Grasshopper Read online

  ‘The bill was after me,’ Jonny said with some satisfaction.

  ‘No, he is coming because Silver’s papa’s car is broken into.’

  ‘Not me,’ said Jonny. ‘That’s something I never stooped to.’

  Liv took no notice at all. She was looking at Wim, fixing her eyes on him with that undisguised intensity that was peculiarly her own. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a woman gaze at a man with such naked longing as Liv, though it’s true that men sometimes look at women like that. It was as if she wanted to devour him and the effort of keeping her hands from reaching for him made her clench them and brought a frown to her face. The effect was the same as pain but there was no mistaking this for pain, not when you saw that slack mouth and those widening eyes. Jonny saw it and was in no doubt what it meant, I’m sure of that. When Liv said her parents were sending the money for her air fare home, he suddenly put out his hand and took hold of her chin, holding it in a hard grip and turning her face by brute force.

  ‘You’re not going home. If you go anywhere, it’ll be to my place.’ By that he must have meant the room in Chichele Road, where perhaps he’d been the night before. ‘Yes, that’s a good idea. We’ll have a bite to eat and then we’ll go straight over there.’

  ‘I won’t,’ Liv said.

  Have you ever seen anyone stamp her foot from a sitting position? It’s an extraordinary sight. Jonny took no notice. He fetched her a drink. It was whisky, I think, undiluted whisky, and it was half a tumblerful. I knew then and Silver knew that Jonny had been keeping her docile, keeping her for him to use, by feeding her alcohol, indulging a taste she already had and had developed when she was with James and Claudia. She began to drink it in the greedy way no one should ever drink, the addict’s way. Wim remained quite still while all this was going on. Except that his long yellow eyes were wide open he might have been asleep. I suddenly noticed how beautiful his hands were, the colour of pale unpolished wood, sycamore or yew, and grainy like wood, the fingers long but thickened at the knuckles by the climbing and swinging he did. Liv drank her whisky, licking her lips so as not to miss a stray drop or two.

  ‘I won’t go,’ she said again.

  It must have been plain to Jonny that if she refused to leave with him he had no hope of getting her out of the Silvermans’ house. Silver, having said in a very firm voice that she could stay with him until she went home to Sweden, was obviously not going to help Jonny manhandle her. Wim looked as usual as if helping anyone do anything was outside his design for living – though I was wrong there, as a later incident was to prove – and Jonny knew I disliked him as much as he disliked me. But instead of immediately caving in, he turned on Wim.

  ‘You can keep your hands off her if you don’t want your fucking legs broken.’

  Broken legs would be almost worse for Wim than a broken neck. People are always talking these days about ‘quality of life’ and Wim’s depended on the use of his strong long legs. I could quite easily imagine Jonny putting a bullet into each of his knees.

  Wim said in his languid voice, ‘Your meaning escapes me,’ which was hardly honest of him since he had certainly slept with Liv once to my knowledge and probably several times. He moved only enough to cross one leg over the other, perhaps daring Jonny to carry out his threat. Jonny jumped up and stood over him in a way he could have done only when Wim was seated. There must have been ten or eleven inches difference in height between them.

  ‘Leave her alone. I won’t say it again.’

  ‘That’s a relief,’ Wim said. ‘I’m always glad not to hear your nasty cockney voice.’

  Silver jumped up and grabbed Jonny from behind. Without this restraint the smaller man would have launched himself on Wim, fists flying and booted feet kicking. But it was perhaps Silver’s saying in a clear firm voice that he wouldn’t put up with this in his place and if they wanted to fight they could go out into the street, which did the trick. Jonny contented himself with muttering to Liv that she was coming with him, he wasn’t having her defy him any longer. Once he was in a sexual relationship with a woman he believed he really owned her. Wim had closed his eyes, a half-smile on his face.

  Everyone calmed down – Wim had never been anything but calm – and after we had eaten and Jonny had rolled a couple of joints, we discussed my own dilemma, if and when I was going to tell Max I had got the sack. Nothing much else happened that night. I stayed with Silver, having left the window open at old Mrs Fisherton’s for Mabel. Early in the morning, two policemen came, not this time about Silver’s father’s car.

  13

  When I got home Beryl was already there. She had fed Mabel and left her on my bed to sleep off half a can of Whiskas. She took one look at me and said she supposed I had been on the toot. I’m never quite sure what that means, though I’ve a good idea, and I said nothing but went to have a shower and wash my hair. Beryl had made coffee for both of us when I came out. She had opened the front door and all the windows. It was lovely and fresh, the rain had washed Russia Road clean, and so light I could almost kid myself I lived above ground.

  ‘The Professor’s got himself a lady friend,’ she said.

  I said she must be joking, I couldn’t imagine anything less likely. It was a mystery how he had even managed to get married.

  ‘I saw him having a coffee with her in the caff on my way in. He’d been doing his jogging, I reckon, and so had she. She had one of them shellsuits on. Shocking pink, it was.’

  ‘Get away,’ I said, lighting the first cigarette of the day. ‘You’re making it up.’

  Beryl savoured the tobacco smell she liked so much. She sniffed and sniffed and smiled. ‘I couldn’t make it up, love. I haven’t got no imagination. My kids are always telling me. Mum, you’ve got no imagination, that’s what they say.’

  That convinced me more than any protestations could have. ‘What was she like?’

  ‘Little and what you’d call neat, like. What my old man used to call a pocket Venus, dirty old sod. Got a worried face, though, lines round her eyes. Little prinked-up mouth like a baby’s arse.’ Beryl sniffed my cigarette once again and took a swig of her coffee. ‘Not unlike Mrs, when you come to think of it, only younger. Mrs has had her face done, like, lifted, and this one hasn’t, you can always tell. Men go for the same type, don’t they?’

  She began to talk about the neighbours, how Dr and Mrs Clark next door had become vegetarians. They said it was a matter of principle but Beryl thought it more to do with economy, the wicked price meat was these days.

  ‘And how about the police knocking them up at No. 15?’ she said. ‘Last night and the night before. It’s not going to be thieving from cars both times, is it?’

  It wasn’t but I didn’t say so. Remarkably Beryl seemed to have no idea that I even knew Silver, still less that I was spending half my life round at the Silvermans’. ‘He’s got folks in there what are up to no good,’ she said. ‘Drugs, I shouldn’t wonder. You seen the paper today?’ She gave me a shrewd look. ‘No, you’d better things to think about, dirty little stop-out.’

  It was at times like this that I thought how nice it would be to have Beryl for one’s mother and envied the son and daughter. ‘What about the paper?’ I said.

  ‘That couple with the little coloured boy, they been seen taking him round a theme park in Ramsgate. It won’t be long now before they collar them.’

  ‘Won’t you be sorry?’ I said.

  Beryl didn’t know, she wasn’t sure. Maybe Jason would be better off with brown people like himself. Anyway, Lane and Barrie had no business taking the law into their own hands.

  ‘When I was young,’ Beryl said, ‘I mean, when I was a little kid, anyone could adopt anyone they liked, it was dead easy. And there was plenty of babies on account of it was a lot harder not to have them and a terrible stigma for those as did and wasn’t married.’

  I said that you couldn’t call that a very desirable state of affairs and Beryl said no, maybe not, but at least you knew where you w
ere, everyone knew their place and everyone was the same colour. Before I could rise hotly to the defence of the multiracial society she jumped up and set about vigorously vacuuming the living room. I went outside and sat on the iron staircase in the sunshine and looked at the moss and the rampant ivy and thought about what had happened the night before.

  As Beryl had said, the calls made by the police at the Silvermans’ could hardly both have been concerned with thefts from their car. The second had nothing to do with them and everything to do with Jonny. Two policemen had come to talk to him. Silver went down to answer the door, having first taken a look from his bedroom window at the one who rang the bell and the one who waited in the car, and they both followed him upstairs. They were making inquiries, they said, into the death of a woman called Sandra Furbank who had been found dead on the towpath at Paddington Basin. She lived on one of the boats. Whoever had killed her had taken her key, got into the boat and stolen the money she had there. Quite a lot of money apparently, though they didn’t say how much.

  Luckily two of the windows were open in Silver’s room, in spite of the rain, but even so I could smell the lingering scent from the two joints Jonny had rolled. The taller of the policemen kept sniffing but he didn’t say anything about the smell so maybe he just had a cold. They seemed uninterested in any of us, though they looked us over in a distasteful sort of way. It was Jonny they had come for. They had no reason to think he had known Sandra Furbank but plenty of reason, they said, to believe he had been down on that part of the canal that night. Silver said afterwards that they must have recently been given information by someone who said he or she had seen him there. After all, the murder had happened more than a month before. But the important point was that Jonny had a record. He had been in prison for causing actual bodily harm to someone. He had gone to the police station with them, the one at Paddington Green, I suppose.

  ‘I wonder how they traced him here,’ Silver said, and for the first time since I had known him he seemed worried. The anxiety state he warned others against he had fallen into himself.

  ‘His landlady,’ Wim said, ‘or whoever he rents his room from. She’d have told them he’d an alternative address.’ I’d seldom seen him look so happy. ‘No doubt they’ll keep him down there half the night.’ The full force of his unaccustomed smile was turned on Liv. ‘Maybe for good. Maybe we’ve seen the last of him. Bye-bye, Russia Road, hi there, Wormwood Scrubs.’

  Liv laughed shrilly. Wim put out his hand. Not to her, not to take hers, but to beckon to her. He was smiling no longer. His long forefinger stretched out and curled up and he raised his eyebrows just a little. Liv stared at him, drops of perspiration forming on her upper lip and her forehead. She didn’t look at all attractive then, all her rather ordinary prettiness was gone, disappeared under swollen features and the sudden smell of her sweat. But perhaps that is attraction, the real attraction of the female, not cleanness and sweetness and pretty clothes. She wasn’t smiling then and nor was he. She yearned for him and he received her without moving, the beckoning hand still by then, only his neck extending a little as Liv fastened her mouth on his.

  He was in perfect control of himself – when was he not? and well aware of our presence, if unembarrassed by it, but Liv was lost, careless of whether anyone else was there or not. You couldn’t call it kissing, what she was doing to Wim, it was more like the guzzling of a sea anemone first sucking in, then devouring, its prey. But Wim was no one’s prey, more a passive but willing partner who suffered or enjoyed all this – it was hard to tell which – for just as long as it suited him. I think people of my age are less promiscuous than our parents’ generation but also less inhibited. I wasn’t very old but I had already encountered several couples who were indifferent to the presence of others in the room while they made love. It would hardly have suited me or Silver but we saw it as a phenomenon of our time. And now, for a few moments, it looked as if this was going to happen between Liv and Wim, or as if Liv, pushing him back against the sofa cushions and crouching above him, was going to make it happen. She pulled off her T-shirt and let her rather long full breasts hang udder-like and brush against his hands which he held clasped against his chest.

  Then Silver spoke. His voice was cold. ‘Please will you go and do what you’re doing somewhere else.’

  Liv would have taken no notice, she would scarcely have heard him, but Wim heard and obeyed. If he cared for anyone, if he cared about anyone, that person was Silver. It shocked me a bit that they didn’t go into Wim’s room but into Jonny’s. The door closed. Silver put out his arms to me. ‘Is it me,’ he said, ‘or are things getting out of hand?’

  ‘Jonny won’t be back for hours, will he?’

  ‘I don’t know. Ask me another. No, don’t ask me anything but don’t go home either. Stay here with me tonight.’

  So I stayed and listened to the rain drumming on the roof and rattling down the closed casements and thought that, sharing Silver’s bed apart, how much nicer it was to sleep up here in the heights than at old Mrs Fisherton’s. But I slept less than well. I kept worrying about the window I had left open for Mabel and wondering if instead of her the rain was coming in and flooding the place. Although I hadn’t said a word about it to Silver, he read my thoughts and said in his sleep, or half-sleep, ‘Don’t worry, Clo, sweetheart. Worrying never helps.’

  I heard Wim’s footsteps going downstairs and much later Jonny’s footsteps coming up. The police had let him go after hours and hours, though they said they’d want to see him again. They had talked about searching the Silvermans’ house because they hadn’t yet recovered the money and the jewellery taken from Sandra Furbank’s houseboat.

  ‘They’ll have to get a search warrant,’ said practical Silver. ‘They’re not coming in here without one.’

  I must be an optimist because I was sure they wouldn’t come back. Perhaps, rather, it was because I found it hard to imagine the police attributing any dishonesty to Silver and his parents. But that is not the way they think. It’s only in detective mysteries that policemen study human character and rely on psychology in their investigations. In life circumstantial evidence is the main thing and they must have had some, for they returned with that warrant, not to search the entirety of 15 Russia Road, but only Silver’s flat. And to ask Silver about an alibi for Jonny.

  While they were there Wim came in through the window from the roofs. Feet in black trainers came in first, of course, as he swung himself from the lintel of the dormer. He was dressed in black tracksuit pants and dark green sweatshirt and might just have passed for a roofer which was how, with his usual presence of mind, Silver presented him. Clearing out the gutters after the rain, Silver said, and neither of the policemen seemed to find anything odd. It would have been a different matter if it had been Jonny.

  They wanted to know if Jonny had been here, in the flat, as he said he had, on the evening before the body was found. It was quite a long time ago now and maybe (they suggested) Silver would have difficulty in remembering. But Silver had no problem with that. Jonny had arrived at around seven and stayed all night. He had stayed till morning. Liv said the same, though her eyes shifted about while she talked, never looking directly at the policemen but giving them wary sidelong glances, which made me wonder if she would have found it much more satisfactory to rid herself of Jonny by saying he hadn’t been there and she hadn’t seen him that evening. But perhaps it was only that she was afraid. Afraid of any policemen, no matter what they had come about. She, like us, must have wondered what would have happened if she hadn’t handed the Hindes’ money over to me the night before and they had found it stashed between the TV and the video. It was on that visit that they told us the stolen sum was in the region of £2,000, exactly the amount Liv had accumulated.

  She went into Jonny’s bedroom after they had gone, from the way she looked at him over her shoulder obviously hoping Wim would follow her. He didn’t. In his roofer role he joked a bit with Silver about mending the gutteri
ng and how about repointing the chimney stack while he was up there, and then he went back out of the window. He had only come in for a drink of water, he said. Silver put his arm round me and I laid my head on his shoulder.

  ‘I remembered about Jonny being here,’ he said, ‘because it was the evening before the day we met. It was the last evening of my life without you. You went into the underpass because that woman’s body was on the canal bank and they wouldn’t let you through.’

  ‘I remember,’ I said.

  ‘But d’you know what I’m asking myself, Clo? Would I have told them Jonny was here if I couldn’t remember? Would I just have said it because it’d have been easier and because Jonny’s a friend?’

  ‘That’s just speculation,’ I said. ‘You did remember. He was here.’

  ‘You can’t help wondering, though. And another thing I wonder is if I’ve made Jonny a friend of mine because I know my parents would hate it so much. Childish, isn’t it? The superannuated rebellious teenager. D’you think Jonny will go once Liv has gone?’

  I didn’t know. I said he’d more likely find another girlfriend to bring here. But Liv was still there and by next day we knew she had no intention of going.

  The money from her father and mother in Kiruna was late coming through. By now I have learnt money always is late coming through, whether it’s a bill paid at last or a loan back or a fee, it always comes later than you expect. It’s a rule of life. But I didn’t know this then and I began to think Håkan Almquist had changed his mind. When eventually it arrived Silver asked Liv if she would like him to draw it out of his bank account immediately.