by Alex Marwood
Nonetheless, there are greasy plates piled up by the sink, and a rancid waste bin. She goes through the cupboards and drawers at lightning speed. Plates. Pint glasses. Cutlery: but the knife blades are thick, like kids’ school knives. She doubts they’ll fit in a screw head. Well, he must have a screwdriver somewhere, she thinks, or how did he screw it in in the first place?
She carries on. A bunch of pans that look inherited – pitted exteriors, handles with melt marks and scratches – and unused. A drawerful of spatulas. A cupboard so full of gas bills and council tax reminders that she has difficulty getting it closed again once it’s open. A collection of tea towels that have the eerie look of souvenirs about them. Inherited again, she thinks. Like the apron and oven gloves that hang on the end wall. A cork pinboard to which two dozen delivery menus and a couple of minicab cards are fixed with drawing pins. Cleaning stuff. She raises her eyebrows at this. She’s not seen much evidence that he uses it. A bucket with a grey old rag hanging over the edge. A pressure cooker. A slow cooker full of Tupperware lids. A toasted sandwich maker.
Nothing tool-like; nothing that will help her. She goes back down the hall, pokes her head into the bathroom. Mildew along the border of a glass shower screen, a hair attached to a bar of soap, a cardboard box on the toilet cistern stuffed with chemist drugs: laxatives, Immodium, Boots Soothing Heartburn Relief pills, cough mixture, Bonjela. She doesn’t bother with more than a cursory look. No one keeps tools in the bathroom unless they’ve been doing work in there.
A flash of memory. The tool kit on Vesta’s bathroom floor.
‘Oh, shit,’ she says, out loud. Her voice echoes off the tiled walls, mocks her. They took the kit down to the building site when they dropped off the remains of the damp proofing. Some Slovak will have most of it strapped round his waist by now.
She comes out of the bathroom, disconsolate. She’s about to go back to the kitchen and try one of the knives when she notices the cupboard. It’s a big cupboard that fills the space where the stairs up to the ground floor used to be. For some reason, she’s taken the narrowness of the hall, the jink at the end, for granted, maybe because Vesta’s basement hall is narrower, if anything. Ah, now, there you go, she thinks. I should’ve thought that even someone like him would have a Hoover hidden away somewhere.
It takes her a moment to work out how to open the door, picking at its seam with her fingernail, until she tries pushing on it, and it swings open. It’s big enough and deep enough to house a cloakroom, if he had wanted one, though someone his size wouldn’t have used it with any great ease. Instead, it’s filled with more of the sort of junk that lies about the living room: arm and leg weights, an ironing board, an old record player and a box of vinyl records, the vacuum cleaner, an old fold-up director’s chair. A series of narrow shelves on the wall just inside the door houses boxes of bits and bobs: light bulbs, screws, nails, superglue, fuses, batteries: and on the floor, in the back, another toolkit box.
‘Aha!’ she cries, triumphantly. Dives on it joyfully, drags it into the light. It has one of those lids that split in two, and beneath that a plastic tray with more of the same crap as on the shelves in its little divided sections. She lifts it out and puts it on the floor, expecting to find the tools in the void beneath. Looks back in – and takes a huge, gasping breath.
It’s not tools. It’s money. Lots and lots of money. Ten and twenty and fifty pound notes, stacked neatly by denomination. Cher stares at it and her pupils expand. Cash that nearly fills the box. There must be thousands and thousands, here in the cupboard.
‘Fuckin’ Ada,’ she says.
She can hardly bear to touch it, in case it vanishes like some fairy glimmer under her hand. Then she does, and feels that it is real, and sighs in astonishment. Looks guiltily over her shoulder, suddenly expecting someone to come in and find her here, and touches it again.
She sits down heavily on the hard, cold floor. She knows beyond doubt now what they mean by a rush of blood to the head. It really is thousands, she thinks. Thousands and thousands. That’s why this flat is such a shithole, why everything looks like it’s on the edge of falling apart: he’s been socking the rent money away under the stairs.
She picks up a bundle of fifty pound notes. A generous handful, maybe three inches thick. Looks at it the way an entomologist would look at some insect species they’d heard about but never seen. The notes are real, all right. She has no idea how much money she holds in her hand, but she suspects that it might be more than has passed through them in the whole of her life to this moment. Lovely mellow reds, the queen serene and smug on one side, blokes in wigs on the other. Paper quality that feels like luxury itself.
I can’t, she thinks. I can’t. I mustn’t. Oh, God, the things I could do with this. The things we could all do. But I can’t. It would tip us over. What we’ve done already is wrong. I know that. But it’s a wrong I can live with. It’s a wrong that stopped a load of other wrongs. But this?
She fans the notes out, puts them to her face and sniffs them. They smell like – money. Wonderful money. Wonderful, wonderful money, root of all freedom. The only people who really believe the ‘money doesn’t buy you happiness’ line are the ones who’ve never had to live without it.
Through the open door to the living room, she can see the melting corpse on the floor. A miserable life, a miserable death. No one to mourn him, no one to care. Died because he was greedy, in the end. Because his love for this stuff made him think an old lady’s life didn’t matter. And he didn’t even get to spend it. Didn’t enjoy his life. Just stashed it in a box and lived on his settee, watching other people live their lives on his TV screens.
Reluctantly, she puts the notes back on top of the pile. Strokes them, as though they were alive. They’re someone else’s, she thinks. Not mine. I’m not that person. If I take them, I’m all the things I ran away to stop myself becoming. Doing the things I do to keep the wolf from the door is one thing. I’d be doing this to chase down luxury. I’d be stepping over the line.
She can’t stop herself from creaming half a dozen notes off the top. She’s not a saint. Tucks them into her bra and feels better. Call it a rent rebate, she thinks. That’s a couple of weeks’ fags and groceries, some shoes and a good winter coat – compensation for the time I couldn’t work.
She puts the tray back in and closes the lid. Pushes the toolbox back into the back of the cupboard. Someone will find it one day. Maybe they’ll be honest, maybe they won’t. But they won’t be me.
She’s been here long enough. If she doesn’t get on with it, it will be rush hour by the time she gets back to Northbourne High Street, and she knows that, strangely enough, you sometimes stand out more in a crowd. People are more on their guard, more aware of potential threats, and the differences become more obvious. She closes the cupboard door and returns to the living room.
The TV taunts her, smug on its single screw. Ach, fuck it, thinks Cher. I may be doing the right thing, but I’m not that much of a bloody saint. She puts her hands on either side of the casing, braces one foot against the wall and rocks. After a couple of seconds, the rawlplugs in the wall give way and the TV comes with her, stand, plaster and all.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
He doesn’t like to waste things, so he folds his Ziploc up into quarters and tucks it into his trouser pocket. The dogs on the common have benefitted from his presence earlier than usual today. It’s always good to mix things up a bit, inject a bit of variety into one’s life. And besides, Marianne is starting to get on his nerves. Having to look at that peeling décolletage is like living with a nag.
It’s Wednesday, and his short working week is already over, at least until his half-day Friday. When he was working full time, he often bemoaned how few hours he seemed to have for himself. But now he has all the time in the world for galleries and museums, the cinema, for just sitting at a pavement table and watching the world go by, and he doesn’t have the money to enjoy them. He can’t even keep himself amused fo
r long on the internet, because top-ups for his dongle seem to be getting more expensive by the day. Life on part-time wages involves a lot of television, a lot of supermarket cider and very few nights out. Not that his social life has ever been a whirl. Thomas has never understood why, but he seems to make people uncomfortable. Even when the CAB was fully open, his colleagues often forgot to ask him when they were planning their after-work drinks, and after a few council meetings the furniture cooperative people could barely meet his eye when he talked.
Today he feels like a treat. His finances, after all, have eased a lot now the Landlord’s dead and no one will be collecting rent for a while. The lunchtime rush is over, and Brasserie Julien will have finished its must-eat period. He fancies a cappuccino, lots of froth, chocolate on top, and a sit among the baby buggies. It’s another bright day, and it’ll be nice to watch the girls – so unselfconscious as they stroll the pavements in their thin summer dresses – from the shade of the brasserie’s awning, the spillover of their air-conditioning cooling him from the open windows. After, he’ll do a little food shop, pick up a four-pack and spend some quality time on the sofa with Nikki.
The High Street is its lackadaisical mid-afternoon self. It has its waves of busy – first thing in the morning and around the rush-hour – but the rest of the time you can see that London is still feeling the triple dip. People just don’t go out to wander shops, even to browse, the way they used to. Too much danger that one might end up buying something. That’s why Thomas stays at home. Art galleries are still mostly free to get in to, but a small bottle of water from one of their cafés quickly compensates for that. The brasserie seems to be the only business that does okay all day. It doesn’t even bother to open until eleven, but it does a moderate-to-good trade from then right through to closing time, catering as it does for each market that washes through: the mummies coming home from the gym, the lunch crowd, the idle time-fillers like himself, the post-work drinkers and the embarrassed first-daters, all looking for somewhere to meet that doesn’t have an edge of scary like most of the local pubs.
He’s disappointed to see that all of the pavement tables are taken. One, though, at the end by the bookies, has only one occupant. A studious-looking woman, late twenties, he thinks, who’s reading a Kindle with the sort of fierce concentration that suggests that she’s not reading it at all. Stood up, he thinks, or filling time before a meeting. Whatever, she doesn’t look like she’ll be there long.
He goes up and asks if she minds sharing. She looks up and he sees that she’s rather pretty: pixie haircut, overlarge eyes, a small but full-lipped mouth, a cute little pointed chin. If it weren’t for the specs and the wrap dress, a cami underneath to cover the worst of her cleavage, she would look rather like a Manga character. I would dress her, he thinks, indulging an idle fantasy as he often does about women he encounters in the street, in a bustier and Capri pants. She has small breasts and what looks like a narrow waist under that blouse. Something to pull her in and hoist her up would be perfect.
He sees her consider him. ‘I’m sort of waiting for someone,’ she says.
‘Okay. How about I move if – when – they come along? I so want to be outside today.’
She shrugs. ‘Sure,’ she says, and turns her chair side-on to the table to signify that she’s not into conversing and looks back down at her screen.
He sits, waves at the waiter, who gestures back that he will be along in a minute. Thomas turns his own chair towards the street and crosses one knee over the other, mirroring her body language as in all the best NLP manuals. ‘Beautiful day,’ he says.
‘Mmm,’ she says, and doesn’t look up from her reader.
‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘Silly. Every day’s a beautiful day at the moment.’
‘Yes,’ she says, and clicks the clicker to turn the page. Clicks the page-back button a second later. Thomas looks out at the street. Not a particularly endearing sight. They’re opposite the Post Office sorting depot whose back wall faces out over the railway embankment’s no man’s land. It’s square, yellow-bricked, featureless, with a wheelchair ramp up to the red metal doors where the undelivered parcel window lives. A woman walks past in a green jersey tunic and black leggings, gladiator sandals on her feet and a rough bun on her head. Leggings, he thinks, are the devil’s work. Women think they hold them in, but they really don’t. If anything, they emphasise.
He turns back to his companion. ‘Good book?’
She looks up. ‘Look,’ she says, ‘I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have said you could sit down if I’d known you were going to try to talk to me. Sorry. But I’m not looking for friends.’
Thomas feels the blood rush to his cheeks as she looks down once again, pointedly, at her book. ‘Sorry,’ he says, plaintively. ‘Only being friendly.’
She rolls her eyes and purses her lips. Picks up her coffee without taking her eyes from the reader and takes a sip. Plugs in her iPod earphones as a final dismissal.
Embarrassed, he gets up and leaves. He knows when he’s not wanted. Well, actually, of course, he often doesn’t. This is one of his problems. He grew up thinking that it was all about the men, that the women were just waiting to be chosen, and that all the men had to do was choose. It’s been a terrible disappointment to discover that the rules are more complicated. He hurries off up the street once he’s got a few paces from the table, keen to put space between himself and his humiliation. Reaches the Sunrise Café and sees that it’s still open. Oh, well, he thinks. They probably do cappuccino too. Everywhere does, these days. And one of those Portuguese custard tarts. They’re always good.
‘Piss off,’ says a voice beside him.
Thomas looks round, surprised. It seems such a random thing to have said. He sees a man, donkey jacket on despite the heat and combat trousers, glaring at a mousy woman in a loose tweed skirt, a formal white blouse and a lilac cardy. She’s clutching a sheaf of leaflets, one sheet frozen in the air between them where she’s clearly tried to hand him one.
‘Sorry,’ she says.
‘You’re allowed your beliefs,’ he says, ‘but stop trying to shove them down other people’s throats.’
‘I wasn’t!’ she protests. She has a Princess Diana haircut, circa New England Kindergarten, and a little crucifix on a chain round her neck. Lovely blue eyes, though, and a neck like a swan’s. He peers to see what the leaflet says and catches a glimpse of a big black THE GOOD NEWS and a hand-drawn, childish cross. ‘I was just —’
‘Trying to talk to me about God. Yes. I know. And I don’t care.’
‘But I just —’ she says.
‘You people make me sick,’ says the man, and knocks the leaflets from her hand. They cascade to the pavement.
Thomas sees his chance. Leaps across the gap between them and is sweeping them up in a moment, as the assailant is still making his way past to storm off up the street.
‘Sorry, sorry,’ says the woman. How the British love to apologise. ‘Thank you. Sorry. Thank you.’
She has a high-pitched, schoolmistressy voice. A voice that’s far older than she is. And beautiful skin. White as snow and faultless. Hypoallergenic soap and cold cream, he thinks. None of your modern cosmetic products. You only get that beautiful English Rose complexion from cold cream. Lovely skin. The sort of skin you want to touch, because you know it’s not often been touched before.
‘No, no,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry. There was no need for him to go all Dawkins on you like that. Totally unnecessary.’
He manages to collect the leaflets together, taps them back into shape. Yes, they’re Christian leaflets. They have the name of the local evangelical church across the bottom. He occasionally sees them coming out of their barn-like building on a Sunday, pink-faced and pleased with themselves, the men in grey suits and V-necked sweaters, the woman dressed almost exactly as this one is now. He holds them out to her and she takes them with a grateful, bashful smile. ‘You have to expect that sort of thing,’ she says. ‘Some people just don’t want
to hear the Word.’
‘What “word” is that?’ he asks, though he knows, and he sees hope spring into her eyes. She’s clearly not been having much luck today, judging from the quantity of leaflets she still has left.
‘I’m spreading the Word,’ she says, emphasising the Word as though it’s significant for its very existence, ‘about our church.’
Thomas feigns interested surprise. ‘A church? Well!’
‘I don’t suppose… do you have a church already?’
He can feel little prickles of excitement under his clothes. Such beautiful skin. If I had her alone, I could touch it. ‘Well, I…’
‘I don’t suppose you even live around here,’ she says, and looks disconsolate. It clearly doesn’t occur to her that anyone who doesn’t tell her to piss off might not be interested in God.
‘Oh, no! No, I’m just… it’s funny I should bump into you,’ he says. ‘I’ve only just moved into the area, and…’
‘Oh! Where from?’
He thinks fast. The first name that comes into his mind pops out. ‘Colindale.’
‘Colindale! That’s a long way!’
And I’ve never been there. That’s why I picked it. No one from Northbourne has been to Colindale. It’s at the far end of the Northern Line, and God knows the Northern Line’s a hike from here.
‘Yes. Yes, it is.’
Her skin is so pale it’s almost translucent. It’s as though she’s never been out in the sun before. I can almost see the blood beneath your skin, he thinks. I can almost see your arteries.
‘You must be a bit…’
‘Yes, it’s not… anyway, I’ve not found a church yet…’