Grasshopper Read online

  ‘You and me is pals, love,’ she said when I spoke to her about this a couple of weeks later and thanked her. ‘I keep me mouth shut when it’s them as I’m fond of.’

  I was so touched I almost cried. It was then that I persuaded Silver to let her in to clean the place, mainly to have her there for me to chat to. Silver said he would on condition I’d let him give her more money and I didn’t dispute that. In some ways we were like a happily married couple, he and I, weren’t we?

  But before all that I phoned Mum and Dad again. Most of their anger was for Max. Mum said she had never been so disillusioned about anyone in her life and Dad said people were so strange it just made character judgement impossible. They both took it for granted that I’d come home.

  ‘You mustn’t be afraid to come back here, Clodagh.’

  This was a novel view of the situation I had failed to see before. Where did they think I had been? In a hotel? I who had hardly any money and was close to letting Silver keep me?

  ‘We shall let bygones be bygones,’ my father said. ‘No one will say anything to you about that pylon business, so there’s no need to worry about that. Of course, we must have a talk.’

  I could imagine that talk. I said I’d think about it but at present I was staying with friends ‘in north London’. I was all right. They must remember I was twenty years old. It was a measure of my youth that I said ‘nearly twenty-and-a-half years old’.

  ‘There isn’t anything you’re not telling us, is there, dear?’

  Plenty, but not the things you mean, Mother, not pregnancy or a sexually transmitted disease or trouble with crack and smack or even climbing a pylon. It was that phone call and what they said, or didn’t say, that made me decide to get a job. Not to think about it, not to do it next week or even tomorrow but now.

  Silver’s daily paper was on the table in the living room but I dismissed consulting its Situations Vacant columns. More out-of-date pictures of Andrew Lane and Alison Barrie on its front page had put me off that paper, these and the story it carried of the couple and Jason being seen by a ‘member of the government’ while campaigning for a forthcoming by-election in north Wales. I thought a bit about this and what it was that caused otherwise intelligent people to make these misidentifications, apparently want to make them and go on making them all the time. I wondered again if we could be mistaken and how we could put this to the test. Then I went out to look for a job.

  Although I wasn’t paranoid about this sort of thing the way Liv was, I steered clear of any possible sighting by Max and Selina by always walking in the direction of Torrington Gardens. Apart from Max going for his runs, they never went anywhere on foot, so there was little chance of an encounter. I was thinking more about the fire damage than about them. On my way to the newsagent I had a look at the houses where the fire had been. Because of the damage to the roofs of Nos 22 and 24 our route to the end of the terrace had been cut off for several days, but now I saw that the tarpaulins and battens Silver had forecast would soon go up there were in place. Men were working on the roof, not to begin repairing it but to protect what lay below from rain and wind damage. A scaffolding had been put up. It looked temporary to me. It would come down once the roof area was made watertight.

  This particular section of the terrace had a dismal aspect, the two top floors of those three houses black and damp, a grim combination, their charred interiors still exposed. The poor plane tree was just the bare bones of itself. Its branches were like the remains of a wood fire that has been put out because it has begun to rain and its shrivelled blackened leaves lay in drifts all over the pavements and the gardens. Silver had already been round there several times on reconnaissance and reported back that the fire must have been under control before there was too much structural damage to the roofs. The struts, though burnt black, seemed intact. Once the tarpaulins were up we’d be able to go up there again and Silver, as was often the case, had been right to say don’t worry.

  Maida Vale lacks a real shopping centre but it has several little groups of shops, the largest of these being in Clifton Road where there are two newsagents. Each had glass cases of advertisement cards but there were no jobs on offer, only babies’ cots for sale at bargain prices and bookshelves as good as new and women with dubious motives offering French and German lessons. I walked up to the Edgware Road but the café on the bridge had no situations vacant. For once, the only time I really wanted one, which I suppose is what Jonny would have called sod’s law. It was then I decided that as soon as I saw a job on offer, provided it wasn’t disgusting or potentially criminal and, of course, within my powers, I’d do it. Maybe that was less a decision than a prayer because ten minutes later it was answered. The newsagent’s window in Lauderdale Road had a card advertising for a gardener.

  I had never done much gardening except for once or twice mowing the lawn at home and I had even been persuaded to pull out a few weeds. Dad had taught me the difference between a weed and a cultivated plant and because I was quite interested I’d learnt. Perhaps I’d have been wiser to go home and smarten myself up a bit, but I was clean and wearing clean clothes and I had just washed my hair. Besides, I told myself, no one wants a designer-dressed gardener. It made no difference, anyway, for they said they’d take me on. Provided I could produce two good references.

  The house was in Randolph Avenue, one in a long terrace. I’m afraid that before I even went up the steps to the front door I lifted up my eyes to the rooftops and was pleased with what I saw. The people were a Mr and Mrs Houghton, well-off, elderly, owners of the whole house. I never discovered their first names or much about them except that they had five children and twelve grandchildren. That I was a woman amazed them at first but I think they came to like the idea, believing, as many people do, that while women may be weaker and more capricious than men, they are less likely to be criminals or vandals and are more reliable. They showed me the garden, which was large with big unpruned fruit trees, a shaggy lawn and weed-choked flowerbeds. If my references were satisfactory, they’d want me four days a week.

  Job applicants, I know by personal experience, are totally unscrupulous about references. I was. Silver gave me one, though the only gardening I’d ever done at his place was to help dig poor Mabel’s grave. He wrote that I was an expert on the unique flora of Maida Vale. The other came from Beryl, who surprised me with her beautiful italic script, not to mention the headed cream-laid writing paper. Up at the top of her tower block Beryl hadn’t even got a garden, only two window boxes, which shows the depravity to which we had all sunk.

  I worked for the Houghtons for nearly two months. They paid me well and I think I did a good job for them. It was the worst time of the year for gardening, involving as it did no planting at all but only cutting down and mowing and pulling out weeds. Still, I made that large garden neat, got the lawn back into shape with trim edges and revealed in the flowerbeds, once the nettles and thistles and bindweed were gone, unexpected treasures, the pink lily flowers of Nerine bowdenii, a Himalayan blue poppy and a snow-white blossomed Romneya, struggling to bloom in the darkness under the dock leaves. And I learnt a lot about flowers, mugging up plant lore from Silver’s father’s books on my days off. ‘What if?’, as you know, is what I sometimes like saying. So what if I had stayed on at the Houghtons’ and got to love it as I might have done? Would I have eventually left and done a horticulture course somewhere? Or gone to university to study botany? I might have become a park keeper by now. More and more women do.

  But I was only to have seven weeks as a gardener. It was during those seven weeks that we came to grief.

  20

  It was the first week of August.

  As soon as the tarpaulins were up on the burnt roofs, the temporary scaffolding down and the workmen gone, all of which happened in the space of three days, we went up there to see how safe it would be to walk on. Of course, we hadn’t absented ourselves from the roofs on the nights immediately following the fire. We had several times
climbed the scaffolding between the last terrace in Torrington Gardens and the first in Peterborough Avenue and walked along to assess what the builders had done that day. And we had twice crawled under the topmost windows of No. 4, but without catching a glimpse of the people who lived there. Silver and I were afraid this particular scaffolding might soon be taken down. The painting, which was the purpose of putting it there in the first place, was almost done. Once the scaffolding went, approach to 4E would be nearly impossible for us.

  We failed in our attempt. The tarpaulin was there and the battens which held it in place. None of us was heavy but when we tentatively tried standing on the temporary roofing it sagged and a creaking sound came from underneath. Wim ran lightly across the tarpaulin from roughly the top of No. 24 to the top of No. 18 and back again. It was all right if you did it fast, he said, if you had a contingency plan in your head for what you’d do if the floor started to give way under you. He didn’t say what contingency plan he had and we didn’t ask. We sat inside the parapet on the top of 26, ate the Mars Bars he had brought with him and smoked his Marlboros. Since the fire the weather had been wet for part of every day – sod’s law again, for it would have been helpful if it had rained the night of the fire – and even the safe parts of the roof were slippery. Rather reluctantly Silver and I decided not to risk crossing the tarpaulin. Not, at any rate, on a dark wet night.

  So we sat up there and talked about how to be sure the three in 4E were indeed Andrew Lane, Alison Barrie and Jason Patel. Until we were certain of this we felt we could make no progress. We had seen the woman and the boy at the same time and we had seen the man alone but so far we had never seen all three of them together. And we were unsure about the man. Morna had seen someone out shopping that she identified as Andrew Lane but, as Silver reminded us, Morna tended to give well-known names to people she saw in the street.

  ‘You mean, we mightn’t have thought the man we saw was Andrew if Morna hadn’t told us about him first?’ I said.

  ‘I mean that if Morna hadn’t told us she’d seen him, Wim mightn’t have jumped to the conclusion the half-Asian boy and the blonde woman he saw were Jason and Alison. Sorry, Wim, I’m only saying we took our cue from you. We wanted them to be those people and we jumped to a conclusion too.’

  Wim said slowly, ‘There’s a way to prove it.’

  We listened.

  ‘We show ourselves to them.’ His strange pan-European accent had become more marked. ‘The boy’s not important. That is, not for our purposes. Your purposes. We go to the balcony and show ourselves to the man and the woman, preferably together but one or other of them will do.’

  I must have been very slow that night for I asked what for. ‘They won’t recognize us.’

  ‘I think I know what Wim means,’ Silver said. ‘If they see us, and remember they’ll be seeing three young people, dirty and in grotty clothes from crawling along that balcony, if they see us outside their window looking in, maybe even threatening to break in, and if they’re law-abiding respectable people called, for example, Robinson, they’ll ring the police. Anyone not afraid of the law would.’

  Wim smiled. ‘But if they’re who I think they are, they’ll be more afraid of the police than of us. They won’t call them. They’ll prepare themselves to put up a fight.’

  ‘We may as well do it now.’ Silver got to his feet and put out his hand to pull me to mine. ‘Down one lot of scaffolding and up the other.’

  It was dark and windy, the sky covered by a lumpy wrack of cloud that, lit from below, looked like cottage cheese stained with purple juice. The wind came in occasional sharp gusts, bringing a short splash of rain with it, but otherwise the air was still and damp. It was dangerous walking on the slates, though nothing would have made me say so. I was relieved when we slid off the mansard on to the narrow walkway between parapet and house wall.

  Why did we want to do it? To identify them? Most of all, why did we want to help them? We didn’t know them. We knew virtually nothing about the way adoption worked in this country, I don’t suppose we even knew that no central agency existed and that adoption was managed by local authorities – if, indeed, we knew what a local authority was and did. Such knowledge as we had came from reading about Andrew Lane and Alison Barrie in the newspapers. So why did we place ourselves so firmly on their side and against those forces that wanted to take Jason away from them?

  I suspect our reason had something to do with the cause the young always espouse: justice. It seemed unjust to us that some power in the land should have the right to deprive two people of the child they loved and who loved them. Needless to say, we never questioned at that time their kindness and their love, we took it for granted. We never asked ourselves or one another if they were fit to be parents nor if Jason’s best interests were served by living with them. It was justice we saw. Not with the scales in her hand, for we were uninterested in weighing up pros and cons, but crusading, with a flaming sword.

  No one was in the street below us. The usual cars were lined up, nose to tail, all along both sides, and because Torrington Gardens was a wide road, down the centre as well. On the opposite side many windows in the equally high terraces were brightly lit, their blinds up or curtains drawn back, but I had never seen a face looking out of any of them. What, after all, would a watcher have seen but the familiar opposing façade glimpsed through a network of branches, thready twigs and leaves?

  ‘We needn’t crawl,’ I said. ‘We can walk. There’s no one to see us.’

  Silver agreed but said we needed to make ourselves dirty, so we picked up handfuls of last year’s plane leaves and the black grime of many years and rubbed it over our faces and hands, wiping our hands down the front of our T-shirts. We looked quite sinister, especially Silver, fair and pale-skinned as he was, now with his ice-grey eyes peering out of dark whorls.

  ‘I’m sorry we have to frighten them,’ he said, but I said that perhaps they’d just be angry.

  ‘They’ll only be angry if they’re not who we think they are.’

  ‘And then we shall have to get out of here fast,’ said Wim.

  Instead of dropping on to our knees, we walked along the balcony. The room in 4E was lit but empty. It had been a cool day with hourly showers and not much sun but still the window was open about four inches at the top. We sat down and speculated as to what they might be doing. It was just ten, so too late for them to be putting the boy to bed. Washing dishes, said Silver, to whose lot this task most often fell at home in Russia Road. One of them was having a bath, I said, and the other one was sitting with Jason who refused to sleep. Wim offered no suggestions. He lit a cigarette, saying that the smoke would drift in at the window, they would smell it and come. So we all lit cigarettes. The smoke was visible, little grey wisps of it slipping and curling into the gap between sash and lintel.

  It did fetch them, both of the grown-ups. We heard their hasty tread behind us and heard the window being raised and shut. A catch clicked. We got up, then stood, the three of us, side by side, and Wim, taking a penknife from his pocket, as if he had rehearsed this, reached up with it and made as if to insert the blade between the top of the sash and the architrave. The two people inside – they had retreated to the far side of the room behind the table – stared at us in horror. They were clinging to each other, not in a graceful embrace, but each clutching at the other’s clothes, the woman’s hands making frenzied grabs at the man’s chest and shoulders. Her face was such a mask of pain and terror, her eyes huge, her mouth half-open, that I resolved in that moment I’d never again take part in a hunt for anyone or anything. Then she let out a loud scream.

  We didn’t move, beyond Wim withdrawing his hand from the window and putting the penknife back in his pocket. The scream had awakened the child and the sound he made equalled hers. We stood our ground. We had to if this was going to work. Her screams changed to cries of ‘I’m coming, it’s all right, Mummy’s coming’ on sobs of terror, and she ran from the room. He followed her
, slamming the door behind him. I thought I heard a key turn in the lock of that door.

  ‘There’s no phone in the room,’ Silver whispered. ‘It must be somewhere else in the flat.’

  I shivered. ‘She called herself “Mummy”, did you notice?’

  ‘Of course she would, of course she’d do that.’

  We ran back along the balcony this time and climbed on to the roof. Wim said it was the safest place to be, but I thought that up there would be the first place the police would look. If there were any police. I thought of that evening a week before when the fire engines had come, their sirens blaring, and waited for that sound again. This time it would be from police cars. What Wim had done I rather disliked, not so much the smoking out of the occupants of 4E but his act at the window, the penknife inserted between wood and glass, as if he meant to break in and enter. I watched him as we waited, his inscrutable sallow face, the yellow-green eyes like those of a big cat. It was then I noticed for the first time how strange his hands were, the fingers disproportionately long, the backs short and narrow and the wrists as fine, symmetrical and honed as machine parts.

  We smoked one more cigarette. We watched and waited. Nothing happened for a long while. Wim, who had stubbed his out, had snaked to the edge of mansard and hung over it. He turned his head to us and put one of those exaggerated fingers to his lips. I heard the window go up, perhaps to its full extent, a rasping rattling sound. Then a grunt as from someone not as used to clambering out of windows as we were. Wim mouthed, in a soundless whisper, ‘He’s on the balcony.’

  I suppose we knew then. We knew our test had worked. We heard him walk along, picking his way, treading cautiously, as if this nineteenth-century walkway would disintegrate when obliged to carry twelve stone of twentieth-century humanity. He walked a little way to the right, then back and a little way to the left. Law-abiding he might not be but in the past he had been. This was a man who would baulk at trespassing on his neighbour’s property even when he had seen three desperate villains attempting to break in. He gave another grunt as he climbed back into the room. The window rattled and closed with a bang.