Grasshopper Page 15

  ‘Since it is happening I haven’t been outside this apartment. Not down there in the street, I mean. I have been on the roofs.’ She laughed. ‘No one can catch me on the roofs.’

  ‘No, you can just fall off,’ said Morna. She was a big dark girl, dramatically good-looking, with large brown Irish eyes. ‘Do you think they’re looking for you?’

  ‘Claudia and James? The police? I don’t know. Maybe. I expect they are, they must.’

  Jonny came back with a whisky bottle in one hand and a half-full glass in the other. ‘Of course they’re not looking for you, you silly cow. What a load of crap. Waste time looking for a stupid bint they can’t even prove was pissed at the time?’ I listened with interest. I’d never heard someone being called a ‘bint’ before. ‘Now if you was talking about those two as kidnapped the coloured kid, I’d say that’s a different story.’

  ‘They didn’t kidnap him,’ I said. ‘They were his foster parents.’

  Jonny looked at me. ‘It can speak,’ he said. ‘I thought the cat had got its tongue.’

  Silver’s voice had become steely and cold. ‘I’ve told you before, you don’t speak to my friends like that. Clodagh’s a woman, not an object, she’s not an “it”.’

  ‘Sorry, I’m sure,’ said Jonny. ‘No offence, sweetheart. What I meant before I was so rudely interrupted – sorry, sorry, come back all I said – what I meant was, they’ve done wrong, those two, they’ve no right to remove the kid, he’s not theirs, they’re just caring for him and a right mess they’ve made of it.’

  I might have said a lot but I didn’t want to give Silver the occasion again to reprimand Jonny. So instead I offered to help him with getting the meal. Gently, and with a sickly sweetness, there drifted through the doorway the scent of cannabis being smoked. Silver wrinkled his nose.

  ‘I wouldn’t have any of that either,’ he said to me. ‘I can’t think of anything much worse on the roofs than a feeling of nothing much matters and there’s no tomorrow anyway.’ He looked speculatively at me. ‘Perhaps being a country girl you’ve not much experience of these things.’

  That made me smile. I told him the police called the Suffolk town where my school was ‘the controlled-substances capital of East Anglia’. I was eleven when first offered amphetamines and amyl nitrate at the school gates.

  ‘Just an ignorant townee, that’s me,’ said Silver. He passed a spoonful of beans to me. ‘Taste that. What d’you think? Not bad?’

  ‘Not bad at all.’

  ‘I cook beans and pasta and lentils and stuff because they’re cheap.’ He smiled. ‘I’ve got a bit of money of my own. Not a huge lot but not bad. My grandmother left it me.’

  ‘You’re lucky.’

  ‘It’s a mixed blessing,’ he said but without elaborating.

  We carried the dishes in, soup plates and dinner plates. They were all different, odds and ends from reject shops by the look of them, some willow pattern, a couple of orange and yellow Clarice Cliff, a Denmark, a green Doulton with the white spindrift pattern, a Wedgwood with a gold band round the rim. I know, not because I remember from that day but because I have some of those very plates with me here. For sentimental reasons? Yes and no. For one thing, I’ve never been able to understand why people who wouldn’t dream of hanging copies of the same picture all over their walls or fill all their photograph frames with the same family group would want to eat off matching crockery. Plates and cup and saucers in different patterns are more fun.

  At Silver’s we never ate at the table, always on our laps. I was handing round the soup bowl, Morna and Liv and Jonny’s shared joint crushed out but still scenting the room, when Wim came in.

  He was such an extraordinary-looking man that I think some further description of him is warranted. His King of Siam facial characteristics I’ve already told you about, his shaven head and the unrelieved waxen sallowness of his skin. But perhaps I should add how uniform that pale brownish yellow was, so that his hands and his long thin fingers, his arms and his neck, and his legs too for all I knew, were the same parchment shade. You wondered, looking at him, if when that skin was cut or grazed what came from the wound would be more like honey than blood. It wasn’t, as we all had reason later to find out. He was tall, thin and muscular, giving an impression of great strength. That evening he wore a Mao tunic, frogged instead of buttoned, in wine red embroidered with peacocks and flowers and butterflies. He astonished me by going up to Silver, who hadn’t yet sat down, and hugging him in his arms. Jonny gave a low wolf whistle, of which neither Silver nor Wim took the least notice.

  Nor did Wim, emerging from the embrace, seem conscious of anyone else’s presence beyond giving us all a company-including nod. I could see Liv didn’t want to look at him, or rather didn’t want Jonny to see her looking at him, but she couldn’t help herself. The expression ‘fastened her eyes’ always sounds as if the eyes themselves were taken out and pinned to the object in question, but hers were so fixed on Wim as to make the description credible. Wim took no particular notice of her. He poured himself some orange juice from the carton he had brought with him and held it up to the rest of us in the gesture that denotes an invitation to partake. No one wanted any. Liv looked longingly at an unopened vodka bottle of Jonny’s. She wasn’t much to look at in those days, no more than prettyish. It was her slender big-breasted figure that was her chief attraction. She is one of those women who are entirely transformed by a good haircut and the right make-up and clothes, not to mention an expensive orthodontist. Unpainted, her face was pale but not with Wim’s pallor, being pinkish and blotchy, her teeth as well as her fingers were stained brown from incessant smoking and her long, fair but thinnish hair lank from insufficient washing. She told me later that she was torn between not bothering with her appearance in order to keep away Jonny’s attentions and trying to improve it to attract Wim’s. There was no evidence of the improvement attempts that evening.

  We all smoked too much. The atmosphere in the room would have been insufferable if the windows had been closed. But they were wide open, the net curtains fluttering in the light breeze which sprang up at sunset. Silver and Wim discussed whether Morna should accompany us on to the roofs, Morna herself being in considerable doubt. She felt ‘woozy’, she shouldn’t have shared in that joint, and, anyway, wasn’t it a crazy thing to do? Why do it?

  ‘We do it because we like doing it,’ said Silver.

  Wim said nothing. Something seemed to burn inside his clear yellowish eyes. I wondered what colour his hair would be. Light brown? Blond? Black?

  ‘But it’s not what people our age do. We ought to go clubbing or to the cinema or to a pub or something.’

  ‘If you don’t do it at our age,’ said Wim in his rather high, slightly accented, voice, ‘you’ll never do it.’ Something came into his face then, a sadness and a fear. ‘You’re wiped out at thirty.’ He spoke as if it was some competitive sport he was talking about, running or the long jump.

  ‘Before we get on to “time’s winged chariot”,’ said Silver, and I think he said it to distract Wim from some threat or dread, ‘I’m going to tell Morna not to come. Not this time. We don’t take risks, remember? Come on, Morna, there’s a dear, home time. I’ll see you out.’

  It was his custom to escort visitors out, especially women. I doubt if I ever left there without his accompanying me to the front door and down the path. But then, of course, I was different. He came back, running up the stairs two at a time, we could hear him, light on his feet as he was. It was twilight then and the sky was the dusky red of Wim’s tunic. One by one we climbed out of the window on to the roof.

  Liv and I were empty-handed but Wim and Silver each carried a coiled rope and Wim hooks as well, and Jonny had his backpack. Later on I learnt that Jonny took no pleasure from the roofs but saw climbing on them only as a means to an end. Climbing out of the casement was easy, the only tricky bit being hauling oneself up into the ellipse of the dormer, and after that it was a matter only of scrambling up
a few feet. Silver did it with practised expertise, Wim with a wonderful elegance.

  We crossed the roof to the front and squatted on the flat shelf of the mansard, on its smooth grey slates, and looked at what we could see, Russia Road, car-lined but empty of moving traffic and empty of people, still, silent and deserted. The street lights were on but their lit lamps were far below us. Above was half-dark, the night-time twilight of London, and beneath all was shiny, golden and criss-crossed with leaf shadows that trembled in the breeze. The roof where we were was a shallow slope, almost flat. We walked across it, Silver taking my hand. I was afraid of dislodging slates but I quickly learnt the technique of avoiding this. Roof walking demands lightness and precision, it’s not for your stolid plodder. We sat down and surveyed the panorama from the back where there was no immediate, correspondingly high, rampart of houses to impede the view.

  We were looking across the backs of houses, the fronts of houses, streets between, the dark tops of leafy trees and their gold-lit trunks, gardens of gloomy evergreens and pale shrubs, the faces of flowers white and shimmering, stone walls and stone tubs and urns, statuary and in one small enclave a dark shining pool in which golden fish darted, Georgian pillars and Victorian porches, slate roofs gleaming like pewter and tiled roofs matt and mottled. There were wells of darkness whose depths were hidden, cobbled lanes running into mews like uncoiling snakes. The spire of St Mark’s in Hamilton Terrace stretched to the purple sky like a finger and the spire of St Augustine’s like a needle. Nearer to us, companionably near as we approached its level, was the long shaft of St Saviour’s, ugly by day and beautiful by night. The trees amazed me, thousands of them, avenues of them, inky bouquets of foliage lining the streets. And everywhere were dabs and splashes of gold where the limited light caught metal and glass, not fierce and blazing as in sunshine, but tiny stars of brightness and hollow cups of it, balustrades painted with a sheen of light and window-panes glowing fruit-coloured.

  London rolled away below us, to the Heath and Highgate, the towers of Somers Town and Euston, the ribbon streets of Edgware, and, like a low pyramid, Harrow-on-the-Hill. Regent’s Park lay like pastoral acres of countryside or the royal hunting ground it once was, its lake a broken piece of mirror. I recognized very little of all that then, I looked it up afterwards on the map, identifying remembered domes and spires, high rise and palace, dark peaceful open space, streets on which the cars were lined up like shiny oval counters. The course of the canal was plain to see, black as oil and as gleaming, passing from the Portobello Lock into Paddington and Little Venice, a wide still stream hidden for a little while by the Maida Hill tunnel, entering the park like a river. We could see the zoo. We lay on the edge of the roof telling each other of each animal we saw, those that weren’t penned by night, a wolf, a bison, two camels. Liv claimed to have spotted a white peacock, its tail spread into a fan, but the rest of us decided it was in her imagination.

  As we began to walk again our group broke up. Jonny went off on his own devices, his climbing clumsy. He loped along as a monkey might if finding itself on an unaccustomed perilous walkway, even to the extent of proceeding on all fours. His progress was quite swift, though, as he crossed the roof of 11 Russia Road and dropped down over its distant rim. The last we saw of him was his surly face. He didn’t wave. Wim remained with us, strolling rather than walking, never looking down at his feet. The obvious comparison is with a cat and Wim on the roofs moved with the same casual elegance, the same to-the-manner-born negligence and unthinking ease, as Mabel on the tightrope edge of a balcony rail. The only concession he had made to discretion – after all, we none of us had any business to be up there on other people’s property – was to change his embroidered coat for a plain dark sweatshirt. His coil of rope he had slung over his shoulder the way a woman carries a bag with a long strap.

  When we reached the end of the Russia Road roofs, the point where Jonny had disappeared, I saw that here was a change of configuration. Russia Road met Torrington Gardens at an acute angle. The streets themselves parted in a hairpin bend or triangle shape, the apex of which was a large house, a mansion I had often looked at from below. It had perhaps been built twenty years before the terraces it linked, it was Palladian to their late-Victorian, its roof joined to theirs but some six feet lower on the Russia Road side and more like ten feet on Torrington Gardens. It was quite dark but still I could see that on the wall which was the end of the Torrington Gardens terrace a thoughtful builder had provided bands of stone on the brickwork, four of them, carved in a nailhead design and each about two feet apart, though no doubt for artistic reasons rather than for use as steps. This side presented no problem. There were two drainpipes on the wall, their snaky branches hung with ivy.

  ‘It’s all flats, that house,’ Silver explained. ‘Someone lives in the top flat. They’re probably out, they go out a lot in the evenings, but we’d better not take the risk. So don’t jump down.’ How did he know about the people who lived there? He seemed to know everything about who lived where and their habits and routines. ‘We don’t really want them telling the police they keep hearing things that go bump in the night.’

  Wim laughed. He had a strange staccato laugh, like an engine firing but failing to start. I knew without asking that scaling those walls would be easy for him, the mountaineer who has climbed the Eiger confronted by Ben Nevis. All in the day’s work, no more arduous than going up a ladder. He squatted on the coping, placed his hands on the stone to the right of him without recourse to pipes or ivy, and sprang down, light as a dancer. Anyone in the rooms beneath would have heard a soft thud and thought nothing heavier than a squirrel had landed on the tiles. He ran across the roof, which was almost flat. The night wasn’t dark. Inner London is never quite dark. But when he reached the other side his figure had become indistinct. It was a silhouette we saw climb the gable end, but ‘climb’ is not the word for what Wim did. We were climbers, Silver a very good one. Wim walked up walls, danced up them, ran up them, negligently waltzed across gambrels and sprang without fear or even thought across pitched roofs.

  He vanished from our sight. Silver laughed, said to me, ‘One day I’ll tell you some of the things he has done.’ He took my hand and Liv’s. Her face was all woe because Wim had gone. ‘Now what we’ll do is drop down there. Liv’s done it before. The coping gives you a good handhold.’

  I went first, holding the smooth cold surface of the pipe, choosing footholds in the ivy forks to drop, noiselessly as I hoped, on to the roof. It was a slab construction, with a television aerial, a big insulated tank of some kind, and a chimney containing three flues. I walked as lightly as I could but failed to rival Wim. Liv came next, hesitating a bit like an apprehensive swimmer on a diving board, then Silver. We climbed the gable end, finding the nailhead projections, little shallow pyramids, helpful as hand- and footholds, the next best thing to steps. It was a wide gable, the roof of Torrington Gardens was low-pitched, though steeper than that of Russia Road, and made of similar grey slates. How many slate quarries were there in the world, I wondered. Were there any left or had we plundered them all to cover and insulate and protect in warmth and comfort Maida Vale?

  The roofs, divided only by low chimney stacks or chimney shafts, rather in the way groins separate sections of a beach from one another, stretched away into the distance, straight as a Roman road. In the half-dark, under the clear purple sky, it seemed to lengthen to infinity, its end lost in the misty gloom. I went up on the roofs many times after that but remember no other occasion to match the awe I felt that first time, the wonder and the fear. Not fear of falling or of discovery but of the strangeness of it, of seeing what few others had seen or would ever see, that long slate road, segmented by the faintly gleaming pale walls of the stacks, shadowless, dim and quiet. Quiet but not silent for the traffic in Edgware Road was always present, a muted roar and one that always sounded to me when I was high up above it like the sea, like tides breaking on an empty shore.

  Wim was nowhere
to be seen. He had disappeared over some edge, aided by his rope or perhaps only by his genius.

  ‘Do you think he flies in his dreams?’ I asked Silver, whispering so as not to interrupt the quiet.

  ‘I hope not. It would be too frustrating when he wakes up. What do you dream about, Clodagh?’

  I’ll tell him, I thought. But not now, not yet. ‘This and that. My dreams are much like everyone’s, I expect.’

  Liv said she was cold. She hunched her shoulders and hugged herself as she walked. When I think of her as she then was, not as she now is, I see her in that pose, arms crossed over her chest, hands clutching her shoulders, giving fearful sidelong looks to the world. Or curled up in a corner, head buried, arms embracing knees, the child yearning to return to the womb.

  ‘It’s usually cold here at night,’ Silver said. ‘I bet it’s cold at night in Sweden, isn’t it?’

  ‘Only in the wintertime,’ said Liv and she gave a great sob.

  We sat down with our backs to a chimney stack. Silver gave us cigarettes and put his arm round Liv to comfort her. ‘Tell us about life in the far north among the reindeer.’

  But she could only talk about the car crash and James and Claudia and running away. She talked about hiding too and watching. She had taken to spending large parts of every day watching the street from one of the front windows. Both the living room and Silver’s bedroom overlooked the front. In her au-pair days she had often walked along Russia Road on her way to the shops in Formosa Street, the baby in the buggy, Marcus unwillingly holding her hand. Whoever looked after them now would also pass that way. Or James or Claudia might at a weekend. We reassured her or tried to. We told her the Hindes had forgotten her by now and she had nothing to worry about. Then we went to the end of the roof road, the whole length of Torrington Gardens, and looked over the rim of the gable end at a garden lying deep down below, a mysterious place of tall cypresses and dusky ilexes and in the depths the occasional pale shimmering face of a narcissus. The stucco wall on the other side of this chasm rose to a shaped gable, its peak an ogee arch, its flat surface windowless and with multi-curved sides of red sandstone. Silver, seeing my disappointed face in the near-dark, said, ‘There’ll be a scaffolding going up there in a week or two. That’ll be an enormous help.’ After that we went back the way we’d come, down the nailhead steps this time and up the other side, using the drainpipes and the ivy. ‘Did you notice,’ he said, ‘how many top-floor windows were open?’