Grasshopper Read online

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  Silver and Liv and I went up on to the roofs, all the way along Peterborough Avenue as far as the first intersecting street. When you’re on the leads or the slates, coming to where a street branches off is like walking along downland to the edge of a cliff. Or reaching a precipice. The street isn’t just an ordinary useful roadway but an uncrossable canyon. We turned round, we had no choice, and sat down in the middle of a flat area where someone had once tried to make a roof garden. They’d probably found it too much bother to climb up a ladder and get through a trap door every time they wanted to water the plants, for the tubs were full of brown twigs and stems with dead seed heads on them, very like the dried flowers people pay a great deal of money for. There was even a dead birch tree, its silver bark hanging off in rags, its branches dangling threads. The moonlight made everything grey and black and frost-white, though it was a mild windless night, as warm as a London night can ever be.

  Sometimes, far down below us, a car passed, taking the through-route from the Harrow Road to St John’s Wood. Usually the cars were driven quite slowly but one came very fast. We heard a squeal of brakes and then a revving of the engine as the car moved off again. We looked over the parapet at the street lined with cars on both sides and Silver asked us if we realized that for the whole of our lifetimes we had never seen streets without cars parked nose-to-tail between the kerb and the roadway, we had never seen streets looking the way they did when they were first built. The problem with traffic was more than vehicles jammed to a standstill or crawling in a close-packed herd. It was also the covering of streets by day and night, endlessly, with shiny metal capsules, millions of them edging the pavements like the permanent scarring left by a wound.

  It was better up on the roofs. No cars there, no danger and no noise. We sat down by the dead tree and smoked. Liv asked if her money was safe and I said I had checked earlier in the evening, when I took Mabel home. She had an idea, she said. Did we think that if she gave him the money, all of it apart from her air fare home, Jonny would go away and leave her alone? Go back to his room in Cricklewood and forget her? It was quite a lot and he was always wanting money, more and more of it.

  I didn’t know, I couldn’t imagine it would be as easy as that, but Silver said he’d had more than enough of that money, he was sick of hearing about it, it wasn’t hers to keep or give away. He had said in the beginning she ought to send it back to Claudia and James. If she did that she need not be afraid of them any longer. She’d be able to go out into the streets without fear, get a job or go home to Sweden if she wanted to.

  ‘But it is all I have,’ she said. ‘I need it. Besides, if I am giving it back they will know I steal it before.’

  This seemed unanswerable. Silver refused to talk about it and soon after that Liv went back on her own to the roof of 15 Russia Road and in through the window to savour the pleasures of having a room to herself and without Jonny. She had only been gone five minutes when he appeared, walking along from the opposite direction and just inside the parapet. He had searched the roofs from the Castlemaine Road end of Russia Road, across the Italianate house that stood alone, all along Torrrington Gardens and Peterborough Avenue as far as the cross street.

  ‘She’s got that slippery bastard to hide it for her. I’ll kill him.’

  I said, ‘Oh, grow up,’ but Silver said nothing till he had gone. Then, ‘I can’t see any answer to this apart from throwing Jonny out. Sometimes I think Liv will be living in my place until we both get our bus passes.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said and that made us both laugh.

  The moon had gone in and it was dark and warm up there at midnight. Silver said, ‘Tell me about the grasshopper.’

  I was almost frightened, it was such a surprise. ‘The what?’

  ‘You said it in your sleep. You have several times. “Don’t go any higher,” you say and sometimes, “The grasshoppers leap across the fields.”’

  ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘The pylon. That’s what someone once called the pylon.’

  ‘We all have one big story in our lives,’ Silver said. ‘I expect we accumulate more stories as we get old but maybe there’s always just that one big one. That’s yours, isn’t it?’

  So sitting with his arm round me, under the dead birch tree, I told him about the pylon and Daniel, how he’d tried to light his cigarette from the corona, and the fireball that engulfed him. I described how I’d held on to him and how, at last, I’d had to let him fall, how Guy Wharton had seen us and run off to get help but it had all been too late. It took a long time. Silver listened in silence, looking into my face for a while and then away at the hands folded in my lap.

  ‘Now tell me your story,’ I said.

  ‘I will but not till tomorrow.’ Then, as we got to our feet to return first to 15 Russia Road and straightaway to old Mrs Fisherton’s together, he said in a voice so serious that it seemed to commit him for life, ‘I love you.’

  We didn’t kiss. Not then. I carefully chose my words, not wanting to seem simply to be replying to him. Not just giving him some rejoinder. ‘I love you, Silver,’ I said, ‘with all my heart.’

  It was a profound moment, a plighting of troth, up there on the roofs in the half-dark. I believe we both thought we had made a solemn pact that could never be broken. What could part us if we wanted not to be parted? In silence we went back and through the window, down the four flights of stairs and out into the street. Among the glittering parked cars and the scattered litter. And on the opposite side, between the back bumper of a van and the front fender of some big expensive car, there was something dark and soft lying close up against the kerb. I don’t like writing ‘in the gutter’, but that’s where she was.

  She was still quite warm, her fur smooth and sleek, the green velvet collar untouched. It had happened not long before. Maybe the car that raced down Peterborough Avenue and braked and revved had come this way, down this street, and come just as fast and carelessly. I held her body in my arms and Silver stroked her head. The golden eyes were dull and glazed. Silver did something for which I would love him for ever if I hadn’t already loved him. He closed her eyes with his fingertips.

  There was no blood. I couldn’t see a mark on her. We carried her down the iron staircase and into old Mrs Fisherton’s and there we wrapped her up in a sweater of mine, a nice one I loved, not an old thing to be discarded, and next day we buried her in the garden of 15 Russia Road. But that night, weeping, I asked Silver if it was my fault for not keeping her up there in his flat with me. Or did he think that by carrying her into No. 15 I’d introduced her to that dangerous road?

  We’d never know the answers to those questions, he said. Speculating was useless. The likelihood was that she had often been out into the street. After all, to find me in the first place she had apparently come all the way from Sutherland Avenue, and unlike us, had avoided the safe highway of the roofs. He never once said she was ‘only a cat’ or advised me to get another immediately. We went to bed and I cried and he held me in his arms until I fell asleep.

  16

  Silver and I went along to the Clifton Nursery and bought plants for Mabel’s grave. July isn’t the best time of the year for planting anything and it’s too late for sowing seeds. I didn’t know any of this then but Silver did. Being young, we wanted instant results the way children do, so we bought coleus with leaves striped in red and green and chocolate and a pink and white fuchsia and a red geranium already in bloom. On my latest visit to No. 15, only a few weeks ago, I went to look at the grave for the first time in eleven years. The coleus had all died in the first of that autumn’s frosts and the geranium had withered the way geraniums do, but the fuchsia was going strong, a big bush three feet high and covered in buds.

  Mabel’s death left me feeling gloomy and depressed. Jonny’s telling me 30,000 cats were killed on the roads of Britain every year and singing ‘Ding, dong bell, pussy’s in the well’ didn’t help. It was Saturday so he wasn’t at work but he seemed to h
ave left Liv alone. Of Wim there was again no sign. No one had seen him for two days. Morna and Judy came round in the late morning. We had no plans to go on the roofs until the evening. It was a hot steamy sort of day, the air heavy and smelling of diesel and roses, a curious sickly mixture.

  Silver said he’d take us all out to lunch in a pub in Blenheim Terrace where we could eat outside. He meant it as a treat for me because I was sad. Jonny had gone out somewhere by then and Liv, of course, wouldn’t come with us. Morna had her mother’s car with her and Liv would only have had to cross the pavement and get into the back seat but even that was too terrifying for her to contemplate. So we all went down without her and there, parked behind Morna’s mother’s car, was a van delivering wine for Selina’s party. Selina came running out to shout instructions to the driver. She didn’t see me. By then I was sitting in the car, watching her in the rear-view mirror and telling myself not to hate her just because she had shooed Mabel out of old Mrs Fisherton’s on the last day of her life.

  I had never felt so close to Silver as I did that day. I wanted to be physically near him too and he seemed happy about that. At lunch and afterwards we sat side by side with our bodies pressed close together and holding hands when we weren’t actually eating. I drank a lot of wine and so did he to keep me company. We’d have to sleep off its effects before we went on the roofs but that was all right too, we were soon desperate to be alone and in our bed and making love.

  It was quite late when we woke up, dusk if not dark. Liv was asleep on the sofa in the living room, her shaggy hair all spread out over the cushions in tails like the ones on her mice. Silver called me over to the window and we looked down and across the back of No. 17 to Selina’s guests disporting themselves in the garden. Max’s guests, I suppose I should say. Some were sitting on the bulbous white-metal garden furniture, all were drinking wine or brandy – we could tell by the glasses – and two, a man and a woman who looked enormously old to us, were dancing. Faint ancient music came out from the open french windows, and they were dancing, this aged couple, some long-lost dance, a quickstep, Silver said it was, or maybe a foxtrot. The moon that had disappeared so early the night before now showed itself in the pale lilac sky, a shape like a segment of an orange, its light unable to compete with Selina’s bright lamps and the dazzling blue circular element that hung on the wall to kill mosquitoes. From high above I imagined them dashing themselves against it, the sizzling sound as it electrocuted and destroyed them, and I shuddered.

  There were no mosquitoes on the roofs. They never fly so high. The music reached us distantly and the carefully muted civilized laughter of elderly academics who hated to disturb the neighbours. It all seemed remote, a different and unreal world, the same place Guy sometimes took me to, where all the people were unlike me and Silver, and all the things they did nothing we’d ever care to do.

  ‘Can you dance?’ I said.

  ‘I’ve never tried. I expect I could learn if you really wanted me to.’

  ‘I don’t want to dance,’ I said. ‘I want to hear your story.’

  He had to tell it as it had been told to him over the years by his parents and his brother and sister, for he had no memory of what had happened. When he was fifteen his mother had been very keen on the idea of Repressed Memory Syndrome and had coaxed him into encounters with a therapist who claimed to be able to dredge up out of the unconscious everything that had ever happened to the subject. Provided, that is, she was given plenty of time and she could catch her client young enough. Silver had been very taken with the idea of inventing experiences and had thought up blood-curdling events he claimed to have taken place in his early life. And when, later, he confessed that everything he had told her was a hoax, she’d have none of it, saying he was making excuses because he was afraid to confront the dreadful magnitude of what he remembered. Of course, he saw that he couldn’t win. He was bored with it anyway and was going to tell her at their next encounter that he had had enough when his mother read in a magazine (and immediately believed what she read) that an eminent psychiatrist had denied the validity of RMS and called it a cruel deception which destroyed relationships and split families. That was the end of any outside intervention in recapturing what had happened to him. He went on trying privately to remember but most of what he ever brought up out of his unconscious was a cliff with pink flowers on it and very green grass, his sister running, white gulls swooping and wheeling.

  ‘When I see gulls now,’ he said, ‘those gulls we get on the canal, that’s what always comes back, the flowers on the cliff and Rachel running down the slope. Birds and a boat come into it too. But nothing much else.’

  He was three years old. His brother and sister were much older, Rachel nine and Julian eleven. The family, the parents and the three children, were on holiday in a hotel on the Cornish coast. It was high summer, the middle of August. Silver wasn’t called Silver then, that came later, when he was at school, but by his given name, Michael. They were all out for a walk along the cliffs before going on the beach.

  The cliffs are very high there, limestone escarpments, overgrown at that time of the year with Livingstone daisies and at the top with bilberry bushes and gorse. The bottoms of the cliffs are rough with sharp pointed protuberances, like the feet of reptiles, but the sand, when the tide goes out, is smooth and hard and ochre-coloured. How high, I wanted to know, and he said just about as high as the terraces in Russia Road.

  He was in the care of his brother and sister, though neither of his parents had expressly said this. It was simply taken for granted that if the children ran on ahead, and they always did run on ahead, Julian and Rachel would look after Silver. Afterwards, neither of the older children remembered separating from him. They said they hadn’t taken their eyes off him, and then Rachel remembered the butterfly. She had seen it alight on the flower head of a purple thistle and called Julian over to look at it because she was interested in butterflies and this was one of a kind she had never seen before. It was quite large, a rich tangerine colour with green underwings, patterned in black, and Silver, again researching, thought from his sister’s description that it must have been a Dark Green Fritillary. This is an insect that feeds on thistles and prefers coastal districts but it is quite rare, which would account for Rachel’s never having seen it before. Julian wasn’t much interested in Argynnis aglaia but he gave it a glance. He and Rachel said they took their eyes off Silver for maybe half a minute. The butterfly disliked their scrutiny and flew off and when they turned round their little brother had vanished.

  He had been nowhere near the edge, they said. He had been with them, no more than a dozen yards from them, in the meadow that lay between the cliff path and the strip of woodland that separated it from the road. They and their parents ran in all directions calling him. First, of course, they went to the edge of the cliff. To reach it Silver would have had to get over or under a wire fence, admittedly flimsy, push through a dense mass of bilberry bushes and prickly gorse and brambles. But they looked over the edge, it was the first thing they did after shouting in vain, it was the natural thing, and there was nothing to be seen, no little figure lying face-downwards on the smooth yellow sand.

  It was a beautiful clear day, the sun shining, visibility as good as it could be, the sea calm. No one was about except themselves. They ran across the meadow where Rachel had seen the butterfly and they searched the little wood. They called Silver’s name, ‘Michael, Michael, where are you?’ Julian went back in the direction of the hotel in case Silver had decided to return there on his own, a most unlikely thing for him to have done, but possible. Rachel ran on ahead, calling him. Jack Silverman found a way down the cliff, one of the zigzag paths that wound between the bushes and the mats of pink and yellow daisies, but Erica decided enough time had been wasted and returned to the hotel where she called the police and, for good measure, the coastguard. No mobile phones in those days, at least none in private use.

  All the hotel guests, or all those who hadn�
��t gone off somewhere for the day, joined in the search. One party took the two miles of beach, another the cliff top and a third the wooded hinterland and the coast road. That road, on the far side of the wood, not far away, was the most terrifying of all things to Erica Silverman, worse than the sea. Traffic went along it quite fast, as in those days there was no speed limit on it.

  There were four houses at that point. They had no view of the sea, for the woodland interrupted it. At the end of the row was a shop that sold newspapers, basic groceries, ice cream and beach toys. No one in the houses or the shop had seen Silver. No one came upon a little body on the roadside verge or on the sands or caught up in the dense mass of vegetation that covered the cliff. He had been with his brother and sister, they had looked elsewhere for a few seconds and in that fraction of a minute, he had disappeared. It must have been longer, of course, but people always minimize time in these situations. The Silvermans were distraught, the parents despairing, the brother and sister guilty and frightened. All of them passed a terrible day and an even more dreadful night. Silver’s disappearance was on television, reporters appeared, cameras were everywhere. The weather continued glorious, even hotter than on the day he vanished. Some sort of regatta was scheduled for the day after and it went ahead, but amid protests. Silver’s mother said she could never see a sailing ship after that, not a picture of a yacht, or even a painting of a three-masted schooner, without the whole of that terrible weekend coming back to her in all its details.