‘Don’t be an arse-creeper, Reynolds,’ he said as he rolled up his shirtsleeves and stomped on his cigarette.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Reynolds, and followed him back across the road.
‘SPARE CHANGE? … SPARE change?’
The homeless man lived against the buckled wall of the old stone archway between the shops that led to the tiny Tivoli cinema.
He was there all day, whatever the weather, sat on a square of cardboard under a poster for this week’s Hollywood blockbuster, with his legs encased in a sleeping bag like a big blue caterpillar.
‘Spare change?’
He repeated the words every time feet passed him. Next to him was an old plastic ice-cream tub for money. Jack had seen him take the good coins out, to make people feel sorry for him. To make them give him more money.
More free money.
‘Spare change?’
People walked past.
‘Spare change?’
Jack walked past. He kicked the tub so hard that it skittered noisily off the walls of the archway, while the coppers rolled and tinkled across the pavement. The man shrunk from him, shoulders hunched, a protective arm raised at the side of his head.
‘Oi!’ somebody yelled. ‘None of that here!’
An ancient farmer in market-day tweeds. Jack ignored him.
‘Get a fucking job!’ he threw over his shoulder as he headed for home.
From the outside, you couldn’t tell that the house had died. From the outside, it was as neat and normal as a house could be that was squeezed into the middle of a short terrace next to a busy road.
The narrow strip of grass outside the door was always mown. A good lawn was the first line of defence. People saw the outside of the house being cared for and assumed that everything inside was cared for too.
The lawnmower was the best thing Jack had ever stolen. He’d got it from a garage that was bigger than their whole house up near Blundell’s School, and had walked it home through the streets with a noisy rattle – but without any excuse as to why he had it, or where he might be going. So every time a car or a person had approached, he’d simply let go of the lawnmower and walked on without it.
What you doing with that mower, mate?
Not mine, mate. Just standing there when I come past.
But nobody had stopped him.
Nobody ever did.
He had nicked a litre of black gloss paint from HomeFayre and painted the front door.
He washed the windows.
He weeded the path.
He mowed the lawn.
And – like magic – people seemed to forget they were there.
But inside …
The door got stuck halfway, and Jack had to edge around it.
‘Shit.’
There was a stack of newspapers behind the door. It wasn’t big, but that wasn’t the point. The hallway had to be kept clear. Had to. In case of visitors. It rarely happened, but if it did, everything must look … normal.
‘Joy!’ he shouted. ‘Joy!’
He kicked the stack angrily, then bent and hoisted it awkwardly into his arms –
Like Merry
– and walked into the living room.
After the house had died, it had been buried – slowly but relentlessly – under a mountain of newspapers.
All the papers, every day. His father had started them and they had never stopped. Over the years, they had been stacked into wavering walls that formed haphazard passageways as high as Jack’s head and barely wide enough to walk through. They hid the real walls, blocked light from the windows and sucked it from the overhead bulbs so that it never found the floor – and mice and spiders made their homes there in the darkness.
Jack knew it was Joy, working at night when he was out. Moving walls and shifting stacks to maintain some crazy notion of home and family. Their mother was in the papers, and their father would not throw them out, and so Joy wouldn’t throw them out. And so they kept coming. Forty pounds a week they cost him! Jack used to sneak them out of the house and dump them in the recycling bins outside Tesco, but one time Joy had seen him doing it and had chased him down the street, making a scene.
The place smelled of mould and must and mouse piss. Jack was so used to it that he barely noticed it any more except on the warmest of summer days, when the air outside was so fresh that coming indoors made him cough.
He had disconnected the gas fire, and it had disappeared overnight. There was little visible furniture in the house, although he knew it was still there, somewhere underneath. The only place to sit in the sitting room now was one cushion of the sofa, which Merry and Jack tried to keep clear by taking it in turns to sit there, hemmed in by news, so that Joy couldn’t fill it with more.
Jack couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen the television.
Upstairs, the bath and his bed were thick with mountains of news, and Merry slept in a nest she’d made of shredded paper, like a hamster.
Sometimes a clearing mysteriously appeared – in front of a window, or at the top of the stairs – but there never seemed to be any reason for it, and a day or a week later it would shrink and close and become another wall or a passageway, and be consigned to uncertain memory. For a long time there had been a roundel of blue carpet in Joy’s room where they had once played cards, but even that had finally turned from a space into a pillar of papers.
Jack turned on the living-room light but it made little difference except to illuminate the headlines on the very tops of the piles.
He dumped the stack of papers on the head-high wall that bisected the lounge and stole the daylight. ‘There’s papers in the hallway again, Joy. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’
There was the smallest sound behind the wall. It could have been a mouse. There were enough of them. Jack had got traps and sometimes one screamed in the night.
It wasn’t a mouse though.
He edged through the corridor to the kitchen. To the table – the original source of the river of news that had flooded this room too, reducing it to a canyon between the piles on the groaning table and the cubbyholes containing the sink, the fridge, the washing machine and the cooker. When the papers had started to slide on to the hotplates Jack had taken the fuse out of the switch between meals so that nobody could burn the house down. Eventually he’d just left it out, and stolen a microwave instead, which now sat on the stove.
The paper canyon in the kitchen ended at the half-glazed back door, making the whole house into a dingy alimentary canal.
Merry had cleared one end of a bench and was eating cornflakes from a bowl in her lap, with her bare feet resting on the gnarled shell of a large tortoise.
Merry had grown into a wan, pinched-looking child, with her brother’s pale eyes and hair the colour of smog. She wore Hello Kitty pyjamas as faded as she was and two sizes too small, so that her pale shins stuck out like sticks.
‘Hi,’ she said.
Jack said nothing. He put the spaghetti in the cupboard and the apples in the fridge, then checked through the stacks of newspapers, looking at the dates. He found a pile he wanted and sat cross-legged on the floor, pulling the first one into his lap.
Merry ate her cornflakes while he turned the pages. They were brittle at the edges – yellow and foxed – and every page he turned sounded like the wings of small bugs whirring through the hot summer air …
Small bugs
Small bugs
Next to his ear, Merry’s spoon clinked against her bowl.
‘Could you be a bit more noisy?’
She said nothing, just clinked and clinked until the cornflakes were gone, and then drank the milk from the bowl. There was nowhere to set it down because the table was piled almost to the ceiling with newspapers, so she just held it in her lap – her foot swinging gently beside Jack’s arm.
‘Did you buy me a book?’
‘I got you some clothes.’
Merry sighed. She was five, but a master of the sigh.
&nb
sp; Jack scowled up at her. ‘What?’
Merry rolled her eyes.
‘Read one of your other books.’
‘I read them all.’
‘Read them again.’
‘I read them all again. I read them loads.’
She had, he knew. Merry was a demon for books. A home-schooling inspector had once called her ‘gifted’ and been so dazzled by her that he hadn’t noticed Jack’s spelling or Joy’s clumsy maths.
Jack waved a brief arm around the room. ‘Read the papers.’
Merry pulled a face. ‘I read them all the time. I want to read a real story.’
‘I’ll get you a book tomorrow.’
‘What one?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Why don’t you know?’
‘I just don’t.’
‘Can you get me one with vampires?’
‘Jesus, Merry! I don’t know!’
Jack went back to the papers. Back to the small bugs. Back to the hard shoulder. He could almost feel the heat through his shoes …
‘What you looking for?’
‘Stuff.’
‘What stuff?’
‘Stuff about Mum.’
‘But what stuff?’
‘Stuff you’re too young to remember.’
Merry frowned and pursed her lips. Then she tapped the tortoise with her toe and said, ‘Donald’s older than anyone. He would remember.’
Jack snorted. Then hissed with annoyance. Someone had cut a story out of the page, leaving only an L-shaped hole.
He went on to the next paper.
Then the next.
And the next.
There were more square holes than stories about his mother.
‘There’s a new old lady in Mrs Coyle’s house,’ said Merry. ‘She’s got glasses and a whirly bench.’
Jack looked at her sharply. ‘Did you talk to her?’
‘No.’
‘You know what to say.’
‘I’m not stupid,’ said Merry.
Jack turned a page and saw his mother’s name.
Eileen.
DAD’S PLEA TO MUM-TO-BE EILEEN
Angry embers spat and popped inside him. The papers always called her ‘mum-to-be’. But she was a mum-who-already-was.
Everyone had forgotten him and Joy and Merry.
He scanned the story. There was nothing in it he didn’t know. There was a photo of his mother, small and blurry, blonde hair, blue eyes. Smiling.
Alone.
Jack hated that photo but it was the only one the papers ever seemed to use, even though he remembered his father handing over a whole bundle of family photos to the police. Photos he’d never seen again. Photos of them riding bicycles and standing in paddling pools and on days out to places he couldn’t even remember now.
But there had been one of them all together … The sea beyond them and their hair in their eyes – blown there by the North Devon wind, where they’d once rented a tumbledown cottage near a haunted house that hung off a cliff …
For a little while the photo had been on the fridge, and then it had been replaced – by a gas bill or a school report or one of Joy’s drawings of a cat.
Something.
And now it was lost, and he wished he could find it. He thought one of the papers must have used that photo instead of this nasty little one of his mother, all alone …
Merry leaned a bony elbow on his shoulder and he winced.
‘I remember Mummy.’
‘No you don’t.’ He twisted away from her.
‘I do,’ she insisted. ‘She looked just like that.’
‘What? Small and blurry?’
‘Yes,’ said Merry defiantly.
Jack let it go. Merry didn’t remember their mother. Not the way he did. And Joy, perhaps, although Joy was nuts, so it was hard to know what was left inside her head.
The other photo with the story showed his father behind a long table and a microphone.
Crying, of course.
He closed the paper angrily and pulled a different copy on to his lap.
Merry put her little feet on his back and wiggled her toes. ‘I’m giving you a massage.’
He turned the pages.
Small bugs
Small bugs
‘When I grow up I’m going to be a massager.’
Jack said nothing, and after a few moments Merry sighed and slid off the bench and stood on a pile of papers so she could rinse out her bowl and her spoon in the sink, then put them on another pile to dry.
The paltry light in the kitchen dimmed further as she pressed her forehead against the back door.
‘Can I go outside?’
Small bugs
‘Jack?’
‘What?’
‘Can I go in the garden?’
‘What time is it?’
Merry squinted at her watch. It was a child’s old Timex, with red markings for ‘past’ and blue for ‘to’ times.
‘Twenty past ten.’
‘Then, no.’
‘Why?’
‘You know why.’
Merry sighed on to the glass and wrote her name in her breath.
‘Well, what can I do?’
Silence.
‘What can I do?’
‘You can get out of the bloody light.’
Merry leaned to one side and said, ‘Keep your hair on!’ She must have read that in some book, and it obviously amused her because she was using it all the time now.
‘I’m going to pick the lock,’ she announced, and pushed a small finger into the empty keyhole and rattled the handle, but Jack looked up at her with such menace that she let go as if it were hot, and stepped away from the door and edged past him and sat down again.
She pulled a random newspaper from a pile.
‘SHRIMPMAN WAS “ANGEL OF DEATH”,’ she read loudly. ‘What’s a shrimpman? Is it like a fisherman?’
‘Shipman,’ said Jack, and stood up.
‘A sailor?’
‘It’s his name. He’s a doctor who killed a bunch of old people.’
‘Why?’
‘Crazy, I suppose.’
Merry studied the photo of the bearded, bespectacled man in a zip-up cardigan.
‘He doesn’t look crazy,’ she said.
‘Nobody does,’ said Jack.
‘Then how can you tell?’
‘You can’t,’ he said.
There was a long, troubled silence.
‘But you can tell vampires though,’ Merry finally said. ‘Because of the teeth.’
‘Yeah,’ shrugged Jack. ‘But only when they smile.’
‘WHAT’S WRONG WITH you?’
They were on a bench by the canal, and Smooth Louis Bridge was shaving his legs.
Jack jiggled the baby buggy and squinted angrily into the sun. ‘Nothing.’
‘Face like fourpence,’ said Louis, running the knife up his shin.
Smooth Louis was nearly hairless. What he couldn’t shave, he plucked – openly and unashamedly. He had short black hair on his head, but no brows or discernible stubble, and always carried a pair of small pink tweezers with him, the way other young men carried cash and condoms.
He wore cargo shorts even in the depth of winter, for access to his knees, and his hands were rarely still. His long fingers played a constant tune on his own body. He ran them in an unconscious circuit along his brow, his jaw, across his shoulder and up his arm, down his thigh, his knee, his shin, and back to his face.
Checking for bristles.
If he found one he’d pluck it – there and then, without breaking conversational stride.
‘Whatever,’ he said. ‘What do you want?’
‘One fifty?’
Louis sucked air through his teeth like a bad plumber over a broken boiler.
Jack ignored it. It was habit, that was all. One fifty was a fair price, and Louis was a fair bloke. He wasn’t worried.
Tiverton was not a metropolis but it was big enough
to sustain a reasonable subclass of petty thieves and burglars, and two fulltime fences – Louis Bridge and his estranged father, Mr Bridge.
Although he was only twenty-three, Louis had inherited the family business two years before, after his mother was tragically incarcerated.
BRIDGE FENCING.
That was the sign outside the timber yard. It made all the boys laugh, but Bridge Fencing was legal – and profitable enough to raise no suspicions if a person were careful. And Louis Bridge was very, very careful. He had been to prison once, in his old burgling days, and had sworn never to go again. ‘You know what this is?’ he would say, tapping the side of his own nose. ‘Cleanest nose in the West Country.’
It wasn’t true.
Louis wasn’t the oldest sibling of five, but he was far and away the most crooked. On a sliding crooked scale, it was Louis, Shawn, Tammy, Victor, Calvin. Louis was sharp and ambitious, and his mother had left him in charge of both fencing operations because Victor was too lazy, Tammy too crazy and Shawn too fond of heroin.
Louis’s twin brother Calvin was the white sheep of the family. At nineteen he had run away and joined the police. It made things awkward between them, of course, but Louis still loved his brother and each turned a blind eye to the other’s unfortunate career choices, and once a year they went camping together on Exmoor.
However, Mr Bridge wouldn’t speak to Louis because of it. He already didn’t speak to Calvin for betraying the family – even though he himself had abandoned the whole lot of them when they were children and set up house with another woman.
The Bridge family was full of cock-eyed principles and shifting alliances.
The baby stirred as if he might wake, and Jack jiggled the buggy some more.
The baby wasn’t his. It was Louis’s baby.
Baz. The Bazster. Bazman. Baz Baby Bunting.
All Louis’s boys took their turn looking after Baz. If you weren’t ready to do that, you weren’t ready to do business with Louis.
Jack didn’t mind. Baz was no bother, except you had to remember not to swear around him. Much of the time he was in the buggy, and if he wasn’t, Louis clipped an extendable dog-lead to a belt-loop on his tiny jeans, which made babysitting not unlike flying a chubby kite – reeling him in for orange squash, or yanking him off a collision course with drowning or dog poo.
Snap_‘The best crime novel I’ve read in a very long time’ Val McDermid Page 5