A Death at the Palace

by M. H. Baylis

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Moved in with me bird, haven’t I?’ Terry beamed. ‘Gated mews in Leytonstone.’

  ‘Does she mind you giving lifts to beautiful, blonde Polish girls? I assume you were giving her a lift, rather than anything else?’

  ‘I’m not with you.’

  ‘Magda. The cleaner. That’s her scarf isn’t it, in your car?’

  ‘Ah. Right.’ Terry nodded. ‘Yeah. I gave her a lift in. On Friday, I think it was. When it was raining.’

  ‘Pity no one gave her a lift today,’ Rex said, lost for a moment in gruesome thoughts of what had happened up at the Palace. ‘What makes one person want to do that to another person?’

  He was speaking to himself. Terry had gone to fetch a newspaper from one of the other tables. The café-owner came across with their food. He was a tiny, dolorous-looking Greek, with the sort of profile you might find on an ancient vase. He’d always seemed fond of Rex, but when Milda’s name was mentioned, anger flashed in his eyes.

  ‘To be honest, she was on final warning with me before she started all this.’

  ‘All this what?’

  ‘Look. Right. Mate. I’m not being funny with you,’ the man said, in his melodic London-Greek brogue. But actually. She was nicking stuff, actually. Stuff from the fridge.’

  ‘She was nicking food?’ The idea was impossible, comical even. Milda had found a twenty-pound note once and handed it in – much to the mirth of the desk-staff – at the police station. She had berated Rex for getting on the 29 bus without a valid Oystercard. She was so honest, if you asked her some innocent question, like, ‘How are you?’ she’d really tell you: cystitis, lost bank cards and all. There was only one explanation.

  ‘It must have been a mistake.’

  The Greek shook his head sadly. ‘I don’t think so. Carrots, cabbages, cauliflower – big box of stuff.’ He waved his hands in a hopeless gesture and started to turn towards the counter. ‘It’s stupid. They can have anything they want to eat. They don’t need to nick it.’

  ‘But what did she say? When you caught her?’

  The proprietor held his hands up, shook his head again. ‘If you see her, tell her to talk to me. The job’s still here, to be honest… What can I say?’

  He walked away. Rex didn’t want to leave it like that, though.

  ‘Have you got a bit of paper?’ he asked.

  Terry tore off a miniscule fragment of the newspaper.

  ‘A proper bit. One I can write on.’

  The photographer pulled a card out of his wallet. It was from a business calling itself Eazylets. Rex scribbled a name and an address on the back of the card, then passed it across the table to Terry, who wiped his fingers on his jeans and held up the card. ‘Who’s Afaz Demirkol?’

  Rex didn’t answer. He was staring at the name of the Lettings Agent printed on the other side of the card. It seemed familiar.

  ‘I said – who’s Afaz Demirkol?’

  ‘The Borough’s oldest resident. Wish him a Happy 101st Birthday from me,’ Rex replied, as he stood up, and walked out of the café.

  * * *

  He didn’t understand how, because he’d been doing it for decades without any problem – but somehow, today, he’d got on the wrong bus. Instead of taking him down to the allotments in Palmers Green, it took him east and then south, so quickly it felt like an act of violence. And by the time he realised it had happened, he was going down Blackboy Lane.

  The experience frightened him because he’d heard about it. Heard about it happening to old people. That they could be bewildered in the present, yet remember everything that happened fifty years ago. And he remembered everything that had happened here, down the lane the Council were always trying to rename.

  The tall corner house was still there. A shop on the bottom floor sold car alarms and car stereos now, but he could remember every detail of the old interior. None of the people he passed on the bus had been around then. They hadn’t even been in this country, he guessed, and nor, in most cases, had their parents. It was a different area then – instead of the Turks and the Jamaicans and the Ghanaians, there were Irish and Jews and other people with a distinct, prominent set of features that only belonged to North London. He saw those features sometimes, still, though separated and married to new ones: a fleshy mouth here, a pair of heavy-lidded eyes there, and he remembered the Carringtons, who’d given him his first job after the army.

  Mr Carrington was a chiropodist: big business, he used to joke, after a war when everyone had had to squeeze their feet into army boots. It was true enough, though – he converted three rooms at the top of his house for corn-planing and bunion-easing, and a whole decade after the war, they had people in them until long into the evenings. Carrington had been with the RAMC, and this was where he’d picked up the trade. Not much different to a bit of pruning, that was what he used to say. He had sandy hair and jolly eyes, in contrast to his wife, who was, in the words of the man who delivered the coal each Monday, a great long streak of misery.

  He’d spent the first six months sweeping up the cheesy-yellow shards of skin from the floors, stocking up the instrument trays with new blades, making sure the waiting room had newspapers, air in the warm weather and some semblance of warmth in the cold. Then, for reasons unclear, Mr Carrington had declared that he had spotted something in him: a real flair for the business. From that point on, two days a week, he went to learn the muscles and the bones of the feet in a stuffy hall in Holborn; the next two days he swept as usual; and on the last one and a half, he was permitted to cut the callouses from selected pairs of feet, under the close supervision of Mr Carrington himself.

  Eighteen months in, even though he still didn’t have the certificate he needed, they let him cut unsupervised. There was a poplar tree outside his window, and he found he could cut away without looking at his work much, just staring at the branches outside, and remembering how the winds had made the wheat-fields sway like the sea when he’d watched them as a boy. He found the customers’ sore spots without looking, without talking, just with his fingers. That which had made his hands, and indeed the whole of him, so unnaturally soft and yielding, gave him strength in this job, because he could feel the contours of peoples’ feet, and know just where it was right to cut away, to smooth with the plane, or salve with the balm or sometimes just rub the pain away making circles with his fingertips. They made little sighs, sometimes, the people on the couch, when he did that – the big burly men in tweed suits, and the haughty, hard-looking women, and he found he enjoyed having the power to make that sound come out of them. People asked for him again, and it amused Mr Carrington to book them in. He found he enjoyed seeing people with their shoes and socks off. They always looked so pale and vulnerable that way, on the couch, with the soft velvety soles facing towards him, the odours they could not mask.

  It was a November day in 1955. In bad weather, more people came – the cold made them notice their feet more, the damp made their shoes fit less well. He’d had customers from seven in the morning, solid, right the way through lunch – only had to time to wolf down an apple whilst old Mrs Lally took an age over her ancient, Edwardian button-up boots. The coal in his scuttle was quite used up, and when he went down to the cupboard in Mr Carrington’s room for more blades, his employer had laughed at his nose, the tip of which seemed to have gone red in the cold. ‘Get yourself a handful from our living room,’ he’d said, something he’d have considered unthinkable, except that Mr Carrington had come halfway down the stairs with him, and he knew Mrs Carrington had gone into Hornsey for a dress fitting.

  In the living room, kneeling by the grate, he breathed in the strange smells of the Carringtons’ house. They boiled up coley for their cats, and this mingled with the vanilla of Mr Carrington’s pipe tobacco and the fruity scent of the furniture polish to make a heady cocktail. He didn’t want to carry a handful of the coal all the way up the stairs as he’d only need to go two flights back down again to wash his han
ds, so he took a sheet of the Gazette that they left by the fire for lighting, and wrapped up a few of the smaller lumps in that.

  He was just twisting the paper around the coal when Mrs Carrington came in. She had a leaf stuck to the side of her shoe.

  ‘What are you doing in here?’ she asked. She had a way of smiling so only the muscles of her mouth moved whilst her eyes remained like the fish in the fishmonger’s window. He mumbled that Mr Carrington had said for him to come and take the coal.

  ‘Did he?’ she said, as if it might not be true. She wore too much make-up around her eyes, so that when she looked at things, it was as if she was pointing at them. Now she pointed with her eyes at his parcel of coal and the torn newspaper left in the grate. ‘I hadn’t read the Gazette yet,’ she added. And she stayed where she was in the doorway, towering over him, as he squeezed past her and went to the stairs. There was a rustle as he passed by the bulge of her belly, and the fabric of her woollen skirt moved against the stiff petticoat underneath. It made him shudder.

  He shuddered again when he arrived back in his room. A red-headed girl was sitting on a chair, taking off her stockings. He saw her pale flesh under a smart, dogstooth patterned skirt.

  ‘Mr Carrington showed me in,’ she said. ‘I thought I’d just get on with it ’cause it takes an age to undo these laces when my hands are cold.’

  Her fingers were red, like meat. He nodded, going over to the fire and putting the coals in to hide his face. She had a North-country accent, a bit like one of the Nurses he’d worked with in Austria. He got a good blaze going, happy to face the fire instead of the girl.

  ‘Shall I just get on the table?’ she asked, brightly. And before he could answer, she’d lain on it. He sorted out his tray of sharp instruments, hating her now. Why ask his permission, he thought, if she was going to do something anyway? Why talk in that happy, sing-song voice, when it was obvious that she, like everyone, despised him?

  She gave a big yawn and said she worked nights on the buses. He calmed down a little as he began to shave away the callous on the edge of her right big toe. You could look like her, he remembered, in your tight sweater and your smart skirt, you could have milky-white thighs and French scent, but your feet would give you away. Your callouses, and your misshapen nails and the dark hairs on the bridge. You could be as fish-eyed as Mrs Carrington, as cruel as any foster-mother, and still, at the end of the day, there’d be a pile of hard, yellow shards on the floor to remind everyone what you really were. In this job, he saw people: looked down into them, up them, saw everything, like he’d been told Jesus did.

  ‘I’m just going to rub some salve into your heel,’ he said, reaching for the bottle of peppermint-scented lotion on the wooden stand. She gave a faint murmur and shifted her legs slightly. A tiny part of her slip showed against her knee – rose-colour against the paler bloom of her flesh. From the rhythms of her breath, he knew that she’d fallen into a doze. He glanced back at her knee – at the hem of the slip and the soft skin. God did that sort of thing often, he thought – set two things against each other to show you His wonder. A dewdrop on a leaf. A curl on a collar – two things, unremarkable alone, arresting when put together.

  He felt a thickening between his legs and a dryness in his throat, as he moved from her right foot to touch the criss-crossed padding of her left sole. Sometimes, from songs and snatches of what he overheard on buses and in shops, he got a sense that other people felt these things, too, but they felt them in a different way, a way they invited and welcomed. His heart fluttered and he felt the corn-plane slip a little in his dampening fingers. For him, these feelings only meant anger; inside his head, a magic lantern show went by, composed of his foster-mother’s thin lips, the tauntings of her daughters, bare legs, stinging slaps, yanked hair and nakedness, burning shame and punishing, probing, exposing hands.

  ‘Did he?’ he heard Mrs Carrington saying again. ‘I hadn’t read the Gazette.’

  He thought how easy it would have been, as she’d made him squeeze past her rustling, padded belly, to reach out to the folds of her powdered neck and to pinch and squeeze. The shock he would see in her eyes. The way she’d thrash. The sense of injustice in her dying gestures, as if, for once, the whole order of the universe had been reversed, and the weak become the strong.

  This girl’s neck was nicer: long and pale, with a little floral scarf around it. When he’d squeezed the life out of the rabbit, there’d been softness, then something fibrous and grainy, and finally, something like the moment you crunched down on a gobstopper, a great, muted, satisfying crack from deep within the beast. The body of the girl in the camp hospital had made a sound like that as well – not her neck, he thought, but just the ligaments and cartilage of her bed-bound limbs stretching as she bucked and struggled under the pillow. He wondered if this girl lying here, with her red curls and her swelling sweater, would make a cracking sound as well. He found himself wanting to hear it again.

  And then, as if Jesus had been real, and had heard his secret thoughts, as he stood over the sleeping girl on the table, there was sudden, sharp crack. Not from her neck, though – it came from the fire behind, making him jump and making the girl wake up, too. The first thing she did as she awoke was to give him a friendly smile, her nose wrinkling up and the corners of her eyes lifting outwards.

  ‘Blimey. I think I was out cold,’ she said. And she smiled again. A real smile.

  To see such a thing, to be the recipient of such a thing, instead of fear, indifference, disgust, made his legs shake. Her name was Caroline, he discovered later, and she came from Belper, in Derbyshire. He never went there, not in the whole of their time together, but the name of Belper, in Derybshire, assumed the importance of Canaan and Gethsemane in his own legends. A girl from Belper smiled at him, treated him as if he was meant to exist alongside her, and he was forever changed by it. They married in her Church in Stoke Newington, about six months after their first meeting and when he stood at the altar, he made his own vows with his own God. He would never do it again, he said, never squeeze and smother, never wait for the crack, not as long as Caroline was with him.

  * * *

  Rex took the 141 up to Palmers Green. It was on that bus route that he’d last seen her. After an evening working late at the paper, he’d walked down to the Pamukkale Restaurant for a lahmacun. They only served them after 8 pm, for some reason, and it had been well after that on a wet Thursday, a little way into Setember, the street almost deserted. As he left, with the teardrop of lamb-studded bread warming his pocket, a city-bound 141 had sailed past, like some ghostly galleon, Milda its only cargo, sitting where she always did, on the right-front seat of the top deck. That snapshot of her, pale and alone, with her Soviet administrator spectacles and her little Fifties coat, was an eerie image, one that had troubled his subconscious for weeks before Aguta had appeared with her speculations. He’d sent her a text after seeing her, but she’d never replied. He decided she might have been freaked out by him saying he’d seen her, perhaps thought he’d been stalking her. He almost texted again, to say that wasn’t the case, but luckily his dignity kicked in.

  Now, upstairs on the bus, sitting where she sat, he caught a glimpse of the tv transmitters on the top of the Palace, the biscuit-brown brick towers below. Milda had been confused about Alexandra Palace, thought some real royalty lived up there on the hill. It had saddened her to learn that the Victorian hulk was just used for bric-a-brac fairs and the odd bit of ice-skating.

  One hot Thursday night in the office, Lawrence Berne had given them all a long lecture about the old Princess of Wales, who’d opened it and given it to the people for entertainment and education, complete with its music halls and libraries, and how apt it was that the first tv broadcasts had issued from its tower.

  So actually it’s tv station and place for jumble sales – Milda had concluded drily – but in England, that is Palace. Ha!

  Rex found himself smiling at the memory. He wondered what she’d say now, if
she were to suddenly sit down next to him. She always felt so light and fragile beside him, like a bird that might suddenly fly away Ai! Such a silly bag, Rex. He still remembered, with diamond clarity, the first words she’d said to him, as she tried to extricate her buttons from the net on the front of his satchel. He’d felt so awkward, he hadn’t even noticed that the beautiful new office temp knew his name.

  And what would he say, when he found her? He was over her. It was over. He was seeing Diana now. But how could he explain that he’d been worried about her, without seeming as if he still had feelings? It occurred to him that he wouldn’t be mentioning this visit to Diana. She wouldn’t get it. He wasn’t even sure he did.

  Green Lanes was one of those roads people called arteries, a painful term that made you think of skinned beasts and blood clots. It was appropriate. This improbably long and straight passage was an old cattle-drovers’ route, from Hertfordshire pastures to Smithfield slaughter. From country to city, life to death. Similar contrasts were to be found today. At the southern end, two miles and cultural light-years away from Rex’s manor, was Newington Green: a young and artsy place, full of people who worked from home and called their children Milo and Edie. That zone ended abruptly by the old water-tower, giving way to velvet-clad Hasidim, then several hulking, half-empty blocks. After that came the teeming bazaar of the Turkish quarter, then the bland, consumer-conveyor-belt of Wood Green, the whole ribbon of civilisation finally flickering out on a high flat plateau above the city, a windy place jagged with pylons and giant, creaking storage units. Nobody, not even local history bores like Lawrence Berne, could explain why it was Green Lanes in the plural, instead of just a Lane.