Grasshopper Read online

  And I always say, ‘It’s past and gone and it’s no use regretting.’

  They never talk about the pylon now. They never mention Daniel’s name. Not long ago, when I was down there spending the day with them, Mum was full of a story she had read in the paper about two boys who were killed climbing a pylon in Wales. She told me about it artlessly as if it had no parallel in my own experience. I think she has forgotten it ever happened. She and Dad are proud of me now. I make quite a lot of money, you see, and I’m married with a home of my own. Whatever they thought of him once, they are extremely fond of their son-in-law, whom they regard as entirely selfless and a kind of saint. To their friends they refer to me as an ‘electronics expert’. My virtual expulsion from the Grand Union Polytechnic, my banishment from Max’s house, my subsequent disappearance, rooftop escapades and all the rest of it, have gone the way of the pylon, into oblivion.

  Eleven years ago it was different. When I did as Max told me, rang Mum up and said I’d been asked not to come back to GUP in October, there was at first a dreadful silence. Then tears. I could hear her gulping and whimpering and I don’t really know why I didn’t just put the receiver down and run away and hide. Dad came on the line and said I had broken my mother’s heart and he didn’t know why people had children, they wouldn’t if they had any idea what it would be like, just misery and bitterness and despair from the cradle to the – well, he couldn’t say ‘the grave’, so he left the sentence hanging in the air. They told me to phone them again when they had had time to digest what I had said and were less upset. So I did, the next day, and Mum said she supposed I had better come home, there was no point in staying in London if I wasn’t going to college. I told her Max had ideas about that and, plunging right in at the deep end, asked her whether she’d have my cat if I had to leave London. Another silence, then a sort of grudging assent, cut short by an explosion from Dad in the background, a bellow roughly decipherable as ‘I’m not having her bloody mog here.’ I thought I could safely leave that for the time being. After all, I still had old Mrs Fisherton’s, I still had a home for Mabel, and it looked as if I would at least for August and September.

  Silver and I always knew our time on the roofs must necessarily be short-lived, an adventure that would last for months rather than years, and would one day soon have to be abandoned to the pressures of the final stage of growing up. I had taken it for granted when I first met him that he and Wim had been roof-climbing for years and it was a surprise to discover that it was only in the previous July that he had been up there for the first time. A day is so much longer when you’re twenty than when you’re thirty, eight months is a lifetime, yet here’s a paradox: nights pass fast in early youth, they go much more slowly for me now. When I sat on the rooftop with Silver and we talked and smoked and picnicked and talked and talked, the hours flew away. That summer it seemed that no sooner had the last red faded from the great wide open sky than the pale cold light of dawn was coming. And all the time we knew it must end, that there would be only so many long days and short swift nights before the practical world took over and we had to live real life.

  Because what we had was fantasy and, if we didn’t talk about it like that, we knew it was true. We knew it but Wim didn’t. He was the only person I have ever known who lived life as if it were a dream, the sole one of us who appeared to have no past and no future but occupied only the present, and a present of his own creating. Convention meant nothing to him, nor ordinary social usage, nor manners. I doubt if he ever gave a single thought to Liv, or considered her as another human being with feelings and pride and the ability to suffer. Perhaps he never considered anyone like that. When he was away from her, as he mostly was, he forgot her existence. With her, that is in the same room as her, he became nothing more than an idle male animal, amiable enough, stirred to activity only when the female in heat came close.

  He seemed to have arrived out of nowhere. You couldn’t imagine him as being any different from what he was now or living any other sort of life, a child with parents, for instance, or a student. I could easily picture Liv as a little girl up there in that far northern place, going to school before it got light and coming home after dark, the world covered in snow for half the year; the house-proud prudent mother, the father a mining engineer, down quilts on her bed in the efficiently heated house, polished wood floors, perhaps a Lutheran text on the wall, done in cross-stitch by a grandmother. I could understand her longing to get away, escape the narrowness and the sameness of that life, first to Stockholm, then further afield.

  Imagining Jonny’s life was no more difficult, only a good deal less pleasant: the father and his brutish friends, their activities that make you shudder, the squalid flat on the kind of estate people are afraid even to walk past. But Wim existed, it seemed to me, in the here and now. He was only himself, single-minded, covert, a silent mystery.

  Silver had met him on the roofs, but not as he had met Jonny. He was in the living room at the top of 15 Russia Road with his then girlfriend Judy, his parents being as usual away in the country. It was late, well past midnight. Judy was the first to hear sounds from above their heads. Wim said afterwards that what had happened to him on that roof was the first and only time he had ever slipped and dislodged a slate. Judy heard the slithering sound of his foot sliding and they both heard the slate skid down the mansard into the gutter. She was all for calling the police but Silver didn’t like the idea of that and went to investigate. He opened the window and looked up. This incident was the end of things between him and Judy. She said that if he did any more mad things – Silver never told me at that time what other mad things she meant – they were finished, she was going home, she had had enough. Silver disliked being threatened and he thought it absurd when she said if he went out there he’d be killed, so he just told her in typical fashion not to fret, everything would be all right, and why not open the bottle of wine they had brought in with them.

  Judy shouted at him that he was mad. Silver took no notice but levered himself up on to the mansard and then on to the flat roof. A man a few years older than himself was sitting on top of a dormer, holding a slate in his hand.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘I’ll put it back for you. I’ve never done anything like that before.’

  Silver started laughing. ‘Do you come here often?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, it’s the first time I’ve been further along this way than Torrington Gardens.’

  ‘Come and have a drink,’ Silver said.

  Wim came in but he wouldn’t drink the wine. He had a glass of water. He talked about the roofs and where he had come from that night and how, in his opinion, there were few roofs that couldn’t be scaled with a rope and a bit of persistence. Judy went into the bedroom and slammed the door. Silver said he’d like to go up there with him and Wim said OK, fine, but some other night, not when Silver had been drinking. Tomorrow, Silver said, let’s do it tomorrow, and I promise I’ll be abstemious. So the next night Wim came in through the window and took Silver up on the roofs and slept at 15 Russia Road when they came back at around three. True to her word, Judy left but they stayed friends.

  And that was the beginning of the roof-climbing and the friendship with Wim, the two being coincidental. To Silver’s surprise, the third time Wim came calling for him he greeted him by taking him into that curious embrace and a sort of intimacy was established. Wim never said how he felt but it was easy to see that if he ever loved anyone, he loved Silver. Sometimes his glance rested on him with a kind of tender yet ironic regard. It wasn’t the way Liv looked at him but it had more affection and care in it. Yet in all those months since he and Silver had met, not far short of a year, embracing Silver, treating him as a best friend, daily bringing him gifts of chocolate or cigarettes, he had never confided in him, never imparted a detail of his past.

  Silver felt quite flattered when Wim told him he had a job in a café and a room in ‘sort of south-west London but north of the river’. Of p
arents, brothers, sisters, girlfriends, friends, he never spoke. If it wasn’t too absurd a concept, you could say he had been born on the roofs and had grown up there. And there, when his body lost its suppleness and his eye its skill, he would die.

  Morna came round to Silver’s that evening and repeated her story of having seen Andrew Lane. Silver found an old newspaper among the stack in the kitchen and showed her the latest photograph of Lane and Barrie. That only made her the more certain it was him she had seen.

  ‘Draw a beard on him,’ Silver said.

  While she was doing this, painstakingly working with a fine-pointed ballpoint, the phone rang. We all jumped. It doesn’t sound much, the phone ringing. In most people’s lives, I suppose, especially now, phones ring all the time. If it’s not the one in your home or your office, it’s your mobile. But nobody had any occasion to call Silver. The phone in his bedroom was an extension of his parents’ and anyone who needed to call them got on to their number in the country. Silver’s friends and acquaintances dropped in, they seldom rang first. But here was the phone ringing and in the peremptory sort of way it always seems to ring when you don’t expect or want it.

  Silver answered it and came back to say it was Liv’s mother. Her English wasn’t very good but that helped rather than hindered her, for Silver immediately guessed who it was. And guessed, of course, what she wanted.

  ‘I am not wishing to talk to her,’ Liv said. ‘You must tell her I am not here, I am out.’

  Silver looked at her and shrugged. That shrug said it all, that he wasn’t telling lies for her. She looked at Wim and Wim smiled distantly, as well he might at the idea of him explaining anything to her mother. Morna pretended to be engrossed in an article in the newspaper that carried Andrew Lane’s photograph.

  ‘Clo?’ Liv said in a piteous little-girl voice.

  I got up and went into the bedroom and said Liv couldn’t speak to her now (which wasn’t exactly a lie) but she’d call her back in an hour. I always seemed to be an intermediary between Liv and her parents, and you couldn’t have found anyone less suited to the role. Elsie Almquist refused to leave it at that. She wanted to know, quite naturally, why Liv hadn’t come home two days before. Then Liv’s father came on. His English was much better. Had the money for Liv’s air fare arrived in Silver’s bank account? I forgot all about lying and not lying and said I didn’t know. Liv had better call him in half an hour, he said. If she didn’t, he’d fly to London and fetch her, and I could tell her that.

  I told her. She was sitting next to Wim on the sofa, that is, she was sitting on it at one end and he was sitting on it at the other. She gave a sort of sob, edged up to him and put her head against his chest and her arms round his neck. I couldn’t see his face. At least he didn’t fling her off. Perhaps it would have been better if he had because at that moment Jonny’s key was heard in the lock and he walked into the room. Liv remained where she was, only turning a tearful face in Jonny’s direction.

  ‘What the fuck’s going on?’ Jonny said.

  Liv said she had to go home. Her father was coming for her. Thanks to Clodagh – she cast a nasty aggrieved look at me – Far and Mor knew where she was and would come and take her away. She’d have to go home, she wouldn’t have a choice. Jonny looked at Wim.

  ‘Let go of her.’

  ‘Better tell her to let go of me,’ Wim said.

  Jonny took Liv by the shoulders and pulled her away. She crouched with bent back, looking up at him with trembling mouth. Her hair hung down, long and lank. Liv’s hair always had a shredded look, as if the ends had been torn rather than cut.

  ‘If I find you’ve been screwing her, I’ll kill you,’ Jonny said, and to Liv, ‘You’re not going home and you’re not staying here. You’re coming back with me to my place.’

  Liv began to scream, waving her arms and tearing at her hair with both hands. I understood how it came to look the way it did. Jonny slapped her face, not all that hard, not as hard as I’d have expected. Slapping the hysterical person’s face is effective, as I remembered from the car wash experience. Liv fell on to the sofa, quietly weeping.

  Silver intervened then. ‘Jonny, Liv can stay here if she likes. I think she ought to go home but if she doesn’t want to, that’s her choice.’

  ‘No, it’s not. She doesn’t have a choice. I make the choices. I saved her from the law and going inside and paying some fucking great fine, so she’s mine now. Right? She belongs to me.’ It was quite a long speech Jonny was making. I’d not have thought him capable of it. ‘It’s got nothing to do with no one else. She’s mine. If I say she comes back to my place, she comes. And if I say she stays here, she stays.’

  Wim got up while he was speaking and, though it was raining, climbed out of the window on to the roof. Liv’s crying rose to a wail. I could see Silver wanted to tell Jonny that going or staying wasn’t his choice, the flat was his and he made the decisions about who lived there. He didn’t say it because he always refrained from asserting his rights or what he called ‘pulling rank’.

  Once more Jonny took hold of Liv but more gently this time. He sat beside her and turned her to look at him. Her red and swollen face looked as if it had been soaked in water. ‘Things are going to change round here,’ Jonny said. ‘For one thing, you’ve got to hand over that money you stole.’ He sang his nursery rhyme this time, something he didn’t always do: ‘You owe me five farthings, say the bells of St Martin’s…’

  I caught my breath but I didn’t say anything. The rain was coming in through the open window. Silver went over to it and pulled it almost closed, leaving a gap between casement and architrave just wide enough for Wim to slide it open when he came back. Morna, who had been sitting on the floor, started to get up. ‘I’d better go.’

  ‘You can’t go in this. It’s pouring. Wait until it eases up.’

  ‘I said I wanted the money,’ Jonny said. ‘I know you’ve got it hidden somewhere. I don’t know what went on in your head if you thought you’d fooled me.’ He looked from Liv to us. ‘She thought she’d fooled me.’ His tone was wondering, incredulous. A woman had actually thought she could pull a fast one over him. ‘Where is it?’ he said.

  Her voice shook when she spoke. She put up a hand to her mouth as if she could stop the trembling but her hand shook too. ‘It’s in the bank. I put it in the bank.’

  ‘You never. You haven’t got no bank account.’

  ‘Silver’s account,’ she managed to say.

  Silver said, ‘Take your hands off her shoulders, you’re hurting her.’ Jonny did, just about. His hands slid down on to her forearms. People usually did what Silver told them. ‘All I’ve got in my account is the money her dad sent her for her air fare.’

  ‘You sodding little liar,’ Jonny said to Liv.

  ‘Don’t speak to her like that!’ Morna stood over him, big, powerful, well-muscled Morna. He took no notice of her. The phone began ringing again. Quite a lot more than half an hour had passed since the Almquists phoned the first time and asked Liv to call them back. It was plain no one was going to answer it, but the ringing, from a source she was as aware of as any of us, seemed to give Liv courage.

  ‘I put it on the roofs,’ she said.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I am wrapping it up in a bag, the bag of plastic food is in, and hiding it on the roofs. When I am up there I am hiding it.’

  ‘You’re mad.’

  Liv shrugged. ‘So I am mad. I hide it where no one ever find it.’

  The ringing stopped. Silver and I looked at each other. Silver said, ‘Give me your parents’ number. I’m going to call them and tell them you’re ill. You’ll come home when you’re better. OK?’

  Liv hardly bothered to turn her head. ‘OK.’ She had the number in her head, of course, and reeled it off.

  I went into the bedroom with Silver and Morna came with us. We sat on the bed, all three of us, and hugged each other and then Silver phoned the Almquists. I could hear Liv and Jonny arguing, then the
sound of a blow and a scream from Liv. I went straight back and found her lying on the floor, holding one hand to her mouth. Blood was coming from between her fingers. Jonny was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘What has he done to you?’ I said.

  ‘Nothing. I myself,’ she said, a bit like Desdemona.

  I couldn’t imagine then why she lied, but later on I understood that if Silver knew Jonny had hit her she was afraid he’d turn them both out. She’d be obliged to go back to Jonny’s room and be alone with him. For ever, was how she saw it. She’d lose the money and the air fare and become Jonny’s slave. There would be no choice about it, for she was still afraid to go out in the street. She got up on to all-fours, then to her feet and spat something out into her cupped hand. It was a tooth, a molar, that Jonny had knocked out with his fist.

  ‘Liv,’ I said, ‘you’ll have to go to a dentist. You’ll have to go out now and go to a dentist.’

  She mumbled something about it being too late for that and what could a dentist do? ‘It is at the back. It will not show.’

  There’s women for you. The prime concern is always for the look of the thing, for appearance. What will he think? What will other women think? I resolved in that moment, while I was fetching her a glass of water and a handful of tissues, that I wouldn’t be one of that sisterhood and I have more or less stuck to it. If I lose a tooth, it’s my health and ability to chew I think about, not the beauty I’ve never had much of anyway. Still, Mrs Clarkson has a lovely set of grinders now, by the look of them the whole lot capped, and wears the molar round her neck. I wonder what reason she gave the orthodontist for losing it?