Grasshopper Page 13

  ‘Please take it. I want you to have it, Clodagh. Just think of it as a present to someone who I’m sure is in need of it from someone who – well, won’t notice the difference.’

  I said slowly, ‘Why do you think I’m in need, Liv?’ But I knew. My job, or what she thought was my job, was plebeian. My clothes, my hair that’s in need of cutting, my trainers and my ringless hands, all those things were a sign to her of my poverty. She could hardly know I’m always forgetting my wedding ring and leaving it behind on the bathroom sink. ‘Liv,’ I said, ‘I’m not a blackmailer. Did you think I was?’

  She shook her head vigorously. ‘You mustn’t think of it like that. Think of it as a present and then – and then – well, we can say goodbye to each other for ever!’

  ‘Suppose the dimmer switch goes wrong again?’

  She looked so crestfallen, still holding out the money, that I began to laugh. I suppose I hoped that she’d join in, that she too would see what a fool she was being, but she didn’t. She got up, the bag fell on the floor and notes went everywhere. It reminded me of another time, only then it was the wind that blew money across the roofs and down into the street far below.

  ‘Oh, dear. Oh, God. Clodagh, I was going to offer you a drink. At least a cup of coffee. Please stay. I can explain exactly what I mean if you’ll only give me a chance.’

  ‘No, sorry, I’ve got to go,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry –’ Silver’s frequent words – ‘don’t worry, I won’t say a word to Mr Clarkson.’ Unable to resist it, I put my hand through that helmet of hair and ruffled it, saying as she flinched, ‘He’s a lucky chap.’

  It wasn’t the first time I’d been offered a bribe. A householder in Pimlico once wanted me to take £100 over the odds to put two socket outlets into his bathroom in contravention of the IEE Wiring Regulations. But he made no suggestion that I was capable of blackmailing him afterwards. Very likely Liv had given little thought to what she was doing. The habit of flinging money about she may have caught from James and Claudia just as she apparently treated her children the way they treated theirs. Money, she had seen, really does silence people, keeps them sweet, and may instil fear into them. For hadn’t it been so with her? Of the notes given to her to buy a pint of milk or a loaf of bread, she had habitually kept three-quarters, hoarding up a nest egg that was as much a menace as a blessing. She was unable to resist doing it, saving it brought her the only happiness and satisfaction she had at that time. But it frightened her too. It kept her, more or less uncomplaining, the slave to James and Claudia and their children.

  She was always expecting them to ask for it back. It was incredible to her, coming as she did from a prudent family of savers, a household where her parents had a strict plan of domestic finances, her mother keeping a careful account of her weekly expenses to the nearest krona, that they didn’t remember what they’d given her. Claudia and James must know, one or both of them must be keeping a secret tally. Sooner or later she would be asked for it, an account would be submitted to her, a reckoning take place. The screaming of abuse would begin, the threats. She would be in the position of the woman in the dress shop. At night, in her room, she counted her hoard by candlelight, then lay in bed worrying about being found out. She held the tin up against her chest but it was no longer the comforting teddy bear. She thought about Claudia coming into her bedroom or the cleaning woman coming in and opening the cupboard and finding the tin with its contents.

  The cleaner, of course, did go in there. One night, in the autumn, while some half-mile away I was trying to adjust to living below ground and jangling the hangers in old Mrs Fisherton’s wardrobe, Liv decided to leave her stash unattended no longer. She’d find some way of taking it with her wherever she went. They would be unable to detect it was their money if it wasn’t in their house. Unless they had written down the numbers on the notes before they gave them to her. It’s some measure of the state she was in even by then that she seriously considered this possibility.

  The two bigger ones nagging at her and whining, the baby in her arms, she went to a bank in St John’s Wood and changed the money into £50 notes. Round the corner, in the High Street, she bought a money belt. The tin went into the rubbish bin along with all the food that was daily thrown away. From that time forward – while worrying that the bank might tell Claudia and James about the note-changing – she wore the money belt. Not that there was much time forward.

  She was still seeing Jonny, going about with him, as they say, running around with him. There was very little going about or running around. Mostly, it was sex and drinking. Jonny believed that women dislike sex but engage in it from other aims than love or pleasure: gain, advancement, keeping men quiet, avoiding violence. This was certainly true in Liv’s case. You might say that all these motives were hers. She let Jonny make love to her because she sensed that she might one day need him. Their encounters followed a set pattern: drinking in one or other of Maida Vale’s pubs or the rougher pubs of Kilburn, much preferred by him, followed by a sexual encounter in the open air or the back of the van he had recently bought. He wasn’t anxious to spend more money on her than was strictly necessary but he thought the alcohol essential to keeping her compliant. Jonny disliked spending money, though he was making quite a lot of it.

  He had a scam going at the car park. In an expansive moment, he told Silver about it. It consisted in somehow – I have never known quite how – fixing the machine that stamped the time on customers’ tickets to print two hours on the ticket but register one hour. The customer would pay for the two hours’ parking he or she had had and Jonny pocket half of what he was paid. He was subtle about this, careful not to overdo it, and of course there were many occasions, most occasions probably, when a car was only parked for one hour. But it was a nice little earner, as he put it, and he held on to that job until he got the sack for harassment and habitual use of obscene language to female car-park users.

  What Silver saw in him I never could understand. But Silver was that rarity who simply likes other people, all other people. Jonny was amoral, and more than that, to use one of Silver’s words, now outdated in its meaning, he was wicked. His eye was for the main chance, he was the complete solipsist, others being there merely for his use and comfort. ‘Love’ was to him a meaningless word. Jealousy, on the other hand, was within his understanding, as we all came to see. It might better be called possessiveness.

  A kind of semi-prohibition exists in Sweden. You must, for instance, buy your alcoholic drink from a state liquor store, System Bolaget, and it’s very expensive. Draconian penalties exist for driving with more than a tiny amount of alcohol in the blood. So while some go overboard on alcohol and shopping malls are full of winos, many Swedes are abstemious, especially in remote places, and would scarcely think of keeping liquor in the house. That was how it had been at Liv’s home. It would be an exaggeration to say she had never tasted beer or wine before she came to London but she had never touched spirits. In Jonny’s company she learnt. And her evening drinking gave her ideas. Claudia and James were no more watchful of their drinks cabinet than they were of their cash. It was always replenished, the Victoria Wine company delivered weekly, and no one noticed if levels went down. In their attitude they were the reverse of those nineteenth-century householders who kept drink in a locked tantalus to protect it from the servants.

  Liv found that a stiff gin or whisky at six helped a lot in getting through the horrors of bathing Georgia, wheedling the boys into the shower and all of them to bed. On the day of the accident she projected her drinking time forward and at three in the afternoon, when the baby had thrown her bottle at the wall and Marcus been sick in an armchair, she helped herself to two or three half-tumblerfuls of neat vodka, more likely three.

  The two of them strapped into the back of the Range Rover, she set off on her unsteady progress to the small private school in St John’s Wood Cyrus attended. Cyrus sniffed at her breath, called her an ‘alkie’ and said the car ‘stank of booze’. He ho
ped she had bought it with her own money but anyway he was going to tell his father she was driving with more than the permitted level of alcohol in her blood. Georgia began to cry and Cyrus leant over the back of his seat to slap her across the legs, while Marcus began to laugh demoniacally. With all this going on, the baby now screaming wildly, Liv set off for home. It was her nineteenth birthday.

  She told the story of her accident and escape to every newcomer to 15 Russia Road. I heard it several times from her and once from Silver. It was dramatic enough to bear repetition. She said she thought she was losing her mind. She no longer cared what happened and the idea came to her of crashing the car and killing all of them. That three of its occupants were small children touched her not at all in those moments. Helpless and innocent they might be, but so what? Nor did she care that they were unruly and intractable because of neglect and the instability of their home life. She hated them. But still, when the time came, the accident was not due to any deliberate act of hers. On that she insisted. As she drove down Marlborough Place and turned into Hamilton Terrace she was already calmer, getting a grip on herself. She realized that what the precocious Cyrus had said was true. She was too drunk to drive. She must shut her ears to the boys’ squabbling, the baby’s cries, and concentrate hard on what she was doing, so that she could get back safely.

  At the first set of lights she waited, then took the right turn carefully into Hall Road. The lights ahead of her at the Edgware Road were green but when she was halfway along the stretch they changed to amber. Believing she had time to get across the road before they changed to red – she was desperate to get into the comparative peace and quiet of Sutherland Avenue – she accelerated, but the driver of the Peugeot in front of her didn’t. The Range Rover went into the back of it with a crash as loud as a bomb going off.

  The windscreen split into a frosting like a bathroom window. All the children screamed, for once in unison. Cyrus, though still in his seat belt, turned and began punching her, shouting that he’d kill her, his father would kill her. Liv didn’t pause to think. She unbuckled her seat belt, jumped out of the car and slammed the door just as the driver of the Peugeot was getting out of his. She was shaking all over but she could run, and run she did, up the hill and up Hamilton Terrace as fast as she could go, not once looking back, running as if for a race or as if pursuers were after her.

  Perhaps she was pursued, but she thought not. Few people in her situation, after all, would run away in those circumstances, leaving three crying children in a smashed-up car. She knew that. It would hardly occur to bystanders and the driver of the Peugeot that this was precisely what she had done. They would assume she had gone for help. So what exactly was in her mind when she abandoned the Range Rover and the children? There was nothing else to be done, she said. The alternative, facing the music, being breathalysed, recounting events to Claudia and James or listening to some policeman do so, somehow dealing with those hysterical children, was impossible. Staring at her listeners, red in the face from the intensity of her feelings, she said she’d have killed herself first, thrown herself in front of one of those container lorries that pound down the Edgware Road.

  It was to Jonny that she went. He was at the car park, sitting in his glass booth, working his scam. His shift ended at five and it was nearly four-thirty by the time Liv got there. Between customers handing over their tickets and paying their fee, she told him what had happened. By the sound of it, he’d have done nothing for her if her story had not also been about the money in the belt round her waist, almost £2,000 by then. Grudgingly (I’m reading between Liv’s lines), he said he knew a place where he could take her.

  Jonny had a room of his own. It was in Chichele Road, Cricklewood. None of the people I got to know at Silver’s had ever been there. Jonny kept it on for some private purposes of his own, probably criminal, for all I know he may have sub-let it, but mostly he slept at 15 Russia Road. He might have let Liv have that room, he might have lived there with her, the kind of arrangement most young men in his position would have welcomed. For some reason he didn’t. When he came off his shift he took her to Silver’s. Neither he nor Silver suspected that once in there she wouldn’t go down into the street again for nearly six months.

  Perhaps he thought it would be cheaper at Silver’s. For him, that is. And he would have unlimited access to Liv. I mean, of course, sexual access. And he wouldn’t have to be alone with her except when they were in bed, for Jonny disliked women, enjoyed the company of Silver and Wim and whoever else turned up at the flat at the top of the house, and of course he liked what he could never have found in Chichele Road, an easy way out on to the roofs.

  Apparently Silver was pleased to see her. There was something deeply old-fashioned about Silver, though in the nicest possible way. He had no interest in the toys of a modern lifestyle, television, video recorders, movie cameras, any cameras, mobile phones, computers and computer games. A radio he had, what he called a ‘wireless’, and which looked as if it dated back to the nineteen-forties but perhaps was new works in an old cabinet. He read books, something that couldn’t be said for the rest of us. Like a character from some pre-printing era of history, ancient or medieval times, he loved to listen to a tale unfolded. I know very little about Homer but I should think his audience was made up of people like Silver. He welcomed Liv, fed her, doctored her hangover with coffee, and sat (literally) at her feet to listen to her story.

  9

  Not everyone who came to Silver’s had been rescued as I had and as Liv had, but everyone had a story to tell. Even Wim. Yet of his own past he said nothing for a long while. But that evening in April when I saw him come through the window I knew none of this. I was all wonder and excitement and near-disbelief. He walked across the room easily and with grace, as if he had come in by way of the door like anyone else.

  Silver, old-fashioned in his politeness as well as in other ways, introduced me. ‘This is Clodagh. Clodagh, this is Wim.’

  Wim looked at me and nodded. His eye turned to the sleeping Liv. He poked her with his toe but she didn’t wake.

  I can be overawed but I’ve never been shy. ‘What were you doing out there?’ I said.

  ‘Climbing,’ he said. Just the single word.

  Silver elaborated. ‘Some of us,’ he said carefully, ‘go out on the roofs and climb. You can get quite a long way when you know how. Some roofs are better for climbing than others, of course, but it’s specially good along here and round into Torrington.’ He gave Wim a look of deep warm affection, which his friend had done nothing to merit as far as I could see, wearing as he did the expression of the King of Siam being defied by Deborah Kerr. ‘Wim’s the best of us. He’s a genius at climbing. He could go from here to South Kensington on the roofs.’

  ‘Say Notting Hill,’ Wim said, his frown slightly smoothed.

  If I had asked, as many would have, ‘What for?’, I don’t think I’d have been received back there again. That would have been the last I’d have seen of Silver or any of them. It didn’t cross my mind to ask. I knew immediately what it was for and why anyone would want to do it. Like Everest, like Annapurna and K2, the roofs were there and that was enough. They seemed to me as legitimate a place to be, to walk on, to explore, as any street or high road or country village. And in that moment, in the silence that followed Silver’s words, I wondered why roofs should be closed to us, forbidden ground, empty, neglected but lovely spaces.

  ‘I’d like to go out there,’ I said and, crossing to that open window, I looked out and up. To get up on to the roof would be easy for any reasonably athletic young person, certainly for the one Daniel had called Spiderwoman. ‘When can we?’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Silver said, and he laughed, but from delight, not at me.

  Wim said nothing. He fetched himself a mug of tea and one for Liv when she woke, as she did within a minute or two. Silver performed more introductions. Liv said, ‘Hi,’ looking at me warily. The truth is that I didn’t see her expression as wary
at the time. It’s hindsight which tells me it was. She was already painfully conscious that any girl who came to 15 Russia Road might attract Wim’s eye, might be the one for whom his defences would go down, the girl he might love. That one, of course, must be herself, and she seemed to feel that if she could somehow convince him of this, show him that she was the woman for him, she would anchor him and the peril of possible rivals be lessened. What she failed to understand, could hardly have been expected to understand, what none of us understood then, was that Wim had only one passion, obsessed man that he was, and that had nothing to do with women or love.

  At this time she had been at Silver’s for no more than three weeks. She was Jonny’s. Beyond prodding her with his foot to wake her – she slept for long hours – Wim had never touched her, perhaps never thought of touching her, though her yearning gaze so often levelled at him gave her away to the rest of us. At Silver’s instigation, she told her story to me that evening, and that wasn’t to be the only time. The two men had heard it before but they listened without protest, Silver with enthusiasm and Wim with no sign of impatience. Perhaps his thoughts were elsewhere.

  The silence, the peace, the lack of any sort of disturbance which had followed the accident to the Range Rover mystified Liv. No one could have had the least idea of where she had gone, James and Claudia knew nothing of Jonny’s existence, but still for a whole week after her arrival there she had expected the police to come pounding on the front door of 15 Russia Road. She anticipated stories in the papers, news on Silver’s radio or on the television set in Jonny’s room that only he ever watched. There was nothing. But she disbelieved what Silver said, that Claudia and James might simply be relieved to see the back of her, their children unharmed, their Range Rover covered by insurance. Incessantly she worried, principally about the money she had stolen.