The corridor came to an end in a cramped alcove with a ceiling that Steve could almost touch. A set of narrow steps ran down to the basement as steeply as a ladder.
‘Nearly there,’ the old man muttered, starting down.
Steve followed, his dreamlike lack of anxiety still intact. As they descended, it got darker and warmer. At the bottom, Steve actually bumped into the old man, who had stopped, groping for a switch, and this first physical contact between them shocked him almost as much as the time he had touched Tracy’s arm accidentally on purpose. Then everything went black as the old man switched off the light at the head of the stairs.
‘Bulb’s gone down here,’ he explained.
Oddly, crazily really, Steve remained unafraid, following the old man forward into a darkness that revealed itself, once he grew used to it, as not quite solid. The leakage of light from somewhere up ahead was just sufficient to reveal the outlines of the old man’s figure and the doorways and openings of passages to either side. At last they reached the source of the glimmer, a door standing slightly ajar. Inside, the heat was overpowering. The smells whose tendrils had crept out of the front door were rooted in it, rank and exotic as tropical foliage.
The old man pointed out a large table in the centre of the room. It was draped in a dark red oilskin on which lay a bottle half full of milk, a shiny brown porcelain teapot, a pair of trousers, two chipped mugs with spoons in them, a bag of sugar and a grimy towel. Steve dumped the orange sling on the table and started to unpack the plastic bags of groceries.
‘They didn’t have Fry’s cocoa,’ he said.
‘Never mind,’ the old man said. ‘We’ll just have to make do, somehow.’
Two drying racks suspended on pulleys from the ceiling supported an assortment of shirts, underclothes and bedlinen, which formed a canopy over the centre of the room. An enormous armchair was drawn up before the cast-iron kitchen range which occupied one entire wall. Both walls and woodwork were covered in thick glossy paint of a creamy yellow shade, the floor in a sheet of dull red linoleum, which was starting to crack and blister and break away from its backing in places.
‘And you are?’ the old man demanded abruptly.
Steve unpacked a tin of Spam.
‘What?’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Steve.’
The old man poured tea into the two mugs.
‘Ernest Matthews,’ he said. ‘How do you like it?’
Steve looked round the room. On the wall opposite stood an enormous sideboard in whose nooks and crannies were lodged shirtstuds, a leadless pencil, stamp edging, several keys, a large seashell, a stuffed weasel, overflowing ashtrays, a magnifying glass, a selection of dried-up fountain pens, buttons, endless scraps of paper, drawing pins, pipecleaners, a cut-throat razor, empty jam jars, coins, pieces of bone, and half a hundred things whose name and purpose, if they had either, Steve did not know. Every single object was covered, as if by protective cotton wool, in a thick even layer of dust. The corner opposite the door was occupied by a bed consisting of a metal frame with a wire mesh to support the mattress. The blankets were thrown back to reveal unclean wrinkled sheets. The pillow still bore the imprint of a sleeping head.
Ernest Matthews glanced at him.
‘Eh? Speak up, lad!’ he said sharply. ‘My ears aren’t what they were. How do you like it?’
‘It’s all right.’
He hoped that this, high praise to the stotters, would do.
‘What’s all right?’ the old man asked with a bemused expression.
Steve shrugged.
‘Everything.’
‘Well I’m very pleased to hear it, I’m sure!’ the old man snapped. ‘However, I wasn’t asking about everything, I was asking about the tea. How do you like it? Weak? Strong? With or without? Just a dash? One lump or two?’
After a pause, Steve said he didn’t know.
‘Don’t know!’ Matthews exclaimed, with a laugh that sounded like a crumpled sheet of plastic film unwrapping itself. ‘Well, bless my soul, I’d never thought I’d live to hear a British lad say such a thing.’
He added milk and sugar to both mugs.
‘You are British, I take it?’
‘I can’t stay long,’ Steve replied.
‘Mum and Dad expecting you back, are they? Time for a cup of tea, though. Was there any change from that tenner, by the by?’
Steve laid a handful of coins on the oilcloth. The old man separated fifty pence from the rest.
‘That’s for you. Have a cake and drink your tea before it stews.’
Matthews took a mug of tea and walked over to the armchair by the stove. When he was settled, he unrolled a tobacco pouch of waxed cloth and started to fill a pipe which he dug out of the creases of the chair.
‘You’re dripping all over the lino,’ he remarked to Steve. ‘Haven’t you got a proper coat? You’ll catch your death, you mark my words.’
Steve sat down on one of the straight-backed dining chairs drawn up to the table and started to sip his tea. Meanwhile the old man took a large brass lighter from another crevice of the armchair and produced a flame of impressive dimensions with which he proceeded to scorch the uppermost layer of tobacco in his pipe.
‘Hot in here,’ Steve ventured, to break the silence.
Ernest Matthews nodded.
‘And do you know the beauty of it? They don’t have to come in the house. There’s a coal-hole round the side, drops straight down into a bunker next door to the scullery.’
He turned his attention to his pipe again. Between puffs the smoke rose from the bowl in an enigmatic curl, like a lock of hair. Steve took one of the cakes out of the box and carefully peeled away its silver case, which was pleated like an old lady’s skirt. Matthews opened a door in the stove and prodded the glowing coals with a brass-handled poker.
‘The milkman does eggs and bread and potatoes and butter and cheese,’ he went on, ‘but everything else I’ve had to do without. My legs are not what they were, you see. Fifty pence a week and tea thrown in, with a cake or some biscuits, whatever’s going. What do you say?’
Steve gulped down the rest of his tea and picked the crumbs of the cake off the table with a moistened forefinger.
‘I got to be going,’ he said, standing up.
The way back along the basement passage, up the stairs and along the corridor seemed much shorter. Almost too soon, Steve found himself back in the chilly hallway. Before opening the front door, Matthews knelt down, lifted the flap of the letter-box and looked out for a long time.
‘Can’t be too careful,’ he remarked. ‘Times being what they are.’
Outside it was really cold. Steve told the old man he’d see him the following week and then ran off quickly. His thoughts, as he walked back to Trencham Road, were about money. The change which he had been told to keep the previous week had come to only a few pence in the end, and Steve had spent it on sweets, which he’d eaten on the way home. But if the old man was going to give him fifty pence every week that posed a problem. There was nowhere he could hide the money that the stotters might not look, nothing he could spend it on that they would not see. He didn’t even want to think about what they might do if they found out that he’d been cheating them. The fate of his predecessors on the delivery round had been widely reported in the local media. One of the pensioners had sustained a dislocated hip, the other several fractured ribs. Dave admitted that once he got going he found it hard to stop. So the only course open to Steve really was to hand over the extra money, but it was going to be hard to explain this unexpected 25 per cent increase in the money he got for doing the paper round. He was still trying to think up a suitable story when he came to the main road he had to cross to get home. The traffic was heavy, as usual at this hour. It was while he was standing there, looking for an opening and worrying about what he was going to tell the stotters, that the grinning man appeared for the second time, bearing down on Steve like a demented soldier marchin
g to destruction.
‘Hey!’ he called, his expression mocking and exultant. ‘Hey, do you know what time it is?’
As he spoke, the vicious pent-up laughter that glittered in his eyes and twisted the muscles of his sweating face to breaking-point burst out, mutilating the words almost beyond recognition. He stood there, jerking and twitching all over, staring at the boy with such intensity it seemed he might be about to explode. Steve shook his head. The man’s face screwed itself into a fierce grimace of contemptuous hostility, as if the boy was only pretending not to know, just to spite him. The sarcastic grin became bitterer than ever. ‘What’s the point in keeping up this pathetic farce?’ it seemed to say. ‘You don’t think you fool me, do you?’ A gap opened in the traffic and Steve took off, just beating a van that appeared out of nowhere. By the time he reached the other side and looked back, the man had gone.
Jimmy, Dave, Alex and Tracy were watching TV, the floor around them littered with cans of lager and take-out trays of chips with curry sauce. While he was wondering how they’d been able to pay for these luxuries, Steve realized that he hadn’t come up with a story to explain the extra money. To his surprise however, Jimmy — usually stingily suspicious where money was concerned — didn’t even bother to count the coins Steve gave him.
‘What’s this?’ he jeered. ‘You rob someone?’
For some reason this comment made Dave laugh, which effectively put an end to everything else for a while. Dave was not easily amused, but on the occasions when he did indulge he went all the way, whooping and yelping and howling, clutching his gut, drumming his heels on the floor and banging his forehead against the wall. But they were all in form that night, the stotters, for although the old woman Jimmy had selected as their target had been carrying less than he’d hoped, the hit itself had been a complete success and the take was still enough to pay for this modest celebration. The idea of using Tracy as bait had been fucking brill, if Jimmy did say so himself. People were always more trustful of girls, whatever they looked like. With attention focused on her, Dave was able to move in and get to work without any bother, while Alex and Jimmy kept look-out. No sweat! Jimmy couldn’t see any reason why they shouldn’t regularly supplement their income in the same way. Sooner or later they were bound to pick on someone who was carrying serious money, like that first time or even better. Then Jimmy would be off so fast these wankers wouldn’t see him for dust. In keeping with the stotters’ general policy towards the boy, Steve was kept out of this. All he knew was that everyone was in a good mood, that everything seemed to be going right. When Tracy passed out with one leg resting against his, warming him with a gentle radiance that penetrated his damp jeans like sunlight, the boy’s happiness was complete.
The tasks which Ernest Matthews asked Steve to do for him became increasingly various as the weeks went by. As well as the supermarket, Steve visited the chemist, the newsagent, the stationer, the ironmonger, and the tobacconist’s, where he passed as eighteen without any problem. He also went into the library and applied for a reader’s ticket in order to keep the old man supplied with books.
‘What do you want to read all these for?’ Steve asked with a touch of resentment one day, after carrying back a particularly bulky load.
‘They’re all about the war,’ Ernest Matthews replied. ‘Written by famous historians.’
Steve wondered what a storian was. Someone who told stories, presumably.
The ultimate accolade came when he was sent to the post office to cash a countersigned pension cheque. By then almost a month had passed, and Steve had become thoroughly at home in the house in Grafton Avenue, where Ernest Matthews lived all alone in one room in the basement. He had even been taught a special way of ringing the doorbell so that the old man would know it was him. He wasn’t quite sure why this was so important, and the question interested him the more in that he suspected that the answer might also explain why Matthews refused ever to venture outside the house itself. The old man’s attempts to account for this no longer satisfied Steve.
‘It’s my legs, you see. They’re not what they were. I find it hard to get about these days. Still, that’s the way it goes, isn’t it? Have you ever thought what it would be like if it went the other way, eh? If we were all born like I am now and then grew younger and healthier every day? And not just us, but everything around us too. Just imagine that! If every day a block of buildings disappeared and there was a green field there in its place. If there were fewer people around with every year that passed, so you’d get to know them better, of course, and every new face would be a great event. If the roads gradually shrank down to lanes where children could play the day away, and we all knew that tomorrow would be better still, and we’d be fresher and keener yet to enjoy it. Eh? Just imagine that!’
Steve nodded, although he couldn’t see the attraction himself. He knew that his problems would all be solved once he ceased to be a child. But in any case, that was beside the point, a deliberate attempt by Matthews to distract attention from his initial statement. Steve wasn’t fooled by the old man’s claims about the state of his legs. He moved about the house with no sign of awkwardness or discomfort whatsoever. Steve didn’t point this out, however, or demand to know the truth of the matter. In the end it emerged of its own accord one day as the boy was leaving.
‘You haven’t ever noticed anybody hanging about outside, I suppose?’ Matthews asked before opening the front door. His tone was casual, but the intensity of his eyes gave him away. ‘Anybody watching the house, following you when you leave, that sort of thing?’
Steve immediately thought of the grinning man, although he hadn’t really been watching the house or following him. Ernest Matthews had noticed the boy’s hesitation.
‘You have?’
Steve nodded.
‘When? Where?’
‘The first time. And after that, when I was going back.’
Something had happened deep inside the old man’s eyes, as if a blind had been drawn down.
‘What did he look like?’
The boy considered for a moment.
‘He walks funny, like he wants to pee. He smiles all the time too, only it’s not really a smile.’
The old man was trembling with agitation.
‘And he was watching this house, you say?’
In the end Steve nodded again. It was too late to correct himself now. He would have to stick to the story he’d told. It might well be true, anyway. The old man seemed to have been expecting something of the sort.
‘Do you know him, then?’ the boy asked.
The old man sighed deeply.
‘Oh yes, I know him all right. It’s a long story, lad. A long sad story. But I suppose you must hear it. It wouldn’t be fair otherwise, asking you to come here and help me. It wouldn’t be right, not if — ’
He broke off, looking deeply troubled.
‘But how can it be right? What if your mum and dad found out? What would they think of me?’
‘That’s all right,’ Steve assured him. ‘The people I live with, they don’t care what happens to me.’
His only fear was that the old man might tell him to stop coming to the house every week. Matthews looked at him for a moment, as though considering what to do.
‘I’ll have to tell you the whole story,’ he said finally, nodding to himself. ‘Once you’ve heard it, you can decide whether you want to carry on coming or not.’
‘I do!’ the boy cried.
‘You can’t say that now. Not till you know what happened and who he is, that man you’ve seen. For now, just keep out of his way, if you can!’
He unbolted the front door and opened it cautiously.
‘Keep out of his way!’ he repeated as Steve scampered down the steps.
It was a clear freezing night. The sky seemed to be full of eyes.
5
The Adolescent Unit in which Aileen Macklin worked formed part of a psychiatric hospital in North Kensington, overlooking the
canal. The Unit itself occupied a separate block, with its own entrance and car-park, in the grounds of the main hospital, from which it was separated by a row of tall evergreens. The two buildings thus appeared to turn their backs on each other. Physically, too, they could hardly have been more different. The hospital was one of those redbrick monstrosities beloved by the Victorians and used by them virtually interchangeably as prisons, factories, hospitals, schools and barracks. It was lugubrious, authoritarian and massively institutional. It was also warm, dry, indestructible and as functionally effective as the day it was built. The Adolescent Unit, thoughtfully screened from this vision of the past by the conifers, had been run up in the early sixties, seemingly with a view to reversing all the qualities of its Victorian parent. In this it had proved remarkably successful. Although its originally spacious rooms had been subdivided and partitioned under pressure for space, the building remained determinedly casual and easy-going. It was also damp, draughty, cold and slowly falling to bits. Aileen found its air of faded, tatty idealism as depressing as the broken-spined, brittle-paged paperbacks by Laing (‘Brighton, 4/10/68’) or Leary (‘Ya blow my mind — and other things! Ray’), which she occasionally came across on her shelves while looking for something else.
Her office was not in the Unit itself, which had proved to be hopelessly inadequate to the demands made on it as the years went by. As facilities elsewhere in the city closed down, patients who were too ill to be discharged were concentrated in those that remained open. Since there had also been a marked rise in the incidence of psychiatric disorder, particularly among young people, this resulted in the Unit throwing out annexes, wings and extensions whose construction methods and materials grew progressively cruder as budgets fell. Aileen’s office occupied half of a prefabricated hut supported on brick stilts that had originally been knocked up as a temporary storage space a decade or so earlier and then retained because it was there. It had a flat tarred roof which leaked, flooring that sagged underfoot, windows which contrived to rattle no matter how many cardboard wedges were jammed into them and doors you had to kick open yet admitted every draught going. It was sweltering in summer, freezing in winter, and stank obscurely all year round. Jenny Wilcox, the occupational therapist who shared the hut with Aileen, had once remarked that it was enough to drive anyone mad.
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