The Nick of Time

by Francis King

  When he had restored the receiver to its cradle, Adrian stood looking down at it. Self-protective, as always, he thought. You could not bear to suffer with him, even briefly and at secondhand, on that terrible Calvary of his. You cannot even bear to buy a plane ticket, which will cost you no more than a dinner party at your club, and suffer for an hour or so in a church and by a graveside.

  But I am suffering, I am suffering – here, now!

  At that he went over to the sofa and, like a distraught child, threw himself on to it, sobbing and beating with his fists at a cushion, as tears gushed out of his eyes and began to blur his glasses. Pull yourself together. You knew that this was coming. Inevitable. You said your real goodbye to him a long time ago.

  Finally, he did manage to pull himself together. He got off the sofa, removed the glasses and wiped them on a handkerchief. Then he pressed the handkerchief against eyeballs that, from his brief explosion of grief, felt as raw as his throat. No, he would not read the letters. He would put them through the shredder at his office, shredding to no more than jumbled tatters all that he and Siegfried had shared. But first he must write that cheque. Did the London Lighthouse still exist? No, better than that, he would send the cheque to the Kobler Wing of Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. He wrote five hundred pounds and then tore up that cheque and began to write a new one. This time he wrote two hundred pounds.

  Oh, Lord! Mehmet would be here in less than half-an-hour. He pushed the cheque into a drawer. He would write the accompanying letter and post it tomorrow. Now he must get out of his sticky shirt and suffocating tie into something cooler.

  ‘How are you?’ Mehmet asked, in that tone that made it clear that he did not really care a damn how Adrian was.

  ‘OK. I suppose.’ Anyone more sensitive or more concerned about Adrian’s well-being would have known that he was far from OK. His voice was as colourless as his face; his eyes were red at the rims and his cheekbones were glistening as though still damp from the violent tears of an hour ago. ‘The truth is I have a bad headache.’ He had been so much looking forward to sex with Mehmet, and now had no desire for it. He thought in wry self-castigation: ‘ I’m making the excuse of every wife resisting the excessive demands – as it used to be put – of her husband. Except that in this case the husband is so far from making any sort of demands that he is totally indifferent.’

  Over dinner at Kensington Place – Mehmet’s favourite restaurant, since he was always excitedly spotting people whom he had seen on television or in the Sun – Adrian found that the effort of sustaining even the most banal of conversations was almost beyond him. He felt as if had just finished a day-long walk or had just stepped off a plane after a journey tourist class all the way from New Zealand. But Mehmet, eating with gusto, noticed nothing.

  From time to time, Adrian examined him surreptitiously. The white poplin shirt looked new and so did the tie that, when Mehmet turned his head to ask the waiter for something, showed a Nino Ricci label. Adrian had never before seen that suit, with its wide lapels and pinched-in waist, rather vulgar he thought and clearly off-the-peg, but expensive nonetheless. Briefly he was transfixed by first a shaft of jealousy (has he found another lover?) and then, even more painful, by one of suspicion. Could that two grand have been spent not on the passport that had turned out to be dud, but, in part at least, on this resplendent wardrobe?

  As they left the restaurant, Adrian put a hand to his forehead in a theatrical gesture and said: ‘This head is killing me. I really think I’ll have to get home to two aspirins and a lie-down.’

  He had expected some sign of disappointment and some word of protest from Mehmet; but instead there was merely a shrug of the shoulders and ‘ OK. I go home.’ Once again Adrian wondered whether there might not be someone else. There might even be a woman.

  ‘I tell you what. Why don’t we drop into the Elephants’ Graveyard for a nightcap?’ When Mehmet pulled a face at that, Adrian said: ‘A sentimental journey.’ Mehmet then frowned in puzzlement. ‘Have you forgotten that that’s where first we met?’ Adrian reminded him sharply. Really he had no desire to go back to the place but, having been in a hurry to get rid of Mehmet in order to luxuriate in his grief and guilt over Siegfried’s death, he now wished to delay their parting, certain that Mehmet was about to meet someone else and determined to stop him.

  When they were seated in a corner of the pub, Mehmet looked around him and said: ‘Terrible place. These are rubbish people. I hate them.’

  Adrian had often felt the same. But now he was riled. ‘How can you say that? You know nothing about any of them.’

  ‘I know what they are.’

  When Mehmet went off to the lavatory, Adrian suddenly remembered the question that Igor had told him to put. At the time, he had said crossly ‘ Oh, I can’t possibly ask him that’; but now he wanted to do so. For the first time, instead of being exhilarated by Mehmet’s presence, he felt irritated, even resentful.

  Mehmet was followed out by the man whom the regulars called ‘The Colonel’. The Colonel said something and Mehmet laughed and patted him on a shoulder. Adrian wondered briefly if it was the Colonel who had paid for the new clothes; but that seemed unlikely, since he was so notorious for cadging drinks that even the barmen joked about it.

  ‘Mehmet – I was wondering, my dear.’ He sucked in his breath and then exhaled it heavily – something he always did when he was, as now, nervous.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘That passport.’

  ‘Passport?’

  Surely he must know what he was talking about? It was ludicrous to pretend otherwise.

  ‘The one from that creature in the Home Office. The dud one. Do you think I might see it?’

  ‘Why you want see it?’

  Adrian could already foresee trouble. But he pushed on. ‘ I’d like just to check on that date – that 1988. Perhaps you and your friend have got it wrong.’

  ‘How we get date wrong? What you mean?’

  ‘Well – perhaps you misread it. I’d – I’d like to check.’

  Suddenly Mehmet’s face was contorted with rage. ‘You no believe me?’

  ‘It is not a question of believing or not. I just wonder whether perhaps …’ He looked beseechingly at Mehmet. ‘I’d like to check,’ he repeated.

  ‘What this check?’ Mehmet had so much raised his voice that drinkers all around were staring at them. Someone tittered. A voice fluted ‘What a tantrum!’ ‘What you mean?’ Mehmet demanded. ‘No, you no check! You mind own bloody business!’

  More drinkers, farther away from them, were now also staring.

  Adrian’s temper flared skyward. ‘It is my business. Two grand is my business. It bloody well is my business.’

  ‘I give you back your money. I get work permit, I get work, I give you back money. You bad man.’

  ‘What do you mean? What are you talking about? Bad man! After all I’ve done for you. You’ve been damned lucky. And you’ve taken me for a ride. Your landlord never offered to help you, and his friend in the Home Office never existed. There was no passport. Yes, you’ve taken me for a ride.’

  Adrian now rose to his feet, heart thumping, preparatory to quitting the pub. There were familiar faces among the onlookers. Some knew his name, some even knew his business. In the weeks ahead everyone would be gossiping about this all too public row.

  Mehmet leapt to his feet. For a terrifying moment, Adrian thought that he was about to assault him. ‘ What this ride? You mean ride to flat to have sex with you? You mean ride to country to have sex? You horrible man. Pig!’ Adrian had travelled in the Muslim world on business; he knew the insulting force of the word. ‘Do you think I enjoy sex with you? Yes? You think I like sex with pig? You fat, you bald, you ugly, ugly, ugly. You sweat, sweat, sweat, and all time smell.’

  Adrian could now hear the titters rising all around him, interspersed with the Colonel’s booming laughter. He wished that Mehmet were not so much taller than he was. To answer him, he had to tilt bac
k his head, and that made him feel so much more ineffectual. In an attempt at withering dignity, he said: ‘I rather think you’ll regret speaking to me like that. Yes, I rather think you will. I’ll pay you out for this. This isn’t the last of the matter. Not by a long chalk. You ought to realize how vulnerable you are. Yes. You ought to take more care.’

  That seemed to have gone home. ‘ What you mean?’

  ‘Wait and see. Just wait and see. I’m going to see that you get your comeuppance. I’m going to punish you for this. Just wait!’

  Chapter Nineteen

  Drat that bird! What did it think it was doing, at this hour of the night or morning? It was still so dark that, from her bed, her dressing gown, thrown over the chair, looked as if it were the menacing shape of someone lolling there.

  Meg decided that the bird must be a nightingale, and so, along with her exasperation, there were also feelings of marvel and self-congratulation. Fancy a nightingale singing out there in what passed for the garden of this house – the grass waist-high after heavy rain followed by a weekend of scorchers, and the rusty or mouldering detritus of urban living dotted everywhere about it. In fact, the bird was a thrush – as Eric, who, as a young boy wandering the Rainham marshes, had first become interested in birds, would have been able to tell her.

  She lay on her side, hand under cheek, and listened. The song, bubbling up effortlessly and then abruptly stanched, only to bubble up again, soon ceased to exasperate her and instead began to fill her with a placid, not unpleasant melancholy. The little fellow was singing his heart out for her alone, she thought. Everyone else was probably asleep. Certainly Mehmet was, snoring away as a ground-bass to the thrush’s coloratura.

  Eventually, she got up and, with the aid of her stick, tottered down the corridor to the lavatory. No water came when she tried to flush the bowl. That bloody ballcock must again be stuck. She would have to ask Mehmet to get up on the stepladder and see to it for her. During the remission, she would have got up herself, but now it would be all that her life was worth to try that caper.

  Back in her bedroom, she lifted a corner of the curtain and, craning her neck, saw that the dawn was already breaking. A few pink scratches were darkening to red across the sky; the canyon of the street stretched a greenish grey below it. Occasional trucks were already thundering past on their way northwards. It would be another scorcher, she could feel it already.

  She went over to her wardrobe and from the back of it, hidden under a pile of shoes most of them now never worn, pulled out a Safeway’s plastic bag. It was there that she kept her stash. A few weeks before she had read a piece in the Mail – or was it the Standard? – about doctors calling for pot to be legalized for sufferers from MS. She had shown the article to Mehmet that same evening, when he had returned from one of his mysterious errands, and he had said ‘Why no give it try, Mamma?’

  ‘The idea of it! It’s illegal. And where would I get it? I can’t see those specialists prescribing it for me, not if it’s illegal, not on your life!’

  ‘Mehmet find some.’ He had smiled and patted her hand.

  Two days later, he had triumphantly produced it for her. She had been grateful to him, of course, for the trouble and the risk, but she had also been dubious. ‘ Oh, I don’t know if it’s really such a good idea.’ But he had insisted, rolling her a joint, and then showing her how to inhale it – ‘ No hurry, Mamma! Slow, slow, slow!’ Ten minutes of the joint had been miraculous, at once allaying those terrible puppet-on-a-string spasms and gently untying the knots in her legs, arms and hands. ‘When Mamma near end of this, tell Mehmet. No problem.’

  From time to time, she would still ask him if he was sure that it was all right for her to smoke the stuff, and he would then laugh and tell her that almost everyone in the country at some time or other had smoked it. Young people constantly did. Now she sat down on the chair by the window, the stash on the table before here, and laboriously – ‘these might be fish fingers for all the use they are to me these days’, she had complained to Sylvia, holding up her hands, at their last meeting – rolled the joint. Then, no less clumsily, she lit it with the throw-away lighter that Mehmet had found on the top of a 19 bus and had given to her. She inhaled deeply, as he had shown her how to do. The bird was still singing, the sky (she had tugged the curtains fully back) was awash with a pearly light. She felt an extraordinary, wide, vacant peace within her. Again she inhaled.

  Her eyes were closed and she was – as she later told Sylvia, though of course she did not mention the reefer to her – ‘ miles and miles away, in another world’ when she heard the sound of a vehicle drawing up outside the house, of its doors opening and slamming, and then of people hurrying up the steps. A woman’s voice said: ‘OK, Jack. Be with you in a mo,’ and a man’s ‘I almost forgot the file.’ Then the bell rang, not once but a number of times.

  She staggered to her feet and, head twisted sideways, peered out of the already open window. She could just see the three figures, two male and one female. One of the men, so young-looking that he might have been a schoolboy, and the woman, red-faced and buxom, were in police uniform; the other man, who was stooped and balding, with cavernous cheeks above a neat pepper-and-salt goatee, was in plain clothes, a file tucked under his arm. Meg knew at once what they were about.

  Frantically, she stubbed out the pinched end of the reefer in an ashtray and then hurried, ashtray in hand and all but falling over more than once, into the lavatory, where she tried to flush the contents down the bowl. Oh, bugger it! Of course that ballcock thing was stuck! She hurried back into the bedroom and threw the stash back into the cupboard. Then she stooped and, with a huge effort, buried it under some shoes. The bell to the front door went on ringing and ringing. She felt sick with terror. What would they do to her?

  Mehmet, bleary-eyed and wearing only Y-fronts, appeared rubbing with a knuckle at a corner of his mouth. ‘Who ring, ring, ring?’ he demanded angrily.

  ‘Police,’ she whispered, though there was no possibility that they could hear her. ‘Police! They must have come about – you know …’ She pointed to the cupboard.

  ‘Police! What police doing here?’ He was aghast.

  ‘Well, it’s obvious. What are we going to do? I couldn’t get the joint to go down the toilet. That bloody ballcock!’

  ‘Police!’ he repeated. His face was now a greenish colour and there was panic, such as she had never seen before, in his widely-staring eyes. He hurried over to the farther window. She thought for a moment that he was going to jump through it. Then, like a trapped animal, he crossed to the other window and peered out, neck craning, as she had done. She at once joined him beside it.

  ‘Someone has let them in!’ she cried out. Later she discovered that the person who had done so was the neighbour to whom she referred as Lady Muck.

  Now there was repeated ringing at the door of the flat, followed by hammering on it with a fist and shouts of ‘Police! Police! Open up, please! Open the door, please.’

  ‘What are we going to do?’

  Mehmet said nothing. He was standing in the corner farthest from the bedroom door, his hands clasped in front of him and his head leaning back, eyes half closed.

  ‘I’d better open.’

  ‘No. No!’ He opened his eyes wide now, as though waking from a nightmare.

  Then she heard a harsh, loud male voice: ‘If you don’t open this door, we’ll have to break it down.’

  ‘All right, all right!’ Meg called. ‘I’m coming.’ Suddenly, she did not know how, she had acquired a totally unexpected calm and strength. She went out into the hall of the flat, not in the least staggering as she had done previously on her way to the bathroom, and walked unerringly down it. She stooped, with none of the usual feeling that she was in imminent danger of toppling over, and drew back a bolt. She straightened, then once more stooped and drew back the other. Then she unlocked the door and pulled it open. ‘What’s all this? What’s going on?’

  At that moment, to h
er horror, she became aware that the door to the flat opposite hers was open and that the black faces of Blossom, her husband and her husband’s mother, were crowded round it. Immediately after that she also became aware that a number of people were crushed together on the stairs behind her, some in dressing gowns, some merely in pyjamas or nightdresses, and the porter, Mr Bagley, in a raincoat buttoned up to his chin, his legs bare beneath it. Conspicuous both because of her height and because she was standing on the topmost step of all, was Lady Muck in a pale pink kimono, her hair in curlers.

  ‘Sorry to disturb you, madam.’ It was the middle-aged, balding man, in plain clothes, who spoke. ‘ We have reason to believe that a Mr Mehmet’ – he raised the piece of paper that he was holding in one hand and squinted down at it – ‘Mehmet Ahmeti is living here. Is that right?’

  She thought of lying but then decided that that would be no use. There were all those people, the three in the flat opposite, the others crowding the stairs, to contradict her. She nodded. ‘ What do you want with him?’ But she knew that it could only be for supplying drugs. Would they also arrest her as a user?

  ‘We wish to talk about something with him. Is he in residence at the present?’

  ‘I – I can’t be sure. I went to bed early, and I was asleep when you started all that ringing and banging.’ If Mehmet had decided to jump out of the window into the garden, she wanted to give him all the time possible to make his getaway.

  ‘Perhaps you would be good enough to look, madam. Or we can look for ourselves, if you prefer it.’

  Meg almost asked whether they had a search warrant. But she did not wish to antagonize them, and so, instead, she called, ‘Mehmet! Mehmet! The police are here. They want to see you.’