Kid Alone

by Simon Mason

  It was ridiculously hard to pull his eyes away from hers. He became nonchalant. It seemed a way of keeping things normal. He was aware too of Alex watching him.

  “I need someone who speaks Polish to talk to Gimpel’s grandparents.” Groping in his pocket for a moment, he brought out a piece of scribbled-on paper and handed it, nonchalantly, to Zuzana.

  “What’s this?”

  “List of questions for you to ask them.”

  “You don’t think I’m capable of asking my own questions?”

  “Those are the questions I need answers to.”

  “Are they sensible questions?”

  “They’re the right questions. After you ask them, you can ask your own if you like.”

  “Very kind. Is there anything else you want me to do?”

  “Yeah. Write down the answers so you don’t forget them.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yeah. Let me know what time you’re going to see them. And tell them you’d like to go to the funeral and bring one or two of Pyotor’s friends.”

  “Of course. Anything particular you’d like me to wear?”

  Garvie carefully kept his eyes off what she was wearing. She was smiling at him. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Alex grinning too. “Listen, I do my own thing. This is the help I need. You can say yes, or you can say no. Up to you. I’m assuming, by the way, your Polish is up to it. Otherwise we can forget the whole thing.”

  She had a smile he couldn’t pull himself away from. He was aware of his nonchalance fraying at the edges. Keeping her eyes fixed on his, she said slowly, “Jesteś palantem i nie wiem dlaczego tracę na Ciebie czas.”

  Yes-tesh pal-an-tem nee-eh vem de la jego … The words made a caressing sound in his head like the sliding of water over stones. “Fine,” he said. “You don’t even have to tell me what it means.”

  “It means You are a dickhead and I don’t know why I’m wasting my time on you.”

  Alex guffawed.

  Garvie dropped his cigarette butt and ground it out.

  “You have not told me yet why you do this.”

  “No reason.”

  “Really?”

  “My own amusement.”

  “Oh yes. Doing your own thing. But why are you interested in Pyotor?”

  He shrugged.

  She looked at him with those cool, dark eyes.

  “There’s not much else going on at the moment,” he added.

  “Only exams.”

  “I just want to find out what happened.”

  “Why?”

  “’Cause the police are too stupid to find out.”

  “And you will?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Because you are so clever?”

  “That’s it.”

  None of this was what he wanted to say, but he realized that only after he had said it.

  Zuzana said, “But you need my help. Not so clever, then.” She was looking at him still with those big, amused eyes, and with an effort he glanced away again.

  “He’s clever,” Alex told her. “Photographic memory, the whole bit. Just a bit weird. You get used to him.”

  “Good-looking too,” Zuzana said slyly. “Is that why he is so cocky?”

  Alex laughed. “Garvie? Garvie never gets the girl.”

  “But I don’t think much of his reasons for getting involved in all this. Perhaps I won’t help him after all.”

  Garvie said, “Look, I don’t need reasons and neither do you. Reasons don’t matter. Facts matter. Gimpel got shot. His violin is missing. His grandparents speak Polish. That’s what I work with.”

  She looked at him evenly.

  “Okay, you don’t have reasons,” she said at last. “But I do.”

  He hesitated. “What do you mean?”

  “I knew Pyotor.”

  Now he stopped a full beat before answering. “You knew Gimpel? I didn’t know that.”

  “You didn’t ask.”

  He glanced at Alex. “Information I had was, you’d only just come here. How did you know him?”

  “I came here January. Since then I go to the youth club Juwenalia meetings every week. I knew Pyotor, I know Bogdana and Zbigniew.” She was no longer smiling. “So I will help you, for their sake. And also because you obviously need it.”

  Garvie looked all around for something to rest his eyes on, and eventually found his watch. “All right, then. Got to go, got an exam.”

  She looked at her own watch. “It will have started by now, I think.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You didn’t forget, did you? Not with your photographic memory.”

  “I tend not to need the whole time.”

  “Of course. You’re too clever.”

  To Garvie’s relief his phone rang, and he turned and began to walk away up the drive.

  “Felix, mate. Yeah. Got a small job for you … Nah, simple for a boy of your abilities … Yeah, that’s the place … No, I’m good. I’ll ride with Abdul.”

  Zuzana and Alex watched him go.

  Alex said to her, “I know what you’re thinking, babe. He’s strange, right? But all the time I was homeless, he was the only one who came by. Serious. He’s got my back.”

  She frowned. “Why’s he interested in Pyotor? It doesn’t make sense. Why does he want to find out all these things? What is he really up to?”

  Alex shook his head. “It’s just, like, his thing. Working stuff out. It’s not Pyotor he’s interested in. He doesn’t really do people, not like that.” He looked at his watch and down the lane. “Got to go, babe, before they spot me and stick me in a lesson.”

  “I thought you had a school day today.”

  “Can’t.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Nowhere special. Just stuff I’ve got to do.”

  “Alex!”

  “Nothing like that. I told you. All that’s done with. I’ll give you a ding when I’m done.”

  Zuzana anxiously watched him walk away. When he had disappeared she began to read the questions Garvie had written down for her. After a while she sighed, shook her head, and began to bite her lip.

  The trip from Five Mile to Strawberry Hill takes only ten minutes. The bus goes from outside Jamal’s, south down Pollard Way, across Town Road into Cobham Road, Strawberry Hill’s main drag, and up the hill past shops and filling stations as far as the tower blocks. There are three towers, so tall they can be seen from anywhere in the city, vast gray Mega Blocks ridged with walkways, sequined with satellite dishes, standing in a concrete pool called The Plain. To the east, toward Limekilns, are the modern maisonettes, cheap boxy houses, and prefabs. Along the tree-lined streets rising to the west are the older brick terraces, now subdivided into flats.

  The Gimpels’ flat was dark and cramped: half a dozen rooms on the second and third floors separated off from the rest of the house, made darker and more cramped by the bulky ornaments and heavy Polish furniture standing stolidly in the gloom like cattle at the end of day. The old woman came in from the kitchen with a glass mug of raspberry tea, and Zuzana waited until she had settled herself in the upright armchair at the side of the fireplace before beginning to talk.

  Location: front room, Flat 3, 25 Strawberry Rise; dark; bitter smell of gas and old carpets.

  Interviewer: Zuzana Schulz: polite, pale, pert.

  Interviewees: Bogdana Gimpel, Zbigniew Gimpel: tired, shabby, sad.

  Translation by Zuzana Schulz.

  ZUZANA SCHULZ: DziekujĘ za zaproszenie.

  BOGDANA GIMPEL: Nie ma za co.

  ZUZANA SCHULZ: Thank you. I won’t ask you how you are. I know.

  ZBIGNIEW GIMPEL: We can’t understand what has happened to us. It seems to get worse and worse. Today we hear that this man, this Magee, is a well-known racist. Polish people in Heeley, where he came from, tell us this. Dana has talked to them.

  BOGDANA GIMPEL: It doesn’t surprise us. Only the police are surprised.

  ZBIGNIEW GIMPEL: Dan
a is very upset about it.

  BOGDANA GIMPEL: This place! For a long time now we are not welcome here. Stanislaw’s shop has been broken into four, five times in the last few months. We get nuisance calls. Notes pushed through the door. Other things too. Stones have been thrown at the house; once they broke a window. Always we tell the police, always they do nothing.

  ZBIGNIEW GIMPEL: It doesn’t stop them coming to ask us more questions about Pyotor.

  BOGDANA GIMPEL: The questions they ask! The fat one with the bald head. And the Pakistani. It’s as if they don’t know how to think. They seem to believe Pyotor brought this on himself.

  ZBIGNIEW GIMPEL: They think he must have done something strange, something abnormal.

  BOGDANA GIMPEL: And now the papers talk about him as if he was a freak.

  ZBIGNIEW GIMPEL: “Aspie Kid,” they are calling him. You must have seen it.

  BOGDANA GIMPEL: What they ought to be talking about is the racist abuse.

  ZUZANA SCHULZ: He had abuse?

  BOGDANA GIMPEL: So much. He was a good Polish boy, everyone knew that. He went to the Catholic church, he celebrated Easter at the Polish Club. Just last week at the Juwenalia parade that was broken up by those, those … [Sound of crying]

  ZBIGNIEW GIMPEL: Hush, hush. It’s all right, Dana. I’m sorry, Zuzana, it is very upsetting for us. [Sighs] Pyotor was harassed, it’s true. With the school orchestra performance coming up, he was staying late for practice every afternoon, and we used to worry about him coming home on his own. Sometimes other boys picked on him. Once he’d been hit in the face, here. [Points at his own face] Slapped. He wouldn’t tell us who had done it.

  BOGDANA GIMPEL: Do you know what boys are like?

  ZUZANA SCHULZ: Yes. Yes, I do.

  BOGDANA GIMPEL: It’s not just the abuse. Of course they played pranks on him. Jokes, that’s what they called them. But they tried to get him to do the sort of stupid things they did themselves. They tried to corrupt him.

  ZBIGNIEW GIMPEL: Dana, let’s not exaggerate. “Corrupt” is too strong.

  BOGDANA GIMPEL: You never saw it like I did. He was a good boy, very trusting, always well-behaved, always told the truth.

  ZBIGNIEW GIMPEL: It’s true. I don’t remember him ever telling a lie.

  BOGDANA GIMPEL: But he had started to change. Just the last few weeks he got into trouble at school. Detention, can you believe it?

  ZBIGNIEW GIMPEL: He was at that age, Dana. He was a teenager.

  BOGDANA GIMPEL: There’s more to it than that. One day he came home and asked me for money. Money! I couldn’t believe it. Ridiculous. What did he want it for? And what next? Getting drunk? Getting into trouble with the police?

  ZUZANA SCHULZ: Did he talk to you about these things? I know boys are so secretive.

  ZBIGNIEW GIMPEL: Pyotor never talked to us much. He had difficulties relating to people.

  BOGDANA GIMPEL: He was just shy. Why do you have to always make out it was an illness?

  ZBIGNIEW GIMPEL: Whatever it was, he didn’t have any friends.

  BOGDANA GIMPEL: But he was happy. Until recently anyway. Until this harassment.

  ZBIGNIEW GIMPEL: Perhaps. Sometimes it was hard to tell if he was happy. In fact … when he was younger it didn’t seem to bother him to be alone. He didn’t mind he had no friends. He used to call himself Pyotor-on-his-own. He liked names that described things properly. But lately I think he had begun to realize it was a sad situation, poor boy.

  ZUZANA SCHULZ: When he was here, at home, with you, what did he like to do? How did he spend his time?

  ZBIGNIEW GIMPEL: He did his homework, of course. He liked the computer, though what exactly he was doing on it I don’t know. Games of some sort. Math he liked. On Tuesdays he had extra math tutoring at school.

  BOGDANA GIMPEL: He worked so hard, at everything. But his greatest love was music. His violin.

  ZBIGNIEW GIMPEL: It’s true. In fact I’d say … well, it doesn’t matter now.

  ZUZANA SCHULZ: What?

  ZBIGNIEW GIMPEL: He loved his violin so much it made him almost anxious. He wouldn’t let it out of his sight. I suppose that’s just the way he was. In fact—

  “What’s that?” At the sound of the crash the old man flinched in his chair and looked about fearfully. His wife glared at him and he closed his mouth.

  “You see?” she said to Zuzana. “Just what we were talking about. This is the sort of thing they do!”

  Her husband nodded grimly. “What was it? A brick or something? Against the back wall upstairs. Did you hear the window go?”

  “Do you think they’ve broken it?”

  “I don’t know, Dana.”

  “Do you think they’re still out there?”

  “I don’t know.” He looked anxious.

  Zuzana said, “It might be nothing. Let me go and check. Wait here.” She went out of the room into the narrow hallway and up the stairs. It was dim and quiet in the stairwell, her footsteps muffled by the thick and densely patterned carpet, and she crept up, listening in the silence, until she reached the landing above, where she found the light switch and went along trying the doors. The first was a bathroom hung with drying underwear, large and sturdy, the second a bedroom crowded with more of the bulky old Polish furniture she had seen downstairs. The third was sealed off with police tape, and she stood there for a moment looking, wondering what sort of things were behind the closed door, clothes that would never be worn again, books that would never be read, games that would never be played. Finally she went across to the landing window and looked out at the street below, gloomy yellow under the streetlights and deserted. If there had been someone down there throwing things up at the house, they had gone now. Everything was silent. She checked the window itself: nothing broken.

  As she went downstairs she took Garvie’s list of questions out of her pocket and scanned it again, frowning. They were too pointed, too insensitive, too strange. How often did he have temper tantrums? Where has he hidden his violin? She pushed the paper back in her pocket and went into the living room, where the two old people were looking at her anxiously.

  “You don’t have to worry,” she said. “I can’t see any damage anywhere. I’m not sure it was anything at all. If there was someone outside, they’ve gone now.”

  They looked at her balefully.

  “Do you mind if maybe I ask you one or two more questions about Pyotor?”

  The old woman put her face into her hands, and her husband put his arm around her, and Zuzana sat back down and waited.

  In Pyotor’s room Garvie and Felix relaxed as they heard Zuzana go back downstairs.

  Felix was examining the window. “It’s these old sashes,” he said. “They can slip, just like that. Very inconvenient. Nearly took my hand off. Still,” he went on cheerfully, “told you we didn’t need to bring a ladder. Amazing how often there’s one just lying around. Soon as I saw that re-roofing job down the road I knew we’d be okay. Shall I start over here, then?”

  Already looking around, Garvie ignored him. The room was small and square and so tidy it gave the impression of being empty. The walls were white, the carpet brown. There was a twin bed with a plain mustard-colored duvet, a wardrobe dulled in patches where the varnish had peeled off, a chair, a small gateleg table with nothing on it but a narrow frame of dust, and half a dozen shelves stacked with rows of folders and game boxes arranged with a sort of intense neatness by size and color.

  It was a room without happiness, without emotion of any kind, it seemed.

  Garvie opened the wardrobe door. One gray jacket, some gray trousers, a few white shirts, gray socks, white pants, black sweaters, two pairs of black shoes.

  “Going to try some of them on, are you?” Felix said. “Tell me if you are. I don’t want to watch.”

  Garvie ignored him. “No patterns,” he said.

  “Only wear patterns these days, do you?”

  “No stripes, no spots, none of those stupid paisley shapes. Same everywhere. Plain
duvet, plain walls, plain carpet. Patterns freaked him out.”

  “Quite a lot of stuff freaked him, I’d say. Makes you wonder what was going on in his head. Looking at all this, makes you think it was just gray in there.” He sniffed. “Good at math, though, eh, Garv? You math champs are robots.”

  Garvie said nothing.

  “Brain like a computer.”

  “He was clever. That’s what we’ve got to remember.”

  “Fair enough. What are we looking for, by the way? Clues, stuff the coppers’ll miss? Gunpowder deposits, notes in invisible ink, cyanide pellets, that sort of nonsense?”

  He was looking at a row of official-looking cardboard packets arranged with typical orderliness along the windowsill. “Cir-ca-din,” he said slowly and tentatively. “Mel-a-tonin, two mg, slow-release tablets. Abil-ify ari-pipra-zole, ten mg. What do you reckon?”

  “I reckon he needed medication.”

  “And they say you’re a genius. I’ll start over here.” Felix drifted toward the bin, grinning. All his life he’d been drawn to bins. They perked him up.

  Garvie went through the shelves. Game boxes for Assassin’s Creed, Alcatraz, World of Warcraft, Haunted House; three red folders marked ABA, EIBI, and TEACCH, all empty, and one blue one marked ORCHESTRA containing a musical score for something called “The Lark Ascending” by Ralph Vaughan Williams, with pencil comments written in the margins at various points, all very neat and totally unintelligible.

  “This is a bit disappointing,” Felix said, peering into the wastepaper basket. “Nothing out of the ordinary here.”

  “What sort of ordinary?”

  “Tissues, apple cores, sweet wrappers.”

  Garvie went over and peered in. He frowned and fished out a sweet in a green-and-yellow wrapper and stood for a long time looking at it.

  “It’s a sweet, Garv. You put it in your mouth and chew it.”

  “Not been unwrapped.”

  Felix gave it another glance. “Yeah, well, you can eat too many of those things, do yourself a mischief.”

  Garvie was sifting through the bin. “There’s a lot of them in here, none of them unwrapped. Don’t you think that’s odd?”