Grasshopper Read online

  ‘You are always saying that,’ Liv said hotly. ‘Naturally, I wish to be with Jonny. He is my lover.’ She eyed Mabel. Having made sure she would know every piece of furniture again and every square inch of the ragged bit of carpet, Mabel had curled herself up on a patchwork velvet cushion someone had dropped or thrown on the floor. ‘Is this cat to live here?’

  ‘You heard me say she can’t,’ I said. ‘She’d fall off the roof.’

  ‘Cats never fall.’ Liv could be dismissive and dogmatic at the same time. ‘A cat can jump fifty metres and not be harmed. I have seen this.’

  ‘I’d rather not take the risk.’

  ‘Good. You say she is hunter. She will be hunting my mice.’

  She was the only woman I’ve ever known who actually liked mice. I once asked her if there were a lot of them running round Kiruna but she said she had never seen a mouse before she came here. I promised to remove Mabel. Although I much prefer cats to mice, I could see Liv’s point and, for some reason – surely not because she was a mouse-fancier? – I started liking her from then on. I’ve said she was rather unattractive in those days. I’ve often noticed, and I’m sorry it’s there for me to notice, I don’t much like it, that women who are with a man they don’t care for, a man they’e a duty to or simply don’t know how to escape from, soon start looking plain and drab. When they get a new man or they take on another, not instead of but as well as, they blossom out and become pretty, even beautiful in some cases. Love conquers all, I suppose. Well, I know it does, I have reason to know.

  Silver, who knows the Bible and likes phrases from it, used to say Liv was like Leah, the first wife of Jacob, she was ‘sore-eyed and tender’, and that describes her very well, the pinkishness round her eyes and on the lids and the chapped look of her face. Her hair always wanted washing. If she didn’t bite her nails, she tore at the cuticles and picked the skin on her lips. But once she had Wim, or thought she had Wim, at any rate had slept with him and meant to do so again, her skin cleared and her hair shone and she grew some of the longest pointed fingernails I’ve seen on a woman’s hand. She stopped slouching and cuticle-chewing, stood upright and started washing her clothes. Whether Wim noticed any of this I don’t know. I know so little about him except for his passion for the roofs of tall buildings.

  ‘Now if Liv were only a tower block,’ Silver said that evening when we were alone on the roofs, ‘Wim would be on top of her all the time.’

  As Silver had predicted, the scaffolding had gone up, its vertical poles planted in the garden between the end of the Torrington Gardens terrace and the first house in Peterborough Avenue. There was very little difference in height, each was five storeys high, not counting the basement. We crossed the scaffolding easily and pulled ourselves up on to the leads. The long row of small squat pillars, each one moulded in a chair-leg shape, cast a strange ladder-like shadow on to the paleish roof surface.

  A brilliant moon seemed to hang directly above us. Its clear greenish light showed us the world above that hardly anyone ever saw, the roof cluttered with aerials and dishes and tanks and cowled pipes, the chimney stacks here narrow columns, each bearing only two pots. The towers of Westminster’s estates on the canal to the west, which seemed so tall at ground level, were from here reduced to mere apartment blocks. The moonlight painted their pagoda roofs the silvery white of frost. For some reason the canal remained black, its water so calm it scarcely glittered. Browning’s island lay dark-treed and peaceful on the wide stretch above Paddington Basin.

  Liv and Jonny went off together, she with a bad grace but accepting the inevitable once Wim had disappeared into the distance and she had no hope of keeping pace with him. He dressed in black at night, we all wore dark colours up on the roofs, but that evening, in the bright radiance, paler colours might have been a wiser choice. Any observant passer-by, looking upwards, might have seen us. But few people are observant, they seldom look roofwards and, in any case, the streets were deserted. Fear emptied them, though I never found out what exactly people were afraid of. Muggers? Men like Jonny? From up there you could always see a hundred television screens, glowing moonlight-white through uncurtained windows in every row and terrace.

  Jonny was making for the mansion block which was the last in Peterborough Avenue, five storeys in red and white dressings with wrought-iron railings on all but the top one. These balconies made access to the flats easy and most of the occupants had put bars on their windows. But the top-floor windows weren’t barred, Silver told me. From where he and I sat on the parapet we could see the copper domes of the mansions and the cupola with its tower of the winds that grew grandiosely from the centre front of its roof.

  I suppose I was naive if not innocent, but it wasn’t until then that I realized what Jonny was doing.

  ‘He’s quite rich, you know,’ Silver said, ‘and all of it from dealing and stealing.’

  The dealing didn’t much surprise me. Silver’s place was often redolent of cannabis and I’d seen Jonny and Liv do a line of cocaine. But stealing?

  ‘I told you people who live in top flats leave their windows open. Especially in summer. He’ll go in through an open window. He won’t take her. Not because he doesn’t want to involve her; she’d be too much of a risk.’

  ‘Don’t you mind?’

  Silver put his arm round me and we sat with our legs dangling no more than an inch or two above the lintel of the windows below. ‘Shall I sling him out?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s your place.’ I sought for an answer. ‘Are you trying to make him better? Are you trying to – well, redeem him?’

  Silver laughed. His laughter rang round that bare moonlit rooftop. The people in the top flat just below us must have heard him. Perhaps they thought it was an angel laughing or, more likely, sound from next-door’s television. ‘I’m not a redeemer, Clo. I suppose I like him. I’ve never met anyone else who does.’

  ‘He doesn’t pay you rent?’

  ‘No one pays me rent. I tell myself I’m not – well, harbouring him, giving shelter to a thief, I mean. He’s got a room of his own in Cricklewood.’

  But he has access to the roofs because he lives in your place. I didn’t say this aloud. I didn’t have to.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Silver said.

  ‘You always do.’

  ‘I’ve been into one or two flats myself. From the roofs, I mean. I couldn’t resist it, just to look.’

  ‘But you didn’t steal anything.’

  ‘No. It was curiosity. Like your Mabel. Come on, let’s go on.’

  We went as far as the second dome that night. All the blocks in Peterborough Avenue were the same height but each was about three feet from the next one, making two chasms to cross. We jumped. I don’t believe I could do it today, I’d no longer have the nerve. I shudder when I think of the two of us springing across a canyon forty feet deep, its depths lost in shadow, nothing beneath to save us if we fell, not even a twig on a branch, not a wire or narrow pipe. Silver went first, his hands stretched out to catch me as I followed. If I was afraid at the time, I don’t remember fear. The achievement was all, the successful leap, and to make it as soundlessly as possible. We giggled at the thought of people below us listening and attributing the thud of our footfalls to a bird landing heavily. I once saw a heron from Regent’s Park on a roof in Russia Road. Such a big bird would make a resounding thump as it landed on slates. We clung to each other and laughed in triumph, in the mild night and the soft moonlight sinking to our knees, and embraced, kissing feverishly, as happy as could be.

  ‘Not here,’ said Silver, laughing. ‘There are limits.’

  ‘I bet Wim would do it on a roof.’

  ‘I bet Wim has.’

  So just beyond the tower of the winds we turned back, leaving the others to whatever their pleasure might be, and returned to ours.

  11

  We all went on the roofs, the five of us and sometimes others too, Morna and a girl called Lucy and her boyfriend Tom
, Morna’s friend Judy and an older man (too old, we thought him) called Owen. But we five were the real roof people, the Famous Five, Lucy called us. The others, in varying degrees, were afraid when they were up there. Basically, to enjoy the roofs, you had to be someone who loved heights, who was what Silver had a name for: ‘acro-philiac’. Morna and the rest weren’t among their number. Judy was almost the reverse, a girl who had problems with looking out of top-floor windows but who came on to the roofs once or twice in the hope of testing herself, of conquering a phobia by exposing herself to it. It didn’t work. The second time she went through Silver’s window and out on to the roof of No. 15, she squatted there, hugging herself Liv-fashion, her eyes tightly shut. Silver had to bring her down. She was tiny, not five feet tall and thin with it. Silver carried her down, first in his arms, then in a fireman’s lift. And I, who was never afraid while up there, was terrified he might fall and I lose another lover to the heights.

  The rest of them walked gingerly on the slates, trying to tiptoe or slide. The chasms between blocks made them draw back as from some awful sight of blood or ruin. Owen was unable to face climbing the gable façade with its nailhead bands, even though a fall would only have brought him down on to the roof of the detached house. Morna was the best of them, adventurous enough once she was up there, though complaining all the while of our ideas of entertainment when pubbing or clubbing would have been so much more to her taste.

  We five all had different reasons for going on the roofs. When she was up there Liv felt free and safe. That seems a contradiction in terms, for the rest of us were all aware, however much we loved it, of an element of danger. Liv felt safe on the roofs while she’d have been in peril in the street. On the roofs no one could find her, seize her, bring her to justice.

  Paranoia gripped her and, with time, strengthened its hold. The money she had brought with her she kept hidden in a secret place in the flat. No one knew where, not even Jonny. Because she hadn’t been out she had spent nothing in all that time. She had never asked one of us to buy her anything. She used Silver’s soap and toothpaste and shampoo and washing powder. It never occurred to her to dip into her hoard and recompense him.

  One day she told me she was keeping the money intact for when Claudia and James or the police found her and wanted it back. This, she believed, was bound to happen. She was convinced they were searching for her with as much zeal and determination as for Andrew Lane and Alison Barrie and the little boy. I said that if she really felt like that she could send the money back, make a package of it and one of us would take it to the post office in Formosa Street.

  She shook her head. ‘I can’t do that.’

  ‘If you’re never going to spend it and you’re so sure you’ll have to give it back sometime, why not give it back now?’

  ‘I couldn’t do it, Clodagh. I could not, I don’t know if this is the word, physically do it. My hands would not work for me.’

  There was nothing more to be said. I thought she was becoming sick in her mind and I told Silver so, but all he said was, ‘Don’t worry about her. As time goes on she’ll come to see no one’s after her and she’ll go out and then she’ll be fine.’

  In those months she had never been in touch with her parents in Kiruna. Weren’t they likely to be anxious? And how about the agency who had found her the job with Claudia and James? I thought it likely she had been reported missing and I wondered why there hadn’t been a hunt for her. When I considered what I read in the papers, saw on television and heard on the ‘wireless’, how a young girl had only to fail to go home immediately after an evening out or be absent from where she lived for more than a couple of hours for a police search to begin, it seemed strange that there was no hue and cry for Liv.

  ‘It’s not strange,’ Silver said. ‘Her circumstances were different. She got drunk and crashed a car and ran away. They know that. I expect they think she’s gone back to Sweden. That daft pair didn’t notice Liv was stashing their money away, they’re feckless about money, so they don’t know she’s got their two grand. They’d probably like to see her in court for driving over the permitted limit but, as for the money, they’d be incredulous if they knew she was sweating over them finding her.’

  It was the sensible attitude to take but still I wasn’t convinced. Kiruna was part of the civilized world, even though it might be at the end of the earth. Liv’s parents would have made inquiries, been in touch with the agency, with Claudia and James, with their own police, surely, and with ours. So, if she really didn’t want to be found, she was wise to prefer the streets above to the streets below. Sometimes, when I came out from No. 19 to go to No. 15, I’d look up all those floors and see her white face at Silver’s window, looking for Claudia and James or their new au pair with the children to pass that way. If only she could have accompanied Wim on his journeyings, if he’d have taken her with him, she’d have been entirely happy. Instead she was stuck with Jonny, who used her as the cat burglar’s mate.

  His attitude to the roofs was simple. There was no enjoyment in it. If anything, he found the climbing a nuisance, the use of ropes and occasionally a ladder burdensome. They were no more than a means to an end. The views of London spread out in a great relief map below left him cold. He found it literally cold up there and swore long and loudly if it was raining on a night when he’d planned a ‘job’.

  When Silver first met him, leaning over a parapet to see Jonny come out of a window on to a fourth-floor balcony, he was already practised in gaining access to the inside of houses. But he always depended on scaffolding to help him, branched drainpipes, the trunks of climbing plants, their roots in the earth of a basement area, their tops often reaching twenty or thirty feet up, porch roofs, balconies. The easy means the top-floor windows of 15 Russia Road afforded him of carrying on his trade were a boon.

  Silver was the only one of us Jonny talked to – I mean in the sense of confiding in. He wouldn’t have dreamt of talking to Liv beyond issuing instructions to her to cook something for him or wash his clothes or come to bed. Wim’s was not a receptive ear and as for me, most of the time Jonny seemed not to notice my existence. So occasionally, when he had had a few drinks, he talked to Silver and told him about his horrible childhood. His mother had died of a heroin overdose when he was two. His father had abused him from the age of four and later on passed him around among his friends. In order to secure his compliance without beating him – his father did that too – he dosed him with brandy, or in hard times with methylated spirits, so that the boy was insensible when the abuse went on. Jonny wasn’t much more than five feet tall and he blamed his small stature, with or without reason I don’t know, on the quantities of alcohol he was made to consume as a child. His mother had been tall, he said, and his father was tall, so what other reason could there be for him being what he called a ‘midget’? All this somehow made worse his habit of quoting lines from nursery rhymes. Although highly numerate and speedily able to do the kind of mental arithmetic others needed a calculator to do for them, he was unable to write more than his own name, and while he claimed to read a newspaper, I think it was no more than the headlines that he meant. So it was not the printed word he quoted but from memory of the spoken word. In the context of what he had suffered as a child, I found this gruesome.

  In his own way he was as obsessive as Wim. His ambition was to be a millionaire. ‘That’s a load of crap that money don’t bring happiness,’ he often said. ‘Money is happiness. It’s life. If you haven’t money, you may as well be dead.’

  Stealing was the obvious way to get it. If he had been a tall heavy man, he’d very likely have chosen some other form of theft than that which was the result of climbing drainpipes. But Jonny was made to be a cat burglar. He climbed like a monkey and looked like one, especially when loping across the roofs in a dark close-fitting tracksuit. Of course, he had his car-park scam as well, but the revenues from that and his wages were nothing to what he made from selling the jewellery he stole and his drug d
ealing.

  Rather than the result of stealing or dealing, his prison sentence was for something approaching attempted murder. I think the charge must have been causing actual bodily harm. If he confided the horrors of his childhood only to Silver, he spoke freely to everyone about his time in prison and what led up to it. It was an episode he enjoyed describing. Liv was told by him to shut up when she began recounting for what he called the ‘umpteenth’ time the tale of James and Claudia and their children and the crashed Range Rover; his own story he repeated as often as he felt like it. I think he believed it demonstrated his courage and his resourcefulness, that he was a force to be reckoned with.

  ‘I don’t let him mess with me’ was a phrase he often used.

  He was nineteen and working as a porter in a hotel in Bayswater. The hotel’s address was Bayswater but it was more like Paddington, not far from the station. It wasn’t a private house conversion but had been a hotel for decades, probably since the beginning of the twentieth century, and apart from the narrow winding staircase, the only way to get to the upper floors was by means of one small lift. The hotel management in 1906 or whenever had very likely been immensely proud of this contraption. It was capable of carrying four people or up to a weight of forty-five stone, had an inner sliding door of metal mesh that closed with a clang and an outer wooden door. In other words, the lift was a moving box in a shaft to which there was a door of scratched and scuffed mahogany on each one of the five floors.

  Jonny had been there no more than a few hours when he discovered the flaw in the lift system. He said he hadn’t bothered to read the notices pinned to the mahogany door in the reception area. What he meant was that he had been unable to read them. It sounded as if they were in several languages. If they’d been in a hundred, all would have been equally useless to Jonny. After he had had experience of the lift, someone told him what the notices said: Please close the inner door on leaving the lift.