Grasshopper Page 27

  Silver whispered to me to come into the bedroom and leave them to sort it out. We sat on the bed while I told him all about my encounter with Max and Selina and he, eventually, drew my attention back to what Wim had seen through the dormer window. It was natural enough, in the light of what had been happening, that I had almost forgotten it. Silver asked me if I had any ideas. What, for instance, were we going to do about it, if anything?

  ‘I’d like to see for myself,’ I said.

  Silver had asked Wim for precise directions and he had been down Torrington Gardens himself this morning to locate the house. The fifth window on the top floor from Peterborough Avenue was in the second house from the end, there being three dormers on this level to each house. A balcony ran along this floor just below the dormers where the mansard ended and it was bordered by a low parapet of bottle-shaped pillars. If hanging upside down on the mansard was beyond our powers, we could walk along this balcony. The house was of dark grey brickwork with cream facings and red bricks in a Greek key pattern running along just below the parapet and again between the bay windows on the ground floor and the sash windows on the first floor. It would be easy to slip down on to the balcony from the roof.

  This particular house, 4 Torrington Gardens, was divided like its neighbours into five flats. Silver had gone up the path into the porch and read the names beside the row of bells. The top bell and the one below it were for Flats D and E, both apparently occupied by someone named Robinson. No style or initials, just Robinson. Some people called Nyland lived in Flat C and an S. Francis on the ground floor.

  ‘If it’s them,’ I said, ‘what are we going to do? Are we going to do anything?’

  ‘Let’s make sure first.’

  ‘Yes, but are we going to creep up on them or – well, boldly reveal ourselves?’

  ‘We’re on the side of the hunted, not the hunter, aren’t we?’ Silver said and I nodded. ‘So is being on their side giving them up or keeping them hidden? I suppose it’s keeping them hidden because they could give themselves up if they wanted to. Anyway, it’s wrong to do good to people against their will.’

  ‘Is it?’ I thought about that one and ended up by no means certain. It surely might be right to force someone into a rehabilitation programme even if they wanted to keep on injecting heroin, or make a family live in a hygienic new house no matter how much they might prefer their dirty cottage. I told Silver this and he said he didn’t know but the family analogy was a bad one because only the parents probably would make the decision while the children, who benefited or suffered as much as they, had no say in the matter.

  ‘You’re thinking of Jason, the little boy,’ I said.

  But he hadn’t been. He had forgotten about Jason and said he’d only believe in him when he’d seen him himself. He was speculating as to what Lane and Barrie were doing there, if they had been there from the first or recently moved on from some other hiding place that had proved unsafe, if indeed it was them at all, when there came a shattering scream from the living room. We rushed out to find Håkan Almquist trying to manhandle Liv out of the flat. He had two plastic sacks into which he had presumably packed her clothes and these he was pushing across the floor with his feet, necessarily very slowly, while he dragged Liv, pulling her by the welt of her sweater. The sweater welt stretched as if made of elastic and Liv, straining backwards and trying to dig her feet into the thin old carpet, reminded me of a shaggy dog dragging on the end of its leash.

  Mr Almquist stopped pulling when he saw us and Liv broke free. A furious altercation between them was incomprehensible to us but we knew very well she was saying she wouldn’t go with him and he telling her she must. ‘I shall call the police,’ he shouted at Silver, ‘and they will make her come home with me.’

  At the idea of the police Liv looked as if she was going to faint. She crawled on to the sofa and huddled into the far corner of it, hugging her knees. Silver was very polite, but what he said was unlikely to please Liv’s father. It would be useless calling the police. Liv was over-age, an adult woman, and no one could take her anywhere if she wanted to stay.

  ‘But she is my daughter. She lives in my home.’

  ‘I expect you’ll find the law is the same in Sweden,’ Silver said.

  Håkan Almquist’s response to that was to slap Liv’s face. Poor Liv was always getting smacked. As she cried out he seized her by the shoulders and started pulling her off the sofa. She screamed. I have never come across anyone, unless you count three-year-olds in supermarkets, who could scream so loudly and penetratingly as she could. It was a sound which rose and fell and rose and fell like a police siren, and it roused Wim, who had retreated to another room. He came out, quickly took in the situation and surprised me by seizing hold of the older man from the rear and, walking backwards himself, propelling him towards the door. Silver and I held him, taking an arm each. I didn’t like doing this, it felt like violence, though it was only restraint. Wim picked Liv up in his arms and without a word carried her into her bedroom. He came back immediately, closing the door behind him.

  ‘What am I to do?’ said Mr Almquist.

  He had calmed down. He looked despairingly at Silver. We released his arms and he dropped into an armchair. ‘She doesn’t want to go,’ Silver said gently. ‘You must see that. She can stay here, she’s all right here.’

  ‘But what is wrong with her? Is it her mind?’

  We said we didn’t know. No one said anything about her refusal to go out into the street and no one mentioned Jonny. Håkan Almquist sat there for a few minutes, staring at Liv’s bedroom door and casting sidelong glances at Wim. Then he got up, sighed, and said he’d go. Not home, not back to Sweden, but find himself an hotel and come back the next day to try and make her change her mind.

  All this reminded me that unless I did something about it I’d be in Liv’s case myself, a missing person whose parents hadn’t known where she was for months. But do what? It wasn’t likely Dad would behave like Mr Almquist but could I take the risk? He and Mum were already angry enough with me for getting myself thrown out of GUP and we had spoken only once since that piece of news was imparted. I told Mr Almquist I’d come with him and help him find somewhere to stay and Silver and he and I all went downstairs together.

  The only hotel I knew of was the Gilmore. We could hardly recommend it, having tested its lift ourselves, and we eventually found him one in Elgin Avenue, the Edgware Road end. By this time he was talking about the air fare he had sent Liv and saying he wanted it back. She wasn’t to be trusted with money, he said, suddenly confiding in us. She stole from her mother’s purse when quite a small child and there had been trouble at school over her shoplifting. Silver told him he had the money safe in his own bank account and then we left him, I to find a callbox and phone my parents, not relying on the anonymity of any call reaching them from Silver’s flat.

  The ensuing trouble was worse than I had expected. Oddly enough, Max and Selina came in for as much rage and blame as I. Dad would phone Max as soon as I had rung off. A piece of his mind would be delivered. Mum wanted to know what I had done that was so disgraceful (her word) as to deserve summary eviction. Where was I now? When was I coming home?

  ‘I’m not,’ I said and had to back away from the receiver, the outburst was so violent.

  Silver kept feeding the phone with 2op pieces. When I too was threatened with the police I said goodbye and put the receiver down, but carefully and not with a crash. Hand in hand we walked back to 15 Russia Road. It was my home now, a place where they didn’t have to take me in. They wanted to.

  18

  Håkan Almquist’s arrival and his violence towards her, even more than that, his threat of calling the police, made Liv’s attitude to the outdoors worse. Now not only Claudia and James were out there looking for her but her father as well. She stayed in her bedroom, only coming out at sunset. The sun streamed into Silver’s living room on a fine day, and it was as if she was afraid of its rays seeking her out as in wart
ime an airman might fear the beam of a searchlight. Even when those rays had dulled and reddened, she flinched from them, covering her face with her hands.

  Jonny came in as the red light was fading from the walls. He brought in a bottle of whisky and two bottles of wine, but Liv wouldn’t drink, saying she felt sick. She told him about her father’s visit, constantly appealing to us for confirmation of this threat or that. Jonny made matters worse by telling her she had committed a criminal offence. Once her father went to the police, as of course he would, they would know where to find her and be able to prosecute her for driving over the permitted limit, leaving the scene of an accident and endangering the lives of three young children. This last was an offence I believe he invented on the spur of the moment. Liv was terrified. Jonny told her the only way she could make sure of not being sent to prison or heavily fined and deported to Sweden was by coming back to Cricklewood with him. She lay on the floor and cried.

  Jonny sat there, occasionally prodding her with his toe, and drinking neat whisky. We were a pair of ‘fucking wimps’ because we wouldn’t join him. I was desperate for a glass of wine but had to refuse it. We were going on the roofs. Of course, we wanted to go alone, but Silver, whispering to me in the bedroom, said he disliked the idea of going at all if it meant leaving Liv alone with Jonny.

  ‘He could get her out of the house on his own if there’s no one around to hear her screaming. Or he could stun her first, he’s capable of that. You don’t know how often I’ve wished I’d never met him.’

  ‘Then we’d better take him with us,’ I said.

  Would it have been better if we had? Or worse? Perhaps no different. We went alone because Morna arrived just as we were thinking of leaving. Sure, she’d stay with Liv till we got back, there was something she wanted to watch on television. Jonny was far from pleased to see her. He became antagonistic when she suggested she and Liv go and lie on Liv’s bed to watch the episode in her serial. He asked them if they were a ‘couple of lezzies’.

  ‘And what I want to know is, what you done with that two grand?’

  I had been wondering that myself. Liv smiled at him. She had what I thought of as a dangerous way of behaving when defying him – when defying any man, I expect. She’d stand up, stretch her neck and drop her shoulders, thrusting out her breasts and pulling in her waist. Liv’s breasts were big and her waist tiny, so the attitude was highly provocative.

  ‘It is where you will not find it,’ she said, confident now she had big strong Morna to protect her.

  They went off into the bedroom and Jonny lit a cigar. It was to be days before the choking throat-tingling smell of that cigar disappeared from the flat. I changed my shoes for trainers and put on one of Silver’s sweaters.

  Two days before, Silver’s newspaper had carried another Lane and Barrie story – they had something about them, some so-called new angle, two or three times a week – and this one had the usual photographs, Andrew Lane anonymous behind his black beard, Alison Barrie looking lined and anxious, and the little boy Jason beautiful as only mixed-race children can be when one of the races is Asian. No new discoveries as to their whereabouts had been made, but Andrew Lane’s father had died and that was what occasioned the story. A whole article inside was devoted to how much money John Lane might have left and to whom and who would inherit his house: Andrew, his only child, was the opinion of the newspaper, speculating as to whether he would come forward to claim it.

  We went out at the precise time, I calculated, that Max would be phoning my parents. In days gone by, before I became a delinquent, when he had had occasion to phone them, he always did so after nine in the evening. Fond as she had been of Max, nearer a brother than a cousin to her, Mum used to say he did it deliberately to stop Dad seeing the start of the nine o’clock news. At two minutes past nine, when we opened the casement and climbed out on to the mansard, Max and my parents would be tearing me to shreds and spitting out the pieces.

  I could almost hear the conversation, Max detailing my iniquities, Mum and Dad asking him where he thought I had gone, he telling them that as far as he knew I was at home with them, all of them concluding that I was a lost soul who would end up on the streets. But their conversation wasn’t as I had imagined it. Mum’s anger had gathered and accumulated and festered throughout the afternoon, Dad took his cue from her, and by the time Max phoned at two minutes past nine both of them were ripe to accuse him of irresponsible behaviour and criminal negligence. How dare he turn a young girl out of his house with nowhere to go? And in what everyone knew was a rough area, no matter how pretty it looked? Mum had by this time changed her mind about Maida Vale being a ‘nice part’ of London. How could anywhere be nice that was between Kilburn and Paddington Station? Max, of course, countered with a catalogue of my sins and the result was that he didn’t speak to Mum and Dad or they to him for a year afterwards.

  It was a while before I found out about this conversation. While Silver and I climbed up the mansard on to the flat part of the roof I had no idea they were quarrelling over me. I’d have been rather flattered if I’d known, but I didn’t know and I didn’t think about any of them for long. It was a fine calm night, the sky clear. An immensity of purple was spread out above us, unbroken by cloud or aircraft lights or streak of cirrus. Yet it was veiled by a hood of vapour dense enough to hide Venus and Mars and the Plough and the Seven Sisters, which I’d grown up with and become so used to that I only noticed them when they were gone.

  We climbed down the gable at the end of the last terrace in Russia Road and on to the house that stood alone, then up the nailhead steps on the first gable of Torrington Gardens, and walked all the way to the terrace end. There, out of sight from any window, we dropped over the edge on to the balcony. The parapet with its bottle-shaped pillars was very low, less than three feet high, which made me think it was designed for show and not for anyone to walk out on. Besides, the dormers above it contained sash windows, not casement windows.

  The plane trees in the pavement were very tall here, their leafy crowns reaching far beyond roof height. Anyone walking down the street might look up in this direction without seeing us. The street-lamps seemed very far below us, we were in the dark up here, but still we crouched down. We lay down and worked our way along, snake-fashion, Silver going first. It was dirty on that balcony with drifts of the dead plane leaves from autumns gone by and the accumulated dust of years. When we got up on to our knees our hands were black and our clothes covered in sticky dirt as dark as soot.

  Curtains had been drawn in the first three windows we passed, and in the fourth a piece of cloth had been pinned up against the glass to exclude the light. We were now under the windows of 4 Torrington Gardens. Was the cloth there because it was Jason’s bedroom? At the second window in the flat, the fifth one along, Silver got cautiously on to his hands and knees and I did the same. The window ledge was quite low down and when I lifted my head I could see into the room Wim had looked into, see the circular table with chairs around it, two armchairs, one red, one black, a television set, a picture on the wall facing us of a tiger in a rain forest. In the red armchair sat a little boy in blue pyjamas. Silver’s indrawing of breath was just audible. I shifted so that I was closer to him and he took my dirty hand in his dirty hand. The boy wasn’t looking in our direction or at the television but gazing at something on his lap and slowly moving his fingers.

  ‘He’s doing a jigsaw puzzle,’ Silver said.

  It was on a bean-bag board resting on his knees. The board was blue and the bag part dark blue with a pattern of rabbits on it. On the television screen a car chase was in progress, up and down the steep streets of San Francisco, but it wasn’t exciting enough to distract him from his jigsaw. He looked like his photograph, exactly like. His skin was a soft golden cream and his lips red as a rose. We couldn’t see his eyes, they were so intent upon his puzzle, but his hair, which looked black in the photo, was a dark-sepia brown. His bare feet dangled, not quite reaching the ground, an
d they were the most perfect small feet you could imagine, the toes as smooth and straight as fingers.

  ‘What do you think?’ Silver whispered. ‘Is it him?’

  A woman had come into the room. We dodged down a bit in case she saw us, though it was quite bright in there, a central light being on as well as a table-lamp, and fairly dark where we were. She didn’t even glance at the window but went straight to the boy, her anxious face softening as she smiled. She held out her arms but he shook his head quite vehemently. What she said to him couldn’t be heard but it worked, it persuaded him to put bean-bag and jigsaw aside and stand up as she squatted down, so that their heads were on a level. She put her arms round him and kissed him, and for a moment he rested his cheek against hers. It looked as if she was trying to lift him and failing. He was too heavy now. Both of them shook their heads ruefully and laughed.

  Hand in hand they left the room but not before I was able to see her quite clearly. For a moment she had looked unseeing in our direction. She resembled Alison Barrie, though younger and prettier than in the photograph. Perhaps the wrinkles were ironed out by artificial light, for her forehead was smooth and the lines about her mouth less obvious. In spite of this her face was a mask of anxiety, as if acute fear lived with her day and night, and she looked very much in need of Silver’s panacea: ‘Don’t worry.’ If it was Alison, if it was Jason.

  A moment after they had gone a lamp came on behind the cloth hanging at the first window. It was some sort of green floral material and the light showed up its pattern of poppies and daisies. We waited for something more to happen, for that light to go out perhaps and for her to come back into the living room, perhaps with Andrew. Or for Andrew to come in alone. If it was she, if there was a man there at all. The car chase was long over, the film itself was over, and a quiz show had begun. Silver said that we must take into account the fact that the flat was probably quite big, consisting of as many as six rooms, three along the back as well as these in the front. He and she could be in their kitchen or even have gone to bed.