That Polly could be family one day, that she might—and he might—unite Cradle and Spork in one great dynasty of unlikely rules and criminal histories, his present, practical mind puts firmly to one side. Before he can even reach for that future, or one like it, he has to climb up on top of the rubble of the past and see what the world actually looks like. The rubble of Mathew’s past, which now appears to have been less a wrong turn than the heavy footsteps of a man carrying more than his fair share of other people’s history—a description which Joshua Joseph Spork has always considered applied to himself, and which it now appears applies to almost everyone.
He changes buses again and peers through the window, seeing his own eyes as black gaps in his reflection, and looking through them. The building he needs will be an absence against the dark; a shadow in a shadow. It’s not a tourist spot. The nuns do not light their façade with burning lamps as some churches these days do. The place is less than a hundred years old, and ugly beyond reasonable measure. It is the most woebegone religious building he has ever seen.
The gate is black, and so is the path leading up to it: black gravel, pieces of marble and basalt. It must have seemed like a good idea in ’68 and now no one is allowed to change it; the design is protected by all manner of orders and by-laws.
The walls are yellow stone, stained by time and by London’s population of motor vehicles. When Harriet Spork first came here, there was a pile of flowers left at the foot of a lamp-post in memory of a cyclist killed in a collision with a glazier’s van—decapitated, apparently, by a sheet of reinforced safety glass destined for a local school. From sideways on, the safety turned out to be limited.
All of the bouquets were removed after a few weeks save one, a narrow vase the woman’s brother glued to the lamp-post and the concrete slab in which it is set with some concoction not even the borough’s street-sweepers have been able to undo. Joe came once a month in those days, until Harriet asked him to stop, and over half a year he watched the grim little flowers go from living, to dead, to dry, and finally to a kind of strange fossilisation.
And there it is. He lets it slip by, ignores it. There will be danger here, of that he’s quite certain. The enemy—he doesn’t name them because when you name something you believe you have understood something about it, and he has no idea, still, what his enemy really is—would have to be stone stupid to miss this one. They will anticipate disguises and diversions. They will be watching.
Mathew, in his head: Watching is a mug’s game. You watch for something, you think you know what it will look like. If it doesn’t look like that, it can walk right past you. The human brain, son, is a miracle of rare device, but it dreams and fabulates and it can be induced to deceive the eye. Remember the Monte? Yes? Well, this is like that. You watch too hard for one thing, you miss the other. So when you’re lookout, Joe, don’t watch for coppers. Just wait and see who comes along. You’ll know trouble when it turns up. That’s science, that is.
Joe skips off the bus and turns left down a small street with a crowd of kids. He walks with them as if he’s their big brother, then carries on when they duck into a building site for cigarettes and chilly, frustrated foreplay.
Careful to look merely curious rather than like a man contemplating a spot of B&E, he glances up, feeling a long-suppressed and pleasurable thrill.
Here’s to crime.
The far end of this alley is the back wall of a modern block built at a time when human aesthetic preferences were not considered a factor in local government architecture and all housing was to be neat, sheer, and above all cheap. Somewhat less attention was paid than should have been to London’s clay soil and underground rivers, and inevitably the structure bowed and sagged, and had to be saved from collapse using metal struts which run through the entire frame. These struts, the housebreaker’s friend, protrude from the end wall like rungs on a ladder, affording access to a neighbouring Victorian fire escape on a far more elegant building, which in turn—if you have long arms—offers a way onto the flat roof of the block.
Joe the clockworker never quite got out of the habit of pull-ups on the lintel, so Joe the burglar has lean, narrow muscles which play and crunch under his coat. One, two, three … and up.
Wish Polly could see this. Or Mathew, even. I’m good at this.
Joe skids as he lands; water has collected on the asphalt. He flaps his arms and yelps, half-joyful, then remembers that this is a deadly secret mission and he will almost certainly have terrible things happen to him if he is caught, and drops to his knees. He hisses a swear word as sharp grit in the mud grazes his leg through his trousers.
No alarms. No klaxons. No searchlights. He grins. Oh, yeah. Joe the kid cracksman. He scurries across the roof and climbs down a maintenance ladder to the gables of a red-brick schoolhouse. From there, he walks along the ridge to the far end and lowers himself out over the air. Strong hands, long, thick fingers. Bad for guitar, good for burglary … A downpipe, yes, as expected. Burglars have more than a passing knowledge of exterior plumbing. And sometimes, of course, plumbers have a knowledge of burglary, too … metal pipe. Not more than three years old. Good screws … fine.
He swings around the drainpipe. It creaks, but holds, and he drops to an external walkway of another housing block. Heavy landing on concrete. Faint smell of things best left unexamined. Chipboard doors and graffiti. A woman with her shopping comes round the corner and jumps on seeing him. (Well, indeed, how did he get here? It’s a fair question.) He taps his forehead to indicate a tip of the hat, and she settles. He resists the urge to help her with her shopping, ducks into a grimy concrete corridor and along to the end to a utility staircase. Doesn’t even have to unlock it—the door is rusted through around the bolt.
Inside, more smells: bleach; spray-paint; elderly pet; marijuana and incense. Caretaker’s closet, lock permanently broken, emptied out and pushed shut. He looks out of the grubby window and sees, spread out below him, the glass skybridge joining the next floor down—which is a shopping centre—to the train station beyond.
And how does he know all this? He has mapped it from the ground, committed it to memory against a rainy day when, for whatever reason, he must make this trip without alerting whatever watchers there might be. His Night Market self, maligned and paranoid and never entirely abandoned, has scouted his entry. He has criss-crossed London, delivering packages and wandering gloomily, and he has catalogued possible escapes and entrances without ever admitting it to himself. Ready. For this.
He knocks the window catch with his elbow, a sharp tap, and it breaks. He worms his way through and lets himself down.
The glass roof sags beneath his feet. For a moment, he thinks it will break. He doesn’t look right or left, and wishes he was wearing rubber soles. His leather ones are soaked and sheer on the muddy surface, and the ground is a long way down. Not that he’s looking. He walks forward slowly, without running. That would be a mistake. He tries to make haste, all the same.
Joe steps onto the station roof and edges around the guttering, hand over hand. The station is two hundred paces long. He counts every single one of them. And then the parapet of the convent is below him, perhaps ten feet, but it looks further, and of course, there’s the small matter of the four-foot horizontal gap. There’s no way to turn around, not without risking a serious mishap. He’s never jumped backwards before, not when it mattered. He wonders whether he should try to spin around, or just use his arms to give himself a little extra momentum, and then he’s in the air, and thinking oh, shit, and he has just enough time to think this is a very strange way to visit your mother. Then he lands, tumbles backwards and knocks the wind out of himself, and lies on the parapet considering that perhaps he could just have telephoned.
Hell, no. Fifth-floor man, my friends. King o’ the skybridge. Yes.
The door from the parapet into the convent is locked. Possibly nuns do experience a high incidence of cat burglary. More likely they’re just punctilious. Or possibly the job
of closing up still belongs to Sister Amelia, the kindly but stupendously old former disc jockey who, according to Joe’s mother, likes a tot and a fag on the balcony before bed, and therefore takes pains to be sure the job is done right lest someone else take her pitch.
He lets himself in.
Joe has never seen this upper floor before, and so has no idea what to expect. One thing which occurs to him, briefly, is that it may be some extraordinarily secret bordello for bishops with the urge. Another possibility is that it is a casino or moonshinery for bored Anglicans. Then he peers along the sad, green-painted corridor and knows that it’s nothing so bold; it’s just a very quiet, very lonely place where people who have chosen this particular way to spend their lives contemplate the divine. He wonders whether they all believe. Faith has always struck him as either a tremendous gift or an appalling deception, depending on whether there’s a God or not. His grandfather was scathing about “speculative faith,” which is the kind you get from worrying about the possibility that God exists and may be cross with you. Daniel Spork observed that God, if there is one, is well aware of the interior dialogue, and most likely unimpressed by it. Much better, he said, to get on with being the man you are, and hope like buggery that God thinks you did as well as could be expected. Hence all the lessons and strictures concealed in everyday objects. Learn the shape of the world, know the mind of God.
The shape of the corridor suggests that God wants Joe to go down a flight, across the building, and catch his mother when she comes back from evening prayers. If he hurries, he should make it before the place is awash with wimples and he is sternly ejected for possession of external genitals and an unsanctified soul.
Halfway there, he nearly trips over a medical sort of nun who is snoozing on a chair outside what must be the infirmary, and has to sneak by her the way people do in cartoons, actually on tiptoe and for no good reason with his hands held up to his chest, palms out. In a battered brass plaque enumerating the virtues of Saint Edgar, he catches a glimpse of himself in this position, for all the world like a pantomime robber, and sheepishly lowers his hands.
Joe lets himself into his mother’s room and sits on the bed, trying not to notice that the picture of Mathew is on the night table and the one of him is lying on its back by the single chair. He tries to believe that she hugs it, but the chair is not a chair for relaxing but rather one for being penitent, so he suspects she mourns his lack of ambition or his failures, or apologises to him for being a bad mother in her conversations with God. That last one makes him angry, because she was a great mother when she was around: loved him, sang to him, tended and ministered, helped with his homework and stood staunchly behind him in adversity. It was only after she exchanged a gangster for a deity that she began to slip away.
In his earlier life, there were times—perhaps they were even more common, in fact, than the other times—when spending time with his mother was a renewing experience for Joe Spork. They would walk around together, his small hand in her larger one, the cold strap of her watch rustling against his sleeve, and he would feel like a battery plugged into a giant recharging station, warmth and certainty filling him up. After half an hour spotting kites and dogs and ambling with Harriet, he could soak up days of his father’s jittery, electric-fence presence. It worked in reverse, too; Harriet stood taller when she was with her son. She relaxed the muscles of her face, letting go the sultry, coquettish scowl and permitting herself to be domestic, homely, and happy.
Those times faded away in almost perfect synchrony with the change in relative scale of their palms. As Joe’s first equalled and then exceeded his mother’s, so both of them became unwilling to share the inverted contact which told them the years had moved on. The young man became prickly about being seen to be a mama’s boy, and Harriet found it distressing to have such a grown-up son, and then later too full of unwanted memories to be touched by a powerful, wolfish young man so like her dead husband in his prime. By the time Harriet found God in a grimy chapel at Heathrow Airport, they found one another’s company painful, not because it was unpleasant but because it drained what once it had animated. They spoke occasionally, met rarely, and touched little if at all. When Harriet became Sister Harriet, and announced that her retreat from the temporal world would mean she could only see Joe once every six months, it was hard to say whether the announcement implied a greater or lesser distance between them.
And then she’s there, in the room with him. When he was a child, she towered over him and could have worn his pyjama bottoms as Bermuda shorts. Now he looks down at her in her flat shoes, and she’d fit into one leg of his trousers, and with her hair pulled straight back she is hardly as high as his chest.
Harriet Spork stares at her son, and he can see her wondering whether she should call the porters and have him thrown out. Well, no; there’s no question that she should: she’s a cloistered woman and his presence is absolutely against the rules. She’s trying to untangle whether she will, because in the end—in the absolute, final analysis—he’s her son. He hasn’t actually considered what he might do under those circumstances, and wonders abruptly whether his indecision will be tested.
Apparently not.
“Joshua,” she says.
“Hello, Mum.”
“You’re in trouble.” Not a question. She knows, or she has correctly deduced. Or perhaps she has always expected. “I can’t hide you, you know. The Church can’t give sanctuary any more.”
“I don’t need sanctuary.”
“Oh. Oh, dear.” Because if he is not here to be concealed, he is here for some other kind of help. He considers telling her he has come to see her before he gives himself up. He wonders whether the lie would bring her joy or guilt, and what it would do to him. He wishes he could stop trying to play her, and just be her son, but he never knows any more whether he’s talking to God’s wife or the woman with the plasters and the warm neck who could make everything be all right. He is briefly, irrationally furious that God should require of her the abandonment of her son, and almost tells her, but remembers that this approach triggers a lecture on the testing of Abraham.
Instead he says “I’m going to hug you,” and does, and she, after a moment’s appalled hesitation—because it is very much not what they do these days—hugs him back, fiercely, throws her arms around him and shudders massively and asks him what on Earth is going on, and is he all right, and then for the second time what it’s all about and what it means, and he replies that he has no idea, does not understand, but Billy is dead and the world is upside down and it’s not his fault, but please, please, please, she must be careful, she must, she must. This seems to unzip Harriet’s emotions entirely, because she cries silently into her son’s shoulder and he does the same, feeling all the while that he’s being unfair offloading all this on her, because she’s so small.
At last, she manages to peel him off, or perhaps the point is reached where the hug is finished, and the comfort it grants is offset by awkwardness and self-awareness. They part, and he looks at her.
Harriet Spork—Sister Harriet—is still attractive. The voice which sang “Ma, He’s Making Eyes At Me” is now more commonly deployed for the Eucharist, and make-up has given way to a stern expression which mingles faith and devotion with compassion and—on the rare occasions when she is wrong-footed, as now—a confident anticipation of clarity. She is everyone’s mother now, and Joe feels an absolutely dreadful hunger, and a jealousy, even alone with her in this room. These blessings are mine, his heart shouts, mine and no one else’s! It seems so unfair to him that she should bestow her empathy on others and yet bar her door against him, who most rightfully deserves it.
She has grey hair now; the last black streaks are gone. Perhaps they were a final vanity, now dismissed. Her eyelashes are still spectacular, her hands still elegant.
“I don’t want you to forgive me, Mum. I don’t need that.” Normally he calls her Harriet, because she has asked him to. Today is not normally.
&n
bsp; “We all need that.” And Harriet perhaps more than others, which is why she’s so quick on the draw. He pushes the thought away.
“How long do we have?”
“How long do we have before what?”
“When do you next pray or eat or whatever?”
“Long enough.” To achieve whatever God has in mind for this conversation. The fatalism terrifies and angers Joe in equal measure. The answer could mean five minutes or a week.
He takes the folded sheet of accounting paper from his pocket and lays it on the bed, as if it were the final piece in one of Agatha Christie’s murder mysteries and he the detective explaining why he has called everyone here this evening. Except there are only two of them, and it seems far from the last piece, alas.
“Mathew paid for Daniel.”
She looks at him, and then down at the paper, and nods. “Yes.”
“He fiddled the books.”
“Yes.”
“And then later, when Daniel had them done in town—”
“Mathew got Mr. Presburn to fiddle them for him.”
Presburn the honest dealer, accountant pro bono to craftsmen and persons of good character. Except that Presburn, apparently, had been Mathew’s creature, the conduit for his completely illicit largesse to his angry father. All true, then. But what does it mean, here, now, to J. Joseph Spork, who tried as a child to be Mathew and then as an adult to be Daniel, and never, really, has focused on being Joe? And who is, in his various persons, now pursued by demons through this world of sin?
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