Grasshopper Read online

  Of course, around half the people who used it forgot to close the inner door. If you left it open, the lift couldn’t be summoned from another floor and the mahogany door remained locked. Say, for example, you were in the reception area and wanted to go to a higher floor, pressing the button would be useless if someone on the third floor had forgotten to shut the inner door when leaving the lift and going to his room. The only way to make the bugger (Jonny’s word) work again was by going up to the third floor by the stairs and closing the inner door. That was just an example, it might as well be the fourth floor or the fifth.

  Jonny soon found that his duties humping guests’ luggage were as nothing to the nuisance of that lift door. It was almost always he who had to go up those stairs and close it. He counted the stairs. To the top there were sixty-seven of them. A guest might arrive with two heavy suitcases and be allotted Room 52. Jonny’s task was to take him and his luggage up in the lift. But nothing happened when he pressed the button. The guest couldn’t be expected to use the stairs, so Jonny would run up them, checking on each landing to see if the lift was there with its door open, and finally perhaps find it on the fourth floor. He would go down in the lift himself, take the guest and his luggage up, come out of the room and find the lift had gone. So down the stairs he would go to find the receptionist taking an angry call from a guest on the second floor who hadn’t been able to summon the lift. Jonny would go up again and find it stuck on the third floor with its inner door open.

  He began to understand why he had got the job so easily, not to mention why no porter they had ever had before had stayed more than a month. One day he climbed those stairs forty-seven times in the eight hours he was there and twenty-two of them to the top. But all that was more or less bearable. People forgot to close the door, it was in most cases a simple failure to remember. One guest left that door open deliberately.

  He was an American. What a businessman from Chicago who wore a Rolex watch and carried (or rather, Jonny carried) calfskin suitcases was doing in a dump like the Gilmore Hotel, I don’t pretend to know and Jonny certainly didn’t. His name was Tudorlap, Clarence Tudorlap. It’s strange enough to have stuck in my memory, for I noted nothing of Jonny’s story in my diary. In the public places of the hotel he was loud and vociferous in his condemnation of all things British. The United Kingdom was inefficient, old-fashioned, indeed stuck in a time warp, dirty and cold, and it was always raining. The heating didn’t work, the trains didn’t run on time, shop ‘clerks’ were rude and officials ignorant.

  Jonny, whom I’d never thought of as especially patriotic and who probably hadn’t thought of himself like that, suddenly couldn’t stand any more. He’d just run up stairs for the tenth time that day and come down to hear Tudorlap telling the receptionist that the best thing that could happen to this country would be for the United States to ‘nuke’ it accidentally so that it ‘sank without trace’.

  ‘You shut your fucking mouth,’ said Jonny.

  There were quite a lot of people standing about listening and a couple of them laughed in a shocked sort of way. A very good-looking girl Jonny described as ‘lovely, a real lady’ said, ‘I couldn’t agree more. I don’t know why you people come here. We don’t want you.’

  For some reason, none of this reached the ears of the management. The receptionist appears to have told no one and nor did Tudorlap. He took his own private revenge. His room was No. 54. Every time he went up there, and he went up far more often than he need have done, he left the inner door of the lift open. Jonny had to run up the stairs to the top and close that door. He was sure Tudorlap watched him through the spyhole in his door and when he and the lift had gone, summoned it again. Not to use it but for the simple pleasure of leaving that door open.

  It was one of the receptionists who suggested notices with the lettering in larger print should be supplied and affixed to the mahogany doors. Jonny had very little faith in this. He was certain it would make no difference to Tudorlap who, he was sure by this time, was doing it purposely and from a fiendish motive of revenge. And another four days remained before the man was due to leave and go back to Chicago. However, Jonny took the newly prepared notices he could barely read and hung them on the doors himself. He was due to take the notice for the fifth floor up to the top and he tried to summon the lift. Of course, it failed to come. Tudorlap had gone up five minutes before and left the inner door open. Jonny climbed the stairs, carrying the notice, a paper bag containing tacks and a small hammer.

  He fixed the notice to the door. Instead of going all the way down in the lift he descended only one level, got out, shut the inner door and, using the stairs, returned to the fifth floor where he concealed himself behind the half-open door of a bathroom. Tudorlap came out of his bedroom, tiptoed across the landing floor and summoned the lift, unable to keep a smile from spreading across his face. The lift came, he opened the mahogany door and then the inner door. He was turning away, was facing the bathroom, when Jonny came out of it, hammer in hand.

  If Jonny had been a few inches taller, he’d probably have killed Tudorlap. As it was, he managed one blow to the side of the American’s head (rendering him permanently deaf in one ear) and two to his chest, breaking sternum and collarbone, before a man came bursting out of Room 52 and pulled him off. Blood was all over the place and Tudorlap was lying on the floor, groaning and vomiting. The police came and took Jonny away, the irony being that when they tried to get him downstairs in the lift they couldn’t summon it because someone had left the inner door open on the floor below.

  Jonny got three years and served the whole sentence. It took him a while to get work with his record but eventually he did, washing cars in a very upmarket garage in Hampstead where customers liked their Jaguars cleaned and polished by hand and the chrome worked over with a toothbrush. After that came the car-park job, the thieving and the connection with the drug syndicate that seems to have operated from an antique shop in a street off the Edgware Road. He began to dream of making money.

  His expenses were small. He had his car, of course, and he was a heavy smoker. Well, we all were. Being exposed to alcohol in that particular way hadn’t put him off it for life, as you might expect, and most days when he arrived he brought in a bottle of whisky or vodka. But he bought nothing else as far as I could see. However, he had one expense only Silver knew about.

  One day he was going to kill his father. The old man – he had been nearly fifty when Jonny was born – was still very much alive. Jonny never saw him, he hadn’t seen him since he was fifteen, and at the time I’m writing of he was twenty-six. But he had had a watch kept on him. For years he’d been paying a down-and-out to keep tabs on George Rathbone, so that he knew exactly where the old man was, the kind of life he led and who his companions were. When the time was ripe, and he’d know when that time came, he would go to him, tell him he was going to kill him and how, and he’d do it. If he hadn’t quite killed Tudorlap, he had had practice at attempting to kill. It would be easier, and he’d be better at it, the second time. Even Silver didn’t know what form this murder would take. He didn’t even believe in it, he said it was hot air.

  But for some reason Jonny needed to be a rich man before he could do it. Hence the burglaries and the ranging across the roofs of Maida Vale. He was enormously proud of a newspaper cutting he had, a piece from the Ham and High, when they carried a story about him, calling him the Vale Villain and giving an entirely imaginary description of him as tall and bearded. According to their account he had carried out more than fifty burglaries in Maida Vale and Little Venice.

  ‘I wish,’ said Jonny.

  I’d like to be able to tell you what Silver and I so much loved about roof-climbing, but I can’t. I’d no more want to climb out of windows on to roofs now than I’d want to imagine myself Heidi in Johanna Spyri’s books and the gently undulating Suffolk landscape the Swiss Alps, as I did when I was seven. Or to climb pylons as I did when I was in my teens. I no longer understand my motivat
ion or my enjoyment. All I can say is that it became a compulsion and I did enjoy it tremendously. Whatever impelled me impelled Silver also. And, eventually, we lost interest at the same time too.

  Sitting up there in the warm nights of that long hot glorious summer or walking on the leads or daring new feats of climbing and abseiling and ascending ropes, we learnt to love each other. So much of the time we were alone, talking, kissing, laughing, or silent and close in the quiet of the heights. Sometimes we picnicked, our backs against a parapet, eating chicken wings and Boursin cheese and the ciabatta which was new in the shops, drinking milk or coke, but never wine. Below us the fourth- or fifth-floor flat-dwellers were retiring to bed and we saw the pale vaporous gleam of their lights fade from the black air as one after another they were switched off.

  Up there no one bought or sold anything or advertised anything. There were no notices telling you to do this and not to do that, no phones to ring, no television screens – only the aerials that made those screens function – no background music, no rules and, in a strange way, no time. Silver took his watch off before going on the roofs and, following his example, I began to do the same. One night in early July we slept up there, Silver and I. We chose the flat roof of one of the terraces in Torrington Gardens, took sleeping bags and a futon, two cushions from the leather sofa and a blanket from old Mrs Fisherton’s. The evening was dark, though there was a thin lemon-peel moon, and above lamp-standard level the air had that reddish smoky look and feel so characteristic of London nights. We had no means of knowing at what time dawn came, but we saw it come. We saw a round red sun rise over the City, paint the glassy towers with phosphorescence and, as it brightened and lost its shape, sprinkle across the sky feathers of pink and lilac. It was cold in the early morning, sharp as December. We wrapped ourselves in the sleeping bags and drank the hot milky coffee from the flask we had brought with us. The sun climbed the sky and grew warm and down there in the streets the traffic began and the people started hurrying to the tube at Warwick Avenue. A dog appeared in Torrington Gardens and stood on the pavement barking at something invisible to us behind a window-pane. The garden of the house we had slept above was full of roses, climbers and standards and tea roses, and we told each other we could smell them in the clean morning sunshine.

  I said I couldn’t tell you why we loved the roofs, but I see that I was wrong and I have told you. ‘We could get hooked on this,’ Silver said, his arms round me, ‘and then we’d never want to go down.’

  Wim was hooked. He had no reason for going on the roofs but the roofs themselves, to conquer them, to own them, to be them. At that time I had no idea what he had been before he came to Silver’s, or where he had been or what he had done or anything about his background. Wim is a Dutch name but he insisted his surname was Smith, or, laughing, Van de Smith when people asked about the Dutch connection.

  ‘I can be Smith if Clodagh can be Brown,’ he once said.

  Silver told me he had a job but he didn’t know exactly what it was, something menial, he thought, in the catering trade. I was going to write that he was an educated person and intelligent. Later on I found out that this was true but I didn’t know it then. When someone is mostly silent, secretive, contained, you don’t know. The obstacle to understanding was that normal people don’t want to spend their lives, every free moment they have, ranging the roofs of buildings. You start thinking they are mad. Perhaps Wim was. When he told Silver he could have travelled from Maida Vale to Notting Hill on the roofs he very likely wasn’t exaggerating, for he used ropes like a mountaineer, and all the rest of the equipment of Alpinism. What little money he spent went on that and on the dark tracksuits he wore for the roofs and the special trainers. Once or twice I saw him do a line of cocaine but he never used any other drug and he never drank.

  Good as we were at our strange exercise, we couldn’t keep up with Wim, and he never took any of us with him. If she hoped to accompany him, if she hoped he might come to love her, Liv was only storing up unhappiness for herself. He loved no one and nothing but the roofs, with the possible exception of Silver, the only one of us to whom he showed any feeling, embracing him in a rigid, sexless, almost detached way whenever he arrived at the flat. Of those embroidered silk tunics he had several, the red one and a white and a yellow, but a closer look showed them to be old and worn, the cuffs frayed and the embroidery stitches scuffed. Sometimes he slept at Silver’s in a sleeping bag under a big rosewood table, turning it into a kind of four-poster bed. I once accidentally entered the bathroom while he was in there and found him shaving his head with an electric razor. He turned and gave me a strange look, not indignant or surprised but puzzled, rather, as if he had never seen me before and wondered who I was.

  He wanted nothing but to scale the roofs of London and to do so for ever. One thing only troubled him, Silver said, and that was no small thing. He was twenty-eight. Like any sportsman he would begin to lose his skills, his impeccable sense of balance, his bodily control and, above all those, his stamina. Thirty or perhaps thirty-five would be the watershed. His nightmare, a real nightmare, a genuine recurring bad dream, was not of falling but of failing to perform some strenuous move with rope or hook that had once been child’s play to him, his strength ebbing and his energy there no longer.

  ‘If I can’t go on the roofs,’ he said to Silver, ‘I shall die.’

  He said it calmly, even conversationally, as someone else might say that if he failed to find the item he wanted at a certain shop, he would try another. One evening, going into Silver’s kitchen for a glass of water, I came upon him sitting on the floor feeding Liv’s tribe of mice chocolate biscuits. He looked up at me and smiled.

  12

  This morning Darren and Lysander and I started work on three adjoining houses in Sussex Gardens. They have been gutted and are in the process of being turned into one of those small luxury hotels that have become fashionable. The interesting thing for me is that the middle one is the hotel where Jonny was driven mad by the lift and where he half-killed Tudorlap.

  If I had only relied on Jonny’s account and not on my own later experience, I’d never have recognized it. By the time we got there today the lift was long gone, as was the sign telling guests that this was the Gilmore Hotel. We were contracted to do a complete wiring job to the twelve suites, twenty-six bedrooms, lounges, restaurants and kitchens. This is what we call the ‘first fix’, the carcassing, that’s carried out before the plastering. Bare walls confronted us, newly boarded floors, large rooms where formerly there were two or three small rooms. Lounges and dining areas were all to have chandeliers and the installations for these, of course, had to be fitted from above. The window curtains in the suites were to be electronically operated and by remote control, but that would be part of the ‘second fix’, when we put in the switch plates. There would be closed-circuit TV as well. It was a big job and extremely lucrative, just what I needed to occupy the time before work began at Paddington Basin.

  ‘I’ve been here before,’ I said. ‘I took a room for the evening,’ knowing how Darren would take it. He didn’t disappoint me.

  ‘A short time with Mr Mystery, I suppose,’ he said. ‘Him of the sparkling eyes you used to run around with.’

  Lysander sniggered. I grinned at him. ‘You’re wrong. It was someone else. And we didn’t need a room for what’s on your mind, we’d got one of our own.’ I considered the whole truth and dismissed it. ‘We were exploring.’

  Darren said he had never heard it called that before, Lysander capped that with some more innuendo, and then we got down to work. If you’re a woman electrician who works with men, you must expect that sort of thing. Anyway, hadn’t I courted it? Of course it was Silver I had gone with to the Gilmore and in a way we had been exploring. Given a rope and the rest of his simple equipment, Wim could have climbed almost anything, but we needed help in the shape of other windows to climb out of. The houses in Sussex Gardens aren’t very tall and there’s nothing particularly won
derful about their roofs. The attraction of the Gilmore lay in its being a hotel and therefore with rooms to hire, and in its lift.

  It was also cheap. Silver and I booked a room for one night by phone and went along at about six. It was early June. Silver said he wanted to pay in advance as we wouldn’t be staying all night and the man in reception was quite unfazed. I suppose he was used to this sort of thing, though I’d have thought that by the late eighties people had got beyond using houses of call. As I soon discovered, I was being naive.

  Our room was a single, on the fifth floor and at the back. The receptionist obviously thought we’d taken a single room with a single bed because that was all we could afford, while the truth was that we’d no need for a bed at all. We didn’t intend to sleep in it or make love in it. Being at the back made it less likely anyone would see us climbing out of the window. If the Gilmore had let us, we’d have taken a cupboard so long as it had access to the roof.

  I suppose Jonny’s story about the lift wasn’t really funny, wasn’t at all funny, but laughter is often less about amusement than about astonishment, and we started laughing when we summoned the lift and it didn’t come. There seemed not to be a porter about. Silver whispered to me that probably no one would take the job after Jonny’s assault on Tudorlap. We pressed the button again. The receptionist got wearily off his stool and went upstairs. He didn’t say anything but we knew where he had gone.

  The lift came so quickly with the receptionist in it that he must have found it on the first floor.

  ‘Shut the inner gate when you leave the lift, will you?’ he said.

  It was amazing they hadn’t renewed it after what had happened. But perhaps the management knew, even then, that the building was to be sold and gutted and all its ancient equipment thrown on the rubbish heap. We carefully closed that inner gate when we got out and, once on the landing, read the notice, perhaps the very one Jonny had been carrying up to attach to the mahogany door when he encountered Tudorlap for the last time. The lettering was huge, like Sun headlines, but apparently still not effective.