climb up and like get into the street, up a manhole or whatever?’

  Jasper said it again. ‘I don't know.’

  ‘Or could you get out of the train on to one of these – what-d'you-call-'em? – ghost stations, and get off again on another train?’

  ‘I told you,’ said Jasper. ‘They don't stop.’

  He was beginning to feel a loss of nerve. Various memories from his intellectual intake, television and comics, were showing him what he might do. Refuse to say any more until he had another pizza. Ask for payment of another kind. His throat dried up when he thought of that, his appetite went. In this climate of dwindling courage, he found himself with an idea, a means of escape.

  It involved no more than a simple statement. He made it, watching them.

  ‘Jarvis could tell you.’

  Axel said sharply, ‘Who's Jarvis?’

  ‘Just a man,’ said Jasper carefully. He no longer wanted another pizza. His hunger was gone. ‘Can I go now?’

  ‘Wait a minute.’

  Axel unfroze in a strange, unnerving way. His face came alive again and he smiled. His teeth were white and clean and even. Jasper thought of telling Bienvida about him, about his black beard and red mouth and white teeth and the hair tied back with a shoelace. Of course lots of men wore their hair tied back but it was often thin or they were bald. Axel's hair looked like a man's in a costume of the 1700s he had seen in Madame Tussaud's with Brian, thick and dark and glossy as a blackbird. Jasper would not have been surprised if the two teeth at the sides of Axel's front ones had been pointed like Dracula's. Perhaps he would tell Bienvida they had been.

  ‘Who's Jarvis, Jasper?’

  A deep breath in and Jasper said, ‘I haven't got any money to get home with.’

  ‘Can't you walk?’

  ‘Not to West Hampstead.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Axel. ‘So you live in West Hampstead. And does this Jarvis live there too?’

  Jasper was silent. Suddenly the scene in the pizza house had become like television. He saw how foolish he had been to suspect these men of doing the sort of things to him he had half-seen men do to women. If he had known the word he would have said he had been naïve. This was crime, this was something bad and big.

  ‘Who is Jarvis? Does he live with you?’

  ‘He might,’ said Jasper. He had heard that on television too.

  ‘He's your mother's boyfriend.’

  This was Ivan, speaking flatly. Jasper was incensed in the way we are when we discern complete misunderstanding.

  ‘He's not!’

  ‘Never mind that. Why would he know?’

  ‘He knows about the tube. He's written books.’ Jasper, thinking fast, planning, let fall a piece of information he thought useless, that he thought mere stalling. ‘He's our cousin.’

  ‘I'd like to talk to him. Where d'you live in West Hampstead?’

  Jasper's plan of asking for money before he disclosed information had never really got off the ground. He was afraid to do it. Even surrounded by the customers of the pizza house he was afraid to do that. He reached for his jacket, which had fallen on to the floor. It was filthy from the top of the tube train car. He put it on, saying he was cold. Axel Jonas was watching him.

  ‘Funny way you've got of showing your gratitude,’ said Ivan.

  ‘You said I wasn't in danger,’ said Jasper triumphantly. ‘You said I had lots of room, you didn't save me from anything.’

  He sat, darting quick looks from one to the other of them, and then he jumped up and was off. He was off like the wind, out of the pizza house, weaving his way between the people on the pavement, ducking under arms, leaping across the street in defiance of a green light and traffic, down the stairs past the shabby sprawled beggars and into the underpass.

  They would follow him. For some reason they wanted Jarvis, they wanted what Jarvis knew. He had a good start though and he was tube-wise. It was a disadvantage to have no money, but not all that much of one for him. He simply went under the ticket gates. He dived down at the point where the law-abiding put a ticket in the slot and then plunged under the closed leather-bound jaws.

  Left or right? Right was the Circle Line and the way he had come. They would expect him to go that way. For quickness, it made no difference whether he took the Circle to Baker Street and the Jubilee to West Hampstead or the Central to Bond Street and then the Jubilee. But they would expect him to take the Circle. He ran down the two escalators that led deep into the tunnels for the Central Line. There were more trains on this line, it was a better service.

  If they came on to the platform there would be no escape for him. He ran as far down as he could get, put people between himself and the entrance, perhaps fifty people. He had barely reached the end of the platform when a Liverpool Street train came in. If they got in and walked through he would have no defence. Perhaps he should get out at Queensway, throw them off the scent. But that would be bad if they got out too, for there were no escalators at Queensway, only lifts. He thought of being trapped in the lift with them.

  If they were on the train. As far as he knew they were not on the train. He got out with extreme care at Bond Street, feeling like a marked man. A child is marked, a child is distinctive, he has no disguise for his youth, his grace, his smallness of stature. Jasper felt small, he felt like an animal. His heart raced a bit. He couldn't walk, he had to run. The winds of Bond Street were blowing, meeting him on the stairs, whipp
ing down the escalator.

  They were not following him. He waited for the Jubilee train coming up from Green Park and he thought, could they have got to Green Park before me, could they be in that train waiting? But it was impossible. It could not be done. In a taxi maybe, early on a Sunday morning, but not on the London Underground at any hour, not by taking the Circle back to Gloucester Road and the Piccadilly to Green Park, which would be the only way.

  He entered the train with all the caution of an old-time spy who has an assignation at a Berlin checkpoint. His imagination showed him the film, half-real, half-surreal, where the fugitive, safe at last, savouring relief, steps into the waiting limousine to find his two enemies there before him, smiling broadly. Two people only were in the car, a black man and a white woman, both with a weary downtrodden look. A throng followed Jasper in. He thought, I'm OK now, it's all right now. What would they have done anyway? Nothing. They would have done nothing.

  Once at West Hampstead, he considered going home by a circuitous route. It was rather early to go home at all, not yet three. He could go round by West Hampstead Mews instead of the street where the School was or the bridge. It seemed to Jasper that the thing to avoid was leading them to Jarvis's house, to the School.

  But they were not following him. He got off the train, on that very exposed platform, and concealed himself behind one of the free-standing signboards on which were a tube map and cinema advertisements. A lot of people got off but Axel Jonas and surname-less Ivan were not among them.