Grasshopper Read online

  ‘They wouldn’t go to bed leaving the telly on,’ I said.

  I lit a cigarette but Silver told me to put it out. The window was open a little way at the bottom and if they weren’t smokers themselves they might smell it. It was almost ten and I was wondering if we were to stay there all night, when the woman came back. She was barefoot, wearing a dressing gown of pink and white checked cotton. She began to tidy the room, plumping up cushions, blowing dust from the table top, picking up cups by inserting a separate finger in each one.

  She switched off the television, took the cups away, came back and carefully laid puzzle and bean-bag on the table. We ducked down as she came to the window and closed it. She was so near us that, looking up, I could see the golden down on her forearms, the little snag in the material of her dressing gown at the waist, the gold watch on her wrist. We held our breath. She had only to look down – but she didn’t. She went to the door, switched off the light and left the room.

  The backs of the houses in Torrington Gardens can be seen from Torrington Road. We wriggled back along the balcony, climbed up on to the roof, and instead of returning in the Russia Road direction, made our way down the scaffolding between the end of this terrace and the start of the first one in Peterborough Avenue.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s strange,’ I said as we were walking home, ‘that Morna still recognized him even though in the photos he had a beard and now she says he hasn’t?’

  ‘There was a picture of him in one of the papers,’ Silver said, ‘without a beard. That is, what some artist thought he’d look like without one.’

  ‘I wish we’d seen him.’

  ‘We will.’

  I wrote some diary pages that night after Silver was asleep. It was my first night as an occupant of his flat rather than a visitor. I lived there now. I wanted to record my status as a resident and record too our first sight of the people in the flat we began calling simply 4E, the way we went about things and what we said. I’d have forgotten details of our conversation and the precise sequence of events if I hadn’t. Besides, much as I loved Silver, I enjoyed being alone sometimes. I enjoyed being on my own for a while in that room that was so high up, its windows open on to the night, a little wind rustling the leaves of the gum tree and the catalpa whose branches made a canopy over Mabel’s grave. That night I sat there for a long time, writing sporadically, thinking about my life and the strange turns it had taken, about Daniel too and all the people who believed me wicked beyond redemption. I wrote ten pages and thought of Silver and me and our luck in finding each other, until the blackbird began to sing, establishing its territory in the tea bush, as it always did at four in the morning.

  19

  In most houses socket outlets – you probably call them ‘points’ – are mounted quite high up in the wall, so that flexes have to trail at knee or hip level to appliances on furniture in the centre of the room. This is a system I avoid whenever I can and I’m starting to get a reputation with architects and builders as someone who installs floor socket outlets. Darren and Lysander and I are mounting this kind of wiring accessory in the floors of the Gilmore Hotel wherever possible and equipping them with a spring-loaded cover flap to keep the outlets free of dust and debris. It brings me a lot of pleasure and satisfaction to see how elegant the matt (but not dull) stainless-steel rectangles look, even though the tongue-and-grooved wood floors aren’t yet laid.

  My system is safe too, about as far from a fire risk as any wiring can be. It makes me think of its reverse, the hit-and-miss electrics in Silver’s flat where there were still old-style five- and fifteen-amp outlets, flexes trailing from wall outlets, two of these at head height, I never found out why, one flex looped up and hung over a curtain rod. I knew nothing of wiring in those days, couldn’t have mended a fuse, still less changed a plug, but even I sensed it might not be too great an idea to have an electric heater standing on a stool in the bathroom, its flex running across the floor, waiting to be tripped over, and an iron in the kitchen whose cable stretched across the sink. We never had a fire but there was one in a house in Torrington Gardens, and it was caused, people later said, by a similar kind of carelessness.

  The fire started while we were up on the roofs, Silver and Wim and I. We had twice been back to the balcony outside the flat where the people Wim was positive were Andrew and Alison and Jason lived. We had been in daylight but had seen nothing of them. Eight hours later we went again but this time the whole place was in darkness. If they were indeed who Wim thought they were, it was inconceivable that they could all have been out. Perhaps they were in bed, though it was only just after ten when we got there. Silver and I had a great feeling of let-down because we had given a lot of thought to what we meant to do about them. Reveal ourselves? Make contact? We even thought of writing to them. We had come to no conclusions at that point, being certain only that our conduct would not include giving them up to the police or the social services. But when we went back that evening, Silver and I once more crawling along inside the parapet, we had made up our minds that if they saw us it was essential they recognize us as friends and not as hostile voyeurs.

  Wim remained on the roof. He hung over the dormer from the top and announced in a whisper as we approached that all the lights were out in the flat back and front. For all that we waited a while, hoping and half-expecting that table-lamp to be switched on. The truth was that we could scarcely imagine people voluntarily going to bed at ten at night. But after a while we left and Wim said, perhaps by way of consoling us for our disappointment, that he’d help us on to the roofs of Formosa Street. He had brought his ropes and with the help of them and a chimney stack would get us up the gable at the Warrington Crescent end. We walked along the almost flat roof. The shops below us were all closed but a restaurant was open, its lights making window-shaped patterns on the pavement. The sound of talk and laughter and the rattle of plates reached us. To the west rose the pagoda-roofed blocks of flats built to replace slum streets, their windows brighter than the yellow moon, and on the far side of the canal the byzantine spire of St Mary Magdalene, its nave fitting with such architectural cunning into the triangle beyond the gleaming grass of Westbourne Green.

  We heard the sirens before we saw the smoke and flames. Their wailing was commonplace round there and might have come equally from police cars or ambulances as from fire engines. Some extra sense must have alerted the people in the restaurant to excitement, for they poured out into the street. We were wary about climbing down with all that crowd to see us but we moved back to the end of the terrace and it was from there that we saw the thick black smoke billowing and surging into the night air from what seemed, shockingly and awfully, to be the top of a house in Torrington Gardens. Bright red sparks leapt and roared through the column of smoke. By then we could hear a crackling and a roar, quite different sounds from the dismal howl of the sirens.

  ‘Is it them?’ Silver said.

  We both knew exactly what he meant. Was this inferno in the top of 4 Torrington Gardens?

  ‘It’s more like 20 or 22,’ said Wim and we breathed again, for we trusted him to know. The idea of those people we already called ‘our three’ being smoked out of their home like bees from a hive seemed a dreadful ineluctable fate, for it precluded all possible escape. ‘We’ll go to the other end and climb down where no one can see us.’

  A crowd had appeared from somewhere and was surging towards Torrington Gardens. Smoke and sparks and the sirens had summoned them. There was even one woman in a dressing gown. They were uninterested in us and no one looked in our direction when we went over the wall into a wilderness of ilexes and tall weed flowers. We climbed up the scaffolding on to the roof above Flat 4E. Wim had been right and the fire was quite a long way away, in the second terrace from where we stood and beyond three chimney stacks.

  Did the sirens wake ‘our three’ and did they suppose the vehicles that wailed and brayed were coming for them? Wim did his hanging upside-down act and told us the table-l
amp had been switched on in the living room below but no one was to be seen. We stood and watched what we could see of the fire, which wasn’t much, the whole expanse of roof down there being shrouded in dense dark grey smoke. The crowd on the opposite pavement had a better view than we did and we a better view of them than of the fire. Three fire engines had arrived, arcs from their hoses shot into the dark shining air like fountains from artesian wells. A plane tree had caught fire and burnt like a torch until some kind of flame-quelling foam was sprayed on it, leaving a pitiful black skeleton behind.

  No one had been hurt, though we knew nothing of that till the next morning. The tenants of the two top flats were all out, returning home somewhere around midnight to find themselves homeless. Someone, I don’t know if it was ever discovered precisely who, had overloaded the system. I didn’t understand it then, though I was already quite interested, but I imagine that what had happened was that there were old radial circuits in the house and though each was supposed to feed just one socket, extra sockets had been added and too many powerful appliances used. Whatever it was, it badly damaged several houses in the middle of Torrington Gardens.

  We slid off the roof on to the balcony, all three of us this time, and slithered along among the dry leaves until we were under the window of the room where that dim light still shone. Wim went first and was first to get a glimpse of the room. ‘Look. He’s there.’

  A dark-haired man was sitting at the table. He wasn’t much like the newspaper pictures. His face was weaker, the jaw less square, the forehead narrower. Where he sat, if he had lifted his head, he would have faced the window, but he kept his head lowered. In front of him, on a red and black checked tablecloth with which the table was spread, he had a mug of some hot drink. We could see it steaming. The fire and the sound of the fire engines and his consequent fear had awakened him, he had gone into the kitchen and made himself a cup of tea. Made it for himself only, it appeared. Perhaps the others were asleep. He was doing nothing but drinking his tea, reading nothing, watching nothing. From time to time he lifted the mug to his lips and drank but when he set it down again he continued to stare at the red and black squares on the tablecloth. His face had a deeply worried look, sad and despairing.

  ‘Is it him?’ I said.

  Silver took my hand and squeezed it. ‘I don’t know. We can’t even be sure the others are who we think they are. We have to be sure before we can do anything.’

  Wim got up. He stood on the balcony, leaning against the wall between the dormers. ‘Why do you have to do anything?’

  ‘I’ll tell you,’ Silver said, ‘when we’ve decided.’

  Wim nodded. He wasn’t very interested. ‘I think I shall spend the night on top of Clive Court. I’ve got some chocolate I left up there and a bottle of orange juice.’

  We watched him as he headed off for Sutherland Avenue, knowing he could use the roofs for a highway at least as far as the end of Lanark Road before beginning his ascent of the tallest block of flats in north London. Inside the room the man switched off the lamp. For a moment he and the interior were lost to us and then, as he opened the door, light flooded in from some hall or landing outside. We saw him in that light, the whole of him, hesitating for some reason in the doorway, a rather thick-set man of average height in grey trousers and white open-necked shirt. Had he dressed to come to this room? Had he no dressing gown? It was strange to us not to be naked in bed but we knew there were those who wore nightdresses and pyjamas. Why wasn’t he in pyjamas? At the time we kept these questions to ourselves, so it wasn’t our voices which alerted him, if alerted he was. He turned sharply to look at the window. We ducked down quickly and he seemed not to see us. Almost at once the door was shut and the light excluded.

  ‘I thought he’d be taller,’ Silver said.

  ‘And I thought he’d be thinner,’ I said. ‘Come on, let’s go back.’

  When we got home, intent on baths or most probably a shared bath, for we were coated in balcony grime, Liv came out of her bedroom, whimpering that the sound of the sirens had frightened her, she had thought they were made by the police coming after her. Told by Silver that the sirens belonged to fire engines, not police cars, that there had been a bad fire in Torrington Gardens, she became exultant in a quite unseemly way, jumping up and down and clapping her hands. While we had our bath she sat in the bathroom and talked to us, something we disliked as we had our own prudishness and objected to being seen together naked. But there was never enough hot water to take two baths in succession and no one had ever thought of equipping that bathroom with a shower. Liv sat on the stool where the dangerous electric heater usually stood and talked to us about her money. Or Claudia and James’s money.

  ‘Where is it now?’ Silver asked and, seeing her wide-eyed frightened small-creature look, said, ‘You needn’t mind telling us. Jonny isn’t here. Come to think of it, he hasn’t been here for a while, has he?’

  ‘No, thank God. And perhaps will never again?’

  Silver said he wouldn’t bank on it and where was the money?

  ‘It is under the floor!’

  She explained. The floors at Silver’s were all covered with fitted carpet, a different colour in every room, greenish and fawnish and reddish, all very worn and battered by then, with threadbare bits covered up with rugs. In Liv’s room that had been Jonny’s room, this carpet was in a worse state than anywhere else and there were several rugs. While Jonny was at work, Silver and I out somewhere and Wim no doubt on the roofs, she had lifted up a rug, pulled out whatever fastenings there were to pin a corner section of the carpet to the floor and found floorboards of raw unpainted wood beneath. These she had prised up with a tool, probably a chisel or an abused screwdriver, she had found in a toolbox in the utility room on the lower-ground floor.

  ‘The basement? You went down to the basement?’ said Silver. ‘Congratulations. It must be the first time.’

  It was. Liv looked proud of herself in a shamefaced sort of way. ‘I am very scared when I am doing this. But I do it – did it. And I am taking up a bit of floor and putting my money into the hole and putting the bit back again and then the carpet and the thing on it.’

  ‘The rug.’

  ‘Yes, the rug. And now I am making a plan for what I am doing about the money and Far, my papa, and getting away.’

  ‘Getting away?’ I said.

  I hoped I didn’t sound too elated at the prospect but she seemed not to notice. ‘I am being, have been –’ she struggled with her tenses – ‘out of here and down the stairs and I am not dead, no, I am still here, I am survivor. One day, if I am being very strong and brave, I will go down again and a taxi will be there and you will help me walking over little bit of path on to little bit of street and into the taxi!’

  ‘You’re doing very well, Liv,’ Silver said, grabbing a towel and wrapping it modestly round himself. ‘Where’s this taxi going to take you?’

  ‘To Sweden. To my home. But not yet. Yet I am not ready. First I am giving my papa the money to take home and then I am following him when I am brave and strong enough.’

  English is peculiar in this usage it has of continuous present and continuous future tenses. They’re probably not called that but my husband isn’t here to set me right. Silver could have told me. But while I was writing it I never showed him my diary. Whether Liv meant she had given her father the money or intended to give it to him was unclear. But she was sure he’d consent to go home and take the money with him, provided she promised to follow.

  ‘But why not just go with him?’ I said. I should have known better.

  ‘Because I am telling you I am not ready, Clodagh. I am not so brave yet. You know that I am having agoraphobia, it is not so easy to – to –’

  ‘Overcome,’ said Silver. ‘Conquer.’

  ‘Yes, conquer. One day I am conquering and then I will go. First I am glad to take away the money and Jonny cannot find.’

  We got her back into her room and then we went to bed, but first
we looked out of the window we usually climbed out of and from which most of the back of Torrington Gardens could be seen. The fire was out and the smoke was all gone. Down in the garden pale-faced dahlias had closed their petals for the night. The grass was growing long and it was time for one of Beryl’s sons to come and mow it. Silver and I lay in bed and discussed the question of the occupants of the top flat at 4 Torrington Gardens. If they were who we thought they were, the time had come to make ourselves known to them. They had friends, notably ‘Robinson’, who must have lent or let the flat to them, and who must know their identity, but had they any others? If they had, if they had someone looking after them, would Andrew have risked discovery by going out shopping?

  There was a parallel there with Liv’s behaviour, Silver said. She never ventured outside owing to an unfounded fear of being seen and apprehended, while Andrew, if this was Andrew, who had real grounds for caution, had no choice but to go out if his family weren’t to starve. I said that wasn’t a parallel but a contrast, and then, because it had only just occurred to me, I asked him if the damage to those houses would cut off our passage along the Torrington Gardens roofs.

  He had already thought of it. ‘There are other roofs,’ he said, ‘there are other ways of reaching them. We’ll see. Don’t worry,’ and then we went to sleep.

  I’ve given the impression, I know, of being irresponsible and uncaring of my parents’ worries. The fact was that at this time, a week or so after Max had turned me out, I daily expected one of them to arrive at Silver’s and attempt to take me back. Another parallel with Liv’s situation, I suppose, though fear of being caught didn’t stop me going out. By then Beryl knew where I was. I was too proud to ask her not to say anything to Selina, I was sure she and Max must know my whereabouts and have passed this information on to Mum and Dad. As it happened, Beryl hadn’t said a word. She who was such a tremendous gossip about her employers drew a line at what she would have defined as betraying a friend.