Grasshopper Page 14

  ‘They won’t even know,’ Silver said. ‘They think a loaf of bread costs £20.’

  ‘But they can’t. No one can be so silly.’ Liv’s English had apparently improved enormously in the short time she had been at Silver’s.

  He, who was always reasonable, always sane and clearheaded, who could always be relied on to put forward the sensible and worry-free viewpoint, asked how she thought they could prove it. Had she considered that? ‘Did they write it down in an account book? Did you give them receipts you got from shops? No to both, so don’t worry.’

  ‘You think I just keep it and everything is all right?’

  ‘Give a tithe to the poor,’ said Silver.

  He prepared an evening meal, something he by no means always did but when he felt, in his words, in the ‘cooking vein’. It was pasta with carbonara sauce out of a jar, halva and oranges to follow and several bottles of Bulgarian red wine. Everyone smoked, though only tobacco that evening, and Liv lit candles which she set about the room. Silver took me home quite early, about ten. There was no need to escort me, I only had to go down the stairs and out into the street for thirty seconds, but he insisted on coming with me and, after planting a brotherly kind of kiss on my cheek, watched me go into 19 from his front gate and reach the safety of the iron staircase.

  ‘See you tomorrow,’ he said, and added in a whisper in case a concealed Max or Selina might be listening, ‘We’ll go on the roofs.’

  The street was empty, the air cool and the sky overcast, the dull pink of faded overwashed clothes, with a segment of moon showing between the ragged edges of the clouds. Is there any time of life when the society of one’s contemporaries is so yearned for as in youth? I know that I need it less and less now. My companions may be older or younger than I am and my own company is increasingly pleasant to me. Anyway, I’m married and highly content with that condition. But then, a dozen years ago, I had hungered without knowing it for people of my own age to talk to and be with. My fellow students at GUP might have served the purpose if only I had gone there often enough and been there long enough to get to know more of them. Now I had friends. Next day I was to climb on the roofs. I slept deeply that night without dreaming, Mabel lying on my pillow, her sleek furry face nuzzling my neck.

  *

  The next morning I awoke to a sense of doom impending and recalled, for the first time since Silver rescued me from the underpass, what I ought to have been doing on the previous afternoon and had failed to do. Caroline Bodmer had expected me at two but waited for me in vain. Of course, I knew the sensible, the mature, thing to do next: go upstairs, ask Selina’s permission to use the phone in the yellow drawing room, phone my supervisor and either speak to her or leave a message on her answering machine. After that, make my way to GUP, attend the ‘marketing workshop’ that happened every other Friday, check that my message had been received…

  But at this point my imagination faltered. I knew I would do none of it, so why speculate? Why, as Silver might say, fret? I already had a very good idea of the things Silver might say. And how could I get to GUP when the canal bank was closed and my only access to Paddington Station was by way of an underpass I would never dare enter again?

  Eventually, of course, GUP would throw me out and I’d lose my grant. But very likely not before the end of June. Deciding not to think about it till the following Monday, I got up, opened a can of pilchards for Mabel and, peering upwards at the bedroom window, saw over the top of the wall that it was a lovely morning. Mabel ate her breakfast and went out. Craning out of the open window as far as I could, I watched her scale the sheer face of brickwork, stroll across the lawn and, poised quivering at the foot of the wall between us and 17, leap for the top of it, making the ascent with the greatest of ease. She sat there, evidently pleased with herself, surveying from her eminence the spread-out world below. I smiled at her and waved. I understood.

  All that time is very sharp in my memory. The details are etched in stone. And that is as well because I either noted nothing down in my diary or the relevant notebook is lost. But I remember. I even remember what I wore. I put on my black jeans and a black T-shirt with a big red apple on the front of it. It was warm enough to go out without a jacket. I put my washing in a black plastic bag and took it to the launderette. Then, while my clothes were going round in the machine, I did something I had never done before. I bought a newspaper.

  The day was one of those on which, according to the table of contents on the front page, the paper carried its ‘situations vacant’ advertisements. It had occurred to me as I was walking along, carrying my bag, that when my grant ceased I’d need a job. Whether I would still be able to live at old Mrs Fisherton’s if I was no longer in academe or on its fringes was something I’d decided to think about later. Did I, after all, want to go on living there? On the other hand, I had nowhere else to go. I took my newspaper to one of the tables outside the café opposite and bought myself a cappuccino.

  The café had a notice in its window advertising for kitchen staff. I turned to the paper. But if jobs existed for the unskilled there was nothing like that in the ‘situations vacant’. Those in demand were all required to have qualifications or experience. I thought of going into the café and asking if I’d do, but did I really want a job at this moment? Did I want it yet? And if I worked at this popular café, where Max and Selina quite often dropped in on Saturday mornings, I’d soon be found out. So instead of offering myself as a washer of dishes or mopper of floors, I turned back idly to the front page.

  The story that dominated it I at first ignored because I’d noticed a paragraph at the foot of the page. It was only a few lines but it told me that the body of an unknown woman had been found on the canal bank at Paddington Basin the day before. The police were treating the case as murder. So it seemed that I had seen, or almost seen under its scarlet blanket, a murder victim. It made me feel a bit queasy. Somehow this was worse than if the woman had killed herself or accidentally drowned. That uncompromising black print repelled me, so I looked at the top of the page instead.

  It was two years since I had read a newspaper. After the pylon and Daniel’s death I was in newspapers myself, first of all in the basic account of what had happened, my name, my age (given inaccurately as eighteen to Daniel’s sixteen) and my status as his ‘schoolfellow’, not his girlfriend. Then, in the days which followed, I was the subject of those articles feature writers produce on the moral or political aspect of things, that could all be summed up under the collective heading, ‘What is the World Coming to?’ In some of these features, I appeared as typical of eighties adolescents, amoral, feckless, so bored with the routine of life as to need perpetually to court danger, beset by a death wish. In others I was little short of a murderer, thoughtlessly taking the life of a weaker and younger friend. One speculated as to whether I might have been abused as a child, another if what I’d done had been ‘a cry for help’, and a third portrayed me as a victim of the drugs culture. My parents made a little collection of cuttings to give me when I came out of hospital and show me the error of my ways. After that I never read another newspaper until that sunny morning sitting outside the café, drinking my cappuccino.

  I’ve mentioned Andrew Lane and Alison Barrie before. They were the subject of discussion for the guests at the lunch party Max and Selina gave for my birthday. I had been uninterested then but now I read the story because the photograph of these people and the child they were trying to adopt attracted my attention. It was bound to. Andrew Lane looked the way Guy Wharton might have if he was ten years older and had a beard. His was a solid square face but bright and lively with intelligent dark eyes. Beards cover up a lot, they are as disguising as a mask, so it would have been hard to say what his mouth was like or how big or small his chin. Andrew Lane had thick dark hair that was just frosted with grey but grew in the same shape as Guy’s with a peak in the middle of his broad forehead.

  The woman he had been married to for the past seven years photograp
hed less well. Perhaps it was only a case of the camera loving him and not her. Alison Barrie was fair-haired, anaemic-looking, her face lined. Her age was given as thirty-nine. She looked harassed, stressed, anxious. The little boy was eight, a handsome child of mixed race, his skin a dusky cream, his black eyes enormous. His name was Jason. The story described him as having come into the care of the local authority before he was a year old, his single mother being unable to care for him. His father had disappeared.

  Lane and Barrie couldn’t have children. He was sterile as a result of treatment for testicular cancer, of which he was cured; her fallopian tubes were blocked when she had had a bungled abortion in her late teens. All this was in the paper. Five years before this they had tried to adopt a Mexican infant but its mother had changed her mind and decided to keep it herself. This had been particularly saddening for them as Maria’s mother was only sixteen, living in the barrio of Guadalajara, and had given up her previous child for adoption. They believed that they could have given Maria a happy life while, left where she was, she faced a miserable existence and perhaps an early death.

  There had later been an attempt to secure a Romanian baby but the result of the home study carried out on their lifestyle and domestic arrangements was that Lane and Barrie were too well-off, their house was too big and their lives too busy to be suitable. However, social workers for the authority where they had moved to, somewhere in the north, had eventually considered them fit to become adoptive parents. They began by fostering Jason Patel, who lived with them for six months. There was apparently no doubt that in that time he became happier, better behaved and less hyperactive than since he was a baby. He loved Lane and Barrie and they adored him. But he had an Asian mother and a white father, while they were both Anglo-Saxons.

  Then, in a surprise move, out of the blue, the social services department decreed that Jason must go to a mixed-race family. That was their policy. Fourteen days from the imparting of their decision to the foster parents was set as the date for removing Jason from their care. Lane and Barrie ran away, taking him with them. They gave up their lucrative jobs, drew all the money they jointly possessed out of the bank, and fled. Their car they left behind in the garage. To their cleaner they gave six months’ money in advance, asking her to go in twice a week, pick up the post from the doormat, water the houseplants and, occasionally, mow the lawn. This was in February. Since then they hadn’t been seen. In spite of appeals to the public, resulting in many false alarms – a couple with a little ‘coloured’ boy had been seen boarding the Harwich ferry, they had been seen at Disneyland in France, queueing for admittance to Madame Tussaud’s – there was no sign of them. As the story put it, they had ‘vanished into thin air’.

  Whenever I read that I always think it would be far easier to vanish into thick air, as into a fog. But ‘thin air’ it always is. The paper had an interview with the cleaner and another with Alison Barrie’s half-sister, who swore she had no idea where they had gone and had heard nothing from them since early February when Alison had told her in great distress of the social services’ ruling. Jason loved them, you could be certain of that. This was no one-sided affair, the two of them fond of him and he simply acquiescing. He’d have begged to stay with them and gone with them wherever they chose to take him.

  Sitting there, reading about it in the warm spring sunshine, I tried to imagine what it would be like so desperately to want a child that you’d give up everything to keep him, your home, your prospects, your family, your friends and your financial future. Of course, I could easily imagine giving up those things, for none of them meant much to me at twenty, I barely knew what I wanted or where I was going, but to abandon them for a little boy you had only known for six months? I understand now, I didn’t then. I thought only that it was very unfair. Why should these good people be compelled to give up the child they loved and who loved them? I was yearning after goodness by then, you see, as if association with it would somehow save me. I had already caught the infection from Silver.

  I had bought the paper in the first place to find a job but by then I could see that this was something I should think about before rushing into it. I spent very little money. Food was almost my only expense. I’d never have dreamt of buying clothes or going to a hairdresser. The architecture of Maida Vale was my entertainment. Transport costs should have taken a slice of my income but since I so seldom went to college I hardly ever bought a train or bus ticket. I told myself how lucky it was, all things considered, that I hadn’t invested in a student’s pass. That would have been a real waste of money.

  I’m aware that I’m giving a picture of myself as a feckless, selfish, ungrateful and idle young person, one who showed not a trace of gratitude to her anxious parents, blew her chance of a reasonable education, seemed not to realize her good fortune at having a whole self-contained apartment to live in nor understand the generosity of the kindly couple who made this possible. Did I ever ask myself who paid the bills for the electricity I used? The gas and the water? I never thought about it. For all I knew, those benefits might have been freely given, poured out of some invisible infrastructure, and instituted by a supernatural power simply to make people like me happy and comfortable. And the only explanation I had for my behaviour was that two years before I had escaped with my life while 40,000 volts passed through my dear friend’s body and killed him. Not the attitude likely to win the sympathy of responsible people.

  Still, it’s the only excuse I have. And even that was wearing a bit thin as time went by and my life was filled with other things, with, for instance, the way of life on the top floor of 15 Russia Road. So I had no excuse. The trouble is that if I were twenty now – an age I’ve no wish to be – I’d do it all over again. Well, not quite all, there is one act of folly I’d avoid if I could.

  These days the newspapers I take daily are stacked and saved until the end of the week when they go in the bin provided and are put out for recycling. I’m not a hoarder and I’ve never kept papers and magazines lying about when their useful life is over. But for some reason I kept the paper that printed the long account of Andrew Lane and Alison Barrie’s disappearance with Jason. Perhaps I intended it for some purpose now forgotten. I’m sure at the time I had no particular interest in those two people and the little boy.

  They receded from my mind as the afternoon came on and I was out once more in the sunshine, this time walking towards the lawns and slopes of Westbourne Green, taking with me something to read from old Mrs Fisherton’s bookcase. I remember very well what it was because it was almost the only book on her shelves that, in my opinion then and now, any reasonable person would want to read. I still have it. At the risk of damning myself still further in the disapproving reader’s eyes, I may as well add that The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant was another item I stole from Max and Selina along with the silver frame.

  In one of the stories I came upon this passage in which Maupassant describes the Eiffel Tower, though he might as well have been giving his idea of a pylon if they had been invented then: This tall skinny pyramid of iron ladders, this giant and disgraceful skeleton with a base that seems made to support a formidable monument of Cyclops, and which aborts into the thin, ridiculous profile of a factory chimney. If you don’t like pylons, you can’t say fairer than that.

  I rang the bell at 15 on the dot of seven. It was early but I couldn’t wait any longer. There was only one bell for the whole house. I wondered what I’d say if by chance Jack or Erica Silverman was at home and one of them came to the door, but no one came. I rang again, harder in case it couldn’t be heard upstairs, and while I was pressing my forefinger on the bellpush I heard a clear musical whistle from high above me. It sounded like a blackbird. I stepped backwards, out of the porch and down the steps, and looked up. Silver was on the roof, lying prone on the horizontal part of the mansard between the curves of two dormers and looking down at me. The slanting rays of the sun burnished his hair to bright white gold.

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p; ‘I’ll come down and let you in,’ he said. ‘Give me a minute to climb back through the window.’

  He was very quick. He looked approvingly at my clothes, jeans, T-shirt and trainers, though these were my invariable get-up.

  ‘It may be cold up there later. No, don’t go back. You can have a sweater of mine.’

  We ran up the four flights of stairs. He got to the top without flagging or gasping. I both flagged and gasped but not until after the third floor. Liv was in the flat with Jonny, the boyfriend I was still to meet, and a girl called Morna Silver knew from university. He introduced me. Jonny said, ‘Pleased to meet you,’ and looked me up and down the way someone might a piece of furniture he considers buying. He wouldn’t have bought me, I could tell that. He was a small neatly made man, older than the rest of us by maybe five or six years, dark but with very light blue ice-cold eyes, his features blunt with an unfinished look. There was no feeling in his face and no animation. Like us, he wore jeans and trainers but a collarless white shirt instead of a T-shirt and over it the jacket of a dark pin-striped suit.

  ‘Let’s have a drink,’ he said. ‘Celebrate.’ His voice was a grating metallic cockney. ‘What you done with the bottles I fetched in, Liv?’ He pronounced her name as in ‘live and let live’.

  ‘I won’t drink, thanks, Jonny,’ Silver said, ‘not before going on the roofs.’ He saw me shaking my head. ‘And Clodagh won’t. What about you, Morna?’

  She had been up there only once before. The experience she had found exhilarating but it had frightened her too. ‘It’s scary. I should have gone up again the next day but I didn’t. It’s a bit like crashing a car. If you don’t drive again straight away, you never will.’

  This, of course, was the cue for Liv to tell her story all over again. Morna had never heard it. Jonny cast up his eyes and went off in search of drink. In a whisper, respectful of Liv as raconteur, Silver said we’d eat first, he had got soup and a Tuscan bean stew. Wim ought to be along in a minute. That sounded fine except that I was longing to climb out of the window and get on to the upper slope of the mansard. Liv reached the bit where she’d run away to Jonny and he had brought her here, and then she added something I didn’t know.